RP: The Fringe [Chapter 4.2] - Manhunt

Concordia Veil - Outside the Computer Room

There was a muffled sparking sound from somewhere unseen as Desmond cut the door's power, and with a few dull, progressive "clunks" the door to the ship's main computer room jumped open when he forced it, the creaking and grinding sound making the ship's age more than apparent. However, on the other side of the portal was a surprisingly peculiar sight -- what appeared to be cloth fabric ripped into ribbons were strewn in chaotic diagonals across the walking spaces and pulled taut, like some kind of deranged insect's web. The erratically flickering lights inside the ship gave the scene an unnerving visage. While they didn't appear to be made of anything sturdier than clothing or sheets, they made movement more that a couple of feet past the door exceptionally difficult without cutting them down.

For a brief instant, the sound they had been hearing morphed from an indistinct, undefinable whirr to a quiet, but crisp rapid-fire clinking, like spindly metallic legs scurrying overhead. Just as quickly as they heard it, it was gone.


Main Corridor

As Danny searched towards the aft, the sound got quieter. The doors to the cargo bays and engineering sections remained sealed, and there was no apparent sign of anyone nearby that he could detect.

Computer Room

The sound of the door being forced open caused Crash to freeze lock Its spiderbot body. Bastards are already in here... The next step was the upload and transfer of commands to the gaurdbot body. It was a simple opening gambit. the Gaurdbot would start out the cabin and into the main living area screeching about how it would slaughter them all and use their bones to make a new chair for it to sit upon.

Crash would have chittered if It hadn't locked the spider bot down. Next it started up the internal speakers and started pumping ear splitting squeals and low ultra-low sonic vibrations that were carefully picked to cause discomfort and possibly weak anus problems. Then the lights all started flickering off and on in rapid patterns, along with the fact the emergency lighting shutting down, so the whole ship looked like a strobe light effect with different frequencies of the flashing.

Brash hoped that the fleashies would shit and puck themselves to death. Silently it watched through the internal sensors and waited until they reacted.

Outside the ship

Seeing nothing else he could do, Rathe returned to the bucket to resume guarding it. Checking his timer, he noticed that Desmond had a little over a minute before the jammer would lose power and die. 'Come on guys, you're running out of time...' Rathe thought to himself as he activated his comm once more. "One minute before kaput." he informed the three inside the ship, which seemed to be emitting a muffled noise. Rathe couldn't specify what exactly the sound was, but if it could be heard from outside the ship, it couldn't be good. Rathe reached to turn on the comm again, but decided against it, 'They couldn't hear me either way...'

Concordia Veil, Main Corridor
Padding through the corridor quietly, Danny was unsettled by the fact that the aggressor, wherever they were wasn't here. He didn't see anything, but he didn't want to give his aggressor something. They could be sniffing their communications after all.

Then the ship descended into an aural assault and rave party. Danny felt the deck shake against his feet and for a moment, his ears get battered with noise but the SQUID suit quickly protected his ears to prevent further damage while his eyes were protected by the strange pseudofabric that stretched over his face. It didn't change those tiny vibrations in the floor, but he tried to keep soldiering on, looking for living quarters he could break into.

Perhaps it was someone who was doing this from a laptop in the living quarters, was Danny's line of thought as he kept a grip on his intestinal fortitude.

Concordia Veil - Main Corridor

As Desmond and Amanozako worked up towards the computer core, Danny circled around the circumference of the ship's main hallway, passing by what he knew were the cargo bays and engineering, mostly due to his familiarity with the Jinsoku's layout rather than any clear markings that he could see. Circling almost completely around, he finally came across one door that was stenciled in fading, worn letters as "C MMO S." The living quarters were almost certainly behind it.


Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil

Locked out of the ship, Rathe could do little more than wait for the capacitor to run its course. Inside the ship's hull, he could vaguely hear a cacaphony of dull, muted noises, but they didn't sound like anything recognizable to him. One thing that was obvious, however, was that if he could hear them at all outside of the sealed ship, whatever was going on in there was loud.

As if that wasn't enough, however, the lights inside of the berth blinked off for a moment, leaving the three-walled hangar illuminated only by the bright lights from out in the massive docking bay before they flashed back on. Immediately afterwards, a voice boomed over a loudspeaker set in the ceiling. The lights flashing were obviously meant to get his attention. "You there," the authoritative male voice said. "We're reading all kinds of comms squawking in your hangar, and it's playing hell with traffic control. What's going on?"

Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil

Upon hearing the voice that seemed to come from all around him, Rathe put his hand to the HAS he had on him out of pure instinct, but he restrained himself once he realized that he had no idea where they were, and that they had no idea what his situation was. In an attempt to get the worker, or workers, to leave, Rathe acted as a member of the crew of the ship he was currently locked out of.

Rathe looked around for the source of the voice, but seeing none, he elected to announce his alibi, "Hey! Sorry about that! I bumped against this thing and I'm trying to shut it off as we speak, so don't worry! The noise'll be gone before you know it!" It was an improvised alibi with its fair share of holes, but Rathe hoped it would be enough to deter them as he returned to "working on turning off" the bucket, which he knew would die in half a minute, regardless of what anyone did.

Concordia Veil - Main Corridor

"With all this racket, there is either no one aboard, or whoever is is holed up in a cabin or possibly the engineering space" Amanozako commented to Desmond via wireless. "Wither way, we need to shut this computer up before it draws unwanted attention" she added and glanced at the hatchway, switching her vision to infrared to see if there were any thermal sources in what was most likely the living cabins that might be a person.

Concordia Veil - Computer Room

It took some clenching of his teeth to ignore the noise reverbating through the ship, but a rave was far from enough for stopping Desmond. The sound made his teeth vibrate in their gums, setting them on edge, much like when he turned the power field on around his blade; it was something he also got used to in a bit. The strobing lights were another problem altogether. "Yeah," The bounty hunter agreed with the Neko, reaching for something in his toolbelt as he kept getting glances of the room between the flashes of light.

With a click, the strobing lights in the room were dimly pierced by the bright blue sheen of a welder's flame, making it easier for the bounty hunter to see the insides of the computer room. To see a ship in that state made him sneer. "Amano," the bounty hunter started to say to get the Neko's attention, noticing something like a mechanical spider in the middle of the room as he made his way through the strands of cloth, simply cutting them down with the welder's torch. "Grab that, it's not part of the ship. I got the comms," Desmond said, making his way towards the comms array.

Much like the Iron Ferret's, the internal components of the communications array were displayed on the same place and were mostly similar to the bounty hunter's ship. The internal clock in his head told him that they had between thirty and twenty seconds left before the jammer ran out, but he only needed half of that to deactivate the comms. Reaching towards it with his free hand, Desmond opened the access panel, displaying its innards, and started yanking out the cables.

Violent sparks and staticky crackles burst forth from the panel as the bounty hunter started yanking cables, and audible clicks, whirs, and descending hums came from within the computer's mainframe as power and network feeds to the relevant systems was cut. In seconds, the last array was severed from its host, at last rendering the ship completely unable to send or receive any messages.

Concordia Veil, Main Corridor
Looking at the strobe-lit door to the living quarters, Danny had to clutch a wall before continuing and examining the exit. The vague sound of sparks and the constant light of a welder from around the corner told Danny that Desmond had succeeded at finding something to tear up to render the ship mute.

Phew. Danny sighed, wiping his brow now that he could work in relative peace, though the subsonic beats and the lights were still an enormous pain in the arse as the SQUID-suited bounty hunter opened the door to the Common Room with the aid of a hand-held hacking tool to give the doors a quick override, enough for him to jam his baton between the door and doorframe to lever it open.

A lot of engineers reckoned the heart of the ship was the engineering bay and engines. The pilot would argue that it's the pilot's seat. The crew and passengers however, would say it was the common room. You could tell a lot about a crew by looking at their common room, what sort of magazines were on the table, what sort of coffee they drank, the books in the bookshelf, the state of the couch and what video disks or entertainment consoles were lying around near the television.

Maybe Danny would see what this crew was and confirm his scepticism of the bounty, or perhaps refute it.

Computer Room

Grab the big metal spider? Sure, just what I want to do... Amanozako thought to herself as she scrutinized the thing. It seemed to be offline, dead, not moving, though knowing her luck it would have a parasite in it or something like that. Better that she should just blast it to pieces and save herself the trouble, but, that would make a noise all together too loud and recognizable.

"Just what the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?" she asked via wireless. "It's not part of our mission. We're here to bag our mark, not steal"

Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil

"Thing? What thing?" the voice boomed over the loudspeakers again, followed by a pause as whoever was on the other end likely scrutinized their video feed. When the voice didn't continue for several seconds, it started to become concerning as to just what the operator was doing, or worse, who he was calling.

Finally, the voice came back over the speakers. "We're sending someone down there," it said without inflection, intonation, or emotion.


Concordia Veil - Common Room/Lounge

As Danny stepped over the threshold, he saw a room in the shape of a pseudo-square molded around the outer circumference of the main corridor he had just been walking through. In the flashing lights he could make out three doors. Two of them were set in the wall on the far side of the room, one in the approximate middle of the room straight ahead, the other one tucked away in the corner to the left. The left-hand door was completely ajar, the sliding door sitting slightly crooked on its tracks. Between the two doors was a rather utilitarian-looking two-seater sofa that looked worn from use.

Immediately to his left was a vidscreen set in the wall, in front of the sofa and obviously set up for entertainment, but it didn't look like it had seen much recent use. Danny also noted the lack of any kind of shelving or storage unit, traditional or digital, where the crew might store any multimedia discs or data. In the corner, was another, slightly smaller door, stenciled with the letters "GAL EY." Next to it, to the right, were three stand-up metal lockers, none of them with any visible markings, and devoid of any visible locking mechanism.

To the right was the mess table, a rectangular and sturdy piece of furniture that showed its age but weathered it well. It was obviously built for durability and to serve its function, not with decorative tastes in mind. Six chairs sat around it, each one of them canted slightly off-center and the one on the nearest end had its back to the rest. On the table was a half-shuffled deck of cards sitting in front of the chair just left of the one nearest to him. A few stray crumbs of food could be seen in the corners, but other than that, the mess area was kept at least passably clean.

The thing that most caught Danny's attention was what was displayed on the wall behind the table: an arrangement of swords of various lengths and shapes, several of them quite vicious-looking.

Aside from the deck of cards on the table, there didn't seem to be much in the way of signs that this room was used much at all lately, or if it was, it wasn't apparent what the crew spent their time doing in here aside from eating or passing through.

Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil

'Great, they're sending someone... Well, time to get a better alibi...' Rathe thought to himself as he got to work forming a plausible story as to why he was locked out of an active ship with an expensive, complex, and perhaps illegal capacitor screaming over comm lines while he was there with it.

Almost as if on cue, the screeches of said machine grew weaker and fell silent as the batteries ran out of juice to supply the bucket with.

"Hope you guys are done in there, because the capacitor's out of power..." Rathe told his coworkers through the now clear comms, unsure if they would even hear him over what was still going on in the ship.

Realizing that no one on the ship was being affected by the lights nor the sounds. Crash realized that they were no mere goons. So when they announced that they were going to steal Its body, Crash realized there was nothing It could do. Nothing in Its ownership that could sway Goonbas, nor anything to fight against them.

So Crash locked off the circuits outside it's processors and memory components and waited to see where these Goonbas would take It.

Concordia Veil, Common Room
The suit-clad bounty hunter felt for a light switch as if by habit when he walked into the common room. He flipped the switch, but it was overridden by the strobe light show. His head looked over to the left of the room, and he was pleased to see that the couch was in serviceable condition. One of the doors was open - the one to the Captain's room. Leaning a little further in, he saw the Galley door. Some of the shelf and storage beside the galley entrance was missing and the Video Screen didn't look like it'd seen much action recently. Perhaps they didn't have time for movies or entertainment when they had each other.

As his head panned to the right, there was a series of glints and glimmers on the right hand wall, sparkling in the strobe lighting, past the other two doors and the table. Danny raised his eyebrows and stepped further into the room quietly, lowering the baton and looking first at the swords on the wall. He put his finger underneath one of the handles of a sword and tried to lift it off of its rack for a moment. There was a longsword, a pair of sabres, a cutlass, and three zweihanders which looked intimidating, but something was off.

This crew must've come together not long ago. The place feels lived in, but not everyone has put their roots down. He made some deductions as he realised that the sword seemed to be bolted to the wall. These... swords seem odd, though. Haven't seen any style like this before. Completely clean, no signs of combat action, looks like basic stainless steel-

Oh no wonder. He clicked his tongue as he realised that the they were all fastened against the wall and the blade he was trying to weigh was probably meant to be decorative along with all the others. He let it go. Danny could understand why people would want to hang up swords on the walls - they looked cool. The only sword Danny had any business hanging up was resting back in his jet black attache case back in the Iron Ferret.

He then looked down at the table and realised that there was a card game. Solitaire, he recognised. Couldn't they play this on a computer? He wondered as he made a couple of moves to move a ten of spades on top of a nine of diamonds in one of the four piles of cards on top, then running his finger along the table to inspect the food crumbs. They ate basically, but it worked.

They don't live beyond their means. Modest. Though, the decorative sword collection's an oddity. Could be a gift? For what service?

Crushing the crumbs between his fingers, he turned around to walk into the ajar door, poking the business end of the baton against the door to push it open the rest of the way and slink in.

Maybe they just really like swords.

Concordia Veil - Computer Room

"We're done," Desmond said, leaning back and inspecting his handiwork as he put the tools back in their place, having to strain his hearing to make sense out of Rathe's voice. Even though the noise was subsonic, it still made focusing on other ones harder. "Bring the bucket, I'll open the loading ramp," the bounty hunter added, turning from his spot to regard Amanozako. The annoyance in her expression brought a sly smirk to his face.

"Just keep a hold of it. Whatever we find here that can give us an advantage is worth keeping. Besides, it looks like the entire crew is on shore leave," he said, making his way out through the makeshift path he had carved through the strands of cloth. The bounty hunter then deliberately turned to look at the neko once again. "Oh and go check the cockpit for the ship's logs, that should give us a clue as to where the crew is," Desmond said, bringing a finger to his ear again and pressing it against the comms unit. "Danny, find anything?" he said, making his way towards the engineering section to shut down the hellish rave party that the ship had become.


Captain's Cabin

The door didn't budge against Danny's baton; it appeared to be jammed fast in place. The gap was more than wide enough for him to walk through, however, so opening it further proved unnecessary anyhow. The darkened room wasn't flashing in the chaotic light show that was outside, oddly, but rather, the lights within were completely shut off, leaving the room only intermittently illuminated by the flashing lights from out in the commons, throwing the blinks of long shadows across a narrow arc in the floor and to the back wall. On either side of the occasional flashes of light, the room was almost pitch black. The faint outline of the outer corner of beds bunked atop one another came into view every now and then to the left, and a chair could be seen pushed haphazardly against the far wall.

Danny had kept his night vision turned off once the strobe lighting had started - and it didn't seem to extend into this room. He rubbed his eyes through his mask a little, then swooshed his hand across his eyesight to bring nightvision up into view, washing what he could see in a myriad of greens bathing the room, slowly brightening as it took the darkness and dim ambient light of the room in - along with the occasional pulse of strobe lighting from outside. The pulsing lights coming in front beyond the door gave his night vision sensors quite a bit of difficulty in adjusting, causing his field of vision to erratically flash white and struggle with bursts of static as the tiny computer worked on overdrive to keep its display steady. Even amidst the chaotic interference, he was still able to see well enough if he took his time and moved slowly.

He heard Desmond's voice in his ear - a welcome sound amongst the subsonic, rave party bombardment that'd forced him to enable ear protection. "Common room, Captain's quarters," he replied, "No signs of life, nor anything that stands out, going to investigate now." He said as he looked for a flat surface, a desk to inspect perhaps, something to read up on his target. His sidelining investigation of the ship's inhabitants was still a fit of curiosity he had to examine.

The cabin was rather sparsely decorated, the furnishings within having the same spartan, almost prison-like qualities of the common room. The bunked twin beds on his left were oddly devoid of any bedding aside from a raggedy blanket crumpled up on one end of the bottom bunk, and the thin, double-doored locker at the foot of the bed was locked tight. On the floor Danny could make out scuff marks extending around the bed's feet, and they looked relatively fresh. Either the cabin's resident had reason to move the bed back and forth, or she simply liked redecorating often.

To the right was a metallic, little-more-than-functional dresser of sorts, and just next to it was the desk he sought. There wasn't much sitting on top of it aside from a pair of aviator-style sunglasses placed on the far corner against the wall, beneath a bare-bones lamp that was little more than a yellowed light bulb on a short pole. The chair, as he noticed before, was shoved away from the desk and against the back wall, but just in front of the hollow where the chair fit was a notepad lying there, about the size of a hand span.

Fascinating... Danny wondered as he looked around the desk and examined its contents. All of the furniture looks so basic. Form over function, no signs of embellishment or decoration. Everything in the room to him didn't scream someone whose rapsheet included disrupting the peace, destruction, and jaywalking to name a few. Scuffs on the floor from moving the bunk bed around, few blankets. Laundry day maybe? The way they lived with such restraint in how they presented their living just didn't add up somehow.

The sunglasses on the desk caught his eye and he raised an eyebrow, grabbed them gently by the frames and peered through them. Hm. Ooh! He made an 'oh' with his mouth. Good sunglasses...! He would've put them on too, but his ears were currently smoothed over by the pseudofabric of his strange sneaking suit. He put them back down where he found them and flipped the notepad open, examining pages and leaving a smudge where his crumbed fingers had touched the edge of the page - unable to spot it with the nightvision's slight loss of detail.

The notepad was conspicuously blank, although it appeared to have been recently used, given the fact that several pages had been torn off of it. At a glance, it appeared that almost half of the paper was missing. However, running his fingers over the surface, he noticed indentions in its surface. The marks where a pen had written on the previous page, perhaps?

Something written, but the pages are missing and I'm no mind reader. Danny sighed. It must be terrible to be able to read people's minds. He concluded as he examined the indentations, and put his finger against the page gently, then ran his finger across them, trying to see what was written by touch. It felt a bit like Trade was written onto the pad. Will settle for reading paper.

Amid the erratic lighting and the low vibrations resounding through the ship even out of the aging, tinny intercom speakers, he couldn't make out any specifics, but it appeared to be some kind of list. He would have to move to more ideal conditions to read exactly what it said, but he felt relatively confident that written on the previous page had been several vendors located in various places throughout the station, most likely things that the captain needed to hunt down for her ship.

"Hm. Desmond. I think I've found a shopping list," Danny said over the radio to Desmond.

"Come again?" came the bounty hunter's reply. In the background, there was the noise of metal going against metal as he tried to crowbar the engineering door's open.

"I've found what feels like a list of locations written into this paper." The strange pursuer replied. "They seem to be vendors. We'll take a look together."

"Take it, I'm trying to shut this rave down," he replied.

"Oh thank the Goddess for that," Danny mumbled in relief, speaking in Lorath Ly'thir back over the communications, probably referring to the Lorath Goddess. He grabbed the notepad and placed it in the pack that rested against the small of his back and was held together by his suit and the harness over it.


Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil

At Rathe's feet, the canister's chirping and whirring began to slow down and descend in pitch, while the lights on it began to dwindle in intensity rapidly. Although he couldn't hear or see the broad spectrum of wavelengths blasting out of the thing, it was obvious that the capacitor had finally run its course. Within the span of five seconds, the device whirred down to silence, going dead and lifeless.

No further communications came in over the loudspeakers, but he knew that the Origin technicians, or perhaps even a security team was almost certainly on their way. Time was not on their side, and he still didn't know if the ship had been silenced or not. In minutes, however, he knew he'd find out, for better or worse.

Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil

Rathe quickly collapsed the bucket, using the way Desmond expanded it as a guide, 'I have to tell Desmond what's up... But really man? Two slip-ups on your first week? Get it together, Rathe...' The gold skinned nepleslian scolded himself as he waited on Desmond to lower the ramp.

"Oh, be advised, the hangar techs are sending one or more people down here to find out what that noise from the jammer was. I tried to stop them, but they hung up on me..." Rathe told Desmond through the comm line, knowing they had little time to spare.

Computer Center

"Fine" Amanozako replied, eying the metallic spider thing before grabbing it and walking the few short steps to the ship's bridge. She opened the hatch and went into the small cramped compartment that served as the ship's bridge. Setting the robot on the deck, she climbed into the left hand chair.

Amanozako tapped at the station controls to wake up the display and system and see if she could access the ships log.

Concordia Veil - Cockpit

It took a bit of finangling for Amanozako to get the displays to activate, since it appeared that the ship had been for all intents and purposes completely shut down other than basic interior amenities when they boarded, save for the sudden emergence of whatever wacky security system they were facing. The thrumming noise and strobing lights weren't making it any easier to concentrate either. At last, however, she managed to call up what appeared to be what passed for the ship's log, but it contained mostly a jumbled mess of alphanumeric symbols and asterisks. There was a loose semblance of a branching organization structure to it, but there didn't seem to be much in the way of orderly record-keeping. Among the entries that did make some kind of coherent sense were comprised of references and links to huge AV files, most of which had titles which were explicitly pornographic in nature. A few crude representations of stick figures in various comically violent situations drawn in slashes, ampersands, pound signs, and other miscellaneous squiggles could be found as well, as if a child had been somehow doodling in cyberspace with a digital crayon. The entire section of the database was a mess.

Continuing to search, she finally came across something that looked more like a legitimate list of entries, but it mostly seemed to be composed of flight data and atmospheric notes, nothing on any of the goings-on aboard the ship. She found climate control systems, water pressure readouts, flight systems diagnostics, comms statuses which all read as "offline"...

...and finally, what appeared to be a crew roster linked to the station's docking control.

Opening the file, she read the list of names.

SHELTON, SIENNA AUDREY
DAKKAR, OREZA
MCKILL, CRASH
STR--

Click to expand...

Suddenly the list flickered and vanished from the volumetric display, and red letters spelling out "FILE CORRUPTED" repeatedly flashed in front of her. At the same time, the lights and the pounding, headache-inducing bass tones around her suddenly ceased, once again plunging the ship into dim, eerie silence as the reserve running lights resumed their normal, minimal operation.


Loading Ramp - Concordia Veil

With the lightshow turned off and the lockdown lifted, Desmond was free to move towards the ship's access ramp. "Check the other rooms, need to know the kind of crew we'll be dealing with," the bounty hunter started to say, but before he could add any more he heard Rathe's message, and broke into a run, reaching the ramp in the span of a few seconds. He slammed a closed fist on the ramp's internal panel, watching as it lowered painstakingly slow. As if he had just remembered something, he also removed the balaclava that he had been wearing.

"Give it here," Desmond said to the golden-skinned Nepleslian, nodding towards the disassembled "bucket."

Seeing Desmond's haste, Rathe hurriedly lugged the capacitor up the ramp, the latter handing it to the former. Rathe wasted little time afterward, "What's the plan?" he asked the older male in an all-business manner, knowing that their time was stretched too thin to worry about anything other than the mission.

Bridge

Amanozako frowned as she encoded the partial list to her digital brain, then spoke over the wireless.

"I got a partial manifest before the system went down" she reported. "There are at least three other crew on this ship beyond our target"