Husks of Men

The station’s reactor has come back online and, as a result, the strange blue ‘protomoss’ has begun to glow ominously. There does not appear to be an immediate threat, but still, the crew cannot help but to think that this is not going to end well. Attempts to kill the reactor from their current location fails and it appears that some sort of interlock is in place preventing this from happening; according to Aris, this interlock appears to be modern code, which the crew take to mean Kalamanaru’s people.

Aris then hacks into the station surveillance systems, which are now coming back online, and in the process of this, stumble upon a quick image of several ambulatory humanoids covered from head to toe in the glowing protomoss. All attention immediately turns to these … creatures and, though the resolution of the image is not the best, Ibrahim theorizes based simply on what he can see that they are former Sky Raiders whose biological components appear to have been taken over by some sort of bio-mechanical apparatus which prompts Eddy to suggest that might have been infected by the protomoss, especially since they do not seem to require life support. This seems pretty logical to everyone, although Ibrahim points out that he won’t have confirmation until he can open one of them up. Everyone immediately double-checks the integrity of their vacc-suits and Eddy looks askance at Ibrahim’s eagerness to encounter these things. Aris reports that he is unable to seal off the level where these … things are.

Ella attempts to make contact with the Imperium naval personnel boarding, using the Aimless Pilgrim as a go-between, but they instead receive only further warnings and threats from Commander Ferris. While this is transpiring, Aris is able to detect counter-hacking attempts as someone endeavours to take control of the surveillance cameras; rather than engage in a protracted contest, he simply crashes all camera feeds. If he has to blind, then so do they! He extracts as much data from the obsolete systems as he can manage, but this data still does not clear up the exact nature of the biological event or what this protomoss actually is. There is reference to a secret database located on level six, which they do not have floorplans for.

Initially, the crew intend to go directly to level six and, as before, opt to traverse through the elevator shaft itself rather than summoning the lift; as they do so, however, the lift arrives at level four – below them – and since the Imperials are just arriving, this is clearly Kalamanaru’s team. Suspecting that the would-be pirates are attempting to go down to the lower levels as well, Buck steps forward and uses his engineering expertise to sabotage the power supply of the elevator, thus trapping Kalamanaru’s on four. As he finishes, he hears the distinct sound of gunfire, prompting the crew to suspect that the criminals have run afoul of the strange glowing blue bio-mechanical things.

From their current position, the crew head deeper into the facility, intending on heading to the cargo elevator that is on the far side of this level. As they do, a pair of the bio-mechanical humanoids approach the crew from behind; Ibrahim is the first to engage with his storm carbine, but the gunfire draws a great deal of attention, and in seconds, an entire swarm of the things flood toward the crew. With his line of fire clear, Ibrahim advances on his felled target, kneels and begins conducting a full scan of it with his medcomp, covered by Eddy and Lorain while the rest of the crew unload their weapons upon the creatures. Buck is gang-tackled by several of the creatures but they are incapable of bringing him down and with Haank’s assistance, he promptly breaks free; Jim the Drone once more hovers above the crew, raking a steady stream of gauss rounds at the charging hostiles. Once the hostile creatures are down, the crew take stock of themselves: Buck’s space armor is smoking from acidic saliva scars from the creatures while Ibrahim announces his findings, that these things definitely were human once, but are now mere husks of men thanks to this bizarre protomoss.

The crew press on to the cargo elevator, encountering no additional resistance. They creep through what was once the equivalent of a botanical garden but has now been transformed into a hellish landscape thanks to the protomoss, halfway expecting an ambush at any moment. Upon reaching the hatch leading to the cargo elevator, Eddy opts to unlock the smaller personnel door rather than the much larger vehicle entrance. Once through this hatch, they summon the elevator and crowd in; even though they have selected level five, the elevator display reveals they are heading to four instead. Buck mashes the emergency stop, then hacks into the system and overrides all other commands to ignore all other commands. As the elevator resumes its descent, Ella, who is standing next to the door, hears a metallic-sounding tink!

“Grenade!” Ella shouts in warning.

And then, an explosion rips the doors apart and sends the elevator in a sharp dive.

Player Notes:

• Loki was out this week as well. No Mel next week (presuming Hurricane Irma doesn’t prevent her vacay) so based on the way this episode ended, we expect that Ella will be knocked out or something. I suppose the fact we’re aware of the biohazard present – the ‘protomoss’ – is a legitimate excuse why Ibrahim doesn’t pop open her suit to get her squared away.
• Lots of weird technical issues this session due to some map/image sharing issues.
• As stated above, we’ve started livestreaming our games. We play on Saturdays at 6:00PM Eastern and the live stream can be found at Ronnke’s Twitch channel. He’s also setup a YouTube Channel. Bear with us, please. This is still in it’s infancy. We have discovered that Twitch keeps the recordings only for two weeks, so it’s a good thing that he published to YouTube. With that in mind, I’ve removed the Twitch link for the “LiveStream” bit at the top.