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Aimo couldn't make this week due to a starship maldfunction, otherwise known as a fuel leak in the Landy, so Timo is bubbled and doesn't participate. Pity really as there was a lot of wheeled vehicle travel involved!
Having located the Ranch Approval Board - the authority in charge of ensuring new ranching establishments didn't conflict on their Nobble harvesting ranges - Nevada and Feng contacted them to apply to purchase the land including Mossyface Wood. Their details were checked, and the fact that the wood was on the edge of the Nobberosa's range seemed to make their success likely. The application would have to be considered, of course, and there was the matter of the fee, MCr3 for a basic registration. Feng took over at this point and negotiations - including reference to the name "Haydn Poole" resulted in the fee being halved.
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As the Long Walk swung across the sky above the Mountains of Dreams, her military-grade passive sensors were scanning the area to the best of their ability. As before, the completely unnatural permanent circular storm around the Mountains prevented any significant visualization of the ground there; but the edges were more perceptible and the free trader Hydarnis was soon located.
Rather unsurprisingly, it was parked on the same flat piece of tundra where the Maltby Expedition had set up its base camp slightly more than a year before. That expedition's grav transporter and cluster of hab pods was still visible, though none of them showed a power plant signature. The Hydarnis' plant was active, but only at tickover as was normal for a ship docked for a significant time.
A couple of orbits allowed comparisons, and between four and six human forms could be seen around the ship, engaged in assorted tasks probably connected with ship maintainence. Everything looked calm and very unmilitary, so the crew decided to go down and take a look. Loading a good spread of intensely military gear into the wheeled ATV - actually the property of the Maltby Expedition - they put the Long Walk down at midnight fifty kilometres away from the Hydarnis' view of the horizon.
Timing their trip to bring them to just below the horizon by dawn, they disembarked and floated on silent grav modules to a good vantage point 500m from the landing ground, their robotic cats loping along around them.
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Looking over the landing zone, they could see that the ship was closed up for the night - very cold at this latitude. External lights illuminated the area around it, and the transporter and hab pods were dark shadows on the edge of the pool of light.
Nevada sent up the little spy drone he'd built for observing smugglers during the hunt for the Bluey gang, and it hung in the dawn as the Hydarnis' crew woke to their day. The side iris opened and a rather skinny man in ship coveralls emerged, yawning and scratching as he shambled down the steps and onto the ground. Other than a flap-holstered pistol he seemed to be unarmed, and he was certainly unconcerned as he shuffled around lighting a barbeque clearly made from local rocks. That done, he retired back into the ship.
We guessed 4km as a good horizon for Tarsus, a size 5 world. Subsequent research shows it to be 3.8km so we guessed well!
The Cats moved up behind the cover of the transporter until they were close enough for a stun gun to be effective and waited. An hour later he emerged again, lugging two cool bags of meat which he began to lay on the sizzling griddle.
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Balancing his stunner across his forearm, Wombat squeezed off a shot, and the man went over like a poleaxed steer. Closing in, the Cats collected him, disarmed him and headed for the hatch where he'd emerged. It had opened without detailed interaction with a panel, so the guess that it was a talisman system was borne out when the door opened to a simple press from Wombat - who had their sleeping beauty across his armoured shoulders.
The layout was intimately familiar to the Cats, who had lived aboard a Type A for nearly an entire year. Moving down the corridor from the airlock, they passed the Low Berth bay; a glance inside showed the rack of modular berths were empty. Reaching the central corridor they turned for'ard and entered the crew lounge, guns ready.
Two crew were there, heavily armed with ... knives and forks, with which they were laying the table. As they gaped at the battledressed figures crowding through the hatch, Quin Feng deftly rolled a stun grenade along the floor. It went off with a slam and a flash, and the two crew went down instantly, peppered with knives and forks from the overturned table.
Nevada and Feng pressed on to the hatch at the far end while Wombat secured their new prisoners. Only one woman was on duty on the bridge, and Nevada's gauss rifle was more than enough to face her down. As she knelt on the deck, Wombat stunned her down as well, adding to their bag, and Nevada set the surveillance cameras to locating any others.
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The last member of the crew was scrambing through the crew lounge as Feng reached it, and darted desperately for the dorsal airlock, disappearing up the ladder despite Feng's attempt to grab her. Hot on her heels, she emerged onto the hull just as Nevada's cat Gromit sprang from the ground to the hull in one bound and pinned the terrified woman to the metal.
With the crew secured, Nevada set his hacking computer to work and they soon had access to the ship's systems. They had five prisoners, confirmed as the entire crew, and picked up on the logs and manifests to track what the ship was doing here.
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Elizabeth Holloway |
Douglas Shaw |
Nathan Fifield |
She'd been hired on Faldor, on the rimward edge of the Sword Worlds, by an archaelogical expedition from the Zinderplast Institute on 92/1107; 16 weeks ago. The contract was to ship three expedition members (archaeologists Douglas Shaw and Elizabeth Holloway and a doctor called Nathan Fifield), plus two ATVs, ten standard crates of equipment and the majority of the expedition already frozen in modular low berths. On landing, the crew were to be confined to quarters and the internal cameras turned off while the expedition unloaded. The crew seemed unbothered by these bizarre restrictions, which no normal crew would have accepted. Images of the three expedition members were captured, but there was a long gap where the unloading should have been.
Unwilling to leave the crew behind them, but also not keen to let them wake up either in case they were psionics, the Cats slotted them into their own Low Berths and froze them. Nevada fired the drives up and lifted her into orbit, before coming back down on his armour's grav modules, just to practice his orbital assault drill.
Wombat went over to the transport to see if he could disable it, but found he didn't need to bother; its power plant had exhausted its fuel tank over the year it had been ticking over and it was completely inert. He extracted a critical component from the power plant, preventing it from operating even if fuel was provided and completely disabling the vessel.
After a week of ATV travel through the worsening storm, the Cats reached the place from which they had first seen the Mountain. Looking down onto the base of the mountain, they could see most of what they had left there was still in place; the forward camp of the Maltby Expedition, the cave mouth leading into the base. However, there were changes.
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Where the Maltby ATV had been parked, there were two ATVs, matching the ones they'd seen loaded on the Hydarnis' security footage. Guarding these were two figures, armoured in combat armour matching what the Marines had been shown in their 'know your enemy' training ... Zhodani armour, with its distinctive split visor. Up to now, there had been absolutely no proof that their hypothesis of Zhodani in the Mountain was true; but here it was. Beyond them, they could see the cave mouth had been walled across to head height by gabions made of metal mesh baskets filled with rocks; simple but effective. Behind it, they could occasionally see helmeted heads moving which suggested further Zho troops were on guard.
As they watched, they saw one of the servitor frames the Maltby Expedition had been so disasterously inserted into clamber across the wall, carring a fresh gabion without apparent effort. Instead of a maimed human, a local animal had been inserted into the machine, and the whole thing seemed to be working far better.
As they watched, one of the robot cats noticed a movement around 600 metres away to the side. The glimpse it had allowed the team to identify what it had seen as a light Zhodani warbot. Anywhere in the mountains except here, its light grav drive would have seen it blown away and smashed, but here in the eye of the storm it could function as long as it stayed reasonably low.
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Nevada set himself up where he could cover where it had been seen while the other two lined themselves up on the two ATVs, and eventually the robot came back into view. Nevada squeezed off a single HEAP gauss sniper round and the robot disintegrated with a loud boom; only small, it was designed to scout or create havoc behind enemy lines, not stand in the line of battle.
I got cries of "Cheesy Fudge" at flying warbots surviving in the Mountains, after leaning heaviliy into the storm's unnavigable violence for air transport in this and the earlier encounter. Truth is, I'd always considered the area around the Mountain itself as "the Eye of the Storm" but fair do's, I had not actually mentioned it. Whoops.
Simultaneously, Wombat and Feng opened fire. Each launched a HEAP RAM grenade at one of the wheeled vehicles before rolling apart and into different locations - the trail of fire left by a RAM's track was a bit of a dead giveaway to the firer's position! The compact missiles streaked to target with unerring accuracy.
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Feng's slammed into the interior of the vehicle, and the flash of its explosion was clearly visible through the windows. Disappointingly, not much else seemed to happen, but the way the chassis sagged on its wheels suggested the ATV wasn't going anywhere. Wombat's target was hit in the power plant, and the resulting explosion was deeply satisfactory. Both guards were hurled forwards by the blast, though their armour seemed to have held, as they could be seen stirring and reaching for their weapons. Each were treated to a salvo of gauss rifle fire, which left them wounded and unconscious but not actually dead.
No heads were visible over the parapet in the cave mouth, but after a while a rifle appeared, held up from below so that its' scope could relay what it saw to the visior of the holder's armour. Feng grinned evilly as she lined up a shot, with intentions of perhaps blinding the man with the results, and loosed a laser bolt at the scope. Her plan was foiled by the glare filters in the combat armour computer of the target; but the blast not only destroyed the scope, but unbeknownst to Feng broke both wrists of the man holding it.
A tense quiet settled over the area as both sides considered their next move.