Episode 122. Part 3

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Man: Put down your weapons!

He’s holding a stun stick, but Nika’s holding a gun. The guard is outmatched in firepower but he doesn’t back down. Christian cleans up his speech, draws his gun, and points it at the guard.

Christian: You’re going to want to cancel that security alert, now. (over his comm) Rina, come up here. Both of you, come up here.
Man: Guns are not permitted in Erewhon.
Christian: That’s good know.
Man: Put those down.

Give the man some credit—he’s facing down two guns armed with nothing but a fancy plastic Q-tip.

Nika: You should call off the security alert or I’m gonna kneecap you.
Christian: That means ‘shoot you in the kneecap’. More importantly, you should call off the security alert or my friend, the engineer over there, is going to set this whole thing to overload.
Man: Hold on a minute.

Nika promptly shoots a round into the ceiling, then levels the gun at the guard again.

Nika: Call them off.
Man: (into his comm) We’ve got a situation here. They’re telling me to make you not come down. They have guns and they’re using them. They have threatened to do some sort of lava thing and I’m not sure what that means.
Arden: Just shoot him.
Man: (to us) We have a conditioning unit here.
Rina: (picking it up) Conditioning unit?

Christian walks over to take the comm away from the guard. The guard struggles to keep it.

Man: I’m afraid I can’t—
Christian: You’re willing to die for that?
Rina: Excuse me, but did he say conditioning unit?
Christian: (to the guard) Give me the stick.
Nika: Take his radio, too.
Christian: And give me the radio. And if you don’t, I’m going to shoot you.
Nika: One….two…
Man: Um….okay.

The guard pushes a button on the stick and hands it over. Christian promptly stuns him with it. The guard slithers to the floor.

Rina: Did I hear him right? Did he say conditioning unit?
Christian: Arden, what’s a conditioning unit?
Arden: It’s something that makes you behave a certain way.
Christian: Does it involve injections?
Arden: I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve never used one.
Rina: (please?) Let’s get out of here.
Nika: Let’s go.

Arden’s taken the comm unit off the woman Rina knocked out and Christian takes the other one off the guard at our feet. There’s no chatter on either of the comm lines, but it’s only a moment before someone calls on the comm:

Voice: Security team, respond.

Arden speaks into the one he swiped.

Arden: Yeah. We seem to have taken care of the problem.
Voice: We’ve got a team heading down there.
Arden: All right. We’ll stand ready for them. Make sure they have some restraints with them. These characters seem to be dangerous.
Voice: You’re not sure?
Arden: They had guns. We managed to get them away from them, but who knows what other ideas they may get.

We’re moving out of the control room as Arden’s talking, going back up the corridor for the elevator. When we reach it, we take stock: we each have a gun apiece and two stun sticks. Nika advises us to stun the team when they step through the elevator. We don’t want any bodies to explain or deal with.

Arden: Do you have any skill in using one?
Nika: It’s pretty easy. You just jab’em with it. Do you want me using this? (points at the stun stick in Rina’s hand) Or do you want me using this? (holds up her gun) Just in case?
Christian: (to Arden) How well trained are your security here? Would they look around first or just pile out of the elevator?
Arden: They’d look first.
Rina: Less talking, more ambushing.

Rina hooks a thumb at the elevator, now nearly at our floor. The others get into place. Arden and Rina flank the elevator doors. Christian plants himself in full view of the doors, intending to smile and say ‘Hi’ to distract the guards long enough to have us get the drop on them. It’s not much of a distraction, but still….

Rina: How about have two people kissing?
Arden: Are we on the good ship Fifth Grade now?
Rina: (snorts) I don’t think we ever left.
Nika: If you want a distraction….Christian, come here.

Christian and Nika get in a clinch and go at it.

Arden: All right, now I’m distracted.

The elevator doors open. Inside is an older man, in his apparent 60s, balding and dignified, with long features and domed forehead. He takes one look at Nika and Christian snogging like a couple of kids at the prom and stops short of exiting the elevator.

Old Man: What is the situation, here?

There’s a strange humming sound. Christian comes up for air, sees the old man and brightens.

Christian: Oh, good! You’re here. Are you the priest? Because we need to get married. Right now.

Christian sees the Old Man has gold bands on his cuffs, and also notices the humming sound. While talking to the man, Christian discreetly tries to determine if the humming is coming from the old man or from another source. There’s something not quite right about the way the old man looks. He’s….fuzzy, like a picture that isn’t quite in focus.

Ah. Right. Personal force field.

Christian signals to Nika. She’s got her gun held at the ready, behind his hip.

Old Man: Who are you?
Christian: Well, my name is Christian and I need to get married.
Nika: I’m pregnant.
Christian: It happened very suddenly. We believe it’s a visitation by God.
Nika: I’ve been blessed. A virgin birth.
Christian: (brightly) Who are you?

Arden and Rina wait next to the elevator doors, out of sight.

Old Man: I am the security administrator.
Christian: Security? Then you’re not the priest? Because we asked for a priest.
Old Man: No.
Christian: No priests?
Nika: (indignantly to Christian) You brought me to a place that has no God?!
Christian: I didn’t know this place had no God. I figured that God was everywhere.
Nika: But they don’t believe in God. They don’t have priests.

All right. Arden’s had enough of this farce. He steps into view and declares:

Arden: You’ll have to excuse them. Exposure to particulate matter has made them a little….crazy.
Christian: I—hey, now…
Arden: Calm down. Calm down. We’ll get you to some better air than what we have down here.

Arden moves to shepherd Christian and Nika away to the surface. Arden calls Rina over his earcomm, making a show of it.

Arden: Are you here someplace? I need you to gather up the tools and get out of here.
Rina: Uh, yeah. Right here….

She steps up into view, hefting her tools as if she’s just come up from down the corridor, instead of lying in wait just outside the elevator.

Arden: (pointing to the control room) Two of your guards are here. They were affected by the particulate matter too. I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?

Behind him, Nika complains loudly.

Nika: You promised me a waltz. Dance with me down the hall, darling.

So saying, she grabs Christian and they start up with the waltzing. Say this for Christian and Nika—they look good doing it.

Arden: I’m sorry for all the trouble, with the security and everything. I can promise you I will get you a full refund with this visit. No charges whatsoever. But I need to get these people into cleaner air than what’s down at this level.

Arden does us proud: that’s the best damn lying he’s ever done. Christian and Nika are now pacing up and down the hallway in a tango, the better to keep Nika’s gun hand hidden from the Old Man. Christian murmurs in passing that he’s very happy to see her and she replies that they’ve got to get married now, things have progressed a little too far … Arden repeats his imperative that we retreat to the cleaner air topside.

Arden: Onto the elevator, onto the elevator. Never mind the nice hologram.

We see the Old Man tapping something on a security screen on the elevator wall and his image becomes clearer and sharper. He’s just turned his personal force shield off.

Old Man: Please step onto the elevator. Please put any firearms on the floor. Security told us you have firearms.
Christian: Oh, no, no. We have arms. That were on fire.
Old Man: Either you believe I’m some sort of imbecile, or you’re some sort of imbecile.

Nice try, Christian.

Old Man: Put your firearms on the floor. We’re going to talk this out.
Christian: But if you’re an imbecile, there’s no point. And if I’m an imbecile, there’s no point.

Behind him, Nika moves to put her gun back under her coveralls. Arden takes it away from her and puts it on the floor.

Nika: (childishly) Heyyyy, that’s mine!
Arden: I know. We’ll get you a nice shiny red one when we get back.

Nika pouts.

Christian: I want a pony.
Arden: I’ll see what we can do.

Nika complains that Arden promised to take her to a cowboy ranch and Arden just agrees with her.

Old Man: To make this go a little quicker, I’m summoning a medical team.
Arden: (gratefully) Please.

Arden grabs Christian and Rina grabs Nika and together hustle our delirious crewmates aboard the elevator. Christian smiles blearily at Arden for the sake of any cameras that may be watching, and says:

Christian: You’re pretty. Will you marry me?
Rina: (eyeroll) You know, this is the last time I’m gonna ask Jerry to pair us up with these two.
Arden: You should have worn masks. We had the masks right there in the van. We should have gone back to the masks.

It’s tight in the elevator with all of us in there. The Old Man intones to a mike hidden somewhere in the elevator.

Old Man: Level Three, please.

The elevator doors close and we start to rise. Arden continues to apologize on behalf of our ersatz company and the Old Man admits he doesn’t understand Arden’s need to apologize. Arden apologizes anyway as Rina proceeds to upbraid the wayward members of the crew about refusing the masks. She told them what could happen down here, but did they listen? No. Arden apologizes some more. Rina demands if the other two checked the filters before they left, oh please say they checked the filters before they left. All the while, Nika’s humming the melody from The Blue Danube Waltz and slowly turning in the tight confines of the elevator.

Rina: Come on, it’s nearly Pumpkin Time, Cinderella, so quit dancin’.

And so it goes, for the entire ride up.

Old Man:(to Arden) I’ve seen one of yours before.
Arden: One of my what?
Old Man: One of your line.
Arden: My line?
Christian: Yes!
Nika: (brightly) You have lines?
Arden: No.
Nika: (enthused) You didn’t tell me you have lines. Which play are you in?
Old Man: The elevator’s operating under my voice code, now. We’re heading to the security station.

Arden motions to Rina behind Old Man’s back: Knock him out.

Rina moves into position under the guise of trying to restrain Nika, then lashes out with a fist to the Old Man’s jaw. She catches him completely by surprise and he slithers bonelessly to the floor. We quickly search him for weapons or comms and turn up nothing but a small wand and an ear communicator. Christian picks up the ear comm and mimics the Old Man’s voice.

Christian: Elevator. Stop.

The elevator stops, the doors remain closed, and the floor indicator shows we’re on the third floor. We originally came in on the first floor and that’s where we need to go. Rina rigs up an override using her tools. The elevator hitches and then slowly descends to the first floor. We take quick stock of what we’ve got.

Nika’s gun, with her fingerprints, is still on the floor down on SB4. It might as well be in the lake for all the use she has of it. Arden’s left his stun baton down there, as did Rina. But she’s got all the weapons and tools she’s arrived with. Christian still has his gun as does Arden. We also have the Old Man’s wand-thingy and his ear mike. Inventory concluded, we prop the Old Man out of immediate view of the doors, hoping it would be a minute or two before anyone notices him in there, and look perfectly innocuous for disembarkation.

Just a bunch of repairmen returning to home base, that’s us.

The elevator chimes and the doors open. Christian presses the down button before exiting. The way is clear all the way to the building doors. We can see the van across the way on the launch pad, and it looks like it’s been landlocked.

Great. The cops have booted our ride.

Rina starts hacking the control panel at the launch pad, to override the landlock on the van. It’ll take a few minutes.

More security guys show up in the building we just left and seeing us through the clear doors, they disappear—ostensibly to get reinforcements.

Nika: Oh, shite! Gimme your gun, Arden.

Christian quickly puts gas masks on all of us. Nika sees the security guys return and one of them has something remarkably like a grenade launcher. The building doors open…. Nika aims for the shooter, to disable him to make the shot go wild. She just manages to wing him. He grunts from the impact and the weapon fires wild.

Rina ducks but stays at the control panel. Nika and Christian and Arden take cover in and around the van.

The security team look at Nika, since she’s the one most obviously armed. They toss something like a hockey puck onto the launch pad and an ear-splitting screech rips the air. Another one quickly follows. Nika kicks the one closest to her over the side into the water and she suffers a shock on contact. The other screamer lands close enough to Christian that the noise knocks him out. Rina’s immobilized, with both hands clapped tightly over her ears.

Arden exits the van to drag Christian out of harm’s way. Rina grits her teeth and resumes hacking. Nika kicks the second screamer over the side into the water.

Blessed silence.

Nika aims her borrowed pistol at the foremost man in the security team. Rina hacks away. Christian revives and as Nika holds the security team at bay, he duct tapes the building doors closed. Not that the tape would hold back any determined egress, but it will buy us a little time once the landlock is disabled.

The Old Man appears in the lobby.

Old Man: (calmly) I’m going to ask you once more to surrender. Surrender please.

No. We ignore him and continue working toward our escape.

Old Man: You are landlocked. We’re about to shut down that terminal. You’re isolated. Would you rather go with me or with….a Federal Marshal?
Arden: Somehow I think that if a Federal Marshal came down here, you would have more to hide than us.
Old Man: Our presence is not a secret.
Arden: No, but some of the things we found down below are.
Old Man: That’s not the way I hear it.
Arden: Maybe you should check with your superiors, then.
Old Man: Then perhaps we should talk. Why don’t you put down your weapons and we’ll talk about this.
Arden: Why don’t you let us go and we’ll send up a wave sometime.
Old Man: I believe I’ve made my offer.

The security team outnumbers us, but we have the lethal weapons. They’ve got our ride landlocked and are shutting down the control panel, but Rina’s working like crazy on her hack. The control panel goes dark just as Rina hits the final key, but the engineer is just a split second faster: the landlock is canceled. Arden and Nika run for the van, Christian hauls them in, Rina grabs her tools and sprints—jumps—and lands in the van.

We bug the hell out of there and leave the security team in our wake. We spend a tense moment or two looking for pursuit, and when none appears, we relax enough to start thinking again. And arguing.

Nika: We seriously need to ditch this van.
Christian: It doesn’t matter if we ditch this van or not—we rented it under our name.
Rina: It wasn’t my idea to do that.
Christian: We didn’t have a choice. We needed an ID and we don’t have fake ones.
Rina: I could fix that.

Arden growls from behind the wheel.

Arden: In any case, let’s get to our ship and get the heck out of here.

We fly for a moment.

Nika: They really can’t prove we did anything except that we opened a door.

Oh, no? How about assault? Hacking? Stealing colony property? To say nothing of any applicable speed limits on take-off.

Arden: We know that they have access to weapons like Operatives do.
Christian: Not necessarily. All we know is that one of them had technology—
Nika: And now we’ve got it.

She holds up the wand we took off the Old Man.

Arden: Whee. What does it do?
Nika: Let’s worry about that once we get back to the ship.
Rina: Later. Let’s just get out of here.
Nika: Yeah, let’s get the hell outa here, cuz we’re not pickin’ up cargo on Sophie.

We make it back to the storage unit, change back into our street clothes, return the van and on return to our ship, we find a local sheriff waiting for us.

Christian: (in greeting) Officer.
Sheriff: Is there a Marina…Sebastien?

We’d used her ID to rent the van, since it was faked for her alias anyway. Great. Looks like the Sheriff talked to the van rental people. There’s nothing for it, he’s got us dead to rights. Rina speaks up.

Rina: Yeah...?
Sheriff: Everyone stop here, please. Your ship is bound by law. As are you and your three companions.


Come again?

Sheriff: We’ve got a report here of assault, possible theft—
Nika: Theft?
Rina: Of what?
Sheriff: Put your hands on your head and give over your weapons.
Christian: Who did we assault?
Nika: What did we steal?
Arden: Who is our accuser?
Sheriff: You’re gonna make me read you all your Miranda Rights?
Christian: Yes, please.
Sheriff: All right, then come with me to the station, then.

We give him no guff but walk with him to the station, like any other law-abiding citizens. The station is small and messy and in keeping with the environs of Purgatory Station. Also, in keeping with Purgatory’s unsavory side, once we’re all safe from the prying eyes of passers-by, Christian catches the vibe off the sheriff that he’s willing to be bribed to let us go.

Now on surer footing, Christian starts bargaining for our release. He starts by asking about our charges and the Sheriff reads them off. Christian suggests that since we’ve got cargo that needs shipping right away, perhaps we can simply pay a fine to expedite the paperwork? Christian suggests perhaps 500 credits? The Sheriff allows that for 500 he could be convinced he never saw us. Christian ups the ante: how much would it cost to change the name on the warrant? After all, it’s a Russian name, it’s always easy to confuse it with…say…Potemkin? For another 200 credits, the Sheriff allows how it could be arranged.

Christian gauges the man’s demeanor, to ascertain if once paid, he’d keep his word. While it’s possible the Sheriff would give us up in a heartbeat if the Erewhon authorities offered him more money, Christian is reasonably sure that the concept of bribery would never occur to the colonists.

Christian: I think that it’s a fair fee for all your hard work and I appreciate what a diligent officer you are. I rest more comfortably knowing you’re here doing your job.

Christian pays the man and we’re out of there. Since we’d already arranged for refueling while we were out, we’re gassed up and ready to go. There being no time like the present, we break atmo and say goodbye to Sophie. Once clear of it, we take stock of possible ports of call in Kalidasa system.

The nearest planet of any measure is….Beaumonde.

Um, no. We’re not going there.

Sho-Je Downs? Angel? Salisbury?

No, no and no.

Whittier is nice this time of year. We’ve never been to Whittier. What’s at Whittier?

Agriculture. Food stuffs. That means viable cargo.

Whittier it is.

It’s three days’ journey to Whittier, but we shouldn’t have a problem getting there. And once our course for Whittier is plugged in, we get to the business of looking over what we found on Sophie.

It’s a scrap of paper with figures and letters on it and after a bit we decide it’s likely from a cargo manifest. We cannot make out the name of the ship the manifest is from, but there is a partial barcode. We scan the barcode in and run it through a few programs to resurrect the missing data.

We end up with a fragment of a word: …ZARAT…

Arden’s memory nudges him toward something Swordsman said to him back on Boros…a name. An author? A philosopher…?

Arden: Nietzsche?
Rina: (lightbulb!) Zarathustra!

Jumping on the Cortex, we eventually narrow the possible hits to a civilian ship by the name Zarathustra. Its destination was Coldstone, off Fury, and its last known port of call was Highgate, in Blue Sun.

Fifteen years ago. Before the War. And not that far from Miranda….Miranda, famed of song and story and Reavers and chemical genocide and….

Okay, now we’re edging close to tinfoil-hat conspiracy country. Even so, we make note of the particulars—what still remains after so long a time—and go on to the next piece of the puzzle: the wand we’ve taken off the Old Man.

It’s Rina’s first impression that it could possibly be a sonic weapon of some kind. It’s not exactly identical to what the Blue Hands used on us. Rina doesn’t dare fiddle with it. She puts it away for safekeeping. Perhaps she might find a way to test it safely to see how it works, but now is definitely not the time or the place.

So for our efforts, we have a scrap of manifest from a fifteen-plus year old ship named Zarathustra, last seen in the vicinity of Highgate, close neighbor of Miranda. And we have a possibly lethal sonic weapon as yet untried.

We shelve both matters for the nonce and concentrate on making ends meet. We will try our luck at cargo on Whittier and slowly make our way to Blue Sun and possibly, just possibly, find some solid answers surrounding Swordsman’s agenda and Arden’s eventual fate.



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