30/10/2014 - Fugitives (6)
Grant suggests they leave. Zonnos tries to stop them and calls the guards. Ace draws his body pistol and holds it to Zonnos’s head. The two guards rushing over from the door are hesitant. The rest of the crowd of DMC board members back off in confusion and panic.
Grant leads the way to Popara Hunt’s office, as there are no guards there.
Mika steps out from the crowd of board members. He counsels the crew not to make a bad situation worse, but Zonnos tells the guards to arrest him as he’s involved in this. Mika denies this and walks out, daring the guards to shoot him. Which they do not, but one guard goes after him.
Ace brings Zonnos with them as they move over to Popara Hunt’s office. Once inside, they realise there are no exits.
Fleeing the Building
Dirk however is convinced there will be a secret door and gets out his hand computer to scan.
Grant begins to worry about what to do next and how they are going to get out of here. Zonnos keeps telling them they are all dead when he gets out of this. They are trapped and there is no escape.
Dirk uses his Engineering and electronics knowledge to find a trip switch on Popara Hunt’s desk. It causes a secret door to slide open, offering them an escape route. Zonnos swears profusely that they found this.
Cyrus knocks Zonnos out with his stun rod and they withdraw through the secret door. The passageway leads to a waiting small shuttle, which is clearly an emergency escape for Popara Hunt.
Dirk extracts the key to start the shuttle and even though he is sure it is DNA or fingerprint protected, the ship starts. He can pilot small craft and they head for the space port to get back to the Red Queen.
They contact Drent, who asks what the hell is going on. They are on the news. A weird woman who came on the ship talking shite.
Realising they will have to leave the system, Drent begins making the Astrogation calculations to jump to the Gauda system.
A Strange Caller
While the rest of the crew were visiting the DMC building, Drent had gone back to the ship after getting bored reviewing the video feed.
He started to sense a strange voice in his head, calling for help. It was a woman in distress. She seems to latch onto him and he soon gets a signal that someone is at the outer door.
He goes to investigate and finds a rather messed up woman at the door. She begins ranting about "They are coming", "the Overlords", "the Beacon!" He gets an image of a big, dark strange looking ship with horrible robotic slaves on it.
Something strange happens. He seems to feel that something mentally tries to leave her body and enter his mind, but it fails. He has had this sort of experience before while a Scout on the rim.
The woman collapses and he takes her body to the spare crew room.
Making Their Escape
Dirk lands the shuttle near the ship and they board the Red Queen. Drent warns them about drifter woman in the spare room. Ace starts to get into his armour. Cyrus helps him. Dirk heads for engineering.
Drent and Grant go to the cockpit. Grant contacts space traffic control, who inform him the Police have interdicted the Red Queen. Grant manages to persuade them this is a mistake.
Drent pulls off some great piloting manoeuvres, enabling the ship to escape the space dock before they are completely blocked in by the authorities.
Ace wants to stay and deal with their enemies, alone if necessary. He is considering jumping out of the ship and free-falling back to Telcos. There is an argument between Ace and Drent about not opening the docking day doors while he is trying to escape. Ace decides to stay.
Once they reach safe distance, the ship jumps to Gauda. It is a four day journey.
Drifter Woman
Cyrus argues with Drent about how a drifter woman was allowed on the ship. Drent points out that they have been accused of killing one of the most influential business men in the sector.
They go to the spare cabin. The woman is knocking weakly on the door, asking to be let out. Cyrus checks her out, she is suffering from malnutrition, dehydration and general poor health.
She asks where she is and for food and water. She does not remember much, it is more of a haze, she was dreaming seeing things happen but not in control.
Mary
Cyrus checks her for drugs – nothing. He concludes she is psychologically damaged. He takes her to the medic bay to do a brain scan using the Auto-Doc. It reveals no brain damage but she does have an unusual brain scan.
The woman’s ID card says she is Mary Shallaghan. She hands over a datapad. It appears to have data that has been deleted, but a core piece of data is still there – co-ordinates in the Phosos system, which the scouts know is on the edge of the sector and is a radioactive system.
Dirk investigates the datapad and tries to recover some of the deleted data. He uncovers records of shipments of ship parts from the Seven Systems to Phosos. She was investigating these shipments and tracing them back to the source.
Grant questions her further and at one point she projects a thought into his mind. She is clearly a psionic.