[IC] Lone Star (Sci-Fi/Space Exploration/Criminal) - Party Full

[DJAtomika]

Simon breathed a sigh of relief as the turrets powered down. He peeked out of his cover and them got out the full way as Marga and Hundred went ahead, presumably to scout the way. He hung back a little to let them advance; the Gygan was suitably armed to handle everything thrown at them thus far, so he felt safe, at least, for now.

Sevyn was there too, fiddling with a console as the party entered the next room. With rifle lowered he flipped up the faceplate of his armour to give the room a slow scan.

"Optics, full scan. Repeat previous."

Then, to the rest of the group (or anyone that would listen), he threw out another question.

"Anyone hurt?"

He knew Marga was wounded, but the painkillers in the medigel he had applied would've no doubt kicked in by now, so he didn't worry as much. Hopefully they'd get somewhere productive this time instead of constantly running into danger like headless chickens.

He hoped.

[SimplyJohn]

@DJAtomika "Optics, full scan. Repeat previous."

Simon's HUD quickly began to filter through various colours as the scanners took in every detail they could. The party's entrance had disturbed the air in the previously sealed room and dust particles danced in the lights from the emergency overhead fixtures. Unlike the parts of the ship they'd seen so far the control room was virtually untouched, apart from the gun-shot control console.

Mugs of congealed beverages rested on the work surface and several pairs of overalls worker's hung at the back of the room, almost as if their owners had only just stepped out and would be back any minute, even though the ship had been deserted for years. Across from the armoured viewport the scanner noted a row of security lockers, their access pads disabled due to lack of power. Everything else seemed dead and dormant, the loss of power having cut off all functions in the consoles, whose monitors now lay dark and empty.

The scanner chimed a warning as it picked up organic residue on the console. A window opened on Simon's display identifying human blood, the data quickly trying to match it against any known individuals but finally giving up and simply reporting that the blood type was AR+, which meant the person injured had been of a mixed species background, not that it mattered anymore. Even if they'd survived whatever injury had left their blood behind they'd most likely have died of exposure well before the party's arrival.

Continuing its survey the scanner pinged off various data ports and power sockets arrayed along the console, signs of heavy use and regular maintenance having been performed right up until the chamber had been sealed. WHatever had happened here it had been sudden and dramatic, driving the crew from their posts before anything could be done to secure the terminals.

[TheUnknowable]

"Anyone hurt?"

Farvis stood up off the ground and checked himself. "I'm fine." he said. At least this time he had managed to dodge the attack by ducking for cover, something that was much easier when it wasn't krivin friendly fire. He saw Marga heading to the shuttle bay control room and noticed that she had been hit, then walked over to her. "We have a wounded person, though." He pulled some pain killers of his kit. "Are you in pain?" he asked her. He prepared to give her a small shot. Syrial, .14 miligrams. It was designed to work on a wide variety of alien races, and had roughly the same effect on humans and Thuboisii. It was the safest thing he had in his kit given the fact that her mixed anatomy made it difficult to predict the effects of the rest. "So, find anything useful?" he asked her.

[Tenish the Mighty]

Phantom sensation. That was what it was. Phantom sensations from limbs Hundred did not have. Had Hundred ever had any limbs? She shook her head like a pack animal. Of course she had limbs. She had the same arrangement of limbs as most ambulatory, sentient species of the galaxy. This wasn't anything new. After such an intimate utilization of the Dust it was always difficult to reorient her senses with the rote material. Hundred placed a hand on the bulkhead to her left, pausing in her progression. She was not dizzy. The feel of the solid section of superstructure was steadying regardless. Hundred closed her eyes and swallowed. It did not normally take her this long to adjust. But then, she had rarely ever attempted such an expansive test of her Dusts' capacities before. Hundred hummed thoughtfully to herself. Stead. Certain. Hundred continued to the control room.

Looking around the sepulchral chamber Hundred frowned. There was a story here. Violence always had a tale to tell. The Dust tasted of the blood. It told her that it was made mostly of iron. She hummed again. She was not terribly interested in what the blood had to say. Give her the ions of computational systems over the carbon of the dead. Hundred assessed her Dust reserves. She was spread thin. Her tactics seemed successful, but it had left her greatly diminished in reach and grasp. But she had enough.

Moving towards one of the terminals, Hundred extended her hands over the control pylon like a shaman of some failed culture. Flexing her fingers the Dust descended upon the terminal, slithering between casings and keys, running along it's internal circuitry similar to, but much more carefully than, it had with the main lines. As it moved along the circuits, identifying it's structure, motes of Dust coalesced at certain junctures, building microprocessors to interface with the ships systems in novel and useful ways for Hundred's purposes. Building her own access point Hundred allowed her systems to connect with the terminals data. A jolt.

Hundred physically jumped, almost imperceptibly as she connected to the system. Also an unusually heightened response. Hundred tasked some SIs to perform a diagnostic on her internal interface hardware and software. Her attention turned to the data. It was beautiful. It was shoddy. It was dense and shallow. It was familiar. Hundred's frown deepened. Familiar? Why? She dove deeper into the terminals backlog of data. No, it wasn't it's contents. That was as the Syndarian had described, like a river frozen mid flow, it was an exquisite, curving collection of data that swirled and shaped itself in an almost illogical pattern as it had shifted as if in response to the intrusion of their attempted access. Hundred could spend months pouring over the dynamics of the way the code transposed itself. But that was not what had garnered her attention. It was not the data in the system. It was not the river. It was the riverbed. The architecture of the system. Sophisticated yet simple. Not the frankensteinian monstrosities of most modern system design, meant for high fungibility and user friendliness. This was custom work, yes, but it was not just designed, as most custom jobs were, for personal tastes and efficiency. It was not an efficient system. It served it's purpose perhaps, but that seemed like a necessary contrivance. All of the systems and subroutines afforded to ship function seemed ancillary. The system seemed designed for massive transference of data. More communications hub than ship system. Like a intragalactic server system. That was what was so familiar. It was like her own systems, back when she was still a branded slave-spawn of the Consortium. The massive processing power distributed over such a large area. Hundred had used them to generate the compression necessary to produce emergent AI. But this system was not the same. Similar, yes, but Hundred's systems were more foundry space. This system seemed smaller, more streamlined. Like a private repair slip.

Something blared in the back of Hundred's mind, clawing at her attentional resources. Hundred hummed thoughtfully and pulled away from the system. She was slightly surprised to see it was not her diagnostic tasked SI, but rather her biostatic overwatch systems which drew her attention. A backlog of attenuated requests for system maintenance greeted her. Hundred frowned more. Tissue death. Inflammation. Overextension of ligatures and a dozen other anomalous reports of damaged sensory equipment and necessary physical repair and calibration events. Hundred hummed a soft growl, her systems could not self-repair, at least not at a rate that was satisfactory.

"Medic. I require your aid." She said simply over the comm. Breathing out, Hundred shut her eyes again. The Dust remaining around her person obeyed new commands. The fluid layer of Dust that constituted the majority of her suits frenzied into motion. Disengaged from their normal non-newtonian behavior, the Dust flooded to the suit seals, unraveling the seams. Her suit seemed to slit along her flanks, peeling and slithering away from her body, curling up into itself, it folded into her gloves, boots, and mantled collar, exposing her flesh for examination.

Mostly naked now, Hundred turned her attention back to the terminal in front of her. The doctor had all the access to her body that he would need for basic medical treatment, she trusted the man to do his job. Her focus was not on whatever he would do to her. Instead she started to dissect the backlog of system behavior in the terminal, trying to parse what had been done to it preceding the teams arrival. Some artifacts of what had happened aboard the ship must remain in the record, Hundred would have them. She let the q-bits fill her processors and brain space. She hummed thoughtfully.

[DJAtomika]

"You got it."

Simon walked up from his place near the rear of the group, stowing his rifle carefully on his front rigging. A cursory scan with his optics indicated that yes, the Gygan was in need of medical attention, though which parts he would need to use medigel and which parts to solder...were not familiar to him.

"Hundred, I assume your internal mechanisms can repair themselves with that Dust of yours? For I am unsure of how to treat your more...mechanical injuries. Otherwise, stand still so I can do my work."

With her standing straight and still, he ran his optics over her proper, a deeper system scan that ran head to toe to identify injuries, of which she had several. Firstly, all the bruising and inflammation of flesh from the impacts of fragments of the asteroid belt they'd nearly perished in. Secondly, the burns and bruising from when she'd been hit by the explosion of JR's grenade back outside the Lone Star. There was also some stress damage to her legs; torn and stressed ligaments and tendons, bruised flesh and even some minor fractures (if she had any bones, that is).

"Alright, actually I need you to lie down for this. On your chest, preferably. I require access to the backs of your knees and ankles."

Once she did that, he drew a little gadget that looked and was the size of an average pen. With a click of the back end, a small laser was emitted from its tip. He twisted it and the laser's intensity lowered. With his other hand he grabbed a small spray bottle from his back rigging.

"Hundred, I'm going to numb your legs so that I can cut into your flesh. Once I'm done with that, I will be applying medigel to your injured areas, including your bones. I will require you to keep your legs and hips still during this process."

He knelt down and flipped his faceplate back on. With his laser cutter in his right hand and spray bottle in his left, he drew in close to the Gygan's lower half. His first step: spraying the backs of her legs with the bottle. The topical disinfectant and anaesthetic within acted quickly, seeping into her flesh and numbing it, along with removing any chance of foreign infection from the outside air or substances that she'd been in contact with. Next, he drew his cutter horizontally down the lengths of her legs and gently drew the flesh open with his fingers.

He'd never been familiar with Gygan biology, but upon seeing similarities to human physiology, he was silently pleased. With his optics he found several hairline fractures in her tibia and fibula's shafts, along with more severe breakages at her ankle joints, as if she'd been violently slammed feet-first onto something hard. He didn't really know, he'd been too busy fighting for his life for the past few minutes to have noticed her movements. The flesh around these breakages was injured; inflammed, some bleeding, thankfully no damage to any major blood vessels, including the ones that ran down the inners of her thighs. If those were cut, she would've died possibly, unless her more mechanical physiology would've stopped it.

He drew a tube of medigel from his back and popped the top. With a squeeze he laid out half the tube inside her left leg, and the other half in her right. Then he gently pushed the flesh closed with his fingers before using his cutter to cauterise the cuts, sealing them back up while the gel within went to work re-knitting her bones and healing her flesh. Simon reattached the empty tube to his back rigging and stood.

"Alright, that's done. You can re...uh, restitch your garments now, but do not move your legs for about five minutes. Give the gel some time to heal you."

He flipped up his faceplate, a small smile gracing his face.

"Well then, at least that's done with."

[SimplyJohn]

...she started to dissect the backlog of system behavior in the terminal, trying to parse what had been done to it preceding the teams arrival.

@Tenish the Mighty

As the nanotech went to work the consoles began to stutter with life, drawing power from Hundred's systems while still cut off from the central core by some mechanical means further into the ship than the Gygan would be able to reach from this lower deck without extending all of her Dust into infiltrating the maze of wires and network connections, or lack thereof, between there and the control room she was physically inhabiting.

A surge of data flowed from the local back-up memory drive, files and reports covering over two years of continuous operation, most of which seemed trivially mundane and repetitive. An odd report or mislabelled link flagged up on Hundred's display every few seconds, only to be whisked away just as quickly as her search algorithms identified them as on-going activities or explainable damage suffered as part of the ship's journey.

As the algorithms closed in on the last days before the ship had fallen silent more and more of these seemingly trivial repair reports began to pile up and the algorithms began to compile a list. At first the faults seemed random; the temperature in a crewman's quarters turning freezing while he slept causing hypothermia, grav plating cutting out in the middle of a cargo transfer leading to the lose of some non-vital supplies, food replicators defaulting to producing only chilled tomato soup and other such minor mishaps.

Scanning back through the records the algorithms found the earliest of these anomalous events had occurred not long after a shuttle whose previous destination and departure details had been erased from the system had docked with the Lone Star. Immediately the algorithms centred on the event, interrogating the system for any information on the shuttle that was available, but apart from the basic registration and identification details of the craft itself all other requests for data were pinged to the central computer, which at present was showing as disconnected from access.

Flagging the shuttle for future analysis the algorithms moved on, once again scanning the data files for anything of note until reaching the final recorded entries. A video file crackled into life on one of the damaged screen, the sound muted and illegible, showing a group of crewmembers rushing into the control room while bursts of light, possibly gunshots or explosions, flashed in the doorway behind them.

The group were all armed apart from one woman hiding in the middle of them as if being escorted or guarded. In her arms was what appeared to be a large box of some kind which she hugged to her chest tightly while the rest of the party spread out around the room. One of the men, a larger man with subtly different armour from the others, an officer perhaps, moved to access the control panel. After several seconds he began hitting the console with the butt of his rifle before turning the weapon round and firing several shots into the terminal. The woman with the box stepped forwards, apparently angered by the man's actions before her attention was called back out into the corridor. A moment later the party swarmed back out of the room as quickly as they'd entered, heading off elsewhere.

Further systems logs recorded the departure of a shuttle a few minutes later, the same one which seemed to have caused all the troubles on-board the ship, but no information was available as to who was piloting the small craft, or what its cargo could've been.