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[Draignean]

"Thank you, Fuzzy. I think I need to leave... quickly. Do you know Mr Davar's ship? Or his buyer's? I will do my best to stay away from this other threat, and to come back to listen to your proposal. Oh, and to buy you a drink gift. I'll try to remember. Oh, but - Ciccio? is this anything we should be wary off?"

“Ciccio, the name of the owner, or perhaps someone the owner liked. It wasn't worth devoting the resources to figuring it out. Privately owned enterprise, reasonably profitable, caters exclusively to those rich enough to afford having a living animal raised in a farm environment and then shipped into orbit. Mr. Davar's ship is a matter which I, unfortunately, have relatively littler information on. It isn't a feature that he advertises about himself, and there is a rather surprising derth of data gathered on it. From this, as well as Varkonius' tactics, I would gather that it has sophisticated stealth and EW technology, but is not well designed with combat in mind. Not unlike your own ship, but likely at a larger scale,” Fuzzy said, sharing another sidelong glance at Aubrey. “His buyer booked passage on a freelance transport, registered for travel and business by AL-Loy, Tiamen, and a dozen others. Said transport is semi-automated vessel with a single crew member and a twenty passenger capacity. It is harmless, and could probably be critically damaged by infantry weapons.”

[lawastooshort]

"Thank you Fuzzy. I must rejoin the crew; I hope to see you again for my part of the deal."

Confirm action: head back to ship, spend up to all my money on a jump solution on the way back. Then we need to think a bit!

[IronyOwl]

Khate was pulled out of her latest tirade on how scrambling up and/or down a slippery slope ending in a giant sawblade was all the "plot" one really needed by another beep on her communicator. Which was, now that she mentioned it, filled with important things.

Oops.

Excusing herself ("Oops, work calls. Nice talking to you all, but it's time to stop talking about it and start making it!"), Khate began trotting back to the ship.

21 minutes sounds too late to make it in time, unless we buy a jump solution. Are we buying a jump solution? If not, what's the plan?

I can study the black box! I'm good at studying records of things blowing up!

Head back to the ship and review Sadish's black box. As in, study its contents and report them to Sadish, not post irritated 4/10 comments online about how it's mediocre at best and squanders anything of promise.

[Tiruin]

Kesari moved alongside Scarlet until she noticed a logical flaw in her thinking. The station being talked about wasn't the one they were docked on because it didn't make sense that way.

Hey everyone!
I've heard from the rest about the things going on and--while I really think we can't make it on time, we can plot a reasonably possible intercept course and broadcast a face for our ship; who's ready for mercantilism as we strike? Nobody shall suspect our ship if we keep a facade of heavy advertising! (At least not our ship anyway, which will look like a merchant carrier that I could configure to match an unconnected neutral company if ever we're traced).

But that said, everyone get back on the ship please! We have fifteen minutes to keep our nerves down for our first mission together--the next five is spent in bore sickness and de-fluffing for some of us.

Help buy that transaction for that...jump calculation!
Work on a sensor 'firewall' of advertising, marketing, and all around consumerism while calibrating several acute/deep sensors to aid our mission!

[Draignean]

Aubrey

Confirm action: head back to ship, spend up to all my money on a jump solution on the way back. Then we need to think a bit!

Aubrey queued up the station's jump market, only to find it locked off due to a security breach- requiring her to actually meet with a broker at one of the port kiosks, an irritat-

A priority redirect flashed on Aubrey's screen, taking her from the public jump market to a simpler, sleeker, distribution system. Aubrey knew this one, designed by Deliria's information gathering network, for Deliria's information gathering network. A parting gift from Fuzzy, and something she hadn't used in a long time.

Aubrey found an imminent solution to the Flounder, looking the price up. It was rather suspiciously close to exactly half of everything Aubrey had on account. Not unexpected, considering how much Fuzzy knew about, well, everything. Fuzzy was willing to help, but while he was generous, he was businessman- not a philanthropist. She purchased it without hesitation, forwarding it immediately to the Reunion while she rode the lift back down to the port.

Despite the current -rather distracting- environment of Deliria, the trip to the port afforded Aubrey a great deal of time to think. With the solution in hand, they could be within Sled distance of the Flounder and its planet within ten minutes, but that would put them rushing headlong into a furball that they were only minimally prepared for.  The image of a Mercy was of an individual who'd throw dice in a game where victory was wealth and defeat was death, but those that actually followed that doctrine tended not to last long.  This was a profession of tempered risks, not of haphazard gambling.

Aubrey met Sadish at the docks, getting checked back onto the Sled. It was difficult to read anything from the outside of the Finwalker, but she seemed distracted by whatever she was working on. Considering what Aubrey had heard about that topic, a bit of distraction didn't seem to surprising.

A quick check of the Reunion's personnel manifest and port control's sign-in roster revealed that Khate was the only one still aboard Deliria- and, somewhat worryingly, she'd been communications dark recently. Khate could charter a transit shuttle off Deliria, as Boris had, but not knowing where she was or what she was doing invited another level of uncertainty into the mission.

The quick flash of a new message calmed Aubrey's nerves somewhat, showing that Khate had been distracted (unfortunate, but not exactly unexpected), but that she was on her way. At least the Cane hadn't found someway to get incarcerated by Deliria authorities or start a riot between competing fan groups.

When Khate finally arrived, Khate piloted the Sled out of port as deftly as was possible, guiding it back with all speed that wouldn't sending it hurtling through the Reunion. Not that careful piloting made the eventual landing gentle, just slightly less damaging to the docking mechanisms. After the Sled landed, both Sadish and Khate hurriedly disembarked on their separate tasks, but Aubrey found herself with a moment to consider what to do next. The Reunion was ready to jump, the question was whether the rest of them were.



Scarlet

Scarlet glared at the console. "Yeah, this is gonna have to wait. Should probably put this goddamn drone back, though. . ."

Getting the drone back into Sadish's lab before the Fin got back proved impossible. Getting the drone back before Sadish noticed, however, proved pretty easy. Despite hauling a bright pink control module back in with her, Scarlet didn't think Sadish even noticed her entrance. The Fin appeared transfixed by a what appeared to be a rather unique bacterium. Granted, Scarlet was a field medic and not nearly as versed in the intricacies of biology as Sadish was, but she was still pretty sure that DNA should NOT resemble a buckysphere.


Sadish

Action: Buy Backimaged Blackbox data from KaGrenac's ship §4. I don't really have time to watch it, however-I have to get back to the ship and work on making some antidotes!

Sadish's focus on the bio-data was intense enough that she didn't even feel the discomfort of the Finwalker suit chafing at her as she exited the Think Tank and slid back into her mech. The data here wasn't the freshest, but it was well done. Full analysis would have to wait until she was back in her lab, but... there were enough disconcerting things in the sample she had to work with.

Dividing focus between not crushing people with the Finwalker on her way back to the docks and analyzing the preliminary data was not an easy feat, and there were probably a few more broken toes before Sadish stood outside the Sled, providing her identity to port control in order to get cycled back through.

Sadish was dimly aware of Aubrey joining her on board, but she was more focused on analyzing the massive immune response evident in the goop. Not only was everything toxic, but the response cells all looked like they were going after different threats- not a unified pathogen. Hopefully that meant the pathogen was stimulating hyper-sensitivity, not that the bio-weapon was capable of free-mutation in order to cheat antigens.

Sadish needed her lab, quickly, but she was reduced to waiting until Khate finally showed up, which did eventually happen- along with one her typically perky messages. Normally, this was endearing to Sadish, but at the moment she wanted to be focused on developing a defense against the entire crew turning into fountains of pus and infected blood-which required her lab. She wouldn't have much time before Aubrey loaded the new jump coordinates she'd bought off Fuzzy into the Reunion bored across space, but hopefully enough to get her equipment working on synthesizing the vaccine.

The Sled ride was quiet, Aubrey sent the data she had over to the Reunion, Khate skimmed the blackbox, and Sadish did her best to draw as much information as possible out of the goo breakdown. It was slow, and when the Sled ground its way into the Reunion's docking bay, Sadish was the first one out, already forwarding everything to her lab for processing. By the time she actually got back there in person, it should have a reconstructed cellular model of the pathogen for her to work with, as well as the preliminary tests to see which of the immunization packets she'd have to sacrifice in order to get a workable antigen.

By the time Sadish was back in her lab, she had a complete plan for what to do, when to do it, and how to get it done before it should be critically needed. It was good plan. It was also completely worthless when she got a good look at the model of the pathogen that her computer had constructed.

It was beautiful and terrifying, elegant and yet clearly a grotesque perversion of the natural order. The bacterium followed most of the standard features of a bio-weapon: its organs were of the expected obdurate abundance, and its cell wall dotted with a complex of markers that would make it tricky to combat- but all of those were expected features. It was the DNA of the bacterium that fascinated and terrified Sadish. Typical bacteria had a DNA strand, and potentially a number of identical plasmids running around. There could be dozens or even thousands of plasmids, but in all but the rarest cases there were only one or perhaps two unique plasmid types. This cell had well over thirty-thousand unique plasmids. Instead of being free-floating replicon rings, these were linked through one another, resembling chainmail and bent to form a perforated shell around the bacteria's primary DNA strand. There wasn't just one shell, either. This appeared to have four nested shells, each bound to the adjacent shells through a myriad of linking proteins, and the innermost shell was linked to the bacteria's primary DNA strand. The DNA was deriving some information from its plasmid shell, it was utilizing part of it, but the mind-boggling complexity of the problem preventing Sadish from even beginning to track what parts of the structure were active.

This was beyond Apex level bio-engineering. Sadish couldn't decipher it, but she could guess what the structure was for: this was, or was meant to be, a universal cell. Depending on what parts of the plasmid shell were activated, the fundamental nature of the bacterium could be altered nearly infinitely. Bio-weapon was merely one feature of this creation, it could also duplicate a neuron, form a tooth root, or become part of a cornea- and a few envelope calculations showed that the plasmids had enough 'space' to express complete DNA sequences for each of the sentient races with the bulk of their room to spare. This was programmable biology on a level Sadish had never seen, as far beyond her expertise as colony ship design was beyond the expertise of a tribal canoe maker.

If Sadish had found this on a Relic world, and someone had told her that it was responsible for the death of the entire civilization that had created it, she wouldn't have doubted it for a minute. The only certain thing was that this thing could adapt to and consume any antigen she could develop in her lab without even slowing down.


Kesari

Help buy that transaction for that...jump calculation!
Work on a sensor 'firewall' of advertising, marketing, and all around consumerism while calibrating several acute/deep sensors to aid our mission!

Reinforcing the Reunion's EW defenses met with mixed success, largely due to the interplay between Kesari's unspecialized programming experience and the Reunions own quirky physiology. While the defense Kesari created was prototypical, and needed a bit more work to be truly effective, the concept was interesting. Instead of a hard firewall that prevented access to the Reunion's computer, the system Kesari coaxed into existence was a maelstrom of honey pots and system locks. It was relatively easy to step inside the maelstrom and make a connection, but, once spruced up, it should be very difficult for an assailing computer to not get battered into submission by the Reunions hyperactive adware. The best case scenario was that the Reunion would be able to spike a direct hack back, using the assault channel as a window for her own counter-stroke.

The Sled arrived before Kesari had a chance to do more than get the frame of the program down, which meant there was likely to be a tough decision ahead. The more time she had, the tougher the Reunion's defenses would be, but also the longer their target had to escape, or for another crew to racoon their mark.


Khate

Head back to the ship and review Sadish's black box. As in, study its contents and report them to Sadish, not post irritated 4/10 comments online about how it's mediocre at best and squanders anything of promise.

Khate was the last one back to the Sled, checking back out of port authority and heading into the shuttle under the not particularly patient eyes of Aubrey and Sadish. Things had been going on, and that was probably important, but Khate had to defend the honor of DNR, particularly at a time like this. Her efforts hadn't been particularly successful, and some of the claims that had been made put Khate's hackles up.

Still, there would be time for message boards later. After they apprehended the bad guy and did the thing with the whatever, then she could get back to the important stuff.

Aubrey was the one who piloted the sled back, giving Khate ample time to queue up the back-imaged feed from Grenac's ship. It was, as expected from a black market pirate of a government feed,  of terrible quality. The relevant camera, the one capturing the ship's mess, actually looked like the footage was captured through a layer of smeared potato- which was entirely possible on a mercenary ship. The black box was primarily there to record flight data, and thus the video was held to only a few hours- though the ship's computer had been intelligent enough to lock the recording after it detected that all the crew had been killed.

The flight recorder part of the black-box was easy to skim through, particularly to make sure that Grenac had crossed through Tiamen space and had intercepted an encrypted signal with the same origin as the one the Tiamen had sent the Reunion. He had, and though it wasn't infallible proof that he'd been working the same Job as Khate's companions, it definitely pointed that direction. More importantly, the flight recorder showed why and how Grenac had stopped in the middle of deep space.

The ship recorded the endpoints of multiple jump calculations in the hours before the crews demise, apparently flicker jumping towards the flounder with all speed, but then, somewhere in the middle, the calculations go absolutely haywire. Either someone planted something on Grenac's ship that attacked the computer, or somehow, years away from the nearest civilization advanced enough to be on logs, someone managed to track his ship and project a very powerful interdiction signal. Either way, from what Khate could see, the flight computer completely stopped being able to make any forward progress.

Exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds later, a communications connection is opened. The sender's registered ID has been blocked, but the call-name "Nosoi" remains. Whatever exchange there was happened quickly, lasting eighty-nine seconds before the communications channel was cut and sensors recorded an inbound bore aperture opening and an unidentified ship (though presumably the Nosoi) passing through. From there, Khate switched over to the box's limited recording feeds from internal security.

The video of the mess, despite the poor quality, was informative. The problem was the audio was scrambled all to hell. Maybe some fancy tech people could do one of the things they did on deepshows and somehow invert the whatever to differentiate the signal harmonics and somehow make it sound right, but that was well beyond Khate. The video showed Grenac (handsome devil) and his crew assembled in the mess, looking rather intentionally indolent and carrying weapons in a very visible manner. If what/whoever was coming aboard intimidated them, they didn't show it.

Details were difficult, but the Cane who sauntered into the mess hall opposite Grenac's crew was still distinctive. For one; he was tall, zero-g birth tall, and two; he was shiny. The newcomer had hair like rainbow colored wire, shiny, metallic, and in a dozen different peacock hues. He wore no tech harness, nor did there seem to be anyone else with him. He spoke, and Grenac answered. The Audio was incomprehensible, but while it was clear that everyone was doing their damnedest to be calm through the encounter, everyone but the newcomer had a mohawk running between their shoulders.  They talked for three minutes and eighteen seconds, after which point Grenac and his hounds pointed their weapons directly at the stranger. The stranger hung his head, managing to convey mockery with the submissive gesture, and sighed.

That was when the first of Grenac's crew started exploding. There was no warning, no weapons fire from the metallic Cane, no sudden movement. The member of Grenac's crew closest to the newcomer began screaming, and in seconds began ballooning, massive swelling racing across his body, raising pustules and blisters that split the skin. A brief bout of panic fire erupted from Grenac's men, but the tell-tale flash of a personal shield around the metallic Cane absorbed everything. The swelling spread to the rest of the crew rapidly, disabling them in seconds and killing them in seconds more. Grenac succumbing last, his face an unrecognizable mass of weeping infection by the time the first crew member afflicted detonated, spraying gore across the room and further occluding the picture.  After that, there was nothing visible on the feeds except indistinct greyish blobs and globules of... something dripping over the recorder lens. Ick.


Boris

Head back to ship to install the EM Flask

Boris had only just begun installing the EM flask around the reactor when the Sled docked with the Reunion, an event heralded by a slight shudder and flicker of lights as the assault pod 'landed'. One of these days Boris would get around to working on that, but at the moment it was pretty far down the list of things that needed attention. Not for the first time, Boris wondered if it would ever be worth hiring his own engineering team. On the one hand, it would be nice to have a group of people to delegate the unending lists of tasks to, on the other hand it was expensive and the odds of them not all being incompetent idiots who couldn't repair a goddamn paper-clip without a blueprint was almost negligible.

The good news with the EM Flask was that the design was perfectly compatible with the Reunion's reactor, the bad news was that it was a great deal more complicated to install than Boris had suspected. He'd need two hours or more to finish the job, and in the meantime fervent prayer was likely to be a more effective radiation shield than the partially installed flask.


Decisions!

The crew has a jump solution, using that they can reach the Flounder within minutes, and be on the planet in minutes more. Unless Varkonius' goat purchase takes only a few minutes, that means it's quite likely they can catch him on the ground.

On the other hand, both the EM flask and Kesari's improved EW defenses will take a considerable amount of time, which might mean that delaying could be the smarter option- though it gives time for a lot of the unknown variables to converge on Varkonius.

[Dwarmin]

Sadish decided to assuage her crews fears, first.

Bad news. everyone!

Turns out the virus I found is beyond all mortal ken, both practical and theoretical, past my worst living experiences, and most desperate potential hypothesis, beyond the fervent dream and the deeper nightmares of my own mortality. It's post-apex, relic level technology, perhaps beyond that. It is beautiful and awesome to behold, and if it's a harbinger of things to come, nothing will ever be the same. It could remake our very reality on a whim.

There is no chemical defense I can make. If we come into contact with it, we'll all die, and quite horribly. Or, be remade into something unutterably horrible.

I have beheld the exquisite terror of looking upon the face of a infinitely strange deity within my meager instruments, capable of snuffing out all I am and will be, with motivations vast, cold, and unknowable-much as the crawling insect no doubt perceives the swiftly descending sole of a boot as the blank face of angry, unknowable God, so too do I look upon this organism with the fear that goes past mere pain of death and bodily fluid explosion, but the idea that ultimately there is no order in the universe, that random whim and chaos rule o'er all, hope is a sad fiction we tell to children, and that the cold dark between stars is the true nature of reality-light is the lie.

All we know is that we know nothing, and ultimately, we are all damned to a dark abyss of ignorance for the paltry sum of our mortal coil-and in that abyss, we may find a moment of illusionary peace and happiness that we call life.

My only suggestion is to enjoy your ignorance as long as you can, friends.

...

Anyway,  Khate, what was on the blackbox?

...

Afterwards, Sadish would try to contact Keresh from the ship. Not that she knew a whole bunch, but she could probably get the general idea across that they were all doomed.

Action: Ok! So there's no chemical defense. What about a physical defense, such a bio-suit or a forcefield? Or would this thing just adapt to any sort of protection you wore? Think!

Also, time to contact Keresh with what little I have, hopefully before we jump out of cellphone range.

[Digital Hellhound]

Boris kept an eye on incoming messages as he worked. He was getting soaked in rads even with the reactor core behind several layers of thick plating. It was a pleasant yet somewhat bitter sensation; it reminded him of the good old days. He'd made sure to check on the reactors of his ships personally every time - no point letting some fool poke around and get a stomachful of new and exciting cancers, after all, and that was if they didn't cause a meltdown.

Sadish was sending something rambling and long-winded. Boris gave it a quick glance; the blank face of angry, unknowable God, random whim and chaos rule o'er all, we are all damned to a dark abyss of ignorance...

Ah. It appeared she was writing poetry.

Boris sighed. She'd have to forgive him for not writing a full review, but he had more important things to attend to. He noted the arrival of all of the crew aboard and sent out a message.

'Boris Mundus here. The reactor needs more work. We can go after the goat-fancier now if we must, but you may experience sudden mass radiation poisoning on the way. But, ehh... it's probably fine. A lethal dose takes time. You'll manage.'

[IronyOwl]

Black box is mostly the same as Sadish's story: The ship talked to the Tiamen, flicker-jumped towards Flounder, and was sabotaged or intercepted in deep space. Someone contacted them, showed up, boarded their ship, turned out to be a rainbow-colored god, talked with them, and then the terrified crew aimed their weapons at him and exploded.

If one of you is reeeeeaaally good with audio we could maybe get more information, but in the meantime if he shows up we should all surrender immediately.

Anyway, I look forward to pursuing our proud new goat-owner!

[lawastooshort]

I think we should wait. If we delay we increase the risk of losing out on the job; if we rush in we increase the risk of death. It seems. Well, we don't know what will happen if we delay, but if we rush in, it seems probable we'll be caught in a trap involving multiple mercy teams and our target. It sounds messy.

I don't think there is a simple answer so let's go with what seems safer.

Kesari and Boris Mundus: can you finish your work in two hours?

Khate: perhaps I can look at the audio file. I am not an expert but given an hour I might be able to figure something out.

If there is consensus, head to the bridge and find a quiet spot to fiddle about with the audio file and see if I can make sense of it.

((I have to remember that I am Aubery is IT-capable, haha))

[Tiruin]

Since we're all going to be together in this, and I think there is a consensus for planning given what everyone said on the way back...I do hope this comes out for the better.

That said, I've found that our scanner system is also very acute with local culture and customs if the database knows it--look at all these pumpkins!

That aside, yes I can Aubrey. But I'm unsure if two hours is what we have given our timeframe.

Work on scanners; man the scanners! Proceed with plan of attack!

[Dwarmin]

Scarlet glared at the console. "Yeah, this is gonna have to wait. Should probably put this goddamn drone back, though. . ."

Getting the drone back into Sadish's lab before the Fin got back proved impossible. Getting the drone back before Sadish noticed, however, proved pretty easy. Despite hauling a bright pink control module back in with her, Scarlet didn't think Sadish even noticed her entrance. The Fin appeared transfixed by a what appeared to be a rather unique bacterium. Granted, Scarlet was a field medic and not nearly as versed in the intricacies of biology as Sadish was, but she was still pretty sure that DNA should NOT resemble a buckysphere.

As Sadish sent her message out, she heard a responding beep from right behind her. Apparently Scarlet had been there the whole time!

"...Oh, there you are! You got my message, right? It's amazing how utterly doomed we are!

Utterly, completely doomed!" She said, cheerfully.

[Chevaleresse]

"...Yeah, it's fantastic. What the hell is that, anyway?" She squinted at the bacterium in question. That was its DNA? That didn't look like anything biological she could ever remember seeing; though, granted, she never exactly went to medical school. She found the idea of a pathogen exploding people on command rather. . . farfetched, to say the least, but unless there was some sort of parsing error going on here, that thing had to be ludicrously complex. "It really blows people up?"

[Dwarmin]

"...Yeah, it's fantastic. What the hell is that, anyway? She squinted at the bacterium in question. That was its DNA? That didn't look like anything biological she could ever remember seeing; though, granted, she never exactly went to medical school. She found the idea of a pathogen exploding people on command rather. . . farfetched, to say the least, but unless there was some sort of parsing error going on here, that thing had to be ludicrously complex. "It really blows people up?"

Sadish decided not to comment on Scarlets inner monologue being spoken out loud. People did all sorts of weird things, anyway, and maybe she had been in a hurry. Never went to medical school? Scandal!

She corrected it in her mind before responding.

"Simply, you can call Her a Universal Cell-and nearly anything you can imagine, she can do. 'Blowing people up' is Her crudest and most basic implementation, one unworthy of Her genesis, but termination of biological life is certainly something she can be tailored for.

...In fact, the idea that such an amazing advancement was used in such a crude, ugly manner somewhat deflates my idea of Her creators as truly enlightened beings."

[Chevaleresse]

"Huh." She frowned for a moment. A universal cell was quite the find indeed - lots of potential uses for something like that, though Scarlet was rather concerned with more pressing issues that it presented. "I mean, I don't think they went through the effort of making something this complicated just to kill people. Not when there are so many easier ways to do it, so it - her, whatever- probably wasn't originally supposed to be a weapon. Probably. But it's one now, so now it's our problem. . ." She mumbled something under her breath, a phrase somewhat defying translation but coarse nonetheless. "So if you can't synth up a vaccine we're going to have to avoid exposure at all, aren't we?"

[Draignean]

Sadish

Action: Ok! So there's no chemical defense. What about a physical defense, such a bio-suit or a forcefield? Or would this thing just adapt to any sort of protection you wore? Think!

Also, time to contact Keresh with what little I have, hopefully before we jump out of cellphone range.

It was both a pity and a blessing that Sadish didn't have a live sample to play with. Every time Sadish thought up a way to block the spread of the disease, her mind came up with a way that this plague could adapt to get around it.  Bio-suit? Plenty of examples of rather nasty things capable of eating through most all suit materials. Energy field? There was a famous example to counter that one, a war in which one party's primary edge was advanced biotech, and the other party's primary edge was advanced metafields. The second empire's shielding had always been enough to hedge out the city-killing bio-weapons of the first, until the first empire developed a rather ingenious bacteria capable of plating itself in an iridium alloy and forming beta-rings in order to create tiny, microscopic, shield breaches. The rest was kind of history that most people tried to forget.

The clutch was that Sadish had no idea what tricks this thing had, and she was rather certain that she'd be listening for a week or fifty even if someone appeared to explain all of it to her. Her one solid point was that this was a triumph of bio-tech, but it was still designed to be controlled, which meant there would be constraints placed on how it could adapt and change. It didn't appear to have any wireless capability, it was a cell after all, and despite being unfathomably complex it was likely that it could only make major changes to its genome at replication time.  Together, that meant that the controller would have to have some sort of template, a mother cell body, then communicate the desired changes to that, and then produce new bacterium- so the already airborne (or waterborne/blood borne/etc) bacteria would have relatively little adaptability. So, most approaches that the attacker had not likely already accounted for, such as a personal hard shield or the tried and true kill-it-with-fire would likely be effective until the attacker had a chance to manually 'reprogram' the bacteria. Of course, things the attacker had likely already accommodated for, such as an enhanced immune system, would likely be as useless as a pocket full of posies.

Of course, Sadish thought, there were plenty of natural examples for an organism being able to reprogram its DNA based on environmental stimulus, which could potentially invalidate everything. But the idea that the bacteria could be 'surprised' by an unexpected condition was a place to start, in the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to update the Shark.

He picked up immediately when Sadish opened the link and didn't object in the slightest when she jumped straight into exposition and forwarded him the information she had. It was a good trait, and though he seemed a little wide around the eye when she finished, he didn't interrupt or seem unduly unsettled.

"My thanks, Sadish. I'm not going to ask how you got this, but it's precious information. The official copies of most information gleaned from the incident with captain Grenac's vessel, and the two others we recovered, have been... lost." There's more than a hint of anger in the old Fin's tone. "I'm including my extended contact information and your dispensation number, you can use the first to get in touch with me from any AL-Loy outpost, time and ansible resources permitting, and the second you can use to pick up your payment." There was a long pause at the other end, almost enough for Sadish to believe he'd disconnected.
"Off the record. It's possible that Grenac was the last captain to be hit, and it's possible he was the only one that wasn't tortured prior to gruesome death. It's possible the killer was looking for information and corroboration on something, something mercies knew about. That's just a possibility, and one that I would never repeat with the intent to knowingly disseminate AL-Loy information."

"I do not play with dice, Sadish the Restless, and I do not believe in coincidence. I do not say this to disparage your strength or the strength of your crew, but if you come across this man, flee. Contact the authorities and flee to safe waters. Good luck, and I hope that I am merely becoming paranoid in my age."


Star System Crescere
Population: 1.2 Billion
Government Allegiance: AL-Loy Trading Group
Static Points of Interest:
Planet AG-43 'Spot': Agricultural world, peaceful, prosperous. Little to no industrial development. Orbited by multiple space stations that act as hubs to take in goods  from the planet and hold them for trade.
AL-Loy Administrative Complex: A small space station in direct orbit around the system's star: Crescere. Light garrison, governs the system and provides contact to the bulk of AL-Loy space
Macrite Field: Two rocky planets and an asteroid belt are heavily infested by AL-Loy macrites which are in the middle of the several century process of extracting their resources.

The Reunion slipped into the Flounder's system (Crescere) accompanied by the expected rush of light and heat from a slightly stale jump solution. For what little it might have been worth to her crew, the situation of the moment was calm. There was no ensuing battle, no rush of comms chatter heralding imminent violence, and no drifting derelicts to show the passing of violence. Crescere was as calm as an agricultural system should be.

It was a four planet system with a pegasid, two hot rocks, and the bureaucratically named 'Planet AG-43'. There was also a broad asteroid belt running well outside the planetary limit, but that was mainly of interest in order to avoid it carefully. While spinning space-rocks were of little threat to a ship with a half-awake pilot, a decent tracking computer, minimal point defense, and basic shielding, AL-Loy's mining was aggressive. Literally. Eighty years back a couple thousand macrites had been dumped into the asteroid belt and into the two rocky worlds. The macrites did what macrites did best: consume metallic bodies and make larger copies of themselves, but AL-Loy had also given them the directive to be lethally protective in the defense of their property. Bootstrap miners didn't work in AL-Loy space, not unless they wanted their ship chased by giant machines that ate metal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Still, aside from occasional automated cargo drones carrying worthless rock from the asteroid belt to the two rocky worlds in order to offset mass loss from refined element shipments, the macrites weren't an issue. Crescere's official defenses were all clustered around the administrative complex kept near the sun, both for power purposes and to make boring directly to it more difficult- not that it was in much danger of attack. AL-Loy didn't have enough eggs here to make this system a target for their foes, and so the few military vessels stationed in the system functioned primarily as police ships to discourage pirates. Not that any but the most desperate would try raiding a commercial world directly owned by AL-Loy.

The only reason a neo would come here, aside from the AL-Loy mining engineers who checked on the macrite swarm and the mega-freighters that hauled refined minerals back, was Planet AG-43. Also affectionately known as 'Spot' in the agricultural goods community due to an unfortunate mix-up between datachips holding a trade-baron's economic growth proposal and his six year old daughter's class presentation about her pet dog. Spot was a productive world, with neither the excess that lead to new ideas and a desire for independence nor the paucity that lead to discontent and ideas of revolution. Her citizens lived well, with the luxuries of life shipped in from off-world in exchange for keeping the land well worked and tending the farming equipment. For the most part they were middle-class production engineers and agri-technicians, living comfortably in jobs that kept their families well fed and happy while staying connected to the rest of the galaxy via the Deep connected with each other via small on-world enclaves. 

The Flounder was one of three space stations that serviced 'Spot', acting as an orbital middleman for goods coming off planet and as a receiver for the luxury goods making their way back down. She was nothing to write home about, a minor hub without substantial population and very little side enterprise besides shipping, but at the moment she seemed to be getting an unprecedented bloom in business. There were seven ships docked on the station's external clamps. Two looked like trading vessels, one a flying box of great length typical of bulk shipping, and the other a much sleeker, very modern freighter- the kind that did priority shipping for minor luxury goods so an individual could order something in the Deep and get it delivered to their door in less than a hundred hours.  The other five ships were less harmless looking. Two were clearly foreign gunships, with multiple hardpoints, steeply angled armor, and the tell-tale boxes of missile pods. The other three were 'civillian' ships of varying candors, a surveyor, a modified long distance personnel transport, and what appeared to be a heavily modified tug. The last three, despite not being aggressive in their display of armaments all had tell-tale signs that they were less harmless, and much tougher, than they looked. Spinal mounts tucked into a hull seem, superficial battle scars on the outer hull, and, in the tug's case, a long line of fourteen deliberate looking gouges marked into the side of her hull, all spoke to long lives as mercenary vessels rather than sightseeing ships.

A single AL-Loy corvette hovered nervously a short distance away from the Flounder itself, probably engaged in an exceptionally worried conversation with the local authorities about why a small fleet of dangerous looking ships had just decided to all stay on the same backwater trading hub. Such things tended to make groups tasked with keeping the peace a bit itchy.


Boris

Installing the flask went, for the most part, according to the expected plan. There was cursing, spitting, burned fingers, and the constant thrum of radiation in Boris' bones, but that was just the natural rhythm of engineering- nothing to be concerned with.

Only one particularly odd thing happened, but that could be Boris' mind playing tricks on him. At one point he dropped a sprill head into the guts of the reactor's coolant system- not a critical problem, it would just sit there and vibrate until the end of time, but when he returned from mumbling profanities at his toolbox and fetching a new head, the old sprill head was sitting on top of the uppermost coolant line, though Boris was certain it had rolled off.

Still, radiation was a funny thing. Could be getting bad enough to be addling his brain, though Boris wasn't exactly sure what that meant for the rest of his health.

((Boris is currently engaged in a long action, he can talk and interrupt fine until it's resolved, but he will be assumed to be working on installing the flask from here forwards))


Aubrey

If there is consensus, head to the bridge and find a quiet spot to fiddle about with the audio file and see if I can make sense of it.

After guiding the Reunion through the jump to Crescere, Aubrey set up a nest in the Bridge, taking the audio portion of the blackbox file that Khate had sent over and running every preliminary she had. Kesari would let the crew know if anything popped up on scans that needed immediate attention, but for now it was a waiting game. Sadish could hopefully come up with something on the disease, Boris could hopefully keep their reactor from going nuclear at a strong sneeze, and she… well, she could hopefully try and sort out if the doomsday that both Sadish and Khate seemed to have bought in on was going to be visiting them anytime soon.

The audio portion of the recording was damaged, badly- even more so than Aubrey would have expected from back-imaging.  The back-imaging process was highly lossy, as the video indicated, but this was above and beyond standard data corruption- this looked malicious. That suspicion was corroborated when Aubrey pulled up the signal profile, noting that the first six seconds of audio were fine. Not good, not original, but with approximately the same amount of corruption as the video. The rest of the signal, however, looked like it was subject to strong heteroscedastic decay.

Aubrey had seen this before. Someone had been running an active wipe on the real copy of the blackbox data. Instead of destroying the data sequentially, deleting it segment by segment, this kind of wipe had been designed to cause a rapid loss in precision. Essentially, it prevented quick reflexes or technical prowess from saving a pristine part of the recording and instead should have forced the entire sequence to become a muddy mess. What it should not have done was get part of the way through corrupting one part of the recording and then stop. Unless….

Aubrey began combing through raw data, skimming byte code for an out of place pattern. She found it, buried in the access protocol for the black-box’s navigational feed. The original virus that had been used to corrupt this file was still there, but it was broken- missing a critical piece. Almost like it itself had been corrupted.

Which was, Aubrey realized, exactly what had happened. The proper authorities had grabbed the black box put it in as evidence. Once there, someone on the inside accessed the box and planted the virus. Sometime after that, when the authorities attempted to scan the files into the datastore, the virus activated as the nav data was read. At that point the original copy began to decay to nothing, and the destination also copied off the virus- which erased it as well. The only person to get a legitimate copy of the data was whichever hacker back-imaged the transmission itself, the lossiness of the process corrupting the viral program before it could complete.

It was possibly the only case Aubrey had ever heard of where pirating had improved the quality, and it gave her a shot at reconstructing something from the audio. It also meant that she had dodged a bullet: if she'd attempted to do data recovery thinking this was just corruption due to back imaging, she would have repaired the virus and destroyed the blackbox data.

A considerable amount of time later, with the help of knowing how the audio was corrupted, Aubrey got a full nine recognizable words out of the audio.
 “Belief” “Hunt” “Varkonius” “Bounty” “Cause” “Evolution” “Ignorant” “Regret” “Execute”


Kesari

Work on scanners; man the scanners! Proceed with plan of attack!

Kari settled in for a long stint watching monitors and listening to beeps. The computer was relentless in its classification of things, and it would continue to keep her updated as its model of the system developed. The best she could do was to guide it, to hint at potentially profitable areas to explore and keep it from going too crazy on advertising needlessly to every farmer on the face of Spot.  She tried, as near as she was able, to devote a substantial portion of the ship’s capabilities to examine Ciccio farm, and to classify all other ships within scanning range.

The first was not terrible successful for the longest while. The computer kept getting bogged down by major population centers, and Kesari was not entirely successful in preventing the computer from sending them advertisements for the Starset resort- which might result in a few awkward conversations later on down the line. Still, what focus she did manage yielded expected, but still exciting information. A short range tran-satmospheric shuttle had landed there, Varkonius, almost without a doubt. It would also appear that four, somewhat larger, shuttles were heading down to the planet as well, seemingly inbound to surround the Ciccio farm on the cardinal points.

Kari’s focus on that, however, was stolen when the computer pinged to inform her that the ship scan had detected something amiss. The five non-civilian ships docked had all checked out with the computer as belonging to various mercenaries, or at least as strongly suspected of belonging to various mercenaries. That was unsurprising. The bulk trader also came back as reading as a bulk trader that had been in use by the Flounder for nearly half a century. Also unsurprising. The Reunion’s systems, however, threw up a red-flag on the modern transport.

The plating of the transport bounced signal oddly, not like stealth tech, but not like standard plating either. Its engine signature was asymmetric, but instead of asymmetry resulting from natural wear, this looked like a performance enhancement to create a complementary focal point- a common bit of fine-tuning for hot rods and reactor freaks, but not something a trader who spent the bulk of their time travelling via bore would typically bother with.  Its gravimetric signature was also wrong, unless it was fully loaded with something rather extraordinarily dense, the freighter was a great deal heavier than the computer expected it to be. The Reunion’s computer pulled up the freighter’s trade record, and red flags emerged in a staccato beat of near constant beeping. None of them, however, were explained. The computer ‘believed’ (if that word could fit a non-sapient algorithm) that they are discrepancies, but seemed unable to elaborate on why.

In short, the freighter was odd- though nothing about it was actually damning. It had an odd hull, a well optimized engine, was too heavy, and its trading record gave the Reunion’s already erratic computer fits.