SadishSadish was silent for a moment.
"...Where is the Star? Do you know what did Katuen wanted it for anyway?"
"As far as I know, it's still with Varkonius. Wilcox sent teams to investigate his ship, his quarters, and he sent four trans-atmospherics to intercept him on planet. I don't think anyone has found the Star yet, if they had, well, there wouldn't be any reason to keep the rest of us around."
"I have no idea what He wants with the Star, and I think that the only other person who might have been able to tell you was Varkonius, and you saw what happened to the shuttles. I wouldn't bet on him being alive."
MeanwhileVarkonius' EVA suit steamed slightly as he levered himself out of one of the Flounder's surface maintenance airlocks. He slung the emergency EVA bag to the corridor floor, and then dropped down beside it. The bag bleated softly.
"Yeah, yeah. I know, not exactly how I planned for things to go either."The bag bleated in consternation.
Vark nodded.
"I know, rude little buggers weren't they?" He knelt by the bag and unzipped it. The goat inside was relatively small, wide-eyed, and mildly scorched. It was also wearing a harness that wound through and around its chest and over the top, connecting to a loop over its spine that let Vark pick it up as through it were a fuzzy and indignant briefcase.
Vark tested the weight of the goat in his left hand, made sure his right hand was free to grab his knife or his explosives, and headed back to his rooms.
"Come on now, we've got to go meet your new friend. And probably kill people. And maybe blow something up."The goat bleated in confusion, staring up at Vark with those odd, alien eyes.
"Believe me, I'd be happier if this was my party. Still, we make do with what we have, eh?"The goat gave a neutral bleat, apparently considering how it was going to make do with what it had. If anything came to its mind about how it intended to deal with being carried in a sling by a terrorist, to be later fed to same terrorist's pet panther, the goat did not share the plan.
SadishMickaw grimaced.
"That's probably for the best. If Varkonius could be tortured for the Star's location, this would be over much more quickly. Ka-Taeun will likely keep people around to search for it, but there won't be any more use for any of us once he has it. We nee-"The hangar's lights flickered, and the grav-field supporting Sadish seemed to shiver.
"Is this it then?" Mickaw asked, his voice becoming soft and dangerous again.
"Is this where your crew tries to rescue you?"
AubreyUpdate to action: there must be nearby security imaging. Try to access it to see what lies ahead. Is this one enemy presently? Where is he and what is his situation? Pass details on to comrades to enable assault. Them zoom in on him. What is his equipment? Perhaps comrades can suppress him sufficiently for Aubrey to get close enough to use implants to disable his weaponry or immobilise his armour. Or blind him. Use cloak to do so if better option. Assess potential and convey plan to comrades. Can't do anything for this man's leg.
Aubrey extended her implants into the security system, tapping into the feed as easily as if she had a direct line. Civilian grade security was a wonderful thing to work with. There was a camera at the corner, worked in as a bulb on the lighting.
The soldier was kneeling in a defensive position about six yards bag from the corner. His armor was scorched on one shoulder, but not the other, where Scarlet had shot him. Very likely a personal shield, although not one of sufficient caliber to stop the impact from rocking him- which likely meant it wouldn't be good enough to actually stop a bullet, just slow one down. He was gripping his carbine one handed, a two stage accelerator weapon from what Aubrey could identify. Chemical charge to accelerate the slug through the barrel, and a rail assembly in the barrel in order to super-accelerate the round from there. In his off hand, he appeared to be punching commands into a small black box.
Mounted onto that small black box appeared to be an equally small missile.
Aubrey recognized those. Programmable smart weapons, designed to take out armor from behind cover. Most of what she knew about them consisted of sale prices on the black market, but she did know that he was likely programming the missile to shoot around the corner. Which would be bad for them.
In the corridor behind the kneeling man, two more soldiers were jogging forwards with raised rifles. Their armor was similar to how the first soldier's had looked before Scarlet shot him- AL-Loy colors and design. Their weapons, however, were identical to his. Considering their appearance, and the first soldier's asymmetric scorch marks, it seemed the camouflage was likely linked to their personal shielding.
If she got a little closer, the four way intersection of the succulent garden would be close enough, she could probably start messing with their equipment directly. All combined, Aubrey had a couple good options, but she probably only had time for two, maybe three if she was lucky.
1. Disable the secondary accelerators on their weapons, dramatically reducing their stopping power.
2. Alter their camouflage, disabling their shielding, and making them look like anything she wanted.
3. Screw with their suit's internals. Regrettably, without a suit of armor to study, she wouldn't be able to do anything specific. But she could blind, slow, or potentially injure if she got lucky.
4. Alter the programming on that little programmable missile.
5. Scramble/Alter/Access their communications.
KhateKhate's jaws clanked shut. "I can only take him if I can get into melee. Paintballs might obscure or bleed off, but they're unlikely to pierce," she said aloud. It'd be good to keep Tagget informed of her armament, even if they weren't informing him of their plans.
She swiveled to face Ty and the Fin.
"There are supposedly two remaining hostages at the hostel, or were before the Al-Loy enforcer ship was annihilated by an alien horror wielding powers beyond mortal sanity. Our own shuttle is docked and ready to go, as is the vessel of said alien horror! So we should leave, very quickly, before our ship is cored like an apple by the bomb desperate defectors from the mercies have brought on board in order to blackmail it into leaving IMMEDIATELY.
So! How do we get to the hostel?"
If the soldier pops up again, the penalty is rainbows.
The soldier, sadly, did not try and pop up again from around the corner. It made Khate a little sad, but she'd gotten some great footage of bullets ripping through the garden. People loved that kind of stuff!
Ty, her body dropped as flat to the ground as it would go and Tagget hovering protectively over her, looked up at Khate as she addressed her.
“Uh, you take a right out of the Garden, then you can go until you hit the employee's only doors, and you take a right at the gift shop, and you're there. Also, you can take the left at the gift shop if you want to get into maintenance to work on the hostel ceiling lights and stuff.” Ty scooted a little as Tagget shifted, nearly stepping on her tail.
"It would put you a little above the hostel so you could drop down, but I think you're a little big to do that."
Kesari
Now finished pondering that, work on getting data out of the station's internal visuals (or otherwise able)--if we fail this mission, Kesari is at LEAST working out how to dredge as much info on what just happened for better outcomes in the future!...including getting the people out safely too.
With little extra that she could do on Sadish's front, Kari returned focus to the Flounder. It was hard, very hard, to turn away from Sadish in danger, but staring at the video feed from the drone wouldn't prevent her from getting shot, and Boris could stare just as well as she could.
Focus on the things that could be changed, push away the noise of everything that was beyond her control. That was the only way Kesari could continue to think clinically.
When the AL-Loy ship had been hovering over the station, it hadn't seemed like a good idea to hack directly in to the Flounder's security. However, in light of the fact that the AL-Loy vessel was in multiple smoking hunks falling towards the planet, and the only other people here to possibly observe the hack were all criminals and worse, Kari didn't think anyone would mind.
The actual camera system was on a closed circuit, and without something like Aubrey's implants, there was no good way to break in without a physical connection. However, when the station had entered a state of emergency it had begun streaming surveillance footage to an unspecified target. Likely as a safeguard in case the station itself was destroyed and the physical banks holding the data perished along with it.
Oddly, the signal was much lower than Kesari would have suspected for an emergency broadcast. It probably wouldn't even reach the next planet, let alone the AL-Loy outpost in the sun's tight orbit. Kari could tap the signal, as could almost anyone else near the station, but seemed to have been sabotaged so there was no chance it would reach its intended recipients.
No help was coming for the Flounder, not until it was far too late.
Regardless, Kesari tapped the stream. It was encrypted, for AL-Loy eyes only, but the encryption was fairly light. The Reunion could break it, given time. She could record the information for later decryption, and she could probably rig it up so that she could read live data for one or two cameras inside the Flounder. It wasn't much, but it would give her eyes inside.
EVA suits are, by the nature of the sentient races, highly individual. While it's possible to swap EVA suits between members of the same species, it's not often possible to trade a suit between members of different species. Canes and Claws can, with great discomfort, get into some bulkier models of one another's suits, and most races can curl up rather uselessly inside a large Fin's EVA suit, but such arrangements are unsafe and error prone.
Enter the EVA bag, a common piece of emergency equipment on board shuttles. It's a large, typically white bag designed to be slipped over basically everything, resize itself to the approximate shape of its occupant, and keep said occupant alive for a couple hours in the vast emptiness of space. Granted, the bags don't really allow mobility, and thus rely on someone else carrying the bag, but it's better than nothing.
Assuming you're not claustrophobic and don't mind getting into something that looks like an oversized body bag.