"Agreed, although I'm still for my earlier plan of crawling through a vent and dropping grenades on them."
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The enemy party is already underway - getting in front of them will require a bit of a hustle. Delta-Rho can see two places where that might be possible - a junction of passageways, and a canteena area.
Another, riskier, possibility is this: DeGrassi and Co. will need to use an elevator to get to the splinter AI. It would be possible to drop down another shaft, to be there when the elevator with deGrassi opens.
It just requires ... a few tricks. Such as briefly disabling the artificial gravity, dropping down the shaft in zero-g, getting gravity back online, and then giving deGrassi the warmest of welcomes.
Crawling through vents has the drawback of being not really fast enough to catch them - and leaving precious little room to dodge, should they toss a granade back at you.
Or say, a flamer (you see no flamers on them - but I like to plant the image in your mind ... trapped in a vent with nowhere to go, as the flames engulf your soft, tender flesh .... mwahahahaa!)
... everyone sees the rushed zero-g drop down the shaft, and thinks 'yea awesome, hero style stuff!!'
... no one sees the word 'riskier', or considers the unskilled tests involved.
Good on ya! I love it - care and consideration is the path of [small cats] and cravens. Just waiting for Delta to poke his head in, before proceeding.
+++The Junction will allow for tighter fire control but less cover for both sides, the lift option would make them more of a target if you can light them up and drop a Grenade through the door as it opens +++
A ... dog-ette?
Anyways, yes - that's an option that hadn't even occurred to me. It's possible, of course, but not exactly easy. Also, elevators don't really travel fast enough to cause a death-on-impact type scenario. For that, you'd need to cut the cables somehow.
Regardless, yes - you can try this, of course. I do feel like you're cheating me of a fight, of course, but all good ideas must be rewarded (then later, secretly punished!)
SpoilerAs you pointed out, theres a pretty good chance it wouldn't work. That and they do have a techpriest with them who could probably fix it in rather short order. Now that I think of it though...
"Rho, could we have it stop on every floor? Get ahead of it, give us time to set up and lure em into self security?"
The psyker motioned at his head. "Computers in the brain. If I were the one designing them, I'd keep them closed circuit, so they couldn't be accessed unless it were directly through some sort of port. If the AI isn't my kind of crazy, though, there's a chance that there's some sort of wireless signal that Rho could pick up if we got close enough."
Actually, you have done decent research into the Lugs. They have implanted circuitry - and Delta-Rho can make a fairly decent stab at guessing what it's for. Though, as he states:
+++ The most accurate results would be obtained by either vivisection, or installing the component in one of you guys +++
With that vox unit, it's hard to tell if he's joking or not. All you can do is hope.
However.
As mentioned, the Lugs have rather limited cognitive powers. It's skewed, though. Their senses and reaction times are excellent, and it seems like they have enhanced capabilites directly relating to threat assesment - as in, they are likely to correctly gauge which enemy presents the greatest threat.
Based slightly more on guessery, Delta-Rho assumes they are also highly aggressive. To temper this, he further expects them to be either gene-manipulated or otherwise conditioned towards loyalty for a specific master or handler.
All this can make for very effective shock troops. But they can handle only relatively simple strategies. They are, one might argue, no better than the one telling them what to do - and their primitive rage might cause them to act ... well, stupidly. In essense, they may well fail to react to direct orders, if presented with credible and valid targets to smash.
Edit: Ah ... also, no implanted signal capacity.
"My plan would be as follows: step one, get ahead of them. Step two, lay out a trap. Step three, make myself the obvious threat to lugs. Step four, run like hell into trap area. Step five, wait for explosions to die down. Step six, profit. Sound good?"
Ok - in the absense of Delta, I'm cooking up a plan for you guys. I'll write something, hopefully later today.
Right - it is, in fact, still technically 'later today'. Long as I finish within 30 minutes.
Delta-Rho accesses his maps of the station. It's easy enough to figure out the route that deGrassi and his cronies are taking. He mumbles something along the lines of +++ through hallway B9 to the main service tunnels and into the main relay area, from where it's just one escalater (currently offline) and into the administration offices, where .... +++ and so on.
You will have to do a bit of dodging and weaving to get to another bank of elevators, get down fast, and be ready to receive. Delta-Rho explains:
+++ We have a choice to make. The slowest path is to go through a floor hatch at 36:412/211, dropping us into tunnels used for air, sewage, water and various recycling systems. It's a bit of a detour, but we should make it in time, and there is little likelyhood of cameras down there that might be used by the AI - hence, slow but safe. +++
He left that sink in, then goes on:
+++ A faster way is to run through Construction and Repair Galleries, down some stairs at 36:473/63, which brings us to a cargo elevator. However, the Galleries are a huge open space, where detection seems likely - provided the AI has access to anything in the vicinity. I cannot say. +++
He concludes:
+++ Once we reach a bank of elevators, you should be informed that if the AI is aware of us - it may well try to switch the gravity back on, while we're in free-fall. This will go poorly for you two. Take heart at the thought that I, however, may survive. +++
Again - you are unsure if the last is a joke.
Spoiler
Back - at least for another two years
Good to have ya back, Leon - I hope my portrayal of Delta hasn't been entirely out of keeping with his real character =)
"As soon as this damn headache of mine goes away, I can float a limited amount, so don't worry about me in zero gravity. I'd rather go the fast option, but Stig's right, there's always the chance we could catch them on the rebound."
Gentlemen - the weekend was consumed by 3 12-hour shifts at work. My apologies for no updates, but I've done little but sleep and work.
Since no one has objected to Stig's proposal, that is unanimously elected king. You go through, basically, the sewers. An adventure classic, and almost without fail the wrong choice. Lets see how this goes.
Delta leads you to the mentioned floor hatch at 36:412/211. It is, in actual fact, not entirely dissimilar to the garbage chute in Star Wars. Actually, I freely admit that my overall mental image of an Imperial Orbital Fortress is not entirely dissimilar to the Death Star. Regardless!
The hatch covers a chute, which you slide down. It unceremoniously and inelegantly dumps you in a pile of ancient dust and debris - remains of what filled the recycling plant thousands of years ago.SpoilerAnd you may roll to search, if a giant pile of dust looks appealing to you.
Coughing and sneezing, you gather yourselves up, brushing the worst off your armor and weapons. Delta indicates a direction, and you shuffle along. You're walking on a conveyor belt (inactive, of course) and various bits of robotics surround you. Some seem designed to sort and disseminate the garbage on the belt - other parts seem like they could crush a medium sized tank.
After some hundred meters of this, you arrive at a new area. Delta-Rho cautions you:
+++ This part of the recycling plant is part burner, part volatile gas conversion, part fuel plant. It's been inactive since the crusades - but there might very well still be explosive or flammable materials all around. +++
With those words, you progress into a series of rooms the size of an immodest cathedral. To your east, west and north are giant hunks of machinery - what could well be, consequtively, the Burner (think something that looks like an oil rig), the Volatiles Conversion Plant (it's basically three giant upright gas tanks, surrounded by forests of smaller one, with tubes and pipes leading everywhere), and the Fuel Plant (which consists of giant vats where things you'd rather not imagine (yes - human remains is one of them) are degraded, refined and destilled into fuels of all kinds). The central area is like a giant turn table, with sorting machinery to divy up the spoils, and feeder systems to bring the trash into it's respective receptable.
Need I even mention that you're not at the bottom of the place? You enter the place at it's hip (if such it had) on a series of walkways suspended over a seemingly endless abyss. The roof, too, is lost in impenetrable darkness.
As you look around - quite possibly a little awestruck - at this, the life support heart of the station, you cannot help but wonder how many thousands of tonnes of stuff ... gunk, really ... is contained here. Was. How long it would last, as a food source for ... critters.
You shrug off the thought - surely nothing could survive that long.
Any interesting actions, let me know. The exit, according to Delta, is at the far north, behind the Burner and through a small maintainance office.
Spoiler
then we make like a tree and leaf it
This'd be fun:
Staring into the dark, silent hugeness of the Reclamation Hall, your minds cannot let go of the image of ancient, starving predators - patiently whiling away the centuries, dormant ... but waiting for prey. Waiting to pounce.
Whispered conversation sends quiet echoes into the dark.
'Emprah, this place's *huge* - I can't believe this place is inside some other place.'
'Say, do you think anything could be alive in here? It seem like a tank the size of a city block could sustain ... I dunno?!'
+++ A tank the size of the one over yonder would contain several million tonnes of bio-nutrients, and would sustain a large predator .... well, actually, it could sustain it's own mini-ecology. +++
A moment of silence, as everyone digests this.
'So by that you imply that .....'
'... wot, a whole like, bunch o' critters, eating each other, for centuries on end ...'
+++ until something more tasty comes along - yes, that seems likely +++
You stare wide-eyed into the dark. Cold sweat beads on your eyebrows. You get that feeling that something - some small insect - is crawling on your skin. Some hard to reach place, like your back, or inside your trousers. Then you get that other feeling, that you're being watched - that out in the darkness, and unseen mass of crawling, creeping, tentacly things are getting ready, just about ready .....
In the years to come, you will all tell everyone that it was one of the other two who first screamed. That you weren't the one to trigger the mad dash. But frankly, none of you really remember.
You run for your lives. Your footfalls pound along, as you sprint in panic over the corrugated steel surface of the walkways. The Reclamation Hall, undisturbed for millennia, briefly rings with the clamor of your fearful retreat.
Then you reach the office. You slam through the door, and hammer it shut behind you. You are safe. You look back across the giant hall. It's empty.
It was all your imaginations. You are ready to move on. You laugh a bit - nervously. 'Whew' someone says. And that was that .....
..... that is not how it goes.
No, in actual fact, it goes quite differently. And hey, why not? Lets roll some initiative. You never know when it might come in handy =)
Ho ****.
SpoilerRolling +6. +4 Ag, +2 from Paranoia.
[roll0]