Today we are at Ernest's (Liz Blessing) place in consideration of his need to keep close watch over his small progeny. Chuck, Paul (Bob the Saurk), Chris (Caleb Kagan) and Bruce (Goat Gulgusskun) all manage to find their way without any particular trouble. Tim (Kraid Naiben) somehow gets lost in the confusion and fails to appear.
This week's NewsNets are absolutely ghastly, reflecting the ongoing disintegration of the ICPA under internal political pressure.
ICPA President Announces Creation Special Security Forces: After the terrorist bombings that rocked the Core Worlds, ICPA President Anton Krieger announced the creation of the ICPA Special Security Forces. The plan recruits members from the existing military forces and colonial security forces and places them under the control of the ICPA. The plan calls for the "Marshals" to be deployed in small groups or individuals. According to the press release, the newly formed Marshals will have whatever power they need to enforce the law and shall coordinate the investigation of the terrorist bombings.
ICPA Strike Carrier Midway Destroyed: The ICPA Strike Carrier Midway was destroyed by Earth Commonwealth Forces. Initial reports indicate that a retrofitted cargo hauler with missile bays disguised as cargo containers fired on the Midway during a routine customs inspection. ICPA military officials were not available for comment. Earth officials released a statement announcing that an Earth military vessel had defended itself against an illegal search. In an unrelated incident, a Martian patrol boat and a pair of ICPA fighters exchanged fire
Earth-New Israel Announce Mutual Defense Treaty: The governments of Earth and New Israel publicly announced a mutual defense treaty as troops from the Earth Defense Forces arrived on New Israel. Soldiers of the Johannesburg Defense Levy took up positions on the outskirts of New Jerusalem and Medina, trapping the Colonial Marines the Earth reinforcements and New Israeli forces. ICPA officials decry the treaty as an illegal agreement and a criminal action. New Israel officials also announced a unique amnesty program for pira<<<REMAINDER OF ENTRY DELETED UNDER EMERGENCY IPCA SECURITY PROTOCOLS>>>
Rojo Beluga Continues Crime Spree! The notorious pirate Rojo Beluga struck yet again in this time in the Nippon II system. A Fujisonysan cargo hauler transporting computer hardware to the frontier was lost with all hands aboard. According to an ICPA spokesman, the ICPA military and the newly formed marshals will do everything in their power to bring the deadly pirate to justice.
The characters estimate that the alien ship that destroyed the Schwarzenegger is approximately size 105. By comparison, a strike carrier is only size 90. There is a certain amount of debate as to how linear size is under the Silhouette design rules, but everyone is happy to agree that the ship is monstrously-large. Someone suggests that the ICPA ship could have been destroyed by anybody capable of fabricating the contents of a military data recorder. Caleb Kagan investigates this possibility and decides that the contents are probably legit.
Some of the characters suggest that the group should package up their information on the intruder and deliver it to the ICPA. Other characters, including Bob the Saurk and Goat Gulgusskun, suggest that doing this would be the quickest way to get labeled "material witnesses" and shipped off to Gitmo for the rest of their natural lives.
The other question that comes up is whether or not the bugs really are some kind of alien weapon. The characters have already been able to establish the direction of bug advance from the mine records. They decide to do a low flyover of the bug approach path to look for signs that they were dropped from orbit. The flight path will go over the Administration Hub of the mine complex to alert any possible survivors that the Salt Witch is back in town.
The Salt Witch flies down over the bug advance path. Some 60 kilometers out from the mining base Bob the Saurk spots three impact trails, each ending in a 300 meter scorch mark. At the end of each scorch there is a phallic-shaped object. Liz Blessing flatly vetoes Goat's suggestion that the characters set down and investigate the scene on foot. Caleb uses the ship's telescopes to investigate instead. He reports that the canisters are about five meters long and a meter and a half in diameter.
There is no visible bug activity, but Liz Blessing doesn't trust this information at all, considering that there was no visible bug activity around the mining base before the characters landed either. Caleb obsessively watches as Liz tosses a container of gloop down onto the ground. Bugs don't boil up out of the ground. The characters immediately make plans to lift one of the canisters up onto the Salt Witch. There is some concern about small bugs being able to chew their way through metal walls.
Goat Gulgusskun and Bob the Saurk set up to go down to the ground to rig up a cargo net around the capsule. Caleb watches from the winch overhead while Liz keeps the ship on station. Bob is shocked to find out that the canisters actually weigh only about 3 kg. They look like they're made out of metal, but designed by H. R. Giger. Goat and Bob collect all three pieces and get winched back up. The three canisters are carefully placed in the hold. Unfortunately, they are rather too big to fit into the hold refrigerator.
Goat and Bob both investigate the canisters. By the time they're done, Bob is convinced that they are machines, whereas Goat thinks they are alive. The shell is made from a carbon-filament compound. There is no sign of additional bugs on any of the canisters. Bob is able to find evidence of mechanical mounting points and a guidance system. The interior contains some remnants of a kind of jelly that may have served as a combination acceleration protection and post-landing yolk sac. Taking the canisters as an example of biotechnology, they look like they were engineered (or built) to survive being dropped from orbit. Bob becomes obsessed with discovering how the canister hulls were made, as the material is stronger than anything he has ever seen before. If these canisters are actually examples of genetically-engineered biotech, they are far beyond the state of human technology. Bob tells the others, "For humans to have made this, they would first have to go back in time 2000 years and redevelop their entire technology down a different path."
Liz and Caleb set about doing a flyover, only occasionally disturbed by the cries of, "This isn't terrestrial DNA!" coming from the cargo bay. They hover low over the Administration Hub and broadcast announcements over loudspeakers explaining, "We are here to rescue any survivors, but you'd better be able to announce yourselves when we come back. We will be back in twelve hours. We suggest you use radios, smoke signals, signal lights, or flags. If we don't see you, then we're gonna leave you to be bug food."
They don't see any indication of life.
Except for thousands and thousands of bugs.
Goat, as the only bug-immune character, volunteers to go out and capture a couple of the small bugs. He gears up with armor, a gauss carbine, a gas mask, two tear gas grenades, a flashbang grenade, a container of gloop, and a couple of ammo boxes to serve as capture boxes.
His plan is terribly simple: pour gloop into the boxes, then sit there until some bugs arrive. Thousands of bugs descend all over him. He gets nine in each box, plus another five that still cling on after he's pulled up on the winch. Goat is able to pull all but one of them loose. That one is sitting between his shoulder blades, and isn't moving. Bob the Saurk eventually does "cleanup" with his vibro-ninja sword. The two ammo boxes are rattling around in a rather alarming way. Caleb takes a look at them and yells out, "Bob! Can we get something more sturdy to put those in?" Bob produces a heavy metal box.
Liz pushes the Salt Witch into orbit. Caleb turns up the active sensors, on the idea that if the big alien ship is still around it probably already knows where the characters are. He sees nothing.
The characters are having a debate about where they should go next when Liz becomes convinced that Bob has sabotaged the controls of the ship. They aren't acting right, and he was the last one to mess with them. Besides, he's always doing things like this. She accuses him of tampering. Bob responds, "Guys! I think we're having problems with the psychic!" Goat yells out, "I'm fine! And I have the gauss carbine to prove it! Ka-chk!"
Caleb asks Liz, "Why do you suspect Bob?"
Liz yells back, "He's a saurk! What more reason do you need!"
Caleb heads down to the medlab to verify that the catatonic psychic is still catatonic. He also tries pointing a gun at the psychic's head, just to see if anything happens.
Goat concludes that a bug must have gotten free and heads down to the cargo bay. The box is still intact.
Bob gets his knife and heads to medbay. Liz cries out, "He's heading for the bridge! And he's got a knife!" She locks down the bulkheads to isolate him. "You'll do no harm to anyone in there, crazy saurk-man!"
Caleb, over the wrist-com, tries to enforce a sense of responsible decision making. He tells everyone, "I need a vote here. Do we kill our visitor or not?" Goat tells the others, "I don't think he's the problem!" Caleb very reasonably asks, "Why?" Goat exclaims, "'Cause he's a psychic!" Bob, still stuck in the corridor, complains, "That makes no sense! If some strange saurk were to burst into my room in the middle of the night, I wouldn't say, 'hey brother! Let's go find some human women!'"
Caleb shoots the psychic three times in the head. This does nothing to calm down Liz, who responds over the intercom, "So, Caleb. Who are we going to kill now?" She seals the doors to the bridge. Caleb does his best to talk Liz down after a couple of hours of letting her decompress. His two hours of hostage-negotiations class go out the window really quickly when he starts screaming, "Okay, you freaked-out drugged-up bitch! Calm down!"
Strangely, after a couple of hours, Liz actually does calm down. She unseals the bridge.
Caleb takes some DNA samples of the catatonic psychic. He uses a sponge to get them off the wall. Bob checks out the controls. He doesn't find a glitch, but he does think he figured out where that extra spring goes. Caleb looks up from mopping the walls to ask, "By the way, could someone figure out where Jake Reflux went?" It turns out that Jake is sleeping in his cabin and has no idea anything is up.
The characters decide to head for New Saigon and turn evidence over to the ICPA military governor. And then sell one of the landing canisters to some corporate group (ICBM is the leading candidate). Caleb and Bob work to create copies of the black box recordings and the Salt Witch sensor readings, with enough information removed to ensure that the characters are not going to be recognizable.
Goat decides to take a look at his specimens. He finds out that there are only two left, but that they are a lot larger (and better-fed) than they had been. He kills one and pushes it into his MRI gear. He learns that the creature has a very, very strange anatomy. It is asexual, with a very efficient metabolism. He deduces that the creatures are able to operate under a ridiculously wide range of temperatures. They lack skeletons per se, but rely upon an internal chitinous cell structure to support them when they get bigger. Their brains are primarily devoted to sensory processing, and not a lot else.
Once Goat is finished with it, the dead bug gets put into a jar full of formaldehyde. Goat keeps it on his desk as a souvenir.
The characters listen to Goat's report, and then cooperate in implementing various security precautions on the survivor. The box is put up on stilts with two motion-detect cameras focused upon it. Bob puts together a little pass-through for gloop so the creature can be fed without risking anyone's fingers.
The characters put together as complete a "alien contact package" as they can without revealing their identities and hand it over to the ICPA. The package includes the live bug, one torpedo, plus copies of the black box recordings, the MRI's of the dead bug, and any other sensor readings. The characters put all of it into an old (anonymous) shipping container with "biohazard" labels all over it then send it to the office of the Military Governor by parcel post. Liz sends it from a Packages Etc outlet while disguised as an Asian man.
The original black boxes and the psychic get shrink-wrapped and spaced.
Liz and Bob go shopping for parts to build up an electromagnetic cable winch strong enough to pick up a vehicle (the characters' SUV). They spring for a used magnet and winch, but new cable. The total cost is Cr 5000 including installation. The contractors end up having to charge extra because Bob keeps on getting in the way and starting arguments about the installation procedure.
During installation, Liz goes shopping for a variety of nice pieces of personal gear. And persuades Goat to buy some illicit pharmaceuticals for her. Goat promptly walks off and gets busted. He calls from the city jail, "Hey, I just tried to buy drugs from a narc. Could you please come down and bail me out?" While Liz heads off to get her fix from Czar Nicki, Caleb gets Goat out of jail. It costs Goat Cr 1500 in fines and court fees. On the way back from the lockup, Caleb buys a couple of crates of grenades. Liz mourns, "What kind of world is it where you can buy grenades by the crate but get arrested for trying to buy a few stimulants?"
The plan is to put one torpedo in a random storage locker, as anonymously as possible (the characters pay the rent in cash). The second one will go to Aetna.
The characters then make up identical data packages and send them to several corporations that might be interested in buying the artifacts: ICBM, Grumman-Daimler, Fujisonysan, and RSTW (Reynolds-Sidney-Time-Warner). Liz does her best to look through the companies' websites to try and find appropriate names to send the information to. She does okay for the first three, but not so well for RSTW. The characters send a gift-basket of data plus leftover embryonic sac material to several officials at each company, though those that go to RSTW end up in the circular file.
And now off to Aetna.
The characters touch down and quickly arrange a meeting with Colonel Hotsul (now Minister of Defense), Councilor Edric Pravad, and Colonel Striker. The theme is, "There may be an invasion going on, they have this huge mucking ship, they drop things from orbit in pods that look like this, and the things look like this!" The characters show them the formaldehyde bug in a jar, but do not let them keep it.
The characters give the straight story to the governmental officials, minus the bit about actually retrieving landing pods, but suggest that the story should initially be fed to the public as a possible infestation.
Liz gives the presentation. By the end, the officials are still skeptical but don't think the characters are insane. Except for Colonel Striker, who thinks that the characters are insane, but insane in a good way, like he is. Several things do not make it into the presentation, including: specific information about the Ventura, the psychic research facility and the survivor there, the immunity of psychics to the bugs, and the fact that the characters recovered the three bug landing pods. The characters tell the officials that the second SPB was destroyed, but not by what. Caleb also emphasizes Liz's suggestions about providing information about the bugs to the populace, describing them as a pest on agricultural worlds. Liz suggests that they send local defense forces out to look for burn marks (landing sites). As a cover story, she suggests that they suggest that the guys in the Mako-class ship may be back and causing trouble.
As a side benefit, Colonel Hotsul mentions that the radar is working.
The characters spend some time examining the records recovered from the Bedlam research facility. They determine that the medical research facility was dedicated to psychic enhancement. Specifically, to turn a low-grade zed into a high-grade zed. Apparently, there are some side effects, like a broadcast insanity effect.
The characters learn that there were some research subjects other than the one they recovered, but all of them were already dead before the bugs arrived. They died of brain hemorrhages, screaming fits, tearing their eyes out, and so on.
Caleb spends some time looking through Aetna medical records, trying to find a kidnapped psychic who matches one of the research subjects on Bedlam. The survivor doesn't match, but some of the fatalities do. Caleb tells the others, "Monsters! They were absolute monsters! If we do deal with them, we better squeeze them real hard."
Liz picks up her relationship with Oswald. And ends up spilling her guts to Oswald about everything that happened on Aetna.
"Wow! I've never gotten a letter before!" Goat is beside himself. The address is hand-lettered, in a rather unsteady hand, with a return address on Gaulden. Caleb looks at it and tells Goat, "Been nice knowing you, Goat. Dibs on his sweater. Not the one he's wearing, it'll be too messy."
Goat opens the letter and read it. It's from his mother. The first half is a common litany of complaints: he never calls, he never writes, and so on. She complains that there were so many opportunities open to him that didn't involve becoming a common criminal, and asks why he didn't get his Tradesman's Certificate and get a real job.
The second half of the letter gets down to the real problem. Cousin Morty was one of Goat's more successful relatives. He had managed to work his way from a job in the mines to a job sorting luggage in the spaceport. He had managed to beat the odds in spite of his native lack of intelligence. But now the ICPA has him detained as a "person of interest" and nobody knows where he is. Mother Gulgusskun writes that she knows Goat associates with many unsavory characters, and she doesn't know whom else to turn to.
Caleb is completely amazed, "You have a mother?" Goat protests, "I have lots of relatives! ...except for Uncle Squib, who got disowned after killing and eating three cousins. He said it was an accident, but you don't 'accidentally' debone, process and dehair three people."
Goat immediately tries to persuade the characters to go to Gaulden so they can help his cousin. Nobody else is having any of it. Caleb speaks for the others when he says, "Maybe Lungsucker has your Mother and is forcing her to write letters to you." Liz points out that landing on Gaulden with the Salt Witch would be a problem too - Lungsucker would learn about the characters' arrival right away. Goat is upset that nobody will help him.
The characters eventually decide to return to New Saigon to check their mail. Nobody has yet made a commitment to help out Goat's cousin, but New Saigon is closer to Gaulden than Aetna is so he doesn't complain. Much.
The characters find that nobody has responded to their offer to sell alien artifacts. However, Liz notices a new and disturbing fad among the Marines - some of them have these big beetle-like things as pets. She immediately reports this development to the other characters. Goat confesses to the others, "I admit it, our plan to tell the ICPA was the stupidest idea we've ever come up with." Liz learns that most of the Marines keep their pet bugs in terrariums, but some of them keep them on leashes. They make the creatures fight, and they seem very happy about the things.
Liz promptly ingratiates herself to some random Marine with one of these things and starts asking leading questions like, "Ooooh... Where did you get it?" By the time she's done with him, he can barely remember his name. His story is that someone sent a mysterious cargo container to the Colonel, but he was retiring so he just had someone dump it in a warehouse. Some guys looked inside, and they found this cool beetle. Sure, there was this incident at the motor pool, but it was just written off as a training accident. The characters deduce that if a bug isn't fed for a long time, it just gets really mean.
The characters do get some news from Bedlam. ICBM reports that a reactor leak and explosion there wiped out the mining colony.
Liz decides to seduce a by-the-book sergeant and then tell him about the crate. This plan works, but only persuades the sergeant to file a lot of papers about mishandled cargo. Caleb suggests sending the story to the local news. They don't do anything. Caleb decides that further incentive is necessary: the local newshounds need to scent blood in the water, or better yet hints of some kind of official cover-up. Liz is tapped to use the "warehouses get me so hot!" ploy on yet another of her Marine boyfriends so she can get an opportunity to get back to the crate the characters shipped and turn the patrol boat black box transponders back on. Oddly, her plan works perfectly. She attributes her success to her past as a car thief.
Hearing that the transponders are on, Caleb once again calls up the reporters. Within hours, the story is on the air. Of course, the story is, "How did the transponders from the Schwarzenegger and the Ventura end up on New Saigon? ICPA is denying all knowledge!" but the characters aren't in a mood to quibble. The situation is hard to deny, as the signal is strong enough to totally disrupt television reception across half the city. An ambitious Major pops up to take command of the investigation. Within two weeks, the original Military Governor has been forced to resign and the Marines have lost their new pets.
Bob speaks for the entire group when he asks, "So there are lots of these things? That only happens when they get big... It must have been able to find food somewhere" As Bob speaks, all of the characters get visions of Marines out in the motor pool feeding cows and stray dogs to the first bug. They reach the same conclusion: there are probably a lot of these things out in the ecosystem. Liz tells the others, "Okay. I am so outta here... this place was a shithole anyway... Now it's going to be a bug-overrun shithole." Caleb tries to reassure the others, "At least the infestation is happening in an urban zone. That way, people will take action quickly, when these things start eating people's dogs. And children."
The characters finally get a single response to their offer to sell alien tech. It is anonymous, with no return address: "The bugs aren't our fault. Just walk away." The characters decide that their days as alien tech vendors are on the wane.
Goat sends Cr 15,000 to a good lawyer on Gaulden to learn more about the whereabouts of his cousin.
Each character gains four experience points.