Understandable, yet regrettable. I do like to play something besides fantasy, but if the GM isn't feeling motivated anymore it's best to call it.
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Kamiya dropped the rifle and rubbed the feeling back into her shoulder. "So where are we going? Are going into the wilderness to do a full regroup? If that's the case, maybe we find one of the mining settlements. If we're not going far then I guess we just go until we figure we aren't being followed." ”I don’t think we should go to the town – were I the Azlanti, that’s the first place I’d be looking for insurrectionists,” Robert grunted. ”And our ship is too far. Let’s just find a dry spot to rest our feet for a moment and plan for our next move in the forest – this bloody place is too large to search easily, and if the enemy could just scan it for us they’d have done so in the first place, instead of sending out small patrols.” ”Those isolated settlements won’t help us, I think. First, we don’t know their exact location, only approximations on a map we don’t have with us, so it might take days for us to stumble into one. Second, if the Azlanti have left them alone they almost have to be either too far away or too small to pose them any trouble. And third, if they have been left to their own devices, would they want to risk that changing by aiding us, total strangers, against another group of strangers, but then being the bad guys, unlike us, promise?” ”No, I think we need to lick our wounds as quick as we can, and then make a decisive move. The next time we go back to the town, we go with the intention of leaving only by walking over the dead bodies of the Azlanti.”
"Don't rest long. I think we're 'out' now." "Right, was bound to happen sooner rather than later - astonished we got this far, really," Robert grunted, taking a look at the carcass of one of the fallen drones. But he didn't want to actually hang around to dismantle one, nor drag one with him.
"So, now we are officially on the clock. Before, the Azlanti might have suspected something was afoot. Now, they know, and they have to respond. And considering how they have responded to the colonists' attempts at resistance thus far..." Robert went on, giving the drone's chassis a kick. "Lock-downs, crackdowns, extra patrols, preemptive executions... some of these, surely, depending on how much manpower they really have, and how much automation to free that manpower for policing. So I doubt our little safe heaven in the colony is safe no longer."
@Robert: reading the spell, it talks about an image that you can move within the area of effect. I took it to be like a weak version of mirror image (only one image).
Dismissing his hologram as the enemies flew uncomfortably close, the technomancer cast another glob of conjured acid at the nearest drone before retreating once again, hoping one or few of the others would feel the need to stand and fight, and thus act as convincing targets for the drones' weapons.
Muttering a curse under his breath, Robert focused his attention to the forest around Kip’s position and murmured another incantation, this time to bend light as he had done when camouflaging the graveyard to hide their ambush. But this time, he added instead of subtracted, creating half a dozen clones of Kip, each one rushing to find cover or escape in different directions, hoping the drones’ sensors would not be able to figure out which was which… for the short time he intended to maintain the reality alteration.
"Would be fun, but were I running the show, any autonomous or remote units would use a dedicated network," Robert grunted, dodging behind a local tree-analogue and conjured humidity from the air, murmuring equations that altered the chemical balance of the water, turning it highly corrosive before sending a bolt of the freshly-transmuted acid to splash on the nearest drone's casing.
"Well, question answered," Robert grunted. "Into the forest! They'd have a hell of a time flying between the trees... or whatever the heck these bloody things are." Following his own advice, the technomancer began his retreat, pointedly moving away from the town as he sought the cover of foliage. After all, the locals had proved somewhat useful, and it wouldn't be worth it to lead the drones and their operators to their local safehouse.
"Alright Magnusson, can you tell if the transmission got through? If not, we have to assume there's incoming - strong incoming - right now. Take the weapons and gear, and let's back off." "Would be surprised if one of them didn't," Robert grunted, yet he picked up the comm of the trooper who had been the last on her feet and navigated through its menus to find out for certain. "And even if they didn't, someone will have heard all the gunshots. So I'm all for bailing."
’One to go,’ Robert thought as he took aim and squeezed the trigger. A split-second later, blood blossomed on the last trooper’s abdomen as a metal-jacket bullet found a chink in her armor. ”We can do this all day!” he hollered from behind cover. ”So unless you want to end up as fertilizer like your friends, you might want to drop your gun and comms, put your hands over your head and drop on your knees!”
As Robert found himself the only one to still remain inside the boundary of his illusion he decided to drop the effect - no-one else would be benefiting from the cover, and everyone else was out in the open and thus a more compelling target than the technomancer hunkering behind the cover of a gravestone. He drew his weapon, aimed at his target carefully, using the gravestone to steady the pistol and calmly squeezed the trigger, smiling as he imagined the confusion of the troopers as the air around the graveyard would be warping and twisting for a moment, as the light-bending illusion vanished. His bullet did find its mark, but unluckily the trooper was just in the process of shifting his stance, so the bullet that was supposed to hit the Azlanti in the neck merely grazed his shoulder instead, doing little real harm.
’Well, at least the idiots are still buying it,’ Robert thought, satisfied to his own work as the illusion of an empty graveyard continued to confound the feeble minds of the young troopers. It was a shame their attack hadn’t brought any of the enemy down yet, but the night was still fresh as they said, and strikes from an invisible attacker were harder to dodge. Although the cover was likely about to be blown, with the giant lizard Captain of theirs and the fluffy snowball going for the offense – as hands and blades started emerging form the illusion and vanishing back into it, even the dumbest foe was likely to eventually figure something was going on…
'Ghosts, eh?' Robert thought as he settled deeper into the cover of the gravestone. If only the troopers' subconsciousness's would prefer that explanation to where all the bullets started flying, they'd be golden.
After a few minutes of careful study of the graveyard and the view past the graveyard to what lay behind it, as seen from the path the patrol was most likely to approach, Robert went to work, murmuring equations and formulae that put him to the right mindset to impose his will upon the universe. To bend light to create an illusion. Here, with time to prepare, the work was not all that difficult – he could see the holographic image superimposed over reality and could easily tweak things – that grave marker was a shade darker grey in truth, that bush was a half feet too tall. And once places, it neatly replaced what actually laid in its place, hiding the presence of a few strangers from eyes that had no reason to expect foul play. It took a few minutes longer to point out the limits and borders of the illusion to the others, so they wouldn’t accidentally poke their heads out over the top of the zone, but eventually they were at their places, and Robert had found a nice, solid block of a gravestone to hunker behind, in cover from stray bullets as long as he deemed it necessary to maintain his illusion.
"Well, I don't know about luring them in but I can help with the ambush part," Robert said, kneeling down to inspect the graveyard from various angles. "Old trick, but works wonders. I can cover part of the cemetery in an illusion... of the cemetery, minus our presence. We know it's fake, so we see through it unimpeded. The Atzlanti grunts don't, not before we give them a reason to doubt their eyes... like putting a few bullets into them from absolutely nowhere as far as they are concerned. A good way to start a fight."
"Well, we need to bust out our friend to get to the goods, so might as well thin out the herd a bit before we try their local stronghold," Robert said, half of his attention focused on one of the comms they had "liberated" from the patrols in the forest. "I don't fancy tackling with the local beasts - we haven't had a good track record with the local fauna to date - but picking small patrols one by one seems doable. Of course, that kinda puts us on a timer, since there's only so many troopers who can vanish before the people in charge get all antsy."
"Although, might be a third option as well," Robert mused. "The ship crashed, but might still be spaceworthy. Or repairable. Someone could take the ship out, hide it in the void between the stars, then Drift-jump out with another ship while keeping the stellar coordinates. Take away what makes this rock valuable to the Azlanti, and keep open the option of trying to cash in later. Might be worth looking into."
The pilot looked over at the Captain, "You mentioned making this secret not-secret." and then over at Aibretta, "Are there any comms reaching off-planet that aren't controlled by the Azlanti?" ”Drift beacons aren’t a quick solution, remember,” Robert grunted. ”Takes as long to relay a message as for a ship to fly, so any message would take days to reach the recipient, and their reply just as long to get here. Might be hard to hang onto an interstellar comms that long while the Azlanti are still around. Besides, who would we call that won’t become just as big an issue as the Azlanti themselves? If they believed we had what we claimed, they’d come with an army, and considering the billions of value involved in being the ones to possess this tech… they might just salt the earth with orbital kinetic bombardment to “pacify” the system. As long as they knew where the good were, to keep that out of the way of stray KEWs.” ”No, what I think is, either we get rid of the Azlanti ourselves while there’s only a small advance party like this with boots on the ground, or we destroy the prize and make holding onto the system pointless,” he said. He didn’t add that the very thought of the second option pained him.
At the suggestion they leave the data pad behind, Kip clutched it to her chest. "No! This is a nice one! Let's trash the alter a bit, leave the door open, then they might think the hobgars got in and snatched it." Robert was practically drooling as the implications of the find struck him. Tech of that level would have potential buyers fighting each other for the chance of showering its holder - namely, Robert - with credits. With that kind of money, he could buy half the Arkanen, put the science centers and fabrication plants to work on projects of his own. He could set up whole corporations to manage it all while he could choose his own pet projects to pursue. He could... 'Get killed,' he thought, forcing himself back to reality. "This is the kind of tech governments and corpos will kill for. With extreme prejudice. You, your family, your pets and their playmates," the techomancer growled. "Worth billions... and too hot to handle. Even if it was only close as fast and cheap and effective as the Drift, there would be a market for it, as not everyone is happy with how we just got handed the tech by a self-made god of all things. And if it was better..." "Oh, you can bet we should take the pad with us," he echoed Kip's and Thyx's thoughts. "This ain't the tech itself, but it might be a bargaining chip if things go south for us. And it at least sheds some light on why the Azlanti are to hot and bothered about this relic of a ship. Perhaps one of their tech weenies went rogue and ran away with the tech they were working on - if they got far enough from a gravity well to go FTL... well, the space is a big place to lose a single ship." "No sense in making traps here, since the Azlanti were here already - might be some local kid scavenging for supplies who would "find" it. I say we just hide the evidence we were ever here and move on."
Robert gave the altar a quiet sneer – another sign of the common weakness of the human mind, needing an outside power to bless for their good fortune and complain to when they didn’t get what they thought they deserved. Yet that was nothing new to him and he had better things to do than wallow in the weakness of his own species. She walked around the chapel, looking at the mess with dismay. "Looks like the rumours were true and we weren't the first ones to think about coming here to look. Let's hope they didn't find what we're looking for." ”Might as well be quick about it, then,” Robert grunted, thinking back to what little they knew about the man. ”So, loved the planet, and had a thing with the money-grubbing so-called deity,” he muttered. ”The altar seems an obvious enough place to search, but did anyone spot a painting of holo or some local statuette large enough to hold a data chip inside it?” he asked, taking another look himself. ”If he did hide something here, I doubt he’d just put it in some random place he himself might forget if he didn’t need that whatever for a long time. But in, around or behind something he liked…”
'Hmm, could be rigged' ... "Are Azlanti known for booby-trapping?" ”I doubt they’d bother, as they seem to believe the have the locals properly under their heel already. Besides, no way off this rock for anyone who tries something funny, and most of them have friends and family the Azalanti can punish if the uppity colonists himself managed to run away into the jungle,” Robert grunted, but nodded in grudging respect as the android tapped into the building’s emergency power supply to work the door. ’Smoothly done,’ he thought, filing away the fact of Thyx’s proficiency for future use.
Kamiya shrugged, clearly unconvinced. "Maybe. But it still seems odd to leave people at large when you're trying to subjugate a planet. It makes them an uncontrolled variable." She holds up her hands as if surrendering, "I know, I know. Who are we to know how the Azlanti think? I'm just saying that it seems weird from my point of view." ”Could be they are here for just this one relic and don’t care for anyone who isn’t a real threat? Or they just don’t have the time to waste rounding up single family groups from all over the continent?” Robert suggested, treating the fate of those unfamiliar people as a slightly intriguing puzzle to be solved. "I suggest we take out a few more guards before they start a proactive look for what's disappearing their people. Then we make our play for information. We go to the administrator's house as Kamiya suggested ... Sir." ”On the other hand, taking out more guards is a sure way to make them smell the coffee, and the locals are the ones who are within easy reach to punish, or push for information. And they already showed what they do to people who won’t bend a knee quickly enough,” Robert grunted. ”They start picking people at random to gun down until the ones responsible walk out to be executed, what are you gonna do?” Not that there was any avoiding that, he thought. Not unless they moved too fast for the Azalanti to organize even that much… it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the initiative, to force the enemy to only react to what you did to them…
Thyx listened carefully, 'Dammit! I just finished cleaning the rifle!' 'Sir, as the cadet was just in contact with command from this location, I suggest we clean up the blood here. We leave the rest of the mess, throwing in a few spent batteries. Some hobgar fur would be helpful. We take our chances and transport the body to the woods. We rip it apart there. Then spread some rumours. The story is some hobgars broke in, caused calamity, the cadet chased them into the woods and met a predator." "What he said," Robert agreed, his attention mostly in the store manifest. "Should be plenty of stuff here that'd wash away blood and certainly muddle up any DNA so it couldn't be sequenced. If anyone spots the remains and asks, just say you butchered a local near-chicken there or something. The way these purists bricks think, they'll likely accept something that'll reinforce their image of you as backwards country hicks of the worst order." "But forget that rumor bit. Just take the comms unit, mutter something about examining a disturbance, then when we are all done with the corpse, say something indistinct about local predator and then we cut the link. The people follow the comms to the last transmit location, they find their boy properly ripped to shreds, no doubt by the fearsome beastie he had reported seeing."
The lashunta turned to Thyx and Robert and made her suggestion, "Can you ask the voice what he's looking for on the manifest? Tell it that it's so you can get them the information they require faster than bringing them the manifest. That way we may be able to find out what they're looking for." ”A trooper wouldn’t ask questions,” Robert whispered, shaking his head. ”A good grunt only obeys orders.”
”More like it,” the technomancer grunted, scanning the list quickly. It would be stupid to try and claim the storehouse didn’t contain most of the items on the manifest – too great a risk for another trooper coming over to eyeball the contents. But a few specific items going missing? That was whole another thing. ”You, tin man. Repeat after me,” Robert muttered, then crafted Thyx a simple message. ’Got it, Sir. Heading back shortly. Right after I teach this scum to waste our time.’
”We need to engineer a little fatal accident for this fellow sooner rather than later,” Robert said, nudging the body with a boot, echoing Kip’s suggestion. ”He’ll be missed sooner or later, and I guess it’d be best for him to be found somewhere else. A victim to a horrible and lethal accident, if at all possible.”
She was paralyzed by surprise for a few moments while Thyx tried to mimic phonetically what Robert was saying. Finally she said in a forced whisper, "Wouldn't it be easier if Robert replied directly into the comm?"
"How do you say 'Can't get these natives to hustle if you put a gun to their mamas'." His voice sounded like someone injected his throat with Novocaine.He snapped his fingers at Rendell to get the manifest ready. ”Right, repeat after me,” Robert grunted, taking out his toolkit. ”But just a sec, I’ll see if I can muddle your voice a bit… if the fellow on the other end wants to chat, I’ll take over.”
The mechanic did something that she was not totally convinced, “I didn’t hear a resounding ‘yes’ from you, but we have little choice in the matter. Maybe you’ll remember what a good friend was to you and decide to wholeheartedly help her out.” 'Helping her and helping the whole lot of you may or may not amount to the same thing,' Robert thought, frowning, but decided to play it cool for now - they needed the locals' help to mount some sort of rescue and perhaps in doing so they would end up doing something for the community. But as the Captain said, Robert saw no reason to volunteer to do an inch more than they had to for free.
Kip would have raised her eyebrows, if she had any. Standing before the woman, hands on hips, she said, "There's 100 of you, and five of us, and you want us to save you? We almost died just getting here. If you want help, you'd better have some healing serums lying around." She glanced around her. "Do you have any healing serums lying around?" "The short stuff has it dead to rights - we came here to see a friend, not get dead playing freedom fighters," Robert grunted. Not that the woman had suggested they do it alone, at least, but he had a sinking feeling paying some of his debts to Cedona would involve doing just that. But the last thing he wanted was to appear eager to risk his skin for the warm, fuzzy feeling of having helped. "That said, it may be we do need to drop a wrench into the Azalanti gears to do what we came to do. But we need help, we need resources and we need information."
"Next; who sees a vulnerability we can tie into a plan?" "Details first. You!" Robert said, pointing an accusing finger at the local who had led the latest patch of Azalanti to them. "We need information. Numbers. How many troops? How are they spread out? How many in the garrison, how many out patrolling? Do they keep some of their number guarding that old wreck they were so interested in? How many of you colonists are there? Anyone willing to fight for their own freedom? Any weapons that didn't get seized? Or any heavy-duty construction bots or machines or such around we could weaponize?" "And a map. At the very least draw us a map of this colony town of yours, since you should know it like the back fo your own hand."
"We've got intel now. Time for opinions; do we run, tell the Pact what we've seen and hope they do something? Or do we try to free the prisoners, instigate a revolt and get these eggshells kicked off the planet?" "Pact Council? Do something?" Robert grunted. "Like what? Disapprove in the strongest possible terms? Impose sanctions against some second-level government officials? Recall a few diplomats? No, if we want to pull Cedona's bacon off the fire, we need to do it ourselves."
Not sure how to do it himself, "Ah, Robert? Can you wipe it clean and make sure we're all attuned to it?" ”Sure,” Robert grunted, going around the group to record everyone’s bioelectric readings in the “ally” category after first flushing away the old settings. [b]”Seems all the tech these kids carry is annoyingly stand-alone – nothing’s connected with anything at all. Not how I’d roll, but I guess it’s a blessing in disguise – we can’t gather intel easily, but the other Azalanti aren’t immediately alerted to our presence either.”[/b}
The last trooper seemed to have learned well the lesson of keeping his head down. Now that Robert had got close enough, there was no reason to waste bullets, and the technomancer turned to his talens instead, murmuring an equation to suck in heat from the world around him and channel it into a ray of superheated air, but the vegetation spoiled his aim, and his reality manipulation burned a hole in the trunk of a local tree/mushroom variant a few inches to the left of the trooper's head.
They were making headway, but they did really need to get rid of the last Azalanti - it was nice to run into the enemy in ones and twos, but that was still a losing proposition... there was a good chance they'd literally run out of bullets before the invaders ran out of manpower, if the Empire had really flexed its muscles taking over the colony. Trying to find a clear line of sight, Robert kept on moving ahead, shooting in the enemy's presumed general direction more to keep the trooper's head down than anything else.
"Damn fanatics," Robert grumbled as the Azalanti just kept coming. Granted, they were soldiers, following their orders, but it'd have been so much more convenient if they had done so somewhere else, becoming somebody else's problem. Well, at least he caught sight of a head peering from between a couple branches of what passed for foliage on this forsaken hellhole of a world and the technomancer made use of the opportunity by butting a bullet just under that helmet, through the gap between the helmet and the armor the troopers wore.
Robert’s amusement faded quickly as he got his own share of simian attention. Luckily, he realized electricity was what the creatures were really drawn to – Sigi’s electric discharge may have been part of why the creatures were so impressed with the huge Vesk – and he had the means to replicate the trick. Whenever the critters began to get too physical with him, he’d use a simple equation to conjure a ray of electricity and zap some nearby rock to send the critters swarming and dancing. Of course, after they lost interest in the target of his energy projection they were due to be twice as interested in him – talk about cure being worse than the disease. Still, he hoped they’d reach the settlement and he would have a chance to sick the critters on some Azalanti goon before things got too out of hand.
Action 1 Sigirijus turned up his muzzle at the armour "Alright Magnusson. Time is of the essence. Leave the bodies and the armour. Mark the location. We'll come back once we finish our mission." ”Sure thing, boss,” Robert grunted, thinking that with any luck, they would need to leave quickly enough that burying the dead would become mere wishful thought. That, or some local beastie would have wandered over and decide to find out if off-worlder was digestible. Action 2 He growled, and grunted once, doing his best to look intimidating without threatening. Robert could feel his own hackles rising at the Vesk’s performance, and that was with him being 99% certain the giant lizard wasn’t about to rip out his throat. With any luck, the local simian would find the display equally impressive and maintain a healthy distance – the last they needed was wasting time and resources playing with local fauna while they still had all those Azalanti to figure out.
"Thyx, you and I need to find somewhere to bury them." Sigirijus growled "Can't burn them here." ”Bury them? Why bother? They sure wouldn’t have returned the favor, and it’s not like they are using those bodies for anything anymore. Just roll them over and leave them for the local fauna to deal with – maybe there’s something evolved on this damn rock that can digest them! And if not, good riddance to that beastie as well!” He looked over to Thyx "Can we see if these kids haven't reported back? I'm tempted to suggest we go back to the ship, use the medbay, maybe try to scavenge some armour plates and try again rather than push on with two wounded. On the other hand, if they know a patrol has gone down they might well send more forces out this way." he looked to his crew "Thoughts?" ”Didn’t hear any of them shouting to someone over comms, but could be one of them had something pre-programmed ready, so they only needed to tap a button,” Robert grunted, giving the enemies’ meager possessions another look. ”But even if they didn’t, they are sure to be missed, eventually. So taking a few hours off now might just mean running into even more patrols later, these ones forewarned of our presence.”
”Kid on the front lines, eh?” Robert grunted as they got a good, close look at their fallen enemies. ”Wonder if their bosses don’t care… or if this was supposed to be a safe little OP to bloody up a patch of raw recruits? You know, easy, low risk, just kicking some unarmed colonists around a bit, do some crowd control, that sort of thing?” ”Anyway, we won’t get any answers out here in the boonies,” he went on, taking a quick look at the pile of weapons and decided he wanted nothing to do with any of them. ”Take five here and then press on? You two holding together?” he glanced at Thyx and the only-recently-almost-shot-to-death Sigirijus. "'cause I sure am not going to carry you if you can't make it on your own."
"Well, it ain't worth the scum stuck to the heel of my boot!" Robert shot back in the same language, then aimed his pistol in the general direction the helpful voice had come from and squeezed the trigger... and was more surprised than not when his efforts were rewarded with a fresh grown of pain. 'Talk about a lucky shot.' |