Part two.
Part three.
Part four (short).
Part five.
Tailgate? You’ve never been to a tailgate until you’ve been to one of Digger’s tailgates. He turned the entire Tidewater into a gigantic shrine to the Fins. He had a Cets hat with an obnoxious blue fin on top, Cetaceans posters, a fin t-shirt, even a whole bunch of little dolphin shaped cocktail weenies. Okay, so maybe there wasn’t that much stuff, but there was a lot of it. And more than anything else, there was beer. Oh, my God, was there beer. (Actually, Jeff started off by asking us how much our characters were getting liquored up, on a 10 point scale, with 1 being sober and 10 being three-sheets-to-the-wind-barely-breathing-liver-rotting-fall-down-go-boom-drunk. Patterner didn’t even bother to drop by, as he was schmoozing with the corporate bigfins. But Andrew racked up a 3 or 4, Simon drank to about 2 and a half. Bora and Digger, on the other hand, were as close to 10 as possible while still being able to breathe on their own.)
I mean, this was no ordinary game. If the 4th place Cets could win against the hated Haven Colonials, and then win next week’s game against the Pirates, it could rocket them into a very tenuous 3-way tie with the Ire and Tsunami. And with the Ire’s center out for the rest of the season recuperating from a nasty ACL injury, a big win against Haven could put the Cets in an enviable position for the rest of the season ... but the guys honestly didn’t give a stick monkey’s ass. They just wanted to party.
So there they are, way up in the nosebleed section of New Freemantle’s floating stadium, jumping up and down (or, in Bora’s case, jumping up and falling down) in excitement. They’re about halfway through the second period when this creepy guy sitting next to Simon says "So how long you going to wait before saying hello, Simon?"
Now, if he’d been any more tipsy, Simon would have just written it off to the booze. I mean, there’s only so many people who know his name, right? But here’s this panty-waisted sissy, named Eric, it turns out, who just strikes up a conversation with him like he’s Simon’s best friend.
Turns out that this guy knows Simon fairly well. He knows about some of Simon’s more unusual modifications, and that he’s trying fairly hard to remain anonymous. But after letting Simon know all that, he says something along the line of "I have it, you know. I’m sure you must be anxious about what finally happened to it. It’s in a safe place." While he says this, he takes out a funny remote-control lookin’ thingy on a cord around his neck, and shows it to Simon. He says something about the fact that he’s taking a great risk by talking to Simon, but that there are others who have been working with this mysterious man who are willing to go against the prevailing winds and do what’s right. And, of course, if Simon wants to meet them, all he has to do is <splat>.
He didn’t actually say <splat>, of course. That’s just the sound he made when he got hit in the face with a rather large caliber round and evacuated his brain into Simon’s lap. Eww...
Simon, of course, takes a few moments to realize that
So Simon grabs the whatzit from the dead guy, and starts looking around
for whomever shot him. He sees a rather large individual with a rather
larger gun standing in the aisle a bit further towards the stadium, and
sees him taking aim.
What neither of them saw was the Cetaceans center cutting smack between two Colonials defenders and slapping the squirt right into the middle of the net. The crowd erupts between the two opponents, and now nobody can see anybody else. Simon avails himself of the opportunity and takes off plowing through the crowd, only mentioning in passing to Andrew that there’s somebody in the crowd trying to kill him. He also gets on his phone and calls Patterner, taking a second to explain the essentials of the situation, before diving off into the crowd.
Patterner is stuck with the Hydrospan brass on the other side of the stadium, but his remote is available, so it goes swooping off across the place. It doesn’t take but a few seconds before Patterner sees one of the goons accosting a semi-tanked Andrew, who still doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. The goon quickly realizes this, and shoves past Andrew. Patterner uses the delay to slip up behind Goon #1 and zap him in the back of the head with the stun charge in his remote. Goon #1 drops like a rock. Goon #2, however, dives back into the crowd. Andrew is a little overwhelmed at the moment, and just sort of gapes at Goon #1, so Patterner goes zipping off after the second one. In the process, he sees a bunch of goons running around the stadium, all of them apparently looking for Simon, and all of them apparently communicating with implanted radios. Well, two can play at that game. Patterner uses his radio to hook up with Simon and show him the video coming from the remote. Together, the two of them use some creative crowd camouflage to let the hunters become the hunted.
Needless to say, the goons are now a little nervous. They decide to call it a day, cut their losses, and take off out of the Stadium. Patterner follows them out, screaming all the while for a Hydrospan law-enforcement squad. He sees them get on this black anodized boat, and the boat motor away from the quay. He thinks "All right! Cops are almost here. This is where we nail ‘em. If we can’t get them with a boat, we’ll just follow ‘em in a hopper or something."
Actually, this was the point where they battened down the hatches and turned their little runabout day-boat into a functioning submarine and slipped away into the briny deep. Crap!
The guys, of course, are thinking "Dang. We gotta get us one of those."
Skip ahead a day or so. Don’t worry, you just miss some endless introspection, some pointless wonderings, and even a string-pull or two. Suffice it to say, the gadget that Simon picked up is a key, linked to certain crucial patterns in Simon’s personal pheremones. It’s an "absolutely secure" key, in that he’s the only one that can use it. McLeod Enforcement uses them all the time for their high-security storage vaults. Somebody rents a vault, pays for it in advance, and gets a key. Thereafter, they or anybody who gets their hands on a key and the right stink can get into or out of a storage room at their convenience, no questions asked. And boy are they secure. There are fixed defense points all over the McLeod warehouse, heavily armed and armored remotes stomping around the place, guards loaded for bear. So Simon shows the key to the punk at the desk, and he and Patterner (or, actually, Patterner’s remote) go into the warehouse to find out what’s in the room.
The door opens, and Simon braces for something horrible. Only, nothing happens. The room is empty, almost. There’s this thing in the middle. It’s a box. Or a tube. Or a ... something. It looks like a hibernation tank, except way small. And there’s something inside.
Skip ahead a few more days (in case you’re worried about what you might be missing, what actually happened was that Patterner and the guys sat around wondering whether or not they could use Hydrospan resources on Patterner’s authority, and whether or not they should help, hinder, or ignore Hydrospan law enforcement’s investigation of the killing at the Cet’s game. Needless to say, there was a lot of aimless "Well, what if ..." and not much progress made. Not very interesting to write about, and much less interesting to read, believe me. The only thing of interest was another appearance of the Astounding Secret Sub/Boats, this time in an attack configuration. Here’s a piece of advice. If you ever have the opportunity, watch someone else try and assault a secure McLeod warehouse. Preferably, you should do this from an extreme distance – say, orbit. Watching it from in the middle of the firefight is a bad idea) and we find out that the something in the tank is Simon. Or nearly Simon. It’s a baby human, and it’s an exact genetic match for Captain Stinky himself. Only, the sucker’s only about six months old, or so. And it’s been in hibernation for another nine moths. So, we’ve got a fifteen month old baby in a top-of-the-line Lavender Organics tank, and the only clue to its identity is this triangular hunk of plastic in the tank with it. Now, if you do the math, nine months in hibernation, plus six months lived, plus nine months to gestate, and Simon’s only been on Poseidon for two and a half years, and turns out Simon could not have made this baby back on Earth.
We think the triangular plastic thingy in the freezer tube might be a genetic map, but whatever it is, it contains an astoundingly huge amount of information. We haven’t any idea what the heck it is and no idea how to go about figuring out what it could be.
So, the guys decide that the situation really isn’t all that great. They’re gonna get spanked by those Bad Guys in the Incredible Disappearing Boat/Subs(tm) any time now, and they don’t really want to have to pay to have the bar fixed up – again. And to top it all off, Digger’s been elected Chief Mechanic for a boat that’s gonna run in the Stormbelt 10,000. Wanna guess where he left it? That’s right, folks – tied up at the RSC dock. And, to top it all off, it turns out that somebody’s infested the RSC compound with little crawly remote bugs, and whoever has been watching everything going on around the place for an unknown period of time. So, Simon takes a deep breath, screws his courage to the sticking place, and asks Ethan if they can stash the now-awake baby at Bright Savannah.
Interestingly enough, a piece of detective work in there winds up revealing that the freezer tube, manufactured by Lavender Organics, was sold to Hannover back on Earth. So, for a reason I can’t quite remember, Simon decides to call up the Hannover main offices on Poseidon. The conversation goes something like this:
Operator: Guten Tag.
Simon: Guten Tag. Ich wollte mit ein Customer
Service Representativ
sprechen.
Operator: Ein Moment, bitte.
Andrew: Hey! I didn’t know you spoke German ...
Simon: Neither did I. Crap. <Click>
<END Session ONE>.
Of course, they don’t get even close to making it. Somewhere out over the middle of the ocean, the radar starts painting an airborne vehicle closing at a great rate of speed. There’s no possible way our guys can run from it, and it sounds like it might be trying to jam all outgoing transmissions. Crap!
Fortunately, there’s a mangrove island just on the horizon. Can our heroes make it in time? Of course! It’s a "Plot Device(tm)"! So, they sneak down to the surface, and fly the hopper into the interior of the mangrove island. But, never thinking ahead very much, they fail to realize that there’s really no place to set it down once they get in there. The foliage is just too thick to get all the way down to the water’s surface. Nevertheless, Hot Pilot Simon manages to put it down. After sitting quitely for a few, fishing and generally wasting time, our intrepid heroes hear something. Reminiscent of the Mynoc scene from Empire, Simon realizes that something BIG has the hopper and tries to take off. Well, it's not letting go. So he hoses off a couple rounds and it lets go. Not before the hopper gets into an unusual attitude and tries to push several tons of water through one of the front fans. She ain't goin' anywheres.
So the guys sort of hunt around, and lo and behold, Bora (who’s finally sobered up from the game) finds a trail running through the forest. Boy, who’d think having a native around on Poseidon would be worth anything? I’m kidding, of course. Well, the RSC guys stumble into the middle of (or rather, are caught by) a large group of natives and sympathizers who are using the island as a safe haven and summer hunting camp. They’re not so very happy about the guys bringing the hurt down on them, but decide to send a few warrior-types (including one of Bora’s frat brothers, or some such) out to help pull the hopper out, and hand the baby off to one of the group’s Ma Etta types (they seem to be everywhere. How convenient).
So, the RSC guys (and Patterner’s little hover remote) head back to the site. Now, I honestly can’t remember how we figured it out, but we somehow knew that the Bad Guys would be along in a few minutes with a Magic Black Submarine to try to nail the (supposedly) unsuspecting RSC suckers. We set up a nice little ambush, and sure enough, along comes the opposition.
Now, here’s my favorite part of the whole schmeer. As a result of the electrical nature of the remote, rather than pokey old’ organic limbs, Patterner’s remote is damned fast. So while Andrew is trying to scramble out of the tree he’s in and get to a better firing position, and while Simon realizes he’s lying on a nest of jitterbugs, and while the natives are waiting for the RSC guys to give the signal, Patterner sends his remote zipping across the little waterway to the open aft hatch on this sub. There’s a guy there, and he’s taking aim at the shadow that is Andrew Lattimer.
And just as he’s ready to pull the trigger, Patterner puts the barrel of the large caliber handgun mounted in his remote in the back of the guy’s head and blows it off. I never really conceived of Patterner as an actor in a John Woo flick. Boy, was I wrong. He sends is remote floatin’ through the corridors of this boat, finding one or two people busily working away in each of three or four compartments. And each time, Bad Guy has just enough time to look up, see the remote in the doorway, and take three or four rounds in the face for his trouble. I could not miss! And every time I hit, it was like I was shootin’ ‘em with dynamite or something. Very, very messy. But, in true tough guy fashion, the last goon wings the remote. However, Patterner has the presence of mind to tell Andrew where the goon is, so that Andrew can come in and take out the goon. Which he does. And with some panache, I might add.
I gotta admit, there was a moment where I thought "Yeah! We captured an Incredible Floating Attack Whatzit! It’s ours! All ours! We’re rich! We’re wealthy! We’re socially secure!" But that only lasted until I realized that it was Jeffrey D. Barber at the helm of this little scenario. No sooner did the last goon give up the ghost, than a disembodied voice float through the passageways "The self-destruct routine has been activated. You now have fifteen seconds to abandon ship." Crap. Not even enough time to jack in and try to disarm it.
So Andrew grabs what’s left of Patterner’s remote, chucks it over the side, and dives in the water just as the Amazing Black Water Menace blows itself the heck up. Dang.
<END Session TWO>
So, the guys check in and have dinner. Actually, Simon and Bora! have dinner. Patterner’s remote gets stuck playing World’s Most Expensive Baby Monitor, since his fan won’t work. They’re sittin’ around, drinkin’ beer and whatever, and this punk with dreadlocks and a striped pin on shows up and starts harassing them about not paying their cut. The guys are obviously confused until it becomes apparent that the punk thinks they’re smuggling something. When he finds out that all they’re moving is a baby, he sort of backs off. That’s when Andrew decides that it might be worth their while to have some cannon fodder around. He pays the punk a few CS and buys some "protection" for the group. From then on, they guys can’t turn around without seeing some scraggly urchin watching them and lookin’ all tough.
The next day, Andrew’s sitting in the lounge playing cards with some of the locals, when some jerk walks by and bangs into the table. The other players are a little miffed, but Andrew keeps his mouth shut. This is mainly because somebody’s just dropped a note into his lap written on a coaster. It says "Move your cargo." So, some time passes, and Andrew nonchalantly wanders away from the table, and then bolts up to the room. Bora! takes the baby and dives out the window into the bay. Andrew sort of ducks under the furniture and waits for an opportune moment to follow him. Meanwhile, there’s more gunfire coming from somewheres else in the hotel, but it appears to be directed at the Bad Guys, so nobody pays it much attention.
The Red Sky guys go pounding up the pier from the hotel and are met about halfway by reinforcements from the local gang, who are there to live up to their “protection” contract. They’re perfectly happy to spirit the guys away, but the leader looks at Andrew and says
punk: Fine, but who’s she?
Andrew: Huh? Who?
Punk: Her! You never said anything about a
woman.
Andrew: Ahh…who the hell are you, anyway?
When Andrew turns around, there’s a tall, scary-lookin’ feline hybrid standing behind them. Turns out, she’s the source of the extra gunfire, and she’s here to help the guys. For those of you who’ve played "Natural Law," it’s Andrea Temple, GEO pilot extraordinare. Recently given leave from the GEO at the end of her enlistment period, she’s on her way to Bright Savannah to decide whether or not to re-up with the GEO. She got involved with the situation mainly because it looked interesting.
So Bora! gets on the radio and calls for emergency pickup from one of his Native friends. The gang gets spirited away to a local native camp, and that’s the end of session Three.
<END Session THREE>
[Ed Note: Never, ever, ever, ever ask the RSC guys for "Help"!]
<END Session FOUR>
Andrea: <Critically fails piloting roll>
Control: Aircraft 2A23-M0NK1E, You have deviated
from your assigned approach corridor and are displaying unusual flight
patterns.
Do you wish to declare an emergency?
Andrea: Ahhh…no. ... We’re all fine here. ... Now.
How are you?
So, we finally land. The team debarks, a little nauseated, a little shaken up, but alive. They start sorta wandering around, looking for someplace to eat. Simon decides he’s gonna stay in some cheap efficiency coffin hotel, instead of on the plane. He’s being rather paranoid, even for Simon. So, the group is just sorta wandering around, looking for a place where they can have somebody look at this plastic key thingy, when a remote wanders up to Simon and announces in Hugo-D4’s voice "Call for you, sir."
A little hologram pops up, and it’s the guy from the hydroshot game. Remember? The one that got his noggin blown open? It’s him ... or his twin or something. And he says "Eber? What happened to you? You look like you been sleeping on a rock" etc., etc. Turns out that the guy’s name is Samuel, and he starts getting fairly suspicious fairly fast, since Simon isn’t answering the way he really ought to. So Samuel looks around for a moment and then cuts the signal. A few minutes worth of talking to Hugo reveals that the call wasn’t actually meant for Simon in the first place. It was meant for somebody who looks an awful lot like him. Exactly like him, actually, except for a few of Simon’s newest scars. Hmm ... So Simon tries to use Hugo like an elaborate Caller ID, but nobody answers at the source. Oh, well.
Time passes. Patterner contacts LavOrg security to let them know about this newest development in the investigation of the incident at the hydroshot game and lets them know that Hydrospan would be very interested in any assistance they could provide in this matter. Simon goes poking through the directory and finds mention of an Eber Electronics, which appears to be owned by several corporations. He finds an Ana Carolyn Eber, and one photo of somebody that looks just like Simon himself trying to get a package from Lebensraum through LavOrg customs. Hmm ... Andrea, with apparently nothing better to do, hides Andrew’s underwear. Andrew, grousing about the lost business he’s had to endure while the group is off on this wild goose chase, complains about wrapping babies in coral diapers, sandy nipples, and how he doesn’t like "Kicking in dragons, killing treasure, and collecting doors."
Just as a precaution, Simon goes and has some of his more recent scars removed. After that, it’s off to "Implants-R-Us" to see if somebody can figure out what this plastic thingy is. Next day, while sitting around awaiting the test results, Simon is approached by Major Ashton Clarke, head of LavOrg's Security. Mr. Clarke is concerned over the fact that Simon happens to look an awful lot like somebody else in the city, and he’s worried that that somebody might use their resemblance to commit a crime and then blame it on Simon, and he just wanted to make sure that Simon knew that that would be a Very Bad Idea(tm). Oddly enough, after the cop leaves, he sends a highly edited police report to Simon’s e-mail account, mentioning the theft of a baby-sized cooler tank from Dyfedd a few months ago. Hmm...
So the implants place calls back with some interesting news. Nobody’s ever seen a device like this before, but apparently it holds a couple of different things. First, there’s a complete gene sequence, most likely for a human being. That takes up the first percent or so of storage. After that, there’s something like 10 to the 18th power bits of information, all of which appear to be cross-referenced to each other. The implants place has no idea what this information is, but it appears to be organized in holographic or topological fashion. It might be encoded visual data. It might be a complex molecular map of something. It might be a representation of human memories. It might be a really, really, really big cookbook. Who knows.
Interestingly enough, a more elaborate exam reveals that Simon apparently has an inactive neural interface chip that’s been grown into his brain. It’s not connected to a power supply, and there’s evidence that it used to be hooked up to an external port, but it obviously isn’t, now. Wonder what it could be. Hmm ...
--
-Jason Werner
