LogBrink-Jason-11

Game log for the 2015/01/11 session of Brink, as taken by Jason

Time has passed since last session. Swan has been in and out of the hospital and remains disfigured from his injuries - his left ear and a big chunk of that side of his face as just scar tissue now. He runs the Den and Chronos has moved several of his friends into a bay near Chainsaw's old office, turning into his private garage. Cipher has not regained his eyesight. We're mostly done repairing the den, and the loss of life has not kept us from meeting orders. Skinny and Cletus are still on staff from the old regime. Absinthe is Torch's head of security and Chauncy has taken over a crew. Flail has a crew under Absinthe and Paint runs the other, with Warchest in Flail's gang. Torch works as Swan's personal bodyguard.

Three Neers come in to visit Swan. Torch immediately gets really still. They tell him they want to speak to him about "certain proscriptions against production." They seem concerned about fissile materials, and they want to inspect the Den and carry off any fissile material they find. They're willing to be escorted around but not by Torch, so Swan sends for Chauncy to keep them out of trouble. Swan watches from his office window as they leave this section of the Den.

They come back and tell Swan that everything looks good and he needs to transfer the canisters to Docking Bay C for pickup. Torch asks why transport is Swan's problem, but the Neers don't even wait for any discussion of the matter. Chauncy leads Swan and Torch to the compartment where the Neers went, and there are containers there marked "Depleted Uranium" and others without any marking we can understand. Chauncy sends for someone with a palette jack to move things around.

Chronos is in his docking bay C hangout when a maintenance shuttle comes in to dock. It's customized all to heck, with loads of weird sensors and tools rigged to the outside. When it lands, a Neer gets out. He gets out despite the fact that the bay doesn't have pressure, even though he's not wearing a full suit. Apparently Neers give no fucks about atmo. Chronos tells Apollo to go see what the Neer wants, and about halfway there, he gets a sudden stomach ache. Chronos goes to see for himself and gets the same stomach ache. He guts it out and walks right up to the Neer, and asks if he can help him. The Neer explains that he's here to pick up some stuff from Swan, but seems confused that Chronos was able to walk right up to him. He glances back at the shuttle and suddenly the stomach ache is gone. As Swan arrives, the Neer walks in a full circle around Chronos, inspecting him. One of the Den workers uses a Jim suit to move one of the containers over to the shuttle. As he does so, the Neer goes and picks up the other two containers, just toting them like they didn't weigh anything. As he loads up the freight, the Neer tells Swan that he's allowed to convey gratitude.

As they discuss what the Neers want and Chronos implies that maybe someone should fight them, Torch reminds them that civil war on the station serves The Devourer. Chronos tries to open his brain to see if he can spot it and finds that something seems to be slowly constricting the lanes of his future, cutting off his options and choices. That really bums him out.

Back in time a day: Absinthe's working a side job for some people who she thinks tie back to Savage, eventually. Teton has hired her to listen in on conversations, including one between two guys in a bar down in the lower 40s. She was hiding in a vent with a mic and heard them talking about getting some sort of package, which they have to get on the first pass, and without involving any Neers, and they must dock on 46. Apparently "it" is "space junk", and it's real important to someone.

Back in the present day, Absinthe tracks Swan down in the Den and relates what she heard. Swan and company try to figure out what it might mean and conclude that it probably has to do with more fissile material. Absinthe remembers the coordinates she heard, so we could theoretically go lurk around there and see. Swan calls in the rest of the senior staff to discuss the situation and possible opportunity. Chronos can get us to the coordinates but he thinks maybe we should take the shuttle instead of the tank, since it's more maneuverable. As we wait for Chronos, Cipher opens his mind, and gives some details about Neer life that Torch verifies - but he has no explanation for how he knows it except that he opened his mind. The conversation pegs Swan's weird-shit-o-meter.

Chronos mounts a machine gun on his shuttle, and Eyeball, Swan, Absinthe, Torch, and Hermes board it. They get to the coordinates and find that that precise locus is clear, but there's some debris a few km away, which Chronos can use to hide the shuttle. Of course, anything that hides us would also keep us from getting a good look. We decide to stay in sensor range and start scanning for anything incoming. She locks on to something coming in with significant v, which is small and transmitting. It turns out to be a probe, meaning there's something else coming to match velocity with it. Odds are that the something else will have us on sensors, but Chronos tries to get the shuttle into the clutter to cover us. Cipher opens his mind and sees humans from the station launching a probe into the wider system, to give a better view of the outer solar system, back when the gate was still open. It would have sensor logs of when the gate was open and when it closed. Eyeball interrupts and tells everyone else that the other ship has definitely spotted them and is maneuvering to get on the opposite side of the probe from them. Cipher asks if she can trigger a remote download from the probe. She cannot. Everyone on the ship begins to feel sick to their stomach, and Chronos reports that the Neers made him feel that way. Torch tells them that Neers use the anti-stomach device as a punishment or a warning. As we leave, Eyeball shouts "woah" and the shuttle that picked up the fissile material comes wooshing in. The two shuttles, both of which we thought were Neer ships, seem to be on intercept courses. The new shuttle, the one that picked up the fissile material, blows up the first ship on site and matches vectors with the probe. Swan orders the ship to maneuver to get a scan of the debris from the firs ship. As we pull away from the asteroid we were hiding behind, the sickness returns, much stronger. It remains until the other ship moves so that the moon is between us, at which point it ceases suddenly. It's clearly a line of sight effect. We accelerate and get them back in view, and though the feeling returns, it's weaker. After a few seconds, it gets stronger. Eyeball calls for breaks, and the same down, then up pattern repeats. It's clearly something targeted on us, and Eyeball also reports that it seems vulnerable to the Doppler effect - they have to retune it each time our relative velocity changes.

Swan orders us to make a spacewalk and investigate the wreckage of the first ship. The wreckage shows that the destroyed ship was a shuttle, and Absinthe recognizes the boot and flightsuit as those belonging to the pilot she overheard earlier. Swan's sorting through some wreckage and accidentally detonates something, causing him some injuries. Torch gives him a wee boost but he doesn't even need it; he seals his own suit breach so quickly that he's barely lost any pressure when he returns aboard. Absinthe escapes the debris from the explosion by pivoting around a nearby piece of junk, which turns out to be the housing for the destroyed shuttle's flight data recorder. Swan tells Chronos to get them back to the Den so they can decode the contents of the FDR in relative safety.

As they return, Paint tells Swan that they found a stowaway who claims to know Swan. Swan interviews the stowaway, Dr Raskolnikov, and immediately recognizes him as the bastard who stole from him once. Swan was working a gig to deliver a radio telescope sensor, and Eyeball caught Raskolnikov on sensors stealing it. Paint gets really angry during the interrogation and Swan has to slap him down.

With Paint gone, Raskolnikov explains that he was once on Dr Occulus' staff, but left, and now he wants to frustrate the plans of the Neers and the Farsight Society, since their plans aren't made for his benefit. Cipher drops in to see the new guy, contributes very little, and leaves.

Absinthe tries to open her brain to figure out what all is going on - it seems like too many things are happening at once for it to be purely coincidental. In the maelstrom she's lying on her back, staring up at the sky, when she hears a low murmuring. She sits up and sees a parade of Neers walking through the field, following Cipher. Torch is also in the Neer parade, but he keeps looking over his shoulder, the way he does when he's looking out for Swan. Oh, and one of the Neers is carrying a shiny briefcase.

The flight data recorder shows that the pilot, a guy called Poksu, had a pretty basic but maneuverable shuttle that he'd hot-rodded with more go fast gear. It doesn't show any missions before this one, but it covers this one from the get-go. He went wide around the moon, came back to lie in wait, then picks up Chronos and tells someone that they have company. They maneuver to put the probe between themselves and Chronos so that he can't open fire, but then they detect the Neer vessel, complaining about stomach problems, the engineer begins vomiting, and Poksu actually makes a course change to try to avoid the nausea. They get a weapons lock warning for just a second and then the recording stops. Poksu got very good scans of the probe. They have the hull plate, class data, and registration data, so they know the probe dates back to when the wormhole was open. There's peculation between Poksu and his engineer that maybe this thing has wormhole data.

Absinthe lets Swan know that she has the FDR decoded; Swan cuts Raskolnikov loose and tells Torch to escore the Dr to his work space. Swan decides to hold the data for now while he figures out how to use it.