[BSMS Lady Luck] Ep. 2: All Roads Lead To Roam

The Salvage Marines came from all walks of life, and no two Reapers could ever be said to have joined the Marines because they fit in elsewhere. As Rawley listened to Salvo explain why he'd joined this Ill-fated Maiden voyage. Jumpdrives never failed. The hardware, software and even the science was so well known that it was hard to find the wiggle room for improvements. short range testing had shown incredible promise that the new drive would have let them jump from the fringes of currently explored Lorath space to the heart of the homeworlds in a matter of hours at best. So the AI's desire to see new things? That was sudden ironic icing on the cake for Rawley. And yet... he began to laugh, patting the 'man' on the back,

"You know what SAL? that's a better damned answer than I can even admit to for myself. I told command I had an idea for a ship design that may offer some improvements over the usual escort ships for the new Mothership class Tug they just built. Namely that the BlackStars division needed something... with a lot of bite, a whole lotta ass and could work as our own provisional mothership for whatever operations we might decide to undertake for the Holy Bottom Line. You know, the kinda off the books things that people turn a blind eye to when they suit their needs? the Lady was my brainchild, hell man - I threw together a sketch and shotgunned it at the brass. Reaper-Prime herself decided they needed a new project to keep the eggheads working. Lucky us huh? Well be kings when we get back with the amount of data we've collected."

He'd pause to look around them, they had, according to the Map he'd gotten a look at, made it to the main interior section of the ship. Marines were already hard at work hauling equipment and working to get the adjoining rooms of the stations 'beating heart' airtight and life support systems running enough that they wouldn't have to walk half the kilometer back to the scrapwagon to top their own air reserves back off before their next shift. The mention of wanting to speak to the LAI in charge made Rawley nod slightly.

"I'm guessing you got the thing blackboxed and airgapped so that there's no chance of it screwing us to the point we have to take the station apart around us to get away or else you wouldn't be asking already." He put a thumb to the chin of his helmet, "Yeah, alright - once you got that thing 'stable' and I do mean as stable as you can get we're not looking for perfection here, SAL, if you have to use scrapcode, hopes and prayers alongside some ductape and a quick chant to The Bottom Line? I'm fine with that as long as we get usable results that can atleast help -"

He paused as there was a detectable shift in the station, more parts of it coming online as systems were breached or simply powered back on. The Hardlight display on his forearm popped to life as the floating image of the Ships XO dumped a plaintext script on them:

Code:

The Lady's sensor suit is back online, this place is a graveyard. Sending data after. Something Big happened here. 
We've already had to deactivate what looked to be a freefloating limpet mine that latched onto the ships hull due to faulty magnetic locks.
We're dissecting it on a nearby rock just to keep it away, preliminary findings are... interesting.  Nuclear. 
This thing might not have broken our armor, but a nuke detonating on the hull?
Would've probably killed any crews outside the ship and you all would probably dead via residual radiation.

Something deep in the station also just kicked over after we deactivated said mine and we're seeing station lights flickering on.
Repairs proceeding apace and accelerating incase we need to swoop in and pick you all out of the fire, Sir.
~Juliessa Sarn, XO.

Rawley just showed SAL the message with a grimace, the follow on was an updated, and sensor swept 3D image of the space around the station, a half dozen ships were wrecked and two were at the very least welded together in what looks to have been a ramming impact. Hundreds of 'radioactive' munitions littered the area. Whatever fight happened here had been vicious and dirty. And the victors had taken whatever they wanted from the station, or died trying to get there.

"Lotta the damage could explain why this place is in such rough shape... I'm getting that gut feeling that this place was 'important-important' or at the very least a the kinda place meant to be important and hidden inside a ragular box to keep people from finding out, yeah?"

 

Location: Unknown defense station, Unk. System
Hallways leading to the command deck.
Music: DC Bruins - Charger Victory Lap

Rawley was in the midst of helping a trio of salvage marines remove a crossbeam that had become wedged sideways in the hall after having been blown loose. He reached up and pressed a finger to his ear as a report came in from one of the hangar bays that they were now moving into exploring some of the larger ships berthed there that looked to have never had a chance to be launched... Bodies, spent casings of some kind and scorch marks filled the decks in the frigate sized ship they were looking through. that made him pause fully in his work as even the other marines heads swiveled towards their boss. A mostly intact frigate meant plenty of materials to effect repairs on The Lady. Well, they were getting plenty of those materials from the mess in the main bay it looked like given the fact those ships wouldn't ever be space worthy again. Which meant there were materials of another nature to be plundered form the intact ship.

"Be extremely careful. I want a stem to stern search. Use marking materials to denote cleared rooms and keep a mapping probe running the whole time. By. The. Numbers. This is priority one. Safety of the Marines first, safety of this station second, and then the ship last. Do everything you can to make sure there's no failsafes or you trip alarms. Even if it's going to take days to do that search properly. Do it. Also, I want everyone on station's heads to be alert and on a swivel - this place is waking up slowly with our help... and I don't want her waking up angry at us. We've been pinged and 'friendlies' but who knows what ghosts might remain in the machine, Rawley out."

He'd offload the crossbar to the marines near him as he began designating people to help bolster the search of the ship. It just became priority number two in addition to gathering intel from the station and it's AI. Speaking of, he'd snap the lid shut on the wrist comp before turning to look at Salvo after his companion had nudged his ribs hard enough to leave them sore even through the flexible plating of his suit. He'd been feeling it if he had to hustle at anytime soon, which meant Sal got a slightly grumpy grunt from the man as he mulled over their options, "Well, the AI knows we certainly are not who it thought we are, thanks to whatever glitch let it handshake with us before we yanked it into a box. And it is a limited AI... not a true sentient creature like yourself so... we might be OK chatting it up and getting any new information it might have for us."

His own gut was telling him that the better information they had going further into the station the better. Especially since they were close to the Primary CnC. A lot of heavy fighting seemed to have happened aboard the station considering like the images of the interior of the frigate, the walls, floor and ceiling were all pretty well torn up and black stains and frozen bodies were everywhere in the tangle they were cutting their way through. And this was the fasted route to the place. He could already see the bulkhead doors for the command post through the holes that were slowly being cleared out of the place.

"Go ahead and fire up a conversation with the Lai, Sal. Most of the population probably ended up dead... or taken as prisoners I'd imagine. If we can even get this place ten percent stable and get the Lady docked inside the main hanger and work on repairing and possibly seeing if any of the tech here can be converted....." He trailed off as the engineer in him began to latch onto that smallest sliver of hope they might figure out what the hell had happened, where the hell they were. And most importantly: How the hell can they get home. Or even call home. Given the star were wrong and they had no idea what their heading had been when they arrived and the ship had been tumbling before they finally got her back under control? He couldn't even pick a direction... a mental barrier slammed shut on his thoughts as he realized he was spiraling down a dark path he didn't need. Officers had to at least appear in control at all times. REAPER One, The 'Old Lady' herself had set a precedent on how she expected them all to operate and he'd be damned if that slipped here as his face hardened as he made a decision.

"Right. Lets get the Lai on the horn and sort things out, Sal."

 

The Command Deck
Location: Unknown defense station, Unk. System
Music: Heavy Metal(Take a Ride) - Don Felder

Rawley was watching the marines begin working hard to get equipment and machinery working. He'd reach up to his ear as he walked and paused at one junction, "Yeah, Bring the Lady in - We might be able use parts from the ship in the hangar to fix some of her subsystems and damage. Leave a floater in the belt though, we want some early warning if something goes sideways on us. We're going to need to have her ready to fly and fight as soon as possible... We're in this for the moment, so that means double shifts, volunteer basis only. I want to keep our men and women fresh as possible, Aye, I'll let SAL know to be careful, Rawley out."

The snippet of conversation was one sided of course, but it was obvious he was maintaining check in times with the Lady out in the belt as work on the station progressed and a more detailed layout of the station was offered. While SAL worked, Rawley occasionally stopped to help a group of Marines with their work, lending the enhanced abilities of his officers suit where possible in order to lift heavier damage away from access hatches that would've taken longer to cut with a torch. Half of it was busywork, the other half a bit of moral upkeep. Letting the boys and girls know 'the old man' was watching and getting his hands dirty as well. SAL's small updates kept his mind working as Rawley paused mid stride to rub his chin, he was accessing the shared drive as much as the other marines and just as swiftly building a image in his head of the station and a swift map of the place.

"Having it on our side is a plus... We can... uh...shackle it if we need to, force code changes if we need to, but so far it seems rather...benign... if that makes sense? I have the feeling whatever happened here had to have knocked out a higher functioning AI that may or may not have controlled the station with the LAI is interface for the meat and bones personnel? Or they didn't have a full AI and it was working via LAI only... which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me either. The place seems a bit simplistic..."

He'd scratch his chin and glanced at SAL, "See if you can get it to install myself and you with 'Owners' rights, and build a access tree out for the proper persons who need it... As for date and time..." SAL's fans whirring...

That made him take a long moment of thought, "PA 240ish... hmn... that, makes no sense, especially without context. Lorath dates have different time periods where the date and time style changes based on era, ancient history had a sorta epoch that changed time once they discovered time, by then they'd been alive for like a couple hundred thousand years..." He scoured the databases his people had tapped into and the datapad with the date pinged up, "Let it know the current date is PA 270, according to a recovered datapad... We don't know what that translates to in our time... We've traveled in unknown amount of distance and time, possibly from another galaxy even. Our equipment, for us, states it's just been a few days at most. So." He'd spread his hands, "If we can trust the thing with running the station once we're not gonna get shot up and it's not gonna try and phone home, possibly alerting anyone we're here? We'll settle up about getting times and dates right. So far, we have a station that's...roughly thirty, more or less, years old without maintenance running on hopes and dreams."

He detailed out the information, parsed the materials needed and nodded as if he were checking off a long list of things. The man was a Greaseheart through and through though as he unlatched the glove from his suit and placed the naked palm of his hand on the station and closed his eyes. He had done so with the Lady prior to launch, and the same with the Scrapwagon before lift off. Spaceships and stations 'spoke to him', or at least, that's what Rawley told people. After a few moments of 'zen and the art of spaceship maintenance' he glanced around, "Right. Lets get into the brain of this place and see what the command platforms look like."

It wasn't hard to find the place, they had already been en-route to it, and security teams and recon elements had already cleared the room, a pair of techs were already at work carefully clearing the clutter and getting the computers back up and running, the Main Display of the station was on and displayed a running damage report of the place, translated and parsed into universal so everyone could understand it. It wasn't fully 1:1, but close enough that they could tell that the station itself had taken a beating, returned as good as it got, while screaming blue murder for help that had never arrived. And then had laid abandoned for far too long. She needed work to make her marginally habitable, work that was proceeding swiftly. Sealed sections were already reading pressurized and Humanoid-breathable.

"Well, That's reassuring." He'd glance towards SAL, "I know you're multitasking, but things do look a little..optimistic."