Episode VII - After The Massacre

In the lull following the bloodbath, K'pok had some stern words to say about the need for fire discipline and the strong desirability of negotiation as preferable to the decimation of native populations, no matter how repulsively mutated they may appear. Kappo went into a veritable flood of self-justification, claiming to have shown remarkable self-restraint since he hadn't used any grenades or high explosives.

While this full and frank exchange of views continued, the building over which all the fighting had taken place was belching out dense black smoke, having been set alight by a fleeing mutant who had been set alight by Jek the Firestarter. K'pok wanted to get back to the ship to check on Weptish, since he wasn't answering any hails — all that came back was static. Kappo said that he'd be fine and suggested that it might be a good idea to search the facility for the memory cubes before the whole place became a blazing inferno, and after a reproachful remark or two from the Vulcan the team repaired into the lobby, clambering once more over the loudly swearing forms of the muties who had been trapped in K'pok's riot-foam spray.

The plans shown to the team during their briefing indicated that the comms centre and working data store was located upstairs, so they clambered up the (inoperative) escalator into dense smoke. Jek started coughing as the choking fumes percolated into his tattered rad-suit, and was forced to adopt a horizontal squirming posture in order to breathe. The others did the same, since they couldn't see a thing in the smoke, and our Gallant Crew crawled their way in the direction of the comms centre (they hoped). An unexpected wall barred their way; it had clearly been added post-holocaust. Kappo went for the direct approach and attempted to batter his way through it, without success. Jek tried a more lateral approach, and felt his way a few metres along it to find a curtained doorway. To either side as they crawled down the passage they could see small booths, obviously living and sleeping quarters, all decorated in a tasteful "Mad Max Chic" motif. Some desultory pillaging ensued, though nothing of any worth was found to steal.

Onwards, onwards into the smoke crawled our Brave Heroes, eventually managing to grope their way into the area which had once been the communications centre, now turned into living quarters for more of the mutant community. The immovable remains of the comms consoles still remained, but had been thoroughly gutted of all their components — one had been turned into a serviceable oven, others into Post-Holocaust Barbarian Junk Storage. Kappo and Jek turned the place over as thoroughly as they could, considering that Jek couldn't raise his head more than half a metre from the floor without risking death via smoke inhalation, and Kappo had to do all his searching by feel through the gloves of his EVA suit. They found nothing of any interest, and most importantly, no data crystals. K'pok meanwhile had found the door to what had originally been the office of the station commander — it was locked.

Leaving Jek to fumble about in the smoke, Kappo fairly leaped at the opportunity to use one of his explosive lockpicks, and blew out the lock very neatly. It had no effect; the door had clearly been barricaded from the other side. Combining their resources, and aided by Jek who had given up searching through the mutie squalor, they forced the door open and stepped into the room. A wild shot buried itself in the wall beside them, and they were confronted by a terrified group of three mutie teens, one of whom was wrestling with the bolt action of his antique hunting rifle. Surprisingly, Kappo didn't immediately mow them all down while screaming "Eat leaden death alien mutie scum" — instead, K'pok stepped over to the frantic youths and wrestled the weapon from its owner. Jek meanwhile pushed the door shut to keep out the smoke as far as possible.

K'pok attempted to communicate with the muties, but without any real success. They had all seen the carnage out in the street and were convinced they were about to be butchered without mercy, and kept repeating the same unintelligible phrase over and over. Kappo and Jek turned the room over and hit the jackpot (in a very small way). Under the bed they found a footlocker containing a variety of PHBJ (see above), an antique revolver (unloaded), and a single solitary TES data cube. Eureka! Only 999 or so to go! In the meantime, K'pok made use of the bedding to make an escape rope for the bawling teens, which initially increased the rate and volume of their pleading as they realised that she was going to garrote them before ripping out their livers and feasting on their eyeballs. They must have been very confused indeed when, instead of doing any of these things, Our Heroes just left the room and politely shut the door behind them.

By the time they made it back to the head of the escalator, the far end of the upper storey was well ablaze and they scampered back down into the lobby with flames licking at their heels. K'pok began trying to free the muties caught in her riot-foam, but soon realised it would take her forever without any release spray. Eventually she managed to talk the others into not leaving the muties to fry or asphyxiate and they decided to just pick the whole mass up and move it outside... except that the doorway was too narrow. "I'll take care of that" said Kappo, and using a series of precisely placed demolition charges he punched out the entire front wall of the lobby in a superlative display of controlled pyrotechnics. Grunting and groaning with effort, the three then hauled the trapped mutants out into the street and left them to wait for the foam to degrade enough to wriggle free.

Back into the building, and a quick scan of the ground floor turned up nothing of interest except the gutted remains of an air raft. The last remaining place to search was the basement level, reachable via a lift shaft (the lift itself no longer operational, of course) and by a stairwell. Our guys chose the stairs, and scampered down straight into the booby-trap. At the very last instant, Kappo noticed the spurt of a quick-burning fuse and leaped down on to the landing — regrettably placing himself right in the killing ground of the bank of home-made claymores. Several cans of remotely-detonated whup-ass were opened on him. Fortunately his shields and armour absorbed the worst of the damage and he was not reduced to a fine pureé, but he was reduced to a bleeding comatose mess crumpled against the wall. Fortunately, the GM forgot about his stash of explosives, which were also caught in the blast — probably a good thing really.

The others were momentarily deafened by the explosion, and blinded by the clouds of gunpowder smoke which filled the stairwell, but showing extraordinary grit and gumption they picked up their fallen comrade and began to make their way through the door which had been blown off its hinges by the blast. In retrospect, that may not have been an ideal tactical decision, since the dust and smoke prevented them from seeing the glowing fuse sputtering through the air and the pipe-bomb which clattered into the tangled barricade they were trying to clamber over.... yet another explosion, again largely soaked up by those excellent Vulcan EVA suits, but sufficient to cause a unanimous tactical readjustment to the rear. Picking up Kappo (again), Jek and K'pok beat a retreat back to the ship.

Meanwhile, back at the ship, Weptish had emerged from his fix-it trance to find nobody around at all. He wandered about the ship briefly trying to find some sign of his compatriots, then shrugged and went back to fixing something else.

K'pok, Jek and the deeply comatose Kappo arrived back at the ship, pausing briefly when they realised that Kappo was no longer available to disarm the claymores he'd set out around the perimeter. Not to worry; the claymores weren't there any more. Phew! They made their way back into the ship and decontaminated, and then Jek managed to get Weptish's attention by physically picking him up, moving him away from his work area and shaking him until his attention returned from the Land Of Gadgets.

K'pok put the antique data cube in for detailed analysis by the ship's AI so that the sensors could be configured to scan for them, and Weptish began medicating Kappo to prevent him from leaking to death. Successfully, fortunately for Kappo, who woke up some 18 hours later. Also fortunately for Kappo, nobody mentioned the fact that his EVA suit had been torn open and that he'd therefore been exposed to god knows how many lethally virulent strains of mutant bacteria. Maybe what he doesn't know won't hurt him, or then again, maybe it will.

By the time Kappo woke up (and immediately shot himself up with a TIC regenerative serum), the ship had completed its analysis of the data crystal and was in the process of performing an expanding sensor scan of the surrounding city for more of them. It got numerous positives, but all in very small quantities except for one cache over the river, near the jungle area where the ship had originally landed. The ship estimated that there were approximately 500 units there, roughly half of the total store they had been sent to retrieve, so as soon as Weptish finished his final repairs they took off again.

Flying low over the dead city to the point specified by the ship AI, they found a multi-storeyed stone building rising out of dense vegetation. Circling above, they saw a small flat open space among the steeply sloping gables of the roof, not large enough to land the ship, but easily large enough to get down on to using their A.G. harnesses. K'pok gave the AI instructions to land in a safe area and to return on her command. Then, thanks to the GM forgetting that Jek didn't have an A.G. rig and that Kappo's had been blown up, they floated merrily down on to the roof-deck. Thank goodness for the GM's lousy memory.