The Team has looted the bejesus out of a derelict freighter, garnering a container-load of slightly radioactive small arms (mostly assault blasters, but a few support weapons as well). They have kept a couple of blasters each, two LMG and two HMG (They don't have any power supply or ammo control unit for the HMG). They have contacted Sgt McGruder and will sell the rest of the weapons to him for a half million SVU (about a quarter of their new value), assuming they can get to him without being brutally killed, murdered, slain, whacked, gutted, or fucked up in any other way.
They also found a stasis chamber about the size and shape of a Volkswagen. They don't know anything much about it; it has a bunch of telltales blinking merrily away on the exterior, but no labels to tel them what the telltales actually tell the tales of. Sutton did a brief recce in cyberspace and had a brief and violent run-in with a guardian program. He found a virtual cage, in the middle of which is what appears to be a steel art-deco sarcophagus. The cage is defended with some sort of field; he hasn't attempted to penetrate it as yet.
They disposed of the weapons to McGruder without too many problems, except that Sutton's hot-shot landing was slightly fucked up and the ship's landing struts came in for a certain degree of battering. Fortunately, all of the crew were sedated at the time, so the only people to witness it were the control tower crew, starport ground staff, and all of the other ship AIs on the field.
They left New Amsterdam for Krokinole, in the Rigel system. There they bought a bunch o' stuff, including a very snazzy sensor array for Sutton, and they also did some investigations into the mysterious module they'd found on the freighter. A company performed a deep scan for them and told them that there was a carbon-based humanoid life form in stasis in there, and a representative of CryoGen Inc. told them that it wasn't made by them, nor could he identify the maker for them or guarantee being able to open it safely.
They decided to take the chamber off planet, and investigate it somewhere away from civilization. They took up an orbit around one of Rigel's uninhabited inner planets, and floated the module out on an umbilical about 500m from the ship. Sutton reentered the stasis chamber virtual environment and had a close encounter with some cyber-nastiness. He found a large, rough-forged cage in which lay what appeared to be a steel art-deco sarcophagus. The cage itself appeared to be electrified, and in spite of his precautions when trying to open it, he was zapped from here to breakfast.
This caused a moment of alarm out in the real world when all of the ship's system powered down momentarily.
Sutton recovered, and trying again, managed to diddle the lock and open the cage. Opening the sarcophagus itself offered no such problems, and inside he found what appeared to be a Raggedy-Ann doll which sat up, mumbled some sort of obscenity at him, and then spat something at Sutton's face. The "something" metamorphosed into a nasty spider-like critter which clawed its way into Sutton's virtual mouth and scuttled down into his gullet, where it wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside him. He tried all sorts of radical things to expel the thing, including cutting himself open (ouch!), but to no avail. In a short space of time, he could feel the thing spawning others of its kind in there.....
Sutton came out of the virtual space to find the stasis chamber open, revealing a frost-covered internal cocoon. The memory of his experiences in virtuality faded very quickly -- too quickly. He considers himself perfectly OK, and a series of diagnostics revealed him (he thought) to be in perfect health.
Captain Joe, in his combat armour, was in the cargo hold when the chamber opened, with Talya and Eve watching from the bridge via the surveillance monitors and Fenella watching through the cargo-bay door window. A brief flare of some sort momentarily blinded the video pickups; with cat-like reflexes, Captain Joe immediately fired wildly with his neural disruptor, hitting nothing except Fenella on the other side of the door. (Fear not for sweet Fenella, it was just a graze -- a nasty headache, nothing more). When the dazzle cleared, the inner cocoon was shown to have cracked open revealing a roughly humanoid cavity large enough to hold a small child -- but no humanoid. The Captain searched high and low for anything out of the ordinary, but could find nothing. Fenella, through the hold-door window, could see something clinging to the plates of the back of Joe's suit. It appeared to be a cockroach-like thing, with a flattened, chitinous torso and four limbs. It had no "head" as such, though there was a bulge at one end of the torso which may serve the purpose. Fenella was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the thing.
The Captain attempted to dislodge the creature by scraping it off against the superstructure, and then grabbed at it as it scuttled away. He managed to catch it by one of its legs, which broke off in his hands, allowing the rest of the thing to scurry off up into the superstructure. Joe zapped it with his neural disruptor, but to no apparent effect. Meanwhile, the piece he was holding was still wriggling and thrashing around, so he found a specimen box amongst Fenella's stuff and put it in there.
Time passed, and over the video pickups, the others noticed that the fragments left attached to the Captain's back plates had grown into tiny replicas of the parent. Joe carefully cracked open the specimen box to check the leg he'd put in there, but in spite of all precautions the thing swarmed out over his wrist and disappeared into the clutter of the hold. Once again, Joe was left holding a fragment of the thing. He decided to keep one specimen in a sealed container and space the rest, so making sure everything was secure, he ordered Sutton to vent the hold by opening the main doors to space. Sutton followed his command to the letter, by opening the access door to the corridor. Immediately, a squadron of the things swarmed through the opening, past Fenella, and disappeared into the ducting of the ship. Joe was stunned, amazed, confused, and most of all, angry. He immediately ordered Sutton to perform a full set of diagnostics on himself.
Sutton ran through his diagnostic routines but found nothing to alarm him. Recriminations flew thick and fast, with the crew claiming that he had opened the wrong door, which was (of course) absurd. He checked and rechecked his logs, which showed that he had indeed opened the main space doors. Sutton began to become concerned for the health of the crew; they were obviously becoming delusional and needed help as quickly as possible. He decided that the only reasonable thing to do was to thrust immediately for Alphanor, where they could get the medical attention they required. The situation was exacerbated when the Captain refused to leave his combat armour, and began to display symptoms of severe paranoia, preparing weapons of mass destruction for some unspecified purpose.
Talya had sent off a sub-light message to the M(something) Investigation Bureau on Alphanor Orbital, describing the creatures and the situation. A reply was not expected for about 15 hours. Eventually the message came back that ships of the MIB were on their way to rendezvous with the ship; they want specimens of the nasty little alien greeblies. They gave Talya instructions to deliver specimens at all costs -- if necessary, the crew were deemed to be expendable.
Talya told Sutton that a "hospital ship" was on its way to rendezvous with them, but Sutton didn't believe her and decided that the thing to do would be to increase thrust and get to Alphanor as soon as possible. He ordered everyone to their acceleration couches, ready for deceleration to the so-called rendezvous point (intending, of course, to accelerate. "It hurts to have to lie to my owners like this, but it's for their own good. They'll thank me for it in the end" he thought). Problems inevitably arose with the pig-headed and obstinate Captain Joe, who refused to get out of his combat armour and into his acceleration couch. Sutton attempted to reason with him, saying that he couldn't decelerate unless everyone was secure, and that he would not therefore be able to keep the rendezvous. Eventually, with help from Talya, he was persuaded to grudgingly take his place, although he tried to take an entire armoury into the module with him. Unable to fit the heavier weapons in there, he finally resigned himself to having only a blaster pistol and a laser pencil with him.
Talya and Captain Joe became frustrated with trying to deal with a crazed Sutton and decided that the thing to do would be to cut their way out of their respective acceleration modules with their little laser pencils. Sutton asked that they desist, and advised them that he had evacuated the outer corridor. Talya responded by closing her environment suit, and carrying on. The Captain put on his respirator, and likewise continued with his vandalism of the ship's fittings. Sutton remonstrated further with them, and then announced that he would be increasing thrust to 5g over the next 60 seconds. Talya stopped when they got to 3g. As soon as thrust came off, Joe started again; Sutton warned him that if he did not desist, he would be forced to immobilize him with a high-gee crash burn. Naturally, this threat had no effect on Joe. Sutton "restrained" him by burning for fifteen seconds at 8g, and then removed his laser and pistol while he was incapacitated. Everyone is somewhat unconscious, having been squished in their couches for a while without the acceleration gel packs initiated. Captain Joe and Talya's modules are no longer vacuum-tight, having both had holes lasered through the doors.
(Talya @ -40 STUN, Joe @ -27 STUN, Fenella @ -? STUN -- Fenella was in a yogic trance at the time)
The only member of the team who can be considered fully functional is Eve, who shut herself down prior to the original scheduled "deceleration" burn as per Standard Operating Procedures. She will be coming back on line shortly. She has not been as severely effected by the acceleration effects as the others, as her systems were all inert while all the excitement was going on. She may be interested to smell burning insulation from the passageway, and to see holes in the doorways obviously made by laser fire. It would interest the hell outta me if I were in her shoes.