22 December 2024
Laris and Duke Willoughby show up, and say they have a ship. They explain that the plan is to install a new airlock on the ship (in the shipyard), attach it to the space station, and cut a new airlock into the bottom deck (from the ship, where it attaches).
Laris says he wants the ship back. We argue that Treek may need some time to make a safe habitat for the fleshipedes, and so we should give him plenty of time to return it.
Hank is our Fleshipede behavior specialist.
Buck has an idea about using the gravity generators to move the fleshipedes. Percy notes that Buck doesn't seem all that confident, but that's probably more to do with his temperament than the plan.
We have some maps of the ancient maintenance area, hacked by Diogo.
The bottom deck is basically a big square wth gravity engines on one side.
The map shows a maintenance tunnel that goes down. Henk says there's a slimy waterfall that needs rope to go down. (It no longer has water, just slippery slime.) There's a room at the bottom, and off the side of that room is another room; 2 years ago he saw the queen down there. The queen might be able to communicate or attack psychically. Henk thinks the queen controls all the fleshipedes, and that the non-queen ones are not intelligent.
The little ones take the bodies to the queen. The queen probably doesn't care if she loses the soldiers, but the soliders will probably follow the queen.
Henk doesn't know who is broadcasting the "flesh for juice" message, but sometimes it seems to have more intelligence behind it. He's communicated with them in the past by putting paint on the wall.
Henk has told us that they don't notice bots. We come up with a plan: 1. Have bots install cameras. 2. Turn off the gravity. Then tell the queen that she is in danger and that we've made a safe space at the location of the ship. 3, See if she moves. 4. If she doesn't move, turn off the grav and use the military robots to move her.
Buck says that he needs to get back to the gravity engines to mess with the gravity. We will need to guard him (obviously) while he's doing that.
The fleshipedes have human hands in a centipede formation.
Henk says the soldiers are about the size of a pig but long. She was about 15 feet long when he saw her. The eggs were slimy and about the size of half a person.
Drones are common. Percy suggests using the station's repair drones to install some cameras by the queen. Laris agrees.
The GM reminds us that there were some coms issues between mid-deck and bottom deck. Buck says that this is not to odd for an old ship.
One of Treek's guys (Reginald) shows up and says that he will accompany us.
Buck says that the changes to the gravity will (briefly) affect the mid-deck. We point out that we should announce that there will be some maintenance on the gravity engines that day.
It takes about 15 min to get from the bottom of the elevator to the engines (at cautious speed)
There are plenty of TL-11 laser rifles in the stuff from the pirate ship. We plan to take those.
Only Diogo is good at controlling drones, so we will use only one drone to put up the cameras.
Henk suggests we bring some bodies, to keep the fleshipedes from paying attention to us. We go back to the incinerator guy to get a body. We send the body with the drone to the usual body drop off point.
Diogo sends his little drone to monitor the body.
Opening of the maintenance tube is 2-3m wide and covered in slime. It has clearly been enlarged by being forced (not in any particular direction). Behind that there is a much bigger hole in the floor (but it was always large). Cameras are placed:
- To see the torn hole
- To see the hole going down
- Every 100m or so between the hole and the future airlock, including one looking at the wall where the airlock will go
- Looking at the waterfall and the pool at the base of the waterfall
- At the base of the elevator and along the path to the grav engines.
There are steps of a kind in the "waterfall". There is a pool of muck at the bottom. It is very humid; the camera is fogging up. The drone inexplicably starts pointing up, and then down, and then seems to be stuck in the mud. The gravidic drive starts to register errors. There is a banging, sloshing noise and then the drone cuts out.
We determine that the airlock should be around 5m wide. We want to seal up all entrances that aren't the airlock, reinforced and water tight. We want to add cameras to watch the fleshipedes and the control room, and a repeater to transmit the images to the ship that is remote controlling.
Eloise has come up with something that can cause a delayed heart attack. This can be formulated as pills that can be shoved in the dead bodies. This will work with a delay of 12-24 hours. We decide not to use this as it would be really obvious that the fleshipedes had been intentionally killed, and has a chance of failure.
We install a remote airlock, and also a timer, so that the airlock will "malfunction" and open after a certain amount of time has passed. (Remote controls for airlocks are generally not recommended, but in this case it's needed. Unfortunately since they are not common tech we have to jury-rig something, which means it could fail...)
Shanti and Stigo install the airlock. It takes 10 hours. After about 7 hours there's a smaller fleshipede emerging from the hole. Shanti and Stigo hide on the ship while it's out. After 2 more hours, 2 fleshipedes appear. We're almost done, so we decide to keep working and finish up.
After a grueling 12-hour workday, we get some rest before going to the next step.