Chapter 1: Carnath

It’s been a long and dreary voyage for each of you as you eventually arrive at the small, high-pressure, methane-rich mining planet of Carnath, and the six relative-nearby XeroCorp prisons scattered about on various, and otherwise insignificant moons and asteroids orbiting it.
Once the pride of the XeroCorp empire and its largest facility, Prison Station Echo represented state-of-the-art rehabilitative strategies and inmate training. Those "lucky" enough to do a stint in PS Echo left with an education, networking contacts, and countless opportunities for employment once they returned to society that enabled any former inmate to find work, usually before their sentences had even been completed. The recidivism rate of PS Echo’s population was so low as to be nearly negligible.
Times have changed though, and newer, bigger, better, more progressive prisons in the space worlds have replaced XeroCorp’s crown jewel, and the facility finds itself in a nearly constant state of disrepair, short-staffing, and chaos. When its inmate population isn’t killing each other, rioting, and causing general mayhem, inmates toil round the clock collecting valuable minerals and materials from surrounding the asteroid belt that orbits Carnath, only to be sent back to the ugly planet in an effort to repay increasing incarceration debts.
And while the prison’s reputation for low retention and recidivism rates has gone down the toilet since its glory days, XeroCorp now seems prouder than ever, if not for its now-dismal human rights record, then at least for its new reputation as having a near 100% incarceration rate. One has heard rumors XeroCorp executives, behind corporate boardroom doors, speak fondly of the whispers on Carnath that a trip to PS Echo is one-way only. Inmates may not be sent to PS Echo with life sentences, but they typically find themselves with one before they ever leave, and those that do finish a sentence of incarceration at PS Echo May not be found hidden away on the prison anymore, but neither are they ever seen on Carnath proper, or on any other planet or space station located on the edge of rimspace.

Each of you, down on your luck, desperate for work, has found yourself lucky to have found employment, albeit likely of a temporary nature, as XeroCorp’s most recent hires. Not all of you arrived on the mining planet together, and some of you found yourselves waiting for a number of standard cycles, until the next XeroCorp prisoner transport shuttle departs again. In the meantime, those of you who arrived early were given compensation for room and board while you waited. Those that had hoped for compensation on the form of credits or other standard currency, perhaps intending to squirrel away as much of it as possible, while cutting corners on accommodations or calories, or perhaps see their fortunes grow in one of Carnath’s many and increasingly seedy gambling venues were disappointed, as XeroCorp immediately handed early arrivers compensation on the form of vouchers, to be traded in for an overnight stay in any of a number of Carnath’s tiny sleep-pod banks, small rectangular "bunks", providing little more than enough space to lay horizontally, with a few inches of above your noses, and bit of extra room for a small travel pack to store at your feet; frequently appearing unwashed after use by a previous tenant, reeking of urine and unwashed body odors, and covered in various crusts, films, and other dried fluids it’s probably best one not scrutinize too carefully. Food vouchers, as well, were provided on a daily basis through minimal communication by XeroCorp in your net-messages. Enough for three basic and uninspired synth-meals per day, at one of Carnath’s many synth-cal kitchens; the fare at these locations that prove willing to accept said vouchers little more than bland, watery gruel and tasting as depressing as one feels upon stepping foot on Carnath in the first place..

Eventually the last of you arrive on Carnath, and after checking your net-messages for the umpteenth time for the day, if only to stave off boredom, you’re each informed that a shuttle to Prison Station Echo is scheduled to depart at 0600 hrs the next morning. Each of you is provided one additional sleep-pod voucher, for this evening, but notably no further synth-cal vouchers… Miss your shuttle to Prison Station Echo tomorrow and not only is your employment opportunity likely rescinded, but you’ll be on the hook to provide for your own food and lodging on Carnath; an inadvisable situation to be in concerning the costs of food and lodging on this backwater planet.

The morning starts early with the five of you boarding the only transport shuttle that travels to and from Prison Station Echo. Each of you are glad to finally make your way off-planet, even if only for a change of equally drab scenery. While the bus arrived nearly on time (only a delay of about twenty minutes), the transport staff refused to let the new passengers board for more than an hour, and as patience began to run thin, the reason for the holdup suddenly became apparent as four burly guards, armed with stun batons and pulse rifles escort nearly a dozen new inmates aboard the shuttle first. From outside the transport as you wait for your turns to board, you hear the guards barking gruff orders at the inmates and the shuffling around of bodies, before finally exiting the ship and giving the five of you disdainful looks as they pass by, likely returning to some sort of temporary prisoner holding facility the next wave of inmates is collected on order of the Carnath judicial system.
After the guards leave, the shuttle pilots, in hardly any better disposition than the guards, orders you to board the shuttle, single file. The shuttle interior is little more than a standard bus, and normally would have contained enough seats to seat eighteen passengers, but the seventh and eighth seats from the back have been pulled out and replaced with a cage of heavy-duty steel mesh, acting as a cage around the last six seats. In this cage are nine inmates in orange coveralls, the largest or most dangerous-looking of them sitting in the seats, while three others stand or sit on the floor, worried looks on their faces at the realization that if they’re already ill-equipped to even fight for a seat on the shuttle to the prison, the likelihood they be constantly taken advantage of during the extent of their sentence is all but assured.

After boarding the shuttle and locking themselves into the cockpit, the two pilots inform the passengers that the shuttle takes thirty-six standard hours to reach their destination of Prison Station Echo. There will be synth-cal biscuits and hydration packets provided three times per standard day, and there’s a small waste evacuation pod directly behind the co-pilot’s seat for those that are recent new hires to use as needed. Inmates are to remain inside the cage at all times, and will be the last to be unloaded upon arrival. Nobody addresses what happens if an inmate needs to use the waste evacuation pod in the next thirty-six hours.

The other passengers seem preoccupied in their own thoughts as Dr. Mullins tries to focus on his book. Despite his best efforts, he struggles to keep focused on his reading. Something seems to gnaw at the back of his mind, and for a moment he can’t seem to shake it. After restarting the same paragraph for the third or fourth time, he can’t help but look behind him, taking a second glance back at the inmates secured within the steel mesh structure.
He’s startled to find the brutish one staring directly at the doctor now, a hungry, predatory, intense and unsettling look in the man’s eyes. He’s an intimidating large fellow, strong-looking but not necessarily "well built" in the traditional sense of muscularity. Rather, he carries the body shape of a rather sturdy tree trunk, standing around six and a half feet tall, and by James’s estimate, probably would tip a scale to well over the three hundred pound mark.
As the large brute glares terribly at the good doctor, a second inmate, one that was forced to take a seat on the floor, sits akimbo-style only a few inches from the brute’s feet. He’s small and wiry, with full of long hair that looks like it hasn’t seen a brush or comb, or even a washing in quite some time, and as Dr. Mullins manages to tear his eyes from the brutish man’s unsettling gaze, James notices the smaller one intently staring at a spot of absolutely nothing at all of interest on the bulkhead in front of him, his left hand obscured by a steel crossbeam near the floor which the mesh is welded to, his seeming wrist rotating back and forth and if his fingers are worrying at something near the base of one of the floor-to-ceiling struts the cage is affixed to. The brute glares at the doctor, almost as if giving Mullins some sort of unspoken challenge.

Ellos-11, you note a curious thing… As you watch the long-haired prisoner staring vacantly at the bulkhead, hand apparently working at something out of sight, you go to check his information in the prisoner manifest you’d downloaded only to find the entire file has been corrupted. You were certain that it was intact when you downloaded it, but now it appears to be nothing so much as garbled data. You suspect that this is not an accident, though what it means exactly eludes you.

Having finished with their onboard systems check, one of the pilots comes on a crackling, overhead intercom speaker and advises all passengers to secure themselves and prepare for launch. Shortly after, the shuttle finally departs from its station on Carnath. The high-pressure, methane atmosphere is dense, and the spacecraft bucks and jars roughly, struggling to leave the planet's pull behind them. As it gradually accelerates away from the mine-scarred surface below, one can almost wonder how the craft won't eventually tear itself to pieces at its seams. As it approaches the upper exosphere of the planet, the shuttle begins to stabilize, and as it leaves the satellite's gravitational pull it silently sets course towards the small moons and asteroids orbiting the planet. If Dr. Mullins thought his stomach was queasy before, he finds himself desperately holding down the bile rising to the back of his throat.

@Windyridge: Elios-11 begins to run a facial scan on one of the prisoners, hoping to match the inmate with their charges, sentencing outcome, etc.

@ Windyridge: Ellios-11 runs a scan of the first inmate in the cage. In a manner of milliseconds her scans find several district features of the prisoner's face that should hit in the prisor database, but finds to her dismay that her access to the inmate's records has been •••DATA RESTRICTED•••. She runs a facial scan on another prisoner and again a •••DATA RESTRICTED••• result turns up. All efforts to access the inmate records are met with the same outcome. This is highly concerning, as nothing regarding the removal of Ellois's access to the XeroCorp Inmate Record appears to have been accidental.Bud looks over and sees the large inmate glaring at each of you in turn, but for every brief moment or two of attention he spends on each of you, he sends a bit longer leering at the doctor. It's difficult to read the large man's intentions; perhaps he just enjoys making the doctor uneasy, perhaps his threatening demeanor is merely a distraction to hold the new hires' attentions his way, or as in the case of the doctor, force their eyes elsewhere than from the cage in the back. At the large man's feet, Bud sees a smaller, long-haired man working at something along the floor, but from this far back, his hand is obstructed from view by the base of the cage.

The long-haired. Prisoner stops fidgeting on the floor and looks at the Corporal, a queer look in his gaze. Riggs nudges the man on the floor with his foot and quietly says, "Cool it, Bronson". The man, presumably named Bronson, looks up at the bigger fella for a moment and then turns, still sitting on the floor, and leans against the mesh work of the cage with his back to the travelers, legs pulled up and arms hugging his knees.
The larger man still glares at the newcomers on the other side of the cage, especially the doctor.

The chess game goes on for some time, before resulting in a disappointing stalemate. Afterwards, those that require sleep find themselves getting drowsy. Dr. Mullins finds himself re-reading various paragraphs and he occasionally nods off in tiny micro-snaps, and eventually gives up his efforts to continue with his book.

Twelve hours into the journey, Annalise, Bud, Riggs, and Mullins are sound asleep on the "safer" side of the cage, while Dodger naps on the other side. Ellos is busy contemplating the fact that her access to the prisoner database has been restricted when her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of scraping and scratching. The smaller man in the cage is at it again.

Approaching the cage for a closer vantage, Ellos sees that the floor of the cage is covered with a rubber matting, likely designed to be sprayed down with a hose in the event that blood, urine, or other bodily products need be washed out after a voyage to the prison. Where the rubber matting meets with the bottom of the cage work, there was a small channel the cage base adjoins to, and is sealed shut, but it appears that the man has used what appears to be a small piece of metal acting as a primitive chisel or shiv, and has been steadily cutting away the rubber matting from the cage base. By the looks of it, the man has nearly cut the entire cage base loose from the rubber matting.
Ellos approaches, remaining careful to stay out of grabbing range, and the smaller man looks up from his work, and gives a sinister smile. "Hey, Elmer," the man says.
The larger man, had previously taken a seat from another inmate closed his eyes for a short rest, having lost interest in leering at the workers on the other side of the cage, but at mention of his name one eye winks open.
"Almost there, if you want to grab some of the stronger fellas to help." He says this while maintaining his gaze on Ellos, a look of almost mocking nature on his face.
Elmer stands up, stretches, and begins slapping the shoulders to wake a couple of other prisoners inside of the cage.

Dodger’s nap is suddenly interrupted by the sounds of shuffling and shifting bodies around him, and he opens his eyes to see some of the men rousing from their sleep. The large inmate wears a mean looking smile on his face, and Dodger’s been incarcerated enough times for petty crimes in his younger days to recognize anxious feeling that comes when something is about to go down in a jailhouse.

As soon as the group of new employees begins reacting to Ellos’s news, Elmer shouts to those he roused, "Now!" Hurry up. Elmer, the smaller long-haired man with the shiv/chisel, and two other inmates grab hold of the cage and begin working in tandem to push-and-pull… push-and-pull… push-and-pull… The cage rattles loudly, and those watching see that the cage is quickly being ripped from it’s rubber mounting at the base. Ellos-11’s assessment of the situation does seem indeed to be the case. A prisoner escape seems imminent; an attempt at a hijacking the forgone conclusion afterwards.

As panic builds in the main passenger area of the ship, Mullins rushes to the front of the transport and searches frantically for an intercom. There’s a speaker to the left of the locked cockpit door, but no button is evident or any means to contact the pilot’s on the other side, so he begins frantically hammering on the door with his fist. After a few seconds, which feel like long, precious minutes wasting away as the doctor tries to ignore the shouts and primordial whoops of excitement now emanating loudly the prisoners from the other side of the cage, the annoyed-sounding voice of the shuttle’s first pilot crackles over the speaker.

"…Kkksh… —have nearly twenty-four hours of travel time remaining. What the hell do you assholes want?"

Chaos has descended upon the shuttle. Dr. Mullins frantically tries to communicate with the pilots of the shuttle that things are amiss, while at the rear of the transportation vessel a small number of prisoners who have seemingly been plotting an escape/hijack of the vessel at hand make a desperate attempt at escaping the cage they are confined within.

As the prisoners push and pull against the cage's moorings, Corporal Riggs stands up and throws a blast of flamethrower at the inmates, which runs disastrously off-target, and blasts beyond the rioters. Luckily, the flame hits the plasticated wall behind the inmates. The wall melts and runs drippy down the back of the shuttle, but remains intact, though likely compromised. Dodger immediately dashes and takes cover behind a row of seats.

Ellos-11 fires at the inmates. She's never been anything less than certain that her aim is true, but recent anomalies in her access and programming has left her off her game and as she squeezes the trigger on the escapees. The shot passes between the large man called Elmo and the smaller, long-haired man, and one of the smaller inmates sitting on the floor suddenly collapses, blood bursting from her throat. Elmer looks at Bud's scattergun and grins, wholeheartedly unafraid of the man's threats, or at the very least, less afraid of the scattergun than one should be at the prospect of spending the rest of your life on Prison Station Echo. He stands with his hands grasping through the cage's mesh.

From the front of the cabin, Dr. Mullins is barking desperately into the speaker, something-something about if you value your job, this and that...
"If you value your positions, I wouldn't provoke the ire of XeroCorp. They wouldn't take kindly if the ship lands and all of their new hires are dead. Now do something!"

"Eh, heh, heh, heh... You hear this asshole?, Mullins hears from the speaker, as one pilot seems to speak to his counterpart... Dumbass thinks XeroCorp cares whether him or his buddies, or any of the inmates even make it on-asteroid at all. Ha!
Mullins hears the other pilot chuckling in the background.
The pilot moves his mouth closer to the intercom speaker. Alright listen assholes... I don't know how the hell any of you boarded this shuttle with weapons on your person, but you should take a moment to realize that this entire cockpit is basically a freighter-class escape pod with a bus welded to the back. We could sit here and watch you all fire off every round you morons have and you'll likely decompress the cabin, set yourselves on fire, or otherwise murder one another, and I'll have five or six days of much-deserved vacation time while XeroCorp "investigates" the death of a handful of janitors, rapists, murderers, and malfunctioning droids nobody gives a shit about.
"I strongly suggest you stop shooting guns and flamethrowers inside our fracking ship, and either handle whatever shit-show you have going on back there, or space yourselves.

As chaos continues in the shuttle, much to the pilots’ implied indifference, Annalise’s foam gun discharges at one of the inmates that was rattling at the cage and the foam hits the cage’s meshwork, passes through, and immediately coats the hands, chest, and face of the inmate, binding him to the cage. The inmate quickly tries to retreat from the attack, but the foam molecular structure bonds immediately with the air in the room and becomes a solid mass. Annalise can only stare as the man struggles to pull away from the cage, unable to free himself, or even breathe, and his muffled screams are only barely perceptible through the hardened compound, but for as slowly as his breath is in escaping the dried foam, it’s even slower at being drawn back in, and the man begins thrashing and convulsing uselessly, his feet kicking spasmodically as he struggles for breath.

Annalise immediately gives warning to the other inmates that they are at risk of triggering events that could compromise the integrity of the ship’s hull. Elmer only stands and grins defiantly. The long-haired inmate looks to Elmer for guidance, takes note that his companion ins;t to be persuaded, and begins pushing at pulling at the cage again, ignoring the thrashing of his fellow that’s suffocating in the foam encasing his face. But the other inmate that Elmer recruited for this attempt at escape first looks to the suffocating man, turns to the melted bulkhead behind him, considers Elmer’s scattergun, and promptly sits down, looking shamefully up at Elmer as if he knows he’ll have to answer to Elmer for his cowardice at some point in the future.

Elmer and Long-hair continue working in tandem at the cage. With only two of them now, their attempts at escape might take a while longer, but with probably close to a full twenty-four hours before their arrival on Prison Station Echo, time is still on their side.

Those not watching the prisoners’ escape attempt, or the man slowly suffocating as hardened foam covers his mouth and nose, notice Ellos-11, already an unsettling presence aboard the ship, acting twitchy as if whatever her processors are trying to make sense of is causing her distress. Nothing good ever comes from an Android acting twitchy or erratic, and nobody wants to be sealed inside a small metal tube for twenty-four hours if said Android goers full haywire.

@Ysolde: Annelise attempts to fire the foam gun at the inmates again. This time the device malfunctions as one of the compound mixing lines splits open under pressure. Instead of discharging a quick-drying foam at her target, the side of the gun and Annelise’s forward hand are suddenly covered in the entirety of the foam canister. A large mass of ochre-colored glue, almost taffy-like in consistency, and extremely sticky, covers her and the gun, though without the hardening compound mixed in before discharge, it never solidifies. Annalise’s will have to repair the rubber line and give the gun a thorough cleaning, inside and out, before it’s usable. Until she finds some means of cleaning this compound off, everything for the next twelve hours is sure to be a sticky, uncomfortable mess.@gtg626q: Dodger, seeing a brief lull in the shooting suddenly steps calmly forward and grabs hold of the man’s head and pulls it back from the cage work. The foam is really fastened to the mesh and for a moment Dodger can only hear the muffled scream of the prisoner, as he uses the very last remains of air to protest what he’s sure is his face being ripped off. Indeed, Dodger can see skin tearing at the sides of the inmate’s face and he continues to pull. Just as he begins to think perhaps it’s a lost cause, small fractures in the foam appear, and suddenly the dried foam compound tears away.
The man gasps as suddenly fresh air fills his lungs. One eye is still covered in the compound, as are his nostrils. Blood courses down each side of his face near his ears, and his freed eyelid as badly torn and bleeding as well, but at least he can get air. As he quickly stumbles to the rear of the cage, near the melted bulkhead, he looks at Dodger, perhaps with a look of astonishment at being assisted, and perhaps a degree of gratitude on his still-foam-caked face.

@MicrotheMacroBear:@MaJunior:

Bud’s scattergun discharges at the big man at point blank, but to his dismay, somehow the gun kicks and the shot misses the mark entirely, buckshot shredding into another inmate sitting on the floor, tearing a massive hole through the man’s abdomen, as he slump to the side dead.Having watched two of their fellow prisoners cut down, mostly due to sheer ineptitude on the part of the workers wielding firearms in the cabin, the majority of the inmates now retreated from the cage at Annalise’s threats. Some have begun cowering behind seats, or use one another as shields. Even Long-Hair stands a step or two back. The big man called Elmer, is not to be dissuaded, not even flinching as Bud’s shotgun blasts at him from only inches away. Instead he grins and starts attacking the cage with a renewed vigor.

The doctor looks again at the door. There’s no point of entry that looks as if it could be pried or forced. There’s a keypad with a palm reading mechanism installed, and presumably it’s programmed to read the hand prints of the pilot and co-pilot, but the door has been secured soundly against any attempted hijacking. No matter what chaos descends into the cabin area of this spacecraft, it’s designed to make a safe landing at it’s intended destination where presumably a team of beefy prison guards then takes over and gets everything under control while the pilots sit confortable inside the cockpit and wait for orders that the matter’s been resolved one way or another.