Chapter 6.2: Daring Rescue

"Heard. I'll get the main entrance."
Mercer will make his way to the enterance in the low light left from the edges of light cast from Douklan's light.

James takes a glowbug from his backpack - A palm-sized disc that emits
a white light, illuminating everything within ten
meters for twenty-four hours.

He then answers Hank and Douklan that there won't be a problem and they can reassembly the sled even without the external lights. So he and Corbin continues working.

---

All the local terminals were unresponsive and Hank could not connect to anything in the substation.

But it was not just the Electrical substation that was in the dark...

"Crew, this is Erin. Does anyone hear me? The tunnels that we parked the Solaris just got very, very dark. We are okay but I don't know what happened. Suddenly everything turned off. I thought someone would attack. "

Corbin, you realize that they dismantled the gravsled to put a weapons mount over it. The modifications would be enough to put a laser rifle and fire as you move. You can quickly undo those modifications or finish them.

Gimme a Fix roll, choosing how you gonna do it. Put the DC in the reason, please.

Corbin pauses when the lights go out, listening for a moment to see if there are other sounds revealed by the lack of machinery. Erin's message though seems to imply this is a much more widespread outage. Hopefully that means it's not an imminent threat. "James, take a moment and put up a few more of the glowbugs near the others. It'll help if everyone has some light."

Returning to the gravsled, Corbin continues with the reassembly.

"I will clear it and then I can come cover the maintenance bay. Keep the radio on, i will call you if i need support."

When the lights went off, Peter turned on the night vision of the suit.

Peter starts making his way to the upper left wing, he knows from the map there should be some apartments there so he needs to be careful of what could be waiting for them on the other side of the door, adjusting his night vision to let the most light in without losing clarity he checks if the door is open, and if so opens it rapidly and checking the other side while using the door as cover.

Once everything smooths our Mercer is going to grab anything especially useful from the bodies, as s well as any A/B cells and that sort of thing. Then will get them all buried.

To Maya: "Sure, we have a few minutes, let's do the scan."

To Erin: "Yes, we can hear you and we are currently OK. We found the crew, but unfortunately they were under attack and we were only to save the last one. We are currently holed up in a power substation and our fight with the prior occupants appears to have caused a power outage. We had no idea it was so widespread. We are currently working to get some equipment working so we can try to recover the other team's target. We'll give you an update soon.

"Also, please see if you can contact the robot on the shuttle we found. Try to keep him from panicking, and check on his progress."

Douklan receives the news of the larger power outage grimly. "Stay alert, everyone. There's no telling what will come out to investigate now that it's dark." To Erin, he responds. [b]"I agree; I recommend that you hunker down as best you can as soon as you've contacted the robot. There's all kinds of nightmarish things in this region that might come knocking there as well as here."

At the risk of sounding overly cautious, Hank broaches the subject ...

"Considering that power is out, and so everyone and their relative is going to come looking to see what is going on, should we just cut our losses and retreat? Sure, getting the unit will be very profitable, but grabbing as much tech pieces from here as we can and heading out will still generate some decent profits on its own.

"Just throwing it out there for discussion."

If there's a general outage I imagine people will be holing up.

Mercer they have each a personal compad (locked by their biometrics) and a laser pistol. The maintenance room has two laser rifles, one of them Corbin is putting in the gravsled, a toolkit and 8 spare parts. There is nowhere to get them buried. The floor is metallic.

---

Peter, you notice the batteries are slowly being consumed even though everything is dark and nothing seems to be draining it here. The auxiliary generators are on standby and didn't turn on automatically. You can look into it, if you want. Regardless, the door to the apartment areas are locked now. You're not sure if Hank did open it and someone locked those later or if he didn't mess with it as it was not part of your initial assault. Either way, you have to do something if you wanna enter the north wing.

---

Erin tells you that RB is fine and didn't notice that there was a power outage. It replied that the initial directive was to make it look like a graveyard and it was complying until Erin called. It then closed the connection before she could reply. Either way, she and Jil are alert and waiting for you.

Hank replies to Maya, "When we first got here, we fought a cybernetic ape. On our way to find your group, Mercer and I were too slow, and we fought another cybernetic ape. We scanned the first and it was loaded with nanites. I imagine the second was, too. So, things will likely require more than supplements to fix. But, we'll have to get back for it to all be a problem. You'll probably want to do another scan in a while to see how fast things are changing."

Rather than answer Hank's suggestion directly, Douklan thinks for a moment and then addresses the engineer: "Corbin, how many of us could ride on the two bikes? It seems like it might end up being faster getting back to the shuttle if we all can ride a vehicle, even if we have to wait 20 more minutes for the repairs at first." Then, since he's just a few yards away from Peter, Douklan sees when he finds the door locked. "Hank, when you were in the system earlier, accessing the data about the complex, did you see anything about the living quarters? Power drain, activity, camera feeds, anything? The door to that section is locked."

The bikes can carry two each, everyone else can load up on the gravsled. Provided we don't overload it with salvage.

Mercer, there's no place to bury them nearby (after all, you're still carrying Maya's friends). There is another level of buildings below you, not earth. They are accessible by stairs and elevator shafts.

The abandoned farming village, where they could easily be buried, is miles away, unfortunately. But there are also some sewer pipes and waterways where you can dispose of bodies... I don't know if Mercer has ever done anything like this, but he certainly knows some people who have.