Stray Dogs Episode I - The Station of Death

The figure shambles forward, hands moving to the sides of the helmet. As the group's weapons are trained on the newcomer, the space-suited figure looks from side to side, and moves its hands back to the side of the helmet, pawing furiously around the front and sides.

As the Humavari's shot rings out, the figure drops to its back, a smoking hole in the front of the space suit. With a slow roll, and what might be a groan under the helmet, the humanoid finally finds the release to the visor on the space suit.

A strained human face is revealed underneath, and a loud gasp sounds as visor is lifted, followed by a low groan of pain. "Ooowwwwwww... Stupid mask was stuck and I had no air supply... I must say that I'm relieved you're using lasers and not biting. Forgive my rudeness, but I'm just going to lie here a minute longer, that shot caught me pretty good."

The man sits up slowly, and struggles to remove the cumbersome helmet that was part of the now compromised space suit. He looks at each of the party members, thinking for a moment, "well, I guess you guys have the look of a bunch of Strays so we might be able to come to an agreement."

The stranger shrugs off the painful wound for a moment and grins at the team, "the name's Finley, Chuck Finley. I was on a job when the locals went all squirrely. Not just any kind of squirrely either. Cannibal squirrel squirrely. I figured I would suit up and wait them out in vac, but the helmet and I had a disagreement."


Chuck stands up, having caught his breath somewhat. "So! What do you guys say? I'll cut you in to, say 20% of my take for this," he holds up a small thermos container, "for a ride out of here?"

Saru relaxes and approaches the newcomer and offers his hand.

"You know how to make an entrance, humming. I'm Saru."

"We have a job to do here before leaving, you can join us if you want in the meantime. After we are done you'll be allowed in our ship for, as you said, 20% of your share for each of us." Saru smiles letting his fangs show to remark he is not really "negotiating".

"What the frak have you got in there anyway?" Hotwire says, pointing at the thermos. As he speaks, Hotwire bio scans the zombie remains and runs a scan on the newcomer as well. Can't be too careful - can't have this guy going for their brains later.

"Saru is right, we can't leave as of yet because we have a job to do here... Also, do oyu have any idea what the hell happened here? What caused all this?"

"All I know is that the scientists started getting sick, and then bitey soon aftewards," Chuck pauses, and examines the corpses, counting with his right hand. "There are LOTs more of them by the way, around 24 staff by my last check. Anyway, my employer gave me some cute comment about the water supply, he could be full of shit, but he also might know something, you know how fixers are. Either way, I've been sticking to the liquor cabinet, you know, to be safe." He says the last with a wink.

"This, however," Chuck holds up the thermos to the Skal'Az who asked him about it. "Is currently empty. Best I can determine what I'm looking for is in Lab A. They keep some rocks in there I guess."

"Oh, one more thing, we'd probably do best to avoid the crew quarters, as most of the scientists went to bed to rest it off before they, you know, got hungry."

"Hmm, if this thing is in the water, it might be in the air too... I suggest we find a way to decontaminate ourselves before gong back to The Ronin... Last thing we want to do is spread that thing outside this station... Speaking of which, I also suggest we blow it up to smitherines... Hotwire, once we're done here, you think you can set up some charges?"

S'skaar will turn to Chuck.

"Well, I assume you know the layout of this facility?"

Chuck's eyes light up when the Skal'Az mentions destroying the station. "I've had enough time to get a look around the place, yeah. I also may have brought some explosive, just in case."

"Here's what I know of the layout," Chuck says, motioning the others to gather around while he sketches out the layout on a nearby datapad.

OOC: Map will be posted to map thread.

Hotwire flips his HUD visor up and lools at Chuck intently. "Call me Hotwire." He jabs a finger at the map. "Weapons locker. That's where we're going next. When we've done the job we salvage this heap before we blow it up. Most of what I want will be in this workshop near our airlock. It'd be a good idea to hit the med center too, seeing how much hurt these squirrels can dish out. Speaking of which," Hotwire jerks a thumb at the zombie remains, "You think it's safe to say the guy we came for has already turned into one of those things? Maybe we already cut him to pieces. What's his identification again?" He flips his HUD back down and starts shuffling through the ID cards he got off the corpses.

"A force field in LAB B? I wonder what's in there..."

"And is it still there or has it busted out? Remember the turd I found by the door back on the bridge?"

"Yeah, that's weird. I don't think zombies would be the kind to take a dumpe every once in a while... I agree with Hotwire, we drop by the weapons locker first, then the medical bay, then the workshop, then we'll go check your lab A..."

"Wait a minute, Hotwire told something about some surveliance cameras... Maybe you can hack them and see what is in each room?"

"With the firewall this station is using, I think it's beyond my abilities, sadly..."

(OOC: remember all those cumulative -2 penalties I got for failing all those previous rolls, if I try hacking again, I think my CTN will be like 4...)

"Old fashioned exploration it is, then."

"You think you could do anything if you get local access to the mainframe? this way you wouldn't need to cross their firewall...?"

"Ah yes, the weapon locker sounds great! Maybe we can find some more explosives to use when we scuttle this thing."

"I don't see where else I could do that, according to your map, where we just were in the bridge. So unless Hotwire tries to fidget with the consoles' wires to see if he can disable the firewall that way, I don't see how else, or where else, we could accomplish that..."

"Well, all we want is the feed from the cameras, right? If we tap directly onto the hard lines with your laptop then that might do it. Even if we don't get the whole system at the very least we can take a peek at each area before we go in. Might be more trouble than it's worth though but might be worth a shot. Actually if we can just get our hands on some scanners with some decent range then that's really all we need."

"The workshop back by the airlock, or the labs might be our best bet for scanners. I don't know what they were working on to make a better guess, but those are the likely candidates."