Childsplay

Childsplay
We gathered at the door at the end of the corridor realising that we had no idea how we were going to get through this or any other door. It had a red bar on it indicating a hazard beyond. We unsuccessfully tried tampering with the computer terminal adjacent, but despite our apparent geekiness none of us are really into IT so that didn’t work. Thud’s inspirational contribution was to knock. Nothing happened.

It was left to me to suggest using my telescopic pole to force the door open, Sar magically remembered that he had one too at this point, and in a joint effort including a surge of psychic energy from Skarl we prised open the door and used the poles to wedge it open.

Just another corridor beyond though there was a window through which we could see, somewhat worryingly, one of the two remora like attendant battleships on the move outside the station. Nothing we could do about that any way. Thud tried his loud knocking approach at the next door and no one was more surprised than him when it opened.

Scrap and Sar with some quick (but stupid) thinking fell deliberately into the corridor beyond, Sar trying to accidently inject his pre prepared syringe containing a knock out concoction into the good Samaritan who had kindly let us in.

There was a snap as the syringe broke on the titanium arm of the nine foot tall robot that had opened the door. The robot was unresponsive and moved off at some speed after we attempted to open a dialogue/ command it with degrees of success that varied between complete and total failure.

The automaton stopped at a window blocking the corridor, accustomed to having servants obey my every whim I ordered it to let us pass, which it did. We continued to encounter these strange unresponsive leviathans. We noted they had differing shoulder flashes, whether identifying, some form of rank designator, we could not tell. Two of the strange sentinels joined forces only to run away together. Another tried to break a window in the corridor but only cracked it.

Then everything changed. Playtime you might say, was over. The new toy brought to the game was a chain gun that emerged from the torso of one of the great machines and opened fire. The robot sprayed the corridor and in the confined space it ripped through us like a chain gun through a group of badly organised genocidal criminal desperadoes.

Only Thud and I were standing after the torrent of fire ripped us apart. I snapped off a shot with my las pistol and reached for a Lazarus patch which I knew our medic carried. However, not being terribly good with medical stuff I botched the attempt. Thud surprisingly was more successful and Sar got to work on Scrap and then Skarl.
The robot meanwhile did a transformer bit, morphing so that it completely sealed the corridor. It had reckoned without the great Scrap Maverick though, whose thermal weapon melted a hole clean through, allowing Sar to take fire a burst at a fleeing figure through the hole bringing it down, its back a bloody mess.

After using Scrap’s cutting equipment to get through the instant barricade we learned new and vital information: Sar was a child killer, not just content with slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent children with a good clean atomic vaporisation like the rest of us, he wanted to kill cute pig tailed six year old girls who had tried to kill us first in personal combat, mano a kiddo so to speak. The despicable swine. What was worse, he made me use the phrase,’ dethpicable thwine’, which I find personally very traumatic.

On the upside though, the robots were obviously walkers, occupied by children which explained their erratic behaviour. There were also implants in the child’s body that triggered the doors removing the tiresome door opening problems we had been having. We sheathed our telescopic poles at last.*

*There’s a phrase I never thought would pass my lips

Ever practical, the waif like corpse was packed up into the child slayer’s backpack, listed on his inventory as a skeleton key of course. We had been following a pipe in the corridors all this time that contained a substance apparently unknown to our scans and judging by the pipe construction, something highly dangerous. Of course it was hardly likely to be the fabled 442 but it gave us as good a lead to follow as any.

It now brought us at last to a room, filled with child sized furniture it was obviously an eating area for the little people who operated the walkers. This one was decorated for a sixth birthday party that would never happen, Sar the kid killer looked suitably chastened. He now remembered that his psychic powers could bring people back from the dead if he acted within seconds. This just reinforced the rest of our opinions that he was totally committed to murder for all insufficiently aged persons.

Searching the living quarter chambers we found cages, all empty but in one chamber a huge tank containing a giant fish, into which our mysterious pipe was plumbed. The fish was being drained gradually of whatever was in the pipe, and presumably was still producing it and pumping it into circulation, whatever it was. Curioser and curioser*
*Said Alice, possibly the name of the deceased little girl?

The proximity of the corpse triggered the computer terminal by the tank. We learned that the specimen, from the planet Krosty* in the Urexta system (0506 early closing Thursdays, bring the family, murderers of six year olds welcome) produced a chemical agent with a multitude of uses, none of them good. One hinted at was forcing evolution, presumably accelerating it in certain desired directions.

*Home of the Krosty burger

We found another child hiding in sleeping quarters that accommodated twelve, plus a lot of equipment designed for supplementing the walker suits. Inexplicably Sar failed completely to murder her. At this point any way. The girl was as mute as her dead playmate which she was fortunately unaware of as she failed to notice the bodily fluids soaking into the child slayer’s backpack. Or the smell. She was frightened of the giant fish in the tank and Thud who found and took charge of her did little to ingratiate himself with her, in fact showing every indication that he’d be happy to join Sar in the almanac of baby dicers.

We back tracked as we could find little else in this part of the station, Sar hanging back to feed his pathetic bag of scrappy infant remains to the fish, how much lower can that man sink? We look forward to the answer.

We went past our entry point and eventually came to a high vantage point overlooking a vast docking bay. Four storeys below our ledge we could see guard towers, chemicals being offloaded from bays and taken away on grav vehicles driven by masked guards. Ross foundation groups were everywhere staying in tightly organised formations, also masked. Prisoners in traditional orange jump suits were working everywhere, some half naked with their backs flayed with three distinctive painful looking welts.

This appeared to be an important nexus with prisoners emerging from the larger part of the station to our left and being transported under heavy guard to the smaller third segment and presumably perhaps the fourth part of the Lab beyond that. Smaller numbers retuned from that direction, perhaps depleted by nefarious tests that took a toll of research subjects.

The child at this point shinned up a ladder into an area too small for us to follow and disappeared. Thud was highly annoyed at missing the chance for a bit of brutal murdering and Sar looked a bit wistful too, apparently children are a bit like pringles; once you’ve popped one, you just can’t stop.

We plotted our next move.* We wanted to head into the research area, on the plus side, there were lots of people milling around and there did not appear to be any internal security checks. A determined group with balls could bluff their way through, perhaps even get a lift with a vehicle carrying cargo from the bays in that direction. Our disguises would blend us right in with the Ross workers, and Scrap was noted for his powers of bullshit.**

*This is polite speak for Argued about.
**These are not the idiots you are looking for

On the minus side, Scrap was brilliantly disguised as himself in an extreme example of the art of double bluffing that even Hans Christan Anderson would never dared attempt when writing ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’. We also had no means of communicating with all these helmeted people, and no knowledge of where we were trying to get to even if we could commandeer transport somehow.

The guards all looked highly formidable and were heavily armed and armoured quite apart from out numbering us approximately a thousand to one. In addition, three of us were badly wounded and we had just let go a child who probably knew enough about us to buy us front row seat at our own summary execution. To cap it all, we had Thud.* We could see the pipe we had been following joined a network radiating above this huge area and joined a huge pipe high above us. Who knew how many chambers containing these fish lay throughout the station?

*Salakan has modestly left himself out of this list of cons, it should be noted that amongst his contributions this session were a near fatal attempt to open a window in the corridor as it was ‘a bit stuffy’ plus the sage medical advice he offered Thud when three members of the party were critically injured and near death, which was to ‘go to medical school for seven years’

We descended to the ground level and fortuitously made it to the loading area unchallenged. There we grabbed some random items and imperiously flagged down a grav transport which we loaded and then boarded, heading in the right direction, or at least the direction we thought was right, but who knew what would happen next.

Sar was fingering his knock out syringe but I could see no kids anywhere; Scrap was fingering the brim of his hat like he does when he is engaged in something incredibly stupid;* Skarl was looking slightly sick and Thud was looking ready to punch someone, which to be fair just means that he’s awake. Ho hum, just another day at the office.

*It’s almost worn out now frankly

22.8.15