Marina will volunteer to go down if nobody else is going to, heading down the stairs into the cargo bay.
"If you so much as twitch I will punch a hole right between your eyes," Marina says, keeping her rifle trained on the leader. The rifle itself is a bolt-action and appears very old, but like most guns in the 'Verse it is only modeled to look old-fashioned. The bolt loads the next round into the chamber, but also charges the inertial capacitor. She has kept this rifle with her since the War and brings it out when she needs something that packs a punch.
"Yeah, yeah, nobody bleeds for me but me," Kelly responds to Toki. "Wait for us, Marina, don't want to be down there alone. Come on, everyone..."
Kelly moves down with Marina to keep the Niskanites covered, and though Gabriel and Christopher don't have to obey his orders, this goes off without a hitch. The man sent over to retrieve the hostages does not try anything, nor do the newly-injured bunch. With enough firepower on them to turn them into blood pudding, they almost seem hesitant to move. But then they are through the airlock and safely on their ship, leaving you all alone.
"Harmony, disengage and get the guns on 'em," Kelly says, hitting a comm. "Then, let's get on our merry way. I want a damage check."
"Everything went smoothly, sir? Should we wait for them to go, or just get out of here?" Harmony asks, while closing the currently-open windows on the holographic HUD. She takes a moment to check the airlock security camera, ensuring the would-be pirates are back in their ship, and then disengages the airlock, sealing it. She then grabs the controls- the only non-holographic part of the controls- and maneuvers the ship so the front guns are locked onto the enemy vessel, while waiting for the Captain's response.
"I vote for just leaving...get away from here, and away from them, as quickly as possible," Nadra says, handing the screen she'd been watching back to Harmony.
"Watch 'em turn tail," Kelly commands. "Then we'll get back on track..."
The enemy craft, with the exchange finished, disengages quickly. With Harmony keeping the heavy guns of the vessel concentrated on them, they really have nothing they can try unless they want to be blown apart- the man who took the hostages back over is experienced with this and knows how things should go. Now Harmony gets a good look at it- a junky freighter type, though you think its exterior is merely an illusion and probably packs much stronger hardware than it started off with. Especially if it's one of Niska's jobs. Still, not a pretty sight, not like Gan Ying.
"Best be watchin' your backs, Gan Ying," he sends over a message, just before the enemy ship wanders off and out of comm range, into the black.
Alan checks damage. Only real harm that has been done was to that topside hatch that Harmony blasted. Normally the Captain would be slightly miffed about the damage, but due to the situation, he makes no comment on it.
"Let's just get moving," Kelly says. "No stops! We'll finish this job before we do anything else. That alright with everyone? Doc, get our wounded patched up. Alan, do what you can to patch up the topside hatch. Everyone else, just be ready."
Captain Kelly also permits passengers to keep their arms.
Harmony yessirs over the comm, waits for the enemy vessel to depart, and guns the ship back into hard burn along its old trajectory. Once the ship is moving again, she starts running a few automated in-depth diagnostics, system-by-system, to see if the hack job did any more damage that she isn't aware of. "Captain, we should search his belongings. Maybe Philip was carrying a tracker or something. We don't want them following us, right?" She asks.
"It was," Kelly says. "Good thinking, Harmony. Let's get to it."
An investigation of Phillip's room reveals that he had been doing all his hacking work from a device that he wired into the main computer system using cords in the walls. There are some clothes and other things of that sort, but not much else. No tracking beacons or anything like that.
Harmony agrees: she'll start devising a security measure that will block out all devices attached to the ship's computers except the built-in ones. After using Philip's hacking tool to find out exactly what he did, she will jettison all of his belongings, just in case they missed something.
I was thinking about this recently due to bouncing ideas around for a Dark Tower game. I need to do a great deal of tweaking to make things run smoother- just porting the Matrix/Star Wars rules won't cut it.
Will look into this soon. Firefly ain't kicked the bucket, it just needs some patching.
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Nov 13th, 2009 04:53 PM
