02 - Suspended animation

A Deal with Dangent

In the Solar System's asteroid belt, three of the five-strong crew of the Cookie Cutter - Barry, Faux and Terry - are aboard the stricken pirate fighter ship, Yo' Momma's Ass. At the feet of the team cowers a pirate - in fact the ship's captain - who has just finished pulling on a space suit after his ship suffered explosive decompression on its bridge. The three from the Cookie Cutter radio Mazen back on their ship to exchange ideas for what to do with the captain, who gives his name as Dangent. At length, the party decides to make Dangent a provisional member of its crew, even allowing him to take a pistol from his ship's armoury. Faux takes issue with Dangent's compulsive use of the word "ass", suggesting that the pirate should replace every instance of the word in his speech with the word "heart" - and vice versa.

The boarding party has already taken Yo' Momma's Ass' nav comm from the ship's bridge to replace the one destroyed on the Cookie Cutter, and also the Soviet nav jammer which caused the damage as the crew's ship approached the scene of the attack on the Crispy Wolf. The team makes a last sweep of Yo Momma's Ass to see if it can find anything else useful and finds a bulky gadget with screens and a keyboard interface. It's small enough that the crew can carry it back to their ship with ease but too heavy for anyone to want to lug it around as part of their everyday gear. Dangent claims he stole the gadget from the last ship he raided.

The boarding party returns to the Cookie Cutter with the gadget and Dangent in tow. Reunited, the five nudge their ship towards the inert freighter Dangent's former comrades are still attacking, the Crispy Wolf. The torn docking umbilical left behind when Yo' Momma's Ass broke away to intercept the Cookie Cutter still hangs limp from the side of the besieged freighter, and will need to be cleared away before the crew can secure access to the cargo ships' airlock. Dangent makes himself useful and fires up the gadget from his ship. As the pirate presses this button and that, the clamps securing the wrecked docking umbilical fire, and the nuisance floats away.

Via the Cookie Cutter's own terminals, Barry the butler bot makes a semi-successful attempt to hack into the freighter's CCTV system. The system denies the droid access to the whole camera array, although he is able to bring up a view on his terminal's screen of the freighter's cargo hold. Four of Dangent's men are clustered around a severe-looking figure in a suspended animation pod. The crew of the Cookie Cutter rounds on the pirate captain - they were expecting a shipment of cybernetic limbs, how does Dangent explain this?

Dangent responds that he was promised ₡100 by the Russians if he and his men liberated the pod from the Crispy Wolf. The freighter was taking the pod's inhabitant, the war-criminal Grigory Krovozhadny, to custody on the space station Neptune Prospect, when it was attacked by Yo' Momma's Ass.

By the time Dangent finishes his confession, The Cookie Cutter's own umbilical latches around the freed airlock on the Crispy Wolf and the ship's crew make ready for the second boarding action of the mission.

Aboard the Crispy Wolf

Ripley stays aboard the Cookie Cutter as Barry, Faux, Mazen, Terry and Dangent, still wearing their mag-booted space suits, get the freighter's airlock open and step inside. On the wall of the cramped corridor within, a useful map gives the layout of the freighter. The team have entered the Crispy Wolf at the back of the ship, near the entrance to the cargo holds and the engines. The crew hatches a plan to turn the oxygen aboard the ship down to a level where the pirates and any friendly crew left aboard will fall unconscious without any risk to their lives. To do this, the team will need to get to the bridge. The five follow the coloured line on the floor the wall-map promises will lead to their destination. Beyond the open hatch to the bridge, the party spots three of Dangent's men. At their feet are kneeling another group of three, dressed in uniforms suggesting they are the original crew of the Crispy Wolf. A fourth crewman lies to one side with a bullet hole blasted through his chest.

Mazen opens the negotiations, convincing the pirates that he and his companions are there to rescue the captive crew, and that the Cookie Cutter's team have already struck a deal with Captain Dangent on Yo' Momma's Ass. Dangent, whose reflective helmet visor is down, stays silent and lets Mazen make his play. When the Cookie Cutter team tells Dangent to open his visor to prove their story, the pirate captain betrays them, pulling his pistol and rejoining his men as they open fire on the rescuers.

Mazen and Faux Hawk duck behind the doorway leading to the bridge, allowing them to take pot-shots from relative safety. Terry grabs the motionless crewman with the bullet hole in his chest and drags him through the same entry way, hoping to find a med-bay where Terry can at least stabilise the fallen man. Alone, Barry the butler bot weathers a volley of small arms fire from the pirates. The bullets and laser hits tear holes in Barry's space suit, but the android's exoskeleton holds up to the barrage well. Even without Terry's help, the Cookie Cutter posse whittle the pirates down one by one.

In the med-bay, which is within convenient body-dragging distance from the bridge, Terry lays the body of the fallen crew man in the medical suite's solitary auto-doc pod and races back to the bridge to back up his comrades in their fight against he pirates.

Faux Hawk ducks around the hatchway and channels her psychic powers with devastating effects on the treacherous Dangent. It's testament to the pirate captain's sheer stamina that his head does not explode. Stunned and close to death, Dangent draws a grenade from within his space suit and pulls the pin. Gripping the primed bomb, the pirate captain spits his defiance at the away team.

Terry lunges forward and wrests the grenade from the flagging pirate captain. Sliding the grenade seconds before its detonation into the barrel of his plasma cannon, Terry charges back out into the corridor leading to the back of the Crispy Wolf and fires the weapon, aiming for a point as far away from himself and his comrades as he can. The grenade survives the white-hot blast and detonates not far from the airlock where the crew forced access to the freighter. Although the hull of the ship does not breach, some reactive expanding foam canisters built in to the fuselage of the ship detonate, creating a messy but reliable patch on the wall alongside the grenade's explosion.

Mazen steps back into the room and levels his pistol at Dangent's head. The Cookie Cutter pilot pulls the trigger and the single shot ends both the captain's life and the vicious combat.

The last pirate

Some of the rescuers trade in their pistols for better weapons from the fallen pirates. Faux finds a security key card on one of the killed enemies. She decides the card is for a safety deposit box in a branch of Colognic Asset Management. Barry takes some photographs of the dead pirates' faces, in case this could win bounty money from the authorities.

Four dead pirates lie on the floor, but before his betrayal Dangent told the crew there were five of them, himself included. Terry fires up his motion sensor and he and Mazen go on a manhunt for the last pirate. Terry notices no pip indicating a life form in the med-bay. He glances into the medical room as he and Mazen walk past its open doorway, noticing that the auto-doc pod's head-height window has frosted over.

Terry reads two pips, one strong, one faint, in the freighter's cavernous cargo holds, however. He and Mazen agree to split up and use the maze of ducts and conduits around the cargo bay to close on the pirate in a pincer movement. Arriving at their chosen vantage points, the duo have an excellent line of sight on the pirate. The mean-looking bandit is hunkered down next to an upright suspended animation pod, unawares of the two crew members from the Cookie Cutter. Inside the pod is a shaven-headed man whose features betray even more callousness than those of the pirate next to him. If this is the war criminal Krovozhadny, then perhaps the pirate intends to use him as a human shield, given Krovozhadny's value to the Russians.

Despite the risk to the suspended animation pod, Terry tries his luck with a shot from the plasma cannon. He strikes the pirate off-guard and the white hot plasma turns both the man and the equipment he is carrying into a single steaming pile of nonsensical goo before the pirate has a chance to realise he is already dead. The duo climb down to the cargo bay floor and Mazen tries a few boxes stacked near Krovozhadny's pod. Just as Colin Decker told the crew back in the bar Mag-a-Loft, the boxes are full of cybernetic arms and legs.

The away team reunites on the Crispy Wolf's bridge. One of the frightened freighter crew asks about their fallen teammate - Locke is his name. Terry tells him the med-bay machine has put Locke into suspended animation. The Cookie Cutter party asks about the frozen Russian and the cybernetic parts. The Crispy Wolf crewman confirms what Dangent already told them: the freighter's scheduled mission was to convey Krovozhadny to custody on Neptune Prospect. The cybernetic components, however, are an unscheduled side gig. The Crispy Wolf's crew's plan was to make a cheeky little extra money by delivering the parts to the ice mines on Saturn's moon, Titan. Saturn's orbital position made it a convenient stop-off point en route to Neptune.

With no reason to doubt the crewman's story, the away team debate what to do next. They decide to take all three ships, the freighter, the pirate fighter and their own vessel, to the nearest outpost of civilisation. The freighter crew will pilot their own ship, but with their nav comm fried by the Soviet jammer on Yo' Momma's Ass, they will be reliant on the Cookie Cutter for guidance.

Once docked, the Cookie Cutter crew will have the freighter team request their parent company, Eddie Stobbart, wire their rescuers 100 credits. Once the freighter is repaired, it can go on its merry way to deliver the Soviet war criminal to Neptune and even to make a little profit as planned by dropping off the cybernetic parts to the mines on Titan.

Everyone's a winner!