07 - RVS Atwood
The AA Team pilots the Cookie Cutter to a halt alongside the freighter, the Crispy Wolf. The freighter's captain, Cass Thorne, promised the AA Team an easy gig picking up so-called royal jelly from the research vessel, the Atwood, en route to Neptune Prospect. The Atwood is where Captain Thorne predicted, in orbit around Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons. However, the habitable modules surrounding the research vessel's central fuselage are still. Like the ring which gives the space station Genesis Toroid its name, the modules should be rotating around the ship's axis, to provide its crew with the comfort of apparent gravity.
Working at the console on the bridge of the Cookie Cutter, Barry hails the Atwood, but gets no response. He follows up by attempting a remote hack of the Atwood's mainframe, which he finds easier to achieve than expected. The butler bot sifts through the back-end code powering the Atwood's computers and finds a crew manifest. The word DECEASED is listed next to most of them. Barry spies an exception: one Dr. Jenny Sutherland, who is in the Atwood's medical module. Her vital signs are very slow.
The butler bot, Faux Hawk and Terry don their space suits and take the Astroflea, one of the Cookie Cutter's latest additions for its maiden flight. Whilst his crew mates are en route to the med-module, Mazen uses the ship's optics to scan the outside of the Atwood. He catches a flicker of movement along the hull but decides he can't rule it out as a trick of his imagination.
When the Astroflea is close enough that the med-module is within range of her psychic powers, Faux teleports. She passes in the blink of an eye through the hulls of the two vessels and the section of pitiless vacuum sandwiched between them and materialises on one of the decks of the med-module. The psychic glances at the HUD inside her helmet. The suit reads no atmosphere in the module. Faux needs to use her mag-boots, which clamp to the metallic floor, to compensate for the lack of gravity.
Faux uses the thin beams of light from the torches fixed into her helmet to find a row of three suspended animation units along a curved wall. Seeing the smears of blood around the jagged edges of one busted-open unit, Faux ticks one deceased crew member on her mental inventory. The readout on another stasis container, this one unharmed, suggests its occupant is still alive. The psychic checks herself before opening the unit. The AA Team will need to flood the med-module, or at least this part of it, with something like a breathable atmosphere first.
Like the other modules, the med-hub is attached to the fuselage via a quad truss of heavy-gauge tubes. The truss protects a docking umbilical stretching between the airlock of the module and that of the Atwood's main fuselage. However, something has torn through the med-bay's umbilical, so that the two loose ends float disconnected. Terry guides the Astroflea close to the truss and Barry exits the shuttle's airlock, an impact driver in hand. The butler bot loosens enough bolts to release the med-module, but he finds gripping the freed bolts difficult through the gloves of his space suit. He drops two, and one strikes the hull of the fuselage. In space, no-one can hear you drop a bolt, but Barry is certain anyone - or anything - inside that part of the ship would have heard the bolt's impact. The butler bot shrugs off the mistake and frees the ragged end of the ruined docking umbilical from the med-module.
Mazen holds the Cookie Cutter steady in such a way that the AA Team can connect the freed med-module to the team's main ship. The party uses its emergency oxygen supply to flood the deck where Faux Hawk found the cryopod. When she sees the pressure and air quality readings reach acceptable levels on her helmet's HUD, Faux taps the instructions into the cryopod's touch-screen interface which will wake up its occupant.
Although she doesn't go so far as to take off her helmet, the psychic does everything she can to calm the woman who emerges wild-eyed from the pod. The Atwood crew-woman babbles something about monsters, the results of experiments by the rest of the crew. Faux coaxes the pod-occupant into identifying herself and the mystery woman tells the psychic she is Dr. Sutherland, the medic responsible for looking after the crew. Faux remembers the crew manifest Barry found amongst the Atwood's records, but saves a remark about the doc's failure to keep anyone else but herself alive for later.
Faux Hawk only removes her suit's helmet once she and the doctor are back on the bridge of the Cookie Cutter, with the rest of the AA Team. Dr. Sutherland, now calm enough to give a rational account of what happened on the Atwood, tells her rescuers that her crew-mates farmed gene-modified termites for what Captain Thorne called royal jelly. The enlarged termite-things, which she calls Blatarians, must have escaped from containment and run rampage throughout the Atwood. Dr. Sutherland hid in the cryopod, thinking it would protect her from the bugs. She shudders in horror when the AA Team tell her the pod next to her was torn open, along with its occupant.
There's still royal jelly to be had on the Atwood, however. If Captain Thorne is to be believed, someone on the station Neptune Prospect will pay a sum that dwarfs the value of the spices the AA Team stole from the AI-piloted ship, the Van Buren. The crew aren't going to run away from a pay-out like this, but they are going to need as much muscle as they can to get the goods. The AA Team board the Astroflea for its second mission, leaving Dr. Sutherland alone on the Cookie Cutter to recover her shattered wits. The crew also take "Fluffy", one of the Metalhead killbots Mazen took from the Van Buren. The party asks Captain Thorne for as many willing crew members he can spare from the Crispy Wolf, but only he is brazen enough to accompany the AA Team.
The landing party docks the 'Flea in the Atwood's abandoned shuttle bay. Did any of the Atwood's crew manage to abandon ship before the blatarians killed them all? When Cass Thorne learns that Dr. Sutherland is the only known survivor, he becomes upset. One of the female crew members, Gertrude, is - or was - an ex-girlfriend of his. Although she left Thorne for the captain of the Atwood, Mickey Waffles (yes, really), Gertrude and Thorne remained in touch. Thorne scored the royal jelly transport run thanks to his ex - his ex-ex.
The party climbs the ladder to the airlock separating them from the fuselage. Thanks to Barry's earlier, expert hack of the Atwood's mainframe, the team open the portal with ease, the two robust halves sliding open in the silence of the airless space. In the cylindrical chamber the boarding party emerges into, up and down are a matter of opinion. Handholds are dotted around the internal faces with more around the airlocks leading to other compartments.
The party sees a lone figure standing motionless. Its space suit is rooted to the hull by its mag boots, much like those of the infiltrators. The AA Team approaches and sees that the oxygen hose is disconnected from the suit's helmet. There's no sign of the violent struggle which tore open the cryopod in the med-module. The boarding party assumes the suit's occupant gave up and decided dying by asphyxiation was preferable to facing whatever the party needs to deal with to get its cargo.
Having a working knowledge of the ship's layout from Dr. Sutherland, the AA Team knows the biolabs where the science team housed the blatarian queen is at the other end of the fuselage. The party wrestles its way through the zero-G conditions to the next airlock and climbs through into a cramped corridor amongst close-packed storage units. The team only has a moment to register the gobs of viscous fluid floating in the corridor and the furious vapour leak beyond it before two creatures attack them. The chitinous beasts are insectoid enough that the AA Team decides it has found the blatarians at last. However, the multiple pairs of claw-handed arms and lashing tail with which both creatures attack are a far departure from their distant termite heritage.
The AA Team recovers from its surprise fast and lays down a hasty burst of fire. Mazen scores the first kill. Faux channels her psychic abilities again, forcing her mind into the neural circuits of the second blatarian and exploding its head. However, in the split second before she can deliver the psionic coup-de-grace, Faux feels the presence of the blatarian queen. Faux is not the only psychic on board the Atwood and the fleeting encounter with the alien mind terrifies her.
A shot which strayed from its target during the fight scattered the floating goo, some of which landed on the walls and the bodies of the blatarians. The party can see the fluid corroding into both. Mazen grabs a loose panel amongst the items in the nearest storage bay and attempts to herd the remaining corrosive fluid away. However, a stray gob of the nasty gunk lands on Faux Hawk's space suit and begins eating into the life-preserving fabric. How will the party save its psychic friend from the ravages of space?