The Crimson Tide - Campaign Round 15

Matt couldn't sleep the previous night. He was too preoccupied thinking about his crew and how the brutal nature of Danilov had begun to impact them. With Linda's swarming in the streets and Jeb's general melancholy following the last mission, Matt was determined to make this world a better place. He began to make plans.

As the rest of the crew began to stir, they found Matt and a local doctor at Linda's side in the medbay. Matt had hired the best doctor he could find to help speed up Linda's recovery. The doctor said she'd need to rest up for most of the day, but would be ready for action by the evening. In the process, Linda had the doctor help her with doing a make over, as she felt it was time to change up her look.

Matt decided to be close by incase Linda needed any more assistance during the day, and offered to train with Tyris. Bishop also stayed on board as usual and repaired one of the spare shotguns.

Sebastian and A-113 headed out to do some trading, stopping in at their previous vendor that they were becoming fond of. The brothers were both working today and had just gotten in some new items. Sebastian had found an updated version of the classic barter's guide to the frontier instruction manual and took a read through it's pages. He felt a little more experienced after catching up on the updated sections. Meanwhile A-113 had found some good repair parts for the Bug-out.

Lucas decided to try and help Jeb see Danilov in a better light and took him out for a little exploring. While wandering around, Lucas spied an old alien merchant pal of his and introduced Jeb to him. Jeb was able to make a deal with the merchant to off-load the old communicator they had in exchange for a shotgun and some Dazzle grenades. The merchant also had something of interest for Lucas. They had recently come across an intercepted transmission from one of the cartels operating on the planet. Lucas realized that this transmission, together with the recently acquired extracted data files pointed to something big going on around Danilov.

Lucas brought the new information to Matt, and Matt agreed that something was going on. They called in Bishop to help scrub all the information that they could from the transmission and discovered that while there was no sensitive data in the transmission, it did point to a place under the colony where there was a transceiver sending out these messages.

Matt put the team together and informed them about the new quest they were about to go on. Some organization was using clandestine forms of communication and they were going to find out who and why. Their first step was to investigate the source of the transmission and fight off anyone who would be defending it.

Jeb decided to stay behind with Bishop and guard the ship. The rest of the crew made their way into the sewers heading towards the undercity portion of Larsen's Drift. The visibility was pretty poor as the evening mists swirled around them. Not too long after, they arrived near the coordinates of the transmitter.

Matt nodded towards A-113 to start accessing it while the rest of the team took up defensive positions. Unbeknownst to the crew, a silent alarm had been tripped when A-113 began to access the system without authorization. A small group of guards entered the area and began to make a sweep towards the transmitter. 

Tyris was the first to detect them, as he could hear their foot falls in the distance. Signaling to the others, Tyris crept up to a forwards position where he could ambush the intruders. Marking the targets for the rest of the crew, Tyris then leapt out from his hiding place as the leader of the of the opposing squad came into view. With a quick flash of his glare sword, the squad leader was cut down. The second grunt was then dispatched with little effort.

Linda took out the squad specialist while A-113 stepped out from behind the transmitter and gunned down the last grunt. With the position secured, A-113 went back to their work while Matt examined the bodies. They were hired muscle, corporate security for Galactic Composites, or GalComp for short. Matt wasn't sure if GalComp was involved in these transmissions or if the cartel was using the transmitter without their knowledge. 

A-113 signaled that they had installed their back-door program to observe the transmissions and had downloaded the most recent transmission for analysis back on the ship. With their work done, they slipped back into the night and headed home. Along the way, Linda came across what appeared to be a personal trinket. It was a small necklace with a picture of a women and a small child on the inside.

Once everyone was back at the ship, Jeb informed them of some developments while they'd been out. The ruling Syndicate that controlled the taxes had announced that they were increasing their collection and expanding it to off worlders. This was creating a lot of instability with the population almost going into open revolt at the news. Jeb informed Matt as well that they had been visited by the tax collector and he'd paid the due to stay on the Syndicate's good side. Matt nodded in understanding and thanked Jeb for taking care of it.

Later that evening, as Matt, Bishop and A-113 were analyzing the new transmission, they discovered that it was classified and that in order to decrypt it, they'd have to find a data cache with the decryption algorithm. Without the algorithm, they'd be stuck. Matt figured that maybe they could kill two birds with one stone, perhaps GalComp had a lightly guarded facility where they could access their system to look for the algorithm. If they did, then they must know more about what was going on.