Rubato Tales 6: Enter Sandman, exit Sandman...

Rubato Tales STELLARDATE 111808: Enter Sandman, Exit Sandman...

After our clean up of the mess on Nippon(Note to self-never ever take another bribe for any reason!) Maggie took us back to Mars to deliver some cargo and then to Ceres again to meet up with our next shipment, which was going to be there several days after we arrived.

Hoowoo, vacation time!

For reasons I am not quite certain of to this day we all decided to go to the Deathdome to watch some Exteme Battle Matches. Three of my lady friends from our last trip joined me, Angeliqie, Shawnee and Desore and we were having quite the fun time watching various modern day Spartacus's eviscerate each other when Wally's spybots on the ship informed him it was under attack. And so were we!

Several thugs in the more than rowdy crowd decided to attack us at that point in time and after some fisticuffs and weapons fire they fled through the crowd just as Maggie collapsed to the ground. We quickly headed back to the ship to check up on her and it.

Now at this point I should mention that I had the suspicion since my chat with Maggie on Nippon that there was some sort of connection between her and this ship, I even suspected she was an avatar of it, perhaps some for of AI, which turned out to be fairly close to the truth, but I am getting ahead of myself here. The Doc determined that she was definitely suffering from some sort of loss of mental power and Zechs and Wally detailed that a certain not-particlular-important looking bit of computer gear was all that was missing. Oh that and his robot Mr. Sandman had killed two of the intruders down in the hold.

Doc salivated at the chance to autopsy something else and Maria and I went to see if we could track down those responsible. We naturally suspected Haddington Industries but could find no direct lead to them. Instead we both discovered that a security company named Magnus was apparently responsible for the theft, I from checking out surveillance tapes and Maria I am not quite sure how, Magnus, who was apparently a high end security contractor had an office in the bad part of Ceres near the core named 14C. Meanwhile Doc had determined that the intruders were half cybernetic half biological killing machines! They had no skin but were various organs grafted into their combat suits and were definitely more advanced that even most experimental modern tech would allow, the only things that matched them seemed to be some known Evolvist designs. Weird, Evolvists are not known for attacking people.

Meanwhile Maggie had managed to come around and decided it was time to fill us in on some information.

Apparently her father and Everard Schmidt had worked together on doing some projects for Sol B, the Evolvist Colony far out in the Sol System. They had some sort of falling out and the upshot of it was that her body was killed while she was still and child and her mind was uploaded into the Rubato's computer system. She later learned how to manufacture her body and had become accustomed to having the human avatar and computer link. This did explain her tendency to dislike leaving the Rubato for any length of time and also why she was acting so odd, as a large part of her onboard systems and memory were what was stolen.

Naturally we all felt that we had to get this back ASAP and at all costs.

So we loaded up on the firearms and made our way to Magnus, intent on recovering Maggies brainbox no matter what.

I thought I was well armed for such an excursion as Maggie had fabricated energy weapons and combat armor for us but boy was I in for a shock.

Maria insisted on trying to talk to Magnus first and went in to chat with the robotic secretary.

She returned a few minutes later mumbling things that would cause most dockworkers to bow their heads in shame at hearing spoken. Apparently she never got beyond the front desk.

We then decided to try another approach.

While my remotes could not penetrate the Magnus compound they did find the back door into it and what we concluded must be the emergency escape exit as it lead to the surface and had a few well secured vacuum doors sealed shut as its only entrance.

After some fiddling I managed to get my nanobots inside it to open one of the pressure doors and we carefully made our way up to Magnus's base.

Once we got to the base they asked if I could similarly open the back door there, but alas I had used up nearly all my nanobots on the first door. So we used explosives.

The fight that ensued was a massive affair, all I remember doing was taking a few pot shots and then running across the room and trying to find Magnus or Maggie's parts while VERY large amounts of heavy fire permeated the room.

I remember Tyson bashing things, Maria unloosing barrages of laser fire, and Wally's robot, Mr. Sandman, firing off several barrages of missiles that seemed to blow up an awful lot of things, such as other robots, robotic secretaries, doors, walls and several cyber-warriors. It was both impressive and terrifying. Good thing we were in the bad part of Ceres!

Doc had stayed behind at the ship to oversee Maggie's health but other than that the rest of the team seems far better equipped, armed and skilled at combat than I, eh, each to their own.

I did manage to find Maggie's parts but the rest of the computers and information had apparently been wiped. Magnus succeeding in escaping after blowing up Mr Sandman, although judging by my friends comments apparently Mr. Sandman did quite a bit of damage before going boom!

We quickly hustled back to the ship and restored Maggie's bits, Doc and Wally used some schematics that got brought up and while I helped them mostly I just ended up handing off tools and clearing clutter. Nevertheless Maggie was restored to 100% functionality and while Magnus and whomever had hired him remained a mystery at least we had learned quite a bit more about our boss, her history and that of the ship as well. Good enough for one day!

Postscript: This adventure did serve to remind me of some facts about my childhood, Mom and Da told me that I had been found in an unusual escape pod and showed me records of it. When I return to New Wellington I will have to look those up. Why might you ask, well the parts and pieces of Evolvist technology we encountered in this last episode on Ceres seemed to bear a remarkable resemblance to some of the technology shown in those pictures. Very curious. Will have to check it out.