The pace is increasing... 
Quote:How dare they! How dare they! How dare they!
Naoko Sato was not in a good mood as she glared at the base map. She was sick with rage. She was shaking. She was panting through gritted teeth. Normally she never acquiesced to some of Quattros more esoteric requests, but in this case, she might make an exception.
Cally Auron had lied to her face. Cally Auron had officially made her enemies list.
There was something to be said for the deep-fat-fryer and homeostasis biomod method of enforcement. Picturing her revenge certainly helped stoke that fire in her belly.
“They’re not in the old habitat section,” the tech said. She was a vampire biomod, grey-skinned, fanged, sparkly and judging by the celery stalk she was munching on, vegetarian. “Of course, werewolves suck.”
“Hey watch it fang-girl,” a voice growled from across the control room.
“Knock it off,” Sato said, keeping her voice even “Just find them. They are heading down to the labs. ”
Illuminated solely by the glow from walls of monitors and consoles, Sato just stared. A few of the gothic-dressed crew kept their heads down. None of them had ever seen her this pissed off.
A small alarm announced itself in the silence that followed. Boop - Boop.
It went unheeded. Nobody dared say anything.
It announced itself again. Boop - Boop.
“We’ve got a ship coming into our sector,” the vampire said, tentatively “Coming in fast.”
“Great Justice?”
“No, It’s...” There was a pause as she checked her readouts. “It reads as one of ours. Type-204. Boskone-Two built. On a landing vector.”
“There’s nothing scheduled,” Sato said, momentarily putting Cally Auron to the back of her mind.
Either this was someone who had a problem with their ship, or someone who had a problem with them. And she couldn’t quite shake the notion that it was too much of a coincidence with that distress signal being broadcast.
“Nothing on my panel,” the vampire answered.
“Nope,” werewolf confirmed. “No type-204s for at least a month,”
“Hail them,” Sato ordered.
----
Linda was at the comms-station on the Nova’s bridge. Lights were on full. The turbines where wailing below, warring with speakers playing Astronomy at full volume.
“Nehallenia is hailing us,” she said.
“Let them meet static,” Mari ordered. She sat back into her chair, resting her chin on her steepled hands.
Desmonds hologram was overseeing the whole affair in his tweed suit. “Sensors show their defense grid is still down,”
“Good. Slow us down. We’re all one happy bunch of evil Zwilniks.”
The pilot, a sweet strawberry blond by the name of Carrie rotated the thrusters to the reverse position, and pushed the throttles forward. The big fusion engines roared and blazed a bright white.
----
“She’s coming into our perimeter, and slowing,” the vampire reported.
Sato sat down in her own chair, sighing deeply to herself. “Now this is damn peculiar.”
“Transponder details give her name as the Wilhelm Canaris,”
Sato looked to the werewolf. “Forward them to Quattro. See what she makes of them. Raven, keep trying the hail them.”
She had a very bad feeling about this. Cameras zoomed in on the approaching ship, looking somewhat like an airliner that’d been fused with the back end of a yacht. Running lights glowed an ominous red alongside the bright, sparking fusion engines.
The vampire keyed open a channel.“Wilhelm Canaris, Wilhelm Canaris, this is Nehallenia Control. Respond please...”
----
Cathy was banging on the walls of her prison. It was a desperate, near futile attempt to get free. The door was starting to give way. Just a few millimeters. She was panting, she was whimpering, she was desperate. Even if she was a copy, she just didn’t want to be erased like a defective tape.
The hardware around her began to him. She felt her skin begin to tingle. Energy tickled her air.
“Just a few more commands,” Quattro reassured her. “Then you can feel your mind just go away.”
“No!” Cathy screamed. “I won’t let you. I won’t let you!”
“You can’t stop me,” Quattro replied and smiled. “Just admit it and stop fighting.”
A new window popped up in front of her demanding her attention. She scowled at it for a moment. Her scowled morphed into a smirk... this might be interesting. Quattro got to work.
“It seems you again have to wait a few more minutes.” Quattro said and sighed.
----
“We just received a text message, they say their engine coils are overloading their com-system.”
Sato raised an eyebrow. She turned to the werewolf. He glanced at his sensor readouts.
“Their coil emissions are normal.”
The intercom beeped, Quattro as fast as usual.
“Oh, Sato-chan,” she called out, gleefully, “It’s a fake.”
The penny dropped. The Canaris was a Trojan horse.
“Raise station alert! Get the defenses up now.” she snapped out. On the control screen she could see the alert racing outwards to the rest of the asteroid station, systems powering up and switching over. It lasted less than a moment.
Fractions of a second later the control screens exploded with activity, windows opening windows untill the entire screen was filled with useless garbage. Systems bogged down as memory was swallowed up by millions of processes spawning and respawning clogging the whole system. Packets exploded across the network, routers and switches failing under the unexpected load. A moment later, each screen turned into a deathly blue.
“Internal and external communications are down!”
“Connection to the remote defense turrets lost!”
“Control systems on local backup, the stations network is offline!”
Sato glared at the blue screen. There were more rats in the basement than she’d thought. This was bad. This was very bad.
“Get them back! Get them back now!”
It was hard for her to not sound like she was panicking. A part of her mind couldn’t help but notice that she was playing the stereotypical Bond Villain role to a tee. If she stayed, she was going to be captured, or probably killed in an amusingly ironic way.
----
“Most of their systems just shut down,” Desmond reported. “It looks like Cortanas virus just kicked in.”
“I thought you said we’d have ten minutes,” said Mari quickly.
“That was just an estimate. We should’ve had ten minutes,” The hologram leaned in over the comm’s panel, making a show of checking systems he’d already checked. “That’s not right.”
He trailed off as he set to work figuring out how his conterfeit codes had been beaten so damned quick. It was an insult.
Mari gritted her teeth. It didn’t matter. In for a penny, in for a pound. It was too late to pull now. “Go to full throttle. Their defense grid isn’t going to be down for much longer. Tell Jet to standby, we’re not going to be landing,”
----
Quattro knew that Nehallenia was doomed. Great Justice wouldn’t stop with just one ship. This was just the advance guard, the initial raid to disable the stations defenses. The stormtroopers would follow soon after.
She did the math.
She figured that from the moment they landed, she’d have twenty minutes to clean up after herself in the lab. It’d take them twenty minutes to fight down to the lab from the landing bay. Time enough to grab what she could, destroy the evidence and get out.
She turned back to her little pet, “Looks like your friends are coming,”
Cathy pinned herself against the tube wall. Did she hope or did she fear?
Quattro ignored her. This was no time for play. A virus in the computer, an impressive one from such a limited intelligence. It would take at least a half hour to get the stations systems back from scratch.
Her own systems were still online. This wouldn’t take long. First, she brought up the comms. Try to sound like some control room droid.
“All personnel, All personnel. We are under attack. We are evacuating the station. Make your to the hangar bay. Make your way to the hangar bay for evacuation.”
When Great Justice landed, they would open the bay doors. By the time they sorted out the resulting mess, she’d be long gone.
----
“All personnel, All personnel. We are under attack. We are evacuating the station. Make your to the hangar bay. Make your way to the hangar bay for evacuation.”
Sato’s blood went dead cold when she heard the announcement.
“Who gave that order?”
Whoever they were, they’d just gotten a lot of people killed. And she’d take the blame for it. Wasn’t that how command responsibility worked?
“I don’t know,” the werewolf answered in a panic “I can’t even get manual. It’s... the whole lot’s fried.”
He looked to Sato for the answer, those yellow wolf-eyes pleading for deliverance.
“Maybe we should evacuate?” Raven suggested, hopefully.
Sato glowered at her. She shrunk back. She was terrified.
“Alright,” Sato sighed, rubbing at her temples. The beginnings of a headache were starting to gnaw at the back of her mind “Stay away from the launch bay and any airlocks. Go back to your apartments. Do not make a fight of it.”
She stayed until they’d gone, fumbling out the doors. Someones terminal died with a pop of smoke as a mug of liquid spilled across it. Some would still try run for it
She took one last look at the control room, before she ran for her private hanger herself. Nehallenia was doomed, there was no sense in staying to face the music.