"I hope so too..." Sarith said in response to his comment about him hoping that she is 'damn good. After nodding to Killik's friend, she followed after Killik as a brisk walk, just enough to keep up with him. As she walked she couldn't help but note that he didn't seem to be in a huge hurry to save his friend. But his reasons for walking were his own, and Sarith didn't care enough to ask, just as long as they were doing something.

"So what exactly is the situation here?" She asked as they walked. She'd like to know just what she was getting herself into before she did anything crazy, as if she had much of a choice anyway.

"Adam, one of my crewmates is being held by the reliance somewhere behind a security check point. The check point is guarded by two tactical marines, in full armor, there are marines and covert ops wandering around, I have no idea where Adam is being held, other than behind the checkpoint, and I'm sure the area back there is crawling with reliance personelle... probably more tactical marines, so, in short, we're screwed." Killik answered as he continued to walk, "Now try to act natural, we don't want to draw attention until neccessary, besides, we are not going to want to be too tired to fight to our fullest when we arrive."

Robert nursed his strong double long enough for the squad of Tacs to receive a new set of orders and rapidly move out. As they left the bar, he slipped a few credits to the barkeep out and headed out and away from the Reliance personnel, keeping a close eye out for covert operatives. The station seemed even more abandoned now, but Robert couldn't really trouble himself with it. He needed to find some of his crewmates and get the hell off the station. He walked to a turbolift and headed down, back towards the market area where several members of his crew could probably be located. As the turbolift doors opened, he found himself floating into what remained of a zero-gravity firefight.

"What in God's name happened here?" Robert whispered to himself. Not fifteen feet away, a single marine perked his head up and looked at him.

He tried to not flinch as an ungodly slugthrower was pointed at his head. "Would you care to join them?" the Tac asked, jerking his free thumb at the floating corpses.

"No thanks," Robert said. "D'you mind letting me pass? I need to contact my superiors."

"Who and what for?"

"For blowing a three-year, 20 billion credit investigation into weapons smuggling," Robert dropped his voice. "I wouldn't have this getting around, but we were just about to bring our own hammer down on the place."

"Who's 'we'?" the Tac sergeant asked.

Robert rolled his eyes and quickly went through a list of some of the most respected, renowned, or feared agencies in the galaxy. He finally hit on one he thought might work. "Cerrean Border Guard, Interdiction division*."

The Tac whistled. "So you're a 'guard, huh? You don't look much like a Cerrean."

"Human," Robert answered. "I'm on...contract with them...they don't like dealing with their kind." he jerked his thumb at the floating bodies. "I must say, I'm impressed. You were almost as thorough as my employers would have been." Robert looked at the Tacs' shielded visor. "Would you mind if I collected a few things as evidence for my employers?"

"No skin off my nose," the Tac shrugged. "I'm rejoining my squad further in anyway. Oh: from one military man to another, I'd get the hell outta Dodge...or at least find yourself a 'suit."

"Thanks," Robert nodded. "A pleasure talking with you."

"No problem," the Tac began moving off then, as Robert started swimming through the air towards a pile of floating weapons, munitions and equipment. He began sorting through the unusable junk and eventually came upon a series of helpful things: a laser pistol not unlike the one he had left aboard the ship; a few power-packs for the weapon; a datapad with a few augmented (and highly illegal) features; and a comm-set.

Robert was already swimming for one of the 'alleyways' of the station, hoping to get there in time to avoid the Tactical Marine and his gun if he realized that Cerreans never work with other species. Fortunately for Robert, that did not prove to be an issue. As he floated in the alleyway, Robert tried to remember protocol for sweeps like this. The first thing would be to lock down all comm channels which were not being used by Reliance (or government) personnel. That meant that pretty much all communications would be cut off...unless...

"Sol military comm frequency is a high-band channel..." Robert began fiddling with the comm-set. "There. Maybe the Reliance will consider this an official channel..."

"Beacon, transmitting to anyone on this channel. Respond. Repeat, this is Beacon transmitting to anyone receiving on this channel. Please respond." Robert stopped and floated. For the moment there was nothing to do but wait.

--------

I pulled the Cerrean (pronounced Ser-ee-en) Border Guard out of thin air, but here are the relevant details.

*The Cerrean Border Guard is an ancient and venerable military institution hailing from the Cerrean Imperium. Little is known of the species, and less is known of the Guard. What is known is that the Cerreans believe their Imperium is granted to them by divine right, and the Border Guard is charged with maintaining their territorial integrity. The 'Interdiction Division' is the most recognized division of the Border Guard, being charged with interstellar police work within the Imperium, and outside of it when circumstances call for it. The Cerreans are a highly xenophobic species, and refuse all but the most carefully regulated contact with other species. Thus, when the Cerrean Border Guard goes to work, they tend to not take prisoners, preferring to deal with 'alien scum' by vaporizing them as thoroughly as possible. As such, there are very few reliable records of the Guard in action.

"Jam no can can through!" Jam pouted. Jim shook his head.

"Alright. Here's my plan, I'm going to go distract the bot for as long as I can. The door to the ship is probably locked or shielded, so You'll need to blow it to hell or computer spike the controls that keep it shut. Julice'll have to enter first, or JEN will think she's being invaded and do something drastic. From the ship, do whatever possible to take out the droid. As for the others, we can do something about their rescue easiliy from outside the Outlaw Star."

Jim readied his hookshot and holstered his gun. "This may be crazy enough to work! Or I'll be hurting tomorrow!"

((IF you guys have any other ideas, feel free to try and stop Jim from distracting a super mech, unless you want to see Jim seriously have trouble staying alive))

The marine must have got tired of pointing his portable tank cannon at Adam, or he was ordered to stand down. Either way, Adam didn't like reality much at this point, and decided to retreat into his virtual vision.

The sense of virtuality was only slight with his kind of cybernetics. Instead of looking at a screen of command prompt, he felt partially binded to it. Not action, but thought, would trigger response. He enjoyed the feeling overall, it was...different.

Ok. Time to try and lighten the situation, then maybe think of finding a way out of here. If the Reliance had shoddy hacking systems, how good are their backdoor systems they use during the hacking process? His cybernetics translated the queries from rough human thought to mechanical response.

They used two high-band wireless communication ports to infiltrate your inserts. Output inefficency suggests overall inefficiency.

Is it possible to make them believe they're getting somewhere, when in actuality they are hitting a dead end repeatedly? Then, would it be possible to gain access to their systems using their own ports?

Theoretically, yes. Access control would be minimal to ensure covered tracks, and processing power will be split between hacking and feigning your own infiltration.

Set up the fake infiltration. How minimal is minimal?

Reconfiguration commencing. If access is successful, you will be able to surf communication channels without raising any alarms. Actual user access presents a moderate to high risk of being revealed.

Well, let's get started.

Raze'el watched Killik and Sarith moving away and stopped, almost snarling at them. Damn fools will get themselves killed.

He turned then and headed off in the other direction, half-concentrating on how to track down the rest of the crew, half-berating his shipmates' lack of strategic forethought. Whatever happened to tactical finesse?

As he walked he tried to recall who was on the station that needed to be tracked down... there was the captain... Robert... and Raine had also been on the station...

He glanced both ways at the empty section of the station and thought better of staying in plain sight. Checking his clothes, he ducked into a corridor and headed for a lower level.

<I was waiting for someone to say, NO Jim! Don't leap onto the mech! it's stupid and I've a better plan! Oh well, as they say, Alls well that ends well, and I sure as hell hope this ends well!>

Jim leapt up and shot out his hookshot, sticking it right above the mech. He launched through the air and onto the roof, thankfully avoiding the Battle Armor's scanners. He held himself up solely by the hookshoot by wrapping his legs in an upside down indian-style sitting posture, his feet holding on to the rope as well as his hands.

Jim waited for when the time was perfect, and let go of the rope while also releasing the hookshot. Jim dropped down onto the Battle armor's back and rapped on one of it's backplates. "Yo!"

<So far, so good, No forcefield.>

((Say, could any of you give me some specs on what it is I'm attacking. Just noticed I know very little and very vague descriptions beside the fact it's a battle armor.))

((Back from 6 days of no-internet hell. I'd say something to Jim, but...))

"Jim!" Alicia called after the man, but he was already gone.

"Well... This won't work. An AI would resist any computer-spike attempt, and blasting a starship open with handhelds is darn near impossible, not to mention making it unspaceworthy..." She thought, detecting many, many faults in Jim's plan besides the fact that he was about to commit suicide unintentionally.

So, she did the logical thing.

"HEY!" Alicia shouted, darting out of the maintenance shaft and firing a few shots at the mech to annoy it, before darting back. With any luck, it wouldn't risk damaging the station...

"Freeze." A metallic voice said from behind. Alicia turned around and was greeted by a Tactical marine who had followed them. The very same that she had shot in the face. He didn't appear as dead as he used to.

"You've got to be kidding me." Alicia muttered, dropping her gun and putting her hands on the back of her head, sincerely hoping that the Tactical marine didn't have any hard feelings about being shot... In the face.

The first Raze'el had run in to was Artemis, getting away from the gunfight in bar.

He quite literally ran into him too, as Artemis wasn't watching where he was running.

"Oof! Raze'el--!"

"No time, follow me," Raze'el barked, holding his palm up to stop Artemis' coming sentence.

The two ducked quickly to the side and disappeared down a different "street".

***

"So you see, we've got a bit of a problem."

"I'll say..." Artemis replied, rubbing his hands together nervously as he tried to think of something.

Raze'el looked up at the ceiling as they walked, this part of the station being fairly deserted, except for the stray criminal running away from a pursuing marine. The two shipmates stayed wisely out of sight. "If the new one and Killik somehow survive the rescue attempt, that'll be good, but I would still prefer if we could handle this some other way besides resorting to using our guns..."

Artemis nodded, apparently only half-hearing what the lizard said, probably being deep in thought. Raze'el spotted a broadcast speaker as he walked, and his step slowed as an idea slowly came to him.

Grinning, he muttered, "What if we were to hold the captors captive...?"

***

The marine holding Adam captive stared him down stonily, aiming his gun at him constantly. Adam had just gotten to work on the counterhack, when the lights suddenly dimmed, and the blue emergency lights came on.

***

The station operations room had only been partially occupied. Mostly it was station staff, with two unarmored Reliance officers inside and one tac' marine outside the door. It was as simple as flooding the room with anesthetic gas and erecting a force field over the room, powered from an internal generator.

Raze'el and Artemis walked amid the bodies, the result of their little covert operation, over to the control consoles. As if knowing just which buttons to press, Raze'el then lowered the station's shields and cut power to all areas of the station, effectively releasing a lot of the locks on the ships. However, Reliance safeguards kicked in and the locks came right back down, but they would be a lot easier to hack in to now that main power was cut.

With a calm, almost mischievous expression, Raze'el took a microphone and began to speak into it, addressing the entire station at once over the PA system. "This is housekeeping speaking to all Reliance personnel... we thank you for visiting our little corner of the galaxy, and respectfully welcome you to Planet Con."

(( Bwahahah ))

"'Ey," Julice said, and that was all the time the TAC who had Alicia was given before Julice fired her magnum. She fired four times, putting two bullets each into the two holes her rounds punched into his back. It was Julice's attempt to crunch through the armor and push the entry rounds into his flesh. Julice put her foot against his back and pushed, shoving the marine into the open where the body was suddenly hit by a grenade...
...that began to spew smoke, the dispersal emanating evenly from the source due to the lack of gravity. Julice looked at Jim and Alicia, the two closest to the smoke grenade fired from the Battle Armor. "Please, let them want us alive," Julice breathed, and was rewarded by detecting the signs of tear gas. "Phew," she said. "Our best bet is to disable it with EMP weaponry. 'Nades sounds like our best bet."

OOC: "As for the Battle Armor itself, think a 12 foot bipedal metal monstrosity with weapons designed more for riot control and incapacitating people than putting down organized terrorists. If the shield was down, the only thing separating the pilot from a quick death is a reinforced transparent windowy material."