((Thanky Phoenix!))

The armor-rider smirked at this idiot leaping upon his back. The Mech jumped, a function few would guess it had, but it was apparently making use of the low g's.

Jim responded by leaning over the side of the armor quickly, and shooting his hookshot beneath the Armor and into the opposite wall. Holding on tight, Jim let the hookshot pull him towards the wall, flipping the battle armor upside down.

Jim leapt up from the wall and kicked the armor down the hall. Jim smirked. The Battle armor pulled itself back up. Jim heard the whir of machine guns. "Oy!" Jim bolted at a speed that was thought only possible by cheetahs and possibly a large blue hedgehog. Behind his feet were the sound of bullets ricocheting of the floor. Jim leapt behind a nearby container. Well, this doesn't look good, though at least I'm still alive...

Jim heard a vaccuum then a loud noise. Oops. Cannonfire. Jim immediately leapt away. from his position. Instead of a boom, however, There was a hiss. From the smell, TEAR GAS! Jim hookshoted himself back to the others. From there, he spotted nearby TAC, lying upon the ground.

"Julice? Is that a TAC? And is it down?" He stammered.
"You are aware that TACS have an automatic detonation once vitals stop, Right? It's a pretty big boom. Part of an anti-theft and anti-revolution thing."

Adam felt like he was falling for a good ten seconds after the emergency lights came on. The lights of course had nothing to do with this, he was barely aware of the conscious world around him at the moment. The feeling was his mind's reaction to literally being thrust into the core access subroutines of the Reliance network on the station. Trying to hack it at overclocked speeds, and then having the firewall immediately come down without notice triggered some kind of nervous reaction. It was one of the many setbacks of trying to merge a human mind with machine's. Adam would probably never feel any truly serious effects because, compared to some aspects of the field, he was barely "connected" to the machines anyway.

There he was, peering into his virtual vision, looking at a neat little command network.

Why did the firewall drop?

The station is losing power. The network itself is currently powered by generators, but the Reliance security systems are not internal systems. They've lost all power. There is no need for the mirror hack, all processing power is now dedicated to your offensive.

Crystal clear. I doubt I need all the power, I'm already in. Let's see what I can do...

There were cybernetics out there advanced enough to let humans literally start ascending to different planes of consciousness. Merging with AIs, going "elsewhere" while their real body sat, zombie-like or automated by the powerful microcomputers wired into their head. Adam had a standard internal rig, nothing along those lines. What that actually boiled down to was difficulty in trying to absorb all the information a computer system throws at you. Even without any security measures, a simple network was tough to grasp in such a short period of time. It took Adam a minute or two just to get basic commands working. First, he accessed the life support system.

His systems were only partially compatible, he had to remove a lot of the fluff and wittle it down to a skeleton mapping of the entire station with dots signifying life signs. He preferred it that way anyway, the problem was time. All of this took time, and that was something he was running out of. He figured the Reliance, or at least the marines would have built-in comm. systems outside of the temporary ones in the station. That meant once the chaos died down, he'd probably be receiving a chest full of antipersonnel rounds when the marines found out he was snooping around in their former systems. He examined the map of the station.

Upload the identity files of my crew. One-time packet, full encryption, set to destroy itself if someone fails to access it even once.

His inserts did the rest, after a few seconds the mapping refreshed and his crew members' dots were neatly outlined. Two in one of the control rooms...

--------------

Adam's face, or a decent approximation of it, materialized on the view screen at Raze'el's station. He couldn't help but smile a little. "Hey there."

Raze'el was a little surprised by the appearance of Adam's face, but he didn't seem shocked. "Oh, so it was you."

"What?"

"Somebody was hacking in here," Raze'el replied, moving over to the monitor. "I had a suspicion it was you. Is there anything you can do about all these tactical marines? Or at least the locks on the ship?"

"Really?" Julice said, then looked at the corpse. "How long do we have until the body explodes?"

(( *beep beep beep*

Julice: Oh shit. o.o; *BOOM*

Julice: tHaNkS fOr thE wArnInG... x.X~ ))

"Not long enough!" Jim heard the beeping noise. He ran towards the enemy, enduring the teargas. With pained eyes he managed to grab the TAC by the foot with his hookshot. He reeled him in and swung his arm. By releasing the microclaws of the hookshot as it whipped towards him, he slung it ahead at the Battle Armor.

The battle armor opened fire on the incoming TAC Corpse, so even if he wasn't dead yet, he was now. There was a big boom.

As the smoke quickly cleared, there was good news and there was bad news.

Good News: The TAC was dead, and the explosion rippped apart the nearby bay door, and the Battle Armor had been sucked into the vaccum of space.

Bad News: The whole bay door gone thing.

Jim and the others found themselves being pulled away. Jim managed to grab hold of an emergency handle. "OOPS! MY BAD!"

"As a matter of fact, I think I might be able to...hold on." Adam's face disappeared as he shut off the live-feed comm. link to the control room. He retreated back to square one of the command network in his virtual vision. For a moment, he wondered if the marine in the room with him was wondering why he didn't seem fazed by the whole gun-pointed-at-head thing.

Reliance Lockdown Protocols...primary system should be disabled with the power outages, as well as the standard systems on the station. That leaves secondary systems built right into the docking bay...

ACCESS DENIED.

Fine, be that way.

Adam's face materialized on the monitor again, only forty seconds had passed. "Reliance safeguards deny all wireless entry, and they are not connected to the station's relays. It means they're manually controlled and powered by generators. I can't hack them, no one can. We just have to push the button there."

Raze'el nodded. Adam continued, "I'm going to contact the other crew members, and see what kind of communications the Reliance have running." His face construct disappeared for a second time, and didn't return.

Reliance Communication Channels, high-band frequencies...bingo.

The message echoed out of Robert's datapad, and through every Reliance personnel comm. set on the entire station in a generic mechanical voice, addressed by a stolen Reliance officer identity certificate:

"Command Deck is being compromised. Command Deck is being compromised. All marines report directly to Decks One through Three. I repeat, the Command Deck is being compromised by organized terrorist attacks, all marines report directly to Decks One through Three. Any captured hostiles in your vicinity are to be met with swift non-lethal incapacitation. Do not waste time, station security is about to be compromised, over."

Adam had to work really fast, he locked onto Robert's life sign and connected to the comm. frequency at his location, sending a private message:

"Don't-"

A projectile hit Adam in the torso. He lost consciousness immediately, the safeguards in his cybernetics pulled him out of the station's network at the speed of light.

Alicia grabbed her gun, "Thanks Julicie." She said. Of course, then Jim informed the two of them that the TAC they had just worked so hard at killing, was going to kill them right back by exploding. He managed to sling the TAC out into the bay, and marvelously kill the battle armor in the process. He also managed to seal their fates rather handily, what with decompression into space, and all that. Apparrently he hadn't been studying those "Don't shoot here!" points on the station.

"This is just great!" Alicia yelled over the sound of whipping air, as she grabbed hold of the maitenance shaft's doorway, now hanging sideways, legs dangling toward the hole in the bay, "We can't move because of decompression, and we can't stay or else we'll be killed by the same!"

Now was not the time to panic... Of course, panic was natural.

Raze'el was about to turn to Artemis, but he got a warning.

A rather loud, obnoxious warning telling him that a bay was decompressing. Snarling and cursing under his breath, he began madly hitting switches. "Damn tactical marines... damned Reliance... damned stationborne fights... decompress our ship, will you?!"

He found the right ones for localizing power to that area, and managed to put up an emergency force field.

Unfortunately, it also turned the main Reliance locking clamps back on. "Damn you!"

He slapped the console and went over to another one behind him, telling his captain, "We need to get out of here as soon as I get done here, I believe Adam just sent every Marine on the station up here."

Which was quite brilliant for getting those monkeys off most of our backs, but damned inconvenient for us. He quickly got a mechanical seal over the breach in the docking bay, and then cut power to the bays again, releasing the main clamps. Grabbing one of the fallen Reliance officer's commpiece, he tuned it to a frequency JEN would detect and began making his way to an air shaft, waving for Artemis to follow him. Hitting the frequency, he scrambled it and sent out a message over the ship's external PA system. "Attention, attention, the lock must be released at the generator point. Repeat, release the last lock at the generator point. We're nearing your position."

Pocketing the device again, he wondered how long it would take the Reliance to reverse engineer the scramble code. It was actually quite simple; reversing the actual final signal and then scrambling it with a simple prime number equation. JEN could crack that no problem... probably not more than a minute or two for the Reliance, if they even bothered, but he planned to be well within the safety of the ship by then, with Artemis.

The decompression stopped. Jim fell face first on the uncarpeted ground. "Ow!" he picked himself up. Looking back at the missing bay door, the slight shimmer of an emergency forcefield was evident. "Well, someone saved our behinds." He watched as the others picked themselves up.

"Well, we've made to the ship, now just for that little matter of releasing whatever Reliance clamps holding our ship here, and actually getting in."

Jim pulled out his pistol and headed for the ship.