The Corwin II Facility Raid
Participants
- Six — destroyed the drone, most of the robots and the cannon-armed unit; cut the hangar doors open by hand
- Ronin Sanchez — disarmed the hidden guard; severed the autopilot override; flew the escape
- Shackleton Magellan — cracked the terminal; ordered the drone shot; covered the ramp
- Rock Lavey — held the stairwell; treated Six afterward
- Marlo Petrak — aboard
- Pratrock security robots and one unseen guard
Overview
The Alien Navigation Device took the ship. On arrival in the Corwin System the cube seized the autopilot and would not give it back, flew The Albatross down a fissure in a crater wall on Corwin II with inches of clearance, and set it on a powered landing pad that clamped the gear and lowered the whole platform underground. The hangar sealed overhead. Emergency lights came up yellow.
It was not the facility Pratrock has on the charts. Pratrock Dynamics Research Facility 42 sits on the far side of the same planet. The cube flew them past it to a concealed site — the Corwin II Subterranean Landing Bay — which the crew had never heard of and no one had told them existed.
Inside: an operations centre above the bay, two dead terminals, a facility map, a dust-dry apple core, and a Pratrock Dynamics employee handbook belonging to Gary Johnson. Johnson’s children’s names and birthday failed as passwords. A dog tag reading Benji, found in a desk drawer by Rock Lavey, worked.
Then the phone rang. Ronin Sanchez answered it with “Fuck you.” The line went dead, the second terminal reached the outside network, and the facility registered the intrusion.
A surveillance drone came down the corridor. Six asked whether to shoot and counted down from three. Ronin said no. Shackleton Magellan said yes. Six shot it, and the lights went out.
What came next was four-legged security robots with beam weapons identical to the crew’s own grazers, a hidden guard whose hand Ronin shot around a corner, and finally a bipedal machine with a cannon arm firing tangler grenades that trapped two of its own units. Ronin’s blaster bolts skated off the plating. Six’s grazer did not, and Six did effectively all of the damage in that corridor.
With fighters scrambling from the far side of the planet (from Pratrock Dynamics Research Facility 42) and from Corwin III D, the crew ran — into a hangar whose overhead doors had been sealed and cut off from power. Six went out onto the hull in magnetic boots and cut through the locking mechanisms and counterweights with the vibro-axe, one at a time, while Shackleton held the ramp with Rock’s pistol. The final cut sheared so cleanly the doors flew open and the bay decompressed past him without moving his feet.
Participants
See frontmatter.
Outcome
- The crew know the alien tech has an agenda, or at least an itinerary. It brought them here deliberately, and two more destinations remain in it.
- Ronin severed the autopilot override by pulling wires under the console. The cube still outputs navigation data but can no longer fly the ship.
- Shackleton holds a live bridge into the facility’s launch-and-recovery system via his network adapter, established before the firefight.
- Pratrock Dynamics know. The crew were seen, recorded, phoned, and broadcast a surrender demand. They left destroyed hardware, a wrecked drone, and a hangar with its doors cut off.
- The crew jumped for the Eris System on coordinates Shackleton entered by hand.