Scene #6736: Decaying Orbit

Owner	Pose
The Janitor	An androgynous, well-enunciated voice hails the responding Elites on the same channel as the original distress signal. It has the cool smoothness that only rather dull AIs can manage. "Hello, rescuers. My name is Dais. Thank you for responding. Current priorities are as follows: 1. Ensure survival of crew. 2. Ensure containment of prisoners. 3. Ensure survival of the IJC Reprimand." "Presently, immediate threats are: our current course colliding with the star Mesa-12 in one hour. Fatal loss of atmosphere due to uncontained breaches in fifteen minutes. Supermatter reactor undergoing runaway resonance event in eight minutes. Escapees reaching the aft Interspatial Gateway in four minutes." "My ability to aid you," it concludes, "is regrettably limited, due to ongoing power surges and hardware damage. Nonetheless, I can assist with navigation and camera coverage." Those with HUDs or video players who accept Dais's help will see them light up with snippets of high-quality video and 3D maps of the ship's layout.
The Janitor	The IJC Reprimand is an angular, red-and-silver prisoner transfer ship easily half a kilometer in length. Its silhouette looks like an oval split the long way, with its two halves misaligned in an overbite. It's coasting towards a yellow star, its thrusters dark and its dozens of escape pods floating around it like a cloud of glittering chaff. Gaping holes pockmark its hull, some vented to hard vacuum, others still burning where emergency shields hold the oxygen in. Until they're fixed, it's bleeding air. 45 MINUTES EARLIER: A woman in a gray jumpsuit jams a screwdriver into a door panel. The door opens to the atmospherics pump room. She takes the battery out of an electro-baton and connects it to the pressure sensors' wiring, then turns the distribution valves to precisely the wrong settings. Atmospherics is now a liquid-oxygen time bomb. Those arriving by teleporter pad rather than approaching from space will find themselves in a gunmetal-gray environment of stark and sparse rooms, opening up into wide multi-story cell blocks. Flashing red lights and blaring klaxons are omnipresent. Escaped prisoners in orange jumpsuits stalk the halls aimlessly, menacing anyone they don't recognize with improvised shivs and spears, though not quite too on-edge to be talked down. Here and there, red-and-black-clad security officers are sealed in the forcefield-walled cells that the prisoners once occupied, bruised and handcuffed to pipes, or- more rarely- killed with a nearby object in spectacular fashion. Roomba-like security bots with electro-batons are trying and failing to control the riot. 53 MINUTES EARLIER: The guards are transferring a prisoner to her cell. She loops the chain of her handcuffs around a guard's neck and pulls him in just as the forcefield activates, cutting him in half. She breaks her cuffs with his gun and deactivates the field with his ID card before the others realize what's happening. Three of them open fire; one hits the red alert. She ducks past them and jabs her fist through the iron plating to rip out a handful of wires. All of the cell block's forcefields go down. Hell breaks loose.
Android 17	Seventeen had the option to go in with George or go in through the teleporters. Seventeen does not trust George, good old George, for some reason. It's just weird, right? Instead, he takes the teleporter, to appear in the gunmetal room and immediately walks out to a riot. He just walks through the people, without an ounce of fear. "Alright, listen up. You're crashing into a sun, your Oxygen's about to explode, and honestly..? I'm not gonna die because you're all feeling suicidal. So do me a favor. Calm down, walk back into your cells, and let me get the crew working on avoiding either of these horrible fates? Yeah?" He says, before turning the Android Barrier on. "Or you can try and crack this. Either way, time is oxygen, so do you wanna die, or does Prison not sound so bad compared to either of the fates awaiting everyone if we don't start calming the HILF down?"
Penelope Vasquez	One Penelope Vasquez warps in precisely thirty seconds after Android Seventeen- clad in armored trenchcoat, large sword stowed, goggles over her eyes giving her a very bug-eyed look. She wades through the crowd with placading hand gestures, nodding her agreement with the forcefield-projecting android before speaking up herself. "As the man says, put the fuckin' pipes down and help us so we don't ALL suffocate." A tap at the side of her head as she addresses the crowd, trying to make her voice carry to as many orange-clad prisoners as she can. "We aren't here to stuff you back in the cells, we're just trying to not watch everyone onboard get killed. The ship's telling us we got two big problems- the reactor's about to go critical, which sounds pretty fuckin' bad, and also the air's leaking. Anyone hear beat down an engineer? Seen where one ran? Used to be an engineer?"
Staren	A house-sized castle with a giant mechanical serpent coiled around it and a starfighter docked on the underside drops out of FTL. Staren has AI plot out a course to get close to the occupied lifeboats, deploys a sort of giant mesh bag behind the ship, and then starts remote-controlling his mecha to grab pods and chuck them in the bag. All the while, he has his scanners looking at the Reprimand, trying to determine if the holes in the hull were blown out from inside, or blown in from outside.
Starbound Flotilla	George comes out of FTL near the Reprimand, bringing in the SFS Mendacity II. It's a small engineer craft, and it moves in to latch on fast. First, of course, it gathers those pods, latching beacons on them and trying to push them into a better orbit. The Flotilla gets to work on grabbing them! "Thank you again for joining us on George Airlines. As we land, remember, seatbelts are still prohibited and I'll haze you ruthlessly if I catch you sneaking them onto my ships." He's suited up in his black-and-crimson hardsuit, and equipped with tons of powered engineering tools. He docks with some of the empty ports, and makes his way in on a... hunch. Just a hunch. He gets a heavy stun-gun out, a shotgun-like thing that literally loads heavy batteries into it. He's less focused on rescuing redshirts or taking down prisoners than he is on finding a certain... trail. He immediately sets off through hallways, looking at the bodies of the spectacularly-killed and seeing if they're of that particularly higher rank that signifies someone with ambition. He intends to fix up some of those atmospheric breaches -- he is, after all, a hull engineer by trade -- and to track down the damage to the engines. But as he does, he looks. For spent shells of a particular make. For dropped auto-injectors. Weird crates. Other signs. Events like this, happening from inside, leave signs. And he'll fight any prisoners that come at him, but he has his own particular goal to look for rather than gathering with most. Most key though, he's gotta check the Supermatter. The sun is a problem, the hull is a bad problem, but the supermatter is an /emergency/.
Corona Arclite	It took a slight bit longer due to having to divert from a previous course, but fortunately it was still in the Zero sector of space and not that far off. The supply delivery was going to have to wait though, as the ripple of a spacejump deposits the craft resembling a giant locomotive into the vicinity of the crippled prison ship. Windrose maneuvers the Steamhammer Express to keep a fair distance though, as it's not a craft armed for combat, and she doesn't want to drift too close if something goes bad with stopping the explosions. "We're making holding position within deployment range." The skunkette clicks a few controls. "AI will engage departure when in position." A few minutes pass and then a brief discharge can be seen from one of the rearward 'cars' of the space-train, the one that serves as a vehicle bay and storage. It takes another minute before the Foxtrotter finally jets past the bulk of the spacecraft and into view, thanks to the maneuvering thrusters on the back of the torso and legs. Corona is safely in the cockpit, a retro-scifi bubbledome having replaced the mech's usual rollcage to maintain breathable and pressurized environment within, adjusting her goggles to sync with the other systems she's got at the ready. "A'right then. Let's see what we can see." As the mech closes in to the Reprimand, a couple of small delta-wing drones detatch from the machine and zip towards the crippled jailer ship to start scanning for the hull breechs and find the worst of the damage.
The Janitor	Staren will find that the vast majority of the escape pods launched empty. A handful, however, have prisoners and crew inside- people who will likely fall into the yellow star and burn up within the next hour if not rescued. These pods are lit up with green highlights instead of red, but their mini-turrets will fire plasma barrages at anyone who approaches without the correct friend-or-foe ID. 35 MINUTES EARLIER: A janitor walks up to the panicking helmsman on the bridge, taps him on the shoulder to get his attention, and cuts him open from waist to collarbone with a shard of broken glass. She presses three buttons on the control console as he collapses. "PROVIDE RETINAL AND VERBAL CONFIRMATION," demands a cheery synthetic voice. She grabs the lifeless helmsman's hair and shoves his face into the sensor. "Confirm jettison escape pods," she says. Corona's drones will find eight breaches in all, five of them cold and vacuum-exposed, three of them still burning. The first five are easy to patch over; the burning breaches, fueled by pure liquid oxygen, are terrifyingly hot and dangerous to approach until their fuel supply is cut. The metal hull itself is combusting around them, like a hole burnt in a dry leaf with a magnifying glass. The rioting prisoners stare at 17 for a few tense moments as he speaks- some slack-jawed at the demonstration of the barrier, others resentfully keen. Wherever they were headed to, they're doing enough time to seriously consider an escape like this against the risks. They seem just about ready to try their luck on braining him with a piece of rebar until Penelope comes through and offers them a more palatable deal. One of them, a short bald guy with callused hands, steps forward. "Jimmy," he says. "Pretty sure all the proper engineers 're dead. Take me to the Atmos pump room, and make sure everyone here makes it to the Gateway. Deal?"
The Janitor	Everyone on the interior has their work cut out for them. Glowing holographic lines on the floor desperately point them towards either the Supermatter Engine at the fore, or the Gateway at the aft, with a lighter line weaving between them towards Atmos. The Supermatter area is an obstacle course of sealed heavy blast doors, raging liquid-oxygen fires, and regions where entire rooms have twisted or bent like soda cans by gravitational anomalies. The Gateway is guarded with a maze of cutting lasers and forcefield-walls that flicker on and off with the rolling power surges, turning them into a dangerous game of speed and agility. Atmos is comparatively tame, with jets of freezing liquid nitrogen and superheated steam erupting out of the pipes, but they've got to find some way to get Jimmy through safely, and he's just an ordinary human. The end of the Gateway path is blocked by a solid mob of prisoners trying to find their way in; some of them are putting improvised or stolen cutting tools to use on the final blast-door. Inside, a handful of terrified guards armed with ballistic pistols and electro-batons are holed up behind improvised barricades. The Gateway itself is a fifteen-foot-wide ring with a flickering portal inside, but those with keen senses might notice a whirring, hot contraption inside the ring- it's been stuffed with batteries rigged as explosives to destroy it when someone tries to go through. George's investigation will find absolutely no suspicious items- no bullet casings of an unusual make, no suspicious crates, no spent injectors. Those killed mostly aren't the people in charge, but the people with know-how: engineers, technicians, pilots, even prisoners with backgrounds in any of those things. When he reaches the Supermatter Engine, he'll find an unmistakable sickly-green glow and piercing hum seeping through the walls. The Chief Engineer is slumped over his desk, garrotted with a power cable. The glass over the SCRAM button is blood-spattered, but intact. George will see it through the window of the CE's office. Staren will see it as he flies over the ship. A single person, in a gray jumpsuit and flat cap, standing on the scaffolding two hundred feet away from the Supermatter SCRAM chute, suicidally devoid of protective gear in the hard vacuum. She's waiting like a batter at the plate. Resting on her shoulder is a wooden baseball bat.
Penelope Vasquez	Penelope is an assessor, first and foremost- her eyes glide along the lit paths, goggles projecting a rough image of anything on the far side of walls between her and the pathway's terminals. The Supermatter reactor? Out of her paygrade. Like, way out. The gateway? Clogged with guards and prisoners and probably a bomb maybe. In her paygrade, but not the focus right now. Let them duke it out. She has a Jimmy, and her Jimmy can fix the atmosphere, and that will keep her breathing long enough to figure out everything else. "Deal, Jimmy. With me. Everyone else here- don't get anyone killed, please." She zips towards the man, grabs him by the shoulder, and somewhat aggressively steps through the crowd, Jimmy in tow, towards the atmospherics sections. A wave for the android to follow. "Sorry for the rushing, we got four minutes. Scoot." Upon arrival to the combined freezing and burning hellscape of the atmospherics department, Penelope is mostly undaunted. A puff of breath, hands on her hips as she studies the scene, mentally plotting a course. Can't bend the piping shut to create a path- steam is hot and liquid nitrogen is very cold. Can, however, give Jimmy a hand. She scoots her goggles into her hairline to confirm her course visually, then barks a few orders at her companion. "Use the shield thing to try and divert the gas away from here, here, and here. Jimmy, loop up my arm with your arm." She doesn't wait for his compliance, and instead does it for him- her speech is mostly out of courtsey. Once he's secure, she steps to a wall, sets her her hand on it- and pulls up, like she's gripping a ledge that just isn't there. A tiny blade shinks out of her boot and jams itself into the bulkhead with a sharp kick. Using this combined forced-foothold and gripping handhold, she performs a haltering spiderman-crawl through the maze, towards the pump rooms. "You're gonna need to divert all this nitrogen to the engine so we don't all cook, Jimmy. Can you do that from here?"
Corona Arclite	Corona Arclite frowns a bit as the drones' findings flickering to life on-screen. She notes the cooled breaches, sends a message to the relay channel for the others, and then sends a command to the drones. As they return to her she removes one of the inventory devices from her belt and shoves it into a compartment. This deploys it into one of the Foxtrotter's manipulators, and from there releases it outside. Where it is collected by one of the drones to remove the materials within. It's not the most high quality metal, being scrap and salvaged parts, but as they're more worried about containment at the moment, it's enough to work with. The drones should be able to handle the task of sealing the cooled spots, at least. Corona re-engages the mech's thrusters and starts moving towards the breaches that are still burning. Those are going to take a personal touch to deal with, it's a higher danger level than the basic drone computational systems will be able to contend with. Not to mention they'd probably melt first.
Staren	Fortunately, Staren isn't approaching the pods in person, he's short-range remote controlling a giant warmachine. The first shots catch him by surprise, but the mecha can take it. After that he deploys the shield to block them, destroys the turrets when he gets close, and THEN shoves the pods into the mesh bag. During all this, he sees SPORTS. George advises him to take no record that he saw it, so he blanks those portions of the recording his sensors are taking all the time, and sets them not to record when pointing at that location. Not changing course to show any sign of seeing her is easy enough since he's busy controlling his mecha. However, George says he's needed inside, so he redocks the Star Hawk, has S.A.I.L. move the SSC Stranger Than Fiction into a stable orbit around the star, and then beams onto the Reprimand. Staren is in a beefy powered armor that kinda makes him look like a miniature Space Marine. Compared to his normal armor, it's got more armor, and more importantly, even more enhanced strength, which should help with some things on a breaking-down spaceship. Like tearing out the forcefield wiring and breaking handcuff chains, if 17 didn't already free the security guards. As he makes his way from the arrival point to the supermatter, he gathers pipes, ripping them off the walls and such when sensors indicate they're unpressurized. He also just sends George photos of any toolboxes he comes across -- George will know what's missing better than he will.
Android 17	"That works too," Seventeen says, though would rather see murdering criminals behind bars rather than...out and murdering people randomly like they are now. Though right now being a stickler for that means nobody lives. "Alright, deal. Let's go to the pump rooms and take care of one of the like, five hundred problems we need to solve in order to not crash into a sun," He says, trying not to say anything more. Especially as apparently there are sports somewhere on the ship. He follows, as Penelope beats him to the punch and he follows with a helpless shrug. He can't deny her way got them this much. As they enter, Penny makes some demands of his shield. "Doesn't work like that, it's a personal shield around me, but I'll do what I can...but the more I expand it the less defensive it's gonna be." Seventeen steps in, expanding the shield out to try and keep things blocked up so they can get their engineer in and start fixing things and divert coolant.
Starbound Flotilla	There's an ache in George's bones, an ache he hasn't felt in long, long years. Something intuitive about the matter, something encoded in patterns he can't fit into the prefrontal cortex, and that can only sit, weighty like a stone in the stomach, somewhere in the amygdala. Flickers in an old, lost fire. He locks eyes on something outside the Chief Engineer's window, when Staren calls his attention. His blood runs cold. He goes pale. He shakes his head and jams a shutters button to close the window. "Fuck." He mutters. "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck." He grits his teeth and immediately begins to jam a cigarette into his mouth and re-don his helmet. Welder out. Wrench, too. "Focus. Focus, you old piece of shit." He chatters on the radio as he moves out into engineering to get to work. His geiger counter is going wild. "I know, I know." He's gotta reinforce the pipes. The outer radiator pipes... He's just gonna hope that he doesn't have to go out there. Or she'll be gone when he has to. In here, he's gotta find a leak. He needs to hit the supermatter cooling bypass, to take everything from the cold loop into the hot loop. When that happens, the pressure equalizing should give him a small handful of seconds where the leak is more visible, gushing more air; he hopes he can get it sealed up with the welder, or replaced with what he needs. He's already assuming this will work, and trying to plot out a piping path between him and that sweet, sweet chilled N2. Engineering by the seat of his pants, so to speak.
The Janitor	The gray-clothed figure out on the scaffolding in space reaches into her pocket with one hand, pulls out a device that looks like a walkie-talkie, and presses the button. Gravity immediately stutters and goes out on the Reprimand, switching abruptly between 'zero' and 'full Earth' settings every few seconds. Anyone without a solid handhold or uncommon acrobatic skills will get repeatedly lifted up and slammed into the floor. 27 MINUTES EARLIER: Someone steps into the gravity generator room at the precise center of the ship. Multiple laser turrets immediately open fire. She pulls up a metallic floor tile and deflects the shots she can't weave between while sprinting towards the center of the room. The maintenance panel is kicked open, and something that looks like a sparkplug with an antenna is shoved inside. Thanks to Penny and 17's efforts, Jimmy takes relatively little injury from the shaking-about and the gouts of horrible fluids. He snaps some welding goggles onto his face and starts welding breaches shut in the seconds where gravity behaves, and then moves on to the distribution console, setting his jaw and trying to map out a puzzle-solution that looks like an old game of Pipe Dream. "That ought to... wait..." It's a pretty fierce problem, but anybody with a knack for puzzles might be able to find an answer that wrings a few more percentage points of efficiency out of it. While he works, dangerous jets of fire erupt from overload valves around the room, backwashing from the oxyliquit-burn breaches as they compensate, compounding the gravity-hazard. As Staren blanks the sensor feeds from the mech, the figure outside looks up, staring directly at the Star Hawk. The last frame they catch before being set to not record is of her expressionless face. The brim of her cap and her messy black hair just barely hide her eyes. By improbable chance, they always hide her eyes. The prisoners are much less friendly to Staren inside, especially once he starts freeing the guards- most of whom immediately sprint for safer parts of the ship. Most of them can't do much to him in his armor, but those with improvised electro-spears or stolen guns try to plink at the joints of his suit. George might be able to tell, from glancing at the toolboxes, that two things are consistently missing: welding tools and signaling devices. When he takes off his helmet to get a cigarette, he just might smell a trace of welding fuel. Corona's drones patch up the breaches well enough to hold for now, and the fires in the burning-breaches are dying down. They're still partially atmospherically-shielded, so she'll need to smash their blue forcefield-bubbles a few times before she can start repairing the hull underneath. It's less hellish now that the atmosphere's being rerouted by Jimmy, but there are still periodic plasma-jets that erupt from the pipes while she works! George's seat-of-his-pants solution finds the coolant leak pretty quickly- mercifully, it's indoors and solvable, even if his disrupting the meager flow through the 'cool' loop advances the Doomsday Clock by a few seconds. His relief may be short-lived: something knocks on the CE Office's window. The window to space. The window his old friend saw him through. In the distance, gunfire. Something explodes. "The Interspatial Gateway is down," Dais observes via radio. "Sabotage is likely. No known evacuation solutions remain."
Staren	When the prisoners first start attacking, Staren points out, "Prisoner, guard, it doesn't matter anymore. This ship is doomed unless everyone works together." If they keep going, he adds: "Seriously? I'm trying to fix the ship here. Go menace someone else." As long as they don't actually interfere with his pipe-gathering, he won't fight them. Any that seriously become a problem are shocked on contact with the suit or, if they make it necessary, blasted with particle beams. The gravity thing is annoying. The first time it happens, Staren starts dropping the gathered pipes, then sucks them into the matter manipulator. Afterwards, he uses thrusters to move when he needs to -- at least he's far from helpless in zero-g. When George announces what the pipes are needed for, Staren echoes the broadcast to any bystanders -- if they seem inclined to help, he'll let them, as he sets to laying down pipes with the matter manipulator. At least the tools make it faster.
Corona Arclite	The Foxtrotter sets down next to one of the burnt sections with a clunk and a jostle as the thrusters settle into position over the shield-bubble. A glance at the readouts confirm the temperature of the breached hull is lowering, to the point it's at least managable even if not entirely out. The mech should be durable to hold up long enough, at least. But first the bubble-field needs to deactivate... To deactivate... to.. uh, shouldn't it be turning off once the hazard is under control? "Sassafrag it all, ain't got time to wait fer it to stop." Corona leans forward and grabs one of the secondary controls. When she squeezes the Foxtrotter retracts the left hand, replacing it with a sizable drill already revving up. Then thrusts it into the forcefield in a cascade of sparks until it finally collapses to expose the semi-hot breaches. A burst of plasma spats out of a breach at almost the same time, scorching across one of the shoulder pauldrons. Still hot enough to sheer into the metal despite it's toughness. "Gonna have to watch out for that." Corona re-engages the hand, and operates both arms to draw the robot sized version of her smithing hammer and made to withstand some pretty intense heat. But that's the idea. If she can hammer down those smoldering edges while they're still cooling, she's got a chance to reshape some of the metal over the gaps while it's still cooling.
Penelope Vasquez	Penelope's mouth doesn't move as her chatter echos through everyone's radios. There's a few moments of mental math, before she hops up and down, shaking out her arms. A hiss of pressurized air as one of the little white nodules on her collar goes hollow. Stimulants enter her bloodstream, steadying her hands, speeding her mind, providing a bit of clarity. Another couple jumps, clenching and unclenching both hands and teeth, before she slaps Jimmy on the back and starts hopping from spot to spot- she's bouncing from point to point now that she's not weighed down by a human. "Jimmy- sit here, just- keep fixing shit. Hold on, uh-" She reaches into her coat and pulls out a dollar-store walkie talkie, and pitches it at the engineer. "Hold this! Listen to the guy! Give him the seventy percent juice!" She's back to the entrance of atmospherics already, vibrating where she stands. Still vibrating for a solid couple seconds, holding onto the wall with a grippy glove, before her deliberation is over. "Teeny." Apparently that's the android's name. Okay. "Teeny. Teenyteenybobeenie you gotta listen to the guy and get the parts. I'll get to the bridge. I'm good. Iiiii'm good." Another little hiss as another nodule presses stimulant into her system, re-upping her dosage. She kicks off the floor and bolts away at thoroughbred speeds. Through the crowds of prisoners, jerking from empty lane to lane- past Staren, little more than a black-clad whisp trailing air as she follows any directions available towards the bridge. She finally slows to a stop- before pausing. And pushing her way back towards Staren, his radio crackling. "It just now occured to you that you have a spare suit?!"
Android 17	The Barrier drops once things start getting under control and the need to block holes is gone. He listens to his radio, with some back and forth before he looks back towards Jimmy and then Penny. He's already potentially forming an idea if worse comes to worst...buuuut. Well, let's hope it doesn't get that bad. He flies out of the room, using his ability to fly to try and negate the repeatedly zero-g and not zero-g repeatedly, trying to get back towards the gateway room. He doesn't stop to get crap from Prisoners, making his way towards the room itself to find the air filter. Assuming nothing stops him or explodes, he moves to try and take it to the pipe and set it up to try and get it going. "Jimmy, walk me through this."
Starbound Flotilla	George slams hard into the ground the first time. "Christ, J." He mutters under his breath. "Some of us have /joints/." He starts his magboots, and latches a grappling hook onto the ceiling to give himself a little room to work with. His gun goes spinning away in the chaos. "Fuck. Shit." He knows better than to take the ten seconds it would need to get that back though. He hears a knock. He looks to the window... He swallows dry. He almost expects the sound when something explodes. "Oh no." He shakes his head hard. She's not outside, should he chance the SCRAM? ...No. They need the core for these thrusters. He needs to get the cool N2, circulate it fast, get it sucked back out /with/ a fast-installed filter, and-- Fucking hell, get the gravity back to normal!! He shuts the bypass, and finds the nearest atmos-to-engine pipe. Gotta hope they're gonna be pumping a /lot/ of chill N2 through that /soon/. If he's right, his arrangement will flood the dying Supermatter with cooling N2. And that means he needs to... go work on gravity. Or else nothing else can get done. Which means he has to lift the engineering lockdown. He has to lift the engineering lockdown. He staggers his way back to the CE's office. Gotta hope she ditched the welder. Gotta /hope/. Gotta hope he doesn't regret leaving his damn gun out there. He welds the CE's office door, pops the lockdown, and tries to go find the gravity generator as fast as he can before... Well. Before something.
The Janitor	Once Staren makes it clear that he's not exactly on the guards' side, most of the prisoners relax somewhat, though he'll need to keep explaining himself as he runs into new groups. They eye the "freed" guards suspiciously. Some of them throw a punch or two, exacting informal revenge for their imprisonment. Most of the crew, and a few of the orange-suited inmates, end up pitching in to help him rearrange the pipes to reroute the atmosphere, even as they're eyeing each other with palpable mistrust. Corona's improvised forgework seals over the last of the breaches, allowing for easier atmospherics reshuffling. "Pressure's tighter- pushing eighty percent to the Supermatter now," Jimmy reports via intercoms. She can dock to head inside, though the docks all have dangerous halos of loose zero-grav crates and shrapnel to navigate by now, or try to find other things to do on the exterior!
The Janitor	Jimmy fumbles with the walkie-talkie like a hot potato, then nods shakily, obviously disconcerted by Penelope's sudden shift in affect. "Alright. Going to seventy... now." The pipes hiss and groan with the abrupt redistribution, but thanks to the breaches being patched, everything seems to hold! 17 will find the route to the Gateway is much the same as it was the first time he had the chance to take it, but with the added hazard of periodic gravity malfunctions; it's a maze of cutting lasers and flickering forcefields, with the evidence of a massive prisoner-versus-guard fight scattered around. Several of the rooms are vented completely to vacuum by the Gateway's explosion itself; some of the inmates and crew who were in those rooms fled or managed to find emergency softsuits, while others are suffocating if 17 doesn't take the time to rescue them- but does he have the time? The Gateway itself is half-destroyed and totally offline after its explosion, but the fridge-sized air filter in the corner of the room is still ripe for the taking. Penelope's path is indicated by a red holographic trail on the floor mapped out by Dais. It twists and winds through hallways and cell blocks, rooms full of zero-grav globules of molten metal and hard-vacuum rooms that were previously breached, still crumpled and bent in chaotic terrain and stuffed with hostile security-bots. Unsurprisingly, the robotic security is tightest at the helm, but in the room itself everything is dead. And everyone. Anyone who could help steer the ship is smeared across three walls, the ceiling, the huge fore-window showing the looming yellow star ahead, and most of the floor. The guy who looks like the captain was half-decapitated with a stapler. In the center of the bridge, just behind the captain's seat, is a monstrosity of an IED assembled from welding tanks, welding tools, and a cancerous growth of wires and beeping signalers. It's the size of a small truck, at least, and looks to be hooked up to multiple control panels. The Gravity Generator isn't far from where George is now, but it's where the effects of the disruption are the strongest. The whole room is twisting, crumpling, metal groaning under the invisible hand of an angry god. The point of sabotage is obvious- the sparkplug-like device shoved into the generator's side- but without his gun he'll have to get close to unfuck it, and most of the laser-turrets are still functional. They don't recognize him as a friend. Stuffed right behind the sparkplug inside the Grav Generator's maintenance panel is a ripped-off nametag from a prisoner. "JOCELYN DANE", it says. It's hard to say whether that's supposed to be funny.
The Janitor	Several tense moments after the jury-rigged atmospherics network starts pumping liquid nitrogen into the Supermatter, the whole ship shudders as a subtle warping distortion eases off. The air didn't look green before, but it somehow looks a little less green now. A ringing that could've been dismissed as gunshot-tinnitus fades away. "Supermatter integrity increasing," Dais says helpfully. "Your help is appreciated." Just then, the thrusters stutter and flare with light, giving the Reprimand a little "kick" in exactly the wrong direction to be moving. Dais cuts the impulse as quickly as possible, but it's already perilous. "Updated estimate to collision with Mesa-12: 14 minutes."
Android 17	Seventeen with superior balance and movement thanks to his flight and mobility, however, the men suffocating cause him a delay. He grabs as many as he can at a time, and with a burst of speed gets them into the atmosphere and repeatedly does this again and again until he can save all he can. This might cause delays, but Seventeen can not help but try and save as many people as he can. Even at risk to himself, but then again, he's pretty hardy. Finally, the portal room is reached. Releasing all of the air, he plunges in and attempts to tear out the filter. He tries ripping it out and getting it to George as he wanted. Breathing heavily once he manages to get back to the atmosphere. "Alright, do we have an emergency suit?" he asks anyone.
Corona Arclite	<<Breaches are sealed. Least for the time being.>> No certainty on how long they're going to hold up, but it should be long enough at least for people to get the ship on a less imminantly disasterous course. Corona back-thrusts away from the hull, turning the Foxtrotter once it's clear to head towards one of the docks. <<Still wouldn't dwaddle too much in ther-->> She's cut off by the thud of something banging into the mech, shaking it enough for her to briefly flop backwards in the cockpit. Fortunately the safety harness keeps her from being banged around too much, though she does have to squirm a little to reach down and grab her hat after it was dislodged from her head. The vixen cusses as she sits back up and replaces hat to head, glaring out into empty space. Except it isn't so empty thanks to the jettisoned debris floating around. "Ah swear, every step forward is a stumble back still." While not dangerous in and of itself, if one of the crates or a sharp chunk of metal collides with the wrong part of the ship it could undo a lot of their work, losing precious time they already didn't have. Stray damage to those engines, when the power is back up properly, could be catastrophic. That in itself is enough to make Corona's paranoia start to flare, especially with friends and allies working on the inside. So instead of heading inside she reinitiates the assistant drones, and sets about gathering up the floating junk to keep it away from striking anything important. Being a hero ain't always glamourous, kids.
Staren	Supermatter is up, pipes are up. New problem: Helm is rigged to explode. But they don't really NEED helm, do they? The thrusters have some kind of electric or mechanical mechanism that determines whether they're on or off. Staren will drive the goddamn ship by touching wires together if he has to. Staren heads for the physical location of the thrusters, and he keeps an eye out: With how thorough the sabotage has been so far, it seems certain the saboteur anticipated his thoughts. Though maybe he'll be lucky and it will have been too low priority to sabotage? Maybe?
Starbound Flotilla	George isn't liking this. His bones are too old for this pressure cooker of a gravitational field. Grappling hook to the opposite side of the chamber's ceiling. Then this side. Same for the opposite ground, then this side. It's a sort of a rappeling arrangement on both sides, one that George can loop through his hardsuit and sort of clamber across the floor as it tries to rip him apart. He struggles to the generator, and finds the problem in a brief moment of respite between the crushes. He groans, painfully -- from more than just the pain -- before yanking the scrap, and re-affixing the sparkplug properly -- maybe even swapping it out for a spare he keeps, just in case. Hopefully, that'll stop the generator! Especially if he can rip out any signalers that were used to set it to that unstable state. Then he hears something terrible on the radio. He seizes up, not just from the strained muscle pain. "She's back aboard."
Penelope Vasquez	No time to steal a spacesuit from Staren, evidently. Especially as the ship kicks, everyone loses their footing for half a second, and the AI makes it's rather dire pronouncement. She bolts like a frightened foal from room to room. The rooms of molten metal splattering up and down thanks to the loss and gain of gravity are little navigational issue; moving kill fields. Track the timing, kick at speed, make sure your coat is covering wherever they're unavoidable. She quickly gains a scent of melted plastic as her trenchcoat begins to lose it's ablative covering, melted away under splashes of cooling steel. She skids to a stop before a blinking emergency door, presses against the window. Hard vacuum is outside. And roomba-like robots with stunprods. A moment of pause. Exposure to vacuum for more than thirty seconds will kill me. Cannot stop to disable defense; will take longer than thirty seconds. Cannot stop to navigate- will take longer than thirty seconds. Reapplication of gravity will force navigation which will take longer than thirty seconds. Is the other airlock in view? Yes. Gravity falters every three seconds, approx. Path is clear. Align and execute. Penelope Vasquez settles into a position much like a linebacker preparing to charge. A tap at the emergency shutter- a warning that proper authorization is required. She unsheathes her blade, and times it perfectly. Her weapon cleaves up in gravity, cutting open the airlock. The already stressed structure flings itself open, air rushing out. In the same microsecond, gravity fails on the projected timer. Penelope has exhaled, as recommended. She is riding the rush of air into vacuum through open space. She is now on a fixed velocity towards the other door, out of reach of the floor, of the robots flailing prods at her. She swings the blade again, cutting into the other lock. She rolls into the hall as air rushes away into the void, ice crystals glittering on her skin. The next airlock will quickly enter emergency mode. The gravity comes back online. She touches a boot, snicks her blade into the metal, and pole-vaults herself towards the airlock, which slams shut behind her. A moment of silence, then an elated, disbelieving laugh as she rises on jelly-like legs, and walks herself, slowly, to the bridge. Where there is an IED waiting. IEDs are not her forte. She touches nothing. Instead, she examines the carnage with a professional's appreciation, before touching at any panels not visibly wired to the explosive for some sort of input.
The Janitor	Staren arrives at the thrusters' maintenance chambers with surprisingly little incident- this part of the ship seems essentially vacant by this point, perhaps unsurprising given its far-aft position and current uselessness. Even so, he'll occasionally find the bodies of engineers, very purposefully killed very dead with seemingly whatever was at hand. A piece of scrap metal, a wrench, a cable, each left right there in the pool of blood. Almost everything is intact, save for one piece: the complex thrust nozzle vectoring system, a labyrinthine network of pipes and shunts and computer components the size of an AC unit, has been completely charred to ash in a welder-fuel burn. Without that one component, any power sent to the thrusters will just push them directly forwards, accelerating their fall towards the star. 17's efforts save over two dozen people in all, some of whom immediately set to work on resuscitating those in worse shape as soon as they're to safety, but the erchius-infused hot nitrogen is backing up to dangerous levels in the pipes. Jimmy's instructions- "blue dial to the left, red dial to the right"- are the only thing standing between them and another set of hellish overpressure-breaches. Or was it red dial to the left, blue dial to the right? Corona's scrap-gathering uncovers a few things of value- the odd crew-member flash-frozen and drifting in space, exposed to liquid nitrogen and perhaps still revivable if brought to the right person. A few crates full of exotic-looking energy rifles, spilling their cargo out into the void. And one that's full of angry electro-roombas, which pour out, automatically activate, and start trying to mob her like ticks on a cow! Penelope's rooting-around in the un-tampered consoles predictably doesn't turn up any kind of navigational aids, but she does turn up a list of criminal records and identification for everyone on board- useful blackmail material on any of the prisoners who survive this ordeal. One record out of the six hundred has, naturally, already been deleted. George finally manages to replace the sparkplug and rip out the signaler- when he does, the turrets momentarily power down, giving him long enough to escape in sweet, merciful, normal Earth gravity. Once again, any relief he might feel won't last long. His path out of the Gravity Generator room necessarily has to take him back through the CE's Office. Someone's audibly moving around on the other side of the door.
Android 17	Seventeen stands in front of the panel, ripping it off and looking at the dials. Of course, he's gotta remember which one goes where...and he's already starting to get light-headed. What did he say...? Red...right? That means blue is left, right? He can't swallow, so he just does what he needs to do. The Red goes all the way to the right, and the blue all the way to the left, and pushes himself out of the room and quickly towards the air. His lungs nearly burst, as he starts taking in sharp breaths of air. He struggles to bring himself back under control, before walking towards George's ship to grab the suit and pill. At the rate everything is going to hell they're going to need every bit they can.
Corona Arclite	Junk.. junk.. junk... well maybe better those guns are out here rather than inside where the escapess can use them... junk.. junk... just shoving it into a cluster that can be bound together and.. holy shit a survivor out here! Maybe lucky he is frozen at the moment. That's a little too delicate for the mech to handle. Fortunately Corona has one of those snazzy retro space bubble-helmets handy, which she plops over her head. And then puts her hat back on top, because she's not leaving without that. Then she pops open the hatch, and climbs out on the Foxtrotter's extended arm to grab the frozen body and carefully tug it close. She's no medic, but she can at least put him inside the machine before he gets smashed to bitty pieces. He might know something important about what happened. It's while she's trying to carefully negotiate the frozen form to the mech's cockpit for safe keeping that two crates collide, sending guns scattering in one direction and drones in the other. Cleaning drones. Space roombas. That apparently activate, and with all the junk still floating around spaz out and swarm... how do they even move in open space?! Questions not important enough to ask right now. "Ah swear, Murphy is laughin' in his grave rawht now!" With one arm around the freezer victim Corona draws her handcannon with the other and fires off a couple of shots at the roomba swarm. "Back off ya dust buster wannabes!"
Penelope Vasquez	Useless. Controls for the Mr. Coffee. Useless. Useless- paydirt. Penelope takes a few minutes from saving the ship to pursue profit. And, finally, a hit. Prisoner records consoles. She memorizes a few choice pieces of information before putting an elbow through the screen. Gravity has stopped fluctuating- that means the spaceman has been successful. All that leaves is Staren's harebrained idea, or... her. Resident bomb expert Penelope Vasquez, apparently. Her eyes drift over the wiring as George shouts instruction over radio- ones she can't hope to follow coherently. Hrm. As she thinks, her eyes drift up- and lock there. The bridge is covered by a glass dome, giving those inside an excellent view of outer space. Her eyes are locked to the sight as she leans into the smashed computer, breath slowing, for a moment. She shuts down her HUDs, and simply takes it in. The view is dominated by the star she's rapidly approaching; but even that, face to face? Is utterly, truly, breathtaking. She steps forwards- subconciously avoiding footfalls on the sprawling wires- to press a hand to the window. She's sweating, the ship's basically burning down. But even if the data she got isn't much? The view through the window was, honestly, worth the price of admission. A blink. Window. WINDOW. She exits the room. She re-enters with a waddle, stuffed into a garish orange softsuit grabbed from a knocked-over oxygen locker in the hall. Each step sounds like rubber snowboots. After ensuring that her airtank is on- there are handy instructions on the arm of the suit, neat!- she simply buckles herself into a seat near the window, takes her blade, and smashes it. The air and countless pieces of debris are sucked from the compromised area as the airlock enters emergency mode. She waits, a very pleased smile on her face, until everything settles. She then waddles herself over to the IED and begins to confidently rip important-looking pieces off.
Starbound Flotilla	George is wandering out when he hears the noise. His breath catches in his throat. He freezes. She might be out there. He scrambles for his gun. Empty holster. Eyes close and he takes a deep breath. Whelp! Time to get out of here. He knows he can't weld through the grav-chamber plating fast enough. So he just... doesn't. Because she sabotaged the gravity chamber. And he knows, above all else, she didn't wear any fucking rad-gear to do it. So he reads something from her history. He... checks the walls, nearby. He checks them for that special, particular mark of a special, particular arrangement on the walls. They click when you push them just right, the sound of plating settling against frame. But hopefully, if he's right about what his old friend did... He can just pop open one of the walls, jump through, and take off for the helm to work on this problem. Hopefully his welder will be enough to deal with the rogue security! Assuming the stolen ID he has from the gravity generator doesn't stop it! If he's wrong, well, he'll have to walk rather calmly out back towards the CE's office. And have a bit of a reunion.
Staren	Ah right. Thrusters need many things -- power, fuel, possibly an oxidizer. Still... it's a matter of how badly he wants to risk breaking things. Staren starts digging into the guts of one of the thrusters on the starboard side. If there's an electrical component, he'll disconnect the power and repeat the process for other thrusters on that side. If he needs to mess with the fuel... He'll disconnect the pipe to one thruster, start sucking the fuel into his matter manipulator, and check remote sensors to see if the ship is turning sharply enough. If that's STILL not enough, he'll open more pipes and let fuel start pouring into thruster maintenance. It's a problem a few-minutes-from-now Staren will have to solve.
Penelope Vasquez	Penelope is finished- with no oxygen to allow for a spark, the improvised fuelbomb cannot go off. It's disassembled 'safely' and 'efficiently' until it's a pile of mangled parts on the floor, with the woman herself breathing a satisfied sigh into her helmet as she leans into the console. With Staren having jury-rigged the engines and everyone else doing... whatever, all that's left from her is to follow Jimmy's instructions. She steals the hat from the beheaded captain's head, sets it on top of her suit's helmet, and settles into the captain's seat with a flourish. A shame the softsuit makes her look like a giant dork. Strapped in, leaned forwards, tapping at the screen in front of her- a few rigged signalers try to go off, but can't. A big red 'full thrust' button. She taps again to open the ship's intercomm system, and her Wire connects to it. "Attention all passengers, we've fixed shit. Settle down, find something to hold onto, secure the wounded. Engines coming back online in ten." Penelope mentally gives herself an Apollo-like countdown, voice and all, speaking it into the mic in her regular voice. "...three. Two. One. Ignition!" The big red FULL THRUST button is smashed.
The Janitor	Deprived of any oxygen to mix with, the sparking wires in the welding fuel don't do anything except make the liquid fuel bubble and evaporate harmlessly. Penelope's plan is off to a smashing start, even if the rays of the looming sun ahead might start to tingle her skin and bring a taste of metal to her mouth. Doesn't the Earth's magnetosphere normally protect from solar rays? ... That's probably something to worry about later! It'll take a lot of constructive sabotage for Staren to start making a sharp enough turn- by this point, they're close enough to the star that there is no such thing as "too sharp" to veer. By the time he's done, liquid fuel is flooding the maintenance- but they're ready to go full thrust. Borrowing from the future to pay the present, as they say. George's intuition proves correct- the wall clicks under his fingertips in that predictable, familiar way, its girder groaning as it folds in like the door of an impractically fancy car. On the other side, a greasy and blood-stained dim maintenance tunnel, and freedom. From the CE's office, he can hear glass shattering. There are only two pieces of glass in that room. The pressures in the 'hot' pipes leading away from the Supermatter are so high that it's physically difficult for 17 to turn the knobs, but there's an enormous hissing roar of relief once his inhuman strength manages it. Pipes that were starting to bulge and glow red shrink back down with metallic pings and groans, and the Supermatter's integrity becomes a little more manageable, letting Jimmy pull more nitrogen off to cool the hull! Corona's fight with the drones goes about how you'd expect a brawl between a proper pilot and a dozen cheap murder-frisbees to go: very, very poorly for the frisbees. It only takes her ten, maybe twenty seconds to smash them all. The more pressing hazard: the ship's getting close enough to the star that she's going to be seeing heat warnings soon if she keeps up with it! Is there anything she can do to help nudge it further off its disastrous course? When half the thrusters come online at full bore, the ship starts listing to one side- even the artificial gravity can't fully compensate for a turn this hard. It's bankng into the sun, practically drifting like a race-kart in an attempt to establish a slingshot orbit. Loose objects and people the entire ship over slide to the side as the subjective direction of gravity shifts. The metal on the left side of the hull starts to shimmer and drip from the heat; rooms on the Reprimand's far left side begin rupturing to space as the weakened steel yields to the shearing forces of inertia and gravity. Everybody, hold on tight.
Android 17	Seventeen manages to get the suit and swallow the pull just in time. Things were already getting, literally, too hot to handle as Seventeen pushed his way towards one of the depressurized sections, and tore off a section that was visible to the sun. The heat was awful, he couldn't last long in this, but he couldn't exactly not do something dramatic. He dug his feet into the bulkhead and pointed both hands forward. A wordless scream escapes his list as the heat becomes nearly too much to bear. A massive beam of energy, literally everything the Android could muster at once goes flying from the side of the ship right into the sun. His body is flattened against the bulkhead as he grunts with intense pain. He couldn't possibly hope to destroy a sun... But he could use his beam to hit the sun and help nudge it just a bit more. To get out of the burnup range and manage to get to safety. All he could do is scream into the emptiness of space when the pain became too much to bare.
Corona Arclite	The robo-frisbees are taken care of. Now the more pressing matter of the frozen survivor, and the fact that her mech is the fastest way to get him inside somewhere, but is only a one-seater. Plus the whole getting the main ship off it's course with the sun. Corona drops the man in the seat and snaps the harness over, reachs down to punch something into the controls, and then slams the bubble-dome shut. "This is gonna be a wild ride parder, hold on." Corona magnetizes her boots to the exterior of the Foxtrotter, and fiddles with her arm device to operate the machine via remote. It shifts to point it's back towards the other ships, away from the prison, and raises it's arms forward. Venting briefly hisses as the generators charge up and the internal launchers arm. "Fire!" Corona fires both 'Rocket Punches' at once and launchs the fists into the side of the prison ship, the boosters that propel them giving maybe that little extra bit of thrust to help nudge the ship off it's collision course. While the recoil sends the Foxtrotter backwards, towards the other ships, in a sort of controlled drift so Corona can get the popsicle inside the cockpit somewhere inside, and hopefully later Staren can do his fancy brain saving mojo to get some answers. It's not a comfortable ride, clinging onto the exterior of the mech like that. But Corona is being true to cowboy form, giving a whoop as she hangs on for her own safety.
Staren	Wow, that actually WORKED. Staren takes a few seconds to relax in his accomplishment (and hold on tight as the ship lurches.) Then... they have two options. He contacts S.A.I.L. In his HUD, its robot-wizard avatar appears in a little window and gives projected successes. The number for one big boom is higher. <"Wait until I say!"> Staren radios to Jimmy, then opens all the other pipes too, then starts making his way back towards the teleporter. When he's WELL out of the projected explosive range, he radios Jimmy: <"Now! Everyone, hold on tight!">
Starbound Flotilla	George books it /fast/. He hears that there's going to be a big burn. "Shiiiit shit shit." He knows how the Janitor works. He knows he needs to run. "Come on, come on, do it like you used to..." He stumbles hard into a wall, and scrambles onto his feet, dashing hard as he can through the listing. Artificial gravity is overpowered, and he finds himself running, then stumbling, and finally clambering and crawling over the main hall walls. "'Scuse me!" He shouts as he struggles to make it over the tops of the heads of prisoners, working as hard as he can to get to the rightmost side of the ship. The rest of this business is mostly handled. He's just gotta survive it now, and hope that the others can handle it. And that... He looks around. If she's not here, she might be with them. And that, more than anything else, is much more worrying.
The Janitor	The metal starts to bubble and boil under 17's feet, sinking him in to his ankles as he acts like a makeshift thruster. Corona's rocket-fists impact near him, aiding in his heroic effort. The entire Reprimand bends slightly as they push its side, steering it off-course from its hellish destination. It feels like forever- an eternity of pushing, of steering, of hoping that the entire ship won't just give up and melt like a candle in an oven. Inside, prisoners and crew alike scream and scramble for safety as the ship lists. At Staren's urging, Jimmy sparks the thruster-fuel bomb, blowing off the engines entirely and giving it one last terrifying kick of momentum to escape. Finally, the ship slingshots off of the sun and careens into mercifully cold vacuum. The hull starts to re-solidify as it radiates its searing heat off. They're in the clear. No matter what happens now, they've made it. Reprimand is dead in the water, but everyone aboard can be evacuated at their leisure. Then the ship goes dark. All but essential components switch offline as it changes over to backup power. And, silhouetted against the starry void, George sees Sports happening. "Supermatter stability at 65%. Supermatter ejection confirmed."
The Janitor	6 SECONDS EARLIER: Jane Doe stands in the CE's Office. A chunk of a spare FTL engine is slung over her shoulder. She smashes the glass case over the big red button with her baseball bat. "72%", the voice said. Low enough to force a SCRAM. She presses the button, then makes sure the electrical cable on her ankle is tied tight enough. It's hundreds of feet long, ripped out of the wall and heaped in coils on the floor. She turns around, looks out the window into space, and smashes it. The depressurization sucks her out into space. The Supermatter is fired seconds later. NOW: Jane lands with both feet on an empty escape pod off the right side of the Reprimand, staring up at the approaching green Supermatter Crystal. The vacuum boils the sweat off her brow, chilling her skin. All of this- the spectacle, the havoc- that wasn't her job. Her job was to kill one man. She could've done that with a boxcutter. This was her hobby. This was making an example. The Crystal is the size of a Prius. It's traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. She squares her shoulders and stares it down, holding up her thumb to judge the exact point she needs to hit. The exact person she needs to hit. Anyone looking out a window might see it. Corona might have a front-row view. But everyone can feel it when the wooden bat makes contact with the spacetime-shredding crystal. The ship pings and groans, metal distorting with the ripples that the impact sends through space. The Crystal's vibrating surface chews at the wooden bat, shredding layers of it to ash in the tense milliseconds of direct contact. And then, with a satisfying crack that reverberates through Jane Doe's bones and resounds even in the vacuum of space, it's returned to pitcher. A line drive that cuts a luminous green trail through the starry void. The Supermatter Crystal vaporizes a fridge-sized hole straight through the Reprimand. A handful of people are turned to ash where they stand as it passes through them. More are sucked out the hole in its wake, directly into the sun. The Crystal descends into solar fire, and with a distant howl, explodes in a spray of purple-green light. The Reprimand's bones shiver as it escapes the explosion radius. The Janitor looks down at a cell-phone-like device in her hand. It pings green. Auto-sealing airlocks will quarantine the breach. The vast majority of people on board will survive. But her mission here is finished. She unties the makeshift rope from her ankle, slips into the empty escape pod, jams the makeshift FTL drive into its electronic guts, and presses a button. It starts to fade blue, spinning up for the jump.
Corona Arclite	Corona Arclite saw that. She's not entirely sure WHAT she saw, but she saw it. And what happens when the crystal of metaphysics breaking stuff is knocked right back at the ship somehow. But with her mech already disarmed so to speak and drifting back towards their ships, she can't really do anything about. Plus she's got this frozen guy to get out of space so maybe they can get some answers out of him with Staren's weird science stuff. The things she gets herself into.
Android 17	The heat was intense enough to burn flesh and melt the metal. It gives enough to burn into the suit, causing him to scream more. However, the ship skips away just enough to save from diving into the sun. Sore, in pain, drained, and also in pain, Seventeen realizes that he's in a lot of pain, and probably in shock. Also pain. However, when Jane swings, he screams for her to stop. Ineffectively, as the ship is smashed, and more life is lost. He's unable to move, now stuck to the ship as he was...and also in pain. That was all he had, and his eyes close. Hopefully, someone will get him out. Right now, he just wants to rest his eyes.
Penelope Vasquez	Penelope feels very hazy. There's little she can do to help now- her compatriots are firing off energy beams and dumping their personal mech's fuelcells in a desperate attempt to push the ship into a slingshot solar orbit. Her brow is soaked in her own sweat. She's probably absorbed an unfortunate amount of solar radiation from near-direct contact with a stellar-sized fusion engine. But she doesn't mind. She's floating out of the captain's chair, having undone the seatbelt; the struggling gravity generator can't hold her down, and with the lightest kick, she's floating free from the Reprimand, through the window she shattered, into the void of space. The ship is safe, her friends are alive, the people onboard are mostly alive. This was a good day, and as she stares into the stellar dance, freefloating in rough lockstep with the craft. Part of why she feels so wonderful is because the suit, intended for emergencies, only has a small supply of oxygen. And then, on the horizon. Sports. She blinks, and watches, in awe as a green beam of light is shot out of the ship, whacked with a wooden crack, sent right through again, and explodes with enough force to briefly turn the sun beautiful firework hues. Some distant neuron fires in her brain- sports are bad. She pulls a firearm from the suit's beltloop and looses potshots which ping off of the Sports's craft, and propell her back into the metal of the Reprimand as it drifts further and further from the deadly heat. A rasping, delirious giggle into her mic as she clings to a rended piece of metal, eyes drifting closed in 'job's done' relief. "Hhhhhoh, MAN. This was- just. Man. Did you see that?"
Starbound Flotilla	George dives when he realizes what's going on. He presses as flat as he can go. The crystal passes near him, near enough that it just about sizzles his armor. "FUCK!" He shouts into a decompressing room, and the air carries his swear out the back of the ship. He holds tight to the ground as the air rattles the area around him, still not believing he's survived, and then... He looks back. Through supermatter-shaped holes in the hull, he stares out to the Janitor, settling into her escape pod. "Jesus." He whispers. "J..." His heart falls into his gut when he sees her heading out. He's worried now. Wherever she was, whatever she's doing, she's very... very much /here/ now. And unlike George, she hasn't lost a step.
Staren	Staren holds on tight as the thrusters are blown off the ship. Owwwwww. His armor can't protect him from G-forces. But it could've been worse. And THEN everything goes dark, and external sensors confirm a hole through the ship. If the intercoms are still working, he announces that all survivors are to stay in pressurized sections of the ship and await rescue. Staren checks on the radio if anyone here is a hardline paladin. It turns out... no? And Jimmy's interested in a new job. <"Very well. This ship is now claimed by the Concord as salvage and we will handle its prisoners. Although I don't care if the rest of you make off with whatever you can carry."> Staren sends the call for the Concord to send over transport and salvage ships. Security personnel can get a ride to the closest station, prisoners will be evaluated by the Concord based on the ship's records to decide whether to hand them back, or put them in the Concord penal system possibly on work-release. Part of the process will involve showing a video of Seifer decapitating the last guy to get funny ideas about trying to escape, along with records of good prisoners getting the best medical care and early release, with Staren personally describing caring for some of those who needed it, because he did. More immediately, substitute power's gotta be set up for the atmospheric systems, Seventeen needs to get un-melted from the hull, and so on. The immediate future will be very busy.