Secret Negotiations
Apr. 17th, 2004 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight was an episode of the sci-fi shadake game. The party decided not to do anything stupid, so it was pretty uneventful. On the upside, they're probably in a better situation than if they'd tried to fight their way through.
So the party waited until midnight before sneaking out of the guest quarters and finding a terminal to try to hack into the Sefosa clan's files. The 'prevent stupid people from breaking things' filter was defeated easily enough, and Hesperius started rummaging through whatever files people on the system had left readable -- he wasn't a real hacker, and wasn't about to break actual security, but he knew enough about computers to rifle around.
He found out that this was the right clan -- the original estimate for the work was in an old outdated backup copy of the work database. He found a map of the facility, detailing where the control room and security checkpoints were. Nothing else really useful.
So what now? They could *try* to fight their way down to the hangar and escape with the ship, but that would mean doing a lot of damage -- even assuming they succeeded -- and they'd be persona non-grata on the moon forever, and possibly hunted by the UTMN, which was closely allied with Luna. They could always try talking with the Sefosa clan to convince them to give the ship up to the Constantines, or set up a dummy corporation that could buy the ship from them (and then vanish off-moon).
They decided that the main barrier was the LFS's refusal to allow the Constantines to transfer credits, and set a search daemon across the web looking through various corporate balance sheets (as reported on their quarterly financial statements) for entities to which the moon was heavily indebted, and therefore required to accept payment from under its own rules.
Only one turned up right away -- the UTMN. Considering this possibility led to them imagining themselves on the vessel when the UTMN boarded it and searched it for contraband, and discovered the massive antimatter drive, and put them away in prison forever.
They also discovered that the Constantines were NOT on the list of corporations that were banned from trade with the moon. They decided that the information they were getting from the net was being filtered, and couldn't be trusted.
Meepas noticed that the air ducts, while far too small for any normal person to fit through, even a feriphal, were large enough for his tiny sugar-glider body to fit inside, and went off exploring. He mostly got lost, and almost got sucked into a couple fans, but did find the main shaft leading VERY FAR DOWN before giving up and heading back.
Suddenly, Hesperius had an idea -- the LFS could prevent the Constantines from trading *credits* to the Sefosa clan, but it couldn't stop them from landing with a freighter full of trade goods and paying for the work that way. "Why didn't they do that earlier?" "Because they don't even know that it's the Sefosa clan that has their ship -- their previous agents all vanished because they talked to Kalomine." That still left the question of the clan's reluctance to sell a weapon of mass destruction, however.
He also had another idea -- they could have some third party, "Oh, say, the Illiski," buy the ship from the clan, then sell it to the Constantines. If the Sefosa wouldn't sell to the Constantines, maybe they'd sell to the Illiski -- the Sefosa did a lot of business with Illiski. And Hesperius had the contacts to get the Illiski to make the attempt.
So they made a couple phone calls, to the Constantines first, and then to the Illiski, telling them the situation and asking them to contact the leader of the clan to negotiate a purchase. The Constantines were on board with the idea of going through the Illiski, although they wanted to make sure that the Illiski didn't ever have actual physical possession of the ship at any time during the transaction.
Hesperius assured the Constantine representative that he'd make sure of that... then completely failed to mention that condition when talking to his old Mentor, who was associated with *some* group of Illiski who were obviously up to something, since they'd made odd requests of Hesperius at various times, one of the requests being to help them get their hands on the ship in question.
So, figuring that one or the other would work something out, the party went to sleep for the night. In the morning, they were not woken up and given more work to do, as they'd been expecting. Wandering downstairs, they found only a single young Procyonisk of the clan on duty, in case other customers stopped by. "Everyone's at a clan meeting right now, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait to pay off your bill..." she said, "I wish I could be there, but *someone* has to man the shop."
Curious about this meeting -- although they figured it was about the contact they'd instigated the night before -- they sent Meepas back into the air ducts to spy on the meeting. It took some doing to find the meeting -- there was no air vent leading to the main hangar bay where the meeting was taking place (it was the only room large enough for the whole clan to gather in one place). He did find a window overlooking the bay, though, and saw that yes, the ship they were looking for was there, and yes, there were all the Sefosa clan arguing with each other. Not content to *watch* an argument, Meepas used his bottle-magic variant to burrow a hole in the glass so that he could hear.
The clan was arguing bitterly, and there seemed to be three sides: One wanted to sell the ship to the Constantines as originally agreed, one wanted to sell it to the Illiski because they were more trustworthy, and the last wanted to destroy the ship outright because it was too dangerous to sell to anyone. The head engineer who'd worked on the job was among the third group, and went on and on about how the 'special stardrive' they'd installed was NOT any sort of engine -- it was a weapon of mass destruction designed to annihilate everything in a light-second radius by spraying antimatter everywhere. Meepas turned on his phone so that the rest of the party could hear.
The argument seemed interminable, so the party called Meepas back. He was careful to repair the glass before he left -- five feet thick glass overlooking a hangar bay, where all the entrances are airlocks, hinted that maybe bad things would happen to the Sefosa if he left a hole there that they didn't know about and someone tried to open the doors. In doing so he had to heat it up to a red-glowing state so it would re-bond, which was noticed down below, but he was able to escape through the air ducts before they could find him.
With nothing obvious left to do here -- either the Illiski would buy it and sell it to the Constantines, or the Constantines would buy it with trade goods, they figured -- the party asked the Procyonisk on duty to ready their shuttle. They'd checked their credit balances, and they were all positive with the Sefosa (for setting up contact with a buyer who'd get this white elephant off their backs -- certainly worth the price of a room for the night, and a few broken windows and air-vent gratings). So she made a call, and they heard the pilot take their rented shuttle out through the 'secondary airlock', then send the codes (they didn't hear the codes) to lower the energy field.
"Okay, I'm outside. I'll send the codes to -- what the hell is that?!" the pilot exclaimed in surprise, then nothing but static.
last week next week
So the party waited until midnight before sneaking out of the guest quarters and finding a terminal to try to hack into the Sefosa clan's files. The 'prevent stupid people from breaking things' filter was defeated easily enough, and Hesperius started rummaging through whatever files people on the system had left readable -- he wasn't a real hacker, and wasn't about to break actual security, but he knew enough about computers to rifle around.
He found out that this was the right clan -- the original estimate for the work was in an old outdated backup copy of the work database. He found a map of the facility, detailing where the control room and security checkpoints were. Nothing else really useful.
So what now? They could *try* to fight their way down to the hangar and escape with the ship, but that would mean doing a lot of damage -- even assuming they succeeded -- and they'd be persona non-grata on the moon forever, and possibly hunted by the UTMN, which was closely allied with Luna. They could always try talking with the Sefosa clan to convince them to give the ship up to the Constantines, or set up a dummy corporation that could buy the ship from them (and then vanish off-moon).
They decided that the main barrier was the LFS's refusal to allow the Constantines to transfer credits, and set a search daemon across the web looking through various corporate balance sheets (as reported on their quarterly financial statements) for entities to which the moon was heavily indebted, and therefore required to accept payment from under its own rules.
Only one turned up right away -- the UTMN. Considering this possibility led to them imagining themselves on the vessel when the UTMN boarded it and searched it for contraband, and discovered the massive antimatter drive, and put them away in prison forever.
They also discovered that the Constantines were NOT on the list of corporations that were banned from trade with the moon. They decided that the information they were getting from the net was being filtered, and couldn't be trusted.
Meepas noticed that the air ducts, while far too small for any normal person to fit through, even a feriphal, were large enough for his tiny sugar-glider body to fit inside, and went off exploring. He mostly got lost, and almost got sucked into a couple fans, but did find the main shaft leading VERY FAR DOWN before giving up and heading back.
Suddenly, Hesperius had an idea -- the LFS could prevent the Constantines from trading *credits* to the Sefosa clan, but it couldn't stop them from landing with a freighter full of trade goods and paying for the work that way. "Why didn't they do that earlier?" "Because they don't even know that it's the Sefosa clan that has their ship -- their previous agents all vanished because they talked to Kalomine." That still left the question of the clan's reluctance to sell a weapon of mass destruction, however.
He also had another idea -- they could have some third party, "Oh, say, the Illiski," buy the ship from the clan, then sell it to the Constantines. If the Sefosa wouldn't sell to the Constantines, maybe they'd sell to the Illiski -- the Sefosa did a lot of business with Illiski. And Hesperius had the contacts to get the Illiski to make the attempt.
So they made a couple phone calls, to the Constantines first, and then to the Illiski, telling them the situation and asking them to contact the leader of the clan to negotiate a purchase. The Constantines were on board with the idea of going through the Illiski, although they wanted to make sure that the Illiski didn't ever have actual physical possession of the ship at any time during the transaction.
Hesperius assured the Constantine representative that he'd make sure of that... then completely failed to mention that condition when talking to his old Mentor, who was associated with *some* group of Illiski who were obviously up to something, since they'd made odd requests of Hesperius at various times, one of the requests being to help them get their hands on the ship in question.
So, figuring that one or the other would work something out, the party went to sleep for the night. In the morning, they were not woken up and given more work to do, as they'd been expecting. Wandering downstairs, they found only a single young Procyonisk of the clan on duty, in case other customers stopped by. "Everyone's at a clan meeting right now, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait to pay off your bill..." she said, "I wish I could be there, but *someone* has to man the shop."
Curious about this meeting -- although they figured it was about the contact they'd instigated the night before -- they sent Meepas back into the air ducts to spy on the meeting. It took some doing to find the meeting -- there was no air vent leading to the main hangar bay where the meeting was taking place (it was the only room large enough for the whole clan to gather in one place). He did find a window overlooking the bay, though, and saw that yes, the ship they were looking for was there, and yes, there were all the Sefosa clan arguing with each other. Not content to *watch* an argument, Meepas used his bottle-magic variant to burrow a hole in the glass so that he could hear.
The clan was arguing bitterly, and there seemed to be three sides: One wanted to sell the ship to the Constantines as originally agreed, one wanted to sell it to the Illiski because they were more trustworthy, and the last wanted to destroy the ship outright because it was too dangerous to sell to anyone. The head engineer who'd worked on the job was among the third group, and went on and on about how the 'special stardrive' they'd installed was NOT any sort of engine -- it was a weapon of mass destruction designed to annihilate everything in a light-second radius by spraying antimatter everywhere. Meepas turned on his phone so that the rest of the party could hear.
The argument seemed interminable, so the party called Meepas back. He was careful to repair the glass before he left -- five feet thick glass overlooking a hangar bay, where all the entrances are airlocks, hinted that maybe bad things would happen to the Sefosa if he left a hole there that they didn't know about and someone tried to open the doors. In doing so he had to heat it up to a red-glowing state so it would re-bond, which was noticed down below, but he was able to escape through the air ducts before they could find him.
With nothing obvious left to do here -- either the Illiski would buy it and sell it to the Constantines, or the Constantines would buy it with trade goods, they figured -- the party asked the Procyonisk on duty to ready their shuttle. They'd checked their credit balances, and they were all positive with the Sefosa (for setting up contact with a buyer who'd get this white elephant off their backs -- certainly worth the price of a room for the night, and a few broken windows and air-vent gratings). So she made a call, and they heard the pilot take their rented shuttle out through the 'secondary airlock', then send the codes (they didn't hear the codes) to lower the energy field.
"Okay, I'm outside. I'll send the codes to -- what the hell is that?!" the pilot exclaimed in surprise, then nothing but static.
last week next week
