should we help or hinder the assassination of Jedao?

[zuhrovet]

[In the current move, Flute has just informed the team that they are to accompany a group of Lanterner assassins to a conference where the Lanterners will attempt to assassinate Jedao. This post is for reactions and plans, both in and out of character.]

Sasha's quiet as the group heads from the Catastrophe Axe back to the Cantata. She wants to have a cup of tea and spend a few hours working her way further into the Axe's grid, but work comes before play, and figuring out how to handle Flute's instructions will be a fuck of a lot of work.

Once everyone's safely on the Cantata and the lock has closed behind them, she starts issuing orders. "Grid, please ask Sulen to meet me in my office in twenty minutes, and inform everyone there will be a team meeting in the common room in one hour. Reshad, I'll want you in the meeting with Sulen."

She pulls her memory stick out of her pocket and gives it to Alaric. "Find Aymad, stick this in the minigrid--not in the main one--and see what you can find out about the watchers in Flute's system in the next hour."

Then she turns to Seyli. "I know you want to yell. Go ahead and do it. You've got twenty minutes." [These are heptarchate minutes, so it's more like ten minutes in our calendar.]

Comments

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - paging everyone

[zuhrovet]

"Of course." Sasha slides the galley cupboard door shut, with perhaps more force than necessary.

Ione seems friendly, and sweet in her own odd way, and eminently breakable. Some of that has to be an illusion. Sasha knows that, of the two of them, Ione has spent much more time around people actively trying to kill her. But she wasn't Sasha's responsibility then, and the danger wasn't from her own side.

The closest thing to a remedy will be some version of Reshad's plan. They'll have to fuck up the Lanterner attack, and the attack on the station too, and somehow extricate Jedao without making themselves a target. So many threads to follow--and every strand a wire, and every knot a burning star.

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - paging everyone

[hoardingpearls]

Reshad noticed when Ione hustled past the hallway she'd just happened to be traversing, and she noticed again when the distinct sound of a cupboard being closed with what one might politely term "authority" reverberates from the direction she went. Voices: Ione and Sasha? The latter, angry.

She goes, curious and concerned in equal measures, and stops in the doorway, hands visible, face open. "Is something the matter?"

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Seyli and Sulen

[zuhrovet]

Sasha takes her tea, now fortified with jam, and her ration bar, and walks out of the galley and into the common room proper. The common room has multiple exits, and the fact that Reshad is blocking one of them does not in any way constitute a threat. Though Sasha can move her anyway. Hypothetically. "Sit, please. Both of you. Grid, please ask Seyli and Sulen to join us, and display the text tagged white-eight-white on the main screen."

Sasha makes herself sit, unwraps her ration bar, and counts to sixteen. Quill's orders appear on the screen, in tidy, even columns. "I uncovered more information about Quill's instructions, and Flute's contingency planning."

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Seyli and Sulen

[hoardingpearls]

Reshad sits, the deliberate care with which she'd entered the room extending to that motion.

As she reads the orders, her eyes widen and her lips tighten - appropriately into a flat slash of an expression, rather than a smile.

"Nasty, Flute," she mutters. "Not even a warning for your allies.

But discussion can wait until the others answer the summons. "Tea?" she offers, rising again, heading for the galley. Sasha already has some, but Reshad wants something to do with her hands.

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Seyli and Sulen

[zuhrovet]

Sasha unwraps her ration bar, listening to Reshad's movements in the galley, but carefully not turning. She adds a secondary display with a map of the conference section where the attacks will take place, beneath Quill's orders and Flute's annotation. Then she breaks her ration bar into small pieces and eats them, alternating with sips of tea. This is another cricket and lime leaf bar; it tastes oddly sharp with the jam, but then, Sasha's not eating ration bars for the flavor.

[Does the plan to vent atmosphere depend entirely on software/Spider & Firecracker, or will there be physical bombs?]

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Seyli and Sulen

[yhlee]

[Entirely on software and Spider & Firecracker. It's probable that Flute couldn't manage a reliable physical bomb setup in the time available.]

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Seyli and Sulen

[kese_seyli]

"You paged?" Seyli asks as they enter the room and takes stock of Sasha and Reshad and determines it's casual enough they can drop down into a chair. It's not like anyone seems to stand on any kind of formality around here. They haven't noticed the screen yet.

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Seyli and Sulen

[bariolage]

Ione sits, though there's an air of unconvinced about her facial expression when she looks at Sasha for a moment that she's not trying to hide. Ione Does Not Believe You. It doesn't last, though, as she is instead now sitting, reading what's up on the screen before her.

Her brow furrows and she squints, and then looks over her shoulder to Reshad: "Surprise me," is probably a request and not a specific kind of tea. She does not realize the dangers yet of telling a (former) Shuos to surprise her. Seyli, or their entrance, gets a weak smile.

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Sulen and Alaric

[zuhrovet]

"Right," Sasha says. This is going to be a long and ugly conversation; no sense delaying. "Grid, please play the summary I'm about to make to Sulen; they can listen as they walk. And tell Alaric we'd like him up here, as well."

She straightens, and tries to speak slowly and carefully. Her hands are empty, but she's counting her points by tensing her fingers. "I took a look at Flute's records, and I learned three things. First, her orders definitely come from Quill, but she has not connected the source of those orders with Personnel. Second, Quill specifically stated that the worst-case scenario is for Jedao to become aware that rift travelers are interested in him. That makes me think perhaps we should prioritize sharing that information with him. And third, Flute has a contingency plan, if the Lanterners' attempts to kill Jedao fail. She's going to vent the atmosphere from that segment of the conference."

"For rapid decompression of a room the size of an auditorium, you're looking at a hole perhaps so by so"--Sasha shapes a square in the air with her hands, perhaps half a meter on a side--"with just a few minutes before losing consciousness. They're looking at a software solution, not explosives, so to get that area of exposure, they'll have to override the emergency airlocks."

Re: how dare other people have contingency plans - literally paging Sulen and Alaric

[slybrarian]

"My guess is that they'll target the safety systems," Alaric said, nodding as Sasha explains the nefarious plan. "They could convince the emergency locks that there's pressure on the outside and it's safe to open. Alternatively, they could rig the life support sensors in the compartment to show that there's a dangerous overpressure. The system tries to compensate by removing atmosphere and keeps the vents open until it's a vacuum inside because the sensor readings don't change. Meanwhile the main doors all seal because of their own sensors show a pressure drop, and by the time anyone inside notices they're too hypoxic to use the manual overrides."

how not to kill Jedao? - paging everyone

[zuhrovet]

"Yeah, I'd bet on fucking with the emergency locks. They should be on a separate circuit, but if there's physical proximity there are ways to issue a command, and that's just the sort of loophole Spider likes."

She looks around, at the assembled team. "We can deal with the atmosphere problem. But before that. We want Jedao alive, because fuck if I'm going to do what Quill wants. We don't want Flute's people to know we have him, because then we become a target. How are we going to accomplish this goal?"

Re: how not to kill Jedao? - paging everyone

[slybrarian]

"If we're un-sabotaging the air supply already, we could introduce knockout gas - say, a safe exotic crowd-control agent like Sevenfold Soothing Scilla - and swoop in through unsecured emergency locks," Alaric suggests. "Or we pretend to be medics after one of the assassination attempts. How hard could it be to dress up, right?"

Re: how not to kill Jedao? - paging everyone

[zuhrovet]

"The hells, Alaric, you know dressing up isn't enough. There are six moths full of surveillance equipment we have to fuck, or they'll just read off our haptics. I'll take that as a proposal for sedative gas or Lanterner assist, though. Ione, I'm assuming you have a stronger tranquilizer available? Seyli, any thoughts on recovering Jedao?"

*shows up late*

[venndaai]

Sulen enters the office quietly. "Apologies for my lateness. Have we decided who we're sending to train our allies? It sounds like they might need to perform some sabotage."

Re: *shows up late*

[kese_seyli]

Any thoughts on recovering, Jedao? That almost is enough to make them want to punch someone.

"He was well liked by the his soldiers, if we can't pose as medics, is there the same issue posing as Kel?" They ask, as Sulen enters the room. "I don't doubt they'd close ranks around him." They nod toward Sulen. "I think that would be me."

[posing as Kel]

[yhlee]

[Note that this is an era before formation instinct, so Kel do NOT all have the same body language and y'all don't have to worry about that, if posing as Kel is an avenue you wish to pursue.]

[hacking the station]

[zuhrovet]

[Will Sasha be able to try to hack various systems (the conference center, tests of the Rahal accesses, etc.) while the Cantata is in transit? Or does interstellar travel mess up grid access?]

Re: [hacking the station]

[yhlee]

[Interstellar travel will mess up grid access--for reliable results she'll basically want to be on-site.]

Re: [hacking the station]

[zuhrovet]

[But Spider and Firecracker are staying in this system, right? Are the six moths basically holding a giant ansible collection?]

Re: *shows up late*

[zuhrovet]

"Also Reshad, Gerae, and Aymad, in my current thinking: Reshad to talk to people, Gerae to memorize what they say in answer, and Aymad to act as a tech and work his way into the Lanterners' systems. If the Lanterner assassins are going to be wearing our armor, we may be able to sabotage them by glitching its software, though I'm open to other suggestions."

Sasha taps her fingers on her mug. "And I'm not saying we can't pose as medics. We'll need to fuck a lot of rebellion surveillance, no matter what we do. I like the Kel idea, though, because that explains why Jedao would end up somewhere that Spider's eyes can't see."

Maps and accesses

[zuhrovet]

[How much do we know right now about the conference center layout? I'm particularly interested in how closely they monitor the outside of the station, and in what the docking process will look like. Could we conceivably end up on the same corridor as other ships? Or will exiting through customs point directly at our moth?]

Re: Maps and accesses

[yhlee]

[Assume that you have a map of the exhibition areas. The exterior is fairly closely monitored, but things will also be chaotic. A little digging on space internet will reveal to Sasha that one of the things that attendees do to screw around and/or "advertise" is to hack and/or otherwise prank and/or take down station security, and there are multiple incidents every time this conference is held; Sasha should be able to exploit this to cover y'all's escape.

This portrayal may be brought to you by the fact that one of my friends is a security consultant and every time she goes to Defcon, she lets us know that if we get messages from her claiming that she lost her wallet and she needs to be wired money for a plane ticket home, it's NOT her, it's some Defcon attendee who's hacked her phone.]

Re: *shows up late*

[hoardingpearls]

"If I remember my history classes correctly, we should be able to be convincing Kel at this point in time. They didn't get the standardized body language until later." Reshad goes still, though her eyes continue to flick from face to face.

"I may be able to be a decoy," she suggests. "They know me as the captain of our little deception-" a smirk, fleeting- "not as anything else. So I can make a scene at the appropriate moment, or try to get close to their infiltrators. Whichever is more likely to help when we fox their plans."

The last verb sounds almost like another, similar word, the pun fully intentional.

Kel impersonators - paging Aymad, Seyli, Sulen, and Virmad

[zuhrovet]

But Seyli was Kel. Why wouldn't they be convincing? To people who hadn't traveled with them, at least? Oh. Right. Eight hells.

"You mean, the Kel aren't all bound together, yet," Sasha says, for Sulen's benefit. "Who are we using as our false Kel? If it's Seyli, we'll have to make sure the Lanterners can't report their involvement. But we could send one of the Rahal. Or Aymad, if I pose as a tech instead of him."

Re: Kel impersonators - paging Aymad, Seyli, Sulen, and Virmad

[kese_seyli]

"There is no reason I can't pose as Kel, a convincing one at that. I can do a crash course on current standards." Seyli's lips twist at their own wording. They don't particularly want to pose as Kel, but they can get the job done. "My options as posing for something other than a solider are limited, to be honest."