Mission 22

An allied colony named Perun on the planet Velnias has gone quiet. We were supposed to send a diplomatic team there, but the colony has suddenly stopped transmitting everything except an automated passive warning signal, a dead man's switch triggered after nobody pressed the "we're OK" button for a few weeks. There were no signs of enemy activity in the area, although a ship did deliver supplies a short while before communications went down.
Whatever happened there happened fast enough that no signals could be sent by any of its approximately 15000 inhabitants, and it has rendered everyone there unable to deactivate the passive signal. That is literally all we know.
This is a hard mission. Newbies are unlikely to survive long and even veterans may struggle.
You will be dropped off at the colony's entrance, located in the centre of a flat salt plain. The colony itself is a high tech city hub that exists mostly underground. It is surrounded by several smaller family spheres.
Floors tend to lose a bit of meaning in colonies like this with complex 3d patterns, but Steve can guide you around and there will probably also be signs. For the most part, think of it like this: Imagine a big bunch of grapes with a fat tube instead of a normal stalk at the center. Each grape would be one of the "Family" pods. A misleading term since they're really more like a small community then a family, but they are generally involved in the farming of food, creation of some substance or other entrance level material creation. What it is will vary by pod. These pods all connect back to the main structure, a sort of vertically oriented industrial, governmental and entertainment complex where all the materials from the family pods are processed into goods, where all the life support and similar functions are handled, and where the residents can go to do something like watch a movie or get drunk enough to forget that they live in a mechanized underground labyrinth under the surface of some shitty rock in the far end of space.http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=108083.msg6370351#msg6370351
There is a nuclear reactor in the colony, but it should be large, shielded and obviously marked. Still, try not to blow it up. Unless blowing it up could help us kill whatever is in there.http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=108083.msg6377366#msg6377366
Investigate the colony, find out what happened, save anything valuable and try to stay alive. Keep your eyes open for traps and enemy ambushes, because they are very likely to be there.
The planet has good temperature and pressure, but oxygen content is low and there are dangerous gasses in the air. There should only be a few extremophiles alive out there, since it's not very good to multicellular life. Even though most of the colony is underground, the same might be true for certain areas that have been compromised or even the entire colony. Even if it isn't, we can't discount the chance of something contagious being there. Try to keep your helmet on, watch out for weird stuff and don't get impregnated by any aliens.
==Links==
== Mission Equipment ==
Quantum Entanglement Communicator (QEC, 6 tokens)
AWaCCP (3 tokens)
Mono machete (Tek, 4 tokens)
==Team==
Miyamoto de Bergerac (Radio Controlled) is Mission Control.
===Deep Team===
*Lars (Toaster)
*Lyra Arden (Lenglon)
*Yancy Hargraves (tryrar)
*Tek (Nunzillor)
*Taddok Find (Hapah)
===Shallow Team===
*Dubley Steptimus (NAV)
*Vanessa Anagrid (Xantalos)
*Elias Shrike (AkumaKasai)
*Flint Westwood (Parisbre56)
*Judas Smythe (Persus13)
==="Grave Team"===
*Alex Manson (Shaporia) In stasis in shuttle, nearly dead due to first sound wave
*Jobasio Hootzal (Yoink) Temp-dead due to first sound wave
*Kai Branden (Dutrius) Temp-dead due to first sound wave
*Ian Smith (HavingPhun) Temp-dead due to first sound wave
*Ben Neutro (bcneuf) Temp-dead due to first sound wave
==Mission Summary==
A sod team and their gunnerbot companions was dropped in with their drop pods. They searched the entrance and surrounding area and reported no hostiles, only corpses with no sign of combat or survivors.
With the drop site declared safe, the team landed on one of the landing pads with a standard shuttle. There they discovered that the corpses were people that had been liquefied inside their space suits, leaving only their skeleton intact. Yet they had not decomposed. They were perfectly preserved.
The ground was also strange. The sky there had a strange light pink-purple hue and yellowish tinged clouds, while the surface was an expanse of strange neon-greenish moss or perhaps slime. It turns out the slime was just a thin layer covering the salt bed below it. It looked kinda like bacteria cultures done in agar. There was no slime inside the colony itself. Certain organic chemicals seemed to be hanging around in the air; nothing dangerous but you generally don't find a planet with aerosolized phospholipids just floating around naturally. Scans made by Steve showed the effect extended in a radius of about 15 miles centred on the colony.
There were no radio transmissions detected on the surface besides standard automated ones.
There were other ships in other landing pads, small things made for travelling across the surface of the planet. One of them was investigated, but nothing important was found in it. It looked like it hadn't been used for some time.
The nearby storage area and docking cradle (for larger freighter ships to land) was also investigated but again nothing important was found. It looked like no ships had docked recently. The last recorded thing in the supervisors log was to move a number of large containers down into the colony and store them in an internal storage area near the industrial sector.
There was something like a soundwave, a palpable tingling wave, something sounding like distant discordant singing. Yet the suit's microphones recorded nothing. It could somehow be felt hitting the team from below, from underground, resulting in many cases of blood loss, headaches, fainting and feelings of illness. 5 team members died or were otherwise rendered unfit to continue the mission, while 5 others were significantly injured. The gunnerdogs and 30% of the sods were also killed. Even some manipulator brains were injured or killed. The ones that remained standing proceeded to the freight elevator along with some explosive and corrosive barrels, while the rest were transported to the shuttle by the sods and put in stasis to prevent further damage. 
Preliminary analysis from biometric sensors on the team members and sods by Miyamoto showed that the soundwave affected the entire body. The degeneration effect was getting worse (or at least its effects were getting more apparent), putting more pressure on the team to work quickly. Further examination by Vanessa's medical body revealed that whatever the soundwave was, it was causing the cell envelope of biological cells to break down. This left gaps in the flesh of those that remained alive, causing internal bleeding and impairing the function of organs.
The elevator was a large circular thing that seems common in those remote colonies. There were buttons for 25 levels on the elevator. The team decided to split into two to cover more ground, one team called "Shallow" and lead by Dubley making its way to level 10, while another called "Deep" and led by Lars made its way all the way to the bottom, to level 25.
Level 10 turned out to be a mall of sorts, a large doughnut shaped area around the main elevator shaft filled with stores and similar things one would find in a mall. A quick investigation revealed that there were no survivors. Everyone appeared to have died almost instantly, turning into unrecognisable puddles of slime and bones, their skeletons frozen in various postures of pain and shock. The air was thick with lipids, remnants of dissolved cells. Even unprocessed food had turned into slime. None of the skeletons appeared to be panicking, trying to hide or otherwise reacting and trying to protect themselves, they were all in normal positions. Shopping one moment, dead the next. None of the intact food had been taken. The chances of finding survivors were practically non-existent by now.
Meanwhile, above ground, the sods had finished putting the dead ARMy men in one shuttle and the dead sods and gunnerdogs in the other. Fearing that this was an ambush and that the enemy had some way to keep the team from retreating, the sod shuttle was ordered to fly towards the Sword first, with the player shuttle following it. It turns out their fears were not unwarranted, for the sod shuttle came under fire. A single, extremely precise shot took out both the shuttle's cockpit and remote control computer, forcing it to stop its ascent as automated emergency systems took over and forced it to stop. At best, signs of the presence of a LESHO Rifle. At worst, signs of the presence of a Shadow Walker, an elite assassin of the UWM.
At the same time, at level 25, the team led by Lars arrived at some sort of storage area, probably the internal storage area mentioned in the work orders in the above ground storage area. It was a large, tall, open space carved out of the stone of the planet and supported by several large metal pillars. In the poor illumination provided by the storage room's lights, a large number of corpses were visible. They were mostly clustered around a large container that they must have been moving at the time of their death.
Without a moment's delay, Lars headed straight for the container surrounded by bodies. One moment he is trying to open it. The next he is flying away, his battlesuit missing several layers of armour. He bounces off the ceiling and crashes into a stack of containers like an oversized bowling ball. And out of the container emerges an Arbiter of Peace. If you don't know what they are, click on that link and go read about them. Don't worry, I'll wait.
...
You did? Well, even if you didn't, I'm going to assume you did. Now imagine that superhuman literal killing machine, equipped with a kinamp club, monoatomic wire fabricators and both offensive and defensive automanipulators. Imagine a purely mechanical being that is insanely fast and durable. Imagine facing that thing, that thing that just took out the most powerful member of your team and the leader of the mission in one blow. Imagine that thing looking at you with its skull face, with the eyes of an unremorseful and highly efficient killer. And now imagine it taking a step towards you. And now imagine that you are an ARMy man, the best soldier the ARM has to offer. Now, what would that soldier do?
...
As you can probably imagine, everyone panicked and flipped the fuck out. Yeah. Turns out that those guys that died in the sound wave? They were the lucky ones.
There was a brief argument between the team on level 10 and Miyamoto, the team arguing about going down to rescue the team on level 25, while Miyamoto opting for the riskier option of detonating a nuke down there and hoping the team was lucky enough to survive. The level 10 team chose to disobey orders and had its fliers start make their way down towards level 25, while the rest stayed back and watched over the elevator shaft.
Meanwhile, the team on level 25 suffered further injuries while desperately trying to fight or run away. Lyra Arden was the first to die, sliced apart by the Arbiter's wires after her attack was thwarted by its defensive automanipulators. The only reason her death was not permanent was because she managed to user her amp to protect her brain at the last second. Many others lost their limbs to the same wire attack.
At this point, Miyamoto decided to initiate Green Storm, a secret mind control add-on made to the shock implants of most ARMy men that allowed their minds to be controlled by Steve for a limited amount of time. Moving under his flawless guidance, the team managed to hold off the Arbiter and trap him long enough to use Lars' battlesuit's escape pod to fly up the shaft, where they were caught by Flint and Dubley, who then used gravity-based attacks to block the elevator shaft behind the team, thus trapping the Arbiter there. Even Lyra's brain was reactivated, moving people around with superhuman speeds and making sure all members of the level 25 team got to the elevator shaft and on the escape pod on time.
That is, all except for Tek, who made the most heroic sacrifice. While the rest of the team was distracting the Arbiter, he got close to the automanipulator hidden in the container the Arbiter was protecting, the one that caused the soundwave. After getting a good look at it, he destroyed it and overloaded his Microwave Field Manipulator, thus ensuring the death and destruction of the Arbiter and any equipment he was protecting.
Unfortunately, that was bad news for everyone still alive. The colony started collapsing and sinking as the overload caused everything around it to dissolve into a mush of superheated plasma. It was left up to Dubley and Flint, as the only two fliers left, to fly the remaining team members out of there as quickly as possible.
As the team was flying up through the elevator shaft, the entire colony started breaking apart and tipping sideways like a capsizing ship. The team was forced to get off in a level and started heading up through it, with Steve acting as their GPS guidance. The escaping team below ground and the remaining sods above ground both fired everything they had, trying to make a hole to the surface. They succeeded and escape to the shuttle waiting for them. The shuttle came under fire as it escaped from the same LESHO-firing assailant, but Flint was able to use his battlesuit's body to protect it.
As the shuttle escaped, the colony and the area surrounding it received copious amounts of orbital bombardment to ensure that no UWM assassins survived. 
In the end the team survived the assassination attempt with only one permanent death and even managed to obtain enough data to possibly recreate the automanipulator that was used to kill everyone on the colony. Even though they did not investigate very thoroughly, had to receive help from Steve to survive and had to destroy the colony, the mission was tentatively deemed a success.
Category:Mission
==Casualties==
*30% of the sods and 100% of the Gunnerbots died in the first sound wave.
*Jobasio Hootzal - Tempkilled by the first sound wave
*Kai Branden - Tempkilled by the first sound wave
*Ian Smith - Tempkilled by the first sound wave
*Ben Neutro - Tempkilled by the first sound wave
*Alex Manson - (Almost) tempkilled by the first sound wave, stasis'd in shuttle
*Lyra Arden -Sliced up by the Arbiter's wires, brain still intact.
*Tek - Both feet sliced clean off by the Arbiter's wires, then incinerated in a heroic manip overload.
*Yancy Hargraves - Sliced in half by the Arbiter, but he's okay because he's a robot.
*Taddok Find - Sliced in half by the Arbiter, temp-dead.
*Lars - Arbiter punched right through his chest.
==Artifacts and Samples Recovered==
*Box of green slime from landing zone (in sod's shuttle)
*Space suit full of liquefied human and skeleton (in sod's shuttle)
*Box of green slime from landing zone (in player's shuttle)
*Space suit full of liquefied human and skeleton(in player's shuttle)
Category:Mission