40K Dark Heresy: The Recondite War

[The Yosemite Bear]

hmm, a circle bisected by a lightning bolt, possibly some order, however given it's location It's probably a very covert group.

[NecronLord]

Mithras could hear the sound of a man’s – or at least, it seemed so - breath over the comm. bead, but there didn’t seem to be anyone using the network at the moment.

Troveo looked at the bisected corpse and winced, glancing at Ajax, covered in blood, and the entrails pooled on the floor. “Nothing Sir,” he said. He didn’t recognise either of the two men who’d been sporting autoguns, nor the one armed corpse, nor did he recognise anything about them.

Meanwhile, merely several minutes after the call (payment was a great incentive) a cable-car arrived, containing a quartet of men and woman carrying bags and dressed in grey robes over which they wore dark red aprons. “Someone wanted a ciurgeon honoured sirs?” the lead woman said, glancing back at the bloody remnants of the heretics…

[The Yosemite Bear]

those can go to servator duty, there's a few of us with soem wounds, though one of us took two armour pierciers to the head.

[Lancer]

Mercurius opened his eyes to look at the chiurgeon and assistants.

"See to Darien first, he took two solid rounds to the face. I was hit in the lower ribcage by one of these." He indicated the partial clip of hyper-density penetrators. "Ajax was also shot in the chest. Eli and Scar have been wounded as well, but not quite as seriously."

He slumped back into his seat to conserve his strength, though he did spare an effort to check and see if his charge packs were ready.

[Block]

"So, anything to report on the escaped sniper? Anyone find him? Or any traces of him?"

[Jaevric]

Before letting the chirurgeon attend to him, Darien directs Troveo's attention to the coats the snipers had been wearing.

"Do those colors mean anything to you, or have you seen coats like that before?"

[Balrog]

Mithras walked back up to join the rest of the group, the heretic comm-bead still in his ear. "He's still alive, but he isn't talking. He could be the only one left, but my money's on there being more of them out there. Oh," he added, taking the heretic comm-bead out of his ear and replacing it with his own. "We now have a few extra comm-beads for the rest of you without one already," adding with a sly grin.

[Block]

"Well, any trail? Any trace of where he may have gone? If we capture him we may be able to beat something out of him."

[NecronLord]

The Cirugeons set about looking at injuries, two for Darien, one for Mercurius and Ajax.

[Zablorg]

Crom, in a desperate effort to be vaguely useful or interesting, attempted to find a way to track down their elusive sniper. He remembered something, a quaint little tracking method he learned from one of his friends. It was simply a small game then, but it might serve some practical value here.

"If..." Crom paused, formulating his words.

"If we got... two of these here vox beads, and have Mercruirius somehow find out where they were both transmitting from, that would give us their precise coordinates, wouldn't it? Can you do that, Merc?"

It occured to him that he had never seen a vox with an indicator about where it was recieving from, other than the special one his friend had shown him, but it was worth a shot.

[Lancer]

"Not with something this small. Microbeads like this usually only have basic send/recieve capabilities; if we wanted to triangulate with any degree of accuracy, then we'd need a vox thief or vox caster."

"However, there were tracks from the fourth shooter headed down into some sort of manufactorium. We didn't pursue at the time, but once our injuries are treated, we could go look into it."

[NecronLord]

The Medicae assistants and the Chirugeons had some success on everyone, notably Scar, who would perhaps just about have one from his experience; the others all had wounds that would need bed-rest, which the doctor made a point of saying, “You should all have proper bed rest, preferably in a good facility, I can recommend several in the area…”

Meanwhile, Troveo did not to recognise the coat worn by the sniper, nor the sigil they’d found on the body. Mithras, meanwhile, could still hear the sounds of a man running through the vox-bead…

[White Haven]

Ajax thanks the Chirugeon once he's done working, then stands, moving slowly at first to test the spot-repair work. When he fails to explode into a blood-fountain or anything similarly silly, he moves over to the others, "Well, pursue the runner into unknown territory, or pull back and proceed with the initial plan? Possible good lead, but risky."

[Block]

Scar shakes his head, setting off after the remaining sniper, attempting to track him through the manufacturing plant. "You will NOT escape me."

[Zablorg]

"I'll come too. They might try to jump you and then you'd die all alone. And that would be a shame, probably."

An idea passed across Crom's face, and he grinned.

"Speaking of... would we be able to reconfigure these vox-beads into a single network so that we can communicate with each other from afar?"

[Lancer]

Mercurius nodded. "It should be possible, but without a vox-caster unit, range is going to be limited to a kilometer at best. I'll see what I can do; this should only take a few moments."

Mercurius took the remaining vox-beads and began the task of readjusting them.

[Jaevric]

"Alright, Troveo, back to the ship. I'll see to it the crew gets you some food and water and the chance to use the facilities."

Taking Troveo back to the ship and arranging for him to get some basic necessities -- albeit at gunpoint -- Darien returns to the rest of the band to see if the plans had been settled out.

"That sniper's long gone, but I suppose Scar and Crom might get lucky. I think I should go see the Arbites; they may recognize those coats or that symbol. The coats look like a uniform to me and those guys were not amateurs."

[White Haven]

"As my particular mission is to attract attention and be shot at, I'm going to do as the good Chirugeon instructed and see about letting myself mend first." Ajax comments with a thin, wry smile, "Under the circumstances, however, I think I'll take my leisure in our helicopter, rather than a medical facility."

[NecronLord]

Troveo was disappointed, he’d been hoping the entire group would go off and get themselves killed in some horrible way, and thus let him escape. Of course, this wasn’t because he knew much, but simple wishful thinking.

Also, he was fairly certain that Ajax would begin to smell, and he was a psyker anyway…

Meanwhile, outside, as Mecurius slid a probe from his electro graft into the hair-sized control port on the vox bead, the bead emitted a little squeal-pop noise. A feedback spirit passionlessly told his hindbrain that the vox-bead was not manufactured to military charge-handling standards, and had been overloaded, and would require a reboot.

Down the opposite-slope, the clear footprints petered off in the heli-fuel works, and, after a few minutes, a short, rotund man dressed in greasy overalls and casually smoking a suicidal lho stick, shouted from a gantry, “Eh! You down there, with the guns! You don’t want to be firing anything off around here. You could start a fire!”

[Block]

With an evil grin Scar replied,"Fire cleanses the heretic citizen, and since a sniper just ran through here after taking a shot at us, this place may be in need of some cleansing, unless of course you'd like to tell me where he went? Or at least tell me what the insignia he was wearing is." With that Scar gave a short detailed description and scanned the area visually, attempting to spot any further signs of his prey.

[NecronLord]

"Haven't a zot what you're talking about!" he said, in the local vanacular, "and I ain't seen nobody but you..."

[Balrog]

"That sniper's long gone, but I suppose Scar and Crom might get lucky. I think I should go see the Arbites; they may recognize those coats or that symbol. The coats look like a uniform to me and those guys were not amateurs."

"Agreed," Mithras responded, shouldering his lasgun. "I'll come with, and we can stop by the local PDF station and see if they know anything either. If we find out anything, we'll try and contact the rest of you over the comm-beads."

[Block]

"Haven't a zot what you're talking about!" he said, in the local vanacular, "and I ain't seen nobody but you..."

"How many ways out of here are there? Did anything take off recently?"

[Lancer]

Troveo was disappointed, he’d been hoping the entire group would go off and get themselves killed in some horrible way, and thus let him escape. Of course, this wasn’t because he knew much, but simple wishful thinking.

Also, he was fairly certain that Ajax would begin to smell, and he was a psyker anyway…

Meanwhile, outside, as Mecurius slid a probe from his electro graft into the hair-sized control port on the vox bead, the bead emitted a little squeal-pop noise. A feedback spirit passionlessly told his hindbrain that the vox-bead was not manufactured to military charge-handling standards, and had been overloaded, and would require a reboot.

Mercurius swore under his breath in a creative but fully fluent mix of Hive Sibellan and Tech. Glancing inside, he saw Troveo's look of dissapointment and snapped at him. "You do know that your collar is set to a dead-mans switch, correct? If any one of us is foolish enough to get ourselves killed, then your head gets ripped from your body by a tongue of flame. You'll probably remain concious just long enough for your head to hit the ground before the shock kills you."

The abrupt shift in expression on Troveo's face from dissapointment to horror was extremely gratifying, and Mercurius worked on rebooting and resetting the microbeads, this time requesting the assistance of the helicopters onboard cognator through an interface mechadendrite.

[NecronLord]

"Dozens, I'd guess. There's a fence on the lowside, but you can jump it. And no sir, not from here. Just the pads."

Meanwhile, the comm-bead was disappointingly reticent, immediately tuning into an unencrypted frequency used by the Ministorum, and through the link, playing a hymn into Mercurius' senses. Troveo obligingly gulped and shuffled off away from the sinister tech priest as much as his supervision would allow.