Session Nine: Rus’ To Judgement - kaseido/NeoTokyo GitHub Wiki

304 Bezos 1 Fire-Water

Dr Madison, Rina, and Rook are down at the Net cable backbone, preparing their drone for launch. Meanwhile, three hydrofoils close in to attack the TreeHouse boat on the surface!

Two passes by the attacking speedboats do negligible damage, but after dropping off their divers, the third round hits catastrophically, and the security boat starts to sink. The boat that lands a devastating barrage comes in for a close circling, giving the crew the finger. Lane shoots back and misses wildly. As Quan packs her into a life vest, Lane calls Search and Rescue. As a TreeHouse Obsidian Client, they get a helo dispatched immediately at speed.

Undersea, Rina gets the drone connected to the cable backbone. She very deliberately snubs the bad guys in the water and goes back to work. Her tail swishes to show her disdain for them. Rook maneuvers to protect the drone and Rina. Rina takes out a second diver, protecting Calder, who’s seriously injured. Rook heads on up to the sinking boat for cover. Rina takes out the last one, and bites his ankle for vengeance as he heads up to the surface.

Rina heads back to the drone ,repairs it, gets it on its way, and heads up to the sinking boat.

At the sinking boat, Rina, Rook, and Calder take some shelter. Rook stabilizes Calder, but Rina can’t get Rook patched up. Madison shoos off the sharks coming to check out all the blood in the water, and gets Rook patched up.

At the surface, Lane takes out two of the three dive troopers. One manages to kill Quanh before the rescue copter arrives and finishes him off.

Back at the TreeHouse security suite, Rina is ready to jack in to the drone’s connection to Rus’Net. Getting in is easy: Rus’Net is designed to keep its subjects from accessing out much more than to keep anyone from getting in. It’s vaguely like FeliNet, which is designed to be invisible to the outside but open to the inside, with limited points of contact with the global net.

It’s not hard to get a sense of the overall net architecture: the Novy Kreml is an immense glowing red digital fortress, surrounded by a few relatively small industrial and infrastructure sites. The surrounding digital architecture is virtually barren (heh, virtually) – you’ve seen slum blocks with more action.

The Novy Kreml, though, is world-class stuff: you’re not getting in there. Except, wait, the Ministry of Media is partially outside the fortress wall – it’s actually the contact point with the global net. And if you want read-only, you can walk in the front door.

_The Tsar’s Own Truth Morning News: “The Crown Prince will be touring the new Techtronika Heavy Fabrication Facilities adjacent to the Tereshkova Skyport downriver at noon on Bezos 1 Earth, after the Imperial Ball to celebrate his sister’s coming of age. _

“The complex includes state of the art aviation manufacturing – and the new Main Hangar is so large it generates its own weather! In addition to the personal thanks of His Royal Highness, the Seventh Heavy Shockworker Brigade will receive the blessings of the Deep Ones from Grand Patriarch Armitage himself, who will be joining His Royal Highness and several other honored guests.”

Lane puts the pieces together: likely Zhukov and the spaceplane will be at the same place in a couple days. She turns to thinking about the party: she’s going to want an invitation. Rina goes looking for guest list: “List of Super Poncy Nonsense.” Issued by the Seneschal of the Royal Family.

Calder is going shirtless and showing off his big bandage. He tells Rina that Umbral has a local fixer in Port Romanov that she works with sometimes, Crimson Frost. Don’t read her in on the op, but if you need contacts, local recommendations, etc., she can hook you up. And all tourists in Port Romanov have to contract with a “guide:” she’s licensed as one, so that’s out of the way. She’ll meet you on landing and get you to your hotel.

Rina wonders if she and Moopsie are going to be an issue in Port Romanov. Yeah, they absolutely will. Rina swishes her tail.

Jiefan calls Lane from the hospital: she’ll be down for four days as they replace a few shattered bones. The good news is, she’ll get to keep the grafted muscle and bone lace that will be holding everything in place. She’ll be better than new. Really. Maybe three days, if she can sneak out. It’s like she can sense in her soul the team is getting attacked without her.

Lane tells her to meet them in time for the Techtronika tour on Day 4. She doesn’t mention her concern that Jiefan won’t be there for the ball. She does tell Jiefan that they’ve got good muscle backing them up, and she shouldn’t worry.

Rina looks to Markov and Butina, when they arrive, on how handle the “ears and robot issue” and the fixer. Maybe fashion blogging?

Moopsie and her entourage of a rollerball manager and two psychiatrists arrives. Apparently they did some good: Moopsie’s pretty much her usual self. She runs over to Rina right away and gives her a big hug – which was a lot more comforting when she was soft and furry, and not made of pointy bits.

Rina raises the issue right away. “It’s not a normal coming out party, it’s like hi, I’ve reached puberty and can be bought.” Moopsie suggests maybe they should rescue her.

Turns out Markov and Calder are both big pro-am water polo fans: they’re quickly lost in their own incomprehensible conversation. But he hears Moopsie suggest maybe she could get a stealth mod, and agrees they can do that.

Rina turns Moopsie over to the other nerds. Everybody else goes to get patched up. Rina makes the rounds having casual conversations with everybody. Lane spends some time with Madison. Madison is looking forward to Lane’s return, and will be on that sub when the time comes: she’s a mermaid not a SEAL, but there’s a lot a metallurgist can do to fuck shit up underwater. She pulls Lane into the shallows for a passionate full-tail embrace. It’s worth having to change into dry clothes for.

You’re all off to the airport, and onto a smallish but comfortable corporate shuttle.