Who's flying the Body Snatcher and who's remote-piloting the Morningstar?

What is Max doing?

I'll need an inventory of what Max has left.

Given that the Body Snatcher is unlikely to need to manuever as well as the Akuma, might be good to have Swims flying the Snatcher and Luis handling the Akuma. Alternately, Swims may want to be the one controlling his ship on it's last flight.

Whichever way that goes, Luis will take control of the ship Swims isn't working with.

Max has:

Khiraba armor, currently marked as "enemy" to Imperial IFF
Beam Rifle + 2 spare barrels, IFF-inactive
SCAR-H 120/150
Colt M1911 16/21
PB6P9 silenced 9mm handgun 1/8
Stinger

Alrighty.

Replace the barrel on the Beam Rifle and pop a fresh mag into the SCAR-H.

How long would it take me to nullify the enemy IFF marking?

You basically need to get back into their network and get one step ahead of their IFF with your jammer. They were able to sniff you out because it takes a concerted effort to stay "logged in" as it were, and with you running around shooting guns, their ECM guys had no real resistance.

You can probably get your IFF back up but at this point they know they're looking for a shot-up Khiraba. It should fool drones and you might get the drop on fresh Turai but you know at least some of them know how to disable their weapons' IFF on the fly.

Did the Toughbook survive?

Oh, yes, right. The Toughbook survived. I didn't have my Big List of Loot at the office so I forgot to mention that.

Is it possible for them to now track me since I'm wearing the suit? If so, I'm turning my Toughbook's jammer up to 11 and beating feet. I'd like to say I picked up some countertracking from the Deltas, but that may be a bit much.

Also, is the Khiraba suit still worth wearing or is it fragged beyond repair?

I don't suppose there'd be any hope for a Frisbee use for Bello?

I was planning on just waving it over him and leaving it at that, but I suppose I could use it on him.

All I can say:

Kickass. I love it when a plan comes together.


Anyway, hopefully that'll get them off our trail a bit. As for te Snatcher, I think we should comm Orbital Traffic Control or whatever, and ask them to clear our current vector. Signal that we have the problem contained, but need a little bit of time to purge our computers and run diagnostics before we're ready to fire up. Until then, if they could mark our current projected path as a potential hazard zone and keep it clear, that would be good. Getting Dunamis to make a few of the calls might add to the realism. Then we play the standoffish mercenary team who've just seen their job get blown up by those f---ing fleet idiots, wait a bit until the Gate embargo is lifted, then get out of here before somebody tries to pin the screwup on the blameless private contractor.

No no no, we can't go anywhere near that gate. We weren't the only targets they were looking for, and there's a lot less room to manuver in orbit. Those ships are still scanning every single ship in the area, so there's no way we could get through that gate. We continue the "Our engine is busted" routine like you said, but we head down to the ground as soon as we can, since I think they might find a little ship like the Snatcher filled with crashers to be somewhat suspicious. We hook up with the resistance, give them the Body Snatcher to get to a safe place, and we head to the gateship through the foot gate, using the chaos at the ground terminal as cover if our friends don't have another way out. Besides, we can't get there through the orbital gate and Dunamis only has the foot gate code. We hang out there for a day or so, then gate back to Earth with our resistance friends and assorted crew.

Edit: Oh, and be sure to turn off all the non-essential systems. Davis doesn't want to be the one who loses the next round of Musical Chairs.

Either way, the difficult part is getting to a gate and exiting the system. (I'm sure if there was some option to make it to the orbital gate in one piece, our rebel friends would have a gate code that at least takes us somewhere else where there's less heat.)

The gate in the city has the obvious problem that it's in the middle of the city and we can't just walk up there, dial out and get away without being scrutinized.

So, either way, we need a good excuse and we need it soon.

If the Body Snatcher wasn't failing on its wiring, I would be tempted to vote for a "Run like hell for the orbital gate and pray we don't get shot down in the momentary confusion" kinda plan. But we're already pushing our luck being up here.

Gatac

There is also the matter of the good Dr. Max.

On that note, Max did drop a beacon, and we do have a squad of "State of the Badass Art" characters who haven't stretched their legs in awhile.

The problem is that half of the Imperium army is between us and him, we don't know what planet he's dialed, and we're supposed to be dead. Suddenly showing up fifteen minutes later trying to get through to Max would show we were alive, and defeat the entire purpose of the suicidal run with the Akuma. Unfortunately, Max must suceed or fail on his own, but I think Dieter (and Max himself) knew that would probably be the result.

A. All that assumes we get caught

and B. That I care. Or, more verbosely, that the radical shift the last thread or two worth of game has gone on hasn't bored me to the point that occasionally Ivan forgets that he should be posting to this board, feels bad, then discovers that really a 1 post every three week schedule is working out just fine.

Not that, from a literary perspective, that last scene wasn't pretty sweet.

Yeah, right now, it's really fucking slow. Unfortunately, we have to play it safe right now, since we need to make it out of here without getting noticed, or we'll be doublely-screwed. Now, say if we have to fight our way into the gate complex after knocking out comms and security somehow, some real black-ops raid shit, that would be awesome...

Yes, it's a gimme, but this way you don't have to leave people behind to die in the gate control room.