Subject: DunDraCon part 3 of 4 Date: Tue, 30 May 95 11:34:31 -0700 From: Liralen Li The alarm went off at about 7:30am and Mark and I scrambled for the shower and arrived at Carl's game still dripping a bit. -------- Save the Shoemaker-Levy 9!! --------- We all started at a space travel conference in Washington D.C., most of us there looking for a job, a few of us not. One of the amusing things was that Carl had kinda made a character for me, 'Justice' -- a female Navy Top Gun pilot that was kicked out of the Navy 'cause she was too darned aggressive. She was ferrying a plane to another base and it wasn't HER fault that it happened to be armed and two pilots of other jets decided to try and pick on her. During the conference she was looking for a job that would take her up into space. Not one of those rocket in a cans for her, thank you, but the *real* thing. Problem was that there were just all kinds of guys trying to pick her up and not take her all that seriously. So she went to sleep that night kinda disgruntled. Then the fun began. Gunshots in the hallway. Justice didn't wear 'little guns' she was too used to the big ones to care about the little ones, but there was a glass in the room, one of those nice heavy highball glasses. So she picked one up on the way to the door, and she popped out into the hallway in nothing but her extra-large Navy blue t-shirt with a highball glass ready and waiting to bop whomever was stupid enough to wake her up. Across the hall, in the doorway of the room there, was the Russian astronaut she'd met earlier in the evening wearing nothing but satin red boxer shorts with a hammer and sickle on the butt. He had a lovely semi-automatic and was firing it at a really, really tall dude in a trenchcoat who was firing some strange blue rod thing into a room where there were other strange noises. From the sounds that she'd heard, the original gunshots had come from the room that the big guy was attacking. The bullets the Russian had fired into the big guy's chest, though, weren't having much affect. On seeing her come out in the hallway, he yelled, "Be safe, go back in the room!" Justice didn't, instead, she readied herself to attack the huge guy who had been firing into another room. The Russian then slid his gun at her and rushed the big guy and HIT him in the jaw. The big guy's head spun 180 degrees and then spun back. Whoops. Wow... Justice didn't like that. The head proably wasn't a vital area. So she shot for the guy's sternum, right over the Russian's head. It took the whole head off the big guy and neon green blood spurted everywhere. Neon green... kinda like a hilighter. Yow. The alien fell with a thud and didn't move. The Russian barreled for the beseiged door, so Justice followed, covering him. She got to the door just in time to see the Russian push an equally big guy off the balcony. Just to make sure, she shot at the flying body as it went down, four times. She checked the ledge to both sides and didn't see anything. By the time she got out the hallway was nearly filled with a bunch of guys from the conference. One was Dr. Jeffery Falcon, a two-fisted rocket scientist, and he was the one who had been in the room, following him was a tall, slender woman... think of Demi Moore, stretch her to 6' tall but equal mass, so she was really slender... ash blond hair to her waist and eyes that were slanted and completely and totally black, as if her pupils were totally dialated. She called herself Scout and she said that she was here to help save our world. Justice also found the body of the alien that she'd blasted the head off further down the hallway, this time with a huge pipe wrench head buried in the torso of it. Along with the body were a number of folks from the Convention. There was the Russian pilot, the Irish engineer who had planted the pipe wrench in the alien, a science fiction author with a camera taking pictures, and a JPL scientist studying the body. Scout said that the alien was one of those that wanted to 'purify' the Earth for their own use, and that would involve completely destroying all human life. She said that she needed our help to save our world, but wouldn't tell us any details until we were out of the hotel. She was also astonished at a civilization that was able to invent 'star bombs' without real space access. In the meantime, the Russian took the blue wand from the body, and everyone wrapped the body up in a blanket, and took it to the cargo elevator. Justice followed, 'cause from the way that Scout was talking it sounded like the Scout had *real* space flight, not the stupid riding a can on a rocket way the Earth had of getting into Space. The whole gang crowded into the elevator and then the blue wand started whining at a very high pitch and the body started vibrating at a very low pitch. The Russian hopped up through the elevator car roof and attempted to leave the wand on a previous floor. We all heard the tink-tink tunk as the wand fell off the shelf he put it on. So the JPL guy hit the button for the next floor and we all piled out. Literally. With the rolls made, the Russian, Justice, and the SF author all made it out the elevator doors at the *same* time while the doors were just a foot apart. The rest exited in a like hurry and left the body and the wand and raced for the stairs down... and the elevator door closed. We hit the ground floor at about the same time as a squad of police and the elevator. Since all hotel stairways have to have an exit to the outside, most of us headed that way and went out into the parking lot and hit the ground. All the windows of the entire lowest floor of the hotel blew out with the explosion. After a very intense argument and a bit of wandering about the hotel, and going by the pool where Justice was able to see the concrete where the other alien had landed and had left nothing more than cracks, the group headed back out into the parking lot. A fairly nearby shuttle bus had most of its windows blown out as well, and the driver was incapacitated... so we carried him out of the shuttle, left him for all the emergancy vehicles to find. I took his shoes. We took the shuttle. In the shuttle we asked Scout what was next. Her reply was, "We must leave this gravity well and go out into synchronous orbit with the Russian space station, ***." We look at each other, it's 1994 and there certainly aren't easy ways out into orbit. By chance the space shuttle is launching the next morning and the JPL guy calls in some favors and we get to meet with the astronauts. Justice has gone through the Space Shuttle training and knows all that there is to know about flying the brick on a rocket. Not that she *likes* that kinda work; but she can do it. The only plan we seem to be able to think of is to go in, interview the astronauts, overcome them, put on their suits and go up in the shuttle. We steal a jet to get from Washington D.C. to Kennedy in Florida, and Justice flies it fast enough to satisfy her need to push it's envelope a bit. Once there we get the VIP treatment and then find that the commander of the mission is one of Justice's ex-boyfriends. Not an entirely friendly encounter, so she just puts his lights out and then the rest of the group does their thing on everyone else. We put on the suits and go out to the shuttle and start the countdown sequence, and put most of the launch stuff to manual and get out of there eventhough Control didn't sound too happy. So We're Off.... and the JPL genius has to redo most of the flight equations to make our orbit with ***, which is no problem for the super genius (and some really hot dice), and we hook up. The Russian has to go in, 'cause ehe's the only one that knows ***'s safe zones. Jeffery Falcon goes along for backup and it's probably a good thing. Scout gives the Russian a white rod that will completely disintigrate what it touches, once. They make it onto the station, and find that the neon-green blooded aliens have taken over and pretty much vivisected the crew of the station. The Russian and Falcon make it off the station with a slew of nuclear bombs, some nasty fighting armor, controls for the bombs, and they manage to leave one bomb behind and uses it to self-destruct the station. We manage to pull the shuttle out to a safe distance before blowing everything up. Then we get to Scout's ship, which was hidden on the other side of ***. The Ship is nearly organic. Scout pretty much uses an ointment for being able to be out in space, and the whole ship is built on the same technological principles. It is also a Scout ship, not a fighter, and there is no weaponary on it. Once in her ship, she tells us that the aliens are coming *in* the ice and rock globuals that make up the Shoemaker-Levey 9. That each meteor chunck is a piece of a system that they're trying to setup to 'cleanse' the Earth, and if we destroy any piece we'll destroy the system. So the trick is figuring out if the nuclear bombs that we have are enough to 'take out' a mile of ice and rock. Basically, we decided that the bombs wouldn't reach all the way through... that we'd have to bring them in. So the Russian put on the battle armor, and the rest of us followed, each carrying a bomb. We landed on one of the meteors, found access gates down in to the bowels of the station and killed pretty much every alien we ran across. We went all the way down, planted the bombs according to the instructions by the engineer and then fought are way back up, this time without the armor, 'cause it had been blown. It was... odd in some ways... mostly 'cause we were being chased out of the game room at about this time 'cause the next game had to go in... but some of it was 'cause of how Carl had set things up. Most of the personnel on the station was technical... not military. So there was almost no resistance to anything we did. And it felt kinda odd to go into a situation like that and wreck that much destruction. The other thing, though, was that one of the aliens found the SF writer in our ship and talked with him, asking him to stop his friends... and that while the alien was very sorry that all of human civilization would have to be wiped out to purify the planet, surely he must see that there was a *need*... Self-preservation is a very strong drive. Even in the face of, possibly, a moral problem in killing off a whole station of these people to preserve our own race... It brought to mind the question of, could there possibly have been a way to talk them out of it? We didn't have the time, though, so the game pretty much ended with the nuclear bombs going of in the heart of their station and vaporizing it. The rest of the pieces of their system, instead of setting up orbit around Jupiter, simply fell into the planet... which was kinda haunting as well. --------- End of Save the Shoemaker-Levy 9! --------- We had a quick break during the game to sign up for Hubert's game, and it ended summerily at noon, which was when Hubert came in to set up for the next game. Mark and I went back to the room to pick up my six-sided dice, and, by luck, the phone started ringing when we were in the room. It turned out to be John!! Poor John... he'd been calling the other room all day, wondering why I hadn't called Saturday night and kinda wondering if things had gone wrong or something... He was also kinda frustrated at work 'cause a whole slew of UNIX files had been killed by on of our sysadmins by 'accident' and while he'd gone into work in order to work, he wasn't able to get anything done because of the problem. He was also kinda summerily recruited to help fix said problem. So I talked with him for a while, even knowing that Hubert wanted to get started fairly soon; but John sounded like he could use the talk, and it was fun talking with him 'cause even with all the activities I did miss him. So we started the Albedo game a bit late. ----- end of 3 of 4 -----