In a drone, on a boat

Things have been going pretty okay for the last week since our first run. Orca's settled in here and doing pretty nicely for herself. She says that my place is a Huge upgrade from her old place which, from what I could tell, seemed to be a hovel that was about to fall down. So better living conditions, a better suburb and she still has access to a Surf beach, so what more could she want?

But then we got another job offer, which we all leaped at. I guess the need for more drones/arrows/keeping your brother out of jail/whatever it is VBas spends his money on (Not sure I want to know) was a good enough incentive to get us all going even if everything seemed a bit strange from the get go. Mister Macquarie wanted to meet us at a seedy, run-down, dockside pub in Botany of all places, which was far from what you assume to be a typical meet.

Totally legitimate Macquarie

I was thinking that a suit would look very out of place in a grimy industrial wasteland, but it turned out that he was either dressing down for the occasion or this really was as last-minute as it seemed. Johnson was a scruffy-looking man dressed in casual wear who actually didn't look that out of place,  but his job offer was definitely unusual. There was a Wuxing oil tanker called the Yuansu coming in to dock in the next day or two, and he wanted us to deal with it in a number of very specific ways.

First of all, we needed to plant some software in its host. Then we would need to plant a pair of bombs in very specific locations while the ship was empty, being in the floor of one cargo hold and the wall of another. And afterr that, once it was filled up we would need to plant another pair of bombs in very specific locations again, this time being the hatch covering one of the holds and an electrical box on the main superstructure. And only after we'd done that and it was several days out of port would we be notified if the job was successful and that we would be paid.

So in short, it looked like Mister Macquarie wanted to arrange a very exacting accident.

We took the job and immediately set to work laying down a plan. The first problem would be the on-site security; no matter what we did, we'd want to get as many people away from the boat and the docks as possible so that we could operate quietly. Mo immediately came up with the plan of hosting a pop-up party near the docks in order to draw in people and make them well and truly distracted from what was going on.

The second part was then to get the bombs in place. While I had some demolitions training, the issue was getting them there. We hit upon a two-stage plan that could be combined with our other objective, being to get the software onto the ship's host. This would be achieved by Bas doing his Technomancer thing and inserting the software, but then fishing around for the ship's maintenance drones (A ship that size would have a small human crew to run things and then a swarm of maintenance drones to actually do the hard work). He'd take control of one of those and then hand it off to me.

In the meantime, Orca would swim out and around to where the ship was docked and clamber up its side. She’d hand the bombs off to me in the drone and then simply get out of there once I did the job. Then I'd plant the first two bombs before returning the drone to what it was doing beforehand and jumping out, while leaving the Marks on it so I could get back to it for round two.

Simple.

So armed with our plan (and explosives) we drove out to Botany and found a nice secure place to stash the truck while we all went to work. Mo reported that his party was going well and that there was a good turnout (Gay Trolls throw the best parties, apparently) Which meant that we were all in the clear to do our thing. Orca was quickly in the water and heading to the ship, while VB started doing his Technomancer brain-hacking.

I'll say this much now; from the outside, a Technomancer doing their thing looks pretty boring. In Bas' case, it just looks like he's a passed out wino, really, so nothing to really report. True, he twitched every now and then, but that could just make him a passed out wino with the DTs. (Although according to Bas, his sprites look like Pink Gorillas that throw exploding bananas at IC. Make of this what you will). At any rate, he 'resurfaced' enough to tell me that he had a Drone and that he was handing its control over to me.

I love these things. They're so useful

So I found myself in an EVO Proletariat drone that was down in the ship's hull cleaning it up before they started loading up their cargo. Breaking off from work, I snuck up to the deck, taking advantage of the simple fact that people rarely play attention to what these drones are doing. It's the truth; as long as a worker drone isn't doing something blatantly wrong, like say, planting a bomb, most people forget that they're even there.

I met Orca up on deck and collected the explosives form her, before going back down to get to work. This was the hard part for me as, what do you know, I was now a drone doing something blatantly wrong, so I had to be sneaky. The good thing is that given how small and agile the Proletariat is, it's easy to quickly duck and find cover if you see somebody coming. This allowed me to quickly plant the first two bombs and then return it to work without anybody being any the wiser. And with Orca having made it back to the truck, we were done with stage one of the plan.

We retreated to recover and wait for the loading to be complete, which, from the info Bas had recovered and fed to Mister Macquarie, should take about twenty-four hours. (So in the meantime, Pub Nachos). That gave us a working schedule for phase two, which was going to be in some ways easier and harder. Easier because Bas didn't need to do as much dicking around in the Matrix as before. Harder because now we wouldn't have Mo's party to distract everyone.

Taking all this into consideration, we moved the truck back to our ready position and resumed our operation. I was able to find the same drone and jump back into it, noting that it had already been locked down for transport. This meant that if it was seen in motion on the deck, somebody would instantly know that there was something wrong. Added to that, there were more crew on the deck patrolling the ship. Not good.

Oil Tankers. All the inconvenience of life on the ocean with
none of the romance

Orca met Drone-Me and handed over the bombs, and then came up with a plan of sorts to keep everyone occupied while I planted the bombs. She ran down across one of the cables and onto the docks, disappearing in among the buildings. Once in there, she began throwing around whatever she could in order to make a god-awful racket and rather nicely distract everyone on the ship. That gave me the cover I needed to plant the last two bombs and then return the drone to its park After rebooting its system and my own, there would be no trace of me in the system. We then collected Orca and got the hell out of there.

Two days later Macquarie contacted us, telling us that it was a job well done and that we would get our payment. Presumably, whatever he had wanted to happen to the Yuansu had indeed happened in a way that correlated to our work. So job well done, I assume.