System Crash

[legionnpcs]

[After Brainy and Babbage disappear, cameras start broadcasting from where they were taken to. The entire encounter is shown to the team and the rest of the UP. When Earth is taken through the portal, Legion World lurches, and at the end of it all, when the traps are tripped, it lurches again. Lights all over the ship go out, fires starts, systems fail. Only lockdown procedures that Brainy himself put in place, to protect Legion World’s most vital systems if he were ever compromised by telepathy or other influences, keep the viruses from self-destructing the ship or turning off life support -- but they’re certainly trying to.]

[The network goes back up again fairly quickly, however, but it’s using a much older, inferior form of networking. Something a little more distance-based and analog, a little less hackable.]

[They’ll be able to communicate again, but there’s a lot of interference. Sometimes the video goes out during video calls and sometimes audio cracks up. Text seems to be the only form of communication that’s guaranteed to go through every time.]

[ooc: People can react and start planning things on this post. This is also where information about the Spectre's attack will get dropped.]

Comments

[voice]

[agnominal]

Is evacuation an option?

[ If worse comes to worse and life support does fail. ]

[voice]

[steelandtemper]

We're gonna have to send a team to Earth to take out that little family reunion, but evacuating the staff? Not with the T-gates offline, and if that thing that nailed Dox gets aboard, we'll need to quarantine ourselves anyway.

[She huffs out a sigh.]

Even with the scrubbers down, the Hab Deck has a large enough atmosphere reservoir that it'll stay livable for weeks. Worst case, we move everyone there.

[Pause.]

Well, no. Worst case, you all become some kind of technological zombie slave race and I delete myself rather than get reprogrammed.

[She's very reassuring.]

[voice]

[agnominal]

All the more reason to deal with this quickly.

[ He's not concerned. Mostly because losing isn't an option until it is. That outcome is possible. Many outcomes are. There's no reason to assume anything just yet. ]

Still. Non-essential staff that cannot actively assist in combating the virus should be moved out of harm's way.

[voice]

[steelandtemper]

[Locus is the sensible type. Cortana likes him, minus that whole genocide thing.]

Not sure there's gonna be an "out of harm's way" for much longer, but if you wanna go after people who are trapped worse than most right now, I have a list.

[A list which is now in blinking in the corner of his HUD.]

[voice]

[agnominal]

Acknowledged.

[ There's nothing to shoot, nothing to fight outright at the moment. That means priority lies with as few casualties as they can manage.

Time to go to work. ]

[voice]

[steelandtemper]

Yell if you need anything.

[The "Cortana" comms icon in his HUD vanishes as she cuts the channel.]

[unrecovered]

Loop me in on that list. We can divide and conquer.

[steelandtemper]

Tossing it on the b-net. Have fun.

[And there, now everyone with UNSC comms can access a real-time updated version of Cortana's search and rescue map.]