Raylan...

We’d all been stood there for a few minutes, taking it in. I hadn’t known him that well, but even so it wasn’t nice seeing someone you knew splayed out on the wall like that. I pinged his comm device, something had lured him down here so I wanted to see if I could get into his comms and see if there was anything I could find in his messages or contacts. It might shed some light on who had gotten to him.
 
I found it fine and tried to get in, but it came up as a grade 5 and that I didn’t have admin privileges. That was odd as I had his device registered as a grade 3 and I did have privileges. I looked again and this time I saw the grade three device and was able to access it as expected. The grade 5 was there but on a partition. Essentially the two devices were one and the same.
 
Why, why would he need a grade 5 device hidden from the rest of us, it didn’t stack up. I kept quiet as I didn’t know what it meant and wanted to see what I could find out. Someone must have been watching the device, or had an alert set up on it as, no sooner did I get in than someone tried hacking me back. I beat it back once but wasn’t quick enough the second time and they managed to overheat the device and it exploded. Fortunately for me I’d been able to pull most of the data off it before they did.
 
I started to look at call logs and messages but there was nothing there. All of the records just have 00000 in their place. There was literally no data stored there, possibly explaining why I was able to download so much so quickly. Basically his device had saved nothing. I could go direct to the comms towers to get the data but it would depend on who he had been talking to and, given that his device had had a grade 5 device hidden on it, I didn’t hold out much hope that we’d get anything from it. That device would be about 20k, which was a lot and made me think that someone else had probably provided it, it was tech way above what we’d needed as mercenaries.
 
The others were still inspecting the body. From what we could tell he wasn;t dead when he’d been impaled on the walls. The rebar had also been impaled through the body into the concrete rather than the body being impaled onto already protruding rebar. That had to take some serious strength. Even if he hadn’t been conscious and fighting, getting the rebar into the concrete would take some real force.
 
I worked out he was also only about 240 feet from the base, so not that far away. I scanned through the base security footage to see if I could see anyone with him as he came down here, he was close enough to the base I was hoping I’d be able to pick something up. Unfortunately as was usual for Raylan, he was wearing his baffler mask so I couldn’t see much,, or even if he was talking to anyone at the time.
 
Ilyara told us that there was magic in the tunnels but no Sanguimancy or Necromancy. There was a very small trace of mystical energy but it was old and unlikely to be linked to Raylan. There is other magic there but with the spirits down here it’s hard to tell for sure because they could be messing with it. What we did find was that the body was emitting two different gamma signatures. These were likely from intense mental effort from psychic energy. We knew he was a psychic so that was no surprise, but it meant he was likely engaged in some kind of psychic activity. The second signature could also mean a second psychic. We found some further traces but there was nothing conclusive.
 
Ilyara wants to get the body back to the medbay to see if she could figure anything out away from the magic in the tunnels. Max wanted to do a sweep of the tunnels so we called Bob down and set out. Fortunately all we could find was a few large cockroaches and rats. We dealt with them and then headed back up. As we headed back up Max decided it was time we blocked up the door and we made arrangements for someone to come and concrete up the gap. We didn’t want anything using the back stairs to get into the base.
 
Ilyara does the autopsy while we are down in the tunnels. Once we got back she was able to tell us what she’d found. She had found a sub-dermal microphone in his lower jaw. A benign tumour growth and scarring in the brain. A barcode on the forearm near his elbow. I scanned it to see if it would bring up anything. It was an ERF ident tattoo, not military but likely intelligence
 
I went with Max into his room to start sorting through his belongings. There was his plasma pistol, claw pistol. the Railjacker and a stun knife. A credit chit with £31k on it and lastly, KAN his little bot. I’d never really looked that closely at it but now I could see he was heavily modified, it looked like 3-4 different units kit-bashed together. I tried asking him to turn on, tried talking to him but nothing. I left him there and went to go and talk to the others. I wanted some time to think about it.
 
We held a funeral for Raylan, which was bascially we burned the body and scattered the ashes. According to the others he wouldn’t have wanted much of a fuss, would have preferred we spent the money of an official funeral on drink anyway. So thats what we did.
 
As we were drinking the Robot body was delivered from the police. It had been released. I’m not going to lie, I got very, very excited and immediately took it to Maggie. I also took with me the bottle of Lagavulin I’d gotten her. I knew she’d been working really hard recently and that this was just going to add to her workload so I wanted to sweeten the deal a little for her. She rolled her eyes when she saw the bot but smiled when she saw the bottle. ‘Park it over there, it’s going to take some work because I need to tweak it for direct control rather than remote. I’ll let you know when it’s done’ I flattered her some more and left her to it.
 
I didn’t want to be with the others at the moment. I hadn’t known Raylan that well and I was feeling bouncy and excited because my new robot body was here so I figured I’d go and get KAN and have another look now I could take my time.
 
I took him back to my room and sat on the bed turning him over and inspecting him. I found a port with a fibre-optic tendril. Well it was another thing to try and so I plugged him into a terminal. Maybe being plugged in would help. He came up with a shell script, ready for data entry. I tried asking him to wake up again. A prompt appeared and asked me for an access code. His firewall was higher than what I’d expect for a beat up droid. Although looking at him again, although the outside is beat up, the inside is pretty new.
 
I tried to hack into him again. I could see a 3d model of KAN in front of me. There were also three bars. One lit up red. I had two more chances. The second time I managed to get in but a secondary programme ran and stopped me getting any further. Rather than hack again I thought I’d try and spoof the access codes. It had to be worth a shot. Turns out it was and it worked. A video screen came up, it was Raylan, he looked up with a wry grin. “Well, if you’re watching this it means I’ve come to some kind of sticky end. I’m guessing that you aren’t who I work for. Now you may have found I’m not exactly who you think I am. I do in fact work for the ERF for dept of social stability. My focus, trying to stabilise ERF settlements, one of my main focuses was Ilyara, before her Morethai. Also Mr Winters. Now you seem to have stumbled across my data. Maybe one of you put me down. I’ve collated all the data he I have on Broadcastle, you can take it or delete it. All I ask is that you make sure Kan goes to a good home. Happy trails” I saw files open up. The ERF contact info self deleted before I could get a chance to do anything. Any comms or codes access codes must have been part of the same auto-delete as they were gone too. All the information on us and our Amaranthian counterparts and reports are all still present. Lists of activities, pictures of Ilyara. Videos of infected humanoids, images of someone being blown up. Max paying money to non-humans. The files were pinging up quickly, there was a lot of information here on a lot of different things. If this were given to an ERF enforcer this could be damning. Involvement with communes would be damming. There are images of someone I know to be Rui but her face is scrambled. If I’d had a stomach it would have dropped as I saw my face pop up a few times as well.
 
There was a lot of information here to go through. I didn’t know what to do with it. It also wasn’t really my decision. It was Max’s. I pinged him a message direct to his comms device and asked him to come and see me. This was something not everyone needed to know.
 
While I was waiting for him to get here I looked through to see if any of these reports had been sent off. Some of the reports have been submitted, but the text files only, no evidence has been delivered. Some had been sent but had unregistered responses. I did find some messages back and forth. Some advising the information was good and to retain and build a file. But there was some pushback from Raylan, it started out quite business like but later on there was some more opposition, saying we’re not that dangerous and he’s not sure it’s worth his time. That was encouraging I suppose. Maybe he’d been having second thoughts once he got to know us.
 
Max arrives and I tell him what I’ve found. I can tell it;s hard for him to hear, and I’m not surprised. To find out that someone in the group is a double agent is not the thing you want to hear as the commander. He asks me to delete the files, and I do. But I did scan them first. I’d been with the group the least amount of time and wanted to see if there was anything else I should know about any of them. Fortunately there was nothing that raised any alarm bells with me.
 
I also messaged Scarlett to let her know what I’d found. It was only right as there was information on her as well, it was possible this information had made it to the ERF and I needed her to know.
 
We all needed a distraction so we picked up a job. There was something therapeutic about going out and doing something proactive rather than sitting around and moping. There had been a ransom demand for some Dedalus technicians. They were out in a convoy an hadn’t expected any complications so they only had light support. Well, I say light, they had an aircraft, three jeeps and a heavy transporter. All but two of the bodies had been found. The attackers had actually been quite clever about it. They had set a ring of explosives and waited for the convoy to drive into it before they set off the devices. It sounded like a military tactic which indicated that at least some of them were likely to hav had some kind of training. There are small micro-canyons in the area so lots of ground to cover. The conviction raiders have claimed responsibility and some of their uniforms have been found.
 
We got to the site and I sent out my drones. I saw some of the wreckage, an old tank shell and a burned out jeep. I also found some caves. We parked the Manticore and started walking towards the caves. The larger cave opening is large and quite rectangular, the middle opening looked almost like a mouse hole from this distance. The smallest opening looked almost perfectly circular, too circular to be natural.
 
I tried to ping for any technology but nothing came up.
 
Now we were closer to the larger opening I could see that around the left and right of the opening there were footprints. There was also a line in the sand where there was a definite drop in elevation. the shape was too regular to be natural so there had to be a reason for the change. It looked like it could be the way a grav vehicle would push away sand when the engines were kicked in. I walked over to the middle entrance, there were cigarette butts so someone had obviously been hanging around outside. Looking inside I could see that a tunnel went back about 20 feet and then met a sheer rock face. I moved over to have a look at the smaller tunnel but that seemed to snake into the rock and I couldn’t see very far.
 
We went back to the bigger entrance and started heading in. Max went in first, we were looking for traps but obviously missed something as we hadn’t gone very far in when a bear trap sprang out of the sand and latched onto Max’s leg. I tried to help him get it off but there was an explosive device attached to it and, not only does Max loose his leg, but I lost an arm as well. That’ll teach me to help Max.
 
Bob came over to see what was going on and if he could help. Turns out Bob is good with Junk magic and was able to craft us some limbs from the junk lying around. He warns me that the arm won’t work in the usual way as the computers might struggle to communicate with it. If I didn’t think too hard I was able to use it so it was better than nothing. He’d also put a Japanese flag on the back of the wrist for me. I liked Bob.
 
He also made us a big pokey stick for moving forwards to try and stop us getting any other limbs blown off. Ilyara also went ahead using the stick and her scanners. She finds a few and is able to highlight them so we don’t accidentally set them off.
 
We get to the back wall. from what we can tell there is a solid metal wall at the back but it has been disguised with a layer of sandstone. There are also mechanisms and a structure behind it. It’s not a wall but a thick metal door. The sandstone is a facade. There is power going to the door but it’s analogue and not digital so I’m stuck. I’m good with digital, analogue not so much.
 
Why oh why do we always seem to get stumped by doors….