Downtime

We’d headed straight back to the base from the Grey Markets, we wanted to be there ready for the delivery. We got there with enough time to prepare, the slaves we’d bought were going to need some medical attention, not to mention a hot shower, clean clothes and good food.
 
What we didn’t know until they arrived was that two of the adults were the parents of one of the children and so we were able to reunite a family. I did ask the other children if they knew any details about their parents. I was hoping I might be able to find them via an online search but they didn’t know enough for me to be able to find them.
 
One of the children was a Poseidonian, I called Bob over as I thought it might make him feel better and more at home. Bob took him off to talk to him and he seemed happy enough. I wasn’t sure about how wise it was for Bob to headbut him, but that was the poseidonian way
 
We got the rest of the former slaves over into the medical bay and Kaiser gave them the once over. The vast majority of their issues were down to malnutrition and dehydration, there was also a substantial amount of bruising and mental trauma. The physical we could help start to heal, the mental trauma would take a little longer.
 
Now that the former slaves were settled I slipped away back to my room, well, I say my room, it was the main hub for the base and the others had been quite happy for me to take up residence in there. I hooked up to the terminal and settled back in my chair to sort through it all and see if there was anything useful. There was some corrupted data and some heavily encrypted. There was a vast swathe of data from the last 100 years on weather and creature migration. I needed to look into the scientific and meteorological community because there was someone who was going to want this data, just needed to find the right audience.
 
I was contemplating what to do next when I noticed the DSD we brought back from the Scotland job that had the AI contained in it. I had an old terminal that wasn’t connected to anything. I plugged it in and tried to talk to it. It was working to a point but it was difficult as the test was a little jumbled and there were symbols mixed in. I managed to find out that it was created in a lab by the ERF, they had been on the base for more than 50 years. it also confirmed that it did have information on the ERF.
 
Ilyara had come in to see what I was up to and I was telling her about the AI and we were talking about what to do and how we could persuade the AI to relinquish the information on the ERF. Ilyara was also winding me up about being an AI which resulted in me slapping her. Something I actually took great pleasure in despite it being in jest.
 
Unfortunately the AI heard every word of what we were saying and decided that self destruction was preferable to continuing to listen to us.
 
With nothing else to do I decided to go with Ilyara to check on Umbrella and the work they were doing in the caves at the back of the base. They were waiting for the lifting equipment to be able to get down to the chamber with the ship, but they had made pretty good progress on everything else that was accessible. They had catalogued some secretions as well as the acid and the blood of the creature we had killed which was also acidic in nature. They also had collected and sent off samples of the Orpheomorph.
 
They had put quite a few protocols in place to keep the critters at bay including barricades and some metal divides they had dug into the ground. They couldn’t tell us much about them, they had collected samples which had been sent off to the main labs and they were waiting for the results. They asked that if we wanted access to the site we just let them know ahead of time so that they can make the proper arrangements as they were concerned about cross-contamination, or at least limiting it as much as possible.
 
Rather than kicking about and doing nothing for the rest of the afternoon we headed over to Harborne, it had been a little while and it would be good to get out and blow off some steam racing. We’d decided on storing the bikes in Harborne so we took the AV. After a brief stop in The Dusty Diner for food we headed to the racetrack. We could have made the next race but it would have been a push so we decided to watch and race in the next one.