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Then all of the sudden we hear the crack of small arms fire. Not even major weapons, like a pistol or a flechette weapon. They are firing at two Elementals who are undamaged. We order them to retreat back to us anyway, and they still refuse to answer our hails.
Dagger orders more mechs to jump over and two Shadow Cats, a Catapult, and a Highlander follow. They wait until the second lance crosses space and arrives, and then move down. A Starslayer moves out and is fired at by small arms fire again.
We can see a handful of people attacking the Starslayer. It has all of the effect of attacking my desk with noodles. It won’t even scratch the paint. Okay, it will do that. But nothing more!
We move forward, cautiously scanning for mines and traps, ambushes and more, but none are here in the JumpShip.
After pushing back the locals, we notice they have the same hair style, clothes, and have made jewelry to wear as a bracelet on their left arm, looking very similar. Hmm.
We push back the folks and they retreat after not impacting our mech. We keep exploring and find more people dressed identically and popping out and firing small arms fire at us. Meanwhile, it’s clear that the JumpShip’s systems are not working well, as power is completely out on a few decks.
Explorations onto the two DropShips – Achilles and Overlord C reveal similar situations. Power, but we are similar attacked on both ships by the same sort of folks, but with different clothes, hairstyles, and clothing on each. Did they form gangs or something?
After hours of work we capture all of the antagonistic folks here and do two more searches. We imprison them in the Buccaneer cargo spaces – very cold and uncomfortable, but we put one group in each space, and they aren’t attacking each other within the group and we have removed their weapons and such. We scan the ship to make sure none others are there, then we return to do a full investigation.
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