We decide on what mission to do next, since it is the end of January. We have a data pickup on Hektor from a hacker friend of Canti’s. Stitch tells us that Hektor has very high security. The contact’s name is Sarah. We will need some legit cargo.

OC Prime is the name of the hacker, but it is not a person; it is an AI. From what we know the AI is a backup of a hacker’s brain that activated when the hacker died.

Eve searches out a legitimate job that would take us to Hektor. One of Stitch’s contacts hooks us up with a job, Fess Higgins. We will be picking up a shipment from Vanlo Biotech on Venus (San Marcos) and dropping it of on Hektor.

While discussing our options regarding the Nanke situation, we notice that there is currently a protest going on in front of the corporate building. Raptor suggests that we use this to our advantage and incite the crowd to riot, letting us get in to either extract or kill Garignak. We work our way into the crowd and Eve starts yelling and Man-Bot comes into the crowd firing. The crowd breaks into the front door of the building and we follow them in.

Meanwhle Cam and Canti attempt to hack into the system and get a higher level of account access. After a few minutes we are able to get in and deactivate the sentry guns and open the security doors. Cam sees that labs “C” and “E” have containment large enough for a person. The group heads towards lab “E” and the hackers get the door open.

A scientist comes in behind the group and asks what they are doing there, but Eve uses the stun gun on him to bring him down. They release Garignak from his cell and decide to free him. Raptor explains that he came here to get revenge on him but now that he sees him he pities him. The group then escapes; Cam encrypts the door controls so it cannot be locked again. Garignak starts trashing the place and the group quickly gets out of the building. Cam enables the maglocks on all of the exterior doors and then reboots the security system to further cripple them.

Once we go to pick up the group they notice an object attached to the hull, which appears mechanical. Upon getting closer they see that it is a person in heavy armor. Suddenly the armor turns bright white and crystalline wings appear. Attempts to hack into the person’s armor prove unsuccessful. Rex checks the person in astral and they appear to be extremely bright, but an odd color.

The stranger comes down to the ground and Cam starts the shuttle up to escape. Canti sends his drones out to attack the figure and the others shoot and fire magic spells at him. Cam quickly does a search to find out what technology could be creating the wings, and he sees that it is an older but extremely expensive technology. Most likely it is someone from the Artemis Guild.

The group continues to fire on him and Raptor goes down after being sprayed with a flammable liquid. Rex hits him with several spells but he does not seem fazed. The man then turns towards the ship and shoots the flammable liquid inside the ship. Cam pulls the ship up and the man disappears.

We head to Mars and try to find the corporation that bought Garignak, which is called Nanke. Cam is able to hack in and take a look around their system. They are a smallish genetic tech & research lab. There are a lot of stories on the web about protestors for their activities in animal testing and such. Cam sees that they have several active projects.

[log censored by moderator]

We enter the ship, bringing the two girls with us. The other ship has already fled and has a good head start on us. We start things up and begin after them, but decide that they are too far away to follow. We concentrate our efforts on trying to find their shuttle that they landed in so we can figure out more about them. Cam does a sensor sweep but doesn’t find much. We decide to do a much more extensive search and we find a ship buried in the snow about a mile away.

We start digging it out and Canti finds that it is online. He tries to hack it but sees that there is no firmware or anything, so the door cannot even be opened. Raptor sets a charge and blasts open the ship, we climb inside and start searching around for clues to where they came from. We only find a few shell casings and some used food wrappers, so we head back.

We take both ships, Cam flying their ship, and return the girls to Earth. There is a tearful reunion and we get our reward. There are jetpacks for Raptor to choose from and also some flying drones. Stitch gets a stealth glider.

Taking some downtime, Cam and Canti contact Yusuf to purchase some hacking programs. Meanwhile Stitch starts asking around on information on the Artemis Guild people. Cam and Canti also get bioware installed.

We then venture to Callisto and pick up all of the weapons and other equipment that we had on order from the group’s armorer.

Next we head to Mercury and Raptor goes back to the fighting pit to look for Garignak. He asks around and no one has seen him for several months. Raptor goes up to the offices of the place and asks to see Lou, but the security force will not let him in, and then attack him. Raptor manages to lay one out (with the help of Eve’s tranq darts) and a voice comes over the PA and says that he can come in. He gives Raptor a lead as to where Garignak might be and Raptor takes off, warning the other security guy not to mess with him.

We go to an apartment building from the lead and hit the intercom to the room, an old man answers and we offer him 5k to come down and speak with us. He says that Garignak was bought by a biotech company on Mars…!

The visitor seems to be checking out the front door to look for a way in. We decide to let Raptor try and take him from behind, since he is still in the ship, but it will take him almost 45 minutes to make it there. In the meantime we fortify the inside of the entryway with robots and C-12, and Stitch takes up a sniper position. He seems to be talking with himself; Canti tries to tap in to his wireless signal but can’t seem to get anything. Rex tries to check him out in astral and there is similarly nothing there, but something seems wrong.

Raptor finally makes it to the corridor but there is nothing there. We think that someone might be hacking our system, so Canti checks it but can’t find anything. Suddenly an explosion rocks the front corridor and starts collapsing the tunnel. Raptor quickly comes inside and we shut the door behind him. More explosions occur outside the loading bays, which essentially seals the base and us inside.

Canti does a sensor sweep with the ship and finds that there is a reading just inside sensor range. They seem to be hacking our ship as well. As we are trying to organize, we call on Master Exploder (another employee who is a demolitions expert) to come to the loading bays. The Foreman notifies us that the robots in that area are not responding, so the enemy might be trying to come in that way. We come into the loading bay and are attacked by our own security drones.

After a protracted combat Canti is finally able to disable the attacking drones and instruct the diggers to get us out. In the meantime Cam talks with the two girls and asks them if they know of people like this, and they deny any knowledge of these people. Rex checks out the enemy astrally and is pursued back to the base so quickly goes back to his body.

Finally the diggers reach the surface and we all walk out. As we exit, Eve and Raptor lay covering fire while the rest of us make a run for it. Rex takes a burst of machine gun fire in the face and almost buys it. The others try to take down the remaining enemies as they are running away.

Canti plots our course and we start off to the drifts. The trip takes 5 days and we see the ship on an asteroid as we arrive. The asteroid itself is about the size of North America, and is actually a binary dwarf planet. Canti deploys drones down to the asteroid to search for life signs. There is a thin methane atmosphere. The drone comes in closer and sees a man-made structure, in front of which is a metal statue of a bird that is half-finished. We decide to land the ship and take a look around, gearing up for the conditions and Canti brings his drones.

While searching the area we do find what appear to be ATV treads all around the area. We also notice a small surveillance drone by the other ship, which Canti hacks into and sees that they’ve been using it to survey areas around the planet. The ship’s entries are locked but Canti is able to hack in and get us inside. It looks like the occupants hastily grabbed items from inside the ship and took off. The ship’s sensor logs show videos of two women putting up the bird sculpture.

We start searching the outlying areas with the ship’s sensors and notice that there are cave entrances nearby. We trek into one along with Man-Bot and eventually we come to a blast door. Canti tries to hack in but finds that the protocols are quite old; the protocols are over 200 years old. We use a maglock sequencer to open the door, which opens to a warehouse hallway. We see three robots on tank treads ahead of us, which trundle up and stop about 15 feet from the entrance. We notice that they are staring blankly ahead at us. They are making a radio transmission which Cam realizes is analog. It is a synthesized voice that says “Are you here to see the foreman. Are you replacement crew?” We answer yes and they take us into the mine.

It seems that part of the building is used to build the robots that we have seen. The robots take us to a separate area with a teleconference screen and tell us that the foreman will be with us shortly. We see the symbols on the walls that say “Automated Mining Systems” in Chinese characters. Eve searches the company name in one of her databases and sees that it has been out of business for more than 100 years.

A moment later the door closes and a computer generated avatar comes onto the screen and explains that we are the new replacement crew and we must start work immediately. It is able to respond to questions and verifies that the two women are currently working in the mine. We decide to play along for the time being and allow ourselves to be taken in to personal quarters.

We manage to get a communique open to one of the girls and she explains that they’ve been here several months and can’t get out. There was another crew that tried to take them out by force and were cut down by the robots. Cam asks her why they came here and why they decided to build the bird sculpture. She says that it was just a fanciful trip to come here and that the sculpture was just art that they created before they were pressed into service. Cam doesn’t believe her and says that after the group gets them out they need to answer truthfully.

Stitch gets called to repair the video feed to one of the monitors. Meanwhile Canti sends his drones throughout the facility to scope everything out. A short while later, an alert goes out throughout the system that says the facility is being hacked and security is being deployed to take care of the problem. However, Canti is not seeing any activity coming to stop him. Soon he is able to get root control and deactivates the high alert status. However, it seems that the Architect likeness controls many of the main functions. He sets it to Eve’s likeness so she can be in charge of the system. Eve makes all of us admins in the system and lets the AI know that the facility is due to be changed for new products, therefore production quotas are now zero.

We tour the facility and see how incredibly large it is…every time they run out of warehouse space they build a new one (there are 35 warehouses as of now) to house the obsolete fuel cells that the factory creates.

After a while the system notifies us that there is a visitor. We see a visual of him and he seems to be heavily armored. Eve commands that security be put on high alert and we go to see who it is.

Cam uses the ship’s equipment to determine that the metal we found is Ozmium, an extremely dense metal. We have 12 slabs at 300 kilograms each. At 1/4 nuyen per gram, this is likely worth about 900,000 nuyen. Stitch calls one of his contacts, Fess Higgins (on Mars), and he says that he may be able to sell it more easily if it were cut. Higgins would be interested in 3 of the slabs at 72,000 nuyen apiece. We decide to try some of our other contacts to sell them as well. Bengal is offering us 62,000 per slab, and he would buy 4. Bryce Tebbe would buy 1 at 65,000. Erich Schichammer would buy up to 3 for 70,000.

First we will go to Vesta to meet Fess, then Earth to hawk the paintings, the Moon to see Bengal, then Ceres to meet Bryce Tebbe.

We get to Earth and start negotiations with Eve’s buyer, Rina, at an art gallery. The offer needs to go back to “the brass” for a decision, so Eve invites Rina out for dinner in the meantime. Stitch goes along to dinner; Raptor stays with the paintings at the art gallery and the others stay on the ship.

They seem to be making a good impression on Rina, but Stitch notices that someone at the bar has been checking them out. Cam does a search on her likeness but finds nothing. She walks out of the bar soon after, so Cam, Rex and Canti head down to the bar. It takes them about 20 minutes to get there. After searching for a while they don’t see anything.

The evening with Rina ends, and she lets us know that the buy was approved. Eve opts to meet the director of the museum this evening and get the money right away. We get 250,000 nuyen for the paintings.

Eve talks to her doctor, also on Earth, and asks about buying the “creepy” vials that we found on the sub. She says that she will be able to send them out to a lab for analysis. The group lets her know about the possible danger of the vials.

By the time we are done with these runs, it is the end of November. We go to see Yusuf and Eve has lots of sex with him. He can’t seem to find any info on the Artemis guild that is apparently stalking us.

We go to Ceres and sell the last of the Ozmium. From our hauls we get 100,000 nuyen apiece.

Cam lets the others know that he has a lead on a possible job. His friend Kerza Brokk, a parts dealer on Vesta, sent him a message saying that her cousin and her fiancee are lost in the Kuiper Belt. Her cousin’s father is a wealthy individual who works for an aeronautics corporation on Earth. Unfortunately he has already hired several people who either did not follow up with the job or got lost in the process.

We speak with the man and he offers us 250,000 nuyen in equipment from their company plus 100,000 for expenses and extra cash. We start to determine how much it will cost to fit the ship for the conditions and also to buy the equipment we’ll need for the mission. We price out space suits, weatherproofing the ship, modding our weapons and other equipment. The total is about 205,000 nuyen + 16,000 for the ship + 92,700 for upgrading Canti’s drones.

The wasp clearing efforts continue; Cam starts up the bilge pumps to get some of the drenched bees out and Raptor and the robot help to move them towards the drains. The group then goes to the cargo hold to see what is there. There are 6 crates in here. The plans are off-colored seaweed with small flowers. Cam takes a look at them and thinks that they are terrestrial plants that have been colonized by other solar life. They must be providing chlorophyll for the other plants so they do not need sunlight; some kind of symbiotic relationship. In another there are large metal slabs. The next one has a bunch of paintings. The last one has cultured bioware that was to be delivered to a corporation. Man-bot helps take the cargo to our sub.

Rex goes astral into the control room and sees two disgusting corpses and almost vomits. Raptor walks through the other rooms and finds nothing else. The engine room looks heavily broken. The logs say that the crew tried to recover from the hack and reboot the system and regain control, but screwed themselves in the process.

Cam tries to figure out how he could make the sub float again but it seems hopeless as the ballast tanks are certainly leaking. Eve notes that we might have better luck if we sell the salvage rights to someone else who has the means to raise the sub. Raptor grabs the nearest tool he can find for Cam and returns to the ship. Eve looks for any IDs or other personal effects that she might find.

We head back to the sub rental place but the proprieter is not there. Instead there is a mafioso and his thugs who try to shake us down. Raptor charges into the room and shoots the leader and we start popping his buddies. After taking them out we drag the bodies onto the sub and take off. We shut off any non-essential systems so we are camouflaging our signal.

From the corpses we take 4 Zoa Executive Armored Clothing and 1/2 Suit Form-Fitting Armor. 3 Optimum 2 assault rifles, a modified Ceramic Natama Namax pistol (rating 2). Also a credstick with $1500 on it.

We find the other vessel again and put the dead guys on the other sub and made it look like they killed one another. We then return to the rental place and Rex checks it to see that no one is there. Unfortunately it has been ransacked and the money that we put down on the sub is long gone. We scuttle the sub and take the mule, the scrubber drone (from the sub dock) and the loot and head back to the ship.

As we are heading through town on the mule we see a traffic camera that seems to be following our position. We can’t do anything about it so we head onto the ship as soon as possible and leave orbit. We head to Ganymede to talk with Aparna and see if we can find any leads on the group that tried to shake us down. She offers us medical help as well as food and supplies. We give her some weapons for the resistance’s use.

Back on the ship we decide to check on the last of the crates that we hadn’t opened, and Raptor sees small spores coming out. To stop them from spreading, Eve grabs a blowtorch and burns it off of him.

We stay on Ganymede for a while to lay low.

Eve goes down to the mines with Erwin but there is a lot of security, so they decide to do some recon. Rex helps by going astral to scout things out. Canti contacts a hacker who may be able to cut their communications. Ultimately it is decided that it is too much of a risk to break in as we would have to shoot our way in and out.

Another interesting gig is a stranded sub stuck under the ice of Europa with precious metals, biotech and genetically modified plants on board. There was a heist of 6 high class cruisers on Patroclus, put all of the loot in the sub on Europa and disappeared. Stitch’s contact thinks he knows the location of the submarine. Brandon goes astral to try and see the area but he cannot see much since there is no life in that place. Once he reached the sub he thought that he had found something, so the group decides to venture down.

Once the group has reached the sub in a smaller sub, Canti tips the larger sub on its side so the group can gain entry. When inside the group notices noxious fumes and beehives, and the party tries to defend against them with guns, nanomagic and drones. We back out as they start to overwhelm us but Rex, Raptor and the drone are still inside as the door to our sub is sealed. Canti turns on the sub’s sprinkler system which helps the effort.

It is three months later, October, and several of the group members have been busy on side jobs, getting equipment or cyberware, or just laying low. Stitch has been hanging around Chelle’s shop and has met a drone rigger who goes by Canti. He and his brother Rex seem to have some skills that might help us out.

Yusuf contacts us via email and says that he has heard of someone is looking for us. They are called the “Artemis Guild” and are deep underground. He forwards the chatter he came across and it seems to be enough to worry about.

We decide to head to Ceres to lay low a bit. Stitch is continuing to do jobs for his fixer, but the rest of us are kind of spinning our wheels since we don’t know where these Artemis folks are. We keep our eyes open for a few weeks but don’t see anything.

In November, Raptor gets an opportunity from his armorer. A weapons manufacturer called Dynatron is showing their wares to various potential buyers throughout the solar system. Sakura has a buyer lined up for some of their merchandise, so if we can acquire we will get a sale. Depending on where they are going to be we have several opportunities to intercept. We start researching this group.

A professor contact named Fess sends a message to Stitch, with an opportunity for a job harvesting ice cores from Ceres. Fess has a grant for 40,000 to research the ice. The mining company is giving him a hard time about access to the ice in the area and they may need our help to operate the machinery and get the cores without being caught, or bribing them. Stitch tries contacting his fixer to see if there is anyone else who can help. Erwin Patch is a contractor that doesn’t work directly for the mining company, who might be able to help. Eve finds out through a contact that the mining company is afraid that they are going to get hit with environmental regulations due to what they’ve hit in their mining efforts on Ceres. They may have hit some fossils according to the contact.

We head out to Erwin’s favorite watering hole to check him out. Eve starts hitting on him and he responds favorably. They go back to his place and she pumps him for info. He says that he works on a lot of the equipment. We decide to head down to the mines using his info.