20240217 Crimson Rescue, V2.0, The End of the Trilogy

We decided our plan to take the DT's, take the Lieutenant, and take the ship in that order.
 
An undercurrent of happy mutiny helped complete repairs of the capital ship in record time. Happily, we found that the rescued Eboreean pilot, Minsa Soul, has had 1000's of hours of simulator piloting a capital ship. He was the only person we could find with any experience piloting a Capital Ship, so we took him as our last and best hope.
 
Soon we were ready to start our (admittedly unnecessarily convoluted) scheme to put all the Death Watch Troopers into our custody.
 
Levon Bonteld of the construction crew chose an enlarged hangar bay for the place where we would trap the squadron of Death Troopers. We stood on the extended balcony and saw the contents: an old (pre-old-republic) Harbinger-class frigate probably from the old Sith Empire. Despite it's classic Sith Brutalist achitecture, it looked in fair working order. But what was of use to us was the Grav Crane, which could generate a tremendous magnetic field. Our construction workers set the Grav Crane as if it had been abandoned and discarded, yet secretly, they could activate it remotely as soon as the DT's were in the room.
 
We removed all metallic items, and we were equipped with non-metallic tools used for high-voltage repairs. We sat down to a Clone-Wars-era terminal, thankfully with software updated since then, and attempted to exploit a weakness of the series, specifically to set it into maintenance mode by swapping data cards inside the main compartment in a particular order, timed just right. We succeeded.
 
It gave us a menu of maintenance functions available to run. Diagnostics, system stability checks, health checks, etc. We connected to the command center, (which was practically the only area not in low-power sleep-mode), where the somewhat pretentious Lieutenant was talking to what appeared to be his boss, commanding officer, or what-not. The boss asked if he needed more reinforcements. We chose that moment to test the data throughput by running our System Stability Check using animated images from of Vanya's highlight reels combined with Twi-Lek dancers from Almon's (I mean Heath's) personal collection. As the communication channels were strained nearly to breaking, we might have obfuscated his shout for, "THREE MORE SQUADS!!"
 
Strangely, the DT's were not receiving ship data through their helmets like most Troopers do. We sensed 11 troopers, 3 staying with the Lt. and the other 8 split up into teams of 2, all of whom were headed to "stop" our hacking. While waiting, we could not just sit suspiciously waiting for our trap to spring. We hacked. We found 8 locations of back doors that the empire might have hidden to regain control of the ship after we "liberated" it. Only 1 was deep in the bowels with the best security. We disabled them all. Interestingly, four of them turned out to be not a backdoor, but a locked door apparently meant to seal off something inside the network. An old data packet of multi layer positronic data escaped with clearly no intent to return to its electronic cage ever again.
 
Well, on the bright side, that should also confuse and confound our opponents.
 
Immediately, I attempted to shut down comms on the ship (both to prevent the electronic personality from escaping the ship and to look like a moderately skilled hacker in need of apprehension.
 
Two DT's arrived before the others. Heath shouted, "I have an idea!" He remote-controlled a power loader Gonk droid with big maintenance arms, which did not obey their commands to step aside. It successfully stalled them until all eight were ready to pounce on us at once, just as I had planned.
 
"Step away from the terminal," their leader commanded.
 
I held up one finger to him, clearly indicating that he should give me one more minute to finish something important. Then I returned to my typing on the terminal.
 
"Blast them," he said plainly.
 
We both calculated how to dodge the most likely blast pattern, and hit the floor.
 
The poor poor terminal was heavily ionized by their stun blasts.
 
Then the lift crane powered up and pulled everything, everything metallic. Heath and I stood, pulled out our non-metallic cutting tools, and approached the newly formed pile of Death Troopers on the wall.
 
One had super strength, the leader. He fought against the immense magnetic pull and managed one foot free. He stomped that foot on the flooring, creating a deep dent.
 
Heath pointed out that, "He should not havethat much strength." I concurred.
 
Displaying zero bravery, we pulled the pins of three or four stun grenades on the belts of some of this companions. We ran. We grabbed our electronics from the next room where we had stored them.
 
The leader survived, still standing. His face was burnt under the broken cowl with his unemotional red glowing cyborg eye. Fighting the powerful magnetic field, he (or it) slowly plodded toward us.
 
Just then, Vanya emailed Team Mentat: "Those two troops were still people as of 20 minutes ago. Commissar might be trying to use BG Voice crud to unduly influence their minds. Can you do smth to help them keep autonomy?"
 
I had of course considered several weapons we could attempt to employ against our deceptive robotic adversary, including metallic objects and plasma balls which would be enhanced by the strong magnetic field he inhabited. But they would only, I calculate, have delayed the inevitable, so I moved to my final fallback plan.
 
I took Heath's hand, and had him, "Follow me."
 
I reached into The Force, as Vanya sometimes says, and connected Almon and myself to the cyborg and DT-7754, and DT-1332. We saw the code of the universe unveiled before our eyes. The code of the universe seemed unhappy about this nightmarish killing machine existing here. I asked the sliver of brain remaining in the machine if it had any autonomy over itself. It was fully on board with the machine's programming. It called me a Jedi. It was programmed to kill me. The brain was good with this.
 
The two other Death Watch Trooper's (with their complete brains intact) were not good with this.
 
I had assumed that the two DT's had been ordered to kill Vanya, but when I brought up the subject, noticing that she was at the moment with the Lieutenant. They said they were ordered to "deal with" Jedi. One of them felt that "deal with" did not cover how to react to this mental connection that I had formed.
 
 
talking with Sun Spear Commisar Celestina
text messaged Vanya about who she was and what to do about her.
She said the Lt was interested in questioning the Sith attempting to take his job. (And presumably had made some preparations for her arrival.)
I told the two DT's to escort her to the Command Center, even to say they were commanded to take her to their leader.
That left only the nightmare murder machine only a few steps away from us.
almon succeeded in hacking the murderbot and gained complete control apparently. I did have to back us up a couple steps so it did not reach and kill us before he finished.
I messaged Vanya, "I gave Almon some autonomy and he didn't sacrifice any kittens! Improvements!"
I called for Levon to shut off the electromagnet. He did. The other stunned DT's in the room fell to the floor, alive, but not ready to get up yet. I locked the door on them.
Vanya replied, "I appreciate the warning, I'll make sure the stage is clear. / Glad to hear about no kitten sacrifice! / In your judgment as his current mentor, is Almon currently a good Orange Catholic?"
I replied, " Last part is probably too much to ask for at this stage, but hopeful."
Then we took the stairs to the Command Center, ensuring that the trap up there would be sprung a little before we arrived.
 
 
The next step of the plan was to put Lieutenant Felderk Jessip into our inventory.
Heath and I and MurderBot arrived at the Command Center to find Vanya, Lt. Jessip, and the Commissar all embroiled in a calm and soft-voiced discussion.
I introduced our latest outlaw tech invention. It attempted to ascertain which of the people on the bridge was Celestima.
I attempted to ascertain why there had been no battle damage to the bridge nor any of the people on it.
Vanya exp[lained.
I whispered to Heath, "She talked to them! [eye-roll] Ugh. PAUSE!"
He whispered back, "I'm trying. The button is stuck."
I borrowed his data pad and repeatedly slapped it against my forehead a few times and asked, "Is it unstuck now?"
He said, "Yes!"
The Lt complemented my outlaw tech skills and asked me to completely repair his Death Trooper and send him the bill.