The crew of the Blind Jump continues their exploration of a series of mysterious wormhole exit coordinates. Now, in an underwater installation, they have reached a domed central chamber. At the top of the dome, a sphere of water floats suspended in mid-air. A single chair sits below the sphere on the floor. And a dozen security biodrones and a supervisor drone patrol the room.
Max opens the party with a missile, which detonates between two of the biodrones but doesn’t harm either. He leaps into the room and slashes with his cyber blades, decapitating one of the drones as it recovers from the blast. The supervisor takes cover as Binx fires her needle rifle in full auto, shredding another drone. Hooey pulls his welding torch and incinerates a third, but another blasts him square in the chest with a raygun, seriously wounding him. Hooey goes off on a rant about how unfair that is and why they need to kill us after millenia in this underwater base as he staggers backwards.
More biodrones fire their rayguns, hitting glancing blows on Max and the already-scorched Hooey. Lefty shoots back with his Founder rapid-fire raygun, blasting another drone, and Shuhb fires his needle pistols akimbo, striking the supervisor drone where it cowers behind a control console. As the supervisor drone rears back, Miaulong’s battle armor mouth opens and the built-in lightning cannon blasts the supervisor apart.
The remaining drones return fire from cover, but both Max’s and Miaulong’s armor proves strong enough to resist the beams. Shuhb fires his needle pistols again, drilling a drone through the eye with his upper-left-hand gun. Lefty fires wildly with his raygun, trying to keep the drones’ heads down, and Max drops into cover then fires a lethal spray of needles from his assault rifle, killing one drone and grazing two others. Binx also fires, punching a needle through a drone’s head. Miaulong’s lightning gun incinerates another drone.
Hooey grabs a weapon from one of the fallen drones and then falls back into the corridor to activate the Founder medkit and patch himself up. Binx sprays suppressive fire into the room with her needle assault rifle, but with limited success as the surviving drones are all in cover. Miaulong bull-rushes a drone and knocks it out of cover, and Max shreds it with his needle rifle. Shuhb takes out another with a pair of clean shots to the torso as it pops up to fire, and Lefty finishes off the last with rapid fire raygun blasts.
After taking time to patch up Hooey, the crew examines the room and the strange water sphere. They quickly realize that the chair in the center of the room can ascend into the sphere, and Miaulong volunteers to try it. As she rises into the sphere, she realizes that it acts as a virtual reality screen, and she sees a partial exit coordinate. After noting the coordinate, she examines the rest of the display and finds a strange lockout interface involving moving colored bits from one side of the screen to the other. As Miaulong and Shuhb struggle to resolve the lockout, Binx assesses the other controls and discovers that the facility is a lithium refinery, pulling the metal out of salts in the ocean. With great effort, Miaulong and Shuhb crack the code, and are rewarded with a snippet of Founder programming language.
Worried about other crews finding the coordinates, the crew deploys their Founder welding torches and cuts the chair away from the floor, loading it on their trusty mule drone. As they continue their explorations, they see more repair drones headed for the command center. A bit further along, they reach a large processing center where jets of water periodically spray across high catwalks above a large pool. Seeing not only more drones but also shark fins in the water, Binx immediately says “Nope” and slams the door shut again…
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