Shipbreaking Ghosts

This mission was the first official mission in the Silent Harbour series, though previous missions have contained a few hints at it. The Harbour is a SecComm era shipbreaking yard recently rediscovered. An eerie place, total silence comes across the long-wave channels and even short-range comms can struggle sometimes. The facility is roughly split into three colossal ringworlds around the central star.

An encrypted message was detected faintly from the spectral variations of the central star, almost unintelligible. The only information that could be extracted was a location tag, which formed part of the encryption package. Without any other way to discover the message, a team was prepared to find this mysterious location.

Four brave Lancers stepped onto this mission to scout the outermost ring of this forlorn place, callsigns Castoff, Count, Decaf and Barbarossa. Stepping off the ship, their mission control bid them farewell and they made their way through a labyrinthine and pitch-black series of pipes and maintenance tunnels,guided only by their onboard LIDAR. Short-range scanners had been picking up some faint signatures for a while, but now they duplicated, jumping around as shadows shifted and IFF tags of mechs appeared in front of them - an ambush!

Seeing the gauntlet ahead, the four of them set weapons free and charged at the figures ahead, Barbarossa activating flight systems and soaring into the air. As they moved forward, Castoff dove to the left, finding a small passage and the small mech responsible for their scanner glitches. Swiping at it with sword in hand, it retaliated by injecting hostile code into Castoff's systems and making the cockpit a little more than toasty.

Barbarossa, Count and Decaf finished off the initial skirmish and headed after Castoff as a huge hulking tower of a mech approached the intersection of the main tunnel. While Barbarossa was determined to take it out, the rest of the team were focused on moving around to fight this battle on better ground. The three of them came to Castoff's rescue and opened fire on the small mech causing so many technical issues. As it retreated to concentrated fire, Castoff darted through, but the towering bastion they'd been trying to avoid planted itself in the gap, cutting them off. They kept going, using cohesion to cover themselves as they found an alternate route to meet up with their isolated teammate.

Castoff, meanwhile, was trying to avoid a critical reactor malfunction at the hands of the small mech that had fled in the face of the full four Lancers. Heat warnings flashed as they frantically tried to stabilise the rising core temperature. Managing to clear it, they returned to combat to see their opponent had vanished. Muttering curses, Castoff continued on to catch up to the team...

The four arrived at their destination: a bridge across the void, nothing but the stars below them. With a roar, a huge mechanised chassis dropped down, carrying a blunt hammer the same size as the pilots. Other hostile forces moved into position and the clock began ticking.

Barbarossa darted towards the location as Count was caught helpless in a grapple and dragged towards the bridge. At the same time, Decaf was hit with electronic attacks, removing reactor limits and moving heat dumps towards their allies. A timely howitzer blast and a volley from Castoff's assault rifle shut down the operator and the code was purged, much to everyone's relief.

The message began decrypting, snippets of code coming through as the hammer came down on Count. Though initially only a glancing blow, repeated strikes severely damaged Count's chassis as Barbarossa got the final pieces of data out and began to move out. A mine, grenade and shot from Decaf ended the attack on Count, but not before their chassis took one final hit and was destroyed.

Leaving the ring to their extraction, the pilots had time to examine their result, a fully decrypted message. Inside, it consisted of a colossal piece of ever-mutable code and several new locations. MSMC have since put up missions to investigate these.