Epilog
With the miners’ help, the Desperado’s engine and hull are repaired and the ship is able to take off once again. The crew has to wait for a lull in the storm however, so as not to risk overloading the ship’s systems with lightning strikes, and is finally able to leaves Io – five days after crash landing on the miserable planet in the first place.
The moment the ship leaves orbit (and the storm), the two Demetrius passengers (inhabiting Bartok and the other miner’s bodies) drop dead. Flying back into the storm itself does nothing to revive them.
The magnetic storm itself, lasts twenty-three days, significantly dipping in intensity after the first five days. Following the fifth day, choppy communications is restored between Io and the rest of the System (and no more zombies are found wandering about).
Once the Desperado is back in space and far enough from Io, regular communications between the ship and the rest of the System is also restored. News feeds open, showing interviews with some of the miners that must have escaped on the Queen Anne.
The entire System is completely amazed by the unbelievable tale, which runs on all the news channels for an entire week. Follow-up stories after the storm passes, confirm the tragedy of the dome breach, but are not be able to corroborate any accounts of walking dead (and none of the other mining colonies on Io report similar zombie experiences during the storm – though one colony does report the murder of two morgue employees that seemed to occur sometime during that period…).
The miners that the Desperado rescued are also sucked into the lure of temporary fame (telling their story all over the Net) and Captain Montoya has to lay low for a while, due to the unwanted spotlight all the attention brings.
It’s not long after, that Ethel contacts the crew to see if they collected any scientific data.
When it is revealed that recordings were made of the storm’s electromagnetic signatures, she offers 1,000,000w, for the data (which se openly admits will be used by her father’s company, DarkTech).
---
Fortunately for Gilbert, his contacts are satisfied (given the circumstances) with his “delivery” of the “Anti-Rad” to Io and have their men recover Samuel’s cargo containers. They don’t send them back, but Samuel is able to pick them up later after the fact.
---
Following up on Shen Mao’s story about the disappearance of the Capitol Ship Demetrius, Gilbert and Montoya find the fabricated story about the collision between the Demetrius and the drunken freighter captain, as portrayed in the official record.
Some deep hacking on Gilbert’s part uncovers evidence about what really happened:
Five years ago, the capital ship Demetrius, carrying five hundred passengers was lost in Hyperspace, when an accident disrupted the Jupiter Hypergate and caused a Gatecrash, just as the ship was about to exit through the Jupiter ring.
When the Hypergate was brought back online, the Demetrius was gone and no communications could be reestablished with the ship. Experts believe that the ship was thrown out of the wormhole during the Gatecrash, but somehow remained in Hyperspace.
Rather than admit this to the world and cause excessive fear over the safety of the Hypergates however, the Gatestone Corporation covered up the displacement of the ship and fabricated the story of a collision between the Demetrius and a drunken freighter captain during the evacuation of the wormhole, to explain the loss of the ship and its passengers.
Confronted with this evidence, the Gatestone Corporation offers the crew of the Desperado a 5,000,000w bribe, just to let things alone and keep silent on the matter.
There is enough evidence however, to actually make a case against the Gatestone Corporation, which the crew can either pursue for the sake of justice – or to blackmail the company for up to 50,000,000w.
If they go for justice, that’s all they’ll get out of it – a long drawn out trial, lots of judicial corruption, a few scapegoat arrests, and a small slip in the public’s opinion of the Solar System’s largest corporation.
If they go for blackmail, they can do so safely as long as they don’t demand more than 10,000,000w.
Demanding more than that will get them the money (up to 50,000,000w), but also the Bounty Head and Enemy flaws and the finest assassins money can buy trying to hunt them down and make them pay…
END
Author
Topic: Did Somebody Say Zombies?!? (Read 231684 times)