(G268 18/03/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP, MI) 47

(G268 18/03/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP, MI) 47

DAY 127(sat) cont...

Feeling rather isolated and vulnerable, Kirk tried to contact the Cacophony, but could only get static. He shot up a red flare, but he didn't hold out much hope of that achieving anything.

Rather than going any further forward he decided to flee back the way they had come. The riders followed, but out of musket range, keeping their eyes on Kirk and his followers. Kirk found though that he was being slowed down by Marion and Guyus, so decided to send them on back to the south while he waited where he was to see how the riders responded.

One of the riders rode off to the north east while the others stopped, rested their mounts and watched Kirk.  He then decided to go around them and keep walking north. The riders, again, followed him from a safe distance and he carried on up into the mountains for another two hours.

He tried to get a message through to the Caco and eventually a subspace burst was returned to him, telling him that there was a small group of vulcan soldiers at the spaceship and that Adam's avatar was captured and being held somewhere in the nearby city.

Kirk's situation was getting a bit more serious though as six more, better armed, riders appeared, dismounted and began advancing on him. They came up on his position and he shouted at them to leave him alone then shot twice over their heads.

While all this was going on he saw something swoop down about a hundred metres to his east and then a bang like a small grenade going off. He didn't know what it was and forgot about it, concentrating on his more immediate worries.

The vulcan warriors started firing on him with their long muskets. They were not hugely accurate weapons and slow to load. Kirk activated his personal shield generator and found that was enough to protect him from all but the luckiest shots.
He in turn fired back with his Desert Eagles, trying his best to only injure his pursuers by shooting them in the legs, but often they were hidden behind rocks and this difficult. On two occasions they rushed him and tried to bring him down with the butts of their muskets, but Kirk ran off as fast as he could to hide behind another set of rocks further up.

After a long chase though, the Vulcans were all so badly injured they could not continue, one was in need of urgent medical attention so the others took him back down the mountain. Kirk continued on to the Caco where three vulcan warriors were. They gave him a wide berth and he entered the ship.

The crew were reasonably pleased to see him. After some discussion with Dell they decided that using the impulse engines might work, although this was still warp, it would be low enough powered to avoid the effects of the anti-warp field. The other option was to reconfigure the thrusters. The fact that using warp of any kind might destroy the ship made them opt for the thruster option.
Adam, for some reason, was now offline and unavailable to help.
Even so, they still managed to find out that the anti-warp field extended up about six miles, it seemed to use Tropospheric propagation, so beyond that part of the atmosphere the warp engines would become safe to use. All they needed to do was go straight up using the thrusters, just like an early space age rocket.

They started work on this and after three hours, at 1700 hours, the modifications were finished. Kirk had to go outside to do about an hours work, but the Vulcans had not arrived in enough force to risk attacking him. He did notice, though, a small drone, about the size of a football, hovering about and watching him from a distance. He used his MATSE to look closer and saw that it had 'ANTO Productions' written on the side of it in the language of the Burung Mera. He suspected this was what he had seen eariler falling and exploding just at the start of his firefight.

Once the modifications were finished, Paterson fired up the engines and gave it a go. Using the thrusters of the Caco to go straight up into the atmosphere she said, 'Felt like trying to drive a shopping trolley with a bunch of fireworks strapped to the back and a pair of oars for steering.'
At about one mile up the Caco tilted over and stalled, but as they plunged back down to the planet  Paterson, by some miracle, saved them all and wrestled control of the ship again.
She was terrified and sweating by the time they made orbit, but somehow they had managed it.  The others gave her a round of applause as she leaned back in her seat and took her shaking hands off the controls.