While we had been on Earth, one of the firewall research facilities, a warehouse near the TAU was attacked by unknown forces. The attack was repelled but only one of the guards survived. There were two types of attackers, six were augmented pod morphs carrying shard pistols and six were splicer morphs carrying titan forged beam weapons. They attacked from the sky using jetpacks. They were defeated by firewall security and the bodies were now on ice. The splicers had shaved heads and there was a series of depressions on their skulls. Bob thought he had seen the depressions before on asyncs, morphs which had undergone experimental psionic augmentation.

Nova created a simulspace of a medlab into which we transferred the ego from one of the splicers. The aim was to make it look like he had been resleeved. The figure stood silently and did not react to anything. Nova then proceeded to perform psychosurgery on the stack. He got the words AWE which related to a thing and LAPRIYE which related to a religion. I searched on the mesh and found myself at a classified Cognite page. Cognite were the hypercore pioneering in research into cognitive science whose base we had found on Eris. LAPRIYE was a bastardised form of Voo dun, colloquially known as voodoo.

I hacked into the server and coped the files on the AWE project. The security was very high. The AWE project was marked as having been shut down as the project had proved to be too costly. It was originally conducted aboard the habitat Aten And aimed to create a seed AI able to perform psychosurgery at an accelerated rate. Aten was in the asteroid field. The project was lead by a Prof Blackwell. He and the project heads still worked for Cognite in other roles.

The prof spoke to one of his contacts about the project who said he would get back to him if he found any information. The energy weapons the attackers had carried were some form of beam weapons, definitely not transhuman tech, probably Titan in origin, and likely coded for use by specific individuals. Video footage of the attack showed them flying down from the sky and accessing the warehouse after attaching some device on the door which exploded. The energy weapons looked very effective.

We searched the warehouse. The prof found a residue of organic matter splattered on the wall. Review of the security footage showed it as coming from one of the pod morphs which had got hit by some form of kinetic weapon. Bob performed an autopsy on one of the pod morphs. He found a gland which had been surgically added. It was tied into the endocrine response system and produced a pheromone which he theorised could provide a way of pheromone communication. He found a similar gland in one of the splicer morphs. He did some research and found a reference to nomads from the Titan quarantine zone on Mars who believed in demons that communicated to their god by smell. There was a picture of one which looked a lot like the pod morphs.

The prof manufactured some anti pheromone grenades. His contact reported back that the project was attempting to create the seed AI and he found a report saying an unknown force acquired data on the AWE project about a year ago when Cognite systems were hacked. It was theorised the hack was by an organisation called Nine lives. Nine lives were a criminal organisation, primarily dealing in egonapping and were based on Legbar, an asteroid in the belt.

Aten is now run by the University of Shanghi and several corporations and the Cognite base would have been long cleared so we requisitioned a ship from Ming to fly to Legbar. On approach we received an invite to a simulspace session. The simulspace was in the form of a swamp. We were greeted by Theo, leader of Petro Nanchun, a faction of Nine lives, who asked what we wanted. We told him we were after information into their hack of the AWE project and he said it was Nazon, leader of a rival faction who did it.

Nazon was acting under contract to SIS, renegades from the Jovian republic lead by Admiral Osario. Whey wanted lots of Egos and the psychosurgery technology to create an army. Theo would give us more information if we killed Nazon. He warned that his quarters were heavily guarded and he had recently acquired a dwarf tank.

We docked to Legbar and I hacked into Nazon's network, downloading security feeds and blueprints. Nazons quarters were on a taurus rotating round Legbar. We identified a duct which would give us direct access from the outside of the taurus to Nazon's quarters. Bob crossed easily. I had some difficulties but eventually crossed. Nova and the prof drifted away into space and had to get the ship AI to rescue them.

While they were busy being rescued, we entered through a duct and made our way to his room. He had four people with him. We waited for a while until one left then attacked. I locked all the doors in the habitat, encrypted all the access and revoked the AI's access to the system to slow their response. They were quickly dispatched. Nazons head was removed then we fled.

We delivered the head to Petro and he told us Admiral Osario was on board the ex flag ship of the Minervan fleet. It was called the Minerva and had stealth technology but could be found in the Kupter belt using some prototype technology and Petro provided us with the blueprints. We fabricated the device and fitted it to the ship on the way to the Kupler belt.

We found the battleship then flew past, freefalling over and leaving the AI in charge of our ship. The crossing was a bit tricky as I became untethered from the others, but we finally made it. We entered through an airlock and made our way to the engine room. The security was tight and I was unable to hack the system before attracting the attention of the engineers. Nova pulled a gun and opened fire. While the guards were fighting us, Bob hacked into the systems and started to shut down the antimatter containment of the engine. We transmitted a quick report to the AI on our ship before the engines exploded, destroying everything.