Having agreed to Join firewall we became sentinels and Ming was assigned as our proxy. Ming invited us to a replica of his office in simulspace. He welcomed us to firewall and assigned us our first mission. He had evidence of disturbing behaviour that he thought could be a result of exotech. A few days ago, Tasembeker Sallentine, marketing VP with the hypercorp Gate Research until recently attempted to breach a dome on titan with explosives. She was stopped after Local residents informed authorities of her unusual behaviour and is currently being held at the security HQ on titan. She had a device thought to be exotech with a built in nanohive. Ming reported the nanobots were resistant to damage from many sources and had similarities to Iktomi, a now extinct alien race whose remains had been found on exoplanets Droplet, Echo and Sunrise. We were tasked to find out where she got the device and investigate. Ming wanted to know if it was it smuggled through from an exoplanet. We were shown footage from the dome. Tasembeker was clutching a small device in left her hand and a wireless detonator in her right hand. She was quoting passages from the bible:
"Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of Heaven." Genesis 19:24.
"Upon the wicked He will rain snares, fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup." Psalms 11:6
"He also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger, and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb." Revelations 14:10.
The police arrived and hit her with an agoniser then cuffed her and took her away.

We travelled to a TAU facility half an hour away to examine the device recovered from Tasembeker. It looked like a scallop shell about 8cm across with no seams or access points. There were some nanobots on the surface which looked like small squid and were somewhat organic in appearance, and Professor Cornelius thought they looked to be more aquatic in nature and asked for the quarantine field to be filled with water. That caused the nanobots to swim off the shell and start reproducing. They then started to build a lattice structure in a spiral which they completed after 10 minutes. It looked to be made of a similar crystalline material as the original device.

Professor Cornelius suggested replacing water with methane which had no effect. I searched the mesh for references to other squid shaped things and found a small video of squid and encrypted data file from the hypercore Gate Research. Professor Cornelius continued monitoring the nanobots while Nova and Lucas fell asleep.

Suddenly Nova woke and started shouting about demons then opened fire with her weapon, hitting me. She had clearly gone mad. Lucas grappled her and when I fired back at her, actually shielded her from me, taking the shot himself. Clearly the madness was contagious. Nova broke free and killed Professor Cornelius when he tried to inject her with some drug he had found. Nova then shot me again severely damaging and disabling my morph. Finally Lucas injected Nova with a sedative which apparently was called twitch, but Nova resisted the effects and did not fall unconscious. Nova then shot and disabled Lucas before firing at me again, destroying my morph.

I was offline for 3 hours before being resleeved. Everyone else was also in the process of being resleeved, including Ming who apparently entered the lab just as Nova left and also got killed. Nova was restored from a backup as her cortical stack was corrupt. She seemed obsessed with finding out the missing portion of her life so I gave her a video of my experience of her killing me. I then decrypted the file I obtained from Gate Research. It was created for someone called Morgus who worked for Gate Research where he was VP in charge of gatecrashing parties. The file had been sent from Jessini/night cartel. It was another video which was of the face of Jessini who was sleeved in an exalt morph and with a high rise office in the background, probably taken on Titan. In the video, Jessini said that they had accessed a computer aboard the ship and were attempting to access the data stored there.

Morgus had a life blog and was in charge of arranging gate-crashing parties, including lottery winners and self funded expeditions. Professor Cornelius asked some of his contacts and found the structure the nanobots had created had similarities to objects on the exoplanet Droplet, created by Iktomi, and there were rumours someone encountered something much larger. Nova looked into Jessini and found he had not gone on any gatecrashing missions recently but had been trying to organise one. Lucas found more connections between Morgus and Jessini. The nearest gate to Droplet was the pandora gate on Saturn's moon Pandora. Iktomi architectural remains were first found on Echo 5. They had web like architecture and it is theorised that they had multi jointed limbs and were a spiderlike species. Similar architecture has been found on the extoplanets Sunrise and Droplet.

I found the location of Jessinis office which was at Corvalis synthetics, a medical supply centre. I hacked into Jessini's account and copied any other messages there concerning gate crashing. I found evidence Morgus was secretly funding gatecrashing clandestine expeditions organised by Jessini in return for preferential access to any tech found. Shocki, a security officer at Gatekeeper, which runs the pandora gate was being payed to let through contraband without it being scanned. 6 of the night cartel were involved in the gate crashing and had been given morphs suitable for Droplet. 2 aquanauts, a cestus, a nova crab an octomorph and a nautaloid. I also found the night cartel were keeping artefacts that had been recovered in their ship the Annora Arabella which was in orbit round one of saturns moons Enceladus. I searched the mesh and found some blueprints for the Annora Arabella. It was a ship about 100m long. The latest report concerned a ship found in an ocean ravine on droplet. They had managed to decode some computers on the vessel and had managed to activate a relic, some sort of robot, and had hacked into it, but had little success accessing one area of the ship. I also found Corvalis synthetics has a darkcasting facility to the Annora Arabella. Lucas heard Rumours Morgus had private habitat orbiting Titan where he kept illegal objects guarded by a combat AI.

We arranged with Ming to take the gate to Droplet. As droplet is a water world Ming arranged for us to get suitable morphs when we egocast to Pandora. Professor Cornelius chose a dolphin, I chose a Cetus as did Lucas, and Nova chose a novacrab. Ming also gave me a Blue box system which would allow me to activate the gate to return from Droplet.

Travelling through the gate was disturbing but the transit time appeared to be instantaneous. We found ourselves on a small island with a beach nearby. Nova drove the GEV into the water then lost control and the AI had to take over. She blamed it on the effects of re-sleeving and travelling through the gate.

We found the alien vessel. There was a Nautalus docked onto it. Nova fast talked whoever was sleeved into the nautalus into thinking we had been sent by Morgus. He said the rest of the team was trying to break through to the starboard section of the ship ant hey had managed to decrypt some of the database on board. They had also found other tech, possibly weapons and references to other destinations through the gate including Zata Raticulai which was on the outer rim of the milky way. They had decrypted some terminology about a destination called zoo and references to trans species. While he was talking and distracted I popped the cortical stack from the Nautalus and stopped the AI backup coming online. Nova then undocked the Nautalus and moved it away from the ship out of sight.

We entered the alien ship. It looked like the inside of a shell. We saw some lights and found where the rest of the night cartel team were working. We opened fire and killed two, and the other three surrendered. Professor Cornelius took their weapons and we put them in another chamber. I hacked into the door they were trying to open I found the system had a musical operating system. I got the door open and water rushed into the chamber beyond. It contained large glass containers, holding what looked like creatures from earth, now extinct. They were identified by the professor as a Bygee dolphin, a manatee and a monk seal. There were also two prehistoric creatures which should have been extinct for millions of years, a Nothosaurus and a Liopleurodon. In addition there were several humanoid creatures which looked like humans that had been spliced together with aquatic animals. All were alive but in stasis.

From the computer I determined the language was based on pictograms connected with sounds. I spent time hacking around the computer and trying to learn the language. Lucas looked round the ship and found a small black sphere floating around. He claimed it behaved a bit like a small black hole. I learned the basics of the language and ships systems. The black sphere wasa singularity and was the ships power system. The ship was multi environment, supporting both air and water sections. I worked out how to control the singularity and moved it to where it belonged, where it started providing power to the ship. The navigation systems were corrupted but indicated the ship was able to travel via wormholes.

Lucas recovered the exotech which the night cartel team had stored on the nautalus. I managed to activate the auto repair systems of the ship and started the ship moving slowly, moving it a couple of kilometres. I then repaired the navigation system while the ship repaired itself. From that I was able to determine the planet Droplet orbited the MV3 star system, and from there wormholes went to several destination including our solar system, and to Zata Raticulai which appeared to be the ships origin.

We returned through the gate to report to Ming. We let the night cartel team go and returned the cortical stacks we had taken. Ming arranged for us to return through the gate as we wished to try to recover the ship. Ming was also interested for us to explore Zata Raticulai if that was possible. Nova and the professor swapped into flexbots as aquatic morphs would be less suitable on the ship. When we returned through the gate there were crab creatures on the beach which scuttled away into the water.

On returning to the ship and took it to surface and allowed it to empty of water ,then took it up into orbit. From there Nova plotted a course to the wormhole to Zata Raticulai. After 6 days alarms suddenly sounded, and the navigation system showed we were heading into a black hole. Nova quickly corrected the errors in the course she had plotted and we spent another 6 days heading to the wormhole.

The transition through the wormhole was much like travelling through the pandora gate. The ships systems detected one planet and a black hole. We headed towards the planet. Nova managed to crash the ships systems while trying to scan the planet. As the ship was brought back online it rocked violently. Scans detected three small objects emanating energy as they approached. They fired an energy weapon and our ship lost control, spiralling down towards the planet.

Professor Cornelius and Nova jumped out in an attempt to glide to the surface leaving myself and Lucas to our fates. The ship crashed badly and I regained conscious in a ghostrider module carried by Nova. She had erected a firewall to prevent me from reading her thoughts, not that it would have been much of a barrier if I really cared what was passing through her mind. They had both suffered extensive damage due to hitting a tree while trying to glide into landing and all that remained of the spaceship was a large crater. We found a river nearby so Professor Cornelius and Nova turned into a boat shape to float down the river assuming if there was any civilisation we would find it at the mouth of the river.

We floated down the river for about 8 hours before hearing some noises in the canopy of the jungle. They sounded to me like cries of distress in the Iktomi language. We saw some humanoids being pursued by a robotic spider. I got wireless access and tried to hack it but having to use the damaged systems of Novas flexbot meant I only managed to get its attention. It approached then projected a hologram of a human. It spoke French initially which Nova understood but then switched to English.

The hologram identified himself as Dr François Moroe. The robot lead us to a large walled compound with a spaceship outside. It was a Gulix Wayfarer which was a long term exploration ship sent out after the pandora gates were discovered. Moroe had been on his mission for ten years but had left nearer 100 years ago. The black hole in the system must have been causing time dilation effects. He offered to re-sleeve everyone with some of the spare morphs on board the Gulix Wayfarer. I chose a basic synthbot, Professor Cornelius went for a neo hominid orangutan and Nova chose an Olympian which turned out to have a smoking addiction.

When Moroe went to make lunch, Professor Cornelius studied Novas new morph and found the smoking addiction had been added as well as dormant genes for cystic fibrosis. He also found the cystic fibrosis gene in his own morph. I found a basic backdoor device connected into my morphs cyberbrain, so removed it. I hacked into the nano replicators to make some weapons while we were at lunch as Moroe had taken Novas gun and had restricted the nano replicators from making weapons.

At lunch Moroe said there were 6 crew originally but he was the only survivor. Cara had got the ship past the satellites in orbit though he was reluctant to say how. He would not talk about how the crew had died. Moroe had what appeared to be a fork of himself serving. Professor Cornelius claimed to not be hungry as he was suspicious and left to explore. Moroe warned him not to go more than a kilometre from the compound. After lunch Moroe went to rest. We were forbidden to enter his labs. As we looked round the compound we heard moans from a lab. I hacked the door to open it. Inside was a half man, half dog monstrosity which Nova killed. Professor Cornelius checked Nova and found the cystic fibrosis genes had been activated, probably by the food she had eaten.

I tried to find some data in the system that Professor Cornelius wanted but triggered an alarm. As we left the lab we were attacked by one of Moroe's robots. It had a lot of armour but we destroyed it with sustained fire. A Moroe started threatening us over the tanoy. I hacked into the compounds computer systems, took admin access and revoked Moroe's access. I then turned off the tanoy to shut him up. There was another robot and two Moroe forks approaching the compound so I shut the doors. There were another 5 Moroes on the second level of the compound. As I watched on the security monitors they had moved to cover he stairs up.

We engaged two of the Moroes at the top of one of the staircases. They were killed but I was badly damaged in the fight. I retreated and turned my attention to the robot outside, wirelessly hacking into it and taking control. I gave it orders to eliminate the Moroe's. It killed the two with it, then I directed it up the stairs to kill the rest. Unfortunately while I was busy Professor Cornelius and Lucas were badly hurt and unconscious with only Nova keeping the Moroes at bay.

The robot dealt with the Moroes and nano bandages were applied to Professor Cornelius and Lucas. After they recovered, Lucas messaged the last Moroe and he was convinced to return with us on the Gulix Wayfarer to the solar system. I copied off the databases from the compounds computer system including data on Iktomi gene splicing technology. I then fixed the engines of the Gulix Wayfarer. Moroe admitted to controlling the satellites so we took off and Nova navigated to the wormhole. She took the ship through and we ended up 16,000 light years from home by her reckoning of the stars. Realising the problem, Nova took the ship back through the wormhole and ended up very near another star. In trying to get out of the gravity well, she shut down the ship and I had to go outside to fix it. Finally after entering the wormhole a 3rd time we emerged about 12 days out from Titan.

After extended discussions with Moroe, Professor Cornelius realised he was completely insane so he was eliminated on the journey back to Titan and Lucas threw his stack out of the airlock.