Ming was unavailable and we were told to return as fast as possible as there was a crisis. When we returned we were told there had been a security breech and Ming had turned traitor. Our new temporary contact was called Lady Exobyte. A few days ago Ming accessed the TAU facility, took the corrupted stack from when Nova went crazy and destroyed my morph. He then killed a technician before leaving. He took a car from the parking garage and drove off. The car was found at a private spaceport. Our mission was to Terminate Ming and retrieve or destroy the corrupted stack.

I hacked the spaceport systems to access the security cameras. Ming had left on a ship called the Balerathon, an antimatter courier heading to Valis New Shanghi on Mars. We then drove to Mings house. On the way I noticed we were being followed by three motorbikes, one with a sidecar, and the passenger had a seeker weapon he was aiming at us. He fired but it hit another car. Lucas threw an overload grenade back, stunning one of the bikers, causing him to fly off his bike. I shot the rider of the bike with the sidecar but he kept control of his bike.

Another seeker was fired, hitting and damaging our car. Lucas fired on the same target as me, hitting him and causing him to lose control of his bike. The last biker fired, hitting me with a machine gun. As the last biker drew level with us, Nova swerved into him, causing him to crash. The sidecar rider got up, picked up his seeker and fired at us. I returned fire as did Lucas, and he was killed. We checked the bodies, they were all wearing a red bandana and heavy armour covered by a white tabard.

The police showed up. We were interrogated by officer Tera. She asked a few questions then let us go. We got to Mings house. I hacked into his system and went through the security video. There was one woman who entered the house about a minute before Ming left. She never left. I opened the door and Nova rushed in. A menton morph was lying face down on the floor and there were scorch marks on the wall.

The body started to twitch and something could be seen moving under his clothes. As Lucas approached a metallic creature erupted from his back and attacked. Lucas ran away and the creature attacked Nova instead. It injected her with something then shocked her before repeating the same on me, temporarily overloading my systems. Lucas then shot and destroyed it. Three cortical stacks fell from its body and we found another three still inside.

We took the creature and stacks, and Lucas set a swarm of cleaner nanites loose to remove physical evidence of our presence. I edited the security system to remove evidence of our entry, and replaced it with footage of us arriving, finding Ming not in and leaving.

Lucas talked to some of his contacts and found The tabard our attackers were wearing were from the church of the luminous saints (CLS). Their leader was rev Warhol and their main operation was on Mars. They followed the book of Mohab, Mohab being an angelic being. They had about 20000 members spread round the inner system. I found an image taken at Valis New Shanghi of someone wearing one of the tabbards.

We were put in quarantine by firewall. After a few hours myself and Lucas were released, but Nova was found to be infected by an exo-virus, probably by the creature. She was incinerated and her stack destroyed, then she was restored from a backup. We then egocast to Mars. Nova upset someone at customs and got arrested. She called in a few favours and eventually got released. Lucas spoke to one of his contacts and arranged for us to get some equipment in return for a favour. We then booked into the Shangi Hilton.

Lucas found an article on the Mesh about Rhice Warhol. He subcontracted on the creation of the titans before the fall. He became religious after the fall. There was a picture and he had a cherub on his shoulder. Nova’s criminal favour got us a meeting at a club run by the Church. Nova was able to convince the manager of the club that we had a cortical stack that was corrupted with the Titan virus for sale, and he gave us the location of a dome called Ebb 6 in the Quarantine Zone where the Church ran a research facility. He told us to deliver the stack there to a person called Dagra for payment. The manager of the club had a Cherub on his shoulder that would whisper to him occasionally. Under the pretence of petting the Cherub, Professor Aronnax scratched it to capture some skin samples. When he later analysed the DNA from the skin he came to the conclusion that it was Exotech, and very probably connected to the Iktomi and Echo, where we had been previously. They seemed able to emit a pheromone as a defence mechanism, more than likely some kind of mind control or mood influencing pheromone.

We needed a vehicle to get through the Quarantine Zone and the Church provided one. On the way to Ebb 6 we were attacked by corrupted drones that caused us quite a lot of damage. However, in a truly inspired piece of programming, Lukas was able to use the remnants of one of the drones to modify the signature of our vehicle so that it would appear to be a drone and not get attacked. This gave the vehicle time to repair itself.

We got to Ebb 6 without further incident and were greeted by four heavily armed individuals. As we obviously didn’t have any Titan tech to offer them and this was going to be apparent very quickly, we decided to use surprise and the heavy weapons on the vehicle to get the drop on them. This worked after a fashion, and although the first bursts of machine gun fire only gave then warning of our attack, after a few more bursts we killed three and the fourth surrendered. However, the fight did alert Dagra and he fled in a vehicle and we decided to give chase.

The chase was not without incident. Nova got stuck in a mudslide. She finally got free but while we were stuck, 3 radar contacts appeared and headed towards us. It was more of the corrupted drones. I hacked 2 of the drones and sent them chasing Dagra. We then returned to the dome where I hacked into the computers. I learned that something called a macro forge completed, and it was beginning construction of a mega cortical stack. There had been a request for Surya and Sundiver morphs from rev Warhol. Dagra was the designer of the macro forge which was a vast nano fabricator inside the suns corona. They were loading the stack with every titan corrupted cortical stack they could obtain on Moabs orders with the aim to transmit and infect everyone.

Nova found some demo charges. Our captive, who was called Rents Perry, was forced to set them. It took him 4 hours. I suspect he was delayong. We set off the charges as we left to destroy the dome. We then went to recover Degras stack from where the drones had destroyed his car, but his head had been removed. We returned to Valis New Shanghi And Reported to Lady Exobyte. She requested we go to the sun and destroy the macro forge so we Egocast to a station near the sun and sleeved into sundiver morphs. Nova and the Professor were fitted with antimatter warheads. I struggled to control the sundiver and was left behind as the others headed into the sun. Finally I saw a large antimatter explosion so I returned to mars and arranged for the Professor and Nova to be restored from backups and reported our success to Lady Exobyte.