Assault on the Caravan XX

4.22.20. 

The spacers prepared for their heist, spending tens of thousands of credits and a solid 32 hours of feverish planning and skulduggery. Flavius worked with a cosmetic armorer, Mr. Disco, to get quick-release catches on his armor in case he had to change shape. Lynx probably contacted the Hydrogean Anarchist League to work out some sort of arrangement for backup. Many other plans were developed, some discarded and some prepared.

Pan Sear

O used his new computer setup to arrange an elaborate meet with Pan Sear, the spacer working for Salmarand. Pan Sear was delighted to talk to him, bringing him into the virtual space he created with his hacking skills. Apparently Salmarand wanted to hire the exilic spacers to work for him, providing them with resources and missions while pretending to hunt them (to keep the rest of the Strata Collective off their backs.) This was an elaborate ruse to get their attention and arrange a meet.

O was unimpressed, turning the offer down and instead trying to suborn Pan Sear to betray Salmarand. Pan Sear was not interested, as his current arrangement met his needs; he did not want a ship, the spacers couldn't offer him money like Salmarand could, and in general he had no reason to risk betraying Salmarand. Pan Sear didn't like O's entitled tone, so he dumped him out of the connection. Furious, O re-opened the connection and made demands; Pan Sear threatened to load him up with viruses and the like. 

Since O had been spending over a day in intense meditation trying to figure out how to load up his consciousness with Exilic energy independent of his physical form, he had a reserve with him in cyberspace, and he poured it into Pan Sear. Heady with his experimental energy transfer techniques, in a fit of pique O tried to use Exilic energy to isolate Pan Sear's consciousness from his software and hardware so he could persuasively scream at him, threatening and humiliating and recruiting him all at once.

Reality could not bend in that direction, but in his emotionally and energetically charged state, O forced his will against reality and reality broke. O touched his consciousness to the Exile, where he encountered the Sphinx; the Exilic god loaned his power and majesty to O, who dragged Pan Sear's consciousness in with him. O revealed Pan Sear's actual form; not the suave hacker, but instead a withered and elderly husk in a wheelchair. O, now appearing in the Sphinx's majesty, boomed about how humanity was on the precipice of change, prepared to reshape the future of humanity, and that it was time to use that power for good. He roared that the face of the enemy was an inter-dimensional consciousness, and petty machinations were now irrelevant. There was no hiding in cyberspace, for the Exilic will devour all! And we need your help.

Pan Sear was overwhelmed, quivering and drooling in the deep shine, rendered helpless. Impatient, O decided to gift the hacker by remaking his body in the image of his online avatar; he had that kind of power in the Exile. He reached out and connected Pan Sear's mental image with his flesh. However, since the hacker was not physically present, but a mental construct connected across dimensions, the flow of power was too much. The hacker's body exploded back in realspace, and the connection fizzled.

The Sphinx and His Best Agent

The Sphinx took his mantle of power back, basking in the afterglow, and invited O to join him. The Sphinx thanked O for being his most creative, effective, and favorite agent in realspace. O declined to join in the pleasantries, and the Sphinx sent his consciousness back to his body, in realspace. The whole Starhook combat hub was brimming with Exilic energies that returned with his consciousness, since O had retrained his mind to contain abstract energy.

Boarding the Caravan XX

Since Pan Sear had been aboard the Caravan XX, and exploded with a strange energy signature in an accident that killed a number of spacers, the exilic spacers moved fast to impersonate some Transit Authority inspectors and demand to board and inspect for safety. They ambushed the inspectors and left them restrained, unwilling to kill them and trigger a high priority Transit Authority bounty hunt.

Flavius and Kojiro impersonated the officers, and got a grav crate for inspection tools that hid O inside. They used their expertly back-stopped false credentials to get aboard the shuttle that supplied the Caravan XX, but their acting skills left something to be desired and the canny spacers on Salmarand's crew suspected them.

They met Captain Tuttle, and were sent back to the engine room to look at the site of the accident. At least, that was the story; they were sent into a long corridor with bulkheads, which sealed as the Strata Collective spacers planned to murder them in a confined and risk-free space.

Killing Ambushes

The spacers came prepared. O jumped out of the crate with the military grade boarder cutting torches and breath masks, and they cut a hole in the wall. Unfortunately, they cut too close to a power conduit, shorting the power in that area of the ship and exposing a crackling energy arc they'd have to bypass as the heat and atmosphere drained from the killbox.

Flavius squirmed into the gap, but touched the energy and was torched, killed almost instantly.

The ship was on high alert, but they did not realize Lynx had hitched a ride on the shuttle while wearing a vac suit, and he had transferred over to the Caravan XX with a cutting torch of his own. He cut into the power and the hull over the barracks, breaching the hull and exposing the surprised spacers to hard vacuum, killing them before they could repel boarders.

As he did this, the Transit Authority enforcement showed up, having found the captive inspectors and tracing their stolen credentials. They arrived in time to witness Lynx and his act of terrorism, and their cannons spun up. Lynx used a harpoon gun to reel himself into the ship interior even as the atmosphere and corpses vented out.

The under-the-table dealing the exilic spacers did ahead of time to bribe both the TA enforcer who came after them and the leader of the boarding team halfway paid off; the team leader deleted the footage of the terrorist attack and didn't log their credentials. However, the leader of the boarding team had called in sick, and his replacement had not been corrupted.

Lynx blew an internal airlock, killing the spacer trying to man the gun, and reuniting with the rest of the exilic spacers. O had repurposed Pan Sear's computer defenses so they locked down the Caravan XX guns, prevented their interceptors from launching, and scrambled their communications. The main reason was because he did not want the escape pods to fire; Salmarand was not going to escape them, not this time.

Escape

The ship was badly listing now, and as opponents lined up and reinforcements blazed towards the attack, the exilic spacers decided to make good their escape while they could. O unlocked the interceptors so the spacers could steal them. As they closed in on the launch bays, they confronted the TA boarding team. Lynx hit them with a gravitic wave, Kojiro blasted them with stun grenades, and the boarding team kept coming even in the chaos. 

The fight abruptly paused, and the TA boarding team withdrew, leaving the exilic spacers a clear path to the interceptors.

Reborn

Flavius regained awareness in a gleaming golden forest made of energy, his body like his appearance eight years ago. The Sphinx asked if Flavius wished to be restored; Flavius knew there was a catch, but the Sphinx was not forthcoming, only noting that there was a price for all things. Flavius shrugged and took the deal. 

The Sphinx used the connections the exilic spacers had inadvertantly created between realspace and the Exile, and in a burst of effort, reshaped the overflowing energy in the Starhook combat hub into a new body for Flavius, implanting his consciousness in it as the ship and the three Strays aboard were destroyed by the transformative conflagration.

Radiant with energy,  a golden idol in the Void, Flavius felt all his emotions for a moment. Then he powered through the afterbirth of is recreation to catch up to the boxy prison that had the Strays that Salmarand was holding hostage. Somehow able to survive in freezing vacuum, Flavus leveraged the prison to open it, and discovered that the Strays were not in the box. Some camera feed trickery had duped the spacers. With the last of his energies, Flavius bounded from the box and hit the side of the space station, triggering an airlock and escaping inside as reinforcements piled onsite, responding to the terrorist attack.

There was no immediate way to know if they got Salmarand or not, but it was time to regroup and work out next steps. This assault was probably over.