[OOC: Warning, this is going to be long! 
]With that the two part ways, Derryck and the Nar-Ghosts heading in the direction Azrael recommended would lead them to fire control with the least resistance.
Moving through any enemy installation with over 40 people
[OOC: Derryck + 40 Nar-Ghosts + 4 recruits from the ruins] stealthily is not an easy task. As such Derryck took 4 of the best and most experienced warriors with him to form an advance group that could deactivate security optics allowing the bulk of the group to pass unnoticed. As they were sticking to back corridors and the crew had plenty to keep them occupied in distant parts of the ship they did not expect to encounter much resistance, at least hopefully nothing the 5 of them couldn't handle.
The first two groups of crew members they came across indeed were no problem. There had only been 3 of them in each group, unarmoured and only armed with pistols they had surrendered without a fight. Azrael had asked them to try and minimise crew casualties as he hoped to be able to establish relations with them later, as such Derryck simply knocked them out, tied them up and locked them in storage cupboards.
The third group however decided to be stupid. There were 6 of them, slightly out-numbering Derryck's team, and two of them had rifles rather than just pistols, but they were still outgunned by the Nar-Ghosts. Had they any sense they would have surrendered too, however they decided to opt for heroics and fought back. Derryck and his men put them down quickly, but Jonas and Theo were injured in the process. Theo only slightly, though it would slow him down, but Jonas was serious. They weren't too far from their entry point yet and the way back should be clear, so after weighing it up for a moment Derryck sent Theo plus one of the other ghosts, Renard, to take Jonas back to Irena outside the ship, cycling two others into the vanguard team.
Meanwhile outside the ship"I think that is as much as I can do from here Inquisitor," said Azrael, packing up his communications equipment, "The orbital communicator should enable us to remain in contact now. I am going into the ship to see if I can try and salvage something from this situation. I will keep you informed of progress."
The Magos turns to Corporal Usher, "Your support would be welcome if you would offer it."
Usher nods, "Aye, we will assist you, but Roman here cannot go far or fast."
"We will leave him in the care of Irena along with the injured Relictor, come Sam," says Azrael, gesturing for the servitor to carry Roman as they make their way down to the maintenance hatch.
[OOC: Hope this is fine LordPyscho]Irena is hidden a short distance from the maintenance hatch with an assistant, Karl, and the injured Relictor marine.
Azrael enters their small hideout followed by Sam carrying Roman and then Usher and the other Necromundans.
"I have another patient for you Irena," Azrael nods towards Roman, "his ankle is injured."
Sam sets Roman down carefully beside Irena, who delicately examines Roman's ankle. Roman winces slightly as she does so.
"It is very badly sprained, but not broken. Nonetheless you will not be able to use it much for the next few days," Irena says kindly.
"We will leave him in your capable hands," Azrael says turning to go.
"Good luck," Irena says softly.
"Thank you," Azrael replies, as he steps out of the small hideout.
Azrael, Sam and the four remaining Necromundans reach the maintenance hatch and enter the ship. They take a different path to Derryck, winding through narrow corridors until Azrael finds what he was looking for, a small data shrine from which he can access the ships systems.
Azrael then goes through various safety procedures, including connecting Sam to the shrine. He had a bad experience with a renegade Land Raider the warband came across some time ago. Its machine spirit had been heavily corrupted and quite insane. While Azrael had been able to deal with it, it was not an experience he wished to repeat, at least certainly not without warning, and so he had been much more cautious before connecting to unknown machines ever since.
Satisfied that nothing unpleasant was lurking within this part of the ships data grid, or at least nothing his failsafes can't handle, Azrael jacks himself into the shrine.
"Keep watch while I access this shrine please Usher, my perception of the physical world will be dulled whilst I am connected."
There is the familiar feeling of falling through blackness until his consciousness emerges into the grid. It has been a long time since he has connected to a grid large and complex enough to support a full anthropomorphic actualisation and he stretches his incorporeal form as he drinks in the experience.
"It's good to be back," he says quietly to himself, before turning to look at his surroundings.
Every Mechanicum adept experiences connecting to a data grid differently, their mind projecting a landscape onto the grid to aid interaction. For senior adepts the landscape also varies with the level of immersion. At this low level of immersion, to Azrael, the data grid appeared as a long corridor full of doors and with the occasional branch leading off it. Different Magi treat their anthropomorphic actualisations differently too, Azrael's appeared much like his physical self, albeit rather cleaner and clad in his Mechanicus robes. Some Magi however, particularly the most senior and ancient ones, bear even less resemblance to a human than their physical selves.
Azrael regarded the corridor. While it is primarily a landscape projected by his own mind, it picks up aspects of the ship as well. Rather than the clean stark white that Azrael would find in a new and well maintained Imperial ship here there is a thin layer of dust covering the floor, and there are cracks in the paintwork too. This ship has not seen a true Mechanicum adept for a long time. There is something slightly baroque about the corridor too, a slight vaulting to the ceiling, oversized, albeit tarnished, door handles. This ship is old too. Despite the grime there was a sense of solidness however. Though it was old, and not well cared for this was still a sturdy ship that would serve a good master well.
"It's about time someone looked after you a little better old girl," Azrael said absentmindedly, stroking one of the wall panels. He heard, or perhaps imagined, a faint appreciative sigh from the ship as he did so.
Looking more carefully Azrael could see that as well as the dirt and the cracked paintwork there was a vague
darkness about some of the corners, almost like mould. Corruption. Not dramatic, but definitely there, the touch of Chaos is unmistakeable to one who knows how to look for it. Not unexpected given who the ship's owner was, and actually not as bad he had thought it might be. Either the ship was quite resistant or it had only entered the service of Chaos comparatively recently. The corruption was also slightly stronger toward the rear of the ship. He could only directly access the forward part of the ship from here, but he could get echoes from other parts of the ship and there was a definite sense that something dramatic was going on at the back of the ship. No doubt that was where the struggle involving the Relictors was taking place.
"Right," he said to himself, "down to business."
Azrael made a gesture and the walls of the corridor rushed past him.
Whilst it would seem to someone else immersed in the grid that his reverie and examination had lasted some time it had in fact only been a fraction of a second. Actions in the grid moved at the speed of thought. This was something else Azrael had missed about being connected to such facilities. While there are of course many subtle differences an Adept of the Mechanicus is probably the closest a non-psyker can be to understanding what it is like to communicate and interact with objects psychically. One can have an entire conversation in the space of a microsecond and one is not limited by the ability of language to articulate ideas. Nonetheless everything else in the grid moves at the speed of thought also, and while the ship is obviously not overtly hostile, and all machines have a certain deference to members of the Machine Cult there would be roving security programs that would not recognise Azrael as their master. There would not be many here as from this shrine he was limited in what he could do with the ships systems, he could look at most things relating to the forward sections, but his ability to act was restricted.
Azrael made another gesture and the walls stopped. In front of him was a door labelled 'Internal Optics'. Exactly what he was looking for. He reached out to the handle of the door and then froze. There was a security program on the other side of the door, he could sense it. Not a particularly nasty one, but nonetheless.
Preparing himself he put his boot to the door and burst through it. The security program had been just behind the door, as he had hoped, and was bowled over. It had a roughly humanoid appearance, however its head was a smooth pearlescent egg without any hint of a face and the lower part of its right arm was a vicious looking blade. A rather simple low level program, Azrael mused briefly, they always do tend to stand too close behind the doors. It attempted to right itself and slash out at Azrael with its blade but Azrael ducked aside and shot it in the face, or at least where its face would have been. The pearlescent orb shattered and the program fell limp before dissolving.
“Right, hopefully that was the only one in this section.”
Azrael turned to look around the room. Arrayed around the walls were banks of monitors displaying the output of the security optics throughout the ship. He approached one of the banks of monitors and began cycling through the optics in the forward section, around the path he expected Derryck to have taken. A good number of the cameras were non-functional, no doubt partly through damage, and possibly partly through poor maintenance. He found a single winding path along which all of the cameras had been disabled. He smiled, Derryck had done well, not many people would have found that winding path of disabled cameras. He disconnected the next camera along the corridor from the main network so that only he could see its output. Then he activated his vox unit.
“Derryck, when you reach the next camera, rather than disabling it, throw something small into its field of view.”
“Aye Magos,” Derryck confirmed. He had been waiting for Azrael to enter the ship and access its systems.
After what seemed like a long wait to Azrael an ammo pack bounced into the view of the camera he was watching.
“Excellent, I have your position. Now I can guide you around any obstacles,” Azrael said over the vox.
“Great, I was hoping we wouldn’t have to deal with any more of the crew, Jonas was seriously injured in the last encounter,” Derryck replied with just a hint of chagrin.
“What happened?”
Derryck filled Azrael in on the encounter, after which Azrael contacted Theo and Renard and went through the same process as with Derryck, such that he could guide them back out of the ship without running into any patrols.
His people out of immediate danger Azrael scanned through the rest of the forward areas of the ship. It did not take long to spot the original entry point of the Relictor marines and the path they had taken. The trail of blood and carnage was quite unmistakeable. He marvelled for a moment at the shear destructive power of a squad of Space Marines in the tight confines of a spacecraft. The trail did indeed lead towards the rear part of the ship, if they had maintained this level of destruction all the way to engineering they might well have slaughtered over a third of the crew. Nonetheless there would still be over a thousand souls still on board.
Shortly afterwards he located Roldar and his scouts. He activated the communicator he had given to Roldar.
“Roldar, this is Azrael. While you will no doubt be able to find and follow the trail of blood and gore left by your brothers I believe they went in the direction of the enginarium. I can guide you part of the way there avoiding large groups of crew, but my sight does not reach beyond the forward sections at the moment.”
Continuing to scan through the camera views he found the target he had selected for Derryck, the secondary fire control centre. This coordinated the control of the smaller defensive turrets that could be used against the Xenos. Azrael swore quietly to himself. The secondary fire control centre was a hive of activity. He had thought it might be busy given that the fighters only recently flew over but he could count at least 60 people in the room. Azrael contemplated the idea of creating a distraction to lure some of them away, but even if he could get half of them to leave that still left 30. It might be possible but it would be very risky.
Another thought occurred to him instead. He split his focus in two, creating a shadow version of himself. His shadow walked back out into the corridor and the walls rushed past again. This time they stopped with a door marked ‘Weapons status’. He couldn’t access the weapons themselves from this shrine, but he could examine their condition. His shadow paused for a moment in front of the door. No security program this time. He opened the door and stepped inside. Examining the weapons he found that there were only three turrets with fire arcs in the right direction that were still operational in any case. He marked the location of the turrets and drew his shadow back to him.
Seeking out the turrets on the monitors he found that there were, as he had expected, far fewer crew members near them. Automated turrets did not after all need to be attended to unless there was a problem. The path to one of the turrets however lay through a more populated area. Two turrets for two Xenos, the idea appealed to him and he contacted Derryck again.
“Change of plans, secondary fire control is too heavily guarded. Divide the group, I am sending you to two of the turrets to control them directly, they are far more lightly protected. I’m sending you their locations.”
“Affirmative”
Derryck quickly divided the warband in two, putting Yelena in charge of the second team.
Guiding four groups through the ship would be taxing but Theo, Renard and Jonas were near the maintenance hatch now.
The two teams had just started moving towards the turrets when Azrael heard a quiet voice urgently whispering in his ear.
“Magos there’s a group of 12 crewmen heading this way, we need to move.”
It was Usher.
“Feth, that’s too many.”
He checked the camera feeds, Usher was right, they must have moved into the area while Azrael was distracted looking everywhere else. Had he somehow alerted the crew to his presence? It seemed unlikely, but either way they needed to leave this area.
Azrael voxed quickly through to all of the groups, “You’re on your own for a while, I need to move to a different location. I’ll be back in contact as soon as I can.”
[OOC: Hope everyone liked that and it moved things forward enough while still having some ambiguity]
