Still shafted

<ooc>
Here's a back post - I was working on it before things moved on somewhat - that'll teach me to go succumbing to the charms of a boozy weekend when I should have been finishing this off instead ;)
</ooc>

<snip>
The rest of the group also piled into the tunnel one by one as Jay, Cass and the others began to climb the long dark tunnel.
</snip>

Jay led the way, ascending upwards into the darkness, affording Cass, even in these low light conditions, a guilt free but surreptitiously great view of his arse as he clambered up the rungs of the ladder ahead of her

They climbed on in silence for a good fifteen or twenty minutes before Cass finally managed to tear her eyes away from the way the nano-suit moved around Jay's body, and glanced back down the ladder at Phi, her pale face almost luminescent in the gloom below, eyes wide and lips moving in silent repetition of a mantra of some sort or other
“You alright?” Cass asked, her voice echoing suddenly in the darkness
“Dirty!” Phi gasped, flinching as a few drops of water dripped down from Cassandra's still damp jacket onto her upturned face, making her squeal in tight lipped in disgust as she wiped her cheek and forehead off on the sleeve of her lab coat
“Please, please, please, please, please don't do that again!” she snapped with a note of high pitched hysteria evident in her voice
“Oookay...” Cass soothed
“Everything alright there?” Jay asked, glancing back down at them
“I think we might need a breather here” Cass frowned “Are we anywhere near a level intersection?”
Jay looked a little embarrassed
“Yeah, sorry” he smiled apologetically “I sometimes forget the rest of you aren't wearing nano-suit's as well, and can't keep going all day like I can; Thanks for reminding me”
“All day?” Cass breathed, her eyebrows twitching upwards “Is that right...?”
“Anyway...” Jay looked upwards into the darkness, leaving her thankful that he had apparently not heard her “I think we're about fifty meters from the next major intersection; we can stop for a breather there and take stock a little”

A few minutes later, they swung off the ladder and into a crawlway tunnel, similar to the one they had begun climbing from; except that this one was blocked at the end near the service hatch, and was choked with a pile of unidentifiable mechanical detritus that seemed to be slowly leaking effluent of some sort, collecting in an oily puddle at their feet, and slowly oozing out of the crawlway and down the wall of the shaft beyond
Phi didn’t look happy, and began nervously worrying the cuff of her lab coat, as she hopped from one foot to the other, trying to keep out of the oily ooze
Cass, in the meantime, dug into the disgustingly cold and clammy pocket of her jacket to pull out her psi-scanner, glumly gazing down at the little device, taking in the filthy water sloshing around behind the glass of the screen and the crack that had unaccountably appeared in its case
“I don't think I'm going to have a lot of luck with this...” she muttered, petulantly slapping the psi-scanner hard on the side to try and get it to boot up

To her immense surprise the screen lit immediately, listing a helpful array of information, detailing the location and movements of several non-human entities on the decks around them, even going to far as to list them ranked them by their relative aggression and lust for brains
“Sod me...” she breathed, tucking a filthy lock of hair back behind an ear and out of her face as she leant in over the device “I can't believe it's actually working!”
“Huh” White Wolf grunted “What's it telling us?”
“Ok...” Cass paused to wave the psi-scanner around in a wide arc “The dead seem to be massing in a few locations around us; Holly's probably directing them in preparation for something – maybe an assault against us or the stasis decks?... There...There seems to be some sort of carrier wave activity as well; probably used to direct the corpses, but I've no idea how the damn things are actually moving! – For all I know Holly's been planning this shit for centuries, and the virus only unhinged the crazy smegger even further and just added a little demonic colour”
“Yeah, but what about that device the Simulants went off to build?” White Wolf asked “Isn't that supposed to be responsible for all this?”
“Smegged if I know” Cass said bluntly “But I can't imagine that one device alone is responsible for making the dead just get up and walk; it'd need something else surely? Nanonic muscle articulation? Neural replacements? Control structures? Maybe Holly was working on using them as a skeleton crew before it went insane?”
“That's bonkers, but as plausible as anything I've seen around here these last couple of days” Jay sighed “So, can we jam that signal? What are our options?”
“Well...” Cass frowned “We could try jamming it, but if I were Holly I'd be employing fail-safe's, which would probably just force the zombies into a killing frenzy if the signal got smegged with; so yes it can be jammed, but no we probably wouldn't want to do it”
“Bummer” Jay grunted “Do we have enough ammo to fight off, what? Five, six hundred angry zombies if we do?”
Davie shook his head
“Not at the moment” he rumbled “I'd need to go visit Staples or one of the other stationers on the Promenade...”
“And even then!” Seymour butted in “You'll still only be firing paper clips at them! These are the walking dead were talking about! It'll take explosive bullets and anti personnel mines to take them down, not bloody stationary!”
“They've some very efficient paper management solutions at Staples” Davie huffed defensively “You haven't seen their sixty mil bulldog clips!”
“Regardless...” Cass cut smoothly across the both of them “Jamming or disrupting the signal would probably be a bad idea; similarly any attempts to try and modify it to control the corpses will probably result in a killing frenzy as well, unless I'm very careful; but I've got to crack the control structures Holly'll have erected before I can do that, which alone might take weeks!”
“Which brings us back to what to do about Holly, right?” Jay asked
“Yeah” Cass sighed “There are a few options, but I'll need a dig around in it's Mind before I can give you an accurate idea about the best thing to do; and the Drive Room with it's hard-wired security overrides is the best place to do that”
Jay scowled
“Doesn’t sound all that promising, does it?”
“No” Cass admitted “We might well wind up using a half ton of high explosives on the smegger, but I'll do what I can before we have to resort to that”
She paused and looked around the small group
“Or...” she began “We could all just say 'Bugger this' and bundle into a Starbug along with a few palate loads of beer and then go find a planet with a few nice beaches?”

“Nah” said Jay after a moment “That would be too easy; c'mon lets go...”