<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/4/46/Shuttle_Icon.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>The Crew Of Cooler Shuttle III - <em>Storm Petrel</em></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Descending from orbit to land on the pad.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td>All newly arriving player characters</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Regular supply run, and delivering new inmates.</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>It was just another milk run for the crew of Cooler Shuttle III, informally known as the Storm Petrel. The other shuttles all had names too, all named after flying creatures that lived in icebound regions of their home planets. But only Shuttle III was named after a creature from Old Earth. The pilot had warning that a military shuttle was departing the planet on a parallel vector, and acknowledged. He saw the other vessel on his scanners, admiring the way the armed vessel simply defied the laws of gravity in a way that his own ship was not quite able to.<br/><br/>He waited until they were in the atmosphere and then called up the "cabin crew" on the intercom. "Heading in, start getting 'em ready".<br/><br/>Back in the cargo bays, each one holding a small number of stasis pods, the prison guards put their armour on, and activated the revival sequence on the first pod in their bay.<br/><br/>As soon as the pod door slid open, the inmate was told to stand up and get undressed. Any that questioned the order were first told again, including any clarification that yes it meant completely naked, no they couldn't keep their underwear, if they had requested to keep cetrain jewellery they would be allowed to keep it buteverything else was to go into that bag there. Any who refused were shoved into the restraints on the walls and their clothing cut off them.<br/><br/>The convicts were then told to climb into a vat of rather disgusting looking gloop. "This is the last suit of clothes you'll ever wear", the guard told each of the women. Again if they refused, they would be carried, struggling or not, and simply dumped into the vat. The guards wore military grade power armour for that very reason, that and it meant the women convicts couldn't hurt them. It also stopped them from sexually molesting the prisoners - the power armour simply wasn't equipped to touch a woman in that way, without doing her serious damage.<br/><br/>Dunked under the gloop and then told to clime out, each inmate in turn would find themselves coated in a thin layer of the stuff which rapidly congealed into a transparent, flexible, body hugging suit. Smartex, the material was called, short for smart latex. It was made from regular synthetic latex, but each molecule was attached to a nanite, a microscopic robot, that was programmed to function in conjunction with the molecule-nanites around it, giving the latex suite certain properties that more than justified the "smart" tag.<br/><br/>As the suit around each inmate congealed, they were directed to stand in an alcove that looked like it should rotate. In fact, this is exactly what it did, sealing the convict off completely from the prisoner preparation bay and leaving them facing what was obviously the outer hatch of an airlock, with a small window in it. Peering out through the window would reveal nothing but grey clouds, as the shuttle descended through the atmosphere. Obviously, any inmates refusing to enter the pod were simply forced in.<br/><br/>Any inmates asking questions about how they would live, what they would be doing, what facilities were available, were, as a sort of sick joke, handed a small leaflet entitled "Howe to build an igloo".<br/><br/>With the transportee safely locked in her own private exit pod, each guard would then activate the revival sequence on the next stasis pod, repeating the procedure until all inmates were safely contained within the ship's outer skin. In this way, the procedure was kept impersonal. None of the inmates saw the face of a guard, nor did they see any of the other inmates.<br/><br/>The ship would hover in whatever cloud could be found - something quite normal, especially as the ship would often make it's own cloud due to the heat of it's jets - until all the prisoners were processed, and then it would land.<br/><br/>On this particular day, the cloud layer was low and the shuttle dipped out of it only a few hundred metres above the pad, giving the transportees on the port side of the ship their first glimpse of their new home. Those on the starboard side saw only the never ending ice plane, dotted here and there with a ridge or crevasse, stretching away to the distance, until the shuttle touched down. Then the Duraplaz landing pad would finally come into view.<br/><br/>Once on the ground, the doors on the exit pods slid silently open. a speaker in each pod crackled to life and a synthetic voice pronounced: "You have ten minutes to exit the vessel. If you do so immediately, you will be expected to help your fellow convicts unload and load the shuttle. This will no doubt earn you some favour points. If you are still on the ship in ten minutes time, the ship will lift with you still on board. Please be aware that you will not be allowed back in the ship under any circumstances. This is your only warning. Stay where you are and you will either fall to your death or asphyxiate when we exit the atmosphere. Message ends".