I hereby accept the Blake's 7 Round Robin Challenge... to tie up the various strands into a coherent plot *and* include all the necessary items.
The 7 Challenge Round Robin, part 3:
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"Avon!" Jenna said sharply in an undertone. She beckoned him up beside here as he glanced round. With her other hand she was working the controls of the console. "Look at these frequencies. What do you make of that?"
Avon leaned over her shoulder and frowned, reading the data on the screen. "This is the transmission we just heard?" His tone was edged with disbelief, and Jenna's mouth tightened.
"You think I can't tell white noise from a coded transmission when I hear it?" She jabbed at the buttons, re-running the sequence. "Filter one -- filter two -- filter three...."
The dancing specks resolved once more into half a dozen wavering lines across the screen, and she tapped each in turn with a finger. "These two I know. Main energy bank feed. Navigation override..."
Avon's own mouth had drawn back into a thin, hard line. "Detector cut-out," he filled in grimly, as she hesitated. "*Teleport* *activation* *channel* --" His eyes met Jenna's, the same cold realisation dawning in both. "Someone's tapping into the Liberator's functions from outside!"
"Direct computer transmission. That communication wasn't aimed at us. It was aimed at Zen. It's an old smuggler's trick." Jenna's voice was soft and bitter. "With the right codes and frequency, you can cripple any ship --"
"--if," Avon said equally softly. "you can find some dupe on the inside to give you access to the ship or the codes in the first place." His fingers tightened on her arm. "But even among our noble idiots, who could have been so *stupid*...?"
He swung round abruptly. Jenna followed his gaze down across the floor of the flight deck as he stiffened.
Vila was still scrabbling after his scattered possessions, trying to retrieve a handful of odd-looking coins that had rolled across the deck. One had lodged itself under Blake's feet. Blake stooped automatically to pick it up, gazing down at the writing on the battered disc blankly, his attention all too obviously focused on the communicator's stubborn silence.
And Gan -- Gan was staring at the grille where Cally's voice had sounded, both hands clenched by his sides so tightly that his knuckles showed white even in the dim light. For a moment Jenna hardly recognised him. His face was ghastly pale and he looked half-dead with sudden understanding, his eyes dark shadows of pain.
Avon's breath hissed between his teeth. "*Gan.*"
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Cally flattened herself back against the partition, breathing hard, and listened to the faint voices of her pursuers.
"We're too late. She's got away. Now she'll have the rest of them onto us." A hard-edged drawling accent that she guessed to belong to the smaller of the two men, the one with the bell-mouthed hand weapon. Her side still stung like fire where the outer nimbus of the shot had caught her.
A muffled obscenity from the other man. He sounded out of breath. He had her gun -- and much good might it do him without the power pack! -- but all the same she'd managed to knee him where it hurt. "Where's that little runt? It cost us enough to grab him and the other two off that planet, with his savage friends squeaking after us. I thought you'd got him trained this time!"
"Back here. Hiding." A thump and the sound of a squeal, followed by a flood of high-pitched babble.
Cally edged cautiously forward, trying to get a glimpse around the edge of the sheltering wall. The two interlopers were silhouetted against the light in the teleport bay. Between them was a smaller figure, half-cowering. Even at this distance, she could see enough to tell that it was barely humanoid, let alone human.
"I should have known you couldn't be trusted!" The smaller man let loose a kick at the little fronded creature, who squealed again and backed away, still chattering frantically. "You do what you're told, do you hear me? Who cares if the big man was kind to you, hey? Who cares what he said? None of that stuff you've brought is worth its weight in sand!"
There was a clatter as he swept a litter of objects off the top of the teleport console with a blow of one hand. A small, slim shape skittered across the deck-plating and rolled to within a few yards of Cally's hiding-place. She shrank back automatically as both men glanced towards the sound; but not before she had recognised Vila's missing probe. Her mind was whirling.
The angry voices were still going on. Cally leaned out again.
"Don't tell me you were shut up in that cabin all the time. We told you what to look for, remember? Now where is it?"
Hesitantly, the little figure held out one final item. Cally's eyes widened as the light caught the circuitry in the clear sliver of plastic. Orac's activator. But how....
She took a step forward almost without thinking. Low down on the wall opposite, the crudely scratched words mocked her with their message, cryptic no longer. She stared at them in dismay. ==== ____________________________________
Challenge things, one or more to be included in the next piece: