Blake37, it just dawned on me that you are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to putting together Volunteers posts. As far as I know, there is no terminal viewer or editor for the PC. When I did the Rubicon Volunteers series, I used the excellent terminal editor in Pfhorge to copy and past directly from the terminal screens as appropriate. You lack even the capabilities of Durandal Terminal Browser. That explains a lot - you have to read everything in game and remember what you can. I'll help you out on this one.
What the hell do you think you're doing? Do you have some sort of death wish? A waste disposal transporter... of all the stupid... uhr! . . . That transporter you just took is targeted straight into the sun. I saw you climbing into it from up here and had to move fast to intercept the transport beam. I mean, I understand that you don't know where any given transporter goes, but did you honestly think a garbage disposal would transport you anywhere even remotely pleasant?
Wait a minute! Didn't Lela tell us to use that transporter? Lela goes on to say that she understands we had little choice, given that she couldn't get through to us. Couldn't get through to us? If it wasn't Lela who contacted us down below, who was it then that told us to use the garbage transporter? Perhaps it was Hathor, wanting us to be destroyed once and for all. But wan't the best way to insure that to just leave us on the planet? Hmm . . . could someone else be helping us here? And there was that "dual host" warning in that message as well. Very interesting.
In any case, there is a lot of backstory told in the terminals on Dread Not and I'm certainly not going to repost all of it here. The major point is that the Drinnol have begun their rebellion against the Pfhor and this will ultimately decimate the Pfhor empire, starting it on it's slow but unavoidable decline. Because the hulks were fully socialized and assimilated into Pfhor society, but subjugated by nothing more than fear, once they did rebel, the battle took place on all Pfhor worlds and led to the outright destruction of a third of the Pfhor empire. This was not like the Nakh rebellion that came later, in which the trih xeem could be used to simply anialate the Nakh worlds. The Pfhor couldn't wipe out all of their own worlds, and had to expend all of their resources just to regain control. Once they did so, however, the Drinnol that remained were never in a position to challenge the Pfhor again - hence the nature of the hulks we encountered in M1.
All of these events depend on getting the rebellious Drinnol to safety so that they can spread the rebellion. It's interesting that Lela had to transport them to this Jjaro dreadnaught, implying that the Drinnol rebellion might have never gotten off the ground if not for her intervention. My take on this is that it was Hathor's intervention that jeopardized the Drinnol in the first place and that our mission is to undo the damage she has done. Although it would be ideal to simply use the Jjaro dreadnaught for the Drinnol's escape, the problem is that we cannot take the chance on this ship getting into the hands of the Pfhor. We'll clear out a Pfhor ship in the next level, but our mission here is to destroy this dreadnaught, keeping it out of the hands of the Pfhor. We need to activate the ship's self-destruct mechanism, but it's what we do after that that will determine whether we enter the success or failure branch of this chapter. See to it that Hathor cannot simply disable the self-destruct mechanism and the success branch awaits us. Fail to do so and the ship will fall into Hathor's hands, the consequences of which we're going to see shortly.
