Hand waive some solar activity that makes standard inter station communication impossible for a few hours? I am not sure on the science, but that is how I did one of my adventures when I needed a station out of the loop for a few hours. "And remember citizens, tonight marks the zenith of the most powerful solar storms this side of the Fall. Expect Mesh connectivity to be lacking between UST 2:00 and 9:00. Hardwired communication systems will be unaffected, and will remain in service throughout the expected downtime. Please report any disturbances to security immediately, using the newly AR-highlighted access points."

First, communications must be suborned - no raising the alarm, no calls for help. That suggests attacking the communications systems - farcasters, antenna arrays, or the systems controlling them. Also, people with emergency farcasters (if any) must be identified beforehand and neutralized. I would use an infiltration team, looking like a completely legit group of visitors. Ideally they are a standard group, like the belters who usually visit whenever the habitat is near or that gang of extropian merchants selling slightly pirated blueprints. Except that the real group might have been replaced with your infiltrators - ideally even taking their bodies and software. They enter, behave apparently normally, but quietly inserts sabotage nano, gremlin bots, and malware in the station AI systems. A bit of clever misdirection to get security to focus on something else - a crewmember apparently going crazy, a sudden brawl in a remote part of the habitat, a nasty micrometeorite impact (actually a projectile launched by the infiltrators beforehand). At the right moment they strike. Main AIs and emergency system taken offline and/or suborned by hackers, malware and sabotage devices. At the same time the infiltrators unveil a hidden arsenal of nasty tech. I would go for nanoswarms over bioweapons, since on a space habitat most people would have emergency spacesuits. Although if you have a long incubation bioweapon most could become infected before the attack starts, and then a trigger chemical could be spread to get the designer disease to launch into its fulminant mode. With the control of station system in infiltrator hands they could be turned against the inhabitants, locking them in, spacing them, or killing them using bots or life support cut-offs. For direct anti-personnel attacks against security and militias, splash them with suitable nanotoxins or nerve agents, then mop up remaining concentrations of force by those reapers you had stowed in the visiting spaceship. If you do things right there is no real chance of sending the alarm, and you now have control over the AI systems and plenty of cortical stacks to work with. Make gamma forks of key people, use them to pretend everything is fine for as long as possible. Leave quietly. If you are worried about investigators tracing the attack, leave some suitable suicide option to the suborned AI so that it will start erasing all traces once it thinks the game is up. Nuclear or antimatter warheads are a bit extrovert. Deliberate overheating using the reactor and a wrecked cooling system looks more accidental. Disassembler or protean nanoswarms are a neat option but might look odd. For the real "bizarre AI accident" look you instead reprogram gardener nanoswarms to prune and compost all biomass and have the AI release self-replicating worms in the local mesh, slowly breaking it down into a mess of parasites and hyperparasites.

For a hab with 30 people, I would send a fork to lurk long enough to build a personality profile for each of them, and a contact profile for anyone who regularly communicates with other habitats. After that is reasonably complete, jam all outgoing communications, intercept any incoming communications, and spoof any interaction with outside parties according to predictions made from the profiles. After you are done murdering everyone, have a medvat spit out clones running the profiles as egos. With luck and skill, people may simply never notice the swap. If you replace the artifact with something else, they can even wind down their research in disappointment, and go back home. Families of the victims might realize the pod people switch and restore them from backup, but by then you and all traces of your mission are long gone.

You could also let them conveniently discover that a fresh team of researchers is scheduled to rotate in by egocast. (Gumshoe the aforementioned; if you leave it up to skill tests, you potentially have no scenario). Research on sanity-bending TITAN technology is mentally stressful, so it's possible the org sponsoring the research is rotating researchers in and out so that they have fresh minds available (and maybe the previous crew gets sent straight to psychosurgery). Let your PCs replace the real researchers (possibly with some help from friendly hackers if they don't have the skills themselves) and egocast in. Once there, you've got a very different scenario than an infiltration/assault, but potentially much more rewarding. The team has to impersonate the researchers they're supposed to be (with the help of skillsofts to fill in the knowledge they don't have), but on the side, they'll be using the 3D printers while no one is looking to make the arms & other gear they'll need to mount a mutiny. They'll have to balance the danger of discovery vs. their level of preparedness for when they make their move. And they'll have to figure out how to escape when they're done. This has the potential to be incredibly tense and exciting. If you don't write it, I will. :) This way of doing it is hard if you have one of those groups that's terrified of egocasting, though.

Someone's been playing Deus Ex Human Revolution, already! I just could see all that happen with the 3D engine of the game and the gold/black palette. ... it looked awesome!

Kyorou wrote:

Neutron wave inside the habitat's rad shielding ?

Ah, that is a good one! Maybe a nuclear isomer bomb: certain isotopes have nuclei that can remain in different energy states. Were they to move to a lower one, they would release the energy as gamma rays. One can imagine a weapon producing a "laser" effect where the isomer change in one atom triggers the next one, producing a massive gamma pulse. So the attackers bring a biggish chunk of tantalum 180m linked to a triggering apparatus, and then irradiate the whole habitat. The tantalum chunk will likely vaporize in a small explosion, but that's it - not even any residual radiation. On the upside, this is probably perfect for wiping out nanomachines, much electronics and it is instant. On the downside, this is not instant kill: biomorphs can still live for up to an hour despite lethal radiation poisoning (they get the cerebral syndrome with rapidly worsening seizures, ataxia and lethargy). So blocking communications is still necessary. If it is strong enough to destroy synthmorphs too, it might be hard for the attackers to survive. As per the infiltration story, that sounds like a good adventure idea! In a really old thread we discussed something similar for infiltrating a Jovian research lab; some intriguing possibilities not just for having to impersonate people but to get the PCs to (re)consider the morality of what they and their opposition are doing.

Oops. Heh, sorry. On the up side, now I have my spring con scenario seed. :)

Quincey, be mindful that you might be focusing a little too much the players' future adventures in that direction. I was a little against making the Glory infectees smarter because, well, I was using the adventure as a second step before aiming my players to mars or venus... at least until rimward gets published ^^. Of course, my poor and innocent players didn't thought about being sure that the had not been any more infection in the greenhouse habitat... XD

One thing to consider is that far out into space, whatever offensive the attack team uses, one major way of covering their tracks is to make it look like the exhumans are responsible for the attack. It's plausible, and it's likely to send anyone who follows to investigate in the entirely wrong direction (and as a nice bonus, the exhumans are very likely to try and kill/assimilate any investigative teams that follow the fake lead.)