21: Is It Getting Hot In Here?

 Lee decided to set up some surveillance cameras to keep an eye on the exterior of the ship while they were in dock, which paid off quite quickly. That very night, while he was on duty, he noticed something on one of the monitors, though he couldn't be sure what it was.

He failed his Security Systems roll, but not by much. So he had a functional video feed, it's just that the cameras weren't really pointed anywhere very useful.

He hit the silent alarm to wake everybody, and dashed out the side airlock opposite to where he thought he'd seen the bogey. He moved stealthily down the ladders, so stealthily that the intruder, fossicking about around one of the ship's landing struts didn't even know he was there until Lee challenged it.

It immediately spun round and started shooting blindly in Lee's general direction (it still hadn't seen him), and Lee tossed a flash-bang over in its general direction (can't throw for toffee).

Regrettably, Enkain'os, who had slipped sneakily down the ladder on the opposite side, wasn't expecting the flash-bang at all and was momentarily dazzled when it went off. The intruder took to its heels, sprinting across the tarmac. Enkain'os rapidly recovered and went after it, and Lee attempted to slow it down by winging it with his plasma rifle.

He certainly did wing it. In fact, he blew one of its arms right off, and it went down like a sack of spuds.

Enkain'os dragged the corpse (and its arm) back to the ship for examination. It was a Perseid in some sort of chameleon suit. They found a small holster (empty), a hip pouch (empty), a belt pouch containing a set of micro-tools, and — uh-oh — a police ID blazer.

Janey examined the landing strut where the cop had been working and found a cunningly disguised module of some sort, but could not determine what it was. Lee and she between them managed to detach it without blowing anything up, but they couldn't get it open to see what it did.

Enkain'os set about dismembering the corpse and shoved it into a plastic bag in the refuse disposal system, to be automatically dumped next time they were in space.

Lee went out on to the tarmac to find the gun that must surely be out there. On the way over to where the cop had dropped he noticed a pair of spaceport cops loitering about in a doorway, so he went into "fly casual" mode and attempted to pick up the little pistol without looking like he was picking up a little pistol. He failed utterly. Twice. So it was probably a good thing that the mall cops were just wasting time  on their shift and taking not a blind bit of notice of him.

Enkain'os took the gun, badge and Mysterious Module off to find Dagog (the mobster) to see if he could take care of them. Dagog was clearly not pleased to be given a bloody police ID and gun, but kindly told Enkain'os not to worry, he'd make sure that none of them went to prison.

This, Enkain'os naturally assumed, meant that he'd be killed on his way back to the ship and that there would shortly be a kill team on its way to take care of everybody else back there. He made a not-very-cryptic call to Lee to alert him to the situation, and began to make his way back to the ship, with every nerve a-tingle for the assassins he just knew would be there any minute.

Sure enough, as he passed through a section of the promenade strangely bereft of any traffic, he became aware of a pair of shadows closing in on him. He decided to try to take them one at a time by virtue of his superior stealthiness....

Superior to one of them, at any rate. One of the hit-men was depressingly amateurish, and Enkain'os encouraged him to stab himself in the throat with his own vibro-knife. regrettably, the other was considerably more efficient, and managed to creep up behind him while he was dealing with the dummy. A brief struggle ensued, in which the Good Guy triumphed; he left the Bad Guy unconscious and hot-footed it back to the ship, which was just warming up for take-off.

As he crossed the tarmac, he saw a suspiciously L'regh-heavy "maintenance" crew emerge from one of the administration buildings and head right towards our ship — he leaped on board, got everything buttoned down, and they took off, leaving the kill team impotently on the ground, since they hadn't brought anything heavy enough to take down a ship in flight.

As they were achieving orbital altitudes, Our Heroes received a message from the departure tower saying that there was a problem with their flight plan, and they were required to return to their docking bay... Lee exerted his Fast Talk skills.... "Sorry you're breaking up, message not understood, we're going through a tunnel..."

And they took off for one of the asteroid belts, where Janey had pinpointed a Super-Secret Dark Web Refuelling Depot...

No she hadn't. She fumbled her roll completely. She'd actually pinpointed a Super-Secret Dark Web Military Research Station. Oops.

They had about a week in transit to consider that maybe they wouldn't want to be going back to Talat Prime any time soon. They also had time for Janey to discover the Talat Customs techs' little sleight-of-hand with their navigation and jump control modules, but there wasn't anything much she could do about that now.

Fortunately, Patience's sensors skills were substantially better than Janey's dark-web research skills, and she figured out that the featureless asteroid they were heading for was, whatever it was, not a covert refuelling depot. She exerted her magnificent piloting skills to make it look like they were just casually flying past and had no interest at all in that completely featureless asteroid... and success! They were not blown out of the sky.

They decided to give up the idea of trying to refuel on the down-low, and just to find a regular old Esso station or something. Which they did, and spent all their local cash on enough fuel to make one jump.

Lee got out his Planetary Sciences For Dummies and tried to figure out which of the systems within range might be most likely to have one or more nice fat juicy gas giants to feed from, and narrowed it down to three out of the dozen or so systems in their extremely basic Perseid navigation database that were on their heading. They decided that they might as well squeeze every last light year out of this, possibly their last jump, and set a course for the last of the three likely potentials.

Thankfully, the system they chose bore fruit, and they settled down to skimming gas into the ship's refineries.

Not dead yet.

Their next jump should take them into the Spinward Territories, and from there it's not too far back to Terran space.

20: Minimalist Precis

I have not been keeping up this journal, entirely due to laziness. Therefore this entry is just a very basic precis outlining the barest bones of events.

• The crew decided to try to jump their way back to Terran space, preferably avoiding any Perseid Imperial entanglements. They can carry enough fuel for four (?) jumps, and plan to refuel at handy gas giants. The navigation database they've been gifted shows the coordinates of star systems along their route, but not the composition of those systems, so each jump is a bit of a gamble when it comes to refueling. If they don't find a refueling stop after two jumps, they're going to use their third jump to hop to a known inhabited system for refueling, leaving them with fuel for just one more jump.
• Things went okay briefly, but then a series of effectively useless systems meant that they had to take the emergency Perseid-engagement option.
• They jumped successfully to TALAT, a Perseid manufacturing colony fairly near to the imperial border.
• Unlicensed aliens are not very welcome, and allowances are not made for them. There is no legal free refueling available in this system, so they're going to have to find a way to come up with some local money.

Talat

There is one human(oid) habitable planet in the Talat system, very heavily industrialized. There are a multitude of sealed environments on other planets, moons, and asteroids, as well as a fair number of orbital installations, all servicing the central industrial core at Talat Prime.

There is an alert and active Imperial Customs and Police presence in the system. There is also a thriving criminal underworld and black market.

The predominant species are Perseids, but there are also a lot of non-Perseid species present as well, mainly from the CCR, with whom the Perseid Empire maintains fairly friendly relations. 

• Our ship was pinged almost immediately on arrival, and on claiming the status of Distressed Mariners, a long, tedious, and intrusive immigration procedure ensued. Both the ship and crew were subject to intensive and detailed scans and tests. The Perseid techs were very very interested in the shiny and seamless navigation and jump controllers gifted the ship by the Dreary Remorse, but were unable to find any way to look inside. So they just took them out (without even asking) and replaced them with standard Perseid modules, jury-rigged to interface with the Terran systems of the ship.
• Once they were allowed to land on the surface, and were given temporary licences as Alien Visitors (spaceport only), Esekain'os made contact with a fairly low-level L'regh criminal family, in the person of a supposed street-food vendor named DAGOG.
• Esekain'os organised doing a job for the Family: delivery of a discreet cargo to one of the asteroid belt factories, accompanied by Dagog's two "sons" (?), MAGOG and AGOG. A successful conclusion will earn the team 10,000 credits (they need 40,000 to refuel fully, plus docking fees).

The L'REGH (of which Eskain'os is one) are humanoid-insectoids, with chitinous skin, compound eyes, and creepy mouth-parts.

• The cargo arrived at the ship, in the form of a number of nondescript crates, along with Agog and Magog.
• The outgoing Customs inspection went suspiciously smoothly. Also, a potential boarding by a patrol ship on the outbound journey was unexpectedly aborted after Agog (or Magog) spoke with them. It appears that Dagog and his family might have more clout than first appeared.
• The ship arrived at its destination and landed without problems, but the unloading party (naturally) turned out to be hijackers. They were fought off with heavy losses, but the cargo bay systems, and all the un-hardened spacesuits therein (Our Heroes) were briefly knocked out by an EMP grenade. Also, Eskain'os had an arm blown off.
• New unloading arrangements were made, and carried out, by Agog and Magog.
• The "discreet cargo" turned out to be small stasis pods, child-sized. Hmmmm.
• Turns out that the ship's AutoDoc isn't programmed for L'regh physiology.
• They made it back to Talat Prime, and got their 10,000 cr. bounty. Also, the Family arranged to have a new arm put on Eskain'os as a courtesy.
• The ship has been moved to a bay in a part of the spaceport controlled by the Family, which makes life a lot cheaper for our gallant Crew.

19: The Dreary Burden

 Apologies for my great Slackness at keeping this journal up to date — I am but a worm.

Out of nowhere, all the ship's instruments showed massive interference, and all the speakers made an ear-splitting Dolby-THX VROOOOOOOAAAAAAAAOWWWWWWW noise as a huge thing like an elongated blob of mercury suddenly appeared floating beside them.

Almost at the same time, a floating vaguely humanoid mercury figure like a silver Oscar appeared on the bridge in a flash of ultra-violet light that left Our Heroes blinking with arc-flash and instantly sun-burned on all their exposed skin.

"Greetings!" it said. "You are in possession of artefacts from this embargoed cemetary planet. They may not be removed without authorization. I will now return them."

Down in the cargo bay, unaware of all this, Janey was quite startled to see a series of mirror-globes appear around all of the bits and pieces from the planet that she'd used to bodge together her jump-controller, and then disappear, leaving perfectly spherical holes in her benches and things. Various of the fittings, having been cut into pieces, fell to the decking and scattered bits and pieces all over the show.

On the bridge, the entity said "I see from your records that you were unaware of the status of this planet, and that your theft was from no malicious intent, so I will therefore not obliterate you at this time. I will update my warning beacons to accommodate your primitive sensors in future. Have a nice day."

There was a brief period of chaotic babbling as multiple people tried to get information out of this entity before it disappeared. They did get some, and some more tangible benefits as well:

• It calls itself The Dreary Voluntary Burden of Remorse
• It was, indirectly, responsible for the destruction of the planetary society below by prematurely accelerating their technological development before they had outgrown their tribal competitiveness and aggression, and had thus arranged and kept the remains as a sort of museum, reminder, and cautionary memorial.
• It agreed, having investigated the condition of the ship's navigation and jump systems, to fix their damage. It replaced the ruined modules with a pair of amazingly compact sealed units that Janey is panting to get a look at the guts of. Alas, there is no way in that she can find.

The Dreary Burden disappeared in a similar actinic flash as it arrived in, and almost immediately the ship's sensors started picking up signals indicating that they were in orbit of a guarded memorial planet and that access was restricted.

On investigation, they've found that the ship's jump and navigation systems are as good as new. No better than they originally were, but certainly no worse, and their navigation database has been updated with basic, fairly low-resolution maps of their current whereabouts. They are in the spinward reaches of the Perseid Empire.

18: Delusion, Illusion

 As dusk drew in, the away team made their way back to the ship and battened down the hatches for the night. They decided that since they'd got their intrusion sensor packs blown up, they'd rely on old-fashioned sentries for their security. Lee took the first watch, keeping guard from the bridge.

When he turned off the bridge lights so as to be able to see out the windows into the dark, and once his eyes had adjusted somewhat, he began to make out what looked like faintly luminescent vaporous sprites moving around outside, hundreds of them.

Ah, fumbles. I just love 'em.

He immediately leaped to the conclusion that they were some kind of alien surveillance devices, and that an attack was imminent. He hit the alarm and got everyone back... fortunately no one had had time to actually get to sleep.

Since Lee was the only one on the team with military experience (Enkai'nos doesn't count, for he is but a simple supercargo, and not any kind of secret ultra-ninja assassin-spy or anything) the team took him at his word, and they decided to vacate the locality and find some high ground from which they'd have a decent view of the surrounding countryside. This was done without any problems.

Patience settled the ship down on top of a flat-topped hill, and Lee (now hopped up on a stimulant to keep him awake) and Enkai'nos went out to do a sweep of the immediate area.

Lee continued his run of luck with the dice by utterly failing to spot one of the centipede-creatures they'd seen earlier in town, this one roughly the mass of a centipede-shaped cow, barreling at him from the shelter of a tumbled pile of rocks and thorn bushes. Fortunately, Enkai'nos was a bit more alert, and shot at it with his looted alien ray-gun....

....which fizzled out after about ten or twelve metres. Clearly a very short-range weapon design.

Lee finally woke up to the danger, and shot at the creature with his trusty plasma rifle when it was almost upon them. The shot blew the thing's head apart in a shower of boiling goo, but a goodly portion of the beam was also reflected almost straight back at him, whizzing past his left shoulder.

Fortunately, Enkai'nos was standing to his right, or else there may well have been tears before bedtime.

Fascinated, Enkai'nos took a sample of the creature's iridescent carapace for later analysis. As he was working with the corpse, he observed a faintly luminescent vaporous sprite-like phenomenon gathering above it. Hmmm.

Back on the ship, they too had failed to spot the thing on sensors until it was opened up, whereupon it showed up on infrared like a flare.

The idea of having large, effectively invisible predators roaming about the place filled nobody with joy. They buttoned up the ship to make sure nothing could get on board, and settled down for some rest. Even Lee eventually collapsed into sleep once his stim had worn off.

Next morning arrived uneventfully, and they decided they needed a larger city. Referring to the cursory survey they'd done of the planet from orbit, they noted an unobliterated urban conglomerate of reasonable size within easy reach, no more than a couple of hundred kilometres away, so they hopped over there.

As they approached at low altitude, they noted a collection of several hundred areas on the outskirts of the city, each perfectly square, each with a slightly different texture and albedo. Intrigued, they descended to within visual range and found something startling.

One area consisted of perfectly regular piles of bones, each pile constructed of a single bone type. A pile of skulls, a pile of pelvises, a pile of femurs, and so on. A quick volumetric calculation of the skull pile indicated that there must have been several million of them in there.

Other areas were each composed of a single class of object. One that attracted their attention was an array of several hundred thousand vehicles, personal transportation modules probably, roughly analogous to an air-raft, though much more primitive. They were briefly attracted to what appeared to be a flying saucer, in the hope that it might yield components they could use to jury-rig a working jump controller, but on examination it quickly proved to be nothing more than a primitive internal combustion powered hovercraft, or at best a highly inefficient helicopter.

There were collections of various sorts of household appliances, children's toys, furniture, sculpture, and badly decayed piles of perishable substances — cloth and paper and the like.

Though a bit creeped out by the idea of an OCD obliterator taking the effort of arranging all their victims' stuff, they put the piles behind them and went in over the city proper. It was completely empty of anything but buildings, dust, and the occasional hardy thorn.

The buildings got generally taller towards the centre of the urbanization, and in several areas they detected signatures above the ambient radioactivity that indicated some sort of low-level nuclear activity. They landed the ship on a large open paved area beside one of the indicated buildings, suited up, and made their way inside. The doors were unlocked.

They used their suits' built-in rad counters to trace the signal, and made their way down underground. Though a bit of a labyrinth down there, it didn't take them too long to find the reactor and control room, and found that the reactor had been put into a more or less safe standby mode, just barely ticking over. Of who had done it there was no evidence at all.

Further investigation revealed a maintenance workshop, which still held some potentially useful stuff: circuit board blanks, boxes of incredibly basic switch chips, primitive photolithography and etching equipment, and a bunch of other bits and pieces that Janey thought could be used to build some sort of JayCars "My First Jump Controller" kludge. So they nicked the lot.

They spent the rest of the day humping the loot back to the ship's cargo bay, with occasional breaks to douse themselves with Radz-B-Gon.

Janey got on to designing something that might work well enough to get them somewhere civilised, and while she was doing that, the others decided to take a jaunt to the planet's moons to see if the inhabitants had progressed far enough to make that hop. They did find evidence of landers and what-not, and briefly thought of finding the Cape Canaveral equivalent in search of more computer stuff, but then decided that any such facility would almost certainly have been bombed to smithereens.

It took Janey just over a week to construct a jump controller that she's absolutely sure — well pretty sure — well fairly sure will work. The whole device takes up about ten cubic metres of the cargo bay to replicate a much more complex device that could be held in one hand. But at least they've got a thing (maybe) as long as nobody trips over the cables and unplugs something.

17: Frying Pan, Fire

 While the others were investigating the abandoned survival shelter, and finding a lot of nothing very much worth nicking, Patience on board ship noticed an energy blip appearing out near the hulk, followed shortly afterwards by another, then several others. She alerted the rest of the team, and this time, rather than offering their heads for a whacking, they decided to choose the path of caution and hide until they knew who and what they were up against.

Patience powered down her active sensors immediately so as not to be broadcasting the fact of their existence far and wide. By the time everyone was back on board the newcomers' numbers had swelled to a couple of dozen.

Hugging the ground, Patience relocated the ship into the shadow of a crater wall between them and the shelter site, just in case. Regrettably, this left the ship effectively blind to what was going on, so Lee and Enkai'nos humped a pair of sentry sensor packs up on to the crater rim — short range devices, and pretty much useless for seeing what was going on a quarter of a million kilometres away, but hopefully they'd give some warning if anyone approached too close. Enkai'nos got his up and running in no time at all by just following the instructions from the manual step by step, but somehow Lee managed to get his unit stuck in a feedback loop, and it was about an hour before the combined efforts of Enkai'nos and Janey managed to get it properly up and running.

Meanwhile, Lee went back to the ship for a nice, simple telescope that he could look through without having to worry about any sort of networking nonsense. At that range he couldn't see in great detail, but he could see enough to show that the newcomers, whoever they were, appeared to be scavenging and dismantling the hulk and neighbouring wrecks, and tumbling the remains down into the atmosphere of the gas giant. And they seemed to be working remarkably quickly and efficiently.

Once again the same old "we should talk to them" "we should hide" discussions ensued. They decided to split the difference by keeping the ship hidden, but sending a standard Terran communications blurp via an off-site aerial, so that the beam wouldn't lead directly back to the ship....

Which turned out to be a good thing, as it happened, because about ten minutes after the transmission was sent, all the ship's sensors whited out, and when they reset themselves, they saw that the site of the aerial and the shelter site and the two expensive sentry sensor packs were a boiling, fuming, molten crater. Clearly whoever these newcomers were, they were not interested in having any survivors around.

Someone noted that the strangers not only had jump technology, but obviously better jump technology than the Terrans, since they're able to jump right into a planetary gravity well. Which lead inexorably to the idea that they should hijack one of these alien vessels and steal, if not the whole thing, then at least their jump tech. The immediate problem was that the aliens vastly outnumbered and outgunned Our Heroes. What to do?

We've got to sort out a name for the team's ship.

Lee, keeping an eye on proceedings via his telescope, noted that their efficiency did not seem to be abating, and already the leviathan was well on the way to being completely skeletonized. Within a few hours, there were indications that the swarm was diminishing, and fairly soon it was down to the last couple who were engaged in dumping the remaining debris down into the gas giant.

The team came up with a Cunning Plan: they would take off, keeping the moonlet between them and the mysterious Dismantlers, detach the other alien escape pod, and send it on its way to attract (hopefully) a single dismantler ship to gobble it up while Our Guys stayed dark and invisible until the moment to pounce. A cunning plan indeed.

It went well initially and all according to plan except for the bit when it all fell apart.

As soon as the escape pod hove into view, both dismantlers immediately perked up and thrust out towards it... or at least, one of them did; the other one thrust directly towards the Good Guys... who had not seemed to take into account that the aliens were not restricted to passive sensors and could see them perfectly well sitting there with their engines ticking over and their life-support running and everything.

It did not take long before they were close enough to make out their configuration fairly clearly: definitely not like any Terran vessel anyone was familiar with, they looked roughly crab-like with a more or less spherical central mass surrounded by a fringe of articulated limbs, and with a pair of large pincer-like booms extending to the front. Almost as soon as they could see this, they could also see the tips of the limb-fringe light up, and a beam weapon of some kind just missed the ship, briefly knocking its sensors off-line — an EMP weapon of some sort, they theorized. And now they could see arcs of some kind of energy between the pincer-booms....

They quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and took off for the cover of the planetary ring, attempting to lose the alien in hot pursuit. A chase ensued amongst the tumbling rocks, and a game of hide and seek for about six hours before they were confident that the disassembler craft had given up the pursuit.

Since they were basically fully fueled, and were only lacking jump control and navigation systems (pfft, who needs that stuff?) they elected to head back into the system to check out the potentially life-supporting planet they'd briefly seen when they first arrived. It took a little over six weeks to get back in under thrusters, and they settled down to do a more thorough survey.

Though there was some vegetation to be seen in the sub-polar regions, most of the planet was arid and barren. Although no signs of current habitation could be found, it was clear that it had been inhabited in the past. The ambient radiation was pretty high, though in environment suits they'd be safe enough for six or eight hours at a time. Built-up areas could be observed from orbit, as well as many, many devastated and highly radioactive areas at places like the confluence of rivers and the like — prime sites for major urban areas.

They decided to set down near a small, undamaged town, and everyone except Patience went off in the ship's air-raft to explore. Lee noted some odd tracks in the dust that looked like they'd been made by some small tracked vehicle. It was just a few minutes into town, and though everything seemed largely intact, there was no sign of life... except for a brief glimpse of something like a huge millipede, about four metres long and maybe half a metre in diameter, which scurried in under the foundations of one of the buildings.

Lee noted that it left tracks in the dust that looked like they'd been made by some small tracked vehicle.

It's purely coincidental that I just finished watching Fallout. Honest.

Further into town they flew, to the largest building they could see, which bore a strong resemblance to a Greek temple of ancient Earth. They made their way inside, and found.... a bank. It was a bank.

The whole settlement looked like, and displayed the technology of, a small European or American town of the 1950s or 60s, when the Wild West was engaged in its genocides, and people used exploding hydrocarbons to power their velocipedes. On the walls of the bank were a group of portraits, showing a species clearly humanoid, but clearly non-human — strange fan-like ears, and no visible eyelids over large, bulging eyes.

Janey judged, by the general level of decay, that the place had been abandoned for perhaps fifty to seventy years. Certainly no longer than a hundred or so. Maybe a hundred and fifty. Two hundred perhaps. There was no sign of any inhabitants, but curiously, also no sign of any corpses.

16: Deus Ex Machina

Events in this episode are a little hazy, as I very slackly didn't get around to writing it up while they were still clear in mind. The reason for that is that I am a lazy prick.

---

Time passed in Our Heroes' air-lock prison. Their captors appeared to be completely ignoring them.

Janey spent her time thinking about how they could get out without immediately being killed, and looked around for something to help with that... and, by an amazing stroke of luck, in the Survival Ball cupboard she found a toolbox she'd mislaid some days earlier and completely forgotten where she'd left it!

She quickly had the cover off an access panel into the ceiling maintenance ducting, and Lee wriggled his way out and over towards the  crew lounge.

Peering furtively through a convenient ventilation grill, he could see a couple of their alien captors lying sprawled on the floor... very, very still. He watched them for some time and saw no sign of movement.

As stealthily as he could manage, made his way back to an access panel outside the cargo bay airlock and eased his way down to open the air lock door, freeing his compatriots.

There was something around about here where the crew got themselves some spare environment suit helmets from the suit store; I forget exactly why, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

They made their way into the crew lounge and found the two aliens lying there, very clearly dead. Their faces were swollen, blackened, and oozing with suppurating lesions, which (it turned out when Ekain'os shucked it out of its suit) extended throughout its body. It had clearly succumbed to some horrible and fast-acting plague, which did not make Our Heroes feel any more comfortable than they had been.

Further investigations eventually accounted for all of the known intruders, on the bridge and in the engineering bays, all showing signs of the same disease. Someone took a sample of the oozy slime and fed it into the ship's autodoc for analysis, and while waiting for the results, everyone else cleaned up the revolting corpses.

I don't recall what they did with them. Probably just dumped them outside I suppose.

Patience got the ship's internal sensors up and running again, and found that they had a parasite — the alien escape pod was clamped to the upper hull of the ship. They soon found that an umbilical had been run from the pod to the engine bay roof hatch.

Lee, Enkain'os and Janey crept up it and found their way blocked by a locked iris hatch. Finding no way to open it gracefully, Lee burned his way through it with his plasma rifle, and just missed having his head shot off by the terrified, wildly shooting pilot still inside. A second shot also missed, and then Lee returned his fire and cut his leg off at the thigh. The unfortunate pilot died on the spot from trauma and shock, but on the other hand he was spared a revolting death by plague, so there was that.

Back at the autodoc, it transpired that the cause of death was a massive allergic reaction to a fungal spore, completely harmless to humans but clearly deadly to whoever these people were.

On the bridge, Patience had back-tracked the course of the escape pod, and found that it appeared to have come from a small shepherd moonlet, part of the planetary ring of rubble (and also now spaceship debris). The team decided to take a look.

There was some refuelling at some point, courtesy of the gas giant — I don't recall exactly at what point in the proceedings that took place.

The ship made the crossing without incident, and in short order they found what was clearly a temporary survival shelter. Nobody shot at them, so they decided to investigate more closely.

There was nobody home.

15: That Went... Well?

 The away team, having landed themselves inside the Brobdingnagian alien spacecraft via one of the spherical disintegrated sections, peered down the corridor into darkness. By the illumination of their suit lights they could see that the passage was about four metres high by six wide, and every surface was covered in ornate organic decorative enameling and embossing.

I completely forgot to take into account the fact that they had no gravity to work with, which made things much simpler for everyone than it had any right to be. Ah well, there's always next time.

Lee noted that their tether, where it crossed the edge of the disintegration area, was being alarming cut and frayed by the more-than-razor-sharp edge, and promptly took steps to reattach it at a point where it wouldn't make contact with anything sharp.

Searching down the corridor, they found an oval panel that seemed door-like — probably not a pressure door, as there were no seals in evidence — but no sign of any way to open it, until eventually Janey found a group of what might be... buttons? If so, they did nothing. Then she realised that there was probably no power, so of course they'd do nothing. She searched further, looking for the emergency override controls, and after a while of trying to figure out what was just decoration and what was an actual component, she found a small panel and managed to get it open.

Inside was a handwheel and locking bar, and also an array of pipes. Even here the mania for decoration held sway, with the handwheel cast in a mandala of animal (?) forms. She quickly figured out the mechanism, and the door rolled away into its wall socket.

Behind the door they found a small room, missing a perfectly circular chunk of its far wall, and thus open to space. Three corpses floated in chairs facing a wall of dials, gauges, and small glassy screens. Hopeful of being able to jury-rig some repairs to their own ruined navigation and jump-control systems with the alien tech, Janey and Esakai'nos attempted to detach one of the screens... and completely buggered it. Then they ruined another one, but on the third try they managed to get one more-or-less intact.

Esakai'nos noticed that the corpses (all very tall, cone-headed humanoids) had what appeared to be sidearms in holsters at their sides, so he nicked all three. Alas, Janey and Lee noticed, and decided that they should have one each.

And right about then...

Back on the ship, Patience had been alerted by the ship's computer of an anomaly out in the debris ring around the planet. A piece of... something... was moving contrary to the drift of all the rest of the debris, and it soon became apparent that it was on a course that would intercept (roughly) with their position.

She alerted the away team, who made haste to get back to the ship, and they decided to go silent and turn off their active sensors and try to hide. Using only vectoring thrusters, Patience drifted the ship over to a cluttered part of the hull that she hoped would give them visual cover, and they grappled the ship to the hulk.

Unfortunately, with active sensors inactive they were effectively blind, and had to rely on optical means alone of keeping track of their bogey. They knew the part of the sky they should be looking at, but even so the chances of actually seeing anything before it was very close indeed were minimal. Nevertheless, against all odds, Lee did manage to pick it up with his binoculars when it was perhaps half an hour out.

In the meantime, Janey, in the lower-deck engineering section, got their looted screen open, and found the innards almost incomprehensibly complex. It was full of mechanical componentry, like a huge and complicated steam-powered watch, with only minimal electronics. Huh. That does not bode well for any kind of compatibility with their own systems.

There was some discussion about who or what the bogey might be, and eventually the generally accepted most likely scenario they came up with was that it was maybe an escape pod from the mega-ship, coming back to see what the activity was about.

Lee decided to camp outside in a good fire position, just in case. Patience (with an optimism bordering on naivete) thought that perhaps the two groups might be able to help each other — maybe the aliens might be able to fix Our Heros' systems, and they could all go home. Maybe.

They switched their active sensors back on and activated a distress beacon, and Patience opened up the forward cargo ramp to indicate their lack of hostile intent.

And then...

From outside, Lee was following the process of the pod, and as it approached closely he saw it disgorge a line of smaller dots, which rapidly formed into four groups of three. It didn't take long before they got close enough to distinguish them as suited humanoids.

Three of the groups landed out of his line of sight, but one group of three landed around his position... he elected not to attempt to fight it out at this time, and they disarmed him and walked him back down to the ship, he clumping along on his magnetic boots while they floated gracefully around him on three sides.

Meanwhile, another group had burned their way up through the engineering floor hatch, forcing Janey to scramble for her suit helmet. Another group entered through the cargo ramp. The fourth combat team are nowhere to be seen.

The Good Guys were herded together, disarmed and stripped of their space suits, and locked into the starboard cargo lock. Esakai'nos noted that (a) the aliens appeared to have only their side-arms, no long guns or heavy weapons, and (b) they did not remove their own suits at all and in fact seemed very reluctant to make any physical contact with Our Heros.

And there we are.

No doubt it will all end up just fine.

Terran Empire 14: The New Era

Note: After a hiatus of more than two decades, I restarted this campaign using the Basic Roleplaying system from Chaosium.

---

In the (new) beginning...

We have a whole new team, and a new ship. Probably the same old chaotic fiascos though.

They are:

• Annette — Patience Strôenn, pilot. On a trail of vengeance for the deaths of her parents.
• Clare — Janey Terranova, engineer.
• Andrew — Lee Thomas, bounty hunter.
• Carl — Esakai'nos, Lregh union worker who is definitely not any kind of secret spy-assassin or anything like that.
• Keld — itinerant magician. Pick a card, any card.

The deck plans in PDF format, scaled for use with 15mm miniatures.

The ship is an Empress Marava class Far Trader (as yet unnamed). It is an elderly and somewhat battered vessel, third- or fourth- or even sixth-hand, but it is kept running by the tender attentions of Patience and Janey.

(Note: don't be misled by how nice and clean the ship in the illustration looks.
Appearances can be misleading.)

---

First Steps

Our story opens with the team departing, with relief, from the bleak and tedious New Canaan for Vaxandros Prime, ostensibly in search of cargo and/or passengers to help keep the ship flying, but actually because Patience, via Lee Thomas, had heard murmurings that members of the Malorean Syndicate (the gang responsible for the murders of her parents) might be found there.

VAXANDROS PRIME: Located in the spinward regions of the Outer Core, Vaxandros Prime is the first of five planets orbiting the yellow dwarf star Vaxandros. Dis covered in the late 2400s, it's a pleasant, Earthlike world that's attracted over 200 million settlers in about a century and a half. Most live in one of the planet's five major cities, but a few have struck out into the wilds to establish homesteads.

Unfortunately, the planet's relative proximity to Drago's Reach makes it a convenient stop for smugglers and other neer-do-wells traveling to or from that lawless region of space. The Intelligence Bureau, a combination law enforcement and espionage agency under the control of the planet's ruling oligarchy, often has difficulty keeping track of all the criminals in or passing through the Vaxandros system. The enormous Vaxandros High Port in particular has a reputation as a haven for criminal activity.

NEW CANAAN: A barely-habitable world, New Canaan was deliberately selected for its harsh conditions by its original settlers. Motivated by religious faith, they sought to create a society that met the most exacting requirements of all religions. The original settlers were Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, but since then settlers from dozens of other religious groups have immigrated to New Canaan. Under New Canaan's constitution, all citizens must obey the tenets of all religions represented on the planet. In cases where practices directly conflict, a citizen can choose, but otherwise he has to follow all the rules. New Canaanites eat no meat, drink no alcohol or caffeine, may not divorce or use contraception, and wear robes and veils. They use only the minimum technology necessary to support life. Needless to say, the planet's not exactly a tourist destination.

They broke orbit and made their way out to Minimum Safe Distance for jump, and hit the go button.

Immediately there was a loud bang, a stench of burning hair and flesh, and a brief squealing from inside one of the bridge consoles. The jump-drives started to spin down, then they spun back up again, out of control, and the ship went into an uncontrolled stutter-jump which went through six or eight cycles before they could cut the power and turn them off.

They found themselves floating inside a system of six planets, which sensors revealed to consist of two gas giants and four rocky worlds, orbiting an old orange star. The second planet from the sun could conceivably support — just — human life, but there were no signs of any kind of industrial settlement that could be detected from this far out.

Janey opened up the console and found, hanging from an energy bus, the barbequed corpse of a New Canaan creature, a bristly cross between a pangolin and a rat. She saw more signs that the creature(s) had been chewing on other pieces of equipment, most importantly the navigation control systems, and there was poop a-plenty as well. Listening carefully she detected the sounds of skittering feet, so it looked like the ship had become infested on New Canaan.

She removed the corpse of the vermin and made a quick survey of the damage. The jump-drive controller would need to be replaced, and there was no spare on board. That's a big problem. But fortunately the navigation array controller looked simple enough to fix.... and lo! It blew up in her hands (rolled a 00 for the repair) and is now completely irreparable, and will also have to be replaced. If only they hadn't put off paying for all those spare components...

The mis-jump had virtually drained the fuel reserves, so getting more fuel became of pressing importance. The gas giants were the obvious place to look, and Patience set a course for the nearest — about a week by thrusters. Looking ahead with the sensors, she discovered not only that the gas giant's atmosphere contained useful quantities of fuel-gases, but she also detected an intermittent radio signal from its orbit — incomprehensible, but clearly artificial.

Lee, Eskai'nos and Keld filled their time during the passage attempting to hunt down the infestation of galacto-rats, with limited success. Someone suggested just opening the ship to vacuum, but janey was resolutely opposed to the idea of venting all their atmosphere without the certainty of being able to replace it.

When they got close enough for more detailed scans, and eventually even visual inspection, they discovered that their signal was coming from something big. Very, very big.

Floating within an extensive debris field that created a complete ring around the planet was an unreasonably massive hulk, in space. A Space Hulk, if you will. It was not of any recognisable configuration: certainly not Terran, nor Perseid, nor any other tech known to any of the crew. It reached over three kilometres in length, the remains looking like a weird Gothic space-cathedral dreadnought.

It appeared completely dead, except for the mysterious radio bursts which seemed to be emanating from somewhere towards what they assumed was the stern due to the presence of gigantic thrust cones there. Large parts of the structure were completely missing, apparently disintegrated by some unknown weapon that left perfectly spherical voids, leaving the vessel like a Brobdingnagian Swiss cheese.

Patience maneuvered the ship, with great care, right into the bowels of the giant via one of the disintegrated holes. Lee managed, though without really knowing what he was doing, do send a magnetic grapple from one of the cargo locks directly exactly where he meant it to go. He, Janey and Eskai'nos suited up and wheeled themselves across the line into a corridor in the behemoth.Nobody died during this exercise.

The corridor extended off into darkness. Mysterious structures jutted out into the passageway, function unknown. All of the surfaces are etched and embossed, decorated in a gothic baroque style.

What lies ahead? We don't yet know. It'll probably be fine.

13: Uninvited Guests

 Note: In the interests of keeping track of what's happened when and to whom, while maintaining my habitual sloth and indolence, I've written this highly abbreviated summary of recent events:

K'pok limps slowly back towards the Hzeel freighter, failing to observe the tiny life-pod zooming past her.

Jek, Measure Twice and Weptish, by means of a bit of random fumbling, manage more or less accidentally to restore artificial gravity. On the bridge they feel a sudden jolt through the floor-plates. Jek, looking out a window, observes something tumbling rapidly away from the ship, but cannot identify it.

After a while, Jek decides to investigate and floats off back down towards the airlocks. Down a stairwell and through a pressure door, he surprises — and is himself surprised to run into — a large humanoid wearing a Nasty Scary Ruthless Warrior brand environment suit and hefting a HUGE plasma rifle. All hell breaks loose and Jek ends up floating unconscious in a thoroughly melted stairwell, saved from being brutally killed to death by his trusty armoured EVA suit.

Measure Twice is alerted by Jek's girlish shrieks over the radio and makes his way cautiously down the stairwell, narrowly missing being blown up by one of the warrior's plasma grenades.

Jek recovers consciousness moments before the Ackalian and zaps the bejeezus out of it, fortunately failing to ignite the bandolier of plasma grenades across its chest.

K'pok attempts to rendezvous and dock with the freighter, but is startled when it disappears from hyperspace. Fortunately, she isn't travelling at too fast a clip, but nevertheless by the time she is able to initiate her own exit from hyperspace the separation between the two craft is several million kilometres.

Jek and Measure engage in a fire-fight with an indeterminate number of foes in the main cargo deck. Jek, as usual, spends considerable time unconscious. By the time Weptish makes it down there to join in, Measure is also feeling poorly.

K'pok eventually catches up and attempts to dock at the ventral docking port. With a masterful display of piloting she actually collides with the ship, sending it tumbling sedately through space and upsetting the combatants who are getting it on in the cargo bay.

K'pok manages to dock successfully on her second attempt, and responding to the wails coming over the suit radios makes her way down to the cargo deck to join in the fun. More biffo ensues. At some point, I don't recall exactly when, the artificial gravity stutters and goes off again; Weptish is immediately blamed.

One of the bad guys ignites a couple of smoke grenades and makes his escape up the freight elevator; Our Heroes, hearing the elevator (by some mystic means through vacuum — once again the GM's poor memory comes into play) assumed it meant the arrival of more foes, rather than the exit of the ones they already had. They hunkered down for another attack, until after some time they realised that they were the only ones left fighting. K'pok gets an emergency distress call from her ship AI alerting her to the fact that someone was attempting to force access, and then that intruders had entered the vessel.

K'pok dashed back up the stairwell with Measure to try to find the escapees, leaving Jek and Weptish to investigate the battleground. Jek attempts to salvage a fallen Ackalian's plasma rifle which had unfortunately been rigged; once again he enjoys the thrill of flying through the air (OK, the vacuum) on a wave of white-hot plasma. Once again he is saved from annihilation by his extremely expensive and increasingly battered EVA suit.

K'pok and Measure get up to Deck 4 in time to the elevator to the ventral lock; pounding down the corridor they stabbed frantically at the call button. The elevator arrived and the door opened; Measure leaned forward alertly to check whether or not the Bad Guys had left any unpleasant surprises, and was therefore in the ideal position to see the plasma grenade drop right at his feet. Bravely he shielded K'pok from the blast by not being able to get out of the way in time, and he too experienced the Jek Effect, ending up sprawled down the other end of the corridor.

About then, the ship shuddered and its tumbling worsened as the Ackalian pilot tore loose from the docking clamps. K'pok is understandably upset at having her ship, and also her mother's body, stolen. Unfortunately there's not a hell of a lot she can do about it.

An extended period of tinkering with the ship's systems is undertaken, guided inexpertly by Measure's extremely basic grasp of the Hzeel language and script. Not much is achieved initially except to lock themselves out of the systems until Jek manages to trace a hardware bypass. Eventually, by trial and error, enough systems are deciphered to restore the life support systems, and more importantly, to determine that they don't work and are busily pouring nasty poisonous gases through all the corridors and staterooms. Weptish goes off to check the plant and finds the tell-tale holes left by duct-creepers. Measure, checking the manifests, finds a lot more weaponry installed than one would expect of an innocent freighter.

Jek checks out the gravity generators, squeezing his majestic bulk through the very tight confines of the Underdecks, but having not the first clue what he should be looking for can't find out why they aren't working properly. He does find out what caused the hyperdrive to malfunction however — it had melted down to worthless slag, though he doesn't know why.

Once he got back up on the bridge, it suddenly occurred to Jek that since the ship was a Terran design, the Hzeel systems were probably just a translation overlay over the Terran originals — and so it proved to be. The previous week turned out to be largely fruitless effort, not to mention the discomfort of being confined to EVA suits for such a length of time — d'oh! Once he made the appropriate adjustments, almost all of the systems became freely available. Only the security protocols remain undeciphered, and they soon submitted to Jek's ministrations. And not too soon, as it soon became clear.

The Ackalians had managed to get the Vulcan ship more or less under control, and with their characteristic stubbornness were having another go at the Hzeel vessel. Though inexpert at manipulating the ship's tactical systems, the defences were more than adequate to fend off the attacks of the Ackalians as long as Measure could angle the shields, which he did almost half the time.

K'pok attempted to disable her ship with a shot to the reactionless drives, but miscalculated the power of her lasers slightly, missed her target and accidentally blasted a gaping hole right through the bridge. Her ship immediately lost all power and control, and drifted off into the void.

ur Heroes caught up with it easily, harpooned it with magnetic grapples and boarded to find nothing where the bridge used to be, and a badly wounded Ackalian in one of the med bay hibernation chambers. Jek quietly spaced him and regretfully told K'pok that there was nothing he could do for the injured warrior. K'pok found her mother's corpse still safely frozen, Weptish managed to retrieve his collection of Weird Stuff, and together everyone began to salvage as much usable stuff as possible.

Weptish has a plan to build the Hyperdrive Of Doom with salvaged bits and pieces and whatever components can be saved from the freighter's drive, but that's still very much a work in progress and the ship is currently far, far away from civilization. A sensor scan managed to detect some faint signals that indicate sentient technological life, but they emanate from a direction in which the nearest star is over a light-year away, and even at best speed using the ship's reaction drives it will take several years to get there — and there's no guarantee that the nearest star system is the source of the signals. Our Heroes settle in for a long, boring trip and hope that Weptish manages to come up with a miracle before the food and life support supplies run out.

Measure Twice, with the aid of his trusty Hzeel phrase book, ploughed his way through the ship's logs and cargo manifests. Much he found incomprehensible, but he did find a reference to his two comrades, who had been travelling on board in stasis as cargo — it appears that they had been sold off to some tin-pot warlord outside the fringes of Terran space; a notation accompanying the entry contains a recommendation that they be pithed before revivification to ensure that they are controllable. This information has caused Measure some upset; there's no possible way he can reach the planet in time for a rescue mission, but honour demands revenge.....

Jek is relieved to be in a relatively roomy spacecraft after the extremely cramped quarters on board K'pok's ship, but all of the sleeping quarters — and more importantly, all of the ablutions — have been rebuilt to suit the Hzeel stature. A Jek-sized bed he can build, but he's forced to shower one limb at a time, and going to the toilet is an exercise in claustrophobia.

K'pok is as stoic as ever in the face of the prospect of years drifting through space. She has her meditation equipment, and she keeps herself occupied familiarising herself with the ship's

12: It's Clobberin' Time!

 After some deliberation over the relative merits of lighting oneself up like a christmas tree or trying to hide behind a big freighter still swarming with energy leeches, K'pok ran her own scan to locate the unknown ship that was scanning her. She determined that it was a smallish scout, probably Ackâlian, and about half an hour out of weapons range, assuming she was right about it being a small scout. It was decided, after a full and frank exchange of views, that K'pok would lure as many of the leeches as she could off the crippled freighter and lead them off towards the mysterious incoming vessel, leaving the other three to deal with the remaining critters mano-a-leecho in honourable hand-to-hand combat.

Our doughty heroes got themselves kitted out with K'pok's riot foam dispensers, the plan being to encase the leeches in the stuff and then pry them off the hull once they'd been rendered inert. One by one, K'pok shoved them across the intervening space with her tractor beam, leaving them to float off before thrusting in to buzz the remaining leeches in the hopes of atracting their attention. She was moderately successful, managing to entice a couple of dozen to detach from the Hzeel ship to chase her off into the void, leaving only fifty or so for Jek, Weptish and Measure to deal with. Once sure that no more leeches could be tempted off, K'pok set off at a sedate pace to intercept the gatecrasher.

Regrettably, K'pok's aim wasn't quite what it might have been, and although Jek and Measure were on-target, Weptish wasn't, and found himself about to miss the freighter by a substantial margin. Fortunately, Weptish being space-born, he is as at home in zero-G as a fish is in water, and was able to correct using his suit thrusters, arriving not too long after the others. By that time, Jek and Measure had found out to their disgust that riot foam doesn't set in vacuum, and so all they'd achieved was to squirt some streams of silly-string off into the æther. A certain amount of low-level swearing occurred. Fortunately, Jek had brought his trusty crowbar, and Measure his equally trusty shotgun, and they began the arduous task of quartering the hull and physically beating the leeches into jelly. They were soon joined by Weptish, who with equal foresight had thought to equip himself with the biggest wrench he could find in the ship's engineering supplies. It was a messy job, not made any easier by the masses of leech fragments floating everywhere from the first passes with the sand-caster, but after a long and tedious time they finally clobbered the last of them into scintillating smithereens. After as thorough a search of the hull as they could manage, they made their way inside and up to the bridge.

Meanwhile, K'pok and the incoming vessel approached their intercept point. She put her foot on the accelerator, leaving the swarm of leeches directly in the path of the oncoming ship and made a big loop back towards the freighter. The other ship ploughed straight through the swarm without any obvious effect that she could detect, closing the distance between them rapidly. At closer range her scan was considerably more detailed, and she determined that the other vessel's main reactor was displaying some alarmingly erratic behaviour. She hailed them, enquiring whether they required any assistance. They replied with a traditional Ackâlian greeting which, in rough translation, goes something like "Worthless Terran scum! Surrender immediately! You are now prisoners of the glorious Ackâlian Empire!" This cheery hello was immediately followed up by the release of three high-G missiles, which forced K'pok into some extreme evasive maneuvering; she managed to account for two of them with her puny bow laser, but the third exploded close enough to her to cause some minor damage to her drives. Now unable to outrun the Ackâlian scout, and having no luck at all with her attempted negotiations, she was forced into a vicious dogfight which went on and on and on and on and on, each ship dodging and firing, each doing puny amounts of damage to the other.

Eventually, a lucky series of shots by K'pok did sufficient damage to her foe's drives that she could break off the combat, and limp off back towards the freighter, leaving the Ackâlian more or less adrift. Her scan showed her that the other ship's reactor was becoming wildly unstable, but they responded only with insults and threats to her offers of assistance. She did the Vulcan equivalent of a shrug, and began to make her way back to rejoin the others on the Hzeel ship.

When she was about half way back, her sensors showed a violent burst of energy from where the Ackâlian had been. The others, on the bridge of the Hzeel ship, saw a sudden bright light far off in the emptiness of hyperspace.

11: Salvage

 After the debacle on Ierisiou, Weptish required two months of hospitalization stuck in a regeneration tank, and Jek got a month of out-patient care — medical bills generously covered by TIC, written off under the umbrella of mission-related expenses. All thas time, the party's gold mine (the derelict Hzeel freighter) was drifting further and further off the the hyperspace lanes.

Once his injuries had healed sufficiently, Jek got a job stevedoring. This made him enough money to live and breathe, and even to save a very little. By a stroke of good fortune, a windfall came his way when we realized that he hadn't spent any of his C.C.E.F. (Character Creation Equipment Fund), which had been sitting in his bank account all this time. He immediately splashed out on an armoured vac-suit which actually fits him (no more Vulcan-vac-suit wedgies), and the biggest, nastiest-looking, most frightening laser rifle he could find.

Once Weptish was discharged, planning began. Doing a quick costing, the party estimated they'd need about cr150,000 to equip to reclaim their prize from the energy leeches. Problem: party does not have cr150,000. Party has about cr5,000 between them. Sale of the salvage rights to a professional salvage company was mooted, but decided against for a number of reasons, not the least of which being a desire to avoid angering a veangeful GM. K'pok agreed to raise a mortgage using her ship as collateral through an old and highly respectable firm of financiers, Whitlow, Futtle and Crun, and they also advertised for investors, by which means they met Measure Twice, a ghurkatroid academy graduate currently on his gap year OE before being called up to the regiment.

Measure Twice was interested in the freighter since he believed it to be carrying some of his friends as cold-store freight, and agreed to invest some of his own trust-fund income (about cr50,000) in the venture. He wanted to go along to oversee his investment, of course.

At least one of the team had to go down to the surface to organise all the work they needed done to the ship — there was no genuine necessity for this, since all the equipment and workshops and what-not were at the dock station, but the Pantokratonese are nothing if not adept at infuriating bureaucratic bastardry. Since everytone else was otherwise occupied, K'pok was nominated to take care getting a licence to buy a sand-caster, to be installed in a cargo module slung beneath the hull of K'pok's ship. K'pok's natural honesty made her laughably ill-suited to dealing with a bureaucracy which is simultaneously corrupt and paranoid, but by a miracle she managed to remain un-arrested and also to stay under budget for the exercise. In the end, the 50 credit license and work order cost the team well over cr2,000 due to K'poks lack of familiarity with the ettiquette of bribery.

K'pok returned, and the sand-caster was installed without any problems at all. Alas, the cost of getting the license and work order meant that there was no cash left over to buy ammunition for it. Answer: spend a couple of weeks in the system's asteroid belt using the ship's tractor beam to hoover up iron-rich gravel. Things go right for a change, and the cargo hold is filled to capacity in only a few days. K'pok turned the ship outwards and thrust for Minimum Safe Distance for the jump to hyperspace.

Well aware that in the time since they'd first found the Hzeel freighter it had been drifting further and further away, K'pok took extreme care over her navigational calculations. She checked, and rechecked, and then checked again before committing herself to a vector. Confident that even the tiniest errors had been weeded out, she set the controls and activated the hyperspace drive....

....in completely the wrong direction. Sigh. Inevitably, in this one crucial instance, she fumbled her navigation roll and sent the ship off towards the Mon'dabi Federation. Hey-ho. A week later, when they dropped out of hyperspace the error was revealed and course adjustments were made (successfully this time), but the delay meant even longer stuck inside K'poks tiny, cramped, claustrophobia-inducing shuttle.

The projected intercept point placed them well within the Ackálian Empire, so they ran without scan in the hopes of remaining undetected. No such luck. About half way into their four-month voyage, they were attacked by a ship they never saw. K'pok managed by the skin of her teeth to dodge and zap three missiles, and thanks to a spectacular change of luck her eveasive high-jinks managed to get the unknown assailant off the scent. Once sure that they'd escaped pursuit, they continued towards their destination, and made rendezvous almost perfectly.

They used the ship's scanners to create a decoy beam to attract the energy leeches into a killing zone, than blew them to smithereens with the sand-caster. The tactic worked beautifully, but unfortunately the sand-caster ran out of gravel before the last of the leeches were destroyed; there still remained about seventy of them attached to the hull of the freighter, and quite likely more floating among the fragments of the dead leeches.

There was some debate about tactics to be used to clear the remaining leeches, but before anything could be finally decided they were interrupted by the ship's AI alerting K'pok to the fact that they were being scanned....

10: Farewell To All That

 K'pok ried to communicate with pod-people, Jek tried to access computer systems. Failed. Found elevator down, found food stores (most refrigeration pooted), found personal effects stores. Tried to access secure lockers, failed.

Weptish in a bad way from radiation poisoning.

Decided (eventually) to fuck off and let the Imperial Navy clean up the mess. Back upstairs, found route back out blocked by the security door Kappo had earlier tried (and failed) to blow open. Opening mechanism rooted owing to being blown to smithereens. Tried to find alternate route to exit point, failed.

Weptish getting worse (hair falling out, skin sloughing off, bleeding gums and eyes, puking blood), but eventually manages to jury-rig door controls so that it could be cranked open manually. Team gets back up to balcony.

K'pok calls ship — problem, nowhere for the ship to land, can't hover close enough due to crowding by roof gables. Jek detaches tether (20m) from Weptish's EVA suit and tries to jump for lowered embarkation ladder - fails. Tries instead to lasso ladder, eventually succeeds after quarter of an hour. Made loop of tether with Weptish on one end, dragged him up but too weak to cling to the ladder himself. K'pok climbs up tether line (squashing Weptish up against ladder) and helps him into air lock. Ship won't open inner lock until they are decontaminated, another 15 minutes or so. Jek follows, hauls up Kappoborg.

Weptish put into stasis until return to spaceport hospital.

Out of Ierisiou space (good riddance to the dump) and back to rendezvous point with Navy, who are surprised at the change in Kappo. Kappo by this time losing any sort of human intellignece, also emitting an unpleasant aroma of decomposition. Put into stasis for return to base hospital where he will be brain-taped and restored into a clone body in 20 years or so. Remainder of team debriefed, remaining issue equipment returned — there's not much left to return. After thorough debriefing, team receives agreed payment and heads back to Pantokrator Docking Station.

09: Beneath the Planet of the Apes^^^^Mutants

When last we left our intrepid pals, Weptish and K'pok were being carried off in one direction by a creepy creaky zombiebot each, and the unconscious Kappo was being carried off in another by three of the biomechanical horrors. Jek Porkins bravely chased after the three carting off Kappo, regrettably unaware of the plight of his other two comrades, and ran hell-for-leather after them through the pitch black bowels of the building. Through room after room he followed, guided by the squeaking and clattering of their mechanical legs and the occasional glimpse of them in the light of his suit lamp, until finally they came to a stop in an elevator. The doors slid shut as Jek galloped up to them.

Jek pressed his helmet up against the doors and could could hear the elevator car descending; immediately he set to forcing the doors open by means of his huge bulging manly muscles to reveal a moving cable. Looking down he was just in time to see the roof of the elevator car descending rapidly, out of the rangle of his puny suit light. A man of action, he hesitated not and leaped out to grab the elevator cable, intending to shinny down on to the roof of the car. Alas! The thickly-greased cable offered virtually no purchase, though he squeezed like buggery, and he plummeted downwards barely more slowly than if he had simply jumped. He smashed straight through the relatively flimsy roof of the car, but fortunately did not smash straight through the slightly less flimsy floor, ending up in a heap on the floor of the car covered in elevator debris.

“Crikey!” exclaimed the GM, sotto voce. “Good thing that in the heat of the moment I miscalculated the falling damage or else Jek would be a bag of pulp at the bottom of the elevator shaft!”

Picking himself up and shaking off the remains of the ceiling, Jek once again exerted his mighty heavyworlder muscles and forced open the doors, finding himself at the end of a duct-lined concrete passage. There was no sign, neither sight nor sound, of his quarry. Undeterred, he trotted off down the passage, reasoning that there was no other way they could have gone.

Somebody.... Kent, I think, pointed out what a bummer it would be if the things had got off and sent the elevator to another floor. That would just be too tragic though.

After jogging along for maybe 50 or 60 metres, he came to a steel door blocking the passage, where he stopped for a moment to clarify the tactical situation. He tried to raise Kappo on his communicator, but got no reply; he had no better luck with K'pok, but at last he managed to raise Weptish who (with a certain amount of panicky blubbering and pleas for immediate assistance) described the area he was being carried through. Jek opened the door and resumed his steady trot in what he sincerely hoped was the right direction.

Shortly thereafter, he began to pass flattish ovoid pods, about 2.5m long, mounted on the walls of the passages. Some of them (about one in four or five) showed blinking LED telltales, but most appeared completely inert. Weptish's cries for help became more urgent, so Jek picked up the pace and galloped through the passages as fast as he could go, eventually coming out into a huge open space filled with towering racks full of the same sort of pods he'd been passing earlier. Stopping briefly to take stock, he glimpsed a moving light far off through the racks bobbing up and down, but could make out no details.

Meanwhile, Kappo had arrived at his destination, a nexus of control panels and indecipherable machinery surrounded by enormous pod-racks fading out into the darkness. Operating everything was a squat cylindrical cyborg, about two metres tall, and considerably more cyb than org — it appeared to be wholly mechanical, except for what was obviously a brain floating in a transparent dome on top. Four flexible and extensible limbs spaced equidistantly around its torso reached every point within the nexus, making adjustments and pressing buttons and what-not.

When the zombiebots arrived with Kappo, it immediately left what it had been doing and rolled over to inspect him.

TUT TUT THIS IS INCORRECT PROCEDURE it blared in a toneless buzzing electronic voice. WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT YOU SHOULD NOT BE OUT IT IS NOT SAFE YET YOU MUST GO BACK OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS YOU ARE DAMAGED YOU ARE BADLY DAMAGED I WILL FIX YOU SO THAT YOU CAN GO BACK.

Working rapidly and precisely it detached Kappo's head and installed it in a small life support module, from where he could see the thing go to work on the rest of his body. It was an odd sensation to say the least, to be able to watch from across the room as his body was opened up, organs taken out, inspected and either replaced or discarded into a sump beneath the operating slab. A genuine out-of-body experience.

At about this point, Weptish and K'pok also arrived, firmly in the grip of their zombiebots. K'pok had recovered consciousness by now, and was struggling to get free, thus far without success. The zombiebots stopped and shut down, becoming inert.

Jek followed closely behind. The combined lights from K'pok's and Weptish's suits provided enough illumination that he could see what was going on, and he didn't like the looks of it one little bit. Neither, for that matter, did K'pok, and Weptish was especially alarmed when the cyborg looked up at him from his work and said YOU ARE DAMAGED ALSO I WILL ATTEND TO YOU WHEN I HAVE COMPLETED THIS ONE. Jek found himself in something of a quandrary; if he followed his immediate impulse — which was to smash the thing's brain case to bits with his crowbar — then he may very well impair Kappo's chances of recovery. On the other hand, if he did nothing, then Kappo looked like being turned into one of the ghastly zombiebots, which was also not an optimal result. He decided to let the cyborg finish mending Kappo, on the grounds that if he were still at least partially alive then he could maybe be rebuilt back in civilization (assuming he had really really good health insurance), whereas if he were dead he'd really just be good for compost.

Jek decided instead to attempt to free Weptish. He crept up behind the zombiebot holding him captive and taking careful aim, shot with his auto-pistol into the general vicinity of its shoulder-joint. Alas! Poor Weptish. Jek's terrible shooting missed the zombiebot completely, tearing a great hole in Weptish's arm instead. “These guns are completely fucking useless!” cried Jek, and he threw his pistol away into the darkness in a fit of pique. Weptish just made pathetic squealing noises as blood began to pool in the glove of his environment suit. Gort (the cyborg's name is Gort) became alarmed at Jek damaging one of his charges and decided that he should be restrained before he could do any further harm. He zapped at him with a powerful neuralizer, but missed and accidentally hit Weptish, adding to the misery of an already miserable day for him. Weptish slumped into a flaccid drooling mass, unable to move or speak.

K'pok took advantage of Gort's distraction to break free of her restraints. She charged at the harrassed cyborg, but not fast enough — it got off a shot at her with its neuralizer which hit its target this time, and K'pok slumped bonelessly to the floor. Meanwhile, Jek climbed bodily up on to Weptish's zombiebot and heaved at its arm with all his might and main, bending and snapping the shoulder joint; its claw relaxed and Weptish slumped, ending up hanging head-downwards. Jek transferred his attention to the other shoulder of the inert 'bot, smashing that in its turn and causing Weptish to drop to the floor, still unable to move a muscle. Fortunately his environment suit took the brunt of the fall as he landed head-first on the concrete.

Gort now took the opportunity to neuralize Jek who also fell down, his mighty muscles now limp and useless. Now that all of the disruptive elements had been neutralized, it returned its full attention to rebuilding Kappo's eviscerated and dissected carcass. It replacing most of his internal organs with mechanical replacements, applied exoskeletal joints to his neck and shoulders, and discarded his badly crushed legs entirely, mounting the remains of the torso on a six-legged mechanical walking chassis.

K'pok had been fighting off the effects of the neuralization by gathering her highly-disciplined Vulcan mind, and suddenly found herself free of the effect again. She took advantage of Gort's concentration to sneak up on it and punch it right in the brain-bubble, cracking the plastic and causing a leak. EXERCISE CAUTION! he blared. YOUR ACTIONS ARE CAUSING DAMAGE TO THIS UNIT! Since K'pok showed no immediate signs of showing caution and avoiding causing damage to this unit, it zapped her again and rushed off to slap a patch of duct-tape over the crack to stop the leak.

Gort returned a few minutes later, and returned to the reconstruction of Kappo. It took his head from the life support unit and reattached it to the neck-stump, connecting a variety of transparent fluid-pumping hoses between his skull and torso. It ran a series of command and response diagnostics, closely observing readouts on one of its panels; Kappo attempted to dissemble and make it believe that he was its slave, but it was not satisfied with the results and kept making further adjustments in the composition and flow of the various substances squirting through the plastic tubes.

K'pok once again rallied her mental powers and regained control of her voluntary muscles. She decided to atttempt to persuasion rather than violence this time, asking Gort to let them all go. Gort declined — I AM SORRY IT IS NOT YET TIME IT IS NOT SAFE YET FOR YOU TO BE OUT YOU MUST GO BACK UNTIL IT IS SAFE I WILL CALL YOU OUT WHEN IT IS SAFE

K'pok briefly considered smashing Gort's brain-bubble again, but on reflection decided that it was a bona fide AI and therefore a life form, and her respect for life got the better of her. She asked instead if she could mind meld with it, and Gort agreed to indulge her while he attended to the damaged and bleeding Weptish. The meld was wildly successful; K'pok scanned deeply into Gort's memories, finding the all-clear code. She withdrew from the meld and gave him the code.

Gort was overjoyed that his mission had been successfully completed, and immediately set about reopening all of the stasis pods. Lights flickered back on, revealing a vast space containing stacked racks of pods, tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of them. Gort moved rapidly from pod to pod, initiating revivication procedures, with K'pok following behind. As the lids hissed open she saw the inhabitants — pale, thin humanoids, now beginning to move ever so slightly, trembling and drooling as their metabolisms began to rise back to normality.

Some of them, anyway. More often than not, a pod would open to reveal the dessicated remains of a long-dead corpse.

K'pok suddenly realised the implications of her impetuousity — by giving Gort the all-clear code, she had started something she could not stop. Gort, following his instructions implicitly, was releasing his charges into an environment which was decidedly not safe. None of them could hope to survive for long unprotected outside of this deeply-buried chamber, and there was no food for them down here that she could find. The Vulcan word for “oops!” was heard.

Kappo meanwhile grabbed the limp neuralized Weptish and Jek and dragged them back upstairs, storing them in a crate for six hours while he searches unsuccessfully for data crystals. K'pok meanwhile followed Gort as he carried out his duty, pleading with him to stop and trying to convince him that a mistake had been made. Gort insisted that the system was foolproof, and that she should set her mind at ease since it was now safe and time to wake everyone. How could it be otherwise, since the verified all-clear code had been given?

She then tried to get it to give her the location of the data crystals, but Gort insisted that the information was classified and required the appropriate access codes before he could release it to her. She tried another mind meld to find the codes, but this time could not get deep enough to find them.

After six fruitless hours of searching, Kappo retrieved his assault rifle from where he'd dropped it when he was knocked out, picked up the now thoroughly irradiated bodies of Jek and Weptish from the crate in which he'd stored them, and dragged them all the way back down to the stasis chamber. He tried to persuade Gort to give him the location and access codes for the data crystals, but with no more success than K'pok had had. He then attempted to interrogate the recovering stasis patients, but got nothing more than moans and dribbles out of them.

At last, frustrated and angry, Kappo opened fire on Gort to stop it from opening any more of the pods. CAUTION! YOUR ACTIONS ARE CAUSING SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THIS UNIT! trumpeted the unfortunate Gort. IF YOU PERSIST IN THIS COURSE OF ACTION YOU MAY CAUSE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE TO THIS UNIT! I URGE YOU TO CON...SIIIIII.....derrrrrrr.............

Poor old Gort, its century and more of loyal and selfless service tragically terminated in hail of gunfire. Poor old Gort.

08: Bloodbath at the Zombie Robot Death House

 

Our gallant crew landed on a small weed-infested balcony set among the steep roof gables, a waist-high wall along two sides allowing a view out over the dense jungle below. Jek leaned out over the parapet to see if he could see anything hostile on the ground and startled a small, vaguely reptilian flying monkey-creature clinging to the wall; it took off flapping frantically across the tree-tops and got about twenty metres before a tree-fern-like thing uncurled a long tongue (for want of a better word) and snatched it out of the air. "Crikey" said Jek, "It's a good thing we flew".

Checking out their immediate surroundings, they found one wall of the balcony entirely covered in extremely filthy glass, another side consisted of a covered walkway leading to a door in a third. Kappo checked the windows but could make out nothing through the grime; then he tried the door and found it locked — a simple mechanical lock which he made short work of with his trusty TIC burglary kit. He huddled behind the door as he opened it (some might say cowered, but that may be a little harsh) and waited for the others to set off any booby-traps. Er, that is, to begin exploring the lightless interior. The doors opened on to a landing at the head of a stair heading downwards into inky blackness. The team switched on their suit lights and made their way fearlessly down the steps, with Kappo fearlessly bringing up the rear.

Emerging from the stairwell they found themselves on a walkway overlooking a huge, dark space. Last off the stair, Kappo caught a glimpse of a bright pin-point flash of red light from out of the darkness down the walkway; immediately assuming the worst (i.e. that it was a targeting laser and that everyone was about to be mown down in a hail of gunfire) he activated his shields and squawked a warning to the others, who all also activated their shields. Everyone milled about glowing and humming, waiting for the attack. Which didn't come. Never mind, better safe than sorry. After a short while everyone calmed down a little and began exploring their surroundings.

Almost immediately to the right from the stairwell they found a heavy fire door, locked and immoveable. Looking out over the parapet by the light of her suit lamps, K'pok could make out piles of what appeared to be wooden crates six or seven metres below her feet. K'pok fastened her suit tether to the handle of the fire door and detaching it from her suit, tossed it over the edge of the walkway. She activated her A.G. harness and floated down on to a large crate below, and then on to the floor, using the tether as a guide. Once down, she caught the merest hint of movement and again the red light appeared — this time it was obvious that it was a scanning beam flashing across K'pok. She made her way across to where it was coming from, and found a peculiar thing — a small cyborg about the size of an infant, clearly non-human, its biological elements reduced to skeletal remains. It ignored her and continued working on some kind of system behind a wall access panel.

Meanwhile, Weptish had come down the same way, and had found a pair of doors and another stair. He immediately began to try to get the door handles off — a pair of simple metal pipes on frames — presumably because they might come in handy some time. K'pok called him away from his mission of vandalism to get his opinion on the cyborg. Fascinated, he bent over it and soon found the off-switch; he deactivated the little thing and poped it into his backpack. It might come in handy some time. K'pok went back to meet the other two, sliding down the tether without the benefit of A.G. (the GM having remembered this time), and Weptish, unable to resist the temptation to fix something, began poking around inside the access panel.

Jek and Kappo, in an effort to do something productive, decided to start searching the crates for data cubes on the off-chance that they might be in one of the hundreds of crates. Working with a will, Jek smashed open the largish crate K'pok had used as a landing stage and made a grisly discovery — the crate was full of human remains! The corpses were all entangled and fairly well stuck together by their own congealed juices into a great amorphous mass, but the skulls and other easily-identifiable bones made it obvious that they had once been people. Needless to say, Jek was a little shaken by the discovery, and called K'pok and Kappo over to see. Unfortunately Kappo had made his own discovery, in a similar vein, which brought on such an attack of the heeby-jeebies that he immediately ran shrieking out through the doors beside the lower stairs, around the corner and smack into a wall (which brought him back to his senses after a moment or two). K'pok went after Kappo, leaving Jek with the macabre cluster-fuck slowly oozing out through the broken timbers of the crate.

Weptish was blissfully unaware of all this; he'd been happily tinkering with the guts of the system the little cyborg had been working on, and happily made the last connection....

Everything went dark as all the suit lamps shut down, and off in the now absolute darkness massive doors could be heard grinding and booming closed. For some reason everybody immediately started ragging on poor old Weptish. "What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?" was the gist of the babble, to which he replied with a shrug (which noone could see) and "I din' do nothin'! I was just fixing it!". Since all the suit radios had also gone dead, all that anyone could hear of anyone else's screeching was a muffled murmer, which was probably a good thing on the whole.

Groping their way by feel, everybody made their way back up to the mezzanine, hoping and praying that they wouldn't end up thigh-deep in rotting corpses on the way. The exertion of clambering back up the slender tether brought on a great deal of sweating and panting.... Jek realised that he couldn't see any of the tell-tales of any of the suits' life-support systems, which explained the shortness of breath. Deciding that a relatively slow death by radiation poisoning was preferable to a quicker one by asphyxiation, he undid his helmet (discovering the most incredible eye-watering stench in the process) and groped his way around the rest of the group, shouting through their muffling helmets to do the same. All did, except for Kappo who refused outright to expose himself to god knows what contagion, and instead he fell to the ground unconscious and suffocating. Taking advantage of his sudden cooperativeness, K'pok took his helmet off so that he could breathe and left him to wake up in his own time. Jek and Weptish meanwhile had been feeling along the wall for the stairwell back out, and found instead something that felt discouragingly like a door.

K'pok decided that some kind of light was essential, and so climbed down once more — this time, alas, not so successfully avoiding the putrescent mass. She groped in the darkness for as much broken lumber as she could find around the crate, and made her way back up to the others. By the time she returned, Kappo was awake again and once Jek had ignited one of the makeshift torches by the power of his mighty mind he set about trying to open the now-revealed door. It looked depressingly sturdy, and proved to be so when he failed to blow it open with the last of his explosive door-openers.

Jek and K'pok had gone exploring more of the mezzanine in the hopes of finding some way out, and not far away they found what they assumed was the other end of the stair they'd found below. No help there. Further around they found more piles of crates, and opened one of them with some misgivings.... fortunately, no rotting corpses this time. Instead they found crates full of all sorts of rubbish — cheesy paperback romance novels, old kitchen appliances, trinkets and childrens' toys. While thus engaged, they both heard a mechanical chunka-chunka-chunka noise coming from through the wall in front of them, and hurriedly started back to rejoin the others. Bringing up the rear, Jek saw K'pok's tell-tales light up again, and her suit lamps came back on just in time for her to see, coming through an open blast door, a nightmarish abomination — a ghastly patchwork of robot and human corpse, its rotting head lolling vacantly back and forth with the movement of its mechanical appendages. It's probably a good thing that Vulcans aren't imaginative. It attacked K'pok, flailing with its pincers and trying to grab her as another came through the door behind, making for Jek.

Kappo fired at the thing with Jek's assault rifle (Jek having decided that it was a useless weapon) and managed to break something in its legs, so that all it could do was stump around and around in small circles. An encouraging start! Regrettably, the noise of shooting meant that he was blissfully unaware of the door behind him opening and three (THREE!) more of the hideous things clanking up behind him — Weptish, not so unaware, gave a girlish shriek and promptly ran away over the balcony and down the tether to the warehouse floor, leaving Kappo to deal with the zombie-bots.

Yet another zombie-bot appeared to threaten Jek and K'pok, and Jek used his pyrokinesis to set its biological bits afire. It didn't appear to discomode it at all, which was discouraging. Yet another one came through; there seemed to be no end of the blasted things! A mighty battle commenced, Jek and K'pok engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the things. Jek managed to punch one of them hard enough that it stopped working, and K'pok threw one bodily over the railing — unfortunately it didn't let go of her and they both went over together. Even more unfortunately, K'pok landed underneath it on the stairs, which hurt quite a lot, but the zombie-bot went rolling away down the stairs giving her a chance to pull herself together and stagger back up on to the mezzanine.

Weptish, meanwhile, had scampered back up the stairs with his antique pistol just in time to be grabbed by another stinking zombie-bot. He managed to wriggle free, and even to bounce a bullet or two off its carrion-shrouded carapace, but to no avail and he was eventually carried off writhing and straining to get free. The same fate fell to K'pok; still suffering from the battering she'd received falling over the railing, she was soon knocked out by another of the 'bots and also carried away. Jek had seen the same thing happening to Kappo, overwhelmed by three of the horrors simultaneously and ran off after them in the hopes of saving him; he chased them through several rooms, catching up just in time to see the elevator doors closing.

• K'pok is unconscious, and a prisoner.
• Kappo is also unconscious, and a prisoner.
• Weptish is conscious and wriggling, and is still armed with an automatic pistol, but is thus far unable to get free.
• Jek has forced open the elevator doors and is listening to the elevator car disappearing into the depths below.

All in all, the situation could be better.