Having considered the reactions of his shipmates to his multiple-personality act, Kappo decided to come clean and let them all know that he was a spook working for TIC. Reactions were generally neutral; nobody tried to kill him on the spot, so really it was a good outcome for Kappo the Space Loony. He still has numerous neuroses to deal with, but at least the rest of the party no longer consider him completely barking mad. To celebrate his coming out, Kappo decided to entertain everyone with his Man of a Thousand Faces act.
For a while it did allay the tedium of being stuck in a teensy tiny ship with nothing to read but Vulcan philosophical treatises and technical manuals, but after a week of enforced closeness the first signs of cabin fever began to show themselves. The prospect of spending three months in this situation began to look bleak indeed, and to make matters worse it turned out that the food dispensers produced nothing but bland nutrient mush.
Jek was the hardest pressed; his bulk made the sleeping quarters terribly uncomfortable, the tight corridors were claustrophobic, he couldn't even use the toilet facilities without having to keep the door open, and he could only shower part of himself at a time. Plus, those jealous bastards at the Psi Academy kicked him out. For no reason. Bastards.
Weptish kept himself occupied by trying to rebuild one of the Med-Bay's stasis pods into a regeneration chamber with some assorted spare parts, with some success in the short term at least. Unfortunately, although he can build these remarkable gadgets out of what anyone else would consider useless junk, he has found that he has to give them constant attention or they tend to fall to bits. This turned out to be problematic when he finally had to get some sleep, and came back to find most of his hard work undone.
Kappo had his obsessions to keep him occupied, along with occasional make-work jobs assigned by K'pok. He decided to try imitating a Vulcan, with K'pok as his model. Everyone agreed that he was remarkably convincing, all things considered. The ears were deemed to be particularly effective.
The tedium of the journey was sharply broken ten days in by an alarm from the ship's computer; the signal from the upcoming Hyperspace Navigation Beacon had ceased. The loss of a single beacon was not too bad; they should get within range of the next beacon in the chain without having to make any course correction. However, if the neighbouring beacon was lost, they would have to try to navigate by dead reckoning and hope to make it within range of a functional beacon station — a chancy business at best. They hurtled along for another ten hours, trying without success to raise the beacon. They did however receive another signal; badly corrupted and very weak though it was, the computer nevertheless managed to identify it as a standard distress signal with some accompanying voice audio in a Hzeel dialect. Regrettably, the computer's translation circuits appeared to be malfunctioning and it could give no useful translation.
Working with a standard pocket translator, and feeding the audio signal through it, they managed to make out a few words amidst the static before the signal faded out completely — "losing power", "life support". They got a bearing on the distressed vessel and found that it lay directly on their flight path. They began preparations to render assistance, as required under Imperial Space Law, though it occurred to them that with conditions already so cramped it might prove difficult should the Hzeel have to be taken off their own vessel. On the principle that it pays to be prepared, there followed an intensive bout of study on standard Imperial salvage laws, just in case.... certain members of the group noted that if they took their time then there might not be anyone left alive when they arrived which would certainly help to clarify the salvage situation, legally speaking. Of course this was purely in jest, and of course nobody on K'pok's ship would consider stooping to any tactic so low. Wouldn't even think of it. No sirree. Uh-uh.
A few more hours brought our valiant and compassionate crew within visual sensor range of the position of the missing navigation beacon, though the image on the viewscreen initially proved to be unintelligible. The beacon appeared to be where it ought to be, but it seemed to pulsing with lights, as if it had been draped with christmas tree lights. Cranking up the magnification, the lights turned out to be weird translucent starfish-like things plastered across the surface of the beacon, clustered especially thickly about the point where the power plant should be. Weptish, with his xenobiological training and with the help of the computer's biological database, identified them as space-dwelling energy leeches, presumably carried into the hyperspace dimension attached to the hull of some ship. Having identified the critters, it was immediately postulated that a similar infestation was responsible for the plight of the Hzeel ship ahead, and plans began to be formulated for dealing with the menace once they arrived in the vicinity.
The problem was fairly simple in essence; how to approach the Hzeel vessel without becoming infested themselves? The ship's weapons would be of no help, since the leeches would just treat being fired on by a laser as an unexpected dessert. Nobody on board owned any slug-throwers of any kind, and the only weapon which might possibly have any effect on them at all was K'pok's hand-held stunner, a device with a precariously short range for this sort of task. Kappo revealed that he had smuggled a crate of plastic explosive on board, a declaration which surprising didn't raise an eyebrow from anyone at all. A stoic bunch, our heroes. Eventually it was decided that the thing to do would be to lure them away from the stricken vessel, allowing our heroes to get close enough to carry out a rescue. Various plans were formulated as the ship approached the Hzeel position.
Soon the Hzeel ship could be seen on the screens; it turned out to be a sizeable freighter, possibly stuffed to the gills with valuable cargo. Sure enough, its aft sections were covered with what appeared to be several thousand energy leeches. Kappo tried scanning for life signs, but the ship just appeared as a black blob on all his scopes — presumably the leeches just absorbed the scanning beams; certainly it attracted their attention, and some of them detached from the Hzeel craft and began to float towards our heroes as they approached the vicinity.
An excellent plan by Weptish involved using the remaining spare EVA suit as a drone, towing charges cobbled together from laser pistol charge packs set to explode in sequence and hopefully attract the attention of the creatures. The plan was a thing of beauty, and the execution flawless, except for the fact that the execution was somewhat flawed and it didn't work. The idea was to use the umbilical airlock, designed for connecting the crew compartment with a cargo module (not present) as an aimimg tube, with its magnetic grapples holding the suit in place with its thrusters on full. Alas, the grapples merely sent the suit corkscrewing off into hyperspace, towing its charges behind. They did go off as planned, but only attracted the attention of a paltry few leeches, most of which went straight back to feeding on the Hzeel freighter though some of them made a beeline for the delicious, plump-breasted Vulcan craft so temptingly near.
This meant falling back on Plan B: to use the ship itself as a decoy to lure as many leeches as possible away, relying on superior acceleration to remain out of reach. K'pok began buzzing them to stir them up, and then made off at a leisurely pace for half an hour or so, with a train of voracious leeches trailing behind. Once far enough away, she stepped on the gas and left them behind, circling back to the distressed Hzeel ship. Returning, they found that the numbers of leeches still attached to the Hzeel were severely depleted, and all the remaining cretures were clustered around the power nacelles aft so that there was a good blind spot directly forward, allowing K'pok to approach (hopefully) undetected. Kappo and Jek were tractor-beamed across to an external emergency lock — not entirely smoothly, but at least there were no broken bones. Once there, K'pok backed off in the hopes that she wouldn't be detected and infested by any stray leeches, leaving Jek and Kappo to gain entrance to the Hzeel and begin their reconnaisance.
Getting through the lock and into the ship proved to be relatively straightforward, and J&K were soon in the dark, freezing corridors of the Hzeel freighter. Conditions were cramped to say the least — the Hzeel are a relatively diminutive race, and Jek is not a very diminutive human being. Even Kappo had to do a lot of crouching. Just past the inner door of the airlock they found their first corpses floating, and everything covered in a rime of hoar frost glittering in their suit lights. The inner iris doors proved to be less cooperative than the airlock, and Kappo was forced to blow the first one with one of his home-made demolition charges. Things went a little more smoothly from there, and though there were a lot of wrong turnings and blind alleys taken, they eventually found themselves up on the bridge where they found some survivors (blast!) floating in emergency survival bubbles. All were getting to the end of their oxygen supplies, so J&K made haste to bounce them back down to the airlock so they could be taken across to K'pok. The demolished door proved to be the nemesis of one of them; his bubble was torn on the ragged shards and he immediately went into spasms and died. The remaining three were at the redlines on their oxy bottles, and though Jek laboured heroically to widen the hole, by the time they made it back across to K'pok they were all dead of asphyxiation.
Meanwhile, the disappointed train of leeches originally lured away were returning, so K'pok got out of the vicinity. While waiting for J&K, she had been plotting the freighter's vector and velocity so that hopefully they could find it again, having stocked up on some kind of anti-leech supplies.
As an afterthought, K'pok ran a diagnostic on her own power systems, and sure enough, found a small but significant drain. A once-over via the external monitors showed that during the whole affair, she had picked up half a dozen parasites of her own, all happily feeding away on her power supplies.
