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.
