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.
