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.

07: After the Massacre

 In the lull following the bloodbath, K'pok had some stern words to say about the need for fire discipline and the strong desirability of negotiation as preferable to the decimation of native populations, no matter how repulsively mutated they may appear. Kappo went into a veritable flood of self-justification, claiming to have shown remarkable self-restraint since he hadn't used any grenades or high explosives.

While this full and frank exchange of views continued, the building over which all the fighting had taken place was belching out dense black smoke, having been set alight by a fleeing mutant who had been set alight by Jek the Firestarter. K'pok wanted to get back to the ship to check on Weptish, since he wasn't answering any hails — all that came back was static. Kappo said that he'd be fine and suggested that it might be a good idea to search the facility for the memory cubes before the whole place became a blazing inferno, and after a reproachful remark or two from the Vulcan the team repaired into the lobby, clambering once more over the loudly swearing forms of the muties who had been trapped in K'pok's riot-foam spray.

The plans shown to the team during their briefing indicated that the comms centre and working data store was located upstairs, so they clambered up the (inoperative) escalator into dense smoke. Jek started coughing as the choking fumes percolated into his tattered rad-suit, and was forced to adopt a horizontal squirming posture in order to breathe. The others did the same, since they couldn't see a thing in the smoke, and our Gallant Crew crawled their way in the direction of the comms centre (they hoped). An unexpected wall barred their way; it had clearly been added post-holocaust. Kappo went for the direct approach and attempted to batter his way through it, without success. Jek tried a more lateral approach, and felt his way a few metres along it to find a curtained doorway. To either side as they crawled down the passage they could see small booths, obviously living and sleeping quarters, all decorated in a tasteful "Mad Max Chic" motif. Some desultory pillaging ensued, though nothing of any worth was found to steal.

Onwards, onwards into the smoke crawled our Brave Heroes, eventually managing to grope their way into the area which had once been the communications centre, now turned into living quarters for more of the mutant community. The immovable remains of the comms consoles still remained, but had been thoroughly gutted of all their components — one had been turned into a serviceable oven, others into Post-Holocaust Barbarian Junk Storage. Kappo and Jek turned the place over as thoroughly as they could, considering that Jek couldn't raise his head more than half a metre from the floor without risking death via smoke inhalation, and Kappo had to do all his searching by feel through the gloves of his EVA suit. They found nothing of any interest, and most importantly, no data crystals. K'pok meanwhile had found the door to what had originally been the office of the station commander — it was locked.

Leaving Jek to fumble about in the smoke, Kappo fairly leaped at the opportunity to use one of his explosive lockpicks, and blew out the lock very neatly. It had no effect; the door had clearly been barricaded from the other side. Combining their resources, and aided by Jek who had given up searching through the mutie squalor, they forced the door open and stepped into the room. A wild shot buried itself in the wall beside them, and they were confronted by a terrified group of three mutie teens, one of whom was wrestling with the bolt action of his antique hunting rifle. Surprisingly, Kappo didn't immediately mow them all down while screaming "Eat leaden death alien mutie scum" — instead, K'pok stepped over to the frantic youths and wrestled the weapon from its owner. Jek meanwhile pushed the door shut to keep out the smoke as far as possible.

K'pok attempted to communicate with the muties, but without any real success. They had all seen the carnage out in the street and were convinced they were about to be butchered without mercy, and kept repeating the same unintelligible phrase over and over. Kappo and Jek turned the room over and hit the jackpot (in a very small way). Under the bed they found a footlocker containing a variety of PHBJ (see above), an antique revolver (unloaded), and a single solitary TES data cube. Eureka! Only 999 or so to go! In the meantime, K'pok made use of the bedding to make an escape rope for the bawling teens, which initially increased the rate and volume of their pleading as they realised that she was going to garrote them before ripping out their livers and feasting on their eyeballs. They must have been very confused indeed when, instead of doing any of these things, Our Heroes just left the room and politely shut the door behind them.

By the time they made it back to the head of the escalator, the far end of the upper storey was well ablaze and they scampered back down into the lobby with flames licking at their heels. K'pok began trying to free the muties caught in her riot-foam, but soon realised it would take her forever without any release spray. Eventually she managed to talk the others into not leaving the muties to fry or asphyxiate and they decided to just pick the whole mass up and move it outside... except that the doorway was too narrow. "I'll take care of that" said Kappo, and using a series of precisely placed demolition charges he punched out the entire front wall of the lobby in a superlative display of controlled pyrotechnics. Grunting and groaning with effort, the three then hauled the trapped mutants out into the street and left them to wait for the foam to degrade enough to wriggle free.

Back into the building, and a quick scan of the ground floor turned up nothing of interest except the gutted remains of an air raft. The last remaining place to search was the basement level, reachable via a lift shaft (the lift itself no longer operational, of course) and by a stairwell. Our guys chose the stairs, and scampered down straight into the booby-trap. At the very last instant, Kappo noticed the spurt of a quick-burning fuse and leaped down on to the landing — regrettably placing himself right in the killing ground of the bank of home-made claymores. Several cans of remotely-detonated whup-ass were opened on him. Fortunately his shields and armour absorbed the worst of the damage and he was not reduced to a fine pureé, but he was reduced to a bleeding comatose mess crumpled against the wall. Fortunately, the GM forgot about his stash of explosives, which were also caught in the blast — probably a good thing really.

The others were momentarily deafened by the explosion, and blinded by the clouds of gunpowder smoke which filled the stairwell, but showing extraordinary grit and gumption they picked up their fallen comrade and began to make their way through the door which had been blown off its hinges by the blast. In retrospect, that may not have been an ideal tactical decision, since the dust and smoke prevented them from seeing the glowing fuse sputtering through the air and the pipe-bomb which clattered into the tangled barricade they were trying to clamber over.... yet another explosion, again largely soaked up by those excellent Vulcan EVA suits, but sufficient to cause a unanimous tactical readjustment to the rear. Picking up Kappo (again), Jek and K'pok beat a retreat back to the ship.

Meanwhile, back at the ship, Weptish had emerged from his fix-it trance to find nobody around at all. He wandered about the ship briefly trying to find some sign of his compatriots, then shrugged and went back to fixing something else.

K'pok, Jek and the deeply comatose Kappo arrived back at the ship, pausing briefly when they realised that Kappo was no longer available to disarm the claymores he'd set out around the perimeter. Not to worry; the claymores weren't there any more. Phew! They made their way back into the ship and decontaminated, and then Jek managed to get Weptish's attention by physically picking him up, moving him away from his work area and shaking him until his attention returned from the Land Of Gadgets.

K'pok put the antique data cube in for detailed analysis by the ship's AI so that the sensors could be configured to scan for them, and Weptish began medicating Kappo to prevent him from leaking to death. Successfully, fortunately for Kappo, who woke up some 18 hours later. Also fortunately for Kappo, nobody mentioned the fact that his EVA suit had been torn open and that he'd therefore been exposed to god knows how many lethally virulent strains of mutant bacteria. Maybe what he doesn't know won't hurt him, or then again, maybe it will.

By the time Kappo woke up (and immediately shot himself up with a TIC regenerative serum), the ship had completed its analysis of the data crystal and was in the process of performing an expanding sensor scan of the surrounding city for more of them. It got numerous positives, but all in very small quantities except for one cache over the river, near the jungle area where the ship had originally landed. The ship estimated that there were approximately 500 units there, roughly half of the total store they had been sent to retrieve, so as soon as Weptish finished his final repairs they took off again.

Flying low over the dead city to the point specified by the ship AI, they found a multi-storeyed stone building rising out of dense vegetation. Circling above, they saw a small flat open space among the steeply sloping gables of the roof, not large enough to land the ship, but easily large enough to get down on to using their A.G. harnesses. K'pok gave the AI instructions to land in a safe area and to return on her command. Then, thanks to the GM forgetting that Jek didn't have an A.G. rig and that Kappo's had been blown up, they floated merrily down on to the roof-deck. Thank goodness for the GM's lousy memory.

06: To The Unpronounceable Planet

 Thanks to K'pok's superlative navigational skills, Our Heroes popped out of hyperspace right inside the Pantokrator system. As an added bonus, there was nothing solid in front of them when they appeared in realspace at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

As expected, soon after exiting hyperspace they were hailed by an Imperial Navy cutter and ordered to come to a halt for a customs inspection. A gunboat came alongside and sent a shuttle to dock with the good ship Vulcan-ships-don't-have-names-stupid, and the customs team — two marines, a Naval officer, a TES officer and an unidentified civilian — came aboard. They immediately began a log scan and a physical search of the vessel. They were interested to know why Our Heroes had so many corpses stowed away in various places about the ship, but since corpses aren't strictly speaking contraband, it was purely a matter of curiosity. Kappo experienced some qualms about having a crate of explosives under his bunk, but apart from noting the fact of its existence the marines didn't give it a second thought.

K'pok registered their salvage claim on the Hzeel derelict now floating somewhere in hyperspace, and it was duly witnessed and date-stamped by the naval officer (Lieutenant Hendry Albert Wittleson III, as a matter of fact. Just thought you might like to know that).

Once the search was complete, the naval contingent left and the remaining two — the TES officer and the civilian — took Kappo aside on to the shuttle for a private discussion. The civilian identified himself as a local TIC field agent with orders for Kappo concerning a covert mission within this system. Kappo was ordered to land on the planet Ierisiou at specified coordinates, enter the remains of what had once been a TES monitoring station (originally thought to have been destroyed in the war between the two planets), and retrieve datacubes from the station archives. He would then rendezvous with a naval craft before proceeding on to one of the Pantokrator lagrange berths. There was a suggestion that the debilitating war of a century ago had been engineered; one theory was that the Thorgons were responsible (that, of course, being the default conspiracy theory), but more likely, and more useful for the Empire, was the possibility that the war had been purposefully engineered by the Pantokrator of the day, in which case the present government would be liable for some very, very heavy reparations (though to whom they would be paid was a matter left unsaid; most likely the money would go straight into the Imperial coffers). Having evidence of the case would provide a potent stick with which to keep the uppity Pantokrations in line, and it was hoped that the old datacubes would provide that evidence. The mission budget included provision for a fee for his civilian team-mates: 750 credits each per day (up to 3 days on-planet), plus the berthing fees for the V.S.D.H.N.S while our Intrepid Crew finished their own business on Pantokrator.

Kappo went back to the V.S.D.H.N.S and let the rest of the crew in on the secret; they shrugged collectively and said something about not having anything else to do that day anyway, and set about compiling lists of all the equipment they hoped to weasel out of the Navy arsenal. One thing which gave Jek some considerable satisfaction was getting hold of an XXXL environment suit, so that he could stay safe in the glowing ruins of Ierisiou without giving himself a permanent wedgie. Kappo got some more demolition charges, since you can never have too much high explosive, and everyone (except K'pok, who declined) was issued with ancient chemical-mechanical projectile assault rifles and pistols for reliable use in a hard radiation environment. They were given a quick familiarization course by the naval armourer, who failed to laugh at any of their jokes about muskets and blunderbusses. No sense of humour, these navy types. K'pok did ask for, and got, a riot foam sprayer sufficient to cover about 10 square metres in quick-setting immobilization foam. They also got an air raft, which they attached to the hull with magnetic grapples, and they were issued with 24 1-hour doses of RadPro to help stave off the hair loss and bleeding gums while they were in Ierisiou's glowing ruins.

Once fully briefed and supplied, K'pok lit the blue touchpaper and they blasted for Ierisiou orbit.

They decided to go the long way round, leaving the plane of the ecliptic and approaching Ierisiou from the shadow of the sun to minimize the chance that they might be observed by watchers on Pantokrator. A brief passive scan showed one small ship in orbit and another on the surface not far from their own planned insertion point; there was no way of telling who or what they were without a more active scan which would reveal their own presence, so they just crossed their fingers and started the landing cycle.

As they entered the outer atmosphere, the computer started making those "Whoooop! Whooooop! Warning! Collision alert! Collision in 12 seconds!" noises that always indicate something really bad is about to happen. Immediately everyone began scrambling desperately into their spacesuits, except for K'pok who called up the obstacle on the viewscreen — it proved to be a missile rising towards the V.S.D.H.N.S from the surface. K'pok immediately went into an evasive pattern,trying to use the anti-debris laser to shoot it down, but the missile kept on coming. Flying like crazy, K'pok managed to maintain separation and even landed a hit with the puny ship's laser, but its only effect was to trigger the warhead to flower into a dozen smaller warheads. The general consensus was that things had just got a lot worse. A momentary miscalculation by K'pok gave the pursuing missiles an opportunity to close the gap; our Brave Heroes shut their eyes and put their fingers in their ears as the missile swarm tore into the ship.... and bounced tumbling away off the outer shields. All except one failed to detonate, which was a very good thing, because the one which did detonate took down the shields, stripped away all the external sensor arrays, destroyed the navigation systems, life support systems and artificial gravity. It also pulverized the air raft on the hull, as well as blowing up a console next to Jek and showering him with sparks and bits of circuit boards.

There followed a full and frank exchange of views; some wanted to skedaddle back out into space and make repairs before risking a landing, others wanted to land as quickly as possible to avoid any more missiles. In the end, K'pok had the casting vote by virtue of being the one actually flying the ship, and she made straight for the surface. Having no sensors or navigational array any more, she had to navigate visually and dropped for a city chosen at random, hoping it was the right one. She flew low over it, hoping to stay low enough to avoid being a nice fat juicy target while staying high enough to see a reasonable amount of the city for comparison with the orbital photos. By a stupendously lucky chance, it turned out that they had found not only the right city, but even a right part of the right city! Spying an more or less open area, K'pok put the ship down into what must once have been a large park, now being reclaimed by the twisted mutant post-holocaust vegetation.

There was a brief moment of peace as everyone counted their arms and legs to make absolutely sure they weren't dead. Then there was a load "BONG!" on the hull. And another. And then some more. K'pok flicked on the viewscreen and panned around to see what was going on, and found a number of humanoid creatures milling around in the undergrowth and hurling things at the ship. Not just little things either; big things like boulders and big tree branches. Rather than risk going outside and being squashed with a rock, K'pok took off again and made for another open space, this time a square surrounded by the shells of buildings. She hovered briefly, checking to make sure that there was nobody in sight, and then settled the ship as far from any cover as she could manage.

Weptish immediately set about crawling around the bowels of the ship to find out what was broken and how to fix it, while everyone else pored over their orbital photos to find out where they were and how far they'd have to go to get to their objective. Not far, as it turned out; the position of the old monitoring station was only a couple of hundred metres from where they'd set down. Kappo set claymores around the ship, and left the detonator inside with Weptish — who took not a blind bit of notice, since he was utterly engrossed in his repair work. Leaving Weptish obliviously fixing things like crazy, they headed off into the ruins.

Moving through the desolate streets, they saw little moving except for the inevitable tumbleweeds (not ordinary tumbleweeds though — mutant tumbleweeds). At one point they startled something which looked like a mangy dachshund covered with sores and with a dozen superfluous legs dangling along its flanks; it ran off making a pathetic gurgling baying noise. Coming to an intersection, they stopped: scanning the surrounding buildings, Kappo briefly caught a glimpse of eyes and noses peering over a windowsill (one head, but plenty of eyes and noses) before it ducked back inside. From around the corner they heard footsteps hurrying away. Peering around, they saw a tall humanoid with a tiny torso and head running away down the street towards a crowd of thirty or forty mutants, all gathered around the intersection of the corner where the old TES station was supposed to be located.

Taking the bit between their teeth, the bull by the horns, and the bouncer by the testicles, they turned on their force fields and began to walk down the street towards the gathered multitude who immediately raised an outcry and began shaking their fists and shouting incomprehensible imprecations. There was a shot from someone in the crowd which went ricocheting down the street, though it didn't come close to hitting any of the Good Guys. Kappo went into Calming And Pacification Mode and emptied a clip over their heads — they immediately scattered to cover, and a desultory fusillade of shots came back, one of which hit Jek, knocking him arse over kite. Kappo tried to change his mag on the run and dropped it in the road; he stopped for it and was hit by a human body which came hurtling out of one of the old store-fronts, knocking him down. He saw a movement in the dimness and let rip, virtually cutting the unfortunate mannequin-thrower in half and spraying blood and gore all through the old shop.

The team ran towards their objective, and more shots began to come from the mutants; poor old Jek was hit again and was knocked senseless. Meanwhile, Kappo went into full MyLai mode, and laid waste left and right. He poured fire into an upstairs window where someone was wrestling an oil-soaked mattress over the sill; the mutie was flung back inside, but the burning mattress fell out into the street just in front of the doors of the station, sending up a plume of choking black smoke.

About then the doors were pulled open — Kappo and K'pok got a brief view of what looked like a huge dustbin pointed right at them, with a sputtering fuse on top. They flung themselves to the side as the home-made bombard blew, showering the street with a shrapnel of old cutlery, nuts and bolts. Alas, Jek failed to spot the danger and just as he was staggering to his feet he was caught in the blast and flung back unconscious again, his shield down and his environment suit torn open.

K'pok charged in through the dense smoke which now completely filled the station lobby, spraying riot foam ahead of herself. Kappo continued the work of massacre, and a lengthy period of hand-to-hand combat ensued. Jek eventually woke up again, and staggered into the lobby a little unsteady on his feet, but gamely ready to rejoin the fray. All was going swimmingly well, from a blood-soaked slaughter-of-minions point of view, when the muties disengaged and drew back. The reason became apparent when, from outside the building, two mutants approached: one huge, muscular and horn-covered, the other eyeless, scrawny and with a nastily-pulsing exposed brain throbbing beneath a slimy membrane. Kappo immediately shrieked as his brain was crushed telepathically; once more and and he dropped unconscious to the ground. It was Jek's turn next (but he was getting used to being unconscious by then) — as he dropped he managed to blurt out "not.... brain... guy...ugh!", but it was too late for K'pok to do anything about it. Her brain was next to be squeezed into pulp, metaphorically speaking, but her Vulcan mental training kept her upright briefly. It was surely only a matter of time before K'pok would succumb like the other two, but then the mutie mentalist suffered a powerful brain fart, his eyes rolled up and he dropped to the ground unconscious, having squished his own cerebral cortex. The little eyeless one threw himself onto the inert body, pawing at it and mewing pathetically.

K'pok fought off the now demoralized remainder of the mutant crowd, giving Kappo and Jek time to recover. They groaned their way to consciousness, took up their assault rifles and cold-bloodedly emptied them into the helpless unconscious mutant and his pathetically sobbing lover. The rest of the mutants fled just as fast as their various numbers of limbs could carry them, leaving the bulk of their fellows blood-sodden hulks lying in the street, more sad victims of the cruelty and brutality of the normals.

05: When Space Leeches Are Attacked

 Even as K'pok watched the greedy little energy-sucking bastards on her viewscreen, one of them began to swell, bulging and writhing, and split neatly into two. Almost immediately, the power output display dropped a few points further — clearly something would have to be done, and soon.

Jek Porkins crammed himself back into his undersized EV suit, ignoring the lewd comments from his tactless companions ("Look! He's circumsized!" and so forth), and armed himself with a trusty steel bar. Kappo decided that he too would enter the fray against the Peril of the Space Leech, and asked Jek which persona he should assume for the fight. Jek said sarcastically (and incautiously) "Madam Fifi", and so Kappo immediately began the process of disguising himself. Owing to the urgency of the situation, he did a rush job and slapped on makeup and fake boobs and what-not in only ten minutes, resulting in a figure certain to give Jek and Weptish alarming dreams for months to come. K'pok merely raised one eyebrow in that infuriating Vulcan fashion, and said nothing.

By the time they made it outside, the leeches had reproduced to an alarming rate and K'pok was forced to call on the resources of her emergency fusion plant to keep the ship's systems up and running — even so, there was barely enough power available to keep life support operating. Kappo and Jek went into action, hunting out clusters of the creatures and destroying them with Kappo's home-made claymore mines — Kappo set their mechanical timers and Jek maneuvered the mines into position with his TK, holding them there until they exploded, showering the target area with ball-bearings. Jek's inexperience with explosive devices meant one or two near-misses when the two had ball-bearings bouncing around dangerously close to them, and one of the charges failed to ignite, but overall the tactic proved to be very succesful and after an hour or so of this most of the leeches had been destroyed.

K'pok and Weptish now came out to join in the hunt, to bash the snot out of the immobile leeches mano-a-leecho. Actually finding surviving leeches turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, due to the large quantities of pulverized leech fragments smeared across the hull and floating in the immediate vicinity of the ship. The remaining leeches were still feeding, and still reproducing, and since only Weptish had any training in Zero-G movement, most of Our Heroes were restricted to creeping about painfully slowly.

For a time, it looked as though the leeches would be able to breed faster than our intrepid team could find them and batter them to jelly, but with a little luck and some heroic efforts, they eventually managed to kill the last of them. To make absolutely sure, Weptish, Jek and Kappo did a search of the hull centimetre by centimetre, while K'pok went back inside to check the functioning of the power plants. After a couple of hours, all appeared to be well and everyone returned inside.

They decided to drop out of hyperspace and head directly for the nearest technologically advanced system to stock up on anti-leech supplies, so that they could get back after their potential prize just as quickly as possible. K'pok went into a frenzy of navigational calculation and found that the nearest suitable system was Pantokrator.

04: When Space Leeches Attack

 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.

03: In The Mines, and In The Poo

 The simultaneous detection of human life signs from within the egg chamber and movement coming down the passage behind them led to Our Heroes engaging in a protracted period of dithering. Eventually, Kappo and Weptish advanced to meet the unknown motion signals, while K'pok and Jek followed at what they hoped would be a safe distance behind.

Before long, Kappo's enhanced eyesight and cybernetic pattern-matching module resolved what appeared to be two humanoids advancing through the fog towards them, one short and one tall. He immediately dropped to his knees to brace his gun-arm and called out a challenge..... Weptish, deciding that craven cowardice was the better part of valour, threw himself to the floor to avoid the hail of gunfire he was certain was about to erupt. What followed was extremely unpleasant for all concerned.

Regrettably, the mysterious opponents of our Gallant Chums failed to shoot wildly into the thick mists with nice safe lasers, but instead stooped to the dastardly depths of using a portable mining crumbler. The first few seconds of pulverizing with this tool left both Kappo and Weptish with bleeding noses and ears and an all-over body bruise, not to mention blurred vision and really sore teeth. Worse still, the internal pounding led both of them to lose control of their bowels, and in a closed environment suit that's just no fun at all. Even K'pok and Jek, five metres behind, felt as though they were standing in a steel drum right next to the giant bass speaker at a heavy metal concert for the profoundly deaf.

Weptish let fly with his trusty Mk.II-D laser pistol, burning through a whole battery pack in the blink of an eye and hitting nothing at all (except the floor and the roof). Jek picked up a hefty chunk of resin that had been vibrated out of the ceiling and frisbeed it blindly down the fog-bound passage, also hitting nada. Then everybody retreated back into the egg chamber to get out of the line of fire — everyone, that is, except Kappo. Kappo charged. And Kappo discovered something about mining crumblers: the effect gets worse as you get closer. In no time flat he was flat on his face, bleeding from every pore, with eyeballs reduced to red pulp and with internal organs the consistency of paté. His teeth all shattered, and every one of his bones was a network of hairline fractures — quite nasty really.

The remainder of the team retreated, and K'pok activated her shield and A.G. harness to float off over to where she'd detected the human life signs. Weptish, having neglected to buy any spare batteries, frantically set about trying to modify the power supply of his A.G. unit to power his laser pistol, and soon became engrossed in the fascinating problem. Meanwhile, the Bad Guys advanced to within visual range, at which point Jek could see that each of them had one of the spider-critters attached to the back of his head, its knobby finger-like legs wrapped around the face. "Oh no!" he said. "Weptish is going to be posessed by something!"

Having none of that, Jek slapped on his shield and attempted to do the shorter one — who happened to be carrying the crumbler — a favour, by setting his head on fire. He collapsed as his spider-critter sizzled, and the other one fired randomly with a strange-looking laser rifle, fortunately missing everyone. Meanwhile, egg-sacs along K'pok's path were bursting and spitting out more of the nasty little creatures which attempted to crawl up her dangling legs; fortunately they were unable to get a grip on her shield-encased form. Some of the disappointed parasites gave up and started swarming towards Jek and Weptish — also safely encased in glowing force fields.

Up the mine shaft, Kappo had regained consciousness but found himself blind, deaf, and in incredible pain. Fumbling around in his medkit, he immediately shot himself up with a Giant Economy-Size dose of painkillers, and when the worst of the agony dissipated began to drag himself back up the passage towards the outside world.

K'pok, having seen the laser fire in the mist, turned around and came back to the aid of Jek, just in time for him to set the other Bad Guy on fire; oddly, the man ignored his suddenly inflammable chest and carried on firing ineffectually. Jek then tried to grab the rifle from his hands telekinetically, only to find that his puny TK was inadequate to the task until K'pok finally got in a lucky shot with her stunner. He turned the rifle on the swarms of spider-vermin, only to find that he could not make head nor tail of the trigger mechanism, the model being completely unfamiliar to him. At that moment, K'pok heard what sounded like machinery starting up back up the mineshaft. Although momentarily curious, she decided instead to try to retrieve the burning crumbler from the burning Cordwainer's burning corpse and began trying to beat out the flames.

Weptish finally finished jury-rigging his laser pistol, and noticing what K'pok was up to, went to help. Jek, having given up on trying to make the laser rifle shoot, began using it as a club to beat the spider-swarm to death. regrettably, though they flew a good distance when whacked they failed to die properly.

Leaving Weptish to retrieve and mend the crumbler, K'pok went back over towards the point where she'd detected the life signs, and soon found them — eighteen bloated humanoids, mostly Human but including four Cordwainers. They were semi-conscious and moving feebly, but all showed great tumorous swellings in their abdomens, and none were able to speak at all. Confronted with the problem of getting eighteen inert people, possibly full of alien spider-eggs, back up the passage and back to medical care proved to be a bit of a poser. However, Jek recalled that the ore carriers back at the head of the shaft all still appeared to be operative, and thought to use them to carry the invalids out.

Weptish was still engrossed in fixing the burnt-out crumbler, so K'pok and Jek went back up the shaft to the ore carts. Getting there, they found Kappo still trying feebly to drag himself out. K'pok picked him up and went to carry him out into the refinery, when over their suit comms they heard a command to put down their weapons and surrender "...or lethal force will be authorized against you". Peering around the refinery machines they saw half a dozen tropers in battlesuits — at first glance, they thought they were marines, but then noticed that the insignia were not marine, but TSS. Uh-oh. After a brief moment of thought, they put down their weapons and followed instructions to lie face down, whereupon they were handcuffed and dragged outside to join about a dozen other prisoners, Cordwainers and Humans, handcuffed and kneeling under the very big and intimidating guns of the TSS guards. Kappo was given medical attention sufficient to ensure he didn't die on the spot. K'pok tried repeatedly to convince them that it was all a huge mistake and that they were there on Panderjack's authority, but for some reason they did not seem to want to pay any attention to her. Unarmoured TSS officers were making piles of what, in daylight, proved to be Thorgon laser rifles; they photographed them, and also photographed the prisoners.

Weptish, having fixed the crumbler, was having a fine old time squishing bugs when he noticed bright lights from the tunnel entrance — battlesuited troopers. They saw him easily through the fog, though all he could see was a bright glow, and unfortunately since he was deaf as a post after having been crumbled, he didn't hear them command him to drop his weapon and surrender. Fortunately, at that moment a freak eddy in the mist revealed them in all their terrifying glory; having already been forcibly evacuated earlier under the gentle ministrtaions of the crumbler he was able to maintain his presence of mind and immediately dropped the crumbler and put his hands up. He was led away to join the others.

It took the TSS interrogators about half a day to determine that Our Heroes were actually there on legitimate business. nevertheless, they were kept in custody and under more or less constant interrogation for over three weeks. Once released, they went straight to Panderjack to find out what was going on; it appeared, according to the news releases, that the TSS strike force had been invited in by the peace and freedom-loving people of Cordwainer to avert the threat of civil war and a Thorgon-sponsored terrorist coup, and that Imperial forces promised a return to normality "soon". Panderjack's mining operation had been impounded and nobody would tell him what was going on there, or what had happened to his missing people.

Although they hadn't been on the job for more than eighteen hours when they were arrested, Panderjack (to the outrage of his accountants) offered Kappo, Jek Porkins and Weptish two days pay and a $500 bonus for the inconvenience of having been incarcerated. Naturally, the company bean-counters bickered and argued over every little detail, and stretched out the procedure so that it was more than a month before payment was actually authorized, and nearly two months before K'pok got the deuterium she'd been promised. As it turned out, that was fortunate for Kappo

Kappo had gone to the newly-established TIC field office — a very tiny operation — to deliver his report and to get some replacement equipment. Regrettably, he decided to continue his pose as John Alexander, and when his forged ID failed to pass muster he was immediately thrown into pokey for impersonating a TIC officer; a very serious offence, even punishable by death if the judges happened to be in a foul mood. He tried first to bluster his way out by brandishing his (real) TIC authorization, but they just assumed that he'd also either stolen or forged that as well and took it away to go with the rest of the evidence. He tried next to use the Old Boys' Network to find someone to vouch for him, but that also failed to pan out. Things were looking pretty bleak for a while, but eventually someone finally returned his ever more plaintive calls, and he managed to establish his bona-fides before actually being put before a tribunal. He finally got out of jail after about six weeks, and immediately set about demanding that the local office re-equip him and get his busted cybernetics fixed. The long-suffering agents took care of his needs, even supplying him with some explosives — after subjecting his (forged) authorization to very close scrutiny.

Back at the spaceport, K'pok had finally managed to get refueled and was about ready to blast off for Vardel IV when Kappo reappeared.

Kappo waited until they were well out into hyperspace before discarding his "Jack Alexander" persona, and reassuming the "Biffo the space rat" persona he'd originally met Jek and Weptish in on the Etylia Gargantyr. Curiously, in spite of being in a very small hermetically sealed box hurtling through space faster than the speed of light with only three other people (and the corpses of K'pol and the other two dead Vulcans), he seemed to expect everyone to be taken in by his Cunning Disguise. Nobody was. K'pok is beginning to think he may have some sort of mental disorder.

02: The Mining Camp

•  NOTE: For the sake of convenience, I will refer to Kappo as Kappo throughout, not by his various alter-aliases, unless the situation warrants otherwise.

Having received from Panderjack some satellite and aerial recon photos of the installation, our intrepid crew made some vague plans and set off for the area, ready to become highly-paid heroes. Just before take-off, reports reached them from Panderjack that the leader of the Cordwainer extremist group had cut off communications, and that there was no reply to their hails although the comms system was still up and running. "That's odd" they thought, and set off without further delay.

Except for one or two delays.

Kappo was given the task of operating the communications console, but could not bring himself to touch it without first scrubbing it down with an industrial strength disinfectant, to minimize the risk of catching any sort of Vulcan cooties. The computer immediately raised an alarm to alert K'pok to the fact that Kappo was interfering with its systems and introducing potentially toxic chemicals to its surfaces. Kappo was eventually calmed to the point where he could sit in a Vulcan chair, but then found that he couldn't read any of the control labels or tell-tales (they all being rendered in the Vulcan script). K'pok provided translations for him, and he began sticking sticky labels all over the console — at which point the computer raised another alarm, etc. etc.

Meanwhile, Weptish had been poking around all over the engineering section, offering to make little "improvements" here and there, much to the dismay and vocal disapproval of the ship's computer, and then disappeared out the exit hatch to pick up a few things which might come in handy — such as an old rubber tyre, for example. (Why? Your guess is as good as mine).

Jek Porkins mainly just sat brooding on the unfairness of the universe and the venal spitefulness of the Mind Police training personnel.

Eventually, our intrepid team got underway and flew without incident to the coordinates of the mining installation. They hovered for a short time, debating whether or not turning on the ship's shields would be a good idea or whether that might alarm the hostage-takers. It was decided to land defenseless in order not to appear hostile, and K'pok began hailing the control tower. There was no response, though the automatic landing beacon was still functioning. In response to K'pok's queries, the computer reported that its scanners were subject to low-level interference due to the relatively high level of ambient radiation in the region, but it was easily able to compensate. A scan of the installation buildings showed no humanoid life signs at all.

Satellite view of the installation

K'pok landed on the elevated landing platform, and they performed a visual scan of the surrounds. The door to the control tower appeared to have been broken in, but there was no movement or sign of life to be seen. The atmosphere of Cordwainer being somewhat thin, they decided to make use of the ship's store of EVA suits — not strictly necessary, but the protection and comms capabilities of the suits, not to mention their shields and A.G. harnesses, were deemed to outweigh the slight hindrance of the party's movement. Kappo, naturally, wanted to have his suit thoroughly irradiated and disinfected before he would put it on (those Vulcan cooties again), but fortunately one of the spare suits was still in its original factory wrappings, and he persuaded himself that it was probably safe.

Fly-by showing the landing pad and traffic/loading control building

The group made their way out of the ship and through the broken doors into what appeared to be a loading bay. Ore barrels on loading pallets and several loading robots were the only occupants of the area, but running across the plascrete floor towards a freight elevator was what appeared to be a sticky smear of blood and entrails. This was unanimously agreed to be a Bad Sign, not least because it almost certainly meant they wouldn't be getting their $12,000 "Zero Body Count" bonus. They tried to call the freight elevator, but it sounded as though it was jamming in its shaft. A smaller personnel elevator was available however, and three of the party took it down to the lower floor, leaving Kappo alone in the loading bay. From the lower loading bay, they were able to call the freight elevator and get the doors open, and it could then be seen that the blood trail stopped in the middle of the elevator floor. Looking up, they could see that the service hatch in the ceiling appeared to be gummed closed with more blood and goo, indicating that a body had been dragged up through it. For some reason, nobody seemed very keen on poking their own heads up through the hatch....

K'pok landed on the elevated landing platform, and they performed a visual scan of the surrounds. The door to the control tower appeared to have been broken in, but there was no movement or sign of life to be seen. The atmosphere of Cordwainer being somewhat thin, they decided to make use of the ship's store of EVA suits — not strictly necessary, but the protection and comms capabilities of the suits, not to mention their shields and A.G. harnesses, were deemed to outweigh the slight hindrance of the party's movement. Kappo, naturally, wanted to have his suit thoroughly irradiated and disinfected before he would put it on (those Vulcan cooties again), but fortunately one of the spare suits was still in its original factory wrappings, and he persuaded himself that it was probably safe.Instead, they decided to take the smaller elevator up to the top floor, where the traffic control centre was located. Again, it was abandoned, but there appeared to be signs of small arms fire and a couple of the terminals had been shot out, though no vital systems had been affected. Someone called up the most recent logs, but nothing illuminating was found there — just the usual arrivals, departures and loading specs.

Weptish got the idea to attach one of the loading bay security cameras to a loading robot's derrick arm and use it as a mobile surveillance drone to find out what was on the other side of the gruesome Hatch of Gore in the ceiling of the freight elevator. After a false start in which they discovered that there wasn't enough light to see anything by (easily fixed by duct-taping a flashlight alongside the camera), they maneuvered the robot into the freight elevator and opened the hatch remotely. The video quality on the companion camera's teensy little screen was not very good, but it could be seen that the guide rails at the back of the elevator shaft were buckled and there appeared to be damage to the plascrete wall of the shaft itself. The camera monitor was inadequate for a detailed survey, so at length Jek decided to go through the hatch himself.

Meanwhile, Kappo had crept into a secret fort made of ore barrels back up in the upper loading bay, from where he kept up with events over his suit comms and hoped not to be brutally killed to death in nasty and unpleasant ways.

Jek climbed up on top of the freight elevator, and immediately found what had been stopping it running freely up the shaft — the rear guide rail was very badly buckled and corroded, and a large area of the plascrete around it also appeared to have been eaten away by some powerful corrosive. The top and rear of the elevator itself was also very badly pitted and corroded. There was no sign of any body, though there was a good deal of blood and gore on the elevator roof. A bio-scan indicated that most of the gore was of human origin, but there were strange DNA readings from the corroded area of the shaft; there was no match found in the scanner's database, nor could a match be found by the ship's computer when the data was relayed to it.

Coming out from the lower loading bay, the team began exploring below the landing platform itself. They found the platform to be supported by a thick central pillar, and stabilized by lighter columns around its circumference. A number of vehicles were parked in its shelter. Moving among the parked vehicles, one of the team stumbled upon two strange creatures — apparently dead. They looked like naked fleshy greyish-pink spiders, their bodies about the size of a basketball and with long knobbly legs. Using K'pok's bio-scanner, they soon found that the things matched the DNA signature detected in the elevator shaft; K'pok could detect no electrical activity from them, nor any other life signs, but Weptish wanted to take no chances and shot one with his laser pistol from a safe distance. The results were quite spectacular — it exploded into steaming gobbets, and where the bits landed the plascrete surface steamed and bubbled as it was eaten away. "Aha!" they said. "Now we know what did the damage to the elevator shaft". Weptish, having cast his mind back to his old xenobiological training, postulated that they might possibly be some sort of old Xenovore bio-weapon; perhaps the miners had accidentally unearthed an old Xenovore military cache?

The party made their way back on board the ship, and recalibrated the scanners to pick up traces of the anomalous DNA sample they'd found in the elevator shaft and in the creatures under the platform. A quick scan of the surrounding area located a total of six sources of the material, all beneath the landing platform.

Kappo, meanwhile, had been investigating the support column of the platform, and found a locked access hatch secured by a simple mechanical lock which he had open in no time. Inside was a vertical tube with a ladder running up one side — a filthy ladder, almost certainly swarming with god knows what germs and bacteria. Jek bravely dared the teeming swarms of disease-causing dust and dirt however, and squeezed his massive bulk up the ladder to find a circular opening with hatches equally spaced around its periphery, what appeared to be a control terminal, and a loading pallet which had strapped to it what appeared to be a bunch of large, leathery puffballs, all of which appeared to have been burst open. Avoiding the puffballs for the moment, he checked out the terminal and found it to be the controls for the landing beacons. Using Kappo's camera, he took photos of the pallet and it load, especially a serial number which appeared to have been partially erased with a laser. Only three of the characters could be made out, and from its length it looked as though it had been a 16-character alphanumeric sequence. Closer investigation of the puffballs themselves showed them to be empty, except for a sticky glutinous residue left in the bottom of each.

Leaving that particular mystery for the moment, the team made their way over towards the office and accommodations building where with a very perfunctory examination they again found evidence of small arms fire, but no bodies. Carrying on to the refinery they found the entrance barricaded; Weptish again called on the services of a loading droid to break down the barricades and they made their way inside. There was no sign of life to be found, and no bodies at all, but all of the machinery appeared to be still operational and running in standby mode. Kappo contacted Panderjack via the ship's comms to check whether the machines should be shut down or not; the company requested that they be left running as they were.

Investigating further, the party found the mine entrance itself down the back of the refinery building — a large circular passage made up of what appeared to be flexible metal ducting with a metal grid floor. The entrance was choked with automated ore carriers, but they managed to clamber over and past them without too many difficulties and continued on into the mines, still searching for any sign of the missing miners. As they moved further in and down, the ambient temperature and humidity began to rise sharply until they found themselves walking in a dense fog. The ventilation and power ducts running along the ceiling of the shafts had been ruptured in several places, and at some points were encased in what appeared to be some sort of resinous extrusion, which reminded them sharply of the Xenovore foundations of Cordwainer City. Mutterings of "This is not good, this is not good" started to make themselves heard from our intrepid crew. At this point Weptish suddenly realized that the dense fog was going to play hell with their lasers if they had to shoot their way out.... and just to make the situation even better, it was found that the dense plauttite deposits were interfering with communications back to the ship to the point where they were indecipherable. Oh, joy.

Moving further into the mine workings, the shafts no longer showed any sign of Terran construction, being entirely formed from the Xenovore resin. Nervousness mounted, and suddenly K'pok's bio-scanner registered human life signs up ahead. Hurrying forward, they found themselves suddenly in a large open chamber, its floor and ledges entirely covered in what must be thousands of the strange puffball-like objects Jek had found in the landing beacon control chamber. Kappo, and to a lesser extent Weptish, began making noises about getting out and just telling the authorities about the whole thing. K'pok demurred, saying that they had a responsibility to rescue anyone still alive, and eventually resorted to bribery, offering to take them back into Imperial space in her ship if they agreed to stay and help. K'pok homed in on the life signs she had detected and pinpointed them up on one of the wall ledges of the chamber, and began working out how to get to them without disturbing any of the eggs when her spatial scanner alerted her to movement back up the passage. . . . .

Terran Empire 01: Trouble On Cordwainer

K'pok, having spent almost all of her available currency on repairs to her primary fusion plant, was able to stretch her remaining resources by living on her ship. Although the auxiliary power plant was inadequate for hyperspace travel, the ship was otherwise operational and more or less spaceworthy; the reactionless drives having been unaffected by the collision. All that now remained was to obtain sufficient deuterium to refuel the primary power plant, and for that she needed money — about 12,000 credits.

The other three got themselves settled at the Grand Regent hotel in Cordwainer City — an impressive name for a fairly mediocre hotel, but at least it provided the neccessities of life. The datanet terminal immediately came in for heavy use, as each of the three set about job-hunting in an effort to raise enough money to get off this frozen godforsaken rock.

Prominent in the news feeds was a tense situation arising from a dispute between an off-world mining company, Panderjack Industries, and a consortium of native Cordwainer miners. The trouble revolved around mining rights for deposits of the mineral plauttite, a rare earth used extensively in the Terran cosmetics industry to counteract the carcinogenic effects of a wide range of many of the Empire's most popular beauty treatments. Plauttite is primarily mined in an area of geological excrescences, about 250km from Cordwainer City, called the Brainlands for the supposed resemblance of the formations to the creased folds of brains.

According to the native miners, the dastardly Terran interloper Panderjack had snuck in and by devious lawyers tricks stolen away their rights to their deposits from under their very noses, ruining their livelihoods and destroying their very way of life at a single stroke. Needless to say, Panderjack's version of the situation was quite different; his position was that the mining claims were unassigned and they bought them both legally and fairly. Veejay Panderjack, the owner and operator of Panderjack Industries, stated publicly that he was more than willing to give native miners reasonable precedence for employment in his plauttite extraction operations; the representatives of the miners accused him in reply of trying to reduce them from proud independence to menial servitude, and accused him further of trying to soften them up for annexation by the Terran Empire. Panderjack's reply was intemperate (and heavily censored by the local news media), and the matter continued to escalate with bad feeling on both sides, culminating in an attack on a Panderjack mining crew by a group of native hotheads in which they took 22 office staff and miners hostage. The extremists demanded that Panderjack allow the native miners to continue as they have traditionally done, and to buy their ore at rates to be set by the Plauttite Miners Syndicate, or else risk some unspecified and unpleasant fate for the unfortunate hostages.

There was considerable grass-roots sympathy in Cordwainer City for the case of the miners, though almost everybody agreed that taking people hostage and no doubt jostling them unpleasantly was impolite to say the least, and that no good could come of such rash and aggressive actions. Regardless of their sympathies for the native miners, almost everybody also agreed that Veejay Panderjack was within his rights, and that his claims were legally valid, and even that he'd been fairly reasonable (for a wosker). There was much collective tut-tutting and shaking of heads, and the general opinion expressed was that there would be tears before bedtime.

The news that a famous Vulcan mediator had landed and was at hand came as an enormous relief to the embattled Panderjack; well recognizing his limitations when it came to temperate negotiations with the suspicious natives, he leaped at the chance to hire a professional to do the job for him. He immediately invited K'pol to visit him at his office. K'pol, as it happened, was not available, being dead, but K'pok kept the appointment and though she made it clear to Mr Panderjack that she was not qualified for the task as her mother had been, in Veejay's eyes a Vulcan was a Vulcan, and any Vulcan was better than none. A deal was struck between them; K'pok to mediate the dispute to the best of her ability, and Panderjack to finance the refueling of her newly-repaired fusion plant.

Not being one to leave anything to chance, Panderjack also made inquiries after hiring a group of quite a different sort of "mediators", just in case the Vulcan variety failed to get his people released.

Our other heroes saw in the discreet advertisement an opportunity to make enough money to get off Cordwainer and back into Imperial space, and answered the call along with a varied group of local roughnecks and troublemakers. For some reason known only to himself, Kappo decided to adopt the persona of a retired lawman called Jack Alexander (why? It probably seemed like a good idea at the time). After a reasonably thorough series of tests and interviews, they were chosen as the three candidates for the job who were least likely to leave a trail of corpses behind them, if worst came to worst and the hostages had to be rescued. Panderjack offered them 1,000 credits a day and made it very clear to them that although he wanted his own people released safe and sound, he was equally concerned that casualties among the native miners be kept to an absolute minimum — preferably zero. To sweeten the deal, he offered a 12,000 credit bonus if the job could be done without anyone being killed.

K'pok, Kappo (Jack), Weptish and Jek finally met, and together they went on board K'pok's ship to make their plans for the release, and if need be rescue, of the hostages.

Why are we here?

 This is where I will be putting the journal entries for any of my TTRPG campaign logs.