Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was forced out
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks
For you sing, “Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow
Oh my heart, Oh my heart shies from the sorrow”
The cast for this session:
  • Gunner Adam (Soldier)
  • Oliver Greenstar (Colonist)
  • Engineer Reiko Ando (Deckhand)
  • Pilot Saqr Geroushi (Pilot)
  • Sensor Operator Siladan Hatshepsut (Archaeologist)
  • Ship’s Doctor Banu Delecta (Medicurg)

The PCs are on Rockhome 3, where they have made a significant profit selling spare parts to the desperate colonists, but they have been asked to stay and investigate the reason the mining colony was sabotaged. Ingrid Silverstern, the Consortium representative on the mining colony, asked them to find out who sabotaged the colony’s reactor, gravitron drives and life support systems, afraid that a full-blown miners’ mutiny was in the offing. The PCs are confident that the colony is not under threat from a mutiny, but they suspect that a rich and arrogant young man, Aslam, child of one of the colony’s rich founding families, sabotaged the colony and has some kind of plan to take over complete control of the colonists. The PCs were just marching across the lush gardens of the luxury quarters to challenge him when they heard word of the arrival of a new ship, the Algebraic Escalation. Because Adam and Oliver Greenstar were staying on their ship, the Beast of Burden, the group decided to split along convenient lines: Reiko, Saqr, Siladan and Banu would interrogate Aslam in his luxury apartment while Adam and Oliver waited in their ship.

Aslam’s Redoubt

Reiko’s group pursued Aslam to his luxury apartment, using tools to open the front door. Siladan was carrying a proximity sensor, which they jury rigged to give them a precise assessment of the location of anything moving or alive in the apartment, so they were able to quickly pursue Aslam down two levels to a kind of basement tunnel. Here they found themselves confounded by a security door that they could not penetrate. They first tried electronic tools to break through, to no avail, and then attempted to break it with force, but this too failed. Banu called up schematics for the building and they concluded that this was not just a blast door, but a secure airlock door leading down to a private dock. They made some desultory attempts to communicate with Aslam, to no avail, and so gave up and searched his house as best they could.

The Algebraic Escalation

While they were attempting to hack the door, Oliver and Adam were lounging around in the bridge of the Beast of Burden, failing to make small talk as Adam stared obstinately into space and grunted monosyllabic replies to all of Oliver’s cheerful attempts at communication. Bored, they stared out of the window at the hangar, and so were easily able to see three men, obvious miners, come running into the hangar and begin frantically open a shuttered and locked storage area on the hangar’s far wall. Moments later the men were dragging out carbines, loading them and pointing in rapid, angry gestures back towards the main entrance. Intrigued, Adam and Oliver decided to grab their guns and head outside to see what was going on.

Outside the ship was chaos, the sound of gunfire and the faint smell of burning. The three men ran ahead of them to the hangar entrance, one being shot down as soon as they entered the hallway outside and the other two disappearing from view, firing wildly down the hallway. Oliver and Adam approached the doorway more cautiously, and peering outside found a scene of devastation and pitched battle. The two men who had run into the hallway were already dying, gunned down before they could reach cover further down the hall. There were other dead and injured Rockhome residents in the hallway, which stank of smoke and explosives. At the far end of the hallway a group of soldiers of some kind had taken cover at the entrance to hangar 2, and were professionally and carefully opening fire on anyone who came down or into the hallway. People in the main residential area of the colony were firing back, but it was obvious that the intruders at hangar 2 were better armed and better trained, and they appeared to already have established a bridgehead on the far side of the hallway, from where they could begin to invade the colony proper. The doors to hangar 2 were not closing, and all the emergency doors that should have sealed the colony off from the hangar section were still open.

Hangar 2 was the hangar that had received the Algebraic Escalation. The station was under attack!

Panic and chaos in the hallways

Oliver and Adam made contact with the rest of the group and they quickly joined the dots. His involvement in the sabotage discovered, Aslam had called in his collaborators and they had approached the station in the guise of merchants, then attacked as soon as they landed. It was likely that with Aslam’s help they knew the layout of the station and had secured access to the security station above the hangar. Their motives were not clear but everyone guessed their goal was to take over the station or to rob it of some valuable artifact or relic. They decided to help the station. Their plan was rough and uncertain, because they had no time to make decisions. Saqr would travel back to the Beast of Burden to prepare it for escape, running along the viewing corridor above the entrance hallway. While Saqr did this Banu, Siladan and Reiko would go to the security station and secure it, and try to use it to close the doors on hangar 2. Oliver and Adam would go into battle in the hallway, to try and buy time and even up the odds for the station’s defenders. Oliver and Adam were not wearing their battle armour, but they had no time to go back and change. Battle was joined!

The next few minutes were a storm of chaos and blood. Adam and Oliver fought valiantly in the hallway but were overwhelmed by the superior force of the intruders, and would have died in the hallway along with the miners if Banu had not come to them in time. As the battle raged in the hangar zone the rest of the party were able to invade the security station, kill the intruders who had taken it, and return it to the control of the colony. They tried to interrogate an intruder but had no time, and were forced to leave him tied in the hallway so that they could rush to the aid of Oliver and Adam, who were being cut down in the lower level. With Banu’s medical help and Reiko and Saqr providing melee support they were able to push back some of the intruders, giving the colony enough time to seal the doors on the hangar. As the doors sealed shut and the miners mopped up one or two remaining intruders the party were able to breathe a sigh of relief, reload, and take a moment to rest.

It was then that the Algebraic Escalation fired her railgun through the hangar doors.

And then fired again.

Capitulation

The railgun wrought enormous damage on the colony’s ancient structure. It smashed a massive hole in the hangar door and carved a 100m long track of ruin through the centre of the residence district, caving in a part of a wall and leaving a steaming, smoking path of ruin in its wake. The second shot punched the hole wider and careered off through the residential section, tearing down a piece of wall and exploding in a cloud of dust and shards of rock on the far side of the asteroid. The PCs had to recoil from splatters of molten metal from the door, and crouched on the far side of the hallway watching the ragged fringes of the railgun’s hole fade from white hot to red to purple, dripping chunks of molten metal onto the steel floor. The whole hallway filled with the rank stench of burning insulation and singed steel, and people panicked and ran away in horror.

Everyone waited as the smoke cleared, and then the colony leader, Abraham, contacted them. The captain of the Algebraic Escalation had contacted him and told him he would lay waste to the colony using the railgun if they did not surrender. He had perhaps 10 minutes to make a decision. The captain of the ship and his soldiers were waiting inside the hangar for Abraham to step through the doors and surrender. What would the PCs do?

Their plan was suicidal but fast. Saqr and Reiko put on their exo suits and flew to a small airlock on the outside of Hangar 2, where they let themselves into the hangar. Then, when they were in place, Abraham opened the hangar doors enough for the rest of the group to enter, and they attacked.

With the benefit of the flank attack their operation was brutally effective. There were only five remaining soldiers waiting on the inside of the door, wearing exo suits and carrying carbines, but they were not expecting a rear attack. The PCs managed to kill most of the captain’s guard, and cut him down before he could retreat inside his ship. With the captain down the rest of the ship’s crew surrendered, and the battle was over.

Execution

The PCs realized that in order to find out what had happened they would need to offer at least one crew member mercy, but Abraham was not feeling magnanimous. He made clear that there was no circumstance under which the ship’s gunners would be allowed to live, and neither Aslam nor the captain were getting away safely. They narrowed the surviving crew down to three people who did not have to be executed, and offered the three of them a deal, prisoner’s dilemma style: the first one to reveal everything would be spared. Fortunately they identified that two of the three were a mother-daughter pair, and they offered the mother an easy death and freedom for her daughter if she would tell them everything. She immediately agreed, so they spaced the third crew member and took her story. Everyone else from the crew was spaced once the mother offered up her testimony.

The ship and the crew were from Samina’s Corsairs, a pirate outfit in the Hamura system. They had made contact with Aslam and used his greed to take over the colony. Aslam would sabotage it and they would arrive with the supplies the colony needed, offering the colony a simple deal: survival in exchange for becoming servants of Samina’s Corsairs. Their life would continue as before, though now they would be ruled by Aslam, but in exchange for their continued survival they would become agents of the Corsairs, with pirates based in the colony and using it to spy on activity in the Kua system, and as an outpost of their smuggling enterprise. By seizing Rockhome 3 the corsairs would gain a foothold in Kua, with all the intelligence and smuggling benefits such an outpost offered. Obviously a few people would have to be killed to send a message, and some of Aslam’s baser instincts would have to be tolerated, but the corsairs would ensure that life continued on the colony. A simple plan! Unfortunately the Beast of Burden had destroyed the picket ships that the corsairs had set in place to prevent anyone interfering with their plan, and had ruined the entire scheme.

Denouement

As they had promised, they gave the mother a quick death, and locked the daughter in their ship, to return her penniless to Coriolis station. They looted the Algebraic Escalation but left the ship itself to the colony, who had lost so much to the corsairs, though Abraham allowed them to take its encrypted data core with them. Abraham promised them safe harbour in the colony if ever they would need it, and after a few days spent recovering from battle they returned to Coriolis, releasing the daughter to find her own way in the Cellar. With the spoils of their victory they had enough money to pay off the first month of the debt for their ship, and to replenish their supplies.

Their exercise in disaster capitalism had been both more profitable and more ethical than they had expected. They had secured both a safe house and a contact in the Consortium. They had an encrypted data core from a corsair ship, which if they could hack it might provide them the location of the corsairs’ base, a very valuable piece of information. Their first excursion on the Beast of Burden had proved a huge success.

Now their gaze turned to the planet of Kua and the ancient secrets hidden in its fertile jungles. Could they be as successful delving into the secrets of the ancients as they had been in uncovering the fatal lies of the pirates? Let us see …