Our heroes have returned to Coriolis loaded with Firstcome loot that they stole from a drifting cargo ship beyond the Eye of Anuba. They plan to relax in Coriolis station for a week or two, selling off their loot, repurposing some Firstcome artifacts, and looking for new work. The cast for this session:

  • Pilot Saqr (Pilot)
  • Gunner Oliver Greenstar (Colonist)
  • Deckhand Reiko Ando (Deckhand)
  • Sensor Operator Siladan Hatshepsut (Archaeologist)
  • Doctor Bana Delecta (Medicurg)
  • Captain Al Hamra (Mystic)

Their first act upon arrival at Coriolis was to sell off the torpedoes they had scavenged from the ruined freighter. Once they had done that they settled in to count the money, while Dr Delecta set to work on the strange medical device they had recovered from the ship, and Siladan Hatshepsut tried to reconfigure the defence drone they had salvaged. They learned that the medical device had the power to cure any critical injury just by being placed on the wound, though they weren’t sure how it worked[1]. They managed to not only repair the defence drone, but also to give it a voice-activated command setting, and build an app that they installed on everyone’s tabula so that they could activate it remotely.

The crime

The PCs were relaxing on the third observation deck of their ship (the deck with the sumptuous cushions and the arabesque wood panels) when they were alerted to a visitor requesting access. His calling card introduced him as a policeman, detective Alef, and he seemed quite intent on being admitted. They roused themselves from their mid-afternoon caffeine revelry and assembled in a greeting room, and waved him up.

Detective Alef was a stern middle-aged man, trim but not excessively macho, wearing regulation khameez in a suave dark grey, hair at a business-like buzz cut with streaks of grey running through it. He introduced himself and took a seat, obviously impatient to begin business, and flicked them all a picture of a dead woman. In the picture she lay on a steel floor, swollen face streaked with dried blood and eyes hideously misfigured. They did not recognize her.

“This is Lydia,” he told them. “She arrived on your ship from Rockhome 3 on the 37th of the Merchant, and she was found dead two days ago. I’m here to ask about her.”

With the name and the date came recognition, and they realized this was the sole surviving corsair from the raid on Rockhome 3. Her mother had been with her, and her mother had agreed to tell them everything about the raid in exchange for Lydia’s freedom. They had then brought her to Coriolis and dumped her on the station with a small amount of birr, and the promise that she would not return to the corsairs.

“We found her dead in an old airlock down near the cellars. Conveniently the security cameras and activation alerts were long since dead, probably used by smugglers. You can see she didn’t have a chance. So I’m here to ask you about her.”

They looked nervously at each other, because they could see where this was going. Detective Alef then proceeded to lay out his theory: that they had brought her here from Rockhome 3 to do some criminal work for the people of Rockhome 3, but she had betrayed them and the PCs had killed her in the secluded airlock. He had joined the dots well: he had evidence of Rockhome 3 suddenly paying off a debt that had been festering for years, and the PCs suddenly disappearing on a long journey into the Dark Between the Stars. Was it smuggling? Artifact dealing? Slavery? Organ harvesting? Had she failed them or betrayed them? Which one of them pressed the button that depressurized the air lock and killed her?

They denied everything of course, with all the shifty contempt of people who know they are falsely accused. They could hardly tell him the truth – that they had spaced her mother and left her colleagues to be beaten and tortured by the Rockhome 3 survivors, then brought her here and dumped her on the express condition that she never tell her pirate bosses about who did all that to her. All they could do was deny any knowledge of her purpose and her origins, and assure Alef that they had done nothing wrong and were not involved in crime. Eventually, with no admission and no contradictory evidence, Alef was forced to give up and leave – but not before giving them all his number and telling them that whoever cracked first would be treated leniently by the adjudicators. “Call me,” he grunted as he walked out of the cargo bay entryway.

They shrugged it off. There was no evidence they had done anything. Presumably Lydia had returned to a life of petty crime when her small birr supply ran out and, not knowing the station, had crossed the wrong people. Their promise to her mother had only delayed her spacing for a few cycles. Truly, crime does not pay. They returned to the observation deck, and prepared for the week of job hunting.

The sniper

Al Hamra was returning from a day spent looking for possible work when he noticed a group of stevedores working at a cargo lifter near the entryway to the cargo hold of the Beast of Burden. As he passed them by he realized that their coveralls were a little bulky, and they were watching him a little too attentively; a second glance confirmed for him that their coveralls were hiding body armour, and that these were not stevedores at all. He reached for his tabula to send a warning to his crew, when he was suddenly struck by a huge force in his shoulder and thrown to the ground. A moment later he heard the crack of a sniper’s rifle and realized he had been shot – and terribly wounded. He rolled onto his face, trying to cover his tabula, and played dead. The last thing he saw as he fell was the stevedores reaching into the cargo lifter and pulling out vulcan carbines. Moments later they walked past him, briefly talking about whether to finish him off but deciding against wasting the ammunition. The threat passed as they walked inside, and left Al Hamra dying on the cold floor of the dock.

Al Hamra waited until they were heading up the ramp and sent a message to Saqr, in the cockpit, warning him of the incoming thugs. Then he gritted his teeth and hauled himself up the ramp towards the entry, beating the sniper to the shot and ducking under the cover of the ship’s hull.

The raid

Saqr sent the alarm across the bridge, and they sprung into action. Siladan opened the app and activated the defense drone, which was in the cargo hold that the thugs entered by. As it came to life they noticed it and three of them opened fire on it, while three more ran to the elevator out of the cargo hold. Saqr, sitting in the bridge, sealed the doors to the living quarters and the bridge so that they would be trapped in the elevator access hall when they arrived. Dr. Delecta ran to the rear elevators to descend to the cargo hold, while Siladan and Reiko Ando grabbed weapons and ran forward to engage the incoming raiders. Downstairs the defence drone engaged the three thugs remaining in the cargo hold, and Al Hamra hauled himself up the entryway and into the cargo hold. His wound was very bad, and every action was a struggle, but he had to defend his ship.

The battle that followed was short but brutal. Upstairs, one of the pirates managed to hack the doors and enter the living space before the team could properly gather, and a vicious battle broke out in the main lounge, with Reiko Ando and Siladan in close combat against two of the thugs while Oliver and Saqr fired on them and a third took cover behind the doors. Downstairs Delecta sprinted the length of the hangars and into the cargo hold, reaching it just in time to see the defence drone under heavy fire and Al Hamra knocked down by gunfire. She opened fire from her surprise position at the door, and her intervention was enough to turn the tide: between her and the defence drone two of the three raiders went down, and the third sprinted out the door. Upstairs, with four PCs attacking the thugs from two directions, they cleaned up quickly, although it was a close fight.

The death

With the raiders defeated Delecta was able to run over to Al Hamra and assess his condition. He was dying of his wound, and they would need the new Firstcome medical device immediately. She called to Siladan, who ran to the medibay and trashed it looking for the device. Finally he found it and sprinted down to the cargo bay, but the huge distances in the ship prevented him getting there quickly. As he arrived Al Hamra’s condition had worsened, and he appeared to be breathing his last ragged breaths. They slapped the machine onto the dying mystic’s chest and activated it.

Al Hamra breathed his last, his eyes opened and he died without even the grace of a few last words. Delecta had failed.

Moments later the machine beeped and a robot voice said, “Download completed. Please transfer to stable storage within one minute.”

They looked around in confusion. What had they done? But the machine was insistent – its battery was low and it needed to transfer the data before shutdown. They hadn’t even charged the damn thing! Yelling recriminations at each other, Siladan and Dr. Delecta connected the machine to a data outlet for the ship’s computer and, not really knowing what else to do, yelled at it. “Commence download!”

Moments later the ship spoke to them in Al Hamra’s smooth Zenithian drawl. “You people really can’t do anything right can you?”

Their mystic captain had become the ship’s intelligence.

The nest

As this battle unfolded Oliver Greenstar was returning from a mission to make a deal with a hacker. He saw the remaining raider and a heavily-armed sniper hustling away from the docking bay, and guessed that his ne’er-do-well companions had got themselves into more trouble. He called a nearby street urchin who had been lounging around the docks for the last few days looking for work, and gave him 50 birr to follow the fleeing thugs. The urchin took the job eagerly and disappeared after them. Greenstar returned to the hangar and boarded their ship just as the rest of the group were cleaning up. The PCs had found one of the thugs still alive and were interrogating him in the blood-soaked cargo hold when Greenstar returned.

The thug had little to say, but they learned what they needed to. He and his friends were agents of Samina’s corsairs. They had learnt that it was the PCs who had foiled their mission on Rockhome 3, and they had come to get the ship’s data core of the Algebraic Escalation back from the PCs. They had killed Lydia in the process, and intended to kill the PCs too once they had the information they needed about the ship’s data core.

Well that hadn’t really worked out, had it? They killed the remaining thug and dumped him in the trash disposal with the rest. It was then that the doorbell rang, and detective Alef returned, responding to Al Hamra’s call.

What to do now? They spun a fast story and delayed the detective until they could clean the cargo hold and hide the bodies in the smuggler’s stash. They told him that Al Hamra had called him because they had been under attack by some local thugs, but that the thugs had gone. Somehow they convinced him to leave, and disposed of the bodies in the spaceship’s recycling unit. They were not in trouble with the law – yet – but they still had work to do, because Oliver Greenstar had received a message from his street urchin. The two thugs had returned to a base near the cellars, and they were not alone.

It was time to finish these corsairs. They prepared themselves for battle.

fn1: Actually it’s a recorder, that downloads the soul of a dying person, but they rolled a botch on their skill check and didn’t know this, a fact that will become relevant later …