Marfik 4 on a clear afternoon

Our party have arrived at Marfik 4 and found it in the midst of an epidemic. The population of the one settlement on the planet has split into two parts, with one small group of security and medical personnel in a separate section where they have established a quarantine and appear to be unaffected by the disease. The PCs think that the disease may have been uncovered from ice mined on the planet, or perhaps is a bioweapon being tested by the medical personnel on the planet, but they have not yet established which. Their task now – for which they are being paid handsomely – is to guard the medicurg Md Jenin Abad as he tries to save the colony, and to figure out what has gone wrong. The cast for this session:

  • Adam, gunner and acting captain
  • Reiko Ando, deckhand
  • Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
  • Saqr, pilot and mystic
  • Dr Banu Delecta, medic

Day 3 of the epidemic has now begun, and the PCs have made a little more effort to prepare for what they expect to be inevitable conflict with the security team. They have managed to access some basic schematics for the factory area where the quarantined security squad are, and have started referring to these people as the Isolation Faction. Most of the patients taken to the Grace of the Icons 7132 in the first two days have died, and in the morning of the third day Md Jenin Abad took another 10 up to the ship for further investigation and treatment. On the surface, in the small and cold rooms of the settlement, the epidemic raged on.

The emergency message

The PCs were in the briefing room discussing the best approach to take to the Isolation Faction when they were alerted to an emergency message being broadcast from the planet. Adam answered it while Siladan traced it to a small relay station perhaps two hours’ drive on a crawler from the settlement. The message was weak but urgent, and when the broadcast opened they could hear gunfire in the background. The messenger was a person called Hamza, who told them that he and two others were trapped in the relay station and under attack by security guards from the Isolation Faction.

Hamza was not asking for help, however. He and his two colleagues had fled from the Isolation Faction and run to the relay station when the Beast of Burden arrived in orbit. Because they had fled the Isolation Faction they knew that the ice from which the disease had come was now being transported on an ice hauler to the Lithofor, but no one in the settlement knew this because the shift supervisor was dead and his records had been altered. The leader of the Isolation Faction, Mehrak, had told everyone that they could not alert anyone to the ice hauler’s journey because this would invite orbital bombardment, and the rest of the Isolation Faction were doing as they were told, but Hamza and his friends refused to obey this terrible command, and fled to the relay station. They then spent days rerouting command systems to avoid the control the security guards in the Isolation Faction were exerting over the planet’s comms and to try and make contact with the Beast of Burden. They had finally managed to set up a temporary bypass and need to send a message to anyone who would listen: they had to stop the ice hauler. This ice hauler was on a course for the Lithofor. It was carrying the ice that the PCs suspected might have held the disease – and being transported now to a planet with 700,000 people living in it.

Once Hamza and his colleagues set up the relay bypass the security guards had come to physically stop them. They had barricaded the door and now they only had hours to live, but they needed the PCs to act: stop the Callow Boy in its journey to the Lithofor, and prevent a disaster.

The PCs checked their star maps and determined that the Callow Boy was traveling slowly on a long journey – it would take about 20 days to reach the Lithofor and was moving about half the speed they could do in the Beast of Burden, so they could catch it even if they left the next day. Someone pointed out that if the Callow Boy changed course and headed for a portal they would not be able to catch it in time, but they decided to risk it: if the ship changed direction for the portal they would have to send an emergency message to the whole system, which would likely mobilize one of the Queen’s old Firstcome ships to despatch it – and would end with an orbital bombardment of Marfik 4 and the death of everyone on the planet.

But first they would rescue the people at the relay station.

Travel on Marfik 4

Battle at the relay station

The PCs did not waste their time with ice crawlers. They took the No Satisfaction and screamed in to the relay station in a crash dive from orbit, arriving 10 minutes after they left the Beast of Burden. At the relay station they found two ice crawlers, with soldiers hiding in them and firing on the sealed door. Rather than end the fight quickly and gracefully using the No Satisfaction‘s ion cannon they piled out of the ship onto the ice, and Saqr took the ship up to provide air support.

As they approached the crawlers the soldiers inside them switched their focus and began firing on them. Reiko Ando ran forward to engage one squad in melee, and Siladan ran forward to attack the leader, who was crouched in cover behind a crawler. Meanwhile Banu Delecta and Adam provided covering fire from prone positions on the ice slopes. Saqr fired the ion cannon at one crawler but missed, leaving a long dagger of super heated fog expanding in waves in the frozen air above the battle zone. After that one shot Siladan and Reiko entered melee, and the No Satisfaction‘s weapons could not be used, so Saqr completed a circuit of the relay station to search for other attackers, finding none.

Although the battle did not go too well for Siladan, Reiko was a vicious whirling dervish of violence, managing to knock two attackers unconscious and drive the others away into the snow without taking any injuries. She chased after them but they ran straight into the No Satisfaction‘s firing zone and, caught in her spotlights and receiving threatening warnings from Saqr, dropped to their knees and surrendered. Meanwhile Siladan and Adam finished off the other four attackers, Adam firing into the ice crawler until Siladan could charge in with his halberd and begin cutting them. Finally all but two were dead, and the relay station was liberated. Hamza and his colleagues emerged, saved just in time by the PCs’ bravery and overpowering firepower.

Their gaze turned back to the settlement, and the two Isolation Faction soldiers they had taken captive.

The Isolation Faction’s story

They learnt little truth from their two prisoners, or from Hamza. The Isolation Faction doctor, Amira, told them that the disease likely came from the ice, and ordered the security guards and their families into the factory for safety in the first day of the epidemic, before it could spread. They shut down communications with people off planet, and waited. Amira and the leader of the security guards, Mehrak, told them there was nothing they could do about it – it was likely a fatal xenoorganism and no treatment would stop it in time; all they could do was wait and pray to the Icons. Similarly, they could only hope and pray that the ice in the Ice Hauler was safe. Hamza stumbled on the shift supervisor’s body, however, and his abandoned tabula, and learnt that the records had been altered; realizing he had been betrayed, he convinced two of his friends to flee with him to the relay station and risk their lives to send the message to the Beast of Burden. In his cowardice, he had not simply gone to the settlement because he did not want to catch the disease; and he did not expect the relay station would have been shutdown by central authority. So he had done what he could, and thankfully with the Icons’ grace it would be enough.

Hearing this story the PCs again began to suspect that this was not simply a story of an accidental epidemic released from ancient ice. There was too much going on, and too many strange plots. That medicurg was up to something, and they intended to find out what. They returned to the No Satisfaction, and headed back to orbit to plan their next move.