Our heroes are on the planet of Marfik 4, fighting an epidemic in an ice-mining community that has been abandoned by its medical and security staff. They have been told that some of the ice that was the likely source of the disease is en route to the Lithofor on the ice hauler Callow Boy, and need to stop it before it infects that community of 700,000 souls. They were planning to first attack the security and medical staff who abandoned the community, however, and were preparing to attack this group – who they call the Isolation Faction – when they learnt of a new complication in their mission. The Callow Boy has turned off its transponder and has disappeared in the Dark Between the Stars. They need to rush to find it before all trace is lost.

The cast for this mission:

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

First defeat

The PCs decided that they still had time to liquidate the Isolation Faction before they headed after the Callow Boy, and wanted to prioritize this because they thought they needed more information about the ice and whatever the Isolation Faction knew about it. So, they decided to approach the factory where the Faction hid, carrying breaching charges, break down the door, and kill them. Unfortunately they did not see the automated machine gun turret set up on the roof of the factory, and were gunned down by a hail of bullets as they approached. The attack was ferocious, knocking down both Adam and Reiko with potentially fatal and heavy-bleeding injuries. Banu and Siladan had to drag their colleagues back to the main settlement under a rain of gunfire, and administer emergency first aid in the shadows of the settlement.

Defeated, and needing days for Adam and Reiko to recover, the PCs returned to the Beast of Burden, and took her away from the planet of Marfik 4 to search for the Callow Boy.

Lost in the Dark

They headed first to where the ship had last been recorded, assuming that there was some chance it would be waiting near that location for a rendezvous, or had continued on a straight path to some secret purpose. They were afraid that it might have changed course and was now heading to the portals, perhaps to offload its ice at a more populous planet in Caph or even Coriolis, but since they had not thought to download the schematics for the Callow Boy they were not aware that it was incapable of portal travel, and their fears in this regard were unfounded.

After a few days’ travel they reached the point where the Callow Boy had gone silent and discovered a very simple reason for its sudden disappearance: it had been destroyed. The ship lay silent in space, broken into four parts, its ice cargo floating harmless around the wreckage of the ship. There was no emergency message, no SOS beacon, just the silent ruins of the 1km long ship hanging in four huge pieces in the darkness. They approached the ship and soon learnt the cause of its destruction, as two huge squid-like monsters detached themselves from its ravaged hull and began moving rapidly toward the Beast of Burden. The infamous vacuum beasts of Marfik 4 had taken the Callow Boy, and now sought to destroy the PCs’ ship.

The fight with the beasts was difficult. Their shadowy, biological structure was hard to lock onto with the ship’s sensors, and they moved quickly and easily through the Dark Between the Stars. Before Adam and Reiko were able to destroy one of the beasts they other had latched onto the hull, and was preparing to begin eating its way through to the crew. Adam had to disengage from the gunner’s post and run to an airlock, carrying the ship’s only machine gun, with the perilous task of going outside the ship to attack the beast himself, since the ship’s guns could no longer lock onto it. As he ran through the ship Saqr threw the ship into complex manoeuvres to try and shake off the beast, as Reiko destroyed the second beast. Fortunately Saqr was somehow able to shake off the beast, and Siladan somehow managed to get a lock onto it as it flew off the hull of the ship. Moments later their torpedo struck the newly-locked beast, and it blew apart in a cloud of ichor. They had survived.

The Draconite Message

They approached the ship and were able to identify three crew hiding in a safe room in the centre of the engineering section. After some complex manoeuvres they were able to dock and rescue the crew, who came on board relieved but shaken. They knew nothing about the disease in the ice, and had simply been conducting standard cargo operations on Marfik 4. They had not kept track of the ice as it was loaded, preferring to enjoy the settlement’s spartan accommodations while the ice miners loaded the ice, and so could not tell the PCs which of the ice in their cargo had come from a potentially contaminated source. They were innocent of any plot to poison the Lithofor, and were able to confirm to the PCs that they had planned no secret course changes on their mission – they had simply been attacked by vacuum beasts and their comms systems destroyed before they could send off a distress signal.

Near the wreckage of the Callow Boy the PCs found a small message drone, of the kind used to deliver physical messages between ships. This message drone had detached from the Callow Boy when it was attacked, following some algorithm intended to preserve the drone, but had been caught by one of the vacuum beasts and partially consumed. They recovered it and confirmed that this drone had been programmed to move secretly between ships, intended to latch onto a ship heading to the portals. It was an advanced Draconite design, small and highly stealthy, and obviously intended to take messages in a physically secure manner. The message it carried was intended to be delivered to a contact on Coriolis, some kind of procurer who must be working for the Draconites. The message was a short video message from Amira, the medic on Marfik 4:

We have found a possible specimen of interest to your employer. Direct experiments are not being conducted, but we are recording evidence of its progress in a human population. It is highly effective. Please inform your employer to send agents to investigate.

It was short, and clearly indicated evidence that the Isolation Faction were working for someone. The PCs returned to Marfik 4 with a clear plan.

Liquidating the Isolation Faction

The second attack on the Isolation Faction went more smoothly. They used the ion cannon on the No Satisfaction to destroy the automated gun turret and managed to approach the entryway without being attacked. A breach charge soon tore down the outer door and they burst in, all guns blazing. Through judicious use of a motion sensor they knew where all their enemies were, and could anticipate their ambushes and flanking attacks. There were 8 remaining security guards in the Isolation Faction plus their leader and the medicurg Amira, spread through three rooms in a flanking formation. While Adam and Delecta took on the main front of the guards in their position on a gantry over the factory floor, Reiko Ando and Siladan charged into the side rooms to take on flanking troops. The battle was soon over, and ended with the death of the security guards and their medicurg Amira.

The Draconite Contract

On Amira’s tabula the PCs found a short message from the same contact on Coriolis. The short video message was a year old, and it told Amira that her planet had been identified as one of a set of planets with a high probability of hosting native pathogens capable of infecting and harming humans. Were any unusual diseases to present themselves in the settlement she would receive a large payment for identifying the source. Extra money would be provided if she were able to track the natural history of the disease, study it directly in humans, or obtain samples. The sums on offer were huge, and clearly an incentive for her to react as she had done when the disease struck the settlement. When she had indicated her willingness to perform the task, the Coriolis contact had shipped her the Draconite messenger drone, to use if she identified any such samples. It was clear that when she had seen the opportunity to profit from the colony’s disease outbreak she had decided to abandon her role as doctor and become instead a mercenary, waiting for the colony to die and filming their final death throes. She had planned to burn the whole settlement down once the epidemic was complete, blame the whole thing on a huge accident, and then profit from the ice samples. Unfortunately she had not expected Md. Jenin Abad to be contacted secretly, and had not planned on the PCs interfering with her plans.

So what, the PCs wondered, were the Draconites doing? They must have sent these messages to other settlements, and had a broker in Coriolis collecting information on potential bioweapons that they would then presumably collect for research. Why were the Draconites building a bioweapons division? Why had they been hunting that statue on Kua? What was the Draconites’ secret plan?

A few days later Md Jenin Abad isolated a cure for the disease and distributed it among the colony, saving 60% of the colonists. The PCs made sure they obtained a copy of the cure, and left Marfik 4 for the Amedo system considerably richer, and considerably warier, than when they arrived.