Our heroes have found the location of the Collector, the man who was willing to pay a million birr to procure a Skavarran mystic and smuggle it onto his research base. They have raided the secondary entrance to the station, but after taking heavy casualties have withdrawn to the relative safety of their ship to rest and recover. The roster 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

By now, Saqr has developed new mystic powers that enable him to heal minor critical injuries, so he tended to the smaller critical wounds that the rest of the team had accumulated, though he was not able to treat his own punctured lung, and Dr. Delecta’s ministrations were not able to prevent the injury from slowing his movement and actions.

As the Saqr and Delecta tended to the wounded Adam watched the docking area through the umbilical passage that linked their ship to the station. They had used a laser cutting tool to make a hole in the inner entrance and break in, so there was nothing the surviving guards inside the station could do to prevent them coming back, but Siladan’s proximity sensor told them that there had been two survivors of their first attack, who were now joined by several other guards in a loose cordon behind cover in the far side of the entry chamber. One of those guards was a mystic, with the stop power, which had been used with dangerous effects in the last battle. Another of the guards was moving around just out of sight beyond the broken door, doing something near enough to it to make Adam think that a mine or explosive trap was being set at the entrance. The guards were setting up a death trap for them, and they were already injured.

They decided to use a space walk to re-enter the station from an external air lock. They detached the docking station, moved away from the loading area, and opened fire on it with the Beast of Burden’s accelerator cannon. This tore the docking station apart and blew open the entire loading deck area behind, killing the entire guard squad and destroying much of the superstructure at the top of the station. Once debris had dispersed Saqr space-walked across to an external air lock at a lower level, attach a zero-g rope, and the rest of the team crawled across without incident. They breached the outer door of the airlock with a breaching charge and moved inside, finding themselves in a large hangar that held a class 2 spaceship – the spaceship the Collector’s messenger had used to travel to Algebar.

Descent into hell

From the hangar the PCs hacked a small side elevator and descended to a mostly-abandoned living area. Following Siladan’s proximity sensor they crept into an overgrown garden/observatory, where a mystic attacked them from the shadows with an accelerator pistol and bursts of hellfire. He was well hidden but they found him and killed him quickly enough, with Adam taking significant fire damage before they could silence the man. They stood in the darkened garden, looking out of its huge observatory window at streaks of pale sunlight against the veil of the asteroid belt, and wondered what strange place they had entered. The garden was unkempt and long-abandoned, its plants grown into impenetrable thickets and the windows and garden fixtures overgrown with mould, slime and algae. The rest of the living quarters were powered down and poorly lit, as if no one had lived here for a very long time. The elevator controls and some of the room doors had information printed on them in some ancient Firstcome language, which had been overwritten with sloppily-painted modern logos. It appeared that a small group of armed soldiers and mystics were squatting in an ancient Firstcome space station.

Siladan was able to break into the dead mystic’s tabula using biometrics, and through it called up floor plans, crew rosters and communications. They identified another level of living quarters, a huge garden level, and two levels of laboratories. There was another mystic called The Fey, a second security team led by a captain wearing Scarabaeous Armour (an artifact!), a golim armour defense system, and the Collector himself. The Collector had informed his underlings that he would be in “the machine” in the bottom-most lab, and after using it to repel the PCs’ ship he would be rendered unconscious by the strain for several hours.

They guessed that the Collector had a machine that boosted his mystic powers, and had enabled him to hurl asteroids at them while they were approaching the station. Adam suspected a Cadaver Clock, but in any case it must be a terrible device. They decided to go straight down and attack him while he was unconscious.

They took the elevator down and emerged into a scene from hell: flayed and vivisected corpses stretched out on benches and floating in gel, a cage holding a body completely drained of all its liquids, and smears of blood and gore on the walls and furniture. The Collector was obviously a deranged experimenter of some kind, and a mad mystic. He and his strange machine were in an adjoining observatory room, and the PCs were moving towards it when the security team emerged from the second elevator, guns blazing.

The battle was vicious and merciless. Adam had brought their machine gun, and used it to gun down the leader in his Scarabaeous armour, though not before he had injured one of their team badly. As they were fighting The Fey appeared in the second elevator, accompanied by the Golim Armour, a 3m tall monstrosity of black composites carrying a huge thermal carbine that it used to break Reiko Ando and Siladan. Saqr and Dr. Delecta tried to help them up while Adam fought the Golim, and finally Siladan was able to crush its chest with his dura halberd, bringing the fight to a bitter end. The Fey fled, but was shot down as he tried to escape from the second hangar in a small shuttle.

The PCs entered the adjoining room and found what they had expected. The Collector was resting in a small stasis pod, which was connected to an evil machine of Firstcome design. This machine was shaped like a huge inverted cone, built of organic parts and steal and ceramics, with the wider part of the cone opening over the stasis pod and the small end pointing at a cage suspended from one wall. The small ended in a nozzle-like apparatus, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet, which had a disgusting fleshy countenance as if it were  a pair of evilly sensual lips. In the cage lay a dead person, killed in the past few hours, whose body had been completely eviscerated from within as if impelled to tear itself apart by some huge force. Dark whispers and evil thoughts surrounded them, and they understood immediately what they witnessed: some strange device that could draw the mystic energies from a person, concentrate them, and use them to amplify the powers of whichever mystic lay in the pod.

Adam tossed a frag grenade into the pod and they left the room to catch their breath. After the explosion, they returned with flamethrowers from their ship and set to work on eliminating this monstrous device.

While Adam and Reiko cleaned up the observatory, Siladan hacked into the Collector’s poorly-protected computer systems and confirmed everything they had suspected: the Collector gathered mystics and performed horrific experiments on them, to try to understand mystic powers and their origins. Delecta and Saqr found three surviving mystics in cages in the second lab level, and returned them to the Beast of Burden for observation. They also liberated a large amount of funds from the Collector’s accounts. Finally Siladan learned three other interesting facts from searches of the Collector’s messages and notes:

  • Samina’s Corsairs have some kind of mystic defense that enables them to hide their base and prevent access, which the Collector wanted to get hold of
  • Wana has been trading information and data with the Collector – she wanted access to a Cadaver clock but had only learnt rumours of them
  • The Collector knew of a Cadaver clock on Kua and had paid a team to find it, but they had been killed at a nearby dig site. The PCs had helped the sole survivor of this mission on Coriolis and subsequently discovered the Cadaver Clock themselves
  • The Draconites are also looking for information on the nature of mystic powers, and the Collector had been looking for ways to infiltrate their outpost on Coriolis

This was useful information, and helped them to understand what they would face when they dealt with the Corsairs. But now they had a base in a hidden location, which they could register as theirs once they found Samina’s hacker on Dabaran, and another spaceship to add to their growing fleet, with money to upgrade their own. They were ready to move closer to the Corsairs.

But first they needed to shake off the nightmares, and find a way to sleep again …