The Belle of the South

The crew of the Beast of Burden have disabled a pirate ship in the Rigel system, and are preparing to board. The cast for this session:

  • Adam, gunner and acting captain
  • Oliver Greenstar, colonist
  • Reiko Ando, deckhand and swordwoman
  • Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
  • Saqr, pilot and mystic

Two of their attackers have escaped, one has been reduced to shards of metal, and one lies paralyzed in space, Siladan’s data pulse still wreaking havoc in its systems and preventing it from escape or attack. They transferred all their fighters to the Beast of Burden and moved in to board the incapacitated vessel.

Onboard the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd

They drew close and attached their docking station, though it did not connect cleanly because the seal on their target was of a strange and unorthodox design, that did not fit their docking seal. Siladan fit a breaching charge and they blew the door open and prepared to enter.

Inside was a small open area, covering the majority of the space inside the ship, containing only four standing steel barricades set at even spaces in the room. Soldiers lay in wait behind these barricades, ready to open fire on anyone who entered. Unfortunately for the men waiting inside, Adam was carrying the group’s machine gun, and laid down an immediate barrage of bullets that decimated the crew. Siladan and Reiko charged forward under Oliver’s covering fire, and although some of them suffered light wounds, they were able to break into the room and close to melee range. Most of their enemies were firing vulcan carbines, which they used ineffectually to attempt to drive the fighters back, but one was using a strange energy weapon that seemed to fire a highly-focused and extremely dangerous laser. They had never seen this before, but after a couple of seconds of brutal and one-sided hand-to-hand combat its owner lay gurgling on the floor, the gun in Adam’s competent hands.

The rest of the ship consisted of just two small ready rooms that led from the docking area to the bridge. In the bridge they found two crew in their seats, dead, and a large and precise series of holes cut in the hull by the Beast of Burden‘s accelerator cannon. There was no atmosphere in the bridge, and when they entered they found a man hiding under a desk. They dragged him out, and when they did so they somehow broke a seal of duct tape on his exo suit, causing it to leak air. As he panicked they dragged him back into the ready room, sealed the door against the de-atmosphered bridge, and forced him to surrender. They had the ship, and a prisoner.

The Loser’s Flag

The ship yielded nothing interesting. It was an entirely functional, plainly dressed and frankly very primitive looking fighting vessel, with no decorations but for a picture of a strange orange-skinned fat man in one room, and a cross with a strangely sexualized semi-naked man crucified on it in another. They thought it might be a strangely perverted figure of one of the icons, but they could find no sign that anyone here was religious at all, and their prisoner obviously did not speak their language fluently. The only other icon they found was a strange flag, with many stars on it. It made no sense though, because it did not have enough stars to represent the Third Horizon, and too many for just this system. No one could remember how many stars were in the Dabaran circle, so it was a mystery to them. Stranger still, every crew member of the ship had replaced their natural eyes with poorly-made and rough-looking cybernetic goggles, which protruded from their skull and made them look like barbarians. Medical scans of the bodies revealed no other cyberwear – just the complete replacement of their visual system with these poorly-crafted cyber-eyes.

They attempted to loot the ship’s Exo suits but they were old, run down and heavily-repaired, and not worth much. When they investigated the dead pilot and gunner they found that they had died when the atmosphere exited the ship – their exo suits were not impermeable, and they had died of suffocation as the air drained out. This ship was obviously very old, very run down, and was running on tape and stitches. These pirates had not expected serious opposition, and had been flying in a vessel that was obviously not much longer going to be able to hold out the Dark.

The First Horizon

They tried to get their captive to show them where the ship’s data core was, but they could only learn that the ship had no data core, only separate partial data storage for each position on the ship. Worse still, their captive’s position was Data Djinn (though he called it “SIGINT Ops”), but he had to interact with the ship’s computer using a keyboard. They gave up on electronic information and resorted to interrogating the captured crewman.

This data djinn’s name was Alex “The Q”, and he was cooperative with their interrogation after a few threats. He first warned them that his mother ship would come back for him and then they would be in deep trouble, but after that he was happy to speak. They learnt that he and his fellows were the remnants of a First Horizon fleet that had been trapped in Rigel at the end of the portal wars some 200 years ago. They were based on a troopship called Zarra’s End, and at the last moments of a retreat in this system its drive systems and main reactor, as well as its stasis pods, had been destroyed by heavy fire. Unable to move, it and its complement of support ships had been abandoned by the last scattered survivors of the First Horizon’s fleet, and had been left to die in the Dark of the outer reaches of Rigel. They survived, however, and since then they had become pirates in this system. They used the ships they looted to repair their own ships, but would not take on any of their victims’ technology, and had no way to repair their own stasis beds and no technological skills to transfer stasis pods from the ships they captured. They had been stranded here for more than a century, building a pirate society in the barely-functioning remains of the Zarra’s End.

Further investigation revealed that the society on Zarra’s End was an unpleasant and abhorrent system of heirarchies and slavery. Alex “The Q” told them that the system they lived in had infected them with a strange, incurable and inherited disease, Deneb’s Blindness Disease, which caused anyone in the system to go blind after 6-8 years. So all children born in the pirate enclave had cybereyes fitted at about this age, and grew up with only electronic sight. There were not enough cyber-eyes to go around, however, and the skill to make and repair them was limited, so they recycled eyes and newly-made eyes were often not very good quality. The men who received the best eyes became warriors, while the men with poorer eyes became support staff and servants. Women received no eyes, grew up blind, and were confined to a small area of the ship. People captured from other ships were used for slave labour until they went blind, then spaced.

Adam had been planning to recommend they take this ship and leave, but when he heard that he decided that they needed to destroy these pirates. They would not take their time sending information about them to the Legion. They would go and kill them all, and free their prisoners.

Strange Manners from Strange Horizons

Something they noticed about Alex “The Q” was that he had very erratic behavior that made him very difficult to talk to. He alternated been explosions of extreme and violent rage and sudden desperate craven spasms of sorrow and despair. He would cower and beg and cry, then bristle up and scream and fight, until someone punched him enough to put him in his place. Sometimes he would become sullen and unresponsive, as if wracked by depression and angst. From these episodes of depression he would inevitably explode in spite and rage, before cowering and sniveling to his new captors. His behavior was incomprehensible and erratic, and they could not fathom how he could be this way.

On a hunch Saqr accessed the video recordings from the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd‘s last few days, hoping to see the face of someone who had stayed behind on the Zarra’s End before the ship left on its pirate mission. If Saqr could see one person who was not currently on board the ship, he would be able to use his mystic powers to find the Zarra’s End’s location. Unfortunately, however, the video recordings from the ship’s internal cameras only went back two days, and no new faces were visible on it. But the footage did show Saqr a wild panorama of violence, bullying and hatred. The pirate leader would regularly beat and castigate his inferiors, forcing them to cower and beg and hitting them with impunity; and they would then enact the same violence on those next down the ladder of the heirarchy. The entire crew lived in terror of each other, on the edge of constant violence, acting barely civilized and obviously only uniting in the appreciation of violence towards others. Something was very wrong with this pirate community – either it was a strange and desperately evil cult, or something had gone very awry in its military code. Was all of the First Horizon like this, completely overrun with authoritarian violence? No wonder the Firstcome had fled, and no wonder they had fought a war with the First Horizon and sealed the portals. No one wanted a society like this a mere portal’s jump away.

No matter. They would exterminate this nest of hold-outs, free their prisoners, and end the menace in Rigel.

The ambush

Alex “The Q” spoke a strange language that they could not decipher and could not hope to trust him to use, so they decided to lay a trap for the rest of the fleet from the Zarra’s End. They asked the passenger ship Plainsong – the original targets of the pirates’ violence – to again send out their distress signal, and lay in wait for the incoming ships of the Zarra’s End, their ship disguised in stealth mode.

They did not have to wait long. Soon a large contingent of fighting ships approached, which Alex “The Q” identified as:

  • The Twin Towers
  • Constitution 231
  • The Kentucky Derby
  • The New York Minute
  • On the Road
  • The Michelle Malkin

and a larger ship, the raider Belle of the South 142. As they approached the Plainsong’s emergency beacon the PCs’ entire fleet – the Beast of Burden, the Judgment of the Dancer, and the No Satisfaction – closed the jaws of their trap.

This battle was vicious, and when it began there was no guarantee that they would prevail. Fortunately their first shots disabled the Belle of the South‘s drives, and as it drifted by useless they were able to decimate the remaining smaller ships in the fleet, returning through the debris cloud to tear apart the larger ship as it repaired its drives and returned to the battle. Within a few minutes of springing the trap they had eliminated the entire pirate fleet, and were ready to attack the Zarra’s End.

They piled into the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd‘s boarding area, loaded up their weapons, and headed towards the Zarra’s End, faking battle damage and ready to attack. These barbarians from the First Horizon would be dead soon, and whatever horrors they had brought with them would be lost in the Dark between the stars. No mercy for slavers, and no kindness towards their ancient enemies: they were ready to do what had to be done.