Our heroes have finally captured the First Horizon pirate base Zarra’s End, freed its captives and liberated the women and children who had been cowering in its bowels. Now after a little investigation they plan to fly on to Dabaran, to find the Hacker Livan who works for Samina’s Corsairs. The endgame is coming …

For this session we again have a full complement:

  • Adam, gunner and acting captain
  • Oliver Greenstar, colonist
  • Clementine, technologist
  • Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
  • Saqr, pilot and mystic
  • Al Hamra, captain and droid (with mystic powers)
  • Dr. Banu Delecta, medic
  • Kaarlina, mystic

They have now learned the secrets of the strange society that had been built here, hanging in the Dark beyond Rigel’s ion storms, and had obtained a complete copy of the available data on the First Horizon that was still stored on the pirate base. They planned to sell this to the highest bidder when they arrived Dabaran, along with the location of the Zarra’s End, which they would sell off for scrap. They interviewed the three pirate doctors who had been responsible for installing and repairing cybergoggles on blind children, but soon lost interest and spaced all three. They showed no mercy to the people responsible for the horrors they had found here. They also discovered that one of the women on the ship, Clementine, was not blind, and had been born somehow immune to the disease that overwhelmed everyone on the ship, and had spent the last 15 years pretending to be blind as she taught herself mechanics and technology. With her help they were able to learn their way around Zarra’s End and unpick more of its secrets, and in return they took her and her infant child onto the Beast of Burden as new crew.

With that they flew on to Dabaran, negotiating the portals at Rigel without incidence and arriving just two days later at the starport of Atuta, home of the Dabaran shipbuilders. Here they relaxed, finding accommodation in an old passenger freighter near the outer docks of the huge spaceport and taking time to explore the wonders of this strange complex of jumbled together debris. They visited Atuta itself, the Unbroken, the original ship that the Shipbuilders had used to come to Dabaran, and wandered the huge, silent spaces of its central dome. They joined the people of Dabaran in their strange, austere prayers to the Messenger, and wandered the shipyards and warehouses of the spaceport’s huge, sprawling docks. After a few days of rest they organized repairs and small improvements on their ship, began negotiating bigger work, and set about looking for the hacker Livan.

They found him easily enough. Of course they had a friend in the port, a trader who knew the ins and outs of its myriad dockyards and slums, and he was able to direct them to a small, disused ice freighter, packed in amongst other tenements on the far side of the station. He was fairly sure that the hacker was holed up there, and they simply had to pay him a visit.

They did, taking a long series of ramshackle fliers and public shuttles and long vacuum-tube trains to a transport hub far from the centre of the spaceport. Here they found a long corridor carved out of the spine of an old class V ice hauler, stretching away into the distance and dotted with docking stations to individual tenement-ships and crumbling mini-habitats. At the 77th door they found their man, a docking station opening to an old ice hauler. They opened it easily enough and slipped inside.

They did not have to explore for long before they found themselves in the darkened cargo hold of the old hauler, peering into a shadowy mess of crates and workbenches and machinery. As they cautiously entered the room someone threw a grenade in their midst, which exploded with a loud but harmless whump, and then the nekatra attacked: four big, scary, frenzied monsters, all claws and anger, slamming into them from the shadows with unbridled ferocity. The team had fought nekatra before but not these: these were legion nekatra, ex-military grade beasts, bigger and much stronger than the ones they had fought before, fast and full of rage. Nonetheless, the group made short work of them, dodging the worst of their attacks and cutting through them with mercurium, thermal blasts and vicious heavy melee weapons. Once they had beaten down the nekatra they pinned down their gangmaster too, and finally Siladan sliced his spine through with a monosword, and the battle was done.

They stood amongst the wreckage of the room, suffused with the stink of burning hair and the tang of too much nekatra blood, thinking thankfully at last they had made it through a battle where the blood was mostly their own, and then wondering – how rich and connected was this hacker, that he could afford to keep four legion nekatra as his personal bodyguard? Someone had connections, and wasn’t afraid to use them to guard his stuff. They looked at each, adjusted their armour, grunted, and paid it no mind. Where were his connections now, in the darkness of the hold? Nothing but cooling flesh. He would talk! They looked upward, to the residence deck of the ice hauler, and prepared to march up to get their answers…