Our heroes are trapped in a ransacked cultist sanctuary in Hamurabi station, facing off with a draconite hit squad that has surprised them. They were here to capture an Oracle and learn from him how to travel to the secret lair of Samina’s Corsairs, but he has teleported away using a large and ominous statue of the Dancer, their secondary objective; they cannot now move to take it, because they stand under the readied guns of a draconite hit team[4]. The roster for today’s adventure:

  • Clementine, technologist
  • Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
  • Dr. Banu Delecta, medic
  • Al Hamra, captain and mystic
  • Adam, soldier and gunner
  • Oliver Greenstar, colonist and roustabout
  • Saqr, pilot

They decided that in this case discretion was better than bloody valour, especially considering they had had no time to recover from the many injuries they had incurred over the past week of frantic pursuit, and now even a light smattering of damage would likely go badly for them. Adam and Clementine eyed up that meson pistol, and considered the options for killing the draconites and taking it, but even though they both thought their team would prevail, likely one or more of them would die in the exchange. They decided to talk.

The draconites also seemed disinclined to fight, a good sign given that they had held the element of surprise. Al Hamra asked them what they wanted and they indicated that they had come for the statue. He suggested to them that he would happily hand it over if they helped him catch the Oracle, which offer the draconites declined: they did not care for the oracle, and would not waste their time helping the PCs. They wanted to get the statue and go.

Here the party had a small advantage over the draconites: Al Hamra could read minds. He asked a question and applied his mind-reading mystic power, learning quickly that the leader was in telepathic conversation with another, hidden draconite, presumably a mystic and definitely their leader[2]. From this little exchange Al Hamra also discovered that the draconites thought they could control Adam[5], and with that he realized that they really were going to need to talk their way out; but he also learnt that the draconites genuinely only cared about the statue. “Why do you need it?” He asked, and a moment later, against all expectations, the negotiator told them:

“It holds the soul of our founder.”

Well, that drew their attention. Realizing that this statue must be very valuable to them, Al Hamra decided to cut a deal: he offered to have Saqr bring it to them if they would hand over the leader’s meson pistol and leave in peace. It took the leader only a minute to accept this deal, and he even threw in the kind consideration of not killing dr. Delecta and taking back the draconite technology she carried. An agreement was reached, and Saqr walked over to pick up the statue.

As soon as he touched it Saqr was assaulted by a mystic wave of horror, fear and rage, an ancient and powerful force desperate not to be contained. He fought with all his will to resist the force possessing him, and resisted it long enough to hand the statue over to the draconite. Unable to tell anyone what he had experienced, he could only hope that the same force would not overwhelm the draconite. It appeared not to, and the draconite calmy took the statue, and handed the meson pistol over to Saqr. All five men then withdrew carefully, maintaining a cautious watch on the PCs until they were out of sight.

They had lost the statue, and for little prize. They retreated to the ship to nurse their pride and think about the next step in their mission against the Corsairs.

The legacy of the Dancer

Back at the Beast of Burden Saqr performed a mystic powers search, and located the Oracle in the Corsair base. They guessed then that he had teleported there to warn the Corsairs, who they could expect to be readying a welcome party. They guessed that the only way to get to the Corsair base was to travel to the coordinates they had found on the tabula, and there find some lost portal that would take them to the base. They guessed that they only had three days before the coordinates in the tabula expired, and they did not expect another message to arrive, so they had to act fast. However, they wanted to go in with some basic knowledge of what they were doing, and with a little recovery time. They took a full day to recover, during which time Al Hamra and Adam went in search of a weaponsmith to improve their weapons, and Siladan dug into his tomes of ancient knowledge to try and learn something about the connections between the corsairs and the cult of the Dancer that seemed to be so widespread throughout this part of the Horizon.

From fragments of text, stories and hints in the ancient histories of the Dabaran Circle, Siladan was able to piece together an outline of the story of the Dancer in this part of the Horizon. He learnt that when the Dabaran Shipbuilders came to the Third Horizon from the First Horizon they brought with them a dark cult, some kind of heretical nonsense connected with the original religion that they had believed in Al Ardha. This cult had survived for a while in the community those first shipbuilders formed around Atuta, the Unbroken, in Dabaran, but evnetually they were found and driven out, their terrible rites deemed despicable and evil. They fled to neighbouring systems, and in their flight they either discovered or were taken over by some power from the Dark between the Stars – or perhaps it had infected them in the long flight from the First Horizon and corrupted their religion that way. It was possible they laired in some ancient Portal Builder ruin, where they learnt dark secrets, but in any case somehow in this time of flight and conflict they mixed stories of some feminine energy called Lilith, from their original religion, with images and iconography of the Dancer. So their cult formed, hiding in the dark reaches of the lonely systems at the extreme edge of the Dabaran Circle, an area ignored by much of the rest of the Firstcome as they expanded into richer systems in the rest of the Third Horizon. Stories then told of a fresh assault on the cult by forces of the Nomad Federation, in allegiance with the Shipbuilders of Dabaran, in which a small militarist cult of the Messenger (or perhaps the Messenger himself; legends differed on the details) finally vanquished the emissaries of this twisted shadow of the Dancer. The cult was scattered, but over the succeeding centuries tales would arise hinting at the continued existence of fragments of the cult. Stories were also told about lost stars, dark stars, portal builder ruins far away from the portals themselves, wandering portals, and tears in the Dark itself which some creatures from the Dark between the Stars could use to travel between systems.

The PCs had been told before that the Corsairs were a kind of cult, and in the writings of the Collector at the space station in Algebar they had learnt of rumours that Samina herself was a powerful mystic in possession of a horrifying artifact that could boost her powers. Siladan surmised that the remnants of this ancient, corrupted cult of the Dancer had somehow formed Samina’s Corsairs and that Samina herself was the leader of this cult, perhaps taking on the form of the Dancer herself, or some twisted version thereof. This cult must have been twisted by exposure to the Dark between the Stars, and now dwelt in some lost Portal Builder ruin, from whence Samina used her strange powers to send ships to raid any system they chose. Perhaps the Corsairs’ plan to take over a small mining community in the Kua system, near Coriolis station itself, had been more sinister than a mere attempt to have a presence near Coriolis – perhaps she had known about the Cadaver Clock on Kua and aimed to take control of it or study it, with Rockhome 3 as a staging post for the mission. Or perhaps her plan had been to take over that community and slowly convert it to a cult, giving her a base of religious affairs from which she could easily touch Coriolis itself …

Whatever the reason, Siladan’s research confirmed for all the group that the Corsairs needed to be exterminated. Their mission was personal, religious, and essential. The next day they set off for the coordinates on the tabula, taking the Beast of Burden, the Grace of the Icons 7132, and the Shield of the Faceless. The Grace of the Icons 7132 had been reconfigured as a gunship at Dabaran, and the Shield of the Faceless, originally an Order of the Pariah troopship, had been reconfigured as a multipurpose attack ship with more weapons and a different signature. They hired 8 mercenaries, who took positions on the Beast of Burden, and left Hamura station in force.

The Corsair Base

They traveled for a day to reach the coordinates and when they arrived found themselves floating in empty space. They were an astronomical unit further away from the Hamura portals, far from any planet, and there was nothing to see but empty space. Unfazed, Al Hamra retired to the Beast of Burden’s observatory with a pair of spectacles of mystic vision, and under the glass dome lay back to stare into empty space through the spectacles. With their special power to see the Dark between the Stars the emptiness of space was transformed into a horrifying web of darkness, as if some hideous gigantic spider had stretched its lethal gossamers over an entire star system. Hanging in space in the midst of that web, some distance from their ship but visible through the lenses, was a ghostly portal wreathed in shadow. Their portal was a mystical gateway, and they would have to fly through it.

Using their two sets of glasses, Al Hamra and Saqr plotted a course through the portal. Everyone retired to their stasis pods, Saqr set a course, and the three ships entered the Dark Gate.

An hour later they awoke to the sound of proximity warnings, alarms ringing to warn them of incoming ships. They rushed to the bridge, activated sensors, and found themselves in uncharted space. The ship’s astrolabe told them they were in the centre of the Dabaran circle, equidistant from all of its stars, in a part of space with no star. Visual scanners showed them a stunning vista of stars, their sparkling light undiminished by any nearby star, and far away in the distance a single rock floating in space – the Corsair base. And from that rock had come four attack ships, which now bore down on them from four distant points. They had been warned, and had been waiting in orbit of the portal exit, and now they were incoming. Worse still, the Beast of Burden was alone: the Grace of the Icons 7132 and the Shield of the Faceless had not come through the portal, and were now lost in the Dark between the Stars, no doubt being torn apart by horrifying beasts of gigantic and terrible form. Only the Beast of Burden stood against four class 2 attack ships.

Saqr desperately manoeuvred to try and make space between some of the ships, so that they could fight at least one on its own before the whole squadron arrived, but he failed. All four ships came hurtling in, and the crew of the Beast of Burden turned their ship about, and prepared for the fight of their lives …

 

fn1: In game terms this means that all 5 of the draconites are in overwatch, and will get an automatic attack as soon as anyone tries to do anything aggressive. The leader is carrying a meson pistol, which ignores armour; as one player noted, Dr. Delekta is wearing an invisibility sphere stolen from the draconites, so it is likely that there are more scattered about, invisible, also in overwatch, possibly with meson rifles.

fn2: Just as that player predicted, I had a sixth draconite hidden, with another meson pistol, in overwatch, using telepathy. So there was a very good chance that in the first round of combat these two would eliminate two of the PCs, since their weapons can cut through armour, and then things would get very nasty very quickly[3]

fn3: This might seem like overkill but my party by now have accrued probably 80xp each, three attribute increases, a second group talent, and a shit-ton of high quality weaponry[4], and it is almost impossible to set them a challenge when they’re geared up; the draconites know this, because they aren’t stupid, and have acted accordingly.

fn4: We are a couple of sessions from the end of the campaign and they deserve every hard-earned point of advantage they have accrued so far; indeed, the denoument of this campaign is going to be a raid on their own space station to dislodge an ifrit they accidentally teleported in there. They still have a lot of work to do!

fn5: At the very beginning of the campaign Adam’s player chose “creature of the draconites” as his personal problem and, well, that’s really too luscious a peach not to pluck at a time like this isn’t it? Had the PCs decided to fight these guys, Adam – their machine gunner and most powerful combatant – was going to be forced to switch sides, or at least to make very difficult skill checks to resist commands.