Distance  Separation
Leaving  Terra Firma

Darkness  Ringing empty
Lights out  Resurrection

Burn it down and start over
I want to leave this all behind
Abandon all the trepidation
Weighing heavy on my mind

 – Catechism of the Cult of the Dancer

Our heroes have ground their way through waves of soldiers defending the secret base of Samina’s Corsairs. Having destroyed more than 40 enemies, they stand in control of the elevator hall that leads to all levels of the remote star base, ready to descend to their final confrontation with Samina and her few remaining soldiers. The roster for this (last) session:

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

Oliver Greenstar remains on the Beast of Burden, ready to leave and warn the world of the corsairs’ location if the rest of the party are killed.

The PCs had been given floorplans for the corsair base, so they knew that the level above their current location was a public area, gardens and a few rest spaces. Immediately below them was the station’s main hangar, a space 100m long, 200m wide and 40m deep. Below that was a residential level, almost certainly mostly empty now they had killed nearly all the station’s guards, and below that the secret prison and medical level where Samina herself lived and worked. They needed to get down there, but only one elevator went all the way down and they could not fit their whole team into it. Two other elevators descended to the level below the hangar, and they could fit their whole squad into those two, then transfer to the elevator that went all the way down, and travel to the last level in two trips. They decided that Kaarlina would use her technomancy skills to control all the lifts, sending them down to the sub-level but sending signals to the central computer to indicate they were going up. They would skip the hangar and head down to surprise Samina in her lair while she thought they were heading up.

The monster in the hangar

Unfortunately their strategy failed, because Samina took control of all the elevators over Kaarlina’s mystic powers, and opened them all one level down, in the hangar. The doors opened into darkness, lit only by the faint red emergency lights in the elevators, and by one or two of the party’s suit lights. In the faint glow of these lights they saw a huge hall stretching out into darkness, scattered with crates and equipment in seemingly random piles around the elevator shafts. Somewhere nearby they could hear sounds of sniffling and desperate breathing, and the air of the room seemed to be faintly misty or suffused with a fine smoke.

This fine mist saved their lives. Adam saw it first, a beam of laser light questing towards them through the mist, and in the last moment realized there was a sniper about to target them. Since he was in overwatch he immediately opened fire, sending a wave of automatic fire in the direction of the laser. Clementine followed him but neither could hit their target, and a moment later a wave of thermal energy struck Adam in the head, almost shredding his remaining ear. Saqr, also in overwatch and carrying an accelerator rifle, fired along the line of the beam and killed the sniper with a single shot as the rest of the crew piled out of the elevator and into cover.

It was as the first of them began to emerge from the elevator that they saw it: a huge, hulking figure in the darkness just beyond their vision, charging towards them. It stopped and raised an arm and a moment later one of their entire teams of support marines died, cut down by a wave of thermal energy. Moments later the beast rushed into the light, and they saw what it was: an automaton constructed out of the twisted, still-bleeding and twitching bodies of Samina’s remaining soldiers. Two men in battle exos had been slaughtered and draggd into the mess of flesh, to be surrounded by the twisted bodies of 12 other men. It had misshapen, thick legs and arms wielding huge thermal rifles, with two more arms holding massive axes compiled from all the crew’s dura swords. Lights flickered inside the frame of its twisted flesh, and strange machine noises came from its joints and chest. It roared and stumbled forward.

Out of the elevator to meet it came Siladan, walking now in his own battle exo and eager to put its powers to the test. He surged forward and hit the thing in the chest, stopping it in its tracks, and the two began a monumental battle on the floor of the hangar. As they fought Adam, Clementine and Kaarlina poured rifle fire into the beast, seemingly doing nothing. Saqr could not join the battle, however, because moments after the marines in front of him were cooked to death by the beast’s weapons they reanimated as darkbound, undead humans bound by the Dark between the stars, and turned to attack him. Though they struck at him only with fists, they blocked his exit from the elevator and he was forced to deal with them before he could leave.

As the battle raged Al Hamra moved away from the elevator to the source of the sniffling, finding one of Samina’s soldiers crouched behind a crate, weapon at his side, panting heavily. Al Hamra wasted no time in conversation, going straight to mind reading using his mystic powers. The images that poured from the distressed soldier’s mind confirmed his suspicions: Samina had gathered all the soldiers in the hangar and enacted some horrific ritual that had slain them all and drawn them and their equipment together into the monster before them. Two of her soldiers, seeing the deaths begin and realizing they were betrayed by their own master, managed to break her mental control and flee, hopeless though this act was; now they crouched in the dark of the hangar, waiting to see which side would prevail in the battle and who would hunt them down and kill them.

Al Hamra saved this man the wait: he dominated his mind and sent him in to melee against the beast, in support of Siladan. The monster had been briefly stunned by Siladan’s first attack but soon recovered, unleashing some kind of mental blast that staggered Siladan and stunned him. It then smashed him once with one fist and marched past him to kill more marines. By the time Siladan could come back to melee the beast had beaten down the remaining marines and was in melee combat with Adam, smashing him with its fists as he tried to stab it with his dura knife. Fortunately Kaarlina had disabled its dura axes, so it could not cut through his armour the way it wanted. Adam had done furious damage on it with his machine gun, and in its rage it tried desperately to kill it as Siladan struck it with his dura halberd, Saqr fought off the darkbound that trapped him in the elevator, and the others poured fire into the beast’s heavily-armoured back. At the same time Samina poured healing magic into it from her remote location, somehow keeping it upright despite all the damage it endured.

Finally, however, Dr. Delekta was able to put a bullet into its back somewhere vulnerable. A battery pack from one of the absorbed battle exos exploded and the thing fell dead to the ground. They quickly killed the darkbound attacking Saqr, and the battle was done. All of Samina’s remaining soldiers lay in a rotting heap on the hangar floor, along with most of the party’s marines and almost all of their remaining sanity.

The Cadaver Clock

They rested briefly, Dr. Delekta providing medical care to the injured members and Saqr easing their wounds with his mystic powers. Al Hamra gathered the two corsairs who had escaped the ritual and gave them a choice: join their sole remaining marine in helping them clear out the base, or die. They took the better part of the choice, and once everyone had restocked and taken a breather they took the elevator down to the bottom level.

Following the marines’ instructions they passed a prison, where they found four starving victims of a past raid, who they released. They moved on to Samina’s personal quarters, at the back of which they found a tunnel leading down through the rock. They followed it, and at the bottom rushed into Samina’s lair.

Their three marines died as they entered the room, brought down by Samina’s mystic powers, but the rest of them were able to break into the room before she could act again. She stood in the centre of a terrifying construction of cogs and chains, arranged in a large rough-cut stone chamber. The cogs were ancient iron, embedded in the wall and connected with a complex network of heavy old chains. At points around the network of chains dead bodies were hung from the chains by meat hooks, slowly rotting and suppurating in the slightly stuffy air of the room. On one side of the room stood an ancient stone altar, covered in dried blood. In the middle of the room, under the dripping corpses, stood a collection of plinths of different heights. On two of these plinths stood the strange ugly statuettes of the dancer, and between them stood Samina. She was tall, impossibly skinny, obviously old but not worn or wrinkled. She wore simple silk robes, her hands empty and free, and looked at them from dark, deep-set eyes.

As they came to a halt in the room facing her, the collection of cogs and chains shuddered and the entire apparatus took a single, lurching movement according to some strange geometry. A loud tick! rang around the room as all the cogs turned over once, the bodies shuddered and jolted on their hooks, and a drop of rotting gore fell onto Samina’s cheek.

She ignored it, and said to them, “I am your only way out of this darkness.”

They ignored her, and opened fire.

The battle was short but almost deadly for them. At her waist Samina had a gravitic sink, which absorbed the first four shots from their weapons. She unleashed a dark mystical energy from her cadaver clock, which wracked their bodies with pain and, had she had a second chance to unleash it, would surely have killed them all[1]. Fortunately before she could do so her gravitic sink expired, and they slaughtered her where she stood.

Epilogue

They searched the base and found a huge stock of money and artifacts, which they stole. They should have rushed to escape before the portal out of the area degraded, but Al Hamra announced that since he had died twice and his soul was trapped inside a machine, he chose to end his time here. He would use the cadaver clock to hold the gate open until they all could flee, and then wait in the dark until his batteries powered down. He gave a stirring speech that convinced all the PCs that their captain would choose to die in this dark and lonely rock, but all the players knew that Al Hamra was going to use the cadaver clock to become the next Samina.

They left, having destroyed the corsairs that had plagued the Horizon for 30 years, and became fabulously rich and famous selling off their story and success across the Horizon. All that remained was to recapture the space station they had lost to an Efrit, and to establish their new Order, a movement committed to hunting down and killing evil mystics.

Here the Coriolis campaign ended, after 41 sessions. A challenging, bloody and sinister ending to an excellent 18 months of gaming!

 

fn1: The first wave of the attack did 7 damage I think, though I rolled very well, and it was pretty likely that the second one – due after three more actions – would finish the job. I rolled randomly for the gravitic sink’s charges and got 4. Had it held two more, things would have been dire, especially since her dancer’s talent guaranteed she could evade Siladan’s halberd. I did warn the group that I was happy to end the campaign on a TPK, but actually that was a lie: Oliver Greenstar was going to rescue them at the last if Samina prevailed.