Compromise and Conceit

The PCs have destroyed the Nekatra guards protecting the Dabaran hacker, Livan, and are ready to ransack his apartments and capture him. The roster for today’s mission:

• Adam, gunner and acting captain
• 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

First they began investigating the large warehouse room where they killed the nekatra, ignoring the stench of burnt fur and blood. They found nothing of interest in the cargo space but in a neighbouring storage room they found a collection of electronic equipment, and buried amongst it a box full of data chips with the names of important local figures tagged on them: The Grand Vizier, Inspector Aluf, and so on. They inserted one into their tabula, and Siladan was about to begin his data djinn work to decode it when a speaker in the corner of the room crackled to life and Livan spoke to them. He asked them not to take his data chips, and offered to cut a deal with them if they would return him the chips. After a very short negotiation he invited them upstairs to his living space.

They moved cautiously out of the room and into the hallway, where a previously locked door opened to reveal an elevator. They took the elevator up to the second level of the old abandoned ice hauler, into a small and messy kitchen. The centre of the kitchen held a large circular table, and on the far side of it a tall, thin, rangy-looking man sat in a chair with his legs on the table, an accelerator pistol pointing at them. He gestured to them to sit, and they cautiously joined him at the table.

The negotiation that followed was simple and effective. Livan revealed to them that Samina’s Corsairs were his most rewarding and most demanding clients, and he did not like working with them. He also thought they were very dangerous, but he was willing to cut a deal with the PCs in order to secure the return of his data chips, which were his insurance policy for his work on Atuta; if he lost them he would need to move or begin his entire career all over again. The PCs, seeing a chance to learn all they needed without any dirty work, agreed to return him the chips if he would tell them all he could about the Corsairs, and also scrub the registry of all their stolen ships. He agreed to both, and had refreshed the registry of their stolen ships in a matter of minutes. He then told them what he knew of the Corsairs:

• Samina herself must be a powerful mystic, or at least had some mystic power
• A mystic barrier of some kind protected the Corsairs’ home base from being found, so ships would pass it by without ever knowing it was there
• No one on a Corsair ship knew how to pass through the barrier. Instead they visited Hamurabi portal station and met someone called the Oracle who then guided them through the barrier
• The Oracle must have some mystic power, or perhaps carried some token or symbol that helped pass through the barrier
• The Corsairs were run like a cult, and were fanatically loyal
• There were perhaps 60 soldiers remaining in the Corsair base after the damage the PCs had already done to them
• The Corsair base was rumoured to have a resident fleet of attack ships to defend it if ever the barrier is breached
• There are perhaps 3 remaining Corsair ships that are used for travel across the Horizon, between portals

Livan also told them that he routinely dealt with three agents, who visited him occasionally. The most recent visit was from an agent in a ship called the Haymarket Massacre. Saqr asked him if he had video footage of that man approaching his home, and indeed Livan did. He shared this with Saqr. They asked after a few other details, and agreed to part ways in peace. Livan was sure their trouble with the Corsairs would soon get them killed, and doubted he would ever have to see them again.

They returned to their luxury quarters far from Livan’s rundown old freighter, and decided to take this time in Atuta to prepare themselves for the biggest action yet of their campaign. With their ships now officially registered as theirs they were finally in a position to upgrade them, and now they were in one of the largest shipbuilding spaceports in the Horizon. They took a month here, resting and recuperating from their many injuries, while the Beast of Burden was repaired and the Judgment of the Dancer upgraded with more modules and weapons. They also modified the Grace of the Icons to increase its armaments and prepare it for war. For a month they took in the airs of Atuta, enjoyed its thriving souks and bustling cantinas, and wound down from months of constant combat.

Then, a month later, on the day of the Founding, as they were relaxing in their quarters and preparing to return to their ship, Saqr took it upon himself to use his mystic powers to see if he could find Livan’s contact, and to scry upon him. He took his support cat Orange to his lap, made himself comfortable in his cushion room, played the video Livan had sent him and sunk into a mystic trance.

He found the contact easily enough, though in a bizarre place. His mystic powers told him that the contact was not in Hamura, but at a location far from any star, in the centre of the Dabaran Circle, a place light years from the nearest portal and not connected to any star. Had the Corsairs found a hidden portal!? He tried to investigate further using his scrying powers, but here everything went wrong: his mystic powers failed him, and a huge shadow of darkness passed over him as he fled the scene of his scrying. As he tried to draw his powers back into himself the great shadow followed him, and the Dark between the stars broke into his room.

It manifested as four huge, ghostly hounds, one in each corner of the room, which immediately broke into a great howl that almost tore Saqr’s spirit from his bones. Then they attacked him.

These were the infamous Hounds of Tirides. Fortunately their howl alerted the rest of the group, who were able to quickly come to Saqr’s aid, charging into the room unarmoured and with only the gear they could quickly grab to try and save him from the swarming Dark. This battle was nearly deadly: the Hounds had some mystic power to shift in time and space when attacked so that they took no damage, and every time one of them howled it tore at their souls. Within moments Saqr was a gibbering heap on the ground, Siladan was unconscious with his face torn off, and the rest of the group had nerves so frayed they felt they must flee. But they perservered, and finally through a mess of gunfire and mercurium they were able to cut the beasts down and send them back to the Dark from whence they came. Dr. Delecta and Adam between them dragged Saqr back from his catatonia, and as they recovered from the battle he explained the strange thing he had seen.

They realized now that some great and dark power was invested in the Corsairs. When they killed Samina it would not just be a dangerous bandit nest that they destroyed, but some sinister force from the Dark. They must prepare themselves for a bitter battle not just against human cruelty, but against the Dark itself …

A note on darkness points: My players have been pretty liberal in giving me darkness points, because failure has consequences in this game so they often reroll, especially with knowledge or observation checks where failure can be misleading. So when the Hounds of Tirides materialized they had given me 13 darkness points, and for the first few rounds they gave me a few more. This enabled me to liberally spend darkness points avoiding damage and using the horrible howl power of the Hounds, which causes 2 MP damage every time it happens. By the end of the battle it was clear to the players that if they gave me even one darkness point I would be able to use the howl again, and probably render half the crew catatonic (they were all pretty low on mental points by then, and most of the fighters don’t have a lot, maybe 6 or 7). So they had to fight the last part of the battle unable to pray for any rolls, with two of the crew down and desperate to beat the dogs before another person took a serious critical. It would have just required one or two more howls, or one serious critical on a fighter, for the battle to turn from a hard fight to a TPK. Darkness points can be very dangerous when the GM has a lot of them!

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…

In session 27 normal service resumes, and in a short session our PCs spent a considerable amount of time on book keeping and ship management. They now have possession of a small fleet of mostly stolen ships:

• The Beast of Burden, their main class 4 yacht
• The No Satisfaction, a class 1 shuttle they use rather a lot
• The Gun Metal Logic, a class 2 attack ship that they have stashed at the Rockhome mining community in Kua until they can launder its information
• The Grace of the Icons, a class 3 converted freighter/troopship that they stole from Samina’s corsairs
• The Judgment of the Dancer, a class 3 Order of the Pariah troopship that they liberated from its mad captain

They did also have possession of an unregistered Firstcome space station, but Adam accidentally teleported an Efrit in possession of an elite Order of the Pariah soldier into that space station, so it appears they will have to do some work to recapture it.

At the beginning of this session the PCs are on Hormous station in the Melik system, basking in the glory of having rescued the entire system from a falling moon that would have radically changed its gravitational layout and probably killed millions. Being of some renown, they have been invited to parties and given accommodation in the station’s richest and most outrageously appointed suites. However, their focus is on moving along to Dabaran, to launder their ship registrations, before someone finds out that they are not so much saviors as collectors of stolen and hijacked starships. The cast for today’s session:

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

The first half of the session was spent at the octopus races,  meeting a highly-placed figure in the Syndicate’s local operations so that they could find a hacker to crack the data core from the Judgment of the Dancer, to sell to the syndicate. With this somewhat tricky arrangement done, the data core hacked and the losing octopusses eaten, they were ready to move on to Dabaran.

The Plasma Storms of Rigel

Traveling to Dabaran requires the PCs to pass through Rigel, an empty system dominated by a white super giant star with no redeeming features except its plasma storms. Before they set out the PCs took on passengers, a family of shipwrights returning to Dabaran, and collected also a few rumours of pirates in the Rigel system which were generally dismissed by more sensible captains as hearsay. Ships go missing in Rigel not because of pirates, but because occasionally when they emerge from the portal the system is experiencing a plasma storm, and then only the best pilots can escape from the storm – some, inevitably, go missing. Wiser captains travel to Dabaran on the counter-clockwise path through the Dabaran circuit, and for most journeys Melik is the end of the line. But the PCs, having no choice, would have to risk the storms of Rigel.

Misjump

And so it was that a few days after their dealings in Melik were complete they headed to the portal stations. As always they calculated the portal jump themselves, and entered with Saqr piloting the Beast of Burden, Reiko on the Grace of the Icons, and Oliver Greenstar flying the Judgment of the Dancer. Two ships passed through safely, but after they arrived the Judgement of the Dancer did not pass through. They waited some hours but the ship did not arrive. Obviously, a jump error had happened, and in perhaps some cosmic retribution for its theft, the Judgment of the Dancer had become lost in the Dark Between the Stars.

None of them had experience of a misjump, though they had all heard horror stories about what could happen. Had they lost their doughty (though somewhat morally flexible) colonist? Had their ship been seized by djinn or other creatures of darkness before they had even a chance to fly it properly? They waited a day but all that emerged from the portal was a passenger ship called the Plainsong. Even Saqr’s mystical finding power, which should work anywhere in the Horizon, could not find Oliver – he and his ship had disappeared from this space. In desperation they left the Plainsong to settle into its waiting cycle for entry to the portal, and returned to Melik. Here, after a day, the Melik portal disgorged the Judgement of the Dancer, broadcasting its distress signal and drifting aimlessly.

They rushed to board, but found nothing amiss – the crew was still deep in stasis, and no damage done to the ship. However, when they opened the stasis pods they found Oliver catatonic and incapable of speech or response. They took him to the chapel and with prayer and medical care were able to restore him to his senses. No one on the ship remembered anything, and no harm seemed to have been done. Shaken but not daunted, they recalculated the jump coordinates and re-entered the portal to Rigel.

This time they emerged together and unscathed – but straight into a plasma storm. A raging sea of super hot gasses was rolling outward from the brilliant white surface of the star and threatening to engulf their fleet. By the time the crew was awake from their stasis pods and aware of the danger they were in no position to take the time to recalculate coordinates for the next jump – all they could do was flee outward from the star. They raced away, with the roiling white clouds of the plasma storm seething in their wake.

Pirates

After half a day’s travel, with a half an AU between them and the portal, they emerged from the tempestuous edge of the storm and into clear space. Electrical systems that had been faulty under the storm’s erratic magnetic fields were recovered, and they found themselves drifting safely while the inner system burned up. They were just beginning to relax from this terrible series of events when an emergency beacon activated, and they received a distress call on loop:

This is the Plainsong. We are under attack by pirates. Please assist us. Emergency! This is the Plainsong, under attack by pirates.

With sighs of exhausted resignation, they turned their ships in the direction of the beacon, and sailed to the aid of the beleaguered passenger ship.

They arrived at its location quickly, to find it outnumbered and outgunned. Three class 1 attack ships circled it while a class 2 ship moved in to board the Plainsong. As they approached, the leader of the pirates hailed them from the larger pirate ship:

This is the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd. This ship is our prey and if you interfere you will be destroyed. Desist, or we will destroy you.

The three smaller ships peeled off from harassing the passenger ship to head towards the PCs’ fleet, and battle was joined.

The pirate ships fired strange energy weapons that the PCs had never seen before, and their ships were of a design that they had never seen, nor did they register in any databases of ship types, shipbuilders or known pirate organizations. Even their list of nomad federation hybrid ships showed no likeness. These ships were a mystery to them. They were not, however, especially powerful, and the Judgment of the Dancer’s antimatter torpedoes, combined with the Beast of Burden’s accelerator cannon, made short work of the smaller ships. Finally they crushed the hull of the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd and destroyed one of the smaller attack ships. The remaining two attack ships fled, leaving their stricken flagship to its fate.

No doubt people still lived in the tattered wreckage of the ship, and there was no way the PCs would learn the truth of this ship’s motivations – or steal its strange energy weapons – unless they could take some of those people alive. They put on their exo suits, and prepared to board their vanquished enemy.

Howling in shadows, living in a lunar spell
He finds his heaven, spewing from the mouth of hell

Those that the beast is looking for
Listen in awe and you’ll hear him

Bark at the moon

Our heroes are in a difficult position. They have been trapped in a buried firstcome space ship by an Efrit, which has escaped and obviously intent on wreaking havoc. Meanwhile, the moon that hangs over Melik 2 has begun to fall, and in just a week will destroy the planet. The PCs have to escape from the buried ship, warn everyone, deal with the Efrit, and find a way to stop the moon falling. The roster for today’s chaos:

• Adam, gunner and acting captain
• Oliver Greenstar, colonist
• Reiko Ando, deckhand and swordwoman
• Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
• Banu Delecta, doctor

Before we begin the description of today’s events, however, let us introduce a small example of Chekhov’s gun…

Vortex Grenade

This is an artifact, probably portal builder. The PCs found it in the space station they captured in Assager’s Ghost in the Algebar system. This station was in the possession of a mad mystic who was conducting experiments on other mystics, and after they killed him and his guards the PCs found this single vortex grenade in his equipment. This grenade is a shimmering white orb with glyphs carved on it, one raised and slightly larger. The PCs had learnt what it does: when activated and thrown it briefly opens a portal that sucks everything in close range into the portal and transports it somewhere else. This makes it a very effective weapon, and they assumed that it would open somewhere deadly, like the Dark between the stars or a sun. Adam carried this weapon, with the intent of using it only when he was desperate. Now, the PCs are desperate.

The buried ship

Oliver Greenstar chased the efrit when it fled the bridge of the buried ship, but it slammed a door shut before he could pass through, and they found themselves trapped inside the belly of the ship. They tried the doors and found a second door they thought they could hack, although they were attacked by another bokor as they searched the area. As Siladan was working his magic on this ancient door they heard a distant rumbling, which they assumed was their spaceship being stolen by the efrit. After a few minutes of frantic work Siladan broke through the door and they rushed to the rear exit of the ship, to find it blocked by a rockfall. The rumbling had been the efrit using Dr. Sinra’s last archaeological explosive to block their only exit from the ship.

Fortunately dig explosives are not powerful, and had not brought a huge wall of rocks down on them. They guessed that they could shift a gap in the wall if they spent hours working, and so they set to work digging through the wall, moving rocks back down the narrow gap in the wall and into the large cargo area. As Adam worked on this the others set about looting the Firstcome ship. They successfully pried loose the ship’s data cores without compromising them, and also were able to manoeuvre the beautiful Firstcome flyer out of its hangar and through the cargo space to the rear exit. By the time Adam dug through to sunlight, perhaps 7 hours later, they had managed to restore some dignity, get some rest, and prepare themselves for the next stage.

The disaster begins to unfold

Outside they found the half-track still facing the entrance, its machine gun untouched, and the No Satisfaction waiting in gently falling snow. Alma Sinra lay face down in the snow, unconscious. They approached her slowly, confirming she was no longer possessed before they woke her, and then moved carefully into the ship itself, expecting the Efrit to be waiting for them inside. They wondered if perhaps the efrit was already gone – the long white contrail of a spaceship, hanging in the sky far above them and glowing rose gold in the setting sun, suggested to them that they might be too late, and it had already found a way off planet.

It was not waiting for them on the spaceship, so they put in a call to Saqr on the Beast of Burden, and called their flagship down to the surface. As the Beast of Burden pulled away from the Hormous station towards atmosphere Reiko saw that the portals on the station were already beginning to malfunction, and watched in horror as station residents walking through a portal were dumped into space, wearing just their station clothes. They would walk into the empty Dark, calmly expecting to be walking in the portal’s destination, then after a moment realize that the portal had ejected them into space, begin frantically struggling, and then die. Every few minutes another person would emerge from the strange ripple of a misguided portal, and fall in a perfect arc towards the distant planet. The moon’s changing gravity was disrupting the portals in the station, and everything was beginning to fall apart.

When the Beast of Burden reached atmosphere they flew the No Satisfaction to dock, and took their flagship to the exploration settlement they had visited on the way to the research site. They wanted to collect the expert on Firstcome languages, Argent Flame, to help them. Although Adam had burnt the horrific book that had held the secrets of the ancient ritual that had frozen the moon in place Oliver had stolen a few pages, and they now had the data core from the ship and all the writing in the ritual circle and on the walls of the rooms of the buried ship. They intended to ask Argent Flame to help them decode it all, and see if they could bring together some kind of counter-ritual that Saqr, Oliver and the mystics on the Beast of Burden could perform to reverse the falling moon.

On the way to the exploration settlement they called their employer, Aaryan Sin, at Terminus Island, and warned him of the falling moon. They told him that as soon as they had picked up Argent Flame they would come and get him. Then they called Argent Flame on her tiny radio set. She answered quickly and told them that something terrible had happened. The Order of the Pariah troopship, Judgement of the Dancer, had landed at the exploration settlement and for some reason they had begun shooting each other. There was a gun battle happening in the exploration settlement between factions of the Order, and she was trapped in the medical bay.

They guessed immediately what had happened. The Order of the Pariah, who they suspected had killed all the priests of the Church of the Icons on Hormous station, had come to the planet to find out whether the Efrit had escaped, or perhaps to rescue their agent Muhammad Ibn Har. When they arrived at the exploration settlement the Efrit had been waiting for them, had possessed the most powerful member of the group and enslaved some other soldiers, and now was trying to take over the ship. They now had a chance to kill it, if they could surprise it during its battle with its own kind.

Fighting the Order of the Pariah

The Judgement of the Dancer sat steaming in freshly-melted snow and mud at one end of the settlement, a lean black terror against the grubby simplicity of the settlement. A squad of soldiers had taken cover behind cargo crates, and were firing at another tumbled mess of crates where some other soldiers appeared to be hiding and firing back. The PCs flew the Beast of Burden in, dropped off Adam to rescue Argent Flame, and entered battle.

Unfortunately, this battle was one of the most dismal, embarrassing, chaotic and ridiculous battles I have ever seen my group engage in, and it is an embarrassment to report it. Oliver Greenstar spent his time attempting to negotiate with the efrit, to no benefit, while Reiko Ando and Dr. Delecta presented themselves as rocket launcher fodder and everyone abandoned Adam to face the Efrit by himself. The efrit had possessed the troopship’s leader, a monster in animate armour with a gravitic hammer. This monster smashed Adam into the dust with one blow from that hammer, then fled to the spaceship to escape. Oliver finally got his act together and shot the beast with the Beast of Burden’s accelerator cannon, which should turn any living human being to ash, but the animate armour has mysterious glyph protection, and the efrit rode out the damage without taking even a bruise. The fight came to its bitter end with Adam, on his last legs, badly injured and strung out, charging forward to throw the vortex grenade at the efrit. This landed right at the beast’s feet, the portal opened and the efrit was sucked in. In the moments that it was open and they could see through, Adam looked carefully to see where the beast might be dumped …

… and was horrified to see that the vortex grenade opened a portal to their own space station. The portal slammed shut a heartbeat later, leaving the efrit stranded in their space station back in the Algebar system.

The mystic must have reprogrammed the grenade and planned to use it as his own emergency escape device, capable of teleporting him back to his home from anywhere in the Horizon. The PCs had assumed it was a weapon, and did not realize it had been redesigned to be used as a glyph of recall[1]. Now this hideous beast, in possession of one of the Order of the Pariah’s elite troops, wearing animate armour and carrying a gravitic hammer, was waiting for them in their station.

But at least it wasn’t trying to kill them now. They took control of the Judgement of the Dancer, and set about finding the ritual that would reverse the falling moon.

A ritual of life

After just one day of research, during which increasingly serious gravitational disruptions began to wreak havoc across the planet, the PCs found the ritual they would need. It would be a ritual of life, on an island in the sun on the sunward side of the planet, in which the mystics from the ship and all the PCs would engage in an orgy of frenzied coupling with the devotees of Ahlam’s temple that they had met at the exploration settlement. If they could conduct the ritual correctly, and one of them or the devotees of Ahlam’s temple could conceive a child, then that spark of life, arising in the sun on the far side of the planet from the horrific ritual of death in the dark soil of the moonward side, would serve to reverse the falling of the moon. It would be locked into a closer orbit, but it would no longer be falling[2].

For a whole day they danced and prayed and chanted and drank and fucked, and at the end of the day the moon stopped its slow, spinning fall. A sunchild had been conceived, to counter the evil that had entrapped the Efrit, and disaster had been averted.

The next day, ashamed and exhausted, they took their new Pariah ship and the Beast of Burden, made their farewells, and headed to the stars. Behind them the world was wracked by storms, earthquakes and disaster as the moon took up its new orbit, circling the planet like any normal moon and leaving in its wake a trail of destruction and ruin. They had stopped the evisceration of a planet, but the cultures that had grown up there over 1000 years in the shadow of that moon were now doomed, their way of life torn apart as they fell into the thrall of that falling moon[3].

fn1: This was my plan all along. I had expected them to use this on some elite squad of soldiers at this point, only to have them teleport back to the space station at Assager’s ghost and take control of it. I did not expect them to teleport an Efrit back there!

Fn2: I used an accrued success mechanism to resolve this: the group could make a research check every 8 hours and once they reached 10 successes they had the ritual. Once they got the 10 successes the PCs could make up the ritual that they would need to enact, but for every failure or every time they prayed, I could insert some complication or evil detail into it. They rolled no failures and did no prayers, so they got to completely control the ritual. And of course, being players, this is what they chose …

Fn3: This is a riff on the title of a session write up from a previous campaign, where I was a player, In the Thrall of the Failing Moon.

And if you die by your own hand
As a suicide you shall be damned
And if you try to save your soul
I will torment you, you shall not grow old
With every second and passing breath
You’ll be so alone, your soul will bleed to death
Moonchild, hear the mandrake scream
Moonchild, open the seventh seal
Moonchild, you’ll be mine soon child
Moonchild, take my hand tonight

Our heroes have arrived at the Melik system, where they stop briefly at the famed Hormous station. For a day they explored its mysterious portal wonders, wandering around the white-washed halls of the ancient portal builder station and enjoying the mysteries of its many interconnected sections, before they received a message with an offer of work. A man called Aaryan Sin sent them a video message, telling them he needed the help of “Amadi’s combat archaeologists,” and inviting them to visit him on the surface of Melik 2, at the island called Terminus. To sweeten his offer, he was willing to pay them 1000 birr to transport some basic cargo to the base, where they could discuss – and refuse – his job offer if they wished.

The roster for today’s mission:

• Adam, gunner and acting captain
• Oliver Greenstar, colonist
• Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
• Banu Delecta, doctor

Terminus island

Terminus is the only permanent non-native settlement on Melfik 2, and serves as the main supply and support base for researchers working all across both hemispheres of this strange planet. It is located at the furthest reach of the shadow of Melfik 2’s largest moon, on the equator, so enjoys the warmest weather that can be experienced within close reach of the dark side of the planet. Melik 2 has a strange celestial phenomenon, a massive moon half the diameter of the planet that is locked into a geo-stationary orbit with the planet, so close that it blocks much of the sunlight to one half of the planet. As a result one half of the planet is permanently in shadow, seeing sunlight only for a few hours at dawn and dusk, and the entire planet is very cold because of the lost energy. The planet’s original Firstcome inhabitants have regressed to a near-neolithic existence, likely under the catastrophic effect of the looming moon, and live in scattered islands on the sunward side of the planet, or remote and isolated communities in the ice of the night side. Because the planet was originally a Firstcome settlement there is much research here, with archaeologists and scientists attempting to find ancient ruins to investigate; and the looming moon draws the attention of physicists and biologists eager to learn about its influence. However, Consortium rules prevent direct interference in the lives of the natives, and so only one permanent settlement exists, the hard-scrabble island of Terminus.

The PCs flew in on their shuttle, the No Satisfaction, leaving the Beast of Burden in a nearby orbit to monitor their situation. No ships above class 2 are allowed to enter the atmosphere of Melik 2, and all movement around the planet is restricted to ground vehicles and native mounts, a kind of huge bison-like creature called a Hovva. This restriction is partly intended to protect the natives from interference, and partly intended to prevent accidents – under the influence of the moon’s gravity the smaller graviton projectors of class 1 or class 2 ships can be unstable, so flight is limited. This was clear when they arrived at the Terminus airstrip and found it deserted, with only a few crates to break the vista of mud-and-snow, and no one to meet them. As they waited on the desolate, frozen, windy landing strip a small crew of men arrived to being unpacking crates, and a petrochemical-powered vehicle rolled up to their ship. A middle-aged, brown-skinned man hopped out and introduced himself as Aaryan Sin. He was a cheerful, relaxed and voluble chap, welcoming them all with broad gestures and a loud voice, and inviting them all into his undersized vehicle. He gave instructions to the surly stevedores, and they headed into the settlement over bumpy, poorly-maintained roads.

At the settlement Aaryan explained himself and his situation. He was a long-term friend of their patron, Drefusol Amadi, and was thrilled to have them in his system – he had run into a small problem recently with which he could use their help. Aaryan was a fixer, a man who organized porters, security, transport and guides for researchers working on Melik 2. Recently one of the teams he had been supporting had gone missing, and he needed someone to go and find them. They had been out of contact for three days so he had activated their insurance clause, which meant he could pay the PCs 10,000 birr upfront to help find them, and 15,000 more if things turned dangerous. He expected that the research group was already dead, but he wanted the PCs to find out what or who had killed them, and if necessary bring them to justice. If it was something sinister, such as a Firstcome remnant, they were to kill it if they could and split any treasure with Aaryan. Aaryan gave them a brief overview of the research team – a leader, two students, three labourers and a data djinn – and their coordinates. Since he suspected that they might have been betrayed by competitors, and had some cargo to deliver, he would like them to first visit a research base, located three days’ journey by boat and Hovva from Terminus, and three days’ Hovva ride from the research team’s last location. He would like them to spend a night there investigating the activities of possible rivals, then go and find the team. Since the insurance clause had been triggered, they were able to use their spaceship for the mission – a rare benefit for anyone on this planet. Aaryan warned them that graviton projectors would not work well, and they would not be able to use advanced communications in the shadow of the moon – most people used radio. He gave them a simple radio set and loaned them a half-track, to which Adam attached the group’s machine gun, and they were ready to go.

The PCs agreed to the mission, and set off for the nameless exploration settlement that Aaryan directed them to.

The exploration settlement

They arrived at the exploration settlement within an hour, and were greeted by its manager, Col Maggarh. The settlement was a ramschackle collection of huts and warehouses, with about 70 residents of whom only about 40 were regulars, mostly bodyguards, porters and courtesans. They checked into the only hotel, a small series of capsules called the Ice Rose, and ventured out to the local tavern, the only watering hole within 1000km, an old but well-kept place called the Ice Louse. This tavern was some kind of converted warehouse, warm and decorated with idiosyncratic tables of driftwood and polished bone. Here they separated, with two members of the party heading to the local Ahlam’s Temple conveniences while two remained in the tavern to socialize and learn rumours.

They did not learn much, but it was enough. No one knew much of the group they were chasing, but one of Ahlam’s courtesans recalled one of the group, a Muhammed Ibn Har, spent a lot of money at the Temple, even though he was just a labourer. Others reported that the team’s leader, Alma Sinra, was extremely secretive about her mission. While they were here they also learned that most of the natives in the area were friendly and not dangerous, and that there had recently been some gravitational disturbances. These disturbances were so bad that the exploration settlement’s earthquake warning alarms – which are triggered by graviton waves – had been going off without cause, annoying the camp and creating conflict between the researchers and Col Maggarh, who did not want to repair them until he was paid.

While they were dressing in the rest rooms of Ahlam’s Temple, Oliver Greenstar and Siladan saw a disturbing news item on the public news channel. A few hours earlier someone had discovered that the entire complement of Church of the Icons monks on Hormous station had been murdered. Someone had infiltrated their rooms and murdered them. The news did not reveal exactly when or who had done it, only that investigations were ongoing. Why would someone murder peaceful monks, whose only job was to maintain constant prayer at their strange and unorthodox shrine? Most likely it was just some internal religious conflict, but it was still disturbing news. Something about the circumstances of this mission made them all jumpy.

They also met a woman, Argent Flame, who was a specialist in Firstcome languages. Adam invited her to visit their space station, and investigate its rich (but disturbing) writings. She agreed, though they did not settle on a time. The next morning, they all headed to the research team’s last known location.

The crash site

As they approached the coordinates they had been given a thick mist lay across the landscape, giving them only fleeting views of a small expeditionary camp. As they flew towards it Delecta activated her proximity sensor and identified eight shapes milling around pointlessly near the landing site. They came to a careful halt a short distance from the camp and rode the half track down the ramp towards the camp, coming to a halt a short distance from the milling figures. In the thick fog the half-track’s headlamps only reached 20m before the scattered light became blinding. Oliver Greenstar stepped out of the half-track and moved forward, covered by Adam’s machine gun, and Siladan moved the half-track forward slowly, its ancient petrochemical engine growling and coughing in the cold.

After a short distance they found the body of a dead man, badly disfigured. As Oliver approached the body, a gang of huge scavenger-beasts scattered and ran away – the source of the eight points on Delecta’s proximity sensor. They had obviously been eating the body, which was torn apart and scattered over the frozen ground. Beyond it the temporary accommodation of the research base loomed in the mist, three auto-erecting prefab buildings. Dr Delecta exited the half-track and checked the body, but her university education and residency in a swish plastic surgery in the upper levels of Coriolis had not prepared her for this kind of wreckage, and she could not sort through the gore to identify how the poor person had died. They identified the body as Mohammed ibn Har, the man who had been splashing his newfound cash at Ahlam’s Temple, and when they searched his body they found a strange, small tabula that was too thin and too small to be normal.

The tabula’s battery appeared to be drained and the camp was deathly silent, so they decided to explore the buildings and see if they could charge the tabula or find other evidence of the activities of the camp. Adam remained on guard duty in the half-track, machine gun at the ready, as the team fanned out to check the accommodation. Dr Delecta searched the labourer’s accommodation, finding ibn Har’s bunk and looking for evidence of spying, but was attacked by one of the strange scavenger dogs as she searched. It attacked her from behind, its vicious bite failing to break her armour, and she ran outside screaming. The beast followed, a huge ragged six-legged furry slug of a thing, the size of a dining-room table and made entirely of claws and thick, stinking fur. As it burst out of the door, snarling and breathing noxious rotten-meat breath, Adam hit it with the full force of the machine gun and smeared across the accommodation walls. Somewhere far away the other dogs wailed and ran away. Delecta retreated to the safety of the half-track, chastened.

Siladan found Dr. Sinra’s office and accommodation. He found a map that showed where the dig site was, but seemed to indicate that there was a strange geological structure between the camp and the site, though he could not understand from the map what it was. He searched her research tabula and learnt the reason she had come here: she had learnt rumours of a crashed Firstcome ship, probably from the Emirate planet, and had come to investigate it. She seemed averse to writing down details, so he could learn nothing about how she had discovered its existence or what she was looking, except that a native had stumbled upon a fresh rockfall that revealed the ship, and someone had alerted her to it. This seemed very suspicious to Siladan, but he could not pin down why. He dug around in the research room and found a charger, which he modified to fit into ibn Har’s strange tabula, but was surprised to discover, when he tried to activate it, that the tabula was not drained. Rather, its battery had self-destructed and melted much of the inside of the tabula, apparently intended to render it inoperable. Siladan fiddled, and was able to liberate an undamaged memory chip. He linked this up to his own tabula, and discovered that the strange tabula had been used only once, and for one purpose: to send a tight-beam burst on a highly advanced communications system directly to the Order of the Pariah troopship, the Judgment of the Dancer, which was docked at Hormous station. The message was a single, ominous phrase:

The worst has happened. Activate all measures immediately.

It appeared that Mohammed ibn Har had been working for the Order of the Pariah. Something must have happened at the dig site, and he had fled back to the camp to release this message. What were “all measures”? And what was “the worst”?

Adam grunted. “I’m getting sick of careless archaeologists,” he muttered, and they boarded their ship to head for the dig site.

Behind the seven seals

The dig site was just 2 km from the camp, but they were glad they flew there. Beneath the No Satisfaction they saw a huge expanse of broken and tumbled ice, that would have been almost impossible to navigate with their half-track and which looked dangerous even for a small team on foot. They skipped over it and landed within a short distance of the dig site itself, again rolling down the ramp from the ship in their coughing, roaring old half-track, which crawled over shallow snow and gravel to a small hillside, where a recent rockfall had revealed a narrow cut into the hill. A single long-lasting expedition lamp cast a smouldering, sulphurous glow over the outside of the cave. They had found the dig site. The ship must be behind the rock fall. What icy aeons had encased this ship, and what had the ship been carrying? There was only one way to find out, so they drove the half-track close to the hole, parked it with the machine gun facing the hole, and exited into the chilly, filthy planetary air. As they walked towards the hole in the rockfall they received a message from Saqr, on the Beast of Burden. It had been hanging in orbit above Melik 2, in a position from which they hoped to be able to receive broadcasts, but Saqr’s message dashed those hopes, and brought far worse news:

Adam, team. I’m sorry but there is gravitational disturbance up here and the Beast’s graviton projectors aren’t working well. I am returning to Hormous station to check them, and for safety. Also, I know you’re not going to believe this but please do. I think the moon has begun to fall towards the planet. I think you should come back, because my calculations are it will destroy the planet in a week if nothing changes. Whatever’s going on down there, please figure it out and get out soon. If I don’t hear from you within 12 hours I’ll come looking. Somehow.

Something terrible was happening, and after the news at the research base the PCs had a good idea of what. Whatever was happening in orbit was connected to whatever this archaeological team had been doing in this hole in the ground. They had no choice but to continue, even as the moon began to fall.

They crept through the narrow culvert and into the bowels of the ship. First they entered a large, empty cargo hold. They searched it and found two strange sarcophagus-like stasis pods. Both were empty and closed, and were not connected to any power source. They appeared to have been simply cargo. Both were of amazing beauty and probably great worth, just sitting there untouched in the first, most easily-accessible room of the ship. Why had the dig team not taken them?

The cargo hold was maybe 40m in diameter, its inner side holding two large doors. A firstcome symbol had been painted on both doors in bold, strong strokes of red paint that had not faded in however many centuries the ship had rested here. They could not read the symbol, but it seemed freighted with menace. The right hand door was locked, but the left hand door had been hacked using a common archaeological device, which was low on batteries but still active. They pushed the button, slid the door open and stepped inside.

Beyond this door was a 15m long, 10m wide hangar. It held a single Firstcome flyer, a beautiful example of its kind, splendidly worked in strange metals with beautiful designs etched in its slim and stylish form. It was clearly a very high quality, and extremely rare specimen of its kind, probably priceless on the antique market. They stared at it in stunned silence, until they noticed a blood stain on its bow, and a body lying in a pool of blood on the ground. Approaching carefully, they identified it as one of the expedition’s students, Jiwanna. She was a 23 year old third year master’s student with a stationary background, obviously attacked by something that had bitten her throat and back. She must have fled here but succumbed to her injuries, falling on the front of the flyer and then dying in the dark, cold of the ship’s bowels.

At the far end of the room they found another door with the same disturbing symbol carved on it. This door, too, had been hacked with a common archaeological device. They slapped the button and stepped through into a room of darkness and horror.

It was 40m wide and about 30m deep, an octagonal shape. There were no lights or energy in the ship, so they could only explore it using their suit lamps, narrow beams of forlorn blue light that only showed them small parts of the disturbing scene at a time. The first thing they saw was a dead person, preserved by an aeon of frozen dry air, their skin dry and clinging to their bones. The person was wearing a ceremonial robe and lying in a circle that appeared to have been hastily painted on the floor, a silver knife lying by their side and a thin film of dessicated dried blood surrounding their body. The painted circle was part of a larger arrangement, two circles that touched it on opposite sides. These two painted circles were filled with Firstcome writing, hastily scrawled in large, messy, sweeping patterns between the circles. They followed the circles around the room, peering into the gloom with the weak blue light of their suit lamps and confirmed their worst fears: a ritual had been enacted here. Two huge circles had been drawn on the floor, linking together seven smaller circles and filled with ancient writing. In each of the seven smaller circles a single robed person lay dead. In one circle was a book, full of Firstcome writing, that appeared to be made of some kind of cured flesh bound between two plates of bone from some kind of large animal. The ritual must have been enacted hastily, because the room had once been a kind of rest room or ready room for nobles, but all the furniture and items in the room had been torn up and hastily thrown against the walls to make space for the circle. The PCs guessed that the ship had crashed and whoever was in the ship had hastily moved everything in the room aside to make space for the ritual. Why?

There was a large door on the far side of the room, again painted with that strange symbol. The two doors that opened in the room from the direction they had come were not painted with the same seal. This seal was only painted on doors on the face that pointed towards the ship’s only viable exit. Why?

As they were pondering this the party were attacked by Bokor. Thin, shadowy beasts emerged from the second door on the wall next to the door through which they had entered, and tried to kill them. There were four of them, almost completely insubstantial with their hunger, reaching desperately for the only warmth they could hope for in this Icons-forsaken ship. The PCs fought the starved shadows off easily, killing them quickly without injury. When they searched the room the Bokors had come from they found the other two labourers from the dig crew. They must have entered this room and been ambushed by the Bokors. Perhaps the Bokors had been sealed in here and the labourers had opened the door? In the main room they found the body of the dig crew’s data djinn, Azzar Akter, a 25 year old man. All of them had been killed by the Bokors. It was tempting to think they had been ambushed here and fled, but where was Sivada, the other student? And where was Alma Sinra? The door on the inner side of the room, protected by its seal, had the same hacking device attached to its control panel. They activated it, and stepped through.

Inside was a small ante-chamber, separated from the ship’s bridge by a glass door, on which the same seal was painted. The remaining student, Sivada, lay dead on the floor in the middle of the room, and Alma Sinra was prowling around the bridge, looking ragged and haunted. A sarcophagus lay open in the bridge area. As they entered Sinra ran to the door and yelled at them,

Don’t go back! Die in here with me!

Then suddenly her expression changed, becoming wild and frenzied. Her whole body, short and frumpy from years of deskwork, shook with rage and anguish, and then she screamed a super human scream of rage that could never come from a woman of her frame. She hit the door button, and it slid open.

Moments later, a strange shadowy form slid across the space from the door, and took control of Dr. Delecta. She opened fire on Adam and turned to run for the next door. By now the PCs were used to this kind of thing – they had seen djinn[1] before on the Orun 2 – so they tried to tackle her. Two of them failed, but Siladan beat her down with his halberd. He knocked her down, and Adam grabbed her and dragged her towards the sarcophagus, hoping to stuff her in and seal it before the djinn could escape. He wasn’t fast enough, and as he was trying to push her in a dark shadow slid out, took control of poor confused Dr. Sinra, and fled for the door. She turned towards them and hit them all with a blast of Mystic power that completely floored them, smashing them with a wave of panic that threw them all away from her. As they cowered in the corners she hit the door open button and ran outside before anyone could stop her.

By the time they recovered the Efrit was gone, the last door closed behind it and sealed against them. Whatever madness had possessed it over the past aeon was now free on Melik 2. And the moon was falling.

They had failed.

fn1: Actually this beast is an Efrit, the elite of Djinn, and makes the djinn they met in the Orun 2 look like small fry. Big trouble here, and it’s only getting worse!

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 …