Category: Across the Rift

088-1104 – Orsasch Rebel Base

With Ada briefing the party (see https://traveller-rpg.com/week-19-the-hellworld-heists-5-orsasch-sighlands/) the Aurora’s Fortune jumped to Senlis Station, carrying the Serendipity in her clammps.

088-1104 – Senlis High Orbit

While Ada and the Aurora’s Fortune hid in the shattered hulk of an ancient Sindalian bombardment cruiser, refuelling from a pre-placed cache, the party took the Serendipity, herself still fully fuelled, in towards Senlis Station, identifying themselves as a GeDeCo logistics vessel. The codes provided by the rebel spies worked, and they were advised to dock at one of the external boarding tubes on the upper station.

088-1104 – Senlis Station

On docking, a three-person search team from the Senlis station customs and security division performed an inspection of the Serendipity and her crew. The inspectors were clearly on edge, brimming with stimulants intended to increase suspicion and paranoia as the security team tried to regain favour after the earlier terrorist attack on the station. They expressed distaste at the presence of Roach, a Vargr, and suspicion as to why Dr Bilal had a face belonging to a burns unit patient (explained as a maintenance accident aboard ship), but the declared tools for bringing onto the station checked out, and they failed to find the Serendipity’s smuggling compartments in which a veritable armoury lay hidden.

The Travellers, as part of their GeDeCo cover, managed to persuade Senlis Station that they may have to perform a close-range survey of the corporate nacelle later. They then gathered their tools (including two EVA kits, a magline, a plasma hull-cutter, a power unit and a variety of suspiciously heavy and threatening-looking wrenches) and headed into the station.

Making their way through the central concourse, they noticed that there was propaganda everywhere: while life seemed fairly ordinary for many of the locals, above their heads played heavily edited footage of the players’ rescue of rebels on Magen. This had been recut to look as if brave Senlis soldiers had been rescuing injured civilians, women and children when Rosa Perre’s sandcaster attack at close range had eviscerated them and their charges, provoking outrage amongst watchers at such cruelty.

Penetration mission start – The DNA scanners at the entrance to the corporate nacelle accepted the players’ identification, due to the earlier work done by the rebel spies. Making their way along a corridor, they were asked to help by another GeDeCo crew who were struggling to diagnose a wiring problem. Although possessing only moderate skills in the area, the party identified the fault correctly, and moved on.

50 minutes in – Entering a large, corporate office area with signs of abrupt abandonment around them (mould-filled coffee cups, jackets over chairs, knocked-over seats), the party thought they saw motion but failed to see what it had been. A door locked shut ahead of them, and they had to burn time opening it.

130 minutes in – In the darkened corridor beyond, with most of the lights damaged, the party saw a droid, quietly watching them, and heard scuttling from nearby access shafts.

170 minutes in – Entering a utility block, the gravity suddenly shot up to 4G, and the party found themselves attacked by four maintenance droids wielding cutters and engineering equipment. The gravity where the droids stood remained normal, and Rosa, Zhana, Ferric and Marcus were all hurt in a vicious fight. Two of the party were overcome by the high gravity, passing out temporarily, while some unseen actor vented the atmosphere from the block into space. However, the opponents were all dealt with, and after some first aid work by Rosa they moved on. [At this point, the party had been dealing with a rogue GeDeCo security operator who, suspicious about the party’s identities, was using the droids as her eyes and ears to follow them and interfere with her plans. She could not report them, however, without her illicit activities being uncovered]

210 minutes in – reaching The Gap (the shattered void left by the explosion in the earlier, misfired rebel intrusion) the party were forced to leap across a ten metre void open to space, made harder by the stark contrast of brilliant sunshine, unfiltered by any atmosphere, against the darkness of the corridor beyond. However, they had brought a magline and almost all of them succeeded. Rosa suffered minor injuries as she hit the side-wall before landing, while Ferric nearly killed himself when his head crashed against jagged remains torn by the explosion.

250 minutes in – after more than four hours, the Travellers reached the vault which was unpowered and locked. They had brought a power supply block, however, which they used to provide the power needed for Zhana to hack into the vault door security.

At this point, Skylar Tanlin, claiming to have “found” a communicator which one of the rebels had “left” in the brig, contacted the party. Offering them amnesty, contracts and triple the pay they had been offered if they would surrender to GeDeCo, he informed them that “Lady Ada Wishart” was, in fact, Princess Jisa Northgate, sister of the prince of Senlis, and asked them why they should risk their lives for a private, palace intrigue clearly aimed at replacing one autocrat with another. When the party declined his offer, he expressed his reluctant admiration.

Next, they powered up the data core within, which did indeed trigger the alarm, as warned. However, their intel had been faulty: the data transfer would take not five minutes but thirty. This was too long: security would reach them before it completed. So Zhana worked to compress the data before transfer, cutting the expected time to thirteen minutes, during which the rest of the Travellers moved crate after crate of valuable, advances manufacturing goods to The Gap, and started transhipping it to the Serendipity, which they had called to meet them as it performed its “close survey”. This maintained the cover that this was a common theft.

265 minutes in – As security forces drew closer, the group shut down the vault once more and made their way to The Gap. There, they were forced to leap into the void, using the mag line and EVA kits to reach the Serendipity. As klaxons blared aboard the station, and as three Senlisian Lancer corvettes, demanding that the Serendipity dock at once, the session ended.

Hellworld Heists, episode five: a crew of Imperial Navy Intelligence Operatives pretending to be independent spacers who are pretending to work for a rebel noble, who is pretending not to be something else.

080-1104 – Orsasch: The Sighlands

As the echoes of the firefight in the Orsasch oxygen wastes died down, the Travellers assessed their situation: they had a group of Senlis Foederate prison convoy guards, their leader – Convoy Commander Emm – the two rescued spies, and five other prisoners who had been in the same transport.

Given that the Senlisians had set up a dummy convoy, the party were suspicious that they might also have planted a mole amongst the prisoners. However, one of their rebel troops reminded them that in a few minutes, when the convoy didn’t report-in after leaving the radio reception blackspot, the Foederate forces would dispatch a larger force to investigate what had happened. So the Travellers placed bags over the heads of each prisoner (as well as the convoy commander) and extracted their forces, leaving the surviving convoy guards behind.

On arriving at the rebel base in the hidden aquifer, the group set about working out if any of the prisoners was, in fact, a spy.

Speaking to each in turn, they found out the following information:

One, Kael Vance, claimed to be a common criminal who made a living bypassing the Senlis Foederate’s controlled, drugged water supply. Vance operated a small black-market ring selling purified, un-dosed aquifer water before a rival tipped off the authorities. He said that he had no interest in grand political revolutions; he simply viewed the government’s monopoly as bad for his bottom line. “I was just moving a few dozen litres of un-dosed aquifer water to the lower habitats, making a decent credit. The Boyars don’t like it when you cut into their monopoly and they’re keen on keeping people docile so they weren’t too happy at the undoped juice.” He, himself, didn’t drink the undosed water: he liked money and he liked to feel good.

The next, Darius “Scorch” Hemlock, was a hardened, heavily scarred man who needed little provocation to explain that he viewed any structured government – including Lady Wishart’s GeDeCo-backed rebellion – as a disease to be eradicated. He was arrested after attempting to exploit Orsasch’s hyperoxic atmosphere by plotting to ignite a devastating chemical fire in an administrative block. He viewed the Travellers with just as much suspicion as he did his former captors. “Wishart just wants to trade one corporate master for another with GeDeCo, but I want to burn the whole system to ash. They caught me trying to spark a little cleansing fire in the capital’s central ventilation hub.”

Unassuming, slightly balding, and sweating nervously, the next prisoner was Olin Trask. He claimed to be a quintessential, overworked Senlis bureaucrat caught in a political purge. “I missed a quota on the atmospheric scrubber maintenance logs, and you know how they punish clerical errors. I was just supposed to do a month of hard labor here to pay off the fine then back to Senlis. I just wanted to do my time and get back to my family and now that’s all screwed.” He was terrified that he could never go back, now, that he might as well stay here because they’d kill him for contact with rebels. He was on the edge of tears.

The fourth prisoner – Goran “Ox” Velt – was a massive, muscle-bound thug whose hands were already shaking from acute withdrawal from the Foederate’s chemical cocktail of combat drugs. He wasn’t a freedom fighter; he said he was a former gang enforcer who violently lashed out at a supply depot when his local distributor cut off his supply. He looked on the edge of violence, with dilated pupils and trembling hands. “I broke my dealer’s jaw because he shorted me on my ration. You get the shakes out here if you don’t get your fix.” When asked if he knew any of the other prisoners, he said that yes, he knew the fifth prisoner who was a magistrate who had sent him down, before. He stated that he was going to make the rest of his life short and unpleasant.

The fifth prisoner had soft skin and softer hands. Magistrate Lucian was a former minor official who was deeply offended that he was placed in a standard transport. “I simply misallocated some funds from the Reaching Lake garrison to my own accounts, which is standard practice until you cross the wrong Boyar. Now I am being treated like common refuse instead of a man of station.” He offered substantial bribes in return for being transported to an Imperium planet.

The party continued questioning, with Travis Drevil seeming disconcertingly keen on finding a reason to torture someone. Then Rosa Perre suggested that the doctor try and find out if any of the prisoners were not on the standard downers that the Senlis Foederate used to control their population. Dr Vanderpool was able to make use of his med-kit to run some basic drug tests, while Marcus’s PRIS vision revealed which prisoners were going through withdrawal due to elevated temperatures. It turned out that only Trask was not drugged. Based on this knowledge, and having talked Travis Drevil out of further war crimes, Dr Vanderpool provided a low dose of anaesthetic which acted to disinhibit the prisoner sufficiently to act as a truth serum. Sure enough, Trask was a spy, although it was true that his motivation was to return to his family.

Ferric Osmund then beat up the semi-conscious Trask, so that it looked like he had been tortured, and he and Kael Vance were left to be found by the government forces. Scorch and Ox were considered as party hirelings, but neither a compulsive-arsonist anarchist nor a drug-addicted criminal attracted them sufficiently, and both were given water and supplies and set free. Magistrate Lucian was handed to the rebels as a source of potential cash and intelligence, as was Convoy Commander Emm.

083-1104 Orsasch Rebel Base

A few days later, Lady Wishart’s adopted mother – Elder Dakaasin Wishart – asked the Travellers to help her move some atmospheric scrubbers down a kilometre of maintenance pipes to the filtration intake for the base. On the way, she sought information from them about what Ada had told them. She seemed fond of her daughter, but worried about her goals and motivations. She asked, amongst other things?

• What had Ada promised them, in her own words? Perre explained about the payments offered.
• What do they think she wants — the water contract, or the throne? Marcus felt it was perhaps both, but she had not exactly mentioned taking the throne herself.
• Have they noticed she never asks about her own kin? Dakaasin has raised her for twenty years and Ada has never once asked whether anyone came looking for her.
• Do they know she arrived speaking court Senlisian? Not the commo: the court register. A lone woman sentenced to death in the wastes with the accent of the Steelheart Palace itself.
• Do they know she has been paying for information about one man for a decade, and only one man? The party asked who, and were told it was Skylark Tanlin.

084-1104 Orsasch Rebel Base

The next day, the party were invited to lunch by an unlikely person: GeDeCo director Skylark Tanlin. Having given his parole – and having no obvious way to escape the ship, the base and the oxygen wastes – he had been allowed out of the brig to dine in the galley three times a day. He was keen to talk with the Travellers who had kidnapped him.

When the party arrived, Tanlin cheerily thanked them for this unexpected opportunity to unwind away from the rigours of work and the ritual of his commute, none of which would have been possible without his sudden and violent kidnapping at their hands.

After general discussion, he asked them a series of searching questions, although he sometimes seemed to drift a little during their answers:

He asked Drevil: “Suppose the water were clean tomorrow. What happens on the fourth day? When twelve million people start suffering from withdrawal symptoms. When 12 million people wake up able to feel worry and anxiety and anger for the first time in their lives?” This sounded, to Drevil, like a good question, but that the hope was apparently that revolution would ensue. “Violent revolution,” stressed Tanlin.

• To Rosa Perre: “You give an order and forty people die. Does that get easier or harder with rank? I’ve always wondered whether it’s the first one or the four hundredth.” The former admiral said that it never got easier, which seemed to make Tanlin very sceptical indeed.
• To Bilal: “Two Imperial science prizes. Four books. And here you are with your face burnt off in a rebel’s hold on a world that catches fire when you sneeze. I’d very much like to know what she offered you, because I don’t think it was money.”
• To Ferric: “You were law once. Now you’re this. Which of you changed — you, or the law?” Ferric equivocated, saying that the job had changed but that he had moved on, too.
• To Anson: “You don’t like me. That’s fine. You don’t like anyone who’s never had to fix anything with their hands. It’s the healthiest prejudice on this ship.”
  He then asked Marcus: “If it were you running the Foederate – not reforming it, running it – how would you treat people like you?” Marcus avoided a direct answer to this, and there was some general discussion around the lunch table as to ends and means.

As the group left after lunch, Tanlin – who they were now thoroughly convinced was some sort of mind-reading, psionic space wizard – offered them one last piece of advice: “Ask your employer which canal she was born beside. Not now. Sometime when she’s tired. See how she answers.”

The party were beginning to notice, as the days went by, the sympathetic and pitying glances of the rebels around the base. It seemed that they did not think much of their life-expectancy.

087-1104 Orsasch Rebel Base

The Travellers were once more invited for a meal: this time to dinner with Lady Wishart, who was in excited mood. Everything was in place and it was time for the penultimate stage of the plan!

After handing each of them a dataslate and showing them a picture of the state of the Senlis Station corporate nacelle, she gave them a brief set of instructions:

‘My friends, today you change history. Your job is to infiltrate Senlis Station. Once in, you’ll need to work your way into the damaged corporate nacelle and find the GeDeCo secure datavault.

‘Inside that is the GeDeCo master system containing all the contract data for the cluster. My team has put together a passkey that should automatically overwrite the data. All you need to do is power the system on, and insert the key.

‘Oh, there is one final thing.’ Ada smiles. ‘We do not want anyone catching on to our true objectives. So try to make it look like a robbery: grab something of value on your way out.’

‘Luckily for us, thanks to your actions rescuing our agents on Orsasch, you have an easy in: we have security codes which will make your ship appear as a GeDeCo general vessel, already registered with their system. You’ve just got to sell the act.’

076-1104 – Orsasch: The Sighlands

Lady Ada Wishart approached the party with new information, and a new request:

“Much of the data the rebels gathered about Senlis Station is from Idar and Radi, hackers who bluffed their way to an administrative position on the station. They were building a backdoor into the system but I’ve learned from my contacts that they ruptured a fuel line and got caught.

“Luckily, they survived, and they’re on Orsasch. Senlis has always liked to dump trouble here. They’re being taken from the pad at Reaching Lake to the Darkwater military base in four days. We have data, but no one knows the station like those two.

“The rebel leaders want to mount an operation against the prison convoy and rescue them. They’re hopeful you can lend you expertise. What do you think?”

The Travellers volunteered to lead the rescue mission, and set to planning. Reconnaisance of the routes between the prison complex at Reaching Lake and the landing pad Deepwater where the prisoners had arrived travelled along three routes. One had a bridge that was currently out of commission, so the party found ambush spots on each of the others. They also asked the rebels to use their TL7 workshop to build eight stinger strips to disable vehicles, as well as a ten improvised grenades, which they distributed amongst themselves and the dozen rebels who volunteered to join their mission.

080-1104 – Orsasch: The Sighlands

The prisoner transport vehicle and its normal escorts were all wheeled vehicles that would travel on the rough, tarmac roads from the landing pad to the prison complex. The party had the advantage of possessing two grav vehicles: the Grav Carrier which had been procured for the Albe heist (which, uncortunatly, had seen its armour largely scoured off by the intense dust storm that served to hide that event) and Marcus’ own Grav Bug, which he had come by during his service. These allowed the party the advantage of mobility, and they placed themselves in these between the two routes, confident that they could reach the required ambush site within minutes of discovering the route taken by the transports.

Ferric Osmund, the ex-lawman from Acrid, concealed himself in the hills overlooking the landing pad, around a kilometre from the main gate and with a clear view of each route. Unfortunately, the security forces caught a glimpse of movement and sent out an armed search party to locate him, forcing him to reposition using his grav belt. This also seemed to cause a delay inside the compound.

Eventually, however, Ferric (whose player was not present for this session) saw two escorts and a prisoner transfer vehicle head off along the eastern route. Rosa Perre suggested waiting to check for a decoy convoy, but the consensus was that Ferric join the Travellers as they headed for the prepared ambush site. With Drevil and Bilal placed on high ground with their laser sniper rifles, the rest of the crew and half a dozen rebels (armed with bows) hid close to the road. Nobody used chemical slug-throwers, as they were prone to jamming or even exploding in the phenomenally-oxygen rich air or Orsasch.

Thge ambush went fairly well, with vehicles disabled and the heavy weapons of the security forces rapidly taken out of commission and Zhana taking out the wheels of the transport vehicle. However, out of the back of the prisoner transport emerged not convicts, but half a dozen Senlisian assault troopers on combat drugs. This made for a dangerous fight for those closest to the vehicle, but the superior, higher-tech firepower of the party told in the end. Each time a laser hit someone, there was a risk that their clothing would erupt in flames: the oxygen-rich atmosphere causing violent fires closer to an oxy-acetylene torch than anything else.

At this point, the party received a crackling message over the radio from a gloating Convoy Commander Emm, boasting of how he had captured their spotter (they knew that he had not) and fooled them with a fake convoy: he was already safely on his way to his destination. He had not understood that they had grav vehicles at their disposal.

Racing to their backup Ambush Spot, at a sharp corner in the switchbacking road through the canyons of the badlands, the party arrived with only a single minute to take their positions. The half dozen Rebel soldiers already had their stinger strips in place, and trapped the vehicles as planned, although two of them tried to swerve and take a side-canyon. This lead to the prisoner transport crashing into a boulder, while the front escort was disabled by the stinger strips. The rearmost vehicle’s driver kept control, but Drevil used his laser rifle to shoot his gunner. A superb shot removed the unfortunate gunner’s left arm, which caught fierce fire and fell into the vehicle into the lap of the driver. The driver, naturally panicking as the resident of a world terrified of open flames, caught fire himself and promptly drove into the canyon wall as his priorities shifted away from watching the road.

Next, Bilal dropped a grenade into the disembarking troopers from the front vehicles, while Marcus and Zhana swooped across to lay down enfilading fire. At this point, the effect of the extra oxygen on explosives was discovered, as the grenades tripled their blast radius, killing two of the three troopers instantly – somewhat merciful given that they also burst into flames – but charring the top half of Dr Bilal’s face as it did so. Somewhat incautiously, Drevil tried to bounce a grenade into the rearmost vehicle despite it being out of range, and the grenade caught Marcus in its blast radius.

Eventually, the scene was secured and the prisoners removed from the transport. A charred and bloody Convoy Commander Emm, somewhat chastened and considerably less prone to crowing, surrendered alongside the remaining, uncooked troopers.

As well as the two rebel spies, five more prisoners were found in the back of the vehicle, and the Travellers considered their next move.

067-1104 – Redrock Rebel Base Magen

The Travellers had landed at the embattled Redrock rebel base on the ash-covered, volcanic world of Orsasch and immediately found themselves pinned-down by Senlis Foederate assault troopers. The centre of the base was dominated by two huge boreholes, around which were built a variety of prefab, concrete buildings. The rebels had been driven back to their last redoubt – the command node and its associated computer core – while a dozen, armoured Foederate soldiers were attacking from the south, from the armoury buildings which they had taken first, cutting the rebels off from most of their weapons. To the east, two more Senlis specialists guarded the radio jammers that had stopped the rebels broadcasting for help. And soon, from the north, the crew of a crashed bomber started pouring flamking fire into the Traveller’s position, beneath the Serendipity as she stood before the entrance to the Command Node.

Travis Drevil, armed with a laser sniper rifle, started picking off targets of opportunity to the north and east, suppressing the crew of the bomber to stop them flanking the party’s position.

Zhana and Marcus took advantage of the suppressive fire to push east along the causeway to the jammers, taking out the Foederate soldiers there before returning to defend against the main assault.

Dr Bilal and Ferric entered the command node and calmed the civilians inside while coordinating with the remaining rebel soldiers. Ferric organised the rebels to retreat to the open cargo ramp of the waiting Serendipity, but the fire of the asault troopers to the south made the crossing dangerous. In the meantime, Dr Bilal found Section Leader Tibious in the computer core room, struggling to delete the records stored on the computer. Tibious knew that the deletion would take too long, and volunteered to seal herself into the building and oversee the deletion while the others escaped. However, Dr Bilal had other ideas: with his mastery of computer software engineering, he short-cutted the process and corrupted the entire system’s storage in a matter of minutes, allowing Tibious to follow to the entrance of the building.

At this point, the assault troopers charged. Maddened by Senlisian combat drugs which provoked animal aggression and utter fearlessness, howling and roaring loud enough to be heard by the waiting Serendipity, the soldiers were driven on by their commander, Captain Esrick, who had given up trying to negotiate the rebels’ surrender. Ferric had pushed forward, and was caught, exposed in the open as the violent assault began. However, for Rosa perre, waiting in the turret of the Serendipity, this was a golden opportunity. Even in an atmosphere, the huddled group of recklessly charging troopers, by now only fifty yards away, presented the target of every turret gunner’s dreams. Swivelling to aim at the centre of the group, she fired a single sandcaster into the centre of the group: 200kg of sand moving at near-supersonic speeds in an expanding cone of death. God’s shotgun tore through the group’s armour and removed the front two inches of flesh from eveyone in the group.

With the vanguard removed, and the main body of the assault on the way, the Travellers loaded up their terrified passengers and took off in the Serendipity, the atmospheric conditions combining with the stealthy hull of the smuggling craft to prevent detection by their lower-tech opponents.

During the jump to Orsasch, the huddled rebel refugees experienced division and schism, with different families arguing as to which should have better sleeping arrangements (despite most being consigned to the holds of the Serendipity and the Aurora’s Fortune, such were the numbers involved). The strict caste systems on Magen, essential to ordering life on such an inhospitable world, divided them and lead to arguments as to who had precedence, which the party had to defuse.

In addition, the life support systems of both ships were straining to support the extra numbers, leading to uncomfortable humidity and heat, as the ship’s engineers worked to try and retreive the situation.

076-1104 – Orsasch: The Sighlands

Arriving at the base of another rebel cell, in the so-called Sighlands of Orsasch (named for the sound of the oxygen venting from fissures in the rock on this hyperoxic world), the party were able to take a couple of days to rest and recuperate, joining the rebels in their base, in reclaimed aquifers secretly occupied without the knowledge of the Senlis Boyars who run the planet. It was not long, however, before Lady Ada Wishart approached them with another task…

061-1104 – Albe Surface

Having infiltrated Eschaton, one of the three major cities on the blighted surface of Albe, the Travellers went about their plan to kidnap GeDeCo Director Skylark Tanlin. Their plan was made more complex by aspects of the environment: the maglev train track was held kilometres in the sky by grav-tech; the atmosphere itself was a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen air with salt-dust and a high chlorine content, rendering it unbreathable without filters; and the heist had to occur while the train was travelling at hypersonic speeds through a violent salt-dust storm with constant electrical discharges occurring. Any signal from the train would lead to armed emergency responders arriving in an average of forty minutes, but potentially less.

Zhana, with her basic ability in Steward skill, was inserted into the train as an employee of AMTC: the Albe Maglev Transit Corporation. As a steward, she would have full access to the carriage.

Travis Drevil flew an armoured grav vehicle procured by Ingabel and lay in wait near to where the hijack of the maglev train was to occur. On-board was Marcus while Roach, Anson and Dr Bilal waited with the ship. The terrifying force of the chlorine-salt sand-storm rapidly began to ablate the armour from the grav carrier, and Drevil had to place it between ruined buildings on the city surface to prevent the hull being scoured away entirely.

Ferric Osmund and Rosa Perre were booked into the same, luxury-class carriage as the target.

Having accessed the train’s ventilation systems, the group on-board the train pumped knockout-gas into the carriage, almost immediately disabling the luxury compartment passengers. Then, using a computer they brought onto the train, they hacked into the train control and detached the rearmost carriages from the rest of the train. Unfortunately, this immediately triggered the train’s emergency braking system, hurling Rosa Perre forward down the train corridor and into the carriage bulkhead, breaking her nose in the process.

As the train stopped, Drevil and Marcus took off and headed for the crippled train, docking with the rear of the separated train compartments.

Entering Tanlin’s compartment, the party found him entirely unaffected by the knockout gas, due to his very expensive cyberware. Although both guards appeared to have been knocked out, one turned out to be faking this, and there was a brief fight as he attempted to defend his principal.

The party then extracted Tanlin through the rear of the train, leaving him bemused as they became distracted by a small-time drug dealer who had bribed his way into the cargo compartment to protect the package he was smuggling between cities. “Is this your first kidnapping? It’s not my my first kidnapping…”

The party then embarked upon the Grav Carrier, which was by now badly sand-blasted, its armour ruined, and detached from the train. As they departed, they could see that the magnetic shielding that protected the train had been disabled for the front compartments, separated from the generator, and that violent lightning was repeatedly striking the stationary vehicle, packed as it was with passengers.

The Travellers then made their rendezvous with Lady Ada Wishart in the Aurora’s Fortune, hidden amongst a tangle of fallen skyscrapers, delivering Director Skylark Tanlin to her. She congratulated them on a job well done, immediately paying them the promised KCr100 and opening an eye-wateringly expensive bottle of 300-year old Drinaxian champagne to celebrate. She then revealed her plan:

“For too long the Foederate has oppressed my people. They rule with an iron fist, keeping citizens in line by controlling the limited supplies of water, which they drug to keep people complacent and happy. Thirty years ago, GeDeCo approached them offering a deal; infrastructure and trade at bargain prices. The princes of the Foederate refused. The only trade they agreed to was to line their own pockets, so that was the deal GeDeCo made.

“Well, I want to alter the terms of that deal. I want you to break into the GeDeCo offices at Senlis Station and swap the contract data with the forgery we’re going to produce from Tanlin’s biometrics. Then, I want you to do the same with the records kept on Senlis, in the princely palace itself.

“If you pull it off, when the contract shifts to phase 2 in a few months, GeDeCo will have full access to distribute water to the beleaguered people of my world. They’ll be able to break free from the tyrant’s grasp. And if Senlis refuses? Well, GeDeCo is a power in its own right, isn’t it? Either way, you’ll be all the richer for it. What do you think?”

The party’s ship, the sleek and stealthy Serendipity, docked to the Aurora’s Fortune for the three parsec jump to Magen. Ingabel had arranged for cold-weather gear, breathers and other survival equipment, since the worlds of the Senlis Federation are universally inhospitable places.

067-1104 – Magen orbital space

Arriving in the Magen system after a week in jump space, Lady Wishart was unable to contact the hidden rebel base in the system, so the streamlined Serendipity was dispatched to the planet surface to make numerous refuelling runs while the Aurora’s Fortune remained hidden in the asteroid belt nearest the planet. The planet surface was hellish: active volcanos threw vast quantities of ash and acidic gases into the choking atmosphere while kilometre-wide lava flows curved down from vast mountains. The local temperature was -63C while landing was made terrifying by the way that the ship would sink into the thick layer of ash that covered every surface. Attempting to breath the air unfiltered would lead to the victim’s lungs dissolving and filling with acidic ash-sludge. Using the ship’s sensors, the party were able to find water-ice deposits beneath the ash which they extracted for processing into fuel, but they were spotted by a drone sent by the local authorities, and had to talk their way out of being attacked, pretending to be a GeDeCo craft.

After laboriously refuelling the Aurora’s Fortune, the Serendipity was filling her own tanks when Lady Wishart contacted them:

“I’ve found out why the rebel base at Redrock wasn’t responding. Military forces are jamming the area. It’s bad news – they’re under attack. They’ve already been bombed and an advanced force is securing the facility. The main enemy force arrives in one hour.

“Those rebels have all the information we’ve gathered about Senlis Station but it’s worse than that. There’s information on just about every rebel agent on the planet there. If the Foederate forces get their hands on it, it’ll be a disaster. But there’s still hope. You’re close enough to help. You can get inside, destroy the computer core and get away with as many people as you can.

“I won’t lie to you. It’ll be dangerous. The Foederate controls its people with propaganda and drugs, and their troops are fierce, crazed fighters. If you do not want to face that, I understand. Bring that fuel home and we’ll regroup in Orsasch. But if you can pull it off, if you can rescue Section Leader Tibious, well, you’ll be heroes, won’t you? And, if that isn’t motivation enough, you’ll have earned yourself a big fat tip. What do you say?”

The party agreed, and KCr50 was immediately transferred to their accounts. Lady Ada also sent them a map of the base and a note of its location.

Abandoning caution, the Travellers flew the Serendipity to the rebel base and found an attack underway: electronic jamming equipment had been landed in a vehicle within the base perimeter, and bomber craft had attacked the base’s anti-aerospace weapons: one of the bombers had crashed into a building on the edge of the base.

Most of the party disembarked from the Serendipity, along with the vargr Roach. They quickly found themselves surrounded by enemies on three sides, and the Travellers split up to suppress each flank while making contact with the rebels within the base.

010-1104 – Tobia Naval Base

The party arrived in Tobia: the Spinward terminus for the Riftliners that cross Reft sector between Gushemege and the Domain of Deneb. Tobia is a marvel of the Trojan Reach: the vastly rich, incredibly high-tech capital and the seat of the sector duke.

Here, they were met by Commander James Kazowich, an Imperium Naval Intelligence handler who turns out to belong to the INI faction who believe that the Hierate pose a grave risk to Imperium Spinward holdings, and who seek to strengthen potential buffer states to slow the Aslan advance.

This was not delivered as a monologue, but this was the thrust of the conversation:

“You’ve done the Imperium a service with the Perfect Stranger, and the Navy has expressed its… formal gratitude as promised. However, official channels are currently too ‘bright’ for our next objective. I represent a significant faction within the Imperium Naval Intelligence service who feel that we need to bolster the neutral systems to Spinward to create a buffer against the Aslan Hierate’s expansion.

My department’s assessment is that Drinax is the key; King Oleb XVI – the current monarch – has ambitions to reclaim the lost worlds of his kingdom, and while the Imperium cannot officially support a frankly borderline piratical king, we find his goals align perfectly with our need for a localized power to blunt and slow the Aslan advance while we push for greater naval funding in the region.

Drinax probably won’t be more than a speedbump, but it is two hundred years since the Aslan destruction of the Kingdom of Drinax, and the cost for the Hierate clans involved was so high that they are only now returning to their pre-885 strength. Indeed, their expansion was redirected to Spinward and the war on the Glorious Empire as a result.

Should you accept this mission, we will arrange for the ship you purchased to be deposited at Pryme and we will ship you there separately. We will have ‘greased the wheels’ through an underworld contact to ensure a Drinaxian recruiter named Sal Dancett will be present in-system for a lucrative cargo and we will arrange for her to notice you when you pick up your ship.

Your objective, which Dancett will think she is introducing you to, will be to assist a woman named Lady Ada Wishart in her efforts against the incumbent Senlis Foederate government. By helping her, you secure Drinax’s flank and earn the trust of Princess Rao. Play your parts as independent spacers looking for work; the less the Drinaxians know about your history with Naval Intelligence, the longer you’ll stay alive.”

046-1104 – Pryme Lowport

The party having agreed, they were shipped to Pryme system. As promised, Sal Dancett had been subtly made aware of the presence of a group of largely ex-Drinaxian and Drinax-adjacent spacers with mainly military or paramilitary backgrounds, on the system.

The party had not been warned of what would happen – to the planners of Imperium Naval Intelligence, an injury or death would have lent the scenario extra verisimilitude – and so were genuinely surprised by an attack in their ship hangar by a local, anti-Imperium terrorist group just as Sal Dancett was nearby. The party dealt with the attack swiftly and efficiently – although not without suffering injuries – and Dancett witnessed the interaction, noting the professional response of the party. This confirmed her in her opinion that she had found the right candidates.

And so the party were recruited by Sal Dancett to help Lady Ada Wishart. Dancett tells the party only that they are to perform a heist of a valuable object on Albe. The party knows that they are, in fact, working for Princess Rao, even though Dancett did not share this information. And unknown to Dancett, the party are in fact working for INI as double agents!

265-1103 – Herzenslust Orbital Space

Having left Herzenslust with the missing data cores in their possession, the crew of the Perfect Stranger were keen to minimise the risks that remained before they could claim their rewards in Zuflucht. After debating diving straight across the rift to Serendip, they decided to lessen the effects of fatigue and possible deep-space psychosis by making for Elysee first as an intermediate stop, while bypassing Besancon with its known Neubayern presence.

272-1103 – Besancon Outer System

Without pausing to even carry out gas giant refuelling, the party topped off the J1 fuel tanks from their duel-use cargo tanks and jumped immediately to Elysee.

279-1103 – Elysee Lowport

At Elysee, the party were able to relax somewhat in the knowledge that their popularity there knew no bounds: they had, after all, saved the planet from devastation not six weeks before (See A Dagger at Elysee). They were provided with hotel rooms and a free monthly maintenance for the overdue Perfect Stranger’s aging jump drives, and were able to unwind for a couple of days as a result.

Next came the long, three-jump leg from Elysee to Serendip Belt across the deep space of the Rift itself. Amusing themselves with quiz nights and movie marathons, the party tried to avoid the stress that builds up with weeks in jumpspace, trusting the astrogator to have plotted a course that avoids death in the depths of the void.

304-1103 – Serendip Belt

With relief, the crew of the Perfect Stranger emerged from their three-parsec odyssey precisely where they hoped, near to the main asteroid complex of Serendip Belt. The system contained two billion people across dozens of hollowed-out asteroids and hundreds of orbital complexes, its almost-limitless mineral wealth exploited over the course of a thousand years to make the occupants wealthy by New Islands standards.

320-1103 – Gloire

Arriving at Gloire after a two-hop journey, the party found it a great contrast with Serendip Belt, who controlled Gloire as a colony. Gloire was largely settled by Francophones, and was a sparsely-populated agricultural world that supplied Serendip Belt with the foodstuffs needed for their asteroid-based society to function. Another monthly maintenance was overdue on the Perfect Stranger’s jump drives, giving the crew a couple more days to relax.

Some time after departing Gloire Lowport, as the Perfect Stranger’s 1G engine clawed its way towards the hundred-diameter jump point, the sensor operator received a call from a freighter in high orbit, whose transponder identified her as the Imperium ship Ershi. She hailed the Perfect Stranger upon detection:

“Imperial Naval Auxiliary Ershi to Perfect Stranger.
Stand down for boarding and crew replacement.
Job well done. Time to go home.”

The party were politely non-committal in their reply, but were immediately suspicious. They had been given instructions to deliver the data cores and ship to Zuflucht, and enough Neubayern agents had tried to stop them for this late change of plans to strike them as highly suspicious. Swapping to Imperium codes, they hailed the Ersi, who responded first by bluffing then by launching a series of pairs of fighters and ordering the Perfect Stranger to cease manuevring and submit to boarding.

The Ersi – much larger than the Perfect Stranger and apparently more heavily armed – also accelerated to cut off the Perfect Stranger near the 100-Diameter mark. Manning the guns, the party started fighting the approaching fighters, which responded aggressively. Three of the fighters were destroyed, although the Perfect Stranger also took damage: luckily none of the hits damaged fuel or jump drives, or the situation would have become critical.

Finally, after almost an hour of dogfighting and defence, the Perfect Stranger entered an emergency jump, right at the 100-diameter point, and escaped, praying that the rapid calculations would not lead to a misjump deep into the heart of the Great Rift.

246-1103 – Elysee High Orbit

The damage to the Perfect Stranger from the fight with the Neubayern scouts in Sturgon’s Law having been fixed for free by the shipyard at a grateful Elysee’s starport, the party settled on a more profitable route to Herzenslust, taking the slightly greater risk of travelling via Besancon in order to take the chance to trade.

253-1105 – Transit Lounge, Besancon Downport.

The downport was a subterranean, pressurized bunker built into the ice-rock crust. Thanks to the Size 2 planet’s low gravity, everyone moved with a careful, sliding shuffle to avoid bouncing. The Law Level was minimal, meaning some people were openly armed, but firing a weapon in a pressurized dome was a fast way to get lynched by the locals.

The party was moving through the concourse, waiting for a cargo broker, when they spotted a familiar face reflecting in the grimy perspex of a noodle stand.

Sitting at a small, bolted-down table was a thin, pale man in a rumpled, ill-fitting grey suit. He looked chronically exhausted, nursing a lukewarm synth-caf and rapidly scrolling through a data-pad. It was unmistakably Klaus Reinhardt, the Neubayern handler they were warned about on Acadie.

They stopped to discuss Reinhardt, immediately setting off his professional reflexed as a long-term, undercover agent. He looked up. His gaze met Ferrick’s. There was no panic, no widened eyes. His expression remained utterly detached. He calmly turned his data-pad off, slipped it into his coat, stood, and began a smooth, practiced low-gravity glide toward the heavily crowded shuttle boarding elevator.

Anson commented: “where does he do his bloody laundry? In a cement mixer?”

Ferrick, a trained agent, trailed Reinhardt to the highport in the shuttle, then on towards his dock, which Zhana was later able to discover held the Solidus, a 200-ton far trader. But Ferrick spotted that he, in turn, was being trailed by a second agent, and returned to the rest of the crew with his information.

Having bought a cargo, the Travellers left for Herzenslust on 255-1103.

262-1103 – Herzenslust

Directed away from the main downport near the capital, Stahlstadt – reserved for New Colchis vessels – the party were sent to land at the Type E starport – a field outside the city of Rauchhafen, lit by the constant orange flare of refinery stacks and stinking of ozone and the smoke from heavy fuel oil. Heading into town, they hired a car, which they used to return to the starport, where a budding young capitalist called Raymon prevailed upon them to pay him to guard their “nice lookin’ car” for them as they enquired at the starport’s offices, located in a basic shed.

There, they bribed a civil servant to look up the records of the Perfect Stranger’s previous trip to Herzenslust, discovering that one crew member – “The Dog” – had been arrested at the time that the ship hurriedly departed, and was employed at Sammy Malpenseri’s nightclub The Electric Veil, where his alien status made him a draw for patrons.

Heading there, the party found that The Dog was in fact a Vargr called Roach. Establishing their bona fides with the Third Imperium codes they’d been given, they persuaded him to share what he knew: he had joined the Perfect Stranger from Zuflucht as a late addition. The old crew had headed to hire a crawler from Gruber’s Motors in Staubrand. At this point, several New Colchis anti-espionage agents moved in to arrest the Travellers, alerted by the return of the Perfect Stranger and aware of the ship’s links to Roach.

However, at the same time, Neubayern agents also moved to kidnap Travis. With Zhana alerting the bouncer and the party resisting, a four-cornered fight began in the bar which ended with the Islands intelligence agents largely injuring or subduing each other and the party escaping to their ship.

Leaving the Starport, the group flew out to the badlands near Staubrand, took their launch in to meet Gruber, an aging mechanic with a crude, mechanical arm.

From Gruber, they got sufficient clues as to the strange dirt on the tracks of his crawler to roughly locate where the previous crew took it, used the Perfect Stranger’s sensors to get a fix on a likely location, searched the resulting abandoned mining site, retrieved the data cores and headed for orbit, pausing only to drop off the crawler with Gruber, who had commented on how it represented his pension.