Category: Actual Play Accounts

120-1103 – Rampart

Most of the party started this session in cold berths during the flight from the naval base at Rampart where they had been given their mission to retrieve the Perfect Stranger and her valuable, top-secret data cores. They were headed to Amondiage, via the lonely, deep-space refuelling point at Riftspan Station, one of the most remote, occupied locations in charted space.

Dr Vanderpool had been nominated to stay awake to provide medical assistance for the sometimes-risky process of waking the party up from their suspended animation: the rest of the group saw nothing of their journey aboard the vast Riftliner until they awoke on Amondiage.

148-1103 – Amondiage

Amondiage was a culture shock after weeks on isolated planets, in space stations, jump craft and highports. A hot, dry world it had some 3 billion inhabitants, a deeply French culture and an omnipresent, authoritarian government headed by Monsieur le Directeur: the Director of the planet. A few people spoke Rift-Galanglic, but mainly the party relied on their translator devices to talk to a population who had never known Imperium rule.

Propagandistic news stories were being broadcast constantly in public spaces, government offices and even on screens in bars announcing fleet deployments to counter aggressive Neubayern manoeuvres within jump range of Sansterre. New Home was condemned for “Anglophone cultural subversion”. The government of New Colchis was accused of “persistent spying incidents.”

Investigating the whereabouts of the Perfect Stranger, the party visited the coroner’s office, where they met Political Officer 2nd Class Thomas Volonnelle. Presenting appropriate documentation, they discovered that she had, in fact, been last reported at Acadie, and that the crew members whose bodies had been returned from Amondiage had died there, but that the “firearms discharge incident” had occurred on Acadie: the Perfect Stranger had jumped there from Amondiage and had posted a flight plan taking her on from Acadie to Colchis and New Home, deeper into the Great Rift.

Further research had uncovered distinctly unflattering reviews about the facilities and service offered by the Perfect Stranger in her plodding travels around the subsector.

The party then took low passage on the tramp freighter Le Bonhomme to Acadie, a light year distant.

158-1103 Acadie

Alhough another Francophone world, Acadie was a great contrast to Amondiage: where Amondiage had billions of occupants, Acadie had less than a million; where Amondiage was orderly and authoritarian, their Acadie colony was chaotic and on the point of riots; where Amondiage was dry, Acadie had plentiful water, and a light rain seemed omnipresent on the coast where the starport lay.

Le Bonhomme had landed at the starport, and the party set about finding their ship: the Perfect Stranger. They visited the Starport administration centre, and met Capitaine Marcel Durat, the chief administrator. He certainly knew where the Stranger was: it had been sitting at the starport for months, consuming energy and water and blocking a berth, and he wanted 72,000 credits just to release it.

This sum (over $400,000!) struck the party as unfair. Zhana pointed out the administrative flaws in his assessment, while Ferrik skimmed the legal terms and found various loopholes. Finally, with the use of Broker skills to haggle, the cost was reduced to a more reasonable 28kCr, which was within the party’s ability to pay.

The Perfect Stranger was found at a remote berth, and the codes the party were given by Naval Intelligence worked to open her up. Zhana went to the bridge and checked the security systems, finding three accesses since the ship landed. One was by Acadie government officials but the other two were done surreptitiously by other parties.

Ferrik and Dr Hakim swept the ship for bugs, and found several. They didn’t remove them, but warned the others of their presence, and Travis used the ship’s advanced sensor suite to discover the frequency that their transmissions occurred on.

Zhana’s investigations of the ship’s logs revealed that the crew had departed in the ship’s launch for the town of Houillon for a tempting trade deal, and had never returned. Houillon was in the news at the moment, as the centre of riots and demonstrations that saw the likely imposition of martial law on Acadie in the next few days. Research by the Travellers showed that this sort of unrest and frequent strikes occurred on Acadie not infrequently.

Investigating the ship, the Travellers found that various systems, such as power and long range sensors, had been deliberately, if crudely, sabotaged. They also found that the ship’s safe had been lasered open and the contents taken. The ship’s vital data cores, the main object of their mission, had also been stolen by one of the groups who had infiltrated the ship.

On the upside, they found a hidden backup-cache of credits, and a hidden file in the ship’s computer that gave the coordinates of where duplicates of the data cores had been stashed.

Travis embarked on fixing the ship’s power systems, taking his time: the job would, he predicted, take him a full week. Dr Bilal’s job repairing the sensors was a little easier, but would still take him three days of work. Between them, the work would cost 17,000 credits to complete, and would require parts from in Acadie City.

Aware that martial law might be imposed at any point, the group headed into town. As an experienced agent, Ferrik noticed that they were being followed, but the tail disappeared. Then, taking a wrong turn, the Travellers were help up at gunpoint by a group of four plain-clothed individuals claiming to be gendarmes. They ordered the party to disarm and to come with them for questioning. The party, their hands hovering over their weapons, declined to do so, and a stand-off ensued. Eventually, the apparent Gendarmes arranged to meet the Travellers at their ship the next morning, and withdrew.

The session opened with the Travellers back at Sakaliin Highport, where they reported their findings back to the Bwap Dalglee Hahsh, head of Starport Security and therefore an Imperial law enforcement agency officer.

What they had found aboard the damaged research ship Calendula had revealed a complex web of illegal activity. All of it related in some way to the ship’s owners, Lysani Laboratories, but clearly not all of it was done with their agreement.

The email records, experimentation logs and ship security audit trail all pointed to Lysani Laboratories performing in vivo experiments on both animals and on unwilling human subjects, in the fields of both combat drugs and psychoactive agents.

Sandinista Logistics had been providing Lysani Labs with kidnapped test subjects, mainly from the Trojan Reach and Gushemege sectors.

The psychoactive drugs had been used as part of Lysani Laboratories’ scheme to gather further test subjects, with the help of members of the crew of the independent Smallhauler-Class ship Maus, and at least one employee of Stenmore Minerals at their Proving Site Nine on Sakaliin.

Two attacks on Lysani Laboratories and their supply chain had occurred within a week of each other: an explosion on board the Calendula had exposed the crew to a potent mixture of combat drugs and psychoactive agents; while an EMP explosion on the Maus had lead to the loss of that ship, perhaps earlier than had been planned as it had made a stop at the Stenmore Minerals site before proceeding to the Calendula.

It seemed that these attacks had been the work of Butler Chemicals, a competitor of Lysani laboratories in the life sciences sector. They had suborned the Calendula’s astrogator, who had set the explosives on the research ship that had lead to the crew turning on each other. Butler Chemicals seemed to be linked to the FATCAT consortium of traders working the Floriani and Aslan trade routes, and was a mid-stage, biochem startup whose latest drug, based around the use of mild hallucinogens as part of a regimen for untreated, schizophrenia in adults, had failed in final-stage testing.

Dalglee Hahsh appeared intrigued by this set of relationships, and had informed the party that he would investigate, taking their logs, visual records and statements.

The party, accompanied by Anson Kobleinz, the ex-belter who had been in the same smugging shipment as the Travellers and who also needed to return to the Trojan Reach, had then proceeded on to Rampart, taking passage on the Spirit of Liberty 2, an A2 class Far Trader which worked the long, local jump-1 main.

Rampart was a single parsec to Rimward of Sakaliin, and was the site of a major Imperial Navy base, perched near the edge of the Great Rift. On the way, Travis Drevil had made the acquaintance of Carmen Sinclair, a fellow passenger who had inherited a small amount of money and a useless title, turning them into Countess Cleaners, a firm specialising in starship cleaning services across several nearby systems.

In Rampart, former Imperial Navy Admiral Rosa Perre and former Marine Lt Col. Zhana had visited the officers’ club at the highport, and had persuaded a Lt Commander Shaun Deering to provide her with an introduction to his friend: a member of Imperial Naval Intelligence. A meeting was arranged with him for 0730 the next morning, station time.

The meeting, the next day, yielded the opportunity that the party had hoped for. Commander Ras Forenz introduced the mission to them:

“This is why you all had to sign the Imperial Secrets Act: INI has had a ship – The Perfect Stranger – in the Islands subsectors for the last couple of years, quietly plodding around and looking for all the world like a tramp freighter. You probably know that the Islands subsectors were only contacted in the last couple of centuries, and we still know relatively little about them. What we do know is that some genius from the Scout Service misjumped and gave Serendip Belt jump ability, and that then yet another of the Scout Service’s many geniuses handed out jump drives to all the other powers in the region. This worked out so well that, after a thousand years of peace, they’re all on the brink of war as a result.

“So in fact, the Perfect Stranger had a seconded Navy, Scout, INI and Merchant-Navy crew and was actually reconnoitring, recording and scooping up all the E-Int her sensor suite could handle, which it turns out was a lot, because her sensor suite is a thing of beauty. They should have been back any time now, but instead, all we got back was the bodies of two of her crew, with an Amondiage system coroner’s finding that they were killed in an ‘accidental weapons incident.’ An ‘accidentally repeatedly shot by lasers incident,’ it turned out.

“So the INI wants the Perfect Stranger’s data cores back, and we want it badly enough to pay you quarter a million credits each for the privilege, not to mention a 10k per month each expense account, first month up front, although it’s all got to be itemised and justified, bureaucracy being bureaucracy. We’ll give you another 250KCr between you for safe delivery of the ship itself. Her intact data cores are what we really care about: the ship would just be a bonus.

“We’ll give you the passcodes for the Perfect Stranger. Our job is to find her, we believe on Amondiage, and bring her to Zuflucht. If you can find out what happened to the crew, great. But to be brutally frank we are a lot less worked-up about that than the ship. Still, we’ll give you another 250KCr if you can provide us with details of that.”

“The Navy have kindly agreed to arrange passage to Amondiage, but I’m afraid that the budget doesn’t stretch to middle passage, so they’re sending you as iced lollies.”

Faced with a long journey, Travis promptly hunted down a drug dealer and purchased three months of anagathics by way of precaution, while the crew as a whole went shopping for the biggest and most extreme weapons that they could find. Which, in a TL15 system with a law level of zero, turns out to be quite a lot.

103-1103 – Sakaliin Low Orbit

The session opened with the group aboard the Lampway Labourer: a thousand-ton minerals freighter which had diverted from a run to trhe out-system asteroid belt in order to rescue the remaining survivors from Stenmore Minerals Incorporated Proving Site Nine, which had been overrun by Pedersons Creepers: large hive beasts native to Sakaliin which looked like a cross between scorpions and lobsters, and which had been agitated by an EMP explosion on board the Smallhauler-class ship Maus as she had been approaching the site to land.

Ferrik Osmund had still been in a hallucinatory condition due to the drugs administered to him by Telford “Abe” Abergevenny, the medical tech at Proving Site Nine, and his colleague Katrioni Starvni. Until he came round, there was no solid reason to doubt their story – that Osmund had, like others who had survived the crash – gone berserk and they had merely drugged him to calm him down. By the time he did regain both consciousness and some of his memory, the Labourer had docked at Sakaliin Highport and the pair had made their escape.

The first thing that the group did was to start the process of reclaiming their identities (costing 800Cr each – a substantial sum), using the office of the local branch of the Travellers’ Aid Society to do so. The crew of the Lampway Labourer, led by First Mate Armagh and hearing of the predicament of the survivors and having seen the situation on the ground, had held a whip-round which had raised enough money for the group to get a change of clothes and a bed for the night.

Captain Lennick of the Lampway Labourer had been able to point the party at the head of station security, Dalglee Hahsh. After cleaning up, Rosa Perre, Zhana, Travis Drevil and the still-woozy Ferrik Osmund, accompanied by the gruff belter Anson Kobleinz, headed there to inform Hahsh of what had apparently happened to them with their apparent kidnapping and then events on Sakaliin.

Dalglee Hahsh turned out to be a Bwap – a race of amphibious, lizard-like humanoids, and his office was incredibly humid. He listened to their tale before noting that, although their kidnapping on another system – and even the attack on them on Sakaliin – would not fall within his remit as an Imperium law enforcement officer, their allegation that they had been smuggled between systems was very much in his jurisdiction. The Imperium left planets to their own devices, but space was the responsibility of the Emperor and his agents.

The party were sent away and told to come back the next day.

104-1104 Sakaliin Highport

When they returned, rested and cleaner, Dalglee updated them. A probe droid, sent to the surface and using its inbuilt densitometer, had backed up many parts of the Travellers’ story. Furthermore, he had discovered the freight shipment of which the party had been part: a signed-through shipment intended for the research ship Calendula, registered to Lysani Laboratories. The Calendula had not been heard from for the best part of a couple of weeks, and Hahsh made the Travellers an offer. As station security chief for a backwater system, he didn’t have the manpower to investigate the Calendula. But he could make a gig (a small spaceship) available to them if they would do him a favour and check why the research ship was silent.

So with Drevil at the controls, Perre, Zhana, Osmund and Kobleinz flew the few hundred thousand kilometres to the higher-orbiting Calendula. It was immediately obvious something was wrong: a body, with no suit, was in a slow polar orbit around the ship and the weak force of its grav plates. The pinnace was gradually drifting away at a few metres per hour, and was already more a couple of kilometres away. Inspecting it from the outside, the windows had been partly covered in a paint-like substance from the inside, obscuring the view within.

As they approached the ship, the party saw a face staring out from one of the windows. It quickly ducked down and disappeared.

Having first broken into one of the air/raft bays – which took several hours’ work – the party docked with the station in the space vacated by the pinnace. Taking the stunners they had been given, the party passed through the airlock and descended the central arm of the research ship to enter the outer ring which made up most of the circular ship. Gravity was on, life support was functioning but many of the light fittings had been deliberately smashed.

Investigating the ship’s galley, the party found human bodies on meat hooks, with areas where flesh had been gnawed and bitten by what seemed to be human mouths.

In the laboratory space, there had been test animals but some of these had escaped and others, by the looks of it, eaten. There was also what looked like a human-sized nest made of overturned tables and filthy blankets. Drevil found some intact drug samples amid the debris and chaos of the lab. He inspected them and found a mixture of different combat drugs.

The laboratory computer was working, and Admiral Perre logged-in. Regular, routine communicator transmissions of laboratory reports have been made to Lysani Laboratories, the registered chartering company for this ship. These were sent via the starport and presumably then to be forwarded on via Rifthaulers. There were also a dozen other transmissions sent and received. The contents were deleted but close inspection of the logs showed that they were between Butler Chemical Company and Haris Slocombe, the Calendula’s astrogator. The last incoming message was received eleven days ago.

The visitor roster for the last four months listed several mercenary officers. Several test subjects were referred to as “of Willow Dawn.”

The party were attacked, first by a hyena-like creature then by a frenzied creature as big as a polar bear but with more teeth. Both animals were clearly drugged in some way.

On finding a terminal for the ship’s computer, the travellers found that over the last four months, the ship has received six deliveries of between 4 and 12 cryoberths from Sandinista Logistics Co. Five were from Liini (Sallounn Subsector, Gushemege 0923). One was expected two days ago from Darchona (Tobia Subsector, Trojan Reach 2912).

The group also found 2 racks of 12, single-dosage bottles of “Extract – Reptor Pedersoniani (Carnifex)” – “Pederson’s Creeper (Killer)”. It contained a refined and stabilised version of the creeper poison. Records show experimentation on animal and human subjects.

While searching through the computer records, the Travellers heard someone banging a heavy, metal object on ship’s bulkheads in the distance. They also heard a howl: whether from human or animal was hard to tell.

Life Support records indicated that at 01:30 one week ago, an explosion occurred in the auxiliary laboratory. A resulting power surge temporarily disabled several functions. Once back online, sensors detected an unknown chemical in the air. Fully scrubbing the chemical took 20 hours. By that time, the chemical had already infiltrated every quadrant of the ship. The ship’s cameras had been disabled shortly before the explosion by user slocombeh.

The party decided that they had enough evidence and made their way back to the gig. On their way to the starport, they boarded the drifting pinnace, finding that there were two occupants. One had hacked their way through the partition wall into the bridge with an axe from the ship’s locker, and the two had killed each other, with one suffering a lacerated carotid while the other had a slash to the femoral artery. As a result, the windows and control surfaces were covered in blood.

In all, it appeared that Haris Slocombe, working with Butler Chemicals, had switched off the cameras, detonated a device, and that the resulting explosion had allowed a mixture of powerful combat drugs, and psychoactive hallucinogens based on Pedersons Creeper poison, to circulate. The crew had attacked each other, murdering most of the survivors and turning to cannibalism.

103 to 104-1103 – Sakaliin

As darkness sank across Proving Site Nine, the party and the other inhabitants of the site realised that they were all but out of time to make any further preparations for the onslaught that lay ahead. In front of them were the remains of Ken Himoji’s body: the mining specialist had proved too heedless of the risks presented by the Creepers and had been mauled and poisoned by them as a result. Beside him lay the carcasses of a Feeder and a Killer, with another, very-much-alive Breeder slowly losing interest in the buggy it had been obsessed with. Killing it was the first task, but this took yet more ammunition from the dwindling supplies within the camp.

As well as the Travellers, the site still held:

• Anson Kobleinz, another victim of kidnap like the group, who was beginning to regain memories of her life as a Belter in the Wildeman system in the Trojan Reach
• Lance Person, also kidnapped, a mineralogist from nearby Estos
• Sayelle Mikolos, the engineer from the smallhauler Maus who was helping fix the broken Walker: refined, reserved and quiet
• Hambley Tommerman, the bluff, confident captain of the smallhauler
• Telford Abergavenny, the medical tech for Proving Site Nine
• Corey Shiro, the site’s young, terrified drone operator
• Katriona Starvni, who described herself as the “scientist, just barely” for the proving site

Ken Himoji and Davide Maxanni, the co-pilot of the Maus, were both dead already, as were several Proviing Site technical staff who had been killed the previous night.

When the first full wave of Pederson’s Creepers finally turned their attention on the camp, the defenders found themselves facing at least a dozen of them, including a Killer, a couple of Breeders and nine Feeders. The group had a wide arc to defend, only partially protected by log barricades and shallow, diesel-filled trenches which had yet to be lit.

In the right-centre, Ken’s body had been placed on top of one of the bombs, and this quickly attracted a group of scavengers which were destroyed by the ensuing explosion. As a result, the fight on the right flank went well for Zhana and Perre, while the centre was held by Vanderpool, Drevil and the Belter Anson, but the left flank began to collapse, with first Lance and then Hambley killed as a Killer and a Feeder emerged from the bushes on that side. Ferrik and Dr Hakim were under heavy pressure but as the others were able to drive off the rest of the attackers with gunfire and grenades, they were able to move to the left and shore it up, with cutlass-work in particular proving effective.

There followed a lull of several hours. Yet more Creepers appeared outside the defences, but they were initially distracted by cannibalising the bloody remains of their own nest-mates. After a time, they completed this task and there was a brief, eery quiet, during which time Sayelle and Captain Drevil completed the repairs to the Walker, which sputtered into life with a blast of black, diesel smoke before Drevil triumphantly piloted it out into the encampment, testing the controls.

Soon, the Creepers re-emerged, perhaps drawn by the noise and electrical activity of the Walker, and an even larger attack fell upon the defenders. Telford triggered the second switch a little early, only catching three Creepers who had been drawn to the bodies of Lance and Hambley, and those in the surrounding area were covered in the exploded remains of creepers and corpses alike.

This time, a Thinker was visible fifty yards away, and it seemed to be almost guiding the attack from its place on the mine site embankment. While a few of the Feeders and Breeders attacked the left flank, they were driven back by the bomb, burning diesel and the fire and grenades of the heavily-armed Ferrik Osmund. Others attacked the centre, including a Killer that had been covered in diesel and which had caught light. These tried to clamber over the barricades and a fierce fight began as Vax Vanderpool, Rosa Perre and Lt Colonel Zhana rained fire down on them from above, their bullets rendered less effective by the armour of the Killer but deadly against the others.

The main force fell on the open right flank, undefended by fire pits or barricades, and here Travis Drevil placed the Walker in position in the centre of the gap, using its huge manipulators to smash down on the skulls of the Creepers which approached. One after another attempted to pass, and although the Walker took damage, and Corey and Anson were badly injured on each side of the Walker by other attacks by a Breeder and a Killer, eventually the great metal machine took its toll on the attackers and those in the centre were able to roll up the flank of the Creepers’ attacks.

In the meanwhile, however, Ferrik Osmund had been injured and Telford had gestured to come over to where he and Sayelle were sheltering. Instead of treating him, however, Telford injected him with what seemed to be the same psychoactive sedative as had been used on the party in their low berths, and Sayelle attacked him at the same time. Osmund called out to the others but couldn’t be heard over the sounds of gunfire, clanging metal, diesel fire and the screeching of the Creepers as they attacked and died. When the fight ended and others ran over, Sayelle and Telford explained that Osmund had been stung by a Creeper and had gone berserk, attacking them and forcing them to defend themselves by giving him a sedative.

As the party took in their surroundings, they saw that Rosa, Ferrisk, Vax, Anson, Telford and Corey were all injured – some badly so – and that an even bigger swarm of Creepers was assembling. Dr Bilal al-Hakim took pictures and copious notes while he could on these strange creatures. But more and more were assembling.

Retreating into the larger residential building, they made a last stand, using the last of their grenades and ammunition to kill as many Creepers as they could, but the waves seemed inexhaustible…

Then, as Creepers climbed onto the roof of their building, hurled themselves at the windows and burrowed into the ground under the floor, the party received a message from the incoming freighter: they were on final approach and would be using their shipboard lasers to clear the area, so could the party mark their position? As only one building still had lighting, this was easy, and there was the sound of a ferocious attack as the massive beam lasers of the hovering craft swept the area, filling the building with the repulsive chemical smell of the burned Creeper bodies where they had been carved open by laser beams two full inches wide.

The freighter was too large to risk landing on unprepared ground, but it sent down a modular cutter to rescue the survivors while the ship’s gunners stayed at their posts, scanning the ground for danger and occasionally loosing another blast where they saw movement in the tree line. The exhausted Travellers and their companions, having been awake for 22 hours of heavy physical activity and of fighting, collapsed in the hold of the cutter as they were taken to the giant ship overhead.

101-1103 – Sakaliin

Escaping from the Smallhauler “Maus”, the travellers foud themselves atop it as it slowly sunk into the cold waters of a lake, whose shores were only fifty feet away.

This seemed little challenge, and the group lowered themselves into the water and struck out for land. Unfortunately, not all had swum before, while others were so laden down with salvaged weapons and equipment that they promptly began to sink through the icy waters to the bottom of the lake. In seconds, half of the survivors were struggling, including Ken and Lance who were wearing only the thin coldberth suits, and Anson and the other members of thr group had to rescue them.

Cold and wet, the survivors saw a communications mast in the distance. After a debate on whether to light a fire or push on to this sign of civilisation, the decision to presson was made. After a couple of hours, they made a grisly discovery: the half-eaten corpse of a member of the Maus’s crew. His pockets had been rifled through and something had been gnawing on his legs. An improvised investigation by Doctor Vanderpool revealed that the deceased man had died, not of the obvious burns and cuts he sustained in the crash, but by internal bleeding.

This impromptu autopsy was interrupted by a rustling in the bushes and a fierce attack by the beast whose eating had been disturbed by the party’s arrival. Thinking that they were stealing its prey, the animal – looking like a mixture of spider and scorpion but the size of a low pony – launched a frenzied attack and the party had to spend valuable ammunition fending it off.

By this time, the party members were beginning to remember more of their past: the travellers remembered being in the Trojan Reach sector, in Tobia subsector, with only a few jumps to go to pick up their new ship. Anson, Ken and Lance remembered careers in belt-mining; planetary mining; and mineralogy and inorganic chemistry respectively.

After several miserable hours of damp trudging, the group reached what looked like a mine, on a plateau atop a low hill with steep sides to the south (from where they arrived). Two people were gesturing to them to hurry. These turned out to be Katriona and Corey. Katriona, who explained that she was the scientist (“barely,” she said) for the site, told the travellers that this was Proving Site Nine, run by Stenmore Minerals Incorporated as part of a broader effort to decide whether to mine the planet of Sakaliin.

This was a shock to the party, who had thought themselves to be around a hundred light years away, on the far side of the Great Rift.

Katriona explained that the Maus had been approaching the mine for landing the previous night when there had been an explosion aboard her. All of the electronics and electrical systems at the mine had gone down and the Maus had dived for the water for a crash landing.

Corey was the robotics expert and drone operator for the site, and was barely out of his teens.

Ferrick Osmund spoke to Hambley, the pilot from the Maus, who bristled at the suggestion that he’d left the party on the ship: he said he had sent Davide, his co-pilot, to check on them and had been told they were dead. Sayelle had been panicking and so he had evacuated his two crew. He felt his flying had been pretty darn good, and that Ferrick and his friends were welcome for him keeping them alive at all. In the woods at the other end of the small plateau, Osmund and Corey were able to see at least twenty more Creepers.

Sayelle, the engineer on the Smallhauler, was working on the power plant and didn’t speak much to Drevil, who started off working on that until is was completed, then moved to relieve Zhana, who was working on the Walker. While Drevil concentrated on getting the Walker vehicle up and running, Zhana used her military experience to improve the defences.

Katriona explained to Rosa Perre that after the flight four of the miners had gone to investigate the crash, but three were lost and the other returned delirious and injured, attacked by the Creepers.

Pederson’s Creepers came in four varieties, she explained: Feeders, Breeders, Killers and Thinkers, although some denied the reality of the Thinkers. Since the attack they had

Telford, the site’s medical tech, was digging a grave for their dead colleague.

Ken and Lance dug pits for diesel between the log piles, while Perre worked on the diesel pumping system.

Ferrisk, with Corey and Hambley, built three more sets of log embankments to channel the attack by Pedersen’s Creepers that everyone expected was coming. The previous night they had been going crazy and the same was expected again.

Some of the team used their explosives expertise to make grenades and bombs for use in extremis against the Creepers.

As evening arrived, and darkness sank, the fusion plant came online sufficiently to run two sets of lights and the radio mast.

Dr Hakim focused on fixing the radio transmitter. This he achieved after a few hours, which gave him the opportunity to contact potential rescuers and then to threaten them with a one star review on Space Yelp for their refusal to travel faster than light to save the group. They were several light-seconds out from Sakaliin and estimated that, by the time they reversed their burn and returned to the planet they would arrive at about 5am the next morning.

A few creepers started digging around the areas where power lines were buried, with one of them attempting to gnaw fruitlessly on an exposed, armoured cable. Sayelle commented that a few of the Creepers were digging around where one of the buggies had been the previous night, before being pushed over towards the storage sheds.

One of the Feeders wandered into the inner area of the compound, and Ken wandered up to it. It paid him little attention at first, then he shot it, harming but not killing it. Having seen this happen before, by the body of Davide Maxine, Ken then followed this up with a blow from a wrench as the coup de grace.

Confident from his victory, wandered casually up to the next Creeper, which sported a large stinger. Ken shot it, doing a little harm and puncturing its armour, but mainly serving to make it angry. A second shot did no more good, and the creature grabbed Ken between its pincers and started trying to rip him in two, while punturing him with the stinger that arched over its back. Meanwhile, one of the breeders started making sweet love to one of the buggies, lending a darkly chaotic edge to the horrific scene as an increasingly desperate Ken was poisoned while having his arm ripped from its socket. Others rushed to help Ken, but it was too late: it took several shots and cutlass blows from the party and Anson to defeat the beast.

Standing over Ken’s widespread remains, Dr Hakim vowed to destroy Professor Pederson.

101-1103 – Sakaliin

The six Travellers awoke from cold sleep to a voice – one clearly intended to be reassuring – informing them that their spaceship was badly damaged across multiple systems and that they had to exit immediately. They had almost no memory: who they were, how they got there, more than a vague memory of each other… nothing.

Worse, on exiting the cold berths, they discovered that the ship was flooding with cold, fresh water from somewhere aft, and they could hear cracking, creaking sounds as the hull adapted to the increasing pressure of water.

Investigating their surroundings, they found a container for 20 vials of some sort of drug, with only eight remaining. Doctor Vanderpool investigated and managed to glean from the hand-written label that these were organic in nature, potentially psychoactive and definitely not standard protocol for cold berth use.

By now, Rosa Perre was recollecting not just her name but that she didn’t normally have an itching, burning sensation between her collar bones, just below neck level. Asking the others, she found out that she had the word “SNITCH” laser-burned into her skin. She also had a note in her pocket, which read “You don’t remember right now but you once had a better life, and you never will again. I did this to you and your friends. You deserved it.”

On leaving the cold berth chamber, the group found a body, face down in the water having been shot, execution-style, in the back of the head, with a stream of blood and water heading down into the cargo hold next to it.

Moving into the galley, the group gathered some kitchen knives and attempted to open the ship’s locker, but it was secured.

At this point, another survivor appeared, unable to even remember her name and barely capable of standing up at first. Later, they would find out that her name was Anson Koblienz.

Travis Drevil briefly checked the other cold berth chamber, finding that it contained six more pods, three empty, two containing dead people. A couple of the berths lay collapsed on the ground, damaged by the crash.

Next, the party moved to the bridge, which had suffered damage in the crash, with signs of a substantial fire and a discarded extinguisher, bloodstains on the floor, and an open emergency locker which had shed contents onto the floor. Searching what remained, the party found firearms and a little ammo, along with a passkey.

Returning to the ship’s locker, the party used the passkey to open it. At this point, they were attacked by what looked like another survivor, who was foaming at the mouth, shouting and raging and waving a wrench. Caught by surprise, the party struggled to deal with this sudden attack, but Vanderpool and Anson managed to both shoot and beat him unconscious, and he was left lying face down in the water.

The locker was, like most ships’ lockers, a mess of old parts and anything else that didn’t fit somewhere else on the ship, but it also contained the standard set of vacc suits and more weaponry, and the party donned those.

At this point, two more survivors made their way aft, drawn by the sound of the fight.

After searching the cargo hold, and finding mining equipment belonging to Sternmore Minerals and a crate ripped open by an explosion, the party started looking for exits. Finding the main airlock underwater, they made their way to the rear maintenance hatch, and were able to clamber up onto the roof of the ship, finding themselves afloat in a small lake amidst a dreary landscape