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.
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