Death Station

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.