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.
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