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.
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