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#RustbucketTales #Part6

We started with a new Jump Point this week – the repossession one I posted earlier. And disappeared down a rabbit hold of tigers and psychotic Viking North Korean-style dictators…

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Anvil and Orcha scan the package with handheld scanners. Anvil thumps his as it gives odd readings…

…Orcha-37 receives a tipoff from Orcha-17 that someone he is hunting is on Asherah (a file pops up on the screen, identifying him as the Reverend Klune, wanted for inciting a mutiny by Ironclad)

…Anvil is told by a pair of ALF thugs “no-one works on our docks without us getting a cut”. He agrees to boost some parts from the ship he is working on as payment.

…Kestrel talks to a new passenger, Matha Dowe, in a bar. She’s a turncoat from the Shards of Xa; “I need to get outsystem. My former crewmates won’t be too happy to see me”. Later, Orcha checks out her identity and discovers that she is a bounty hunter…

…Orcha centres Reverend Klune’s head in his scope and squeezes the trigger. It explodes like a ripe melon and Klune falls to the floor. He looks up to see people pointing in his direction and yelling…

…Kestrel watches a news report with a fuzzy picture of Orcha and says “we can’t wait; we’re leaving on schedule”. Dev is outraged; “would you leave me behind like that?”

…Anvil tries to find out what’s wrong with his hand scanner and connects it to the test system. A massive amount of data downloads, then a message pops up: “Hello. My name is Sai.”

Neria: a backwater world run by the sort of psychotic feudal dictatorship that crops up when a private colonisation effort goes wrong. Jarl Egil sat at the top of the pyramid, funnelling the planet’s resources to himself and using them to fund a life of luxury and buy the loyalty of the mercenary bodyguard who keep him in power. Of course, he had to have toys too, so he’d bought himself a “grand fleet” – a couple of gunboats and a small squadron of fighters – so he could pretend to be a real power. And a luxury yacht, the Fenris, both as a plaything and in case he needed to blow up anything personally or flee the planet in a hurry.

Unfortunately he hadn’t paid for it. And Ironclad, who had built it, wanted it back. But they couldn’t just turn up in orbit and threaten to slag the planet unless they got their money – that’s the sort of thing the Shards of Xa do, the sort of thing Ironclad is Officially Against. And it would make the nature of their organisation just a little bit too obvious for Ironclad’s command staff to be comfortable with. So, instead, they outsourced…

It went fine, initially. Arrive on a commercial flight in the guise of “technicians”. Scout then infiltrate the starport. Override the airlock security, do a quick factory reset on the ship’s computer to gain control, disable the remote self-destruct mechanism wired to the ship’s reactor… And then, when Orcha was clearing the tasteless, glitzy luxury quarters, they hit trouble, in the form of Brigette Egilsdottir, the Jarl’s daughter, and her boyfriend, Captain-General Sigfried, who were rather… busy in the Jarl’s personal stateroom. With no embarrassment whatsoever, Orcha interrupted them – and when Brigette threatened to have him executed and Sigfried went for a hidden weapon, stunned the pair of them. He was partway through dragging them up to the bridge when the real trouble arrived, in the form of a guntruck and a jeep load of soldiers, and they had to dust off in a hurry and under fire.

Making it to orbit, they discovered more trouble: the Jarl had launched his interceptors against them: a half-dozen fighters, with skilled mercenary pilots. Putting Brigette on the comm got them to back off, but in the meantime a gunboat had arrived on the scene, and ordered the Fenris to halt or have its engines disabled. Figuring that the Jarl would have ensured that his personal yacht could outrun any other ship in his fleet, Kestrel opted to run. The Fenris’ shields held against the long-range bombardment from the gunboat, while Orcha took down half the fighters with the ship’s point-defence cannon. After some more ineffectual fire, the rest broke off, low on fuel.

Having made their escape, and with days to cruise until the jump point, the crew could work out what to do with the prisoners. Brigette had said that her father would ransom them, but an in-system transfer was too dangerous, and dumping them in the escape pod would mean not getting paid, so they decided to bring them along. Anvil cracked their comms, and used Sigfried’s as a backdoor into the Nerian Grand Fleet’s internal systems. Poking around to try and find out what had happened to Ironclad’s money, Anvil discovered that Sigfried had been part of a cabal of senior officers, including the Grand Admiral himself, who had been skimming the naval budget. Exactly what they were doing with the money wasn’t clear, but now the Jarl’s yacht had been repossessed someone would probably be facing a firing squad over it. And with Sigfried offworld, he’d make a very easy fall guy…

They also discovered their other unexpected passenger: “Grendel”, the Jarl’s personal green-striped hunting tiger, pacing back and forth in its cage on the cargo deck, wearing a diamante collar. Fabulously valuable and equally dangerous, and with a reputation for eating the Jarl’s Ministers; apparently the Jarl had been planning a hunting trip – or maybe an execution – and had loaded it on board. While they could ransom it back with Brigette and Sigfried, Orcha immediately wants to keep it. Anvil wants to throw it out the airlock, so Kestrel splits the difference: they’ll steal it, hide it from Ironclad, and sell it. When they get to their destination, they’ll radio Dev in the Rustbucket to come and do a covert cargo transfer, collect their payment from Ironclad, and be out-system before anyone goes “what do you mean, a tiger?!?” Unfortunately, this doesn’t manage to satisfy either party, and the group squabbles about it all the way to their destination.

Lyca: a large, established colony on a warm, habitable world. Safe, stable, and peaceful. And kept that way by a large orbiting Ironclad base. Ironclad’s crews use Lyca for R&R, its yards provide work for Lyca’s economy, its fleet protects Lyca’s extensive shipping. While Lyca is officially self-governing and independent, there’s no question about who really calls the shots here.

Fenris drops into the system and heads for the depot, tightbeaming Dev for the pickup. Meanwhile, there’s a series of messages with Fleet Captain Rutland, the officer who hired them. When Kestrel mentions “complications”, Rutland demands a full report – and when that fails to convince, she dispatches the frigate Churchill to conduct an inspection and escort them in.

Rustbucket will arrive before Churchill, but any docking manoeuvres will be visible (and Dev isn’t a good enough pilot to dock with a decelerating target from Rustbucket). So Kestrel goes for hiding in plain sight: she contacts the Churchill, explains that one of her crew was injured and needs medical attention, and requests permission to have Rustbucket pick them up. And it works! The Churchill gives permission, and Rustbucket heads in to dock. The first thing Dev says on cracking the cargo lock open is “what’s that smell?”

They get the cargo transferred across, and leaving Orcha and Dev with Rustbucket to meet them in orbit, continue on. A few hours later the Churchill docks and sends over an inspection party – which immediately takes charge of the prisoners. The Lieutenant in charge is suspicious of Kestrel – apparently she’s read her file – but Anvil provides thorough data on the ship’s condition and damage sustained, which impresses. The Churchill clears Fenris and escorts her in.

On Rustbucket meanwhile things are not going so well. Dev doesn’t like the tiger one bit and is worried about it escaping. And two months on Lyca hasn’t eased the tension with Orcha one bit. She presses Orcha on his decision to kill Reverend Klune rather than let him escape and recapture him elsewhere. Orcha says something about Orcha-17 getting him. “So its more important that you beat your brother.. sibling… whatever you are, than not kill someone?” After equivocating, Orcha admits that yes, it is. Which is when they discover that the tiger is no longer in its cage.

Dev barricades herself on the bridge with a stunstick while Orcha goes to his cabin to collect some gear. After armoring up, he checks the ship’s internal surveillance footage, and tracks Grendel to the port airlock. Remotely triggering the doors, he fails to catch it in the airlock but manages to trap it in the cargo bay. Returning to the bridge, he tries to work out how to get the live, hungry tiger back into the cage. They hit on the bright idea of lowering the oxygen content of the atmosphere in the cargo hold and waiting for the beast to pass out. It seems to work – the tiger apparently goes to sleep – but when Orcha goes in with a respirator and stunstick to move it, it turns out to be merely groggy. A swipe of a claw breaks a leg and knocks him down, then the tiger is on top of him, biting at his helmet and trying to crush his skull while he stabs at it repeatedly with the stunstick until it falls unconscious.

It gets worse. Orcha’s crude first aid isn’t very effective, and Dev refuses to enter the cargo bay to help move the tiger, even when its unconscious, so Orcha has to do it alone. In the process he makes his leg even worse; he’ll require real surgery now, in a proper hospital. But at least the tiger is back in its cage and he can pass out.

At fleet headquarters, Fleet Captain Rutland chews Kestrel out over the diplomatic incident they’ve caused. They were meant to be subtle, dammit, but she has two unexpected guests and three dead Nerian fighter pilots to explain. Kestrel convinces her that it was the pre-operation intelligence at fault; they weren’t warned of interceptor reaction times, let alone Brigette’s likely movements. And so Kestrel gets paid, while some nameless intelligence analyst gets unjustly reprimanded, and swears vengeance for it…

#RustbucketTales #Part5

Fifth session. This continued straight on from the previous session, which had left Orcha in the middle of things while the others were ready to leave. It turned out… messily. But now things are wrapped up on Asherah, and no-one is particularly invested in what happens on Nakhon, so its time for another Jump Point.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Dev tells Kestrel that she was an indentured servant and wants to go “anywhere far away”.

…Orcha-37 receives a tipoff from Orcha-17 that someone he is hunting is on Asherah (a file pops up on the screen, identifying him as the Reverend Klune, wanted for inciting a mutiny by Ironclad)

…Kestrel docks at Asherah, under the shadow of a garishly coloured, heavily armed Shards of Xa destroyer.

…Orcha and Kestrel back nervously out of a dockside bar, as a trio of Xa pirates threaten to cut them up if they ever see them again.

…Kestrel and Orcha listen as Europa the belter tells them “we’re not owned by anyone here”.

…Anvil is told by a pair of ALF thugs “no-one works on our docks without us getting a cut”. He agrees to boost some parts from the ship he is working on as payment.

…Kestrel negotiates with the Cargo Handlers Guild, gaining special handling for the solar panels and a discount for breakages. They shake on it.

…The ALF tell Orcha that if he can get his “package” to a particular dockside warehouse, they can get it on board for him.

…Reverend Klune goes to open a hab door, then stiffens as Orcha sticks a stunner against his back.

…Orcha and Klune turn a corner and walk right into a pair of police. Klune cries that he’s being kidnapped, the police draw, Orcha drops a stun grenade, and in the confusion Klune runs off down the corridor…

Orcha-37 headed for the medbay when he dragged himself on board, and got Anvil to dose him up with stims to counteract the police stunners, then disappeared into one of the ship’s hidden compartments in case the police came calling. A few hours later, he drags himself out, still a bit numb from the second shot, and considers his next move. His target – Reverend Klune, going by the name of “Lee Oret”, is probably trying to get off station. He heads for the bridge to try and track down his prey. He hacks into the station surveillance net and scans quickly through the footage surrounding his fight with the police. He tracks Klune as he makes his escape, then follows him as he makes his way to a pre-prepared bolt hole, and then to the docks at the other end of the axis. Catching up to realtime, he finds Klune in a bar talking with a spacer; the surveillance system tags her as Captain Reid of the “Northwest Passage”, a tramp trader currently parked in docking bay 37 and registered to depart in three hours. Grabbing a few things from his kit, he ducks out of the ship and heads into the station.

Kestrel gets back from the dockside bar where she’s been recruiting passengers, and has just started settling down to preflight when she gets buzzed from the docking bay. The station police are here. She goes out to talk to them, and discovers that they want permission to board “Rustbucket” to extract computer logs relating to an illegal accessing of the station’s systems. She can cooperate, or they’ll have a warrant here in half an hour. Kestrel decides to stall for time, asks for details, and says she’ll see what she can find. She heads back up the ramp to find out what the hell is going on. Cornering Anvil and Dev, she asks what they know about Orcha’s current target. Dev spills the beans about “Oret”/Klune and her trip to the Housing Office to find his details. Kestrel quickly concocts a story about Oret booking passage, backing it up with a false passenger registration; according to her (carefully edited) log data he used the ship’s systems for the hack, then left the ship. The police buy it completely and head off. Worried that Orcha’s comms may be monitored and that a specific warning may be intercepted, she issues a 3-hour departure warning, which he should get automatically.

Meanwhile, Orcha has been busy. The police dockside are obviously looking for someone, probably him. So he steals a belter’s coat, changes his posture, and disappears into the crowd, just one of the people shambling from bar to bar. Making his way to docking bay 37, he scopes it out, looking for cover and exit routes. He finds a suitable spot in a stack of empty shipping containers, and starts unpacking his sniper rifle. “Northwest Passage” is still going through preflight, with a handful of crew overseeing the loading of final cargo, checking out external sensors, and kicking the landing legs for good luck. And then, with an hour to liftoff, Oret appears and heads for the ship. Orcha lines him up in the scope and pops his head like a melon, capturing the entire thing on his scope’s data recorder so he can verify the bounty. Unfortunately, one of “Northwest Passage”‘s crew happened to be looking the wrong way at the wrong time and spots him. Chaos erupts as some of the crew draw pistols and try and give chase, while others try to assist the (very very dead) Klune, but Orcha makes a noisy escape under the cover of his stun grenades. And after that, its just a matter of sneaking his way to the ALF’s warehouse. Where they charge him triple for pissing off the cops and for making the hit on their dock.

Back at the ship, the others see the news of the killing on the SectorNet. It’s messy and high-profile, and there’s even a fuzzy picture of Orcha making his escape, captured by one of the docking-bay security cameras. Kestrel decides not to wait – they’ll depart on schedule, and if Orcha isn’t on board by then, they’ll look at sending the “Shadow” back to collect him. Dev is outraged, and wants to know if Kestrel would abandon her like that. But Kestrel is adamant. Anvil heads down to the cargo bay to take a last-minute cargo delivery (for Orcha, apparently), then “Rustbucket” undocks, slowly makes its way past the looming “Xa’s Torment”, and sets a course for the jump point.

Half an hour later, when Orcha calls up to be let out of his package, Dev is pissed. “You promised me you wouldn’t kill him”, she cries, then storms out. Orcha just shrugs, then files his footage to collect Klune’s bounty.

#PlanetBoundSalvage #KapCon

Over the weekend I ran Uncharted Worlds at KapCon, New Zealand’s top tabletop rpg convention. I used the “planet-bound salvage” jumppoint from the book, as it seems to produce reliable fun. The characters were chosen from the public pre-generated archetypes, plus the options of Bounty-Hunter (brutal clandestine military) and Smuggler (not used). Here’s how it went.

The group consisted of Barton, a fighter jock (pilot) working for the Shards of Xa; Xil, a Bounty Hunter on retainer to the Shards (1 debt) and with a bad history with the Epoch Trust (2 debt); “Rat”, a Melange-addicted Drifter with a price on their head by Ironclad (3 debt); and Claudia, an analyst who had fled the Epoch Trust (2 debt) with the assistance of Nakamoto Horizons (1 debt). They generated their ship – “Shrike”, a stealthy, stately ship with a few hidden compartments and a medbay – and decided that as Barton seemed to be the richest, he owned it and the others were crew / business partners. It later emerged that Nakamoto was their employer on this run, Claudia having brokered the job.

In the initial setup they decided that the crashed ship had belonged to the Epoch Trust, who were also trying to defend it form them. Epoch had evaded Barton’s airborne overwatch due to the tough terrain and use of stealth tech. He was just lining up on their troop transports for a strafing run when he was jumped by a pair of stealth fighters. His ship crippled, he was forced to flee and make his way to the (landed) Shrike.

In the ship, the fight went badly. Xil fled from the oncoming Epoch marines, ducking into the air vents and going stealthy. Claudia cracked the vault open with the aid of a charge from her shock cables while Rat tried to hold off the Epoch marines, but there were too many and they found themselves cornered in the vault. An attempt to blast their way out with an experimental Epoch Trust rapid-fire plasma cannon was unsuccessful – the marines stormed the vault, injuring them both in the process, and they were forced to surrender. Xil’s attempt to rescue them went badly as well, resulting in more injuries and Claudia receiving a crippling shot to the leg. Some botched battlefield first aid by Rat confirmed the worst: Claudia was going to lose the leg.

Back at the Shrike, Barton powered up and headed for the wreck. With Epoch fighters on his tail, he executed a daring pickup, using the ship to shield the others from their strafing run, then powered for orbit. Where things promptly got worse in the form of an Epoch Trust frigate. While they shot down its boarding shuttles, they were forced to flee and hide in the stormy atmosphere of SR-388’s moon, where they went dark and waited for a chance to escape.

Meanwhile, Claudia had finally opened the package, discovering that it was a sample (well, two samples) of superheavy superfissionables, elements from the far end of the periodic table, well beyond the island of stability. Enough to blow up a good-sized planet. This was not what she’d been told she was after, and a debate immediately ensued about what to do with them: continue on with the delivery, or try and find a new buyer. Barton suggested the Shards of Xa, Rat just wanted whoever would give them the most money, while Claudia pushed for fulfilling the original contract. It was interesting seeing the way people’s debts helped drive this debate. Eventually, they decided to go ahead with the planned delivery on the hub-station of Yabos. After a nerve wracking flight through the moon’s atmosphere, they were able to make a stealth run for the jump point. On the way out, they were able to eavesdrop on some Epoch communications – learning the unwelcome news that Epoch had their ship’s ID codes, and had squirted the data out via a (hugely expensive) jump buoy. Even if they escaped the system, Epoch forces would pick them up where-ever they went.

Tensions rose on the trip to Yabos, with Barton locking Rat out of the medbay to prevent her from pillaging its supply of pharmaceuticals and Claudia blaming her for the loss of her leg. The debate over what to do with the cargo reopened as well, but they pressed on. At Yabos, they exited the jump point in stealth mode and on a wide orbit; while they weren’t detected, listening in discovered even worse news: the Epoch Trust had reported their ship as a pirate and put a price on Barton’s head. If they tried to dock, they’d be shot out of space. If by some miracle they made it on board, Barton would be arrested or killed the moment anyone recognised him. But after analysing broadcast traffic data with Xil, Claudia was able to hack the SectorNet and change the transponder codes in the Epoch warning notice. It wouldn’t help Barton, but it would at least let them dock.

The rest was easy: disguise Barton, go to the meet – which turned out to be with Claudia’s ex, a Nakamoto executive in the acquisitions division. Things were tense, and not assisted by some of the crew wanting more money for transporting such a dangerous cargo. But their contact made it clear that they could take what was on offer, or Nakamoto could tell everyone where they were and let the bounty hunters kill them. Face with that threat, the crew backed down, took the money and ran off for their next exciting adventure. Which probably revolves around Claudia having to get a new leg while dealing with her brand-new drug habit.

#RustbucketTales #Part4

Fourth session. I abandoned my plans to open with a new Jump Point, since I really wanted to find out what happened to the Cadmium. So, another new system opening, with a few basic questions designed to establish threats. The opening was a bit slow as I struggled to turn the mundanity of “we hit the bar” into action. But it took off quite nicely after that.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…the “Shadow” dodges between laser blasts as Orcha-37 tumbles through the rear cargo door with his jetpack.

…Kestrel promises Alvin Hassani a share of a cargo – high fluid vegetables, real coffee. Hassani says “if you cross me this time, it will hurt you”.

…Dev tells Kestrel that she was an indentured servant and wants to go “anywhere far away”.

…Anvil says to his friend “the problem is the declaration of whether or not you’re human”.

…Kestrel’s attempts to sell his cargo are frustrated by a strike.

…Anvil is hit with a hand-stunner by a Nakamoto agent and goes down like a sack of potatoes.

…Orcha shoots two Nakamoto agents with a silenced pistol; a third runs for cover and escapes.

…The Rustbucket soars into orbit from Ghazan.

Asherah is a thick belt of rock and ice orbiting close to a dim red star. A few decades ago they discovered unusual concentrations of radioactives and rare earths, and so now Asherah is the site of a colonisation effort, with a small but determined group of colonists trying to bootstrap themselves into an orbital industrial economy. “Port”, the major settlement, is built into a small rock, spun for gravity. Nearby, there’s the glistening array of the system’s new solar power project – and a garishly coloured, heavily armed Shards of Xa destroyer. As “Rustbucket” negotiates docking clearance and noses towards the port facilities at the axis, the SectorNet is full of nervous talk about the Shards of Xa wanting “tribute” from the new colony…

On the way out of Ghazan, Orcha-37 received a tipoff from Orcha-17, one of his clone-brothers who was just arriving. The Reverend Klune of Green Worlds is probably in the Asherah system. Ironclad has a price on their head for inciting a mutiny, and wants them – preferably alive, so they can hold a show-trial.

After they clear customs, Kestrel heads immediately for a dockside bar, in search of faces other than the four she’s been cooped up with for the last few weeks. Orcha and Dev the deckhand tag along. Its a rough-and-tumble place, full of belters, port-workers, and scarred, armoured pirates on “shore leave”. Orcha starts asking questions about whether there’s any Greenworlders on Port, and a couple of people remember someone. But his clumsy attempt to bribe a customs officer causes offence, and he barely manages to talk his way out of the police being called. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long for the pirates to cause trouble. A scruffy belter spills someone’s drink, and he’s quickly up against a wall with a knife to his throat. Kestrel decides to intervene and tries to talk the pirates down, but merely makes herself their target. When the pirates turn on her, she dodges out of the way, but it doesn’t come to blows – Orcha has his own knife out and is backing her up. Together, they back nervously out of the bar, as the pirates threaten to cut them up if they ever see them again.

Outside they meet up with Dev and the belter Kestrel rescued. He offers to buy them a drink, and they head up a few levels to somewhere away from the docks. The belter, Europa, fills them in a bit on the local economy and the landscape (the racks, where belters and itinerants spend their time dockside, and Brook Park, which has trees and flowing water – admission 5 credits). They spend the rest of the evening getting happily drunk.

Meanwhile Anvil has been looking for work. He wants to upgrade the ship’s engines, and is looking to barter his engineering skills for some parts which will help. After scanning the SectorNet, he gets a job working on the Kublai, a class-1 refinery ship, repairing its misaligned drive in exchange for a five tonne Necklin Rod. But when he gets in from his first EVA scoping out the task, there’s an unwelcome surprise: a pair of goons from the ALF, the mafia which runs the port. They dabble in slavery, and view synthetics like Anvil as risk-free investments, able to be easily sold on worlds which don’t consider them human. But they haven’t pegged him as a synth yet, and he keeps his engineering suit faceplate closed to minimise the chances. The ALF have a simple rule: “no-one works on our docks without us getting a cut”. Anvil folds immediately, apologises, wants to make it right. So they offer him a choice: he can pay them 10% of the value of his job up front (which would wipe him out), or use his job on the Kublai to boost some parts for them. Anvil weighs the options, and agrees to scam his employer…

Last night Europa had told Orcha that the Housing Office has info on everyone in Port, but he suspects they’re unlikely to be friendly to a bounty hunter, so he asks Dev to make some inquiries. She agrees, but only after he promises he won’t kill his target. Ten minutes later, she emerges from the Housing Office with a scrap of paper with a name and address: the only Greenworlder on Port is a “Lee Oret”, with a single down in the Racks. Orcha heads off to a stakeout, and Dev heads back to the ship.

Meanwhile, Kestrel heads for a cargo brokerage to finally shift that Cadmium. She manages to move one unit, in exchange for some fragile solar panels, but demand is low at the moment. She takes the opportunity to fill the rest of the hold with rare earths and processed ores, and on the way out the broker warns her that she’ll need to pay off the “cargo handlers guild” (AKA the ALF) as well if she wants her cargo to make it into the hold intact. Sighing, she heads off to another dockside bar to negotiate a price. It eats up her profit from her passengers to Ghazan, but she negotiates special handling for the solar panels, and a discount for breakages. Leaving Dev in charge of the loading, she heads off to another bar to find some passengers for their next stop.

Anvil works on the Kublai, scavenging some of its hyper-capacitors to pay off the ALF. Next time they crank up the drive to push a rock, it’ll go “krunk”, and a ship full of people will be left in the middle of nowhere with no power. But Anvil will be in the next system by then. Sealing them into a crate for the ALF, he heads back to the ship to supervise delivery of his Necklin rod.

Orcha stakes out “Lee Oret”‘s space in the racks, and verifies that he is indeed Reverend Klune. When he gets back to the ship, he finds it a hive of activity, with cargo handlers sporting ALF tattoos loading containers into the hold. He asks Anvil about ways to get his bounty aboard without attracting attention, and Anvil points him at the ALF. Sure, they can help him move a human sized “package”. Living or dead? Conscious or unconscious? Having made multiple positive business connections with a profit-motivated criminal organisation with a sideline in slavery pays off; it’ll cost Orcha 10% of his bounty, up front, but he can afford that (though it’ll hurt if he doesn’t get paid). All he has to do is get his target to a particular warehouse near the docks, and the ALF will handle the rest.

Orcha heads back to the racks for the pickup, and intercepts his target as he is coming home at shift-break. Klune’s shoulders sag as Orcha sticks the stunner against his back and declares that he’s collecting the bounty – it was only a matter of time before he got caught. Still, he tries to talk Orcha out of it as he walks him down quiet corridors in the direction of the docks. They’re most of the way there when they turn a corner and almost walk into a pair of police; Klune, seeing his chance, cries out that he’s being kidnapped, and it all goes to shit. Orcha tries to disable the cops quickly with a stun grenade, but gets tagged with a stun pistol; Klune runs for it as the cops call for backup. Orcha gets stunned again breaking contact, but manages to stagger away and hide. He’s lost Klune in the confusion, and the place is swarming with cops looking for a piece of the scumbag who took a go at them. Cursing, he sneaks his way back to the ship…

#TheSurveyCrew

Kicked off a new game of Uncharted Worlds last night with one of my local groups, and we had an absolute blast! We gathered at 7, but didn’t get to kick off and play until something like 10 — it turns out that character creation, faction creation, and ship creation can take some time. If I were to do this over again, I might come to the game having chosen what type of campaign we’d be playing, with factions of my own creation for players to slot their characters into. The results would likely be just as good, but I was very excited to see what kind of setting we all came up with together, so I don’t mind the time-sink.

This is lengthy, but it goes into the whole shebang of things. This detail is mostly for Sean Gomes, but others might find it interesting!

I have five players, and after some chatting about what space opera is like — what it looks like or means to us — we dove into talking about campaign types; it was very easy to settle on a standard Starship Campaign. Before going into characters, the players talked about some options for what exactly they do with their starship, and thought that a Survey Ship would be an interesting focus: characters on the fringe of space, finding and charting planets, asteroids, stars, and trying to evade trouble all along the way. We very quickly — via some asides about the state of politics in the U.S. — latched onto the idea of blue collar space opera; that a survey ship is not a glamorous career move, that being a surveyor isn’t a job you choose so much as it is a job you take to survive, and that the people who take these jobs don’t have other options or need to be far away from civilization.

Very 99%, and very very exciting to me since I’ve been watching The Expanse and I was filled with images of the Belters and the work being done aboard the Cantebury. In a lot of ways, as we talked, it sounded like our game was developing into this rentpunk space opera, but we’ll see how that develops over multiple sessions. Regardless, just from hearing what they were interested in, I’ve got ideas for what kind of buttons to press and what situations to explore.

Character-wise, we wound up with:

> ELLA STIKO the Wunderkind (Productive Academic Industrial)

> HESTER the Lapsed Soldier (Regimented Militant Explorer)

> VAX SU the System Op (Productive Academic Technocrat)

> QATALLA YARHAM the Killer-for-Hire (Impoverished Clandestine Military)

> JAX BANNON the Wanderer (Brutal Starfaring Scoundrel)

So these five, for whatever reasons, have congregated on this survey ship and now work together jumping around beyond the borders of civilization, looking for anything people would pay money to see or own. We dug into Factions next, thinking more about what kind of galaxy this strange band must hail from. In the end, we continued to focus on our blue collar, capitalism-gone-too-far aesthetic that we seemed to have stumbled into. We cooked up three Factions, and then started asking ourselves whether our fourth Faction should represent some kind of stellar navy or governmental power — and then suddenly were struck with a very different idea.

The idea that there is no official stellar state regulating the vast depths between worlds; that the “law of the land” is a matter of whose backyard you’ve stumbled into; that our first three Factions were companies and other private interests, and that our last Faction should conceptually oppose that.

So, our Factions include:

> The Surveyors Guild, the powerhouse responsible for discovering, mapping, and appraising stellar objects (and probably Jump Lanes, honestly). Their Might comes from their maps, their secrets, and their necessity as the ones willing to risk life and limb on damn fool discoveries. Their Reach includes the travel beacons used throughout space, their frontier stardocks, and Surveyors Lounges on every world.

> The Alchemist Combine, a corporation that specializes in one product: labor, willing and otherwise. They bill themselves as helpers of the desperate and downtrodden, finding them work that they may desperately need if they’re just willing to go offworld; in reality, they sell human labor off into slavery and indentured servitude to all buyers. Their Might comes from the ludicrous wealth they have accumulated, their political connections, the size of their fleet, and the demand for their “services.” Their Reach includes camps, recruitment offices, and corporate HQs. Their Structure is typical corporate style with a CEO and board. Their Ideology is “A Person is a Product That Hasn’t Been Sold Yet.”

> The Juniper Networks are a technologist group — a cabal? a company? a think tank? So far, we don’t know much about JN, except that they are committed to technology and discovery, and they have the best toys around.

> Shards of Xa are a loosely connected network of pirates and isolationist cells who refuse to recognize the authority of the interstellar corporations. Their Might comes from sheer numbers, their presence throughout known space, public opinion romanticizing them, and secrecy concerning their movements, identities, and sympathizers. Their Reach exists in the form of pirate bases, unregistered freighters, and black markets. Their Structure is made up of Captains commanding “ghost fleets” of unregistered ships, and off-the-map “free states.” Their Ideology is “No One Can Own Space, No More Than They Can Own The Breath In Our Lungs.”

With Factions finally out of the way, I passed out a stack of starship flashcards that I printed out. Each player settled on a couple favorites, and then of those 10 we finally narrowed it down to one in particular that represents their Class-2 Survey ship! They picked Workshops and assigned those:

>The Helm holds Vax’s Communications Workspace and Hester’s Survey Workspace; The Helm also provides firing control for the ship’s Point Defense Turret

>The Quarters hold Ella’s Medical Workspace, and Jax’s Sleazy smoking room

>The Cargo Bay holds Qatalla’s Stealthy bolthole.

Finally, with all of that settled, we took a small pizza break, and then ripped into the Planet-side Salvage jump point from the Uncharted Worlds rulebook.

—

We joined our survey team aboard a Juniper Networks starship that suffered a crash-landing long ago on the unexplored world SR-388 — a world made up of interlacing bands of primordial rain forests and blasted desert wastelands; where the ancient, towering flora are so hungry and greedy that they destroy the land around them to survive. Hester was up in the helm area when suddenly laser fire poured out of the jungle in front of her; she snapped into cover and saw a three shards taking up firing position some distance away, while three others broke off to try and circle around, likely to cut their way onto the bridge if possible. Hester opened fire from her position, suppressing the breach team and held the helm.

Meanwhile, Ella and Vax considered the Juniper Networks vault door in the cargo bay. Huge, sealed, and no power to disengage the locks. Jax Bannon joined in the conversation with a simple solution: explosives. Vax did a quick scan of the area though and realized that an improperly placed explosive would bring the hold down on them, and while they argued about using explosive, Ella made her way back to engineering to bring power back online.

The jump drive was an absolute wreck, with exposed cabling and the interior mechanism on-display. Rather than reinitialize a, you know, damaged reality-warping engine, Ella found some juice left inside the ship’s batteries and brought those online just fine. The symbol on the vault door suddenly flickered and then glowed with life as the cracked and broken control panel beside it lit back up.

Vax jacked into the console and accessed the locking mechanism; the vault door slid open, revealing the six meter long, one meter tall rust-red crate striped with yellow warning bars. At the same time, though, a security alert blipped up on the console… Vax saw this warning. Bannon didn’t need to see it, though, because he saw the two floor panels flanking the vault rise up into columns that suddenly twisted and rotated around like a fractal rubix cube to construct a lightning canon on-the-fly! Bannon grabbed Vax’s collar to try and get him out of the way but took a lightning blast to the back that dropped him; Vax, having seen the warning, fired up the jump boots he wore, but was weighed down by Bannon’s spasming body still clutching his jacket. Vax ditched the jacket — and Bannon — on the cargo bay floor to reach the safety of the catwalks overhead.

Meanwhile outside, Qatalla monitored the perimeter of the ship from a rocky dune, some distance from the crew’s own shuttle. From her perch, Qatalla could see the Shards staging an attack on the helm — and was in the perfect position to see a grav-skiff with two more pirates come zooming out of the jungles at the nose of the ship and bank its way around the neighboring sand dunes. Unnoticed, Qatalla used the hook and line from her infiltrator’s kit to disappear from her perch and appear on the grav-skiff between the pirates! Chaos ensued as she tried to plant her laser knife in the neck of the driver, only for him to panic and jerk the skiff off-course — the laser-knife dug into his back and he yelled out as the wound burned! Qatalla didn’t have a chance to finish the job, though, as the passenger on the skiff pulled out his own knife and sliced across her side!

Qatalla takes a moment to think that it’s suspicious that these pirates were already on this planet, seemingly watching this ship.

Back inside the ship, Hester held the Shards at bay with continued suppressing fire — igniting the jungle around them — before suggesting they go the hell away. Clever pirates, they took her advice and retreated into the jungle. Having seen the skiff herself through the bridge portholes, she dashed back through the ship to find the crew’s entry point — a giant gouge through the cargo bay — and stumbled on the fractal lightning guns! One lanced off a shot at her, and she deftly dodged into cover without a care in the world.

Vax, meanwhile, now had a connection to the system and used it to shift from the vault controls into the security system, and succeeded! However he was only able to shut down one of the cannons, and picked the one preparing to roast Bannon’s recovering form — and worse still, this unregistered access to the system caused the reactive security system to pingback his location!

The remaining cannon, targeting Hester, pulled another rubix-fractal bit and morphed itself 360 degrees to instead fire on Vax’s hiding place in the catwalk! He threw himself out of the way as Bannon, having recovered, pulled his pistol and shot the cannon to throw off its aim! No dice! The reactive security constructed a deflector shield out of its own components and ricocheted Bannon’s bullet off somewhere into the hull, all while its lightning-bolt electrified the railing of catwalk holding Vax — jumping from there to his cybernetic braincase and corrupting his optics!

Ella, hearing all of this chaos going on, got into the computer system and looked at the ship’s power schematics and used her own brilliance to assess what was what. She hesitated to simply kill the power, because the crate was still inside, and she was right: the vault door can be deactivated when power is being supplied, but if power is cut then the door is designed to reseal with powerful magnetic bolts. However, there will be a few seconds to enter the vault and the schematics suggested that an emergency route existed out of the vault, allowing it to be used as a panic room in certain scenarios. She forwarded all this info to the crew and then shut down the batteries!

Back outside, Qatalla wrestled with the knife-wielder riding behind her while the driver did his best to shake her loose from the skiff! The knife-wielder went to stab her in the throat — but had already had her laser-knife plunged into his chest, as he toppled helplessly off the back of the skiff and was dragged along the rocks and sand by his security harness. As Qatalla prepared to turn her knife on the driver again, the skiff suddenly jumped a sand dune, sailing through the air before nose-planting into the sand with a sickening crumple! The passengers are thrown clear, and roll across the sands in a heap! While recovering, Qatalla has enough time to process the Shards of Xa shuttle settling down beside their own, disgorging additional pirates onto SR-388’s surface.

In the cargo bay, Hester takes off in a sprint to reach the vault! The remaining fractal cannon gets off one final shot before it loses power completely, and Hester easily evades it like some kind of space-valkyrie or something, scooping up Bannon by the hand as she goes! Vax watches from the catwalk as Hester and Bannon enter the vault and get their hands on the cargo as the doors nearly grind shut and seal them in. But Vax is a clever guy with a bright idea! He draws and throws one of his shock knives at the vault, and managed to sink it into the tracks of the door! It discharges, and the vault doors gradually open — just slightly — as the door drains the power cell of the knife!

Bannon and Hester take this opportunity to drag the cargo out into the open, just as the vault doors conclude slamming shut with a thunderous CLANG. A job well done, right? Well, celebrations are cut short when they realize they’re now surrounded by seven Shard pirates — must have come out of the jungle and crawled in through the opening in the cargo hold’s hull during the chaos of dragging the cargo loose. They’re arranged in a semi circle around the two of them — but one of them steps forward and puts their gun to Bannon’s head, taking him hostage!

And that was where we left off, an excellent cliff-hanger for our next session next Saturday!

Third session of play.

Here the account of the two section.

Jor and Haroon, my two players, find a military Imperial base on a Planet.

Here defended by some robots, there are datas about some kind of military experiment.

While fighting one Jor contracts a nanovirus that can potentially cure him, but slowly killing him.

Defeated the robots, the characters found that a shio has sailed to a principality outside the empire bordes(Despotate of Myta), inhabited by reptilians

They reach the despotate and start investigating.

They found that the ship is vanished.

Using diplomacy and some laser Haroon gains access to the all-powerful minister of the fleet.

Ssavk, a sort of mafioso collecting money from black market and piracy.

They contracts with him a deal: he gave them the information they want, if they kill the persons of the ship.

So he tell them that the ship is hiding, along with others, in the ancient mines of Xenio on the fourth moon of Myta.

In the next section the players shall goes there.

#RustbucketTales #Part3

Third session. I’d structured questions to try and create new baggage (around the girl they picked up last session, unwelcome arrivals, and old friends with problems they needed help solving), but most of the responses weren’t used. Instead, the characters went haring off after the unwelcome information gleaned from a failed assessment, before some old baggage came back to haunt them (and gave one of them Debt). But we’re also at a point where we can drop out of continuous play if we wish and open with a new Jump Point next episode.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Anvil finishes cutting an armoured vault door open, then looks down at a significant (and bulky) looking cargo crate.

…Orcha-37 scans the package with a handheld X-ray scanner, turning it to full power at the precise alignment specified by his HUD to scramble the AI core’s short-term memory.

…Kestrel and Orcha-37 wait nervously in the dark on the bridge of the “Rustbucket” as a pirate cruiser passes nearby.

…Kestrel offers a young woman passage on the Rustbucket; she is obviously nervous

…Orcha tells his contact, Ito Hiroshi, that there is a Nakamoto agent on his tail.

…Kestrel promises Alvin Hassani a share of a cargo – high fluid vegetables, real coffee. Hassani says “if you cross me this time, it will hurt you”.

…Anvil gets into an argument with Wray the backpacker and confines him to quarters.

…Orcha steps out of the shadows behind Hiroshi, slits his throat with a kitchen knife, then places the knife beside him as he gurgles and bleeds out.

Rustbucket touches down on a landing pad on Ghazan. In the background, huge factories pump plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. The air here tastes of sulphur and pollution; everyone wears masks when outdoors.

During the trip the girl, Dev Nekor, had revealed to Kestrel that she was an indentured servant fleeing her contract with Nakamoto Horizons. She wants to go “anywhere far away”, and is willing to work her passage to get there. Since the crew needs a deckhand, they hire her on and give her a comm so she won’t be left behind. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew get to their business: Kestrel and Orcha to try and sell their cargo of Cadmium, and Anvil to look up an old friend.

Anvil’s friend, Daran, needs help: he’s applying for citizenship here, but expects to have some problems with the species declaration. Like Anvil, he’s a synthetic person, made as part of a bulk lot by the Epoch Trust to work on the fringe worlds (in this case, an asteroid belt surrounding a high-G world). Anvil speculates on getting stuff taken out, or replaced with models which can pas a scan. But Daran has a better idea: false documentation. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the contacts to do it – but Anvil does. Anvil gets to work, and makes a connection with someone who can provide the necessary paperwork. He makes the deal and arranges to come back tomorrow to pick everything up.

The cadmium sale is a bust: a strike has paralysed the major buyer, while those bulk cargo haulers have flooded the market. Undeterred, Kestrel and Orcha decide to do some sniffing round in the hope of finding some way to end the strike, or at least leverage for a sale. They split the task, with Kestrel focusing on the union side, while Orcha looks into the company.

Kestrel hits the bars and starts talking to people. The strike is over shift hours, safety, wages – the usual story. Its in its early days, but the workers are committed; it could go on for some time. Still, she identifies the union leadership, and has the outline of a plan on how to sell their cargo. Unfortunately, Orcha screws everything up for her. While assessing the company and its position, Orcha notices his comm has been hacked. A little counter-hacking later, and he’s poking around the inside of a Nakamoto comm system, which includes some details on him, a dossier on Dr Hiroshi, and the case-file for the murder, which identifies Orcha as a person of interest. It appears Nakamoto security have figured out that Hiroshi was killed to silence him, and have pegged Orcha as the likely assassin. They have a team of at least two people here tailing him. But Orcha has penetrated their systems and can follow them as they watch him. He can turn the tails on them.

Orcha heads back to the ship to arm up, and runs into Anvil. After an initial failed attempt to use him as bait by switching their comm signals (resulting in him bricking Anvil’s comm), he instead decides that he will be bait. They go to a bar, then Anvil leaves early so Orcha can lure one of the two-person tail team into an ambush.

Naturally it all goes wrong. Anvil is all set up for the ambush, when a third agent – one they didn’t know about – tries to loop a garotte round his neck. He manages to shake them off, and then the one he was waiting to ambush steps round the corner and hits him with a hand-stunner. He crumples immediately. The Nakamoto agents disarm him and are just working out what to do with him when Orcha appears at the other end of the alley. He drops the one with the garotte immediately with a silenced pistol shot, dodges the return fire (also silenced) from the team leader, before shooting her as well. The third agent dashes away. Picking up the weapons and one of their comms, he drags Anvil to the other end of the alley, then hails a taxi to help him and his “drunk” friend get back to the ship.

And then its time to leave town: two bodies and a likely response from Nakamoto means its no longer safe to remain, whether they’ve sold their cargo or not. Orcha gets on the comm to summon Kestrel and Dev back, while Anvil gets departure clearance and calls to tell Daran where to pick up his documents. As they break orbit, Kestrel checks the sector net to try and find somewhere where they might finally be able to move their cargo, and finds that the market is good on Asherah. They lay in a course and head for the jump-point…

Yesterday we start a little campaign.

I have two players.

Yesterday we make the world building session.

We built a nice galaxy in which human race is having the Roman empire role.

The empire is governed by military (like French empire), but the Military class is tied together like Venice.

Travelling between stars is done with solar wind motors, called sails, so moving in stars filled space is more easy and quick than where stars are rarer.

One of the character is a navy man with a command of a ship, the other is a scientist with a remarkable IA.

More to follow in next weeks.

#RustbucketTales #Part2

Ran the second session, dealing with cleanup form “Planetary Salvage”. This one went rather differently. The lack of a strong opening scene led to a lack of focus, while I never really pushed hard enough to make their problems that big. OTOH, what we did get was character; Anvil doesn’t like people, Kestrel solves problems by talking her way out of them, Orcha by murdering people. And its created some baggage which can come back to haunt them in future sessions.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…A Shards of Xa shuttle strafes the bridge of a wrecked starship; Orcha-37 flings himself away from the blast.

…Anvil finishes cutting an armoured vault door open, then looks down at a significant (and bulky) looking cargo crate.

…Orcha-37 flubs an ambush on a group of Xa pirates, catches a laser blast on the shoulder, and flees into the wreck.

…Anvil and Kestrel haul the crate across a hole blasted in the hull and into the hovering “Shadow”

…the “Shadow” dodges between laser blasts as Orcha-37 tumbles through the rear cargo door with his jetpack.

…Orcha-37 scans the package with a handheld X-ray scanner, turning it to full power at the precise alignment specified by his HUD to scramble the AI core’s short-term memory.

…Kestrel and Orcha-37 wait nervously in the dark on the bridge of the “Rustbucket” as a pirate cruiser passes nearby.

…the “Rustbucket” coasts through space, then engages its jump drive and disappears.

Several weeks later. While the Rustbucket escaped SR-388 without being identified by the Xa (they think), the ship has taken a back-route through the jump network in an effort to keep a low profile. Now it has arrived at its rendevous point: New Perth City on Eanope – an airless world famous for its cadmium red colour, toxic soil, and water rationing. The planetary economy revolves around extracting and exporting cadmium, and the operation is run (through a subsidiary) by Nakamoto Horizons.

Kestrel has past history here. A few years back he beat a local mine supervisor, Alvin Hassani, at cards, at least according to “the wider rules of gambling” (one of which is apparently “its not cheating if they’re too drunk to notice”). He won a consignment of ore that was supposed to go somewhere else, causing Hassani some difficulty. Orcha-37 meanwhile has to make contact with Ito Hiroshi, their Epoch Trust employer, and deliver the salvaged (and covertly lobotomised) AI core. But he works undercover as a science commission leader in the mining company, and can’t afford to have his cover blown. So the crew have reasons to tread carefully.

And they do – mostly. They split up, do their housekeeping (Anvil arranging spare parts and making more permanent repairs to the Shadow, Kestrel arranging a cargo), and let Orcha get on with it. Unfortunately he draws himself to the attention of local police by applying for a weapons permit to bypass restrictive local weapons laws, which puts him on a watchlist and gets him a tail. He makes it to the appointed meeting place, a high end bar in an upper-class entertainment district, and sends the “I’m here” signal: a simple matter of ordering the right cocktail. Then having set things in motion, he ditches his tail in a shopping mall, buys some stims to keep him running, and settles in to watch the meeting place for the next 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Kestrel has been working the starport bars to find passangers. He finds four – a pair of miners at the end of their contracts, a young girl who is obviously in trouble, and a tourist / intersteller backpacker named Wray. He’s just taken payment from the latter when he’s flanked by a pair of large miners and Alvin Hassani sits down in his booth. Hassani wants his ore back, or the money to pay for it; Kestrel claims he won it fair and square. They go back and forth a bit and Kestrel starts spinning him a line about having a hot shipment of luxury foodstuffs – high-fluid vegetables, real coffee – coming in in ten days. He’ll cut Hassani in for 50 percent to smooth things over. Hassani buys it, but makes it clear: “if you cross me this time, it will hurt you”. And he sticks one of his goons, Rusty, on Kestrel to keep an eye on him. The moment Hassani has gone, Kestrel starts work on Rusty. And before you know it, they’re best of friends, and Kestrel has brought him off with a free passage to start a new, higher-paying career on Ghazan. The moment he’s got his cadmium and Orcha has finished his business, they’re out of there, and screw Alvin.

Orcha spots his contact, but also realises that Hiroshi has a tail: a professional, far better than the cops he lost yesterday. He slips inside the bar, establishes the delivery point (a warehouse near the starport, where the AI will be interrogated), and informs Hiroshi of the tail. They plan an ambush: Orcha will leave first, then Hiroshi will follow about 20 minutes later, taking a specific route which should allow his tail to be neutralised. But as Orcha leaves the bar, he gets spotted by the cops again; rather than draw attention to himself, he tries to talk his way out of trouble. The quick study of local law he did when arriving on-planet pays off, the detective calls his supervisor, and the potential arrest is turned into a formal “character interview” at the station in the morning. But in the process he’s missed his chance at ambushing Hiroshi’s tail, so instead he heads back to the ship to sort out the delivery.

Back at the ship, Wray the backpacker has turned up early. He’s curious, friendly, and just a little bit too observant about the Shadow being a stealth shuttle – which immediately gets on Anvil’s nerves. When Orcha turns up, Wray bugs him about his business. So naturally they recruit him as a temporary cargo handler to deliver their small, high-value package to its destination. That goes well enough, but when Orcha checks out Wray on the SectorNet, he learns that Wray writes about his travels, including the illicit adventures he gets up to (apparently helping someone sell forged artworks several worlds back). So, details of his mysterious secret op may get splashed around in six months. Oh dear.

In the morning, the cadmium cargo finally arrives – delayed due to having to wait behind higher priority bulk haulers, and only half the amount they wanted, but its something. Kestrel oversees loading while Orcha tries to convince the local cops that he’s just an honest bounty-hunter looking for work, and not up to no good. Once he’s done there, he decides he has some unfinished business, a security leak in the mission to clean up. So he tracks down Hiroshi’s address (a nice apartment in a high-class neighbourhood), breaks in unobserved, disables the surveillance the Nakamoto spies have put on it, and when Hiroshi returns, slits his throat. A very professional job, except that he gets seen by a bystander walking away from the apartment and pegged as a stranger. Which means that when the body gets found, and the locals get interviewed, he’ll get noticed, and possibly marked as a suspect. But by then Rustbucket will have lifted and he’ll be halfway to the jump point…

#RustbucketTales

Ran my first UW game last night using the “Planetary Salvage” Jump Point from the PDF. It worked pretty well at producing cool, space opera action.

The crew – Anvil (Wrecker), Kestrel (Smuggler), and Orcha-37 (Bounty Hunter) – had been hired by the Epoch Trust to recover the package from the crashed freighter. Naturally, they were attacked by the Shards of Xa (pirates seem to be the go-to opponents in this setup), who strafed the crashed ship’s bridge, forcing Orcha to flee. Anvil’s recovery of the package was quick, but noisy, attracting pirate attention, and Orcha’s attempt to ambush a group of them to buy Anvil some time was unsuccessful, resulting in a laser blast to the arm and another retreat. Then things started going well: Anvil created an emergency exit with a hullbuster, Kestrel brought up the crew’s stealth shuttle, and they got the cargo on board before hauling it out of there. Orcha kept a Xa shuttle on the ground with his sniper rifle, before making a crazy jetpack escape and rendezvous under fire. “Its almost like we’re a bunch of professionals who’ve done this before…”

On the way to their orbital rendezvous with their ship, the “Rustbucket”, Orcha scans the package with a handheld X-ray scanner. At this stage, he decides that its a sentient AI core – and that someone in the Epoch Trust has given him specific instructions to hit it with a blast of X-rays at just this angle to scramble its short-term memory stores (so, competing agendas within the employer; that’s going to be fun). They don’t want to be caught with that – AI cores are highly regulated, and transporting one disengaged like this is considered trafficking.

In orbit, they discover the Xa mothership is searching the area for them, but Kestrel manages to pre-align the docking manoeuvre perfectly so they don’t give themselves away. The AI core is quickly hidden in one of the “Rustbucket”‘s hidden compartments, while Kestrel and Anvil worry about the Xa ship. But Anvil blows the flux capacitor while optimising the ship’s stealth signature and BSOD’s the entire ship. It works, but fixing it consumes the last of their spares (which may come back to bite them later). When the Xa mothership disappears behind the limb of the planet, Kestrel fires up the drive and burns for the jump point in a carefully-timed burn, then shuts everything down and goes dark again before it re-emerges. And thus the Rustbucket and its stolen cargo makes its escape…

Pretty good all-up. Everyone got their moment of feeling like a badarse, and they left several interesting questions hanging for next week. It will be interesting to see what answers emerge.