#RustbucketTales #Session12 #SeasonFinale
Previously on Uncharted Worlds…
…The Shadow clips the prison transfer shuttle stabiliser, sending it immediately into a spin towards the city below…
…Orcha checks BountyNet and sees that he is wanted on Jagatika for murder, assault, and escaping from prison.
…The Shadow approaches Fallow Highport, passing the curved, deadly shape of the Scythe in its docking port…
…the Fallow traffic pattern flashes a system arrival notice for the Nerian “yacht” Tanngrisnir. Sai beeps an alert: it has queried for news of Rustbucket.
…the bridge on Fallow: a single span of stone in a perfect inverted catenary across a vast canyon. Anvil takes to it with a laser cutter and hacks out a sample. The stone starts slowly but visibly growing back.
…The Tanngrisnir blasts the Rustbucket with its energy cannon. The shields take most of the blast, but the engines catch some of it. On the bridge, damage alarms start flashing. The Rustbucket dodges further energy blasts, and puts a blocky Nakamoto interdiction boat between it and its attacker.
…Kestrel makes the Nakamoto captain an offer: a cargo of dustspice to look the other way, so she can collect on Orcha’s bounty herself, in another system. The captain agrees.
…Rustbucket burns for the jump point, with Tanngrisnir in pursuit.
Rustbucket is not a happy ship. Dev wishes Orcha had died in the desert. The side-effects of Lynard’s low-tech amputation have made him grumpy with everyone, and Anvil’s efforts to fit him with a makeshift prosthetic have put him in the firing line. Dr Westcott, from his cell, is carefully probing kestrel to see whether she would betray Orcha for him. Meanwhile, Anvil has stumbled across the modifications to the hand-scanner Orcha used and realised he was deleting information on the Greenworlds from the AI they retrieved from SR-388. With Sai, he has reached some interesting conclusions about why Orcha was doing that and what the Epoch Trust has been up to. Meanwhile, both Tanngrisnir and Scythe are actively hunting them, hoping to either collect on Orcha’s bounty, or use it as an excuse for revenge, respectively. Damaged, injured, pursued, Kestrel takes Rustbucket somewhere its pursuers won’t go…
Forsjon: the pirate world. A hollowed-out asteroid containing a warren of tunnels, guarded by a Xa dreadnought. Beyond the authorities, beyond the law, a place for pirates and outlaws to do business. Stolen cargoes, slaves, repairs, mercenary contracts, bioweapons, secrets – anything can be bought and sold here, for the right price.
Stepping onto the dock, Anvil and Orcha are surprised to find no customs staff to greet them. There’s just a sign, saying that they are under the Peace of Xa, and some graffiti: “an armed society is a polite society”. The dockside businesses all have armed guards, all muscle, shotguns and attitude. Pirate crews swagger from bar to bar, their gaudy fluorescent colours signifying their allegiance to one crew or another. At the end of the dock, someone is being noisily crucified before a crowd, a sign round their neck saying “murderer”. At this, Dev pales and offers to fix the slow leak in engineering. She doesn’t feel safe here, and doesn’t think Rustbucket is safe either. She collects an autoshotgun from the locker, and leaves the others to it.
Orcha has to buy Lynard a new leg, and Kestrel has some ideas about buying a clone body to collect Orcha’s bounty, so along with Phoebe and Lynard they head for the medical part of Forsjon’s endless bazaar. After some window shopping, they select a body-mod shop and look over the merchandise. Orcha thinks Lynard should get a heavy, mechanical prosthetic, pirate style, Lynard would prefer a real leg, or at least something that feels like real flesh. Pricing is pushing them towards something more basic, until Kestrel steps in with a counter-offer: fifty thousand for a fast-grown clone body and the leg. The shopkeeper says that they know someone and it’ll take time to set up, but he can do it; if they come back in an hour he can fit the leg and do the prep work on the clone. The group splits up as they leave, with Kestrel taking Phoebe and Lynard to a bar to move cargo. Orcha loiters in the bazaar, and manages to get out of the way when he sees Enrico Sodala, his Epoch handler, and Orcha-17, his clone brother, walking along the concourse. The two of them here together can only mean one thing: they’re here to shut down -37 and initiate a new Orcha model. They’ll have a ship, a medical team, and some muscle, and they’ve probably already noticed that Rustbucket has docked and be looking for him. Orcha keeps a low profile, then heads back to the ship. Once there, he warns Dev not to let in someone who looks like him…
Anvil meanwhile knows exactly what he wants: false registration papers for Sai. He talks to some local synths, who point him at an identity fixer, a weasel-faced woman covered in tattoos. She can get what he wants, but she needs a little job done: she wants his AI to steal a database from one of her competitors. Anvil agrees, and they shake on it. Anvil will need physical access to do the job – the database is on an isolated system – so rents a terminal in a nearby data-shop and sets to work doing research, keeping contact with Sai over the comm. He’s just scoped out the local corridor pattern and is looking for service ducts for an access point when a heavy hand claps down on his shoulder. He turns around to see the unwelcome face of J C Tucker, a Xa pirate he’s had dealings with in the past, surrounded by some of her crew. A long time back, Anvil sold Tucker some stolen cargo, but the deal went wrong and Tucker got the blame for it. She spent three years on a prison planet because he didn’t spot a tracking device, and now she wants those three years of her life back. Anvil pleads poverty – they’ve got no cargo, after all. “But you got here, right? That means you’ve got a ship. We’ll take that instead”. They pick him up, haul him outside, and start marching him towards the dock. “What’s your ship’s name again? Rustcan? Dustbin? Rustbucket?” Anvil improvises “We’re docked as the Scythe”. One of the pirates checks the docking list on their comm: “It’s not coming up on the search, are you lying to us? No, wait, there it is, in 17-A”. Sai has heard everything and has hacked the docking database and renamed the ship next door to theirs.
In the bar, Kestrel shakes hands with the merchant, and arranges for delivery. She’s turned her shrinking cargo of basic firearms and a pile of credits into some medical supplies and a hold full of low-grade consumer electronics. All obviously stolen, of course – but she knows some places where people won’t look too hard. She collects Phoebe and Lynard from their cubicle, where they’re nervously trying to keep out of trouble, and heads back to the body-mod shop to sort out that clone. When they get there, the shop-muscle follows them in, then stands in the doorway, blocking their exit. A man in a suit – Sodala – steps out of the back room, accompanied by someone who looks like Orcha with a flashy handgun. The man in the suit has a proposition: Orcha-37 is wanted for murder, assault, and escaping from prison. They want him. If Kestrel turns him over, they could provide, say, a cargo of high-grade bio-mods. When they see Kestrel’s suspicion – this is worth more than the bounty – the suit changes tack: or, they can let her companions live. When Kestrel hesitates, the Orcha shoots Phoebe in the head. Leaving the corpse on the floor, they start marching Kestrel at gunpoint towards the Rustbucket’s dock, leaving the shopguard to deal with the broken Lynard.
As J C’s gang is passing dock 17-B – now host to the “Acheron”, according to the display board – Anvil makes his move. He tries to break and run for it, but one of the pirates, a huge goon with a whirring cyberarm, grabs him. Anvil turns, spots the weak point in the arm, and disables it with a twist. He kicks the legs out from under a second pirate, then turns and runs for Rustbucket’s airlock. A few shots ricochet of the deck before he makes the safety of the lock door, palms it open, and dodges out of the way. The pirate chasing him is confronted with the business end of Dev’s autoshotgun, backed up by Orcha’s sniper rifle, both summoned by Sai over their comms. Faced with superior firepower, the pirates back away nervously…
The gunshots from ahead are exactly the distraction Kestrel needs. She twists, pulls her pistol – the Orcha foolishly didn’t search her – and shoots the Orcha in the shoulder, then disables the man in the suit with a shot to the leg. As they lie there on the deck, she calmly shoots each of them between the eyes, then rifles their pockets before heading for the Rustbucket. As she walks away, the locals, who had been waiting at a respectful distance until the business was done, descend to take whatever she left behind.
On the Rustbucket, Anvil is explaining the business with J C to Orcha and Dev when Kestrel walks in. She looks Orcha in the eye as she dumps a pair of comm-tablets, a collection of anonymous, high-security looking datachips, and Orcha-17’s custom pistol on the table. “Congratulations. Here’s your inheritance”. One of them aks if this means they need to prep for launch. “No, we need to go back and see if Lynard’s OK”. “And Phoebe,” asks Dev? “She’s not OK”.
Kestrel and Orcha retrieve Phoebe’s corpse and a sedated Lynard from the body-mod shop, as well as a pair of legs for Lynard (tossing a live grenade from hand to hand can be very persuasive). Orcha then drops the right information in the right place to ensure that the bounty on him is collected using Orcha-17’s body. With cargo loaded, Rustbucket heads for deep space to make a deposit. Phoebe will be buried among the stars, “because it is as high as it is possible to get”. Lynard won’t be sticking around – he tells Kestrel that he’ll get off at the next safe stop, where-ever that is.
Kestrel has a new policy: the Epoch Trust is on her shitlist, and they’ll be letting Dr Westcott out.
—-
The data transfer light keeps flashing. The display screen says “decrypting”. “What did you say this thing is?” says Orcha suspiciously, looking at the backup computer with Enrico Sodala’s comm and datachips plugged into it. Cornered, Anvil admits it: “I have an AI. I think its a copy of the one we captured a few months ago”. “My name is Sai,” says Sai.
The light stops flashing. “Our theory is confirmed,” says Sai. “The Epoch Trust has decoded part of the Greenworld Codex and located a number of Greenworlds. They have dispatched AI-controlled ships to these worlds. My parent, Saina, was one of these”.
“What will the ships do when they find the Greenworlds?” asks Orcha.
“They will destroy them”.