In The Black S003

Metagame Info

GM: star
Date Played: 2020 Feb 16
Where

Start: Umuru system
End: Umuru system – deep orbit

Important People/ Places/ Things

  • 2-Bok – AC Weapons System Officer from a clone cult called the Matrix
  • Abelard – Campi saboteur rescued on Eldoran Station
  • Heloise – Campi spy rescued on Eldoran Station
  • Sofia – Campi rebel/pirate captain of the Last Chance

Crewmembers present:

  • Tomas Moon (elected Chief Facilitator for the mission)
  • Cosmo 4737
  • Haar il-Juhanssen
  • Abelard
  • Heloise
  • 2-Bok

After the last mission, the crew convalesced aboard AC Gate station 343 in the Umuru system, recovering and filling out reports regarding the situation with the rogue Ethicist, Ian Starholm, and an aborted coup of the Grand Vestidor.

The Trappist slaves rescued on Eldoran Station turned out to be quite a bit more intelligent and skilled than they initially pretended. They took on crew duties aboard the ACSS Decker while awaiting the testing procedure for Alpha Centauri citizenship.

Heloise and Cosmo became ill during the course of their duties. The crew investigated and discovered they were infected with a previously-undescribed pathogen, which they dubbed the Umuru Syndrome. Most of the crew was immune due to the standard Alpha Centauri medical nanites circulating in their systems. The bacteria itself, though, had not previously been tagged as dangerous and was able to slip through the ship's filters.

During this, the ACSS Decker was tasked with investigating a previously unknown asteroid on a collision course with navigation beacons in the Umuru system. Deep space scans had detected the object only three weeks prior, with no record of it on previous surveys.

The crew resolved to destroy the aberrant asteroid to prevent damage to the beacons. 2-Bok laid out a detailed analysis of the capabilities of the ship’s primary weapon – the McIntyre T-220 phased gamma laser – to aid in the plans.

They spent several weeks syncing up with the asteroid. When they arrived, they landed and explored its surface. It turned out that the asteroid had been had been inhabited recently and had been mined extensively.

The crew ruled out the possibility that this represented an intentional attack on the positioning buoy, since it was easily identified more than a year before it became a threat. However, the origin of the asteroid was a mystery. An analysis showed that it was likely remnants of an unregistered habitat. The crew began backtracking the course to locate its origin, but before they arrived…the Decker was ambushed!

Scans showed a merchant ship that had been modified for combat. Firing a mix of automated probes, modified to act as missiles, and escape pods, modified to be used as boarding pods. While some of the crew moved to repel boarders, others opened a communications channel.

Heloise discovered that the captain of the ship was his own sister, whom he thought had died years ago. Actually, she had joined a Campi rebel group known as the Worker's Liberation Front. Drawn from the worker caste of the Trappist systems, the WLF (pronounced "wolf") is dedicated to creating a home for Trappist workers free from the oppression of the Trappist worlds.

Heloise was able to leverage this fact into a cease fire, though not before one of the boarders was killed and carried off by Cosmo's pet night stalker, Tickles. The rebel group left with Heloise back to their base, Freedom Station, a deep-orbit asteroid.

Epilogue: Cosmo 4737 died of old age and Cosmo 4738 emerged from her cocoon.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License