Note: I get better at writing updates: more dates, more continuity and more images, after this or the next update.
King Oleb summoned his new privateers to the throne room to introduce them to Margaret Blaine, the Terror of the Spaceways, who turned out to be a very nice lady who looked about fifty or so but must in fact have been at least a hundred years old. She had, for decades, been the leader of the most feared pirate fleet in the Trojan Reach.
Now, Blaine explained, the only ship she had ever lost was plying the trade lanes of the Reach and had taken to smuggling to make ends meet. More than that: its crew had become predictable and some contacts had let her know where it would be in a few weeks’ time. She wanted the Travellers to help her retrieve some items of personal value from it.
The party jumped to Hilfer first, carrying a valuable, high-tech cargo which they sold at a considerable profit at the desert planet of Hilfer, which could not make anything nearly so sophisticated. From there they jumped to the system of Tech-World, a place with a strange and even sinister reputation for its highly advanced and wholly unregulated robotics, cybernetics and bionics research.
During the two weeks in jump space with Margaret, the Travellers asked her questions and heard her advice:
Margaret’s secret was to essentially be invisible. Her attacks were low-key and involved as little violence as possible. Indeed, sometimes passengers were unaware their ship had been robbed and upon occasion she tricked high-end liner captains into letting her marines board their vessel to conduct a search for contraband or fugitives. There was always some noisier or more violent pirate captain making the news and she ensured that attention was diverted in other ways too. A little bribery, some polite intimidation and a network of informers ensured that responses to her raids hit empty vacuum. And most importantly, she got out. She created a new identity, which changes every few years, and became the most unmemorable person in the Reach
The party lurked in orbit around an outer ice planet where they had been told the Cicendai would appear and sure enough, slightly ahead of schedule, it did so. A couple of warning shots across her bow from the SS So Much for Subtlety’s long-ranged particle accelerator – which reached further than anything but their quickly-destroyed missiles, and the demonstration of the Subtlety’s superior agility, and the Cicendai surrendered. The Travellers were polite but efficient, taking the Cicendai’s cargo of illegal cybernetics in the knowledge that they would never even be reported missing.
As a bonus, The Cicendai’s nine-foot-tall Aslan gunner/security/cargo loader Sharyl K’zinti, sickened by his Captain’s rapid surrender, asked to join the Subtlety’s crew as a marine and was accepted onto the team:
By now the crew of the So Much For Subtlety had begun to collect (steal) whatever robots they could. This is their renovated, idiosyncratic but highly upgraded steward droidm Patrick Steward:
And this is their extremely stupid security droid, “Boogie Woogie”:
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