The crew of the SS So Much for Subtlety, their hearts inflamed by the joy of looting and encouraged by the mild approval of Margaret Blaine, decided that it was not yet time to leave the Tech World system, but that more pirating would be fun.
After another day in the system, they intercepted a Vulture class salvage vessel burning in-system from the asteroid belt to the main world. The crew of the Subtlety fired a warning shot from distance at the ship – the SS Steelgrinder – and were alarmed when it responded by rotating to unmask its pair of triple pulse laser turrets and opening fire on the Subtlety at a longer distance than pulse lasers can normally reach: she had higher-tech, customised guns that could reach out to the same range as a particle beam.
Facing hostile fire for the first time, the Subtlety initially stretched her legs and bravely scarpered back towards the edge of laser range after taking damage with the first hits and failing to make contact with her own attacks. Then the ship’s engineer Deanna swapped into the gunner’s booth – Sharyl grumbling that he was trained to hit planets, not annoyingly evasive spaceships – and the armour and advanced weaponry of the Subtlety began to tell against the sturdy but civilian salvager, which eventually surrendered after taking repeated devastating hits to her hull which left her venting atmosphere.
The crew of the Steelgrinder were told to retreat to a cabin while the ship was boarded, with the new and reassuringly competent ship’s marine Sharyl going first. Examination of the cavernous cargo hold – almost as voluminous as the entire hull of the Subtlety – yielded up recently-salvaged spaceship parts, some of them extremely high tech and useful to repair the travellers’ Harrier-class ship. Much of the rest of the hold was filled with valuable rare earth metals, mined from out-system asteroids. The crew of the Subtlety were restrained enough to take only a share of the insured cargo, and did not harm the crew of their target beyond a little mild irradiation.
Their hold full, the Subtlety jumped out for Hilfer, where they dropped off Margaret Blaine. They sold some of their loot at the starport, albeit with some difficulty. Looking at Hilfer in the ship’s library, the crew noted that the desert world had been more active and populous before war had shattered its sophisticated water reclamation technology. Perhaps, they thought, with some investment and some diversion of water-rich bodies from the asteroid belt, the planet might see the advantages of aligning with Drinax.
The party then jumped to Drinax itself, where they sold the rest of their ill-gotten gains at Rachando’s bazaar.
They reported to a pleased King Oleb, who nonetheless seemed as excited by the robotics of Tech-World – on which he was geekishly knowledgeable and thoroughly agitated – as by the actual piracy. He was a particular fan of the eye-wateringly expensive Hive Queen design.
Princess Yao then spoke to the party about some news that she had had regarding pirate attacks at Clarke and then Torpol, urging the party to investigate them in the hope of Drinax being seen as capable of protecting its neighbours. As a bonus, Clarke was offering 0.5MCr for the capture or killing of the culprits, while Torpol, the richer of the two, offered 2MCr: a rich prize indeed. The Travellers decided to fly to Clarke after they finished repairing and upgrading the Sublety.
A discussion with Scholar Voha – the sector’s foremost academic in the field of Sindalian history – yielded an interesting clue about a hidden Sindalian base that a certain Captain Envai – long dead – claimed to have found. By combing the library in the Scholar’s Tower while awaiting ship repairs, and by asking around in the spaceport bars, the party managed to narrow the location down to the Borderlands cluster, and then further due to the presence of a gas giant with a specific number of moons, one of which held the base itself. Eventually, they managed to deduce that it must be in either the Arunisiir or Exe systems.
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