216-1105 – Theev Highport
The session opened with the party leaving the shuttle terminal on Theev Highport, aka “The Skull”. There, they noticed Leff Roister – one of Miria’s crew on the Silverhand that they had seen on their previous reconnaissance – boarding a shuttle for the planetary surface. Calling Krrsh on the surface, they told him to intercept Roister and capture or kill him.
Krrsh set up a tail on Roister, waiting until he was in a quieter part of the lower city near the Scrapyard before sending in the stealthiest of the Vespexers – Volodymyr Patraev – with an auto-injector to sedate the pirate on a passing contact. Then Phoebe and Ilya moved in, apologising to passers-by for the state of “their friend”, and recovered him to the So Much For Subtlety.
While this was happening on the surface, the party moved in on the Mercifuge, disguised passably well as Miria and her crew. A huge ship, twice the size of the Harrier, she was in lockdown while half of her remaining occupants was away on the surface, however Deanna was able to gain entry via an airlock, using Miria’s own codes.
Moving swiftly inside, Tim took point and moved ahead while Eric checked the entrance to the bridge. Alerted by the airlock alarm, Jon Canning was already prepared and armed but not armoured, meaning that Eric was able to move swiftly to user his stunner pistol to knock him out during the confusion as Canning tried to work out why he looked quite but not exactly like his shipmate.
The party swept the Mercifuge swiftly, finding no other occupants beyond a humanoid cargo loader droid. Identifying themselves to Traffic Control, they departed the Highport for Blacksand City starport. There, they froze the final member of Ferrik’s gang of those that were on Theev, and divided up the crew that they had between ships for the journey to Palindrome to confront Redthane.
217-1105 – Blacksand Upper City
There was then a brief interlude: with money in their pockets and a new-found respect for the possibilities offered by the medical augmentation industry, several of the crew had booked into the Phenotype-A clinic to get some work done. So the rest of the day, and the whole of the following one, were spent in surgery and in recovery, making use of medical slow drug for accelerated healing.
218-1105 – Theev Lowport
Before the Mercifuge and the So Much for Subtlety set off for Palindrome, two of their entourage made requests. Vi Lon asked to be allowed to man one of the several turrets for which they had no gunner. She couldn’t bear to sit in her stateroom during a fight, she said, awaiting the outcome. So she was assigned to the Mercifuge.
Krrsh, somewhat embarrassed, asked that if his old shipmate Arnara Rrax survived the fight she be offered the chance to swap sides rather than face the same fate as the rest of the Redthane gang. She was, he asserted, a good engineer and calm in a crisis, and he felt indebted to her for her past support.
Finally, Sharyl announced that he planned to train the rest of the marines on ship boarding tactics during the flight. They were to travel in the Vulture, so he would use the cargo droid to arrange crates into the right pattern for the corridors and rooms of the Janel Torsk, Redthane’s flagship, saying that “perhaps they will move with purpose, not chaos, when the airlock opens.”
225-1105 – Palindrome Inner Gas Giant Moon 540PD-5/4
In the end, the plan was different: the Mercifuge made a direct approach to the location given by Miria’s notes, while the So Much for Subtlety approached stealthily from below the horizon of the small moon. The Mercifuge landed at Redthane’s base, which was a series of modules that had been delivered by Ferrik’s modular Jump Cutter ship, The Phlebotomist.
Noting that the modules included two suitable for human habitation – a pressurised shelter and a planetary base module – the SMFS swept in and blew up the pressurised shelter with a single volley from her dual lasers, instantly killing several of the gang. Then the Vespexers and Krrsh used explosives to breach the airlock of the planetary base module in which the rest of Redthane’s group were awaiting what they thought was the arrival of Miria. The explosive loss of pressure mean that there was no resistance to the attack as the marines were faced with a shocked group desperately reaching for their helmets amid the howling gale of venting atmosphere.
Arnara Rrax was spared as Krrsh requested. Redthane made his airlock pitch: Darokyn was an imperial navy spy and that was why he wanted Redthane eliminated. If the party would spare him he would bring his surviving crew to work with them, and he could tell them how to prove Darokyn’s secret role. In addition, they could benefit from the assets he was assembling: the marine barracks module in the Vulture, the planetary assault and missile modules and fighter hangar module for the jump cutter, with which he planned to hit planetary facilities and outposts for more predictable gains than those from ships.
The party listened, declined, and swiftly dealt out justice to the people who they had been pursuing, after all, for piracy and murder. Adding their corpses to the increasingly full low berths of the Harrier, they turned their minds to their prizes: a heavy jump cutter (The Phlebotomist), an up-gunned, up-armoured and uprated far trader called the Janel Torsk (Redthane’s flagship) and an SA-class armoured scout called the Misery’s Company.
Beyond those were an array of various modules for the Jump Cutter, ranging from planetary assault modules and a fighter hangar to planetary base modules. There were also the cargoes stolen from Torpol and Clarke: electronics and biochemicals, as well as a refinery module from the Torpolian orbital station.
Everything that could be loaded into the Vulture or attached to the Phlebotomist was gathered, while the Misery’s Company was docked to the Mercifuge and the party flew in victory to Palindrome, where they unloaded, deposited the Vulture and returned in two ships to gather the remaining base modules in the Phlebotomist.
236-1105 – Astrogo (Palindrome Lowport)
In the space of a month, the party had gone from a single, somewhat beaten-up Harrier to a (temporary) fleet of five ships. Now they were faced with the problems of success: they faced a crew who were now due 8.73MCr in shares of the spoil, and they could muster more ships than they possessed the crew to fly.
Fortunately, Timaeus haut-Roth knew the Minister for Security at Palindrome, who doubled as the head of starport security at Astrogo on the planet. An old school friend, he was able to suggest three potential recruits for the growing outfit that the party were assembling: a pilot, a gunner and a retired army captain.
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