089-1107 – Ergo
Having survived their battle with the two leviathans in the forests of Ergo, the group then engaged in a shooting match with two of the Chain Gang members, before encountering locals, who appeared to possess a culture originally based in some strange half-memory of ancient Persia, and who had been essentially enslaved by the Chain Gang and their higher technology. Discussions with several groups of locals revealed a society divided into inherited societal roles: one family might produce technicians, another soldiers, and another hunters.
The locals had, it transpired, ritually killed the crew of the ship having taken them for gods, and had then placed their own, preserved clan gods (long dead astronauts from another crashed vessel) into the ship, closing it in the belief that they would fly the ship into the heavens and return with great wealth. Now the ship was locked and disguised from scans by piles of scrap, the anomaly in which it sat, and the ship’s own stealthy hull.
Breaking into the ship, the party found the embalmed bodies of the locals’ two gods. Leaving the natives with gifts, including substantial numbers of weapons with which to greet the remaining Chain Gang members on their return, the party then left for Tech World, taking both the Shinkiro and the Deepnight Amundsen.
097-1107 – Tech World
After some basic repairs, the party left in the Deepnight Amundsen to perform a survey of the apparently-empty parsec 2523. For this, we used the surveying rules from the Referee’s Guide of the Deepnight Revelation box set. This took five weeks of surveying, and a second jump, but the party managed to identify (alongside a rogue cometary body, to which they burned over the course of five days to refuel) a dense dust cloud half a light year across, within which they found a brown dwarf, orbited closely by several moons, one of them a tidally-locked moon 50% bigger than Titan which lay inside the fearfully-narrow, habitable belt of the Brown Dwarf. Bookmarking its location, they jumped out to Tech World once more, to rendezvous (a month late) with the crew of the So Much For Subtlety.
153-1107 – Tech World
Leaving the SMFS on Tech World, the Mercifuge, Shinkiro and Deepnight Amundsen then jumped to the moon they had discovered.
And on that moon, they located the Heart of Darkness: the fabled, long-abandoned Sindalian base. The rest of the session was spent investigating this base, and the greatest prizes were two Harrier-class commerce raiders. Each had been stripped for parts, and the ships were in far worse states than the SMFS, which had spent its long exile out in the dark vacuum and constant temperature of Drinax’s Oort Cloud instead of a moist, oxygen-laden atmosphere. But they were, nonetheless, recoverable (for a nine-figure investment of credits).
Satisfied, the crew of the Deepnight Amundsen – Timaeus, Eric, Lars and Penelope – then jumped to Acrid and then Pandora to work out what to do with the treasure-packed Martin II. The Shinkiro departed for Clarke and their long-planned reckoning with Dr Izikai Nafir.
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