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Ashen Stars: Darren's new Star Hero home campaign


Darren Watts

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Hey all! Started up a new Star Hero campaign here in NYC and thought you might like to hear how it's going. We've adopted the setting from Robin Laws' Ashen Stars, originally written for the Gumshoe system, and are adapting it to Hero. We're running it like a modern basic cable TV series, with "episodes" and "seasons." Part of the conceit of the campaign is that the show is a modern, gritty reboot of a campier '70s TV series, with different actors playing earlier versions of the same characters much like Battlestar Galactica or the Star Trek reboot. For background on the setting and races, check out Pelgrane Press' website. In short, "Lasers" are freelance law enforcement agents on the frontiers of space seven years after a terrible war devastated the worlds of the Combine. The core worlds have no resources remaining to maintain the frontier, now called "the Bleed." Also, nobody seems to quite remember precisely how we won the war, or what happened to the enemy...

 

"Pilot"
 
We are introduced first to Lorena Mendez, who nimbly ditches mysterious shady types following her on the streets of Vilnius, a major shipping center colony world at the edge of the frontier known as the Bleed. She arrives only a little late for a meeting with one of the lawyers for Charter House, a trade organization for freelance ship crew. Her lawyer, a Kch-thk named Tk-Zt, arranges a Laser contract for her and her new business partners: Ullrich von Jaeger, a handsome young doctor who was a combat medic during the war, and his half-sister Shawna Broome, a tomboyish pilot. (Shawna at least is disconcerted by Tk-Zt's employment of a kobir, a race apparently genetically altered by the Mohilar to be entirely subservient, to the point they cannot survive on their own without masters. Tk-zt points out that his firm pays and protects the kobir, who otherwise would likely wind up being exploited by the local mob. Lorena flinches when the mob is brought up.)
 
After signing, Lorena takes her new team to a local shipyard, where she's been looking at a "refurbished" ship being sold by a durugh corporation. The engineer doing the refurbishing (read: building from scrap), one Alan Style, insists the Peregrine is the fastest ship on this or any lot.
 
Meanwhile, a cybe named Brennan Foresworn Holt, also looking for Laser employment, arrives to meet Lorena after a brief distraction flirting with a lovely evangelist for the Church of the Restreaming, who believe the universe is a computer program with a crippling virus that needs to be rebooted. Holt accidentally gets the drop on two mobsters spying on Lorena and chases them off. He applies for a job, and is invited along as the team test-drives the Peregrine. The ship lives up to its billing when Shawna takes them on a joyride through an asteroid field, and Holt demonstrates his skill with the ship's guns on some small rocks.
 
As they try to return to Vilnius, they discover they're being pursued by two small ships with no serial numbers. They complete their transaction with the durughs by transmission, paying cash upfront, and hire both Holt and Style directly. They then flee the approaching ships, demonstrating their exceptional speed by leaving them in the dust.
 
Deciding the Aventine Cluster may be a little "hot" right now, Lorena suggests they begin looking for jobs in the nearby Palatine Cluster, while the crew get to know each other on the five-day journey. They take advantage of the absence of several other Laser crews in the area, who have all been hired to participate in the burning of a recently-discovered Jaggar nest, by collecting a job protecting a mile-long colony ship called the Bao Chan.
 
The Bao Chan has been hired by the Deng, a ruralist political minority from the colony world Kylestone, who have banded together and bought a newly-discovered planet called Ukan (coincidentally from the Loghos Corporation, Alan's former employers.) Ukan is just finishing its terraforming, and the Bao Chan is transporting thousands of settlers along with their livestock and plants to the new world. The administrator, Henry Tsai, has his hands full keeping the various religious subdivisions of the Deng from quarreling, and the team is asked to keep the peace for the five-week journey.
 
The first three weeks pass with only minor squabbles and vandalism, and they meet the various leaders of the sects (the Blue Hats, Green Hats and Yellow Hats), as well as the ship's Tavak pilot Getek. Then, Blue Hat leader Duy Vendak is found one morning in the cattle stockade with his throat torn out by a crude weapon. Tensions rise as various accusations are thrown around. Getek is accused, but Ullrich confirms the wounds don't match his natural claws. As the team investigates the wealthy Vendak's affairs, Ullrich has difficulty maintaining the sanctity of the crime scene as that particular crosswalk is a convenient shortcut between different units of the ship. As he's continuing to work on the scene, he is interrupted by several maintenance workers running around him; it seems they've had a great deal of trouble with the plumbing that provides the vitamin-enhanced slurry feed for the livestock, and another jam has caused a backflow next door. He joins their investigation, and is horrified when the blockage is revealed to be another dead body, this one noted Green Hat agriculturist Hara Prasad...
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Tensions are running high on the Bao Chao after the discovery of the second body, and Holt and Lorena make their way through the protesting crowds to meet in Tsai's office while Shawna and Alan try to help calm the crowds.. They discover him trying to meditate using a Deng biofeedback technique that uses a plant called the Zen Iris, which responds to its owner's scent with calming pheromones. He's too stressed for it to work, though, and insists the Lasers get to the bottom of these murders. They call for a meeting with the leaders of the various Deng sects, but they are deeply suspicious of each other while protesting their own innocence.

 

Meanwhile, Ullrich performs an autopsy on the second corpse, determining that while the cause of death was drowning he also suffered a fractured skull premortem, and that his adrenaline levels at the time of death were almost toxically high themselves. The plumbers finish draining the feed pipes and find another foreign item- a weeding hand tool that Ullrich determines matches the wounds on Vendak's throat. Learning that Prasad was in charge of caring for the crops on the ship, Ullrich discovers that all of the Zen Irises used by the Deng are cuttings from four "mothers," each over thirty feet high, which are kept in a special greenhouse near the cattle paddocks (and both murder scenes.) Ullrich and Lorena don filter masks and demand to see the Irises, and are forced to call on Tsai to overrule the guard. When they go inside, the mother irises release pheromones that fill Tsai and the guard with unreasoning fear, and Holt and Alan are forced to physically subdue them when they run panicked from the room. Ullrich determines that the mother irises have been "corrupted" by their transplanting, and caused Prasad to suffer a debilitating panic attack that night, when he killed Vendak  by accident and then struck his head while fleeing blindly, knocking himself into the slurry vats.

 

The mother irises are ritually destroyed, and the Deng are successfully transplanted themselves on their new planet. The Lasers get a decent month's pay, and Ullrich decides to turn down the Deng's offer of a baby iris of his own.

 

Season One, Episode Two: "The Witness To My Worth"

 

The Peregrine responds to an emergency distress signal from an environmental survey base on Ares-3, a once-thriving colony world in the Bleed that was devastated during the war. Now home only to gray-market scavengers, the Combine survey unit is measuring the background pollution and contaminants to determine whether Ares-3 is recoverable. The star, Ares, is currently suffering the mysterious Ashen Star effect itself, leading to strange effects to all electronic equipment and communications. When they drop into orbit, their ship's computer launches an unprovoked attack on a commercial hauler in orbit, and Alan is forced to take the engines off line to avoid killing them. They determine their ship was compromised by a signal beamed from the surface, and since they have no defenses against it happening again they decide to leave the ship shut down and take the boat to the surface to find the sender.

 

They fly to the surface, struck by the awful destruction they see, from twisted spires of skyscrapers to the horrible coating of organic ash. The EV base seems deserted, but the security systems are working and Alan has to disable them. He discovers the door has a bomb wired to it and narrowly is able to disarm it. When they get inside, they find the entire eight-person team is dead, from physical trauma, disruptor fire and even one poisoning. They rescue a few logs, which suggest that one member of the team had been disciplined for substance abuse and "deteriorating relationships with the locals." Meanwhile, Lorena has set up a program to determine where the invasion signal came from, and it finally finishes- the signal was sent from a location in the city ruins, which was once a museum dedicated to Brian Hudd, a great admiral of the fleet who was a hero in the years before the Mohilar War and was the first human to encounter them...

 

dw

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  • 4 weeks later...

After three weeks of various delays (Dexcon mostly, but we blamed it on network executives) Ashen Stars returned today! Out of character, I declared (as any player in the game can) a new fact about the setting based on the cheesy original series, declaring that Admiral Brian Hudd was in fact a character in a 70s episode, a former war hero who was promoted farther than he liked and agitated his way back into action, requiring the lead characters to rescue him. In the modern reboot, of course, he died fighting the mysterious Mohilar, but not before a museum had been dedicated to him on his home planet of Ares 3.

 

Ullrich finishes his autopsies, determining that the three "attackers" have all suffered brain damage of some sort, and the scarring pattern suggests that their "tethers" (personal computers worn like headphones) were the culprits. The team agrees to deactivate their own tethers for the duration; Holt, whose tether is internal and much more advanced, begins to worry. Lorena determines that the three had been sent out to examine a site where the atmosphere seemed clean and nontoxic, which may in fact match up with the aforementioned Hudd Museum. They pile into the EV team's truck and head into the ruins of the city.

 

There, they find a bar whose patrons are all scavengers, many suffering from longterm conditions related to radiation and other poisons, who are primarily making their livings scavenging the ruins. The most lucrative finds are unexploded munitions, and indeed the Durugh have arms dealers on site to purchase them. The bartender is saddened to hear the government base crew is dead, even though most of them weren't popular with the scavengers. Lorena and Holt quickly determine that the bartender is in fact the central point of the barter economy in the city, and that McClung, the crewmember who'd been disciplined, was prone to trade equipment here for information, interesting scavenged stuff or most frequently illegal drugs.

 

Suddenly, the quiet of the ruins is disrupted by a truck driven by a couple of local scavengers, who seem to have gone insane and are both running over everything (and everyone) in their path while firing weapons wildly. The truck crashes into the bar's outside patio, as we determine nobody in the party is a particularly good shot. Fortunately, one of the durugh in the bar is a crack shot with his mysteriously complicated personal pistol, and the driver is dispatched.

 

Lorena talks the other scavenger down, determining she's lost her memory back to the point they went exploring in the rubble in an area where the atmosphere seemed strangely clean, in hopes of finding working scrubbers for sale. The durugh are horrified to learn from the team that their ancient enemy Hudd has a museum here, and promise to help destroy it. The team heads off back up their trail, finding the rubble of a collapsed skyscraper covering the entrance to the Hudd museum. Climbing inside, they're stunned when the lights come on and a voice begins to detail the life of Hudd, concentrating on his warlike activities and selectively editing out all references to his diplomatic and peacemaking successes. Alan opens a wall panel, while Holt explores the Combatorium, a non-functioning exhibit allowing patrons to experience a simulated firefight between Hudd and the Mohilar.

 

Lorena and Shawna are the first to see that the building is now surrounded by zombie-like scavengers, all seemingly controlled by their tethers, while Alan continues to probe the computer's memory banks. Realizing the memories have been altered, making the AI think Hudd was only a warrior, he finds a quarantined file that seems to have garbled the memory. He debates the computer while working to break the quarantine, and the rest of the team fights to keep the zombies out- Holt is forced to shoot the bartender. Finally, Alan opens the file and realizes it contains the computer's knowledge about the Mohilar- the same effect that drives humans crazy to think about them has made the computer insane, and it begins to self destruct. The team barely escapes along with the suddenly-freed zombies, and Alan hears the last broadcast from the computer - "There is additional information about the Mohilar available" just before the Durugh drop a bomb on the building, destroying everything.

 

Season One, Episode Three - "The Pleasure Bringers" (Gareth Hanrahan)

 

The team is hired to find Mar Gravely, a Loghos Corporation employee who went missing on Andarta, a well-known "pleasure planet" known for it's decadent resort lifestyle. Holt discovers that Loghos in fact has a second employee on the same planet they seem to be going to great lengths to cover up. They land at the starport and are initially overwhelmed by all the sex on sale, finding the place a little seedier than its reputation. Some of that is probably because on internal pressures from the number of war refugees forced to settle here recently, forming a new underclass in the outskirts of Joy City. Holt encounters feuding representatives of The Church of the Restreaming and the Church of Regenerative Carnality, and discusses philosophy with representatives of both. Alan is approached by an aggressive pimp, but humorously confuses the man by asking where to buy ship parts, which the pimp tries to translate into sex acts. dw

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As a player in this campaign (I play Lorena Anunciación Arce-Méndez), I've got to say, I'm having a blast.

 

The Dramatis Personae in this group are:

 

Lorena Méndez

Created/Played by: Tom Davidson

Concept: Grifter/Face

Race: Human

Vessel Role: Hailer

Landside Role: Face

Notes: She has a bit of a shady background and has yet to pay the price for it (not that the other PCs know that).   :)

 

Brennan Foresworn Holt

Created/Played by: Warren

Concept: Just south of Robocop

Race: Cybe

Vessel Role: Gunner

Landside Role: Bagger (think lawyer/bureaucrat)

Notes: Former military; has built in tether and a gun for an arm.

 

Shawna Broome

Created/Played by: Darren Watts

Concept: Hotshot pilot

Race: Human

Vessel Role: Pilot

Landside Role: Unknown (Darren might be able to elaborate on that)

Notes: Also former military.  Is not testing well with test audiences.

 

Alan Style

Created/Played by: Rob

Concept: Greaser

Race: Human

Vessel Role: Wrench (duh)

Landside Role: Techo

Notes: Built our ship The Peregrine from spare parts.

 

Dr. Ullrich von Jaeger

Created/Played by: Scott

Concept: Captain America with a stethoscope

Race: Human

Vessel Role: Doc

Landside Role: Doc

Notes: Is very intelligent, and is easily the smartest of the group.  Shawna is his step-sister, and there are some... things... going on there.

 

So far, I'm having a blast.

Edited by tomd1969
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S1E3 The Pleasure Bringers (cont.)

 

Our heroes make it to Gravely's hotel, determining quickly that he disappeared three days ago after being in the company of a blonde, probably a prostitute, for several consecutive days. His hotel room also contains several empty syringes that contained broad-spectrum antibiotics, so Ullrich is concerned he may have been trying to self-medicate- Andarta is extremely strict about STDs and their biomed scans for entering the city are stringent and state-of-the-art. Also, a bottle of brandy is missing from his minibar, even though the door was never opened. Alan scans the fridge and theorizes a durugh phased through it recently. Reading Gravely's tether and mail reveals he's been getting vague and anonymous blackmail messages.

 

They head off to Joy Services, the legal escort service Gravely called several times, and bully their way inside to talk with Hana, the secretary and dispatcher, and Dylan, a nervous computer tech. They learn Kara, Gravely's escort of choice, quit a few days ago. Hana stalls them until Kevin, the owner, and a few of his hard boys show up, and during the confrontation Holt dials the police station. Eventually cooler heads prevail, and Kevin reveals that one of his lieutenants, Rayan, had been Kara's pimp. Rayan was also missing, having stolen some money- if the lazers do track Rayan down, Kevin'd appreciate hearing about it himself.

 

The lazers call their contact at Loghos and let them know about Jezhabur, the other durugh from their company on Andarta. Loghos confirms he's not there officially, but apparently on his own vacation. Isn't it interesting that Jezhabur reports directly to Gravely, a rare human at the company, and would likely be considered to replace him if something untoward happened to him? They confront Jezhabur, who confesses to spying on his boss for personal gain, but really has nothing on him except his dalliances with legal prostitutes and missed meetings. Having spied on them several times, Jezhabur reveals he knows Kara offered free services to Gravely if he'd get her a gun (illegal on this planet.) The lazers begin to suspect that Loghos might be messing around with bioweapons of some sort, but Jezhabur claims they mostly work in perfectly legal munitions, especially now that they're allied with the Combine government.

 

Meanwhile, the team is contacted by both a government troubleshooter, who only wants whatever they're up to kept as quiet as possible; and a woman from the Church of the Restreamers, who wants whatever they're investigating made as public as possible to humiliate the city and hopefully cause more people to turn away from sins of the flesh. They politely refuse both entreaties, realizing that they're being watched by several interested parties.

 

Holt learns that Gravely had some interest in the Church of Regenerative Carnality, who the Restreamers *really* don't like, and heads over to take a personal "healing session" with one of their temple prostitutes, Heather, who fills him in on their philosophy of sexual healing and connecting with your essential nature and desires. It apparently goes quite well and lasts all night. Lorena realizes that the head of the CRC, John Brook, is a former lover of hers from her grifter days, who last she heard was in jail fifty light years from here. Apparently.  one reason the CRC is doing so well on Andarta is that he's taught the street preachers several grifting techniques, even though the "business" of sexual healing is booming and they don't actually need to rip anybody off. She confronts Brook, who cheerfully cops to being a fraud but for the first time claims not to be actually hurting anybody. He, in turn, congratulates her on her new scam of "pretending to be a lazer." She also claims to be serious about her new gig- neither one is quite sure whether they're telling the truth.

 

The lazers finally make their way to Kara's apartment, a rundown tenement in a particularly squalid part of the city. She's not there either, but her roommate Steve confirms that a) she did hate Rayan and certainly didn't take off with him, b)it was common for her to disappear with a client for a week or more at a time, and c) he had sex with her the last night she was here, when she seemed quite upset. He seems a bit sickly, claiming to have mixed up which alien fruit he was supposed to eat, and Ullrich quickly examines him, fearing a contagion. While being probed, Steve claims to be quite a lover himself, but only had sex twice this week (a low for him)- once with Kara and once with a CRC worker named Heather. Ullrich can't place the name, but Holt's eyes bug out a bit.

 

Kara's apartment phone rings, and Steve answers, but there's no one on the other end- just wind, bird calls and heavy breathing. Allan traces the call- it's Kara's own phone, and the call is coming from the jungle outside the city. Holt asks Ullrich if he suspects Steve is sick and contagious- when Ullrich says he fears so Holt tells him, "better take me in too." Ullrich calls the government troubleshooter back and has her reserve a lab, taking Steve's blood samples and Holt with him. Lorena, Alan and Shawna head off to find a way out of the city to track the phone call...

 

dw

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Holt and Ullrich arrive at the hospital, meeting Dr. Terrell who's been briefed on their situation. As she's taking notes in the crowded emergency room, there's a sound of shattering glass in a lab next door, and she (and the heroes) head in, stopping short when they see two grey, scaly aliens who have broken through a window and are sniffing the lab cultures Terrell has taken from sick patients. One heads for the window and escapes, while the other grabs the biogenerator and throws it at the PCs- the glass test tubes inside spray all over the room and Terrell herself is doused with goop. Holt wrestles the alien to the ground while Ullrich tries to help the frantic Terrell, but he's too late- whatever was growing inside the cultures has poisoned Terrell, and before Ullrich's horrified eyes she transforms into an alien like the other two. Hospital security helps Holt subdue the other alien, and the two are strapped down while several doctors join Ullrich in analyzing them. Holt realizes the disease he picked up from Heather may not be a simple STD...

 

Meanwhile, Lorena, Alan and Shawna sneak out of the city and find a defoliated area of the jungle where future farming is planned- it seems this is also where the local mob disposes of bodies, as they find a shallow grave with a body that's half-transformed into an alien, and Kara's phone. They call Gravely's phone, and determine it's only a few miles further into the jungle. Holt calls to tell them about the horrible transformations, and they realize the body in the grave must be Kara's, with the transformation halted by her death.  In a clearing they meet half-a-dozen other aliens standing around a meteor crater, and learn that among them are the aliens that were once Ryan and Gravely. This seems to be how the aliens, called Druath, reproduce- not sexually, but by rewriting the DNA of other living beings to create more of themselves. Ryan found the meteor while hiding a body out here, and was infected- he slept with Kara, and the infection spread from there. They intend to use a stolen courier ship to drop more Druath genetic material on the city and create millions more Druath. Lorena explains that now that they know what's happening, the government will shoot them out of the sky long before they can get to the city. Instead, she brokers a deal- Loghos will give them an empty, colonizable planet in exchange for the rights to the chemical transformation process, which they believe might bring incredible medical breakthroughs beyond the Druath creation process. Anyone who wishes to become a Druath- the elderly and sickly, who will get new (if unusual-looking) bodies - can move there and live peacefully in the wild.

 

With the crisis averted, Ullrich and the local medics create an antivirus that destroys the Druath DNA-rewriter chemical and cure everyone who doesn't want to transform, including Holt. Meanwhile, Lorena helps Heather donate Kara and Steve's belongings to the CRC. After leaving, she finds herself cornered in an alleyway by five mobsters looking to kidnap her back to the Proper to face the Solarte mob. Things look bleak, until the Tavak they brought along to intimidate her is revealed to be Getak, the colonists' pilot from "Pilot" who Ullrich proved innocent. He switches sides and kills the head mobster, while Lorena injures the second, and the other two flee.

 

Back at the ship, Alan discovers that Gravely's hotel room phone was used to call the mobsters (since he secretly bugged it in case anybody called in)- listening to the call reveals that it was Shawna who betrayed Lorena to the local mob, who she owed money to herself. Shawna draws a gun on the confused Alan and flees before the rest of the PCs get back. Lorena wants blood, but  realizes they can't stay on Andarta, so they hire Getak to be their new pilot and take off for further adventures, the whole while debating how to handle Shawna's share of the large bonus they just got from Loghos and bickering about their contacts.

 

<Note>- Shawna had only been on the team as an NPC pilot because Josh, who plays Getak, got sick before the game actually began. I've been holding off Shawna's inevitable betrayal until he was ready to rejoin the campaign, which was today. In that time, she went from a faceless extra to having several team members become quite attached to her, and now the PCs are looking forward to her return as a major villain in the future. In the metafiction of the TV series, we decided that Shawna's actress had asked for more money or a bigger part, Denise Crosby-style.  #ThingsthatonlyhappeninRPGs.

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S1E4 - "Dead Rock Seven"

 

The crew of the Peregrine, riding high reputation-wise after their success keeping their employers out of trouble while solving the health crisis on Andarta, get another corporate job from a mining company called Cronstedt Consortium, who do high-end mining of rare earths from asteroids. They're decommissioning a mine that extracts high-energy particles called mesions, which are created when certain minerals are exposed to the energies of translight corridors- they're extremely fragile, hard to mine and worth a great deal of money. While still in the process of shutting down, a junior engineer named Gera Lonzo was killed in an explosives accident that depressurized a corridor. The lasers are hired to investigate her death and make sure the decommissioning is still happening on schedule, as the corporation faces extensive fines and fees if they're late.

 

The ship arrives at the asteroid, where they are inconvenienced by all of the safety precautions necessary around mesion collectors- no robots, no gravity in the mines and no magnetic boots allowed, and they have to orbit and dock using thrusters only. They meet the management of the station- Chief Engineer Wickham, his top accountant Huang, his security/safety chief Rk-Khz, and young engineer Jo Dawn, a lovely young woman who was Lonzo's best friend and is now stuck with both of their jobs as they work around the clock to meet the deadlines. The team discovers that the workers at the mine are highly segregated- the engineers are highly paid, well-educated professionals, while the actual mining work is done by teams of low-wage manual laborers and kobirs, who because of the restrictions on magnetic fields around the collectors can't even use drilling lasers, but must instead use picks and shovels. Very quickly they pick up the tension existing between "upstairs" and "downstairs"- the miners as a group are paranoid that the management is trying to get them to quit early and forfeit their bonuses.

 

The story they;re given about Lonzo's death doesn't really check out- there was no reason for her to be moving explosives in that corridor, and they get conflicting reports on whether she was a diligent worker. They search the corridor, finding conflicting evidence and somebody's personal knife. Lorena and Holt interview her fellow workers, while Getak takes the ship out in search of her body after figuring the air pressure meant she was probably not traveling that fast when she went through the relatively large hole into space. Indeed, in a few hours they do recover the body, and Ullrich's autopsy confirms that something hinky is up- she didn't die from either the explosion or exposure to space, but rather from a sizable wound from a weapon that entered her back and emerged from her chest, approximately the size of a harpoon! She's also been stabbed post-mortem, and the wound matches the knife they found.

 

Lorena discovers that Lonzo was a holovid fan, and had two players in her room- one was an instructional manual on mesion collectors, to which she had added notes about how one could be modified to work at low power (something that would make the collector useless for mining). The other was a documentary about the great Combine naval captain Numi Grant, who disappeared over fifty years ago after a battle with the Mynatids, a race of giant space wasps that fought two wars against the Combine (and countless more before against the Kch-thk, who are terrified of the creatures.) Nobody has seen a Mynatid since Grant led the swarm into the outzones, but Lorena can't help but look at the holovid and imagine the damage one of those massive stingers could do...

 

Holt talks to the miners' spokesman, Harry Skull, who claims the management is crooked- he knows this because Rk-Khz used to be a cop when he was a criminal back on Pactyas Three, and got him thrown in jail by planting evidence on him. They also meet "Weird" Tucker, a crazed miner who's been downstairs a little too long, and likes to talk to the power cables- he refers to a "space angel" and tells Lorena that the unrighteous will soon be smited.

 

Using Lonzo's headset, they determine where she was *supposed* to have been working the day she died- replacing a power coupling in Junction 5. When they get there they find the hatch to the tiny junction has been welded shut from the outside. Breaking in, they see that though the place has been thoroughly cleaned, it's clearly where Lonzo was murdered, as her blood traces can be found along with magnetic anomalies in the hull plating.

 

Jo catches them in the Junction, and the team tells her they doubt the official story and want to interview management again. She agrees to call them again, but is interrupted when the station AI calls her to come to the assistance of Huang, who is apparently "in distress." They dash to his room, meeting Wickham and the base medic, but the door is locked. Getak shoots out the lock, and they find Huang's horribly murdered corpse and the room soaked in blood from wounds that match Lonzo's.

 

Wickham and Rk-Khz attempt to take over the investigation, but the lasers pull rank and they retreat back to Wickham's office. Searching the room, they find the holocamera was disabled twenty minutes earlier. Huang;s computer reveals that he was in the process of forging accident reports claiming that sixteen collectors were destroyed in a tunnel collapse- they check and confirm the tunnel is just fine, and further that about fifty collectors have been "taken off the books" that way, a sizable financial windfall for resale. They confront Jo, who confesses she was part of the plan to steal the collectors and sell them to the mob on Pactyas, to whom she owes a great deal of money for her college tuition. However, she seems clueless about the murders, and the team seems to buy it. They play back the audio recordings that caused the station AI to call for help- they hear the sound of great buzzing wings, followed by Huang almost whispering, "I'm sorry," before the thunk of his body being penetrated by the giant stinger and slumping to the floor.

 

Horrified by the possibility that Mynatids might somehow have returned, Jo promises to show them something else about the station- she doesn't know how it connects, but there's something downstairs the team needs to see. They're interrupted by the AI announcing another miner is "in distress" in a nearby corridor! The lasers split up- Lorena and Holt go with Jo, while Ullrich takes Getak and Alan to see if they can help the miner and get a glimpse of what's killing people. They suit up and enter the dark, airless corridor, seeing a slumped body looking broken by the exit airlock. Ullrich moves to see if he can help and turns the body over, revealing that it's just a vacc suit filled with mining charges that are about to explode...

 

Nice cliffhanger! See you all in two weeks after Gencon! dw

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