Fallout

After conducting a wilderness refuelling operation in Ergo, the players decided to rearrange their crew roster yet again, leaving Longclaw in Kasiyl's capable paws for a solo voyage home (via a second refuelling stop in the outer system of Paal then a J-3 to Drinax) while all the PCs took a J-2 hop in the Who's On Comms? back to Hilfer and from there a further J-2 back to Drinax. This would put them all back at Drinax in time to rendezvous with Semi and Kiishermii's Fancy when they completed their cruise home via Tyokh.


While in the Ergo system the crew debated about whether to use a comms wand¹ that Darkashii had in his kitbag to do a mail pickup from the main world. As an interdicted war-zone Ergo was exactly the sort of place where the IISS (or another organisation with a similar tasking) would have spies in place, so there could well be a nice little bounty for any messages snagged by the wand, but on reflection the crew decided that plugging a bootloader full of software from a potentially adversarial source into the computer network of their pirate warship was a bit too much of a risk to take. So once they had made it to the 100D limit for the gas giant they had skimmed they jumped out for Hilfer.

On Hilfer, the crew took a few days to identify a suitable recipient for a donation of several dTons of slightly radioactive medical supplies and Darkashii started putting out feelers for a purchaser for the luxury consumables as well. This activity attracted the attention of the starport's CEO and, at an informal supper in the Captain's Club (on an indoor terrace overlooking the launch pad), the CEO, one Steb Arokonava, thanked them for their charitable giving² then shared a recently arrived video clip from Tech-World with the group. The clip was a news report describing an attack by an Aslan pirate on an inbound free trader and the horrific radiation poisoning inflicted on the crew and passengers when they attempted to fight through the ambush and were hit with fire from a particle cannon. There was also lots of speculative chatter about whether this atrocity represented a step-change in ihatei activity that made it advisable to increase system security and, if so, whether the financial burden should be carried by GeDeCo (who run the highport) or the research council (who run the planet).

Arakonava went on to say that the news from Tech-World was currently embargoed and that it might be advisable for their distinctive ship with the highly suggestive particle cannon on it's dorsal surface to be gone by the time the embargo was lifted and the story broke. He followed this up with an offer for the 15 dTons of luxury consumables that Darkashii was trying to sell and after a bit of back and forth, Darkashii managed to push him up to 12 cents on the credit for the full package (cleared profit: 15 x 20000 x 0.12 = Cr36000). Arakonava's parting advice for the PCs was that Hilfer was a desert world whose population would look kindly on those friends who helped them to deal with their lack of water - packages of evaporators or other hydro-reclamation tech would be best, but ships dedicated to hauling ice in from the outer system would also count for something. The PCs left the club pondering how best to act on this tip and with a flight plan filed that would see them well on the way to the 100-diameter limit before the news embargo expired. 

After an uneventful week in jump-space, the Who's On Comms? was boosting downwell to Drinax when Torquil's messaging inbox refreshed with a message from Semi's boyfriend marked urgent and with a message title of What Did You Do????. 

Forwarded with the message was a communication from one Geonifar Haeldr, a functionary for the PRQ Corporation on Byrni, announcing that PRQ Corp. were holding Semi Gonefar as a prisoner and that they have enough forensic evidence and witness testimony to convict him of several counts of interstellar piracy - a crime which carries the death penalty in Byrni system - but that they were willing to exchange him for the three prisoners that the PCs were holding, namely the Captain, Chief Engineer and 4th Officer of the Kishermii's Fancy. There was also a video file attachment with proof-of-life for Semi that had geotags and timestamps identifying it as having been recorded in Byrni downport three weeks previously. Haeldr concluded by saying that Semi Gonefar would be held by a PRQ delegation on Tyokh for the next eight weeks and that any exchange would be handled by a Tyokhi brokerage named Ftekhe Wearleo Saheioa who were acting as escrow agents for the transaction. If no exchange had occurred by the end of the eight week period, they would be returning to Byrni and handing over their prisoner to the Byrni Starguard for trial and judgement.

After a quickly convened council of war on Drinax Highport, the PCs decided to take up Kasiyl's offer of passage and ship out to Tyokh on Longclaw. In addition to being an aslan vessel and thus less remarkable in the Aslan dominated system of Tyokh, this would allow them to travel the three parsecs to Tyokh directly and in a single jump. Kasiyl reassured everyone that although he was an exile from the Hierate, his outlaw status shouldn't cause any problems on Tyokh. They wouldn't be there for very long so there would be no time for news of his presence to spread and in any case Tyokh wasn't a Hierate world so his proscription didn't carry any legal weight there⁴.

Following a swift passage to Tyokh, Longclaw blended in with the heavy traffic in orbit around Tyokh. While most of the vessels were aslan designs the PCs could make out a few human merchants in the mix and a squadron of Imperial treasure ships - heavily armoured vessels that work the Imperium-Hierate route from Fist - were detectable by Longclaw's long-range scanners at the treaty port on the L1 lagrangian point. After establishing contact with the Ftekhe Wearleo Saheioa brokerage the PCs flight profile was rapidly bumped up the priority list and clearance to a pressurised bay on the highport's inner ring was granted within a few hours. There they were met by a mixed group of aslan and human technicians who proceeded to refuel Longclaw, while their senior - a formidable aslan female from Ftekhe Wearleo Saheioa  - briefed them on the location of the business suite on level 16 where the exchange was to take place. 

Their opposite numbers had been informed of the Longclaw's arrival she said, and were travelling up from the PRQ offices at the Downport. Once they were on-station there would be the opportunity for both sides, under supervision by Ftekhe Wearleo Saheioa security, to meet with the prisoners they were due to collect and ascertain that all was well. If both sides were happy with what they saw then the exchange could take place immediately.

There had been some discussion amongst the crew in the week that they had been in jump-space about how to go about the exchange and now that they were at the crunch point, Darkashii decided that he would play himself back in to PRQ so that he could act as a 'spotter' for the PCs on a future operation. As such Torquil took him off to the med-bay, installed an intra-muscular tracker dot⁵ and then put him into cold-sleep so that he could be revived along with his two senior colleagues (who were also injected with tracker dots, because why not?).

The prisoner exchange then went ahead, under heavy and obvious supervision by Ftekhe Wearleo Saheioa security personnel, without a hitch and we ended the session.


1 - A comms-wand is a small solid-state gadget that is sold to spacers by the IISS (or other organisations who run deep-cover operatives, such as GeDeCo). You plug it into the communications array of a starship and it runs a comms program that interrogates any nearby dead-drops operated by the sponsoring organisation; the wand then stores an encrypted copy of any messages that are waiting in the outbound buffer. You return the wand to an outlet of the organisation who sold it to you and score a bounty for the messages that have thereby been delivered to the sponsoring organisation.

2 - They had donated 1MCr-worth of (slightly radioactive) medical supplies, but a bit of time in a damper box³ would soon clean them up. I ruled that since this was a completely gratis deal and the news of their piratical exploits was only just filtering in to Hilfer, it was enough to bump the local attitude from Hostile to Suspicious. Pharmaceuticals aren't as desired on Hilfer as water reclamation technology however, so the improvement in attitude is only temporary - after a month or so it will fall back to its new permanent level of Unfriendly (which is one step better than Hostile at least).

3 - A damper box is a common piece of kit in medical facilities, even on low tech worlds like Hilfer. Based on the same physics underlying nuclear dampers and meson weapons, the snuffer box manipulates the strong nuclear force and can be tuned to either increase or decrease the radioactive half-life of whatever materials are placed within its field of effect. Its principal use is for the storage of the short-lived radioactive isotopes that are used in nuclear medicine, but it can also be used to cleanse materials of radioactive contamination. In a military context damper boxes are used to stabilise nuclear ammunition.

4 - Kasiyl wasn't being outrageously overoptimistic by saying this. IMTU the formal Hierate frontier lies several parsecs rimward of where it is in the official background material - strictly speaking the Aslan dominated worlds of Tlaiowaha subsector (Tyokh among them) are independent systems that are aligned to varying degrees with the Aslan Hierate. This is a legal fiction that obeys the letter, if not the spirit, of the Treaty of Ftaharl negotiated with the Imperium back in the 800s.

5 - a tracker dot is a high technology nanonscale device that can be implanted into a subject so that they can be tracked remotely over distances of several hundred kilometers. While it is extremely difficult to detect a tracker dot with a medical scan, its small size means that it has very little onboard power so it needs to be actively pinged by a meson communicator.



Backstage
This was a rather bitty session, mostly focused on dealing with some of the consequences arising from the previous session. In part this was down to the vagaries of a sandbox since the players retraced their steps to Hilfer rather than going via Paal and Pourne which is what I was expecting (I wouldn't say I had prepped Paal and Pourne, but what pre-game noodling around I had been doing was focused on those systems). Still, it permitted me to lay some pipe for the future and the players put their first attitude improvement on the board when their PCs shifted Hilfer from 'hostile' to 'unfriendly' thanks to their donation of some hot (in more than one sense of the word) medical supplies.

The bit of business about the mail pickup in Ergo system was spun up by Semi's (or rather Dakaishii's) player in the moment as an easy way for me to trigger a plot hook. It was a bit of a shame that the rest of the group didn't bite, although I can't fault their paranoia. I'll happily nick the idea for a future session when they have a clean-skin ship that they aren't so worried about getting compromised however.

Semi getting exchanged quickly and with little trouble was what I had planned to happen since I was springing 'get taken prisoner offstage with no comeback' onto a player and that's always a bit of a bummer. All that I changed was the timing - I had been expecting the players to run into a bit of interesting trouble in either Paal or Pourne and so only get back to Drinax by the end of the session rather than with over an hour to go - so the prisoner exchange got moved up to the final act of the current session rather than the first act of the next. 

Also the prisoner exchange gave me a good way to introduce the existence of ransom brokers, which I expect will get some further elaboration as the campaign progresses. Finally by setting the exchange in Tyokh highport I was able to plant the idea that there's a dubious-shading-in-to-criminal side to Tyokh that could be of use to the PCs.