Session 6 Summary
The Dire Straits was heading out from Zerzi Station toward Cuthbert, a 4 hour journey. Their Tatternet feed included a new story, Destroyed Ship Siouxiana Discovered in Golden Seed.
Soon after, Jim Dade receives a Tatternet message from Delano Mack on the Jitterbug, apparently sent surreptitiously just before he was boarded by pirates claiming to be from A Single Red Eye. The message included the coordinates of the Jitterbug and A Single Red Eye. It would take close to 4 hours for the Dire Straits to reach the coordinates. While the rest of the crew discusses plans, Chris jumps into Crysalis and races ahead.
When the Dire Straits gets to the last known position of the Jitterbug, they discover the Jitterbug’s ejected black box. They discover the scans of the approach of the ship calling itself A Single Red Eye, the message from them, and a video of them boarding the Jitterbug and knocking Delano out before the black box is ejected. They are able to trace the in-system drive energy trail of Crysalis, following it as it veered away from the path to Cuthbert Station, curving behind the orbit of Cuthbert towards the outer system. While carefully following the energy trail, at 05:45, the Dire Straits sensors indicated a faint graviton signal from the outer system.
The signature of the signal was similar to that indicating a Slipstream ship shooting a strait, arriving or leaving the system. This was very short and limited in range, though. Usually these are detectable anywhere in the system. The sensors of Zerzi planet are too far away, this signal would have been lost in regular Tatternet traffic. It is possible that Cuthbert Station’s sensors were not scanning in the correct direction, or it was similarly lost amongst other signals there as well.
The signal was not coming from any of the known strait points in Zerzi system, although the signal was not strong enough to see exactly how far it was away. Presumably it would be at the same distance from the star as the other strait points.
Jithal quickly refined and filtered the signal so that he now knows a precise heading to its origin, and has enough data that he feels they have a good chance of locating the strait point.
Meanwhile, the Crysalis trail leads to an asteroid in a stellar orbit between between the orbits of Cuthbert and the Strait points. Dire Straits’s passive scan of the asteroid reveals what is probably a large hangar bay door made to look like the irregular surface of the asteroid.
Having settled on a plan to get into the station, they set up the Dire Straits’s Grulvaxian active scans to periodically ping the base so they would (hopefully) take out the base’s sensors. After landing the Dire Straits near the edge of the large hangar bay door, They hacked into a maintenance door, getting into some little used maintenance corridors. They made their way through the currently empty hangar bay control room, which had alarms blaring because of the sensor and communications systems constantly rebooting. Through the big windows overlooking the hangar bay, they could see the Jitterbug, Chrysalis, a ship that, from it’s paint job was probably A Single Red Eye, and a few other smaller ships.
They continued down some stairs into the cargo airlock between the hangar bay and the main part of the base. Through the airlock window they could see a large area with stalls, stacks of crates, and many sapients of various races moving between them, all in dirty white jumpsuits. They noted a group of 6 sapients led by a large purple biped individual, obviously an Ohlzor, brandishing blaster pistols and looking warily around them.
Not wanting to be trapped in the airlock, the quickly slipped through the door into the maze of stalls and crates, and hid like the Miniature Jackals when they wait in ambush while hunting the Red Iguanas of Dalderana.