The characters all wake up, and sit up. They are each in what they recognise as a Low Berth capsule. Four out of ten of them in this room. They are all young and healthy, but can remember nothing, not even their names. As the lids of the low berths rise up the air outside smells stale and smoky. It's cold. There is one door, closed. There are signs of damage in the room particularly at the far end where some kind of blast seems to have cut through a pair of low berths and damaged some of the others.
The place is in zero-G, but everyone seems able to manoeuvre in weightlessness without problems. They can sense a slight motion, as if the room is tumbling slightly.
They examine the other six low berths. Five hold the corpses of old people, all of them dead. One (closest to the ones they were all in) holds a young man. We bring him out of the low berth (one person seems familiar with the low berth's operation), but he does not wake up and seems to be in a coma.
They leave the low berth chamber. Outside is a corridor with more doors in the walls. They explore and discover that they are in a spaceship, a 300 displacement tons cargo-type ship. It seems badly damaged; the jump drive needs repairs and will not function until then. Other systems are barely working. There is only about 12 hours life support power left; this time will be reduced if they do anything else. There is a ship's locker containing weapons, vacc suits and other equipment. The ammunition for the weapons seems quite depleted of its more deadly items.
As they go round the ship people seem familiar with things - one person with the sick bay, another with the bridge (we assume he is the captain), another with the ship's computer (which seems damaged too), the last with the weapons in the ships locker, though everyone seems to have some familiarity with weapons. The person with most weapons familiarity seems most familiar with the Assault Rocket Launcher there. The bridge person seems most familiar with the Snub SMG. The medic seems most familiar with handguns, and the computer person with the laser pistol and rifle there. Everyone seems familiar with the operation of the vacc suits too.
We choose names for ourselves, to make things easier:
From the bridge, Hermes stabilises the ship (using up precious power) and we play with the sensors. As the ship's tumbling motion stops we see a planet with two moons nearby, and a small, dim, far-off-seeming red sun. We seem to be heading for the planet. The sensors tell us that there are plenty of ships about, and a lot of broadcast signals.
From these we quickly discover that we are heading in towards the world of Orcrist. Which is in the Sword Worlds.
As we head in we do various things:
We identify ourselves to Orcrist space traffic control, and explain our rather desperate situation. We are allowed to approach.
In the computer we find details of the crew of this ship (which is, it turns out, named the 'Dolobid'). We are not them. It seems the Dolobid came to Orcrist from the Caliburn system, which is too far away to be reached in a single jump-2 (all this ship can do). We seem to have mis-jumped here during or after a space battle. Did we steal this ship? Perhaps...
We also find that the ship belongs to the SuSAG megacorporation. Everyone has a bad feeling about this name.
It seems we mis-jumped to way out in the Orcrist system, too far for life support to last, so we went into low berth to survive the long drift in to Orcrist. This seems to have taken about three months.
In the sick bay, Jonah finds that everyone has a virus he does not recognise running through them, but its dying away. The samples from the corpses also show signs of the virus. Given the dead old people in the other low berths we wonder if we have been subjected to some kind of ageing-reversal experiments...
As we continue to search the ship, Hermes finds an ominous message written in his own handwriting in marker inside a wardrobe in the captain's cabin:
"Stop them. They infected us.
Took our memories. Tell the
Government. Make them stop."
We close in towards Orcrist, coming inside the orbits of its two moons. There are other ships about, warships, shuttles, trading ships and so on. As we head for the orbit traffic control has designated for us, a ship closes in towards us. From its transponder it is the 'Tessalon'. Another SuSAG ship. Bad.
We ask traffic control for help, but none is forthcoming - The Tessalon has been authorised to deal with us and will be doing their job in this case. We try various ways to get Orcrist traffic control to help us, including asking for political asylum, but we are given the run-around and so our efforts are to no avail.
The Tessalon approaches. We arm ourselves from the ship's locker and think about ways to stop people boarding us. We set up high-G traps using the grav plates in the cargo hold.
The Tessalon pulls alongside and vacc-suited troops armed with ACRs fly across. And we fight. A cargo-handling arm holds the outer airlock door of one of the Tessalon's airlocks open; cunning manoeuvring on the part of the captain. High-G in the cargo hold pins down some troops, who do not seem to be trying to kill us. Unfortunately, in the process Cleon damages the power cable of his laser rifle, and it stop working.
Then the Tessalon's crew appears to get tired of pussyfooting around and ships guns fire at very close range in both directions. Both we and they lose a turret.
Su-Lin, with her ARL, eventually blows open the inner door of the airlock we re holding open. We go across and board; Jonah takes a hit while doing so and starts to fall asleep - they seem to be tranq rounds. He injects himself with stimulants and wakes again.
Some more troops are taken out on the ship, but the crew lockdown all the doors, trapping us in the main corridor. Cleon hacks the ships computer system, and seems to know some back doors which enables us to get much further than we would otherwise; they try to shut us out of the system, but he is still able to use other back doors to keep going. We make our way to the engine room, cut the main data bus to the bridge and take control of the ship. When they realise what's happened, the crew surrenders. We fire the drives for a second, stranding some troops in orbit.
That done, we bullshit traffic control that the legitimate crew are still in charge and that our business here is now done - the people who had taken over the Dolobid are in custody - so we will be leaving. They can have the remains of the Dolobid. They seem to accept this.
We leave Dolobid behind, and begin to head out to 100 diameters so we can Jump elsewhere.
On the way out we question the prisoners. They are:
They are all SuSAG employees, and only know that they were told to capture the Dolobid and take all those on board alive. They were to return all the people on board to the Caliburn system. They were told to do this by one Abrey Tollivarn, the Junior Vice-President of Security in the Caliburn system. They all seem to be fairly loyal corporate employees who are just here to do a job.
They came here from Caliburn as we did (coming to Caliburn from the Forine system before that), departing Caliburn two months ago. They have been waiting here since they arrived, for six weeks now. They bribed some officials in Orcrist to let them rather than the local forces deal with the Dolobid were it to arrive here.
They are put into emergency low berths for the duration.
A jury-rigged repair is made to the data bus between engineering and the bridge (no-one seems very familiar with technical things).
We discuss things and decide that we want revenge against SuSAG. But first we need to cover our tracks. We select a destination - Joyeuse - based on its Amber zone status (caused by its having a war on at the moment) which should help us do this. And off we jump...