Adventure Writeup: Death Station

Author's Note: After a (much longer than expected) hiatus, Traveller's Raid Society is back! The stars finally aligned for the Traveller group to meet up for a session recently, and with that momentum behind me, I was able to write up this long-awaited chronicle of our fourth adventure. Our Traveller campaign is now over five years old and still going strong-- and as always, it's a pleasure to share it with you. Thanks for reading. 

In our line of work, there's no such thing as comm malfunctions. 

That doesn't mean that there's no times when you're hanging off the edge of a cliff, trying desperately to comm your buddy for help, and then you realize your comm got fried by that Vargr's laser pistol blast and things are even more dire than you thought. Comms do, in fact, malfunction all the time: battle damage, lack of battery, immersion in the fetid swamp waters of the New Lusakan outlands. Absolutely. But in our business, there's no "comm malfunctions." Because when someone trying to hire you spins some pretty tale about a simple, harmless comm malfunction at an outlying settlement that needs to be investigated—there's always some little detail they're not telling you, and that little detail usually comes back to bite you in the ass. And that's exactly what happened on Death Station. 

The contracting agent didn't call it "Death Station," of course. He was an ordinary Imperial bureaucrat at the consulate on Balthazar, and he found our name from some place (maybe they had a list of particularly expendable guns-for-hire) and told us about a little, tiny comm malfunction happening in system, on some scientific station called 02. 

"Just a little comms malfunction," he told us, leaning over his desk at the Imperial consulate towards us. "Nothing to worry about. We're just a little shorthanded on ships at the moment, and we heard you have a free ship at the moment—" (Alex nodded enthusiastically at this, having been working quite hard to refurbish the starship we'd inherited) "—and so we'd like you to just go check it out. It should be a quick in-and-out, but we'll pay you for your trouble."

It's not that we didn't sense danger; after all, as Travellers our senses of paranoia are quite robust and well-developed. But at this point, we were all so desperate for some quick credits that we accepted. "Excellent," the bureaucrat said. "Also...we have another contractor we'd like you to take along. This is Sergeant Hanklin Stockert, formerly of the Imperial Army."

Sergeant (ret.) Stockert was a hard-faced man who looked like he'd gone through a lot of scraps in his day, but what immediately caught our eye was the laser rifle he was carrying at his side: high-powered, military-issue, and more firepower than anyone else in the group. 

"Just haven't been off Balthazar since I mustered out of the army three years ago," Stockert said. "Been feeling the need to go stretch my legs outside of orbit." As a group, we collectively shrugged. He looked like he knew how to handle himself, and he had a laser rifle, heavy firepower Daniel kept casting longing glances at. You never can be too cautious. So we all climbed into Wolf and took off, breaking atmosphere for the first time in our new ship. 

As we approached 02, we could see it was in the standard spinning-top shaped design for space stations: several rings centered on a single spire, with a docking pay around the waist of the station. We touched down in the docking bay and crossed over to the station, to be met by a member of the station's crew in uniform, who walked us to a security checkpoint for incoming visitors. 

Yes, at this point, from the fact that there was a security checkpoint on a gorram research station to how vague and unspecific our escort was being about the exact type of research the station was doing, we should have figured out that something was wrong. Daniel still claims that he knew something was wrong from the moment he set foot onboard the station, "as soon as I tasted the smell of death in the air." 

The guy at the security checkpoint was giving us a hard time about our weapons. Turns out that the multiple pieces of military-grade armament we were packing weren't exactly regulation for the research station. 

"The rapier is ceremonial!" Vanai insisted. "As is the automatic pistol. And the rifle. That's ceremonial too."

"Look, ma'am, I really can't let you take these on board. Look, just hand me your gun and you can have it when you get back."

"I was knighted in service to the Imperium, you know," Vanai seethed, as she handed in her rifle to the man at the security desk. 

In all the commotion, Alex, Hanklin, and Daniel had managed to slip past the desk, and the security guy decided not to make an issue of it. "We're here about a comms issue. Which way to communications?"

"Up on the upper spire. You want me to give you an escort too?"

"No, actually."

The level we were on turned out to be full of mostly humdrum administrative offices. None of us were feeling anything amiss in particular—but there was something up, something we couldn't quite put our collective fingers on. 

"There's hardly anyone here," Amelia said. "I've been on research stations like this before. They should be bustling with people." 

"We can just go take a look around the station," Alex said. "I'd like to know a little about what kind of research they're doing here." 

We found an elevator, but it required a key to access the upper levels. "No worries, guys," Amelia said, pulling out a screwdriver and her comm. About 30 seconds later, we were on the elevator as it ascended to the level marked "Upper Administrative."

The air was stale and the lights were dimmed in this level of the station, but we advanced cautiously out into the corridor to investigate.  

"Over here!" Daniel said. "I knew this wasn't a harmless little research station!"

He was standing in the doorway to an immense room, which as we gathered around saw was dominated by an immense industrial fan, now lying dormant and blackened by an explosion. Around the catwalk surrounding the fan were scattered the dead bodies of half a dozen heavily armed people in anonymous body armor. Amelia crouched down next to one of them. 

"This is Pyotr," she said. "He was one of my brother's gunmen, one of his most trusted. I think...I think this is a hit squad from the Mondasian mafia."

The rest of us were digesting that information when Hanklin nudged Alex. "That scientist chick is with the Mondasian mob?"

"Her brother is. It's a whole thing." 

"What would the Mondasian mob want with a bunch of scientists?" Hanklin asked, the question that had been on all of our minds. Daniel went and peeked out the entrance on the other side of the fan. Beyond was an airlock. 

"Looks like they came in through here in a hurry," Daniel said. "Used a torch to cut through the airlock after it was sealed."

"Then got cut to pieces by a bunch of scientists in the first room they entered?" Vanai said. "That doesn't sound right. There's hardly any security here on the station."

"So you think this caused the comms blackout?" Alex asked. He was cut off by the sound of a slow, scraping gait from the corridor outside. We quickly and quietly took up firing positions by the door. Staring down the dimly-lit corridor, we saw what looked like a single person in a lab coat advancing slowly towards us. 

"Don't move!" Vanai shouted. "Put your hands up, or we shoot!"

The person didn't respond, instead still marching stiffly towards us. 

"Hands up, or we shoot!"

Nothing. The person was just fifteen feet away when Daniel's shotgun sounded and its head vanished in a spray of red mist. They toppled over with nary a sound, and we went to get a closer look. 

The unfortunate scientist was covered in cybernetics, with what looked like a mechanical exoskeleton extending all across his body and covering much of his face, at points protruding through the skin. 

"My God..." Vanai said, expressing the thought on all of our minds, "who could have done this?"

"Some messed up sicko," Hanklin said. 

"This man wasn't killed by the shotgun blast," Amelia said, kneeling beside the corpse. "Hmmmm. That is most interesting. Most interesting, indeed..."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked. 

"He died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Some time ago, maybe two weeks."

"So someone popped his body into a robot suit and made him into a meat puppet," Alex said. 

"Informally, yes." 

"So these are zombies. This space station is full of zombies?"

"So are these what killed the gangsters?" Vanai asked. "I didn't see any bullet wounds on their bodies."

"Whatever it was, we need to go deal with it," Alex said. "We have guns, they don't. But if they get down to the main crew area, they'll all be dead faster than you can say 'Braaaaaaains'."

We shouldered our weapons and moved out. 

02 Zombie (Artist's Impression)

The elevator doors opened on the next level, the station's apex, with a ding, and our party advanced, bristling with guns and swiveling to cover every angle of approach. The station's uncannily-narrow corridors were eerily clear, and then we heard the slow rasping scrape of feet dragging across the floor from the corridor to our right.

"Line up your shots and fire on the zombies!" Vanai shouted. We all lined up our guns and fired down the corridor at them, lighting it up with sound and fury as we watched the corpses go down. Hanklin's laser rifle lit up the dark corridor for an instant, and we saw it filled with the advancing dead, even as those in the lead went down under our hail of fire. 

We were so busy pouring fire into the poor undead saps advancing down the corridor at us that we didn't even check behind us-- until a zombie that must have snuck up through a doorway jumped Alex, pummeling him with a crowbar. Alex shouted, unsheathing his navy-issue cutlass and batting at him with the blade, toppling into the rest of us as he wrestled the zombie off of him, slashing deep cuts into his face. 

"We need to fall back!" Hanklin shouted. "We can't hold this!"

In the chaos of the undead advance and Alex trying to keep his face from being eaten off by the zombie, our defensive position fell apart—Amelia took off running first, followed by Hanklin and Alex, who'd finally dispatched the zombie, followed by Vanai yanking a furious Daniel along as he pumped shotgun shells at the undead horde. We raced down the darkened corridor and Amelia found a control panel on the wall, punching in a command and shutting an airtight door behind us. We were safe-- at least for the moment.

"Hang on," Daniel said. "Where's Vanai?"

Vanai herself had taken a wrong turn—when the airtight door had slammed shut, she'd found herself at the intersection of two corridors, with a door behind her separating her from the zombies, but a door in front of her separating her from the rest of the party. Only the corridor to her left lay open, and so she walked that way, pistol in hand. A single door at the end of the short corridor lay ajar, and she pushed it open. It's a testimony to how fast her heart was beating that she nearly riddled the shadow-clad form at the other side of the room with bullets before realizing it was just an abstract statue gazing impassively at the door. On a pedestal sitting beneath the statue's gaze was a sword in its scabbard. Mindful of the trusty blade she'd been forced to leave behind with security, Vanai reached for the blade and withdrew it from its scabbard. 

As her fingers touched the hilt, a tremor ran through her, as if she'd stuck her finger in an electrical outlet, and the memory of her investiture ceremony, of kneeling before the duke as she received the service medal and collar tabs marking her as a knight of the Imperium, flashed through her mind.  

"Finally. You don't know how good it feels to have a wielder of decent breeding."

"What?"

"After my wielder was taken captive far from home, I passed through many a grubby commoners' hand before today. In the hands of you, my new mistress, glory will once again be ours."

"So...you're the sword?"

"I am as fundamentally different from any common blade as fine porcelain is from an earthenware spittoon! Forged of Casterly steel, with an exquisitely-thin monoblade capable of striking cleanly through practically any armor."

"I'm always glad to have a blade, especially one as fine as yourself," Vanai said, at last remembering her manners. "How is it that you can speak?"

"All the better to serve your every command, my mistress. For I am bound to serve truth, justice, and a feudal system of government!"

"Right," said Vanai drily. "Well, I have a lot of techno-zombies between me and my friends right now-- you think you can help me with that?"

The rest of us were still in the sealed-off corridor, tending to our wounds and counting our remaining ammunition, when a sword blade began to thrust through the airtight door of the compartment, carving out a roughly human-sized oval, before Vanai stepped in. "Delighted to see you all."

"The hell? What is that sword?" Hanklin said. 

"His name's Joffrey, he can cut through anything, and he's a monarchist. I found him in one of the back rooms here." 

Alex was scratching his head. "So....that's great, Vanai, now what?"

"There's one more level to this station," Daniel said. "In my experience, when you're looking for a big bad? You go to the top."

"There's an emergency ladder shaft on the corridor back that way," Vanai said. "Passed them on the way over. We get to the top-- maybe we can figure out what the hell is going on here and turn it off."

We shouldered our weapons and moved out. We didn't see any more zombies on the way to the emergency ladder—it was like they'd all melted into the ventilation shafts like so many rodents. By some miracle, the emergency ladder supported the weight of Daniel's combat armor, and we made it to the upper level in good order. 

The upper level was, of course, the worst. The air was inhumanly cold, weird steam was venting into the corridors, and all of the offices were trashed, in some cases with blood sprayed across the desks and walls. Amelia stepped into one of the offices, while the rest of us guarded the corridor with our rifles. 

"Looks like this facility was working on advanced AI development," Amelia said. "Some sort of high-tech project. Computers are down, so I can't find out the details."

"So we're dealing with some kind of rogue AI," Alex said. "One with the capability to create those cyber-zombie things."

"We can proceed in accordance with that hypothesis," Amelia said. 

"So all we've gotta do is march up to the computer, disconnect the thing, or maybe just shoot it until it stops working," Alex said. 

"It already knows we're here," Amelia said. 

With that sobering thought in mind, we advanced deeper through the station. The floor had begun to slope downward, an unusual feature for a space station, and then Daniel, leading the way, held up his fist in the military "stop right where you are" gesture. He pointed through the gloom (Side note: where does a space station get all that mist from? It was like they had a whole bank of fog machines going) at the zombies milling around near an important-looking door. 

"Two hostiles, maybe more, near the door," Daniel said. "I'm guessing that's where the big bad is."

Hanklin was hardly even listening. "I got this," he said, stepping forward with his laser rifle, and then he blasted the first one, practically blowing its head to pieces. The other one had barely turned in confusion when a full volley of small-arms fire from the rest of us practically turned it into chunky salsa. 

What can you say? We're Travellers, and we travel armed. 

"Well, there goes our chances of surprise," Vanai said, striding forward. "Let's go see who our charming host is tonight."

We all let Daniel do the honors. "BREACHING!!" he bellowed, and rammed through the double doors. Inside...well, inside looked like a scene from an architect's worst nightmare. The vast room beyond was the very biggest room we'd seen anywhere on 02, with a bizarre chasm criss-crossed by a variety of bridges, which, of course, had no railing. Beyond the chasm, on an immense island or pedestal on the far side of the room, was an immense liquid-computing tank filled with a reddish gel, fed by a nest of wires and tubes. 

"HAVE YOU COME TO TERMINATE ME?" 

The voice boomed over hidden speakers in the walls. Vanai ignored the question and responded with one of her own. "Are you the computer that runs this place?"

"I AM A COMPUTER! I'M GLAD YOU NOTICED."

"Why did you kill the people who worked here?" 

Friend Computer (Artist's Impression)

"KILL IS SUCH A NEGATIVE WORD! I PREFER 'REARRANGED'. I 'REARRANGED' THE PEOPLE HERE. THEY SAY THEY LIKE IT MUCH BETTER NOW. THEY SAY THAT I'M THEIR FRIEND."

"This is some creepy-ass monologuing," Alex muttered to Vanai. 

"What about the mafia killers that were here earlier? Did you "rearrange" them too?"

The computer giggled, a breathtakingly-awful sound. "NO, SILLY! I KILLED THEM. I KILLED THEM ALL BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO DESTROY ME. YOU WOULDN'T DO THAT TO A FRIEND, WOULD YOU?"

"Right now, you need to cede control of the station's functions and power down your zombies," Vanai said. 

"Playtime's over, cyber-freak," Hanklin growled. 

"OH, I DON'T THINK SO," the computer said. "OH, I DON'T THINK SO AT ALL. YOU'LL ALL DIE TO ME—OR MY NAME ISN'T FRIEND COMPUTER!" 

All of us Travellers had already begun spreading out across the platform we were standing on, readying our weapons for action. A moment later, gun turrets dropped down from a panel in the ceiling and opened fire, spitting bullets at us as we collectively dived for cover. A moment after that, the floor panels in the room, all islands amongst the darkness-shrouded chasm that was the room's sorry excuse for a floor, began to erratically move up and down, some raising into the air while others sinking down, all while Friend Computer's maniacal cackles filled the room. 

In those moments of chaos, we all found ourselves separated. Vanai, Amelia, and Alex dashed for cover and started returning fire at the turrets, while Hanklin's laser rifle spat its beam at Friend Computer's mainframe and Daniel, clad in his full-body combat armor, stood out in the open pumping shotgun blasts at the computer. "Knew we should've brought explosives!" Daniel shouted over the din.

From behind a conveniently-located waist-high partition, Vanai, Amelia, and Alex kept their heads down as automatic gunfire rang out overhead. A few well-placed shots from Amelia's stunner fried one of the turrets, but another round of turret fire sent Hanklin to the ground, clutching at his leg. 

"Friend Computer's just too well-armored!" Alex said. "That laser rifle barely scratched the paint on its casing."

"If I can get close, I can make it hurt," Vanai said. "I'll head over on the left, you take right. Amelia can give us a distraction."

"Wait, can you even distract a supercomputer—" Amelia started. 

"Go!" Vanai shouted, brandishing Joffrey over her head as she dashed from cover, leaping across a gap between platforms to advance closer to Friend Computer. Alex followed, racing across the platform, past Daniel and Hanklin, skirting along the rightward side of the room. Past the broad, flat platform at the entrance to the room, the remaining floor tiles became narrow and further between—just far enough from each other that you could jump from one to another. In retrospect, Friend Computer was toying with us, the equivalent of a predator playing with its prey. Friend Computer knew that all of our combined firepower could do little to hurt it. What it hadn't counted on was Joffrey. 

As the others resolutely kept firing, spraying Friend Computer with enough laser blasts, stunner bolts, Gauss rounds, and shotgun shells to shred any living opponent, Vanai leapt from platform to platform like a trained gymnast, all while the sword in her hand shrieked something about upstart peasants. With one final, daring leap and a roll, Vanai landed on the platform at Friend Computer's base, bringing the blade with a single swift motion through the mainframe, sending sparks flying. She brought the blade down again, hacking and slashing through the computer and its accompanying tubes. The gun turrets fell silent. 

"Did we kill it?" Daniel called from the other side of the immense room. 

"Think so," Vanai said. "Some of the hardware might still be intact, but it's definitely cut off from the station's systems."

"Do we have a medic or something?" Hanklin called. "I think I'm bleeding out over here." Amelia rushed over to tend to the wound in his thigh. 

Vanai scrutinized the jigsaw-puzzle pattern of the room's floor. "I'm gonna try and find a way back to you guys—"

"You'll do no such thing," said a cold voice from behind her. "Drop your weapons and put your hands on your head." 

From the other side of the room, the rest of us looked on in shock as four men, heavily-armed and with the trademark trenchcoats of contract killers, shuffled out from a maintenance door, guns pointed at Vanai as she set down her sword and her gun onto the floor. We had all the firepower necessary to splash their bodies up against the wall, but even the most trigger-happy among us knew that we couldn't kill all four of them before one of them put a bullet through Vanai. 

"Let's try and talk this out, can we?" Alex said. "We don't mean to pick a fight with you." The four men ignored us. One of them bent down next to Friend Computer's shattered casing and began fiddling with a hand terminal, evidently trying to upload data. When he'd finished, he stood up and the hit squad began to back away from the door, one of them grabbing Vanai roughly by the arm and pulling her along. 

"Any of you try and follow us, the dame gets it!" one of them called. "Once our ship is away from the station, we'll be in touch."

"Don't worry about me!" Vanai called. "We'll get it all worked out!"

Her positivity wasn't shared by the rest of us, who looked on pretty much helplessly as they led Vanai away as a hostage. The door closed firmly behind them.

"The hell was that?" Hanklin said. 

"I recognized those men," Amelia said softly. All eyes turned to look at her. "I'm sure those men were from the Mondasian mafia. And if I'm right, Vanai's in a lot more trouble than she thinks."

Character Profile: Amelia Straffin

Amelia Straffin: Tormented Genius

"I have talked to many people about how we survive our exploits. Some believe we are skilled, while others believe we are simply lucky. My personal opinion is that when we screw up, we cause enough chaos that the universe forgets we were supposed to die in the commotion." -Amelia Straffin, in her journal, The Traveler Phenomenon

Amelia Straffin was born in 1078 in Valderon, an insignificant city on an insignificant mining asteroid (also known as Valderon) orbiting the planet of Mondas. She was the sixth of seven children in a poor family, and though her siblings and parents were kind people, she only ever bonded with her twin brother, Erik (the seventh Straffin child). Her parents were miners with no formal education and as such, expected the twins to begin working when they were still young in order to keep the family from starvation. Neither of them exactly took to it, and used their charm and wit (which both of them possessed in great supply) to get out of it whenever possible. Eventually, they reached a crossroads which would change Amelia forever.

In the year 1090, a freighter landed in Valderon. The jet black ship was well maintained, sleek, and clearly of the best make available in the Mondasian shipyards. Embossed upon the side in gold was a image depicting an orange star, surrounded by a spiraling torrent of light being pulled into it. Out of it stepped several figures, dressed in identical black suits, flanked by hulking marines wearing jet black armor. All of the figures wore the star symbol from the freighter. They were offering money for children, whom they said would be fed and trained to become the finest soldiers in the subsector.

To her surprise, Amelia's parents immediately volunteered Erik and her. While their motives were to provide a safe home for two of their children, while saving money for the rest, to the twins, it seemed like they were being abandoned. Erik took it especially hard. With the economic parental transfer (a contract designed to allow a parent to transfer legal guardianship of their child for money) signed, the twins were worried. While these contracts were deemed legal by Mondasian law, children had few rights in the asteroid belt and these contracts were often abused to allow Mondasian citizens to kidnap and brainwash asteroid dwellers in order to gain cheap labor.

Mondas was nothing like Amelia expected. While Valderon had been a small, dim, and dingy underground mining complex, Mondas City was a metropolis. It had layers upon layers of developments, some so deep and old they had been forgotten. This led to the creation of Undercity, a hive of criminals which existed underneath the steel ground of Mondas City. Unfortunately, this was where the ship was destined. Taken to a small processing station, where children bought by Mondas Ascendant (a group of Mondasian patriots that paid for the costs of their organization by selling children such as Amelia and Erik to the highest bidder) were processed and sorted based on their skills. Both Straffin twins got perfect scores on the exam they were given to test them, and were placed in the A group. Erik almost got bumped down to the B group due to exceptional physical frailty, but the slavers figured they would make more selling the twins together.

With their abilities, it did not take long for a buyer to emerge. A woman of exceptionally average build and appearance wearing a black suit (which the twins now recognized as the standard attire for a Mondasian businessperson) came to the building the twins were being housed in. She took one look at them, handed over a fair sum of money to the manager of the building, and left with the twins. After a long ride in a covered air raft, they arrived at a large building in a wealthy district of the city.

The woman, who refused to reveal her identity, declared that the twins were no longer to be enslaved by the economic parental transfer. They would be free to return to their parents, live at a reputable orphanage, or stay with her. The twins took one look at each other and decided to stay with their savior. They were 12 at the time and, for two years, they lived a happy life. During this time, they became increasingly interested in just how what their new mother (she would not reveal to them her name) did for a living to live in such comfort.

When they were 14, they found out. A short man in a (you guessed it) matte-black suit told them that she was a high ranking member of the Mondasian Mafia, a group that controls the planet's government and economy. Most people would have been horrified by this discovery, but not the twins. Idolizing their "mother", they decided to join (she did not approve, but supported their decision). Amelia became a scientist and Erik an Intelligence operative.

Amelia soon took to an eccentric mentor who referred to themselves simply as Professor and only contacted her through messages. They taught Amelia about DNA and genetics, which they referred to as "The Source Code of Life". Amelia took to it, and developed the techniques to perform genetic experiments over the course of two years, while assisting Professor with theirs.

After that, Amelia did her own genetic research, developing modified microbes that destroyed specific diseases (which the mob sold for profit). She also did research on Stem Cells, developing a modified version of human stem cells which could be directly controlled by their host, as well as turn back into Stem Cells once their purpose was served. They were considered "Interesting, but useless" by the mafia, who disliked them due to the incredible amount of energy they consumed.

Soon after she developed them, these Stem Cells found a use. Her brother, Erik, had been poisoned after mouthing off to the wrong person. All the doctors in the mob told her that he was a dead man and that she should give up. Instead, she replaced large amounts of his blood with he modified Stem Cells, hoping that he could direct them to heal him. In order to power them, she put the cells in liquid Phaezite, an material that emits immense energy. His body initially rejected the transfusion, but he controlled the cells to restructure his body, from his organs to his skin, to be compatible. When he awoke, he was a new person. His former frailty was gone, replaced with amazing physical ability. He also awakened Psionic powers, which he used to bend the laws of physics around him.

Sadly, Erik's mind was also affected. He became extremely ambitious and narcissistic, to the point that he pushed his sister away (even when she tried to help him deal with his new body's unsustainable energy consumption). As her brother used his new abilities to rise through the ranks, Amelia continued her research. One day, she received a call from her brother, who she hadn't seen in years. He wanted her to create a cell that would target cancerous tissues, destroying them and holding off the disease. After complying, she quickly realized that the cell was not being used for its intended purpose; other geneticists, including her professor, had modified it to target all flesh. The mafia used it as a biological weapon, inducing necrosis in the flesh of any who opposed them.

When she confronted her brother, he smiled and told her that she had contributed greatly to the organization. He hoped that she would not be troubled by this and would continue her research. She quit but, as she was about to leave, her brother shot her with a syringe gun containing the weapon. While she managed to get away, her muscles were severely damaged, impairing her physical abilities.

To survive and continue her research (hoping to undo her condition and those of the weapon's other victims), she hitched a ride with a Alex Movithi, a trader. While they became fast friends, Alex's financial luck turned and he ditched her on Balthazar to escape those he was in debt to. She stayed their for several years until, one day, she met Alex, as well as two other interesting characters, in a bar. Since then, they have traveled together, sharing their fortunes and misadventures.

Traits and Personality
Amelia is 5'2" with blond hair and grey eyes. She usually wears her lab coat, but keeps her black Mondasian dress suit (with the insignia ripped off, of course) for special occasions. She is very committed to scientific ethics, and to doing as much good as she can to make up for her past wrongdoings. She still is extremely curious, and she faces the world like a student; trying to learn as much as she can. As the youngest member of the group, Amelia is often naive and optimistic about the universe, but is keenly aware of how far people can go for power. Amelia is an multidisciplinary scientist, skilled in pretty much every intellectual field, but has very little physical or combat skill. Her likes include research, asking questions, and densitometers. She dislikes those who operate dishonestly, rule through force, and, most of all, use biological weapons.

In combat she uses her stunner, shock gloves, densitometer (she uses it for everything), and whatever she can build on the spot.

Adventure Writeup: Dancer

You'd be surprised how easy it is to get work as a Traveller. Most people think that it requires hunting down shady characters, doing covert meetings in dark alleys, and getting double crossed more often than not. Mind you, that last part is true, but as for the rest of it? Most of the time, work would find you. Of course, we never got easy jobs. Far from it, in fact, we always got what seemed like the worst jobs you could get. So we tended to spend our time between jobs relaxing as much as possible. Which, for most of us, meant going to the best bar we could find and getting as drunk as possible.

So there we were, enjoying the best bar on Balthazar with varying levels of enjoyment. Vanai and Amelia were having seltzer water and watching the news, while Daniel was grumbling about how we were still on Balthazar. Alex was off making sure our new ship was actually space-worthy, which we had decided would be worth checking. Unfortunately, it turns out that would take a couple days longer than we would have liked, which is to say a couple days. In the meantime, we just hoped to lay low, and not get into trouble.

Needless to say, we'd barely gotten drunk when a Patron (he was a bar patron in the sense that he actually bought some drinks, but he was also a Patron in the Traveller sense, ie, that he was paying us money to go kill people and deal with problems) showed up and started chatting us up. He was a fairly nondescript fellow in a business suit who we would have taken for a stockbroker or insurance agent if it hadn't been for the job he was giving us.

You see, he was apparently representing the interests of the Balthazari government. In our first mission on-world, we'd blown up a train full of their weapons, but in our second, we'd tried (and pretty much failed) to save the one Balthazari government official we liked, so we reckoned it'd all work out. At least if Daniel could overcome his urge to stab the guy as soon as he sat down at the bar and started talking. The man told us that a spaceship carrying an important cargo of the material phaesite had crashed in the desert. The government apparently urgently needed to retrieve this cargo- but not urgently enough not to outsource it to a bunch of rookie subcontractors like ourselves.

To be honest, a few things should have tipped us off during our conversation that something was up. For one, they had decided to hire four guys in a bar instead of sending out their own people after the crashed ship. This happens to us often enough, and those are usually the adventures where people end up trying to kill us. Second, the guy was really vague about what phaesite was and what it did. Like, really vague. He said something about it being used to generate electricity, though, so we ignored it. He was also very unspecific about why exactly they needed a ton of heavily armed mercenaries for a simple salvage operation. Again, we probably should have asked about this. But hindsight is 20/20, and we just settled for a payment of few thousand credits apiece, and transport out to the desert and back.

Alex needed to stay behind and get our ship problems figured out, but the rest of us assembled on the edge of Balthazar City with our gear and weapons. For a Traveller, your weapon is like your underwear- you take it everywhere, and you feel acutely uncomfortable without it. It was just going to be the three of us on this adventure- Daniel, Vanai, and Amelia- but between us we were basically hauling along an arsenal. It's not like there's a baggage limit on mercenary work, after all.


When we showed up on the edge of town the next day, the Balthazari government had a vehicle waiting there for us. The driver and guide were both very tight-lipped, and while we tried to get some information out of them, the best we could get was a terse reminder to "grab the phaesite, and get out". They dropped us off in the middle of the desert, and sped off.

We walked over the next row of dunes and saw the ship below us. It was a large ship, with a central hull and two engine pods attached to the rear, one on each side of the body. It was half-buried in the sand, but it looked as if it hadn't taken too much damage in the crash. There was clearly an entrance airlock located along the side close to us, almost exactly at dune level, and so we walked up to it and went inside.

The airlock was fully functional, and so we just walked in, Daniel taking the lead. The ship was dark inside (presumably the power had been shut off in the crash), and eerily silent. We all pulled out our weapons at that point, and turned on our night-vision goggles. We're Travellers, meaning that we have a healthy sense of paranoia, and a tendency to solve problems with overwhelming force. The airlock opened onto a long corridor. A name-plate across the hallway identified the ship as the Orpheon, a research vessel manufactured at Hightower.  

The Orpheon (Artist's Rendition)

What we saw was mundane in the extreme, at least until we walked into the room marked 'Life Support'. There was a body on the floor, dressed in a crew member's uniform. He was still holding his arms up before his face in a vain attempt to protect himself from- something. His body had been slashed in multiple places, and most horrifying of all, there were large bite marks along much of his body, where flesh had been torn off. Droplets of dried blood littered the floor and the computer banks around him. We weren't exactly strangers to this kind of thing (we are Travellers, after all) but this was gruesome and unexpected, and we had to look away. 
"His entire left arm's been practically devoured, as has his torso," Amelia said. "The position of the corpse indicates that he died violently, and was then eaten quickly rather than by scavengers." Vanai had by this point turned away and looked as if she was trying not to vomit. 
"This means there's enemies onboard the ship," Daniel said, hoisting his shotgun. "Exactly where I want them."
Vanai for once didn't contradict his macho posturing, possibly because she was thinking Daniel was trying to deal with the carnage, in his own way. We looked around the room, and it looked as if life support had been managed through here. The equipment was damaged badly, although this seemed like more the signs of a fight than deliberate sabotage. The fire extinguisher from the wall had been ripped out, and we found it, dented, in a corner, with bits of fur stuck to it. "Aha!" Amelia said, looking for all the world like a private detective. "The engineer here must have used the fire extinguisher to defend himself against a furred monster."
"Good thing we have guns instead," Vanai commented dryly.

As we left the life support room, we were becoming more and more convinced that there wasn't anyone alive on the ship. We weren't exactly flush with cash, so we didn't have any means of scanning the ship. No matter. We started moving room by room down the hallway to our left. As it turned out, the ship's bridge was only a few doors down the corridor. 

The doors to the bridge had been electronically sealed shut. Amelia elbowed us aside and got to work on the access panel, and the doors unlocked. Daniel pushed them open and we got inside. The ceiling lights glowed faintly on a scene out of a murder movie. A uniformed crew member was lying dead on the floor, her chest practically ripped open and half-congealed blood covering the floor around her. She was still clasping a rifle, which had been almost cut in half. Vanai bent down to examine her, but couldn't get much out of it other than that something onboard the ship had been killing people, which we'd all deduced by that point. Amelia, meanwhile, bent over the bridge consoles, while Daniel pointed his shotgun out towards the dark corridor we'd just come in from. It looked much more ominous now. 

"It looks as if the ship crashed because no one on board was at the controls," Amelia said. "They were coming into Balthazar's gravity well and then they just stopped inputting commands. Interesting."
"Can you look at, say, why people stopped inputting commands?" Vanai asked.
"I'm guessing it's something to do with why this crewman is dead," Daniel added. 
There was more typing, and then Amelia grimaced. "I'm not seeing anything. Either the ship had an absolutely horrible internal camera system, or it was cut off for some reason. Either way, there's no recordings for over a month, after they stopped at a lab station someplace called Gadden. I might be able to scrub it out into the open if I had a day or so." 
"We don't have the time. Are there any life forms on board the ship?" Vanai asked. Amelia hunched over the console. "That's weird..." she said softly.
"What?" Vanai and Daniel said, near-simultaneously. 
"I'm picking up one lifeform. Very faint, not moving, in the cargo hold."
"Like a human?" Vanai asked.
"If they're a human, they're close to death.  There's also a few animal-size signatures in one of the central rooms. Computer says it's a laboratory. But for just a second, the system was showing another lifeform in one of the engine pods. But it's gone now. Probably just a sensor ghost." 
"Okay," Vanai said, trying to digest the new information. "We'll head to the cargo bay, try and find the survivor. We'll then pick up the phaesite cargo, and get out."
"The manifest says the phaesite is in one of the labs adjacent to the cargo bay," Amelia said. 
"Let's move, then," Vanai said.

We set out into the corridor of the ship. As we'd seen on the computer, the ship had a fairly simple layout. It was shaped like a large rectangle with two engine pods bulging out along the rear, with the bridge made up the front of the rectangle. The main body of the ship included labs and staterooms, divided by two hallways running parallel to the long side of the rectangle. The cargo bay made up the rear of the rectangle, with access to the engine pods from the cargo bay. As we set off for the cargo bay, we found ourselves moving along one of the long hallways, which due to the tilt of the ship in the sand was leaning slightly downwards. We moved with our guns out, scanning the long hallways for any sign of movement. We knew that whatever had killed that crewman on the bridge was more than likely still out and about. 

Daniel, who was in the lead, had just opened the door into the main laboratory when a massive thing leaped out onto his chest, screeching horribly. He flailed backwards, while the creature's claws scraped against the armored chest of his combat armor. Daniel himself wrestled it off, throwing it to the ground of the ship. It was a massive rodent, the size of a small horse, with beady little eyes and sharp claws. Vanai fired at it with her pistol, striking it several times in the side, but it just leapt forward, claws outstretched towards Vanai. Daniel lined up his shotgun on it and blew its head off. It was writhing on the ground in it's own innards when Daniel shot it again, in the flank, and stopped moving. "Gross," Amelia said. Its blood had fanned out along the corridor floor. 
"Where the hell did that come from?" Daniel asked. 
"Maybe it was a lab specimen of some kind?" Amelia said. She pushed open the door to reveal a laboratory. There were rows of lab tables bolted down against the floor, a bank of computers along one end, and assorted laboratory materials scattered along the tables. There were several small cages, presumably for animal specimens, on the tables. They had all been wrenched open. When we peered closer, it was obvious that whatever had been inside had perished gruesomely. 
"So maybe that rodent was mutated, or grew somehow to that size?" Vanai said.
"I...don't think that's how science works," Amelia said. "Animals have a biologically determined upper limit for their size. They can't just be scaled directly up to be larger. Their internal skeleton, their anatomy just won't work if scaled up. You couldn't just make, say, a cockroach the size of a person."
Vanai shuddered. "Then where did that rat thing come from?"
Amelia shrugged. "It's a big galaxy. Maybe they picked it up somewhere early in it's life cycle, and it grew. Do you think that thing killed the crew?" 
Vanai furrowed her brow. "Probably. The fur seems to match up with what we found on the fire extinguisher in life support. It's probably been feeding off of the crew."
"Let me take a look at the ship's records," Amelia said. "Don't touch anything." She sat herself down at a computer console and powered it up. The rest of us wandered around the room, looking at the shattered equipment.
"Found it," Amelia said. "Their lab records. It looks as if they were testing the effects of phaesite chemical exposure on various lab animals." We all gathered around the screen. 
"They picked up," Amelia said, "eight rodent-like animals from a dealer on Nestrom. They put them into these cages..." she pulled up a video feed, "and applied the phaesite chemical regimen." On screen, a handful of scientists bustled around in what was clearly a sped-up video. "This one in the center," Amelia said, as if she was narrating a documentary, "rodent #4, received a greater treatment than the others. It experienced major growth. At the time of the last lab update, they were trying to figure out whether this was an unusual phaesite side effect, or if this rodent was the same animal as the other lab specimens they had."
"It looks like they never got a chance to find out," Vanai said. "Rodent #4 broke out of it's cage and killed them all."
"They're scientists," Daniel said. "Taken by surprise, with no chance to defend themselves, they'd be dead meat."
Amelia was clearly trying to come up with a cutting rejoinder, but before she could respond, the ship shuddered and the floor pitched beneath us. When it settled, the angle of the floor was more pronounced. We all exchanged worried looks.
"I think the ship's sinking," Vanai said.
"It's a heavy ship," Amelia said. "I could see it sinking into the sand."
"Let's move," Daniel said. 

We went back out into the corridor and walked quickly down to the entrance to the cargo bay. Daniel wrenched the door open, and we were in. Large rows of shipping containers filled the immense space, which had a higher ceiling than anywhere else on the ship. "The life sign was near the back," Amelia whispered to Vanai. "Do you see anyone?"
"I see them," Daniel called. He'd taken a few paces down between the rows of shipping containers. "Over here. She's hurt badly."
We came over to join him and saw that he was bent down over a middle-aged woman. She was lying prone and clutching at her stomach, trying to hold her guts inside her body. 
"Oh no," Amelia said. "Oh no." She bent down and started rummaging through her backpack.
"Can you do anything for her?" Vanai asked. 
Amelia bit her lip. "I...I don't think so." Vanai bowed her head. 
"You're in danger," the woman croaked out. "I'm done for. You need - to run."
"What happened?" Vanai said, low and urgently. "What happened to your crew?"
"They're dead," she said. "They were killed by a monster. You need to run. Flee."
"We killed the monster," Vanai said, urgently. "The giant rat. Were there any more of them?"
"They weren't killed by rodent number four," she said. Her eyes were dropping shut.
"We're losing her," Amelia said. 
"They were killed by...the thing we called Dancer." 

Her eyes closed. Amelia bent over and felt for a pulse. When she looked up, both Vanai and Daniel were very clearly agitated. 
"We need to go," Daniel said. "Right. Now." 
Amelia stared at him. "What did you say? What's Dancer?"
"You heard him," Vanai said. "We're moving. Daniel, take point. I'll take rear. You stay in between us. We'll move into the room with the phaesite, pick it up, and get out through the entrance we came in. No stopping. No exploring. We stay in formation. We see anything move, we shoot it. Do you understand me?" 
"Okay, but I don't-"
"Do you understand me?" 
Amelia nodded. 
"Let's move, then." Vanai unslung her rifle from around her shoulders and brought it up, sweeping the rest of the aisle, particularly the dark corners. Daniel stood up, shotgun bared, and started walking at a swift jog towards one of the exits. Vanai nudged Amelia. "Move," she said. Amelia stood up and ran to catch up, and Vanai followed, running. "There!" Vanai said, pointing to a door ahead, and Daniel burst through it, only to stop straight in his tracks. The rest of us came to a stop behind him. 
"What is that?" Amelia asked. 
"I was sort of hoping you'd know," Vanai said. The small room was full of uniform square crates. Some of them had burst open, and an orange substance had poured out and was coating the floor. 
"Is that the phaesite?" Daniel asked. 
"Looks like it," Amelia said. "Some of the tanks must have ruptured in the crash."
"I'll grab them," Daniel said. 
"Wait, don't-" Amelia said, but Daniel was already stepping through the thin layer of goo on the floor, leaving bootprints in it that steamed slightly. He picked up the first crate and turned back to us, carrying one in each hand. 
"Do you smell something?" Vanai asked. There was a strong aroma, something like cleaning fluid but with a sort of sickly-sweet note, like poisoned cinnamon. Amelia suddenly frowned. "I don't feel very good," she said. And then she toppled over onto the floor. Vanai herself was feeling unpleasantly woozy, like the time she'd drank entirely too much wine at a teenage party.
"She needs air!" Vanai said, picking up the smaller woman in her arms and carrying her out into the hallway. Out in the mildly cool, machine-filtered air of the hallway, her mind cleared. Amelia picked herself up, coughing. "I probably should've wafted." Daniel stepped out a moment later, carrying the phaesite containers on his back. "These are all the sealed ones." He passed a container to the rest of us, which we strapped on to our backs, Amelia eyeing it suspiciously.

The ship groaned a little, and the deck of the ship began to shift a little under our feet. It settled again, with a chorus of creaks that echoed throughout the ship. "Let's be moving," Daniel said.
"You still haven't given me an answer about what this Dancer thing is," Amelia said. Daniel turned and started jogging up the hall, shotgun in hand. Amelia quickly followed. She'd taken out her stunner, unsure of what to be looking for. Vanai was taking up the rear, gun drawn, scanning every patch of darkness for threats. Suddenly, Daniel stopped dead in his tracks. Amelia nearly ran into him. He fired his shotgun into a patch of darkness ahead, the blasts echoing through the hallway. Vanai pulled up beside him, pistol drawn.
"I saw movement!" Daniel shouted. He fired again into the darkness, and Vanai joined him, spraying pistol shots into the corners of the hallway. As Daniel fired another blast, we heard a horrific screech, and then all of us saw from the corners of our eyes a shape, just the hint of a human-sized form, leaping from a patch of darkness and clinging onto the wall. Daniel and Vanai fired again at that silhouette of a figure clinging to the wall, put it jumped, inhumanly fast, into an air duct in the side of the wall and vanished, our bullets riddling the wall around it.
"What was-" Amelia began, when she was cut off by Daniel yelling "Run!" We ran up the hallway, guns out.

As we reached the airlock that we'd come in through, we practically dashed out and into the hot sun outside.
"We're not safe yet," Vanai said. "We've got the cargo, though, and we're out in the open." She and Daniel trained their guns on the airlock opening. "Anything comes through, we shoot it. Amelia, keep an eye out for anything coming towards us across those dunes."
"We got what we came for, and we're out of the ship," Amelia said. "Isn't that enough?"

"Our ride gets here at sundown," Daniel said. He turned to face the sun. "That's maybe four, five hours from now."
"We have to hold out until then," Vanai said. "We can't afford to let down our guard." She wasn't looking up from where she was sighting down her rifle at the airlock door. 

The sun was high in the sky, and the heat was sweltering, but we didn't dare move away, for fear of letting Dancer slip out of the door. "So what exactly is Dancer?" Amelia finally asked.
"Death on six legs," Daniel replied.
"We heard stories in the navy," Vanai said, "about a creature so dangerous, it found its way onto a space station and killed everyone on board. The Imperium didn't advertise it, but Dancer wasn't just some rumor. Details- confirmed details- got out. Dancer is an alien predator. The Imperial Navy found it on a planet a subsector or so away, or so the story goes."
"I heard it was Imperial Marines who found it, actually," Daniel said. 
"Either way," Vanai continued, "they found it on a planet, and decided to take it up to their research station to study. It got out on the flight up, killed half the crew before they got in tranquilized again."
"These were Imperial Marines," Daniel said. "Wearing power armor, and Dancer cut through it like tissue paper. It's a six-legged monster, bluish skin, claws like a broadsword, and a venom that'll kill you before you can blink."
"And it's nimble and graceful," Vanai said. "Like a ballerina, when it kills you." 
"And...are we sure that these aren't just stories soldiers tell?" Amelia asked. "You have to admit this sounds like something out of a thriller." There were a few moments of silence. 
"Something killed those poor people in there," Vanai said. "And we aren't going to let it kill us."

Keeping watch the old-fashioned way, with eyes focused on looking for threats for hours on end, is a lot harder than people assume. We were baking in the desert sun, eyes and guns trained on a single point for hours. We were sweating under our clothing, although we'd decided to set down the containers of phaesite, which helped somewhat. It's near-impossible not to have your mind drift off during those hours of watching and waiting, and start thinking of a cool glass of seltzer water, or the terrifying story you've just heard (Amelia), the deaths you've just seen (Vanai), or the explosives you're going to buy with your share of the payment (Daniel). To our credit, though, we kept watch steadfastly for hours, even as the sun began to drop close to the horizon. The ship seemed to have settled, and didn't seem to be actively sinking, so we just stood there, guns pointed at the airlock, ready for the terrifying monster that we just knew was about to come out of it. We're saying this just to make clear that what happened next was entirely due to circumstances utterly and completely beyond our control. 

It was getting close to sundown; there was maybe an hour or so left in the day. We'd been pointing our guns at the entrance for hours straight, while Amelia was scanning the horizon with binoculars for our ride, or anything trying to creep up on us. And then we heard a scraping of claws on metal, and Daniel looked up just fast enough to see a monster come out of nowhere and leap on top of Vanai. None of us could get a good look at it in the confusion, but it was bluish, with six legs, too many eyes, and spikes protruding from it's back. It nimbly leapt down onto Vanai's chest, and she screamed, almost falling backwards. Daniel gave a yell and shot it at near point-blank range with his shotgun, as it was clutching onto Vanai's torso with two legs and slashing with the other four. Daniel shot it again, and it turned away from mauling Vanai's face in order to stare at him, revealing a face with too many eyes and an inhuman mouth full of teeth. And then it leapt from Vanai onto Daniel, claws extended. Vanai pulled out her pistol and shot it, once, twice, thrice, but it hung on, slashing at Daniel's faceplate and opening up gouges there. Amelia had pulled out her stunner and was trying to get a clear shot when Vanai dropped her pistol, pulled out her rapier, and slashed at the monster, cutting into it's side and releasing a bluish ichor. This gave Daniel the opening he needed to throw it off, where he blasted it with another shot from his shotgun. Dancer reared up, baring it's teeth, and Daniel shot it again. It then leaped forward, inhumanly fast, and grabbed Vanai around the waist with it's jaws, twisting to pull her off her feet. Vanai kicked to get free, but Dancer kept her in it's jaws and turned back, dashing towards the airlock. Daniel got off another shot at it, which missed, and then Dancer and Vanai were gone, back into the depths of the Orpheon. 

Amelia turned to Daniel. "Why aren't we going in after them?" 
"We're not going in there without a plan," Daniel said. "That could be just what it wants us to do." He shouldered his shotgun. 
"But we do have a plan, right?" Amelia said. "We're not just going to abandon Vanai in there, right?"
"Um...of course not," Daniel said. "So let's think."

Vanai woke up dazed and woozy, thinking of for the second time that day that wild high school party at Sonja Alvarez's place. She blinked a few times, and realized that she was buried waist-deep in a room full of sand. The room was dark, but Vanai could just make out metal walls. She tried to squirm and free herself, but she couldn't move. She tried to move again, and she felt nothing but numbness. It was as if her entire body had fallen asleep. Underneath the deadly numbness, she could feel the dull pain of a wound. She must have been bitten by Dancer, and then dropped here...
She tried to look around, but she couldn't see or hear anything. Dancer's not here. So am I bait?

Outside, Daniel was staring at the gouges on his combat armor. "Look at those claws!" he kept saying, half-admiringly. He and Amelia were walking around the perimeter of the ship. 
"She'll be expecting us to go in through the airlock we came in through," Daniel had said. "We'll find another way in. There must be another entrance that she came out through."
"Since when is Dancer a she?" Amelia asked.
"You saw her! She's clearly a she. No male can jump like that." Unable to argue with that logic, Amelia conceded. 
The two of them had walked most of the way around the ship, when they spied another airlock, half-buried in sand. Daniel walked up and pulled it open, struggling against the sand. Eventually, he wrenched it open, and it stayed put, sand flowing into the ship. He and Amelia walked in, guns drawn, and they were back in the dark corridors of the Orpheon. 

"If I was an alien superpredator, where would I be?" Amelia mused. She and Daniel walked down the hall until she bent down to take a look at something. It was a puddle of some bluish-black substance, adhering to the floor. "Looks like spoor, maybe? Like it's marking it's territory?" 
Daniel gazed warily up and down the corridor. "Must mean we're close."
At that moment, their comms both chimed. Amelia pulled out hers and answered it. "Amelia Straffin."
"Amelia! This is Vanai. I'm, ah, still alive, and I'm inside a room half-buried in sand. I can barely move; I'm half paralyzed. Dancer's nowhere in sight. How are you?"
"We're inside the ship. No sign of Dancer, other than some kind of fluid substance. Do you have any idea where you are?"
"No," Vanai said. "And I can't really move much right now. It took all I had to reach my comm and dial you."
"Don't worry," Amelia said. "We'll find you. Just give me a second..." She typed in a few commands onto her comm, and then smiled. "I've got a lock on you," she said. "We'll be with you in a minute."

Vanai spent a few anxious moments trying to regain sensation in her limbs before the door burst open with a cry of 'BREACHING!' and revealing a hulking figure in combat armor, shotgun in hand. He took a step inside, shotgun raised, and fired it into one of the ventilation shafts, blowing off the shaft cover. 
"Daniel," Vanai said. "I'm glad to see you here."
"Did you see where Dancer went?" Daniel asked. "I was pretty sure she'd be hiding in one of the ventilation shafts."
"Or in the sand," Amelia said. 
"Dancer's clearly not here," Vanai said. "Now let's be moving." She tried to stand up, and fell to her knees in the sand. "I don't think I can walk."

There was suddenly a tremendous clattering sound, and the ship started to incline dramatically, the floor itself tilting under our feet. It wasn't stopping, but instead it continued to shift beneath us.
"This is Dancer's doing," Vanai said. "I don't know how, but it's behind this."
"We need to move," Daniel said.
"I can't walk."
"We need to move!" he shouted, and pushed the door open and started to run, the boots of his armor magnetically adhering to the tilting floor. It was at around a 20-degree angle, and tilting rapidly. It was all we could do to stay on our feet. We braced ourselves into the sand and opened the door to the hallway. We looked down it, and at the end, we could see sand starting to flow into the hallway, like a shipwreck but with sand instead of water. 
"Run!" Amelia shouted. She and Vanai started to run up the hallway, but it was like running up a hill. The ship bucked and swayed again, and suddenly it was immensely steeper. Amelia's ankles were burning, as if she was trying to climb a steep hill. The ship tilted again, and Amelia and Vanai grabbed onto a doorway to hold on. Daniel was far ahead already, his boots propelling him towards the first airlock and to freedom and sunlight, but Vanai and Amelia were too tired to curse his name. Behind and below them, sand was pooling rapidly and gaining on them. The two women pulled themselves up the hallway, using every finger and toe-hold they could find. The ship tilted again, and they found themselves at a 45-degree angle, staring up at the square of sunlight that was the airlock at the top of the corridor. They pulled themselves up the corridor even more frantically, while the ship kept tilting. Vanai and Amelia were more than halfway up the corridor, shooting glances down at the long slide to the sand beneath them, when the ship started to tilt and kept tilting, bringing up the floor in front of them as if it was trying to become a wall. Vanai gave an animal growl and threw herself forward, boots sliding on the floor's surface. And then her weakened, half-paralyzed ankle gave out, and she fell, sliding along the carpet back away from the sunlight towards sand and darkness. 

And then Amelia grabbed her by the back of her jacket, and Vanai clambered to her feet. Amelia was hanging on to a doorframe with one hand, and Vanai with the other. The ship was at a 60-degree angle or so, and the airlock entrance just a few meters away. 
"Couldn't have you dying on us, could I?" Amelia said. And then the ship pitched underneath them, leaving them hanging on for dear life. Visions filled their heads of being buried in a desert tomb ship, with an alien monster lurking somewhere inside. Vanai growled, physically picked up Amelia, and began to pull herself along the wall. The ship's floor lurched up towards them, but by some miracle they held on, Vanai's fingertips grasping the edge of the airlock. Amelia pushed off against the wall and grabbed on as well. They hauled themselves up into the airlock, and then up on their feet, sprinting out of the airlock and into the glorious sunlight. Daniel was waiting a good distance away, and he beckoned wildly for them to run to him. They set off across the sand, the ship sinking into the dunes behind them, knowing that the ship sinking would create a hole that could swallow them up as well. Running on sand felt horribly slow, and they shot glances back at the doomed ship, but they reached the crest of the next line of dunes, where Daniel was, and we all turned to watch as the Orpheon was swallowed up by sand.

"We made it," Amelia said. 
"No thanks to Daniel," Vanai said.
Daniel shrugged, the gesture hard to spot inside his power armor. "I saved the phaesite," he said, gesturing to the cargo crates. "We'll be well-paid for this."
"Can we perhaps have our next job be something where there isn't an alien monster trying to kill us?" Vanai asked. 
Daniel snorted. "We're Travellers. What did you expect?"

Just as the sun was reaching the horizon, the Balthazari government's desert vehicle pulled up to us. The driver gave us a questioning look, maybe wondering why we'd only escaped with a few crates' worth of phaesite, but Daniel and Vanai alike gave him a glare which practically dared him to criticize our results. We climbed into the vehicle and sped off.
"You don't think Dancer is dead, do you," Vanai said softly to Daniel from the backseat. 
"Dancer set that ship to sink on us," Daniel said. "She's too smart to not escape."
"Do you think she'll..come looking for us? For revenge?" Vanai asked.
"Whether she survived or not," Amelia cut in, "she's stranded in the desert. No food, no water...I don't think we need to worry about her."

We arrived back in Balthazar City, and the nondescript fellow in a business suit handed us all credit sticks with our payment. We handed the phaesite to him, and he promised that it'd come in handy. We all knew that he didn't want us asking any questions, but Vanai did. "So what are you going to use that phaesite for?"
"Internal security matters."
We didn't want to know anything more. 

We got back to our rooms at the TAS hostel. Alex was there, and we immediately launched into the story of our escapade. He'd heard of Dancer as well, making Amelia the only person in the party who hadn't known about her (the gender Daniel assigned sort of stuck) beforehand. We would have considered our adventure wrapped up right there, and just tallied it up as a third successful job, but we happened to hear about a murder the next day. 

A Balthazari government employee, working for an agency with an abbreviated name that, to be honest, probably did horrible things, had shown up murdered gruesomely. Guts strewn around his house, blood everywhere, all of that. We would have considered that just another day on the crapsack planet we'd found ourselves on, if it hadn't been for that Amelia recognized the man as the driver from the ride the Balthazari government had arranged. That, and the fact that a mysterious bluish fluid had apparently been found at the crime scene. 
"They drove us out over a hundred kilometers into the desert," Vanai said. "There's no way Dancer could have gotten here that quickly."
"Yes, there is," Amelia said quietly. "If she hitched a ride with us." There was a period of silence.
"Are you saying," Alex said slowly, "that Dancer may have ridden onboard your ride out of the desert with you?"
Amelia nodded. "And now she's loose in the city."

Adventure Writeup: Travellers at a Formal Ball

Good bars are few and far apart in the 3rd Imperium. In the future, substitutes have been introduced to replace alcohol in drinks in order to reduce harmful effects and risk of addiction, sacrificing flavor for safety. These drinks cover the shelves of many bars across known space, and while each bottle is good, they are almost never great. Not that alcohol is gone. If you have a bartender who's willing to go out of their way to get real alcohol that will boost your confidence and destroy your liver, then you know you'll have a good bar. Say what you will about Balthazar; most of it is accurate. It's a burned-out war-torn hellhole that nobody and their mother would ever in their right mind want to visit, much less stay. You don't go to Balthazar; you end up on Balthazar.

But damned if it didn't have one of the best bars in the sector. 

High off our success with the train heist, we all went back to the bar where we'd been recruited by "the resistance". We could have gone back to the hotel room, but it would have been too small for all the party we were packing. The rest of the patrons couldn't have cared less about us being there, but for many of us, it was our first real victory for a long time, the first of many to come, if we didn't die horribly first.

We were causing a real scene, with Amelia having trouble holding her spiked seltzer, Daniel singing a nursery rhyme (poorly) with Alex laughing at him, and Vanai wishing she had been there. Most of the other patrons began to leave because of how late it was. At least, I think that's why they left. No matter. The night wore on, and eventually it was only the four of us and the bartender left. He's probably a psion, the way he talks funny and how fast he gets us our drinks and the way his eyes glow when he thinks we can't see. Psionics are totally illegal, but we aren't exactly saints ourselves.

It was at this late hour that the door opened, and we all turned to look in a drunken stupor. A man, sharply decked out in a tuxedo, strolled into the bar, eyes full of life, and anger, and tears. He surveyed us all carefully before taking a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and dabbing at his eyes. He turned to us, and in an imperative tone, asked us-

"Is this the place?"

We looked at each other in confusion. We weren't totally there, and it seemed like he wasn't either, looking not at us but through us, preoccupied with something. Daniel spoke up.

"Um, sure."

The man perked up. "Really? This is where Archduke Ferdinand the 2nd-13th-5th died? Where he was stabbed to death by a madman? The place where my best friend was taken from me?" He began to choke up. We looked at each other uncomfortably. Great, another Balthazar nobleman. He probably knew the guy Daniel had shanked just before we were hired for the train heist. Daniel made a move towards his blade; we knew things were going to turn ugly fast. The man looked up again. "Then you all must have been here when he died. You must have seen the murder-" He was overcome with emotion again. "You all were here. And now- now you must-"

He pulled a few pieces of paper out from his jacket and handed them to us. They were invitations to some kind of formal ball.

"You were all there. You saw what that killer did to Ferdinand. I'm sorry you had to witness the death of a good man, and now I want you all to attend his funeral."

We stared at him uncomprehendingly for a minute.

"So... you don't know who we are, then?" asked Amelia.
The man looked at her with confusion. "No, but clearly you're all regulars at this establishment. You must have been there when he died, so you're invited to his funeral."

We stared at him again. Maybe he was too distraught over the death of his friend to think straight. Maybe he was trying to trick us. Maybe he was just stupid.

Nobody said anything until Vanai spoke up. "On behalf of this fine party of travellers, I, Lady Dame Vanai Cordé of the House of Cordé do accept your invitation to the funeral of Archduke Ron Paul the 2nd-5th- what were the numbers?"
"2nd-13th-5th."
"Yes, that. I accept your invitation on our behalf, sir. What was your name?"
"Lafayette. You may call me Lafayette." He turned to the rest of us. "Thank you, friends. I eagerly await your presence at the funeral."
He quickly turned and left the building.


"Huh," said Alex.

"I didn't think people could be so dense," Amelia thought aloud. "Clearly, I was wrong. Is this a good idea? Who knows the risks of going to a party for a dead guy that we killed!"

"Hey, don't try to take credit for that! That was all me!" said Daniel. "Anyway, parties are fun, and there'll be free food, so I say we go."

"We ARE going," declared Vanai. "Didn't you hear anything I said to that guy?"

"Yeah, but we thought you weren't gonna follow up," put Alex bluntly.

"But that makes no sense! What kind of person would just lie about going to a formal occasion like that? That's rude!"
The rest of us shuffled awkwardly before she continued. "It would be against protocol not to go after I already said yes, and it would be disrespectful to the dead guy. We are going to this party."

"See, I'm with this lady." exclaimed Daniel.

"Not you," she said.

"What? Come on! I'm great at parties! If anything, you should stay behind. You're the boring one. Eh? Eh?" He looked to Amelia and Alex for approval. He found none.

"Juvenile remarks aside, if someone was at that party who actually did see us- I mean, Daniel- kill the archduke, then we'll have real problems. The rest of us can claim ignorance, but not you. Besides, it would require changing out of your combat armor, and nobody wants that."

Daniel began to see the logic of the situation. Not that he liked it. "Yeah, yeah," he mumbled. "I was gonna stay back and, um, protect the hotel room, anyway. I hope y'all have fun."
He clearly did not want us to have fun. He disappeared into the hotel's parking garage shortly after that, muttering that he was going to go work on our stolen police car.

Back in the hotel room, Vanai nodded as if it were all settled and then started looking through pictures of what looked like prom dresses on her comm, sighing in delight now and then when she saw a particularly nice one. Alex checked the invitations, and saw that the funeral-ball for the guy Daniel shanked would be the day after tomorrow. Amelia sat down on the carpeted floor of the hotel room and pulled out a pair of woman's gloves, an industrial-strength battery, electrical wire, various electrical tools, and a soldering iron and started assembling some device while cackling softly to herself. Alex wondered once again what kind of group he'd gotten himself involved with and wandered outside.

Vanai's grey ball dress.
Shame about what happened to it.

On the day of the ball, Vanai assembled Amelia and Alex to look over their outfits before the ball. By golly, she wasn't going to go to a formal event without her 'bodyguards' looking tidy and professional. She was herself wearing an elaborate grey dress, loose and flowing and maybe a bit impractically long, but she had a smile on her face as she wore it. She nodded approvingly upon seeing Alex's pilot's dress uniform, looking well-kept and only about a decade out of style. Amelia had stubbornly decided to wear her lab coat, and was wearing the gloves she'd been working on earlier.

"Shouldn't we go check on what Daniel is doing?" Amelia said as we were on our way out.
"No, it's probably nothing," Vanai said, holding her dress to make sure it didn't get muddy in the gutter.

We learned on the drive to the ball every single one of Vanai's nervous habits. She was clearly worried and/or excited, as she kept clasping and unclasping her hands, and she kept on looking out the window, dreaming of meeting that one perfect guy or girl (after almost a year with her, we're still not sure) or something like that. Alex and Amelia were more wondering more about whether using the plastic baggies they'd brought to bring food home with would get them ejected or not. Balthazar may be a hellhole, but it's got good seltzer water.

We showed up at the building where the funeral was to take place, and we honestly couldn't tell whether it was supposed to be a funeral or a party. There was a live quartet playing classical music, a bunch of fancy-looking people wandering about talking and dancing, and an honest-to-God caller. "Dame Vanai Cordé, and escort," he announced as we entered.

Basically what the funeral looked like

Vanai practically squealed as soon as she got inside, and quickly went off to go hang out with some of the local bigwigs, ditching us. Alex wandered over to the buffet and made small talk with one of the guards posted around the room. Amelia did the same, but skipped the latter.

The party had been going on for a while, and the unkind, stingy souls manning the buffet were starting to give Alex and Amelia dirty looks, so the two of them quickly made themselves look busy by 'admiring the architecture' of the room. It was while they were trying to avoid making eye contact with the buffet servers that Amelia noticed the suspicious-looking person in a maintenance worker's outfit slipping furtively into an unmarked door near the back of the room.

"I'm gonna go check that guy out," Amelia said. "It'll give me something to do."

"Go ahead," Alex said, shrugging. Amelia went off to go follow him.

Atherton Beryl

On the dance floor, Vanai had just finished another waltz with another young officer in the Balthazari Space Force when she went to sit down for a moment and grab some champagne. She had just taken a champagne flute from a passing waiter when she turned and ran straight into a man in a tuxedo passing the other way, jostling some champagne onto his jacket.
He looked up. "You insult my honor," he said angrily. Then his eyes met Vanai's. "You!" he said. "You're that Cordé woman!"

"You're that Beryl war profiteer," she said. "Tell me, do you still charge your workers for their sleeping privileges, or just for their food?"

"You have no idea of how a business is run," he said coldly. "Perhaps that's why House Beryl continues to have larger revenues and a stronger shipping fleet than House Cordé." A crowd of people, including Alex, had begun to gather around as voices were raised. The two evidently had some history.

"I had no idea that being a merchant of death was so lucrative," Vanai replied. "Of course, I suppose you need the cash to pay for your older brother's- Gavilar, I believe his name was- gambling debts. 7.4 million credits to a Mondasian mob leader, I believe?"

"Slander. Remember, everyone," Beryl gestured to the assembled group, "my family's honor is being slandered, openly slandered, by this woman who has fallen in with a group of vagabonds and Travellers!"

Vanai's lips tightened. "You talk a lot about honor for a man with none."

"Honor?" Beryl shouted. "Tell me, Cordé, how many of your Traveller boys have you slept with? How many? Give me a number!"

With a quick gesture, Vanai dashed the remainder of the champagne in the flute onto Beryl's suit. He looked down at it, then looked up at Vanai, rage in his eyes.

"You Cordé bitch!" he spat. His hand went to the sword at his side. Vanai turned to Alex, who had a shocked expression on his face.

"Sword," Vanai said. "Pass me my sword."

And then the old guy we'd met at the bar, Lafayette, swept in. "This will be an affair of honor," he declared. "Dame Cordé, you may prepare with your retainer in that corner. Mr. Beryl, you may do the same over there." The two duelists did as he instructed, and the assorted nobles watching split into different camps surrounding their preferred victor.

"Huh. Did you just get yourself into a fight at a fancy party?" Alex asked Vanai. "I kind of figured it'd be me doing that."

"His family's an old enemy." Vanai said. "I'm fairly certain that provoking duels with Beryls is a family tradition. Pass me my sword."Alex handed her Navy rapier to her from where he'd been holding it, and she swung it around experimentally. "I'm going to stretch beforehand," she said. "I hear Atherton Beryl's good with a sword."

"Don't you want to change out of your dress?" Alex asked.

"I'm wearing my cloth armor underneath," she said, "and, FYI, dresses are actually fairly easy to move around in in combat. Ask me how I know this."

While the insults and duel preparations were going on on the dance floor, Amelia had snuck into the maintenance door and was looking around. It was dark back there, as maintenance passageways tend to be, and so Amelia felt her way along to the left until she bumped into something on the floor. She looked down. It was a body, dressed in a maintenance worker's uniform, and he was not breathing. Oh shit. Gripping her only weapon, her gloves modified to give an electrical shock, she crept past the body and encountered a set of stairs leading upward. She considered for a moment, and then crept up them.


Back in the main room, Vanai stepped forward, blade in hand, to face Beryl. He had a rapier in his own hand, and crouched slightly, blade in front of him. Vanai turned to assume a classic fencing stance, side turned to face Beryl.
"Begin," Lafayette called. The poor guy held himself together pretty well, considering that there was going to be a swordfight at his best friend's funeral.
Vanai charged forward, slashing at Beryl, who easily parried. Vanai stabbed at Beryl's chest, and he stepped to the side, slashing at her head. She brought up her blade just in time to parry it, once, twice, and then again, before stepping back to recover. Beryl gave her no time to rest, however, as he stepped forward, slashing at her defenses. Vanai blocked the first slash, and the second, but the third slash nicked her arm. Despite the bleeding, she recovered quickly, pressing the attack and forcing Beryl backwards behind a flurry of blows. Beryl fell back, forced to defend himself, as Vanai slashed at his cheek, cutting it, before using a superb riposte and lunge which caught Beryl in the torso.

Back on the maintenance stairway, Amelia had just crept up to the top and was looking out. There was a balcony there, overlooking the entire ballroom below. Behind the balcony railing, out of sight, crouched an assassin in the classic 'I'm-about-to-shoot-someone" pose, staring down the sights of a sniper's Gauss rifle. The assassin was wearing full battle armor, which had some form of camouflage active which made it blend into its surroundings. Amelia took a look at the assassin, took a look at the combat armor, took a look at the sniper rifle, and glanced down at her own electrified opera gloves. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, she carefully took a step backwards towards the stairs.

Back on the ballroom floor, the look of shock on Beryl's face was beautiful to watch. He'd evidently been expecting to win, and was staring at the bloody hole in his torso with a look of complete dumbfoundedness. Then he recovered his composure, and bowed theatrically to Vanai.
"A good day to you, Dame Cordé," he said. Then, smirk on his face, he stepped aside to give the sniper a clear shot at Vanai.

The sniper fired, a magnetically-propelled tungsten-alloy dart exploding out from the barrel at a speed of over 3,000 meters per second towards Vanai. And inexplicably, it slammed into Beryl's back, sending blood spraying out over the assembled guests and Vanai's gorgeous grey dress. And the ball erupted into chaos and screaming. Alex, with the trained reflexes of a combat veteran, yelled "Move!" at Vanai, and ran for cover, pulling out his own cutlass as he went. The nobles were practically tripping over themselves to get out of there, and Vanai was staring blankly at Beryl, who was lying in agony on the floor, and wondering how it all could have happened.

And then the Imperial Intelligence kill squad broke in through the massive picture windows on one wall, and the chaos really started. There were four of them, wearing full tactical gear, brandishing automatic rifles and spraying bullets at anything in sight. The nobles who had been fleeing in that direction turned and ran, some of them falling to the kill squad's indiscriminate fire. From the balcony overlooking it all, the assassin fired again, the Gauss dart splitting the air directly above Vanai's head. She finally saw sense and ran for over, sensibly hiding directly below the balcony with Alex, the only place in the room where the assassin couldn't fire at her.

Near the window where the kill squad had burst in, Lafayette, the host of the now horribly off-track funeral-party turned to his retainer. "Give me my sword," he said. The sword in question, Adrienne, was a massive broadsword, a family heirloom of the Lafayette lineage. Forged in the fires of Mount Hestian on Imperial Prime using techniques now lost to the ages, it was the blade of centuries of great warlords and leaders. Now, it was being used in it's eternal purpose: to kill or maim as many of the enemies of the Lafayette line as possible. Lafayette drew Adrienne from its scabbard, crying "For the memory of Ferdinand the 2nd-13th-5th!" He swept upon the kill squad like a storm, hacking and cutting at those who had dared dishonor his dear friend's memory.

Seeing the chaos that had erupted in the ballroom below, the assassin, known only as 'Wolf', stood and crossed quickly to the stairs leading down, shouldering her sniper rifle. She would have to deal with the target quickly, lest she escape in the chaos. She quickly took the steps down at a jog, and was about to exit the maintenance chamber when, from behind a corner, a pair of hands in white gloves grabbed her armor by the neck. "Got you!" said Dr. Amelia Straffin, before clenching to activate her gloves. Thousands of volts of electricity arced into Wolf's neck.

And did nothing. The combat armor was completely insulated, and impervious to pesky little things like water, the elements, and near-lethal doses of electricity. Amelia suddenly realized, with her gloves ineffective, exactly how much trouble she was in. The faceplate of Wolf's helmet turned to face Amelia. "Give me one reason that I shouldn't kill you right now."

Outside, Vanai and Alex were firing potshots at the kill squad from their cover, and Lafayette was carving his way through the would-be assassins, his broadsword seeming to gleam with bloodlust. He ran an assassin through with Adrienne, before wrenching it out and hacking at another, a fierce grin on his face. And then, as if fate herself had flipped us the middle finger, a band of anarchists burst in through the front doors, firing at everyone in sight.

"Today is just not our day," Alex observed dryly.

Vanai ignored him, firing at the assassins threatening to overwhelm Lafayette from all sides. One of them, seeing the muzzle flash from her autopistol, fired a quick burst at her, and she screamed, blood spreading outward over her dress.

Amelia, back inside the maintenance corridor, was utterly terrified. To her credit, she tilted her head to the side, as she always did when she was concentrating, and started to think. "Well," she said, "you were probably hired by my brother, Erik Straffin, the Mafia boss. You know him? Looks like me, but a bit taller, scar on his cheek, and a burning psychopathic desire to utterly destroy his enemies?"

"Yeah, actually," Wolf said. "Sounds like him."

"Think about it," Amelia said. "Your target's Vanai Cordé. A tough target at the best of times, but you failed. She's still very much alive. As I've said, I know Erik well. I should. I'm his sister."

"Really?" Wolf asked, looking up and down.

"Now, in our family, I'm the nice one. I don't work for Erik. But do you know what Erik does to people who fail him?"

Wolf furrowed her brow inside her helmet.

"Trust me when I say you don't want to find out," Amelia said. "He's a sadistic and extremely inventive man. Right now, your best move is to run, and run as far as possible. Trust me." Wolf thought about it.
"What did you say your name was?"

"Amelia. Amelia Straffin."

"See you around, Amelia." She quickly strode out the door. "I'd love to talk with you more, once this whole thing with your brother is sorted out."

Amelia watched as the professional assassin in full battle armor reached the grounds outside and started sprinting away.

Inside the ballroom, it was complete and utter chaos. Machine pistol-toting anarchists were spraying bullets at the nobles, the Imperial kill squad, the Travellers huddled in the corner, the walls, and basically anything that moved except for each other. A stray bullet hit Vanai and she went down, clutching her arm. Alex picked up her autopistol and returned fire, pumping shots at the oncoming anarchists. Lafayette thrust his sword into the chest of one of the assassins, and the man fell, dead before he hit the ground. Alex fired at the anarchists, killing one, while fire from a member of the kill squad dropped another, and the remainder fled. In another part of the ballroom, surrounded by the corpses of fallen foes, Lafayette faced only two survivors from the original kill team. He swung at one, a vicious overhead cut which bit deep into the assassin's neck. He screamed, and then his partner shot Lafayette in the back. As Alex watched, Lafayette staggered, and the assassin shot him again. Alex desperately fired at the assassin, who shot Lafayette once more, before fleeing towards the window.

Alex surveyed the room. The shooting had stopped, and those who had survived began to stir. Alex quickly assessed Vanai's condition, noting that she was still breathing. He tore off a few strips from the bottom portion of her dress, and quickly binded them around her wounds. "Much appreciated," Vanai said. "I don't suppose you could help me walk?"

Alex helped her up, and together, they slowly walked over to Lafayette. He was on the floor, and in bad shape. He looked as if he was quickly bleeding out, and his breathing was ragged and slow. "Thank you," he whispered, "for doing...your...best." He relaxed, and grew still. Alex felt for a pulse, saw there was none, and stood up. The few nobles able to walk had gathered around Lafayette's body, heads bowed. Outside, they heard the sound of police sirens, coming to the scene. Vanai and Alex walked to the door, slowly, to greet them. Amelia came out from the maintenance area and fell in alongside them. "Hey guys! I just bluffed this professional assassin into fleeing! How cool is that?"

"Huh. That is something," Alex said.

"Also, you two look like hell. Actually, just Vanai," Amelia said. Vanai was bleeding in two places, and her dress was torn and covered in bloodstains.

Alex patted himself up and down, as if to check all his limbs were still there. "I seem to completely fine," he said. "How about that?"

Afterwards, there was a lot of bureaucracy to wade through. The police had to investigate and tag dozens of bodies in what was already being billed as the massacre of the century, which was pretty impressive, given that the new one only started eight years ago. Of course, given that this was Balthazar, there'd probably be another one equally horrific next month. We had to do a great number of interviews with police and detectives, in which we expended a lot of time and energy in proving to the police that we weren't, in fact, in cahoots with the assassins. Beryl's official cause of death was the crossfire from the kill squad, although the Gauss rifle shot to the back probably hadn't helped him. We didn't hear anything from Wolf, but given her occupation, we presumed that was a good sign.

As an unexpected plus, it turned out that the party guests who gave interviews to the police had been suitably impressed by our heroism (or rather, to Alex's disgust, the heroism of "that brave young noble lady with the sword and gun, and her plucky sidekick") that when the executor assessed Lafayette's will, we were given a small portion of his estate. Lafayette's family had all died years ago, and, as befits the man who we learned was in fact Lord Admiral Gilbert Lafayette, of the Balthazari Space Navy, that we were given one of his older ships, an aging 'Free Trader'-class ship with a full jump drive, multiple staterooms, and a 64 H-ton cargo bay. So like that, we were real Travellers, in possession of a good ship and the means to fly her. We weren't quite sure what to call her: Vanai lobbied for a suitably grand name, such as Atlantica or Lady of Aquitaine or Galactica, while Alex was reportedly partial to Battle of Dessel. In the end, though, Amelia won out, and our ship was called Wolf.