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."