Everyone shows up for the inaugural session of Chuck's new Prodigal Suns game, except of course for Mike, who remains in the Happiest Place on Earth: Tijuana, MEXICO! Our happy crew includes:
Thanks to the wonders of the backstory, the characters own a refurbished Aurora-class free trader. There is little question that it needs a name, so we hold an electon. The early candidates include:
Each player gets three votes. The results of the election:
The winner is Salt Witch. Kraid Naiben gets an extra Genre Point because Tim originally suggested that name.
In an earlier, simpler time Elizabeth Blessing was shacked up with the infamous Armenian crimeboss Legos "Lungsucker" Vartanian. Lungsucker Vartanian was primarily known for the bloodthirsty way he had consolidated his control over the underworld in the massive Drengulskava city complex on Gaulden. Sensing that her time in the sun might be drawing to a close, Liz Blessing cooperated with a former cop named Caleb Kagan in a complicated scheme to extract a tremendous amount of money from Lungsucker's accounts and convert it into a means of escape, the Salt Witch.
Blessing and Kagan knew that they needed more people to run the ship and to ensure that they could survive on the run. They knew that Lungsucker Vartanian ran fugitive contracts for the Gaulden Treasury Enforcers and was looking for "Goat" Gulgusskun, a psychic healer with significant legal problems. They found him first and hired him as their medic, confident that he was otherwise totally unhirable. Goat brought along Bob the Saurk, whom he had recently treated for several gunshot wounds. Bob happened to be an engineer who was also totally unhirable. They hired Kraid Naiben the demlux as a gunner on their way between Gaulden and New Saigon after a brief dalliance with a pirate convinced everyone that the autopilot gunner was not going to cut it.
At one time, New Saigon was a gangster paradise. Then the ICPA decided that it was an unregistered colony and needed to be relocated. They reconsidered when they realized how difficult the task would be. As a compromise, they set up a Protectorate and put a Military Governor in charge. The current Governor isn't on the take, but he isn't really in charge either.
Like most colonies, it is moderately self-sufficient in food and has its own economy, even with all the corruption.
Most colonies have an Exchange, a place for contractors and ship crews to go to find work. In the case of New Saigon, the Exchange is a profit-making enterprise operated by a local businessman. A 24-hour pass costs Cr 50. The appeal is that all manner of folk with cargo to ship will be looking for ships to carry it at the Exchange. The characters arrange a field trip there to find some cargo. Liz Blessing, Goat Gulgusskun, and Kraid Naiben all gather up their credits and head to the Exchange.
Caleb Kagan doesn't have the money or the social skills to find useful contracts, so he just sits in front of the Salt Witch in a lawn chair with a sign saying, "Will haul cargo for food." Bob the Saurk stays down in the engine room, scratching the new skin mite colony that's developing near his muzzle.
Once inside the Exchange building, the characters swiftly discover the problems of looking for work in a slow economy. They spend most of the day looking around and commisserating with other ship crews also looking for contracts. In a moment of desperation, Liz gives some money to Goat and sends him off to find some illicit pharmaceuticals, a task that isn't that tough for him.
Liz has almost given up on finding anything when a fairly well-dressed foreigner approaches her. He introduces himself as Alman Dekravakian, and explains that he is the Assistant Vice Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs for the world of Aetna. He needs to hire the Salt Witch to transport some goods to his world. He claims that he has heard many wonderful things about the ship, a claim that Liz finds hard to believe. He then tells her that his contract involves transporting 20 persons, plus some cargo. His price is Cr 2000 now and Cr 4000 on arrival at Aetna. Liz knows that Dekravakian is lowballing, and negotiates him up to Cr 2500 in advance, and Cr 6000 on completion. She also learns that Dekravakian came to New Saigon to hire some people.
Once the details have been arranged, Dekravakian asks when the ship can be ready to leave. "Is tomorrow good?" "Certainly. Will you be joining us on board?" "Oh yes, but I have many other important things to take care of today." The deal is signed and notarized by an agent of the Exchange.
Liz returns to the ship, "Hey boys! We're leaving tomorrow! We're going to take 20 people to Aetna!" The characters divide the money up, with each character taking Cr 500 to each character. The remaining Cr 500 is placed into the ship's maintenance account. The characters debate for a while on whether or not they should worry about the fact that they're going to be putting the passengers into the cargo hold. They decide to worry about it tomorrow.
Liz, Caleb and Bob head out to what is supposed to be a hot party to celebrate. They find that the place is not nearly so exciting as advertised, at least until Liz starts popping the pills that Goat found for her earlier in the day. After that it doesn't take long for her to vanish with some guy. She doesn't reappear until the next morning. Caleb stops at three beers because he's a really boring guy. Goat stays home and darns his socks, proving that he is even more boring than Caleb is.
Some of the characters spend a little time learning about Aetna. They find that it is a pretty small colony of about a million people. It is only theoretically self-supporting, and has been quite poor for all of its fairly brief existence. They are on the verge of being behind on their dues to the ICPA, which is usually a sign of desperation (and possible impending takeover) for any colony. On the plus side, the locals have found some minerals and are in the early stages of negotiating a contract with ICBM to exploit those resources.
Morning arrives. The characters crawl from their bunks. And then three trucks pull up in front of the Salt Witch. Twenty "Independent Military Consultants" step out, causing the characters to realize that their contract is likely to be even more exciting than they had expected. Liz comments, "I knew we didn't need to buy them bedrolls. Who travels in a cargo hold besides mercenaries and refugees?"
Liz and Caleb step down onto the tarmac to greet their passengers. Two humans, a demlux and a voniri approach. The lead human has a cigar welded to his teeth and looks like he was cut from the pages of a GI Joe comic. He looks down at Liz and announces, "I'm Colonel Redgar Striker!" Liz takes her time looking up at him then comments, "Of course you are..."
Colonel Striker does his best to ignore Liz' attitude and introduces the rest of his companions as:
About this time, Caleb emerges from the hatch mumbling, "What the hell is all this noise?" He looks around at the assembled mercenary company and grumbles, "Twenty-nine days in jump with all this lot. We're gonna need another porta-potty." The mercenaries start loading their stuff onto the ship. One mercenary is sent off for extra water and extra sanitary supplies.
The mercenaries are very efficient at loading, and Liz is eager to leave as soon as they are done, but Colonel Striker points out that everyone needs to wait for the paycheck to arrive. While the characters wait, Liz tries pumping the Colonel for information. The Colonel is very upfront in explaining that his organization was hired for training and counter-insurgency. One of the things Aetna is trying to keep quiet is the presence of a sizable insurgent group that thinks mega-corporate involvement in the colony is wrong. The government wants Striker's crew to help suppress the insurgents. Their primary job is to train up the Aetna Home Defense Force into an organization able to fight the insurgent threat.
After a long while, Alman Dekravakian pulls up looking tired and rumpled. He i still wearing yesterday's clothes and obviously hasn't shaved. Goat loads his suitcases onto the ship.
During the trip, the characters have a lot of opportunity to talk to the mercenaries. They find that the mercenaries break into two groups: one elite core group and a larger group of more recent recruits. The old guard have known the Colonel the longest, and apparently were all in the same unit at one point. They include:
Liz looks forwards to the day when she finally gets two of the soldiers to fight over her. The other characters are not so eager to see this day, but that doesn't stop them from making bets on which two come to blows first.
During the journey, the mercenaries spend a lot of time holding briefings on the local survival situation, including flora, fauna and terrain hazards. This is far more interesting than anything either Caleb or Goat can do on ship, so they spend a lot of time listening from the background. Caleb listens as if he's watching a television show. Goat listens while making a sweater.
The mercenaries stay on the lower deck almost all the time. They do some gambling, with draws in Kraid like a moth to a flame. He loses Cr 100 in an embarrassing display of ineptitude. Caleb does okay, losing only Cr 50. Liz pulls in Cr 100, challenges Milo to another hand, all-or-nothing, and wins. She'd always wanted to rip off a voniri, and now she's managed it. She crosses one more item off her List of Things To Do Before Lungsucker Hunts Me Down.
Bob spends his time taking apart and reassembling redundant systems down in engineering. Most of the time, nobody notices. Except when he shuts off the hot water midway through the mercenaries' laundry cycle. Or when he turns off power to all the bridge instruments for three hours without warning anyone.
When he isn't disassembling things, Bob wanders the corridors of the ship, fretting over the fact that there are strangers on board. He becomes obsessed with a spare spring that Caleb left in the engine room as a joke.
Two-thirds of the way through the trip, Liz tries to provoke a couple of soldiers. She is disappointed to find that the soldiers are more scared of Grarg and Striker than they are enticed by her. Liz redirects her efforts towards seducing Sergeant Oswald, the goth sniper. She concludes that Oswald is interested, but not until after the mission is over. At which point Liz won't be interested any more. By the end of the journey, she is so bored that she is using her implants to change hair and skin tone practically every day.
The Salt Witch slides down out of jump. Caleb warms up the sensors and looks around. It is disturbingly quiet - space traffic control seems to be down. All he can get is local radio broadcasts from the planet. He doesn't see a single active ship in the system. He turns to monitoring local news. It seems that the People's Liberation Army of Aetna are broadcasting a lot of reports about how they have liberated the colony from those who would sell it out to the evil Corporate interests. This doesn't sound very promising to him. The one glimmer of hope is the implication that the takeover may not be complete: the PLAA are offering substantial rewards for the capture of a variety of "traitors" who remain at large.
With typical understated grace, Liz Blessing gets on the PA to announce, "Colonel Striker and Undersecretary Dekravakian to the bridge please..." They arrive. She tells them, "Gentlemen, it seems that we've run into a slight complication. We're getting some very interesting transmissions from Aetna City. It sounds like the sinsurgents have taken over the city and are busy re-educating the traitors. And there are no signals from the spaceport. Can we get our three grand now?" Dekravakian stammers out, "That... that's not possible. We had good troops..." He is visibly shattered. Liz hammers in another nail by telling him, "You realize that we get paid double if we have to touch down in a hot LZ." Colonel Striker looks unimpressed, indicating that he's not getting paid enough for this nonsense.
Dekravakian continues to fall apart. He shrieks, "We can't go back!" It develops that he managed to get into a high-stakes poker game on his last night and lost Cr 100,000 that he didn't have. The characters figure out that this was a game run by Nicholas "The Czar" Cavanaugh, and that with normal underworld interest rates Dekravakian probably owes Cavanaugh Cr 500,000 by now.
By the time the characters finish interrogating Dekravakian, Striker is holding his head and moaning about how he needs a drink.
Liz puts the Salt Witch on an unpowered course by the planet, "flying casual" to let Caleb do a sensor sweep to gather more intelligence. Dekravkian and the mercenaries tell the characters that the Aetna government had one surplus ICPA patrol boat, plus several VERTOLs and no armored vehicles. Most ground vehicles are on the level of technicals: a pickup truck with a MG on the back. In the background, insurgent radio continues to list off "war criminals" in the former government. Dekravakian is among this august group, for taking large sums of the people's money offworld.
People's Liberation Committee propaganda is highly oriented towards the idea that the corporations would have enslaved the people and oppressed them. Caleb determines that there are no dissenting opinions on the airwaves. He gets some good maps of the planet from Major Billingsworth, but doesn't have sensors good enough to get a good image of the spaceport.
The characters and the mercenaries hold a meeting to discuss their options. The mercenaries are discontent, and make the quick suggestion that the first course of action should be throwing Dekravakian out an airlock. More helpful ideas include making a quick commando raid for supplies, knocking over the insurgent government, and so on. Chief Faremghou is first among those who are upset about all the money the mercenary company is going to lose on this job. Colonel Striker indicates that he wants to negotiate with Dekravakian to up the money in the contract. Everyone agrees that this sounds like a fine idea, up until they find out that Dekravakian doesn't actually have any more money: he was originally given enough money to pay the mercenaries and the characters up-front, but then just gave them down-payments and lost the rest gambling.
The characters eventually work out what seems like a reasonable plan under the circumstances. The Salt Witch is able to land in unimproved conditions, so a wilderness touchdown is very feasible. They will bring the ship down near a settlement out on the edge of the settled zone. The mercenaries (who are busily breaking out armor and guns) will head out to liberate a truck and reconnoiter the area. Further actions will depend upon what the mercenaries find.
The landing is uneventful. The mercenaries set out, and return several hours later with a truck and some food, but no prisoners. They did manage to find some good-sized pigs, which prompts the characters to start up the grill and hold a luau. Caleb talks to the mercenaries and learns that they never actually met any locals. They found a couple of deserted farms, took the truck, and filled it up with stuff on the way back.
The next morning the characters, plus Billingsworth (the Intel Officer) and Oswald (the sniper) head out to find some locals. Before he goes, Bob the Saurk disables the ship's engines by bringing along an irreplaceable component. Bob the Saurk and Kraid get to sit in the back of the truck, underneath a tarp.
The characters drive up to a farm building. Nobody is visible outside. Liz and Caleb walk up to talk to the residents. They seem pretty suspicious, and claim that they don't know what's going on in the city. They order the characters to go away. Then they ask the characters to go away. Finally they beg the characters to go away. The characters eventually comply.
The characters' next stop is an automated farm, where they find lots of things they can steal. Bob the Saurk, Liz, Caleb and Oswald head in to check out the situation, while everyone else stays behind at the truck. It is quickly clear that somebody has noticed them: a bullet whizzes past Bob the Saurk. He ducks and lunges into a full-on charge while unlimbering his ninja sword. Caleb is surprised, commenting, "Bob, you are the most un-ninja-like creature I know. Why are you carrying a ninja sword?" Bob ignores him and chops the trigger-happy local into pieces. Liz spots two more locals and shoots one with a taser, knocking him down into a twitching heap. Caleb tells the last guy, "Drop it!" The farmer shoots at him. Caleb repeats, "I said drop it, dumbass!" Then Oswald takes him down all permanent-like.
The characters investigate the bodies and determine that they happened across a local insurgent patrol. The characters capture two 7mm rifles, plus the insurgents' wallets, belts and boots. The insurgents aren't wearing uniforms, but do have little insignia patches (one of them was drawn on with a heavy marker). They also have a small technical-style truck nearby. The engine cowling is up, and Liz can see that the engine is shot. She tries to fix it until Bob the Saurk walks up and dismissively says, "Sweetie, why don't you let me handle that?" He fixes it in minutes, though he doesn't think it'll last for long.
The characters ravage the place, carrying away about Cr 2000 worth of swag, mostly computer parts and cabling.
The characters head back to the ship, where Caleb attempts to interrogate the prisoner. Caleb can be a pretty threatening guy, but not today. The insurgent literally laughs at Caleb's puny efforts at intimidation. Then Kraid punches him. And knocks him out. Goat stims the guys back to life. The prisoner remains obstinate, howling out, "Die, terrorist! You were stealing parts from the People's Automated Farm! You will pay for your crimes!" He thinks the characters are some of the terrorists that Dekravakian brought back. The characters try to bring Dekravakian in to scare him, but it is clear that the insurgent is not very scared - even the locals think of Dekravakian as someone's idiot nephew.
Caleb tries an alternate plan, asking the insurgent, "Would your people's committee be interested in purchasing the Minister of Snack Foods?" Caleb explains that Dekravakian is no longer the characters' employer because he ran out of money. The insurgent suddenly gets caught up in a fever of ideology-inspired impracticality, shouting, "He belongs to us! He must face people's justice! Blah blah blah blah!" Caleb kicks him down the ramp.
The characters let the mercenaries vote if they want to bring along the truck to sell; they offer to split the proceeds with them. There is wide acceptance to take the truck among the mercenaries.
Liz takes the Salt Witch back into orbit and preps a course back to New Saigon. She opts for a rapid, very obvious takeoff. Caleb decides that there's no point in stealth anymore, so he just lights up the sensors. He picks up the patrol boat doing its feeble best to catch up.
The patrol boat hails the Salt Witch, ordering the characters to turn around and land on the planet. They are particularly interested in having us turn over the war criminal Dekravakian and the terrorists (their code word for the mercenary company). Liz tells them to suck goiters and turns up the engines to full. Bob the Saurk tries to shut down the transponder. And proceeds to break it. Permanently. He tells the others, "At least it's off! And we're never going to be able to make port anywhere, 'cause they shoot ships on sight that don't have working transponders!" Caleb: "I... hope... you... can... fix... it." Bob very cheerfully responds, "I hope so too!"
Salt Witch outdistances the patrol boat easily, which doesn't do anything to satisfy the characters' more bloodthirsty desires. Under Kraids and Caleb's urging, Liz reverses course and makes an attack run on the patrol boat. Kraid sprays the patrol boat with the gauss guns and manages to inflict a bit of damage, shredding away some armor plating (a crew hit, absorbed by reinforced crew compartment). The patrol boat crew fires two missiles at the Salt Witch. Kraid kills them with antimissile fire just as Liz evades. Caleb points out that standard patrol boats normally carry a whole lot more ordnance than the insurgents have been firing at the characters. A typical weapons loadout includes one PDS gun, plus four missile racks and two big fire-and-forget antiship missile pods. Even though the evidence suggests that the patrol boat crew is working against a large barrier of incompetence, the characters finally decide that discretion is called for. Liz turns the Salt Witch around and heads to the jump limit.
The jump back to New Saigon is rather dull. The mood is bleak, but not defeated: there isn't any money, but there are a lot of truck parts that can be sold. And Liz finally manages to talk Sergeant Oswald into some victorious lesbian sex. Caleb spends his time trying to catch Liz and Sergeant Oswald on tape. And Bob the Saurk spends his time fixing the transponder at a cost of Cr 100 of swag.
The session ends with the characters breaking out of jump into the New Saigon system. Each character gains four experience points.