Start: Tuesday (late) 2070.06.19, Duriim System
The Crew:
- Captain Thomas Logan
- Pilot Josh Naxon
- Chief Engineer Kit Malloy
- Navigator Dennis Ross
- Comm/Sensor Officer "Skip" Karbuga
- Chief Steward/Cargomaster Khalekshii Sadaka
- Chief Medical Officer Dr. Svetlana Batsoev
Other Characters:
- Falk - Terran expat that lives on Duriim and helps Free Trades get around the restriction on trade (for a cut of course).
- Mizikhi Larsharlum - First born child of the local iishakku. She has rejected the life of Vilani nobility and now runs a small smuggling operation.
- Ammim Larsharlum - Third born child of the local iishakku (and by law the heir to that title). He does not adhere to the kimashargur philosophy and is looking to strengthen ties to to non-kimashargur nobles.
Vilani words:
- kimashargur - Virtue of the Foremost. Vilani culture that rejects the ban on technological advancement and exploration.
- iishakku - Governors
Recap:
The party met with Mizikhi Larsharlum, where she asked them several questions almost like an interview. She explained that her brother, Ammim, was being groomed by by her father to take over as one of the three ruling iishakku on Duriim. In order to flex his political weight, he has been clamping down on trade with Terrans. This both endears him to the hard-line Imperial Vilani, but also gives him some power over the other iishakku.
Mizikhi explains that Falk has been able to get around most of these controls but is limited in the amounts of trade he can deal with at any one time. She also states that she could get the crew's cargo "bumped up" the line if they help her out. She's looking for some leverage over her brother. This could also lead to long term gains for the crew, if she can get her brother to loosen the trade restrictions.
Then she asks the crew to look into a missing ship that her brother had kept off the books. It arrived in the system a couple of days ago, sending the standard arrival and location message and confirmation of approach vectors. But then a few hours later the ship send a second, garbled signal. A search was ordered, but then called off. And to seems that Ammim had all record of the ship wiped.
She wants the party to find what happens to this ship and try to bring it, the crew, and the cargo to her. Or which ever of those still remain.
The crew begin to search out what information they can about this ship. The public records seem to be mostly purged, other than confirming that a ship sent a signal on arriving in the system. They also learn that the ship was not listed on any arrival lists, and that it was set to land at a private landing location.
After the initial search they decide to hit up Falk, to see if he can give them some direction. He does a lot better than that, as he keeps tabs on all incoming ship transmissions and has a copy of the missing second message. It is encoded, but the crew think they can break it. They take a copy of the message to the ship and are able to decrypt it. It's an SOS signal with a location.
They move the ship's cargo into the spaceport's warehouse, and leave Sadaka on the planet to continue to work on making trade contacts. Then they take off towards the location in the SOS signal. Once there, they find no sign of the ship, but after some scan, realize that the ship may have been heading to a nearby moon (based on where it can arrived, and the second location).
As the Ziggy Stardust approached the moon, they saw a ship launching from some sort of facility hidden on the moon. The Captain hailed the ship, and learned that this was "The Shop", a space "chop shop" where pirates and smugglers get ship upgrades, and presumably where they might drop off a captured ship. The pirate captain mistook the Terrans for some new smugglers in the area, and gave them the pass phrase needed to get entry (and not get shot out of space).
The crew then hailed, gave the phrase, and were on their way to "The Shop".
To be continued...
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