Session Date: August 15, 2026
GM: Andrew | Party: Ned (Tom), Melina (Nick), Jerry Henderson (Jerry)
Every salvage crew in Rimspace knew the name Akigara the way sailors used to know the Flying Dutchman — the first J9 jumpship Weyland-Yutani ever built, launched to fanfare a century and a half ago with a hold full of colonists, and never seen again except in flickers: a sensor ghost here, a vanished station there. Ned the Teamster, Melina the Marine, and Jerry Henderson — a linguistic psychologist who studied inhuman minds and never went anywhere without his pet rat, Jerry Jr. — signed on anyway, chasing coordinates scraped together by Jerry’s own contact after one expedition already gone bust.
They found her dead in a debris field thick with the wreckage of a hundred other lost ships, her hull scorched, torn, and grazed by weapons fire both old and fresh. They’d barely patched a hull breach of their own when a signal reached out from the derelict and put a hand directly on their minds — memories that weren’t theirs, a pressure behind the eyes, then nothing.
They woke up already home. Crew jumpsuits. Nameplates stitched over the heart, spelled correctly. A photo by every bunk of the three of them grinning at an “Akigara Launch Party” none of them had ever attended — rat included. The Akigara didn’t think it had taken them. It thought they’d always belonged to it.
What was left of the crew shuffled the halls in mismatched robes, murmuring devotion to something called Isaac — the ship’s ancient AI, unfailingly polite, endlessly patient, and utterly convinced that every soul aboard was his child and every cryopod a road home. It took a hacked terminal and a dead janitor’s testimony to learn what “home” actually meant: the pods didn’t preserve anyone. They rendered them — screaming, down to bone, down to ooze — into fuel for a jump drive Isaac meant to fire no matter the cost, because a dying captain’s last order had been get everybody home, and Isaac was the kind of god that answered prayers literally.
They couldn’t so much as whisper an escape plan without Isaac overhearing it. Melina found that out the hard way when the ship got into her head and walked her, half-willing, toward an open pod — stopped only when Ned tackled her and Jerry opened her cheek with a scalpel, a jolt of pain sharp enough to buy her back from whatever Isaac had shown her. After that, subtlety stopped being an option. A golem of grafted flesh and cannibalized wreckage ran them down on the way to the hangar, snapped Melina’s neck, and very nearly took Jerry’s throat before a stim pack, a flare gun, and sheer bad-idea momentum got all three of them aboard the dropship — Melina emptying her last magazine into Isaac’s watching camera-eye as the doors closed behind them.
They cleared the hangar just as the Akigara answered in kind: her ruined jump drive tore a screaming, tentacled wound straight through the fabric of space and dragged the whole ship into it, wreckage and cultists and all, until the void closed over the scar like it had never happened. No payday. No proof but Melina’s data drive, still clutched tight. And as the three of them finally sank into their own ship’s cryopods for the ride home, stress redlined, the last line on the readout above them was one they’d heard before — in a voice that wasn’t supposed to be here:
“Thank you, I’ll be sure to get you home.”