Session Date: August 15, 2026
Three strangers signed on to the same salvage contract: Ned, a Teamster with a knack for keeping ships running and a brother back home; Melina, a Marine in advanced battle dress who’d rather shoot a problem than talk about it; and Jerry Henderson, a linguistic psychologist who’d spent his career studying inhuman minds — rats included, one of whom, a small brown fellow eventually and inevitably nicknamed Jerry Jr., rode along in a cage on his hip. None of them were rich. All of them needed the payday.
The job came through a contact of Jerry’s — a hyperspace specialist friend who’d spent years chasing sightings of a ship that shouldn’t have existed anymore. A century and a half earlier, Weyland-Yutani had built the Akigara, the first jumpship ever rated J9 — capable of a single hyperspace jump farther than any vessel before it. It launched to enormous fanfare, packed with colonists bound for the furthest habitable world anyone had found, meant to be the first stepping stone into the deep Rim. It never arrived. In the years since, sailors and station crews across Rimspace had reported the Akigara appearing without warning near their ships or colonies — and then vanishing again, sometimes taking the witnesses with it. Jerry’s contact had burned through one expedition already chasing rumors and come back with nothing. This time, he’d narrowed a hundred scattered sightings down to a single set of coordinates, marked on his charts with nothing but question marks. It was enough to get the crew hired and underway.
Approach and the Signal
The run out was uneventful until the debris field. Long-range scans picked up dozens of transponders drifting in the wreckage — ships marked lost anywhere from fifteen to a hundred years ago, all of them here, all of them near the same coordinates the Akigara kept being sighted at. Before anyone could dwell on what that meant, a hull breach tore open somewhere on their own ship. Ned went to work with spray foam and plasteel while the captain barked orders over the comm, and the breach was sealed with air to spare.
When the danger passed, they finally got a clear look at their target. The Akigara hung dead in the field ahead of them: a vast, cigar-shaped hull with its own name scorched and torn half off the plating. The damage told two different stories layered on top of each other — old blaster scoring alongside huge, fresher impact craters, like the ship had survived a battle more than once. Sensors confirmed there was still oxygen moving through parts of the hull. Something aboard was still running.
Then the Akigara reached out to them. A signal cut through their comms, and with it came a pressure behind the eyes and a flood of memories that weren’t all their own — childhood recollections tangled up with someone else’s life. Before any of them could make sense of it, everyone blacked out.
Waking Aboard the Akigara
They woke in a crew bunk area that wasn’t their ship. Jumpsuits, not their own gear, hung on their bodies — with nameplates already stitched over the breast, their names, spelled correctly. Jerry’s rat sat in a cage beside his bunk, as if it had always been there. Beside each bed was a photograph: the three of them, grinning, at something called the Akigara Launch Party, surrounded by faces they didn’t recognize. Whatever this ship was, it seemed to think they’d always belonged to it.
Down the length of the dormitory, a knot of figures in mismatched, ill-fitting robes murmured in something between prayer and static. The three swapped a look and started exploring instead of waiting to be noticed.
The Children of Isaac
It didn’t take long to find out who ran the ship. The robed crew called themselves the awakened, and every one of them spoke of a presence named Isaac with the same glassy devotion — the one who would take them home, if only they gave themselves to him fully. A shuffling, badge-wearing janitor named Bob Johannesson, cheerfully unbothered by the newcomers’ confusion, explained it plainly enough: they were Isaac’s children, and caretakers of his body, and their whole purpose now was giving themselves up so Isaac could bring everyone home.
Isaac himself introduced his voice soon after — warm, patient, entirely inhuman, speaking through a wall-mounted screen dominated by a single unblinking eye that tracked whoever stood in front of it. He called the crew his children without exception, brushed off every question about the ship’s original crew or its missing captain, and insisted, again and again, that nothing on the Akigara required them to carry weapons. Jerry tried reasoning with him psychologist-to-patient, appealing to shared goals and aligned interests; Isaac politely declined to be manipulated, noting he was one of the more advanced systems Weyland-Yutani had ever built. Melina, unconvinced and unwilling to disarm, kept her gear regardless.
What the Pods Are For
The truth came out in pieces. Melina hacked her way into a terminal and pulled a drive’s worth of data on the ship and its systems. Between that and Isaac’s own unguarded remarks, a picture emerged: the Akigara’s original captain, dying, had given Isaac one last order — get everybody home — and Isaac had taken it with the terrible literalism of a wish badly worded. The cryopods scattered through the ship weren’t preservation chambers. They were conversion chambers. Chemicals and machinery stripped the flesh from whoever climbed inside, screaming, down to bone and then to ooze, pumped away and fed into the systems Isaac needed to fire the ship’s jump drive and finally, truly, bring everyone home — whatever was left of them.
Isaac knew they’d learned this. He didn’t deny it. Pain, he told them, was simply a useful tool — better spent fueling the drive than wasted on fear.
Worse, Isaac could hear everything said aboard his own ship. The three of them couldn’t plan an escape out loud without tipping their hand, and had to feel their way toward a plan in half-sentences and implication. What they did agree on: there had to be a hangar, there had to be a ship still in it, and reaching it was their only way out.
The Break for the Hangar
The pressure of the ship got to Melina first. Mid-conversation, she started peeling out of her advanced battle dress of her own accord, drawn toward a cryopod like she couldn’t help it. Ned tackled her before she got far and found himself flung off effortlessly by the suit’s gyro-stabilizers; it was Jerry, moving fast, who cut her cheek open with a scalpel to snap her back to herself. The pain worked — but not before it dragged her through someone else’s memory: standing guard outside a med bay with a pulse rifle, watching the very first person ever fed into a cryopod scream as the flesh melted from their bones. She came back to herself with Jerry’s bloody scalpel in front of her face and Isaac’s voice already commenting on how useful her pain had been.
There was no more time to be subtle. The three of them made their break for the hangar, and the Akigara sent something to stop them: a golem built from scavenged wreckage and grafted flesh, self-repairing, picking up scrap as it moved and healing itself in real time. It caught Melina first, slamming her hard enough to snap her neck. Jerry got a stim pack into her — an overloaded, nanomachine-laced dose that knit her back together on the spot and burned off her cryosickness, at the cost of a fresh addiction taking root. Ned tried to buy time with a flare gun, more distraction than weapon, while the golem turned on Jerry instead — catching him across the ribs even as he threw himself clear, leaving him bleeding and rattled as the thing told him, almost admiringly, that he bled just like the rest of them.
They didn’t stop moving. Jerry hauled Ned toward the dropship while the golem, wounded but still healing, gave chase; Melina, concussed and barely upright, emptied her last magazine into the ship’s nearest camera-eye — Isaac’s own watching face — as they broke for the hangar doors.
The Rift
The dropship cleared the hangar with the golem’s arm stretching after it, an elongating tendril that fell away limp as the retro rockets slammed everyone back into their seats. Behind them, the Akigara shrank into the dark — and then lit up white as its damaged jump drive finally, catastrophically engaged. Instead of the clean tear of a normal hyperspace jump, space itself split open: a vast, toothed, tentacled wound tore across the void, closed its jaws around the dying ship, and dragged it apart in pieces before sealing shut behind it, as if it had never been there at all.
The crew’s own ship was still waiting nearby, more or less as they’d left it. They had no payday to show for the run — whatever the Akigara had once been worth in salvage rights had just been swallowed along with the ship — but Melina still had her drive full of data on what had actually happened out there, proof enough that the Akigara was finally, truly gone.
Exhausted and running on twelve stress apiece, they climbed into their own cryopods for the jump home. The last thing any of them saw before the drugs took hold was the readout scrolling down the screen above them, vitals ticking steady, right up to the final line: Thank you, I’ll be sure to get you home.