Type: Pirate vessel, roughly the same class and size as The Second Chance
Affiliation: Believed to be working for, or with, the Shears
Overview
The Iron Cross first hailed the crew on their approach to Bodhisattva 2a, asking for the second half of a tree shipment promised in passing to the Shears back on Prospero’s Dream. Jon talked them off with a story about a glitched transponder — that they weren’t the Second Chance at all, but the Second Choice — and after a long, disbelieving silence the ship broke off toward one of the planet’s moons and went dark.
It did not go far. While the crew were on the surface fighting through the colony uprising, the Iron Cross drifted in alongside The Second Chance under silent running — all power down, indistinguishable from junk on any sensor sweep — and put a boarding pod in through the open salvage bay. Their dropship, which carries a great iron cross painted across its nose, backed up to the cargo doors to haul the container out.
The Boarding Party
Captain Vane “Rusty” Kross — killed
The entire lower half of his skull is a cybernetic assembly, rusting and cheaply made, his voice coming out of it thin and tinned. Polite, unhurried, and openly contemptuous of the crew’s ship. He put a barrel to the back of Jon’s head, took the tree cargo and every drop of the warp core’s jump fuel, and intended to sell the rescued colony staff as indentured labor — “prisoners with jobs.” When the fight turned against him he called for the self-destruct rather than lose. Pinned to the deck by Jackal and executed on Jon’s order.
Mara “Three Cut” Thrall — killed
The crew’s sniper, posted prone on a cargo container covering the whole shuttle bay — three scars laid across eyes that glow a dull pink. Being flat on the crate made her the only one aboard barely moved by the decompression lurch. Killed by Dax, firing a shotgun in each hand.
Jax Vanko — killed
The brute. His veins shine faintly through his skin. He took a point-blank shotgun blast to the back from Benny without being wounded at all, said “oh,” and turned around to look at him. What sprayed out when Jackal finally opened his chest was luminous and blue, not blood; Dixie broke a vial of acid over him on her way past. Benny eventually took his neck out. Whatever was done to Vanko, the crew has seen a failed cousin of it before — in a dead rat with crude implants in a Siddhartha’s Peace alley.
Jason “Fox” Fiero — killed
Had Etna Sola at gunpoint. When the deck went sideways she turned her foam gun on him and glued the pair of them together instead, which left him fixed in place and helpless for the rest of the fight. Marge shot him where he stood.
Zeid — killed
Held Bernard at gunpoint in the med bay. When Bernard came at him with a crowbar, Zeid blocked the swing with a cybernetic arm hard enough to leave Bernard’s hands ringing and the crowbar on the floor. Bernard fled and tried to jam the med bay door behind him; the control panel blew instead, and the door has been cycling open and shut at random ever since. He barricaded himself in the med bay afterward, gun trained on that malfunctioning door, and tried to negotiate his way out: cryo, passage, delivery to any station at all, and he would put the weapon down. “I’m just a man of my word looking for money. Killing’s not really my thing unless I’m getting paid for it.” Marge ended the negotiation by firing through the gap; he took the hits, threw a flashbang into the corridor, and was taken at gunpoint by Jackal, who came through the door behind a hand-painted tennis ball he had mistaken for a thermal detonator. He went into The Second Chance’s brig alive, promising to make the crew pay when he got out, and settled down on the bench to whistle. His pulse rifle went to Jackal, who found and disabled the trap rigged into it before it took his hand off.
He never got out. When the oxygen emergency forced Bernard to seal and drain the compartments nobody needed, he included the brig — the one section he did not announce over the comms — and pulled the air out of it with the prisoner still inside. Zeid suffocated in there while the rest of the crew were fighting for the ship. Last of the boarding party to die, and the only one killed after he had surrendered.
Tanya — killed (Session 5)
The blade. Cloaked and effectively invisible — nothing but a shimmer in the air, like heat off a plate — carrying a vibro-sword. She was already on the bridge when Kross spoke into his wrist and told her to pull the cord, which is where the sixty-second self-destruct came from. Carl walked in on an apparently empty compartment, felt with total certainty that he was about to die, and ducked; the top half of his chair came away with the metal glowing molten. Bernard flooded the bridge with fire suppressant to make her visible, Marge put rounds into the shimmer until blood ran down out of nothing, and something screeched — not quite machine, not quite person. She spent the following hours in the ship’s ducting, cut apart the environmental controls and filters on her way through, and dragged Dixie Doss out of the reactor room by the neck into Arnold’s workshop — welding the door shut from the inside, booby-trapping the lock, and forcing Dixie to repair her damaged arm. Marge found her through a vent grate and traded fire with her at arm’s length. It ended when Dax overrode the airlock on the far side and blew the compartment into the open cargo bay: Tanya went out with the air, still holding Dixie, and lost her when Jon closed a salvage claw on Dixie’s leg. Her last act was to fire a grapple line at Jon’s pod. It missed the pod — but it fouled The Second Chance’s sensor array, where Weaver and Dixie later found the cut line and its spear-tip, and at the moment the ship docked at the terraforming station, the station’s cameras caught an airlock cycling with nothing visible coming through. She was last seen tumbling end over end away from the ship, without a line, wearing an expression the crew described as panic.
The dropship crew — all killed
Two pilots at the controls and two more in EVA suits with cutting torches, one of them tattooed and pierced to the eyes with his teeth filed to points. Dax killed the first EVA man with a shot through the faceplate; Jon caught the second’s torch arm in a salvage claw and drove him into the hull until the suit came apart. Dax put his last anti-materiel round through the cockpit window, and the decompression pulled both pilots out through the hole.
Standing
The boarding party is finished. Kross, Thrall, Vanko and Fiero died in the first fight; the four aboard the dropship died in the second; Zeid is in the brig; Tanya is somewhere in the dark over Bodhisattva 2a, unsecured and unaccounted for. The dropship itself — disabled, its cockpit window blown out — was dragged into The Second Chance’s cargo bay by the salvage arm, and with it the crew’s stolen apple trees, still in cryostasis and undamaged. The jump fuel was not aboard it, and is presumed still on the Iron Cross herself, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
One piece of Iron Cross hardware is worth remembering: a jury-rigged device welded to the dropship’s flank that charged up blue and then released a pulse which killed every system in its reach — Jon’s salvage pod, the salvage arm’s servos, and Bennett II, who was caught mid-stride out on the arm and frozen in place.
At the terraforming station
Session 5: Welcome, Traveler.
The Iron Cross docked at the terraforming station about eight hours before The Second Chance. Station cameras show her crew going in armed and moving tactically, a drone operator among them — and, many hours later, walking back to the ship stiffly in single file, fewer than went in. The fuel logs show she took on a full load of jump fuel, enough for several jumps, before she left. Where she went, and what is now crewing her, is unknown; the crew suspect her people were taken by the station and sent to bring colonists up from the surface.
Tanya did not die in the dark. She turned up on the station’s manufacturing floor remade: her body grafted onto a mechanical spider frame, her face replaced entirely with machinery, claws on one arm and the glowing blade on the other. The crew found her weeping over what had been done to her own body. She ran Marge through — the blade turned on Marge’s armour — and Dax killed her with a shotgun blast to the head. Arnold cut the sword-arm off with his torch; Dax carries her vibro-blade now, her hand and forearm for its grip.