Date: July 26, 2026
Attendance: Jon, Dax, Carl, Marge, Bennett II (Arnold wasn’t along this trip)
The crew accepted Ukko/Ukka’s delivery job and rode the rail out to the Farm — but Prospero’s Dream had already thrown them a scare before they’d even left dock. A wrecked cruise liner was being dragged into dry dock, and Bennett’s hack of the terminal confirmed everyone’s fears: it was the New Horizon, the ship Jon’s father had shipped out on months earlier. They rode the train believing him dead.
On the way in, they passed the Solarian Church’s competing faction booths — the compassionate Soil, handing out food and oxygen to the poor; the hardline Shears, who see charity as wasted resources on people better off rendered down for fertilizer; and the much larger unaligned majority caught somewhere between them, with the Shears disturbingly gaining ground. At Quiet Contemplation, they found a filthy, wild-eyed man in a bloodied spacer’s uniform being thrown out for scaring customers with talk of “the blood” and “no one believes me.” It was Jon’s father — alive after all. He begged them to clean up and meet him later at Auntie May’s Noodles for the full story.
Inside the teahouse, they walked in on Ukko/Ukka accepting a parcel from Yandee’s men, a stern cardinal named Jael looking on. On her way out, Yandee cornered Jon against the wall, cyberblade drawn: she’d known all along the crew were the kids who beat her to the Grand Theft Space 6000 heist, and had let it go only because killing children was bad for business. Now that they’re adults, she made it clear the debt is finally due — and, almost as an afterthought, that they also owe her a new car. Black, if they don’t mind.
The job: two shipping containers of genetically modified apple trees, bound for the fledgling colony of Siddhartha’s Peace, paying 1 Debt and a year of oxygen credits for their families. They accepted — then Cardinal Jael followed them out with a counteroffer of her own: 2 Debt to quietly reroute the trees to a rich buyer through a pirate contact instead, staged as a robbery. The crew strung her along, then walked away from it, and came out of the conversation trusting the Shears a lot less.
A damaged warp core kept them grounded at the dock for a few days, and in that time nearly everyone on the crew got a private visit. Cutter offered Dax real whiskey and a deniable, off-the-books job: track down James Ramirez, a Tempest merc who deserted after repeatedly refusing to fire on civilians, dead or alive. At Canyon Heavy, Angus called Bennett in and revealed something the android hadn’t known — Angus was the one who’d found his broken body and rebuilt him, for a purpose: to be a spy planted in the most unassuming crew he could find. He offered him a job anyway: bug the comms array on Siddhartha’s Peace. Reidmar offered Carl a way to make his mounting lawsuits disappear — smuggle a case of psychotropic mushroom powder to the tea house on the colony; refusal, he made clear, was not advised. And the Babushka, through her intermediary Zhenya, asked Marge to recover a stolen genetic sequencer from her former protege Genma, last seen on Siddhartha’s Peace.
Reunited at Auntie May’s Noodles, Jon’s father told them what happened: he’d survived a Martin Rayne pirate boarding of the New Horizon by hiding in the engineering tunnels while the pirates harvested organs and dragged captives onto their boarding shuttles, then stowed away on the salvage ship that eventually found the wreck. Auntie May’s own chef, watching his business get gutted by a flashy new bao bun stand next door, repeated his standing offer: 15,000 credits for the secret to their recipe.
That stand — Xiao! Long! Bao!, fronted by a cheerful animatronic mascot — turned out to be exactly the trouble it looked like. The crew dined and dashed with a sample bun, and the mascot didn’t take it well: it unfolded into an armed war machine and opened fire on them in the street, sending a pair of gun-drones after them. Bennett II shot one out of the sky from a rooftop; Jon beat the other to scrap with a wrench. Tempest security showed up more interested in the illegal gunfire than the theft. The crew got away with one intact bun — and Marge, mid-chase, swallowed hers to destroy the evidence.
It came back to bite her, literally, days later in the Babushka’s own office: mid-sentence, she seized, and something with wings tore its way out of her throat and went for her neck. The crew killed it on the spot. It was pure luck the whole thing happened in a hospital instead of the street. Called in afterward to analyze the corpse, Bernard — another face aboard the ship, who claimed to be nothing more than a teamster — made the discovery that explained everything: the “buns” were psychically imprinted alien eggs. Anyone who looked at one saw and believed it to be their own favorite food, imprinted on whoever first encountered it — in this case, someone who loved bao buns. The effect fooled cameras and lab equipment just as easily as people, since anything observing the eggs up close ended up convinced they were food too.