Date: August 29, 2026
The night the crew spent camped at the landing field turned into a colony-wide uprising, a running gunfight at the colony office, and — once they finally clawed their way into orbit — an ambush waiting for them aboard their own ship. They left Siddhartha’s Peace with roughly twenty refugees, no cargo, no jump fuel, and the Abbot gone up the space elevator at gunpoint.
It started in the streets. Bennett II slipped out of the shuttle toward the gunfire and found two shaven-headed converts with the flame and the spear tattooed across their scalps, herding Franco and Sasha off the street in the name of “purification.” They named him one of the great apostasies — the artificial mind in physical form — and he took both their heads with a single shot. The dead turned out to be ordinary colonists: an oxygen farmer and a sanitation worker. Moments later every screen in the colony lit with the same emblem and a voice screaming that the prophet had come, while a speech carried up from the colony office to answering roars from a crowd. The crew tracked Franco and Sasha to their apartment, collected four thousand credits for passage off-world, and sent the family toward the shuttle. When a column of torches turned toward the landing field, Bennett hijacked the colony PA in Bishamonten’s voice and sent half of the faithful to the Agrodome instead.
From the shuttle, Carl watched Ensho open the landing-field gate with a stolen badge and walk Abbot Ben Shirayuki and a man in a Straylight Computing jumpsuit into the space elevator at gunpoint. The capsule powered up and began climbing toward the station.
The rest of the crew worked their way through back alleys to the colony office and found the building under siege — cultists dug in behind barricades with real firearms nobody could account for, and an automated sentry gun in a second-floor window that Tenka had set up before he went down. Dax was shredded by it the moment he stepped into the open, and pinned at gunpoint behind the enemy line, before Bennett II hacked the turret and reassigned friend from foe. Arnold Wilkerson took rounds through his left arm and kept coming. Bennett was thrown into a fence hard enough to snap something in his spine. Dax ended the fight by driving a knife into the heart of the enormous scarred convert who had Arnold by the skull. Carl brought the dropship — christened the Hot ‘n Ready that night — down onto the roof of the colony office, snapping a landing gear on the debris.
Inside they found shell-shocked monks in the corridors, the comms technician Odo begging for help, First Instructor Fugen demanding the Abbot be rescued, and Tenka bleeding out in the Abbot’s office, still firing out the window. They reloaded the turret, knocked a grenade back out through the breach, stripped the remaining ammunition crates so the cultists couldn’t turn the gun on the building, welded the landing gear back into place, and lifted off with about twenty people packed into the hold — Odo, Tenka, Fugen, Jian, five office workers, and Franco’s family. A shoulder-launched missile caught a stabilizer on the way up.
Docking with The Second Chance put them straight into a trap. Pirates off the Iron Cross — the ship they’d talked their way past on the approach — had been drifting alongside under silent running and boarded through the open salvage bay. Their captain, Vane “Rusty” Kross — the lower half of his skull replaced by a rusting cybernetic jaw — had Dixie Doss and Etna Sola at gunpoint, Bernard held in the med bay by a pirate named Zeid, and Mara “Three Cut” Thrall covering the whole shuttle bay from a cargo crate. He took the tree shipment he’d been promised, drained the ship’s jump fuel, rigged the impulse engines to detonate on ignition, and announced he would be selling the rescued monks as indentured labor.
The crew played along and quietly did not. Bennett raised Benny Letcher and Jackal, locked in the armory, and woke Weaver asleep in an engineering crawlway; Weaver went to work undoing the sabotage while Marge and Etna stalled by tending the wounded. Then Carl blew the salvage bay hatch, the ship lurched, and the fight went through every deck at once. They killed most of the boarding party — Thrall on her crate, Jason “Fox” Fiero glued helpless to Etna by her own foam gun, and Jax Vanko, who bled luminous blue and shrugged off a point-blank shotgun blast before Benny finally took his neck out — then pinned Kross and executed him, and shut down the sixty-second self-destruct he’d called for with seconds left on the clock.
It wasn’t over. Tanya — the crewmate Kross had called on for the self-destruct — was already on the bridge, cloaked and invisible, and sheared Carl’s chair in half with a vibro-blade the moment he sat down in it. Bernard flooded the compartment with fire suppressant to make her visible and couldn’t shut it off, knocking both of them unconscious, and Marge put rounds into a shimmer in the air until blood appeared out of nothing. Tanya is still up, and Zeid is still loose somewhere below decks. The session ended with the fleeing Iron Cross dropship caught in the salvage arm, and Bennett and Dax sprinting out of the airlock along that arm into open space.