Date: July 26, 2026
Attendance: Jon, Dax, Carl, Marge, Bennett II
They’d barely left dock before Prospero’s Dream reminded them what kind of station this was. On their way to meet their contact in the Solarian Church, the crew passed a hulk being dragged into dry dock by salvagers — the broken husk of a cruise liner, big enough to blot out half the view. Loshe caught them staring and said what everyone on the docks already knew: it was a charnel house in there, blood and guts everywhere, and the cleanup crews were taking forever because of it. Fearing the worst, Bennett hacked the dock terminal to pull the ship’s registry. It came back the New Horizon. Jon’s father’s ship. The one he’d shipped out on months ago.
Nobody said much on the train out to the Farm after that.
The ride gave them plenty else to worry about anyway — reports of pirate activity ticking upward, and unrest building in the Choke as the poor demanded more oxygen rations than the station was willing to give. When they finally reached the Farm, the agricultural sprawl of it was almost enough to make them forget, right up until they noticed the three groups of monks working the fields weren’t all working toward the same thing. The Soil, tunics stitched with a hand cupping a sapling, ran a booth handing out food rations and oxygen tokens to whoever couldn’t afford them — by raising up everyone, we raise up humanity. The Shears ran a booth of their own nearby, signing up the poor and the dying for something considerably darker: rendering, for those who couldn’t survive on their own, to better serve the fertilizer needs of those who could. The largest group by far were the unaligned clergy, who mostly leaned toward the Soil’s compassion without formally picking a side — though more than one person muttered that the Shears were growing faster than anyone was comfortable with.
At the Quiet Contemplation teahouse, before they’d even gotten through the door, they found a scene already in progress: the shop’s owner physically ejecting a filthy, wild-eyed man in a bloodstained spacer’s uniform, sick of him scaring off paying customers with his ranting. The blood, he kept saying. It was everywhere. No one believes me. They’d kill me if they knew I survived. He turned around mid-sentence, and Jon’s whole world tilted sideways.
It was his father.
It took a second for recognition to click the other way, too — the man in front of him barely looked like the father he remembered — but once it did, he was overjoyed, and just as clearly not okay. Jon sent him to the ship to clean up and change into something that wasn’t caked in blood, and his father, before he left, begged them all to meet him later at Auntie May’s Noodles. He had a story to tell.
They finally made it inside the teahouse only to walk into something else entirely: Ukko/Ukka in a tense exchange with Yandee and her men, a stern, greying cardinal named Jael standing just behind him with her arms crossed. A thug handed over a parcel. Ukko took it without a word. Yandee turned to leave — and then she saw them.
She didn’t bother pretending not to recognize them. A cyberblade slid out of her wrist, and she had Jon pinned against the wall before anyone could move, telling him — almost warmly — that she’d known exactly who those kids were the whole time. Known, and let it go, because the Bratva had still recovered enough of the stolen game to sell, and killing children over merchandise was bad business. But they weren’t children anymore. The debt was still owed, she told him, and someday she’d collect it. She retracted the blade, turned to leave, then paused at the door just long enough to mention, almost as an afterthought, that they also owed her a new car. She likes black.
Then she was gone, and the meeting with Ukko/Ukka could finally happen. The job: two shipping-container loads of genetically modified apple trees, bound for the struggling colony of Siddhartha’s Peace. Payment was 1 Debt, plus enough oxygen credits to keep their families breathing for a year. They took it.
Cardinal Jael caught them just outside afterward. She thought the trees were wasted on a dying colony — she had a buyer, a wealthy client who wanted them for his private estate, and she offered 2 Debt to quietly reroute the shipment to a pirate contact instead, with the delivery staged to look like a robbery. The crew let her think they might go along with it, then walked away and decided, without much debate, to honor the job as given. Whatever the Shears were building toward, none of them wanted a piece of it.
Back at the docks, Loshe delivered the bad news: the warp core needed more extensive repairs than expected, and the crew was grounded for a few days. Word must have traveled fast once their flight plan to Siddhartha’s Peace was filed, because the visits started almost immediately. Cutter reached out to Dax first, pouring him real whiskey and laying out a job he needed handled off the books — deniable, untraceable. James Ramirez, a Tempest merc, had stolen a dropship and deserted after a string of citations for refusing to fire on civilians and refusing to use explosives to break up a riot. Cutter wanted him back, dead or alive, 5,000 up front and 5,000 more on delivery. Dax knew the type of pressure Tempest put on people who wouldn’t cross certain lines — it was no small part of why he’d left their employ himself, sick of watching mercs do anything for whoever paid the most.
Angus called Bennett out to Canyon Heavy — a zero-g dome where hackers and operators floated between workstations in a wide-open lattice of consoles, a cute little drone leading him through it to Angus’s office. There, Angus told him something Bennett hadn’t known: it was Angus who’d found his broken body and rebuilt him. Not out of charity. He’d built Bennett for a purpose — a spy planted somewhere no one would think to look, tucked inside the most unassuming crew he could find. He offered him a job anyway, same as always: plant a bug on the comms array at Siddhartha’s Peace, 10,000 credits.
Reidmar found Carl next, subtler about it — an opportunity, he called it, to start paying down what Carl owed the dock. The debt went back to the wreck that first got him off corporate payroll: pirates, a damaged ship he’d barely nursed home, and a crash into the dock itself trying to save his crew. He’d saved most of them. He hadn’t saved the cargo, or the ship, and corporate hadn’t cared that most of his people lived — he’d been fired, and was still being sued by half the parties involved: the cargo’s owner, his old employer, the dock association, even the Teamster’s Union. Reidmar’s offer came with an edge to it: a case of psychotropic mushroom powder, delivered quietly to the tea house on Siddhartha’s Peace, for 10,000 credits. Refusal, Reidmar made clear, was not advised. Carl took the job.
And Marge got a message of her own — Zhenya, on the Babushka’s behalf, letting her know that if the crew was headed to Siddhartha’s Peace, the Babushka had something she needed done there too.
First, though: Auntie May’s. The noodles were as good as any of them remembered, and Jon’s father, cleaned up and wearing a borrowed Second Chance jumpsuit, looked steadier than he had at the teahouse. He told them what happened. He’d been doing repairs in the engineering access tunnels of the New Horizon when the Martin Rayne pirates boarded — figures in modified vacsuits, visors streaked red like paint or blood, spikes and jagged fittings bristling off every surface. He’d stayed hidden and watched them harvest organs from the living and pack them into cryo coolers, watched them herd the rest onto red-and-black boarding shuttles. He survived on the wreck alone until salvagers finally found it, and stowed away on their ship back to Prospero’s Dream. He’d been carrying that alone ever since.
Steven May, the shop’s chef, was in worse shape than usual too — the crowds outside had thinned to nothing, and everyone knew why. Next door, a new bao bun stand had opened, its mascot a short, cartoonish android with a bun for a head, shouting Xiao! Long! Bao! over a line that stretched out the door. Steven repeated his standing offer: 15,000 credits if the crew could steal the recipe and tell him what he was up against.
They waited in that line for hours. Inside, the place was cramped, loud, and closely watched — a scanner and a sentry turret by the door, every table full, and nearly every plate paired with a drink. They ordered one plate of buns, expensive enough to notice, and split the three of them between Carl, Jon, and Marge. Bennett hacked the turret dark, and the crew bolted for the door.
Outside, the mascot’s voice dropped an octave and lost every trace of cartoon warmth. Proprietary samples detected outside premises. Leave all corporate property on the ground or I will open fire. You have three seconds to comply. Its arms and legs unfolded, and it kept unfolding, doubling and then tripling in height, rotary autocannons sliding out of its arms and a missile rack rising out of its back.
The street became a gauntlet. Carl and Bennett II cut down a side alley and out of the initial line of fire; Jon peeled off the other way; Marge, half a block ahead, swallowed her bun whole to destroy the evidence and kept running with Dax beside her. The mascot answered by launching two more bao-bun-shaped drones, SMGs slung underneath them, one locking onto Jon and the other onto Carl and Bennett II, the mascot itself lumbering after the second pair on foot.
Bennett II broke for a fire escape, climbed to a rooftop, and put two armor-piercing rounds from his smart rifle through his drone before it could get a fix on them. Jon wasn’t so lucky with distance — his drone tracked him into a side room, and he ended up beating it to scrap with a wrench, over and over, until the thing stopped moving and he was covered head to foot in hydraulic fluid. From the rooftop, before he climbed down, Bennett II heard sirens and watched a Tempest dropship arrive — more interested, from what he could tell, in the illegal gunfire (his own rifle, unfortunately) than in the theft of a few dollars’ worth of buns. He was gone before they could find him.
Carl and Jon made it back to the ship with one bun still intact. Marge ran the analysis herself: real beef, otherwise unremarkable. They patched up, rested, and figured that was that.
It wasn’t. The next day, everyone made their rounds — Canyon Heavy, Cutter, Reidmar, the Babushka — closing out the jobs one by one. At the Babushka’s clinic, Zhenya led them through the noisy, cluttered space, past exam rooms full of moaning patients and mechanical sounds nobody wanted explained, until the Babushka herself emerged from surgery and brought them into her office. She said nothing — just held up a photo of a compact, custom-built device. Zhenya filled in the rest: before Marge, the Babushka had a protege named Genma, who’d vanished a few years back with the sequencer, a stack of money, and a stash of drugs. He’d recently been spotted on Siddhartha’s Peace. She wanted it back.
That was when the bun caught up with Marge. Mid-sentence, she seized and dropped to the floor, and something with wings tore its way out of her throat, latching onto her chest with claws raised like it meant to open her throat properly this time. Carl and Bennett II wrenched it off her before it could, and between the three of them and whoever else was close enough to help, they killed it right there on the office floor. Carl came away bloodied for his trouble. The Babushka took the creature’s corpse to study and treated Marge on the spot — a stroke of luck that this had happened in a hospital and not out on the street, because it very likely saved her life.
The corpse didn’t stay a mystery for long. Bernard, another face aboard The Second Chance who claimed to be nothing more than a teamster, turned out to know his way around a dissection table. What he found explained everything that hadn’t added up: the “buns” weren’t food at all. They were alien eggs, psychically imprinted to look and taste like whatever the person encountering them loved most — in this case, someone who loved bao buns, which was why every single person who’d eaten one, ordered one, or even glanced at the menu had seen exactly that and nothing else. The effect didn’t stop at human eyes, either. It fooled cameras. It fooled lab equipment. Anything close enough to observe the eggs ended up just as convinced as the people eating them — which was exactly why Marge’s own analysis, run the night before, had come back reading nothing stranger than real beef.