Date: August 16, 2026
The crew delivered on the Solarian Church’s job and made planetfall on Siddhartha’s Peace, a struggling neo-Buddhist colony running out of power, parts, and patience. A simple tree delivery quickly turned into a tangle of factional unrest, a missing scientist, and an ominous broadcast promising “purification” from an orbital station gone dark.
En route, the crew found a derelict half-ship adrift in space, marked “MARTIN RAYNE” and scarred by old combat damage; rather than risk towing it in, they marked its position to recover later. Approaching the colony’s system, they were intercepted by an unknown ship, the Iron Cross, sent to collect a second tree shipment on behalf of the Shears faction — the crew talked their way out of the handoff by claiming a transponder glitch, and the ship broke off toward one of the planet’s moons. On approach to the planet itself, they picked up two competing transmissions: an automated broadcast from the orbital terraforming station promising “purification and genetic enhancement” in the name of a figure called Bishamonten, and a garbled, human warning from the colony’s Abbot urging them to land on the surface and avoid the station entirely.
Down at Siddhartha’s Peace, the crew landed at the small starport by the space elevator, leaving Weaver to guard the shuttle. They met Ensho, a black-market trader who warned the colony was doomed, and were escorted into the settlement by Tenka, the colony’s sole security officer, passing damaged tide-power generators, a desalination plant, and a temple on the ridge above the streets — along with a dead rat bearing failed mechanical implants, evidence someone on the colony has been experimenting on local wildlife. At the colony office, they met the administrator Jian and Abbot Ben Shirayuki, who laid out the colony’s crisis: failing power, a locked-down orbital station that’s their only source of parts, a crushing debt to the corporation Straylight, and the disappearance of his former coworker and the colony’s co-founder, Genma, an AI engineer who vanished around the same time the station went dark and started broadcasting its prophecies. The Abbot offered the crew a job worth roughly double their delivery contract: dock with the station, fabricate a replacement power converter, and claim salvage rights to whatever else is up there.
The crew delivered half their tree shipment to a thrilled xeno-soil biologist at the Agrodome, quietly holding the rest back as leverage, and were approached by a desperate colonist family — Franco, Sasha, and their son Joe — begging for passage off-world. At the Blossoming Lotus Teahouse, they discreetly paid off the old tea-master Rogen for a prior black-market delivery and learned more about the doomsday broadcasts and a rumored falling-out between the Abbot and Genma. While the Abbot marched off with an armed escort to confront Ensho over illegal trading, the crew slipped into the empty colony office, and Bennett II planted Angus’s listening device in the comms room, hacking a technician’s optic nerve to move unseen.
That night, camped at the landing field, the colony’s monitors lit up with a looped, ominous broadcast, and torch-bearing colonists began gathering in the streets — right before an explosion and gunfire erupted at the colony office, sending the crowd surging toward it as the session ended.