Date: October 10, 2026
Attendance: Varrik Stonehorn, Franklin, Calvin, Rotti, Torse
The crew of the Stargazer — an old clunker captained by Torse and flown by his mouse droid, Fido — took a Guild containment ticket at a Khymera Biotech hydroponic farm in Neo-Edifex. Khymera blamed a rival for sabotage. What the crew found was chaos: toxic sludge creatures bursting from the irrigation pipes, and the farm’s own security androids firing on fleeing workers while demanding the return of proprietary information. The crew put down the sludges, a small Boom Bot and a hulking security unit; the last robot overloaded and exploded, dropping Calvin until Torse got him back on his feet. Torse spiked the farm’s control tower afterwards and found what Khymera had left out: the company had been pumping grey water up from the lower levels to feed its crops, and the sludges had come up with it.
Payment was arranged at the Astro-Burger, a chrome-and-checkerboard diner twenty storeys up. Agent Vosk of Khymera paid 900 credits, wiped the seat with a handkerchief before he sat, and offered a second job off the books: retrieve a runaway employee, Imee Sarra, from the abandoned Hope’s Reach Hospital, alive, before Khymera’s own reclamation team arrived in about four hours. With her came a list — the patient index of Ward 7 on the third floor, the pharmacy’s dispensing records, legal documents marked LGL, the project’s correspondence and the donor genetic records. Two thousand credits now, four thousand on delivery to Delivery Ramp 5 in the Low Market. He claimed a fatherly connection to her. He paid for lunch.
Fido set them down on the hospital’s ambulance pad. In the intake lobby they found a fresh trail in the dust and a sticky note on a terminal someone had used with Khymera credentials: 212 in, 181 out. Where are the other 31? Beneath it was a number for Tovac Wren, an Action News 5 reporter Khymera had sued into retraction more than once. A padded care-bot decided Rotti’s invented surname made him Cavalon royalty and tried to take his blood for its cancer programme before it shorted out.
On the ninth floor a locker gave up a charge nurse’s uniform big enough to fit over Varrik’s exosuit, her badge, and a notebook about Patient 7, a senior figure called V who insisted the consents were fine, and an approver named Dan Trask whom corporate had never heard of. Franklin forged badges for everyone off it. On the eighth floor the crew surprised a Chemtek salvage crew stripping medicine for a free clinic below; they had lost two men to the pharmacy’s guns. In the project office was a billing file for Project Viridian — three payments from the Shensaati Trade Legation, the fourth voided when Shensaati fell to the Cavalon Empire — and a shredder full of consent forms. The crew took the whole bag.
On the seventh floor Varrik, in the nurse’s uniform, talked the pharmacy’s security robots down. Past them lay Imee’s dropped go-bag, with copies of the building’s sale contract leaving the third floor out entirely, and the pharmacy itself: dispensing logs for a drug called Veldrin-C, every line approved by Dan Trask of the Department of Experimental Treatments, and an empty rack of Viridian samples tagged Sample K retained — moved to cold storage below the third floor.
On the third floor they found Imee under a bed beside the welded doors of Ward 7, working at them with a bone saw. She took them for the reclamation team, and had no idea who they meant by her father. She would come only once she had her evidence, so Varrik tore the door out of its frame. Ward 7’s charts told the rest: compassionate-use trials, batch after batch, patients dead within days, until Batch K. The office behind the ward belonged to A. Vosk, Legal and Compliance, who had hired the whole department and was moving its money through a nail salon he owned. In the frozen room below, bodies floated in tanks, each labelled with a line of descent to the Cavalon royal house. Veldrin-C was a weapon, and it had been tuned to kill one family.
As they took the Batch K ampoules, the bodies broke out of their tanks and came for them. The crew destroyed them — Calvin went down again and was hauled back up — and then the Chemtek foreman walked in with a far better-armed crew and offered 6,000 credits for the sample. The crew gave him half. A Khymera dropship was closing on the roof, so Fido brought the Stargazer to a fifth-floor balcony and Varrik threw Imee aboard.
They had enough to give Tovac Wren her story. They flipped a coin instead, and it came up Vosk. They smashed Imee’s transmitter and delivered her, and every page, to Ramp 5, where Vosk took her into the back of a fruit van and promised there would be more work.
Weeks later, over milkshakes at the Astro-Burger, the news reported five hundred dead in a Cavalon shopping complex, every one of them related to the royal family. Khymera was blamed for testing a bioweapon, and the crew’s faces were among the suspects. Tovac Wren had been gunned down buying drugs from Imee Sarra, who had died with her family in what was called a gang shootout. Khymera stock was up ten points. Outside, the windows were filling with police lights.