Shadows - Part 1

Our Adventurers travel to the planet Yorbund and find themselves trapped.
 
This note is mostly based on Carl's excellent notes. I did the Pyramid renderings with Google Sketchup and Kerkythea.
 
Location: Regina Highport, a large space station in the Regina system
Imperial Date: 301-1101
 
When we left off, we had arrived at Regina Highport and offloaded our cargo and passengers safely.  Fig, a Regina native, looked up an old contact from the Merchant Marine days, Elvis Yombe, to regale him with tales of single-handedly saving the plante Raschev from an alien invasion. (OK, Kipenzi did a little bit of flying the air raft, but mostly...)
 
Elvis had an envelope for Fig, dated more than two years back, from an attorney in the system of  Vanegen in the Rhylandor subsector. Great Aunt McTavish Newton died and left various bequests to members of the family, and Fig was one of the beneficiaries. No details were given beyond the attorney's address, so Fig sent off his own letter asking for some more information, and requesting that if it is a small item please send it COD to the family address at Regina, and if money less than 10,000 credits please donate it to a suitable charity on Vanegen, if more please forward to the family here on Regina, and let him know what the disposition was. We could go if absolutely needful, but it is a long way to and from so not a vacation jaunt to make on whim.
 
  Down planetside, Fig learned that several of the family on Regina had received similar letters, and had ultimately received sentimental items or some money, but no one had been named Baron of Vanegen or received multi-million credit checks, so we are all on a 'wait and see' position.
 
    Additionally, as long as we had some time to spend in system, Fig looked into the possibility of upgrading his cyber arm, and learned that it is as pricey as you would think, but there are some definitely beneficial reasons to do it.
 
    Perhaps after the Skylark 2 is paid off... With the way Sam is tearing up the trade lanes, that will not be nearly as long as we had thought it might be.
 
  While enjoying two weeks of relaxation in the Highport entertainment and eateries, Kipenzi heard that General Shipyards (of interest because they are the people building the new Skylark II for us) had lost their Navy contracts because of troubles in performance, including ships disappearing on the first voyage - bet yer bippy we will be doing our own comprehensive acceptance inspections when the time comes.
 
    GS's main problem class ship was the Kinunir, with overall  undesirable results on most of the production line. One of them was ultimately gutted and turned into an orbital prison at Pixie (escape from there? .... I think not)
 
    With cargo loaded, fueled up and plenty of life support, on 315-1101 we launched out from Regina Highport to safe jump distance and headed out toward Yorbund, first stop at Hefry, arriving in system uneventfully (and we always like it that way) on 322-1101.
 
    A non-industrial vacuum world with an Imperial Scout base in system, it is a long (two days) haul from jump in/out to the port itself, giving us plenty of time to scan for trouble.  Fortunately, we failed to find any.... this time.
 
    The standard magic of Sam's cargo wheeling and dealing followed, along with fuel, and by 329-1101 we were jumping out for Roup.
 
  The only memorable thing about Roup was a laboratory ship in orbit, detained by customs because they were carrying (or so we heard) anti-matter garnered from Shionthy, a 3-jump away.  We had the occasion to remark that pretty soon we will be doing jump-3 trips when we need to, and happy to be getting the option.
 
339-1101   
Jumped out of Roup for Feri, arriving on 346-1101.
 
    At least at Feri we had a short transit from arrival to port, only a few hours, but there was a slight delay in getting docked due to a bomb threat. Apparently Feri is blessed/cursed with multiple factions who are, for all intents and purposes, at war. The Scout Base in system gave us an update on any pirate or other activity of concern as well.
 
349-1101 
Jumped out from Feri to Beck's World, home of an actual Ancient Site.
 
Arriving in system on 356-1101,  we updated our knowledge of the Ancients, getting a good talk with some of the people concerned with the studies.  Most noteworthy for us is that, basically, Ancient Weapons KILL you, first time, first shot.  Dead, Dead, Dead.  In the (believed to have been) war that brought the Ancient 'civilization' to its end, there were no meaningful sites left, and no collateral damage around the ones that were hit. They aimed, they hit, they killed.
 
    This, from the first time we heard it back long ago, has and continues to give us the heebie jeebies, but if we are headed toward an actual Ancient Site (and we had mixed hopes for yes/no on that one) at least if there are defenses, it won't hurt.
 
    Kipenzi recalled that the Kinunir class of ships was supposed to have a defense system built around the black globes that were found in an Ancient Site once, and speculated that perhaps the real trouble was with that component rather than the overall building of the ships and materials they were made from.
 
359-1101 
Jumped out for Kinorb, one short hop to Yorbund and our last cargo delivery before going to check things out.  Happy new year to all in jump, two years of fun and saving planets from devastation. On a financial note, Sam pointed out to Fig that the payroll times were out of synch. It turns out Fig the Friendly had paid everyone 10 days ahead of schedule about a year and a half earlier, and never put it back in proper dating.  Now we are on a more definitive payday timing.
 
004-1102  
Finally, we jumped to our actual destination, arriving in the Yorbund system on 011-1102.  Yorbund is a fluorine atmosphere world, and the spaceport gets at least as much traffic as the ground port, which needs considerable atmospheric security and exterior cleansing of the ships that visit.  Planning to go down to the surface anyway, we went to the ground station for fuel, and offloaded our cargo directly while there.
 
    We purchased some supplementary atmosphere sniffers, to complement the ones in the VACC suits, and learned that there is scant life known on planet: 6 species of flora (3 trees and 3 shrubs)  and the rumor of one bat-like creature, so far not recovered.  The planet has not been explored very much, understandably.  Our super-VACC suits are only good for a short time before needing to be refurbished, so going out and about would require a considerable investment of resources.
 
012-1102 
The day had come, the crew was ready, the ship fueled and prepared, and we headed out toward the coordinates we recovered from the database on Chamax, so long ago in the Alenzar system.
 
    Approaching the location, we saw some pyramidal structures and we got SHOT AT by what appeared to be an energy weapon coming from the face of one of the pyramids.
 
    Medicus got us down into a gully, probably the only place available to be out of line of sight, but the right wing was hit, cameras and lighting disabled, and we had no sight or sensor inputs to evaluate the potential threat. 

The incoming camera footage allowed us to make a fair approximation of a 3D model of the structures.  As this was being done, Leon went out and replaced one camera and patched up a potential rent in the wing, which if allowed to corrode in the atmosphere could wind up with us venting half our fuel.  As well as that, our paint was already sluffing off any place that was not horizontal.  Fluorine is not kind.

    Kipenzi the Daring went up the gully side with camera and sensor gear and got a more complete picture of the buildings, and noted neither movement nor any signs of life.  Fortunately the site did not fire at her.
 
   The structures were a small flat topped pyramid, a larger one and another smaller flat top on the other side, this one with a statue, and a platform with what appeared to be statues.  A staircase led up to the platform and on from there to the further small pyramid. The small pyramid without the statue was registering about 100 degrees Celsius on our scanners, but the rest of the place was ambient atmospheric temperature. Nothing else was noteworthy from a distance.
 
    We speculated that if we could get the big pyramid between us and the small one we might be able to fly out, but with no terrain to mask behind that was relegated to last-ditch effort.  An additional concern was that we were hit about 2 kilometers out from the place, and the gully was much much closer than that.
 
  After the repairs were completed the Away Team (Kipenzi, Leon, Fig) geared up and walked carefully over to the structures.  Best plan we could come up with was to find out who shot at us and make sure it would NOT happen when we try to leave.

As thorough and cautious a check as we were able to make a good video record of the place, and gathered samples of a couple different materials involved in the construction.  Perhaps we can market these after some Materials Scientist figures out how to reverse engineer them, and Yorbund could actually have some shelters for people wanting to explore.
 
    Atop the second flat/smaller pyramid was indeed a statue, bigger than us, on rails. We all pushed and after some stubbornness it moved, so suddenly that we all could have fallen into the opening, but managed to catch and stabilize each other before any slip occurred.
 
    Moving the statue revealed a 3 meter circular hole at the top of the pyramid. Looking down we were doubly glad to not have fallen. It was DEEP, perhaps 100 meters or so.  We had brought some rope, just in case, and let down a camera and a life scanner, finding there were possibly three levels in this shaft.  The first was only 6 meters or so below us, with passages going off in three of the cardinal directions. About midway down were two ledges which might have openings or might just be the result of a geologic shift that moved part of the shaft, and at the bottom two passages went off.  The passages were round rather than rectangular, and good-sized.  No need to crawl if we decided to go inside.
 
  The atmosphere in the shaft was the same as outside, but to our surprise (and Medicus's gleeful chortle) we detected three different types of life forms, all moving, within different parts of the shaft and off-shooting passages.  None of us had any doubt that, if we survived, the Medicus' traveling biological lecture series would include these as well as the Chamax.

  The Away Team made a thorough examination of the entire outside of all the structures, but found no other potential ways in (there were two barred possible entries in the bottom of a rectangular pit, but the pit was deep and the openings were small, and we decided to not try crawling into anyplace in VACC suits if we had a different option.

With no further good we could do at the moment, we went back to the ship, decontaminated and cycled through airlocks, did the best possible to clean our gear (although the weapons we took, while still functional at that point, were going to be scrapped ultimately), and examined the sample materials we recovered.
 
  To our moderate surprise and both disappointment and relief, the samples dated at about 40,000 years old, so this was definitely NOT an Ancient Site.  Good news for us, because if it turned out to have any value or goodies/loot, we would not be arrested for failure to report it, but a part of all of us was hoping that this might turn out to be The Home of the Ancients, the site that has never been found, perhaps to answer many of the questions and settle some of the debates about what really happened 300,000 years ago.
 
  Since that was not the case, we started fitting our selves out for a more thorough reconnoitering of the inside.  Lights, comm relays, rope and safety gear, sample bags for both solids and biologicals, scanners, some of the flares left over from the Haunting Thunder adventure, and whatever else we could think of that might be useful, and readied ourselves for the walk to the jump off into the unknown.
 
Continued in Shadows - Part 2.
 
See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde.