Prison Planet, Part 2

The adventurers discover the source of the disease infecting the prisoners and staff of Tarkwall Prison and find a cave that may lead to the origin of Medicus' ring.

This note is from the November 3, 2013 session and was mostly written by Carl with input from Kay and I.  I did the models in Sketchup and rendered them in Kerkythea.

Continued from: Prison Planet, Part 1

Location: The outer Lanth System, Lanth Subsector

Date: 135-1098

One of the curious things about space, reflected Talbot Vinge, is how much time one has to consider things. He knew the imperial authorities were on their way, but their cutter would not arrive at his research station for another ten hours. He had a shuttle waiting at the axial dock, but this would only delay his arrest by – he thought for a moment – another six hours, based on the relative accelerations of the shuttle and the cutter. Mathematics dictated there was no escape. Suicide was, of course, an option. If he chose that course, then he had a wealth of choices. This one laboratory contained hundreds of lethal compounds, many of which Vinge had himself invented over the last two years. He could even, if he wished, take the imperial agents to hell with him – the focus of his research was on plagues which could bypass filters and bioscanners.

He made his decision. He touched one control, and the lab flared blue as plasma incinerated his life’s work. Another control erased the computer logs completely, wiping then physically destroying the storage system. There was nothing left of Vinge’s bioweapons research, nothing but his own memories and the contents of the five pea-sized sample sacs in the safe.

He pressed a third control. ‘Subotai, come here. I need you.’

Location: Tarkwall Prison on Keanu in the Lanth Subsector.

Date: 004-1104
While Leon and Kipenzi worked to disassemble the Auto-Doc for transfer to our working area in the prison, Medicus wanted to try and track back the disease spread to find Patient Zero, so we got access to the records of the prison. While most of the infected people were from Cell Block 2, not all came from there. No recent deliveries had been made, and only one new prisoner had recently been incarcerated, a pickpocket who had been here only one week. The new prisoner had only lately become sick from the disease.

While backtracking the progression of the disease outbreak, Medicus was able to get a complete dump of Tarkwall's entire database for our use at a later time if needed. You cannot overvalue data that may turn into Information at some point. He also found a partial transcript of an interview with Talbot Vinge, as he was being interrogated. This put a definite terrorist spin onto Vinge and his assistant, Subotai Shanad.

Ministry of Justice - Confidential File

Reference: 43A/LANTH/1100/33a/H/4322/t192

Transcript of conversation between Imperial Agents and TALBOT VINGE

Agent: You’ll gain nothing by not co-operating. We have everything we need.

Vinge: You have nothing. Just an empty space station and two innocent men.

Agent: Innocent? We can pin a half-dozen unsolved murders on Shanad.

Vinge: All right, an empty space station and one innocent man.

Agent: We don’t care about the murders. Just the bioweapons.

Vinge: What bioweapons?

Agent: You scorched your lab. We have evidence tying you to the biowar on Rech, to the Ine Givar, to Tolroy’s organization.

Vinge: An unfortunate accident wiped my lab’s records and specimens. You have no evidence of any wrongdoing on my part.

Agent: If we find one single engineered virus, you’ll wish you’d fried yourself along with the lab.

Vinge: And you won’t, because you have nothing.

Agent: You don’t think you’re going to get away with this, do you?

Vinge: Of course not. You bastards don’t give a damn about justice or truth.

END TRANSCRIPT

Shanad was one of the sick people, and was tied to the Ine Givar terrorists in the transcript piece [as well as the biowar on Rech and “Tolroy's organization” that we’ve never heard of - Kipenzi]. He had been in "The Hole" since about the time of the initial outbreak. Most prisons have isolation areas for security or punishment, and Tarkwall is no exception. Subotai had been in a fight, using a pickaxe to pummel another prisoner, Stiv the Blade, a Cell Block 2 resident. Most of the people who watched the fight were also sick since 5-6 hours after the fight took place. Light bulbs to the ON state, Medicus felt he was on to something.

Late in the day, Fig and Medicus returned to the Skylark to help with the autodoc and for a more rigorous data analysis of the prison records. It turns out the female prisoner is Balin Starovich’s niece, not Medicus’s dead mother, as we had feared.

005-1104
With Sam staying in the ship (NOT, NOT, NOT going to leave it alone to be used for an escape attempt) the rest of us got the autodoc transported into the prison. While Leon and Kipenzi rebuilt and tested it, Medicus, Fig and a couple of guards for safety, went down to the scene of the fight.

We learned on Fulacin that parking close to possible trouble might not be the best thing, so after consulting maps of the local terrain Sam decided to move the ship to a mesa about 50 km away, and well above the rest of the terrain. We learned in the Querion system that flying into rough weather is not always the safest way to go. As in Querion, so it went on Keanu - winds, sand and low altitude turbulence made for a bad landing. Sam made a rough landing, damaging the holographic projectors on the bottom of the ship so we could not pretend to just be a rock. Fortunately nothing that affected flight or space-worthiness was damaged.

Back at the prison, Medicus, Fig and two guards went down the elevator to the fight scene, in the Hot Zone. Medicus took air samples and looked for any blood spatter or other possible contaminants. We found nothing of note, but since the Hole was nearby on that level we went to check on Shanad. In the truest B Movie tradition, he was not there. Food packets made it look like he had been gone about 2 days, and it appeared that a pickaxe (later determined to have come from nearby equipment storage) was how he chiseled out hand and footholds.

Our working theory at that point was: Shanad put a pickaxe in the Hole, started a fight to get thrown in there, somehow released the disease, and was using the confusion and lockdown to make an escape.

Having purchased 5 automapping airborne 'robots' (Rover 1 through 5) the last time we were on Rhylanor, we got one and released it into the level with the programming to map the place for an hour and come back to the elevator for data dump and processing. Absent Shanad, we felt that Stiv the Blade was our next best bet, and we wanted to obtain blood and saliva from him. When we got to his room we found him on the floor and babbling. His face was covered with blue blotches, and as we tried to examine him he coughed fiercely and keeled over dead. Fortunately we were wearing our vacc suits and not breathing the local air.

As quickly as we could get him to our work area safely and the autodoc reassembled he went in. While Kipenzi went down to recover Rover 1, Medicus and Fig tried to make some sense of the symptoms and disease spread.

Rover did not come back, and there was no line of sight for Kipenzi to do manual control. She had the scanners along, and with two guards she went looking for any sign of life. While she did not find any life signs, she did find Rover, smashed in a way that suggested sudden impact with a pickaxe. She brought the pieces back up, in the hopes that we could recover some of the data.

The autodoc could not explain the symptoms in Stiv's body, but Medicus was able to analyze the body fluids and the pustules, and late in the evening made a breakthrough and isolated the virus causing the infection. It was not natural, and was clearly an engineered virus, and small enough to get through most filter masks. We were all doubly glad we had worn our vacc suits the whole time.

Building 170 - Where the prison's quarantine facility is.

Not wasting any time, Kipenzi and Fig (with a live comm link to Medicus) [and recording-Kip] went to talk with Talbot Vinge, to see if he could add any information. I confess we did not expect any real cooperation (at least not voluntarily) but when we described the symptoms he went nearly white and sat down suddenly. It turns out that the virus was one of FIVE that Vinge had engineered, and the only non-fatal one.

He had planted all 5 in containers in Shanad's lungs just before his capture, and planned to serve his time and then recover them. He said the fight must have broken the one, and that if any of the others break it will be almost 100% fatal for the prison. As an added complication, if Shanad were to die, Vinge told us that ALL the containers would open within a few hours, and likely the entire planet would be wiped out.

He offered us a deal, to salvage the containers from Shanad and get him (Vinge) out of prison. With his contacts we could sell the viruses for billions of credits. (Probably a good thing that Sam was either out of range / cut off by the sandstorm or not monitoring our intercom at the time).

Medicus had enough medicines on hand in the quarantine area to synthesize 10 doses of an antidote, and while Kipenzi flew back to the Skylark to get more medicine to make antidotes (Sam put it all outside for her to pick up) Fig took 5 doses for four guards and Shanad, and with the bioscanner and 4 now safe guards went back to the mining level to look for Shanad. Looking back on that, we really should have put some knockout juice in the syringe too.

Looking around the level, the guards and Fig came to a rubble area that had been hacked to make an opening. The guards remarked that there were rumors of other tunnel areas off the main levels, and perhaps this was where some of the prisoners who 'disappeared' had gone. Down some more winding tunnels, and just as the bioscanner started to show life beyond the rocks, our eyeballs showed it too. Shanad came out swinging the pickaxe, and hit a guard solidly. The four guards (3 and 1/2 at that time) subdued him and Fig injected the antidote.

After some much needed first aid on the injured guard, we got him back up to the work area, sedated him and put him into the autodoc. With his usual medical acumen, Medicus was able to extract the four remaining containers/nodules/sacks of disease, and into the best most secure most unbreakable and padded container we had they went.

Kipenzi took Rover 2 and some guards back down to the mining level and turned rover loose to map the caves and tunnels beneath the mines. It came back several hours later with a map of the cavern system which showed an outside entrance in the desert to the east of the prison. We sent a copy of the map to the prison after editing out the outside entrance.

Tarkwall Prison

Over the next week or so, we planned to inject everyone in the facility with antidote, and put some of the worse cases into the autodoc. We also contacted Circle City and warned them of the outbreak and how to mix the antidote; as the guards and the gopher had been sick when we met them at the bar, we suspected the disease was spreading there too.

Tarkwall will have to order more supply packets for the autodoc in order to continue using it extensively, but that was one of their several issues to deal with.

One of the pirates, Balin Starovich was responsible for the death of Medicus's mother when he was still a child, and the one female prisoner was Freya Starovich, Balin's niece and engineer. For those two, and Vinge, Medicus had arranged a surprise. When their turn in the autodoc comes up they all three would get a little something special, three different things that would almost certainly kill them - in three different ways within 4-6 weeks. We figured that would be enough time that we would be gone and disassociated with anything.

The autodoc recorderd that Starovich is over 100 and has been taking aganathics. Someone has been supplying him while inside the prison; there are also several cases of drug addictions among the prisoners that show that they’re also being supplied somehow. Maybe the break in the mining level wall into the caves is how smuggling is going on. Or it could be the shuttle pilot, as he does have access to the city and the prison.

We also plan to explore the outside, with the air raft and the map Rover made, and find the entry and plan our exploration.

So, with the prison soon to be disease free (as much as prisons are ever likely to be) and us paid off for the consultation, we close this journal with the ship still parked on the mesa, with the holographic projectors still out, and without an autodoc.

[Kip: things to do: explore the caves. Have Medicus talk with the old-time prisoners here that he knows to get some background info. The Ine Givar terrorist here for example could be a treasure trove of info. Talk to Vinge about his contacts some more. I’ve thought that hunting them down could be a hobby for us – like finding the Octagon buildings.]

Continued in: Prison Planet - Alien Legacy.

See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Skylark 2, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde, Shadows, Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak.