Prison Planet - Alien Legacy, Part 2
This note is from the January 12, 2014 session and was mostly written by Carl with input from Kay and I.
Continued from: Alien Legacy, Part 1.
Location: Tarkwall Prison on the Planet Keanu in the Lanth Subsector.
Imperial Date: 007-1104
Late evening.
When
we left off, the crew had just returned to the Skylark, after the
initial exploration of the lower cave system. The prison's guards had
escorted the group to a breach in the wall of the lowest level of the
mines which had allowed prisoners to enter the caves. Leon and Kipenzi
had been attacked in the caves, and their VACC suits had been ripped in
places.
Sam contacted Circle City, to try and get us approved to stay parked on the plateau. The authorities denied the request. We decided to fly back to the starport and buy two replacement VACC suits, which were for sale at 18,000 credits each. We returned to the prison landing pad as Keanu's two suns were rising on 008-1104.
The ore shuttle was also parked on the tarmac. Looked like they were minimizing any possible disease vectors.
One more time doing the dance of handing over our weapons, getting escorted down, and getting the weapons back led us to the cavern area again. We made our way directly to the installation's door and back to the room with the planters, and put the alien artifact that we had found earlier onto the cargo lifter.
The room had the look of a lab facility, a terrarium area or part of the installation's life support with algae and scrab fungus tanks hooked up to ducts going into the walls. The place looked very old, and not of imperial fabrication.
Kipenzi said, "Perhaps these aliens required the scrab fungus spores in some metabolic way".
Leon was able to figure out how to open the scrab container, but just as he did the robot we had encountered once before came into the room.
This time Leon and Kipenzi didn’t wait to see what would happen and just fired away. Kipenzi hit it first, and it returned fire. Leon also hit it, both of them doing minor damage. It got a hit (but fortunately not a penetration) on Kipenzi damaging the new suit she had just purchased on our last trip to Circle City. As Medicus and Fig were getting their weapons ready, Leon shot it, and actually took off its weapon arm. After taking more damage to its armor, the robot back-stepped through the door and closed and locked it in front of us. We left the weapon arm on the floor and pursued.
By the
time we got back to the entry/electric tree room (recall that the first
circular room had a metallic tree-shaped mechanism with many lights and
indicators) the robot was not in sight. With 8 doors available, it was
very fortunate that Kipenzi had been keeping notes on which doors had
initially been locked. One of them was not locked before but now was,
and it seemed likely to be the path we should follow.
We came to a cylindrical room with a center walkway. There was a work table on each side, and many things that appeared to be tools. We speculated that it was a workshop of some kind. On one of the work tables was the robot, and Medicus fired on it. The robot was pretty much cut in half at that point. Concluding that it had come here for repairs, we disconnected all the leads from it.
On the other workbench there was a cat’s cradle like device, holding a black oblong-shaped object. On closer inspection we recognized the cradle as stasis field. This relatively low tech (relative to the Ancient tech we had hoped to find) could have been built on Rhylanor, we left it alone.
Beyond the workshop was a spherical room with a platform in the center. Panels were all around the sides of the room, and a locker of some kind was on the platform in the center of the room. Most of the panels were lit up, and what appeared to be a control panel was on the ceiling.
After scanning, Kipenzi recognized that the structure was being electronically augmented, like the bonded superdense armor used on larger warships. Examining the panels, our best assessment was that they were power-related, and we did not mess with them at all. Scanning the locker, it appeared that there was a space suit of some kind, but since our main concern of the moment was to see if there were any other threats (robot or otherwise) in the facility, we left it for the moment.
The door from the ‘power room’ opened onto a large roughly rectangular room that appeared to be a docking bay. It was much bigger than we had expected a room to be. Two of the walls looked like the native rock had collapsed into it. We did not check the walls, but stayed mindful that ‘fake rock walls’ had been built in the cave area. The construction of the installation appeared to have been carved out of the local rock rather than having been part of a ship or space station that had been landed and buried.
In the bay was a ship, a fighter or shuttle type. Tempted, but mindful that our main goal at the time was to be sure we were secure, we went back to check out the rest of the facility.
Back in the ‘tree’ room, we checked out
the doors systematically, going clockwise from the central room. The
first led us to a hemispherical room with a round table in the center,
and chairs with controls in the arms. There were some devices hanging
from the ceiling, and spherical glass-faced enclosures in the walls
around the room. One of these chambers had been blasted open, revealing a
pile of ash. Examining the ash, we found a ring very similar to the one
Medicus had – the ring that led us here and unlocked the doors.
The rooms appeared to be quarters, similar to the zero-G type found on space stations. One was dedicated to locker storage. Kipenzi took the new ring, and she confirmed that it did unlock and lock the doors. Good to have a backup.
The next door from the tree room led to another hemispherical room with round chambers arranged around the perimeter, similar to the previous room. No ash, no rings, sad to say.
One more door led to another quarters area, with the first chamber that appeared ‘lived-in’. Things on the walls, a tablet of some kind, a cup with dried residue. Medicus picked up the tablet.
Another of the chambers had an actual body in it. Gray-skinned, definitely not a species we recognized. They had short legs with hands rather than feet at the end of them - a species adapted to zero gravity which explained some of the odd features in the installation's architecture. The body crumbled to dust when Medicus tried to get a biosample. There had been a small device in front of the being, possibly a tool or weapon. We left it for the moment.
The next room in sequence, clockwise, was the cylindrical repair room with attached docking bay; so we skipped it.
The next door off the tree room led us to a rectangular area with ornately decorated walls of a greenish glass-like substance, with glyphs shimmering on them. At the far end was an altar-like object on a raised dais. We noticed that the wall glyphs shimmered only when we were moving in the room. Leon touched one of the walls, and a circle with new glyphs appeared. We concluded that it was a control room. We did determine that there was no different reaction from the walls for people holding a ring than for those not holding one, but did not mess with anything.
As Medicus approached the ‘altar’ block he noticed one glyph more prominent than the others looking like a backward N flashing insistently. Again, we left things alone.
The place felt really OLD, but not like an Ancient facility.
The last door from the tree room opened onto a corridor that led to a room with a robot-charging station. Only one station was there, making us much more comfortable in terms of safety. Beyond that a door led to an oval-shaped room with a chair and controls. There was a goodly amount of computer-ish equipment attached to the chair.
Comfortable that there was no additional threat for us to contend with, we went back to the ‘plant room’ and beyond to the room with the pit. We found a set of stairs on the far end, and sent Rover-2 to map it out for an hour or until complete.
While Rover-2 did its thing, we went back to rooms we had not fully examined. The locker in the power room held a VACC suit, with what looked like four hands instead of 2 hand/2 feet, and the ship looked like it would take 4 hands to fly.
After about an hour of further looking, we decided we had spent enough time here, and that the prison staff would wonder about how long we were gone. Believing we could come back in through the back cave entrance we headed out.
Rover-2 had found that the low part was a series of levels. No living quarters or hookups. It looked unfinished.
On the way to the rear entrance to the caves, Fig was leading and holding the scanner. He detected a small life form approaching on the floor of the cave, but not in time to avoid being attacked. It was a little lizard-like animal, and while it did not penetrate Fig’s VACC suit, it had a good grip on his ankle. As it gnawed away, Kipenzi’s gun jammed when she tried to shoot it. Leon pulled out his cutlass and decapitated the critter, with Fig seeing visions of an artificial foot as well as the arm. Fortunately, Leon knew his cutlass skills, and got a clean (figuratively speaking) kill. Medicus dropped the head in a sample bag.
We got to the back door and contacted Sam. As we uploaded our video and data, and noticed for the fist time that this entry was actually in a line of sight of the prison tower in the distance.
Sam told us that the Scout Service had quarantined Keanu, and Captain Valiente of the Children of the March, a 60,000-ton cruiser was in orbit to enforce the interdiction as necessary.
Sam had checked the library files:
Children of the March: A frontier cruiser of the Azhanti High Lightning class. Tail number 6355. Laid down 095-994. First flight 117-997. 60,000 tons and heavily armed.
The Children of the March was unusual in this class of ships primarily for its method of financing. The boost to subsector economy created by the award of starship construction contracts is always important enough to make all areas of the Imperium vie for the privilege. At the time of the bidding invitations, the Solomani Rim War (990 to 1002) was burning on the other side of the Imperium; there was little chance that the Spinward Marches would receive a contract.
The Duke of Regina, speaking for the Marches, proposed that the Marches fund one additional ship from its own resources, on the condition that the Marches receive a contract to produce a portion of the total run. The school children of the worlds within the Marches contributed their lunch money, at a quarter credit each, for the ultimate funding of one ship, and it was named Children of the March in their honor.
At least, that's the story available to the casual reader. But that sort of activity is very cost-ineffective, and has a great potential for graft, or at least inattention. Instead, the sector government came up with the idea, and implemented it at the highest levels. Given a population of 783 billion in the Marches (under direct Imperial rule), children in school amount to about 10% of that population. Assuming a contribution of a quarter credit per student, the campaign could produce the sum of 19.575 billion credits.
The bureaucracy simply deducted this sum from funds budgeted to education; the responsibility for replenishment fell upon educational administrators, who could solicit donations from students (or others) for the shipbuilding campaign. Aside from the initial notification from sector government, no further effort was necessary, no further credit transfers were needed, and the campaign was allowed to go on for however long was necessary. Reportedly, some backwater school districts still collect for the "Starship Fund."
The Scout Base in system was also sending a medical team to deal with the disease breakout.
ACK! We knew that meant we would not be getting back into the underground base/ship, so we went back to the facility. We put the severed robot arm near the workbench and made sure the doors were locked. For the record, our story was that we found a door and could not get through it. At least we got a lot of video and a few souvenirs, and if the Scout service meets a robot… Too bad we couldn’t have gotten in and been able to warn them.
They will also find the mummified body of prisoner 9096.
We made our way back to the prison and did the weapons dance one last time.
After we got topside, we heard that one of the prisoners, Otto Mefoil had hanged himself last night. He had been due for parole in a few weeks but for some reason the parole had been slipped for 10 years.
Medicus took some time to speak with people he had known in his previous time on Keanu.
Waltrin Gana: He is training to be a lawyer, and complained about a brutal guard named Vittorio Krane.
Felip Karageorge: he said he was ‘connected’ and could get Medicus any help or stuff that he needed.
Medicus checked in with the medical staff and looked at the reports from the autodoc. One of the guards showed the effects of long-term alcohol abuse (in fact had alcohol in his system when processed through the autodoc). Another guard showed signs of organ damage from a rough wake up from cold sleep.
The medical staff had been giving preference in administering the antivirals to younger and healthier prisoners who would be used as a labor force in the spice harvest as well as getting the mines back on line.
Finally, back to the Skylark for dinner.
009-1104
Early in the morning a 100 Ton Scout ship landed at the prison strip
carrying a medical team. They checked us out for disease and the medical
staff (with Medicus with Fig supporting) talked about what we had done
and learned. The Scouts already had a anti-viral cocktail they were
confident with, and cleared us to go back to Circle City.
That morning a 600 Ton liner, the Elbec, came out of jump space. Sam talked with them a little, and learned that:
- They were carrying an official with a pardon for one of the prisoners, but the radio person did not know who.
- A news crew from Dinomn’s channel 400 is on board to cover the release.
Looking at the copy of the prison database that Medicus got a few days earlier, the only prisoner with any serious connection to Dinomn was that one prisoner had hit Dinomn with a starship at high speed while trying to put down a revolt, and had been convicted of war crimes.
Also from the prison database, we knew that the body found in the installation was Scott Kovestov. He had been missing for about 5 years, presumed dead.
The Scout team would take a few days to clear the prison.
We flew the Skylark back to Keanu Down Starport and topped off our fuel supply. Sam started to look for cargo as we waited for the navy to lift the quarantine.
Along with the Skylark, several ships were in port for the spice, since the harvest was expected to happen in about a month after the rains stop and the spice beds dry up:
- Bold Venture 200 Ton
- King of the Hill 200 Ton
- Reliant 100 Ton
- Tsunami 300 Ton
- Laitayo (Aslan) 400 Ton
While we waited for departure clearance, we planned to examine the alien (but not ancient) equipment we had recovered, and the symbols and glyphs we had on video.
Next the plan was to make two jumps back to Rhylanor to replace the auto-doc, and seek our next adventure. Maybe we could go back through Fulacin…. Nah, bad idea.
Continued in: Prison Planet - Conclusion
See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Skylark 2, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde, Shadows, Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak, Prison Planet.
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