Mission to Mithril - Part 3

The Crew of the Skylark 2 travels across a frozen continent to rescue a family of archaeologists and they get a few more clues as to what happened at the starport.

This note is from our November 4, 2018 session and was written by Carl and Kay with additions by myself.

Since we are now scattered around the country, we used Discord for voice communications and Roll20 online virtual tabletop to connect with each other.

Continued from: Mission to Mithril - Part 2

Imperial Date: 305-1107.

Location: The Planet Mithril in the Sword Worlds Subsector.

We spent a lot of time in the morning going over multiple scenarios about what could have happened at the starport. One puzzle: was the EMP supposed to delay or catch the bad guys but got us instead? We decided that the distress signal that we were receiving was from the family that arrived or maybe a survivor from the attack who got away and ran into trouble out there in the wilderness.

Weaponizing the ATV turret was a good idea too. Never have too many guns when you need them. A laser rifle looked like a good choice, it could be mounted and powered off the ATV’s power system, essentially giving it unlimited ammo. Leon should be able to hook it up in about 10 minutes.

After noon we decided to start refueling the Skylark 2 just in case.

We hooked up our hose with one we found in a storage shack next to the landing pad ran it to the water pit nearby and started pumping water into our tanks for refining into hydrogen.

While the tanks were filling, Leon hooked up the laser rifle and we did a more thorough search of the ATV to make sure there are no nasty surprises there.

Decision time: who goes in the ATV and who stays with the ship?

Medicus and Kipenzi decided to stay with the ship, Fig, Sam and Leon will be using to ATV to track down the distress signal.

Medicus and Kipenzi will:

1) Try to figure out why the EMP didn't go off before we got there.

2) Look over the shipping information we found to see if we should expect any inbound ships in the next couple weeks, since we don't know who did what, be suspicious of ANYONE.

Checking out the ATV one final (and thorough) time, we found some snow gear, survival gear, radiation badges, climbing gear, etc. but no bombs or sabotage that might maroon us.

FOUR PERSONAL KITS:
• Boots, 1 Pair (all sized for people with quite big feet)
• Knee pads and tough ‘field’ gloves
• Personal harness with attachment points for tethers and climbing rope
• Padded ‘field’ cap with rigid plastic skullcap insert
• Light working jacket, sleeveless
• Overcoat, waterproof
• Face mask with light-reactive lenses
• Pack of 6 disposable detection badges; these change color in the presence of harmful radiation or some chemical threats
• Poncho/blanket

COMMUNAL EQUIPMENT:
• Climbing rope and pitons
• ‘Cold Light’ lighting kit – spikes, brackets and holders for the included chemical glow units
• Field tent, very cramped with 4 people, and groundsheet

This time of year Mithril’s 20 hour day is divided into 10 hours of light followed by 10 hours of night. We set our local clock for sunrise and sunset are at 0500 and 1500. Sam, Leon and Fig decided to start off at dawn the next day.

Loading the ATV with lots a food (can make water from ice) and enough to get the rescuees back with us too (there could be 5 plus us).

Sam insists on taking ALL of the remaining food from the admin building, except for the plants in the greenhouse, into the Skylark.

We set up two of our button cams in the main hallways of the starport. In the case anyone comes back in, we want to know about it.

We set up a comm link to the control tower between the Skylark and the ATV to warn us of in-coming ships. We’re also able to access the satellite for weather info which should come in handy.

306-1107 0500 Local Sunrise.
Before heading out, Leon asks Medicus for drugs to re-set our biological clocks to local time.

We head out with Fig behind the wheel driving west.

We plan on driving 20-hrs/day: we can cover about 250 km during light, and another 125 each night driving at 50% speed, without increasing our chances of a mishap too much. It also should prevent us from being stalked by predators or being surprised at night when stopped.

The temperature is -20 degrees C, with clear skies. Weather reporting is sorta possible, via satellite photos. One weather system is coming our way from the west.

We move the SL2 next to the water pit so it’s out of the way if a ship comes in for a landing.

The ground got a little slushy as the temperature rose through the day and it started to rain late in the afternoon. After the sun went down things started freezing up again. Uneventful driving.

Kipenzi spent the day trying to figure out the EMP device. There was some kind of controller, perhaps with some code embedded. A generic device rather than specialized. The EMP device itself is 100 kg of scrap and mostly melted into a work bench.

Kip took the controller and the notes that the engineer left with her. The notes were mostly written in Sagamaal, the Sword Worlds’ national language. No one on the crew speaks it, but a dictionary in the Skylark’s computer helped when Kipenzi got back to try to figure it out.

People on the ATV put each put on one of the detection badges for the trip, just in case.

1700
It starts to rain at the Skylark 2.

Kipenzi got the controller plugged in into some of the test equipment in engineering and downloaded the code to a buffer and scanned in all of Engineer Katla Karlseffni’s notes so they can be translated into Anglic.

Rain turned to snow as the night progressed. We blundered on through the dark, the ATV’s powerful spotlights lighting our way.

307-1107 0500
Just before sunrise, we noticed that we were headed east - ack! We got turned around somehow during the night. Leon was driving, maybe his drugs didn’t kick in. Probably happened a couple hours ago. We got back on course, following our own tracks. We ran diagnostics on all instruments shortly thereafter. Temp: -10 degrees C, it is snowing hard and covering up our tracks.

Another cold day (well, yeah). Made it back into new territory and kept on going west.

Back at the starport, Medicus is watching the sensors and Kipenzi continues working on the controller. Medicus did not detect anything on the sensors.

Fig, in the ATV, got stuck in a recent melt. It was covered with fresh snow, and we missed seeing it. After seven hours of puffing and flailing in the dark, we finally got loose before everything could freeze and leave us trapped. Everyone is exhausted as we start rolling again about midnight.

308-1107  0200
The storm hit us. Medicus, looking at the satellite maps, estimated we would be in it for about six hours. And once again, Medicus detected nothing on the local scan.

Late Afternoon:
The ATV made it to a river in high winds and hail, about the end of the light hours. Just below freezing at the spaceport. Lots of hail. Fig took the wheel to get us across the river. (Be careful what you ask for when the skill is NOT too high) Fortunately, we got across.

Midnight: After we left the river, Sam noticed a strong return from something metallic. A few hundred yards off, to the right and ahead of us. He woke up Leon who just got to sleep after his shift at driving.

Curving around "behind" it, we saw another ATV! Tracked, unlike ours, it appears to be disabled in a gully. Doors and hatches are open, no lights. Sam and Leon go out to check the vehicle with Fig on gun and door locks. Temp is dropping, -6 deg below. We moved to as much of a block line of sight as we could.

The Wreck

On closer examination the ATV was dented up and looks like it had been there for years. It also looks like it had been stripped long ago. No control panels even. We marked the wreckage on our map and headed out.

309A-1107
To keep things simple, we have been using local time. The only problem was that Mithril’s nearly 20 hour day was losing 4 hours against the 24 hour imperial calendar. Our solution is was to add an extra “leap day” every 5 days to keep things aligned, thus we have 309A and 309B.Moving right along, we covered about another 250 Km with good weather.

309B-1107 0500
We traveled all night. Morning dawned and went. Clear and crisp now, but rain and storms forecast for the next day or two.

1500
We spot something large ahead, 30-40 meters high and 1 kilometer across. Too steep to go over, we drove around. It looks like a mesa or maybe a glacier. Checking the satellite pictures, it was round. We were looking at the rim of a crater! It was nearly 150 meters deep at the center.

It didn’t look fresh, maybe been here a long time. We drove around it.

The storm had passed the Skylark by this time.

We continued driving in shifts through the night without incident.

310-1107  0500
Sunrise. Pressing forward. The rain started again.

1000
Noon, we picked up a new radio signal. A voice, from same direction as the distress call. Female, calling for help in speaking Anglic and Sagamaal. “If anyone hears me, we are the Bothhildr expedition, running out of supplies”.

It’s the expedition, family of four.

We answer, and they are really happy. It was hard to get info, she has strong accent, what happened at port? “Egil and Katrin were headed back to port in air raft.”

Told her we were a day or two out (200 km). They asked about Egil and Katrin, heading back to the base in the air raft. They left for base about two weeks ago. This corresponds to our best guess of the time for the attack at the starport.

1700
At the 2nd river. It would take about two hours to cross in the dark. We decided to stop until morning, with two people sleeping and one on watch until morning. The terrain near the river is broken ice. One risk was enough.

Kipenzi had been studying the remains of the EMP device all week, and figured something out. Laboriously translating the notes, Kip learned that the device was supposed to be multi-use (oops), the engineer wanted to get shielding so the base would not be affected.

It was supposed to get the next ship (presumably the killers) but didn't trigger. There was a bug in the code. It didn’t get next ship that left but instead got ship after (us). She finished it in the middle of the attack and presumably got shot in the engineering area so she didn’t get killer’s ship.

Fig had earlier accessed the port’s ship logs, next ship out and the last ship to land on Mithril before us was the the E-a-taka Wasab, a Newt ship.

Could be they came in after the attack. The records were automated, but it looks like the Newt ship was involved somehow.

“The records showed that the E-a-taka Wasab came and went about a week before our arrival. So, either the action happened after they left or they were part of it”, says Kipenzi

311-1107  0500
Early morning, light snow. Kipenzi’s home world was first settled by the Sword Worlds, so she is familiar with the kind of culture they have. Kipenzi tells them that they will be happy to be rescued but suspicious of Imperials. “If offered food accept it, but share your food with them as well. If they’ve been isolated, they may not know that war has started.”

Crossing the river did NOT go as well as last time. We got stuck on a sand bar (or something like it) in the middle of the crossing. Four hours later we got up onto the bank. We saw what looked like a bridge abutment when we crossed, not a natural feature. Very old and worn.

The snow turned to light rain.

Around 10 we spotted the Archaeologists’ camp in a sheltered area, on the fringes of a range of broken hills. There were a couple of small shelter-type buildings that we could see.

A man who turned out to be Eric Bothildr, waved to us as we approached from up on a ridge. Sam and Leon went up to meet him, Fig staying behind on the ATV’s gun just in case.

A woman came out in a few minutes too, and two kids. It looks like we have found One Researching Family; Eric, Myntelle, Egino, and Runa.

All of them are armed.

Greeting the people, asking what was going on and what the problem is, we learned that they don't know what happened at the port.

They’ve been out here at the archaeological dig since they arrived. About two weeks ago they got a distress call from the port. Egil Tedorsson, a Field Operative, and Katrin Gyrowetz, the port Comm Tech, took the air raft to go back, but it hit a rock outcropping. The air raft kept going, “but we don't think they made it back”.

Sam tells them, no one was there when we arrived at the port and the air/raft was missing. We got your distress call. Pack up and we’ll take you back.

“What about Egil and Katrin?”

They want to try and find the two folks that were with them. We asked about their possible route and checked the map.

When the distress signal came in from the port, Egil and Eric had a disagreement that came to blows. The family wanted to pack up and go with them, but Egil wanted to leave right away and left without them, taking only Katrin. He hit a rock just after take off, but continued on his way anyway. It looked like they were headed maybe more to north than they should have been going.

They offer food and we offer our supplies. They were running out and hunting for animals and running them through their food processor. The local animals were edible, but unpalatable, the food processor was able to turn one of them into a kind of bland meatloaf.

Good meal that night, and they tell us about their research project.

Their story: the kids offer erudite explanations (their parents are very proud), years ago a ship with jump drive damage came down in this area; the crew found rock carvings and a radioactive waste site. Eric and Myntelle found report of rock carvings in several areas.

The original theory was that Mithril was once warmer and the radioactive waste came later.

The rock carvings were primitive and of Aslan figures, crude cave village settlement. The people living there were Aslan, from the bones and teeth that they found. The bones dated from before before Aslan moved into the Spinward Marches or even this side of the Great Rift. The radioactive waste was from a high tech base that later died out.

We all got a little bit of a language lesson trying to talk to each other.

Back at the Skylark, Kipenzi had another thought – now that we know about the ancient Aslan colony here and radioactive waste, maybe the crater found earlier wasn’t a meteorite, but a spaceship crash. Worth mentioning to the archeologists, maybe.

We found out that the port warden’s name was Valbrand Staer. So as far as we’ve been able to determine, there should have been 5 port personnel, 4 Bothhildr family members, and one unnamed passenger from the Jinfrei. We found the family and the three charred remains in the pit at the port. We are Still missing three people. If we can find Egil Tedorsson and Katrin Gyrowetz, we will be down to one.

Continued in Mission to Mithril - Part 4

See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Skylark 2, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde, Shadows, Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak, Prison Planet, Leedor on Aramis, First Call at Zilla, Trade War, The Bloodwell, ANNIC NOVA, The Kinunir, Kesser's Return and Justice.