Adventure!

You have been living and working aboard the interstellar scout ship Raptor for the last couple of weeks, having joined the crew at the nearby Tondra-3 spaceport. The ship’s captain, William Darcy, was not entirely forthcoming about his reasons for needing a new crew at such short notice, but he seemed harmless enough. In any case, you’re pretty sure the weird rumours swirling about him were just that: rumours. Any successful captain is bound to stir up ill-feeling among the crews of rival ships, right?

You have spent most of the time since leaving Tondra-3 getting used to your new responsibilities and running routine checks on the ship’s upgraded systems. The Raptor has certainly seen better days but, as the captain is fond of saying, she has it where it counts. You assume that he’s specifically referring to the cargo hold when he says this, since that’s where the enormous, frigate-class cloaking device sits bolted to the deck, gently humming within a tangle of power cables.

You were beginning to get quite adapted to the rhythm of life aboard ship when, early this morning, a message from the captain was sent to all hands: Feeling a bit off today. Probably just a hangover, but I am going to sleep it off in the medipod. Absolutely no interruptions!

No major issue. The systems are almost all up and running, and you will arrive at the Gate in a couple of hours. Then it’s just a case of waiting your turn to quantum tunnel to the next star system over.

And then, two minutes ago, the ship-wide alarm calling for all crew to report to the bridge…

The bridge crew is minimal – the Raptor only needs a few people to run the ship under normal circumstances, and everyone on board was hired on by the captain at Tondra-3 at the same time as you were.

A young helm officer turns to you, Abara, and in answer to your question replies, "We just picked up a distress call. Here, let me replay it." They tap on the console in front of them and, after a second or two, you hear a voice, punctuated with violent bursts of static.

"are attacking the … with three, no, four … shields failing … no time."

The message loops a couple more times before the helm officer turns it off and looks to you all with a worried expression. "With Captain Darcy, um, out of commission, you’re the ranking officers. What shall we do?"

"They didn't broadcast for long enough to get a full position lock," they reply, "but it came from the general direction of the Gate." They gesture to their screen, on which a broad line traces a vector from the monolithic Gate structure—orbiting at the very edge of the planetary system—to the Raptor's current position.

They then busy themselves with sending out your message.

"Maintaining course, aye sir." Steede nods. "At our current velocity, we will be within scanner range of the Gate in just under 30 minutes."

"Coming into sensor range now," says Steede, as a holographic image materialises at the front of the Bridge. Redstone, this also pops up on your super-sweet space-phone-camera-communicator-scanner thing.

You all immediately recognise this system's Gate, and that something is very wrong. All space-faring civilisations use Gates to bridge the immense distances between the stars and, because of this, the queue to use them is usually pretty long. Maybe hundred on a slow day. As the hologram continues to resolve, though, you don't see an orderly line of spacecraft; you see a halo of ships scattering in every direction at maximum velocity.

"Aye sir! Running simulation." Steede busies himself with his console, and an overlay appears on the holographic display: the ships slowly arcing back towards their origin...

Those of you still on the bridge watch on as the simulation completes and begins to run forward in time.

You see a long line of spacecraft queued to jump through the Gate. A few seconds after a long, sleek military vessel moves through the gateway, the queue suddenly scatters, the remaining craft accelerating as fast as their engines can carry them away from a point somewhere in the middle of the line.

"I'm beginning to pick up several debris clouds around that point," says Steede. "And what appear to be ships attached to the Gate itself."

As the holographic view continues to resolve, you can just about make out the pixellated shape of half a dozen spacecraft attached like limpets to the structure of the Gate.

The comms officer relays your message and then looks back at you, Abara: "We're just getting an empty ping back. The message was received successfully, but there's no response."

As you approach, the viewport switches from a remote scan to an optical view.

A monolithic structure fills half the screen – a bright, vivid white against the darkness of space. The Gate is a hollow cylinder, over 10 kilometres long and three in diameter. As it slowly rotates around its axis, you can just about make out the six ships scattered across its surface, anchored tightly to the superstructure.

The ship slows as you approach the Gate and the bridge crew look to you all, their faces expectant.

With the Raptor on final approach, Abara is able to take a closer look at the ships anchored to the hull of the Gate. They don't look anything like the craft that make up the Hive Armanda – you know that for sure. They're just too... normal.

The Raptor glides only a few hundred metres over the surface of the Gate towards the nearest anchored ship. On the screen as you approach, you see a fairly nondescript transport craft, its paintwork all but worn away. It has no running lights. With such a quick pass, Logic Bodily can glean no more information than that.

A deep, almost imperceptible hum permeates the ship as the cloaking device spins up to full power. As you busy yourselves with your preparations, the lieutenant carefully guides the Raptor down, not far from the mysterious transport vessel. There is an ever-so-slight bump as it makes contact.

While there are no large airlocks on the surface of the Gate, there are smaller ones designed for maintenance access, and one of these is only a short spacewalk away. You will have to deal with micro-gravity outside the ship, but you have all been out in your vacc-suits before – some of you many, many times. You should be at the airlock controls in less than five minutes.

The outer airlock door opens and your helmet faceplates instantly polarise and darken as the bright white surface of the Gate stretches out in front of you.

You emerge from the airlock and begin to manoeuvre towards the hatch. When you make contact with the surface of the Gate to propel forward, you occasionally feel a deep, pulsing vibration from within.

(This might be an unfortunate reminder for those of you who share a bulkhead wall with the captain, since you were subjected to his favourite Tondra-gabber techno playlist on repeat until the early hours of the morning.)

You have been moving forward carefully for a couple of minutes when, suddenly, a jet of gas bursts from an exhaust vent a little away. A second or so later there is another, off to your right and much nearer. You look down, and see this part of the surface is dotted with vents.

What do you do?

Logic reaches out with his electroreceptor senses, but cannot get any useful information through all the interference, and it seems everyone is too distracted to listen closely to Robo-Barbie's words of wisdom. but everyone feeling very inspired by Robo-Barbie's words of wisdom.

Abara waits for just the right moment and then triggers his thrusters. Each of you feels a slight lurch as the cable goes taut, then you are gliding above the vent field – which, you can see from this vantage point, stretches far out of view to either side.

After just a few seconds, you land gently next to the airlock hatch. The airlock looks to be pretty standard: the outer hatch itself has a small window, and beside it is a red handle to operate the locking mechanism. You're confident you could all fit inside and get through in one cycle.

The airlock cycles and the wall panels light up a vivid green. The inner door opens and you emerge into a mid-sized changing room lined with equipment cubbies. In the corner, piled up on the floor, are a bunch of well-used industrial vac suits and helmets. Maybe five or six sets, at first glance.

You take a closer look at the suits, and it doesn't take long for you to realise that they belong to Space Pirates.

As you pass on this alarming information, you all hear the sound of a distant explosion from down the hallway.

You run into the hallway and are almost immediately engulfed in a cloud of acrid smoke. But you've faced this kind of situation many times before, and as the last of the smoke blows past you and begins to dissipate, you can see several armed figures moving through a security door at the far end of the corridor. It has just been blown wide open.

In response both to being flashbanged and to Robo-Barbie's calm request, you see three pirates who were still holding weapons throw them to the floor and shakily raise their hands, clearly dazed from the effects of the grenade. Two figures lie unconscious in the doorway.

Scott does a quick scan for more explosives. There is quite a bit of explosive residue here, so you can only get a localised reading [that's your complication], but you're confident there are no more charges here.

Ambrose checks the walls and conduits for something wired directly into the Gate's systems. It takes a moment, but you do catch something, some kind of signal, folded into the regular data stream. Your hand-held instruments are not able to disentangle what it is [and that's your complication].

The pirate you addressed, a grizzled human wearing a stained lab coat over his regular crew gear turns, blinking, in your general direction: "We're taking down the quantum tunnel that powers the Gate," he replies. "And there ain't nothing you can do about it!"

Another pirate gestures effusively with his four raised arms: "Yeah! Even at maximum speed, that navy frigate won't be able to get back to Tondra for years. And when they do, we'll be ready for 'em. We're going to make this system our new base of operations. It'll be a pirate utopia."

@zatatmando, can you please make me a Lasers roll? You would have two dice due to Redstone's background as an engineer.

The pirate turns to Scott: "That frigate, the bloody Téméraire, has been patrolling this system for the last two years. And for those two years we've had to hide like..." He pauses, searching for the right word. "... like, well, like common criminals! But by now the other crews will be reaching their positions on the power grid and getting ready to shut this thing down for good. Then we can get back to business."

Scott, you recall being taken to see a Gate in the process of being decommissioned when you were a kid. The process took years. You have a fuzzy memory of an adult telling you what would happen to the surrounding system if it wasn't done with the utmost care...

The prisoner looks up at you, Robo-Barbie, what appears to be genuine confusion written across his face.

"Bombs? Whaddaya mean bombs?" He looks around at the busted doorway, before barking a short laugh. "You mean the door? That was just a breach charge so we could get to the power grid proper."

He turns to the other pirates, laughing again. "They think we're trying to get blown to hell! Nah, we're just turning off to this stupid thing. Who knows when the crew'll need it again down the road. Blowing it up... so wasteful."

Logic, your mind goes back to a stuffy classroom. You're doodling on your pad, half paying attention to the professor's lecture but mainly thinking about the mechanics of romance. Like, isn't it so interesting that a Gate's electromagnetic array supports a quantum tunnel through mutual attraction, and when one of those elements suddenly no longer attracts the other, it all spectacularly collapses? It's so poetic.

The overhead lights momentarily flicker, and then blink out entirely. For the longest second you feel yourselves growing ever-so slightly lighter, before the power audibly returns and you sink back to the floor.

You see one of the pirates smirk as the lights come back on – it couldn't have been them squinting against the bright light, of course. You take this to mean whatever it was you were looking to confirm.

The pirate's bravado evaporates in an instant.

"They– they're heading to the power couplers! I– I've got a map."

He cautiously reaches for a piece of paper that's protruding from his chest pocket. As he hands it over, you see a faded schematic of the Gate. Three locations are marked with a big red 'X' and a number.

"Them's the couplers. We're gonna– we were supposed to meet up with one of the other crews and help cut the power to number one." He nods towards to a spilled bag of tools on the floor. "It'll take 'em longer now, I'm guessing."

You see the location marked as '1' is only a few minutes away, through the busted door and down a couple of corridors. Location '2' is a third of the way around the circumference of the Gate and location '3' another third again. A small rapid-transit system built into the skin of the Gate appears to link all three locations.

Redstone and McGunner come together and quickly figure out that the power outage was due to one of the three power couplers being forcefully disconnected. With this information, and thinking back to the simulation on the bridge, Logic does some time-of-flight calculations on the back of a space napkin and pinpoints exactly which one it must have been: the furthest, #3 on the map. Just two couplers remain active. Time is getting short. What do you do?

Logic and Abara, you hustle down the maintenance corridor to reach the nearest coupler.

After a couple of minutes, you emerge onto a catwalk which runs around the internal equator of a sphere at least a hundred metres in diameter. The moment you step of out the corridor, Logic, your electroreceptors pick up massively powerful electromagnetic fields in the air. A cluster of dark machines at the base of the sphere breaks the otherwise clean white interior.

A quarter of the way around the gantry, you can both see three pirates awkwardly making their way down. They have ropes tied to the catwalk guard rail.

McGunner and Robo Barbie, you split off from the others, heading towards the rapid transit system marked on the map. When you arrive, you find a soft vacuum maglev with capsules large enough for a couple of average-sized humanoids. A capsule is already in place, its door open.

Logic slides down the wall of the structure and cuts the pirates off before they near the base of the sphere. With Abara covering their escape from the catwalk, the three pirates realise they are out-matched and indicate their surrender. One of them, a young human, raises his hands, presumably forgetting he was holding onto a cable, and begins to slides down towards you with a cry as he tries to catch himself.

Robo-Barbie and McGunner, the hatch of your transport pod opens and you are immediately face-to-face with two pirates.

"About time," says one of the two, an Abayan in a banged-up SCOBA suit. "You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago." He turns to walk down the corridor, waving you to follow.

The other pirate, an older human woman, walks alongside and looks you both over with a frown. "Where'd you get them uniforms?"

"What issues do I foresee?" replies the pirate, apparently convinced by your explanation. "It ain't really my job to foresee but, if I'm being honest with you, I am a bit concerned about climbing down into this thing..." She gestures down as you emerge onto the catwalk of the coupler.

"Ah, it'll be fine. Says the Abayan, as he secures his cable the railing. "It's the climb back out that's gonna be the hard bit."

Meanwhile, Logic stands above a heap of pirate. It groans pitifully. With Abara, you successfully disarm and restrain the other two. You have just finished hoisting them back up to the catwalk when there's a buzz on your super-sweet space-phone-camera-communicator-scanner thing. It's the ship's computer: there's been a proximity alert. A large ship is on final approach to the Gate...

Steed's voice comes on the comms. The signal is laced with static but even so you can hear the stress in the young helmsman's voice. "It's not broadcasting an ID, but from visuals it looks like it been in a fair few fights and—" The channel dissolves into noise for a second. "—real glad our cloak is still active!"

You relay the message from Logic and Steed confirms. The ship is now manoeuvring over the surface to the nearest airlock, which is maybe five minutes away down the corridor.

In a masterful display of subtle interrogation techniques, Abara casually drops in to the conversation a description of the approaching ship. One of the uninjured pirates nods along with you and identifies it as their flagship, assuming from your tone that you already knew. "It's near as dammit completely automated," he continues. "Harper doesn't even need a crew to run the thing – pilots it himself."

"Yeah, like I say, it's the flagship. Harper's here to bask in the glory of a job well done." He looks uneasy. "Oh, he is going to be so pissed."

As you carefully explain the reality of the situation, the woman's eyes widen in horror. The other had already started climbing down into the coupler itself, but he had clearly been listening in. You can tell this because, when you begin explaining—in somewhat graphic detail—the inevitable result of an uncontrolled shutdown, you hear shocked swearing from below and he rapidly reappears at the railing, sweating hard.
These two still believe you are pirates and, either way, there's no way they are touching any machinery today. The pirates at the other coupler have been essentially nullified by Abara and Logic, and so the Gate is safe for now. But Harper? From what you've heard, he might not go down without a fight...

Logic and Abara, after securing the pirates, you rendezvous with the Raptor at the nearest airlock. With Logic assisting at the helm you quickly and stealthily skim over the surface of the Gate to an access point where Robo-Barbie and McGunner can join the ship, having successfully dealt with the pirates at their location. Redstone is also now back on board.

As you reconvene on the bridge, updating each other on the events of the last hour or so, you see on the screen the pirate flagship making its final approach. It's enormous. It appears to be made up of many smaller craft crudely welded together; the residue of laser impacts streak the hull and you can make out more serious damage from missile impacts dotted all over the ship's superstructure.

Are the rest of you joining in the pod? @zatatmando can fit in with the plan if they like in due course.

Abara opens a channel to Harper and delivers his ultimatum. You hear a static burst which quickly resolves itself into derisive laughter. "State-of-the-art ship, is it? Could’ve fooled me." And then Robo-Barbie’s trained ear hears something like doubt creep into his voice. "But I see now that you did take out my elite crew, so I suppose you can’t be entirely without—"

Meanwhile, at his engineering console, Redstone’s fingers are a blur as he works to redirect the ship’s power. The lights on the bridge noticeably dim as every single spare watt that the ship has available is funnelled to the weapons systems. Somewhere, Captain Darcy’s private mini-fridge loses power.

With the pirate still mid-monologue, Logic subtly manipulates the manoeuvring thrusters and the Raptor gently rotates around its centre of mass until, finally, the ship’s entire laser battery is brought to bear against the pirate flagship.

With a nod from Redstone, Logic gives the signal. The screen goes white in an instant.

As the screen adjusts to the brightness of the barrage and you blink away the after-images, you see the pirate flagship beginning to come apart. The lasers hit their mark and then some.

Abara again: "That was only a small taste of what this ship is capable of, I was hardly able to restrain my weapons officer. Next one’s gonna be deadly, your choice Captain Harper!"

Silence.

Robo-Barbie pipes up: "This is check, checkmate in one, Captain Harper. Concede as if your life depends on it."

Harper’s voice comes on over the comms. He is clearly shaken, but no less contemptuous than he was before. Robo-Barbie, you can hear from his tone that surrender was never on the cards. "You may have stopped us this time," he says. "But you know we’ll be back stronger than ever!"

Trying his best to concentrate despite the pirate’s maniacal rambling, McGunner begins to pick off debris heading towards the Raptor with one of the auxiliary guns. What’s approaching is not strictly a collection of boarding vessels, but they certainly are the remnants of ships, and they are no less dangerous if they were to collide with your vessel.

Harper cuts the connection and you watch as a ramshackle escape pod ejects from the command deck of the flagship. Its engines fire and it accelerates rapidly away from the disintegrating hulk … and straight into the debris cloud left over from the pirate’s initial attack on the Gate.

After a moment, there is a tiny explosion against the darkness of space. And then nothing.

In the hours that follow, you work to make sure the ship is secure and organise pick up for the remaining pirates still on the Gate. By mid-afternoon, Darcy emerges from the medipod and joins you all on the bridge.

"So," he says with a yawn, cup of coffee in hand. "Did I miss anything?"

Logic's Epilogue

After an eventful day, Logic Bodily slinks into his quarters exhausted. With a clip-hiss-dribble he detaches his Self-Contained Out-of Water Breathing Aparatus and tucks it into its dock to be cleaned and recharged overnight. Then with visible bliss he slides into his quarters proper: the large saltwater tank that all Abayans favour when they're off-world.

He sinks to the bottom and relishes the return to his natural environs, savouring the clean, oxygenated, almost-but-not-quite-warm water, lying still so he could feel the tiny currents that the hyro-regulators introduce as cycle the tank.

After a few minutes he calls up a holo-display (which is a bit fuzzy underwater) and starts his reports for the day: approbation for his crew-mates, for Abara's cool head, for RB's penetrating cleverness, McGunner's prowess, and Flint's resourcefulness. Some notes to himself about drills to go through with the flight crew; their performance had been adequate, but there was still obvious room for improvement, even for humans. And another entry in a rather long log of the Captain's... irregular record of command.

With the final detail logged, he drifted to the middle of the tank where freshly oxygenated water would waft over his gills and slept soundly, very soundly, one eye at a time.