Chapter 01 Session 07 Wrap Up

Narrative Recap

The Albatross cut through hyperspace toward the Eris System faster than any conventional ship had a right to. The alien navigation cube beside the helm pulsed with shifting symbols, spitting out precise bearing changes at irregular intervals that Shackleton read aloud while Ronin Sanchez corrected the ship’s heading each time. What should have taken five or six days took four, the cube threading the vessel through the natural ebb and flow of hyperspace rather than brute-forcing a straight line. The crew arrived ahead of schedule, and nobody aboard entirely understood why.

During those four days in the tin can, Shackleton dug through the ship’s communication logs and uncovered something unsettling. The autopilot hadn’t simply malfunctioned back in the Corwin System — it had been hijacked. Something attached to the ship’s communications array had received an external signal, relayed it through the alien device, and issued a direct command to the navigation computer. The signal wasn’t coming through anymore, but that was cold comfort. Shackleton’s answer was characteristically practical: he wired a manual kill switch, duct-taped it to the dashboard, and labeled it in plain handwriting — “Autopilot On-Off.” It was an absurd solution to a sophisticated alien problem, and it was exactly the kind of thing that might actually work.

Six spent those four days in a way that made perfect sense to him and baffled everyone else. He ran the ship’s interior and exterior routes obsessively, timing every door, memorizing every control, and cataloging every button and switch he could find that wasn’t in the cockpit. In the cargo hold, he constructed humanoid dummies dressed in suits and practiced cutting at the neck seals — the weak point where armor met helmet — with the focused patience of someone who had decided this was simply a skill worth having. Rock Lavey, meanwhile, tended to the makeshift infirmary he’d built from salvaged crates and moving blankets, and quietly began planning what it would take to turn the ship’s gutted galley into something capable of producing an actual meal.

The Albatross dropped out of hyperspace near Eris IV, a cold iron-oxide world with potato-shaped moons that crossed its sky in hours. The crew navigated around it and into the standard traffic lanes toward Eris III, the habitable world of the system — a purple-oceaned, rainforest-covered planet wrapped in a dense atmosphere that kept the sky in a permanent twilight glow. Before they got far, a Federal Republican fleet ship called the Montgomery pinged them and requested identification. The transponder was off. Shackleton activated it fast, and the Montgomery accepted the response without incident, though it politely instructed the crew to submit for a transponder inspection upon arrival. The crew agreed, with no intention of following through.

Ronin brought the Albatross down smoothly onto a landing pad at the Aethel starport, and ground crews immediately swarmed the ship to hook up fuel and water lines. The docking fee was fifty credits, which Shackleton paid without complaint. The air outside was breathable and warm, thick with the humidity of a world that was essentially one enormous rainforest. Marlo, still wearing his prison jumpsuit beneath his vac suit and still bearing the Marshal’s handcuffs, decided to stay aboard — walking into a city with restraints on his wrists was not a risk worth taking.

The crew prepared to enter the starport proper, and the question of weapons came up immediately. The starport scanned for lethal arms, and anything unlicensed would be confiscated. Six surrendered his blaster pistol to the ship but kept his vibro-axe, which he successfully argued was a tool. The rest of the crew left their more dangerous equipment behind and passed through the scanners without incident. Inside, the starport opened into a vast, brightly lit commerce district — clean walkways, duty-free shops ranging from small kiosks to multi-level department stores, and security personnel in armored suits accompanied by heavy robotic sentries. Six cataloged every potential combatant, every camera angle, and every efficient route to neutralize the security presence, because that was simply how he processed a new environment.

While the others prepared to head out, Marlo sat down at the ship’s terminal and began searching the starport and planetary directories for anyone named Monroe. He found several candidates, but one stood out immediately: Roselyn Monroe, listed as the owner-operator of a place called the House of Parts. He flagged it and kept searching while the crew set off across the starport. The walk took the better part of forty minutes, the district gradually shifting from polished commerce to something older and more worn as they reached the far end. The House of Parts turned out to be exactly what it sounded like — a sprawling junkyard of salvaged starship components, rows of metal shelving stretching in every direction, with no actual house in sight.

A robotic torso built into the service counter greeted them with aggressive enthusiasm, rattling off an inventory of used engines, gravitational connectors, wires, switches, and centrifuges before Shackleton could get a word in. When he asked to speak to the human owner, the robot insisted it was the owner. Shackleton purchased a fuse capacitor the ship needed, left a message that he had business worth some credits, and the crew turned to leave — at which point a woman walked in carrying a bag and began stocking shelves. She introduced herself as Roselyn Monroe, the real owner, and her posture made it immediately clear she was not someone who relaxed around strangers. One hand stayed close to the metal baton at her side.

The crew mentioned Julija’s name, and something shifted in Roselyn’s expression. She led them to a private warehouse behind the junkyard, a cluttered space dominated by a stripped engine on a worktable and a couch with an old pillow and blanket that suggested someone occasionally slept there. She examined the Marshal’s evidence bag carefully, and when she reached into her desk drawer and retrieved a small device, Shackleton watched closely. What she wanted the crew to see was the device opening the bag. What actually happened was her thumb sliding quietly over the biometric reader, the lock clicking open at her touch. She was the right Monroe. She had always been the right Monroe.

Roselyn retreated to her office to review the contents of the bag, closing the blinds behind her. While she worked, Shackleton and Rock Lavey explored the junkyard and found blank transponders that would work for the Albatross’s system if properly coded, as well as scavenged medical bay components — a bed and a scanner, though no med computer. Nearly an hour later, Roselyn emerged with forged Federal Republican citizen ID cards for each of them, Six’s bearing the name Sixtus Smith. She told them the evidence was dangerous, that the people connected to it would come looking, and that her strong recommendation was for them to disappear into the outer sectors as quickly as possible. She also spoke about Julija in the past tense, with the quiet certainty of someone who had already known for some time that she was dead.

The crew brought Roselyn back to the Albatross, where she used her device to remove Marlo’s handcuffs — a process that required two attempts given that one of the bracelets had been cut in half. Then she spent nearly an hour examining the alien cube, circling it, asking questions, watching the way it interacted with the navigation computer. She identified the technology as having come from Kinetic Logistics and mentioned that the company had since been absorbed by a parent corporation. She said she would look into it. Before she left, she told the crew she might have a deal that could get them a coded transponder, and that she would be in touch within a couple of hours.

While they waited, Marlo announced that he wanted to stay with the crew. His reasoning was straightforward: his former employers would view him as a loose end, and standing behind Six was statistically the safest place to be in any situation that turned violent. The crew accepted this without much ceremony. Shackleton reviewed the ship’s supplies and discovered they were nearly out of food, pooling credits with Rock Lavey to purchase enough rations to last twelve days. Rock Lavey, for his part, determined that properly upgrading the medbay would require a starship engineer — something none of them were — and filed the problem away for later.

Six, Ronin, and Marlo headed into the starport to find Marlo some civilian clothes and get a feel for the local scene. They ended up at the Bamboo Lounge, a massive rainforest-themed establishment that catered to travelers of every social class, from business executives to people spending their last credits on a meal before their next transport. Six requested a silly straw and was presented with a children’s activity kit that included a paper pith helmet. He put it on top of his combat infantry helmet without a moment’s hesitation. When the staff brought out a birthday cake after Ronin announced it might be Six’s birthday, Six ate it with complete sincerity and declared that whatever day this was would be his birthday from now on — every year, until someone established a calendar.

Shackleton’s comm pinged while they were still at the bar. Roselyn had a job. The crew reassembled at the House of Parts, where Roselyn had cleared the worktable and laid out schematics, photographs, and a small crate marked with Kinetic Logistics branding. Inside the crate were six advanced grazer pistols — the same model the crew had previously encountered — that had been appearing on the black market around Eris III. The evidence in Julija’s bag pointed to Goodwin Investments as the connection. Roselyn’s contact wanted Peter Goodwin delivered to Storage Unit B342 on the spaceport grounds. In exchange, the crew would receive a properly coded transponder for the Albatross. If they failed, her contact would come after them. Roselyn was very clear about that part.

The crew knew the name. Peter Goodwin had been on MacMillian Station, wined and dined by the station manager, present in the room when a woman was killed. He ran his operation out of the 17th floor of the Firetemic Tower in the center of Aethel. Roselyn provided what information she had — the building’s layout, the biometric security on its elevators, the fact that his home was in a gated community with heavy private security — and then stepped back. Getting him out was their problem. Six immediately began calculating extraction routes, suggesting abseiling from the roof, carving through the ground floor, or simply going in through the 17th floor window. The others suggested something slightly less catastrophic.

The plan that emerged involved reconnaissance first. Shackleton and Rock Lavey would go into the city to observe the building, while Six pursued his own approach through the starport’s waste management infrastructure. The two of them passed through the Aethel security checkpoint — a thorough customs-style process on the city-entry side — and took the free public shuttle into the corporate district. The center of Aethel was a canyon of skyscrapers, including towers bearing the logos of Castellan Biodynamics, the Federal Republic, and the Firetemic Corporation. The MacMillian Mining building was in the process of being rebranded with Pratrock Dynamics signage. Rock Lavey oriented them after Shackleton walked out of the transit stop facing the wrong direction.

Six, meanwhile, followed the waste pipes from the landing bay down through the starport’s lower levels to the city perimeter fence. A two-fence security barrier with automated pop-up scanners in the gap between them blocked his path. He found a service access hatch on one of the large waste pipes, identified the hinge as the weak point, and tore it off. The cap flew, sewage poured out, and somewhere above him a maintenance worker shouted about Valve 427 busting again. Six waited for the pressure to cut, crawled into the pipe, and was promptly flushed through the city’s sewer system at high speed when the pressure was restored. He hit a wall, slid to the floor, and stood up in the dark, covered in waste water, entirely undeterred. He picked left at every intersection and kept moving.

Shackleton and Rock Lavey found the back alley behind the Firetemic Tower and observed a two-stage armored garage entrance — a large metal door that opened to admit vehicles into a staging area, then a second door that opened only after the first had closed behind them. They noted the camera positions, the security doors along the alley walls, and the shift change pattern of the Millennial Cleaning and Janitorial Services van that arrived and departed with different crews. Then they moved to a nearby bar to avoid looking suspicious, and Rock Lavey fell into conversation with a group of Firetemic engineers who were drinking after work. The engineers complained at length about a tenant on the 17th floor who had locked down the building’s large service elevator that very day, nearly costing them their funding by delaying a prototype presentation. They described him as a prick. Rock Lavey listened carefully and said very little.

Six surfaced from a manhole directly in front of the Firetemic Tower, peered out through a two-inch gap, and dropped back down. He navigated further through the tunnels and emerged in the back alley, startling a transient who had been resting nearby. Six activated his chameleon suit. The transient saw a shimmering blur where a man had been, grabbed his belongings, and fled. Six crouched in the alley and assessed the building’s rear face — security cameras on every entrance, reinforced garage doors, ventilation shafts too high and too smooth to climb without equipment. Then the heavily armored black transport vehicle turned into the alley.

It was a massive thing, sitting low on reinforced wheels, windowless in the back, with armed guards visible in the front cab. It pulled up to the garage door and waited for it to open. Six made his decision in the time it took the door to begin moving. He leapt onto the roof of the vehicle as it rolled forward, flattened himself against the surface, and rode it through the first set of doors. The outer door closed behind them. The inner door began to open. Six clung to the roof of the transport as it rolled into the restricted basement garage of the Firetemic Tower, invisible against the metal, the chameleon suit doing exactly what it was built to do. Somewhere above him, on the 17th floor, Peter Goodwin had no idea what was coming.