Running Dark
Session 06 - The Albatross Takes Flight
The crew of the newly christened Albatross drifted through hyperspace in an uneasy quiet, still catching their breath from the chaos they had left behind. The station manager was dead, Marshal Borja had been stabbed in the neck by Daniela Akkermans during the corporate siege, and Pratrock Dynamics had descended on MacMillian Station IV with combat robots and troop transports. The party had escaped through a mysterious alien cube that tore its own hole in space-time, and now they floated in the between-space with a confused technician named Marlo Petrak zip-tied in the hold and a bag of evidence meant for a junk shop owner named Monroe.
What immediately caught the attention of Ronin Sanchez and Shackleton Magellan was that the ship was not navigating the way it should have been. Normally, a vessel entering hyperspace would lock onto one of the Federal Republic’s navigation beacons and follow it like a lighthouse beam to the destination gate. Instead, a twenty-sided alien cube mounted near the cockpit rotated slowly, its surface cycling through glowing symbols, feeding data directly into the ship’s navigation computer without consulting a single beacon. The alien device was calculating the gravitational bends of hyperspace itself, using the invisible pull of distant stars to chart a course with a precision that no known Republican technology could match. What should have been a six-to-seven-day journey to the Corwin System was going to take four.
With time to spare, the crew set about making the stripped-down cargo hauler livable. Rock Lavey dug through the cargo hold and found enough empty crates and moving blankets to construct a makeshift medbay, bolting the crates to the deck so they wouldn’t go flying during sudden maneuvers and rigging sections of netting to partition the space. Tucked among the crew’s gear he found a first aid kit equipped with an auto-doc, spray-on bandages, an adrenaline injector, and a defibrillator — enough to keep someone alive if things went badly. He used the time to patch up the crew’s injuries from the escape, working carefully and without rush.
Six, meanwhile, had other priorities. He ungagged Marlo Petrak, provided him with water and one of Shackleton’s MREs, and then sliced through the chain connecting the man’s Federal Marshal handcuffs with his vibro-axe in a single clean stroke, leaving the cuff bracelets still locked around Petrak’s wrists. The interrogation that followed was methodical and cold. Petrak claimed he was just a security systems subcontractor who had been hired to wire up the ship before it was destroyed, and that he knew nothing about the alien navigation device — that was the work of a man named Gary Johnson, a former Pratrock Dynamics researcher who had moved to Kinetic Logistics and was the one called whenever the ship needed specialized work.
Six’s patience with Petrak’s limited usefulness ran out quickly. He walked to the nearest airlock, opened the inner door, and then returned to drag the terrified technician toward it by the collar. Ronin physically intervened, winning a brief but decisive struggle to pull Petrak back from the threshold. Six informed Petrak, with the flat affect of someone reading a maintenance report, that he was consuming resources without providing value and that the airlock was the logical solution. Petrak, shaking and wide-eyed, began throwing out anything he could think of — his five credits, his ability to fix security systems, the name of Gary Johnson again — until Ronin talked Six down and took custody of the prisoner. Six closed the airlock, turned back to Petrak, and produced what could only be described as a smile practiced by someone who had read about smiling but never attempted it, and welcomed Marlo Petrak to the crew as a probationary member.
Ronin put Petrak to work immediately, ordering him to clean the ship’s single toilet and then, after scrounging up a spacesuit and a loading torch, sending him out onto the hull to weld patches over the blast damage left by the fighters during their escape. Petrak nearly fell off the ship three times. Six, with nothing better to do, suited up and performed his own hull inspection, walking the exterior of the Albatross in hyperspace with the practiced ease of someone who had done it before. He catalogued the weapon mounting points — all stripped bare — and the mysterious array on the ship’s stern connected to the alien tech, feeding everything back to Shackleton over comms. Back inside, Six located the ship’s media library and sat completely motionless through the entire ST-160 The Albatross promotional welcome video, treating it as a tactical briefing. The crew also settled on a name for their vessel: the Albatross, after the model it was built on, which everyone agreed was either poetic or deeply ominous.
Shackleton spent the transit buried in the ship’s technical manuals and the alien navigation system, piecing together what he could. The ship ran on a fusion power plant fed by hydrogen, with a scoop system to collect fuel from planetary bodies. Everything aboard ran off that standard power plant — everything except the alien device, whose power source remained completely opaque. What Shackleton could determine was that the cube was a miniaturized version of the massive vortex arrays mounted on Federal Republic battlecruisers, the kind that required enormous dedicated power banks to function. Whatever had built this version had solved problems that Republican engineers hadn’t even begun to approach. He also noted that the alien device had three pre-programmed destinations stored in its interface: a point near the atmosphere of a planet called Phoenix III, a location deep in the Sargasso Void, a region of dark matter space, and a coordinate near Corwin II in the Corwin System — their current destination.
Four days later, the Albatross punched back into normal space in the Corwin binary system, a pair of stars — one yellow, one orange — orbiting each other at the center of five planets. Ronin reached for the controls to take manual command of the ship, and the alien cube immediately overrode him. No matter how many times he or Shackleton attempted to disengage the autopilot, the system re-engaged itself within seconds, the cube spinning and feeding new course corrections faster than they could counter them. The ship descended toward the dark side of Corwin II, a rocky, airless world with only trace atmosphere, and slipped into a narrow fissure in a crater wall. The passage was so tight that the hull had only inches of clearance on either side. At the bottom, the ship settled onto a metallic landing pad, mechanical clamps locked around the landing gear, and the entire platform began to lower into the ground. The hangar sealed above them, and dim yellow emergency lights flickered on in the darkness below.
Six was already outside before the others had finished suiting up, having cycled through an airlock the moment the ship touched down. He found a manual release panel on the bay doors and pushed them open by hand, wide enough to slip through, and moved into the facility beyond. The others followed, moving through a hallway past a small electric cargo transport and up a staircase to an operations center overlooking the bay. The room held two powered-down terminals, a facility map on the wall, and the accumulated detritus of someone’s long posting — knickknacks in a drawer, a rotten apple core that had practically turned to dust, and a Pratrock Dynamics employee handbook issued to one Gary Johnson. Shackleton powered the terminals on, and both came up demanding a login under the Pratrock Dynamics banner.
The crew searched for a way in. Shackleton combed through Gary Johnson’s corporate tablet, finding his children’s names and birthday, and tried each in turn without success. Rock Lavey dug through the desk drawers and found a small metal pet tag bearing the name Benji. That one worked. The launch and recovery terminal came to life, giving them control over the hangar’s mechanical systems. Shackleton used a specialized network adapter to bridge his personal system to the isolated terminal so he could operate it remotely. Then the phone on the second desk began to ring. Ronin picked it up, said “Fuck you,” and the line went dead. Within moments, the second terminal connected to the outside network and the facility’s security systems registered the intrusion. A small surveillance drone came humming down the hallway. Six spotted it, asked Shackleton if he should shoot, and began counting down from three. Ronin protested, but Shackleton gave the green light. Since Six answers to Shackleton, he shot the drone out of the air over Ronin’s objections. The lights went out.
Security robots poured in from the T-junction at the end of the corridor — small, four-legged units armed with beam weapons identical to the grazer pistols the crew carried. Ronin opened fire first, catching a hidden guard’s hand as it came around the corner and forcing them to drop their weapon and retreat screaming. Six and Ronin traded fire with the robots in the dark hallway. Ronin’s blaster pistol shots kept bouncing off their heavy plating, but Six’s grazer pistol proved devastatingly effective. Six did all the damage in the corridor, destroying several of the smaller robots himself. Then a massive bipedal robot filled the corridor behind the smaller units, its arm mounted with a heavy cannon. It fired three spherical projectiles that burst into webs of sticky polymer, designed to root targets in place — and managed to trap two of its own robots in the process. Six responded by unleashing a sustained barrage directly into the large robot’s core systems, landing hit after hit until the machine sparked, shuddered, and collapsed in a shower of electrical discharge.
With fighters being scrambled from the far side of the planet and from the residential moon of Corwin III D, the crew made the call to run. Ronin sprinted back to the Albatross and began the power-up sequence, then discovered that disabling the alien autopilot override required physically pulling wires under the console — which he did, restoring manual control but severing the navigation feed from the alien cube in the process. Shackleton retreated through the bay doors, leaving three limpet mines on the floor inside as a parting gift, then thought better of it and grabbed them on the way out. Six covered the retreat, walking backward down the corridor and continuing to fire, taking a hit to the back before finally breaking for the ship. The crew sealed the cargo ramp — and found the overhead hangar doors sealed shut, power cut by the facility’s security systems.
Six didn’t hesitate. He climbed out of the ship onto the hull, magnetic boots locking him to the surface, and went to work on the hangar doors with his vibro-axe. He cut through the locking mechanisms and counterweights one by one while Shackleton took Rock’s pistol to defend the ship’s ramp, shooting out one of the two remaining robots that had begun climbing the walls to bypass the polymer traps. On the final cut, Six’s axe sheared through so cleanly that the doors flew open, the sudden decompression of the bay rushing past him without so much as shifting his footing. He walked back to the nearest airlock, cycled through, and told Ronin they could leave.
Ronin pulled the Albatross up through the narrow crevasse manually, threading the ship through the rock walls without a scratch, and broke into open space above Corwin II. With fighters closing in, Shackleton manually entered the coordinates for the Eris System using the data output from the alien cube — the device could still provide the information, it just couldn’t automate the process anymore — and Ronin fired the vortex engine by hand, opening a portal and driving the ship through it into hyperspace. The portal sealed behind them. In the quiet of the between-space, Rock Lavey patched up Six’s scorched back in the makeshift medbay, and Shackleton intercepted a piece of business news buried in the communications traffic: Kinetic Logistics, the company that had employed Marlo Petrak and wired the Albatross for destruction, had been dissolved and absorbed back into its parent company. The crew was headed for the Eris System, Ronin’s fuzzy dice swaying gently in the cockpit, and whatever answers waited for them there.