The Far Dark

Session 02 - The MacMillian Anomaly

Life aboard MacMillian Station had settled into a grinding routine for the team. Over the course of several weeks, they walked the patrols, learned the rhythms of the place, and came to understand the unspoken rules that kept the station from tearing itself apart. The entertainment sector hummed with money and vice, while deep below in the decommissioned Processor One, the poor and forgotten had carved out a community along the old Main Line — a mile-long corridor of makeshift shops, illegal gambling dens, and cramped residences stretching from the station’s core to an outer docking ring. Wealthy visitors arrived regularly, not for mining contracts, but for pleasures unavailable elsewhere, and the whole operation was quietly overseen by criminal organizations that kept the peace just enough to keep the credits flowing.

At the morning briefing, Security Chief Holger Graeme laid out two priorities. The first was Harsha Trent, a scammer last seen in the Nova Nexus gambling den who had been lifting tokens and running cons on station guests — he was to be detained for questioning, unharmed. The second was Peter Goodwin, a corporate dignitary from Goodwin Investments arriving from the Aria system, who was to be protected and kept comfortable at all costs. The team was assigned to patrol the entertainment sector, and Shackleton Magellan, ever the methodical one, quietly noted that the station’s scheduling board showed far too many blank team slots — and that their group had been formally designated as the TAC team.

The team split up to cover more ground. Six and Rock Lavey headed down to Station 45 on the Main Line, the last known location of Harsha Trent, while Shackleton and Ronin Sanchez remained in the entertainment district. Shackleton’s sharp eyes caught Peter Goodwin already deep into his visit, lounging at The Silk Abbey with expensive companions while the station manager entertained him. More interesting, however, was the figure Shackleton spotted sitting at a careful distance — Solveig Kaufer, the station manager’s assistant, quietly tapping notes into a tablet with far more detail than any casual observer would need.

Down on the Main Line, Six and Rock Lavey found Station 45 easily enough. The entrance to an illegal fighting ring was tucked into an old maintenance area, and a cluster of gang members immediately tried to melt into the background when they spotted the security officers. Six pulled up the station camera feed and rewound it, discovering that the camera had been deliberately tilted away from the fighting pit entrance — but not quite enough. The footage showed Harsha Trent walking in from the direction of the entertainment district, disappearing into the blind spot, and then being hurled into a pile of trash an hour or two later by two men the system identified as Gio and Alphonse, both members of the Station 45 gang.

Six pointed out the lurking gang members to Rock Lavey, and the two approached. Rock Lavey attempted a diplomatic conversation, and the men grudgingly admitted that Trent had owed money to their bookies and had tried to scam his way out of it. They claimed he had since “settled up with someone else,” but refused to say who. As the conversation stalled, roughly ten more gang members began drifting into a loose, menacing perimeter around them. Six and Rock Lavey exchanged a glance, turned, and walked away at a measured pace — their scouting mission complete.

The full team reunited and made their way to the Nova Nexus for their 11:30 meeting with Asher Bhattacharya, the gambling den’s head of security. They were led into a run-down back room that stood in stark contrast to the glittering casino floor — plain walls scarred with dents, a simple desk, a crate for a chair, and, notably, a window looking out into open space with an airlock set into the wall beside it. Asher, a rough man with a long history of assault and extortion charges, proved willing to cooperate. He pulled up security footage showing Trent befriending a patron, receiving a stack of chips, and cashing them in for hard credit before slipping out — a classic skim operation that had gone sideways when Trent got greedy and started gambling with the money himself.

Asher offered two leads, on the condition that his name never be attached to them. The first was Vanadís Baumhauer, a lifelong station resident who sold information about anything happening in Processor One. The second was Surendra Antonescu, an Orthodox priest running a soup kitchen deep in the Main Line — less likely to talk freely, but more likely to have accurate information. Six compiled everything into a written report and handed it off to Agata Nicodemo, the leader of the next security shift, carefully omitting any mention of Asher as the source.

That evening, the team pursued what Six had declared a “fun mission” — finding the illegal fighting pits so he could register himself as a fighter. The Nova Nexus legally broadcast fight feeds from outside the sector, and the team pooled their credits to watch while Six interrogated the staff about how to get on the fight card. The staff stonewalled him with practiced ease, insisting they knew nothing about any illegal fights. A security guard, eager to be rid of Six, quietly directed him to Section 102 and a door with an orange handle. The team followed the lead with confidence — and walked straight into a dusty emergency exit corridor that led nowhere useful, triggering a station-wide alarm in the process. Rock Lavey and Shackleton, reviewing the evening afterward, realized with some amusement that the guard had played Six perfectly.

The team retreated to their quarters and settled in to watch the fight broadcasts more carefully. Six tried to order food and booze, but had no credits and was declined. Six studied the backgrounds of every frame, looking for environmental details that might reveal the pits’ location. He recognized one of the fighters — a man he had previously arrested for public intoxication in the entertainment district. Cross-referencing the fighter’s record, the team determined that after winning a fight, the man typically blew his prize money on a long night out and was usually found stumbling around the entertainment sector between seven and ten in the morning. It was a thread worth pulling — but it would have to wait.

At four in the morning, an emergency alarm dragged the team out of bed after barely two hours of sleep. Security Chief Holger Graeme briefed them quickly: a faint, illegal broadcast signal had been detected somewhere inside the mothballed Processor Two, a sector with all sensors and cameras offline. Maintenance Chief Zigurds Sloan would meet them at the entrance to grant access. The team geared up with sonic stunners, nanoweave armor, combat infantry helmets, and sensor equipment, and headed down.

Zigurds Sloan met them at the sealed blast door and cut through the welds with a torch. As the light caught the metal, something became apparent — the door had been covertly resealed multiple times before, the welds disguised to look original. Someone had been in and out of this supposedly locked-down sector repeatedly, and they had been careful about it. Zigurds Sloan restored local power, and the lights flickered to life down the long corridor ahead. Six went first, as always.

The team descended into the processing plant’s loading area, a cavernous space where cargo containers were once packed and shipped out to the docks. Shackleton noticed faint footprints in the dust leading from the stairwell to one specific container — the only one whose door was sealed in a way that suggested recent use. He made his way up to the control room and used a password from Zigurds Sloan to access the terminal, discovering that three of the four cargo slots were empty. The fourth contained a crate. He opened it.

Inside the container, the team found something that defied easy explanation. One side of the interior was fitted with standard human communication equipment — racks of wiring, terminals, all of it exposed and hastily assembled. The other side was something else entirely: technology that appeared to be melded organically into the container wall, displaying symbols that none of them recognized. A countdown timer appeared on the human-side terminal, labeled “Kinetic Logistics,” ticking toward zero. Then the container began to move.

The cargo bay alarms screamed as the container slid out of its slot, pulled by an external drone that had no business being there. Depressurization warnings flashed across every surface. Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez sprinted for the break room and sealed the door. Shackleton raced back to the control room to monitor the situation on the external cameras, discovering that every station drone was offline — someone had disabled them remotely. Six, without hesitation, leaped across the widening gap and landed inside the departing container as it drifted toward open space.

Inside the container, Six worked fast. He identified the relay as a bridge between the human communication system and the alien terminal, and severed every cable connecting the two with his vibro-axe — red, blue, green, all of it. Cylinders at the back of the container ruptured, releasing a dark ooze that began aggressively consuming the electronics around him. The alien material on the walls showed an unsettling property: when Six cut into it, it began to slowly knit itself back together. He swung in rapid, spinning strikes, carving two chunks of the alien material free and kicking them out into space before the ooze could reach him. A brief touch of the substance on his vibro-axe left a faint cosmetic scar on the blade before it retreated. With the countdown expired and a sudden flash of light consuming the container behind him, Six fired his suit thrusters and shot clear just as the container vanished into what station sensors would later record as a vortex.

The security intercept team recovered Six from open space and brought him back through the airlock. Shackleton managed a quick surface scan of the alien chunks before security locked them away as evidence. The medical team arrived to check the party over, and Six signed a liability waiver rather than submit to examination. The team was escorted upstairs for a formal debriefing with Holger Graeme and Solveig Kaufer, where Six described everything — the relay, the two terminals, the corrosive ooze, the self-healing alien material, and the timer that had expired just as the container disappeared. Kaufer noted that the station’s sensors had recorded a vortex event. The station manager briefly appeared, visibly stressed, then excused himself to attend to Peter Goodwin, prioritizing the investor’s comfort over what might have been first contact with an alien intelligence.

Holger Graeme confined the team to quarters and arranged for a meal from the cantina as compensation. The alien samples were sent to Zigurds Sloan for analysis. Six, characteristically, attempted to go to the canteen personally to verify the pizza order before being reminded that house arrest meant staying in the room. The team spent the rest of the evening eating, drinking tequila (or “mexican whisky” as Ronin called it), and processing what they had seen.

The next morning brought new orders. The team was being sent to Thides III — an exclusion zone planet featuring communication relay arrays and geosynchronous satellites — as a security detail for a maintenance run. Shackleton and Rock Lavey recognized it immediately for what it was: a political maneuver to get them off the station while Peter Goodwin was still visiting. Ronin Sanchez’s temper flared at the slight, though he kept it contained. Holger Graeme provided one final update before they departed — Harsha Trent had lost heavily on rigged fights at the Station 45 bookies, taken out a credit loan, lost again, been roughed up, and was now on a deadline to pay his debts. The thread was still there, waiting. But for now, the team had a ship to board and a restricted planet to visit, carrying with them the knowledge that something deeply strange was operating in the shadows of MacMillian Station — and that someone had gone to considerable lengths to make sure no one found out.