The Far Dark

Session 03 - Buckle Up Motherfuckers

The crew of Thides Station received new orders from station management, delivered by Holger: escort a MacMillan company maintenance technician on a routine service run to the restricted planet Thides III. Shackleton Magellan was designated as squadron leader for the mission, with Ronin Sanchez assigned as pilot. The planet, while possessing a breathable atmosphere and near-human gravity, had been placed under Federal Republic restriction due to its flora and fauna’s dangerous sensitivity to electromagnetic signals. The party stocked up on frag grenades and flashbangs from the station armory before making their way to Docking Bay 36, where they were met by Jareth Brand, a soft-spoken electronics repair technician who was directing autonomous robots in loading heavy crates of maintenance equipment into a stripped-down Type 113A transport ship.

Six was immediately skeptical of the vessel, noting flatly that the ship was “incomplete” due to its missing armor and weaponry. Jareth explained that the equipment had been removed to accommodate the weight of the maintenance supplies, and that the sector was controlled by the company — there should be nothing out there to shoot at. Ronin Sanchez nearly caused an incident by attempting to fire up the engines inside the hangar without following proper launch protocols, and had to be stopped by Jareth, who radioed for clearance before allowing the engines to start. Autonomous UAVs then moved the ship out of the hangar and into open space, where the crew was finally cleared to engage the main engines and begin their journey to Thides III.

The planet came into view looking like a paradise — lush, blue, and exotic, with distinct biospheres of mountains, deserts, and polar ice visible from orbit. The crew navigated through a web of Federal Republic sentinel satellites using specialized clearance codes before Ronin Sanchez brought the ship down onto the first relay platform, a concrete structure standing forty to fifty feet above the mountainous terrain below. Before the ship had even fully settled, Six was already off the ramp, landing weapon-ready in a combat stance to secure the area. Jareth went to work replacing non-functional electromagnetic diffuser rods along the platform’s perimeter and used his keycard to access the locked equipment shack, running diagnostics and swapping out degraded components with practiced efficiency.

While Jareth worked, Six and Rock Lavey patrolled the platform’s edge, keeping watch over the surrounding landscape. Rock spotted a small, furry, ball-like creature rolling through the vegetation far below, and Jareth identified them as “furry lampreys” — harmless enough alone, but dangerous in the swarms they inevitably formed. He explained that the ship’s presence was temporarily disrupting the platform’s diffusers, drawing the creatures in, but that the crew would be long gone before enough of them gathered to cause a problem. The process repeated across several more stops in different environments — desert, highland, and jungle — with the same furry creatures reliably appearing beneath each platform within thirty to forty-five minutes of landing.

The trouble began on the flight to the eleventh station. A heavy thump shook the ship, and alarms began screaming as the vessel started losing power and listing to one side. Six opened the rear ramp and saw that half of one engine had been cleanly sliced away, and a second blob of the same strange, dissolving substance struck the remaining engine, beginning to eat through it as well. He spotted the source of the attack approximately a mile or two to the southwest and recorded the coordinates before the ship became uncontrollable. Ronin Sanchez fought the dying vessel down into a jungle clearing, but the crash landing was brutal — Six, Jareth, and Ronin were all knocked unconscious on impact, leaving Rock Lavey to revive them one by one using stimulants from his medical kit.

With communications jammed and the crash site already drawing attention from the local wildlife, the party had little time to regroup. Six tagged incoming furry lamprey creatures on everyone’s heads-up displays as they began rolling out of the underbrush toward the wreck. One of the creatures launched itself at the cockpit windshield, its acidic saliva beginning to dissolve the glass and metal on contact. The party opened fire, incinerating several of the creatures, though Rock discovered that the stun setting on his omni rifle had an unexpected effect — the creature he hit simply began purring contentedly, apparently enjoying the electromagnetic discharge. As the sounds of many more creatures converging on the crash site echoed through the jungle from every direction, Shackleton gave the order to move out, taking the thumper beacon with them.

The trek through the dark jungle was grueling. The party formed a marching order with Six on point and Ronin Sanchez at the rear, moving carefully through the heavy undergrowth as the sun finished setting and the stars emerged overhead. At one point, they were forced to hunker down in silence as a loud, turbine-powered ATV carrying four armed mercenaries roared past their position, heading in the direction of the fallen relay tower. Eventually, the faint yellow glow of the eleventh platform’s electromagnetic diffusers appeared through the trees, and the party arrived at the base of the fifty-foot concrete structure — only to find both escape ladders retracted and locked. Six solved the problem by shooting a specific release bolt on the platform’s underside with his pistol, sending the ladder rattling down to the ground.

The ascent became desperate almost immediately. Rock Lavey spotted a massive creature emerging from the jungle — a Chitinoteuthis, seventeen feet tall, with a near-impenetrable shell, enormous claws, and long, undulating tentacles that it dragged along the ground like feelers. The creature was drawn by the party’s electronic signatures but was partially blinded by the platform’s diffusers, causing it to search blindly rather than charge directly. One by one the crew scrambled up the ladder, with Shackleton and Jareth struggling and creating a bottleneck near the top. Six was the last to clear the edge just as the Chitinoteuthis found the base of the ladder with its tentacles and tore it clean off the side of the platform, leaving the party stranded fifty feet above the prowling predator.

Resting on the platform, the party made a series of alarming discoveries. Jareth found that the station’s terminal was locked with an unrecognized password, and the maintenance logs showed the station had been falsely marked as serviced for over two years by an unknown name. Following a wire from the shack to a box outside, they found a hexagonal alien device with shifting three-dimensional symbols — technology identical to what they had encountered in a shipping container back on the station — wired directly into the communications array and actively jamming their signals. Shackleton used a high-powered telescope to observe a large compound approximately five miles away, glowing with the same yellow light as the platform’s diffusers, and watched as a hyperspace vortex opened dangerously close to the planet’s atmosphere, depositing a ship directly into the compound without triggering a single satellite sensor. Six severed the alien device’s wiring with his vibro-axe, cutting power to the entire platform and sending the diffusers dark, then left the thumper beacon active in the shack as a decoy, which would eventually draw the massive Chitinoteuthis back to the platform, before the party descended the remaining ladder and slipped into the jungle.

Six activated his chameleon suit and moved ahead of the group as a scout, becoming nearly invisible in the darkness. Rock shed his heaviest non-essential equipment to keep pace, and the party successfully avoided the overhead drones by moving carefully through the underbrush. Six reached the compound first and spent time observing from the tree line, cataloguing the layout: a large, manually cleared area ringed by electromagnetic diffusers and a six-foot metal bar fence, two landing pads with ships, a warehouse, and a command building. Approximately fifty to sixty people were manually loading cargo from an older, heavily modified vessel and from the warehouse onto a newer ship bearing the Kinetic Logistics logo. Most chillingly, Six spotted Daniela Akkermans — the leader of the Akker Cartel — scanning the surrounding jungle with binoculars from the second floor of the command building, confirming the compound’s connection to the mercenaries who had been a persistent threat.

The party devised a plan. Six would plant an EMP device on the compound’s main gate, timed to detonate as the returning enemy ATV crossed the threshold. Shackleton calculated the optimal blast radius to disable the command center and the Kinetic Logistics ship without damaging the older vessel they intended to steal. While the rest of the group positioned themselves near the far perimeter fence with a smart rope, Six moved through the compound under his chameleon suit, scaled the fence on the side closest to the older ship, and infiltrated the base. He boarded the vessel via the gangplank, noting strange wires running from the ship to an unknown device on the ground, and made his way to the cockpit, where he found alien technology integrated directly into the navigation computer — with coordinates showing a recent jump directly into the planetary atmosphere. He recorded everything before moving aft, where he ambushed a technician in the process of wiring blocks of alien technology in a sealed rear compartment, grappling the man silently to the floor and choking him unconscious.

The ATV returned. The moment it crossed the gate threshold, the EMP detonated. A cascading power failure swept across the compound, taking out the gate, the command center, and the Kinetic Logistics ship’s systems in a chain reaction that also began knocking out the electromagnetic diffusers around the perimeter. Ronin Sanchez vaulted over the fence using the smart rope and immediately gunned down a guard with both blaster pistols before the man could raise an alarm. Shackleton, Rock Lavey, and Jareth followed over the fence as the compound erupted in shouted orders and confusion. Six opened the ship’s boarding ramps from the inside, and the party poured aboard, where the technician Six had choked unconscious and tied up with wire was already secured. Rock discovered the rear compartment’s alien technology bricks were wired to external detonator lines running down the gangplank — lines that Six had noticed on the way in and that the party quickly reeled inside before they could be triggered.

Ronin Sanchez dropped into the pilot’s seat and announced over the intercom, “Buckle up, motherfuckers,” before firing up the engines. The compound’s defenders scrambled to bring a rooftop heavy weapon to bear on the ship, but the EMP had rendered it useless, and small arms fire rattled harmlessly against the hull. As the ship lifted off, two biological blobs — the same dissolving substance that had destroyed their original transport — were launched from somewhere on the surface, and Ronin threw the vessel into violent evasive maneuvers to avoid them. The ship punched through the atmosphere and approached the orbital satellite network, where Jareth entered the authorization codes to pass through unchallenged. The party set course back toward Thides Station, carrying a bound prisoner, a ship full of alien technology and illegal vortex engines, and far more questions than answers about what Kinetic Logistics was doing on a restricted planet — and what they had been building.