The Far Dark

Session 04 - The Case of the Missing Courtesan

The party piloted their stolen vessel back toward MacMillian Station IV, but the journey was far from uneventful. The ship’s thrust engines were critically low on fuel, leaving just enough to reach either the planet they had left behind or the station — not both. Before they could settle into the flight, an incoming communication crackled through the cockpit from Julija Borja of the Marshal of the Federal Republic, demanding identification. Following a flash of intuition, the party identified themselves as MacMillian security on authorized orders, and Borja accepted the explanation, directing them to return the impounded ship to the station with all due speed. As they complied, a sleek military fighter bearing Marshal of the Federal Republic markings streaked past their viewport, heading toward the planet they had just fled.

During the three-hour journey, Shack made good use of the time. He installed a covert tracking device on the ship’s transponder relay, rigged to respond only on his private frequency — a clever piece of work, though its usefulness would be limited by the sheer distance signals would need to travel if the ship left the system. He also turned his attention to the alien technology patched into the ship’s navigation computer, a strange device that displayed shifting symbols on a faceted surface in response to navigation inputs. After careful study, he determined it allowed for hyperspace navigation of extraordinary precision — far beyond anything the Federal Republican Interseller Fleet had fielded — capable of plotting jumps directly into planetary atmospheres without the catastrophic risks that normally accompanied such maneuvers. A tangle of wires from the device snaked toward the rear of the ship, hinting at further modifications yet to be examined.

Arrival at MacMillian Station IV was, predictably, not without incident. Before the docking ring had even finished extending, Six opened an airlock and used his personal flitters to cross the vacuum directly to the station, leaving the rest of the party to wait for the proper umbilical connection. Holger Graeme, the head of station security, met them at the dock with two officers in tow, looking deeply concerned. He directed the party to the security conference room for a debrief, where Solveig Kaufer collected their preliminary report before Holger himself arrived to deliver the news: the Marshal of the Federal Republic had ordered the ship quarantined, and the party was to make themselves available for a formal interview the following day. As a gesture of goodwill — or perhaps relief — Holger granted them twenty-four hours of rest and relaxation, along with two hundred credits each to spend however they saw fit.

The party made their way to the entertainment district, where they sat down to a proper meal of steak and lobster. It was during this moment of relative peace that Rock and Shack noticed a woman lurking along the promenade, keeping a careful eye on their group from a distance. Six, drawing on his memory of the station’s broadcast channels, recognized her immediately — Pia Kadyrov, a reporter for Thides Cast, the local news and entertainment service. The party moved on toward the Silk Abbey, and the reporter followed, though she was turned away at the door by the establishment’s formidable bouncers. Six, characteristically direct, walked back out and asked her point-blank why she was following him, and she introduced herself and began pressing for a statement about an incident involving a communication device found in a cargo container at Processing II. The party refused, and Six’s parting question — asking whether she was a hooker — left her visibly baffled before they disappeared inside.

Within the Silk Abbey, while Rock and Six enjoyed the establishment’s offerings, Shack was approached by Samina Ventura, the Madam of the house. She explained that one of her courtesans, a woman named Brianna Melvin, had gone missing after a private party hosted by the station manager for an important dignitary. Brianna had a young child, a mother in Processing I, and was the station manager’s particular favorite — but she had not been seen in three days, and this time felt different. Samina offered payment in federal credits, or free services, in exchange for the party’s help in finding her. After consulting his memory of the MacMillian employment contract and weighing the risks, Shack agreed, and the group retired to sleep before beginning their investigation in earnest.

After waking, the party pulled up security footage from the Royale Hotel, where the party had taken place. The footage showed Brianna and several other women from the Silk Abbey arriving at the hotel with two men and proceeding to Room 2002, a lavish suite on the twentieth floor. Hours later, the other women departed — but Brianna never appeared to leave. What followed was more troubling: Solveig Kaufer arrived at the room, then departed with Peter Goodwin and Wilton Agramunt, the station manager. Shortly after, a human cleaning crew arrived and spent nearly forty-five minutes inside the suite before leaving. Most disturbingly, the elevator cameras had gone dark approximately ten minutes before the cleaning crew arrived and remained offline for over an hour after they left, with the cameras in both basement levels also found to be non-functional.

Rock and Six visited the Silk Abbey to interview the women who had attended the party. The escorts, including a particularly charming woman named McKenna, described being summoned to entertain the station manager and his guest, with Brianna specifically requested to remain behind after the others were dismissed. They confirmed that Brianna disappearing for a few days with the station manager was not unusual — he had even taken her to the city of Aethel in the Eris System on one occasion, from which she had returned laden with expensive gifts and fashionable clothes. But three days was beginning to feel like too long, and the women’s easy gossip carried an undercurrent of unease. Six, for his part, remained largely baffled by the entire social dynamic, though McKenna’s offer to show him a “fun mission” sometime left him genuinely uncertain of her meaning.

Armed with their security clearances, the party made their way to the Royale Hotel and rode the elevator to the twentieth floor. Outside Room 2002, they found a maintenance panel with a missing screw — consistent with what they had seen in the footage — but inspection of the wiring behind it revealed nothing recently disturbed. They entered the suite itself using Shack’s authorized security card, finding a lavishly appointed space with panoramic views of the stars. Six swept both bedrooms and bathrooms for immediate threats while Shack and Rock conducted a careful forensic search of the left bedroom, where the smell of ammonia was sharp and unmistakable. Hidden behind the headboard of the bed, tucked almost out of sight, they found a single earring — and Shack’s memory confirmed it matched the one Brianna had been wearing in the photograph Samina had provided.

In the right bedroom, the search turned up different evidence: an engraved watch bearing the inscription “Thanks for your help with the union. Róbert,” and three business cards belonging to Peter Goodwin of Goodwin Investments, based in Aethel in the Eris System. The cards suggested that room had been Goodwin’s, while the scrubbed left bedroom pointed toward something far darker. The party descended to the hotel’s basement levels to investigate further, finding automated laundry systems and trash compaction machinery, but no sign of tampering with the biological sensors along the trash chutes. Shack noted that the bedding being processed in the laundry did not match the high-end linens from the suite — suggesting the original sheets had been removed entirely. Whatever evidence had existed in that room was almost certainly gone.

The party turned their attention to Pia Kadyrov, tracking her down to her cramped residential studio in a poorly maintained corridor of the station. Thides Cast operated out of a single room barely ten feet wide, crammed floor to ceiling with media storage, tangled fiber-optic lines, and broadcasting screens cycling through episodes of shows from the core worlds, some months out of date and missing episodes. Six swept the apartment with characteristic thoroughness, nearly destroying the fragile equipment in the process, while Shack confirmed the room was free of unauthorized surveillance — though Pia herself had a cybernetic eye implant and a camera mounted at the door. When Shack showed her the hotel security footage, she immediately identified Brianna and noted with sharp professional instinct that the human cleaning crew made no sense — hotels on the station used robotics for that work. She agreed to dig into the name Hildebrand Panza, a member of the cleaning crew Shack had identified through his memory, in exchange for details about the technology of unknown origin the party had encountered. The exchange nearly ended badly when Pia mentioned the possibility of reporting on “your unknown origins.” Six, taking this as a direct threat to expose his own secret, synthetic origins, moved his hand toward his vibro-axe. He only relaxed when she quickly clarified she had been referring to the alien technology of unknown origin, not his personal secrets.

The party returned to the Silk Abbey to report their findings to Samina Ventura. They told her about the scrubbed room, the missing bedding, and the earring — enough for her to conclude that Brianna was almost certainly dead or permanently gone. Samina’s reaction was measured and calculating: she had not seen the station manager since the previous day, and had last spotted him speaking with Ajeet Siegel, a specialist who performed system scans for mining operations. She offered a doubled fee if the party could prove Peter Goodwin had been directly involved in whatever happened to Brianna, making clear she intended to use such proof for financial leverage. The party received two hundred physical federal credits each as payment for their initial work, the physical currency a rarity that spoke to the seriousness of Samina’s intentions.

The following morning, the party reported to the Marshal of the Federal Republic office, where Julija Borja sat waiting behind her desk with Marlo Petrak, the Kinetic Logistics technician, held in a small brig behind her. The interrogation began with Six refusing to answer questions, citing classified corporate orders, and challenging Borja’s authority by citing specific clauses in the station regulations and Holger Graeme’s explicit instructions, while Shack was happy to answer her questions. Borja responded by marching across the hall and confronting Holger directly, her voice carrying clearly through the walls as she berated him for failing to report the previous incidents. Holger, visibly worn down, defended himself by explaining that MacMillian corporate policy required all reports to go through the station manager — not the Marshal Service — and that the last time he had tried to circumvent that arrangement, Solveig Kaufer had threatened his position. He returned to the office and ordered the party to cooperate fully, and the interrogation resumed.

Six provided Borja with his detailed written report, which covered everything from the Kinetic Logistics logos at the illegal base on Thides III to the sighting of Daniela Akkermans, to the alien technology found aboard the impounded ship. Borja reviewed it with pedantic thoroughness, asking verbal questions to verify what was already written, a practice Six found deeply inefficient and made no effort to conceal his frustration about. When the conversation turned to the connection between the technology found at the relay tower, the cargo container at Processing II, and the ship, Borja abruptly dismissed the party and left to speak with someone else. Through the walls, the party could hear her continuing to press Holger on the systemic failures that had kept her office in the dark.

The party was assigned to routine patrol duty in the shipping and receiving sector — long, dim corridors filled with the hum of conveyor belts and the clank of automated machinery. It was Six who first spotted the tripwire, a thin line stretched across the corridor near a poorly lit intersection, connected to a small electronic trigger box hidden beneath the conveyor belt. When the party attempted to call for backup, their communications were completely jammed — a sudden and suspicious silence that had not been there moments before. Before they could fully assess the situation, two armored figures appeared at the far end of the hallway, rolled metallic canisters toward them, and ducked behind cover as the canisters burst open and flooded the corridor with thick gas. Six sealed his environmental suit and charged forward without hesitation, while Shack took cover beneath the conveyor belt and Rock moved to engage.

The firefight was brutal and disorienting. The attackers wielded advanced beam weapons that burned large holes through the reinforced station walls, and one of their shots critically misfired — the beam flying over Six’s shoulder and striking a hidden assailant who had been sneaking up behind the party, eliminating the flanking threat before the party even knew it existed. Shack used his sonic stun rifle to drop one of the armored figures, while Six closed the distance through the smoke and darkness and fired a precise burst that struck an attacker directly through the visor, killing them instantly. The remaining conscious attacker abandoned their fallen ally and fled into the shadows. When the party searched the bodies, they found a Kinetic Logistics identification card on the dead attacker — the same corporation whose logos had been plastered across the illegal base on Thides III. The ambush had not been random. Someone knew what the party had found, and they had come to the station to make sure it stayed buried.