The Far Dark

Session 05 - Hostile Takeover

The smoke had barely cleared from the maintenance corridor when the distant clang of boots on metal announced the arrival of station security. Six, Rock, and Shackleton stood amid the wreckage of the Kinetic Logistics ambush, moving quickly and deliberately. Shackleton kicked the pieces of a broken prototype pistol across the floor to make it look like the attackers had been armed, while both he and Rock quietly pocketed a working weapon each — sleek, unmarked firearms unlike anything produced by the Federal Republic. Six, positioned at the far end of the hallway, had already tucked his own prize somewhere considerably more personal.

Security teams two and three swept in from opposite directions, securing the area with practiced efficiency. Holger Graeme arrived shortly after, red-faced and winded, demanding a full account of what had happened. Six gave him a clean report — accurate in almost every detail — noting that the fleeing attacker had grabbed a fallen firearm on his way out. Graeme scanned the Kinetic Logistics ID card recovered from one of the bodies, got nothing back, and ordered it into evidence. A visual sweep of the party turned up nothing suspicious, and the concealed weapons remained hidden beneath layers of armor and nerve.

The unconscious prisoner was hauled back to the security offices and stripped of his gear. Rock took on the task of changing him into prison fatigues, and it was during this unglamorous work that he noticed something deeply wrong. Tucked behind the man’s right ear, hidden beneath a flap of skin, was a physical data port — a hardwired connector in a world where everything ran wirelessly. Rock reported it immediately, and the discovery was added to the official record.

When the party accessed the port, what they found was alarming. The prisoner’s bio-computer contained a full tactical briefing for the ambush: patrol routes, schedules, and detailed personnel files on each member of the party pulled directly from the station’s HR system. The data was thorough enough to include every maintenance request Six had ever filed and every arrest he had ever made. Graeme studied the dump with a grim expression and concluded that only a handful of people on the station could have authorized such a comprehensive pull — himself, Station Manager Wilton Agramunt, or Vita Ó Taidhg, the docking chief. The last entry in the prisoner’s records corresponded precisely to the party’s mission to the planet, suggesting the leak had happened around that time.

Graeme placed the party on entertainment district patrol for the next two days while he quietly investigated, ordering them to travel together and stay visible. Six took the directive to its logical extreme, following Rock everywhere — including the showers — with the blank, unblinking dedication of a man who had been given an order and intended to follow it completely. During their downtime, Shackleton spent time studying the prototype pistol he had recovered, confirming it was a gamma-ray laser of extraordinary power and equally extraordinary mystery. The weapon bore no federal markings, no security grips, and no signs of mass production — it was a prototype, and a dangerous one.

On the first evening of their patrol rotation, Six proposed a fun mission to the Silk Abbey, and the entire group agreed to go. The entertainment district was noticeably more heavily patrolled than usual, and their own shifts had been quietly extended by two hours without formal announcement. When they arrived at the Silk Abbey, the owner Samina Ventura greeted them warmly and pointed out Kate Broadbeck — a seasoned, older worker who had been the station manager’s favorite before Brianna’s disappearance and had since been called up to his private quarters twice. Six and Rock disappeared into the high-roller echelons of the establishment, where they were treated to massages, exotic foods from distant planets, rare substances, and the company of McKenna and her colleague, surrounded by minor celebrities and high-ranking bureaucrats from across the sector.

Shackleton, meanwhile, sat down with Kate and laid out a careful proposition. He told her what he suspected — that Brianna was likely dead, and that whoever had been in that hotel room with the station manager and his investor was probably responsible. Kate confirmed that Agramunt had been behaving strangely, calling her up to his quarters only to sit and weep over a picture of Brianna for hours, barely acknowledging her presence. Shackleton pressed a small communication device into her hand and offered her federal credits to ensure she was the one called up next time, and to signal only if she genuinely felt threatened. Kate accepted, tucking the device away with the quiet professionalism of someone who had learned long ago to read a room.

Three days after the ambush, the party received a message to report to the Marshal’s office at five in the morning. Graeme met them outside and explained that Marshal Julija Borja had specifically requested them for something off the books — a federal matter, not a station one, and entirely voluntary. Six raised his hand before Graeme had finished the sentence. The rest of the party followed, and Borja wasted no time swearing them in as temporary deputy marshals before darkening the office windows and pulling up her briefing board.

What she laid out was a picture that had been assembling itself in pieces for weeks. Kinetic Logistics, she explained, was a front for a smuggling operation running out of the Thides System. The advanced prototype weapons used in the ambush had been seen before in targeted killings of high-ranking individuals across the sector. A secret Federal Republic listening post in the Thidian Belt had tracked a Kinetic Logistics ship not to the gate and out of the system, but to an abandoned mining facility on Thides I — a planet so thoroughly hollowed out that its structural integrity was a matter of ongoing concern for the entire system’s hyperspace lanes. The plan was simple and dangerous: land twenty-five miles from the facility, enter through a decommissioned mining outpost, and find out what was happening inside. The broken prototype pistol was locked away in a high-security compartment in Borja’s wall. The party was authorized to draw whatever equipment they needed from the armory.

They boarded a Strider-class transport in Docking Bay 8 — a rugged, no-frills military workhorse that Six recognized immediately from his time in service. Borja took the pilot’s seat and launched under the cover of a false supply run call sign, and the station let them go without question. Six settled into a jump seat near the cockpit. The ship had no gravity, no kitchen, and no comfort to speak of, but it had fuel and a heading, and six hours later it was descending toward the boiling edge of a dead world.

Thides I was a ruin of a planet. The surface was a wasteland of miles-deep mining pits, shattered automated machinery, and asteroid-scarred terrain. A mile behind their landing site, a sharp line divided the scorching sunward face from the frozen dark side, with the party’s position sitting squarely in the dust zone between them. Borja distributed a three-dimensional schematic of the facility, assigned Six to point, and started marching. The low gravity made every step feel slightly wrong, like the ground was trying to give them back to the sky.

At the bottom of the descent into the mining outpost, they found two maintenance vehicles — one stripped to uselessness, the other mostly intact but missing a critical component. Shackleton dug through a collapsed shelf in the back of the maintenance area and found the missing part wedged in a corner where it had been overlooked by whoever had picked the place clean. Borja installed it, the vehicle hummed to life, and the party loaded in and began the long drive through the dark.

The tunnels were vast and silent, the conveyor belts still and dust-covered. But as they drove deeper, lights began appearing — first a few, then more, and then moving ones, half a mile ahead in the corridor. Borja stopped the vehicle and ordered the team forward on foot. Six pulled on his chameleon suit and slipped ahead into the dark.

What he found were two Kinetic Logistics workers in vacuum suits, running wires along the tunnel walls and connecting them to a central detonator box. They were rigging the place to blow. The workers spotted him before he could withdraw, and Six responded with the kind of decisive violence that had kept him alive through worse situations. Both men were down before either could reach their communicators. Borja arrived, stripped the headset from one of the fallen workers to capture their radio codes, and immediately began cutting wires. The demolition network was being dismantled one connection at a time as the party pushed forward.

The main processing plant was enormous — a cavern carved directly from the rock of the planet, dominated by a cold blast furnace and a web of catwalks, chutes, and ore buckets stretching into the shadows above. The footlights along the walkways flickered on and off, casting the space in alternating pools of dim light and deep darkness. A thick yellow wire ran from the conveyor system toward the furnace, and Shackleton noted that the maintenance vehicles near the large garage door had been recently moved, their dust disturbed in ways that suggested deliberate repositioning. A radio check-in directed at their captured call sign prompted a terse response from the party, but the channel went silent immediately after — they had been made.

Four armored Kinetic Logistics soldiers came running down the catwalks. Two headed for the airlock panel. The other two spotted Shackleton and Rock in the shadows and raised their weapons. Six moved first, swinging his vibro-axe in a brutal arc that connected with both guards in the torso, though their heavy space armor absorbed the impact. Borja put a carbine round through one guard’s head with clinical precision. The remaining soldiers returned fire, and Shackleton took a hit that punched through his tactical suit and left him badly wounded. Six choked the last conscious attacker into unconsciousness with his bare hands while Rock and Borja worked to stabilize Shackleton with trauma patches and nanomachine treatments. The party pressed on.

The control room was visible through a large window, its interior lit and populated by unarmored personnel moving around primitive wiring boards. Daniela Akkermans was among them, speaking to someone before noticing the approach and slipping out through a door on the far side of the room. Six cut every wire he could find on the way in, then entered the room with Borja at his side. What followed was brief and absolute. Six swept through the room in a single devastating pass, his vibro-axe removing four heads in rapid succession and spraying blood across every surface. Borja stepped up behind a fifth operative and drove a concealed blade into his ear. Shackleton attempted a long shot through the blood-smeared window at the last man standing, missed, and Six finished the job with a casual backhand. Borja collected a folding screen case full of mission data, ordered the retreat, and the party was back in the vehicle and moving before the control room detonated behind them in a massive explosion.

The return flight gave Shackleton time to recover and gave the party time to think. When they landed back at MacMillian Station IV, Borja was already moving with purpose, leading them through service passages and badge-locked corridors toward the station manager’s private residence. She had enough evidence to arrest him. Her badge failed at his door. Six put his vibro-axe through the lock.

Inside, Kate Broadbeck was face down on the floor, unconscious. Behind the desk, Wilton Agramunt was dead — a blaster wound to the head, the weapon still on the table beside him. Before anyone could process what they were looking at, Solveig Kaufer’s voice came over the station-wide comms, calm and authoritative, announcing that MacMillian had been acquired by Pratrock Dynamics and that all personnel were to return to their quarters immediately. Through the residence’s large window, the party watched drop ships detach from newly arrived transports and begin attaching themselves to the station hull.

Borja didn’t stop moving. She swept Agramunt’s data pad and comm link into a bag and led the party back through the service passages toward her office. Along the way, Six spotted two Kinetic Logistics soldiers in full combat armor guarding the hallway outside the security and Marshal’s offices. He raised the Grazer pistol, took careful aim, and put both of them down with shots to their faceplates before they could react. Inside the Marshal’s office, Borja packed evidence — memory sticks, reports, a laptop — into a duffel bag while Six used his axe to free Holger Graeme and his team from the locked security office next door. Graeme confirmed what the sensors had already suggested: the station was under total lockdown, the gate was controlled, and ships were grounded. He also freed Marlo Petrak from the holding cell, the technician blinking in confusion as the world around him continued to deteriorate rapidly.

The party reached Docking Bay 36 and cut through the sealed door. Ronin Sanchez began powering up the ship while Rock connected the fuel and water lines. Shackleton scrounged a pallet of food from the docking bay stores and pushed it up the gangplank on a dolly. Ten Kinetic Logistics soldiers in combat armor were marching down the corridor toward them, four of them carrying hard-cased backpacks that Six recognized as deployment rigs for combat robots. Six opened fire from cover, dropping the lead soldier with a shot to the face and destroying one of the equipment cases before the squad scattered behind cover and began returning fire. The robots assembled anyway — three-legged, laser-equipped, and closing fast. Six melted the docking bay door shut with the Grazer pistol and ran for the ship.

Borja never made it. She had removed her helmet to work at a terminal, and Daniela Akkermans came through a door behind her and drove a knife into her neck before anyone could intervene. Six shouted the alert and kept running. The umbilical was severed, the magnetic seal broken, and the resulting decompression tore three combat robots off the gangplank and sent them spinning into the vacuum of space. Ronin Sanchez pushed the throttle and the ship accelerated away from the station as weapon locks began pinging across the sensor board.

Shackleton interfaced with the alien navigation cube in the ship’s former stateroom — a glowing, rotating geometric device that had been quietly waiting for someone to ask it to do something extraordinary. It could open its own gate, bypassing the station-controlled jump point entirely. He activated it. The cube spun, symbols lit up across its surface, and a vortex tore open in space directly beside the station, pulling in debris and scattering wreckage as the ship plunged through. The darkness of the Thides System gave way to the eerie, shifting color palette of hyperspace, and the gate collapsed behind them. In the crew quarters, Marlo Petrak sat tied to a bunk, staring at Six with profound unease. Beside him was the Marshal’s duffel bag, full of evidence meant for a man named Monroe who ran a junk shop somewhere in the lower slums of Aethel — and getting it there was now entirely the party’s problem.