The DCV Memorial approached the warm friendly lights of 243 Ida and its home berth. The signal beacons on Dactyl winked on and off as the cargo hauler came to a dead stop and allowed the dock grappling arms to move her to rest. The crew were in pretty good shape, although they silence of the sensor returns directed towards 20434 Mignon, the once lost now refound asteroid, was unsettling. About 2 hours after their rapid and hasty departure from the hidden base in the crater, the SARA transponder had again fallen silent. The unidentified ship that had launched the wildly inaccurate missile had also disappeared at roughly the same time and had not been located by the SARA Spartan patrol cruiser when it arrived at Mignon.
Ship’s Master Calico had a lot of explanations to do. The Mayor of Mithril himself had come down to their debrief interview in the SARA offices. The dead drone controller in the lander was identified by his tattoos as belonging to a Shanghai criminal gang but nothing more was known apart from the quality of the equipment he was carrying spoke of corporate investment not a life of piracy in the space lanes.
Eventually, however, the green clad officers of the SARA had cleared the Memorial crew, praised them for their work in rescuing the lone survivor of the DMV Southern Cross and eliminating an asteroid pirate base. The Ida News Channel made quite a lot of it for a few days and ran interviews with the crew members. There were free drinks in the Lascaux Crater bars and the belter community gathered around their heroic brothers and sisters who had fought to save “those in peril in deep space”.
Bella Martinez was offered a job by Ida Investment and Development Agency as a crew member for the Memorial. With nowhere else to go and no family, this seemed reasonable. There would probably be more of those pirates to skewer in the search for continued vengeance for the lost members of the Southern Cross.
Billy had a fun time, installing the PDC and the mining laser on the surface of the Memorial. This made the ship one of the more heavily armed civilian vessels in the Belt. Nothing comparable to a SARA or LOPS cruiser but the Memorial was not going to be bullied by some little mining vessel with a bad missile array. Billy kind of hoped that they’d meet those folk again. He’d taken the drone controller and modified it. Now it went ‘beep’ and ‘ting’. He liked that. His collection of strange ceramic dolls seemed to like it too.
Maria was intrigued by the collection of ceramic figurines. She had a small amount of knowledge of art artefacts and their trade value but could not place these as coming from any known art institute. Sadly, an asteroid millions of miles from Earth had no art experts that she could consult. The flint tools were equally a mystery.
Sandy was happy to receive the praise of his new belter friends but tried to avoid the cameras wherever possible. There were still people who would recognise him that he didn’t want to alert. Still, his hospital colleagues treated him with a little more respect and even occasionally asked his medical opinion on something.
Jones the cat? He watched everything. He was a cat. That’s what they do…
THANKS to the players last night. I had a real blast and hope you did too. Although I cannot be a weekly regular, we will try to get down to Spielbar as often as possible. There are several more of these episodic one evening Traveller scenarios set in the Orbital Universe, with additional pregenerated characters and plot threads. The existing characters can also be carried forward.