Editing Season Two Finale: Aberdeen

Air date: 15 Dec 2009<br>
Present: Maer, Terri, Andy, Bobby and Rick<br><br>


Tuesday, 04 Sep 2520<br> 
Inverness Spaceport, Aberdeen<br>
Kalidasa (Xuan Wu) system <br>
10:30 hrs, local time<br><br><br>

We arrange for food and fuel enough to take us to BS.  
Rina does the monthly maintenance


Wednesday, 05 Sep 2520

The Lenore crew arranges to have a meal dirtside for all of us.  
Arden and Annie and Tom and Joshua stay behind.  Rina, Nika, Rick, Mary and Cooper go.

Drinks are had.  Cooper, Nika imbibe.  Rina abstains.  Rick and Mary hie off to romance in private.

Aboard the Gift, Annie comes out of the showers in nothing but a towel and an invitation to get laid.  Arden refuses.  Annie beds Tom instead.

A Quan Fu lands a few berths beside us. It’s the IAV Alabama

Nika and Rina see the name on the arrivals board, go ‘oh shit!’ and resolve to LEAVE.  We all hightail it back to the Gift, save Rick and Mary who are incommunicado.  While we’re en route, Joshua is hailed by Aberdeen’s spaceport (Inverness) and they inform us that “We’ve been told you have Calico Jack aboard.”  

Actually, all ships are being hailed thus and all ships are to submit to a search by the Feds:  An officer and his enlisted men board us. It’s Cmdr. Rodriguez.  El Raton.

All the ship’s occupants show themselves, Tom gets taken for his knowledge of the treasure site.  Annie is distraught that she isn’t taken too.  Annie demands we rescue Tom. We’re not so keen on the idea.  Nika and Rina arrive, get debriefed and we call Rick and Mary.  We have to take off to pick them up in some woods a ways distant.

Nika and Joshua go up in the shuttle and the Alabama fires a missile at them.  Nika manages to evade the missile but does so by crashing right near the base of the Inverness control tower.  They get out of the shuttle just in time to be captured by the Alabama.

Rick and Mary make it back to the Gift on their own.  Arden and Rina manage to disable the landlock on the Gift…but there’s no leaving without our crew.

We decide that since we still have Swordsman’s pass card with us, we can use it as fake ID for Arden to pass himself off as Swordsman.  With an Operative’s authority superceded only by Parliament, there is no way a Cmder of a Quan Fu can refuse an order to turn over his prisoners.  Arden makes it all the way aboard and to the cell where Nika and Joshua are being held…and nearly gets shoved into their cell.  

Arden evades and the door is jammed open.  A fight ensues, with Rodriguez, Calico Jack, and an armed and armored miligrunt on one side, Arden, Joshua and Nika on the other.  Nika is shot in the leg, Jack drops his gun, the miligrunt has the heaviest and most lethal weapon of the group and he’s looking like he’s going to use it.  Several rounds of combat ensue and in the end, we have Jack shot by Nika, both he and the Cmdr Rodriguez are captured by us with a gun to his head, and the miligrunt backs off so we can walk out the airlock. 

We demand to leave, they demand we leave their cmdr. and jack.

We let them go and walk off the ramp.

Of course, once in the open, the Quan Fu’s guns train and lock on us.  The guns paint a line in the ground a yard from our feet.  And they let us walk away.

We get back to the Gift.

During the fight aboard, two flash messages come over the Cortex:

1. Parliament has declared Martial Law on Londinium after a failed take-over of Parliament.
2. Parliament has reestablished control over the Parliament Building and the government

Not too interested in politics at the moment, we take the hell off of Aberdeen, our course plotted for the Halo of White Sun.  It’s where Jack and the Alabama is going.  Mary realizes that Jack, for whom we risked our lives to go back and save, has betrayed all of us.  We agree to head for Halo, there to drop Mary off and reconsider our next course of action.

More news comes over the waves:

Admiral O. Kendall of the Alliance Navy has instituted Martial Law over the entire Verse and all planets must comply.

Friday, 07 Sep 2520<br>
Kuiper II Class, Summer’s Gift<br>
Somewhere in the Black<br>
00:02 hrs, ships time<br><br>

The Cortex goes down. No waves can be sent, no vids, no emails, nothing.  Navigation between planets is a risky business done by paper astrogation and finding and following the nav buoy pingers strung out along the space routes across the Verse.

It will be weeks before we get news, and that will be at the Halo station.  From Halo, it’s another 3 weeks or so minimum to Blue Sun or Georgia.

The silence is deafening.

And we plow on