Episode 217: Morningstar and Fallen Angels
Transcription in progress. Stay tuned!--Maer
Present: Maer, Terri, Andy, Bobby, and Tony
Air Date: 24 Nov 2009
Sunday, 31 Jul 2520
Lucifer's Landing, Angel
Kalidasa (Xuan Wu) system
We spend four weeks on the dirt on Angel, staying at Lucifer’s Landing, loading our cargo of 50 tons of H2 fuel to Aesir.
It’s a sunny day and Rick is minding Lem. Lem is playing ball with the other children of the community and he’s been put in the outfield with the rest of the little kids, catching and chasing down flies. As Rick watches, tne ball gets knocked clear beyond the outfield and Lem chases it. He follows it though the grass to the feet of a business suited woman. She smiles and reaches down. Her hands are blue. Before Rick can yell to Lem to run, she tosses Lem a blinking red metal ball.
Rick finds his voice.
“Lem! Ru—!”
The ball explodes.
Rick wakes up alone on the bridge of the Gift, 3 days en route to Aesir.
Saturday, 03 Aug 2520
02:30 hrs, ship’s time
It’s his turn on watch and before he can shake the last tendrils of nightmare off, BAM! something hits our ship. The consoles light up like the proverbial Christmas tree. A loud scraping sound from the outside reverberates through our hull, under the bridge and in a blink, our long range scanners and parallax array go dead.
Nika’s brought out of a sound sleep by the noise and she’s running to the bridge pulling on some pajama pants even before Rick can call for her over the comm. She takes over from Rick and drops the Gift out of pulse…and we find ourselves in a debris field. There is an intact ship on the edge of our short range scanners and there are automated distress signals pinging away out there. Nika starts steering us for the closest of the signals.
It’s not an impact free ride. We scrape against the debris or the debris scrapes against us. When we find the source of the first ping, we see it’s a 4-man life pod, the name Lenore blazoned on its hull. Rina and Rick don suits and go EVA to investigate. Rick looks through the window to see three people inside strapped to their chairs. Nika does a soft seal with the shuttle and we bring the survivors aboard. They’re shaken and scratched up and one has glass shards embedded in his arm. Arden renders the man medical aid. The injured man is Oriental, has a sister and is accompanied by a huge bear of a man. They tell us that they only had thirty minutes of air left and there’s still one more pod out there. We let the escape pod loose and search for the other pod.
Joshua greets the survivors aboard and asks them what happened.
The tale they tell us explains some of what we see floating outside. They are a salvage team, salvaging the remains of the big ship tumbling in pieces outside. Pirates came upon them and attacked them, ordering them to surrender their cargo, firing two missiles at them. One of the missiles took out their engines, the other breached their cargo bay. The salvage ships Captain issued the order to abandon ship and the crew escaped in the pods.
Rina and Rick stay outside, tethered to the ship as they inspect the damage done to the Gift’s hull.
We find it and seal up with the pod to rescue the people aboard. This time it’s two Anglo women accompanied by a tallish thin man clad in a pilot’s leather skullcap. Joshua reunites them with the rest of their crew and they are all relieved to find each other alive, even as they are dismayed to find their Captain isn’t among them.
Rina finds out that her tether isn’t long enough to allow her to look at the undercarriage of the bridge where our sensor array should be. By tethering Rick to the hull and tethering herself to Rick, she can play out the length just enough to eyeball the damage. And damage there is: nothing remains of our parallax array. It’s totally gone, wires sparking. Rina relays the good news to Nika on the bridge.
Great.
Tom is the survivor in the pilot’s skull cap and he is one nervous individual. He makes his way cautiously through the ship, asking if it’s safe to board, he can smell something wrong with our atmo. He seems apprehensive about being on a Kuiper II class ship, citing their tendency to break down and how this thing or that thing on it is unreliable…he goes on like this for some time and it’s just a good thing that Rina is still outside and unable to hear him dissing her baby.
One of the women who came with Tom is less annoying and fearful, being more bubbly and cheerful. She tells us she’s Mary Read, First Mate of Lenore, the salvage ship floating outside on the edge of our sensor range. The other woman with her is Annie Bonnie, ship’s engineer. The nervous chatterbox with them is Tom Bourne and we’ll have to forgive him, he’s always this twitchy . The other three crew from the first pod are their resident giant and Bosun John “Cooper” Fenwick and an oriental brother/sister team, Fei Li Kahn and Fei Wu Ling, deck hand and medic, respectively.
Nika flies the Gift to Lenore at the other end of the debris field at the rescuees’ urging and Rick and Rina don suits again to go investigate. The rescued crew hope to find their beloved Captain. Their ship is a Raven class salvager, lending credence to the rescuees’ account of what had happened. Annie Bonnie and Rina inspect the ship and find no sign of the Captain.
Meanwhile, Cooper finagles food and drink out of Joshua. Tom mutters about fluorine poisoning.
On Lenore, Annie inspects the damage to the hull and says that she could probably patch it up, no problem. The breach is only about a foot or so wide. The hit on the engines, however is a different story. they are offline, with parts fused solid. There is no way Lenore will fly out on her own power.
We search for the Captain of Lenore, at Mary Read’s insistence, and come up empty handed. The Captain is nowhere to be found, dead or alive, and we report this with regret. There’s nothing for it. The rescuees will have to ship out to Aesir with us. Nika asks Mary Read, now Acting-Captain of Lenore’s crew if we can have Lenore’s parallax array as payment of their passage to Aesir.
Mary agrees.
Nika tells Rina and Annie to get the array out. And she relays permission for the survivors to gather their belongings off Lenore and take them aboard. They do so and Cooper makes several trips, bringing back big sacks and bags full of bulky items, including one that tinkles and clacks like a bunch of glass bottles. Booze? Cooper hits the galley next, sharing the raw protein stores from Lenore. Nothing texturized, thank goodness. Joshua assigns Mary Read the portside stateroom and the rest of the crew quarters in the second class container.
Watching carefully, Joshua observes that there seems to be a rivalry between the friendly and easy-going Mary vs. the more grim and grounded Annie Bonnie. Whenever Annie pushes for command, Mary redirects. Joshua also sees that the Fei siblings are uneasy about something, that Tom is paranoid, and Cooper is…well, Cooper. He’s big, somewhat uncouth, and irrepressible. The Lenore’s crew are upset about the uncertain fate of their Captain and when the talk grows unguarded, Mary exhorts them to remember the Kingston. The crew clams up.
We carry on.
Later, Tom disparages the Gift. Joshua warns him of Rina’s temper. Tom asks to see the bridge and Nika escorts him there. He susses out our modifications and starts speculating on what we can do with the ship using them.
Joshua pulls Nika aside to say we need to go on half rations unless we can supplement our stores from Lenore’s pantry. It’s mostly raw protein paste—but it’s untextured—and we can go easy on the food.
Rina and Nika get that array going. It seems to be fine, but without a baseline reading we can’t be sure.
We get the long range scanners up. Yay! Now we can see better what’s out there.
Nika lays down the simple rules of our ship to our rescuees/passengers: no one goes outside the passenger area without a member of the Gift’s crew as escort. Everyone agrees and we fly on.
We start getting to know each other.
Rick chats up Mary and Annie, trying to make friends…or make out…and they sound him out in turn.
The Feis spend their time mostly away from the others, working out in the crew lounge below decks, working out. The Feis are incredibly limber, Joshua notices as he chaperones them below decks, doing Tai Chi, doing odd exercises that they pull off with amazing grace and suppleness. …which make sense when they tell us they used to be gymnasts in the Sihnon Games. In short, Olympian athletes. The pressure to succeed, however, and their failure to bring home the medal made it impossible for them to find work in their chosen profession. They were looking for work on the Rim and the Lenore was looking to hire. The Captain of Lenore was agreeable to allow them to work for their passage to the Rim. It seemed a beneficial arrangement all around.
Joshua asks Nika about the Kingston. There’s nothing on the Cortex about it. Nika tells Joshua not to tell Rina about what he’s found, or rather NOT found, since the engineer’s twitchy enough with all the strangers. The last thing we need is Rina going off on another conspiracy rant and making EVERYBODY paranoid.
Mary approaches us and asks us not to report the rescue. The Lenore was involved in ‘unofficial’ work when they were ambushed by the pirates. She also admits that Mary Read is not her real name. Rina comments that it’s ironic that they took historic pirate names for their aliases only to be hit by pirates themselves.
Nika gets us out of the debris felid for what we believe to be our course for Aesir. With no baseline to check the parallax array against, we could be off-course and not know it. We fly on despite.
Rick uses his charm and gets a little more info out of Mary. Mary’s father was the Captain of Lenore and Mary was his First Mate. Annie was Second Mate and it seems overall the crew was tight. Everyone had been together for quite some time and the women pass on some insights about others on their crew. Cooper, for instance, is fine so long as you give him some slack to smoke and drink. The Fei siblings are tightly bound together. Mary’s father was the glue that made them a crew. While they talk, Rick can sense that Mary’s coming to grips with the situation and starting to make connections in her head, but out of respect for her recent loss, he doesn’t grill her on it.
Too bad he didn’t.
Monday, 05 Aug 2520
En Route to Aesir
07:00 hrs, ship’s time
Joshua is setting up for breakfast when he notices the Lenore crew gathering into Mary’s assigned quarters. They’re in there for 30 minutes. Joshua tells Nika and Nika orders the crew to arm up and conceal carry. Rina’s already got that covered, thank you. Joshua knocks on Mary’s door when we’re done, saying breakfast is ready.
Cooper comes out first, asks what’s on the menu. We all sit down to eat. Joshua keeps an eye on everyone. Nika checks the bridge constantly, taking her plate with her. Tom rides shotgun.
The Feis ask to be taken to the gym when they finish eating. Joshua escorts them down.
Cooper remains at the table, talking to Arden about pastimes on our ship. What do we do for entertainment around here. Cooper talks Arden into a game of cards, or would, if he had a pack of cards on him. Rina takes a seat next to Arden and pulls a deck from her own pockets. Cooper looks her up and down speculatively and suggests that there are some games with cards that would be interesting to play…intimating rather broadly that strip poker tops the list. Rina flat out refuses to play, saying she’s just there to give Arden moral support.
On the bridge, Tom notices we’re off course and tells Nika about it. She declines his offer to fix it. He insists, getting rather OCD about it. He admits he used to be a Navy fighter pilot before the stress got to him and he was reassigned to something else. Which goes a long way to explain his irritatingly obsessive personality. Tom insists there’s a vibration going through the ship, about 1 kilogram to port. Can’t Nika feel it? Nika tells him to settle down and shut up, she’s flying here.
Elsewhere, Rick chats up Mary. They talk. He asks her what her plans are. She’s not sure. Without a ship, she’s not certain she can keep the crew together. She lacks the charisma. Rick asks her if she’s got a ship’s fund, storing credits away for a rainy day. Mary admits she has one, but not here. Could she hire us, though? To take us where she’s got her fund stashed? After the Gift’s current run? Rick asks where. Mary hedges, saying we’d have to break quarantine.
Blue Sun.
Great.
Rick says he thinks it can be arranged.
In which we make our first cargo run for Morningstar to Aesir, and deliver Jake Aberg home to his family.
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