Session 7 (12 May 2023)

Location: On board the Dejah Thoris, moored at the Class-D starport on Merant (Far Home 1427)

Date: 075-5600

Time: 1600

Travellers: Jacobe Kyman (ex-drifter seeking purpose) and Torka Jax (ex-Navy officer looking for a noble cause)

The news about the fate of the separatists captured by the Vhenjan military at Muuna is hard to swallow. Is Braxton Kader among them? Will he or any of his comrades be able to confirm receipt of the medical stimpacks you delivered? How harshly will the Vhenjan regime punish them? Will you get paid for the job? 

You debate the issue at length. Some voices argue for an attempt to rescue the separatists, either by hijacking the train taking them to prison (train heist) or breaking them out of prison (jailbreak). Motives for this course of action range from the altruistic (help the underdogs and stick it to the fascists!) to the purely mercenary (you could pressure the Timerckian Liberation Coalition to pay, not only for the delivery of the medicine, but for the release of their freedom fighters). For some, there's also the undeniable lure of action, adventure, and excitement (in the form of well-placed demolitions causing big explosions).

Other voices urge caution, arguing that attempting a dangerous plan with no guaranteed reward is unwise. Moreover, it is pointed out, you know little of the true political situation on this world. Are the separatists truly the good guys? Why should you put your lives on the line for them?

The heated discussion leaves you divided. As the others drift to their quarters for the night, Jac and Torka linger to wrestle with the issues. You decide you need more information about the factions involved: the Vhenjan regime, the Timerckian Liberation Coalition, and the Church of the Purple Sun. Torka consults the starport's digital archive of the planet's print media going back several years, writing a few quick programs that enable him to parse thousands, if not millions, of texts for key information. Jac gathers information the old-fashioned way, mingling in the starport casino with some of the wealthier business people who've succeeded by taking the pulse of this world, its economics, and its politics. Slyly assisting a woman named Koma Voight in winning, Jac disposes her to open up with straight talk about what's going on in eastern Vhenja.

From these varied sources, you learn that the Vhenjan government has in recent years veered strongly toward authoritarianism, with the current regime hitching itself to the ideological wagon of a harsh and rigid atheism that blames religion and spirituality for all the woes of the world. While this view has proven palatable in much of urban Vhenja (where it is likely to be tolerated so long as the economy remains strong), it has found little traction in the sparsely populated regions of the country's mountainous eastern border with Kherty, where folks are not so closely tied to commercial/industrial agriculture and where religious sentiment tends to be stronger. Many here, as in much of Kherty, are adherents of the Church of the Purple Sun, a faith that claims great antiquity (back to the days of the Last Armada) but which more objective observers date to a few centuries ago. According to dogma, several major religious figures from the ancient Terran past have taken up residence in the Demon's Eye Nebula: Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad are reckoned to form a quartet of philosopher-prophets cohabiting the massive cloud of luminescent ionized gases and dust that has the Demon's Eye (or Purple Sun, in the church's parlance) at its centre. Although the church's religious rituals seem odd to outsiders — they generally involve toga-like garb, diaphanous fabrics, funny hats, and choreographed dances — by and large its teachings amount to fairly benign advice about how to live a good life. 

A ceremony of the Church of the Purple Sun

The Timerckian Liberation Coalition, named after an early martyr to the cause, emerged in eastern Vhenja several years ago as a separatist movement seeking autonomy for the region and greater religious freedom for its people. Many separatists are members of the church, and many of their coreligionists in neighbouring Kherty are sympathetic to their cause. Only with the harshness of Vhenjan repression against the separatist movement, in the form of arrests, imprisonments, beatings, and executions, has the movement become militant. Vhenjan government censorship has prevented more moderate voices in the country from being heard; instead, many prominent Vhenjan intellectuals, politicians, and religious leaders have only been able to publish their views outside the country.

You reason that, if more Vhenjans knew how widespread moderate opinion was, public pressure might push the regime to ease up on its repression of the separatists — and, in particular, save Braxton Kader and other separatists captured at Muuna from a grim fate at the hands of the government. A plan is quickly hatched and put into action. Thousands of copies of pamphlets compiling the opinions of prominent Vhenjans sympathetic to the separatists' complaints are printed using local facilities. You load them into the air/raft and drive out of the starport, taking the road west. Once you begin climbing into the mountains, well out of the view of locals, you increase altitude (illegally) and fly over the peaks, past Muuna (where you note that about one-quarter of the village lies in ruins) and down the Klekyo River valley toward Photossa, an important city (and home to both a military garrison and the prison where the captured separatists are to be held). In the wee hours before dawn, you fly over several dense residential neighbourhoods and drop the leaflets, expecting them to be discovered in a few hours as folks awake to begin their day. Thanks to a combination of competent navigation, skilled flying, and blind luck [1], you succeed in your propaganda mission without attracting the attention of the Vhenjan authorities. By daybreak, you find yourselves driving into the Khertian capital toward the starport, your air/raft now empty of printed material.

Map of eastern Vhenja, showing Muuna and Photossa at right.

Satisfied that you have done something to help the cause of justice, you return to the Dejah Thoris, exhausted but hopeful.

How will the people of Photossa react to your leaflets? How will the Vhenjan government respond? Will you now leave the planet of Merant behind, or will you remain dirtside and entangle yourselves further in events?

Date: 076-5600

Time: 0900

[1] The Die of Fate was rolled on at least three occasions to determine how things might go, and each time the results indicated circumstances favourable to the characters.