Session 10 (9 June 2023)

Location: Dal Hallen, the tidally locked mainworld orbiting the red main sequence star Gurada (Far Home 1428)

Date: 090-5600

Time: 0600

Travellers: Dr Jaxxon Fomstep (ship's doctor), Torka Jax (security officer), and Jacobe Kyman (ship's pilot)

Rising early from a good night's rest chez Momma Jax, you make your way to the private hangar at the airfield where your transportation awaits. Dr Fomstep, having spent the previous evening preparing a medkit with supplies tailored to the environment you will be entering, joins you there. An advanced fixed-wing jet aircraft, modified to withstand conditions in the day zone and fitted with gravitics for intertial dampening and VTOL, awaits. The pilot, a wiry nervous fellow, greets you professionally but neither asks your names nor offers his. He shows you where the gear you requested — ablat-coated hostile environment vacc suits, sensing devices, a laser saw, and weapons — is laid out: the results of your inspection suggest that your patron has spared no expense and is clearly not cutting corners. They must want those artefacts badly. Within an hour, you are away.

You spend an hour slowly suiting up and making final checks, then buckle in for the final half-hour as the jet struggles through the atmospheric turbulence that is typical of the border between the day and twilight zones. As you approach, the pilot reminds you: he will return in three hours on the dot. You must be ready, as he cannot risk waiting long. You are set down in a rocky, blasted landscape with strange geological formations and highly accidented terrain. The pilot points out the large circular mound, about 80 metres in diameter, that is the Cha Qu site. On its southwestern edge you can see a dark blot on its flank: an area where the rock has crumbled away, revealing an entrance.

Approaching the Cha Qu mound

You enter cautiously, your lights illuminating the dim interior. You see dark grey-green walls and ceilings made of a hard synthetic material, a floor strewn with sand and dirt blown in from outside, and, at the far end, an exit blocked by some kind of barrier: a door? It's not made of the same material as the walls; instead, it's gel-like and semi-translucent. You prod it with a tool, then a foot: it's like a denser, stronger form of Jell-O. Emboldened, you push your way through the 30 cm-thick "door" and find yourselves in a rectangular chamber with two exits. The interior space seems appropriate for human-sized creatures. No sand has made it past the barrier and the temperature here is a relatively comfortable 36℃. The atmosphere is breathable. The place seems quite empty: on almost every wall you see shallow grooves and alcoves, empty sockets, small indentations, hooks and brackets: once this space may have been chock-a-block with machines and devices, but if so they have long been removed. It seems like a space that has been evacuated or decommissioned, not looted or despoiled.

Exploring the interior of the Cha Qu mound.

Immediately upon entering, you hear, — no, you sense a strange murmuring. It's in your head, competing for attention with the rhythmic hiss of your breath in the vacc suit helmet. Is this some kind of telepathy? No words are intelligible, no images form: it's a just "noise."

You begin to move carefully through the space, pushing through several more gel-doors while beginning to get a sense of the complex's circular organization. You find a small white box left behind on a shelf and stow it away: artefact no. 1, worth a cool Cr50,000 upon delivery to your patron. In another chamber (marked C), you find a large perforated hemisphere protruding from the wall: periodically, a small quantity of thick grey fluid seeps out from it and drips to the floor. You collect several vials of the stuff: another artefact, perhaps?

Part way through this exploration, the murmur in your heads suddenly crescendos into a piercing "scream" that stuns you momentarily, leaving you disoriented. Just as quickly, it's gone and the confused background whispering resumes. You sensed clearly that the "scream" had a direction: it came from somewhere to the east.

In yet another large space, you come across a massive, complicated machine consisting of some kind of solid casing surrounded by glass-like reservoirs filled with fluids of various colours, viscosities, and densities. There seems to be some kind of opening at the top of the machine, a little above your heads, and just in front of it a silver metallic plate, about 1 metre square, is set into the floor. Four segmented "arms" with synthetic, tentacle-like "fingers" are spaced evenly about the device. You spend some time examining the glyphs on what appears to be a control panel and, thanks to a lucky combination of linguistics knowledge and fancy computing, deduce that this machine has both ingestion and extrusion functions. There seems to be a "power" button...  While you ponder this mystery, you notice three of the "luck stones" Terzis told you about, sitting on a shelf to the side of the machine. Artefacts nos. 3, 4, and 5? As you pick one up, you feel something brush against your mind: the stone seems to be acknowledging you. You imagine that it's inviting you to focus, to concentrate on it, to deepen the connection. Unsettled, you pop them into your bags for now.

A mild earthquake shakes the place, reminding you of the seismic instability of this region and of the fact that this complex will in all likelihood be reduced to dust by the nuclear devices set by the Dal Hallen government scientists. You still have more than 2 hours left before the pilot returns. Will you cut your losses and get out with the few treasures you have? Will you attempt to activate the machine? Will you explore further?

Image credits: "Red Planet" by eddie-mendoza on deviantart.com.