Session 24 (27 October 2023)

Location: Sath-occupied Bathur (Far Home 0928) in an alternate timeline

Date: 146-5600

Travellers: Torka Jax, Sasha Danlami, Jacobe Kyman, Griff Kodiak

NPCs: Captain Marika Covrig

You race through the ruins to reach the clearing where Kyman is setting the Dejah Thoris down in a swirl of dust and clamber aboard the ship. Jarumi's voice explains the unfolding crisis over comms. Almost immediately after you all experienced that unnerving out-of-body experience, Jarumi, monitoring comms and sensors, was startled as her instruments came alive with signals and blips. A region of space that, only moments before, had been silent as the tomb was suddenly alive with activity. A satellite of some kind was whizzing by several tens of thousands of kilometres away; it had appeared out of nowhere! About 20,000 km further away, a larger ship was slowly changing course to intercept the ghost planet. Scattered radio transmissions of great antiquity were wafting past, fragmented and uneven. What was most unnerving was that all this chatter was not human. 

It was Sath. As if the Sath had been here for centuries.

Sath space marine

And yet not quite the Sath you know. Your ship computer struggles to decode the language: it is similar to, but distinct from, all the known Sath languages and dialects.

Your sensors reveal that the approaching ship is a 300-ton patrol frigate. It launches two fighters that begin speeding toward the planet at 6-G acceleration. The frigate detects the Dejah Thoris as it climbs out of the ghost planet's atmosphere and hails you. After a pause, your computer translates the message: "Unidentified space vessel. This is the SFNV Bhoazzijazk. Remain in orbit and do not attempt to leave the area. You are intruding in Sath space."

You assume your action stations aboard the Dejah Thoris. Realizing that the nearby satellite is scanning you and relaying data to the frigate, you decide to eliminate it. Griff, in the pulse laser turret, blasts it to smithereens. Meanwhile, Sasha plots a jump back to Bathur's Edge while Jacobe maneuvers to keep as much distance from the incoming fighters as possible. Torka programs the probe you'd been using in the ruins to launch away from your ship and transmit signals designed to confuse your pursuers. In the chaos, you note that the comms relay you'd previously launched seems to have disappeared entirely...

Both the frigate and the fighters are faster than the Dejah Thoris, but before they can reach you, you make your jump. Had the Sath wanted to destroy you, surely they would have launched missiles. It seems, in retrospect, that they were more curious than angry...

During the week that follows, fully cognizant of the potential threat that a Sath raiding party might represent in this region of space, you carefully analyze the data from recent days. While Torka and Griff focus on the encounter with the Sath vessels, Sasha and Jacobe analyze the information gathered in and around the bunker. The first of these investigations yields perplexing results: ships, tech, and language were all similar, but different, to what your Library Data contains on the Sath. A rudimentary glottochronological analysis suggests that the Sath language you heard was congruent with a separation from the known Sath tongues occurring between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago. The second analysis is equally unsettling: the device in the bunker was powered by a nearby source — unseen by you — that was capable of projecting some kind of temporal distortion effect on a planetary scale. Readings indicate that the power source was fluctuating and unstable at the time of your visit.

When you come out of your jump on Fiday 153-5600, the other shoe drops. You're not in Kansas anymore. Bathur's Edge is nowhere to be found and there's no sign of Duke Norlande's little space-fiefdom. All around you in the planetoid belt are Sath settlements, Sath ships, and Sath communications. You dart into the shadow of an uninhabited worldlet and power down your engines in order to watch and wait, monitoring the radio waves in the area. Over the next 24 hours, you come to realize that the Sath have been here for many generations and that humanity is conspicuously absent. Some two millennia ago, it seems, the Sath repelled human intruders; since then, this region of space has been occupied by various Sath polities. Currently, the region is at peace; a few naval vessels patrol to ward away pirates, but most of the activity is economic: mining and commerce, principally under the aegis of the Pa'kurass Corporation. As you continue to monitor communications, you register startling breaking news flooding in: it seems a previously unknown planet has appeared out of nowhere, orbiting the most distant of the system's binary stars. Pa'kurass Corp. is reportedly preparing a scientific expedition to depart in a few days' time to investigate this bizarre phenomenon. 

The news spurs you to action. If the Sath expedition reaches the ghost planet, it will discover the bunker, the device, and possibly the means by which the ghost planet shifted from one timeline to another. Your only hope to get back to your own temporal dimension is to get there first. There's only one problem: you don't have enough fuel and you can't afford to spend four weeks travelling between binary stars via your maneuver drive. There's no gas giant or water world within reach. Attempting to mine ice from an asteroid would be time consuming and conspicuous. You decide your only course of action is to turn pirate and rob fuel from one of the many passing mining ships. It's not ideal, but it seems to be the only way for you to rejoin the timeline from which you came.

Image credit: Lizard space marine created using Ai Comic Factory.