Session 34 (2 February 2024)

Location: Athune highport (Halcyon 2424)

Date: 292-5600

Travellers: Nogudnyk, Griff Kodiak, Jacobe Kyman, Ada Windsor, Sasha Danlami, and Torka Jax

As the difficult meeting with Jarumi is winding down, Dipo pulls you aside and asks to speak with you about an unrelated private matter. One of her cousins requires assistance with a delicate matter, one in which outsiders might prove especially useful. The Yimin Jiti elite class is, in general, highly tradition-bound, and anyone who seeks to openly contravene custom would find little support. Offworlders, of course, might not share this reluctance.

Harper Zhang is in love.

You agree to the meet the cousin; a rendezvous is quickly arranged in a quiet section of the highport. The cousin is a young woman clad in the finery of the Yimin Jiti nobility. She introduces herself as Harper Zhang and her proposal is straightforward: rescue her beloved, Jay, from the clutches of his controlling family and help them elope to another system before she is forced into an arranged marriage. Jay, she explains, is not a man of action and, as the date of the nuptials approaches, has been cloistered on his family's estate to prevent any further contact with Zhang. She offers Cr 200,000 to reunite them away from their families.

You consider the offer but your doubts about the sagacity of this job cannot be dismissed. Her obvious youth and significant uncertainty about her beloved's real status — is he actually being kept a prisoner or is he really not just that into her? — make you cautious, along with the sense that you do not want to get caught doing anything illegal on a world of telepaths. Especially since your friend Jarumi depends on their good will. You make a counter offer: you could try to throw a wrench in the plans for the arranged marriage, perhaps by discrediting the groom somehow.  Zhang seems interested at first, but sticks to her guns: she wants Jay. You decide to turn down the job. 

In the meantime, the latest courier ship arriving at Athune delivers a missive to you. It's from Dal Hallen and was written six months ago — a grim warning from a correspondent who declares himself to surely be dead. In it, Yaghisian Kutatás, the private investigator hired by the Vhenjan government to dig into your past, expresses his regret at having sold information about you to the Dark Star, a secret elite branch of the military forces of the Worlds of the Leader. "I arranged for this message to be dispatched automatically in the event of my disappearance. If you are reading it now, it no doubt means that I am dead," wrote Kutatás.

Your list of enemies has grown, if not exactly longer, definitely more sinister. You feel relatively safe in Yimin Jiti space, but Kutatás' note is a reminder that you shouldn't linger too long in any one place.

With Jarumi, Idowu, and Rajani safely delivered, it's time for you to chart a new course. You ponder your options, and recall the wreck of the mining ship Alexis, a potentially lucrative salvage operation. Will you wend your way back to that subsector? And if so, by what route?

In the short term, you need money. You do the rounds and check the usual places for the kinds of "odd jobs" available to Travellers. Two in-system ones look interesting. The first is to check on the employees at a remote fishing lodge on the moon of Lessian, whose deep oceans attract offworlders interested in sport fishing. Communications with the lodge have ceased suddenly; they need someone to go immediately. Since the moon is only hours away for your ship's 2G M-drive, you decide to take the job, but also to contract for the second one. It involves retrieving cargo from a merchant ship that crashed in a planetoid belt in the far reaches of the system, 4.5 days away. You figure you can check on the fishing lodge en route and kill two birds with one stone.

Hours later the Dejah Thoris is skimming over the watery surface of Lessian. From the air, you can see scenes of destruction at the Forsian fishing outpost: only parts of the main lodge remain intact. A great furrow in the pebbled beach indicates that something large and heavy was dragged from the water onto the land near the lodge. A short distance offshore, you can see the wreck of a fishing vessel. Nothing is moving.

You set the ship down on the landing pad, don your armoured vacc suits, and proceed to the site using the air/raft and grav belts. In the lodge, you find no sign of the missing employees, but the remains of a smashed computer may reveal clues once you find the time to work with the fragments of its memory core. You turn your attention to the fishing vessel. You could walk into the water to investigate, but something about the nearby depths of the grey, roiling sea unnerves you. Instead, you attach cables to the wreck and use the Dejah to lift it onto the beach. As the hulk emerges from the waves, water streaming from the rents in the hull, you see that a great drift net is attached to a winch on the vessel's stern. Odd thing for a sports fishing vessel to have! But before you can investigate further, a large area of sea begins to froth and bubble. Tentacles shoot forth and reach for the boat. Something massive is emerging from the water!

To be continued ....

Image credit: Harper Zhang portrait screengrabbed from YouTube video compilation of AI-generated images.