Death on a Starship
The Travellers had pretty much finished exploring the Aslan base, so after some quick final run arounds they left the asteroid behind them. They announce their findings the planetary government at Berlichingen. Given the size of Berlichingen, there’s not much that the government is either interested in doing or capable of doing. However, there are warships here from both Serendip Belt and Neubayern.
Neither want to get involved, but neither wants the other to get involved, so both sides declare that the asteroid is a no-go zone until a proper research team can get there.
On 1106-159 they head into jump space and begin the week long trip to Topas. They do have the singer Gyr on board, and she offers to sing in the evenings in order to help pass the time.
However, two days into the trip they notice that one of their passengers, the art collector Felix Miller doesn’t appear for dinner. On checking his cabin, they find out that he is dead. As far as Zanobia can tell, he died of a heart attack. They had a search of his room, and found a couple of paintings in there – quite decent ones by Nigel Nikateema, both of city scapes – as well as about Cr65,000 in cash.
Needing somewhere to stash the body they woke up one of the passengers from the low berths, upgrading them to high passage for free, and then stuffed the corpse into the low berth.
There really was nothing untoward going on – it was a natural death, and I gave the players an opportunity to pick up about half a million credits in stuff for free (probably less if they sold it on the black market). They decided to be good though and when they got to Topas they report the death and hand over both the body and all his possessions so that they can be distributed to his next of kin. Since Zanobia is a medical doctor, they accept her word of what happened with only a cursory check themselves.
Though the PCs had some details of who Felix Miller was probably going to be visiting on Topas they decide to leave all that to the authorities and get on with picking up some cargo for the next leg of their journey to Serendip Belt. The only interesting thing happening at Topas is a wanted warning about a terrorist, Eloise Brodeur, for whom they have put out a Cr100,000 bounty. There is a warning that she is extremely dangerous and probably looking to escape off world.
It’s A Sex Thing gets some cargo and passengers and leaves Topas without incident, jumping towards Serendip Belt on 1106-72.
Though not a great deal of action happened during the session, there was quite a bit of roleplaying with the passengers and around the incident of the death. We left things in jump-space since there’s going to be a couple of week’s break before the next session, which will give me some time to think about where things are going next with the campaign.
The travellers have the evidence that there was an Aslan landing on New Colchis to investigate, and also a possible follow up to the Deepnight Endeavour incident, though that’s going to be further into the future.
