Salvage!
This year at WorldCon in Glasgow I managed to get into a game of Traveller. Though I’ve been running it for the last few years, I haven’t actually played Traveller since the early 90s. So it was good to give the game a try from a player’s perspective. It was also good to play with a random group of people that I hadn’t played with before. It was a fun game, even if I did need to drop out just before the end in order to run off to watch the WorldCon Orchestra.
We live in an isolated star system called Skemta/1032, in the Foreven Sector. Four hundred years ago, there was a civil war which resulted in the use of relativistic bombardment of the home world, leaving behind little more than a pile of rubble. We’ve been cut off from the rest of the galaxy since then, trying to build back up to being able to manipulate gravity and build jump drives.
We, members of the Open Alliance, are scientists aboard a secret station in the outer system where we work on a secretive project to build a prototype jump drive. It needs to be secret in order to keep it hidden from the eyes of the Skenta League. They are the other major power in the system, and really not nice people to deal with (we know this to be true, because our Propaganda Minister tells us so).
There are five of us aboard the station:
- Daca Harlow, a Pilot
- James Johnson, our computer tech
- George Wisconsin, our lead Administrator
- Haldron Mocrra, our chief Engineer
- plus myself, Lance Morkov the station’s sensor specialist.
There is also a sixth, our gunner, but we are striking his name from the records for reasons which will become obvious later.
It is a normal day aboard the station, preparing for testing the next iteration of the jump prototype, when alarms go off in the station. What has not happened for 400 years has happened – a jump ship has arrived in the system. It’s not far from our station, and going by our sensor readings, the ship probably suffered a mis-jump. It is a large ship, which we eventually determine to be about 400 displacement tons! This is four times the size of our current prototype.
Since there is nobody else nearby, it is up to us to investigate and claim the ship as salvage. There are no signs of life coming from the ship, but if the jump drive is still intact then that would be a huge leap forward for our project.
We no longer have access to the almost mythical ‘grav tech’, so our ship is only equipped with a small reaction drive with limited fuel (for safety reasons the fuel for the jump drive is not connected to the reaction drive). We have 10 hours of fuel, so figure out that a 6 hour burn will get us to the new ship in about 2½ days, leaving plenty of fuel for a slightly slower return.
We try and setup the station’s sensors to alert us if any other ships are detected during our trip, when another warning alerts us to a second EM signature. There is a 600t Skemta battleship not far away and heading towards “our” salvage. What the hell was such a ship doing in nearby space? Unlikely to be a coincidence, and since we hadn’t detected it, we assume it was here spying on us. How did it know we were here?
Anyway, we re-plot our course for an 8 hour burn, cutting our trip down to 1½ days. Our sixth crew member is complaining of a bad knee, so stays behind to look after the station. The rest of us get aboard and head off. 4 hours of high-g burn is not going to be pleasant, but should get us to our destinaton about 24 hours before the battleship gets there.
About two hours into our burn, we receive a message from the station “Eureka!”. Huh? What did he mean by that? Then there is a bang, and all hell breaks loose. We lose power to pretty much everything, and the ship begins to tumble as ruptured fuel lines sets us spinning.
After some emergency work, we determine that a bad payload was sent across in the message which destroyed the escape pod and fuel lines. Once we get systems back up, we make sure that all further message from the traitor are blocked, and James does a clean sweep of our computer systems to ensure all traces of the virus is wiped out.
Harold and George take it on themselves to repair the fuel line and get the engines working again. Our ship is equipped with six missiles, but their avionics are also scrapped. We manage to repair one of the missiles with spare parts from our ship, and slave two of the others to it. It won’t be much against a battleship, but if we get a surprise hit in from close range then we might be able to hurt them.
So we start the drives again, and the thrust is somewhat unsteady – but the ship holds together. We are thankful when the drive shut down and we begin the coasting part of the journey. But soon we flip over and begin the deceleration burn. If it wasn’t for the skills of our pilot holding the ship on course despite the now off-axis thrust then we probably wouldn’t had made it.
Our 24 hour lead time was now down to about six hours – hopefully this would be enough to get us on board and allow us to salvage whatever still worked. We are able to line up our airlocks and complete a dock, so we all head out in our vacc suits. However, the other ship’s airlock was non-functional. After some jury-rigging of the power, our engineer gets it open and we clamber inside.
Surprisingly the ship has gravity, despite not being under acceleration. What strange magical technology was this? It was quiet though, with no signs of life. Interior doors are smashed open and there are signs of a fight. Deciding haste is more important than safety, we split it, and I head towards the front of the ship with our pilot and administrator.
When we reach the bridge we discover that it seems to have been wielded shut from the other side. There is no easy way to get it open, so I head back to our ship to get some cutting equipment. In the mean time we hear from our companions that they have come across areas of the ship where furniture has been smashed, and there are the bodies of humans impaled on the furniture. The engineering room still appears intact, though not active.
Cutting through into the bridge takes some time, and inside we find a room full of blank and featureless control panels. No displays, buttons or other controls. There are three chairs, and in one is a person surrounded by food wrappers and empty cartons.
He looks sick – half starved, but still alive. Eventually we get him to accept food, though he seems confused and paranoid, acting as if we are a hallucination. After much gesturing from Dace though, the crewman waves his hands over his console, and it and the others come alive as holograms project above them. They show sensor displays, astrogation plots and engineering data.
Down in the engineering room, the others notice that the engineering systems have come alive.
Dace starts waving madly at the controls, bringing up what seems to be a sensor display showing us, our ship outside and the enemy battleship that is now only hours away and decelerating hard. From outside the hull, there is suddenly a bang and then a hiss – followed by the slamming of doors. The dots which show our ship and the battleship are beginning to move away from us. However, we feel no acceleration.
More dots and tracks appear on the display, all with inbound vectors heading our way – missiles! Dace is again able to find the gunnery controls, and after much waving at holographic buttons, we discover that our new ship has sufficient point defence systems to take on the enemy battleship. Not only are the missiles destroyed, but the battleship is left in a poor state by the time we move outside of range.
This new ship is of a technology level we haven’t seen in our system for hundreds of years – and now it belongs to us and the Open Alliance. We have control of the most powerful warship in the system, and I’m sure we’ll use that power responsibly!
