Marooned on Ada Soleta
In our previous session, the crew of the Deepnight Revelation took the Droyne they had rescued from the clutches of the Evolver Cult back to their home world. This added another couple of weeks or so to their journey. From there, they headed back to Osk and then continued their journey towards the edge of the sector.
The next world was Etareh, a boring gas giant with a terrestrial world with seas full of green sludge. Here, algae blooms had totally filled the seas, turning them a dark green. The land though was barren rock. Deciding not to stay here, they headed onwards to Ada Soleta.
This system was known to have a garden world, but having just stocked up on supplies they didn’t need to stop here. It was most convenient to come out of jump around an Ice Giant in the outer system, before heading onwards. The original plan, before they’d decided to take a detour to avoid a red dwarf star with a deep jump mask, was that they’d come straight here and restock on supplies. I’d guessed the players would come here, and then I’d drop a plot hook on them in the firm of evidence of Chirpers and Droyne.
But they’d now done that adventure, and were now arriving at the hook backwards.
There was sign of a low industrial level of civilisation on the second planet of the system, and also a starship heading there from planet 3. So whilst they refuelled, they pinged the ship to see what was going on. The round trip for radio transmissions to the inner system from the Ice Giant was over 7 hours, so they were a good portion through refuelling by the time they got a reply.
The ship identified itself as the Curious Tiger, and belonged to a small farming colony on the second world. They had come here to get away from the Federated Commonwealth, and were just after a peaceful existence. There seemed to be a couple of smaller craft with the Curious Tiger, which was itself probably a couple of hundred dtons in size.
Meanwhile, further scans had picked up some radar from the second planet, and also possibly something on the third planet which was a much less habitable desert world. The radar on planet two seemed to be focused space ward, but there was little else above TL 5 there. So the Deepnight sent them a message as well.
According to planet 2, the ship consisted of raiders, and they had been regularly raided by the raiders who were based on planet 3. Given the time lag in getting information from the inner system, the ship’s mission commander insisted that if they were going to interfere, they would have to do it now. Even at 6G burn, it would be over 6 days to get to the inner system from the outer gas giant. Only slightly quicker than if they made another Jump.
The bridge team were on a moralistic high after their previous mission, so decided to head in. All the evidence was consistent with the farmers on planet 2 telling the truth, so they would assume that planet 3, along with the ship in transit, were hostiles.
Something I diverge from in this campaign is the concept of a ‘deep space drive’. Apparently, in some versions of Traveller, M-Drives don’t work more than a certain distance away from a mass. This is normally 1,000 diameters. This works out around the orbit of Saturn for the Sol system. This ‘rule’ is very well hidden, and isn’t mentioned in any of the core Mongoose books (Core Rulebook, Highguard etc). So when I started my campaign (and indeed, in any of my previous Traveller work), I’ve been more than happy to have colonies in the outer part of star systems, with no problems concerning M-Drive limits. Indeed, I like having small settlements in the outer belts and around Ice Giants of populated systems. It makes star systems ‘bigger’ and more varied.
When the Deepnight Revelation campaign threw in the 1,000 diameter limit, I ignored it. Because it broke everything that I’d done before. So in my game, the Deepnight has a 6G drive, and has no problem getting from an Ice Giant at 29AU to the inner system.
The Curious Tiger went into orbit around planet 2 at this time. If it had been planning on making a raid (it had), it now didn’t want to cause any trouble whilst a new ship was in the system. Given the size of the Deepnight’s drive signature, they probably realised that this newcomer was quite large.
By this point the red plant had gone very quiet – they seemed to be wanting to stay hidden. So the XO took his private shuttle, the Opportunities Multiply, out for a spin. With a 9G drive, this could make a hard deceleration burn and get to the Red Planet, doing a fast fly by if necessary.
A few days later, the Curious Tiger came out to meet the Deepnight, whilst its two fighter escorts landed somewhere on the planet. The Deepnight was getting a lot of updates from the farmers at this point as to the nature of the raiders and what they were up to.
The raiders were using tight beam transmissions back to their base on the red planet, obviously thinking that tight beam meant it was secret and hidden. There was enough back scatter though that the Deepnight could tell that a lot of conversations were going on.
When the two ships reached their intercept point, about a million kilometres from the planet, the Deepnight simply did a target lock with all its weapons and told them to surrender. By this point, their resident hacker had also managed to get into the ship’s systems, and basically change their passwords so they couldn’t do anything even if they wanted to.
The raider ship surrendered.
The Opportunities Multiply did a flyby of the red planet, and confirmed that there was a small base there. A couple of ships were out on a landing pad, though covered over with some camouflage netting.
Over the next couple of days, all the raiders surrendered. They had hostages, so a simple blast the base wasn’t an option. They were given an option to be marooned on an island on the main world, which gave them an incentive not to kill all the hostages and fight to the end.
The ships were handed over to the farmers, though they didn’t have a lot of skill in using them. The farming civilisation had some basic industry, and a population of about 100,000. Quite large for a small colony so far out, but they’d been here a while and it was a very fertile planet.
There were some signs of the Biologicals here – but only at the chemical level. The farmers had also previously captured one of the raiders, along with his ‘pet’ that turned out to be a Chirper. He’d picked it up from a nearby world – a fact that would have been a plot hook for the players to go looking for the Chirpers and Droyne if they’d wanted to. But that part of the adventure had all been done now.
The opportunity was taken to pick up some spare parts from the raider base, hand over weapons and ships to the farmers, and finally stock up on supplies. After this, they would head out and continue towards the Rimward edge of the Celadon sector.
There were three more systems before the Deepnight would cross over into LSD Transition One, which would put them about four sectors from their destination.
