Cold Blooded Sanity

It’s been just over a month since our previous session of Deepnight Revelation, due to various real life issues getting in the way. It was good to get back to the campaign, especially since the final goal is in sight. At least it has given me a bit of time to prepare some things, and think about what could happen. The problem I have with published campaigns is that things don’t necessarily come naturally to me. I find running my own stuff a lot easier than running somebody else’s ideas.

Previously, they had been at the system, conducting biological warfare tests. The next plan was to run some basic military drills once they reached the world of Hemigucu in four jumps time.

During the next jump, an issue is raised in the weekly science meetings about certain people hogging use of Kyrransk, the Droyne AI Agent that they had onboard the ship. Two of the crew, Vania Ervine and Niamh McCabe, had been spending a lot of time using it. Apparently, they’d been conversing with it about the Entity, and the Droyne’s reasons for seeking it out. They are told to give a presentation on what they found out.

According to the Droyne AI (and nobody is quite certain how much of what it says can be trusted), the crew of the Treviskiss (the Droyne vessel that had come this way 300,000 years ago) had been the survivors of a high tech Droyne world that had been destroyed by the Entity. The mission was one of revenge – seeking to hunt down and destroy the source of the infection that had destroyed the Droyne world.

According to Kyyransk, the Entity had gone through a stage of being intelligent, and the Droyne had been able to speak with it. However, nothing they could do could prevent it from consuming their world, and eventually itself.

Vania and Niamh both had their own reasons for being on the mission. Niamh had been one of the rescue team that had seen their friends die at Candling Station when it became infected by the Entity. Vania had been a biologist aboard the Deepnight Endeavour, who had seen her friends and coworkers become infected and die when that ship was consumed by it. Both were out for revenge, and Kyyransk seemed to be fuelling that emotion. They weren’t the only ones of the ship who saw the mission solely from the perspective of wanting to destroy the Entity.

The mission leaders decide a subtle campaign to ensure that this isn’t the only thought on people’s minds when they reach the destination is needed. It still isn’t certain what will be found there, or whether killing it will be the desired approach. If a decision goes against what some of the crew strongly want, they might get upset and cause problems.

Other topics of discussion concerned the destination itself. Spending over two weeks running biological warfare experiments had given the small fleet time to scan ahead, and they now had a bit more information on their destination. There was some form of gravitic shell, around which orbited a small K-8 star. There were gas giants and what looked like a habitable world around the red dwarf star.

The scientists dig up old papers (i.e. the players reference some recent science articles on the subject) about shell swarms, and point out that such a shell couldn’t possibly be stable over a long period of time. Something must be keeping them stable.

At the system of Stasod, there is little more than a gas giant. However, there is a buoy in a high orbit around the jovian world. It’s old, and determined to be of Droyne manufacture when they send a scout out to take a look. It’s dormant, but seems to have a heavily encrypted set of data records.

Kyrransk is needed to access it, but the crew don’t want to bring the buoy aboard the ship. A bit of fiddling later, and Kyrransk is setup with a UPS and flown out to the buoy. The AI claims to be able to access it, and provide details on what it contains – which includes astronomical data on the nearby systems.

The buoy is a message left by the Treviskiss. They had feared that they would not return from the end of their mission, so had left behind what they knew so far.

• The destination had a strange gravitic anomaly that surrounded the inner star of the system. Their scientists were working on plans on getting through it.
• There was a space faring civilisation that seemed to inhabit several of the systems ahead. It may turn out to be a threat, which was one reason for leaving the record.
• There were details on the crew of the ship.

The Dryone called the civilisation the Verg, and thought they inhabited systems at 1720, 1623, 1922 and 1226. Estimates on their level of technology would be around TL 10.

Eventually, the Deepnight reaches the system of Hemigucu 1816. The plan here is run some training exercises, including combined air and ground units in a simulated hot extraction scenario. The Solomani vessels will act as mobile artillery, with the scouts and shuttles being used to extra ground forces off the surface of the world whilst under simulated ground fire.

I give the players a chance to select the priority of what they what to improve out of three options. In order, they select: Cooperation, Morale and Skill. For each, they get a simple 2D6 check, starting at difficulty 4 for the first priority option, going to 6 for the second and 8 for the third. They pass all three checks, which means I’ll give them some bonuses if any of these things come up later on.

During the operation, the Solomani vessel Leonard Hussey picks up something unusual during a surface scan. Once the operation is completed, they head to investigate, and discover the ruins of a spacecraft.

So an archaeology team is put together and over the next few days they unearth what appears to be a 300,000 year old craft. It is mostly constructed from a mix of steel and titanium, which implies a TL of around 9 or 10. It looks like it had the remains of a jump drive, but there is very little survived apart from a rough skeleton of the vessel.

There are some organic remains though – the partial skeletons of human-sized humanoids with some signs of having used cybernetics. They also unearth some stone buildings, which also have similar bones in them. It looks like the ship settled down here (no signs of a violent crash), and possibly the crew stayed put until they died.

Some of the remains are taken up to the Deepnight for further study. The ship was somewhere between 100t and 1,000t in size.

The fleet heads onwards.

A couple of days into jump, Khadashi gets a call from one of the biologists – Uriel Endson. She seems oddly calm as she tells Khadashi that she’s contacting him because he has good contacts in high places, and thinks he will probably do the right thing. He notices that she has some blood spatters on her lab coat and face.

She tells him to get some security guards and to get down to lab four, and to not let anyone in or out. They should bring guns. Possibly a flamer. He also needs to ensure that all security access for herself, Yan Holdry (a lab assistant) and Gail Phillipa (a biologist) are to be revoked immediately. There’s been an incident.

She reaches up to brush some hair out of her face, and Khadashi notices that she is holding a blood covered scalpel, and her hand and sleeve is covered in fresh blood.

Khadashi doesn’t question anything, and does as asked, also adding the command staff to the party that turns up and guards the lab door.

Re-contacting Uriel, she calmly explains that one of the bone samples brought up from the planet seems to have had samples of the Entity embedded deep within it. There was nothing on the outside of the bones, so nothing that was picked up by the safety checks that were done on the planet. She doesn’t blame any of the archaeologists.

When she was cutting into the bone to take samples though, for a portion of time it was outside of the containment box. It wasn’t until she put some samples into a petri dish, that she noticed that some cells were ‘waking up’. A check of the DNA matched to the Entity. She locked everything down as quickly as she could, and ordered the two others in the lab into the hazard containment room.

Both Gail and Yan dithered, then Yan decided he wasn’t going to stay in the lab with a possible infection and tried to leave. Uriel grabbed a scalpel and slit his throat as he went past. Gail then did as she was told. Uriel seems to be utterly calm, possibly in a state of detached shock.

The next few days consist of trying to control rumours, and talking Uriel through cleansing down the lab and disposing of anything that might be infected in the mini incinerator. Gail is in a worse state, but remains in the protection of the hazard room. Both get hungry, but there is at least water. With all air vents to the lab locked down, they end up spending a lot of time in vacc suits.

Eventually it is determined that any infection has been dealt with. As best as can be determined, the infection didn’t contaminate anything outside of the petri dish, so all three had been safe an uninfected. Which means there hadn’t been a need to kill Yan.

However, Uriel didn’t know that, and the general feeling amongst the command team (and the players) is that Uriel absolutely did the right thing. Uriel is commended for her actions. The crew probably understand that from a rational perspective, but how they will treat it emotionally is another matter.

This was a situation that I’d thought of during the day before the game, and thought that it would be interesting to play through. The players seemed quite apologetic in how they handled it – but their reactions were pretty much what I’d expected.

As an event, in involved forcing a failure of the ship’s processes, but I decided that what happened was reasonable. For something like this, I wouldn’t force anything that put the ship in a lot of danger without good reason. In this case, the ship was in no danger – the infection was never going to spread. The entire ‘bad event’ was simply the death of a single crew member. But it shows the crew that things are real, and the commendation that was given to Uriel shows them how they should be acting. Which may also have an effect on future actions.

There’s probably only a few sessions now until the ship reaches its destination, about 15 parsecs away.