Episode II - The Mining Camp

NOTE: For the sake of convenience, I will refer to Kappo as Kappo throughout, not by his various alter-aliases, unless the situation warrants otherwise.

Having received from Panderjack some satellite and aerial recon photos of the installation, our intrepid crew made some vague plans and set off for the area, ready to become highly-paid heroes. Just before take-off, reports reached them from Panderjack that the leader of the Cordwainer extremist group had cut off communications, and that there was no reply to their hails although the comms system was still up and running. "That's odd" they thought, and set off without further delay.

Except for one or two delays.

Kappo was given the task of operating the communications console, but could not bring himself to touch it without first scrubbing it down with an industrial strength disinfectant, to minimize the risk of catching any sort of Vulcan cooties. The computer immediately raised an alarm to alert K'pok to the fact that Kappo was interfering with its systems and introducing potentially toxic chemicals to its surfaces. Kappo was eventually calmed to the point where he could sit in a Vulcan chair, but then found that he couldn't read any of the control labels or tell-tales (they all being rendered in the Vulcan script). K'pok provided translations for him, and he began sticking sticky labels all over the console — at which point the computer raised another alarm, etc. etc.

Meanwhile, Weptish had been poking around all over the engineering section, offering to make little "improvements" here and there, much to the dismay and vocal disapproval of the ship's computer, and then disappeared out the exit hatch to pick up a few things which might come in handy — such as an old rubber tyre, for example. (Why? Your guess is as good as mine).

Jek Porkins mainly just sat brooding on the unfairness of the universe and the venal spitefulness of the Mind Police training personnel.

Eventually, our intrepid team got underway and flew without incident to the coordinates of the mining installation. They hovered for a short time, debating whether or not turning on the ship's shields would be a good idea or whether that might alarm the hostage-takers. It was decided to land defenseless in order not to appear hostile, and K'pok began hailing the control tower. There was no response, though the automatic landing beacon was still functioning. In response to K'pok's queries, the computer reported that its scanners were subject to low-level interference due to the relatively high level of ambient radiation in the region, but it was easily able to compensate. A scan of the installation buildings showed no humanoid life signs at all.

Above: fly-by showing the landing pad and traffic/loading control building Left: satellite view of the installation

K'pok landed on the elevated landing platform, and they performed a visual scan of the surrounds. The door to the control tower appeared to have been broken in, but there was no movement or sign of life to be seen. The atmosphere of Cordwainer being somewhat thin, they decided to make use of the ship's store of EVA suits — not strictly necessary, but the protection and comms capabilities of the suits, not to mention their shields and A.G. harnesses, were deemed to outweigh the slight hindrance of the party's movement. Kappo, naturally, wanted to have his suit thoroughly irradiated and disinfected before he would put it on (those Vulcan cooties again), but fortunately one of the spare suits was still in its original factory wrappings, and he persuaded himself that it was probably safe.

The group made their way out of the ship and through the broken doors into what appeared to be a loading bay. Ore barrels on loading pallets and several loading robots were the only occupants of the area, but running across the plascrete floor towards a freight elevator was what appeared to be a sticky smear of blood and entrails. This was unanimously agreed to be a Bad Sign, not least because it almost certainly meant they wouldn't be getting their $12,000 "Zero Body Count" bonus. They tried to call the freight elevator, but it sounded as though it was jamming in its shaft. A smaller personnel elevator was available however, and three of the party took it down to the lower floor, leaving Kappo alone in the loading bay. From the lower loading bay, they were able to call the freight elevator and get the doors open, and it could then be seen that the blood trail stopped in the middle of the elevator floor. Looking up, they could see that the service hatch in the ceiling appeared to be gummed closed with more blood and goo, indicating that a body had been dragged up through it. For some reason, nobody seemed very keen on poking their own heads up through the hatch....

Instead, they decided to take the smaller elevator up to the top floor, where the traffic control centre was located. Again, it was abandoned, but there appeared to be signs of small arms fire and a couple of the terminals had been shot out, though no vital systems had been affected. Someone called up the most recent logs, but nothing illuminating was found there — just the usual arrivals, departures and loading specs.

Weptish got the idea to attach one of the loading bay security cameras to a loading robot's derrick arm and use it as a mobile surveillance drone to find out what was on the other side of the gruesome Hatch of Gore in the ceiling of the freight elevator. After a false start in which they discovered that there wasn't enough light to see anything by (easily fixed by duct-taping a flashlight alongside the camera), they maneuvered the robot into the freight elevator and opened the hatch remotely. The video quality on the companion camera's teensy little screen was not very good, but it could be seen that the guide rails at the back of the elevator shaft were buckled and there appeared to be damage to the plascrete wall of the shaft itself. The camera monitor was inadequate for a detailed survey, so at length Jek decided to go through the hatch himself.

Meanwhile, Kappo had crept into a secret fort made of ore barrels back up in the upper loading bay, from where he kept up with events over his suit comms and hoped not to be brutally killed to death in nasty and unpleasant ways.

Jek climbed up on top of the freight elevator, and immediately found what had been stopping it running freely up the shaft — the rear guide rail was very badly buckled and corroded, and a large area of the plascrete around it also appeared to have been eaten away by some powerful corrosive. The top and rear of the elevator itself was also very badly pitted and corroded. There was no sign of any body, though there was a good deal of blood and gore on the elevator roof. A bio-scan indicated that most of the gore was of human origin, but there were strange DNA readings from the corroded area of the shaft; there was no match found in the scanner's database, nor could a match be found by the ship's computer when the data was relayed to it.

Coming out from the lower loading bay, the team began exploring below the landing platform itself. They found the platform to be supported by a thick central pillar, and stabilized by lighter columns around its circumference. A number of vehicles were parked in its shelter. Moving among the parked vehicles, one of the team stumbled upon two strange creatures — apparently dead. They looked like naked fleshy greyish-pink spiders, their bodies about the size of a basketball and with long knobbly legs. Using K'pok's bio-scanner, they soon found that the things matched the DNA signature detected in the elevator shaft; K'pok could detect no electrical activity from them, nor any other life signs, but Weptish wanted to take no chances and shot one with his laser pistol from a safe distance. The results were quite spectacular — it exploded into steaming gobbets, and where the bits landed the plascrete surface steamed and bubbled as it was eaten away. "Aha!" they said. "Now we know what did the damage to the elevator shaft". Weptish, having cast his mind back to his old xenobiological training, postulated that they might possibly be some sort of old Xenovore bio-weapon; perhaps the miners had accidentally unearthed an old Xenovore military cache?

The party made their way back on board the ship, and recalibrated the scanners to pick up traces of the anomalous DNA sample they'd found in the elevator shaft and in the creatures under the platform. A quick scan of the surrounding area located a total of six sources of the material, all beneath the landing platform.

Kappo, meanwhile, had been investigating the support column of the platform, and found a locked access hatch secured by a simple mechanical lock which he had open in no time. Inside was a vertical tube with a ladder running up one side — a filthy ladder, almost certainly swarming with god knows what germs and bacteria. Jek bravely dared the teeming swarms of disease-causing dust and dirt however, and squeezed his massive bulk up the ladder to find a circular opening with hatches equally spaced around its periphery, what appeared to be a control terminal, and a loading pallet which had strapped to it what appeared to be a bunch of large, leathery puffballs, all of which appeared to have been burst open. Avoiding the puffballs for the moment, he checked out the terminal and found it to be the controls for the landing beacons. Using Kappo's camera, he took photos of the pallet and it load, especially a serial number which appeared to have been partially erased with a laser. Only three of the characters could be made out, and from its length it looked as though it had been a 16-character alphanumeric sequence. Closer investigation of the puffballs themselves showed them to be empty, except for a sticky glutinous residue left in the bottom of each.

Leaving that particular mystery for the moment, the team made their way over towards the office and accommodations building where with a very perfunctory examination they again found evidence of small arms fire, but no bodies. Carrying on to the refinery they found the entrance barricaded; Weptish again called on the services of a loading droid to break down the barricades and they made their way inside. There was no sign of life to be found, and no bodies at all, but all of the machinery appeared to be still operational and running in standby mode. Kappo contacted Panderjack via the ship's comms to check whether the machines should be shut down or not; the company requested that they be left running as they were.

Investigating further, the party found the mine entrance itself down the back of the refinery building — a large circular passage made up of what appeared to be flexible metal ducting with a metal grid floor. The entrance was choked with automated ore carriers, but they managed to clamber over and past them without too many difficulties and continued on into the mines, still searching for any sign of the missing miners. As they moved further in and down, the ambient temperature and humidity began to rise sharply until they found themselves walking in a dense fog. The ventilation and power ducts running along the ceiling of the shafts had been ruptured in several places, and at some points were encased in what appeared to be some sort of resinous extrusion, which reminded them sharply of the Xenovore foundations of Cordwainer City. Mutterings of "This is not good, this is not good" started to make themselves heard from our intrepid crew. At this point Weptish suddenly realized that the dense fog was going to play hell with their lasers if they had to shoot their way out.... and just to make the situation even better, it was found that the dense plauttite deposits were interfering with communications back to the ship to the point where they were indecipherable. Oh, joy.

Moving further into the mine workings, the shafts no longer showed any sign of Terran construction, being entirely formed from the Xenovore resin. Nervousness mounted, and suddenly K'pok's bio-scanner registered human life signs up ahead. Hurrying forward, they found themselves suddenly in a large open chamber, its floor and ledges entirely covered in what must be thousands of the strange puffball-like objects Jek had found in the landing beacon control chamber. Kappo, and to a lesser extent Weptish, began making noises about getting out and just telling the authorities about the whole thing. K'pok demurred, saying that they had a responsibility to rescue anyone still alive, and eventually resorted to bribery, offering to take them back into Imperial space in her ship if they agreed to stay and help. K'pok homed in on the life signs she had detected and pinpointed them up on one of the wall ledges of the chamber, and began working out how to get to them without disturbing any of the eggs when her spatial scanner alerted her to movement back up the passage. . . . .