After the debacle on Ierisiou, Weptish required two months of hospitalization stuck in a regeneration tank, and Jek got a month of out-patient care — medical bills generously covered by TIC, written off under the umbrella of mission-related expenses. All thas time, the party's gold mine (the derelict Hzeel freighter) was drifting further and further off the the hyperspace lanes.
Once his injuries had healed sufficiently, Jek got a job stevedoring. This made him enough money to live and breathe, and even to save a very little. By a stroke of good fortune, a windfall came his way when we realized that he hadn't spent any of his C.C.E.F. (Character Creation Equipment Fund), which had been sitting in his bank account all this time. He immediately splashed out on an armoured vac-suit which actually fits him (no more Vulcan-vac-suit wedgies), and the biggest, nastiest-looking, most frightening laser rifle he could find.
Once Weptish was discharged, planning began. Doing a quick costing, the party estimated they'd need about cr150,000 to equip to reclaim their prize from the energy leeches. Problem: party does not have cr150,000. Party has about cr5,000 between them. Sale of the salvage rights to a professional salvage company was mooted, but decided against for a number of reasons, not the least of which being a desire to avoid angering a veangeful GM. K'pok agreed to raise a mortgage using her ship as collateral through an old and highly respectable firm of financiers, Whitlow, Futtle and Crun, and they also advertised for investors, by which means they met Measure Twice, a ghurkatroid academy graduate currently on his gap year OE before being called up to the regiment.
Measure Twice was interested in the freighter since he believed it to be carrying some of his friends as cold-store freight, and agreed to invest some of his own trust-fund income (about cr50,000) in the venture. He wanted to go along to oversee his investment, of course.
At least one of the team had to go down to the surface to organise all the work they needed done to the ship — there was no genuine necessity for this, since all the equipment and workshops and what-not were at the dock station, but the Pantokratonese are nothing if not adept at infuriating bureaucratic bastardry. Since everytone else was otherwise occupied, K'pok was nominated to take care getting a licence to buy a sand-caster, to be installed in a cargo module slung beneath the hull of K'pok's ship. K'pok's natural honesty made her laughably ill-suited to dealing with a bureaucracy which is simultaneously corrupt and paranoid, but by a miracle she managed to remain un-arrested and also to stay under budget for the exercise. In the end, the 50 credit license and work order cost the team well over cr2,000 due to K'poks lack of familiarity with the ettiquette of bribery.
K'pok returned, and the sand-caster was installed without any problems at all. Alas, the cost of getting the license and work order meant that there was no cash left over to buy ammunition for it. Answer: spend a couple of weeks in the system's asteroid belt using the ship's tractor beam to hoover up iron-rich gravel. Things go right for a change, and the cargo hold is filled to capacity in only a few days. K'pok turned the ship outwards and thrust for Minimum Safe Distance for the jump to hyperspace.
Well aware that in the time since they'd first found the Hzeel freighter it had been drifting further and further away, K'pok took extreme care over her navigational calculations. She checked, and rechecked, and then checked again before committing herself to a vector. Confident that even the tiniest errors had been weeded out, she set the controls and activated the hyperspace drive....
....in completely the wrong direction. Sigh. Inevitably, in this one crucial instance, she fumbled her navigation roll and sent the ship off towards the Mon'dabi Federation. Hey-ho. A week later, when they dropped out of hyperspace the error was revealed and course adjustments were made (successfully this time), but the delay meant even longer stuck inside K'poks tiny, cramped, claustrophobia-inducing shuttle.
The projected intercept point placed them well within the Ackálian Empire, so they ran without scan in the hopes of remaining undetected. No such luck. About half way into their four-month voyage, they were attacked by a ship they never saw. K'pok managed by the skin of her teeth to dodge and zap three missiles, and thanks to a spectacular change of luck her eveasive high-jinks managed to get the unknown assailant off the scent. Once sure that they'd escaped pursuit, they continued towards their destination, and made rendezvous almost perfectly.
They used the ship's scanners to create a decoy beam to attract the energy leeches into a killing zone, than blew them to smithereens with the sand-caster. The tactic worked beautifully, but unfortunately the sand-caster ran out of gravel before the last of the leeches were destroyed; there still remained about seventy of them attached to the hull of the freighter, and quite likely more floating among the fragments of the dead leeches.
There was some debate about tactics to be used to clear the remaining leeches, but before anything could be finally decided they were interrupted by the ship's AI alerting K'pok to the fact that they were being scanned....
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