Note: In the interests of keeping track of what's happened when and to whom, while maintaining my habitual sloth and indolence, I've written this highly abbreviated summary of recent events:
K'pok limps slowly back towards the Hzeel freighter, failing to observe the tiny life-pod zooming past her.
Jek, Measure Twice and Weptish, by means of a bit of random fumbling, manage more or less accidentally to restore artificial gravity. On the bridge they feel a sudden jolt through the floor-plates. Jek, looking out a window, observes something tumbling rapidly away from the ship, but cannot identify it.
After a while, Jek decides to investigate and floats off back down towards the airlocks. Down a stairwell and through a pressure door, he surprises — and is himself surprised to run into — a large humanoid wearing a Nasty Scary Ruthless Warrior brand environment suit and hefting a HUGE plasma rifle. All hell breaks loose and Jek ends up floating unconscious in a thoroughly melted stairwell, saved from being brutally killed to death by his trusty armoured EVA suit.
Measure Twice is alerted by Jek's girlish shrieks over the radoi and makes his way cautiously down the stairwell, narrowly missing being blown up by one of the warrior's plasma grenades.
Jek recovers consciousness moments before the Ackalian and zaps the bejeezus out of it, fortunately failing to ignite the bandolier of plasma grenades across its chest.
K'pok attempts to rendezvous and dock with the freighter, but is startled when it disappears from hyperspace. Fortunately, she isn't travelling at too fast a clip, but nevertheless by the time she is able to initiate her own exit from hyperspace the separation between the two craft is several million kilometres.
Jek and Measure egage in a fire-fight with an indeterminate number of foes in the main cargo deck. Jek, as usual, spends considerable time unconscious. By the time Weptish makes it down there to join in, Measure is also feeling poorly.
K'pok eventually catches up and attempts to dock at the ventral docking port. With a masterful display of piloting she actually collides with the ship, sending it tumbling sedately through space and upsetting the combatants who are getting it on in the cargo bay.
K'pok manages to dock successfully on her second attempt, and responding to the wails coming over the suit radios makes her way down to the cargo deck to join in the fun. More biffo ensues. At some point, I don't recall exactly when, the artificial gravity stutters and goes off again; Weptish is immediately blamed.
One of the bad guys ignites a couple of smoke grenades and makes his escape up the freight elevator; Our Heroes, hearing the elevator (by some mystic means through vacuum — once again the GM's poor memory comes into play) assumed it meant the arrival of more foes, rather than the exit of the ones they already had. They hunkered down for another attack, until after some time they realised that they were the only ones left fighting. K'pok gets an emergency distress call from her ship AI alerting her to the fact that someone was attempting to force access, and then that intruders had enterd the vessel.
K'pok dashed back up the stairwell with Measure to try to find the escapees, leaving Jek and Weptish to investigate the battleground. Jek attempts to salvage a fallen Ackalian's plasma rifle which had unfortunately been rigged; once again he enjoys the thrill of flying through the air (OK, the vacuum) on a wave of white-hot plasma. Once again he is saved from annihilation by his extremely expensive and increasingly battered EVA suit.
K'pok and Measure get up to Deck 4 in time to the elevator to the ventral lock; pounding down the corridor they stabbed frantically at the call button. The elevator arrived and the door opened; Measure leaned forward alertly to check whether or not the Bad Guys had left any unpleasant surprises, and was therefore in the ideal position to see the plasma grenade drop right at his feet. Bravely he shielded K'pok from the blast by not being able to get out of the way in time, and he too experienced the Jek Effect, ending up sprawled down the other end of the corridor.
About then, the ship shuddered and its tumbling worsened as the Ackalian pilot tore loose from the docking clamps. K'pok is understandably upset at having her ship, and also her mother's body, stolen. Unfortunately there's not a hell of a lot she can do about it.
An extended period of tinkering with the ship's systems is undertaken, guided inexpertly by Measure's extremely basic grasp of the Hzeel language and script. Not much is achieved initially except to lock themselves out of the systems until Jek manages to trace a hardware bypass. Eventually, by trial and error, enough systems are deciphered to restore the life support systems, and more importantly, to determine that they don't work and are busily pouring nasty poisonous gases through all the corridors and staterooms. Weptish goes off to check the plant and finds the tell-tale holes left by duct-creepers. Measure, checking the manifests, finds a lot more weaponry installed than one would expect of an innocent freighter.
Jek checks out the gravity generators, squeezing his majestic bulk through the very tight confines of the Underdecks, but having not the first clue what he should be looking for can't find out why they aren't working properly. He does find out what caused the hyperdrive to malfunction however — it had melted down to worthless slag, though he doesn't know why.
Once he got back up on the bridge, it suddenly occurred to Jek that since the ship was a Terran design, the Hzeel systems were probably just a translation overlay over the Terran originals — and so it proved to be. The previous week turned out to be largely fruitless effort, not to mention the discomfort of being confined to EVA suits for such a length of time — d'oh! Once he made the appropriate adjustments, almost all of the systems became freely available. Only the security protocols remain undeciphered, and they soon submitted to Jek's ministrations. And not too soon, as it soon became clear.
The Ackalians had managed to get the Vulcan ship more or less under control, and with their characteristic stubborness were having another go at the Hzeel vessel. Though inexpert at manipulating the ship's tactical systems, the defences were more than adequate to fend off the attacks of the Ackalians as long as Measure could angle the shields, which he did almost half the time.
K'pok attempted to disable her ship with a shot to the reactionless drives, but miscalculated the power of her lasers slightly, missed her target and accidentally blasted a gaping hole right through the bridge. Her ship immediately lost all power and control, and drifted off into the void.
Our Heroes caught up with it easily, harpooned it with magnetic grapples and boarded to find nothing where the bridge used to be, and a badly wounded Ackalian in one of the med bay hibernation chambers. Jek quietly spaced him and regretfully told K'pok that there was nothing he could do for the injured warrior. K'pok found her mother's corpse still safely frozen, Weptish managed to retrieve his collection of Weird Stuff, and together everyone began to salvage as much usable stuff as possible.
Weptish has a plan to build the Hyperdrive Of Doom with salvaged bits and pieces and whatever components can be saved from the freighter's drive, but that's still very much a work in progress and the ship is currently far, far away from civilization. A sensor scan managed to detect some faint signals that indicate sentient technological life, but they emanate from a direction in which the nearest star is over a light-year away, and even at best speed using the ship's reaction drives it will take several years to get there — and there's no guarantee that the nearest star system is the source of the signals. Our Heroes settle in for a long, boring trip and hope that Weptish manages to come up with a miracle before the food and life support supplies run out.
Measure Twice, with the aid of his trusty Hzeel phrase book, ploughed his way through the ship's logs and cargo manifests. Much he found incomprehensible, but he did find a reference to his two comrades, who had been travelling on board in stasis as cargo — it appears that they had been sold off to some tin-pot warlord outside the fringes of Terran space; a notation accompanying the entry contains a recommendation that they be pithed before revivication to ensure that they are controllable. This information has caused Measure some upset; there's no possible way he can reach the planet in time for a rescue mission, but honour demands revenge.....
Jek is relieved to be in a relatively roomy spacecraft after the extremely cramped quarters on board K'pok's ship, but all of the sleeping quarters — and more importantly, all of the ablutions — have been rebuilt to suit the Hzeel stature. A Jek-sized bed he can build, but he's forced to shower one limb at a time, and going to the toilet is an exercise in claustrophobia.
K'pok is as stoic as ever in the face of the prospect of years drifting through space. She has her meditation equipment, and she keeps herself occupied familiarising herself with the ship's systems.
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