Fenella, through her contacts in the academic world, obtained references to the location of a very early religious colony (which had been thought to be completely lost) in the logs of Captain Fedor Voroshilov, a freighter captain of the very early interstellar epoch. This colony had begun with the intention of completely cutting themselves off from the rest of humanity, and after the initial settling-in period of observation, Voroshilov had simply left them to their own devices and returned to Earth. What made this particular group of interest to S.H.E.S.C. is one facet of their dogma, which required that each member of the community must, upon puberty, begin the design and execution of some life-work to be dedicated to the glory of the Universal Principle they worshipped. Often, this took the form of some sort of objet-d'art; some of these could possibly be sold to collectors for considerable sums.
The flight to the projected location of the system went uneventfully; Voroshilov proved to have been quite accurate in his observations. Sutton Hoo performed a comprehensive set of sensor sweeps from orbit, but found no evidence of any surviving technological civilization on the surface. He did detect what appeared to be the remains of an old nuclear fission reactor, and it was this area that the group decided to check out.
The area proved to be swampy, and entirely overgrown with vegetation similar to mangroves or banyans. A scan revealed an area shallow and firm enough to take the 350-ton weight of the ship only a half a kilometre or so from the site of the reactor, and after clearing a landing site with the ship's laser, they put down. Atmospheric testing showed no significant risks, but scans for life signs flooded the sensors. It was about this point that someone said "Okay, so, how do we get there? Swim?" And somebody else said "Doh! We really should buy a little ATV."
Captain Joe was the first to test the waters, and went wading out in his environment suit. Progress, he found, was slow but achievable, with the average depth of the water just over a metre. With care and a certain amount of scouting, a path could be found which would keep heads above water. Or his head, anyway -- Fenella had decided that she didn't much care for wading through the muck in her nice clean safari outfit, and elected to ride on Sutton Hoo's hovering drone. "This situation demeans both of us" grumbled Sutton, but at that point Fenella preferred physical cleanliness to moral purity and persisted with her plan. Talya and Eve decided to remain with the ship.
The trek took a little over two hours, with Sutton (and thus Fenella) loitering to maintain contact with Captain Joe, who waded through the muck and mire, ignoring the assaults of small hungry creatures on his suited body. The reactor site itself proved to be a largish concrete ziggurat, now swathed in vines and blanketed in fallen vegetable mould, and with no immmediately obvious means of ingress. Setting down Fenella, Sutton buzzed about scanning furiously, and eventually reported back with the news that surrounding a large central chamber was a network of rooms and passages, with several openings to the outside world, and that a vertical shaft, now thoroughly choked with vegetation, also pentrated the opening from the top of the ziggurat. His readings became indistinct below ground (or slush) level, but the reactor core was definitely down there, some 75 metres blow. The Captain, following Sutton's directions, eventually found and forced open a door beneath water-level, and entered the complex in his sealed environment suit. Fenella and Sutton ascended to the top of the ziggurat to see if they could clear out the blockage choking the central shaft.
To cut a long story short, there was nothing of any immediate interest found in the central chamber, and the accessible portions of the passage network appeared to be an administrative centre. The party temporarily abandoned the ziggurat, and began to explore the immediate area. In a fairly short time, they had mapped out a small area of buildings surrounding a domed, circular fane. Again, the Captain sealed his suit and entered the fane below water level; inside he found a group of statuary on plinths jutting out of the water, all set out around an ornately carved pillar in the very centre of the building. He fought off an underwater attack by some sort of scuttling, stinging creature, and frightened off several more (though he never did get a very clear look at any of them), before Sutton opened a hole in the aluminium dome with his small cutting laser.
The next several days were spent surveying and cataloguing the contents of the group of buildings around the fane. While the humans carried out this task, Sutton Hoo explored the subterranean levels of the reactor complex in more detail with one of his drones. He found a very old and crude AI core down there which was operating at coma level — very nearly dead. He brought it back online using his own power supply, but could not achieve any meaningful communication with it; all he could get were broken streams of gibberish. He ran what diagnostics he could on such archaic hardware, and postulated that the very long period at stand-by status with a steadily declining power supply had corrupted the brain beyond any hope of repair. He copied the data from the brain's storage for later analysis, and turned it off.
Back at the other buildings, the team completed their work and, having collected what they considered to be a good haul of artifacts, called in the ship to load the booty. Sutton had to expend quite a bit of fuel hovering in place while the relics were loaded, but eventually the job was done and they lifted into orbit. Departure was postponed for a while when several insect infestations were found in the ducting of the ship; Sutton cleaned them out with maintenance drones spraying radiation all over the place. In the process, he noticed an alarming thing: a delay occurred in the execution of his functions which he could not account for. He performed a quick series of diagnostics, and discovered that he'd picked up a rather nasty infection from the AI at the reactor complex which was progressively screwing up his data paths. He alerted the team that something was up, left instructions in case he failed to come back on line, shut down all non-essential systems, and proceeded to perform a comprehensive disinfection. Unfortunately, while the disinfection removed the virus, it didn't restore the missing data adequately, so Sutton Hoo was forced to restore himself from backup. That went perfectly smoothly (fortunately), but it meant that Sutton lost everything from immediately before planetfall; as a result, when he checked fuel reserves, he found them to be unexpectedly low and hit the "Whoop! Whoop!" button. Nobody thought to tell him that they'd been farting about on the surface for several days and so he assumed that there was some sort of leakage occurring somewhere. His alarm transferred itself to the rest of the crew, who started looking frantically for the nearest available fuel and repair depot.
On the way to Slowpoke VI (the closest depot on the charts), Sutton attempted unsuccesfully to track down the source of the mysterious leak. All systems, as far as he could tell, were working fine. They landed at the rather basic Slowpoke starport, and Fenella went off with Talya, Captain Joe and Eve to see if they could buy some fuel. Talya was hit on almost immediately by some sleazy slob, but in spite of the best efforts of the GM, they absolutely refused to be drawn into a fight. Bah!
This was supposed to be their non-lethal introduction to the combat system; which just goes to show that PCs are a pig-headed, contrary bunch and it's hardly worth planning anything because they'll just ignore you and do whatever they want to.
Anyway, they got some overpriced fuel, filled up, and headed off back to their old base on Somewhere. There Fenella did a quick and dirty deal with a sleazy importer who took their whole cargo off their hands at a bargain price, earning everyone a bunch of cash.
The first thing Captain Joe bought was a small ATV -- basically just a slow cargo platform, with a load capacity of a couple of tons and a lifting arm for loading and unloading. The second thing he bought was a second-hand sealed military assault blaster which he could drop in the water without having it short out :). Talya bought the Sniper Rifle From Hell and a pair of multi-goggles, and Fenella didn't buy anything much at all.