More Pirates at the Meriden System 

 

While traveling to the new system, Gabriel checking the mass detectors can detect ships at the destination planet. We are still too far away to get a solid count, but definitely ships.

 

Max and Vincent get into the Horus and prepare for separation. The civilians, their head leader named Jason, are ordered into their drop shuttles for their own safety, while K'nigley gets onto the computers.

 

We hit star-rise at the Meriden system, and the Horus separates away immediately. The Pirates have a sophisticated jamming system, that K'nigley easily bypasses allowing full communication between the ships.

 

"This area is now claimed, this area is off limits to you…" comes a message over the intercom from the pirates.

"Claimed by who, and under what authority" answers back Gabriel.

"From the system Hathorn and under our authority! What right do you have to bring people here"

"By the right of discovery. And we have the paperwork to back this up." answers back Gabriel again.

 

{Example of screen shot using new desktop sharing program}

 

The pirates finally manage to jam communication. "Captain, they are jamming us. They aren't legitimate" calls Max from his fighter.

 

"We have previous claim to this, it's ours!" calls the ships from Hathorn.

 

"Fine, send over your ambassador with the paperwork and we will discuss it." calls Gabriel. The comm.'s go dead and the ships take up a defensive posture.

 

Gabriel gets on the internal intercom and tells everyone to prepare for an attack. The Pirates move first. The first ship moves up and shoots at the Horus, hitting with a ballistic attack but missing on the energy weapon.

 

The next pirate ship moves up and attacks the Seraph, hitting it.

 

The Archangel, not moving, goes into action. K'nigley jams the pirates communication and re-routes energy from the star-drive to the weapons. Gabriel flies up closer and attacks. As he gets closer, he can tell that none of the ships have shields. The particle beams burn into the ship for 91 points damage.

Kahana attacks with the quantum cannons, for 103 and 119 points damage, both cutting into the ship.

 

The Horus moves up and unleashes it's weapons, 66 & 107 points damage cut into the ship as it explodes into a ball of flame. Max then moves over to the other ship and begins Jinking to boost defense and does it beautifully as the pilots can't hit the ship as 3 small attack ships move up.

Two ships move up to the Seraph, hit it once.

One ship manages to hit with a burst of fire, but it does no damage as the shield blocks all of it.

The Seraph takes a couple of hits, but then attacks back and begins Jinking itself, moving very well for such a big ship.

 

A couple of missiles zoom in on target to the Archangel. Gabriel turns on the point defense system to try and hit the missiles. The first one goes up in a ball of fire as the second streaks past. K'nigley quickly tries to hit the targeting for the second missile, but misses. The explosion from the missile rocks the Archangel (96pts damage) as it slams home.

 

Two more missiles fly out and pound into the Archangel, (77 & 90).

 

Two hits pound into the Seraph from missiles (37 & 47) but neither gets through the shielding.

 

K'nigley manages to jam the mother ship, but the explosions throw him off balance and he cannot get the shields recharged. Kahana shoots at one of the small attack ships, both shots hit and manages to take a huge chunk out of it. Gabriel shoots at the medium sized ship by the Seraph, hits for 83, and begins jinking with smooth movements that.

 

Vince does 73 pts damage to all 3 of the attacking attack ships using one of the missiles, then shoots again with the quantum cannons on another. The damaged ship from Kahana's shots explodes. Max shoots, hits, and then loses his position and can't get into the rhythm of jinking.

 

Two pirate ships attack the Horus, only two fire attacks manage to hit, but both of the shots are deflected by the shields. A third moves up to attack the Horus, misses but gets so close that Max unloads with the Quantum cannons, taking away half of the attacking ships armor.

 

Four attacks come towards the Seraph but his jinking allows him to avoid all of them. The captain of the Seraph stops Jinking so he can shoot, and then begins jinking again. Two attacks manage to hit.

 

Seraph Crew: Pilot, Co-pilot, 2 engineers, 2 gunners.

 

A psychic attack comes in and assails Vince. He is able to shrug it off but warns Max.

On the Archangel, K'nigley starts mumbling and bleeding from the nose, and passes out. Two missiles shoot out at the Archangel, but the point defense system takes it out.

 

Vince picks up chatter from the fighters "They are tearing us apart, we have to get out of here we have to….." as it breaks off and a huge mental wave engulfs all the ships as a feeling of "fight on" comes to everyone's mind. The small fighters keep fighting.

 

The medical droid rushes up to K'nigley and stabalizes him. He was able to get K'nigley awake, but that was about it.

 

The Horus moves up, shoots a missile back at the 3 small attack ships hitting all three, then both Vincent and Max hit the big ship with the main weapons. Max then moves into an attack run onto the big ship, skimming along its surface and allowing both of them to shoot again.

 

The mother ship unloads with its defense system and manages to get some energy through the shields.

The fighters all gang up on Archangel. Out of six attacks, only two get through the shields. Three hits manage to get through the Seraph but only one did any damage.

 

The Seraph returns fire, with the two gunners hitting 4 out of 4 attacks, damaging the last of the two small fighters.

 

The mother ship moves past the Horus, allowing him to make an attack of opportunity. Max manages to critical the attack for 224 points damage. The damage is centered on the point defense system and manages to disable it totally! Unfortunately, this means the attacks all go towards Archangel, as a critical hit missile is inbound. The point defense system goes off and just manages to hit the missile that would have done 320 points of damage. Then the other two missiles come in, and Gabriel is able to move and avoid a critical but both missiles manage to hit for 160 points damage.

 

K'nigley is slowly waking up, he can hear the chatter from the small attack ships as they are trying to convince the mother ship to let them leave. But he can also feel the psychic wave of power going out keeping them fighting.

 

Two natural twenties indicate both attacks on the Seraph connected (110 & 81) as the large pirate ship attacks. The large escort ship tries to ram the Seraph as the Seraphs point defense system goes off. The system does connect with the larger ship for 70 points damage. The ships are almost at contact point as the escort ship bounces off the Seraphs outer shields.

 

Gabriel has K'nigley boost shields (+11) and do pinpoint on the mother ship (+5) . Gabriel then launches a missile specifically targeting the bridge to try and disrupt the mental attacks. Myr shoots at the weapons system as well upon Gabriels orders and manages to hit two separate missile tubes (114 & 125). Both shots cause missiles to explode for 300 points of damage to the mother ship. Gabriel smiles as he starts jinking.

 

Vince gets on the intercom "Surrender and power down everything but life support or we will destroy you all!"

"You don't understand! We were being controlled by our captain who had developed psychic powers…WE SURRENDER WE SURRENDER!!!" as the ships all move together but power down everything.

"We didn't want anything to do with this, you can have that ship and everything else on it. The captain has been acting weird ever since we got to this system. We don't even want anyone from the big ship, just let us group up on this escort ship, please."

 

Gabriel calls the colony on Meredith 3, they say they were taking damage from bombardment. Gabriel tells them not to worry, the pirates are rethinking who has possession of the system. Gabriel decides to drop off all passengers, the Seraph will help the people on Meredith 3, while Archangel will come back to where the Horus is monitoring the pirate ships.

 

Suddenly the escort ship starts issuing a mayday "Shut that door, help we need assistance quickly…." as personal gunfire can be heard in the transmissions background. The Horus moves to dock with Archangel as the Archangel docks with the escort ship.

 

Myr, K'nigley and the Ai with a weapon drop into the escort ship. K'nigley hides behind a door for cover as the people on the ship attack. As the people on the ship start attacking, the crew counter-attacks and manages to take out all the aggressors.

The captain of the ship comes up and thanks the party for coming to their assistance as Vince and Myr begin looting the bodies. The captain then goes into an explanation of how and why they attacked and how they were all mentally controlled.

 

Vince suggests the only way to ensure this group stays out of trouble is to join as a sub-contractor to Gabriel's company. They agree and now we have yet another ship on the roster.

 

Everyone goes back to their respective ships after Myr helps our new escort vehicle get their systems up on line. Afterwards, he takes his salvage ship over to the mother-ship to investigate it. He moves up to the bridge area and looks at the damage there. Once he arrives, he can tell the life support system is off throughout the ship, and bodies are still in place where they died if they were wearing some sort of retaining straps.

 

Myr can tell that the stardrive itself looks good, but life support is completely destroyed and five of eight decks have total breaches to space. Engineering looks good, so someone could run things from there.

When he looks at the ships computer, it has been completely wiped. This seems odd since they were caught off guard, but he realizes that there are sub-programs that look like viruses trying to erase things. He shuts those off, but by then all the data is gone. He narrows down some older data, but all data from the past seven days has been erased.

Gabriel does some searching of the registry of the ship name and finds some information and contacts in the Hathorn system related to this ship as well as some of the contracts it had had.

D20-Mother Ship:     Pg 127 future     Battle Cruiser PL7

 

The AI and the medical droid go over to the new mother ship and says "I am sensing some kind of life signs, but I'm not certain. The sensors are all broken so I can't use the ships to search."

As he moves up, he can sense the life signs coming from the dead bodies. Myr has him back up quickly just in case he bodies have a parasite in them. The droid answers that some new files opened up informing him about a hive colony of parasitic worms and he can confirm that all the bodies there have an infestation of these "Teln"

He then says that it looks like the worms are trying to revive. Then he tells Myr to move 3 feet to his right, and as he moves closer, he says "there is a clutch of them behind that wall there. But preliminary scans indicate that you and your race are probably immune. "

 

It seems that the worms go into stasis when there is no atmosphere. So, it is determined to shut off the life support, wait for the worms to go into stasis, and then get what is behind the wall and put it into a secure box for transport.

 

It takes 3 or 4 days to finally wrap everything up. Mark wants to go back as soon as possible and leaves a day early. Gabriel sends messages out to everyone about the things that have happened and the status of the two colonies.

 

The group makes starfall and heads back to Hammers Star. There is a small group that is picked up to take back first, maybe 20 people. They also have a few tons of stuff, but nothing of note.

 

XP: 750

 

GM Notes

• I was very happy with Masterplan, the program that helped me run the battles.  I have a second monitor hooked up to my laptop to show the player view to the players and it works VERY well.  There will be some learning curve to it, of course, but it was a lot of fun!
• I loved the paranoia of the players when the Teln were around.  K'nigley was jumping at everything when he found out about them.  
• I need to work on having more of the day to day stuff ready as well as the big stuff.  I know the big ideas but can't forget about how to get there.  
• I think the battles are still easy and it will be interesting when an equal battle happens.  

 

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