The cast:
- Brace (Brainer): the ship's pilot and also a spook, that despised part of humanity touched by the weird. He has extensive psychic powers. Shiv hates him.
- Midnight Storm (Skinner): teenage post apocalyptic rockstar who has been sleeping around without understanding the consequences.
- Nightingale (a.k.a. "Gale") (Angel): the ship's doctor who had a crush on Midnight Storm. After a one night stand, she realizes he doesn't love her back. She is also hunting her brother Bluejay.
- Vivek (Savvyhead): drug dealer/maker who experiments with his own product. He bought a woman on the last stop named Donna.
Taking Care of Business, Part 1
Brace turned to Gale. "He's coming."
"Really?"
Brace felt a ghost of memory: a man on the bridge of a ship looking out at the void. "It might take a while, but Bluejay is coming to us. If he still survives that is."
"Thank you," Nightingale said, a tempest of emotions welling inside her. Could it really be happening? Would she see her brother again?
"So what do you think Sun?" Vivek said.
The electrical engineer examined the schematics for the aft landing gear, the one he didn't trap.
"I suppose someone could get into there." She zoomed in. "Especially since these plans don't match what's there. That wall for instance. It doesn't exist and Bigs sealed off those vents months ago." She scowled. "And there. That spot is infested with rats. I hate rats."
"But is there a way to the landing gear from the inside?"
"I think so. Cargo Bay 2 has a hole in it. Someone crashed a forklift into it five years ago. That might intersect this line here." Her finger pressed the screen, distorting the image. "You could crawl right to the landing gear casing."
"Let's have a look."
"I can't believe he shot you," Ula said. "Didn't his cult want you to play for them?"
Midnight Storm nodded. "It's been a crazy few days. Cults, toxic dust, shootings."
"Don't forget the stowaways. Have they found the the last one yet?'
"Net yet," he said.
"How is Tatters?" she said softly.
Midnight looked down. "Not good. I should keep searching from him or her. I'll see if Bullet is engineering."
After a short walk and a climb down a rusty ladder, Midnight entered the dim confines of the engine room. Shiv stood by a control panel alone, scanning the room and rubbing a large wrench.
"Everything okay?" the musician asked.
"All quiet," Shiv grunted. "You alone?"
"I was looking for Bullet."
Suddenly Midnight heard a clatter from nearby.
"What's that?" he said as he ran out of the room. The sound echoed from the far end of the corridor. Midnight hurried over and looked into the vent above him.
Gale paused her work on the crews' medical records. "Hungry again?" she asked Rum.
The boy looked up from his third can of cat food. It was not a happy face.
"You want to talk about it?"
He shook his head.
Gale leaned back in her chair next to the medbay computer. As Rum chowed down, she decided to use her gifts a different way. She stretched out her mind to the void.
Sensations flooded her mind. Beatings, deprivation, verbal abuse. Bob and Bob were horrible to this child. Rum learned to snatch food quick when it was available, which it rarely was.
She gets a hard hit on her roll to open her brain.
"I have something to show you," she said walking over to a dusty corner of the medbay. She lifted some plastic sheeting off an old medical android. "Sparky."
Gale has an "assistant" in her workshop.
The robot's eyes glowed and it lifted to a standing position. Its legs were welded to the floor. "How may I assist?"
"Show Rum here Tetris."
A screen on the robot's body glowed and revealed a series of falling blocks.
"It's a game Vivek installed on Sparky," Gale explained. "You touch the screen to spin and move the pieces. Try it."
Farley burst into the room. "Gale, I need you in the brig."
"Rum wait here."
Nightingale and the Captain hurried to Donna's cell. Blood splattered the walls and floors of her bathroom. More blood pooled in the bathtub.
"Donna is missing," Farley said.
"With this much blood loss," Gale said slowly, "if she didn't die, she is very close to doing so."
Vivek and Sun tried to pushed the crate out of the way. The aged wood refused to budge. Behind the crate Vivek could see jagged metal and a gap big enough for a person.
"We need a cargo loader," Vivek said.
"There's one in the other bay, I'll get it."
Vivek watched Sun run next door. A minute later Bullet wandered in from the other direction, carrying an emergency axe.
"Have you seen the rats?" he asked.
"Er, no."
"Have you noticed how Brace is always so eager to leave?"
"Not really."
"He's hiding something. Him and those rats."
Vivek watched him leave, muttering to himself.
Sun returned in the cargo loader. Vivek relaxed and helped load the crate. The hole exposed, he took out his tools. After a few minutes and some welding, the landing gear was again inaccessible.
Vivek began to pack his tools. Something smacked him in the back of his head. He stumbled forward and rolled around.
A stranger, a thin bald-headed man, stood over him. His ragged cloak resembled those of the Family.
Vivek scrambled away and to his feet as his attacker paused to grab a length of loose pipe. The drug maker noticed Sun just standing there. He grabbed her hand and they ran.
The pair made some rapid turns and soon lost the stranger.
A successful acting under fire.
"That's assuming it is her blood," Farley said. "See if you can tell. And find out what happened here."
"I'll need some equipment," Gale said.
"Go get it."
As Gale returned with her gear, she spotted Tia exiting the communication room.
"What's going on?" she asked the passenger.
Tia gnaws her lip. "I was looking for Morrel. I haven't seen him for a few hours. Have you seen him?"
"No. You should go back to your room until we have this situation taken care of."
Tia nodded and hurried down the corridor. Gale returned to the brig and began to empty her box of testing equipment.
Then the lights went out.
Midnight crawled through the air ducts. The twisting metal tunnel led to a cargo bay. The room was strangely dark. He pointed flashlight into the large chamber.
Someone moaned.
Midnight wriggled into the room and followed the sound to the far corner. Donna lay on her side, alternating wheezing and moaning. Midnight gently rolled her over. The woman's jaw swung at an odd angle, unhinged from her skull. Her left eyed struggled to focus on him. The swelling made her right a purple raisen of flesh.
Donna wheezed out a high pitch screech.
The musician set down his shotgun and reached to pick her up. Someone clipped his arm with a metal pipe.
Midnight whirled to face the bald-headed man. As the stowaway swung at him again, Midnight tried to grab his weapon. Instead he ended up knocked down and bruised.
A failed seize by force there.
The man brought the pipe down across Midnight Storm's throat with both hands, choking him. Midnight fumbled with his right hand. The gun sprang to his hand and he fired his sleeve pistol into the man's face. Blood and brains dribbled down from the ceiling.
And then Midnight succeeded at a seize by force roll.
Midnight gasped for breath. He stood up rubbing his throat. Then he picked up the half dead woman and headed for the infirmary.
Brace took the elevator down to the engine room. The door froze halfway open as the lights died.
The pilot pushed on the doors but they only budged an inch. He felt around for the emergency box. The axe inside was missing. Without a lever Brace wrestled with the door for a few minutes before he squeezed through the gap between the elevator doors.
Red emergency lighting flooded the engine room. A whistling noise emerged from the tangle of tubes and pipes on the far side of the room. A pair of lights approached from the hallway to his right. Sun and Vivek ran up to him.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"We just ran into the stowaway. He tried to get us with a pipe," Sun said quickly.
"I also saw Bullet babbling about rats and not trusting you," Vivek added. "He was carrying an axe."
"What killed the lights then?"
Vivek walked over the control panels. "It looks like the Theron reactor is over pressurized. Main power shut off automatically. Until we fix that we only have the emergency lighting. That noise is the release valve trying to equalize pressure. The good news is we won't explode. The bad news is that the exhaust will kill us in about an hour."
"Anything else?"
"Yes, someone locked the controls. I can override it but I'll need another set of hands."
"Sun, you and Vivek fix the engine. I'll go find Bullet. It sounds like he cracked."
Space madness strikes.
Brace positioned himself in an access port just behind a corner. Then he reached out with his mind and called to Bullet.
Using his move Lost.
As he waited, he spotted Shiv down the hall. He stayed perfectly still until Shiv moved out of sight.
This might or might not have been space madness preying on Brace's mind.
A few minutes later Bullet turned the corner. Brace leapt out behind him and tried to wrestle him to the ground. Bullet threw him off but not before the pilot made contact with his mind.
He failed Seize by Force but succeeded on In-Brain Pupper Strings.
Confess what you did to the Captain Brace imposed on Bullet.
But the man refused to head to the bridge. Instead Bullet turned to Brace, his right eye rapidly filling with blood. He pulled back his axe and swung down at Brace.
Bullet takes 1-harm ap.
As he roared at him, the pilot slipped under the swing and tried to overpower him. The axe lodged in a gas pipe. Bullet pulls it free, pouring the gas over both of them. Brace is knocked to the floor by Bullet's second swing and the axe crashes into a control panel.
Sparks leap from the damaged machinery and the corridor is rocked by an explosion.
Pain laces over Brace's body from burns and cuts. He blinks his eyes open in time to see the lower half of Bullet's body slide down the remaining wall.
Pretty sure that was a failed Seize by force roll.
Sun strained to hold the heavy wrench on the exhaust valve. "Do you have it yet?"
A squeek emerged from the tangle of pipes then Vivek called out. "Got it!"
Sun relaxed and Vivek squirmed out of the engine conduits. "Now we can reboot the computers without detonating the ship."
The room shuddered as the explosion rocked the Starlight.
Midnight changed course toward the blast. Donna breathed shallowly in his arms.
In a blacked section of the engineering deck, he found Brace crawling slowly towards the engine room. Vivek skid to a stop opposite him.
"Is she alive?" he asked.
"Barely. Brace can you speak?" Midnight said.
Brace coughed. "I'll live. Take care of her."
Vivek and Midnight carried Donna to the medbay. They passed an empty engine room along the way.
The medbay door slid open and Midnight and Vivek rushed Donna to closest bed.
"We need help here!" Midnight said.
"Over here!" Gale shouted. The men hustled Donna over to Sparky. The robot began monitoring Donna' s life signs in series of erratic beeps.
"I'm heading back for Brace," Vivek said as Midnight looked on at Gale's desperate efforts to save her patient.
Sparky's beeps turned to a steady bleak tone as Vivek headed down the hall.
Gale had the move Touched by Death at this point. She didn't try very hard to save Donna. Instead she took the +1 Weird.
The doctor looked into Donna's glazed eyes. Suddenly she was pulled down into their dark depths.
The familiar church bell tolled. Donna and Gale stood outside the old wooden building. Around them lay the empty streets of some ruined city.
From every corner, building, and hole in the ground poured hungry reavers. They grabbed Donna, dragged her down and devoured her. Then their faceless gaze turned to Gale.
I think the Ruined City with its Church was one of Jamil's threats. We never really learned what was up with it.
"Are you okay?" Midnight asked again.
"I'm fine," Nightingale said stiffly. She turned from the dead woman. "Let me look at you."
She patched Midnight up and shoved a cold compress at him. "I'm going to help Brace now."
Shiv and Bigs stumbled in a few minutes after Gale left.
"What happened to you?" Midnight asked.
"I found him hurt near engineering," Bigs said.
"Someone clocked me in the back of the head," Shiv grumbled. "Knocked me over a railing into level C."
"Yeah, a lot of that going around. Did you see who did it?"
"No."
Gale reached the lift just as Brace and Vivek emerged.
"What happened to you?" Gale asked.
Vivek pressed Brace's violation glove into Gale's hands before sliding out from under the pilot. "I've got to get back down and fix this mess."
"I want that back," Brace said.
Gale ignored his request. "Brace, you are bleeding and burned. We need to get you patched up now. What happened?"
As they limp back to the medbay, Brace explained. "Bullet. He went mad. Tried to hack me up with an axe. Instead he blew a gas line."
"Bullet! But he was such a nice man."
"You spend too long in the void, it destroys you," he said, forcing his way out of Gale's grasp. He stripped off his burned and bloody clothes in the medbay.
Gale placed a hand on his pale sliced flesh, summoning energy to stitch his wounds closed. As he heals, the two shared visions of betrayal: Sun hitting Shiv from behind, Ula poisoning the crew’s food, Shiv talking with Bigs about getting the Spooks, and Farley loading his gun.
Soft hit on Healing touch.
"What? What was that?" Gale asked.
"I don't know. Can I have my glove back?"
Gale absently pulled the violation glove from her pocket. "How did you come by this anyway?"
Brace gently took it from her. "I made it from a standard issue Link-Flight suit. The principles are the same: interface the wearer's mind and something else. I just added IOs from the inside onto the finger tips. So mind to mind. Do you want to try it?"
Gale looked at the limp glove for a few seconds before she said, "No thank you."
Next time: Vivek suffers withdrawal, Midnight decides not to hit on people, and Gale reduces the chaos level.
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