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After escaping from the black site on Sonhandra, Teslan, Lucky and Highball had considered their next move. The things they’d seen on the eternally dark side of the tidally-locked planet had shaken them to their core, but nothing more so than the sight of a humanoid pressure suit apparently encasing a gaseous entity, especially when it momentarily regarded them with a human face… Whilst Lucky continued to decrypt the files they’d extracted from the black site’s data core, Teslan and Highball contacted their crewmates. They’d felt completely out of their depth on the Sonhandra job and had their suspicions about how honest their employers had been. True, the Sahi’ir had provided them with the co-ordinates of the base as well as one of their stealth modules; even now, two of the identical and androgynous Sahi’ir Choir were sitting silently in the rear of the vessel, waiting for further instructions. But the crew couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been hung out to dry by the powerful Sahi’ir for some reason. With that in mind, the crew sent a message via the underground comm network for Dar, Bonto and Vapour to meet them at The Cove in the Rin system, outside immediate Sahi’ir influence.The Cove was a haven for pirates, smugglers and assorted ne’er do wells throughout the Procyon Sector. Thousands of years ago, a Precursor artefact of some sort had been all-but annihilated, leaving a cloud of debris that could disrupt any Hegemonic sensor suite at anything but point-blank range. At some point, an enterprising group of misfits had hit upon the idea of creating a safe port for those needing privacy or somewhere out of the reach of the Hegemony, and so The Cove was born. Ever-expanding, The Cove was built out of the hulks of ships of all types, bolted and plasma-welded together in the depths of the sensor fog. It was always changing its position within the cloud to throw off those who weren’t in the know, but those with the right connections were able to find it. By the time that Teslan, Lucky and Highball reached The Cove aboard the ‘Dark Blade’, the ‘Lazy Susan’ were already waiting for them. Mindful that the ‘Dark Blade’ was an Ashen Knives vessel, they rendezvoused with the Susan deep within the cloud to avoid any unnecessary entanglements.
Sitting in the Lazy Susan’s galley, the full crew considered what they knew and what their next moves might be. They were all in agreement that the Sahi’ir couldn’t be trusted; wealthy and generous patrons they might be, but that didn’t count for much if you were dead. Lucky had managed to decrypt much of the data they’d retrieved from Sonhandra, although the content didn’t give them much comfort. It appeared that whoever was operating the site was collecting Precursor artefacts for some purpose. Although the purpose wasn’t clear, one file in particular contained casualty projections relating to the Iota system. Whatever their unknown opposition were up to could cause billions of deaths…
As to their opposition, things were not a great deal clearer. They were apparently connected to a group of scientists that had disappeared in a failed attempt to access the dormant jumpgate in the Holt system a decade ago. Although the research was classified, the hacking skills of the group had revealed some of the scientists involved; Boyer, Stanz, Mark and Venker. Of these, Nils Boyer was the most prominent, so the crew focused on him first. Early on in their research, the crew came across the name Yola Wu. Wu was a well-known and brilliant research physicist specialising in the study of jumpgates; despite the fact of her xeno heritage, Wu had risen to a prestigious research position at the Khalud Academy on Shimaya. Although Wu and Boyer had made many breakthroughs, their academic relationship had broken down a couple of years before the Holt Incident, as it had become known. Although the trail was now over a decade old, the crew decided to follow this up first to see if any answers could be found.
So it was that Bonto, Dar and Vapour found themselves once more on Shimaya, posing as fellow academics in an attempt to speak with Dr Wu. Despite some evident unrest on the Khalud Academy campus (or perhaps because of it), the crew managed to gain access to Dr Wu’s research assistant, a young human female by the name of Gaia Bartok. Inexperienced as she was, ‘Dr Squam’ found it easy to charm his way into an interview with Wu. The good doctor had a large top-floor apartment in a comfortable hab-block on the campus, but as soon as they entered the crew felt something was wrong. Although Wu initially responded to discrete questions, as darkness fell and the questions moved onto the Holt Incident she became more and more agitated, her glance darting more and more to a patch of blank wall in the main living area. Gradually, everyone present felt an increasing sense of foreboding as static electricity began to build up in Wu’s apartment. With a groan of despair, Wu fell to the floor and began to weep anxiously as she mumbled to herself inaudibly. Suddenly, the temperature dropped and the glow globes began to flicker rapidly; something, somewhere was draining energy from the local area on a huge scale. As the crew watched disbelievingly, the patch of wall that had so fascinated Wu began to bulge outwards, forming what appeared to be a human face, mouth opening and closing wordlessly. Her voice cracking in terror, Wu shouted one phrase before lapsing into silence: ‘Nils! It’s Nils, come back from hell to claim me!’
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