The strangest thing happened to us the other day. We’re cruising through the void, ships on auto, everyone’s in the mess having something to eat. I can’t tell you what it was, because for some unknown reason we let Nitro cook. I honestly don’t know how he made it taste like that, but not even Hunter, our new dog, would eat it. Sadly though, you don’t waste supplies when you’re in space.
As we’re debating whether or not to put the ‘food’ or Nitro out the airlock a comms signal came in. Turns out it was a call for Starburn. He spends a lot of time out on the Net chasing down leads, making contacts, bribing folk and generally being a Rogue. Not a surprise, he’s always done that, but every now and then it pays off big for us. This was one of those times.
Some rich folk, with more money than sense, wanted us to retrieve some data that had been stolen from them and was being used for extortion. It seems that although they had 9th Gen algorithmic code defences in place, it crumbled under an onslaught from a particularly gifted robot Hacker. They wanted to hire us to get the data back and ‘ensure that such a scenario would be impossible to recur’. That’s rich prick code for ‘kill everyone involved’. Their security had tracked this crew down to a failed cultist settlement on Kyanite.
Simple and straightforward really. Find the crew, get the data, kill everyone, smoke some cigarettes, leave. Only problem is, we don’t have any cigarettes.
We took the job, obviously, and laid in a course for Kyanite.
We landed The Stone Shark near the co-ordinates we had for the data Hacker. By some insane stroke of luck the idiot, despite being good enough to steal the data, never deactivated the tracking code built into the data. It’s standard on stuff with that level of encryption which meant one of several possibilities. The first is that they didn’t know about it. Highly unlikely. The second is that they didn’t care because they are well dug-in or have already sold the data on. Quite likely. The final option is that they deliberately left it on as a trap because they wanted to be found. As annoying as that would be I don’t think it’s very likely. They’d have no way of knowing who was sent to retrieve the data so as a targeted ambush goes, it’s a pretty shit plan. I figure they either have the data and are dug-in, or they have sold/will sell the data.
As we approached the co-ordinates on foot we started to encounter some of the cult-level crazy buildings. How these things spread across the Ravaged Galaxy I’ll never know, and I don’t really care either. I mean hey, if you want to go bug nuts and worship Zord or whatever who am I to argue? Anyway, we started to get a view of the situation and, to no great surprise, the Hacker had a crew with him, and they were well dug-in. So not a trap, but not easy either.
In addition to the enemy crew, that seemed to be mostly robotic, they had deployed a Sentrabot. We’ve come across those before, annoying bastards but with limited range. We split into our two squads, Starburn heading left, myself heading right. So far so good. To get things kicked off, Sarge lined up on the Sentrabot and took a shot at it with his carbine. The targeting scanners on his Combat Armour did their thing and he put a slug through its primary sensor. Straight to the power core and it immediately shut down. Great start in my opinion.
The enemy crew had clearly dug themselves in and immediately started returning fire on us. We tried to make some headway and push forward but it wasn’t easy. They had superior cover and firing positions and it felt like trying swim uphill trough treacle. And then, as always, things started to go wrong.
As he moved up to take some cover behind a wall, a grenade landed beside Switch and took him out of the fight. He went down unconscious. I assumed he was dead at this point. Doc headed over towards him to see if there was anything he good do but I couldn’t pay attention to that at the moment. I was too busy trying to co-ordinate the crew and keep everyone else up and fighting.
During the firefight, Wolf’s Beam Shredder jammed and took him out of the action until he could get that cleared. Tragically, he didn’t get much of a chance to as a robot charged in and tried to batter him to death. Lo-ball and Hunter, being close by and seeing Wolf in trouble, ran into the combat to assist and turn the tables. This was extremely successful and the three of them ripped the bot apart in no time at all. Which is when it exploded. The damn thing had a Dead Bot Switch built into it. As soon as it went offline it triggered. It was kind of the ultimate revenge. The explosion put Hunter and Wolf on the ground, out for the count and definitely out of the fight.
Just like that we were down three crew. Lo-ball managed to avoid a lot of the blast but was still down with the Shock of the explosion. It took him a moment but he pulled himself together and got back in the battle.
Things were, obviously, not going our way. This was emphasised when the damn Sentrabot suddenly powered back up. It would seem this one had been upgraded with a self-repair systems module, probably nanites of some variety. A quick scan showed it to be fully functional. Unbelievable. The only upside right now was that we could see the Data storage and could get to it, if we could just stop, you know, getting blown up.
To that end Shell-Shock stopped firing frag grenades. She had hung back to pound the enemy with make shift mortar fire but it wasn’t having a huge effect for us. I signalled across to her from my forward position and she switched to smoke. I threw some out to the right, she fired to the left. We started laying down the cover and all of a sudden the gaps in the enemy defensive positions were exposed. While they had good line of sight on us, the smoke obscured that. Now everybody was in cover and they started missing a lot more of their shots. Good thing too since at this point everyone except Sarge and Shell-Shock was injured.
With the smoke adding to the confusion we were able to move into better cover and start returning fire in a more co-ordinated way. The enemy started dropping like zero-g flies on a high grav moon. The tide of the battle slowly started to turn our way and we began moving up towards the data target.
All the noise had some unintended consequences though. We managed to draw the Unwanted Attention of some of the local fauna. Why they can never just let us get on with business is beyond me. When I say local fauna you’re not going to believe what happened. Another, seemingly unrelated, Sentrabot rolled into the fray. Couldn’t believe it. Happily, it appeared in the enemy lines and started blasting them into oblivion. Bad for them, good for us.
Along with the Sentrabot some Ruffians, a Bounty Hunter and a Tangler also turned up. The ruffians and the Bounty Hunter started in on the other crew, they just happened to be closer, while the Tangler went for Starburn. This was not good for Starburn, he hadn’t seen the Tangler coming and it took him by surprise. It looked pretty grim for him too until Sarge ran over and shit kicked the Tangler into oblivion.
So as you can tell, absolute chaos on the battle field. Sometimes though, chaos is good. We were able to use the carnage from the Unwanted Attention combined with all the smoke to run in and grab the Data we were there for. We also grabbed a couple of other pieces of Loot from the camp. With the mission objective accomplished for us I sounded the retreat before anything else went bad. I was pretty sure we had taken out their data hacker so they couldn’t snatch the data again, but honestly at this point none of us cared. Data was primary, elimination was secondary in my opinion. Don’t mind getting into a scrap but we’re not assassins.
The retreat was quite orderly, we pulled back under cover of fire with Shell Shock back to fragging anything that moved. We were quickly out of range and heading back to The Stone Shark. It seemed like the other crew was too busy with the locals and their injured to follow us.
Back on board the ship we started cycling people through the med-bay. Doc started with Wolf, his injuries seemed like the worst. Turned out to be nothing at all. Just a massive concussion rendering him unconscious. Doc had him back to full strength in a few minutes. Couldn’t have done it during the mission, needed the med bay equipment. Good news regardless.
Doc began working on everyone else. The only people uninjured were Shell Shock and Sarge. Everyone else had taken at least one hit. Nobody died though. Switch was fine, and so was Hunter. Despite getting blown up they all recovered. Hunter not without complaint from Doc though. “Dammit, I’m a Doctor not a Veterinarian,” was what he kept saying. I told him to shut up and fix Hunter, that’s one tough, loyal dog.
Stargrave is published by Osprey Games and was created by Joseph A. McCullough