Remembering that Talon had a base somewhere in the belt that contained unspecified RAM assets, the group decided it was a good idea to find it and disposition those assets. Mourey was asked to be the tie breaker and he decided if there was a way to disrupt RAM and Talon at the same time, then it was a thing worth doing.
From what Mourey was able to find out, Talon’s base was somewhere in the vicinity of Pallas, which knowing Pallas’ history, made a lot of sense. A few short days later, the group of adventurers had traveled to the Pallas orbit. Deflecting the well intentioned but mistaken welcome crew from the Athenite Church, the crew began to search for Talon’s base.
Seraphina and Zaphod worked the sensors eliminating the smaller rocks and then working to find any asteroids large enough to hold a facility. After an hour or so, a good candidate was found with a large entry point into the center so they went to investigate.
Once at the rock, Alex stayed on board with Mourey to defend themselves if Talon came back, because scans of the place indicated there was a small source of power, but there were no real signs of life. The Maelstrom Rider’s boarding tube was extended into the crater to allow the adventurers to make their way to the surface and so Zaphod, Max, Buzz and Seraphina touched down in the center of the crater.
Around them, they found there was equipment to extend a rigid docking structure, but there was no power to it. This was someone’s secret facility, but they were not sure yet if it was Talon’s. Around the crater there were a few cave entrances and a security door leading into a prefab construction facility inside another cave area.
Max made short work of the control pad, and so the airlock opened. Zaphod stayed behind in case something went very wrong and the others headed in to see what was there. Once inside, the adventurers found the building was some kind of warehouse and processing facility. There was equipment for processing precious metal ores and packaging it, along with all manner of elicit goods in packages.
As Max examined some crates, they accidentally smashed their fingers between them while Buzz and Seraphina took stock. The place was running only on emergency power and so nothing was operational, including the facility command and control terminal.
Continuing to look around, the group found another room off the back that had a large number of gennie containers identical to the ones on the Maelstrom rider. They were all opened and empty, and the adventurers determined that this place must be infected with the same gennies that they had to exterminate with Argon gas on the Maelstrom rider; this must have been the RAM assets that Talon had stolen as leverage.
The group called in Zaphod, who was told that these Gennies spread with “brain chiggers” and so immediately scanned the air and discovered that the facility was full of the parasites. This caused Zaphod to start to champion just abandoning this facility, but the group now felt a moral obligation to either eliminate the creatures or set up a beacon to warn people away from the site so that these things would not spread around the solar system like the wild fire they represented.
In order to set up the beacon, the group had to find a way to restore the facility’s power. Not knowing what that meant, the group began to go down the hallways heading off the warehouse area. They found two doors that were not operable without power, which had actual locks, unlike the doors they had been using thus far.
Not knowing what to do with the doors they could not easily pass through, they decided to head the opposite direction and down the other hallway leading off the warehouse. At the end of the hall was another air lock, and a door that appeared to be operable, but being kept open a crack with a thick piece of angle iron. Peeking inside, the group saw that the room was the Medical area of the facility as there was an auto-doc with a corpse on it in the center.
With Buzz watching the door, Seraphina and Max opened it, and stepped over the metal to leave the door in the state it was in, and immediately were descended upon by three ECGs. A fight ensued with no one sustaining any serious harm, but Seraphina and Max being exposed to the contaminated air.
Inside the room, there were a number of corpses which seemed to have been trying to correct the issue with the brain parasites, but fell victim before being messily consumed by the ECGs. Moving on, they headed to the air lock at the end of the hall.
Once outside of the airlock, the adventurers found themselves in an obviously operational mine, but were hesitant to go trying to find and kill the ECGs that were obviously hiding in the tunnels. Zaphod showed everyone the scrapes on the floor showing how a large number of something had come through here, and the group decided it was not a great idea to dive headlong into a swarm of these creatures and so headed back into the facility, remembering that there was a great bundle of cables in the crater that likely would lead them to the power source, if followed.
Back in the crater, they did indeed follow the cables through the caves to another set of doors, which this time were large blast doors. These would not open without power for certain and had mechanical failsafes that would keep them closed, if there was atmosphere on the other side. Breeching these doors would take significant explosives that would just as likely collapse the tunnels, or significant time which would give whatever was crawling around this rock time to find them, so they headed back into the facility to see what they could do with the other doors they had yet to open.
At the first door, Seraphina was able to quickly defeat the lock and permanently open the door using her cutting torch and inside was a large records room. Zaphod spent some time digging through the filing cabinets and found a lot of information that would tie Talon to various operations and activities in the belt at the direction of RAM, as well as a record of how the relationship went sour. Of note, there were records indicating a large number of deliveries were being made somewhere in the orbit of Mercury, but the specifics did not reveal where. Among the records, Zaphod also found and pocketed 1000 credits worth of Grandrubles.
While Zaphod searched, Seraphina and the others discovered a service hatch in the back of the room that led outside the facility and had all kinds of warnings about explosive decompression. Max, Buzz and Seraphina then cut through the second door and discovered a living area, with rotting food and signs of a struggle. In the back of this room was another service hatch.
Not sure where to go next, they decided the best thing to do was to open one of the service hatches and see if they could make their way into the other part of the base where the power source was. Rigging the hatch release with some rope, Seraphina released the hatch. The resultant rapid decompression threw things around the room, including the adventurers to Seraphina and Max’s detriment.
A little roughed up, Max, Seraphina and Buzz went into the tight service tunnels and started following cables once again, eventually finding another service hatch that had windows in it looking into a room full of all three stages of ECG.
The group hatched a plan and then sprung the hatch. Max threw a pair of stun grenades into the room, but clipped the frame of the hatch with one and landed it too close, knocking themselves out. Buzz stepped to the hatch and took out a few of the still conscious creatures, while Seraphina dove in to try and slice the most advanced gennie up with her mono sword. Eventually the creatures were all dispatched.
With the power restored, the group set up a massive radiation leak warning to ensure that people would not attempt to salvage the site and spread the ECGs before heading back to their ship to prepare to head to the surface of Mars.
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