Traveller Session 3: Verorum (Part 2)

Player Characters:

John A Rico - Former Star Marine

Rocke Ramora - Thief-Turned-Trader

Willy Warder - Noble Administrator

NPC Crew:

Zuleikah - Money-Obsessed Astrogator

Clonelord

The crew made contact with the Clone Master Tiberius, who dabbled as a spice merchant on the side, and set up a meeting at the Veroran Super Brothel.  They arrived at the meet to find that the brothel was in full anti-gravity, lending it an appearance similar to an Escher painting full of floating naked people; Rico and Rocke took some sanity damage from the debauchery on display, but Willy, as a noble, was used to it.  Eventually, they found their man entwined with about 20 lovers, but after noticing them the clonelord disentangled himself and got a slave to spray him down with a can of Space-Axe.

Still nude, Tiberius sat down with the crew, and he and Willy got to business working out a deal.  Willy was able to get a phenomenal deal by pointing out that the spice was neither certified cruelty-free nor ethically mined ("It's mined with slaves, sooo").  Willy beckoned for a bottle of space-wine, but upon seeing the exorbitant prices, the crew took their leave.  While they were on the way back to the Suck-It in their rented spacecar, an air-raid siren began to sound.  Pedestrians on the promenade looked around, surprised, but no panic broke out.  Willy asked GX-415 if he knew what was happening, but their slave didn't have any idea.

Lockdown

As Rocke chided GX to properly refer to him as 'master', Rico tried to call Zuleikah on the spacephone, but had no signal.  Several minutes later, they arrived at their ship's berth, and found it on lockdown.  Rocke knocked on the door, and Zuleikah, awkwardly holding a gun she clearly didn't know how to use, opened the door.  She was spooked by the still-sounding siren, and reminded them that Rocke had told her to lock the ship if anything weird happened, so she'd locked the ship.  Willy tried to contact the control tower so they could at least get outside of the dome, but found that something was jamming their comms.

While the crew argued over what to do next, their ship picked up a military broadcast that had punched through the jamming: a military lockdown was now in effect, and the crew were to be detained on suspicion of being outside agitators.  Willy figured it was probably just a miscommunicaiton somewhere, because they hadn't done anything, and let out a sigh of relief.  He explained that he didn't have any enemies except his Klingon ex-wife, and Rocke announced that while he had many enemies, none were in the military.  Rico took this moment to let them all know that an ex he'd broken up with on bad terms was actually the CO of that marine ship in orbit, but he hadn't wanted to make things awkward by bringing it up earlier.

Uprising

A different message came through, in text only, and much shorter: "Verorum is now a free planet.  All former slave owners are sentenced to death".  Willy frantically closed the message window, while Rocke tried to distract GX-415 so he couldn't see that he was now freed.  Once that potential crisis was put on the backburner, they got back to arguing over what to do next.  Things seemed to be stacked pretty heavily against them: they'd have to get the dome open to leave, and then they'd have to deal with the marine patrol corvette, which was both faster and more heavily armed than their freighter.  But that all paled in the face of the biggest crisis: if they left now, without any cargo, they'd lose a shitload of spacebucks.

Willy started hacking into the control tower to fake their ship's registry and plant a false entry showing that the Suck-It was in a berth on the opposite side of the spaceport, but that would take a while.  A flood of dozens of text messages, each slightly garbled, came through, but when averaged out they were able to figure out what it said: "This is Overseer Paulus Calidius.  If you evacuate me from the planet, I will give you many anagathics, free of charge".  Rocke brought the crew went into a huddle to discuss what to do with GX-415; he tried to join too, but backed off when he was told it was for "original crew only".

Rocke brought up that this newly-freed man might be a threat ("flash back to 5 minutes ago when you demanded he call you master"), and needed to be dealt with in some way.  "Some Way" ended up being locking GX-415 into a stateroom with plenty of food, water, and video games, which the former slave went along with easily enough after some words from Willy.  He still seemed friendly, but whether that was because he actually didn't care or because he was outnumbered by armed psychos was up to debate.

Evacuation

Rico and Rocke grabbed holdout pistols and stunners, then got into their rented spacecar to head to the Overseer's office to rescue him/grab the illegal anagathics, while Willy and Zuleikah stayed aboard the Suck-It to continue with the hack into the control tower.  Though it had only been a few minutes, the streets were now mostly empty, save for the occasional dead body (mostly slaves, but some owners) or burning spacecar.  As they crossed an intersection, a spacetruck floored it into them and Rico wasn't able to get them out of the way in time; the spacecar was damaged (Rocke: "Did we have insurance?"), but still operating.

Without further trouble, they made it to the square in front of the Overseer's building, and heard gunfire.  After a moment, Rico confirmed that it was coming from inside, so they readied their pistols and headed in; the elevators were out, so they started up the stairs to the 11th floor.  On the 6th floor landing, they found a cluster of dead, unarmed slaves, and kept on.  Further up, Rico saw a pair of (former?) slaves, each with advanced rifles on the 8th floor landing, looking down the hallway, away from them.

At Rocke's direction, he and Rico drew their stunners and opened fire on the closer slave, who collapsed.  The other one panicked from the ambush and surrendered; Rocke stunnered him anyway.  They grabbed the slaves' rifles and continued up to the 11th floor, where they found the door locked.  Rocke shouted that "your captain has arrived!", and Overseer Paulus, somehow looking paler than usual, trundled out and thanked them.  The trio headed back down to the spacecar and drove off towards the warehouse where the Overseer had stashed the goods.

Mob

Zuleikah interrupted Willy to let him know that there was a horde of people moving into the spaceport, and a crowd was headed their way.  Not wanting to turn away a possible income stream, Willy set her to calculating how many they could take aboard without overloading their life support.  Shortly, the people reached the Suck-It and started trying to contact them through the intercom; unsurprisingly, they all seemed to be of the pale, slave-owning class.  He keyed the outer airlock door, and a mass of people crushed in.

Negotiations

Meanwhile, Rocke and Rico had arrived at the warehouse, and found the sliding door blown apart.  After much arguing, Rocke shoved Overseer Paulus in the trunk to keep slaves from seeing him, and headed in on his own (Rico stayed behind to "keep Paulus company").  Rocke entered via the back door, where he saw three slaves, one with a machine gun and two with pistols, searching the place.  He doubled back to ask the Overseer where the anagathics were, and he explained that they were in the safe in the office; the access code was 0123 ("Wow, just like my luggage!").

Rocke headed back to the warehouse and greeted the slaves, who pointed their weapons at him.  One of them recognized him as one of the "outside agitators" and asked what he was up to, as none of the slaves had ever heard of him.  He tried to bullshit about smuggling resources to the slave movement, when he was asked to name one of the slaves he'd been in contact with.  Rocke's lie of "TS-420" checked out, and with the jammer up the slaves wouldn't be able to contact anybody to verify anyway.

They asked what he was there for, and he explained that he was there to get a cache of anagathics as payment.  Rocke returning the question learned that they were looking for smuggled weapons, and they agreed to search the place together.  After some time, Rocke found a spacecrate containing a battlesuit and rocket launcher, which one of the slaves immediately started to don.  He congratulated them on their new equipment, then grabbed the anagathics from the office safe and headed back to the spacecar.  Once he was strapped in, Rico hit the ignition and they sped back towards the spaceport, forgetting that the Overseer was still in the trunk.

The Cavalry?

Back at the Suck-It, Willy finally finished the hack, so the control tower's records would show the Suck-It as being in a different berth.  The mass of people were holding the outer airlock doors open, and Zuleikah was hesistating to force the doors closed, because it would cut a bunch of them in half.  Just then, the spaceport's iris gate opened, and the star marine patrol corvette flew in and hovered several hundred feet above the ground.

Willy resolved to hold position and wait for some other ship to go first and draw the marines' attention, but it seemed like every other pilot had the same idea.  After a minute, a squad of marines in battle armour jumped down to the ground, using their suits' thrusters to land.  Rocke and Rico arrived at the outskirts of the spaceport, where the Overseer finally jumped out of the trunk and asked why they had kept him in there the whole time.  Neither really had a good answer, but ultimately he was more concerned with getting offworld and asked to get aboard their ship as quickly as possible.

While casually strolling towards their ship with 5kg of extremely illegal immortality drugs, the swarm of people around it came into view.  The only ways in were the main entrance (which was experiencing crowd crush), the cargo bay (which would let way too many people on), and the second-story entrance, which wasn't connected by umbilical.  Rocke resolved to just wait until Willy relocated to another berth, as per their backup plan, and it didn't take long.

Unfortunately, Willy wasn't much of a pilot.  He managed to get the Suck-It into the air fine (incinerating much of the crowd around it in the process), but then veered off into another ship at the berth beside them.  Willy tried to blame Zuleikah for letting him pilot the ship, while she shot back that it's not like she was any better.  Outside, Rocke looked on in despair as his ship crumpled and deformed in the crash; yet another expense they couldn't afford.

Notes:
Where does spice come from?  The same place it always has: giant worms poop it out.

I rolled for Tiberius' debauchery, and got the max, so of course the meeting would be in the hover-brothel.

The crew didn't even attempt to get GX-415 on their side.  The rationale behind not taking him with them was fear of him giving them away to slave revolutionaries.  As for why they couldn't just leave him on the ship with Willy and Zuleikah, if he got a gun (and wanted to kill them), he'd have a good chance of taking the ship.  And to quote Willy: "The ship is worth more than any of our individual lives".

Rocke's morality turns on a space-dime.