The man who killed the Emperor died a prisoner on The Rock
Ezra Cole confessed to the assassination of Emperor Strephon, and only this group heard him say it. That's either worthless or worth everything, depending on who's listening.
Raised at the table and never answered.
Ezra Cole confessed to the assassination of Emperor Strephon, and only this group heard him say it. That's either worthless or worth everything, depending on who's listening.
Somewhere in what
Oot rattled off, each of you quietly decided one was true — and didn't say which.
The pirates in the Architect's office were pulling subject manifests off a server under that name and transmitting them back to their fleet.
ND-E caught a fragment before the encryption closed over it again. Whatever Sable is, somebody paid to have the list of who was in it.
A half-melted nameplate on a containment door in
The Proving Grounds. The three men who came out of those cells do not speak and will not stop tearing at themselves, and the doors were opened from the inside. One in that block is still shut, still lit with blue runes, and entirely intact.
Dr. Voss was erasing it when the crew walked in on her, and by her own assistant's account she was the project lead.
Kael Vass and
ND-E pulled what survived onto an interface rig. It is encrypted, and the one person aboard who could have read it went into the fire.
What the Rust Tide were actually sent for —
Rayna said as much on the docks while they loaded them. The vault under
Research and Development held shelf on shelf of the things, and something was cut out of the floor between them with torches.
Velveteen ate the one nobody found.
Korlok wants to know what
Rayna promised to get mercenaries to join the raid, and she would not answer him in front of his own crew. Two of those mercenaries are lying in
The Proving Grounds dressed as Rust Tide, burned to the bone by something that came out of a cell.
Mistarion waited until the shuttle was clear of the blast to say it out loud.
Kael Vass had the angle and the grip and closed on nothing at all. Either the best hands on the crew failed at fifteen feet, or the woman who fell was not entirely where she appeared to be.
Foxlon pulled a beacon off the hull, but Zabetta's scanner found another tracker wired straight into the shuttle's navigation — one nobody planted to catch escapees. Whoever built that ship wanted to know where it went, not just where it started.
Frozen bread, boiled eggs, and a boy rising off his bed wreathed in flame he doesn't remember making. The physicians who tested him weren't healers — they were looking for something magical in his blood, and they found it.
Narok Tarr wants something smuggled past H&R's checkpoints inside three days, and he's offering a ship, weapons, or grafts for it. He gave the crew twenty-four hours to decide before security cut the conversation short.
Narok Tarr wants H&R and every corporation like it thrown out of the system, the mines and the shipping lanes handed to the workers who risk their necks in them. He's sizing the crew up for loyalty to that cause, not just their sword arms.
Mistarion's photo sits on an H&R be-on-the-lookout bulletin alongside
Korlok's. Nobody — including Mistarion — has any idea why a man who can't remember his own past is already flagged by station security.
Zabetta Tarr wants the H&R operative buried inside the Rustblood Cartel named — not exposed — in exchange for her faction's help. The suspects: Dace Orin, Sister Kel, Vance Pitt Halloran, Mira Tolliver, and Joss Merrick.
Zabetta Tarr
Halvorsen - Ryke
Rustblood Cartel
Dace Orin
Sister Kel
Vance Pitt Halloran
Mira Tolliver
Joss Merrick
An Imperial inspector visited the Reclamation Center weeks ago; days later its droids stopped processing and started attacking. One maintenance crew never came back. A security detail barely did.
Mistarion's journal holds a sketch of the exact container
Kael Vass's relic was in — and
Velveteen is fairly sure it once held the vial of blue he swallowed the day he was arrested. Mistarion has no memory of drawing it, or of where he saw the thing it depicts.
The crew is now running jobs for H&R and the Rustblood Cartel simultaneously while quietly working for
Zabetta Tarr's unnamed third faction — a balance Zabetta herself warned won't hold forever.
The vault door into the Reclamation Center's inner works shows clear signs of an explosion and weapons fire, but no trace of the engineering or security crews who went in before. The droids were busy sealing the way in, not out.
Vyakti Nau's real name, buried in a Forge Home server St. Crow was trying to erase. She took "Now" to vanish from someone dangerous enough to be worth the trouble, and that someone — or Saint Crow working for them — may already know where she is.
A corrupted fragment named a ship hidden somewhere in the system before the data gave out entirely. Nothing else survived — not its type, its owner, or why it was worth hiding.
The crew has a week to decide: spend their last pull on Forge Home's security system chasing St. Crow or the Valkyrie's Dawn, or burn it to make
Narok Tarr's smuggling job trivial.
The corrupted server was wired straight into Forge Home's main security network — the same outages
Theobald Achike complained about days ago trace back to whatever St. Crow did down here.
Well-armed, well-drilled, methodical enough to wipe their own tracks mid-assault. Not a riot — an operation. Nobody's said whose.
The Rust Tide, hired, for the memory crystals in the R&D vault — with disguised mercenaries working alongside them. Who did the hiring is still open.
Engines dead, docks gone, the only route up ends in a corridor where every sign points at a fight — Docks, R&D,
Administration, and whatever "Improving Grounds" is supposed to mean.
Out through R&D, across a catwalk over burning fuel, and off the docks in a stolen prison shuttle. It cost them
Corporal Wexel and
Dr. Voss.
One of those is a debt. The other is a kid.
Oot took the button on one condition, and
Jax is it.
He hit the gas button, not the lift, and flooded the block behind them on purpose.
Korlok found out, and beat him to death for it on the loading docks. Oot said he would do it again.
In
Administration:
ND-E's confiscated grimoire, whatever
Now won't talk about,
Velvet's robe. The route happens to run right past it.
It was the Architect's vault rather than the warden's, and the Rust Tide had already emptied it — but the crew's own effects had fallen into the cracks and been passed over.
Halvorsen - Ryke runs the contracts and the claims; the Rustblood Cartel wants the system for the workers and isn't shy about it.
Zabetta Tarr stays neutral by choice, and everyone else on Forge Home is quietly picking a side.
Carried forward: the crew laid the cartel, the company and a quiet third way side by side — see "Cartel, corpo, or the quiet third way".
The prison shuttle is scrap now and Forge Home has nothing to sell.
Narok Tarr's cartel has ships worth taking,
Theobald Achike's company has ships worth buying — both come with a price the crew hasn't priced out yet.
Priced out at last — a fast, dirty ship through the cartel or a cleaner, slower one through H&R. Carried forward as "Cartel, corpo, or the quiet third way".
Two of the dockworkers who jumped the crew are dead — one caught in
Mistarion's moonbeams, one crushed by a slab
ND-E dropped on him after he'd already gone down. Halvorsen - Ryke security is walking toward the table as the session ends.
Commander
Theobald Achike counted two deaths and a blaster fired in a public space, and settled it with a 1,500-credit fine instead of a cell.
Theobald Achike wants the crew to find out why a tech crew sent to the lower recycling centers went dark days ago, payable against their fifteen-hundred-credit fine instead of in coin.
Taken — the fine is waived if they set the Reclamation Center right. The job itself carries on as "The droids went quiet, then violent".
The crew has laid out the whole board — fast ship and dirty hands with the cartel, cleaner money and corporate strings with Halvorsen - Ryke, or a broke, shipless alliance with the station's grassroots faction through
Scraps — and still hasn't picked one.
Answered: all three. The crew takes the first jobs from H&R and the Rustblood Cartel and works
Zabetta Tarr's third way between them.
ND-E caught Saint Crow's calling card buried in the virus running the Reclamation Center's droids — the same bot who sold Onerous out for gambling debts and vanished. He's dead, or should be. Something of him isn't.
The server St. Crow corrupted was recovered: he was hunting for the name Heishi Q, revealed to be Vyakti Nau's true identity.
An auto-override lever, a coolant wheel, an emergency dump lever — and a stern warning never to touch the red wheel. The paint and plaques that once told them apart are long gone, and something heavy is already moving on the other side of the doors.
The crew identified the controls by trial, taste, and a snapped wheel, welded a makeshift wrench, and forced the vault doors open.
The virus infesting the droid network wasn't just hijacking them — it was destroying data on a server that, by all rights, should only govern recycling bots. Nobody knows what was on it, or why it mattered enough to burn.
ND-E salvaged what survived — confirmation St. Crow was after Now's real name, plus a fragment naming a hidden ship, the Valkyrie's Dawn.