Introduction
Divyash Shaw is an interesting person. A veteran of the war who remembers what life was like before the M² - when Foxglove had governed itself for centuries and The Council was an eight-year ride away. He’s poised, well-read, and incredibly kind. He will give you his last crust of bread or the shirt off his back. He will give comfort to the wounded and the desperate. He will get in and get his hands dirty, turn a wrench if that what it takes. And he will destroy a dome and kill a quarter million people. All for the same reason.
Divyash Shaw is the most terrifying fanatic I’ve ever met.
-The Memoirs of “Gentleman” Jack Cartwright
11 August-17 September, WY602 – Sunrise Bay & Riker’s Belt Foxglove
While the crew debates their next move, Kevin arrives at the restaurant carrying a piece of metal and looking pensive. It seems the Navy didn’t care to take San Orestes’s dedication plate and the foreman thought they might want to keep it. After some discussion of ideas, Daniel takes it and Aiden says he’ll bounce ideas for it off of Jack.
Later that evening, Polly arrives at Dirk’s room carrying what appears to be a dive grid node from San Orestes’s M². She shows him how it was burnt out, and if they had taken one more dive with it, the ship would’ve been lost. She talks about how she intends to install hardened dive nodes, but “between that crazy computer and the overcharged capacitor” she worries that they’re pushing the ship past what should be expected of it. She even mentions that she knows Jimmy Gerstman designed that capacitor and wouldn’t let the crew leave with it without warning them. She advises they inspect the entire dive grid after every jump or else run the risk of misjumps due to undetected damage in the grid.
The crew continues to wait for additional information to surface. During this time, Daniel starts making contacts across Foxglove for specialty shipping and passenger gigs. Din continues to walk the halls of Sunrise Bay and starts to get an uncomfortable sense that something is awry, much like the feelings he got leading up to the Eriksson plot.
A week later, a number of notifications make it back from Whistler in response to the crew’s queries:
- Angelica receives an automated response stating that Benny has returned to Jericho and the messages will be forwarded on.
- No response is received from Ramon Tyree.
- A notification is received stating that Victor Chambers was murdered on August 2nd on Trinity Station.
- Erica Lieu sends a notification back to Din. She’s enthusiastic about helping anything involving the Eriksson plot and has sent an information request along with a warrant to the Foxglove Prospector’s Bank for information about the anonymous account. Three days later, the bank responds. The account was opened in the name of Dianna Patil, the controller of St. Anna’s of The Belts. All of the deposits to the account came from either Ramon Tyree or Victor Chambers on the expected dates and were immediately withdrawn in the form of physical commodities.
After unloading their gear, the crew determines that they won’t need the services of Peach, so Captain Harrington hires on a new crew and goes back to his normal trade routes.
Jack contacts the team and informs them that he’d been attempting to find out anything about Dauntless and has discovered that about a year ago, the destroyer had visited Foxglove and stopped at a cluster of asteroids in Riker’s Belt for three days before jumping away.
After waiting several days for Dirk to orchestrate an illicit romantic getaway to Snowball with Chief Chatterjee, the crew rents a serviceable in-system prospecting craft and makes the two week run down the well to the area of Riker’s Belt that Jack had identified.
At the site, they discover a small mining outpost on a medium-sized rock. There’s a 150-year-old claim beacon on the asteroid from a company called Serendipity Systems. A quick bit of research reveals that the company is about 200 years old and they have a number of claims in Riker’s Belt, but it has the telltale marks of being a front for some other entity. No one from the outpost answers hails, and it appears that the outer airlock door to the hab has been blown open.
The crew enters the hab and finds that it had been blown open by Marine-issued shape charges. Many of the occupants died in the decompression and those that made it to suits were shot. Any piece of technology in the hab that had a data storage medium has been disabled and the data storage removed. Further investigation reveals that the miners at this facility didn’t seem to have any personal effects whatsoever. Everything seemed to have a Serendipity Systems logo and there was no evidence that any personal items had ever been there. The crew takes photos of all of the bodies and attempts to collect them in a single location for a future retrieval mission.
Down in the mine, it appears the miners put up a bit more of a fight, but were similarly slaughtered. Most of the equipment and nearly all of the mined material was missing, but the crew did find a small crate of Arnite. Strangely, the very brittle mineral was in perfectly-formed ingots in a small crate. After a search, Roland discovers what appears to be a mining tool. The crew experiments with it and finds that it has the ability to liquify the normally brittle mineral and form it into the ingots found in the crate. One of the miners had gone to great lengths to hide the tool before being shot, and it’s ability to manipulate the mineral using finely-tuned magnetic fields in this way is amazing, but curious for a mineral that is typically only used for souvenirs.
The crew takes the mining tool and the remaining Arnite ingots and begin their burn back to Sunrise Bay.
A week into their journey back, they detect a large dive signature from the direction of the station. The entirety of the WDF 1st Carrier Group, led by the carrier WDF Arnold Whistler, has arrived in Foxglove.
