Introduction
Canto was colonized some two hundred years ago by, you could say, a gaggle of hippies. The planet was relatively friendly, and it was so far from Whistler that they were never going to get visitors. They thrived there, but they never went back into space - they simply had no desire to.
It was a bit of a joke when they threw in with Grove and Foxglove in their secession. But the Council stopped laughing when Canto revealed they were going to make Foxglove self-sufficient with the advanced farming and recycling tech they’d developed.
August 11th, 554. The orbital bombardment did something to Canto’s natural balance, and the whole place went to hell.
No one lives there now. No one really can, at least not profitably. And honestly, who wants to build their home atop so many graves?
-The Memoirs of “Gentleman” Jack Cartwright
22 April - 25 April, WY603 – Deep Space
Current Contract: We’ve Got Them
A continued search of the shipyard hab reveals a library computer with the entire engineering library of the Grove Cheyenne Drive Yards, but little in the way of actionable intel.
The crew splits up across the shipyard.
Angelica continues investigating the different available computers.
- She pulls the print records from all three refineries. They’ve been operating in this location nearly non-stop for twelve years. They had been transported away during the first invasion of Grove and they have definitely been building ship parts, including a spine the size of a cruiser eight years ago.
- WDF San Martin’s computers had been scuttled in the attack, but she manages to pull the drive cone signatures of three tramp freighters that had been coming and going from the shipyard for several years.
- Two of the freighters had departed a week past. The third had left nearly three weeks ago.
- By comparing the twelve years of print records from the refineries with the engineering schematics, she estimates that the insurgency could have built as many as five assault cruisers and one Lakota-class dreadnaught, in addition to numerous smaller vessels that couldn’t be reasonably estimated with the data available.
Roland, Daniel, Din, and Aiden look into the space-worthiness of all the vessels present.
- ITC My Eyes Are Up Here, Asshole is in relatively decent shape. The crew compartment shows no sign of violence, and it is returned to service with minor repairs on the cannibalized computer.
- All three refineries have functioning M² systems that just require regular maintenance to restore.
- The shot through WDF San Martin’s reactor is shockingly clean, and in a flash of brilliance, Aiden develops a plan to patch and restore it to service in a little over two days.
Cara, Dirk, and Swan address the fifteen prisoners.
- As Swan and the marines were securing the ship, he noted that of the survivors “not all of these guys are sailors”.
- Dirk begins selecting individual to interrogate:
- The first is a marine who really doesn’t know much.
- The second, an engineer named Barker, reveals very little as well that wasn’t obvious.
- The third, a spacer named Bill, alludes to how extensive the Sons of The Reach network is, creating uncertainty about whether this facility was the only shipyard or not.
- The fourth, a chief engineer named Greta Flynn reveals that the freighter crews who were kidnapped had been stranded in an uncomfortable but not life-threatening location on Canto. The insurgents had planned to move the shipyard after disassembling Asshole and was going to transmit the coordinates of the prisoners to the authorities.
The crew takes the next few days to perform maintenance and repairs. They transfer the prisoners to Legitimate Salvage, then remote-jump the three refineries, ITC My Eyes Are Up Here, Asshole, and WDF San Martin to different deep space locations to be retrieved later. They set course for Canto and dive.
Three hours into the dive, the ship is at third watch. Daniel is standing watch in the CIC. Calliope wakes up Dirk and says, “You need to come to engineering. You need to hurry.” Shortly thereafter an alarm sounds in the CIC, it’s an alarm that everyone has heard in training but no one has ever heard in the field and lived to tell about it: the dive bubble destabilization alarm.