Introduction
The space around Foxglove was packed full of the desperate, the opportunistic, the on-edge, the aggrieved, the betrayed, the confused, and the well-armed.
I don’t know if there was any way that whole situation could’ve not been a cluster-fuck, but if there was, no one could see it.
-The Memoirs of “Gentleman” Jack Cartwright
1-7 July, WY603 – Foxglove, Whistler
The situation in Foxglove is tense. System patrol craft are operating up and down the well in the belts and three Navy cruisers patrol the immediate Foxglove planetary system. WDF Apollo is on station above Skinner’s Point on the moon of Snowball, WDF Intrepid guards Sunrise Bay, and WDF Heracles is operating in the trade lanes.
Cara leads Roland, Daniel, Din, Dirk, Swan, and the special forces marines and takes Legitimate Purchase over to the station. Polly informs the crew that a gang of armed civilians have taken up positions outside the Sunrise Bay command center and she doesn’t know why. All fourteen individuals the crew intends to rescue are inside, including Polly, Gerald Chin and his family of four, Smitty and his few remaining Praetorian Security employees, and a handful of other staffers with their spouses. Instead of picking a fight, the shuttle crew decides to take a cue from their own playbook and go through the window of the station director’s office off the command center.
Meanwhile, a megafreighter identifying as ITC The Bonny Hills of Canto has taken up position at the LaGrange point between Foxglove and Snowball and begins broadcasting on an open channel that they have hydroponic rigs onboard donated by an anonymous benefactor. They begin detaching hundreds of cargo containers as all the small craft in the area swoop in to claim the invaluable food production equipment. As this is a breach of the embargo, WDF Heracles moves to intervene.
The situation continues to play out over the next half-hour. The shuttle crew successfully breaches the Sunrise Bay command center. As WDF Heracles approaches ITC The Bonny Hills of Canto, the megafreighter appears to come apart, revealing a battery of capital-grade mass drivers and fires them all straight along the Navy cruiser’s beam. WDF Heracles shatters, breaking apart into pieces. At the same time, Sunrise Bay’s defense system comes online and begins firing salvo after salvo of missiles at WDF Intrepid. Chin attempts to disable the weapons but the control center has been locked out. Intrepid opens fire on Sunrise Bay, causing grievous damage to the station that still has twenty-thousand civilians onboard.
While WDF Apollo maneuvers to the rescue of the WDF Heracles survivors, Aiden orders Legitimate Salvage into the line of fire to act as a missile screen for WDF Intrepid and attempts to convince the cruiser to stop firing on Sunrise Bay. The shuttle crew gets everyone from the command center aboard and detaches, and after a brief conversation with Chin, decide to reposition and dock at a maintenance airlock near Sunrise Bay’s computer core in an attempt to get the station to stop firing. Legitimate Salvage continues firing on missiles to keep Intrepid from harm, but the cruiser’s cannons continue to ravage the station.
The crew docks at the maintenance hatch and move to take the computer center. They find it guarded by a team of lightly-armed insurgents. Cara orders them to drop their weapons as the special forces marines charge. One raises a weapon and is killed, but the rest surrender. The marines attach an uplink to the core, allowing Angelica to easily override the hack controlling the station’s guns and insert her own. The station’s guns go quiet, and Intrepid ceases fire.
By this time, word has arrived from up and down the well, insurgent Murphys have arrived at most of the population centers in the belts and are slaughtering the much smaller Navy patrol craft that are operating in the belts.
Commander Banks calls Aiden directly and thanks him for his help. He says he was under very specific orders in such a situation that he was unable to break, so the breathing room provided by Legitimate Salvage’s point defense systems essentially saved what’s left of the station.
The shuttle crew returns to the ship and they hand the four prisoners over to WDF Intrepid. The crew decides to beat a hasty departure. By the time they reach dive distance, the only Navy ships left in Foxglove are the cruisers Apollo and Intrepid - the insurgents essentially hold the belts. The crew dives for Trinity Station in Whistler.
On the dive, Aiden offers Polly a quarter share in the ship to come on as engineer and she agrees. They discuss the possibilities of starting a manufacturing business with the salvaged orbital forges. The crew also prepare a packet for Harvey to try to take on Smitty and the remnants of his security company.
By the time the crew arrives at Trinity Station, word has arrived of the attack on Foxglove. Thousands more on Sunrise Bay have died as the station has become less viable, but the outposts on the moons have made accommodations and evacuated the remaining fifteen-thousand or so survivors with the help of WDF Intrepid - seemingly operating against orders to not render aid.
Nicole Wahpetonwan of Grove and Divyash Shaw of Foxglove have made a formal offer of peace to The Council. They offer up a complete cease-fire in exchange for the sovereignty of the two systems. The Council steadfastly and immediately refuses, stating that Grove and Foxglove are critical to the economy and security of The Reach and they refuse to allow the only other true garden world in the sector and the resource rich belts of Foxglove to be independent. The WDF is mobilizing all its forces for a second war and invasion of Grove and Foxglove.
Turning to the theft of ITC Xiwangmu’s Moist Peach, Dirk receives a briefing from the Bureau office on Trinity Station that includes a dossier of what they could collect on Izzy Cordova’s movements. They are unsure how he arrived on Trinity Station, but he immediately began attempting to charter a ship to Trilby - an uninhabited system too far from anything to have been colonized by either The Council or Jericho. At one point he stopped and rented a small vessel and travelled to Cartwright for several days and then returned and continued to attempt to find passage to Trilby. Shortly thereafter he was observed boarding Peach.
