Session 04 - The many trials

In the chambers leading up to the illegal airlock the vacuum-blinded Johan Barleycorn runs, Owen Dunda and Kenny Bourbon suit up for a space-walk. Their goal is the computer on which the space station police keep their evidence. It sits within the station, so Owen and Kenny must hack their way back inside, through a second airlock. This portal is the one from which the courts will eject Kenny, sans spacesuit, should the lawyers prove him guilty of the murders of the three space-punks – Spunks – near a slushy stand. Giselle Callista, who the unlikely crew dragged out of a self-induced drug coma for this very job, will wait behind with the sinister Barleycorn. She will relay instructions when the two reach something with a computer that needs hacking.

Owen has years of experience in the inky emptiness of the cosmos. He opens the makeshift airlock and leads Kenny, with Owen laying a tether as the two make progress. At the ‘Gallows Airlock’, Owen and Kenny find a terminal on the station’s outer hull. Despite their bulky space-suits the two men are able to follow Giselle’s competent instructions and navigate their way deep into the airlock’s software. With about half of their oxygen spent, Owen and Kenny get inside via the decompression chamber and the two doors flanking it. The coast is clear, they turn off their air supplies, remove their helmets and their eyes light on a single terminal near a row of sturdy-looking doors. Giselle can’t reach them via radio, now they’re separated by too much mass of space-station, so the two men have to grapple with the terminal’s subroutines as best they can, working with the scraps of expertise they picked up from Giselle whilst still floating outside. They burrow down to the interface for the evidence database and use it to access Giselle’s kill-file, brought by Owen and Kenny on a memory stick. The two run the software and in seconds, gigabytes of data and proof vanish, including the CCTV footage of Kenny battering three Spunks to death with his sledgehammer.

Owen sees Kenny is happy with the result and makes the jaunt profitable for himself by using a climbing piton to smash the lock on one of the line of doors near the terminal. As he expected, this leads into a small strongroom in which physical evidence is kept. Bagged up and still bloody is Kenny’s hammer. It’s useless to Owen, but its owner is happy to retake possession of it. Kenny also pockets an interesting device, not sure what it is. Owen seizes more reliably lucrative fare: cash money and drugs – enough to take a serious chunk out of the debt he owes to Union-Dynamo Haulage for his bionic eye – along with an all-environment hazard suit, complete with a small tank of oxygen to supplement their current supply.

Since Owen and Kenny know their way round the Gallows Lock systems, they find the short schlep through the vacuum back to Johan Barleycorn’s lair easy. Giselle is glad to see the two adventurers return, if only so that she can be away from the eye-less, leering Barleycorn. When Kenny asks her about the gadget he found in the police evidence lockers, she tells him it’s a holographic projector.

Before heading back to the improbable five’s safe house in the Skid Rim, Owen makes back to his company’s ship, The Crimson Midget, so stow the part-used oxygen tanks and the drugs taken from the police station. As Owen is securing his stash, Domingo Flores is finishing up his internet-dive where he has been reading what the Earth-bound papers have been saying about the cults. It turns out they’ve been saying plenty – and none of it good. The press is full of accusations of violence and terrorism, but what draws Domingo’s attention is that he’s never heard of many of the articles’ writers and can’t find any articles by those writers which aren’t focused on cult violence. The journo sends a couple of messages to some long-standing colleagues at his media agency: have these authors been spreading hate on social media, too?

A knock on the door rouses Domingo from his research. The cop who runs the sex shop which is a front for the safe house tells Kenny, who’s now back from his illegal jaunt to the police archives, it’s all but time for his trial. Kenny buys the most decent suit he can find on the Skid Rim and makes his way to the court chambers.

The trial of Kenny Bourbon

Kenny is nervous as he sits through a couple of trials before his own. Apparently Giselle’s kill-file hasn’t scrambled the evidence for these cases, as they proceed without a hitch. Was the space walk and the break-in all for nothing?

The audience in the gallery gives Kenny a warm greeting at the start of his case. The public are tired of the Spunks and their antics, so any enemy of the gangers is a friend of the everyday station citizen. As the prosecution lawyer brings up meaningless static, instead of the all-important CCTV video of the killing of the Spunks, Kenny sits with more ease in the dock. The prosecution lawyer, a deflating shadow of the grandstanding show-off from the trial’s beginning, calls a police witness to the stand to testify. However, this was one of the cops who was on duty when Forrest Zerrick’s cultists stormed the station and saw first hand how Kenny and his companions neutralise the invaders when the cultists stormed the cells. The law-man paints Kenny in a glowing light – more like a vigilante than a murderer. The judge passes a verdict of not guilty and ices the cake by apologising to Kenny for the ordeal and the rigmarole of the prosecution’s case. The words she directs at the prosecuting lawyer are a lot less kind. The gallery’s onlookers erupt with whoops and cheers and Kenny leads them to a triumphant round of drinks at – where else – the slushy stand.

Kenny returns to the safe house with a few extra celebratory slushies for Owen, Domingo, Janus and Hundo. Not long after, the cop running the place tells the five they have to leave. The police need the safe house for a witness in another case.

The cults grow

The quintet leave via the sex shop on the ground floor, intending to go back to their nicer digs on the less seedy stratum of the space station. However, they are intruigued by a larger than usual crowd of robed figures, where they remember Forrest Zerrick has the entrance to his sect’s hideaway, The Mystral Refuge. The cultists are from more than one faction and are joking, laughing and fooling around with one another. It looks like the peace the five brokered between the air and fire cultists is not only holding, but spreading.

The five postpone their homecoming and go to find out what the fuss is about. Zerrick’s air cultists welcome the quintet as brethren and allow access to the refuge, where Forrest Zerrick himself is once again holding court. Janus asks the leader if big money, be it a business or a state, has shown an interest in the cults yet. She explains that his and his followers’ powers will be seen as either a threat or opportunity – or both – by the big players in the solar system, who will want to a say in how the cults’ metaphysical abilities are harnessed.

Zerrick is confused, saying that he sees his followers as peaceful and misunderstood outcasts. His mind is more occupied trying to bring the leader of a group lead by a horticulturalist called Olivia Sage into the expanding multi-faith fold. Rumours say that she and some of her acolytes have mystical powers over plant life. However, the flow of news from her base of operation, AgriHub Central, which produces most of the station’s fruit and vegetables, is more scant than from other groups similar to hers and Zerrick’s.

The five, who now feel loose affiliation with Zerrick and his believers, agree to go to AgriHub Central to deliver the air cultists’ message of peace and welcoming. The hydroponic centre is spacious, light and full of plants and human gardeners. One such horticulturist is Josh Roberts, who tends a market stall jam packed with flawless produce. He is an open character who is easy to get along with, but when the five ask to meet with Olivia herself, Josh becomes more wary. Eventually, the five persuade him that their intentions are good, and Josh leaves the stall to set up the meeting.