Session 05 - The Dawkins

In AgriHub Central, which provides the space station Genesis Toroid with the majority of its fresh food, the unlikely five, Janus Alkers, Kenny Bourbon, Owen Dunda, Domingo Flores and Hundo McCleary, have their meeting with Olivia Sage, who the quintet have been told is the leader of a sect which has mystical powers over plant life. The goal of the five is to foster better relations between Sage's group and Forrest Zerrick's air-bending cult. The latter is increasingly becoming a focal point for other sects on the 'Steering Wheel’.

Sage is somewhat haughty and suspicious of the quintet and claims to have seen evidence that Zerrick is planning a herbicidal attack on AgriHub Central. Domingo shows her the deep-faked videos which show falsified atrocities between Zerrick’s group and that of the fire-wielding Scott ‘Ingatius’ Urban. On the strength of this, Olivia Sage invites the five into her group’s most sacred arboretum. Although the horticulturalists’ collection of plants is stunning and exotic, Domingo can’t help but notice that many are stricken with a fungal infection. Many plant racks are entirely empty.

Before the five and Sage can get further into negotiations, a station-wide alert sounds, “Brace for impact!” Kenny flings himself to the ground, expecting to be knocked off his feet-wheels. However, although the quintet and its host hear the faint sound of a collision, the station is otherwise unaffected.
Ran Lambert is the horticulturalists’ computer expert and is working at a nearby terminal in the arboretum. He tells Sage that the impact was a ship called the Dawkins. The sect leader is upset; she has been waiting for the arrival of the Dawkins as it carries a vital cargo: Vitaflora regenerens, a plant commonly called emberfern. She explains to the five that the plant can produce a compound which will reverse the effect of the fungal infection Domingo noticed, which is killing plants essential to the station’s medical needs. Worse yet, emberfern is illegal on the station, as it also contains a precursor to the drug solar flare.

Kenny seizes this as an opportunity to gain favour with Sage and offers to get the plant specimens from the ship. Ran, reading the latest official news traffic from the terminal, says there’s a window of opportunity. The station’s external docking grabs have stabilised the Dawkins and placed it under quarantine. In three hours’ time, an authorised station recovery party will board the Dawkins. However, Ran, as a Genesis Toroid staff member himself, can get the five into the stricken ship whilst maintaining the official illusion of full quarantine. Ran even has access to schematics of the Dawkins, which he transfers to Owen’s portable equipment. As a whole, the quintet doesn’t know what to expect from the inside of the Dawkins and so negotiate a sizeable amount of cash to sweeten the deal, alongside the promise of cooperation between Sage’s sect and Zerrick’s.

The five gather in the Steering Wheel’s hub, where ships dock with the station and where the apparent gravity caused by Genesis Toroid’s rotation is so weak as to be negligible. The quintet raid a service depository for mag-boots (ideal in zero-gravity), hazmat suits and copious amounts of duct tape, which they need to adapt the hazmat suits for Kenny’s wheel-feet and Hundo’s blade-arm. The station’s docking grabs have not only stabilised the Dawkins, but also brought into alignment with the station to that a concertinaing boarding conduit has automatically formed a seal with the ghost ship’s airlock. Ran gets the Dawkins’ doors open and the quintet are inside.

The head-up displays in the group’s suits tells them oxygen levels inside the ship are okay, but it is deathly cold: less than -40°C. The five are in no rush to remove their helmets, although the clock is ticking on their oxygen supply. There’s no sign of life in the forward section of the ship, although there’s more than one live computer terminal, whose ID card reader Janus deftly hacks and bypasses. Within moments, she has the ship’s heating systems back online.

The terminal also tells the harrowing story of the last surviving crew member of the Dawkins, Shiva Brumen. Her log tells of a rapid, ship-wide descent into madness and carnage, after a fellow crew-mate, Lorn Redwood, triggered an anomaly with a scientific pet project. The ship’s hull has ruptured, its cargo of live polar bears has been let loose, the crew have been killed and are yet still roaming around. To top it all, the last journal entry from Brumen describes how she’s extensively trapped the two parallel corridors leading from the fore-section of the ship, to keep the wandering horrors at bay.

The company find pressurised gas canisters in an adjacent storeroom whose labels sport the tradename PolyVinylBond. Kenny accesses the internet via the ship’s terminal and finds out the chemical is a universal neutralising agent. This makes it just the thing for dealing with one of Shiva Brumen’s traps: according to her log, she planned to flood one of the corridors with fluoroantimonic acid, which would eat through polar bear and zombified crew member alike in moments.

The store-room has a generous supply of tools, as well as the neutralising gas. Owen grabs a drill and a bit wide enough to make a hole through which he can fit a length of handy tubing. As soon as the door to one of the corridors is punctured, a sickly gas starts to seep through, turning the bore of the drill hole from shining steel to suppurating goo in seconds. The acid starts working on the tubing as soon as Owen passes it through the failing gap, but the hose holds up long enough for the team to flood the corridor beyond the door with a whole canister of the neutralising agent. Owen throws the used drill bit through the remains of the hole it made and hears a satisfying clatter from the other side: it has not dissolved. Hopefully the five will survive opening the door, too.

The corridor beyond is a hell-scape of slagged metal, although the outer hull seems to have survived the corrosion. A pile of bones lies slumped next to a toppled pair of two more canisters. Presumably, this is all that remains of Shiva Brumen and her desperate, failed plan to use the lethal acid as a barrier.

Janus hangs back at the Dawkins’ terminal as her four companions edge deeper into the ship. From the schematics on Owen’s portable device, the group know the melted corridor leads to the Dawkins’ cargo bay, where the polar bears were housed. Janus ramps up the heating in that section, to make life as difficult for the bears as possible, if her associates are going to have to deal with them. She gets the door to the cargo bay open. Two of three bears are loose, with the third still behind bars. Domingo frantically fires his blaster pistol at the raging beasts, whilst Kenny lets fly with the sledgehammer he recovered from the police lock-up and Owen flings a smaller hammer from a distance. To their immense surprise, the four bring down the two loose bears. One is dead and Hundo uses manacles to immobilise the other, which is unconscious.

Above each of the barred enclosures is a small white-board cargo manifest, on which is penned the name of the client to whom the bears were to be delivered: one Telkratzer. When this is relayed to Janus, it takes her a moment to remember that this is the station’s doctor, the target upon whom the Soviets had asked her to run surveillance. She files this away as an issue to deal with later. The team’s oxygen is steadily dwindling.

Janus gets the door at the end of the cargo bay open. This leads to the vast nuclear generator which powers the ship and its thrusters. The room is veiled in darkness, although by now Janus is well familiar with the Dawkins’ computer system and has the lights back on in moments. A shrouded figure is tinkering with a device, trying to unify it with the reactor. He is surrounded by the staggering remains of his former ship-mates. Some of these have been torn open by clearly-fatal claw wounds. The others bear the unmistakable ravages of exposure to vacuum. None should be able to walk around, nor attack the four figures emerging from the cargo bay, but attack they do.

The space zombies are clumsy and nowhere near as dangerous as the bears. The four target the cloaked figure working at the reactor until he is forced to take cover behind the great machine. Owen sees that his comrades have the zombies under control and puts his years of experience as an asteroid rigger, for whom mag boots are just part of everyday kit, to daring use. He sprints up a metal bulkhead wall and launches himself over the ship’s engine, coasting into the last chamber of the derelict ship: the Dawkins’ laboratory. Here, specimen plants are housed in racks, amongst them, the emberfern so precious to Olivia Sage and her followers. Whilst Owen grabs as many potted plants as he can, the mysterious figure in the engine room uses unearthly powers to re-raise zombified crew members dispatched by Kenny, Hundo and Domingo. The stranger, presumably the Lorn Redwood mentioned in the ship’s logs, can’t raise the battered corpse-mob fast enough to replace his losses, however. In moments, the three men have Redwood battered safely into submission and shackled.

Janus comes to a decision regarding the Telkratzer lead. She convinces her companions to kill the remaining living polar bears: one already unconscious, the other behind bars. With the polar creatures dead, the cargo bay is an ideal place to leave Lorn Redwood to be picked up by the in-bound station recovery party. With scant oxygen left in their tanks, the reunited five grab as much emberfern as they can carry – Domingo helps himself to some cuttings from neighbouring specimen plants – and exit the nightmare of the Dawkins, ready to make good on their promise to Olivia Sage.