Session 08 - Caelus Mons

Domingo, Hundo, Janus, Kenny and Owen emerge from the lift from Telkratzer’s surgery into a low-grav service hall, halfway between the station’s habitable layers in its main toroid and the docking hub in its centre. The five have the doctor’s laptop, which Domingo hacked to find a healthy array of emails and documents outlining Telkratzer’s troubling genetic experiments. Domingo has plenty of material for his next great journalistic scoop and Janus has enough information to keep the money flowing from her Soviet handlers. The two back up the most juicy intelligence on the laptop to their own devices and the five turn their attention to the next to-do: get fuel for The Dawkins so the damaged, but still serviceable, scientific vessel can get the leaders of the Order of the Elemental trinity to Mars. There, the mysterious alien monolith stands in a cave, which could well be the source of the Order’s mystical powers and the answer to a great many questions.

The nearest source of the helium-3 fuel is Caelus Mons. This is one of the larger asteroids in the belt whose orbit around the sun is shared by Genesis Toroid. The group’s first plan is to hack the station’s systems to amend the manifest of a flight already scheduled to the asteroid, so that the ship’s crew bring back just enough fuel to get The Dawkins to Mars without noticing the discrepancy. The company decides a visit to Giselle Callista is their best option. She is the talented hacker the quintet met in Club Anti Matter and who helped Owen and Kenny break into Genesis Toroid’ s police station via a space walk from one airlock to another.

Giselle’s apartment is on the squalid ‘Skid Rim’, a layer of the Toroid which boasts uncomfortable, floaty gravity levels, sex shops and night clubs. The team use Giselle’s screen-equipped intercom and they see the bedsit’s owner sprawled face down on her bed. Giselle is still in the land of the living enough to raise a hand to allow the front door to slide open. Inside, the quintet see signs of a one-woman drugs bender. Giselle’s ample collection of bobble head, geek-culture characters is complemented by needles, empty pizza boxes and the smell of vomit. Owen realises there’s a down-side to rewarding an addict for services rendered with large quantities of cash. Kenny revives Giselle with a small bottle of smelling salts, but the hackstress is too far gone to be of much use in the five’s fuel-gathering scheme.

The group defaults to Plan B. Ran Lambert, another tech-head and disciple of the botanicalist wing of The Order of the Elemental Trinity, furnished the group with a permit for the fuel, before the raid on Telkratzer’s lab, using the clearance that comes with being an official employee of the station. The downside is that the party has to resign itself to appearing on Caelus Mons in person to present the permit. Aside from being a top-quality fuel for fusion reactors, helium-3 is a precursor to atomic weapons. Finding a way around the ultra-tight regulations the world governments have put on the stuff is hard.

The Order is too shy of the public eye to send its own members to the asteroid and Janus follows its logic. She sets herself and her companions up in the blandest overalls money can buy, hoping to pass the group off as delivery company employees on a routine chore. Disguises and permit secured, the quintet charter a shuttle to the asteroid, complete with pilot. The shuttle dispatcher mentions in passing that the Soviets, whose main, capital ship, The Novgorod, is still docked at the station, have already taken another shuttle to the asteroid.

Via the shuttle’s small windows, en route to Caelus Mons, the party see that the docking terminal is split into different bays for each of the main players in the asteroid belt. One of the airlocks is claimed by Union Dynamo, for whom Owen works, and another by the Soviets. Once the shuttle docks, an asteroid representative approves the permit whipped up by Ran Lambert, much to the party’s quiet relief. He directs them to the ore processing centre, deeper within the asteroid, where they can claim the cylinders of helium-3 fuel.

The admissions offices near the airlock give way to a large hall no doubt once upon a time carved out by wealth-hungry excavations. A glass-fronted door in a side wall is flanked by two of the Russians’ soldatbots - tech-limited, but deadly in a fight. Janus leverages her nothing-to-see-here disguise to get closer to the door without rousing suspicion. Inside, she sees Boris Goncharov: her own, Soviet contact for espionage work, sitting across a large conference table from a man wearing an expensive suit. Business type. Janus wrings her memory for an ID as she recognises him as a big player. She comes up with the name Porro Foster, a Union Dynamo big-wig who represents all the firm’s dealings in the asteroid belt. Kenny speaks to the robot sentries, but they do not respond. Whether this is because they don’t understand English or they’ve been programmed not to talk isn’t clear.

The group stick to the plan, choosing not to investigate the meeting, and press on to the ore processing centre. This chamber is dominated by a huge machine, which fills pressurised containers with helium-3. This precious fuel is derived from the ore fed into the refiner by the teams of workers which bustle about it. Rails lead to neighbouring cavities, from which the quintet hear drilling and other sounds of heavy mining activities.

Uproar amongst the miners prevents the party from claiming the two cylinders of He-3 needed to power The Dawkins. One of the workers has appointed himself a communist agitator. He calls to the others to be emboldened by the arrival of the Soviets and now is the time to throw off the shackles of their capitalist oppressors. A supervisor shouts at the listening workers to ignore this and get back to work, but the agitator has the miners’ attention.
Janus masks her voice with a strangled accent and instead of engaging in the brewing conflict, asks for the cylinders so that the party can be on its way. When the agitator objects, claiming the helium-3 to be property of the collective, rather than Union Dynamo, Janus plays a universal suffrage card. The overalls her and her companions wear make them out to be fellow workers, so shouldn’t they have equal claim to the fuel?

The agitator concedes the point and the party loads two cannisters onto a wheeled dolly. As far as Domingo and Owen are concerned, the task is complete and they’re only interested in getting the fuel and themselves back to Genesis Toroid as soon as possible. However, Hundo, Janus and Kenny find the uprising interesting enough to follow the miners as they bundle their supervisor, Mr. Brown, into a nearby storeroom.

In the storeroom is a huge cylinder made of riveted metal sheets which tapers towards the top. It’s painted white and looks like it could have used a second coat to cover what was underneath. When Janus demands to know from Supervisor Brown what the construction is, the man just says it was delivered by the Soviets. Janus wipes off enough of the paint to reveal ‘CCCP’, confirming the man’s story and Kenny sets about wresting off one of the structure’s panels. Brown panics and tells those of the quintet present that the device is a bomb. Janus leaves, but Kenny gets the panel he’s been working loose off. He fells a gentle tingling on his face and Brown moans that it’s not just a bomb, but an atomic bomb. Kenny slams the panel back on and follows in Janus’ footsteps as quick as he can. Whilst Janus goes back to the shuttle to join Domingo and Owen, Kenny and Hundo decide to throw a closer glance at a door opposite the conference room, in the chamber before the ore processing centre. A sign on the door reads ‘Telkratzer’. Having seen the evidence of suspicious activity in the doctor’s lab on Genesis Toroid, Kenny and Hundo try Telkratzer’s key card on the door, hoping to find out more. The key card works and the two slip inside.

The door opens onto a short corridor which is unoccupied but flanked by doors on each side and a single door at the far end. The doors on the left are sturdy and have the lifting metal shutters of the sort through which prisoners are passed food by guards. In the first cell whose hatch the two open is a horrified-looking, pregnant woman.

“I can feel it moving around!” she wails in terror. Kenny and Hundo remember the monstrosities in the fluid-filled specimen tubes in Telkratzer’s lab on the station and fear the worst.

Another cell holds a man dressed in night-clubbing gear. Another victim of kidnapping from Club Anti-Matter.

The door at the end of the corridor is even heavier than those of the cells. The key card works again revealing a chamber sectioned into bar-fronted cells. These are filled with more of Telkratzer’s monstrosities, but these are far too alive and aggressive for comfort. Some of the walls and floor are splattered with blood. It looks like it could be human. One cell holds yet another night clubber and this could be a member of the Spunks gang, given his fluorescent mohawk. He’s also petrified with fear and wears combat armour. Kenny used the swipe card on a device on a wall on his and Hundo’s side of the bars, to release the man, but this releases the monsters, too. Kenny and Hundo flee, slamming the door behind them as they race back into the corridor. The two have seen enough and release all the prisoners in the cells facing onto the hall. The doors opposite to the cells open onto a small laboratory and a storeroom full of kevlar combat armour. Kenny and Hundo help themselves to a set of combat armour each and smash anything that looks breakable in the lab.

The two leave Telkratzer’s asteroid facility and join the rest of the quintet on the shuttle, hoping the authorities will be too busy dealing with the communist uprising and terrified women pregnant with who-knows-what monstrosities to ask any questions about who released the latter.