The session begins with the sleepers discussing their next move. The discussion becomes somewhat strained, during which Corbett has a memory.
Once the discussion is complete, the party has concluded to bring the Firefly-class civilian transport into service and explore the Persephone system for possible sources of food and information.
Captain Millet and Lieutenant Casey head down to the flight deck to begin bringing the Firefly out of mothball while the rest of the party heads to a small arms locker to arm themselves. They also investigate Locker 17 and Janks attempts to bypass the security of the lock, finding that the mechanism was rigged to explode, and manages to disarm the system, but neither he nor Captain Millet can open the lock, which appears to be controlled from the inside.
Retrieving a small drone from the special forces armory, Janks sends it through the ventilation system to take a peek into the locker – inside the room, they see a small cylinder covered in a tarp, a data core, a agricultural cold storage module, and a pharmaceutical gene vault – none of which particularly belong on a Star League battleship but it does explain why the locker was receiving power during the interstellar journey.
Colonel Becker decides to leave the locker as is and retires to her office to examine service records while the rest of the party works to supply the Firefly transport – currently named “Bernie’s Twat”. It becomes clear that the transport, while looking rundown on the outside, is actually in quite astounding shape inside, and it appears that the ship was often renamed and repainted – in all likelihood for use in covert operations.
Cottle’s cryo chamber finishes the thaw process about the same time that everyone is complete, and the party convenes there to help the old doctor wake. It quickly becomes apparently that Cottle retains all of his memories, and views the amnesiac (and armed) crew with no small amount of trepidation.
He very briefly attempts to explain to the party how they came to be in the situation that they’re in, paraphrased below:
At the end of the Amaris rebellion, when Kerensky and Toguawa returned to Terra and killed Amaris and his family, the League lords, fearing Kerensky’s influence, attempted to strip him of his titles and divide the Star League Defense Forces up amongst themselves, to be used, in all likelihood, in a coming civil war to determine who would rule the Inner Sphere. Kerensky decided instead to quietly recruit the majority of the Star League Defense Forces in a grand scheme to leave the Inner Sphere entirely and found a new utopia on new worlds somewhere far from the influence and politics of the Sphere.
While the forces gathered for this great Exodus, Kerensky sent Tokugawa to retrieve some things their new society would need – some prototypes from an Ares Arms facility on Cromwell (which, Cottle points out, was a nasty bit of business in which Janks almost died), a data core from a Federated Multitech facility, an agricultural sample warehouse from a Pietzo Agricultural research lab, and a gene vault from a Yangtze Pharmaceutical facility. The final stop on the trip was a classified League base on the uninhabited Persephone 2 to retrieve a League Holocaust Archive – a data archive designed to be a time capsule of knowledge. The Ares Arms people hounded the 9th Fleet through their entire mission, all the way to Bernard, where a saboteur caused the misjump.
Cottle scraped up medicines and chemicals to freeze the crews of the Agamemnon and Thermopylae, and the rest everyone knows.
With Cottle’s help, Becker orders several additional crewers be thawed:
- Agamemnon’s Tactical Services Officer and 3rd-in-command Major Justin Summerville.
- Chief Engineer Elizabeth Fagan
- Chief Robert Kim, Agamemnon’s Deck Boss
- Petty Officer 2nd Class Lance Torres, to take over Jenkins’ position as Chief of Human Services
- Petty Officer Morgan Wilson, the Deck Boss from the Coyote
- And the remaining 8 marines from Janks’ unit – five of whom do not survive.
Colonel Becker’s log, 3020, May 18th, part 2
We finally got the chance to peek into the locked room. The one that had its own power throughout the long, cold years when we slept. A gene bank, DNA vault.
It was a surprise, I suppose, but on the other hand, it made sense. Very little else would require the sort of security measures that had been taken here. What the others expected, I cannot say. Even if it had power all those years, no living being that I know of could have survived that.
Since we did have access through the ventilation system, the temperature in the room must have been the same as in the rest of the ship, meaning far below freezing. I’m not sure how close to absolute zero we get after two centuries with almost no heating, but it can’t be much. The exterior would probably be a couple of Kelvin, just a few degrees above absolute zero. Granted, vacuum doesn’t exactly transfer heat easily, but even so, I suspect we’d have been well below -200C, at the very least. Nothing living could survive temperatures like that for long. Not to mention the lack of food and water; even had there been stored sufficient food and water for more than two centuries in that room, that would be pretty much unusuable due to the low temperatures. So, there would be nothing living in that room, at least nothing large enough to be a threat. And anything small enough to be a threat would be able to escape through the ventilation system anyway.
So, we woke major Cottle up. At least that went well. And at least he remembered what had happened, and could fill in the gaps. Some of it we had guessed, but not the details, not the background.
Seems we’re rebels. Or were. And we were fighing loyalists when we had our misjump. We were headed to the Persephone system to collect a holocaust archive, and then we would meet up with the rest of the fleet to settle our own worlds.
I suppose I need to strike major Cottle from my list of suspects. Simply because if he had wanted us dead, we would have been. All of us. All he had needed to do, was to make a ‘mistake’ when putting us all to sleep. Granted, it could still be him. If the goal was to capture, rather than kill, if he wanted to preserve lives, but stop us from defecting, it would make sense to do what he could to save the crew.
Regardless of who the traitor is, if he or she is even alive, we should be safe until we know what happened to the rebels and, for that matter, the League. Since he must have been awake after major Cottle went to sleep, he could have killed us all. That would, of course, have killed him as well, though slower than most of us. My guess is we should be fairly safe from treason until we know what happened to the League, and there are escape routes that he or she can use.
The League. They must have been rotten to the core for us to break away the way we obviously did. To convince someone like admiral Tokugawa to break away.
Who am I fooling. I do not remember him, any more than I remember myself. Still, I cannot believe that I would have followed him, had his reasons not been good. Of course, since I have no idea who _I_ was back then either, I cannot really be certain of anything.