At 1100 Cadiz time, 18 March 4999 (the GM's 3025th birthday), our heroes met Sola Jaems at a local eatery. The most prominent feature of the meeting was barely-restrained hostility on the part of Jaems, followed closely by the Vorox thug looming at the corner table. Surprisingly, Jaems was in a wheelchair, a detail not mentioned in the letter.
Matsushida and Gwen sat down with Jaems while the rest of the group loitered around like bodyguards. Jaana cast Detect Evil on Jaems under guide of blessing Royo's beer, but found nothing.
The gist of the conversation Matsushida, Gwen, and Jaems had was:
Matsushida: Did the Phavian institute gain any of its knowledge from studying Ur artifacts? Particularly one that looked like this fist thing?
Jaems: The Phavian Institute studied all sorts of paranormality, so probably in general, but all records were destroyed by the Church, so particulars are unknown. I have friends who might know more.
M: Do you know what this symbol (the broken jumpgate) means?
J: No.
M: Do you know of any cities with towers that spiral into the clouds?
J: Any Second Republic cities built like that have fallen, and there weren't many anyway. However, the Obun and the Vau produce such architecture.
G: Do you know anything about the lost world called Minsakar?
J: There's some legend about a sword from Minsakar. It used to be reachable from Delphi via Kettle and Normandy, but those keys are lost except perhaps to the Vuldrok.
Jaems drew a map of the route from Delphi to Minsakar for Gwen, and surreptitiously appended a note indicating that she had seen the broken jumpgate symbol at archeological digs on Obun and Criticorum.
During the conversation, Jaems's hostility abated considerably as she got the idea that Matsushida wasn't going to haul her off to a church dungeon.
At that point, Halley skipped over to ask about flux crystals. Jaems explained that they had been grown on a world that was now lost, so the only ones remaining would be those few that had escaped being broken or lost.
Matsushida and Gwen offered to help Jaems with her researches if they ever could in the future, and took their leave without violence erupting.
Our heroes spent only a couple more days on Cadiz, during which Gwen wrote her family to arrange for someone to sponsor Jaems's research. Jaana and Halley spent the time performing geomantic calculations to determine the best location for the terraforming engine so they could dig it up and inspect it. Alas, their calculations appeared to be better than those of whoever terraformed Cadiz originally, since there was no sign of an engine at their chosen spot. They were not given funds enough to rent a backhoe and check, however.
A day out from Cadiz toward the jumpgate, the officer of the watch picked up a distress signal from, of all people, Baron Veroni. Veroni told a woeful tale of mutiny, pressure and power loss, and limited life-support supplies, and claimed that he was using the last of his power to send the distress call. A minimal-bandwidth video signal showed him spacesuited and alone on his bridge. This story aroused considerable suspicion, but since Veroni had never actually broken his word to Elektra, she decided on a course of charity. That course took about ninety minutes to traverse, during which Veroni's signal broke off and could not be reacquired. Veroni's ship, the Far Star appeared quite dead to Elektra's sensors.
There was considerable debate over what procedure should be followed to test Veroni's veracity, and who should follow it, but eventually it was decided that Royce would go over and check things out, ready to bug out at an instant's notice, with Elektra ready to open fire with equal speed.
There was no response to Royce's morse-code knocking, so he went inside and found a lot of bodies. Gwen went across to help him search the ship, and between them they found Veroni, two unconscious people in vac suits, three dead people in suits with no air, and five suitless bodies that had apparently died by violence before being depressurized. Floating next to Veroni on the bridge was a shiny metal tetrahedron about the size of his head.
Jaana, suspecting heresy or demons or something, insisted that the rescued pirates be placed in quarantine in a spare cargo hold, along with herself and the twins, who were ministering to them, and Royce and Gwen. Once immediate medical needs were taken care of, she examined the inner flames of the people from the Far Star, and found them theologically clean.
The two unfamiliar pirates were only suffering from anoxia, and would be fine eventually, but Veroni was in a deep coma and showed no signs of coming around.
The twins averred that Veroni would probably remain stable for several weeks, so the decision was made to keep going outward rather than return to Cadiz. The Far Star was grappled to the Black Jack's Lady for salvage.
One of the pirates, the ship's engineer, regained partial consciousness fairly quickly, and for long enough to be interrogated by Elektra. He confirmed the mutiny story: apparently Veroni had started acting weird and his first mate had taken this as a reason to lead a mutiny.
Halley and Shung Shong tried to restart the Far Star's generator, but it just wouldn't start, or shut down as soon as it started. The power seemed to be draining away, but they couldn't tell where to.
The Black Jack's Lady started losing small amounts of power as well, not enough to impair operations significantly but enough to worry Elektra. When Halley discovered that the drain was strongest near the mysterious tetrahedron, Elektra ordered it moved to the far end of the Far Star, and when that didn't reduce the drain by much, ordered the Far Star ungrappled and towed on a tractor beam at the maximum possible range. Even that didn't eliminate the drain completely, but did reduce it considerably.
Over the next couple of days, Halley experimented with the tetrahedron and its energy-draining effects, determining that it absorbed almost all kinds of energy, including ambient heat, but not light, and absorbed more energy the more it had available. Unsurprisingly, this led to speculation about what would happen if it were dropped into a star.
Matsushida rifled the ship for Clues, and got Halley to break into Veroni's and Malcolm's safes, but mostly found just miscellaneous personal effects. He did find Veroni's personal datapad, which he confiscated along with the Far Star's computer core, to be analyzed by the experts on Kish.
At some point, Halley remembered why Varla Des had seemed familiar: she was on the list of Lim Evrard's enemies they had gotten from Darwin Colt back on Kish, and was listed as Lim's ex-lover.
Further interrogation of the rescued pirates yielded more details of the mutiny and surrounding events: After they lifted from De Moley, Veroni become increasingly reclusive and obsessive about a strange metal sphere. Eventually the first mate Malcolm decide that Veroni had lost it and led a mutiny against him. After some fighting that shot up the ship pretty bad, they broke into the bridge and confronted Veroni, who did something that stopped Malcolm dead in his tracks, and stunned the mutineers long enough for the loyal crew to get the drop on them. Veroni had had something half-visible in or on his hand, described as being snakelike. He ordered the mutineers spaced immediately; it came out that he hadn't even let them pause long enough to get the jumpgate keys off the navigator.
Even at the reduced level, the energy drain from the tetrahedron combined with towing the Far Star was turning the one-week trip to the jumpgate into a three-week trip, so something had to be done. Jaana prayed for Divine Wisdom, and received the insight that the tetrahedron had been created by an intelligence, rather than being intelligent itself, and that draining power wasn't its intended function. Taking a gamble, she took off her glove and picked up the tetrahedron with "I want this to turn off" as her intention. It promptly reverted to its spherical form and the energy drain ceased. Jaana did not fall over dead immediately.
<<Headaches All Around [Index] Holy Light>>This file was last modified at 1635 on 22Jun99 by trip@idiom.com.