Bug Hunt

Around a day in jump-space, the members of the Crew had separately taken some time to socialize with the passengers, in an effort to present a friendly and available persona. During that process, the secretive female passenger, Eleanor, approached Sam, asking to be escorted to her luggage, stowed in the ship’s hold. After recovering from the fact that a woman was speaking to him, he referred Eleanor to Haank, the de facto “security chief” aboard. Haank agreed, and led her to her luggage, musing to himself that some ground-rules regarding fetching of luggage while in-flight might need to be discussed. As Haank looked on, Eleanor found her case, took care to keep her pass-code hidden as she entered it—not unusual—and retrieved a box from it. On request, she agreed to allow Haank to scan the contents for security risks; using his multipurpose hand-scanner, Haank detected nothing of any interest within. He then escorted the woman back to the passenger deck.

A good portion of the first day of jump had been taken up with installation and testing of the ship’s new security system, purchased before they left Rhylanor. In the wee hours of the next morning, during Sam’s watch, the security system indicated a hatch opening—the passenger deck iris leading down to mid deck. He could see nothing on the camera system except the hatch being opened, as if by some invisible intruder. He woke Ella, and the two looked around the access area on mid deck for whatever-it-was, but found nothing, though Ella swore she had heard something scraping around under the lounge table. As they searched around the lounge, they heard the iris-hatch to the lower deck open. They rushed over and cautiously peered into the hold, eventually descending and triggering the lights, but again, saw nothing.

The rest of the Crew was roused, and together, they all started poring over the available security camera footage, but saw nothing but the hatches opening of their own apparent accord. Tabling the discussion about security procedures for later, Haank checked all the passenger cabins for occupants, and found them all where they were expected (although the corporate manager was a little put out at having been awakened so early). As they tried to come up with other ways of detecting the intruder, Sam spent the entire morning reviewing the recordings; in a lucky break, he managed to briefly spot a tiny, unidentifiable object moving around the area of the hatch at the time it opened. After showing his find to the others, they all agreed it was probably some sort of robo-bug, remotely-operated by one of the passengers, the most-likely suspect being Eleanor, with the most-likely purpose of locating whatever-it-was that the commandos were looking for previously. Since damage to the ship or Crew was unlikely, as counter-productive and unnecessary, they decided to keep the details from the passengers and allow the culprit to think he/she remained unsuspected. Abe was dispatched to give the passengers the story that there was a glitch in the new security system that had been addressed and corrected; he also set his robotic pet dog, K-9, to sniffing around the lower hold. Haank pored over the ladar data in a fruitless attempt to detect the bug, while calibrating the system for better detection of the tiny object. Buck produced an EM-detection wand, normally used to find radiation leaks, and calibrated it to home in on the bug’s and/or its controller’s transmissions. Sam also spent some more time rummaging about the lower hold, between the containers and packages, in a continued attempt to figure out where someone might smuggle something, to find whatever-it-was.

The following morning, during Haank’s last watch, using Buck’s EM detector, he picked up transmissions coming from above (passenger deck) and below (lower hold). While waking the others, he moved around the mid deck to triangulate the origin of what he assumed to be the “controller” transmission, narrowing it down to cabin three or five—five being Eleanor’s. Once awake, Abe and Sam went below with the EM-detector to find the bug. As they closed in, the transmission went dead—their search had been detected. After quite some time, about to give up, Sam finally pulled the right panel (that he hadn’t previously) and found an old, dusty OSD cleverly tucked away, about the same time that Abe spotted the robo-bug, which he cautiously collected with some vacc-tape, and handed over to Buck for analysis. They opted to plug the OSD into a personal computer disconnected from any network, for safety reasons, and found a vast wealth of 10-year-old, military navigational data centered around the Rhylanor Sector; they surmised that it was far too specific and complete to have been compiled by either side of the Fifth Frontier War, though they were unable, at the time, to determine the source of its apparent value.

With both the bug and its presumed objective in hand, the Crew had a decision to make—what to do with it all? Getting the spy to fess up who it’s handlers were would not be easy, and wouldn’t really change anything, in the end. They could let the spy off the ship without being the wiser, going so far as to put the bug back where they found it, as if nothing had happened—it would, of course, never find what it was looking for (that having been already recovered), and may convince the spy’s handlers that it was never on the ship in the first place. They could hand over the OSD to the spy, having had the data removed and replaced with something else (the images of the commandos from the Rhylanor docks incident came to mind). They could keep the data and sell it to whomever wanted to pay for it—though the Crew would need to determine what sort of threat its possession might impose on the Sector before giving it to anyone. They could turn it over to the Imperial Navy, as-is.

And, they had four more days in jump-space to figure it out.

Notes

• We had no idea, when we decided to purchase the Basic Security system (SS69), that it would be featured centrally in the next session; lucky it was there
• The idea of the “bug” inevitably spawned the mental image of this scene
• The EM detector was Buck’s use of Gizmo for the session; we all said it looked/sounded like a sonic screwdriver
• Sam kept attempting skills at default, to have an excuse to spend points in them; his player has been trying to figure out what to do with him to make him more useful when he isn’t flying the ship
• Sam was using his Smuggling skill, Perception-based, when searching the hold; this had been done repeatedly over the last few sessions, trying to find what the commandos were looking for, but finally paid off
• We’re treating the OSD as a “treasure map” until we learn otherwise