Escape from Focaline

Only moments have passed. A pair of vargr corsairs race toward the Aimless Pilgrim, their weapon systems charged and locked. The local system defense boat is well out of position, having pursued another ship which the crew now strongly suspect to have been the one that escaped with the abducted Lorain Messandi. Upon Aris identifying the ship classes of the approaching hostiles, Admiral Gloval decides to burn toward them and make a hard thrust to a safe distance for Jump; he expects to be able to easily outrun these corsairs due to the Pilgrim’s superior engines.

The crew report to their respective battle positions and, in standard Imperium Navy practice, don their vac-suits before evacuating the atmosphere from inside the Pilgrim. Long minutes creep by as the vargr continue to maneuver into position while the Pilgrim accelerates toward them. Haank makes an attempt to send a distress signal dirtside, but discovers that communications are being jammed; so much for calling in Imperium reinforcements! The command crew – Gloval and Ella – issue tactical directives as they reach maximum effective range and the gunners engage, though their shots are ineffective. Missiles are also launched, but these are easily taken out by point-defense systems.

With the Pilgrim continuing to build up speed, the three ships draw closer to one another and once more exchange weaponsfire; this time, Armin and Dawes do not miss with their respective weapons, and they brutally ravage their target. The vargr corsair is not crippled but is definitely badly damaged and loses several members of its crew; it’s return fire and that of its fellow hostile is utterly ineffective, thanks to the Pilgrim’s armor and sandcasters. This brief exchange of fire will be the last real shots of this brief engagement as the Pilgrim easily outruns the pursuing vargr, though they do have to deal with a couple of missiles hurled their way.

The 100-Diameter limit is reached without further incident several hours later, despite a false alarm in the galley likely caused by Eddy’s bad luck, and the Pilgrim Jumps, destination: Keng and then onto Heya before moving onto Corfu. On the expectation that the ship they’re pursuing is slower than the Pilgrim’s awesome Jump-3, the crew hopes to beat the unknown far trader to Corfu and then ambush them. Six days elapse while in transit to Keng and, upon refueling at a local gas giant, they jump out once more, reaching Heya seven days later.

Recognizing that they need to resupply, what with most of the landing party’s equipment having been blown up on Focaline, they touch down at the starport. Ella immediately instructs Eddy to do that thing he does and find out whether the far trader they are pursuing is here; he eagerly does so and disappears into the starport to make friends. He quickly locates a young lady who works at the starport and has a lovely evening with her; she agrees to keep an eye out for the far trader and they exchange contact information.

Player Notes:

• We got a very late start as the GM was returning home from a trip.
• As expected, the majority of the session was the space battle as we had to re-acclimatize ourselves to the Interstellar Wars space combat. I think it’s probably safe to say that the group is divided with regards to these rules; half of us dislike them, strongly or otherwise, and the other appear to like them.
• Following the space battle, we sort of fast-forwarded through a lot of stuff, much of which we would later return to on our message boards, particularly the whole re-equipping thing. We might need to revisit this next session.
• As stated above, we’ve started livestreaming our games. We play on Saturdays at 6:00PM Eastern and the live stream can be found at Ronnke’s Twitch channel. He’s also setup a YouTube Channel. Bear with us, please. This is still in it’s infancy. We have discovered that Twitch keeps the recordings only for two weeks, so it’s a good thing that he published to YouTube. With that in mind, I’ve removed the Twitch link for the “LiveStream” bit at the top.