Running the Gauntlet

With the away team secure in the launch bay where they begin undergoing decon, Admiral (retired) Gloval orders the Aimless Pilgrim to combat stations while they begin burning toward the gate that will carry them back to Corfu. The three other starships in this pocket dimension – the Imperial patrol cruiser, Lightning; the Vargr corsair; and the Kalamanaru freighter – are already en route.

Almost immediately, the four ships engage one another; thanks to the slow zone’s effects, all missiles launched are easily torn apart by point-defense systems, but lasers engage easily enough. The lead Kalamanaru ship is hit multiple times – the Pilgrim’s gunners concentrate on it as word has gone out that they cannot allow the pirates to escape – and quickly begins to trail debris; seeing that they will be unable to avoid firing after all, the Kalmanaru ship brings its own guns online. At the same time, the Imperial patrol cruiser and the Vargr corsair exchange fire, ripping into one another and causing massive damage.

Without warning, a ‘high gee alert’ sounds throughout the Aimless Pilgrim and their velocity rapidly increases – whatever was preventing them from accelerating above a top speed has changed, which everyone presumes is due to the protomoss back on that space station. This changes little, however, and the four ships continue their mad race toward the Corfu gate, still exchanging fire. The Kalamanaru freighter absorbs even greater damage – the Pilgrim gunner and begins tumbling out of control; they aren’t going anywhere.

A salvo of missiles launched at the Pilgrim by the Vargr corsair abruptly bank hard for no apparent reason, making them easy pickings for the point defense. As the Imperial patrol cruiser orients onto an approach vector with the Corfu gate, the Vargr corsair darts in front of it, clearly intending on escaping first. Seconds later, one of the corsair’s drives flames out and the vessel misses the gate’s event horizon, instead impacting with the great ring itself. The gate immediately begins flickering wildly, though that does not stop the patrol cruiser from continuing its hard burn through the portal.

From the bridge, Gloval comms Ella – they’re receiving an SOS from an escape pod launched from the Vargr ship and it appears to be using Sae’s codes! Shaking her head in irritation, Ella asks that her errant crewman be retrieved. This deviation slows the Pilgrim down briefly, which allows the Lightning to roar through the fluctuating Corfu gate … and an instant later, the gate goes dark.

Panic is about to set in as sensors have detected massive energy fluctuations at the station when Lorain suddenly has a brainstorm. She gets on the comm and instructs her uncle to use the activation device they left with Gloval and set it to a specific coordinates. It works as a distant gate suddenly activates. With no other options, Gloval orders them to make a hard burn to this escape route.

With a brilliant flash, the Pilgrim transits through the gate and then …

Player Notes:

• CommJunkee’s Traveller run has officially ended with this session. Although it was much shorter than normal, he left use on a nice cliffhanger that will be addressed when I (Rigil Kent) pick up this campaign. As the bulk of this session was a space battle or dealing with technical issues, the recap is by necessity lighter than normal.
• Next week, Gigermann’s Dungeon Fantasy game is scheduled to begin. Both Andricus and Loki are sitting that game out, but Feste will be rejoining us.
• We experimented with running a space battle more as a Chase which was a partial success. Mistakes were made along the way, particularly with regards to range; what we should have done (which didn’t occur to a lot of us until too late) is utilize the Dogfighting Chase rules that were in a Pyramid magazine issue.
• Ran into some irritating technical issues that are likely due to Fantasy Grounds releasing a major new update to their software and our GURPS ruleset not officially supported by it. There may have been some conflict with a layers extension that CommJunkee was using.
• 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.