Space Station Blues - Stars Without Number Side Game -Actual Play

I had a nice juicy encounter all planned out & the players decided that they needed more time aboard the Arch Light Station!  So I sped up the campaign a bit & had them cycle through a small worked up subplot adventure.

Basically I had a small plot about there being a bunch of spacers going through the station in odd uniforms & such. This game started with one of these thugs trying to buy the characters a drink.The odd character talked to the characters & told them that they were deep space miners. One of the PC's noticed him trying to touch him with an odd substance on his finger tips.
The PC immediately hit the man & started a small riot in the place. The whole place emptied quickly. Meanwhile one of the players was following two more thugs dragging away a very unconscious NPC who had been court martialed & divorced since last game. 

The press gang was grabbing folks left, right, & center. The PCs saw these guys work with shock/stun prods , slap patches for knocking them out. The worst though was watching as the upgrades to their own ship which would have taken 5 days stretched into 7 & then more.
They went back to their own ship & there met their first Many Angled One infiltrator. A shape shifter who was swaying the workers with tales of a workers paradise. Free health care, dental, etc. & signing them to life time contracts as well as mind wipes.
The PCs also found quite by accident a bunch of cargo containers which had living human & Phraint cargo in hibernation states & being fed both Nutrient & IV drips. All this to keep them under while they were shipped out to mining in the Talon system.

 The PCs had a hell of a time with the infiltrator. The combat lasted quite a while as bits & pieces of the thing teleported around the place. The melee cost the characters lots of PSI points & ammo. Not to mention the fact that the PCS were blamed for some of the destruction the press gang/pirates/ cult caused.The PCs managed to stop the press gang cold but it cost them time, credits, & man power. two war ships filled with slaves escaped the station but the other was destroyed by the station's guns! 


 Melody  NPC 
 
Weaving in & out of the adventure tonight has been Melody DeBuers the commander of Arch Light station. She's been in the background interviewing various spacers along with her trusty andy secretary Arnold. She somehow seems immune to the trepidation of the various factions on the station as harmless fluff.
 She began to tag around with the PCs after Daddy assigned the party's scholar to baby sit her.
The PCs learned that Melody's mother was a former space pirate who retired to raise a daughter far from the hassles of space piracy. Melody was betrothed in an arranged marriage but before the ceremony could finalized. She was gravely injured, her mother, her teacher, & the space liner they were traveling on was destroyed.
Melody was rebuilt as a cyborg. Very little of her body survived. According to the dictates of her society Melody is no long pure of body because of her cybernetics & therefore shunned by most of her society.  She's living the life of a debutante writing a book on space piracy. This of course is her cover for her investigations. Many think of her as a little girl playing pirate.  Actually she's a 5th level expert & computer hacker. She's capable of linking her nervous system to any tech level four computer. Melody acts as both spy & confidant to her father the station's commander.

 Far from a Mary Sue, Melody is a bitter  more then slightly vengeful girl who is determined to hunt down her mothers killers. The PCs learned that there is more to her when she attended the wounded after a melee & then locked herself in her room after calling her father once the threat was more then she could handle. The players had lots of questions for her But she seemed to give very little answers. Melody has wheels within wheels going on. She's signed herself up as part of the crew of the Icarus (the PC's ship).

Only time will tell what this mystery woman's real agenda is or whose she really working for. One of the PCs is now her personal tutor.