'Playing Out In The Rocks' Cepheus Engine Rpg Session Report Seven - Secrets of Mercury & Tricks of 'The Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky'

 Today's session was solid investigative work & picks up right where the last session left off. With the player's PC's getting the  'The Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky' into dry dock at the local station. Then it was a full going over the ship for alien life forms or worse. Trust me this was a straight up investigation from the ground up. 

Once aboard Allard Technologies section of the station, the party's hacker & cracker got to work on the ins & outs of the computer downloading what happened to the crew, Mercury mining secrets, & more. The party found not only some very valuable mineral data but an alien artifact! An ancient alien stargate on the dark side of Mercury. There was an extensive data list & dump from the ship. There's also alien remains below the surface of the planet Mercury. The crew it seems exited into the stargate 125 years ago before the psychic storms flared up. But to where?! 

The New England Buoys's hacker Hector called into an old favor to an A.I. friend of his name Apollo whose actually an organic computer made from cloned genuis fetal brain tissues. Apollo was created using Cepheus Engine rpg book Synethics from Zozer games. 

But that stargate really bothers the players in spades. There's something about it that doesn't seem to ring true for them. So their hacker Hector has put in a call to bring in a Synthetic belonging to Apollo to help the party with the exploration as Allard Technologies has put in a full claim to this section of Mercury. Allard Technologies has brought in Tiger security forces under the umbrella of security liasons. The shake down of the 'The Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky' mean resupply & full going over. There was quite a bit of wear & tear totaling about  120 million in damage which meant that Allard's corporate backer is stepping in. The players think that these could be a clutch of Ronin freelancers or veterans kicked out of a corp who have been bank rolling Allard. 

A bit of background on the star gate itself. The star gate isn't simply a stargate ala 2001 A Space Odyssey. Instead I went back to The Dragon magazine Dragon issue 27 released in July of 1979 with the article Tesseracts: A Traveller Artifact by Gary Jordon.  

This is artifact that's far more then it seems & very dangerous in its own right. This artifact comes straight outta of my uncle's 86 campaign of original Traveller that's being adapted to our current game. And there are eyes from afar watching with some dangerous interest at the events on Mercury.