Jonah scolds Flannery and she storms off.  A number of inquiries go back and forth between Becker and Jonah, interrupted by a local man delivering peppers for the evening’s dinner, who instantly assumes that the players are defectors from the nearby Draconis Combine.  Shortly thereafter, Flannery finds a photo in an encyclopedia picturing Becker and points it out to Jonah.

Before the conversation can go further, people begin to arrive for the evening’s post-harvest celebrations.  The party learns a few things by prying slightly with the townsfolk:

• Kerensky did leave for his Exodus with over six million people and vanished beyond the borders of human space, never to be heard from since.  Kerensky and his story have become a thing of myth and legend, and the story of the Agamemnon, her charge across human space collecting technologies and subsequent mysterious disappearance.  The power vacuum sparked two (maybe three by now…) “succession wars” where the five major powers of the Inner Sphere essentially bombed civilization back to the stone age.  Many technologies taken for granted during the Star League era can no longer be manufactured.
• Shortly after the First Succession War started, Ares Arms found vast resources of Strontium-7 on Persephone 2.  Strontium-7 is a key ingredient to K-F Drive components.  Within a few decades, several million company workers had been relocated to Persephone 2.  In the middle of the war, Ares signed an exclusivity agreement with the Draconis Combine, which was seen as a terrible threat by the other four Great Houses.  House Marik sent an assault force to Persephone 2 and blanketed the planet with high-yield nuclear devices, decimating the populace and altering the Strontium-7 isotope remaining in the planet’s crust.
• Just ahead of the assault, Angus McTavish, Jonah’s great-grandfather, and a number of other Ares employees saw the writing on the wall and founded a small colony on Persephone 3.  Over time, many people who heard about McTavish’s Hope and its sister-city Thatcherville on the other side of the planet immigrated there, hoping to escape the war.  The community has thrived in its way for two centuries.  Angus also bought out his Argus heavy battlemech in the deal, which Jonah stil has hidden near McTavish’s Hope.
• Three years previously, Cooter had arrived – sent by Gentleman Roderick Black with a half dozen small dropships, a handful of Battlemechs, some fighters, and a few hundred men.  They’re attempting to find something – Jonah knows not what – on Persephone 2, but haven’t been having much luck.  Jonah suspects that Black won’t pay for a Jumpship to pick Cooter up until he finds it – which may force Cooter into more and more desperate measures as his men slowly begin to succumb to long-term radiation sickness.  They haven’t particularly ill-treated the people of McTavish’s Hope – though the threat of violence has been there.  They take just a tiny bit more food than the townsfolk can spare, and have, on occasion, taken priceless bits of technology – such as an old medical scanner and other components.

During the party, Flannery, under cover of drunken flirtation, manages to inform Janks that two men, Sims and Richter, are Cooter’s men and the party should be careful what they say.  She also mentions that Sims has a high band transceiver that is capable of interplanetary communication.

After the get-together has wound down, the party heads back to the Wild Card and offers Jonah a medical scanner (like the one stolen by Cooter) in exchange for the offered supplies.  The party also begins to seriously consider the question of Cooter – who is due to arrive within four to six weeks to pick up the stockpiled harvest.  Previously, a Leopard-class dropship converted to carry cargo has been sent with a dozen men to transport the supplies.  The party also finds two homing devices planted on the ship and the supplies – presumably planted in order to track the Wild Card to its base of operations.

The sleepers depart Persephone 2, burn for several hours in one direction, discard the tracking devices, and then set course for Agamemnon.

While waiting for the crew members to wake, the party loads Bernie’s Twat (which they find out from Cottle is officially named “Wild Card” despite it’s current paint job) with an air bottle and compressor from Agamemnon’s forward bay.  They also load some small arms and two long range remote aerial surveillance drones.

During the loading process, Mitch has a flashback.

Mitch Remembers 1

The new crewmen wake and and spend the remainder of the day and night being briefed and adjusting to their situation.  The next morning, Major Summerville visits Becker to get instructions for her plans for the ship and crew, and appears to have an intimate flashback about his previous relationship with the Colonel.

The crew departs on the Wild Card, leaving the Agamemnon in the hands of Major Summerville and Captain Millet and heads to Persephone 3.  After a forty-hour burn, they arrive and find that the planet has become home to a small agricultural community in the time since they’ve been asleep.  The community appears to be producing an exces of foodstuffs, and the crew lands to negotiate with the people of McTavish’s Hope.

They meet Jonah McTavish, the great-great-grandson of the settlement’s original founder, and his daughter Flannery.  A very strange and uncomfortable conversation occurs over a meal of rich foods, including:

•  Jonah is immediately suspicious of the group’s motives – notably because they call each other by rank and they have appeared at the very edge of human space with a thousand hungry people.
• McTavish’s Hope produces and preserves more than enough food food for twice their number, but all of their reserves (and more) are negotiated to a seedy fellow named Cooter who arrived in system a few years ago with a few hundred men, mechs, and assorted equipment to find some specific artifact on Persephone 2.  Cooter is in the employ of Gentleman Roderick Black – a pirate price who rules this area of the Periphery.  His men are also beginning to suffer from radiation sickness.  It’s unclear why Persephone 2 is irradiated (it was uninhabited during the sleepers’ time).
• Jonah calls out the gas bottle in the Wild Card’s hold specifically – noting that it must go in an immensely large ship or station, the likes of which simply “aren’t around anymore”.