Elsewhere the same evening, Jack is helping out with the Persephone children – the youngest of which were creating art and printing it to decorate the walls of their rooms.  At one point, a piece of art prints from the printer that reminds Jack of the disturbing art they saw on the wall of the lab on Cromwell.

On the marine deck, Janks and Sergeant Major Barret are discussing the ship-wide small arms inventory when they encounter Lev Arris, quite obviously not in his cell, striding down the hall with all of his gear.  He instructs the two Sergeants to grab their guns and follow him.  As they approach the lift, a security alert goes out concerning gunfire at the enlisted mess.  Barret breaks off to investigate while the other two board the lift to the senior officer’s quarters.

Lev explains that for the last several weeks he believed the crew to be attempting to plant post-hypnotic suggestion in him via the lights of his cell, then it stopped several weeks previously.  It resumed the previous day, and then that morning, the ship spoke to him.  He described the conversation as incredibly frustrating, as if with an “incredibly dense child”.  He did manage to glean that it felt it has made a terrible mistake and had put  Colonel Becker in jeopardy.

Becker ducks behind her desk as the brainwashed Captain Alexander opens fire.  Janks and Arris come around the corner, Janks puts a bullet into Alexander and Arris moves forward and disarms him.  Meanwhile, Barret arrives at the enlisted mess and tries to give aid to Corbett, who is in shock after the violent suicide.

Becker manages to make contact with the entity in the computer and confirms Lev’s suspicions.  She shortly thereafter convenes her leadership council to discuss the situation.  The accepted assumption is that the entity is an AI retrieved in the raid on Cromwell and has somehow become entangled in the ship’s computer.  It’s also assumed that it’s operating at diminished capacity since the original Ares cylinder is secured and several cores of the computer are offline.  After some deliberation, they order an audit of the ship’s computer system to determine the available options for either isolating and/or re-integrating the AI.  Becker also orders a 24/7 watch placed on locker 17.

The jump to Bernard is successful, and Agamemnon deploys her solar sail and begins the five-day charge of the K-F Drive.

Celebrations break out that evening across the ship.  Chief Fagan is the star of the enlisted celebration.  At one point during the party, she asks Corbett if she can stay in the specops bunk room – she says she really doesn’t want to stay in her private quarters.  Corbett happily agrees.

The same night, Jameson and Summerville come to Colonel Becker with a proposal – Jameson, Rance, and Sims offer senior officer employment rates to Becker, with a plan to use Cooter’s two remaining Leopard dropships for recruitment and procurement operations to support the Agamemnon.  Becker agrees.

Becker also transmits an HPG message to Natasha Kerensky offering to meet at New Samarkand in the Draconis Combine instead of having to travel the many months it would take to reach Outreach.

Fagan stays with Corbett for several days, until Janks discusses it with him and he agrees to try to move back to Fagan’s quarters.  Fagan reluctantly agrees.  In subsequent days, Corbett wakes with splitting headaches and Fagan continues to sleep extremely poorly.

Becker also begins to notice irregularities – at one point she notices writing on her arm that she knows wasn’t there a minute before.  She checks the surveillance from the cameras she mounted in her quarters and sees herself make a change to the computer while the lights of her quarters flicker in strange patterns.  She checks the logs on the computer and finds no activity logged.  Noting a correlation with the lights, she has Captain Millet physically disconnect the lights in her quarters from computer control.

The K-F drive reaches a full charge and the ship jumps to Caleb.  A civilian jumpship (Star Carrier 5) is charging at the HPG relay.  It doesn’t respond to hails and immediately jumps away upon seeing the warship.

In the following week, Corbett continues to investigate issues with Fagan’s sleep, including attempting to switch quarters.  Alternately, Becker begins to sleep peacefully for the first time in her memory after disabling the lighting control in her quarters.  Further investigation into the Ares expert system continue to show it to be completely inept at what it’s supposed to do.

The K-F drive reaches a full charge, and the Agamemnon must make a dangerous jump to deep space in order to cross a 60 light-year gulf between Caleb and Jordan Wais.

Stella encounters the LSO – Captain Alexander in the officer’s mess and he appears to be extremely distracted and nearly catatonic.  He stresses that he’s fine.  She reports the incident to Cottle, and them Summerville, who see to it that Alexander is put on bed rest for a few days to recover from exhaustion.

Janks and Stella discover a sidearm missing form the specops armory, and the computer logs show it to be in-place.  Corbett approaches Cottle in the hopes of borrowing the necessary equipment to conduct a sleep study on Fagan, and finds out that Alexander was having sleep difficulty as well.  Cottle, Corbett, Janks, and Stella converge on Becker’s quarters and explain the evolving situations.  Becker orders Millet to disable the lighting in Fagan’s quarters just like her own and also has Alexander monitored through the night as he stays in sick-bay for analysis by Cottle.

The following day, Fagan and Corbett are both feeling much refreshed, as is Alexander, who Cottle clears to return to duty.  Becker gathers her council and lays out the recent events for all, deciding to cut off computer control for the ship’s lighting completely to prevent whatever hypnotic activity from affecting anyone else.

During the day, a call for maintenance to investigate lighting issues in the engine room goes unnoticed by those who it would concern.

That evening after standing post, Corbett is met by Fagan on his way out of the enlisted mess.  She gives him a hug and a kiss, professes her admiration for him, slips his sidearm from him and takes her own life.  Simultaneously, Becker responds to a knock at her door, assuming it’s Summerville, whom she had just called to her quarters.  The door opens, revealing a figure raising a firearm in her direction.

The session begins with a cutscene.

Colonel Becker makes it to the CIC and gets a report from Captain Millet, who ordered the reactors scrammed in order to prevent the ship from jumping.  She had detected that the ship’s computer was attempting to trigger a jump.  Becker orders the computers to be kept offline and the reactors restored to service.

Meanwhile, Mitch and Jack, aboard the Thermopylae and burning at 3Gs for thirty hours, arrive at Persephone 3.  Mitch takes his fighter to search for Stella’s flight and Jack descends with a lance of Land-Air-Mechs to search McTavish’s Hope.  Mitch finds Stella and her wing aboard the remains of the Dervish, having cannibalized an air tank to stay alive.

Jack finds Jonah’s body guarding the settlement’s longhouse, in which seventeen of the settlement’s children had been sealed with an underpowered air recycler against the increasingly hostile volcanic environment.  The Thermopylae recovers Stella’s flight and the children and heads back to the Agamemnon.

While en route to pick up the Thermopylae, Becker has the ship’s computer cores scanned thoroughly and isolated from the most critical systems.  Captain Millet suspects, based on the computer logs, that something involving the carrier signal from Natasha Kerensky combined with Millet’s own hack of the computer’s security apparatus triggered a deeply-embedded dead-man’s-switch in the Agamemnon that caused the loss of control.  The offending code was isolated and removed.  Becker remained dubious, however, and had the Ares expert system RASPUTIN examined more closely.  Chief Fagan reports later that the expert system simply processes input and makes tactical suggestions – and those don’t seem to be very good.  Millet reports that Fagan is “beating the thing at chess fairly consistently”.

Becker also briefs the crew on the current situation and her intention to protect the Inner Sphere from the invading Clans.

The crew finally chooses to cut into Locker 17 and  evaluate its contents.  The cylinder from Cromwell seems to be a self-contained computer – Mitch attempts to discern its use to no avail.  Millet assigns staff to investigate it more closely.

During a particularly passionate rendezvous, Corbett notices that Fagan has been writing on her arms and other places covered by her uniform.  He notices ticks, as if she had been counting, and the words “DON’T SLEEP” and “GET OUT”.  He checks with Cottle on Fagan’s overall mental health but doesn’t learn much that is new.

Becker convenes her war council to discuss strategy.

The session ends with the Agamemnon jumping from Persephone.

Meanwhile, on the Agamemnon, Becker examines surveillance video of her quarters from the previous night and finds nothing unusual except a strange flickering in the lights in her quarters.  She also finally inquires of Summerville of the curiosity in the CIC – which he explains is a screen at the signal intelligence station that no one can seem to remember.  It is simply a text input prompt named R.A.S.P.U.T.I.N. – the most they can discover is that it’s a piece of Ares Arms software seemingly designed to aid in tactical analysis.

Back at Persephone 2 – Captain Montenegro gives the order to transmit the wake-up call to the hidden Star League facility.  After several moments, the facility responds with its location, and Colonel Vail along with a fighter escort drop from orbit to secure the area.  When the Thermopylae finally makes it to the ground, the strike team takes an APC into a series of canyons with light battlemech escort to find the facility.  A number of combattants arrive from around the planet to attempt to secure the facility as well, but Vail’s mechwarriors easily keep them at bay.

The find the entrance to the underground facility and with a bit of larceny manage to open the door to the long ramp down to a motor pool.  Some computer legerdemain by Mitch gains the team access to the facility proper.  They quickly discover that there seemed to be a mutiny within the facility several hundred years ago, followed shortly thereafter by a biological contamination.  After gaining access to the facility administrator’s logs, they discover the following:

• The facility was a secret League laboratory dedicated to advancing military biotechnology – the main lines of research involved biological computing and storage as well as advanced myomer materials for battlemech applications.
• Shortly before the Agamemnon made her fateful jump from Bernard, Tokugawa sent a message to the facility informing them of his imminent arrival.  He encouraged all of the facility’s personnel to join the Agamemnon in the Exodus.
• Some of the personel of the facility mutinied – likely in a loyalist attempt to stop the rest of the League personnel there from giving Tokugawa access to the research data and the holocaust archive stored there.  At some point in the mutiny, the biological compound was released and the computer locked down the facility until the contagion was no longer detected.

Early in the morning of July 8th, 3020, Becker finds the words “GET OUT” written in small, precise handwriting on the wall of her personal lavatory.  The door to her quarters having been locked from the inside the entire night.  She calls Cottle to her quarters, but he has little to add except some memories of Tokugawa becoming increasingly unstable and Fagan “being the same as always…a little odd…”.  Becker procures a surveillance camera and recorder from Janks in order to monitor her quarters.

First Sergeant Margaret Hudson from the marine contingent is transferred to Janks’ command to help replace the special forces losses.

Corbett continues to explore a relationship with Chief Fagan.

Becker gathers the survivors and makes an inspiring speech, informing the crew that she intends to staff up and try to bring civilization back to the Inner Sphere.  She also announces a set of honors created in the absence of the Star League, and grants several awards to those who served in retaking the Agamemnon from Cooter’s forces.

The Rose:
Sergeant Lance Geers
Sergeant Darryl Gerst
Gunnery Sergeant Jack Richardson
Sergeant Major Hollis Janks
Captain Stella Ives
Major Justin Summerville
(The additional dead marines)

The Bronze Star
Gunnery Sergeant Jack Richardson
Sergeant Major Gabriel Barrett

The Silver Star
Chief Petty Officer Elizabeth Fagan
Lieutenant Mitch Casey
Chief Petty Officer Robert Kim
Major Justin Summerville

Shortly after the ceremony concludes, Agamemnon receives word from Jameson in response to Becker’s ultimatum, claiming to be in charge of Cooter’s men.  He agrees to surrender under the terms of the Ares Conventions in exchange for transport out of Persephone.  Becker informs him to await pickup.

The Thermopylae with all MechWarriors, six fighters, the special forces unit, and a detachment of marines, sets off.  It stops at McTavish’s Hope and picks up Vail and his lance before proceeding to Persephone 2.

Cooter’s men had made their base in an ore transfer facility, where forty-six men surrender to Janks without incident.  Jameson implies that Cooter won’t be joining them, as he was insistent on continuing to fight.  In the process, the Thermopylae crew secures Cooter’s remaining two Leopards, four aerospace fighters, eight battlemechs, and miscellaneous spare parts from a remaining four.  They also discover a shielded warehouse containing a small supply of Strontium-7.

The session ends with the Thermopylae lifting off to find the location of the hidden Star League facility.

“This is Colonel Becker of the Agamemnon.

By now, I am sure you have realised that the ship you sent to the station to signal Mr. Black is not coming back.  And you are probably also aware that your attempt to take the Agamemnon failed.  You have, so far, lost four ships to us.  You do not have sufficient food to make it through another year, and by now, your men must have started to feel sick from radiation poisoning.  Unless your team got the message off, you have no way out of the system.  And even if Black did get your message, there is no guarantee he’ll bother to pick you up.  You did, after all, fail to find the treasure you are looking for.

I am willing to make you another offer.  Once.  Think very carefully about your answer, because there will be no second chances.

I am offering you a chance to surrender.  If you do, when we have successfully concluded our business in this system, we will take you with us when we leave, and drop you off somewhere less rural.

Think about it.  The alternatives are either that you are stuck here for the rest of your lives, or, if the message went out, that Mr. Black arrives, expecting you to have something for him.  Which you don’t.

Don’t answer yet.  Think about it.  Consider your options carefully, and the consequences of each choice.  In 24 hours, I will listen at this frequency, and you can give me your answer.

Agamemnon out.”

The session begins with a cutscene.

Mitch-
You’re a little stunned, your ears are still ringing from the numerous explosions and roar of automatic weapons in close quarters.  You’re still holding your sidearm at your side, Becker’s across the room at the lavatory door, Summerville’s bruised and bloodied head in her lap.  She’s stroking his hair idly, probably not even aware of what she’s doing, while collecting reports from across the ship.

“Faro, Strike Team, Report.”

Corbett is working furiously on Jack next to you, who is riddled with bullets and still bleeding from several places.

“Corporal Feeney, Strike Team, report.”

“Mitch.  Doc, I have no idea if the ship’s secure yet, but I have four VIPs for your trauma suite and they are very, very impatient.  Mitch.”

“Huh?”

“Sergeant Chambers, report.”

“Goddammit Jack, stop fucking dying!”  Corbet jams a button on a device he’s attached to Jack’s wrist and his whole body jolts slightly.  “Vagabond!”

You finally snap out of it.  “Stimson?”

“Ives has a trauma pack, just like this one,” he holds up Jack’s limp arm, “I need you to go check it, lift this cover, look at the second number, the one in green, if it’s below 100, hit the blue button.  Got it?”

“Ives, green number under a hundred, blue button, got it.”  You roll around the corner into the hall.  Ten yards down there are still tiny smoking impact craters pitting the walls, and there’s blood…everywhere.  Splatters of bone and gore on the wall behind the CIC hatch, streaks of blood across the floor from where the bodies were dragged.  Stella and Geers, bleeding and broken on the floor, Private…Private…you can’t even recall his name….on the deck, the back half of his head missing.

Over the team radio channel you hear Gerst’s half-grumble/half-whisper, “Top, Willis has gone dark.”

You get to Stella and check the trauma pack on her wrist.  The green number says 73, so you press the blue button and the number starts slowly climbing.

You watch as Gerst and Bramer move further down the hall – Bramer dragging one wounded leg behind him – and close in on the door to the enlisted lounge.

Time seems to slow to a crawl.

Corporal Willis…or rather…the body of Corporal Willis is flung out the door.  Even at this distance you see every detail.  His throat is slit so deeply his head is nearly severed…and every pin of every grenade on his vest is missing.

Bramer sees it too.

With a roar, he shoves past Gerst and vaults off his one good leg, tackling the corpse in the air.  You see Blake drop over the top of Janks, and some long-forgotten instinct baked into your psyche by SLDF drill instructors surfaces and you throw yourself across Stella and Geers.  Willis…and Bramer…explode with a series of literally deafening bangs.

With a shudder and a groan, you start to pull yourself upright, the only sound you can hear a high-pitched buzz.  The end of the hall is a scene straight out of hell, covered in gore, you can’t even tell if Gerst was blown apart in the explosion or is simply buried under the mass.  Out from the rec room strides one of the largest men you’ve ever seen, wearing a full suit of combat armor he must of raided from a locker on the ship, and carrying an M-41 in each massive hand.

Mitch snatches up Bertha from Stella’s side and fires a single shot, felling the massive Victor.  Corbett rushes forward and finds Gerst alive, but in shock.  Becker calls up the marines who had been guarding the primary reactor to escort Cottle and Millet from the sleeper bay.  While they’re waiting, Faro calls in and informs the party that the intruder’s ship had vented into space, and she counted three bodies.  Shortly thereafter, Chief Kim calls in and takes credit for the sabotage.

Cottle arrives and all of the wounded are transported to the medical center.

Over the course of the next five weeks, the following occurs:

• Becker orders the remainder of the crew roused, a process that takes the majority of the month.  Nearly six hundred of the thousand sleepers do not survive.
• Faro takes the Coyote and a contingent of marines to the abandoned jump station to disable or destroy the emergency HyperPulse Generator located there.  After the three week journey, they follow their orders and destroy the station when they find a ship docked there.
• The Agamemnon’s sensors, communication systems, and weapons are brought online.  The ship’s transit drives require substantial additional effort to repair before they can be fired.
• The Thermopylae is made ready to fly.
• Using the Rusty Bitch over the source of several weeks, the Agamemnon’s stores of water and air are replenished.
• One member of the crew commits suicide during the height of the resuscitation failures.
• Jonah and Flannery McTavish are brought to the ship and given a tour.  Becker negotiates with Jonah – who seemed to have been testing the virtues of the sleepers – for all of their surplus foodstuffs in exchange for the Dervish and Rusty Bitch and a promise to not attempt to recruit Bob, who is the settlement’s only trained pilot.  The supplies provided should hold over the Agamemnon crew for nearly a year.

As the party approaches the main reactor, they encounter an unknown man floating in the hall with his throat cut.  A little further along, they encounter two of Cooter’s men talking.  They overhear mention that one of them is a former member of the Ryoken – the elite guard of the Draconis Combine.  The man in question, Lev Arris, hears the marines approaching and surrenders on behalf of himself and a young man named William.  The party disarms them both, and shortly thereafter Sergeant Major Barrett drifts out of the dark, having been stalking the two intruders.  He informs Becker that he’s fairly certain Torres is dead, and that Millet and Cottle are holed up in the sleeper bay.  He had no knowledge of the whereabouts of Chief Fagan or Chief Kim.  He also mentions that he and Summerville parted ways several hours previously, he to secure the reactor and Summerville to disable the ship’s computer.

Lev Arris is of no particular help to the party, he insists that he is an Outreach mercenary under contract and will not betray his employer until his contract is concluded – but, he adds, he’s under no particular compulsion to escape captivity, especially if said captivity gets him out of Persephone.  He does mention that the leader of the boarding party is a man named Victor, who he mentions is “violent, dangerous, and stupid”.  Becker leaves three marines to secure the reactor, and then drops off the two prisoners at the Wild Card on their way to the centrifuge.

They find Millet and Cottle in the sleeper bay, none the worse for wear, and move on to the CIC.  In an attempt to break out of the small lounge they used to enter the deck, Janks accidentally make a noise, but as the guards approach, there’s a burst of gunfire from down the hall, distracting them.  The party uses the distraction to invade the deck.  During the ensuing firefight, an intruder attempts to flank the party and take out Becker, but is stopped by Summerville, who definitely looks like he’s had better days.

The party engages a number of men int he process of securing the CIC – in the process several marines are killed, and Jack, Janks, Stella, and Geers are all critically wounded.  They also find Chief Fagan, naked, raped, beaten, and nearly catatonic.  Corbet and Barrett rush to stabilize the fallen while Becker checks in with all of her men.  The session ends with Gerst and Bramer noting that one of the marines who went forward to secure the rest of the deck hadn’t returned.

In the aftermath of the battle, Jonah informs Becker that, in exchange for continued protection until Cooter is neutralized, McTavish’s Hope offers ten crates of miscellaneous foodstuffs.  The implication is there that they do not intend to sell the additional five hundred crates that the Agamemnon survivors were hoping for.

After stashing the Dervish and the Rusty Bitch (the cargo-hauling Leopard) in a field several kilometers away from the settlement, the party heads back to the Agamemnon, leaving behind Vail and his three mechwarriors as well as Warrant Officer Spunkmeyer to pilot the Dervish in defense of the settlement if necessary.

During the trip back to the ship, Becker questions Cooter’s men, their de facto leader, a man named Rance, speaks for them.  Becker offers a trip out of the Periphery in exchange for their help.  After an exchange, he informs Becker that he needs to speak with his men about their willingness to betray Gentleman Roderick Black before he’s willing to offer up any additional information about the disposition of Cooter’s forces.

Upon arriving at the Agamemnon, they do not receive a response from the crew in the ship.  Upon further investigation, Jack discovers a small interplanetary craft docked with their home.  The party docks the Coyote at the Agamemnon’s ventral dropship collar and leaves Lieutenant Ferro in Mitch’s Shiva on patrol outside and five marines on the Coyote to guard the prisoners (who Corbett sedates for good measure).

The party is ambushed in the embarkation area and a spirited firefight with a dozen well-armed intruders ensues.  The party comes out victorious, but Stella is seriously wounded, and Becker leaves her and an additional marine behind to guard the Coyote.  The party moves off towards the primary power plant.

As the interrogation of Sims continues – Colonel Vail radios in to inform the party that two Leopard-class dropships were coming out of the star’s radiation shadow and were twenty hours out from Persephone 3.  The party scrambles to prepare for their arrival.  Vail’s mech lance and Janks’ marines deploy around the landing strip in the event one of the dropships attempt to make a landing.  Stella and Mitch in their Shivas and Becker commanding the Coyote engage the dropships and their fighter escorts.

While waiting for the action to come to the ground, Janks has a flashback.

Janks Remembers 1

A brief battle occurs in orbit – the four Stiletto fighters launched from the dropships are destroyed and the armed Leopard – the Dervish - is damaged, with its transit drives destroyed.  Both dropships surrender and land at or near McTavish’s Hope.