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.

The party travels to Persephone 3, where the Wild Card and Mitch and Stella in their Shivas land several miles from McTavish’s Hope.  The Coyote stays in orbit to perform orbital surveillance in order for Colonel Vail to plan his ground assault.  Janks and the marines assemble the long-range drone and Mitch makes several surveillance passes until the party identifies the likely home of Sims and Richter.

Janks, Corbett, Ives, and Sergeant Gerst hike in to McTavish’s Hope under cover of darkness and attempt to secure the home.  They prevent the men from using the radio and capture Sims, but Stella is forced to kill Richter when he produces a submachine gun.

While Stella was lining up a shot, she has a flashback.

Stella Remembers 2

The gunfire wakes the citizens of the town, and Becker and Mitch race to the scene in the APC and explain to Jonah the situation.  When searching the house they find a set of four frequencies written on a scrap of paper, three of which correspond to the tracking devices that Janks found planted on the Wild Card their previous visit.

They proceed to interrogate Sims with the aid of a drug cocktail from Corbett and learn the following:

• Cooter was sent to Persephone by Roderick Black to find a League Holocaust Archive rumored to be held in a secret facility predating the Ares Arms mining operation and isn’t likely to spend the astronomical expense to send a jumpship to retrieve him until he’s found it.
• Cooter feels he and his men may not survive another year on Persephone 2 – their only hope would be to settle Persephone 3 and try to survive their radiation poisoning.
• Cooter’s unit consists of “150-200 men”, six Leopard dropships, six to eight fighters (though one may be broken down), and a company of Battlemechs, the heaviest being a Warhammer assault mech.
• Cooter plans to report back to Black via an emergency HPG in the now-defunct jumpship anchorage at the nadir of Persephone’s gravity well.
• Cooter’s people usually call in when they’re on their way to pick up the supplies.  He has been expecting the call and says it should just be days until it’s made.
• Sims mentioned that Cooter’s people monitor for jump signatures in system – which makes him suspicious about where the party came from.

The party returns to the Agamemnon and begin to unload.  More than half of the air bottle is used to bring the great battleship back up to its proper pressure, and the food brings a welcome meal to the awakened crew – who get briefed on the mission from Becker and the others.  While they were away, the secondary reactor was brought online and Agamemnon’s power systems refurbished and inspected.  The crews also performed make-ready work on the Coyote, the twelve Shivas of Alpha squadron as well as Stella and Mitch’s fighters.  Furthermore, Summerville mentions “a curiosity in the CIC” to Becker and informs her that she may want to investigate it at her convenience.

Captain Millet and Chief Fagan had inspected the K-F drive.  A drive filament could be fabricated in sections using a nanofiber loom in the ship’s workshops.  The loom would require a pattern not currently stored in the ship’s archive, as well as roughly half a ton of Strontium 7.  It would take several weeks to fabricate, install, and splice the filament sections, but it would at least be possible without a graving dock.

Becker orders several other people woken, including the entire crew of the Coyote, Sergeant Major Barret, Colonel Vail of the Black Knights, and three of his mechwarriors, and a platoon of marines – as expected, some heavy losses occur during the thaw process.

The next morning, Jack has a flashback.

Jack Remembers 1

Becker briefs the assembled crew on the mission to secure the food supplies from McTavish’s Hope and protect the settlement from reprisals from Cooter’s men.  The Wild Card with Becker and the entire marine contingent and the Coyote with Ives, Mitch, Vail, and his mechwarriors depart for Persephone 3.  Major Summerville, Sergeant Major Barret, Captain Millet, Chief Fagan, Chief Kim, Doctor Cottle, and Petty Officer Torres remain behind on the Agamemnon.

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”.