Alien RPG Ep2: Red Veins (Near Earth Frontier)

Last night we pushed on with the second instalment of our Alien campaign, using my homebrew Near Earth Frontier setting. We are returning to Alien when our main Vaesen campaign is short of players. This week we had the following player characters participating:

• Capt Evelyn Shaw, commander of the recovery tug Haimei (Manoj)
• Lt Hannah Price, security officer still attached to the Haimei (Ben)
• Yusuf Qadir, pilot from Mars, still a little jaded and even more freaked out (Stefan)

The game started with Hannah Price intercepting an internal communication within the secure channels of the Interstellar Transport & Recovey Corp (ITRC), which is still the party's employer. This discussed the so-called Tianlu Incident, but some important points were raised which were worrisome for Price - 

1. Several core modules aboard Tianlu do not match known corporate procurment manifests
2. Engineering analysis indicates experimental firmware overlays on the navigational AI cores
3. Shipboard logs contained repeated references to Project NODE but efforts to decrypt these have so far been unsuccessful
4. Even with the power isolation, localised bursts of encrypted data are continuing to be transmitted from the Tianlu's mainframe - source unknown
5. Field teams are being advised to treat all references to Tianlu as classified corporate property
6. There is speculation that Tianlu was a platform for advanced AI experimentation
7. Survivors of the salvage operation - i.e. the PCs - are to be monitored in case they have been exposed in some way to NODE

The crew was then assigned to a recovery operation on Mars at Helios Prospect 9, a mining installation controlled by ITRC. They were ordered to recover a payload from Subsurface Chamber 3 under cover of a routine maintenance run. The ostensible target is boreite-class crystal vein worth 47 million credits at Mars Surface Exchange. Failure to deliver will result in immediate contract termination and full financial reclamation under Clause 19.8.

Haimei docked with the upper cargo ring of the Helios 9 orbital elevator. Leaving NPC engineer Rosa Vega to look after the ship, the three crew descended to the upper terminal which is at Mars surface level. Here they found the terminal abandoned and the lift shaft to the mine sealed with a 'Biohazard Lockdown' alert in place. Qadir was able to force the doors and the team - with safety harnesses - began their descent on the emergency ladder. Halfway down they found a torn safety harness and blood spatters against the wall. Price thought she could hear scratching sounds coming from below.

Reaching the mid level, the team entered an operations cavern. A store room which contained mining explosives was duly looted. 

A control room which overlooked the cavern was explored, and here they found signs of a battle. A wounded miner called Kurt Havelock was here, slumped at a desk in a semi-conscious state. He revealed that there were armed intruders in the complex and that some of the miners had been infected by a strange virus which had driven them mad. Qadir detected that Havelock himself is infected with an unknown virus which is glowing red intermittently in his veins.

Efforts were made to communicate with MARCUS, the AI managing the systems at Helios 9. MARCUS confirmed it was trying to keep the mine in lockdown to contain a biological hazard and recommended flooding Chamber 3, something it is not able to do itself. 

The party then detected three life forms approaching on the motion tracker, which turned out to be three infected miners. The crazed miners (see picture above) tried to storm the control room and one got a claw attack in on Price before the group barricaded themselves in. The party prised open the floor panels to escape, taking the semi-conscious Havelock with them, and leaving a case of explosives behind on a 30 second timer. This destroyed the control cabin and the remaining infected, but also flooded the cavern with red dust, reducing visibility to less than 20 metres.

The crew moved through the dust - luckily still in their sealed suits - to take refuge in the communications room. Here they discovered a cargo manifest that showed Red Echo operative Samantha Del Toro had smuggled a container into the complex after MARCUS had tried to lock it down. It also mentions an organism which is "adapting to the ventilation environment". MARCUS again recommended incinerating Chamber 3 and terminating all biological hosts. Some kind of corporate override signal has also been detected.

The movement tracker picked up more individuals moving out in the main cavern. Screened by dust from the first explosion, the team tried to set up a trap using another bomb and shooting at what they thought were more infected miners. They turned out to be three heavily armed soldiers. Two of the soldiers engaged the crew while one retreated from the cavern. The firefight ended with both paramilitaries dead, thanks again to some extremely lucky shooting. The men were armed with sub-machine guns and military-grade armour (5D soak). Just whose soldiers these are remains a mystery, but the group suspects Red Echo terrorists.

The crew pursued the last soldier, who seems to have exited the complex back up the lift shaft. They used the comms room to contact their engineer, Rosa Vega, on board the Haimei. She lifted off from the cargo ring, taking the tug back into Mars orbit, as the party expects a Red Echo vessel may be arrving shortly.

The bodies of the dead soldiers have been duly looted. Havelock has been tied up in the comms room and is becoming increasingly delirious. The group is now pondering what to do next.