Session 2 — Running Silent
“The only winning move in a bar fight is the door.”
Where: The Long Layover Cantina → Flammarion Highport → the long jump out to Walston
The job: Get clear of the trap, make the Autumn Gold’s berth, and finally lay eyes on the ship they were hired to recover.
Last Call
The barstool was still coming down when the cantina doors hissed open and Hudson walked in — kit bag on his shoulder, straight into a room full of rising mist, a mock birthday song, and three strangers reaching under their coats. He picked his side fast, and the crew had their sixth.
There was no grand plan for the brawl. Kael took a couple of blows meant to put him down — and his cloth armour drank nearly all of it, leaving him standing where the pirates expected a heap. That was the whole fight the crew needed to see. Under the cover of the song and the creeping haze, they broke for the door as one and did not look back.
They slipped out clean. No shots that mattered, no faces the room would remember — just six people leaving a bar in a hurry, which on a Class-A port is nothing unusual at all.
Ahead of the Law
Imperial starport security came converging on the cantina behind them — Starbursts on the shoulder, stunsticks on the belt — but the crew was already gone, moving fast through the cold recycled air of the concourse toward the docking bays. They’d left quickly enough that they never crossed into the guards’ sights. Let the law sort out the three armed strangers who smuggled body pistols past the door scanner; the crew read as passengers with a berth to catch.
And they caught it. The party made the Autumn Gold with time to spare, met Captain Michelle Corelli, and boarded without friction. When the airlock sealed, the trap at The Long Layover — pirates, security, and all — was somebody else’s problem, four hours and one jump behind them.
The Long Quiet
Walston sits two J-2 jumps out from Flammarion, and the crew rode every parsec of it: Flammarion → 567-908 → Walston, a week each in a sealed hull.
They spent it the way careful people do — keeping their heads down and their business to themselves. No trouble found them in transit. Mostly the crew put the quiet weeks to use honing their edges, drilling and studying and coming out the far side of the run a little sharper than they went in. Six strangers were beginning, slowly, to move like a crew.
Cold Welcome
Walston came up out of the dark as advertised: a cold, dim, low-gravity backwater under Albin’s Star, its 3,000-odd souls tucked into semi-sunken settlements, filter masks the price of stepping outside. The starport at Walston Startown received them, and the crew went looking for the man who could point them at their prize.
That man was Minister Alan Greener — Minister for Offworld Affairs, Public Relations, and Fisheries, the official who handles the rare visiting Traveller. He looked over their IISS documentation, found no reason to doubt it, and told them where their ship was — along with the small favour that came attached to it.
The Catch
The far trader — the Highndry — isn’t sitting on a landing pad. It’s parked in the crater of Mount Salbarii, the long-dormant peak that dominates Settlement Island. Getting up there is the only real wrinkle in an otherwise routine errand.
The last crew, Greener said plainly, were troublemakers. He’d chartered them for a simple job; they botched it, disabled their own ship’s drives trying to limp out of the crater, gave up, fled to the starport by air/raft, and left the system. The ship has sat dead in the caldera ever since.
Greener will help the crew get to it and get access — on one condition. They finish the job the last crew abandoned: take the Highndry’s onboard planetary survey gear and its seismic charges and run the periodic geological survey of the mountain that Walston runs from time to time — a standard bit of housekeeping, an updated map of the interior for the government’s files.
The fee for the survey: a flat Cr3,000, cash, from a world that doesn’t have money to throw around — and no room to haggle. Take it, or wait for the next scout to wander through.
To the Mountain
Deal struck, Greener made good on his end. The crew was driven out from Startown to the base of Mount Salbarii — the semi-sunken settlements falling away behind them, the dormant peak filling the windscreen, the Highndry somewhere in the crater above.
Cliffhanger
The crew fought their way out of one planet’s trap and landed on another’s paperwork. Their ship is real, it’s close, and it’s sitting in a crater at the top of the mountain now standing right in front of them — with a couple of days’ honest survey work the price of the keys.
We ended here: boots on the cold ground at the foot of Mount Salbarii, the climb ahead of them.
Next time: the climb to the crater — and whether the crew can reach the Highndry, wake it up, and knock out the survey that comes with the keys.