M3.231.445

At a Glance


Contract	`CTR-DDYQ-MKS4` — TerraMech Industries
Crew	Orin Solren two others, characters unrecorded

Narrative

The prose retelling of the session, in scenes.

I. The Green

TerraMech called it a transport mishap.

That was the word in the contract, printed in the same flat typeface as the payment schedule, and it did what corporate language is built to do: it closed a subject. A mishap is an accident. An accident has no author. Somewhere above the equator of a moon nobody had bothered to name better than Rustwater, a transport had come down, and a prototype loader mech had come down with it, and TerraMech would very much like the mech back before the question of authorship occurred to anyone else.

They were telling the public it had been destroyed. They were paying three people to prove otherwise.

The jungle did not care about any of this. It was hot in the way that makes armor a decision rather than a precaution, and wet in the way that makes every step a negotiation with the ground. Orin Solren went first, because that is where Orin goes — an old duster over medium plate, an old hat, and the unhurried patience of a man who trained somewhere with stone floors and long silences. Behind him came the other two, and between the three of them they made less noise than the canopy did.

For most of a day the jungle was only a jungle. Heat, swamp, the enormous indifferent trees.

Then it started hunting them.

II. The Thing That Should Not Have Evolved

They heard it before they understood it, which was merciful, because understanding it took a while.

It came through the green on a neck too long for its body, a goat's skull and a goat's horns riding on something that moved like a giraffe and ended like a snake. Every part of it was recognizable. No part of it belonged with any other part. It was not a monster in the sense the frontier means when it says monster — not a big animal, not a mean animal. It was an animal that had been decided on.

Nothing about it read as descent with modification. It read as a memo.

They fought it in the swamp, and it was bad, and they won. Afterward, standing over a corpse whose anatomy made no argument for itself, nobody said the obvious thing out loud. Somebody had made this. Somebody had put it here. On a moon nobody was watching, years ago, with no announcement and no recall, and it had been living in this valley the whole time, doing exactly what it was designed to do to whatever came through.

They left it where it fell. The contract had not mentioned wildlife.

III. The Ravine

The crash site was a ravine and the ravine was a grave.

The transport lay half-submerged at the bottom, hull splayed, one flank open to the water. The X-43 was down beside it — the prototype, the entire reason for the fee, canted over in the mud with its frame bent and its running lights doing something intermittent and unhappy.

And there were bodies.

Not the handful a mishap produces. Not a flight crew. The transport was full of them, laid where they had fallen throughout the compartments, and the arithmetic did not work. Whatever this ship had been doing, it had been doing it with far more people aboard than a cargo run needs, and all of them had died here, and TerraMech's contract had described this as a mishap and then moved on to the payment schedule.

Nobody had time to count. That is the part worth remembering later — that there was a moment when counting was possible, and the job was in front of them, and they chose the job.

IV. Waking the Mech

The sensible plan was to secure the mech and arrange extraction. The plan they used was better and considerably worse.

The X-43 was not going to be carried. So they got underneath it, and into it, and started bringing it back — not repaired, nothing like repaired, just working. Hydraulics that answered. A frame that would hold weight. A core that came up in fits and did not seem to enjoy the process.

There is a version of this scene where the mech is a machine and this is maintenance. That is not the version that happened. The core had been damaged in the fall, and damage does strange things to something already halfway to complicated. It resisted. It moved when it was not asked to. Somewhere in the coaxing, in the low hours in the mud with the water rising in the ravine, the X-43 stopped being equipment they were recovering and started being something they were convincing.

They convinced it. It stood up. They climbed on, and the prototype TerraMech wanted back intact became the crew's ride home.

V. Obsidian Shield

Obsidian Shield hit them during the recovery, because of course they did — Orion Dynamics had bought the same prize from the other end, and professionals do not arrive early or late.

It was a firefight in a ravine full of water and corpses, in the shadow of a mech that was not entirely on anyone's side. Neither company had told either crew what was actually down here. Both crews found out at the same time.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the crew made a man an offer.

His name was Kadiri Vance, and he was a contractor, which is a specific thing and not the same as a soldier. He had come down here for a fee. Somebody in the mud shouted a larger number at him — mid-fight, over gunfire, in the way these things actually happen rather than the way they happen in stories — and Vance did the arithmetic while people were shooting at him, and the arithmetic came out clean.

He turned. That was the fight, really. A squad that is suddenly one man lighter and one man's knowledge poorer stops being a squad and becomes several people in a ravine, and Obsidian Shield had not planned for the ravine.

Afterward he did not go anywhere. Nobody asked him to stay and nobody asked him to leave, and in the absence of either instruction he simply remained, unhurried, polite, and entirely willing to explain what he had been paid if anyone wanted the figure.

And then one of them used the vortex grenade.

It was a manifest cypher, which means it looked like exactly what it was — one of those objects the setting is built on, single-use, unrepeatable, and considerably more than anyone needs. She used it because there was a firefight and it would end the firefight, and she was right. It ended the firefight.

It also tore a hole through the transport's hull.

The ship opened like a struck can. The sound went up the ravine and came back. What was left of Obsidian Shield broke, and the crew got clear, and the mech took its first heavy steps up out of the mud with four people riding a machine that had not agreed to any of this.

For a moment it was a win. It was a win. The objective was walking, the rivals were scattered, and the fee was as good as banked.

VI. What Came Out

Somebody looked back.

The breach in the transport was a ragged bright wound in the hull, and there were bodies in it. That was not the problem. There had been bodies in the transport all along; they had walked past them, over them, around them, for the better part of a day.

The problem was that the bodies were coming out.

Not fast. Nothing about it was fast. They came through the gap the way a crowd leaves a building, unhurried and unsteady and entirely without any of the things that make a person's movement look like a person's — stumbling into the water, into the mud, into the light, in numbers that kept resolving out of the dark interior long after the count should have stopped.

Nobody had an explanation. Nobody has one now. Whatever killed the crew of that transport had not finished with them, and the vortex grenade had opened the only thing standing between that fact and the outside world.

The mech kept walking. Four people rode it out of the ravine and did not stop, and the jungle closed up behind them the way it closes up behind everything. One of them had been shooting at the other three that morning.

Behind them, in a valley on Rustwater, the dead of a ship TerraMech had described as a mishap were coming out into the daylight, and there was nobody left to count them either.

They delivered the mech. They got paid.

The site is still there.

Summary

Arrival. The session opened aboard the transport ship; the crew took a dropship down. Nothing of substance happened in transit — noted for continuity only
Into the jungle. The crew made the crash site through dense equatorial terrain — heat, swamp, and the standing hazard of a moon nobody has properly surveyed. No resistance on the approach. Nobody was guarding it
The chimera. They were hunted by a goat-giraffe-snake hybrid — long-necked, horned, serpentine, and entirely wrong. They found it, fought it, and killed it. Nothing about it read as natural selection
The crash site. The prototype X-43 loader mech was in the ravine beside the partially submerged transport. The transport was full of dead bodies — more than a transport mishap accounts for
Inside the hull. They gained ingress and worked through a largely powerless ship to one of the cargo bays, where the loader was
Getting it walking. Rather than haul the mech, the crew restored partial power to it — never full — enough to use it as their transport out. The core was damaged and unreliable; it moved
The ambush. As they started planning extraction, Obsidian Shield — hired by Orion Dynamics for the same prize — hit them for the loader and whatever else was aboard
The turncoat. Mid-firefight the crew bribed one of the attackers, Kadiri Vance, into switching sides. With him the fight turned. He did not leave afterward
The vortex grenade. One of the crew spent a manifest vortex cypher and tore a hole through the transport's hull. It ended the immediate problem and opened the ship
What came out. Riding the mech away from the site, the crew looked back and saw bodies stumbling out of the breach. The dead were moving. Nobody stayed to find out why

Decisions Made

They rode the mech out instead of hauling it. Fast and clever, and it means TerraMech's prototype has now been operated hard by people who are not TerraMech. Whatever the core recorded, it recorded
They opened the ship. The vortex grenade solved a firefight and breached a sealed hull. Both things happened, and the second one was not the plan
They bought a man mid-fight, and kept him. Kadiri Vance is with the crew because they outbid his employer, which everyone involved understands. Nobody has established what happens when someone outbids them
They left. Nobody investigated the bodies, the corpse count, or what the transport was actually carrying. That question is still on the ground where they left it

NPCs Encountered

Kadiri Vance — Obsidian Shield contractor who took the crew's offer mid-fight and stayed. Now with them, on no particular terms
Obsidian Shield (rival mercenary company) — hired by Orion Dynamics, beaten to the objective, and down a contractor to the people who beat them. They lost twice and know exactly who to

Factions Encountered

TerraMech Industries — client. Publicly claiming the mech was destroyed; privately paying to get it back before anyone else does. Standing: owed a delivery, and owes a favor
Orion Dynamics — funded the competing recovery through Obsidian Shield. Standing: lost the race, out the fee
Helios Dominion — never appeared, implicated anyway. See below

New Worldbuilding

The chimera was engineered. A goat-giraffe-snake hybrid is not convergent evolution — it is somebody's work. Helios seeded predators on frontier worlds years ago and never recalled them; see The Biotech Sector. High Tier 2 on the Sentience Scale — cunning, adaptive, not people
The X-43 core. A damaged prototype combat AI that had to be coaxed into carrying its own salvagers. See the Sentience Scale — this is the case that established a Tier-2 system can lurch into unstable Tier 3 under damage: it started modeling itself, and it did not want to be salvaged
The dead of the transport — a hull full of bodies, and after the breach, bodies that moved. A failed biotech experiment, gone rogue — see The Biotech Sector. Which program, which corporation, and what the transport was doing carrying it remain open. Not supernatural: something engineered kept those bodies moving after their occupants stopped

Continuity State

Characters

Orin Solren   Last played:  Session 01 (in-world: TBD)
              Condition:    TBD
              Wounds:       TBD
              XP:           1 banked
              Where:        outbound from the crash site, aboard the X-43
              Locked:       —

(second PC)     — sheet not yet recorded. Spent a manifest vortex cypher
(third PC)      — sheet not yet recorded

Kadiri Vance  — joined mid-session as an NPC; now with the crew.
              No sheet yet; being promoted into the pool.

The world's next move

TerraMech takes delivery and learns the mech was operated, not hauled. Whether they ask what else was at the site depends on how much they already knew
Obsidian Shield files a loss and a defection. A company that loses a job to its own man has a reputation problem, and they are still under contract to Orion
The site is still there — an opened transport, a corpse count nobody has explained, and whatever walked out of it

Open threads

Which program did the transport crew die to? A failed experiment got out. Nobody looked, and the answer is still on that planet
What was the transport actually carrying? TerraMech called it a mishap and lied about the outcome; the body count suggests the cargo mattered more than the mech
Who seeded the chimera, and how many more are out there? Helios is the obvious answer and has never confirmed anything
Does TerraMech find out the crew rode its prototype? And does the core remember them
Obsidian Shield wants a rematch — or a conversation, or Vance back
What is Vance's actual price, and who pays it next? He can be bought. Everyone knows. Nobody has tested it twice

Contract 001 — the original brief
Sentience Scale — the X-43's jump to Tier 3, established here