Five Parsecs From Home: Campaign Turn 2

After last campaign turn, the Astra Coalition managed to get Unity forces to move into system to hunt down the Converted Fleet. In the meantrime, our crew found themselves broke. Ship maintenance was far more expensive than expected. As a result, when an agent from the Sector Government approched them with a job offer, most of the crew were willing to entertain the idea. Maggot ended up being the lone dissenter. When no other job offers presented themselves, the rest of the crew pressured their captain into accepting the job.

The crew was informed that a data relay in a remote part of the planet had gone down. They suspected spies of sabotage and were handed a dossier with information on one such spy with a bounty on his head. Their job was to deliver a new hard drive for the relay, fight off any opposition, and collect an extra bounty if the person of interest was on scene. When asked (by Maggot) why the Sector Government couldn’t handle such a thing, they were informed that all available assets were currently hunting down the Converted Fleet.

The job went down much as expected. There was resistence led by the fellow in the dossier. Maggot took him down with his plasma rifle and the hard drive was installed into the relay. It was then that they realized that they had been duped. While they did get paid, the job was not what they were told. The group they had just fought were a group of disgruntled Unity soldiers who were trying to help other soldiers who were being neglected or persecuted by the Unity Government. The bounty ended up being one of their leaders and the new hard drive was used to pinpoint other cells in the group.

Disgruntled Soldiers, not Spies

Maggot was furious. These disgruntled soldiers were the people he wanted to help, not murder. He turned on his crew and gave them the riot act. In game, Maggot will refuse to participate in any battle next turn. I have interpreted this as an ultimatum: you guys can take any job you like, but if you continue to prove yourselves pawns of Unity he’ll have nothing to do with them.

This display was a bit of shock for the rest of the crew. Realizing that they were too focused on money, rather than the ideal that brought them together as a crew, they set about chasing down some rumors about who this Sector Government Agent really was.