The crew round up the stragglers and convince Kramer “Brains” Fillabar, the saner scientist, to recall the Blockade Runner. They come to an agreement with its owner, Genevieve Ordu, and Thereon Jason “TJ” Drolock, a pragmatic mercenary – in return for cooperation, the pair will be turned loose after reaching Aegis. The remaining pirates are forced into spare cryo-pods and loaded onto the Sparrow. The drug-addicted colonists are put back on ice and ferried up to the Arkadia. This is then hidden underground on 100268/3, the icy third planet in the system. The base is razed and a beacon transmitting a Concord locator signal is left behind.
A minor miscalculation by Mayhem, coupled with the Sparrow’s increasingly erratic stardrive, lands them nearly half a lightyear off their first neutron star waypoint. They detect a cold, dark planet even further out, slowly fleeing the stellar remnant — a planet with artificial satellites.
Entering orbit, a scan reveals that only 3 orbitals remain intact out of a suspected 23. 22 appear to have been large metallic constructs, now mostly reduced to scrap or fields of debris. The 23rd is much smaller, and possibly crystalline, but is still being powered by a beam from below the planet’s frozen surface.
A drone sent to check out one of the two intact large orbitals finds tens of thousands of cryo-pods. Every single one has been broken open; the mangled husks within are barely recognisable as the remains of some kind of lifeforms. A small, free-floating sample is retrieved for analysis…