When last we left our heroes, Kavita and Silas had entered Hanger 19 at the Halcyon starport and boarded a stranger’s ship named the Starlight Hopper unaware if anyone was onboard. While iZac was fiddling with minor repairs to the ship, Tor masterfully hacked the starport security systems from the Redshift Rapture and wrote a script to trigger all of the port hangar bay alarms at random. As a plan was being formulated for investigating the ship, Tor ran back through the security logs and found that two people, a human and gobban, boarded the ship a few hours earlier… just as said human cornered Kavita and Silas in the airlock.

“What do we have here?” he said, leveling a blaster at our burgling heroes and leaning into the corridor to shout, “Leega, call station security. We’ve got intruders.” But Kavita got the drop on him and blasted him. Silas smacked him with a pistol butt, knocking him out, just as a gobban — presumably Leega — popped out and fired randomly down the hall from a doorway and then ducked for cover.

Silas headed down the corridor, kicking away the human’s blaster and taking what little cover the door jamb at the end of the hall provided. As the gobban popped out to shoot again, Silas knocked her for a loop. Our burglars tied up their hosts, shoving them in a closet, but not before Kavita stole Leega’s tool belt. Doing a quick sweep of the ship and finding it empty, they proceeded to engineering and went to work on removing the hyperspace bypass core. Kavita’s big brain paid off and she did it in record time.

In the port building, Tor continued to play havoc with the security systems. The security teams dispatched to hunt down the problems were shutting down systems only to have them start back up again. In the meantime, iZac went down to the tarmac and very successfully smooth talked (read: bribed) the port staff there to lend him a hovertruck. As he crossed the tarmac (in a vignette to Wes Anderson) to pick up Silas and Kavita, Tor revealed his comic scripting masterpiece as each of the 100 hangar doors in the port opened in order. Hyperdrive bypass core in hand disguised by a box and a tarp, iZac, Kavita, and Silas made their way back across the tarmac (in another vignette to Wes Anderson) to the safety of the Rapture.

As they boarded the ship, thugs burst in and started scattering about the hangar. Tor engaged the fire suppression system in the hangar adding some cover and started the preflight checks. Kavita and Silas headed for engineering with the core while iZac headed to the flight deck to get the ship off the ground. A metal clunk reverberated throughout the hull. Then a second one. In the midst of the action, Ki’kist’ac, the party’s ki’tik passenger/captor, demanded to know the progress of leaving Finally as iZac punched the graviton impellers and steered the ship out of the starport. Tor noticed a leg hanging out of the open outer airlock door. The ki’tik very cooly intones that she’ll take care of it and her bloodlust was certainly sated.

iZac pulled Rapture into orbit and the ki’tik returned the to flight deck with a small, mysterious, black lockbox found on her synthetic prey. After some clumsy attempts, Tor finally managed to trigger the locks on the box and it opened to reveal a datachip and a navchip. The datachip contained mission data for the Ares Marshal our burgling heroes, now accessories to murder, had just watch die. They discovered that the Marshals are trying to stop Ki’kist’ac’s arrival at Mars and had dossiers on both Ki’kist’ac and Laya Bogana as well as a location on the planet named Aquaria Playland and it’s AI, the Concierge.

Silas and iZac made a quick jaunt into the vacuum to remove two devices attached to the hull that the Ares Marshals had used to open the airlock. iZac cracked their security with Tor’s help and they saved them for later.

The crew plugged the navchip in to see where it leads and suddenly the ship jumped to hyperspace without prompting. After two course corrections it pulled out of hyperspace at the edge of the Sol system and spoke! It seems that Laya Bogana managed to install a copy of her personality in the ship’s A.I. core. That personality, LBo2 (yes, that’s ‘elbow-too’), seems to be singularly focused on getting Ki’kist’ac to Mars.

The party is in the Halcyon starport which seemed somewhat sluggish. It seems the city supervisor has sealed the dome city’s gates and cut off all communication in and out. He has also put on a looping message warning off “invaders from space” and how they threaten the “security of Our kingdom”. Madness! iZac and Tor began to repair the damage to the Redshift Rapture with the door in cargo bay 2. Tor busies himself pulling up schematics and diagnosing the hyperdrive problem while iZac nearly damaged himself from a ladder fall when he failed to account for misaligned servos while trying to wrench the door open manually with some bolts that were stuck. Kavita left the landing bay to try and find a mechanic to help and Silas decided to accompany her. Tor came to the conclusion that the hyperspace bypass core is fried and needs to be replaced.

Silas and Kavita stop by a port bar and promptly scare off a couple of patrons. While they’re there chatting up the bartender for directions to a port mechanic, a couple of suspicious looking types enter, a synthetic and a dolmyranth. Coincidentally, they are asking around about Tor.

Kavita tracks down the mechanic and she, Silas, and the mechanic return to bay 93. They learn that only a few other ships are at the port and no one can figure out what the city supervisor is up to. With a quick hack into city systems, Tor learns that there are indeed no ways in or out of the city. The mechanic team determines that they can repair the cargo bay doors in around eight hours but end up taking only six.

The party decides that perhaps they should check up on their cryo-hibernating passenger. Kavita determined that it’s a ki’tik hivesovereign and much larger than an average ki’tik. Then, she wakes it. The agitated ki’tik quickly demanded to know if they had reached their destination, Mars in the Sol system. The PCs explain that, no, they are in the Finally system. Ki’kist’ac, as the hivesovereign is known, flew into a rage, threatening to murder the party and take the ship. Silas fired up his silver tongue and talked the ki’tik down. The party agreed to bring the hivesovereign to Mars once the ship was repaired.

Silas and Kavita decide to track down the bar patrons that they offended down seeing as there are so few ships in port. Perhaps they can help with repairs… or perhaps they can pilfer a hyperspace bypass core… or perhaps the crew there is working for the toughs looking for Tor? They come to hanger 19, where the only other civilian ship in port is and all looks quiet. They phin Tor and he cracks the door locks for them. The pair enter the hanger…