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.