A firefight ensues, with Froon fleeing towards the ship, Bankman throwing mega punches, Rogers shooting explosions, and Lani re-arming the marines as reinforcements. The combination is quite effective at clearing the dozen zombies, though the marines are very much unimpressed by our continued detours – at least the station is ECorp, who blew up their ship.

A frazzled voice over the comms says he’s relieved to see a rescue, and calls himself the Chief of Medical for the station, hiding out in Engineering. It seems the infection first came from the Crocodile when it first docked in distress, and quickly spread. The external comms for the station seem to be down, so he’s unsure if he’s been able to request aid from ECorp yet.

It sounded like the Medical wing would have information about the infection and possibly The Crocodile, so we headed there before picking up the Chief. Outside Medical there’s 2 dozen zombies, so we crank up the volume on Lani’s Zune and throw it far away to bait them away from the room, which works way better than expected!

Quack’s emit occasionally from the Zune

Medical is rather empty - an isolation room had been broken out from, probably patient zero for the station, and the Chief of Medical’s office has a wealth of information about the patients and studies of its progression since the Crocodile brought on.

Breaking into the Command room, we finally get logs of the Crocodile and their complete flight paths!! It went from its home station to Phoebe, then straight to this station in distress. We also got logs of all Crocodile crew coming onto the station for medical treatment, with no logs of the Crocodile leaving (due to the station being overrun?). Our first-rescued Crocodile crewmember in our brig was logged as being non-symptomatic aside from being non-vocal even then.

We move up to our final stop - Engineering, but the hallways are particualrly poorly lit, we keep thinking we’re seeing movement just out of vision, but even after we start shooting a bit, we don’t see anything confidently. Then a heavily armored blue creature launches itself at a marine so hard he’s knocked out of view. It takes several great shots just to stagger it enough for a marine to drop a bulkhead between us, and we conclude its time to GTFO. We let the Chief know to meet us at the elevator, but we see he’s obviously infected (if still talking), and having lost a marine our Martian Sergeant has no hestitation to drop him without discussion.

“This isn’t my first rodeo”
– Roger obliterating a space zombie?

The elevator doors open to a horde between us and our ship. The crew bravely charges in (well except Froon), and Lani takes a pretty bad cut straight through the vac suit – not good with this awful blue goop!! Bankman drags her back from the fray and Froon improvises a cleaning solution out of… beer? It washes most of it away at least? She turns her fear into anger and wrenches a path through to the ship, and the group piles into the airlock and activates their waiting torpedo, shattering the shambling station into space dust.

Now the crew knows the full Crocodile flight path, and knows things went wrong at Phoebe… but also has a sick Lani, a mute Crocodile crewmember, and some increasingly angry marines. The UN can wait a little for a complete report. Blowing the station likely severs the Corp’s ability to track the Crocodile further anyway.

Previous Chapter: Crocodile Chase

Next Chapter: Phoebe Station

Dramatis Personae

• B - Froon Blagmare, Belter-weeb, intrepid pilot, and definitely “captain”
• R - Sam Bankman, jacked quartermaster turned “captain”
• M - Eva, “spy” but not the hacking or sneaking type
• M - Roger Roger, Military-weeb, conspiracy theorist
• S - Lani, thin wrenchmaster, probably not infected