The Last Flight of the Sparrow

The Last Flight of the Sparrow by Starit
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Something something spess murder mystery, and you're an antman.

This article contains spoilers! You were warned.

(Seriously, it's a murder mystery quest. Even the table of contents is a spoiler. Stop reading if you're not up to date.)

Characters

Crew

Head of Security Tiak Belint

Our valiant protagonist. Handy with a screwdriver, providing what you want is something swiftly broken into its component parts.

Like most of the crew and passengers, a Maurian (spess ant). Assigned to the ship from the Security Post in Orbital Interception 46f.^[ref] Kind of clumsy.^[ref] (And bungling. And awkward.)

Captain Kiodo Beredime

Physician Kivo Labras

The mysterious doctor, who's crew file is missing the biographical information.^[ref]

Engineer's Assistant Habresian "Mongro" Solav

Large, four-armed, irritable bugwolf.

A Sinarri, which are a race that kind of bare a grudge after the Maurians enslaved them and strip-mined their homeplanets.^[ref]

^{[TODO: death]}

Bartender Mok Corrainte

War veteran with a prosthetic left arm.

Not too keen on the Ziraneé.^[ref]

^{[TODO: death?]}

Navigation Officer Dan Coister

Janitor Mat Nouki

Off his meds, even when on his meds. ^{[TODO: murder]}

Head Engineer Trake Voniggan

Fat, irritable, but helpful engineer.

Murder

Trake was headed to the Zero Deck to look for computer parts on the suspicion that someone had been down there; he left a note in his cabin that the parts had been scattered by someone wanting to utterly disable it, but in a reversable manner.^[ref]

Head of Security Atuk Bounent

Listed in the crew files as Head of Security,^[ref] despite that role being given to Tiak.

Passengers

Ordered by room number.

File:Yery.png

Yery Tcaru

Chemist.

Zira Niadar

Short and mysterious.

An ambassador.^[ref] Political adversary of Mikos and his anti-technological advancement stance and advocacy of returning to war with the Ziraneé. Claims the photo of her found in Mikos' luggage was probably taken at the Intersection, before boarding.^[ref]

Keranos Drai

"The Colonel", given his military uniform.

^{[TODO: death?]}

Reto Mikos

Mayor of Port Augira, a respectable city in Tinosa II, one of the most influential and wealthy planets in the Maurian Republic, and the Sparrow's intended destination.^[ref][ref]

Murder

There was blood in the lift the first time Tiak entered it; presumably his.^[ref] A fat body that had had the head blown off by a heavy energy rifle (something only safe to do in that specific location, assuming you know and care about wall thickness) was found on the lower deck—the first murder discovered. It had been redressed with the jacket inside-out and had been dragged over the blood. Mikos' ID card was in a pocket.^[ref]

According to the doctor, the blood testing confirmed the body as Mikos'.^[ref] Mat witnessed what was assumed to be Mikos arguing another man, who killed him, and later shot the body again.^[ref]

Zeno V'yrian

A Ziraneé (spess snakes). Nayria's mate.^{[TODO: cite]} Has a bionic eye.^[ref]

Nayria V'yrian

Matriarch of the Yrian house—one of five Ziraneé Queens.^[ref]

Other

The Goo

Whispers to Tiak in a mumbling fashion about being whole and separated.^[ref] Eats through metal^[ref], but not through plastic.^[ref] Is motile, and small parts sometimes seem quite agitated, presumably seeking the larger mass.^[ref]

First spotted in a vent up on the upper deck, although Tiak missed it.^[ref]

Stowaway mercenary

^{[TODO: death]}

Places

The Sparrow 12 is an old, old ship due to a War Economy policy. It was originally a Colonization Ship, used to transport hundreds of colonists to new worlds. The three main decks of the ship are actually pretty small in comparison to the entire Zero Deck, now closed and sealed. It used to be where the colonists lived during the years of hyperjump travel. That's why 4/5 parts of the ship are actually hollow and empty.^[ref]

No lethal weaponry is allowed on board the ship.^[ref]

Upper deck

Bridge, infirmary, captain's office.

Middle deck

Security office, bar, passenger cabins.

Lower deck

Environmental, Mat's room, toilets, crew quarters.

Engineering

Houses atmospheric reprocessing, the mainframe, a lift to the zero deck with a chainsaw Walker mech on it,^[ref] and the engines on a sub-level. Going near the engines without a hazard suit would be lethal. Mongro claimed the walker was a hundred years old and lacking fuel, so useless.^[ref]

Cargo bay

Container with bullet holes which the goo might have escaped from.^{[TODO: Doc's results of studying it]}

Zero deck

Busted and obsolete section of the ship that's not supposed to be used. Only the Captain is supposed to have a copy of the key to let the lift go down there.^{[ref] [TODO: Bits of interest that I've doubtless missed.]}

Medical bay

Entrace is blocked with debris, which is too heavy for Tiak to move or cut. But there's a small gap. Contains two barrels of extract of perticanto.^[ref]

Cargo bay

Full of smuggled rifles.

Evacuation pods

Can be reached via doors on the middle and upper decks, but they only opens when the emergency protocol is activated.^[ref] This must be done by the captain.^[ref]

Timeline

Note that times in the quest are presented in DD:HH:MM until arrival, so count down

The hyperjump trip is supposed to take three days, during which most people should be in hypersleep.^[ref]

02:23:30	Tiak gets dressed and noticed he been awoken up about 15–20 minutes later than he should have been (which should have been ten minutes into the jump), during which time someone has sabotaged the mainframe.[ref]
02:23:20	Tiak is knocked out by the hazmat suit attacker shortly after examining the wiring panel.[ref]
02:23:00	Zira claims to have been awoken by her pod.[ref]
02:22:50	Tiak regains conciousness.[ref]
02:22:10	Tiak and Zira discover Mikos' body outside the lifts on the lower deck.[ref]
02:21:10	Tiak returns to engineering; last timestamp before he wounds and knocks out the hazmat suit attacker, but is himself knocked out in the process.[ref]
02:18:30	Tiak wakes up in the infirmary.[ref]
02:15:52	Zira allegedly receives a note under her door asking her to meet in Tiak's office to discuss something important related to Mikos' death. Tiak is downstairs chasing down Mat.[ref]
02:15:02	Zira arrives at Tiak's office.
02:14:52	Tiak arrives at Tiak's office.
02:14:47	Zira leaves Tiak's office.
02:14:30	The bomb in Tiak's office detonates.
02:13:00	Tiak is due to meet in Engineering, based on the anonymous note.[ref]

^{[TODO: flight course from [ref], correlate with Mongro's PDA [ref].]}

Conspiracies

Green Goo

blah blah maybe the non-zero cargo hold

Crescent Keys

Nayria wants us to fetch the other two of three keys for her in exchange for "vital information" about Mikos' murder. The keys may vary in size but all have the same shape. The other keyholders are expected to be trying to achieve the same.^{[ref]THREAD MISSING}

The doctor left his lying around in the open before we knew what it was.^[ref]

Extract of Perticanto

Trake found barrels of it in the Zero Deck Medical Bay.^[ref] Mat mentioned it in relation to "the man who had to die twice".^{[ref]POST MISSING} Yery was able to identify it and inform Tiak of its effects.^[ref]

Weapons Smuggling

Mongro etc. etc.

Bombs

Metal crate presumably full of them was in Mikos' bathroom.^[ref]

Summary

Prologue

2 days 23:30 until arrival

Tiak wakes up laer than expected and finds himself trapped in his room with the mainframe nonfunctional. The camera he sends through the wiring panel alongside the door sees a blur and then suddenly stops transmitting. As he corrects the wiring, a person in a hazmat suit appears on the other side and grab-slams Tiak's face into the wall, knocking him unconcious.

Chapter 1

2 days, 22:50 until arrival

Fourty minutes later, Tiak regains conciousness, to find his ID card and gloves missing, and a Sinarri cutting tool locked in the brig—which he can't open without his card. He also retrieves a key labelled "H.S." in the corridor outside. The bar proves empty, to Tiak gets himself a drink and pockets the balloon released by pressing the hidden party button.

Taking the lift to the engineering deck, Tiak discovers blood on the floor, as if someone bleeding profusely had been dragged in and out. The secondary lift doors, which lead only to the Zero deck, are still warm from being welded shut. Poking into engineering he finds the lights out and a figure trying to break into the filing cabinet, who identifiers herself as Zira when cornered and starts lying immediately.

Stepping back outside into the engineering hallway, Zira and Tiak discover an overweight, headless, Maurian corpse. Examing the body—apparently Mikos'—the janitor appears and promptly flees. While looking for him in the toilets, Trake discovers the body, and irritatedly lends Tiak his ID card to reach the upper deck and report to the Captain, dropping off Zira at her cabin on the way. The Captain is less than pleased and points out that without the mainframe the ship has no communications and will continue to its set course; he also tells Tiak of the two Ziraneé diplomat passengers. Tiak gets a reluctant Dr. Labras to start blood-testing the corpse. Demonstrating his usual lact of tact, he also manages to get the doctor to let slip that Zira is an ambassador, then wrangles a scalpel as an improvised weapon.

Tiak returns to engineering, where Trake has fixed the lights and made Tiak a new all-access security card. Tiak returns Trake's card and tells him of the intruder fiddling with the cabinet, to which Trake points out that only he and the Captain have the passwords, although Trake wrote his down on a piece of paper then lost it. Tiak continues to explore the lower deck; the male lavatory is now unlocked, and the card slot for door E in the crew quarters is jammed with pieces of broken plastic. Fetching a pair of pliers from a now deserted engineering, he sees Dr. Labras scanning the murder victim.

Inside the cabin is a lockbox cut open with an energy tool, which has damaged the contents; all Tiak can make out is the reamins of a note: "...Important... as Engineer...suspect...Security... stored in the Zero Deck...must be safe... ". His servo-camera picks up a bulky person approaching down the corridor, past the doctor who does not react. Tiak attempts to ambush the hammer-weilding hazmat suit attacker as they enter the room, and lands a blow with the scalpel breaking in the wound, but gets his right leg broken. The attacker mumbles that the attack is not personal before Tiak manages to stun them, but their body falls on him, leaving both unconcious.

Chapter 2

2 days, 18:30 until arrival

Tiak wakes up in the infirmary, the doctor assuming that Tiak broke his own leg and tazed himself. The doctor had looked for Mongro to move Mikos' body once finished (the blood apparently matched), but couldn't find him; half-an-hour later Mongro showed up at the infirmary with an unconcious Tiak. Tiak tells the doctor to be on the look out for someone with half a scalpel jammed in their shoulder, then goes to bother the captain, whose shoulder is fine, but has nothing to say.

Noticing that his camera is showing nothing but darkness, Tiak returns to the lower deck to find that Mikos' body and the janitor's cart have been removed. The janitor's door, however, is wedged shut. Seeking some help from engineering, Tiak wanders into atmospheric control and encounters the goo, some of which he traps in the balloon.

Tiak goes to the infirmary to see if the doctor can identify the goo, but he is out, so Tiak steals a syringe. He returns to the brig to fetch the cutter now he has a card to deactivate the forcefield, and cuts open the locked cupboard to find a computer part. In the canteen, Tiak finds a note about gambling debts, and refuses to hand it over to Mok, who likewise "forgets" who he had been talking to while Tiak was in security.

Going to enter Mikos' cabin (4), Tiak is observed from the one opposite (6), so knocks and has a remarkably unhelpful conversation. Mikos' cabin is a mess, and his case contains an unexpectedly large knife, and a picture with Zira highlighted and a note on the rear: "Confirmed to be in the Sparrow's list of passengers. Very dangerous, extreme caution advised. Contact Security. Avoid unescorted actions." In the bathroom is a huge metal crate, with a solitary, unactivated bomb in one corner, which Tiak vandalises and takes.

Tiak decides to bother Zira, but she doesn't answer her door and the room is dark, meaning the lights are broken. She jumps Tiak with a knife. Making his excuses, Tiak wanders back to the canteen to overhear Dan talking with Mok about about Dan's grudge with Mikos and volunteering to be on this flight. The conversation dries up when Tiak approaches, other than the navigator confirming that the course cannot be changed with the mainframe down.

Tiak follows Dan to the elevator, who is heading back to the upper deck, hearing snippets of voices. It stops moving with a shudder and loud noise. Dan gives him a boost to get up on top of the lift through the hatch, where he discovers a huge mass of the goo engulfing the engines, making a sizzling noise as it melts them. It awkwardly says "...Whole... hief...ours...eparated". Tiak empties out his trapped sample, which bounces off the top of the lift and down the shaft, and the mass follows it. As the lift jolts back into life, the hatch slams closed, and Dan can't reach it, leaving Tiak trapped on top of the car. He dives through a rusted hole in the shaft into darkness.

The vents lead eventually to somewhere over the middle deck, where Tiak stops to eavesdrop. He hears Zeno and Nayria discussing his apparent death, and some other quiet matters, before Nayria reveals that she can hear Tiak and invites him in—by cutting a hole with a plasma pistol. She describes him as a wild card, not supposd to be aboard, and hence dangerous, and asks which he values most: peace, honour, or truth. Choosing Truth, Tiak is instructed to find the other keys of a trio of which Nayria was given one as part of an agreement upon which she claims the other parties have reneged.

Tiak sneaks down to the lower deck and decides to make good use of his assumed-dead status by immediately talking to the first person he sees, Mat the janitor, who panics and babbles about people who die twice and spiders before running off to his room. So Tiak shoots him in the back and puts his unconcious body on the bed in the janitorial room. Searching, Tiak steals some of Mat's medication and finds that the cabinet is full of all kinds of paperwork, mostly old. When the now-restrained janitor reawakens, he talks about people arguing and one of them killing the other, then later killing him again. Mat's lucidity comes to and end and Tiak asks to take his cart, loaded with papers, back to his office to read.

On the way, he is accosted by Zeno while departing the lift, who notes that we might even manage to survive the flight. He finds Zira lurking in his room, and asks her to keep his survival a secret, assuming that news of him being alive will spread more slowly than news of his death. She apparently receieved a note asking her to meet with someone there to discuss important information related to Mikos' death. Tiak notices that the bomb is missing from his inventory, and Zira makes her excuses to leave. He starts sifting through the paperwork, finding a printed message from the Maurian Security Forces about a scan showing multiple unauthorized weapons and an unknown life form aboard as the ship departed the intersection, and ordering it to stop. He also finally finds a bomb behind his cryopod, with ten seconds on the clock. He throws it into the brig and dives out of the office with he paperwork, which is regardless destroyed by the fire and subsequent fire suppression.

Mok notes that Tiak isn't dead, and Tiak notes that the brig forcefield is now stuck on because the card slot was broken by the blast. He heads to the infirmary, where Labras had also heard that he was dead, and treats him for the burns before leaving to fetch Tiak a replacement uniform. Tiak leaves a servo-camera behind so that he'll be able to tell later when the Doc is absent so he can claim the crescent key. Mongro appears with a replacement uniform, claims to have not seen anything unusual in the past hours, and leaves when Tiak demonstrates his usual tact and offends him about having four arms. The Doctor also calls Tiak on stealing the syringe, which he returns. Labras them locks him out.

The canteen is unmanned, so Tiak helps himself to something to eat, and while doing so notices a note left the pocket of his new uniform is an anonymous invitation to meet in Engineering in an hour for unspecified help. He fetches Zira, who reluctantly admits to fiddling with the file cabinet, and heads down there twenty minutes early. Zira checks atmospherics, and Tiak continues deeper into engineering, finding the door to the back room open, and Mongro there. He strikes a deal to fetch the Zero Deck key for Mongro if he makes copies, and Mongro offers to also then upgrade his stungun and help with identifying and disarming any future bombs. Mongro returns to the mainframe room and Tiak promptly tells Zira everything.

Leaving engineering, Zira finally confesses that she also found Trake's password—"Tricorco"—and was trying to look up Mikos' file when she was interrupted. The password no longer works. The pair go to the upper deck, although Zira soon retreats, where Tiak overhears the captain and Zeno in his office talking about Ziraneé honour, affronts to it, and the elimination of "dissident individuals", but fails to press the matter. He gets the Zero Deck key off the captain, along with orders to get a report from Trake, and look for him in his cabin (E). Trake is not in his cabin, but left himself a note that he was headed to the Zero Deck. Tiak heads down there, but it is too dark to see.

Chapter 5

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