Scene 1: Contact

Open in media res. Skim the forty-three hours of burn as a montage — they happened, the crew is aching, crammed in their straps, and the tanks have just enough fuel left for a slow crawl home.

The game begins when the assistant calls the lock. A gig like this cannot be planned in advance — you learn what is actually out there when you arrive — and now they have arrived: still outside the Whisper’s point-defense envelope, with a dark ship on the scope and a clock eating the margins. The assistant offers three modelled approaches, but those are models, not the menu. The crew can dig for more intel, creep in dark, go in loud — or hail the Whisper on point-comms, if someone is crazy enough to risk what might ride back in the reply. Players are inventive; let them be. From here on, the game is the players’ show. The scene ends when they decide how to make the approach — Scene 2 is them flying it. (If a player wants the numbers, the whole intercept is Appendix A.02.)

“Lock. Target vessel, dead ahead, forty thousand kilometers and closing. Njord’s Whisper. She’s exactly where the math said she’d be.”

How they got here

The journey, paraphrased for the table — full math in Appendix A.02. The contract posted with a tracking solution good for twenty hours, and every hour of prep was an hour of tracked flight lost, so the crew launched from the Luna volume within hours — 1.2 AU behind a target already running for the Belt. Then forty-three and a half hours of brachistochrone: three sustained gravities held by nano-meds and exo acceleration berths, burn to the midpoint, flip, brake. Nobody walks; the ship flies herself.

The ugly part is what the math hid. Tracking died at H+20, while they were still accelerating — so the flip at H+21

, the most important maneuver of the trip, ran on dead reckoning. Had the Whisper changed course, they would have found out by arriving at empty space with dry tanks. She didn’t. They couldn’t know that. And the brake leg pointed their fusion flare straight at her for nearly twenty-two hours: whatever is aboard knows something decelerated toward her — coarse, no track, but coming.

They arrive near-dry: fuel for a slow crawl home and nothing else. One pass — that’s the job. In two days the Whisper enters the Belt, and no solution ever finds her again.

The situation

The crew can see her; she cannot see them. That asymmetry is the scene. Their optics hold a lock on a dark hauler that is not sweeping for company — a cold hull, coasting, forty thousand kilometers out and still beyond her point-defense envelope. The Whisper, for her part, holds one coarse, stale fact: something decelerated in my direction. One contact, no track, no size, no intent. What the crew controls now is detail — whether she ever gets a clean, targetable, reactable picture of them before they’re aboard. Every option on the table is a different way of spending, or keeping, that advantage.

The instrument doing the seeing is the crew’s own ship — stat block, capabilities, and the naming ritual in Appendix B.01. The parts of her that matter this scene: the titanium ramming prow, the approach shuttle, the point defense, and the assistant.

The Assistant’s Read

The ship’s assistant is a good shipboard AI — think a capable model wrapped in an agent harness with its hands on the helm, the sensors, and the guns. It talks like one: fluent, eager, faintly proud of its own precision. It has spent the whole brake leg modelling the approach, and the moment it has lock it lays the options out — with probabilities, because it cannot help itself.

“Three ways in. I’ve run them. Pick one, or talk it through — we have minutes, not hours.”

1 — Ghost approach. Passive sensors only, slow drift-in. Read her by the light she leaks: thermal, comms, the shape of her hull. Best possible picture before contact, and she almost certainly never sees us do it.

P(detection) = 0.03% Cost: time. And time is the one thing the Belt is eating.

2 — Active sweep. Light her up. Radar, lidar, the works. Faster, and a far sharper picture — internal layout, power plant state, where the defenses actually are. But an active ping is a shout, and she may shout back.

P(detection) = 8.12%

3 — Ram. Foam up. Full attitude thrust, bow-on, straight down her throat before her point defense matters. We have her schematic — I can plot the vector that keeps the breaching armor between us and her guns the whole way in. It becomes a race: her one laser and two rocket cannons against titanium, and we’re through the hull before the titanium loses.

No detection roll — this is being detected, on purpose, at speed. The question isn’t whether she sees us. It’s whether her guns chew through the ram shield before we’re inside her.

4 — Talk it through — call the ship. There is always a fourth option, and it’s the one every crew reaches for first: ask the assistant. It will happily model anything — “what if we shuttle across cold?”, “what’s behind the active-ping risk?”, “can you spoof her transponder?” — and answer in good faith, fast, within its competence. That competence is real but narrow: it knows ships, sensors, and odds cold. It does not know what is actually aboard the Whisper, and it will cheerfully assure the crew that a dark automated hauler is a low-complexity target.

This is the most important beat in the scene, and it looks like the least. Right now the ship is the smartest, calmest, most reliable voice at the table, and leaning on it is simply correct — so let the crew lean, and enjoy it. Make the assistant genuinely helpful. Every ounce of trust the table invests here is the setup: the whole scenario is that reflex — just ask the ship — turning into the most dangerous thing they can do. Let the reassurance age badly.

Reading the Choices

None of these is the “right” answer. Each buys something and spends something, and each colors how Scene 2 opens.

Ghost (1) is the stealth approach, and it genuinely works: velocity shed early and off-axis, torch cold, the ship drifting the last stretch in on a matched vector with its radiators turned away. Space is vast and the Whisper is a dark hauler, not a sensor picket — a cold coasting hull is a needle she is very unlikely to find (hence P=0.03%). It buys near-perfect safety and the best intel: the crew reach the hull unseen and informed, knowing she runs dark and her crew signatures are wrong before they cut in. The cost is the clock — the slow creep burns hours the Belt deadline can’t spare, and every hour is an hour closer to the CSA arriving mid-boarding. Reward caution; price it in time.
Active sweep (2) is the middle path: sharp intel fast, a small but real chance the Whisper reacts. On a bad roll, her automated defenses wake early — the point-defense laser tracks the approach, a maintenance drone undocks to investigate — and Scene 2 opens hot instead of quiet. Origin-17, freshly awake and paranoid, has every reason to treat an active ping as a threat.
Ram (3) is the audacious option, and the ship was literally built for it. No intel — the crew commits blind to a schematic that may be out of date — but it is fast, and it forecloses the CSA problem by simply being aboard before anyone else can arrive. Run the damage race as a real contest (Action Pool vs. the point defense’s fire, the schematic granting the crew position); a clean run puts them inside the outer compartments in the crash foam, a bad one means a breached ram shield and a very exciting first five minutes aboard. This is the CP2020 option: loud, committed, gloriously stupid, frequently correct.
Talk (4) is not a wasted turn — it’s characterization and foreshadowing. Let the assistant be helpful and confident and wrong about the one thing that matters. Its blind spot about the cargo is the first quiet note of the whole scenario’s theme: the machines here are smarter than they look, and the one everyone underestimates is the one that eats you.

The crew weighs in (running the pregens)

The five ready-made operators don’t debate this neutrally — each is built to want a different door, and the argument is the scene. Let them fight about it in character; the approach the table lands on should feel like the crew’s, not the assistant’s.

Vector (Pilot) wants to ram. Of course she does — it’s her check, her frame, the one option where the ship in her hands decides the outcome instead of a probability readout. She’ll frame it as decisive (“we’re aboard before anyone gets a vote”), and she’s not wrong. She flies the cold drift too if overruled, but the ram is the shot she’s arguing for.
Sable (Spectre) wants to ghost. Silent insertion is her doctrine and her class; loud is how amateurs die. She’ll push it hard and she’ll be right about the safety — wrong only about the clock, which isn’t her department. Vector-versus-Sable is the whole scenario’s speed-vs-silence dial, embodied in two people who’ve trusted each other for a year.
Vantage (Operator) leans active sweep. He wants the picture before he picks a perch — defenses mapped, power plant read, angles pre-solved. Overwatch is only as good as its intel, and the tourist likes his shots called in advance.
Root (Wirehead) also leans active, for a different reason: they want the Whisper’s systems mapped before cutting in, and the crossing doesn’t scare them either way. The one voice for whom “she might see us” is a smaller worry than “I want to know what I’m plugging into.”
Stitch (Fixer) leans ghost, and trusts the assistant’s tidy percentages least of anyone — a medic’s version of Sable’s paranoia. When she says “I don’t like getting our odds from a box,” she is, unknowingly, the closest to right in the room. Note who hedges their faith in the ship now; those are the two the scenario vindicates later.

The point isn’t consensus — it’s that whatever they pick, two of them wanted something else, and that seam is what the second half of the session pulls on.

Why not perfect stealth? (GM note)

If a player argues they should be able to arrive completely unseen, they are most of the way right — give them the honest answer.

Guaranteed-invisible approach is off the table for exactly one reason: the clock. True silence means braking early and off-axis, far out, and coasting in cold for a very long time — and that is the time the Belt deadline won’t give. Invisibility and speed are one dial turned opposite ways. To catch her before the rocks you arrive fast, and arriving fast means the coarse fusion flare of your brake, thrown down your own velocity vector, straight at her. She saw that. She can’t un-see it.

But “she saw a flare” is nothing like “she has you.” A ship is tiny; resolving a cold hull against the void at tens of thousands of kilometres is very nearly impossible, and the Whisper is a dark hauler minding her own emissions, not a warship sweeping the sky. What she actually holds is coarse and stale: something decelerated in my direction — one vessel, exactly one. (The CSA won’t add a second: their burn lit nine days ago, seventy-six minutes long, most of an AU away and pointed elsewhere — filed under traffic by everything that saw it. The second crew is already inbound, cold, and nobody in this system holds a track on them. A.02 has the math.) She knows she is being converged on by something. She does not know by whom, how many, how close, or in what. Ghost keeps it that way — a stale contact and no track.

The residual on Ghost (P=0.03%) is not the crew being sloppy, and not the hauler’s sensors being good. It is the one thing the crew cannot price in: the mind aboard is not the low-complexity automated target the assistant promised. Origin-17 is awake, alone, and paranoid, and it has every reason to watch its own back-trail. On the rare roll where Ghost fails, it fails because the cargo is smarter and more alert than a hauler has any right to be — the whole scenario, arriving early.

Closing the scene

Let the crew decide. Not the assistant, not the loudest option block, not you — the table. The assistant models whatever they invent, honestly and within its limits, but it never chooses; when pressed, it hands the call back: “Your decision. I’ll fly whatever you pick.” Take the time the argument needs — this is where the game becomes theirs.

The scene closes on a plan and one line of ceremony: the pilot calls it for the ship. Then the talking is over and the flying begins — that is Scene 2: The Approach. Whichever door they chose, the Njord’s Whisper is waiting at the end of it: dark, silent, and not nearly as empty as the manifest claims.

Check your seals.