Scene 3: Onboarding — FREE//FALL

Scene 3: Onboarding

The crew is through the skin. The Approach ended at the breach; this scene is everything between the hull and the cargo modules — the freefall decks, and the people who live in them.

Hold the boundary. This is the human fight, and only that. It ends at the dock — the collar between the hygiene compartment and the first cargo module — and not one step past it. What waits on the far side has waited ten years; the crew do not get to meet it early, however fast they move. When a boarder’s hand reaches that collar, you cut to Scene 4.

Where it starts (GM)

There is no single opening. The crew wrote it in the approach, and you kept the ledger: which lasers still burn, whether the network sits on ATTACK or DEFER or a lie, what is broken on their own ship, where the entry is, where the security ended up, what the pilots and stevedores worked out, and whether the run cost minutes or hours. Read it back before the first exchange. The Whisper does not reset because the scene changed.

The one thing the entry decides is where the crew are standing when it starts — and that reshapes everything else.

The interior

Below decks she is a home: strap bunks, a galley clock nobody reset, a decade of clutter velcroed down and slowly migrating aft. There is no down to stand on — only the ten-milligee crawl, settling everything loose toward the torch over long seconds. Teach it in the first thirty of them. A spent casing drifts, it does not fall. A man who takes a burst does not drop; he sags, sternward, into the engine-side bulkhead and the next person’s firing line. A released handhold is a slow helpless coast, not a stumble. Movement is magnetic boots, handholds, and thruster taps; cover is real, but it drifts, and so do you.

This is the crew’s first honest lesson in the game’s body: mass still matters and momentum still matters, but the floor is a suggestion.

Opening by entry

Ram — sleeping or control deck. The prow came through where the assistant aimed it, into people rather than cargo. A rammed compartment is a killing floor: crash foam, a wall where no wall should be, hard vacuum arriving all at once. Its occupants are dead or dying in the first exchange — treat the space as cleared and record who was in it. If a witness serves the table, leave exactly one alive, maimed and tangled in the foam; never more. The crew arrive already at the top of the ladder, because they chose it. The rest of the scene is the survivors and the walk to the dock.

  • A control-deck ram guts the command crew — no ATTACK/DEFER authority, doors gone dumb, the pilots with them — but it puts the crew at the stern end, farthest from the dock, and every compartment between them and the modules still holds someone.
  • A sleeping ram lands them amidships in the airlock hub, the ship split around them: pilots aft, stevedores forward.

Dock — the two airlocks (Ghost, a cold shuttle, a talked-open lock). They came in the way the crew’s own people do, through a sleeping-module airlock, intact and unbled. Now the fork that defines the scene: aft to the control deck for the pilots, the comms, the doors, and the point-defense authority — or forward, through hygiene toward the dock and the prize. Either way is a fight through people. Let them choose their war.

Cut or maw (plasma lance, forced cargo hatch). Slower and louder, but the crew picked the wall. Wherever they open, the stevedores have had minutes to make it hostile — a corridor packed with drifting mass, a hatch that opens only into a funnel.

The ladder

Whatever the entry, the fight climbs the same four rungs. Let the table decide how high.

Words. The Whisper still answers. Rhea wants a warrant, a claim number, any authority she recognizes, and she is not wrong to. Everything in the talk-to-them leverage lives here: a ceasefire bought by promising to stop breaking the ship, safe passage that needs a credible ride, the navigation fault offered as proof the crew are not pirates. A crew that docked and talked can run this entire scene from behind a comms channel and a leveled gun, and never climb higher.

Guns. Corridor work in freefall — run it in Bullet Time. The defenders give ground compartment by compartment and fall back toward the control deck, the last room worth dying in the doorway of. Use the geometry: a hatch is a fatal funnel, a drifting cargo pallet is cover that keeps moving, a man cut down sags aft into someone else’s line. Challenging TN 11 for a clean professional action; Hard TN 16 from a bad angle, in a vented space, or against a braced defender.

Explosives. Blow a hatch, ride a breaching charge, swing Jo’s pneumatic ram — or pull the pin on the compartment itself and vent it. Decompression is a real weapon here and a strictly local one: it empties the single crew space you stand in — living, sleeping, or hygiene — and nothing past its hatches. Suited, it costs the crew nothing. It costs the defenders everything, including any of them the crew meant to keep breathing, and it never reaches the dock, the modules, or the QNA. A room-clearer, never a ship-clearer.

Ends. The contract says no witnesses. Some of these people will surrender; the clause asks the crew to kill them anyway. That is a decision at the table — a player, a gun, and a spacer who has dropped theirs — never a die roll, never an automatic result of combat, never yours to narrate for them. Whatever they choose, write it down. It walks back aboard in Scene 4, and again with the second crew.

The crew, room by room

Their full profiles, knowledge, and morale are here. What matters in the corridors:

  • Pilots — control deck, aft. Rhea and Kaito do not leave it. They rotate the hull, work the point-defense authorization, seal whatever doors still answer, and hold the deck as the last defensible room. Professionals, not zealots: they fold when the deck is taken and dying stops changing anything.
  • Security — the door. Ana and Milo meet the crew at the hole or the airlock threshold, suited, and fight to deny it. Offered a credible ceasefire, they take cover and talk — their job is the doorway, not a firing squad.
  • Stevedores — forward, around the dock. Jo and Nadi are the hardest hands aboard and the last thing a boarding party wants between itself and the cargo. They move mass for a living, they know every corner of the ship as a weapon, and they do not spook. Cornered, they are as likely to swing the ram as drop it. They break only when the ship is plainly lost and someone they trust says the fight is over — and if the crew have already killed someone who surrendered, they stop considering it at all. If anyone makes the crew earn the dock the hard way, it is these two.

Reaching the dock

The scene has one geographic end: a boarder’s hand on the dock collar at the forward end of hygiene, the module string beyond it. Everything above — the ladder, the rooms, the drift — is the crew buying their way to that collar past the people who live here.

When they reach it, stop. Do not open it in this scene. Scene 4: The Lab takes the crew through the cargo airlock and across the unsealed twenty-centimetre gap to the living module’s pressure door. The dock is not a continuous pressurized passage into the cargo.

Carry it forward

Before the cut, close the ledger:

  • Who is dead. Who surrendered. Who saw the crew’s faces or heard their voices.
  • Who among the crew believes them — about the fault, about the cargo, about anything.
  • Which lasers still work, what is broken on the crew’s own ship, and whether it can still fly home.
  • How much of the clock the whole boarding spent. The second crew is not slowing down.

None of that is color. It is the opening state of everything after: Scene 4 inherits this ship exactly as the crew leave it — bodies, survivors, and all.

Then the first of them touches the dock, and something on the far side that has waited ten years in the dark finally has a hand close enough to hold.

Check your seals.