Scene 2: The Approach

The plan is made; now they fly it. Scene 1 was the crew and the computer talking; Scene 2 is the gulf actually closing. And here the assistant quietly steps back — it flew them to the decision, but from the crossing on, the ship’s competence runs out at the Whisper’s skin. Whatever happens against that hull, the crew does it on their own instruments.

There are really only two shapes of scene here, not three. Silent and Active are the same approach with a dial turned — a careful, chosen crossing, differing only in what the crew knows and whether the Whisper stirs. The Ram is not that scene at all: nobody crosses, nobody picks a door — the ship makes the door, at speed, and the crew arrives already inside and already loud. Run whichever the table chose; they are genuinely different evenings.

Path A — The quiet crossing (Silent & Active)

The ship holds off at a distance and the crew crosses the last stretch themselves — the approach shuttle flown cold, or suits and a tether if they’re feeling lean. This is the plan working: they reach the hull unseen, on their own terms, and choose where to open her.

Play the crossing as the vulnerable part. For long minutes the crew is out in the open between two ships, small and cold and slow, with nothing to hide behind but the dark. Nothing is shooting — but everyone feels shot at, and that is the scene. This is where the pregens earn their sheets:

Vector flies the shuttle in on attitude thrust, or hand-flies the crossing if they left the shuttle behind — quiet, patient, no torch.
Root doesn’t fear the gap: no rated EVA suit needed, minutes of hard vacuum are just Tuesday. Good point for the one who can drift ahead and read the hull by hand.
Sable runs point by instinct — the crossing is an infiltration, and infiltration is what she is.

What Silent and Active change is only two things:

What they know. Silent gave them the strategic read — she runs dark, her crew signatures are wrong, something is off before they cut in. Active gave them the tactical map — interior layout, power-plant state, where the defenses sit — but not the wrongness. Lean the crossing dialogue on whichever picture they carry.
Whether she’s stirring. On a clean Silent or Active run, the Whisper is quiet and the crew works unhurried. On the Active bad roll from Scene 1, she woke: a point-defense mount tracks lazily, a maintenance drone has undocked and is nosing along the hull. The crossing is now a held breath — avoid the drone’s cone, freeze when the mount sweeps, and get inside before either resolves what it’s looking at.

The door. They pick their entry, and it’s a real choice:

An airlock — quiet, but locked. Root cracks it (System Cracking), which takes time and is the cleanest way in: a working lock is also a working way back out.
A cut — anywhere they like, but slower and warmer, and it leaves a hole where a door should be. Vector’s plasma lance opens a hull in one shot (Single Use, grants Breaching) — decisive, but that is a loud, bright, one-time bang, and it announces them the instant they use it. Save it, or spend it and accept that the quiet approach just ended on the threshold.

Where it leaves them: inside, on their terms, with a way back they chose and (usually) their stealth intact. Scene 3 opens slow — the dread is the point. Cost already paid: hours, if they went Silent, and the CSA merge (A.02) is that much closer.

Path B — The Ram (foam)

A completely different scene, and much shorter. There is no crossing and no door. Vector lines the titanium prow down the Whisper’s flank, the crew blows the crash foam and disappears into it, and the ship becomes a battering ram travelling several hundred metres a second at another ship’s hull.

Run it as a single violent contest, not a journey. The assistant plots the vector that keeps the breaching prow between the crew and the Whisper’s guns; then it’s a race, and you roll it as one:

The crew’s Action Pool — Vector piloting, the schematic granting position — against the Whisper’s point defense (one laser, two rocket cannons) chewing at the ram shield.
Win the race: the prow punches through, the foam takes the shock, and the crew is spilled — battered, alive — into the Whisper’s outer compartments before anyone in the system could have stopped them. The Ram forecloses the CSA problem by simply being aboard first (A.02).
Lose it: the shield breaches before the hull does. The prow still goes in, but the crew takes the impact raw — Harm all round, gear rattled loose, a very exciting first five minutes clawing out of a half-crushed foam cell into a hull that is now venting around them.

What the Ram costs, always:

No intel. They committed blind to a schematic that may be stale, and they’ll learn the ship’s interior the hard way.
No quiet, ever. origin-17 felt that. It is fully awake now and treats the crew as exactly what they are — a hull-breach and a boarding party. Scene 3 opens hot, no ramp-up.
No clean exit. Their own ship is now a wrecked prow lodged in the Whisper’s flank, tangled hull-to-hull. Leaving is its own problem, and the assistant — flying a ship impaled in another ship — has its hands full. When the CSA arrives (Scene 6), the crew is welded to their target by their own prow.

Where it leaves them: inside, loud, committed, and blind — the CP2020 door. Frequently the right one anyway.

Both paths end the same place

However they came through the skin — a cracked lock, a cut, or a prow through the flank — the crew is now aboard the Njord’s Whisper, and the ship’s assistant has nothing left to offer: it can fly the outside of a problem, not the inside of this one. Its last useful line is some version of “I’ve lost your telemetry past the hull. You’re on your own in there. …Good hunting.”

That silence is the door to Scene 3.

Check your seals.