Crew of the Aliya, Part 1: Assessing the Situation

We're playing Coriolis, a game that's basically what would happen if Firefly had been inspired by the Middle East instead of the Wild West.  The new campaign starts in just over a week, but first here's the story so far...

We're playing a published adventure at this point: The Last Voyage of the Ghazali, so spoilers ahead.

We're a team of archaeologists, hunting down rare artifacts. Our crew consists of:
Tahir El Fadil, captain, pilot and speed freak.
Lila, lead archaeologist and mystic.
Shahim, engineer, likes his drones better than people.
Alqadi, former soldier with a strong moral code.
Sayah Bint Suleiman, data djinn with a dubious past.
Gurgeh, assistant archaeologist.

We'd been recruited for a rescue mission. A bunch of small independent ships, all heading out together to the Taoan system to answer a distress call. To get us there together, an old decommissioned cruise liner, the Ghazali, had been put back into service and fitted with stasis pods for everyone while our ships were docked to the outside.

We had instructions to leave any weapons on our own ship before getting into the Ghazali's stasis pods. We decided not to attempt to smuggle anything aboard, but Sayah did spend some time with the electronic locks on the way out to make sure nobody else could get in while we were out.
We slept...and then we awoke. Something had gone badly wrong. We had woken up too soon, after the first jump but before the second. We got dressed and went to investigate.

With Shahim sending his drone to scout ahead, we made our way out into the ship proper. The section of ship we were in seemed pretty unstable, so first priority was getting to somewhere a bit more robust. Once out of danger of being imminently spaced, we found a panel, and with some data djinn work from Sayah, we got access to the ship's AI. Whose name turned out to be Suleiman.

Ignoring Sayah's minor freak-out about that, we obtained as much information as we could about the ship, including plans, the fact that the ship was damaged probably beyond repair, and that we were on a time limit to escape before the Ghazali would fall into the nearby sun.

We managed to locate some kind of engineering and repair room, after Tahir insisted on opening every door we passed, and Shahim built a concussion grenade. Armed with wrenches and bits of pipe we continued on our way to the med lab.

This was where the majority of survivors seemed to be, although Suleiman was aware of a lot more whose stasis pods hadn't woken them up yet. Alqadi made sure to get them woken up, and we hunted around the med lab for some trauma kits. Gurgeh stayed put for the moment.
We headed for the bridge next. Suleiman wasn't able to access the bridge, and we could see why when we got there. We had to space walk to get there, a worrying prospect, although fortunately with Tahir to lead the way we all made it safely.

The front of the bridge was missing, looking like it had been the victim of some kind of attack. An emergency force field was keeping things together, but of course that would not last forever, and there were some worrying looking space fish hanging around outside. We got to work. Alquadi and Tahir found a weapons locker and sorted out arms for everyone. Lila, Sayah and Shahim got to work on the computers, finding as much information as they could and finally removing the emerald key recorder for later examination.

We made our way back into the ship proper, reluctantly leaving behind the very beautiful rugs that adorned the floor of the bridge, which were alas too large and heavy to bring with us. We'd received a message from the chapel, saying that there were people trapped there, and we had to at least try to rescue them.

We'd become aware over the course of the journey that there were a group of Nekatra aboard the ship. Not wanting to get into an altercation with a bunch of lupine super-soldiers, Alqadi attempted to send them a message, and we left them some food before continuing on our way. We also encountered another group of survivors, and there was some brief tension until we managed to convince them to head for the med lab with everyone else.

We found some of the corridor blocked with debris as we headed for the chapel, but with some fiddling with controls, Shahim altered the gravity in the corridor to let us clear things easily. We still couldn't make it all the way to the chapel without another space walk though.

Once again, Tahir lead the way and got us all safely to the next airlock. We found some more usable space suits on the other side - lucky, since we only had six between us. The chapel's anteroom had a really lovely tapestry depicting the Ghazali and the Icons, and we were very disappointed to realise that once again we were going to have to leave a beautiful item of soft furnishing behind.
The group in the chapel weren't in a good condition. They'd run out of water hours earlier, and the plumbing for the sinks had broken. Worse, many of them were showing signs of radiation poisoning. Tahir started organising people, and along with Alqadi took the first group of survivors through the airlock, leaving the rest of the group behind.

Shahim, not liking being around so many people, went to take a look at the plumbing. It wasn't long before he'd managed to get water to the sinks again. Unfortunately this lead to a lot of rehydrated people wanting to hug him, which did not please him.

Meanwhile, Sayah decided to try to calm everyone down ready for the next space walk, and persuaded them to pray to the Gambler to bless them in the risk they were about to take.
The Gambler was clearly with them, as the second space walk was successful, getting everyone across intact. Repeated exposure to radiation was starting to affect the party, however, with Lila and Sayah getting the worst of it.

We headed for the med lab to get everyone treated for radiation, and got there without further incident.

The med lab was significantly more crowded than when we'd left, with over a hundred people present. A fortune teller that we'd noticed earlier was still there, doing card readings and telling people that it was the will of the icons that we plummet into the sun. The priest we'd met on the first trip through the med lab was not keen on her and her pronouncements, and asked Lila to attempt to do something about it. Lila watched her for a while, and got a card reading herself, which didn't impress her very much.

Then she noticed something interesting. The crystal ball the fortune teller had with her wasn't a mystic item at all - and Lila knew mystic stuff. It was a ball of sugar with some LEDs in it. Lila began spreading the word.

Sayah was approached by a woman calling herself Sabetha. She had a lot of cargo she was interested in getting off the ship. Only two of the ships attached to the hull were still in servicable condition - the Aliya and the Fatima's Bounty. Having identified the crew of the Aliya, she approached Sayah, offering a large sum of money to have her cargo taken on board. Unfortunately this would take up enough space to transport twenty-five people.

Sayah was definitely interested in large sums of money, but wanted to know what the cargo was. Sabetha was reluctant to say anything other than 'medical supplies' which Sayah assumed meant drugs. Sayah didn't think she could convince the rest of the crew that the cargo was worth leaving twenty-five people behind for. Sabetha pointed out that lots of people had radiation sickness and probably weren't going to make it anyway. They should just save the healthy people, like them.
Sayah, knowing how badly affected by radiation she already was, didn't much like that argument, but agreed to put the proposal to the rest of the crew, even though she was pretty sure she knew how this was going to go.

Then there was the matter of Suleiman. He might be an AI rather than a human, but he was still a person and we were quite keen to take him with us. We could potentially get his memory cores onto the Aliya, but it was going to be a tight squeeze.

We got a final count of who was actually aboard. A hundred and thirty five people besides our six crew members, plus ten Nekatra and two or three person's worth of Suleiman's memory cores.
We had two usable ships, capable of holding fifty people each, enough escape pods for sixteen people, plus a couple of stasis containers that could hold another forty.

A hundred and fifty six spaces. A hundred and fifty four to fit on board. It would work, but it was going to be tight. It wasn't looking good for Sabetha's cargo.

And was everyone currently on the ship actually on the manifest?