Crew of the Aliya part 2: Evacuation

It was time to start getting everyone loaded for evacuation. Alqadi and Sayah both made an attempt at talking to the fortune teller, but ultimately it was Lila taking her away for a quiet chat that changed her mind. Changed it a lot. Unsettlingly so, in fact, but the job was done.

Sayah told Suleiman to prepare for having his data cores moved. Sabetha asked again about her cargo, but was rebuffed by an increasingly stressed Sayah, and went to make alternative arrangements.

Tahir began herding people down to the dock, while Alqadi went to contact the Nekatra. With some assistance from Gurgeh he was able to convince them to get into three of the escape pods and prepare to launch. Gurgeh also had a look at the remaining escape pods, and managed to identify a fifth pod in usable condition.

Back at the Aliya, Sayah unlocked the doors and began preflight checks, soon finding out that the navigation systems had been affected by the proximity of the nearby star. She set it to recalibrate, but it would be a slow process.

It was perhaps not a complete surprise when we realised that the other ship had disengaged from the Ghazali.

They weren't complete monsters. They had loaded the twenty-five people that the Fatima's Bounty could hold along with Sabetha's cargo, and had taken the ship round to the cargo bay to pick up one of the containers of stasis pods. But now we had an extra twenty-five people that we needed to find space for.

Sayah opened the lock on the door to the main cargo dock, and there was a brief shootout between Alqadi, Tahir and the captain of the Fatima's Bounty. The captain was shot and incapacitated, but it was too late to stop the ship from launching.

And then all our plans (neatly drawn on the Aliya's whiteboard by Tahir) were thrown into further disarray when Suleiman's voice came over the tannoy to tell us that the reactor core was melting down and instead of six hours to escape, we had one.

We had an extra escape pod, and while they were built for four, we reckoned we could squeeze one extra person in there. Alqadi tried to convince the Nekatra to fit themselves into two pods instead of three, but they refused.

Lila and Sayah began stripping the Aliya, throwing out literally anything non-essential to create extra space, shedding perhaps a brief tear at the loss of all the soft furnishings. It was around this time that Sayah came up with an excellent plan, albeit one that required having been thought of a couple of hours earlier to actually be successful: agree to take the cargo, then once the other ship had launched, knock out Sabetha, ditch as much cargo as necessary to fit the remaining people on the ship. But it was obviously far too late for that.

There was a drop ship in the cargo bay, too damaged to fly, but part of it was still air tight. It was hardly an ideal solution, but if they could get it launched, a few more people could be kept alive inside it until the Aliya could come back to tow it to safety.

Sayah disconnected Suleiman's memory cores, and Shahim used a loader from the cargo bay to transfer him into one of the escape pods. Alqadi got in the pod with Suleiman and Shahim, while Sayah got into the other with the four other survivors that we'd planned to send in the pods.

The rest of the crew got the second container and the drop ship ejected and got into the Aliya. Tahir's piloting skills, plus some fervent prayers to the Traveler, got them clear of the ship and picked up the container. With Sayah unavailable in an escape pod, Gurgeh took over the data djinn's chair, and was able to guide the ship to pick up the drop ship. Finally they returned for the escape pods.

Sayah's pod was the first one they found, possibly thanks to her efforts to boost the transponder signal. Then two of the Nekatra pods. Two pods still to find. A tense few minutes. And then a fourth pod was found - the one containing Alqadi, Shahim and Suleiman.

We never found the fifth pod.