It’s been a year since we were here…
You first encountered the Blue Razors pirate gang when their minions abducted Feaysen the Steward on Collace and added her to their slave inventory on Slavers’ Bay island, later Botany Bay, now a Cats base.
There are suspected links from them to Luther Kefaufer, mysterious and dangerous gambler on Collace, and Captain Beefheart, pirate captain, Jesse Wales’ nemesis and Trexalonian agent; though there’s no proper proof in either case.
You then discovered them operating on Kaldamar, where they had an outsystem base nobody wanted to tackle. You destroyed this base, and learned more of their operations and scope from the files of Calico Jack Rackham. These identified several deep-space caches used by the pirates to get across some of the howling acres of buggerall that make up most of the Trojan Reach, the sector ‘below’ the Spinward Marches. You jumped to one, discovered it unguarded, robbed it and blew it up, probably putting a crimp in pirate traffic across that particular part of space.
Rackham’s data included mention of Tortuga, (a or the) major Razors base, located at star system 985-373, listed in the Library Data as an radioactive and ruined Garden World. The world had evidently been cleansed at some point, and was completely controlled by the Blue Razor pirate syndicate as a regional base. Rackham spent two years here learning advanced techniques, many of them distinctly unpleasant, and meeting and sharing knowledge with pirates, corsairs, privateers, raiders, thugs, muggers and buggerers from all over the sector.
Rumours he had picked up about the Razors included the fact that they had fingers in pies all across the Reach - and maybe further - including governmental pies. The organization, he noted, was said to be led - ruled - by a personage referred to as "herself". Said to be dazzlingly beautiful, diabolically persuasive and horrifyingly ruthless. It was also said that those who had actually met her would not speak of her.
After the Battle of Collace – in which Trexalon invaded Collace and you took part in the abstract – it was discovered that there were too few bodies/recovered life pods, and that roughly 1,100 Collacan (mostly) Naval personnel were just gone – probably also a large number of Trexalonians; data is unavailable. You tracked this operation, with the aid of the Hiver robot Vespasian, to the iceworld Kitono, where a secret store of low berths contained some of the missing people. You attacked and destroyed the ship that came to collect them, the Dendra’s Curse, and acquired the data core from their computer which Collacan NI have been analysing. That was 82/1108.
The current date is 102/1108.
In the intervening time, you have completed the design and upgrades to the new, ex-pirate starship Mountain Walk. Day 90 has passed and so everyone gets a Study character Improvement Point.
Tyrex are still working very carefully on the Shortning batteries and Ancient grav vehicles you had left with them.
You have a microcolony of ten Cranium Rats aboard the Mountain Walk, as does Merrick Sturn aboard the Short Walk, currently trading along the Tarsus-Collace-Avastam part of the Collace Main; he has taught his to gamble somehow. Either I can’t remember or you didn’t say what is to be done with the ex-Vargr Coirsair ship Long Walk.
The robot Vespasian is with the Collacan Admiralty, where Naval Intelligence are using his services as a “sneaker” to help them harden their computer systems after he strolled into them without breaking a positronic sweat.
And our story opens….