Do you know how to play Mah Jong Tepha?

Fritz’s sudden gaming question comes out of nowhere.  Tepha had been looking at the most recent scan data.

It seems there’s actually a pretty extensive gaming library installed in the ship.  And Mainframe always cheats.

System engages in similar analytic strategies-

The point is…While we’re waiting, we may as well-

Fritz stops just as the floors and walls and ceiling begin to vibrate.

Seismic activity detected

Thanks.  We wouldn’t have noticed without you.

---

There’s a rumbling through the ground and walls of the alcove the door is situated on.  The door, which sits at the back of the alcove, begins to raise.

Slowly Rig and Ledo see…

---

Silver feels the rumbling.  The vibrations bounce her around inside her suit.  She realizes she can’t hear anything other than her breathing and that fart she just let off.  That’s odd. Obviously sounds not going to travel in a vacuum.  But shouldn’t she hear Ledo saying something stupid through her comm?

---

Tepha, we’ve lost comms.

Tepha watches as the scanners go dark, one a split second after another.  The rumbling increases.

Jamming field has been engaged by unknown-

Never mind that!  Look at the ground!

---

…A small nook behind the door, perhaps two meters deep.  Wedged inside it is a corpse in a space suit holding a large thermite charge. Rig and Ledo blink.

The top half of the suit’s helmet has been bashed in.  A large gap in the face plate indicates how the man inside the suit probably died.  Someone crushed in his helmet and decompression did the rest.  On the lower half of the face plate, across the cracked plastic shielding, someone has spray painted a grin.  A large, shit eating grin in blood red paint.

They even painted in a tongue lolling out the left side.

The thermite charge clutched in the body’s arms isn’t live per se.  It looks like it was placed there in case someone tried to blast open the doors.  Rig can tell that had they done that, the charge wouldn’t have been enough to damage the ship.  But it would have been enough to damage the wall of the gorge.  The charge was set to start an avalanche if someone tried to blow open this fake door.

Which begs the question of course, where’s the real door?

---

Silver blinks.  Oh.  Yeah.  That makes more sense now.

A large section of the gorge’s floor is starting to descend.  Looks like the Tia landed on a station ship’s lift.  It’s just been covered with sections of the natural rock to camouflage it.  The lift has activated, accounting for the rumbling.

Tia is descending down into wherever that lift goes.

The walls of the gorge are also starting to shift.  Apparently, the sides of the gorge swing down from the base like covers to close over the descended lift.  Clesing, or whoever built this, covered both sides of those covers with rock from the asteroid,  again for camouflage.

Convoluted camouflage mechanism?  Traps for Navy landers that try to blast their way in? Check and check.  This place is starting to seem more like a smugglers base to her now.

Oh.  The wall covers will descend over the lift in a minute or so, cutting Silver, Ledo, and Rig off from the Tia.  And a jamming field’s been activated  clogging up the comms.  Rig and Ledo are staring at some dead guy and haven’t noticed yet.

---

Tepha stares out the viewer as Tia descends down into the asteroid.  The ship is in some kind of lift shaft.  Mainframe can’t signal the guys.  Fritz is trying to get the scanners back on line so they can see where they’re going.

Illuminated by Tia’s landing lights, the shaft walls look grimy.  Large blotches the color of old, dried blood are smeared across the smooth, greyish stone.  As the surface is lost from view, a large word painted in a silverish fluid that has a high reflectivity quality shines up from the landing lights.

WELCOME

The descent continues.  Then another message in the same medium.

NO ONE HAS TO DIE

Then after a few more meters, another message, but this one is painted in a fluid so black, it makes the void look bright.

BUT THEY DID

The lift stops.
This message was last edited by the GM at 03:39, Tue 12 May 2020.