Bastion's Fall The party are just one group of acolytes picking through the wreckage after an Imperial Navy battlecruiser is ambushed by parties unknown. This is a classic of a campaign opener – the “broken arrow” scenario giving you a group of heretics with access to one of the Imperium's own ultimate weapons... Notes: One of the party is a former Battlefleet Calixis Provost (played as an arbitrator) and his original ship was the Dominon-Class battlecruiser Bastion. This adventure is space-based and could take place theoretically in any system, and should not be Scintilla or a Subsector capital, but needs to be one important enough that an Imperial Navy capital ship could realistically be found operating there. Whilst the Bastion could be of any class, it is unlikely that any ship below battlecruiser/heavy cruiser displacement would be tasked to play exterminator, and, of course, the class will need to be one that is torpedo-armed. Introduction: The party are called in as a high priority by Interrogator Sithanus, collected by orbital shuttle and transferred to a system defence fleet gunboat called the Dutiful Son. This will be an open, unambiguous 'we know you're inquisition and we're here to collect you' message from the captain of the Dutiful Son, even if the acolytes normally operate covertly. If required, the Dutiful Son's vox officer can provide authenticated instructions bearing the Inquisitor's recognition signals, but doesn't have a detailed briefing to offer. They won't have a chance to collect anything, so find out beforehand what they do and don't have on their persons at the time (it won't really matter anyway as the SDF and Navy will provide what they need). Whilst Sithanus does not initially meet them on arrival, the crew are aware that they are inquisition and will answer any questions they have to the best of their ability. • There has been some sort of attack or disaster in the outer system, resulting in the loss of a capital ship. • The gunboat is en route to a dense dust cloud in the outer reaches. • There is a significant portion of the SDF fleet also either dispatched or already in position to secure the area • Interrogator Sithanus is on board one of the frigates already on station. The Inquisition has put him in command of the operation.
The wreck of the Bastion
It will take some time to arrive at the fringes of the dust cloud, and the party will discover that the crew weren't overstating matters. The Bastion is a mess, its hull pitted and scarred by explosions, and surrounded by a halo of venting gas and fragments of metal. Flame can be seen flickering within its wrecked launch bays. Nearly a dozen ships are standing watch over the sight, auspexes sweeping back and forth into the dust cloud. A visual awareness check (or enough sense to ask for access to the Dutiful Son's own auspex feeds) will identify a steady stream of smallcraft picking their way into the debris, searching for saviour pods, whilst attack craft from a nearby escort carrier are destroying larger chunks of wreckage cutting a path through the debris to allow boarding parties access. There also seems to be a very sizeable fighter patrol around the perimeter – much more than might be expected. A suitable check, such as common lore (war), tech-use or awareness for anyone with a naval background will identify most of the major damage as having been caused by mines.
The briefing Interrogator Sithanus will arrive on board at this point. He's moving around the fleet, giving each of the boarding parties their briefing. Several teams are being sent aboard to investigate every stable section of the hull. Since the party are inquisitorial acolytes, he's tasked them with investigating one of the sensitive areas of the Bastion – namely the command bridge. He will also give them an outline of what happened: • • • •
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The Bastion was on its way sunward when it picked up a distress call from a trading vessel named the Wanderlust, claiming it was under attack by a pirate wolf pack. Captain Haske informed System Command that he was moving to assist the Wanderlust, and set an intercept course just short of the dust cloud. As Bastion arrived on the scene, the raiders succeeded in 'driving' the Wanderlust into the dust cloud. Haske moved Bastion into the dust cloud to engage. His last message noted that despite the dust clouds effects on the auspex systems and shields, it was still more than capable of dispatching the two raiders that had attacked the Wanderlust, and a careful auspex watch was being maintained in case of ambush. The last transmission from the Bastion was made by Lieutenant Senioris Calus; a distress call stating that the Wanderlust's request was a trap – that the Wanderlust itself had been a heavily armed Q-Ship and that, more importantly, a minefield had activated around the Bastion once it was too far inside to escape. Calus had sounded shocked that there hadn't been the slightest warning on the auspexes; even once the mines had started attacking they still hadn't shown up on any of the ship's sensors. (Hence, if anyone had noticed it, the heavy fighter patrol) The transmission cut off abruptly. Whilst some survivors of the crew are starting to be recovered from saviour pods, that was the last contact with a senior officer of the ship's crew. The only crewmen recovered so far are low-ranking gunners from the lance decks and members of the flight crews.
The team are to investigate the command bridge deck, which still appears mostly undamaged, and find out as much as possible about the attack and the fate of the crew. Equipment will be supplied by the Dutiful Son. At least one other team boarding the ship are also Inquisition. Sithanus won't wish to tell them this directly, nor will he tell them outright what the other sensitive areas are. If anyone is smart enough to ask why the Inquisition has taken command of a salvage operation, Sithanus won't answer, brusquely setting them to their tasks. He won't evade or change the subject, he'll simply ignore the question having been asked. Nonetheless, having the insight to realize that all is not as it seems is probably worth an XP bonus.
Equipment The Dutiful Son's armourer will see that each member of the party is issued with a suit of voidarmour with sufficient air for it not to be a problem, an auspex, a data-slate and a shotgun loaded with void-adapted rounds. A couple of krak grenades (for breaching sealed bulkheads) or frag grenades (for paranoids) are available. Any of this hardware which is unused will be reclaimed anyway. The armour incorporates a lamp, vox and pict-capture in the helm, and has a mounting rack on the back which can accept the shotgun or one other similarly sized gun or melee weapon, a patching kit, and two belt clamps for grenades or grenade(ish) sized equipment. Anything else must be carried inside the suit (and hence be inaccessible without removing it) or left behind. It is comparable to flak armour, but allowing it to be breached in hard vacuum is a Very Bad Thing. In addition, if no-one in the party has any naval experience, an SDF rating named Lexandro will be assigned as a guide – he has previously served on a Dominion-class battlecruiser (though not the Bastion) and will know where they should be going.
Aboard the Bastion
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The party will be transferred to the Bastion's command deck by an Aquila, which – despite the craft's fairly heavy armour, will pick its way carefully through the debris floating above the Bastion's upper surface. Its destination is a small personnel landing dock used by ship's boats, which appears intact from outside. Some of the lower bridge decks are clearly starting to break up, though, and there is a lengthy vertical scar in the hull directly prow-wards. The map above is the internal map which became (stage by stage) visible to the party as they explored. 1) Docking Port This is a personnel dock, intended for smallcraft such as the aquila, conveying captains and flag officers between ships, and receiving them with the pomp and ritual so beloved of the Imperial Navy. Now though, the dock is a mess; the shock of the detonation next door having thrown any loose any equipment not directly bolted down. The landing pad is mercifully intact, and the airgate cycles open and closed correctly under emergency power, allowing the party to disembark. The room is depressurized, but intentionally so (it's an airlock, after all, it's just not powered up to repressurize), and as such gives little indication of the state of the rest of the deck – the emergency lighting suggests that there is power, but not too much. The Aquila pilot, concerned about the instability of the decks below, will withdraw from the Bastion and stay within recall distance. Searching the port will find nothing of interest except the corpse of a junior officer crushed by a collapsing support beam. 2) Cloister Hall The most direct route to the bridge will take the party through the cloister halls, a formal, elegant compartment where the ship's trophies and battle honours are displayed. Passing through the airlock will take a bit of brute force but is easily achieved given a minute or two of the part working together. The compartment however was hit by a shot from one of the raider's secondary guns and is a shattered wreck – laid open to space, without even gravity (something the PCs will discover as soon as they move a metre or two beyond the airgate). The room is filled with spinning fragments of shrapnel, some of which are knife-sharp. Reaching the opposite door will require some elementary zero-gee agility, with failure resulting in being stabbed by a particularly vicious bit of shattered marble or steel. Several more decks are visible below this one through the scar in the hull, and are in even worse state – without even emergency lighting visible. The opposite door is sadly sealed beyond the party's ability to unseal, and the clear instability in the hull in this area makes using krak grenades to breach it deeply unwise (even assuming they would). An alternate route is needed, and Lexandro will roughly outline it – passing around the core superstructure (which contains access shafts for the auspex and vox masts) to approach the bridge from the port side. Any PC at home on a starship will be also able to surmise as much. 3) Airgate This room hasn't suffered as much damage and is intact and – more importantly – pressurized. Anyone who wishes can open the helm of their void-armour. The room smells of burned plastic and metal, and distant and intermittent creakings are audible.
4) Junction Room This room has suffered a major structural collapse – although the hull has not been compromised – and a number of officer's corpses are easily visible. Several are currently being gnawn on by rats or other suitable vermin (which may have shown up on the auspex of an alert acolyte), and a couple appear to have been fed on by something larger. At this point Lexandro (or equivalent) should take time to explain about Ghilliam and the assorted subhuman vermin that can be found in the 'tweendecks of ships as large as the Bastion, before the party start jumping to conclusions about what has boarded the battlecruiser. Normally such things wouldn't come anywhere near the bridge, of course, but the collapsing decks are probably driving the things upwards into any remaining part of the hull that's still sound. All of the doors are sealed – the one running in the most useful direction emphatically so as the collapsing roof has wedged it into place, damaging the hatch mechanism. However, the collapse has left a relatively easy access to a ventilation shaft running in the right direction. Knowing what might be in there, the party may be nervous about clambering into a dark, enclosed tunnel. Which is sort of the point. 5) Air vents This should be a fairly claustrophobic experience – dark, cramped, and with a few recalcitrant gratings needing strength tests to open. Worryingly, some of the gratings are already forced. Occasional auspex contacts should show up, none of which should turn out to be larger than a rat; the aim is to induce mounting paranoia and maybe waste a few shells, rather than kill them. One thing that should occur at this stage is a 'hullquake' – effectively an earthquake due to a lower deck fracturing somewhere in the Bastion's hull.
6) Access Point The ventilation shaft will eventually deposit the party in an access chamber that leads to several lift shafts to the lower decks. Before they get too close, anyone with their helm open will potentially smell blood and cooked meat(awareness). The room has clearly seen a firefight. There are several corpses of Navy armsmen, and one greyhaired and quite grizzled officer, who seem to have been fighting towards the bridge. They are armed with naval shotguns much the same as the party and there are a fair number of expended cartridges. There are no enemy corpses but there is the suggestion that one or more bodies have been removed. The armsmen were killed with high-powered energy weapons (of sufficient power to have gone through their body armour without significant loss of power. Someone technically minded may be able to identify the scars as medium-to-close range hellgun fire. Lexandro (or anyone with a suitable background) will be able to identify his uniform as that of a Lieutenant Senioris (one of the highest ranks short of the captain himself). Anyone searching the officer's corpse will identify him quickly as Lieutenant Senioris Abelard, the Bastion's Master of Ordnance. The master of ordnance is responsible for the munitorium bunkers deep within the battlecruiser's lower levels – there is no good reason for him to have been on the command decks, especially during a battle. Also, an astute observer may note that he has a very high rank for his post – having a permanent rank equal to the ship's first officer. This is not normal Navy practice. There are two other things worth noticing about Abelard's corpse. The first – and easiest to see – is that he seems to have gone to significant effort to write the letters DDD with his dying act , using his own blood as it bled from a copious lung puncture. The other is not immediately apparent, due to the torn collar of his uniform, and would take an awareness test to spot. It is a pair of shallow cuts – little more than grazes, really, laterally on either side of his neck just below where his collar would have come. 'A Triple-D Situation' Abelard's dying message is not especially enlightening. The only possible recognition will come if someone in the party either interacts a lot with other acolytes (especially more senior ones) or reads journals or mission reports of the same. If so, they may remember having come across the phrase 'Triple-D Situation' - supposedly standing for 'Doom, Death and Destruction', it has become a generic shorthand amongst the junior members of the Ordos Calixis for When Very Bad Things Have Happened. Note that the acolytes will NEVER have seen this phrase used lightly by a full inquisitor and probably never from acolytes granted interrogator's rank, who have been told what it really means and don't find it funny anymore. An inquisitor may use the phrase 'triple-D' to a peer, but in this case he or she will mean it to stand for 'Per Auctoritas Digamma Decimatio Duodecides' – the first line of a formally worded Exterminatus order. I'm not making this up, by the way – read Ian Watson's Inquisitor for the reference. Abelard is (was) an inquisitorial acolyte secretly placed on the ship by the Ordos to keep an eye on the most important item in its armoury, and carried the vault key on a chain around his neck (the chain torn off leaving the rather odd wound). An awareness test for anyone with their helm open will sense a low hissing sound. Hopefully people will register what it might be before opening the next hatch. It's air leaking.
7) Breach point Fortunately for anyone hard of hearing, the next chamber isn't open to the void entirely. This close to the bridge, the breach has sealed over with a power field, and the chamber, whilst at barely half an atmosphere, still at least has air. More importantly, however, this will still result in a howling gale as the pressures equalize, and anyone not able to make an appropriate strength/agility check (depending on what they're trying to do) or get thrown into the breach, suffering serious burns from the power field. Whilst what's left of the cloister hall is inside a cloud of shattered debris, the relatively small hull breach here leaves someone standing in the surviving corridor able to look down the entire height of the ship and off into the infinite void. The shock of vertigo is probably worth an (easy) fear test. If additional stress is needed, another deck-quake whilst the party pick their way past the breach is not a bad idea. Anyone examining the damage (or passing an awareness test) will likely notice one or more of the following features • • •
Burn damage to the metal around the edge of the deck The regular nature of the hull breach and apparent lack of debris A forearm-sized puncture in the opposite bulkhead at just over forty-five degrees to the deck just before the hatch. There is another, similar puncture sloping the other way on the other side of the hatch. This puts them about central to the breach,
This is, of course, a breach point for an assault boat not too dissimilar to a Dreadclaw. 8) Security barricade This was clearly a battle even more intense than the first one encountered. There are several dozen armsmen dead, some again by hellgun fire, others from heavy ballistic projectile weaponry including several with officer's heraldry on their armour. The room has been set up as a barricade, and there is a significant amount of statuary and stonework, as well as other furniture and cogitator consoles, that have been used as cover. Most of these have been shredded by fairly heavy weapons fire. The sideroom door is open – several armsmen having retreated into the store-room beyond and tried to prevent their main force being outflanked. It didn't work – the room was clearly hit with grenades and there are quite a lot of innards strewn around. Once again, there are no enemy corpses, but both blood and ejected shell casings prove that the intruders had to fight hard for this room. The shell casings are identifiable as heavy stubber shells, but have no recognizable serial numbers or imperial or mechanicus heraldry stamped on them. The bridge doors are sealed – someone examining the lock with a tech-use test will determine that a bypass was put in, forcing the hatch to open, but that it was temporary and once it blew the lock cycled closed again. The security systems which would have prevented this have been quite expertly disabled, though, so having been done once it's easy enough to do again, and will last for several hours.
9) Hull fracture As the party works on the door, there will be another hullquake – several ghilliam (enough for a fair challenge), driven up-hull by the quake and the promise of meat (smelling the corpses) will clamber out of the fracture. Sighting the party, they will attack out of desperation. 10) Bridge Corridor This is the final access corridor before the command bridge, intended as a defensive choke point. The number of dead armsmen suggest it didn't work. The walls are pitted with masses of heavy gunfire. 11) Storeroom Whoever opens the door is in for a shock as the corpse of a navy officer, all but disemboweled by gunfire, will slump out on top of them. The corpse had been balanced against the storeroom door, which (since the body was ignored as a terminated threat) the heavyweight gun-servitor still trapped in the room couldn't find a way out, and has been patiently sitting there since. Of course, the corpse will be rather distracting and it will take an awareness test to notice the servitor before it opens fire. The heavy servitor is much the same as a normal gun-servitor, save slightly heavier armour on its arms and chest and a twin heavy stubber mount instead of twin autoguns. In the close confines of the corridor the party is advised to deal with it swiftly because a few bursts with little or no cover will do a lot of damage. 12) Command Bridge This is the bridge itself – a series of arched armourplast windows gives a view along the spine of the Bastion, and the walls are covered in brass and gold. In the centre is the command throne, and slumped in the throne is the corpse of the captain – an empty laspistol in one hand with most of the other senior officers identifiable amongst the other bodies. Once again, the burns on the walls suggest the crew made a good account of themselves. Some of the cogitator terminals still function despite the occasional bullet-hole, and the party will have enough time to scavenge through them and secure any files still intact to their data-slates. 13) At this point, there will be one final, massive hullquake as several decks below the bridge fracture and spill into the void. At this point there will be a tide of desperate ghilliam driven up through the fracture where the party first encountered them and shortly after from the far end of the bridge corridor. There will be enough to force a fighting retreat into the bridge, giving them chance to bar the doors – which, already blasted open in the firefight, can be held closed only with whatever wreckage they can find to brace them with. 14) Allow a short struggle – enough to get troubling – before a blinding light streams in from the bridge window. It's the aquila, levelling itself outside the ship and opening its hatch. The autocannon aims at the bridge hatch and the pilot will send out a vox warning of “Decompression, decompression!” before opening up with his autocannon in support of the party. The armourplas resists a couple of rounds before shattering and decompressing the command bridge – the party need to make an agility check to aim themselves at the aquila (easy, since the pilot is trying to help), and those ghilliam not shredded by the massive rounds are swept off into the void. If they think to request the pilot to do this, the aquila will turn up at the end of the round after they vox the request.
Debriefing Once the acolytes have been retrieved by the aquila, they will be returned to the fleet – not the Dutiful Son, but the escort carrier Guardian Spear, which Sithanus is using as a flagship. They will be led to a conference room where the interrogator is waiting, past several other groups being helped out of void-armour. Sithanus is currently reviewing a data-slate handed to him by a greyhaired woman. As the party enter, he hands it back with a grim expression. “Get this to Varaak. Now.” He says. He will review pict-records and discuss what the party found. He won't speculate beyond the evidence and won't tolerate unsupported speculation, though. He will also fill in the DDD reference if the party found it but didn't understand it.
It is the practice of the Inquisition to retain careful control and oversight of the Imperium's ultimate weapons of mass destruction, but as a part of this practice the Ordos Calixis deploys a small number of Exterminatus devices concealed on board Navy vessels without even their captain's knowledge, allowing them to be brought into play swiftly in case those hidden worlds and stockpiles where the bulk are stored are inaccessible at a moment of critical need – or indeed are the target. In these cases an agent of the Inquisition will be secreted aboard to watch the device, and personally issued with a firing key to unlock the stasis-vault where they are stored. He will not have the codesequences to actually arm the weapon, of course. This is all done in the strictest secrecy, of course, and how the attackers can have found out about the practice – and that the Bastion was one such ship – is unknown. The records he was just reviewing were from the team investigating the munitorium bunkers in the lower decks (the grey-haired woman, who will have left and will not be directly referred to, is actually a member of Sanctis Black, Sithanus' personal kill-team), and they have confirmed the interrogator's worst-case suspicions; the attackers expended massive effort and took significant risk to disable and board an Imperial Navy battlecruiser but neither finished it off, or abducted the hulk or the crew. They instead took precisely one thing – a single Scythe-pattern orbit-to-surface barrage torpedo from one of the dozen of vaults in the battlecruiser's forward munitorium hold. A torpedo fitted with chem-viral warheads. An Exterminatus weapon.
