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The Wreck of the Salinger
Luxury pleasure yachts come in two models: boringly luxurious, or mindbogglingly fast. Some rich Company exec gave their heir one of the first category, and said heir hired no less than twelve different underworld mechanics to jury-rig it into one of the second. Too many cooks spoiled the soup, and in its first race against other members of the thrillseeking elite, an accidental button press fired its thrice-upgraded jump drive, which not only scattered it but also every other ship in the dock into a neighboring star system. Needless to say, there were no survivors, and the new graveyard fleet was in too close an orbit to its new primary for easy recovery. The stardock they abruptly left, once a prosperous locale with a reputation for Company-friendly seediness, lost its rep, clientele, and a good chunk of its docking bays from the incident, has fallen on hard times. There's rumors of a jumpspace curse across the whole station, which nonetheless hasn't stopped gamblers moving in to test the odds against the one surviving business on the station: casinos. As for the Salinger and its motley fleet? No one's been able to salvage it, on account of the blistering heat and the frankly ludicrous amount of automated security paranoid heirs fit their ships with. You are, of course, welcome to try...
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The Red Screams.
Colonization efforts, especially under funded charitable or religious efforts, are a natural laboratory for disease. Plague, Typhoid, Hercules Vieus, Ebola and all The regular ills of humanity have doomed millions. The Red Screams though was something special though the charitable efforts of the Merchantman's Fund, Tyson and Khan of Mumbai and the Stellar War Relief fund packed no fewer then 40,000, likely almost 55,000, refugees from the spires and habs of New Mars fleeing civil war into a motley collection of rented, loaned and owned ships. Packed them as densely as possible as hab after hab lost life support to bombings, terror hacks and debt seizure.
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The Lost Legion Pepe Home's
Ebon Curiassiers were a reasonably respectable mercenary force of armored drop infantry, specialized in station seizure and boarding operations. Not outright reavers, like many Free Navies, the Ebon Curiassiers disappeared, along with their armed transport "The Phoolan Devi", while escorting a DracoCorp science mission to recover a long drifting extraterrestrial derilect. That was 45 years ago. No one cared about the Curiassiers' fate until the Devi reappeared, a near wreck, drifting and seemingly lifeless. Sighted several times, in oddly distant places, a group of scrapped attempted to salvage the vessel only to have it suddenly come to life, and crash jump just before docking. Since the Devi has been reported in multiple systems, often before disasters and vessel disappearences, a harbinger of grim fate. In the most recent appearence, a deadly engine blow out on the Shark Class Gunboat "Meritcorp Cares" three armored figures were reported climbing on the engine pod before the failure began. This would be dismissed as the hallucinations of men dying from radiation burns, except for a recording, largely scrambled, that clearly show .3 seconds of suit jets flaring from an object tumbling away from the failing engine.
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The Corpse Ring
The planet designated WREGDUIA 15-7 10-G D would be a wholly un-remarkable earth-like world, if not for the ring. Ringed worlds aren't that unusual, but this one is; it is ringed with corpses. Millions of them. Frozen, orbiting the planet at a distance of some 512 km, some dressed in reflective thermal clothing, most naked. How they got there, no one knows. Where they come from, well, that's no mystery. Most of the clothed ones have ID badges, and they show that the poor souls were from The Hand That Sows The Seeds, a vast colony ship, which departed some years ago and was never heard from again. A few curious parties have captured some corpses. All appear to have died due to exposure to the vacuum of space. The spacers that examined the bodies found the "serene" looks on their faces disconcerting.
Some spacers wonder if one of those millions of corpses might have a clue as to what happened to The Hand That Sows The Seeds, and if there might be an empty colony ship out there, ripe for the taking. If only you could avoid the fate of those poor colonists.
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WESTERFIELD STATION
A distant port autonomous space station and refueling rig. Meant originally to help refuel colonization efforts in the Swiss Sector. When colonization efforts shut down, Westerfield Station slowly became a ghost rig. With decreased oversight from corporate, the station became a slum with rampant abuse and illegal trade being facilitated there. Pastor Jesse Arthur Davidson and his church of the Right Redeemer eventually settled there. Seventeen years later the station was found almost completely abandoned. Retrofitted with a malfunctioning jump drive the station drifts through the galaxy. Tales of bodies stuff between the bulkheads and stifled cries coming from the vents are rampant and the squatters who make a home there are known for their fecal graffiti and perverse ramblings. Suicide, murder, and uncountable foul misdeeds are committed there every year. By all accounts, Westerfield Station is haunted by a Veiled Widow cloaked in the ceremonial vestments of the right redeemer and ships drifting by or daring to dock can hear the crackling echoes of the choir on the ships radio.
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Kymata Catastrophe
The Kymata was the last of the second generation NuvoTerra Seed-6 colony ships. 150,000 bleary-eyed people looking for a better life packed in cryo along with a 5-year supply of food, potable water, clothing, and medical supplies, along with a pair of prefabricated state-of-the-art generators and a 100 year supply of enriched fuel. The 4th planet of the 'Argylos System' (AX782-1810 4-G C) had been scouted as an ideal colony location.
The Kymata planned to exit hyperspace 500,000 km out from Argylos IV. The jump calculation was very accurate, but as if by fate, the Kymata appeared only 1000 km from a large asteroid, hurdling along at 61 km/s, on an impact trajectory. Naturally, the massive colony ship couldn't alter course in mere moments and the Kymata was eviscerated by the impact. The wreckage of the Kymata was scattered across the system; there were no survivors.
Aftermath: The Argylos System is Red-Listed as a no-travel system. Some complication from destruction of the Kymata while the hyperspace window was still open resulted in a Hojima-Petrov Class-2 Gravatic Anomaly which wreaks havoc on sensors and navigation systems. Argylos IV, the original target colony, is now a grey wind-torn hellscape where only simple life clings to existence. Arguments, myths, and rumors still abound to this day as to how the scouting missions could have possibly missed the asteroid. Regardless, the loss of the Kymata and her target colony world precipitate creation of SHEP (Standard Hyperspace Exit Protocol): Unless a target system contains a registered NAV buoy -- and a recently dated Jump Code White confirmation has been received -- shipboard AI are hard-wired to only allow exiting hyperspace outside of the planetary system, requiring ships to fly-in via thrusters.
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The Virtrina Colapse
The planet Virtrina-9 was the thriving home of some 18 billion people and was known for it's cutting-edge research in the field of stellar manipulation. In fact, the technology they created powered everything on the planet with energy from nearby star clusters.
One of the leading researchers was Dr. Thomas McGruder. Dr. McGruder believed he could use a new technique to actually make stars. This would be the beginning of endless supplies of energy for all human kind, aiding in humanity's never-ending quest to expand it's reach among the universe. All of this came crashing down when Dr. McGruder put his theories into practice, with the first and only experiment creating a supernova that obliterated Virtrina-9 and most of the surrounding solar system. The only thing left is a lonely sun, orbited by dust and debris.
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The Mind of the Many
AI specialists and cybernetic neurologists described it as a Class V Convergence Event, and it is the reason that direct brain to machine interfaces and network intergration is highly restricted on most civilised systems.
The colony world of New Dahl, a curious ethnic of primarily of Indian, Argentinian and Inuit peoples, was by most standards an extremely successful venture, a bustling corporate planet with a cultural fetish for cybernetics. It was unremarkable in everything but that and its stability. Now it is a dead world, under intense study from multiple govermental and corporate organisations and also under quarantine.
Despite several decades of research, it is unknown (publically) how every single living person on that world came to ve subsumed into the global conscience that is the Mind of the Many. The Mind itself is simply not interested in communicating with lesser minds, if it is even capable of lowering itself to to the level of even our most advanced intelligences - even communications filtered through multiple stages of unshackled AI networks are simply (we are told) unitelligable.
Regardless, visiting the planet is essentially fatal by our standards - the Mind has, in various ways, taken every visitor and neatly slotted them alongside the brain-dead colonists, in cold storage with wires plugged straight into the base of their skull. Study must be done from a distance, which the Mind tolerates.
The little information given out by official organisations has been supplemented by various leaks, rumours and crackpot theories - most of them centered around a brief snapshot of the most successful attempt to communicate with the Mind. Ever since that leak, there has been a steady flow of desperates in ramshackle ships deliberately landing on New Dahl, willingly being consumed.
Because while we cannot understand a word, the Mind sounds uncannily like it is praying.
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The World Where No One Sleeps
A leaky jump drive in orbit fucked a hemisphere. No one caught in the AOE can sleep. No drugs will function, no amount of melatonin does anything. It is a world of living death, quarantined just in case it is contagious.
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PRIZRAK NEBULA
A milky white nebula which runs across the infamous Lakemann Trade Route. Ships that pass through find their comms intermittently contacted by a Sino-Russo distress signal which leads ships to distant and abandoned asteroid fields. No source for the signal can be found, though this often takes days or weeks to figure out. Crew members regularly report an extra crew member on board, or a stowaway, though they are rarely found. Often a derelict ship is encountered just outside the nebula, which seems abandoned when boarded, but eventually disappears. Stories of murders and other violent outbursts abound by those who have interacted with ships passing through the nebula (to return to port with half or fewer of their original crew). Because of this the Lakemann Route, though often much quicker, is avoided by veteran teamsters, for the four times as long, but generally safer, Queen Anne’s Remorse Tunnel (QART).
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