The once-proud, now decrepit hulk of the CMS Salvation roars across space, shedding detonating engine thrusters, melting and twisting radiators, and disintegrating armor plate. There is a lurch as a key frontal bulkhead cracks, glowing red hot and shearing open with an unearthly scream. Atmosphere vents, which fortunately extinguishes several fires among the ship's processing cores, and unfortunately, vents atmosphere. You regain consciousness with a start in your gel control tank, your first breath inhaling a pint of freezing, rancid shock-cushion fluid. Frantically, you order the VI to shunt pure oxygen from chemical storage and drain the tank, just before you black out.

Several minutes later, life support systems kick in, restarting your heart and causing you to immediately vomit up fluid. In the blurred cacophony of images and signals from the sparking plugs on your skull, you finally manage to get a grip on the situation and reassert yourself. The control monitors flash deep blue-gray and you realize that it's not a display malfunction; you are plunging into the depths of an ocean planet. Within seconds, CMS Salvation dives into the atmosphere, retrorockets struggling fruitlessly to halt its decline. It passes through one layer of stormclouds, another, crackling with a corona of electrical energy as all its external sensory feeds cut to static.

There is no such thing as a water landing. There is only crashing into the ocean. You seal airlocks and fuse bulkhead doors together in a panicked attempt to avert fate, but you cannot seal all the leaks, and you know the Salvation will take on water.

CMS Salvation smashes through a thirty-foot wave and scores a boiling furrow of ocean for miles, coming to rest a blind, shattered wreck, bobbing up and down on the dark, unknown sea. You just hope some of the colonists survived. The Nation would never forgive your failure if they did not.

HOLDINGS
Oceanic World
- CMS Salvation [TAKING WATER, THREE TURNS TILL SATURATION]
POPULATION
CMS Salvation
- ~4,000-5,000 Civilians [ERROR, CRYOSTASIS RUPTURES IN MULTIPLE SECTORS; 8,000 CIVILIANS UNACCOUNTED FOR, POPULATION METRICS UNCERTAIN]
-- ~2,500 Unskilled Labor Personnel
--- ~700 (Minimal Military Training)
-- ~600 Corporate Researchers
-- ~800 Ship Engineering Personnel
-- ~500 Security/Canis Military Police
-- ~150 Executives
ASSETS
CMS Salvation
- Hybrid Visual/LADAR/Radar Sensors [ERROR; DESTROYED ON IMPACT BY ATMOSPHERIC STORM]
- Processor Bay [NAV. LOGFILE CORRUPT, DATABASE CORRUPT, CYCLES IDLE]
- Armor Bulkheads [MULTIPLE BREACHES, BUOYANCY UNTENABLE]
- Cryogenics Storage 1-12 [BREACHES IN 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12; PERSONNEL LIQUIDATED]
- Colonial Supply Reserves [ADVISORY FOR THE GOVERNOR; CONTAINS CONSTRUCTION TOOLS, HYDROPONIC EQUIPMENT, SCIENTIFIC TOOLS, GENETIC SAMPLES, EXPLORATION VEHICLES, SYNTHETIC FOOD COMPOUNDS, AND RAW METALS]
RESOURCES
CMS Salvation
[UNKNOWN/UNACCOUNTED FOR]
TECHS
[UNKNOWN/UNACCOUNTED FOR]

The frenzied chanting of the multitude causes you to stir from your reverie in the contemplation of the Most Divine. You look down on the amassed Jihad and smile to yourself. Today is truly a day of reckoning.

As your father and your grandfather and all your ancestors before you (except for the regrettable incident of the female Messiah), you hold the hereditary title of spiritual guide and warmaster of your people. For a hundred years, you have been seeking this promised land. And was it not written in the Book of Callings, "When the skies are as the viper, man will flee to heaven." And heaven itself parted for Jerusalem. There were others on Terra, Great Father Josiah told you when you were a boy. They had slaved and fasted and given everything they had to build this perfect vessel, all to carry the worthy to Paradise. But Earth was sinful; they turned away from the rightful path and became blind to the Divine. And the only mercy for those who would not know truth? It was death.

Outside on the pitted and scarred hull of Jerusalem, its gold plate long since burned away, a meteorite shears off a major sensor tower. The absence is not recorded by the primitive ship computer systems, which were cut down after the Machine-Heresy. And hanging like a cat's eye marble in the void of space is the Promised Land, though not even you, the Messiah know it is there. All windows on the Jerusalem were sealed after the first few cases of the Black Madness.

At least, the planet isn't registered in time. Jerusalem has already fixed itself on a collision course with the Terran-type world of Katarr. It is hours before a space-suited mechanic, sent to stop up gaping holes in the frontal hull, screams into his radio about a planet on an intercept trajectory.

By then it is too late. You give the order for all faithful to return to their habitation sector and pray for deliverance. You retire to the armored command room with your closest advisors, a contingent of the Holy Guard, your wife, and your two sons Iakob and Michael.

There is a screech and deep rumbling as the Jerusalem descends through Katarr's atmosphere. You think to yourself that the landing might not turn out that badly, up until there is a horrible crash and an entire domicile sector tears off and plunges into the sea. The ship lurches and loses what little balance it has left, smashing into the bizarre treeline of Katarr. An iron-like treetrunk impales the command room and rips open two of your guards; you can hear screaming and frantic prayer from the navigation deck.

The Jerusalem finally comes to a stop a pincushioned wreck, speared through with trees and nearly torn apart from the sheer G-forces of descent. The halls of prayer are now defiled with human blood and shattered corpses, faces contorted in agony. Most Holy, you ask yourself, what was our sin? The night of Katarr gives you no answer but a distant screech.

HOLDINGS
Katarr
- ISV Jerusalem (It is night, Lord. Who knows what devil-creatures could be out there?)
POPULATION
ISV Jerusalem
- ~1,000-1,500 Faithful (Most Holy, these are the only ones we could find.)
-- ~600 Crusaders
-- ~700 Slaves
-- ~50 Preachers
ASSETS
ISV Jerusalem
- Greatfather Sanctum (Light of Heaven, the tombs of our ancestors are unsealed! They took many secrets of the faith with them, I know.)
- Crusader Armory (Our weapons are lost and scattered; what if we must enlighten infidels?)
- Slave Barracks (Many valuable slaves were lost with the destruction of the first barracks. The second remains, though, along with supplies and equipment for their toil.)
RESOURCES
ISV Jerusalem
(Lord Messiah, we know nothing of what happened to our supplies.)
TECHS
(Great Messiah, the state of our technology is unknown.)

You take a moment to ask yourself why the hell you set the neuroelectric wake-up signal to alert you two weeks before arrival. It's not like you have any duty to actually fly the ship now; automatic destination-lock systems kicked in long ago and the Hope's course is set for good. As for the destination, well, why the eggheads chose open space to settle in is unclear. The monitoring devices rigged into your ship-control neuroskeleton automatically register distress and begin administering dopamine precursors. Relaxation is immediate.

If it weren't for her you would really go mad. You're not even sure she's a regular VI at all; rumor and suspicions lie with someone from Forward Dawn at least partially transplanting a locked-in patient's consciousness and slaving it to their pilot as a test of potential consciousness duality. As long as you're hooked into the systems, as you are now, you experience what others might call an induced hallucination, vision, maybe virtual reality. But you know the voice in your head is her, and she is real. You close your eyes.

You feel a faint brush of static on your shoulder. A touch of... electricity. You open your eyes and it's gone, so you close them again.

"You were asleep for a while there." A minor static shock. "I got bored, Travetski."
"I know, M3-RK4."
"Oh, please. You know my name."

You grin a little and make no response.

And with that, the clock kept on ticking. What was two weeks seemed like forever to you, immersed in the duality of consciousness with your odd VI and with a hell of a lot of navlog data to catch up on. But shortly after a discussion on Forward Dawn's mission with Meerka (your perception of events was somewhat distorted and you had lost most of your perception of time, measuring by events instead) Forward Dawn finally fires maneuvering engines and coasts into a distant orbit around the system's burning crimson sun.

Sensors directed toward the star had shown anomalies earlier. But, as part of the endless navlog chaff, they were quickly disregarded as unimportant even by the ship's secondary base-processing VI.

A magnetic hiccup inside the star's photosphere begins to swell and demagnetize a larger area of its corona. A few minutes more and the nuclear firestorm within explodes outward, sending an incredible wave of burning particles and magnetic force radiating outward through space, scorching the system planets' atmospheres, lighting auroras, and crashing right into the Hope's Edge. In one horrifying instant, deadly radiation sweeps through the ship, circuitry melts, electrical fires erupt among vital systems, and Meerka crashes with a short, distorted scream. Your implants overload and burn out, throwing you into shock as the lights cut out.

Power flickers. Meerka, thankfully, comes back and cryogenic defrosting protocols initiate in the Hope's Edge. But thanks to a burning circuit in life support control, seventy-three scientists just don't wake up.

The Hope's Edge drifts around the star in a sickly green aurora, inside nothing but a pitch-black, seemingly abandoned wreck.

HOLDINGS
Deep Space, Devil's Pyre
- The Hope's Edge (Our electronics are shot to hell, except for me of course. Isn't that nice? I'm glad I requested additional power last month.)
POPULATION
the Hope's Edge
- 178 Forward Dawn Researchers (We didn't have a lot of people, even before the solar storm.)
-- 45 Consciousness-Emulation and Neuro-Computer Integration Specialists
-- 58 Neuromedical Doctors
-- 33 Roboticists and Engineers
-- 42 Cloning and Biology Specialists
ASSETS
The Hope's Edge
- Drone Lockup Bay (It's not like we're going to have the scientists do the construction work.)
- Gnosis Brain (And as for that giant supercomputer, it could be useful if we got it working again.
- Wetwork Labs (Plenty of genetic samples, biomass, neurochem reserves, and cryo-locked test bodies.)
RESOURCES
The Hope's Edge
(You and I need to have another look at our cargo storage. I'm pretty sure the storm might have triggered a few bay vents.)
TECHS
(Research? Ask the Forward Dawn people. I'm just your VI.)

The GSV Divine Storm coasts smoothly on the glow of its fusion engines. In the light of a pale, weak yellow sun, it sweeps the system for a vaguely habitable planet. No contacts are reported. You'll be damned if you know where you're going; the Storm didn't exactly have a destination in mind when the First Wave left Terra forever. But wherever you and your (recently defrosted) crew are headed, you think you'll be able to make it home. It's going just like you imagined. For all those years of dreaming, you knew you would hammer an empire out of the stars. Everything feels so crisp, so vivid, so goddamn perfect after the frozen catatonia of cryosleep. Perception, heightened; reality, magnified. You look out the control/situation monitoring screen at the looming gas giant up ahead and marvel for a few seconds at its kaleidoscoping clouds. Perfect.

Langley arrives with coffee. You don't know what you would do without her, though you're not exactly sure how she got on the ship. Her parents had to have been wealthy investors, though, otherwise they wouldn't be able to secure the family's place on the Storm. You've narrowed the suspects down to the director of Berliner Metallverarbeitung; they certainly had cash to throw around.

"Lovely clouds, Mr. Mason. They remind me of nerve gas." she remarks. Ever the charmer indeed, though she talks like an ex-military tanker. You nod, take a sip of coffee (black, synthetic sludge that you wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole on Terra) and wait for results of preliminary system-scanning to arrive.

Deep inside the engine sector of the Storm, the experimental Harimaru reactor encounters a temporary difficulty and is shut down by engineers until regular fusion can resume. Ancient backup nuclear systems sputter to life.

But even in the pristine conditions of an isolated, interstellar spacecraft, things can and will succumb to sheer entropy. When a light-water fission plant is not continuously checked and rechecked and preemptively maintained, Murphy's Law kicks in, and even if all these things are done, something could still go to hell. Nothing is impossible, only improbable, and the improbable decided to happen on the second happiest day of your life. There are several hours of smooth operation before a substantial mass of uranium goes critical.

Red hexes flare across the control board. Dangerous numbers tick down and temperatures rise.

The engineers give you only one option; to eject the priceless reactor assembly, the culmination of years of Gungnir research into clean energy. Anything else would mean certain death for the Storm and its crew; a complete core melt, nuclear flashover, and subsequent ship depressurization. You give the order as the reaction burns through a second lead protective layer. For now, two remain.

Teams of space-suited Gungnir men and women bravely scramble to disengage the systems, tearing out rivets, cutting through massed wiring, and making incisions through the hull with plasma torches. With but a few minutes and three inches of lead to spare, the reactor is shunted and departs from the ship with an almighty roar. The engine jockeys put whatever battery power they can into an engine burn away from the reactor.

It wasn't enough.

The uranium-235 finally reaches detonation point. Its fragile lead casing splits and boils away.

First, there is an electromagnetic pulse. It flickers out vital systems, shocks computer databanks, and cuts the lights. Which ends up not being all that bad, because the Divine Storm's hardened systems were prepared for any kind of solar flare or EMP and mitigate all noticeable damage. The EMP is, in the end, the least of your problems. Your problem is the radiation.

Within hours, nearly all of the reactor detachment crew are vomiting in the sickbay, hair falling out in clumps as their brains burn up within from fever. Their tissue is blistered and has gone necrotic; they are marked for death. You make a note to the security chief for posthumous medals. Others begin exhibiting similar symptoms, and within days, you have lost maybe five hundred citizens. Their bravery proved lethal.

The Divine Storm precariously orbits its gas giant in a sickly fugue, crippled, engineless, wracked by radiation. The future is uncertain.

HOLDINGS
Gas Giant
- GSV Divine Storm (Mr. Mason, our first priority should be to get the hell out of the radiation belt we're locked in. Otherwise more people are going to die.)
POPULATION
GSV Divine Storm
- 1372 Gungnir Contract Personnel (These are the survivors, at least.)
-- 1089 Industrial Workers
--- 872 Construction Specialists and Miners
--- 143 Professional Engineers
--- 74 Experienced Industrial Pilots
-- 283 Gungnir Researchers
--- 105 AI Programming Specialists and Computing Experts
--- 92 Focused-Energy Physicists
--- 86 Geologists, Seismologists, and Meteorologists
ASSETS
GSV Divine Storm
- Industrial Processing Sector (The ship came equipped with forges and processing equipment for almost every useful metal on Terra.)
- Armor Maintenance Hangar (Some of the old mechs from Terra came along with us on the Storm. Just in case we run into trouble or ore deposits.)
- Prefab Storage (These should expedite colony-building considerably, assuming we have the resources to churn out enough modules.)
RESOURCES
GSV Divine Storm
(Radioactive contamination gutted quite a few of our food stores. The industrial gear and metal reserves should be fine, operative phrase being "should be".)
TECHS
(Sir, most of our proprietary industrial techs went when that extrasolar comet bitch-slapped us right on system entry.)

You smirk, heft your automatic slug rifle over one shoulder and fire again. Three more of the bastards drop twitching, organs mangled and tissue pulped by the shearing force of its rounds. Then you get up from your desk. Mutiny?

No. Not now. You will crush it personally. The Leviathan hasn't come this far (you glance at Cadet Simmons, 20, with a whole life ahead of him, chest blown open and a death rattle coming from his failing lungs) to have anything get in its way. Do they think this is some kind of frakking game? Do they? There is no answer but echoing rifle fire and the howling of the wounded.

They have no discipline. They don't know the taste of war. You will kill every last one of them and worse, oh yes. Then the Leviathan and its destiny will be yours alone. You begin contacting loyalists over radio. They are your most trusted cadre, company founders and scarred warriors from the most sickening butcheries of Old Terra. The Leviathan's purge begins; room after room after room, blood spilled from keel to stern of the ancient hulk. The mutineers try to fight back. They set shrapnel mines, cut life support to critical sectors, rig automatic rifles and nerve-gas traps.

Clever, but not good enough. In one stunning tactical maneuver (aided by a backup agricultural drone, an arc welder, and carbon-steel bayonets) you completely cut off the head of the rebellion, dumping their officer's savaged corpses at their doorstep. Though the enemy still outnumber you, it is only a week before the summary executions begin. Nearly a thousand traitors each receive a handgun round in the base of their skulls. The bodies are rendered by your expert medics into biomass and genetic material for organ cloning and tissue grafts.

The last rebel to die wheezes a horrible, choking laugh through the blood spilling down his face, and dies with a smile. The technicians who search his body for valuables find and remove a small electronic implant. As soon as it is extracted, a little red light flickers.

Hundreds of concealed explosive devices, rigged from nothing but scrap and primitive mining chemicals, detonate all across the mighty Leviathan. Breach alarms go up all across the rapidly-depressurizing ship as screaming crewmen are ejected into the void. The ancient life-support frame, designed to make it a near-invincible bunker on Old Terra, cracks apart and takes multiple sectors down with it. Fires rage in the areas that still have oxygen, incendiary agents consuming vital supplies and killing survivors.

The ship, with what little control the crew can exert over its rapidly-failing systems, fires retrorockets and coasts to a null-gravity halt.

The Leviathan drifts in lockstep between the twin planets of Hate's Bulwark, the inrushing carbon-dioxide shared atmosphere extinguishing its fires and leaving it a freezing, lifeless wreck. What survivors remain are huddled in airlocks and armored saferooms, shocked, hopeless, and lost.

HOLDINGS
Hate's Bulwark
- the Leviathan (Sir. With all due respect, we are flying inside a tin piece of ♥♥♥♥ colander. We're not going to lose orbit, but we're venting atmosphere out the ass and life support won't hold forever.)
POPULATION
the Leviathan
- 1,197 Leviathan Mercs (High Marshal, the mutiny took a giant chunk out of our manpower. So did all the frakking bombs.)
-- 681 Combat Infantrymen
--- 478 General Issue Marines
--- 124 Armored Marines (the "Kettlehead Division")
--- 79 Old Terra Butchers
-- 516 Noncombat Personnel
--- 233 Logistics/Support Workers
--- 176 Fortification Engineers
--- 109 Field Medics
ASSETS
the Leviathan
- Leviathan Munitions Bay (The whole damn weapons lockup is here. Once we establish a foothold on-planet, we should go through here and rearm.)
- Weapon Prototyping Labs (We will need heavier firepower. Problem is, we don't have any eggheads on board; but there should be a few old designs that Logistics might be able to refine and put into production.)
- the Superstructure (Logistics can strip down the Leviathan's megastructure for building supplies and life support tech when we set up planetside. It should still be able to get off the ground, and we'd be removing a lot of dead weight from the old Terran base.)
RESOURCES
the Leviathan
(Supplies went when the bombs blew. A few canisters might have survived and touched planetside, but I'm not sure about this place's gravity.)
TECHS
(Sir. Are you kidding? Half the bombs planted were in the Leviathan's processor bay. Bastards had a knack for frakking up anything useful.)

It all started with a touch of fever.

oh god oh god they're crawling in my feet

The cryogenics technician came in even later and pissier that day for their daily report. Their eyes were bloodshot and they tapped their fingers uncontrollably against the chair. Supplies were being cut too short, they said. Any lowered dosage of the glycerol compound would result in irreversible tissue trauma and clinical death. Chemical synthesis couldn't replace what was being used up; the crew needed to be removed from stasis, rendering them impossible to sustain before the Salvator reached its original destination. In the end, you directed the VI to put the ship on a trajectory to a sheltered asteroid field around a warm, old Sun-like star. You and Radia thought it could work.

GET THE KNIFE
PEEL THEM OUT

no god no, please no

You looked in the mirror that (morning? time seemed to be going slower now). Your eyes were bloodshot, red and red so much red she would love this, ha, hahahahhahahahahaha

On the initiation of wakeup protocol, you went looking for the cryotech. His life support monitor was disconnected from the system, and only the engine sector had enough interference to regularly blank out inter-ship signaling. You walked for what seemed like hours, absentmindedly tapping your fingers against your personal map display. You found him standing limply in the corner of a dusty maintenance room, staring at a wall as though catatonic. You make a motion to tap him on the shoulder and he screams. His eyes have already decayed into bloody masses, and he lashes out blindly, babbling about the things in his fingers. You draw your Terra-manufactured AMEC-CSD handgun and fire once; the wall is slick with red mist and black pus.

you didn't want to do it
not to
not her

"Jack."

She smiles at you, and behind those beautiful red lips, her teeth are made of twitching worms. You scream incoherently and pull the trigger until its clicks empty. She kisses you. The worms burrow into your eyes, popping them and the gel runs and runs and runs

There is a brief moment of lucidity, maybe a minute or less. Nep is looking over you in full contamination gear, face distorted by her plexiglass visor. Her fun-house mirror appearance would be funny if it weren't for the fact that for once, she isn't smiling. You try to move, but your limbs merely twitch fitfully and jostle a tray full of syringes; at that point, Radia re-enters the room. The two of them exchange words, but you only register slurred gibberish. Nep visibly sighs and taps a few commands into the robosurgery interface. The last things you perceive before everything fades are the whine of the rotary saws stripping your skull away and the cold needle of pluripotent stem cells stabbing deep into your brain.

Radia flashes the light on her submachine gun across each cryostasis chamber in turn. The technician was very through; nearly half your population is physically drowning in antifreeze. Red lights blink all across the control board; colleagues, valued associates, and friends. All reduced to vegetables.

You float free of your body. Everything is grey. But with a sudden, sickening stretching of reality, you snap back into consciousness.

The Salvator drifts among endless asteroids, its brilliant crew now empty shells. And whatever the disease was that drove your trusted tech mad, its origin still silently putrefies inside your contaminated hull.

HOLDINGS
Asteroid Field, Blackreach
- Salvator Ardens Muni (This whole ship is a contaminated hotzone; whatever it was that took out a trained professional like Simmons, we'll need to flash-sterilize the entire hull to get rid of.)
POPULATION
Salvator Ardens Muni
- 1024 Salvator Researchers (Most of our research staff aren't dead, per se... though we know the total number of viable personnel we have remaining, we'll still need to do a follow-up check to determine respective numbers of specialists.)
ASSETS
Salvator Ardens Muni
- Holdout Infrastructure (No one can say you didn't insist on the Salvator being able to mount a capable defense. Every one of these little shipboard panic rooms is stocked with enough man-portable weaponry and protective gear to give any non-military unit a run for their money.)
- Salvator Advanced Laboratories (Even though the Salvator has enough general-purpose stations to direct our efforts to any research we need, two of our labs in particular are extremely well-equipped: Nep's testing station, and of course, my own.)
-- Psychosociology Department (Jack! I'm glad you asked, as it catpuns- you are completely unprofessional. Not you, Jack. -as it HAPPENS, my department is made of the best psychologists from Old Terra. We have the largest array of psychoactive substances, memetic pseudoindoctrination techniques, and social pattern-triggers out of any scientific institution in the First Wave. Not that we'll be needing them; I keep morale high enough already. ;33 )
-- Theoretical Physics Department (This is where my excellent colleagues and I probe the mysteries of time and space, for the colony's practical benefit of course. We possess four parallel-processing supercomputers with a total processing capacity of 16 petaflops, a complete microscale particle accelerator with radiation shielding, and enough gravimetric/radiotelescopic/EM radiation sensors to pick up a solar flare from behind half a mile of lead plate; better than any registered colony ship in the First Wave.)
RESOURCES
Salvator Ardens Muni
(My cursory inspection revealed contamination in seven out of twenty-four food storage units. We should be able to salvage lab equipment and industrial resources with a little sterilization, though.)
TECHS
(Any biotech or agricultural research we have onboard is essentially kaput; there is no way of knowing the disease's origin and I would rather play it safe. If it weren't for the emergency surgery, things could have gotten much worse for you than a few freaky dreams.)

You get three major actions per turn. Can't exactly run a colony doing one thing at a time, can you? Major actions are defined as, well, anything major (in the end I'll use my best judgement), but typically consist of new initiatives, colony upgrades, research efforts and military maneuvers.

You will also receive a few minor actions to just clear up random things that don't warrant a giant hueg colonial effort. Communication, while not strictly an action, is infinite, and players will be able to (assuming they actually made contact first) chat as long as they like.

Note; while minor actions are in play and are functionally unlimited, I will enforce reasonability. Same goes for major actions; don't try to get away with merging two big things together or filing multiple major actions under one. However, a major turn CAN be comprised of several medium-sized actions (for example, streamlining trade by setting up a buoy network AND navigational uplink systems).