Monday we finished a short filler episode we started since the player of the ship commander was out at GenCon last week. The mission focused on a new PC, a Tauron marine staff sergeant who had been working as Colonial Fleet Special Investigations Division, Artemesia Largo.

She’s in the middle of getting introduced to her intelligence crew (she’s the intelligence NCOIC), and the other characters are going about their business. The ship’s command master chief, Ajax Giadis, comes across the chief engineer getting together a work gang to find a missing member of their team. Deckhand Reslou was posted to check and replace damaged life support sensors, requiring her to work behind the bulkheads in the tight, dark workspaces. It’s a lot of girders and the occasional catwalk, but it’s a hazardous place. A lot of the young kids don’t use their safety harnesses because it takes too long to clip on and off; people falling several levels is not unheard of.

The chief spots the FNG, Largo, and “hey-you”s her into aiding in the search. They find her body after half an hour of climbing around in the guts of the ship. (Of course, they find her; they’re in the credits!) She has been beaten sharply on the back of the head with a c-spanner, and fell several levels. She had then been dragged and deposited in an overhead air vent over a general storage locker. She is taken for forensics to the infirmary while the deck gang — the only people in the area — are held for questioning. The commander, in temporary NPC mode, assigns the CAG (a PC) to oversee the investigation, as he has uncanny instincts and they are in orbit around Picon with other ships and they aren’t running CAP.

The rest of the adventure is classic murder investigation. They don’t immediately interrogate  the 11 other members of the work gang. MAJ Muir, the CAG, is also ship’s chaplain and he chooses an unorthodox approach of doing “grief counseling” to get an initial read on the people. Only six have the right foot size for the boot marks in the oil and crud at the murder scene, only one transferred with the girl (she was only aboard for a week) from Scorpia’s Argenutm Bay Military Reservation. None are covered in blood (head wounds bleed copiously) and the perpetrator had obviously carried the murdered girl to her resting place. Two are Tauron and their tattoos suggest top her Ha’la’tha involvement, one is a massive “East German female weightlifter” type welder from Caprica, and the other is a bitchy Virgonian. Largo gets locked onto Deckhand Heraklea — a name taken by a lot of the Heraclitus regime after they were deposed following the Cylon War. Muir uses his Intuition to ask “is it Armov?” (the other Tauron.) The answer is yes…now they need proof.

The master chief heads up the search for the missing work jumpsuit that the murderer must have ditched in a relatively small distance from crime scene to their billets. They also turn over the victim and suspects’ lockers and foot lockers. In the victim’s footlocker, they find evidence that someone had taped a large amount of canaba inside for transit up to the ship. Drug smuggling — but was she a willing mule or no? They find the blood-soaked workvest in an access hatch behind one of the toilets in a general head not far from the scene, along with the c-spanner. The work clothes are Armov’s

With the evidence in hand, they go to arrest Armov — portrayed as a creepy, coiled spring sort of bad guy (think classic Russian mobster) — but he twigs they’re onto him, takes one of the other work gang hostage and tries to get to the launch bays, demanding a raptor. The characters give chase, bullets fly, and they manage to surround him. Largo puts a bullet through him, clearing the hostage, and Muir puts him down with a tight double tap.

Eventually, they find out from his Tauron buddy Heraklea that she was used unwittingly as a mule, but she discovered and flushed the canaba. Armov killed her for it.