Our Battlestar Galactica campaign returned this week from the cliffhanger two weeks ago. We opened with Chaplain the former Colonial Security Service agent, locked in a fight with a man mountain in body armor. The man is bakced by a trio of shooters, all in combat gear — two inside the hotel suite where the boss of the other character, Dar Arris — a computer programmer for Home Robotics, a Vergis Corp. subsidiary — is tied to a chair and has obviously been roughed up a bit. Chaplain had been punched across the room after missing Gigantor at point blank range. He manages to snap off a trio of shots — all excellent hits and the man is staggered, stunned but does not drop. Chaplain clears the room in an intense firefight I wasn’t certain he would survive. Meanwhile, Arris, who was outside the suite when the attack was launched runs away from the last of the shooters yelling “Fire!” and was a good deal of hilarity.

Chaplain has injured all of the men enough to escape, as his pistol has run dry. He catches the man chasing Arris by surprise, puts him down with a whack to hte head with his pistol and the two board the elevator for the lobby. Total fight time, 30 seconds. they get maybe two stories when the man-monster comes crashing through the elevator hatch, his impact blowing out the glass windows on the elevator and stunning Chaplain. A close hand to hand engagement and their opponent suddenly seems to shut down. His last words, “No matter where you go, I’ll be there…” Then he drops through the elevator window and splats on the lobby floor.

They manage to get away, with Chaplain calling his CSS contacts. They hide out overnight in a hacker internet cafe and do research on the software that HR is releasing, putting the strange bits of code on the web. The white hats help them figure out it’s some kind of back door with a key to activate it, and would give access to all things running the software — 32% of the home electronics, many car autodrive systems…it would be a disaster. They also find out the CSS is looking for Chaplain and they think he has kidnapped Arris. The boss is alive and well. They decide to get offworld and track down the software in question on the HR servers on Tauron.

They manage to wrangle passage in a smuggler’s compartment packed with fumarella and canaba that is bound for Tauron, slipping past the taxation people. We ended there. There was a lot of character interaction that was funny enough my wife in the kitchen was chuckling over it.

The goal was to switch up the flavor from the police procedural/spy novel flavor toward something a bit more Bond-like, with exotic locale changes, worlds-shaking import, and fast action. The intention is for the speed and pressure to increase over the next two “episodes” leading to the season finale (for these characters.)

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