The final acts of our mutiny arc were played out this week. Previously, one of the player characters connected to the black market, and who had been the Security Minister until it was discovered his aide was a Cylon, led a coup d’etat against the government. He and one two of his conspirators did for the entire Quorum of Twelve, as well as the president (the father of the commander — played, funnily enough, by the same guy with the coup leader.) Once they had secured the quorum chambers and president’s office (on Cloud 9 in our game because no politician is going to “rule” from a bitty liner…), they set about finding out what was going on with the mutiny on Galactica.

This play session was mostly on the battlestar. Of the two players there that night, one had his viper pilot and a veterinarian-turned-medic (and budding mad scientist researching Cylon infertility); the other had his coup leader and commander of Galactica as their characters. The viper pilot is the cousin of the mutiny leader — a very popular engineer who is also a master organizer, and whom managed to pull of the mutiny in a matter of minutes. They engineered a malfunction of the communications while most of the pilots (the majority of the officers) were out on an exercise, raided CIC, and placed the command staff in the brig until the mutiny was complete.

Things start to go wrong when some of the mutinous pilots with marines in tow try to capture the Three — who had been a sleeper in the Colonial Feet and is wracked with doubt and guilt over her actions — the commander had put back in uniform (along with our version of Boomer.) She was in the infirmary giving eggs for the vet’s experiments, along with Lady Athena — the Lord of Kobol they picked up in the Tomb of Athena. The mutineers attempt to take them into custody, only to get mangled badly by the two of them. (With some help from the vet.)

Athena sends the Three (call sign Trey) to round up the loyal officers currently being held in the pilot’s briefing room by one of the mutineers and the pilot PC, who was having a crisis of conscience. The PC decided she needed to find out what was going on and was being held at gunpoint when Trey arrives to aid her. The loyal pilots break out — some headed for the brig to rescue the command staff, some headed to the CIC to aid Athena, who had disappeared to go “get dressed for the party” — getting into her high-tech (yet Greco-retro looking) armor, with shield and energy-weapon firing spear.

A lot of the violence happened off-camera, but the vet (as their field medic) aided Trey, Helo, and a few others in rescuing the commander and his staff — who then headed for the CIC. The pilot PC, with Starbuck, and a few worshippers of Athena headed for the CIC and managed to link up with Athena before she raided the place on her own. In the ensuing fight, a bunch of the mutineers got dropped, but the pilot managed to talk down her cousin, who wound up in the brig. The Lady of Kobol chewed through the opposition scarily easy; the first time they’ve really seen her in action.

By the time the coup leaders called into Galactica to check on the situation, the ship had been retaken (or at least the CIC), and they were surprised to find themselves not talking to their woman on the inside, but Athena — who told them she was coming for them next. This lead to a chase to capture the coup leader, who was ultimately shot down.

In the end, both players each lost one of the troupe of characters, some of the former PCs were killed, and a host of main supporting NPCs went under the bus.

The players were left with a badly fractured fleet, a sudden loss of a lot of their officer corps, about half the marines of the fleet dead, and no political leadership. they instituted an interim president and decided to run with a periodic meeting of ship captains to manage the big issues, but they need to get the bureaucracy back online to keep supplies and services going. There was some talk of martial law, and the pilot PC is looking to fill their badly depleted ranks with pilots from the humanoid Cylon fleet they are weakly allied with; another idea is not to intermingle the pilots, but have the Cylons — now that everyone knows they’re out there — join the fleet to bolster their air assets.

The next episode, however, will show us that things aren’t exactly stable on the Cylon side of things, and that their “leadership” hasn’t bee playing on the up and up…