Starfire Cronology Dates are given in the format day/year. There are no months or weeks, and the interplanetary confederation calender has a 256-day year. (The ages given for characters in starfire.txt are in Earth years.) The era is based on the founding of the Stellar Confederation. (Unifying several smaller federations and a few dozen planetary and system-level goverments.) 228/93 F-Series StarClipper M2F5D2A leaves Andreas Yards of Dral shipyard. 253/93 M2F5D2A delivered to Yamala Shipping Company. Designated MSV Yamala 12. 101/103 MSV Yamala 12 surplused by Yamala and purchased by Dr. Ben Carey. Renamed MSV Starfire. Original Crew: Ben (Captain, MD), Eliza (Comm/Sensors) and Marcus Carey; Chikar (tactical); Jules Bisping (engineer); Henry Smith (Ast. engineer); Jos Namaril (1st Officer, Pilot) 56/107 Jos Namaril killed in a accedent in orbit around Evar. Amara Var hired as pilot, Eliza Carey promoted to first officer. 199/117 AM type androids flee the Project Doppledanger labs with their primary creator, Gary. 82/118 Amy captued by pirates. Her memory is erased and she is sold at a tech mart on Akiron. 108/118 Amy purchased and activated by freighter captian. 136/120 Starfire visits planet of the rodent people. Jos Namaril and Eliza Carey killed by natives. Amara promoted to 1st officer (continuing her duties as pilot, aslo) and Marcus, then 15, operatates comm/sensors. 60/123 Freighter carrying Amy suffers critical damage in deep space and the entire organic crew is killed within days. 151/123 Gary settles on Danubus T with AM-5. 222/125 Amy recovered by Starfire when the derilect freighter is salvaged. The android is somewhat unstable after spending two years in total isolation and seeing a dozen humans die rather horribly as the life support system failed, but recovers fairly quickly. 19/127 Starfire runs afoul of warlord dictator. Ben Carey held hostage for several days until the crew (led by Amara) rescues him. Dictator vows revenge on the crew, especially Amara, who shot him. (Nonfataly, obviously.) 82/128 Ben Carey killed in pirate attack on Starfire. Marcus assumes command of the ship (as he is now the legal owner), assigns Amy to run the comm station. (The ship is now running shorthanded, having no doctor and having the assistant engineer do double duty.) 3/129 TS: Insidae. 11/129 TS: Oracle. 30/129 TS: Thrall. 73/129 TS: Waypoint. 79/129 TS: Subversion. 91/129 TS: The End of Space. 135/129 Starfire's crew granted citizenship by Artician Leauge. 92/152 AM-5 murdered and Gary Takahashi mortally wounded on vaccation to Saltaric, a independant Saltarian colony world. Gary sends a transmission to Amy, telling her that it was `another replicant'. He belives that it was AM-6. He asks her to seek out AM-6 and find out if somebody did continue to run project Dopledanger: If so, the confederation could be replacing people with the androids as originally planned. Gary dies before Amy arrives, but she decides to investigate as he requested. (Amy is alone. Chikar returned to Danak, Jules finally settled down on Agila, Marcus and Amara married and continue to operate the Starfire in Artician space, with a new crew.) This is the planned overall story arc for Travels of the Starfire. It is subject to revision. (Oracle) The present story arc essentally revolves around the android Amy, and the attempts of the Confederation Intelegence Agency's infiltration division to retreive her. This arc was set in motion by Amy's visit to the Paladin, where Takner saw her. (Takner is afiliated with the Agency.) - He could not act directly, however, for reasons of secrecy. So Takner and his fellow agents planted a bomb intended to force the Starfire to land on Mianor, where they are waiting. Now, why not just blow up Starfire with the bomb, rather than take the time of using a proximity triggered system to force them to a little world? Well, Mianor III is the location of the secret lab of the Agency - that's why it's under quarenteen: to keep nosy people away. They do not know that Amy's memory was erased eleven years ago, and think that she may know the location of Gary and the other AM series androids. Thus the bomb is part of an elaborate plan to capture Amy. This will be thwarted by the capture of Amy by the Mianorians - by the time the Agents, disguised as officals from Confederation Quarenteen Enforcement, get to Starfire, Amy will be gone. However, the quarenteen officals will be exposed as fakes, and combat will ensue, in which they will be defeated by the protagonists using Heroic Cleverness (tm). (So that their ship can be used for parts.) Amy will be returned to Starfire, and the ship and crew will escape. The crew will remain unaware of the objective of the Agents, for the time being. - (Thrall) They will proceed to Akarn for repairs. (After being given a clean bill of health by Confederation medical authorites, who insist - against all common sense - that the planet was `quarenteened by accedent'. Right...) On Akarn, they will discover - among the other robot and android slaves - an artifical person in a design similar to Amy. This stimulates the crew's curiosity, (Jules' in perticular), and as they have little else to do while the ship is repaired, they stick their noses into the afair. Jules and Amy attempt to `liberate' the android, this goes awry (perdictibly) - however, by chance (okay, by pointy object) Amy is revealed to be a mechanical to the slave android's owner, who suddenly become terrified - this is because he knows where his android came from before he memory wiped him, and he thinks that Jules and Amy represent an Agency attempt to retrive the lost AM-4. They mangage to capitalize on this fear to escape, but outside the building they are confronted by an Angry Mob of farmers, upset over their earlier meddling - they blame Starfire's crew for a labor robot revolt. An altercation results (suprise...) in which AM-4 is dramaticly, er, mortally wounded. The Starfire shows up in time to save Jules and Amy from being lynched (4x50kW Laser turet beats slugthrowers, even the local yokels know that much) and the mob disperses with no casualties. After AM-4 kicks the bit bucket and joins Jules' spare parts collection, the crew is left to ponder the meaning of the events they witnessed. (That is to say, there is character development and contribution to the overall plot arc.) At this point, the crew may be begining to suspect that there is something significant in Amy's past that none of them (including her) know about. The remains of AM-4, which are essentaly functional except for the destroyed `brain', are kept on board, which may or may not be important to the plot. - (One-off parody episode) Starfire's crew fly to a differnt part of Akarn, to pick up cargo that their ship has been chartered to cary. On arrival to the spaceport they discover that it has not yet been delivered, and will arrive tommarow - because of a minor shipping delay. Without anything to do and warry of trying to spend much time in the city because of distrust by the locals, (your reputation preceeds you...) the crew is bored. Things get more interesting when the entire crew is invited to the mansion of a local large farm owner (by reputation a rich eccentric) who is ostensibly active in the cause of robot and synthetic rights. They travel to the rual facaility in the ship. He shows off his farm as it is worked by `Paid organic workers', who seem just a little too complacent and happy with their work. They are of a strange humanoid species that none of the crew recognize. Their host spins a yarn about them being from some underprivledged planet from which he saved them. During the tour, it begins to rain, and the group takes cover in on of the processing/threshing centers - except for Amara, who was previously delayed by a plot device. (Perhaps she gets some farm-related substance on herself and has to wash if off, or gets a phone call, or is thirsty, whatever.) While Marcus, Amy, Jules and Chikar hobnob with their increasingly odd host, Amara discoveres that the group is nowhere to be found. She wields her umbrela in the driving rain and presses down the path, but then sees something disturbing - the workers are, with no protection from the elements at all, contuning to work. Amara notices a large barnlike structure and watches as a whole collumn of workers - dozens of them - march towards it. She decides to have a look (there's that spirit of adventure again...) and notices that these workers are taller and more diverse that the others. They seem oblivious to her, as she decides to follow them into the barn. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew is with their host, who is showing off the results of his various genetic experments. (Of questionable scientific and practical worth...) Amara enters the barn and discovers that it contains hundres of tiny hovels where the workers live - and then discovers something really horrific: normal humanoids being TURNED INTO the midget workers by some sort of mutagen bath. (That obviously takes time, the inbetween stage mutants are also trapped in the barn until they reach the stage Amara followed in, which is an almost-complete transformation.) She observes that many of the trapped people are not wearing Akarni garb, and some of them seem to be wearing spacer's uniforms. (Eeek!) Naturally, she tries to exit and warn the crew, but sees guard-mutants by the doors. Amara makes a quick escape by jumping from a catwalk down to a set of large pipes that bring in mutagen from another structure. The pipes come out of the wall through a large enough opening that Amara can get outside while on them, and she proceeds to cross the slippery metal pipes, thirty feet above the ground, in the severe rain. Not seeing any other path, she goes into the opitsite building, where the mutagen is produced. It is a grimy, steamy factory, where the workers gleefully sing as they tend great boilers and feed them with giant logs, carried by manual labor. There is a macabre centerpeice to this: a giant, sphericcal creature - possibly a mutant- figures in the production, as some sort of living reactor vessel. She sneaks out sucsessfully and hides outside to radio the rest of the crew. The rest of the crew is occupied, but she reaches Amy and warns her just before Amara is captured by guards and taken back inside the factory. While in the factory, Amara escapes and - (Waypoint) Starfire - having taken on the cargo destined for the remote coloy of Danubus-Theta 9. They stop at a deep space station built on a far-flung rouge planet, Okalar, on the way. Jules meets up with a friend he knew at Dral Polytechnic, who now works on Okalar. This person is a AI researcher who not-quite-officaly retired from the Confederation Intelegence Agency's reasearch division. (He was loosley involved with Project Doppeldanger.) He recognizes Amy as the missing AM-3 and secretly asks her to meet him later. She does so, (although she thinks she's being followed), but finds him missing from the arranged location. The next morning, they are shocked to discover that this researcher has been murdered, and Chikar is blamed. (The method would have required far greater strength than a human could provide, and the other possible suspects on the small station have alibis.) The crew demonstrates his innocence by proving that a cracked labor robot was responsible - signs point to a highly skilled cracker as responsible. Meanwhile, Amy becomes convinced that someone on the station is out to get her. She's correct, the same agent that caused the murder of Jules' friend, an Agent of the Confederation Intellegence Agency, makes several abortive attempts to corner Amy, but is inturrupted each time without making an actual attempt. Chikar cleared of guilt, the ship leaves the station and moves on - unaware that D-12 has also been cracked. (The ship's main systems couldn't be cracked because Jules installed additional securites after Oracle; the cracker was only able to penetrate D-12's control systems.) - (Subversion) Starfire continues towards Danubus-Theta 9, carrying it's sealed cargo. At `night', the comprimised D-12 goes to Amy's quarters (where she is recharging and connected to the Hypernet.) and collects the android, (who doesn't notice D-12 until the Optical Link comes unpluged because of limited length). D-12 goes to the bridge, while carrying Amy, and drops the ship out of hyperspace in an uninhabited system. D-12 then takes her to the escape pod. Amy manages to escape at the last moment, but D-12 launches the pod and himself anyway, not noticing her absense. (D-12 is a non-senetint machine, he only does what he was programmed to do.) The pod-jettison klaxxon rouses the crew (hey, it's also the `all hands abandon ship' siren) who quickly decide to follow the pod into orbit around a ringed gas giant. They land the Starfire on one of it's small shepard moons near the orbit of the pod, and wait stelthely - determined to find out once and for all `what's going on here?'. After two days of waiting, they give up and are about to leave when a small Confederation scoutship appears in the system on an intercept course with the pod. As D-12 did not activate the pod's distress beacon, it seems reasonible to assume that this ship had foreknowledge of the pod's location. The scoutship does not respond to hails after it collects the pod and sensors indicate that it is about to enter hyperspace, Audiance perticipation will determine wether or not Starfire fires on it to disable it's hyperdrive. If it does not, the scoutship will get away and that will be the end if it. (Boring!) If they do, the scoutship will self-destruct. (It is machine-crewed, owned by the Agency.) The crew will find no humanoid remains in the debre, D-12 and the escape pod are destroyed/gone either way. At the end of the day, at least some of the crew will be starting to view Amy as a liability, and rightly so, but are obviously conflicted since she is their friend. - (End) Starfire arrives at the end of the outback, Danubus-Theta 9, a wet terranoid moon orbiting a gas giant. (Danubus is the system, Theta is the planet, aka Danubus II.) Amy announces her intention to leave the crew and depart the planet by some other ship. The recipiant of cargo is AM-5, in behalf of Gary. The cargo was chartered to draw Starfire (and thus Amy) to Danubus Theta, so Gary and AM-5 look for her after discovering what happened. Starfire's remainaing crew are suspicious of them and think that _they_ are the Bad Guys, especially after they inquire about Amy. The crew the trails Gary and AM-5 through the spaceport. Starfire's crew finally intercepts them and in the ensuing delay Amy boards another ship - this one containing several Agents who tracked Starfire there and -assumed- that Amy would leave. (If not, they were going to simply plant a bomb on Starfire while it was in port, as the risks of being discovered after several failed attempts to abbduct Amy are outweighing the benifits of taking her alive.) Gary keeps abrest of goings on within the Agency through backdoors, and Starfire's crew, AM-5 and Gary pursue the trap ship as it heads towards the Artican leauge. On board, Amy does not yet suspect a trap. Suddenly, the Agency's largest hardware and secret headquarters, a stolen Artician warship, ambushes the transport holding Amy with a hyperspatial disruptor, as the Agents aboard it break into the bridge and take over. (Preventing the signaling of a distress call.) The crew and passengers (including Amy) of the transport are captured and the transport is scuttled. Starfire comes out of Hyperspace to find out what happened. They find that their hyperspatial communcations are disrupted and imediatley come under attack by the Agency's craft. Takner - a high-ranking Agency operative - meets up with Amy. Unfortunatly, he didn't that job by gloating like an idiot at every victory, so he -promptly- sets on disassembeling her. Takner has made a catastrophic mistake, however - he forgot to properly secure his network. Takner is knocked out by a robot comprimised wirelessly by Amy in a bit of ironic justice. Meanwhile, Starfire is taking a serious beating, and it's shields are low. They have no choice but to disengage and flee - suddenly, however, a REAL Artician warship, of the dreaded Agila class (like this Insidae), emerges from Hyperspace. Now, things get really interesting as it engages the Agency's stolen vessel. The Agency tries to flee, but their hyperdrive - being used to create the interdiction field - overloads and takes out much of their power generation systems, leaving them almost helpless before the Articians. Good opportunists that all salvage vessel crews are, Starfire doubles back at once. Onboard, Amy is trying to escape the hostile vessel, which is being pummeled by the Articians and is suffering secondary damage from the Hyperdrive failure. She makes her way towards the docking bay, but is confronted in it by Takner and several agents. They are about to kill her when the Articians score a direct hit on the docking bay doors, resulting in everyone's favorite decompression: explosive! Needless to say, Takner et al are dispatched by the vaccum, and Amy boards a shuttle, piloting it out the gaping hole. She radios Starfire and is collected. The reunited Starfire crew, plus Gary and AM-5, escape into Hyperspace as the stolen ship is destroyed along with most of the Agency. (The ship was destroyed from the hyperdrive damage as much as by enemy fire.) The whole lot of them are picked up by the Articians later, and move to the League to seek assylum and build a new life. Gary and AM-5 settle down on Articia and Gary becomes a professor and the University of South Aranor. The Starfire takes on two new crewmembers and continues its adventures in the leauge.