The Airlock Had a Warranty

Fiction. An invented table disaster, told for fun. No real session was harmed.

The plan had three steps. That was the first mistake, because the crew of the salvage tug Ledger Moth had only ever completed two of anything.

Step one: Ilse, the hacker, walks the Dock 9 door controls past a bored night clerk. Step two: Bram, the pilot, backs the Moth to the pod's tether and cuts it clean. Step three: everyone leaves before shift change, at 04:00.

"Foolproof," said Tovi, the medic, who had never once been right about that word.

Roll one

Ilse leaned over the door panel and rolled Hacking. A 4. Her modifier was +6, so the total was 10 against a DC of 12.

The GM, who did not enjoy this, let her push it. "You can force the lock, but it will log the attempt."

"How loud is the log?"

"Quiet. Mostly."

Ilse took the deal. The door opened. Somewhere on the station, a very small light turned amber.

Roll two

Bram brought the tug in. Piloting DC 13, and Bram was good at this. A 17. The Moth kissed the dock so gently the coffee did not ripple.

Then came the tether. The plan said cut it at the three-second mark, when the pod's anchor cycled open. The crew had drawn this on a napkin. The napkin had a little smiley face on the pod.

Bram counted. He got to two and a half, got nervous, and cut early.

"That's a called shot," the GM said. "Sleight of Hand, DC 15, with disadvantage because you rushed."

He rolled twice. A 3 and an 8. Total 11, with the better die.

The tether parted. The pod did not drift out toward the tug. It drifted the other way, into the airlock the crew was standing next to.

Roll three

Tovi's contribution to the plan had been to stay calm. Her one big idea, when the pod swung toward the crew, was to stand in front of it.

"I'd like to reason with it," she said.

"It's a cargo pod."

"I'd like to reason with it gently."

Persuasion. A natural 1. Nobody had asked for this, and the table went quiet in the way tables do.

The GM read the result out loud like a weather report. "The pod bumps you. The airlock cycles. The outer door closes. The inner door, which has a warranty sticker that says VOID IF TAMPERED, has been tampered with."

Ilse looked at her log. Bram looked at his hands. Tovi, now sealed in the airlock with a drifting pod and a countdown from sixty, said the only sensible thing anyone said all night.

"I would like to renegotiate step three."

The last decision

Sixty seconds is a long time and a short time. The crew argued it out on comms, and the GM let the clock run for real.

Bram wanted to cut the airlock loose and take the loss. Ilse wanted to override the cycle and risk the station alarm, which was already amber and getting curious. Tovi, from inside, asked that somebody please decide before she ran out of things to say to a box.

They voted two to one. The result was recorded, the dice were rolled, and the GM, holding a single hidden card, did not say which way it went.

What the crew did not know, and what the napkin had never accounted for, was that the pod's seal had just released on its own. The lid lifted the width of a finger. A manifest slid out, printed the old way, on paper.

Three names were the crew's own. Every one of them was spelled right.

The manifest on the pod listed four names, and the fourth one was knocking.