We ended the last session with Strachan and his band of trained killers having failed a Stealth test deep in enemy territory, looking to take their sci-fi knives to a local general, hoping to stymy the army about to clash with the 10,000 Tigers.

They got jumped by 10 soldiers with medieval swords and bucklers made of some bronze-ish mineral and lizard hides. Strachan’s crew took one hit and the Kaprianouers were routed.

They made their way to the Naiti army’s general in a ruined fort and killed him as he was conversing with a Gudradim Space Marine via holographic projection. Strachan ate the general’s heart in plain view of the space marine, who shook his head at the savagery.

It was a big reveal, a platoon of space marines from the Guevaran Hegemony were on Kaprianou.

They also took a tech-priestess prisoner and picked her brain but killed and discarded her because she was a religious zealot to the dread-tech-god AR3S, an ancient war A.I. This led to a discussion about how this group just aren’t good guys.

“Our first job was stealing and framing the theft on convicts!”

The players were brainstorming on how to deal with the situation: space marines, a genocidal A.I. self-declared deity, medieval armies on the march and all covered by a blanket of low orbit nanite blanket meant to keep the A.I. stranded here. Dr. Galvari asked, “Would you like to confer with 0R10N?”

They talked with this young A.I., being raised to hunt the genocidal war A.I.’s that after the Scream, went rogue and decimated entire planets. 0R10N was clearly young and naive and eager to impress. He only had the data they gave him. The young A.I. suggested they contact a Perimeter Agency.

 There are pre-tech satellites in orbit around Kaprianou that manage the nanite cloud. Deiter and Arkaday hacked one and they wire their comms through it, so they can easily communicate with the ship. Knowing that the space marines must’ve landed from orbit recently, they looked at the satellite’s memory to see if had picked up anything. Turns out some marines tried to hack the satellite too. They didn’t do as well and the nanite cloud devoured their power armor vacc suits, leaving them to the void.

After seeing that, Arkady named the satellite Baba Yaga.