When we walked back to the ship we were a bit depressed. The cost to get the Black Moth up and running again were enormous. We didn’t have that amount of cash. When we walked up to the ship I was overwhelmed by its size en shape. She looked simply beautiful. I considered our self very lucky that we found this ship, or did it find us? Now all we needed was enough money to repair her.

We didn’t have the chance to explore the ship so that was the first thing we did when we came back. We entered the ship on the upper deck. On the upper deck there was a chapel and an audience chamber. Armand took some time to pray to the Deckhand We also located a security office. On the table I found a tabula. The information however was unreadable. It had the same strange hieroglyphs we saw in the rest of the ship. We took the tabula with us. Maybe Carl was able to deceiver it. After taking the time to say his prayers, Armand also stayed in the audience chamber. At first we thought he was just looking around a bit more, but he found some sort of mini bar and he decided to quench his thirst. When Armand joint us again he was a bit unsteady on his feet. Probably a bit tipsy from the alcohol he drank.

There was a lift that took us to the middle deck. Beside the bridge there was a stasis hold with stasis beds. Probably this ship use to have a crew of eight people. There was a mess room, a sanitary facility with a bath and showers. There also were four cabins. For some reason there were already nametags on the doors of the cabins. Because al the cabins looked the same we decided to leave it as is was. My cabin was next to Armands. To our surprise there also was a mining station and Armand was overjoyed to see that there even was an archeology room. The maintenance unit, the reactor chamber engine room and graviton projector were in the stern of the ship.

The lower deck could be reached by lift but also by ladder. We saw an largely an open space for cargo, surrounding the hangar in the middle. There were crates containing non-perishable food and drinks. By the look of it this food could last us for months. We saw cargo doors on either side of the cargo hold, but no air-locks. This meant that these door could only be used in atmosphere. Tucked away in the back there was a small workshop and an unpressurized service module that could be accessed from outside the hull through a hatch if needed, for the purpose of repairs.

After exploring the ship we couldn’t believe that this was ours. Carl in the meantime had managed to find out more about the ship. Carl told us the following: “THE BHAMUT If someone is familiar with this old, obscure and exceedingly rare ship, chances are they learned about it from the works of Bijan Zandi. Zandi was a prospector turned artist who was part of a crew that discovered a seemingly abandoned spaceship in the iron deserts of Raqus in the Erequ system. Although described as abandoned, the run-down ship occasionally served as a place of refuge and worship for a group of humanite settlers that called that barren landscape their home. Some of them can be seen standing next to the monumental hull as it catches the starlight in the painting titled Bhamut, one of Zandi’s most famous works. It has since been established that the Bhamut, like the slightly more common Tanapur, heralds from the lost shipyards of Khiravo. The lack of a verified designation for the model has led to the widespread use of the name given by Bijan Zandi in CC 14. The motif of the painting, and how it came to be, has become just another chapter of the mystery surrounding the forgotten shipyard. However, the larger size of the Bhamut compared to other known Khiravo ships has led some to re-evaluate both the historical significance of the Khiravo shipyards and the chances of actually finding it.

The real purpose of the Bhamut class of ships is shrouded in the same mystery as its origin, but in general terms it may have been trade, exploration or diplomacy. At the end of the day, the Bhamut is capable of all these things, and is used in a variety of ways by the few who still run them. In typical Khiravo fashion the hull of the Bhamut is heavily armored. But in terms of the propulsion systems there is less to compensate for the additional mass than on smaller Khiravo ships, making the Bhamut more of a challenge to manoeuvre. That being said, it handles very smoothly, but requires a little more forward planning to pilot successfully. The central graviton projector does nearly all of the work and is supported only by relatively low-powered auxiliary projectors underneath the front half of the ship. With such a setup, the aerodynamics really come into play during atmospheric flight. Fortunately the hull is smooth and rounded like an aquatic creature and the foldable wings can adapt to different atmospheric densities to generate just the right amount of lift to balance the craft. Like many aspects of this ship, it is unusual, but it works.”

We were more and more impressed by the ship that was now ours. But what to do next. Shamus came up with the idea of selling the shuttle. The ship had atmospheric landing so we didn’t really need the shuttle. Meybe Aziz was interested. Unfortunately Aziz turned out not to be the enthusiastic buyer we hoped he would be. There was someone who was looking for a crew for a short mission. Maybe that was a way to make some money, Aziz said. That was an interesting possibility. We walked up to the person Aziz pointed out to be the captain. We introduced ourselves to her and she said her name was Lysia Wada, captain of the Mantella. She was indeed looking for a second crew, as she called it, for a short mission to Surha. The reward would be 60.000 Birr. That sounded promising. She was however not very informative about the details of the mission. We would be briefed as soon as we accepted it.

Taking some time to think about it, we considered our other options, to come to the conclusion that we had no other options. We were sandbagged! To see if we could find out some more, we walked toward the Mantella There we saw someone just embark. It turned out to be Aya, a deckhand on the ship. She couldn’t tell us very much about captain Wada and the ship because she herself had just recently joint the crew. She dis tell us than the mission was to Dhaab. A remote station on the planet Surha. The purpose was to collect something for Yussuf Farra. He is the son of Abdul Farra, a scientist who worked at Dhaab and was researching nanites..

A mission to Surha could not only provided us with enough Birr to repair our new ship, but also gave us the opportunity to collect Shamus his piece of junk. Not that I was very attached to this rust bucket, but I did want to collect Jezebel, who was still on the ship not knowing where we were and when we would come for her. There were also all kind of important stuff on-board the banger we could use.

We told captain Wada that we would accept the mission and be the second crew on the condition that on the way back she would stop at Surhani to drop Armand and Shamus. The could fly back the ship to Sesame. I would stay on board of the Mantella, to make sure we would get our reward. Captain Wada agreed to these conditions.

Aziz then promised to order the parts he needed and that as soon as we came back from the mission with enough Birr’s he could start immediately.

“I love it when a plan comes together” someone ones said :