The service passage spills into a concealed fabrication bay. Dormant weapon frames hang from gantries, while jury-rigged reactors blink beneath layers of patched insulation.
Mara carries the containment cradle to a low scanner and locks it into place. The relic’s dead starlight crawls across the bay’s dark machinery.
The Smuggler Captain
Keep watch on the passage. If security gets a clean lock, we abandon the station before they breach this door.
The scanner unfolds a translucent star map. Encrypted coordinates thread through imperial space toward an enemy shipyard, hidden behind false cargo routes and dead relay beacons.
The Smuggler Captain
There it is. The buyers have a shipyard, and this relic already knows the safest way in. That saves us weeks of hunting.
A red countdown ignites above the scanner: eleven minutes until the station security net triangulates the bay. The reactors answer with a nervous, rising hum.
The Smuggler Captain
Eleven minutes. Decide how you want to use them, Avarice. I can build the weapon, steal a ship, or run now.
✓ Quest Accepted
Secure the construction route
✓ Quest Accepted
Profit from selling the superweapon
“"Build the weapon, we'll worry about escape when we cross that bridge. Backstabbing the Empire is more important to me at the moment. Everything else is irrelevant!"”
SUCCESS (Legendary Reasoning, rolled +0)
Avarice
Build the weapon. We’ll worry about escape when we cross that bridge. Backstabbing the Empire matters more. Everything else is irrelevant.
Avarice opens the Tome of The Wicked beside the scanner. Fiendish formulae coil across its pages, matching the relic’s star-map as the smuggler captain reroutes power into the fabrication gantries.
The relic projects a weapon lattice through the bay. For an instant, Avarice sees a future hero standing over her ruined empire, and the vision fractures her focus before the tome’s hidden power forces the pattern clear.
The Smuggler Captain
That book is rewriting the relic’s command architecture. Keep it open. I can make the machinery obey.
The smuggler captain locks the containment cradle into the assembly spine. Weapon frames descend, reactors surge, and molten components assemble around the relic’s core while the countdown burns through its final minutes.
The completed superweapon rises from the gantries, black metal veined with dead starlight. Its targeting system accepts the enemy shipyard coordinates, and a sealed launch module clamps around it.
The Smuggler Captain
It’s built, armed, and keyed to those coordinates. Whatever we do next, the Empire will feel this sale.
Avarice
The weapon is ready before security arrives.
Quest Complete
Secure the construction route