Competition: Echoes in Transit

Howdy Arconans,

Today I bring you a fiction competition that I originally intended to run as a roleplay for the clan. I decided against that because I wanted to leave room for everyone to interact with our unique assets in ways they saw fit. I'm always looking for new ways to encourage fellow clan members to get excited about and engage with the things in our sandbox, and this idea seemed to draw a lot of attention when I first mentioned it, so without further ado:

The Background

A distress signal from a downed Pathfinder vessel comes through on an encrypted channel monitored by House Galeres. The signal is coming from deep within Hutt Space, and communications experts have traced the signal back to the planet Da-Vlunn.

Although previous leaders of House Qel Droma had undermined the power of the Hutt families on Outer Rim planets closest to the Dajorra System, the Hutts have been quietly reconsolidating their power, and have used the distraction of Clan Arcona with the recent war against the Collective to tighten their control over Hutt Space with a series of violent attacks. This has resulted in increased calls from planets allied with the Dajorran Confederacy in the Outer Rim to deal with the criminal elements, with some even throwing their hat in with the crime families in the hope of avoiding their ire.

CADRES, Clan Arcona’s diplomatic attache, has been working around the clock to prevent some of the Confederacy's more tenuous political and economic alliances from falling apart in the wake of increased pressure from the united crime syndicates. All this is to say that a mission to Da-Vlunn, which lies deep within Hutt territory, could potentially ignite the powder keg and send the system into open conflict with the Hutt cartels. This level of conflict would be bad for all entities within the Dajorran Confederacy and its allies, resulting in this particular assignment turning into not just a rescue mission, but a covert extraction.

Prompt

The Dajorran Intelligence Agency has tasked you with locating the Pathfinder vessel on Da-Vlunn, uncovering details on how it crashed, and extracting any survivors.

Requirements

A minimum of 500 words is required to receive full awards, with additional clusters of ice for every additional 500 words.

Attaching a snapshot is optional. You can use or create as many NPCs as you'd like for this story, as well.

Submissions

Submissions should be submitted as either a .word, .pdf, or in the text box below.

Grading Grading will be done using the Fiction Rubric 3.0.