Episode 58: the Great Escape

The heroes' whispered conference in Prince's bedroom was suddenly broken up by arrival of troops in-theatre.

Palace guards. Well-armed palace guards. An elaborate ambush plan was formulated and executed using the secret accessway between the Prince's Apartments, the princess' apartments and the various honoured guest suites. Two guards were dispatched by this strategy, but the rest became alerted and they formed a double line of spearmen.

The heroes decided to engage openly and did fairly well despite rounds of black powder pistol rounds zinging about their ears, but eventually they decided to withdraw when even more guards appeared on the scene, this time armed with muskets.

The arrival of the Prince with his three High Martian guests caused a re-assesment of the situation and the team withdrew and hurriedly discussed options.

These boiled down to staying and fighting by attempting to raid the armoury and using whatever they could find there (a plan complicated by the fact that none of them had ever been to the armoury and did not know where it was), escaping to the outside, taking the obviously newly-returned Ruumet Breehr herd and making for the mountains, or boarding the prince's kite and attempting to steal it.

The team debated for a short while, then settled for the "kite" plan, and so Wilhelm teleported them to the deck of the vessel.

This proved to be something of a mis-step as the crew, although caught on their collective back foot by the arrival of the Earthmen in a ball of green lightning, proved unwilling to meekly turn over the vessel and a pitched battle broke out on the deck.

A hail of gunfire from the crew in response to the Earthmen's own volleys, along with savage hand-to-hand attacks ensued and the casualties were high on both sides.

Jones was killed outright. Forsyth was wounded, and Wilhelm was thought lost to two rounds of terribly effective swordplay and pistol work, but by some miracle his healing device must have been damaged in the fray and it exploded, bathing the hapless inventor in coruscating green energies. The team thought that to be the certain end of their friend, but it seemed the device had actually saved Wilhelm's life, though it left him in a piteous state and the device that had saved their bacon so many times in he past was unsalvagable.

The crew, however, had lost half their number and Forsyth's second demand that they surrender was, finally, grudgingly honoured.

The heroes took up what stations they could to make up for crew losses, and the sullen crew manned the tops, allowing the heroes to escape the Prince and his vile Ground Cleanser friends.

Sadly, halfway back to civilization, the crew mutinied, revoking their parole, and in the ensuing rebellion managed to crash the ship, wrecking her beyond repair. Though the heroes survived the crash with no further injuries, they came to to find no remaining Martians alive in the wreckage, and no immediate way of continuing their journey.