The Scapegoat is still spike-drilling away from Causeway 3 when Patrol Boat Six catches up and opens fire, and the crew spends the whole flight trying to keep the ship in one piece. Felix all but lives in the engine room, redlining the engines past their limit and getting cooked by steam and fireballs for his trouble. Robert pushes the throttle further than he should, and when the engines finally give out completely, the ship goes dead in the water with an enemy locked onto them. Down in the cargo hold, Froggy finds a book called How to Be a Leader and decides it's a manual, staging his own bid for the captain's chair. Haleyy gets her sand chucker calibrated for the first time since Episode 1 and finally proves the gun was the problem all along, not her aim.

Eleven rounds. That's the clock Felix is racing when the crew gets pulled back into Causeway 3's server room mid-hack, three swarms of electro-beetles closing in from every angle while a Virodyne patrol boat spins up to intercept. Thorne throws a flare. Haleyy sweeps them back with her bare hands, twice. Robert drops his gun, pulls a knife, and rolls across the floor covered in bug grease rather than take a hit standing up. All three of them are buying Felix time to pull the one thing they came for: confirmation of where Strake took Voss. He gets that, and something else nobody asked for, buried four subsystems down under a name that means nothing to any of them yet. Getting out of the room turns out to be the easy part.

Three days in the fuel queue, and Felix hasn't left his data slab. When he cracks open what Voss left buried in Strake's transmission, the crew punches in the coordinates and doesn't look back. Eighteen days of transit, one unmarked station in a dead red system, one ship AI with a gift for fake names, one convincing Victor Strake impression, and a server room full of things Virodyne doesn't want them to read.

The crew leaves the wreckage of the Omnitech ship with a shuttle name, a lead, and no answers. When ISO's shop turns up burned to the ground, the plan changes: skip the detective work, go straight to the source. A midnight heist at the Helium Docks, a hacked security gate, one fake employee named Gregory Overton, and 3am waiting in the dark.

The crew tracks the assassin back to a docked Omnitech ship at the spaceport. What they find inside is a face they know. Dr. Iso gets her revenge. The dead man's transponder sends out a signal. And Robert and Haleyy have the conversation they've been circling for years.

The crew is nursing Haleyy's mystery condition and racing a ticking clock: they need a black market ship module or they're grounded forever. A visit to an old military contact brings medical answers no one wanted and an enemy neither of them saw coming.

The Dark Star Adventurecast teams up with Astronomica and 7th Star to the Right for a fully improvised Lasers & Feelings crossover one-shot. Six players, one ship, and a Hive Armada blockade standing between them and a set of ancient space ruins — which turn out to be a 90s mall on future Earth, run by cockroaches doing private equity.