The Dark Star Adventurecast sets the stars aside for a season break bridge episode in Mausritter — tiny knights, big danger. Jeff trades the Star Master chair for a mouse named Sir Clover Saltwick (allergic to bravery), Doja plays knighted bodyguard Sir Sneaker Nibble, and Scott's one-eyed archer Sir Martin Bellflower has strong opinions about bees. Brian takes over as Game Master for a system that fits in a teacup: three knights, one abandoned human shack, and a sunflower field crawling with bees that glow an ominous shade of purple that definitely isn't normal. There's also a skunk. The skunk's name is Shig.

The gyroscope is eating Prometheon Station one ring at a time, and there's no next loop to fix what goes wrong this time. Thorne gets locked in an office with the one enemy he can't decide whether to trust. Felix runs a hack under a ten-second gas countdown with three lives riding on it. Haleyy finds out exactly how many members of an Unhallowed horde one very angry woman can throw. And somewhere in the wreckage, the crew has to decide what an acceptable loss actually looks like.

The crew wakes back up on the bridge with no idea how they got there, except that they remember dying. Prometheon Station resolves out of the dark exactly like it did the first time, gyroscope still sparking, except now they've got twenty-one loops of somebody else's memory to work with. Behind one locked office door: a dead man's switch, and a data chip stuffed with files on something called Project Redwing. On a desk nearby, a photograph shows a face Thorne wasn't expecting to see. Whatever Felix decides to do about the two people trapped behind the gas-locked door down the hall, it doesn't stay quiet for long.

Eighteen days of drift end at Prometheon Station, a spire turning around a five-ring alien gyroscope the size of a city, with a Virodyne fleet hanging dead in the black around it. The crew came for Dr. Voss. What they find is an empty station that isn't empty. Automated drones. People in gas masks and thigh-high rubber boots who call themselves the Listeners. A crowd of workers with the wrong color in their eyes. Voss is here, wired to a pedestal behind a sealed door, and there's gas coming into her lab. Somewhere above all of it, Viktor Strake is watching through the glass, and he seems to think they're late.

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.