GephkeAbout sixty years ago, doring the most recent failed rebellion, several outcast Scholar families sought refuge on Gephke, which at the time was a third-rate smuggler hideout barely keeping afloat. Their ringleaders, led by Velix Avra Storga, used bribery, threats and a bit of violence to persuade the smuggler families of Gephke to form an alliance with them. Velix opted to burn her connections to the Storga in order to marry Ugur Qal, a smuggler, and form a new Gephken dynasty with him. The refugee families contributed their skills and resources to build up Gephke into a formidable rebel base, on the assumption that they would eventually be able to use it to stage a new revolution. Since then, most of the rebel leaders have grown old and died. Velix survives in a life-support chamber. The old smuggler families have reasserted their dominance over the station, and are content to use its resources for their criminal operations without becoming overly involved in politics. They are not happy that Tsaijix Qal has given the Empire a pretext to go after Gephke in force, and suspect his actions of being a provocation planned by Velix and the other refugee families. They intend to interrogate him and attempt to determine his intentions. Velix has discovered that Tsaijix and his friends are travelling with a treeship, and she has given the Ambassador some of her genetic material, with instructions to replicate new units for her as quickly as possible. She will ask Tsaijix and the rest of the party to stall the Gephken council for three days with some kind of business proposal while she summons nearby reinforcements. Once she has several human copies of herself, as well as half a dozen hive spiders, she plans a swift and brutal hostile takeover of Gephke. Her next move will be to send a small unit to sync with herself in the Fourth Founder base, and receive a synced unit in return. She will want the party to negotiate with Zemfiri as her proxies. |