Toru von Taxiwan, the leader of the NPC team on Zinion, had asserted command. During the night, the PCs Alissa and Bobby ("the robber") had tried to sneak into the NPCs' pinnace to take their air/raft but were captured instead: Bobby switched allegiance (a decision made by his player given Toru von Taxiwan's Leader-1) and Alissa had been taken prisoner.
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When morning came, the PCs other than Alissa and Bobby noticed that those two were missing. And a call came in on their communicator, from Toru von Taxiwan, announcing that Alissa and Bobby had been apprehended breaking into their pinnace. The PC Methwit (a diplomat/spy) did the talking, and placed all responsibility back on the Taxiwanians. The result of a reaction roll was 7 - non-committal - and I decided that Toru would try Alissa without extending her hostility to the rest of the PCs. Around this time , Alissa's player established that she had not been body-searched and so still had her single hand grenade on her person.
The trial commenced, narrated by me (as GM). Alissa asked Toru what the sentence might be, and was told up to 6 years imprisonment. Alissa's player asked about the circumstances of the trial - I said that Toru stood at the bridge of the pinnace while the others (3 NPCs, Bobby and Alissa) sat on the couches. Alissa's player then asked (as Alissa) to be allowed to speak in her defence. So she went to the bridge while Toru went to the couches. Alissa then used her psionic cloaking/blurring ability to obscure her reaching for her grenade: she pulled the pin and threw it at Toru. In the rules we're using a grenade does 6D to its target and 3D to adjacent characters. Hits and damage were rolled, and all the NPCs and Bobby were knocked unconscious more-or-less severely (but none was killed outright). The question was then asked, I think by one of the other players, whether the pinnace itself was damaged in a major way. So I looked up the vehicular combat rules (which I've written up, adapted extremely loosely from the rules in the Mission to Mithril double adventure), and called for the appropriate checks: the roll to hit was high indicating damage to the pinnace, and then the next roll indicated a hull breach. Alissa's player made the roll for Alissa to don a vacc-suit (I used the Book 2 explosive decompression rules), and then she pulled a survival blanket over the NPCs to try and stop them freezing immediately from the intense cold of Zinion's atmosphere.
Alissa broadcast a distress call on her vacc-suit communicator, and the ex-pirate PC Xander came to her assistance wearing his battle dress. The surviving NPCs, in orbit about Zinion in their laboratory ship, also enquired (via communicator) what had happened. "An accidental explosion on board the pinnace" was Alissa's reply. There was no more communication from the NPCs.
The players debated what to do next: Alissa's player as (the rather immoral) Alissa; Xander's player as (the rather amoral) Xander; Methwit's player as the voice of reason and consequences (which when I think about it was probably Methwit in character); and Vincenzo's player [the fourth player at the table] as the voice of morality and decency (his only character on Zinion was Tony, who had no strong views of his own). Alissa's player's other character on Zinion, von Jerrel, was no more sympathetic to the NPCs than Alissa, given that Toru wanted to have him punished and perhaps executed for the use of psionics.
Various options were canvassed, from reviving the unconscious NPCs and perhaps handing over Alissa, to launching the pinnace into space with the NPCs on board. In the end it was decided to load all the spare blasting dynamite into the pinnace and blow it up (with the unconscious NPCs, and Bobby). The roll to avoid demolitions mishaps succeeded, and so about half-an-hour after the first explosion the pinnace was blown to pieces. A message was broadcast to the NPCs in orbit reporting an unfortunate "secondary explosion", but no reply or acknowledgement was received.
