The Bounty of Ceres

Middle of the road. This story has some really good moments, and some less impressive parts. But it is never truly bad.

 

The party lands on the planet Ceres, which has nothing on it instead for loads of dust. While they are wandering about, we meet the three people in charge of mining operations on the planet. We have the jokey one, the paranoid one and the leader (not that good with names, sorry). But which one is actually of sound mind?

 

This story spends a lot of time on the one-off cast, and that’s great. You care for these people and it almost feels like a pure historical. I was convinced for a little while that there wasn’t going to be an actual threat.

 

These people have been stuck together for about 6 years in pure isolation. When they meet the party, though, they are out of their depth. They lock them up and some long interrogations follow. It is still really fun though. The banter between the 2 groups is really fun.  However, it becomes clear that something is brewing in the background. The paranoid one is convinced that the planet is alive and out to get them. And the doctor has reason to believe he might be right. The party investigates.

 

And this is where the fun part ends, sadly. The mining robots are possessed and start killing, which immediately turns this story in a rather basic base-under-siege tale. There’s also suddenly a lot of fast technobabble, which makes it hard to keep up with what’s happening. I had to rewind a few times to re-listen, but it was still kind of hard to grasp when the party splits up and swaps guns and all that stuff. Noticeably distracting.

 

The leader of the group also gets killed in action, and while we have quite a bit of backstory on her, the story never really takes time to look back on her. It’s just boom. Gone. Run run run. A bit sad considering how well she was written.

 

After that, we reach the conclusion. Turns out jokey man secretly loathed paranoid man, and decided to mess with him and make him paranoid by reprogramming the ship. He hoped he would eventually kill himself. The story presents this a bit too natural for my liking. Maybe they could have focused a bit more on the consequences of isolation, to hammer this point home. Isolation can drive you mad. We even have a character that could add something here, since Steven is with us. Right now it feels out of left field.

 

And that’s the main plot out of the way. There’s still one glimmer left at the end though. Something that might be a sign of what is to come.

 

After everything is said and done, and the paranoid guy can be renamed to “guy”, the party leaves. But the doctor does something interesting. He hands the guy a little stack of documents. And says that he should read them to be prepared for the future.

 

That interfering! Conscious, time-related interfering. Of course, we’re still in the future and the lines are already blurred, but this is telling someone about what the future holds. This doctor has never concretely done that. And that’s real cool to see.

 

Steven and Vicki get some moments too. This is their first “sci-fi” adventure together, so they relate stuff to their own time and knowledge. It’s an interesting new take, and since they compare with each other, there’s plenty of room to sneakily catch us up as well. It’s neat! They also have some banter with each other and the Ceres crew. A good time.

 

And that’s “The Bounty of Ceres”. It has some really good character work, and really makes you care about everyone involved, but its threat and resolution are really weak, confusing and unsatisfying. If this story was just the first half, and we just focused on the discussion between the two groups, it could have been a 10. Instead it stuffs in a generic threat that feels like it is written by a different writer altogether. This leaves the final product smackdab in the middle of the scoring list. Oh well.