The Ghazali

The Ghazali cruise liner was once a beautiful ship, tastefully furnished with mosaic walls and floors, draperies on the walls, and colorful embroidery on the furniture. Despite its huge size, it was only designed to carry three hundred passengers – the wealthiest of the wealthy, traveling the void in luxurious splendor.   Today, everything is worn – tears and burns cover the furniture, profane graffiti the mosaics. On the lower decks, everything is simple and crude, made from metal and rubber, and dark, dirty, and decrepit. Despite years of neglect, the Ghazali is more or less functional – a testament to the quality of the work of the Alkarra docks that constructed the ship some thirty cycles ago.    

Ghazali to the rescue

The liner had been taken out of service and was rusting in a dockyard when the distress call reached Coriolis. The owners, Exeter, were leaning toward scrapping the ship and selling it for parts rather than spending the fortune required to repair and modernize it. The Ghazali was already singing its swan song when its fate was sealed by the Colonial Agency, who swiftly purchased it for their rescue mission to Taoan. The worn-out furniture was cleared out and replaced by stasis beds stacked on top of each other, covering the mosaics and the hand-woven draperies. Starlight shining through the rose tinted windows now falls on crates of stasis fluid rather than on silk sheets. To the ship’s original three hundred beds were added another two hundred, to make room for the Tsurabi crew if they had to be evacuated. Vehicles, exos, and a huge amount of other gear was brought along in the hopes that whatever had happened to the colony could be repaired on site, at least temporarily. The Colonial Agency doesn’t abandon their colonies unless all other options have failed, as it makes future recruitment that much harder.