Foundry:VotS2: The Shadow of Death (ST-HQ3N0I9QX)

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"[Rom] VotS2: The Shadow of Death" (mission ID: ST-HQ3N0I9QX) is the second of three missions in the Valley of the Shadow series. The [Rom] tag in the title identifies this mission as one designed for Klingon Empire-allied Romulan Republic characters. (The Foundry only supports Federation and Klingon factional alignments; the Federation version was developed and published first as "[Rom] Valley of the Shadow II" and is the basis for this Klingon-allied version. "VotS" is the acronym for the mission series title.)

Historical context
The series takes place in the year 2409 during Cryptic's Romulan Republic story arc, in between the mission series Vengeance and Freedom. It is also a prequel to the Foundry mission series Ghosts of War by the same author.

Plot summary
The player is contacted by Admiral Zashek, the Director of the Romulan Republic's Intelligence service, which has been following up on the player's reports following his/her recent mission to Nivay IV, in particular the unspecified weapon mentioned in Major Tarnak's logs. Unfortunately, the trail has gone cold.

Zashek's only remaining lead is a Ferengi smuggler named Trang, who used to smuggle for the Nivayan resistance, but has since apparently switched sides and now works for the Tal Shiar, who he says pay him in high-grade Romulan ale. Knowing Trang makes regular stops at Drozana Station (in part to resell some of the ale to Belan), Zashek has arranged for the player to eavesdrop upon a clandestine meeting there between Trang and his Imperial Romulan contact, Senator Veledrus, whose name also turned up in Tarnak's logs in connection with the weapon. The player listens to Veledrus give Trang his next smuggling assignment: Pick up cargo from coordinates in a remote area of planet Nimbus III and deliver it to an Imperial military station in the Bironex system.

The player hastily sets course for Nimbus III and finds the designated coordinates, but no cargo. A transporter beam is then detected and the player's team braces for a fight - but the expected intruders never materialize. It turns out that Trang had in fact transported cargo that was right where Veledrus had said it would be - but under molecular phase inversion, so that it could literally be stored inside a solid rock formation at the given coordinates.

The player's ship, under cloak, follows Trang's ship, the Yennek, to a military depot jointly operated by the Romulan Star Navy and the Tal Shiar, in orbit of Bironex Prime. Listening in on Trang's conversation with the station commander, the player learns that most of the cargo is being stored at Bironex Depot, but some of it has been diverted to an industrial facility on the planet's surface. Disguised as Tal Shiar officers (using holoemitters to mask their true appearances), the player's away team encounters Tarnak and Veledrus at the facility. The weapon Tarnak referred to in his logs is revealed to be a satellite-based system whose prototype is being assembled at this very facility as they speak, and Trang's delivery is a shipment of the satellites' most critical components (though neither Tarnak nor Veledrus say just what they are). Tarnak and Veldrus then invite the player to observe a test firing of the prototypes.

The player returns to his/her ship and sets course for Bironex V, where they find the Yennek in orbit of the test moon, along with an abandoned cargo vessel infested with Regulan bloodworms and a fully occupied prison ship. Tarnak's ship, the I.R.W. Pralix, signals the player to rendezvous with her there, and then Tarnak asks the player to conduct the test him/herself. Playing along, the player decloaks the satellites orbiting the moon, then fires them - and watches in horror as the moon is enveloped in thalaron radiation, which quickly wipes out all life aboard all three ships in its orbit.

At this point, Tarnak reveals that he knows the player's true identity as a Romulan Republic officer, and has several more Imperial ships decloak to attack the player's ship. While the player is fighting off this attack, the Pralix collects the satellites from orbit and departs the system, presumably intent upon redeploying them in orbit of Nivay IV, to intimidate the Nivayan resistance into surrendering under threat of instant genocide. Worse yet, the player realizes that similar weapon systems could be built and deployed by the Tal Shiar at any time, in orbit of any other inhabited planet claimed by the Star Empire - including New Romulus itself.

The player immediately returns to New Romulus to warn the Republic about this. Proconsul D'Tan confers with Admiral Zashek and representatives of both the Republic's allies - the Federation and the Klingon Empire - in an emergency command bunker deep beneath the surface of New Romulus. The Klingon Defense Force representative, Captain Cha'vaQ of the I.K.S. Hor'tagh, says the Klingon Empire has no interest in the Nivayan conflict and will not get involved - but also that if the Republic can provide concrete evidence of the thalaron satellites' existence, the KDF will take whatever action necessary to find and destroy them. He believes Starfleet will do the same.

Suddenly a single Imperial Romulan scout vessel appears, approaches the planet, and begins to relay a holographic signal originating far outside the Dewa system to the bunker. It is Colonel Hakeev, or rather his "holopresence", who taunts the Republic personnel and their allies and calls for their surrender. In an additional show of force, Hakeev then begins remotely destroying allied ships in orbit one by one, through means not yet known to the player.

Returning to his/her own ship, the player soon determines that Hakeev is using a folded-space transporter (apparently confiscated from the rogue Nivayan resistance faction who used similar technology during their assault on the Imperial compound in Part I) to plant armed explosives aboard the ships. Aware that Starfleet encountered such technology many years earlier, the player and officers recreate Starfleet's method of tracing the transporter to its source, which turns out to be the cloaked I.R.W. Pralix.

The player's ship defeats the Pralix in the ensuing battle, but Tarnak was not on board; evidently he and the satellites were both transferred to another vessel. Then a massive fleet of Imperial vessels, along with their Hirogen and Elachi allies, is detected closing in on New Romulus at high warp. Reinforcements are on their way from the Republic Flotilla, but for now the player's ship and a few allied vessels, including the Pax Federatica, are all that stand between the huge Imperial invasion fleet and New Romulus.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Objectives

 * Unsettling Scores
 * Concurrent objectives:
 * Valley of the Shadow II
 * Listen in on Trang
 * Defend yourself from crossfire
 * Leave the system
 * A Long Way from Paradise
 * Find source of phase variance
 * Find source of phase variance
 * Find source of phase variance
 * Find source of phase variance
 * Scan the camp site
 * Wait for enemy
 * Special Delivery
 * Slow to impulse
 * Approach the Yennek
 * Scan surface of Bironex Prime
 * Master, or Puppet?
 * Scan buildings and cargo containers
 * Approach Veledrus and Tarnak
 * Speak with Veledrus and Tarnak
 * Move out of Tarnak's earshot
 * Trial by Fire
 * Approach Bironex V's moon
 * Rendezvous with I.R.W. Pralix
 * Transmit modulated subspace signal
 * Send out 47-nanometer pulse
 * Defend yourself
 * Reconfigure deflector array to emit tachyons
 * Approach the moon again
 * Conduct tachyon sweep
 * Conference Crasher
 * Speak with Proconsul D'Tan
 * Speak with KDF representative
 * Confront "Hakeev"
 * Homeland Insecurity
 * Approach I.K.S. Yu'hong
 * Scan I.K.S. Yu'hong core breach site
 * Scan I.K.S. Kravik core breach site
 * Scan U.S.S. Ganymede core breach site
 * Expose cloaked Imperial vessel
 * Defeat Imperial vessels
 * Scan for enemy ships
 * Battlestations!