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There was a bit a bump here because the players had done their financial planning based in large part on the price of Standard Spare Parts™ units as MCr1. This was my mistake but Mongoose's fault; for some bizarre reason all the new Traveller publications don't separate thousands with commas as well as discarding MCr and KCr for million and thousand, making it confusing for the number-blind GM to glance at a cost and come out with the right number. So there was not quite the fortune to be made selling the loot from the pirate cache that they'd expected.
Spare Parts, cheaper than you might expect...
Over the next few days, Nevada and Feng worked their commercial contacts on the starport, selling the spare parts and life-support charges they had looted from the Blue Razors to ship captains passing through. They also took on a cargo of freight for their next destination. This was enough - just - to fund the purchase of the replacement manouvre drive for the BR corsair.
They needed a heavy grav lifter to move both it and the replacement armour plates for the hull, and a tip from Hayden Poole took them to the liquidation sale of Frankenburger Freight Factors, a failed merchantile business on the downport. From there they sourced a lifter for a bargain price. Its' power plant was old and not as efficient as it had been, but it looked sufficient for the job.
A new product was about to hit the markets; with the aid of the rats, the previously impossible job of milking Nobbles had become easy and the product Nob Cheese was nearly ready for sale.
Merrick Sturnn was ready to return to space with the Short Walk and resume his trade run. After some discussion, the rats offered him a group of ten to travel with him, which he accepted. It was very unlikely that he wouldn't be continuing their education into the art of gambling as they travelled.
The Long Walk dropped back into Collace space a week later. For most of the Cats it felt like coming home. They'd not been here for more than six months and things had changed. While system security was still tightly implemented by warships posted across the ecliptic, the percentage of people in uniform in the streets of the arcologies was far lower. Half the system was scattered with wreckage, which was slowly being recovered.
Their PAN message queues were quite well filled after this long. In Feng's was one she found quite interesting; 
There were a few days to go for this, so they landed at Botany Bay and Feng started checking on the progress of the biosphere. She was pleased with what she found. The tweaks she'd applied to the agrobots' instructions on her last visit had begun to pay off.
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The next day, the CWG set out to source the parts they needed to repair the wrecked pirate ship. With the glut of wrecked Trexalonian ships scattered across the outer system, second hand slightly used ship parts were available in quantities. There were dealers in new product from GsBAG and General Products on Collace, but for second hand supplies, the crew had two existing contacts; Billy’s Mart, ship chandler and LS supplies at Shadira Downport and Daven’s 2nd hand Ship Parts on the Highport. After extensive shopping around and haggling between these two, the crew managed to secure the following:
With all of it being salvage from the battle, none of it came with any form of a warranty.
The improved sensors they wanted were beyond either Collace or Trexalon's tech level; those and several of the other upgrades were likely to require a trip to Glisten to source.
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It had been quite a while since the Cats had been in Staerla City, but its sleazy, dystopian, dangerous air was just the same. Checking their comms were set up in case either group ran into trouble, they headed off to the game.
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They'd not seen their favourite Gravball team, the Rangers, for some time. The crowd numbers seemed to have increased, and there were more shirt, food and merch vendors; "Remember Joey" shirts were everywhere, although there were a number of variants now, "Remember Bobby!" "Remember Strephon" and so on. Apparently the Rangers were on the up. The game was its' normal brutal quicksilver ballet, with blood all over the place. The Rangers won 6-1 against the Corfu Cobblers.
Heartened by this, the party split, with Wombat and Nevada heading for Gueverra’s for some Mexican food and Feng going to keep her assignation.
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Zena's was - for Dark City - a pretty upscale sort of joint, and very suitable for private conversation or clandestine affairs. Feng drifted in, wearing her red Diplo dress and only marginally armed to the teeth, and spotted her contact "Gutter" Santiago waiting at a table for two in a corner booth.
The pair greeted each other and settled to a pleasant meal, chatting about unimportant things, though Feng dropped some teasing anecdotes about the party's adventures that whetted the journalist's appetite. His other appetites were all too clear, but Quin Feng was not in playful mood tonight.
Over coffee, Gutter got down to business and explained his discovery.
The defence of Collace was extremely successful, but there were losses, several squadrons of starships of various sizes were destroyed, and associated casualties. Being a nosy git, Gutter had been skimming through data he wasn’t supposed to have access to when he noticed something odd.
There was a tiny but perceptible discrepancy between the number of “Dear Mrs Atkins, we deeply regret…” PAN messages received and the number of crew who had ejected in escape pods. Gutter had been following up with survivors from several ships, and had collected anecdotal evidence of fellow crewmen said to have survived to abandon ship, who were then notified as lost in battle to their nearest and dearest. It was by no means a complete picture, and at some point he had strayed just a bit over the line and been noticed, because the data he’d been working from had been re-secured beyond his ability to reach it.
He had queried the Navy, but they had responded back that they had checked their databases and the missing/dead crewmen and notification messages tallied up; they were very careful to get these things right after all.
Some of the NOK had declined to speak to him, and some were untraceable.
As a result, his investigation was now at a dead end. He did, however, know resourceful people to offer this to!
Total Navy and SysDef casualties for the battle were listed as 40,811 – a flyspeck for a population of billions – but Gutter’s investigation so far suggested around 003% of those should have survived; a little over a thousand people…
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Wombat and Nevada walked into Gueverra's, an old haunt, and responded to the proprietor's greeting. Devel Wilson was not just a restauranteur, but a black-market dealer in weapons and armour with whom they'd done business in the past. "Long time no see," he said, gesturing to their slick Diplo suits, "doing well these days I see." Wombat responded with what he thought was banter but missed the mark entirely. Perhaps because of this, their dinners - while excellent - were breathtakingly spiced, leaving both with tears in their eyes.
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On their way through the city, they'd seen posters for the emerging metal band the Blastoliths, whom Feng had enmeshed in the Joeys T Shirt excercise. Apparently, despite their various unfortunate accidents at the hands of the Bluey gang, they were still going and able to - for want of a better word - perform. Apparently, they even had an album out. The party didn't bother going to the gig.
The next day, the party gathered to consider Gutter's mystery. If he was correct and a thousand servicemen were missing, what could be the motive? Slavery, organlegging, illegal drug testing, political disappearance or dog food were all considered, but there was not much to go on. Of course, there were no records for life pods launched by Trexalonian ships during the battle - of which there would be a lot more, given the outcome. It did occur to them that there were possible paralels with the slaving pirates who had operated out of what was now Botany Bay - and whose onward contacts they had never identified.
The anecdotal evidence, cross-referenced with the ships of the tellers, tended to point towards the outer system, which wasn't news as most of the battle had taken place there. If this was to be unravelled, it was going to need to be in conjunction with the Collacan Navy.
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A request to see Admirak Khundrak of the Collacan navy was responded to by one Lieutenant Kondraki, of Naval Intelligence. On hearing a brief summary of their findings, he invited them to the Admiralty to discuss things further. Nevada and Wombat donned full dress uniform, medals and all, and slung dress swords at their waists; Quin Feng preferred her slinky but protective Diplo dress. This had unexpected side-effects; as the two officers - famous heroes from the Battle of Collace - walked into the Admiralty, all eyes were on them, and Feng, Fabulous as she was, was practically unnoticed.
After explaining the theory, and laying out the evidence collected so far, the Cats considered options for further investigation. Kondraki pointed out that the analysis of the computer logs from the battle and the search-and-rescue afterwards would take months to analyse. It occurred to Wombat that there might be a better analytical engine available, and he asked permission to bring Vespasian in to do the crunching. He was described as a passenger, not owned by the CWG, and the phrase "Hiver Robot" was carefully avoided.
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It took a few days for Kondraki to get clearance to set up the analysis. Vespasian, as ever, answered "As long as it does not conflict with my core programming" when asked if he would assist. When asked if he could use intuition, the robot replied "I am programmed to emulate humanoid emotion, but leaps of illogic are not something I can do. I can, however, consider a matter while retaining in my workspace far more data than a human could. This might resemble intuition to you."
"Can you forget what you discover afterwards?" asked Wombat. "If it does not conflict with my core progamming," answered the robot.
Eventually, the Cats and Vespasian - clad in a trenchcoat and one of Jesse's sombreros - were shown into a data suite in the NI section of the Admiralty, and a white-coated technician, introduced as Emeral Mays, guided them to a data port. "The data required is sectioned off for your use," he said, "can you connect to a standard data port?" Vespasian hinged aside a hand and unpacked an Imperial standard data connection, which he jacked in. The requirement was explained to him and he went quiet.
For nine hours.
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Finally, he announced some findings. Of the ships in the SAR effort, four of the civilian volunteer ships had been in the appropriate area.
None of the four had turned in any pods, and for each there was a gap of several days during which they were somewhere in the vicinity of Karthas. They reappeared during or after a skim manouvre, and headed out to the limit and jumped.
"Their registrations are listed as valid," observed Vespasian, "but on closer examination there are some irregularities."
Other vessels had been in roughly the same area; a type R called the Jarvis, which had a regular 3-stop run to Tarsus and Mertactor; a Marava class named Tabby which had only visited the once, and a type A named Brian Boru that was an occasional visitor. The Jarvis was due back on 070.
It began to dawn on the humans present that Vespasian was very well informed. "You have no access to that information from here," protested Mays. Vespasian was impassive, but there was an air of slight smugness anyway. "Your security systems are good," he commented. "I am better."
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"Are there no sensor records of those four ships' movements for that period of time?" asked Nevada incredulously. "I have checked the records of all commercial ships in the system," replied the robot. There was a short pause. "I have checked the records of all military ships in the system," he continued, "there are no sightings. None were in the vicinity. The records of the Jarvis, Tabby and Brian Boru should cover that period but they are not in-system." he completed.
"There were no SDBs in the outer system during SAR," he added, "They do not have capacity to transport rescued crew."
Mays was pale and shaking. "What is this thing?" he blathered, waving at Vespasian. "How is it getting into all these systems?!"
"The gaps in the records are not deletions," reported Vespasian. "There was nothing recorded for those ships - only - for those times - only."
"What about system defence sensors?" asked Nevada. Vespasian paused a beat. "Many were destroyed in the battle," he reported. "There are sensor platforms in orbit around Karthas, Kitonon and Kex."
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"Who controls those?" asked Wombat. "Systems Defence, Observation Division," stuttered Mays. "Shall we ask him to check those too?" asked Nevada. "Why not?" said Mays rather wildly, "We're cooked here unless we can prove it was worth it!" Feng grinned at him. "Let's ask for forgiveness, then," she said gleefully.
The answer shocked everyone. "I am unable to access the computers on the Systems Defence sensor platforms," he commented. "They have competent security."
At this point, the Admiral himself arrived, greatly agitated, demanding to know what was going on. This incensed Nevada, who pulled his (perceived) rank as an Imperial and a Hero to scold the Admiral for criticising an attempt to rescure his personnel. "Someone needs to go and check those sensors and get those records!" Feng stepped in to defuse the situation, and the Admiral turned to practical things.
"Go and do it!" he snapped. "Mays - you're going with them. And you, Kondraki."
He pointed at Vespasian.
"That stays here," he stated firmly. Nevada nodded - after all, Vespasian wasn't their robot. "Vespasian, co-operate with them, please," he said.
"Of course. As long as it does not conflict with my core programming."