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"Anthill Stories—Arcade" by Marat Zakirov |
Continued from Chapter 8.
* * *
The two groups debrief and divvy up the loot, with the high-value stuff and the pieces Nobu Stephanidis wanted going in the secure crates Director Rao provided (alongside the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher, and the other weapons they're definitely not allowed to be carrying around down here). The three young survivors from the other group of looters will have to smuggle their share of the take into the city bit by bit and fence what they can locally.
These three are Kathy Chen, Oksana Yousef, and Patrick Muñoz. Patrick is the oldest and most experienced of the three, and he's barely 21—seems like the late Lorena was something of a Fagin figure in the lower depths of Sokhna, recruiting teenagers to a life of crime. Without her to lead them, these kids are at loose ends, and Sarai, being something of a Fagin herself, offers them a chance to sign on with the crew, get off Opis, and see the Sector.
After discussing matters among themselves, they agree. Kathy and Oksana will sign on immediately; Patrick is staying on Opis for now to manage the sale of their loot. The three accept a 60/40 split on their art from the heist. The share they're leaving for Patrick to deal with wouldn't all fit in the secure crates, even if the PCs were inclined to stiff the kids (and certain parties are so inclined, though thankfully not a majority), but it's worth a good chunk of change, maybe 100,000 credits altogether if Patrick can swing some good deals.
* * *
Safely back in Sokhna, with their loot loaded up, no APB out on them, and no pressing time crunch to worry about, the PCs split up to run errands, meet old friends, and close a major commodity transaction, with Sarai netting a 16,000-credit profit on the wine they shipped over from Rustam. Batias and BQ find their way, down in the lowest depths of the underground city, into an illegal casino, where Batias gambles away 13,184 of his own credits, then 13,000 borrowed from BQ. On their way back, jumped by would-be robbers, they explain that they're completely destitute. The robbers, impressed both by Batias's sangfroid in the face of deadly violence and how sanguine he is, having just lost a modest fortune, about his financial prospects, stay awhile to listen to him preach the prosperity gospel.
“Give me your credits,” he promises them, “and your wealth will be returned to you sevenfold.” They dig around in their pockets for the credsticks they've lifted off other victims and scrape together 118 credits. BQ promptly demands that Batias give him half.
Sarai has looked up the chef who was assigned to her parents during the family's glory days as high-flying diplomats. The woman, Laurence, is back on Opis, her homeworld, retired from the Ministry of External Relations and raising her two teenage kids, Timothee and Charlotte, in Anchorpoint, which is only five hours away or so from Sokhna by high-speed rail. They make plans for dinner; Laurence recommends several fine restaurants in Sokhna, and Sarai chooses a Franco-Egyptian place called Barbeau's.
Sarai wants to catch up—it was Laurence who started her on the path to being a gourmet and an amateur chef, and Laurence who, among the foreign-service staff who essentially raised her in the stead of her negligent parents, was always kindest to her. They swap stories and recipes; Sarai finally gets the list of secret ingredients to make the tiny samosas she most loved as a kid. But she has an ulterior motive, of course. She wants information. Who ratted her parents out? Laurence isn't 100% sure, but she points a tentative finger at a man named Yuriy de la Cruz, a senior secretary in the diplomatic corps who was assigned to the Commonwealth embassy on Alzuhr alongside Sarai's mother. Just as crooked as the Lentiers, if not more so, he might have betrayed them to save his own skin when his sloppy trail of graft caught up with him.
Mustang, meanwhile, gets in touch with old friends from the world of filmmaking. She meets Elsa Herrera, a documentarian, for a drink at a dive bar down in the lower city. Elsa promises put Mustang in touch with some folks she's been working with who might be interested in facilitating the Jaynewei Moon cinematic renaissance.
Back on the ship, Mustang finds a beautiful pair of shoes among the odds and ends she bagged at the estate—seems Elsa wears the same shoe size as Nana Malik, slightly too small for Mustang—and has Kathy wrap them up and run them over to Elsa as a gift. She gets Kathy cleaned up and dressed up first and gives her some “ice cream money.” Mustang then retires to her quarters to bask in the 126,000 comments and multitudinous DMs her TannTann videos have provoked.
* * *
Krissa wants to find a mentor to help her understand and manage her burgeoning telekinetic powers, but is, as always, leery of letting anybody know just how powerful she is, or that she's a psychic at all. Could she find a trustworthy teacher around here?
There must be literally thousands of telekinetics on Opis; even if a disproportionate number have been pressed into government service, and their mortality rate is high, and less than 10% of the planet's population is in and around Sokhna, there should be several hundred telekinetics in the region, which means several tens of skill-1 telekinetics, which means several skill-2 (but probably at most one skill-3). Even if there is anybody above skill-2, Mosylon has a near-monopoly on the highest-level psychics, and any skill-3 psychics who emerged in the Commonwealth were probably snatched up by the government and military. So there's likely no psychic around who's more powerful than Krissa, but there might be a handful who are as skilled at telekinesis as Krissa is at biopsionics and precognition, and perhaps one or two of them have private academies.
The dice say…yep, there's a fellow named Adamu Ibrahim in Sokhna, trained in metapsionics and telekinesis, who offers discreet training and mentorship, a sort of one-man private academy with a limited curriculum. There's no time for a proper course of story, but Krissa has a consultation, and the kindly Mr. Ibrahim teaches her some exercises to practice her telekinetic powers and settle her fears.
She and Sarai meet up when their engagements are done to restock the ship's liquor cabinet (five bottles of the good stuff, five of rotgut) and kitchen (all-purpose pan, stock pot, stand mixer, etc.).
* * *
Everybody spends the night on the ship and, after some cooking and other lollygagging, depart around midday. They drill out around the same time on the 20th, having tortured Kathy and Oksana (neither of whom has ever been off Opis before, no less out of the system) a bit with mild hazing and then terrifying horror stories about interstellar travel. They arrive in Marquez around midnight at the start of the 22nd, and land on Rustam early in the morning on the 23rd. The delivery of goods to Stephanidis goes off almost without a hitch, but Batias can't resist trying to shake the old man down for some extra money. Not only will he not budge—they get paid only what he had promised them—but they've now probably burned a valuable contact. Oh well; there are more fish in the sea. And more valuable contacts to burn!
They've got a couple other irons in the fire, after all. For one thing, there's the other stuff Leila asked them to look into. Having landed a sweetheart of a deal on Opis, they don't have much incentive to head to Marjan now, so investigating the pretech cultists is out. Leila had two tasks for them here on Rustam, though—looking into Enderlein & Sons and snooping around sketchy pharmaceutical company Foxglove. Their inquiries about Enderlein haven't turned anything up, and the local who probably has the best inside info on whatever pretech smuggling the company might be doing is now disinclined to help the PCs.
Foxglove, though? Turns out a couple university classmates of Roman's ended up working for them, and one, Aline Wang, is an associate director in the R&D department right here at the Porto Seguro research campus. She's willing to meet with them; guess Roman didn't make too negative of an impression on her.
Their conversation is cagey. Aline makes it clear that she has some knowledge of what Foxglove is doing on Lopez Ring—she travels to the station semi-regularly, and her position involves organizing research logistics—but of course she's not going to sell company secrets cheaply. The amount of cash the PCs have on hand clearly isn't enough to interest her. What else have they got? Roman explains that they're in the business of archaeological assessment and salvage, they've been identifying and recovering relics from Mandate-era sites all over the Sector (he begins to exaggerate a little), and surely something they've recovered would be of interest. Associate Director Wang asks, “For example?”
Roman's player turns to me. “Is there any kind of pretech super-science material she'd be desperate to get her hands on?” And hey, what do you know? At one point in my brainstorming, I actually did come up with just such a material: atrament. Of course, at this point, atrament exists only as a couple of scribbles in my notebook:
inky black mercury-like psychic smart matter?
And then, slightly more thought out:
Atrament, or atramentum, is an ink-black, psychically resonant liquid metal invaluable for repairing, producing, or modifying advanced pretech. It's the most important and most valuable of the strange synthetics identified thus far.
It's not nothing, but it's gonna need some fleshing out. Roman's player's first thought was, hey, Roman's a genius chemist, he'll just cook some of this stuff up. But I have to veto this: The thing about atrament, I decree, is that nobody knows how to make it. Limited quantities are left over from before the Scream, tightly controlled, hoarded by governments and other powerful factions. If Roman could figure out how to synthesize the stuff, he'd be the richest (and/or most wanted) man in the Sector.
Roman's player is unfazed. Can't make it? No problem. Roman can just fake it, probably.
“We pulled a couple liters of atrament out of a site not that long ago,” he lies. “We've stashed it in a secure location, of course.”
Wang is astounded, skeptical, and greedily curious. A couple liters, I explain, is far more than she's ever seen of the stuff, more than her employer possesses. Probably on the level of a sovereign planet's entire strategic reserve. A quantity that would be extremely significant even to the few entities in the Sector that do have considerably more than that already—the Commonwealth, the Directory, Seneschal Systems, maybe a handful of others.
She wants to see, if not atrament (she understands why they wouldn't be walking around with it), some kind of proof that they really have been rooting around in untouched pretech ruins. The PCs, who are still carrying a handful of the items they yanked out of the Freeport site (roachpoppers, holocodices, projector panels), oblige. She still doesn't entirely believe them about the atrament, but she can't miss even the chance of an opportunity like this; she asks them to bring her a milliliter of the stuff, gives them the next dates she'll be at the Foxglove offices on Lopez Ring, and encourages them to meet her there as soon as possible.
* * *
How are they going to get their hands on even a small supply of atrament? They contact Leila, who scoffs at the idea of supplying them any, but does transmit some useful information about the substance's chemical and electromagnetic signature, which might help Roman spoof some. Having run some experiments in his makeshift lab aboard the ship, he experiences a rare moment of humility; he doesn't think that any fake atrament he'll be able to produce will stand up to the kind of scrutiny it would be reasonable to expect from Wang. The crew decides to put this flimflam operation on the back burner. They'll be headed in the general direction of Magonia, Roman's home planet, where the Sector's greatest expert on atrament, a researcher named Nelson Martinez, lives. Maybe he can help? Maybe they can rob his lab.
In the meantime, they want to focus on ripping off Ashbrook, with Orlando as their double agent. Ashbrook doesn't know where Orlando has disappeared to—few people, if any outside of the crew and Elias, know that he's aboard the PCs' ship—so a little while back, they had him contact her, explaining in a carefully calibrated tone (half angry, half pleading) that he survived the fiasco in Freeport, still wants his fair share of the money, and has been independently tracking the PCs. He believes the looted cargo is still aboard their ship, he claims, and he has the opportunity to seize it if only Ashbrook will extend him some funds with which to hire mercenaries. She needs to act fast, though.
She does. The message, and the money, come through. She wants Orlando to hire mercs, seize the ship, and bring it back to Morrow. The rendezvous site is a desolate salt flat within easy flying distance of Freeport. He should communicate his ETA at his earliest (secure) convenience.
Batias takes the entire 8,000-credit payment Ashbrook has sent, claiming that he knows a guy who can hook the crew up with combat field uniforms—they want to be prepared for what might turn out to be a knock-down, drag-out firefight, right? He does, it turns out, know a guy, whom he manages to persuade to sell him four CFUs on credit. Batias pockets Ashbrook's credits. Now he just needs to find another gambling den.