Flyover Country: Chapter 1

Sketch by Kunrong Yap

Continued from Cast and Crew.

The crew gamely accepts their mission, heads to the spaceport in the company of a couple of beaux voyous, and rockets their way north toward the Konyr–Sylva border. They set down, as instructed, at the forward base, a sprawl of tents and prefab structures on the edge of a Sylvan town; the landing pad is just a revetment thrown up around the margins of a soccer field.

Unfortunately but predictably, Vasia is nowhere to be found. The base is swarming with civilian refugees from Konyr, PFFK guerrillas, and Sylvan military advisors, though, so there are plenty of folks to talk to. The crew asks around, and shortly learn that Vasia was here recently: She rounded up a small group of volunteers and went back across the border to settle one last piece of business before the anticipated armistice. She left behind a number of soldiers from her unit; most are happy to be out of harm's way and killing time until the war officially ends, but Sarai finds a couple of teenage guerillas who, dismayed at having been left behind and worried about their beloved commander, are willing to lead these assuredly friendly strangers to her.

These child soldiers, Sangeeta and Alain, indicate on a map where they expect Vasia to be. Taking them in tow, the crew boards the ship again and flies east, into Konyr. Roman tinkers with the sensors and calibrates them to pick up human life signs at short range. When they reach the village Sangeeta and Alain directed them to, the sensors indicate several people on the ground floor of the village's one multistory apartment building, so BQ sets the ship down nearby and the crew cautiously approach the burned-out structure.

Turns out the Vasia clashed here with the target of her vendetta, one Suman Dawson, a turncoat royalist colonel who is raiding his former allies along the frontier. He's trying to burnish his eleventh-hour reputation as a rebel in hopes of currying influence in postwar politics, but the PFFK guerillas explain that he's a cunning, ruthless monster responsible for heinous atrocities earlier in the war. Vasia is determined to bury him before the armistice—or after it, if she must.

She and her troops carried the day in the village earlier and pursued Dawson and his surviving fighters north, leaving three badly wounded guerillas in the care of a medic. Krissa offers to spell the PFFK medic and surreptitiously stabilizes the wounded with her biopsionic powers. The crew loots the dead royalists and then takes to the skies again; the rival groups marched north hours ago, but the distance is trivial for a spaceship, and the crew quickly finds Vasia and her troops, who have only just cornered Dawson and his in an abandoned mineshaft. They land and parley with the rebel commander, who insists that time is of the essence and wants the crew's help making a frontal assault. They demur.

Sarai, with some engine-revving help from BQ, half-bluffs, half-threatens to bury Dawson and his troops alive with the ship—it's unarmed, but the enemy doesn't know that, and of course starship engines are potentially dangerous all by themselves. Roman, meanwhile, finds some ventilation shafts for the mine and chucks an improvised thermite bomb down into the tunnel. The crew issues an ultimatum: They just want Dawson; if his erstwhile soldiers will turn him and their weapons over, they'll be let go.

Shots ring out from the mine. A long minute or two later, a few royalists, one wounded, stagger out, hands up. Dawson and a couple others resisted them, they say; they think he's dead, but it's a smoky mess inside. A few of the crew head in, with Mustang taking point. When she sees something moving in the hazy darkness ahead, she fires immediately, killing the last royalist holdout. The job—or at least the first, hardest part of the job—is done.

Krissa patches up the wounded, the crew bids goodbye to Sangeeta and Alain, and Vasia makes a dramatic farewell speech to her most loyal companions, explaining that she's been tapped to represent Sylva in the secret negotiations between Morrow's provisional planetary government and the Commonwealth. Tears, hugs, some "I shall return" promises, and the crew's off to the stars with Vasia to receive further instructions.

* * *

I overprepared a little for this first job—there were a bunch of characters at the forward base the players never talked to, and some possible random encounters they entirely circumvented—but all in all, I did a pretty good job sketching out the big picture, complete with a rough timeline of events, and then just improvising when the players defied my expectations. Which they did right away: I was expecting them to follow Sangeeta and Alain on foot, spend a day or two marching into the Konyri interior, and not catch up with Vasia until at least one more battle had taken place. But why not just fly? Even their junker of a spaceship is TL4 and can't be scratched by the primitive TL3 antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles of the royalist army. Can't argue with that!

Of the various little tools I put together for the campaign, a random name generator I whipped up with Perchance immediately proved to be invaluable and has, from the very first session on, continued to be my MVP. (We have that generator to thank for Sangeeta and Alain; José the medic; their wounded PFFK comrades Parvati, Jay, and Laura; and Suman Dawson himself, not to mention dozens of subsequent NPCs major and minor.) I originally planned to make it super complicated and weight it differently for the different ethnic makeups of all the different planets, but after inputting a couple thousand names, I lost my zeal for that plan. And it turns out that with that many names, and a few Sector-wide weights, I'm getting an enjoyably eclectic mix and don't feel the need to fine-tune.

Next: Factions & Faction Turn 1.