Flyover Country: Chapter 3

"City Gate" by Hector Ortiz

Continued from Chapter 2.

At this point, the crew are right back where they started (meeting Elias Bensaïd at the Café Cosmopol about a job) and right where I want them: beholden to both the Milieu (who provided them a ship and expect it to be put at their disposal from time to time) and the Commonwealth spy agency, IRIS (who essentially swiped the ship via some legal skulduggery and also expect to be able to call on the crew for odd jobs). The new job, however, involves neither of them directly.

Elias explains (French accent, remember): "A businessman in the Collines, Manny Saleh, finds, in the foundation pit his people are digging for a new building, something old is there, underground. He wants help getting in, he shares a percentage. Now, Manny is not such a bad guy, for a slumlord. But Manny is, how you say, a big wheel on a small…bicycle? He is the king in his quartier; he cannot imagine he would be betrayed, does not understand how small he is in the big picture. Manny believes he has kept his find a secret, but he has not. He thinks he calls me, I send a locksmith"—he gestures at the crew—"we help him fence his treasure, fastoche. A little cut for you, a little cut for me. We must convince him things are not so simple. Not only because we want a bigger cut, but because they are not. Others want what Manny has found."

He starts counting out advice on his fingers. "One, Manny doesn't speak Mandate well, so use l'argot; he will be better disposed. And don't be rude about his height. Two, right away, he will say, bon sang, why does Elias send so many people, I will not pay for all this! You must convince him, this is a bigger job than he comprehends. You will not only open his treasure box, you will find out who else is snooping around, you will conceal what you find, you will contrive to remove whatever treasure is there without these snoopers perceiving you, you will protect the operation with force if necessary. Three, don't let him name a price yet. He will try; it will be low. I tell him, my people must assess the situation. Tell him the same. Gather evidence, build a case for us. And four, be subtle. You don't show up all at once, you don't come with flashy vehicles, with high-tech gear. Manny is being watched already. Questions?"

They ask a few, and learn that Manny has ties to two Milieu syndicates active in his area: the Najeebs and the Bautistas. Both will expect a cut if something valuable comes from his dig, whereas Elias wants to carry this all off as quietly as possible and keep the biggest cut for the crew and himself. After a bit of haggling, everybody agrees on a 60/40 split of the take (i.e., 40% for Elias and 10% for each PC).

* * *

Getting to Manny's construction site involves either flying (extremely indiscreet) or hoofing it. The trip is a bit of a schlep: almost 10 kilometers, mostly uphill, through the Collines du Sud, the ramshackle favelas that climb the ridge east of Sainte-Odile. Leaving Sainte-Odile and entering the Collines on foot, the players have to pass through a checkpoint (manned by Tefera Personal Defense, the private-security firm contracted by the city to police the wealthier disticts). The cops try to shake them down a bit—six armed individuals, including one with a sniper rifle (Batias picked it up while shopping at the spaceport) and one with a spear, are surely up to no good. Sarai manages to sweet-talk their way through without them having to cough up a bribe, though.

There aren't many major roads, mostly just crooked alleys and lanes between tightly packed buildings, shaded from the oppressive suns by awnings and canopies. The crew stops partway up for a late breakfast at a market stall, enjoying some poulet à la moambe and fresh fruit (Roman abstains, of course). Then they decide to split up: Batias, BQ, and Krissa will head straight to Manny's construction site while Mustang, Roman, and Sarai check in with some of their underworld contacts to see what they can learn about Manny, the Najeebs and Bautistas, and whether there's any buzz about the find yet.

* * *

The direct path turns out not to be. After encountering a vendor selling pineapple-and-goat kebabs and helping themselves to second breakfast, Batias, BQ, and Krissa come around a corner into a small open area where three lanes meet, where they find a large and growing crowd. The collinaires are banging on a door, waving weapons, shouting—and throwing rocks at a gravcar (think a spinner from Blade Runner) that's hovering above the scene. Unfortunately, the mob is yelling in l'argot morrovien (i.e., French), and Mustang and Sarai are the only two PCs who speak it. Should they try to find a Mandate speaker? Backtrack and find a different way up?

Before they can decide, Krissa finds her compad buzzing—the pilot of the gravcar, having spotted three armed outsiders enter the picture, is trying to contact them. Krissa picks up, and the pilot explains the situation: Her client is in the building below that the mob is trying to force their way into, afraid to come out on the roof for a pickup. Could they disperse the mob, or at least make sure the roof is clear? (A few collinaires have managed to climb up there already.) The pilot loops the client, one Simon Katib, in; he's willing to cough up a solid 500 credits for the PCs' assistance. Sure, they say!

…but they're still willing to hear what the mob has to say, if they can find a collinaire who speaks Mandate. As they push their way through the crowd, they do find one, and he asks for their help: Apparently the building the mob's trying to break into is some kind of brothel where a few gangsters have lured local teenagers with promises of easy money and are now holding them at the pleasure of some offworlder pervert who flies over from the Green Zone a couple times a week. The collinaires want their kids back and they want the pervert dead, but they can't scrape together more than a couple hundred credits to pay for assistance.

The PCs put their heads together. Simon, it seems, is bad news. Simon's money, however, is pretty good. Maybe there's an opportunity here to get paid…twice? In his spaceport shopping spree, we learn, Batias didn't just get that sniper rifle; he also picked up a demo charge, some glowbugs, some thermal flares, and a grapnel launcher (He's basically broke now. This will be a recurring theme.) He takes aim at the brothel roof, fires, and clocks a collinaire in the head. Whoops. He tries again, sticks the landing, and secures the rope. Our heroes ascend.

On the roof, one collinaire is trying to batter the door down, one is shouting to the crowd, and one is now sitting on his ass, clutching his concussed, bleeding head. The PCs shoo the uninjured pair off the roof at gunpoint, then herd the injured guy into the corner farthest from the door. Batias boldly steps to the edge of the roof, dodges a couple rocks—the crowd's mood has turned decidedly against the PCs—and then gesticulates for them all to back off, waving his rifle menacingly. In spite of the language barrier and the fact that he's wildly outnumbered, Batias manages to cow the mob.

The pilot eases the gravcar down toward the roof, and Krissa tells Simon to come on out. He emerges, makes a run for his vehicle—and gets tackled by BQ. Chaos ensues. Simon panics, the pilot starts hollering over the comms, and a couple of the gangsters from the brothel comes up the stairs to see what's going on. After a brief standoff with the better-armed Batias, the gangsters simply close and lock the rooftop door and retreat. The PCs insist they're still going to put Simon on the gravcar; they just want to be sure he doesn't fly off without paying them. The coax the pilot down.

Now covered by Krissa's laser pistol, Simon is bundled into the back seat. To the pilot's dismay, BQ clambers into the front passenger seat and jams a stun baton (another recent spaceport purchase) into her ribs. Krissa and Batias squeeze aboard. They get Simon to unlock his compad, then wrestle it away from him and drain his accounts, netting 2,000-odd credits. They start debating what to do next—should they just dump Simon straight into the mob? He wets himself. Now the pilot cuts in.

"Listen," she says, "I don't give a shit what you do with him at this point"—Simon wails miserably—"I just want to get out of this in one piece myself. If I shut down the flight recorder and get you out of here, will you cut me part of the take and help me make it look like a kidnapping?" Sounds good to them: They transfer her a couple hundred credits, throw Simon to his grisly fate, and speed away. The pilot puts them down up at the top of the Collines, not far from Manny's construction site, hands over her laser pistol, lets them bind her hands, and then slips away to await "rescue."

Krissa stands watch while BQ tries to wipe the gravcar's computer system and Batias sets a demo charge in the cockpit as Plan B. BQ's a smart guy, but he has no background in computer science and struggles to make heads or tails of the system. When Krissa's precognitive powers tell her that an armed corporate-security gravflyer is about to swoop down on them, they rip what electronic components they can out of the dashboard, disappear into the nearest alley just in time to avoid detection, and then set off the demo charge, blowing the gravcar to smithereens.

* * *

The whole Simon Katib misadventure occurred in a single short-handed session, with half the group unable to attend, and started with one sentence in a random-encounter table I slapped together for the trip up through the Collines: "Some kind of street gathering is being broken up as a grav vehicle comes in to land, or a mob is gathering to attack the grav vehicle." I rolled up a slimy little NPC for it to revolve around, extrapolated from there, and then watched my players make a delightful mess out of it.

A precognitive psychic makes her own luck, to some extent, but we also established here that the group is just naturally lucky. So many things could've gone wrong for them but didn't, particularly when it came to bullying NPCs into backing off without a fight. Batias facing off against an entire mob, in particular, could easily have ended with him being ripped to shreds; the collinaires mostly had rocks and clubs for weapons, but a good number of them had zip guns or pipe rifles, and there were several dozen of them!