Flyover Country: Chapter 4

"Nob City" by Félicien Nourry

Continued from Chapter 3.

By the time Krissa, BQ, and Batias make it to Manny's construction site (having stopped along the way to sell the pilot's laser pistol and the various shit they ripped out of the gravcar), it's fairly late in the afternoon. Keeping mum about the mess they'd gotten themselves into and out of—and the several thousand credits they'd made—they question the others about what they've learned. Mustang and Roman have tapped their underworld networks for info about Manny, but learned nothing juicy. Sarai has been schmoozing at a karaoke bar, and although she's learned nothing at all about Manny or the job at hand, she has made the acquaintance of a down-on-his-luck businessman named Hoop Barrett (more on him later). Time to meet Manny.

Mansour Saleh is in early middle age, younger than Elias. He's very short, wears a great big beard, and is, by the standards of the Collines, a rich man, having worked his way up from junk dealing to  moneylending to slumlording and now construction. As Elias predicted, Manny is dismayed when six people show up (“It's not a six-person job. It's barely a one-person job. I'm not paying for six people!”), but he's susceptible to flattery and quickly charmed by Sarai's easy manner and fluent French. He brings her, and through her the rest of the crew, up to speed.

There are a several dozen people working on the site, roughly divided into two shifts (day and night); there are also dozens of people living around the construction site, on all four sides of the lot, who could conceivably be keeping an eye on what's happening. The mysterious find, however, is cordoned off behind and below a palisade of scaffolding and tarps. Only about a dozen people know what's actually going on under there: Manny himself; the night foreman, Cecilia Saxena, who's been supervising the excavation, and the small group of workers who've been doing it; the day foreman, Tu Samir; and Manny's secretary, Gloria Moretta. The ruin was originally discovered on Tu's watch; the workers who first encountered it got moved to the night shift.

Manny wants to talk money, but the crew insist on first having a chance to evaluate the find. Manny leads them under the tarps and shows them: Emerging from the earth at one corner of the foundation pit is a smooth, white convex expanse of some kind of ancient composite material. Definitely pretech. The PCs put their heads together and determine a few basic facts, including where the entrance is and that they could probably punch their way through with a demo charge, although that seems like it's probably an unacceptably unsubtle way to do the job. Krissa, meanwhile, has realized that the structure is psychically responsive; she's pretty sure that she could telekinetically "touch" an activator for its systems. It's just that nobody else knows she's a psychic yet.

The crew decide to employ a little stagecraft to impress Manny with how difficult and dangerous the job is. Roman cooks up a flashy but harmless chemical reaction to make it seem like the structure might flash-fry an intruder who monkeys with it, BQ throws in a bunch of intimidating technobabble, and Sarai eventually persuades Manny that the crew (and Elias) deserve 40% of the take.

While this all happening, a breaking news bulletin arrives:

Just before noon today, a gravcar belonging to Khabara-based multistellar corporation Minara Foods was hijacked in Freeport. In a brazen attack, at least three heavily armed and armored assailants seized the vehicle and forced the pilot to take them into the upper slums, several kilometers east of the city limits, where they grounded and sabotaged the vehicle before escaping on foot, narrowly eluding Minara security. The gravcar pilot was recovered alive; she is injured but in stable condition. The lone passenger, Minara Vice President of Purchasing and Wholesale Simon Katib, who appears to have been the target of the attack, is missing and feared dead. Minara security requests any information related to the identities of the assailants.

* * *

Having provisionally secured the bag, the crew split up. BQ thinks they might be able to activate some kind of door interface if they can wake the facility's dormant systems by broadcasting the right radio signal, so Roman and Mustang get to work on that while he scans the structure and takes notes. Krissa and Batias go to "reconnoiter the perimeter" ("watch soap operas in the quarters Manny has offered them" and "find the nearest bar," respectively). Sarai interviews the night-shift workers as they arrive.

Cecilia Saxena, a burly woman with a cybernetic arm, is chatty and forthcoming. It's an open secret, she explains, that Tu Samir is in the pay of the Bautista syndicate, helping them keep tabs on Manny's operations. The Najeeb syndicate undoubtedly has a mole of their own in Manny's organization, although whoever that is must be more discreet than Tu; Cecilia doesn't know their identity.

As night falls, a follow-up news report comes over the air:

Tefera Personal Defense has issued a statement regarding today's attack on a Minara Foods gravflyer, asserting that the entire incident, including the hijacking, occurred beyond Freeport city limits and that there was no failure of the security network in Sainte-Odile. They assure the public that this is believed to have been an isolated incident and that there is no expectation of subsequent attacks. In response, representatives from Minara acknowledged that their vehicle was operating in the so-called "Collines," but insisted that it was engaged in routine company business and in no way provoked the attack.

BQ wants to keep investigating the pretech ruin, but the others decide to call it a night, advising Manny to post armed guards. Mustang goes to hang out with Krissa; Roman and Sarai join Batias at the bar, where Sarai's efforts to solicit favorite recipes from the locals are stymied first by Roman inveighing against the insalubrious drinking water in the Collines and launching into an impromptu (and surprisingly well received) chemistry lecture and then by Batias getting rip-roaring drunk and projectile vomiting all over several people, including the proprietor. They get kicked out and drag Batias back to Manny's apartments.

Krissa has used her oracular powers both to scout for danger and to check on how her crewmates will react if she lets them know she's a psychic. At least some of them seem inclined to react positively, which gives her the confidence to confess her big secret to Mustang and Sarai and explain that she can wake the pretech systems without them having to find the right signal frequency—although they can still fake the radio signal for the sake of the others, particularly BQ, who comes from a planet where people are inclined to see psychics as witches in need of burning. They all bond a bit. We learn that Mustang got into the whole rootin'-tootin' Wild West thing when she was cast as the lead on the children's program Annie Oakley's Adventures in Infinite Space.

Late in the night, when all of the PCs are abed—even BQ, who's set up a cot in the tarpaulin tent that shrouds the ruin—a primitive (i.e., TL3) drone comes buzzing and snooping around the construction site, trying to get a look under the tarps. One of Manny's guards shoots it down, and Mustang and Roman manage to recover a partial recording from its innards, showing a couple of balaclava-wearing operatives sending the thing on its way. They all get back to bed, with plans to reconvene in the morning.

* * *

A hungover Batias contacts a local fixer and for-hire intelligence analyst he knows, Fatemeh Harbi, and sends her some stills from the video along with the specs of the drone. She can't be certain who the operators are, but takes a guess: a local private-security firm called Sunrise Strategies, connected to neither the Bautistas nor the Najeebs but rather the Umba family, whose Freeport territory is well to the north. Not necessarily information they can act on, but it does encourage them to get moving.

Mustang declares that she's figured out the signal, Krissa pushes the psychic doorbell, and (as precognitively foreseen), a hardlight hologram of some kind of anthropomorphic exotic bird pops up in front of the pretech ruin. It addresses the crew in an archaic form of Mandate that most of them can't make heads or tails of, but amateur archaeologist BQ has taken some correspondence classes on Classical Mandate and is able to serve as interpreter.

The hologram identifies itself as the custodian of the facility and demands that the PCs identify themselves or leave the premises; after some back and forth about the passage of time, the state of the Sector, and the condition of the facility, however, BQ manages to persuade the thing that it's too damaged to be able to judge whether the PCs really are or aren't a maintenance team come to put things right, and it had better let them in so they can make repairs. It does.

The facility is small—just six rooms—and dilapidated, but intact. Turns out it was a monitoring station keeping track of the long-ago terraforming of Morrow and later geoengineering efforts. There's nothing  extraordinary in it, but there are a bunch of functional computer systems and literal tons of near-priceless pretech junk. It takes the crew only a few hours to identify the most valuable and transportable items, with some remote help from Elias.

They pocket a few odds and ends (pretech cosmetics, TL5 tools, holocodices, translation discs, a roachpopper, polymorphic nanites, a TL5 espresso machine…), connect with the computer systems, identify some valuable data, and prepare to extract everything. Batias scurries off to find a data storage unit to back everything up in case ripping the servers out renders them permanently inoperable, for which he ends up paying a hefty markup. Now they just need a plan for getting everything onto the ship.

* * *

I had the ancient holographic construct speak Middle English (i.e., a cobbled-together mix of bits from Chaucer, the output of a Modern English to Middle English translator, and stuff I made up), then texted translations to BQ's player, who got to interpret and deliver them to the others however he wanted. Fun! Silly!

I also lined up all sorts of peripheral characters and Milieu machinations and set a breadcrumb trail of clues for my players to follow to figure out who was sending drones to spy on them, who the Najeeb mole was, what shadowy figures were trying to poach their treasure trove, and so forth. And the scoundrels mostly ignored them, banking on their ability to smash, grab, dodge danger with precognitive psychic powers, and make a rapid getaway in their powerful spaceship.

Was their confidence misplaced? Find out next time!