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| Sketch by Kunrong Yap |
Continued from Chapter 4.
The PCs have a pretty good haul: approximately three tons of assorted pretech junk (with a market value of about 50kc a ton, per the old SWN supplement Suns of Gold), various more-or-less useful TL5 knicknacks, and a bunch of data. Some schematics, the locations of eleven other facilities like the one they've just looted, and centuries of geoengineering observations. They know that the latter data will be particularly valuable on Opis (Mustang's and Sarai's homeworld) or Munda, two planets struggling to maintain ancient terraforming systems. Altogether, they figure they're looking at a quarter million credits or more—enough, even after paying Manny and Elias their cuts, to fix up the ship and have way more cash left over than they've seen in the campaign thus far.
All they need to do is get it out of a hole in the ground deep in a dense urban slum and onto their ship. There's nowhere in the immediate vicinity of Manny's construction site for their ship to set down, and they don't want to draw attention to themselves by trying to winch the loot up into a hovering starship or anything like that. They figure they'll just sneak it out disguised as construction debris—a dump truck leaves the site most evenings, so they'll line up an extra truck (Batias knows a guy, of course), load it with all the portable loot, and head for the dump in a two-truck convoy.
BQ flags down a motorcycle taxi and speeds away to the spaceport to get the ship ready. If nothing bad happens on the way to the dump, the other five will just rumble on down to the port and fly away unsuspected. If things go haywire, there's enough open space at the dump to set the ship down.
* * *
Now, my players may have been largely ignoring my peripheral NPCs and Milieu machinations, but the NPCs haven't been ignoring them. Tu Samir has been spying on Manny for the Bautistas; surely somebody has been spying for the Najeebs too, right? Well, sort of. Manny's beloved secretary, Gloria Moretta, was recruited as a mole for the syndicate, and she's been feeding information to her handler, Orlando Ilunga, but Orlando has gone rogue.
When Gloria informed him that Manny's workers had found some kind of buried pretech facility, rather than pass the info up the syndicate's chain of command, he contacted the mysterious, mononymic corporate agent Ashbrook, who he knows is interested in any pretech finds around Freeport. Ashbrook is, among other things, a fixer for Mputu Manufacturing, a local subsidiary of Khabaran megacorporate giant Echelon Shipbuilding & Engineering, which is heavily engaged in pretech research. Orlando figures (more or less correctly) that the take will be in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, and even a 10% cut will be life-changing for him.
Can Orlando trust Ashbrook to deliver on that promised 10%? Unclear, but he's greedy (or desperate) enough to roll the dice. In order to keep the site under observation in case Gloria gets cold feet (or gets cut out of the loop), and in order to have muscle on hand, he's contracted local private-security firm Sunrise Strategies (who are connected to neither the Bautistas nor the Najeebs but the Umba family across town). He's paying them hundreds of credits—a very large chunk of his meager personal savings. Orlando needs results, and fast.
Ashbrook, meanwhile, has not only gotten herself looped in regarding the Sunrise surveillance, she's also retained the services of a small Khabaran PMSC called Eminent Alternatives; they have eight soldiers standing by with an armed gravflyer, advanced drones, and weaponry that significantly outclasses the players'. Whereas the syndicates just want to shake Manny down for money, Ashbrook is willing to blow up half the neighborhood to get the goods, especially if there's something more significant down there than junk and stims (and she has a better sense than anybody else involved of what this site actually was). She does want confirmation that the PCs have unearthed something worth messily stealing, though.
* * *
Blissfully ignorant of all this but confident in their talents, and especially in Krissa's precognitive powers (which half the crew actually know about now, as opposed to their players, who haven't been able to help metagaming a bit), the PCs wait for their truck. Batias's guy, a part-time driver, part-time model named Konstantin Hossain, rolls up, and with the help of a crude gravsled Roman has MacGyvered together, they quickly get the goods into the truck's bed. They decide that Krissa and Mustang will clamber up there with their loot, concealed by a tarp, while the other three will squeeze into the cab of the truck with Konstantin. The regular crew of the other dump truck—the one actually loaded with debris bound for the dump—will be joined by two of Manny's rifle-toting guards.
The players' faith in Krissa is, of course, well-founded. As it will many, many, many times to come, her Terminal Reflection ability foils the enemy's plans. Sunrise Strategies operatives, shadowing the trucks with a drone, have laid an ambush: Three gunmen will block the trucks' forward path while one steps out behind it; they'll get a look in the beds of the trucks under the pretense of checking the drivers' papers, then simply shoot everybody in the trucks if one or both are carrying the goods.
Forewarned, Konstantin accelerates rather than braking, plowing through one of the gunmen while the others dive for cover. Krissa and Mustang throw the tarp off, the PCs open fire, and they swiftly dispatch two enemies, although the one behind the trucks manages to fatally shoot one of Manny's guards before being brought down in turn. Krissa surreptitiously saves the mortally wounded guard with her biopsionic Remote Repair power; he comes to bewildered, unaware of how he managed to survive.
Speeding toward the dump, the crew call for BQ to bring the ship straight there. They pull the truck with the loot right up to the ship's cargo ramp and hurriedly begin loading (the cargo bay isn't quite tall enough to just drive the truck into the ship).
More operatives (the sniper-and-drone team that had been surveilling Manny's construction site and another four-man fireteam) arrive but hesitate to attack, opting to wait for support from Ashbrook's mercenaries. No such luck for them; Krissa's Terminal Reflection kicks in once again, just as the gravflyer is about to swoop down on the crew and spray them with heavy machine gun fire. The PCs, the truck drivers, and Manny's guards dash up the ramp, the gravflyer's attack bounces harmlessly off the ship's sturdy TL4 hull, and the crew flee the scene, unfortunately leaving behind a literal ton of pretech relics. (They sensibly loaded the most important stuff, including the computer systems, first, however.)
They speed back to the spaceport, drop off the drivers and guards (and pay them a little extra for their trouble), then ring up Elias and assess the situation. Everybody agrees: It's time to get off Morrow and head for the Commonwealth, where they should have little trouble selling their pretech junk and there should be an institutional buyer for the geoengineering data. Elias will shop the locations of the other observation stations locally.
Meanwhile, the guard Krissa saved contacts Sarai: His brother is in trouble. Could the crew take him in, get him off Morrow? He'll meet them at their hangar as soon as he can. And of course they're happy to help—he can pay for passage, right?
* * *
When I turned to my trusty name generator to name the miraculously saved guard, I got "Alexander Ilunga." And it's not like there are an inadequate number of surnames to choose from; I've got like 750 options in there. Two Ilungas—coincidence? No way. This was fate. They must be related!
Yes, the very guy who helped some corporate vulture try to rip the PCs off and nearly got them killed, Orlando Ilunga, has now come to them begging for passage off Morrow, having no idea that his brother's ship-owning (well, leasing) acquaintances are the very people he just crossed. Having no idea that, but for Krissa's intervention, he would have been responsible for his own brother's death. Quelle horreur! (Did he not realize that Alexander would be in danger? He did not. Alexander only showed up at the construction site after the crew recommended that Manny round up some guards. Alexander happens to be a decent shot, and he needed a little extra money…)
A quick interview with the frantic Orlando—who explains that he double-crossed one of the syndicates, he was involved in a botched heist, his former employers want him dead—clues the players in to his identity. He, on the other hand, is still none the wiser. There's some talk of turning him over to the Najeebs or just leaving him to his fate, but craftier heads prevail: Maybe they can use him to get to Ashbrook and get the rest of their stuff back. Or maybe they can just squeeze him for an exorbitant fare as a passenger, since he's something of a captive market. (They definitely do that second thing.)
BQ has Orlando strip and takes his clothes out into the spaceport (the others, meanwhile, find a shipsuit for Orlando to wear). BQ finds a guy who looks very approximately like Orlando and offers him 50 credits to put the clothes on. The guy, no fool, asks, "Is somebody trying to kill whoever was wearing the clothes before me?" But he's feeling lucky: He'll do it for 150 credits, if he gets to keep the clothes too (they're pretty sharp). BQ wishes him luck, and off he goes, running down the spaceport concourse.
Around the time the crew take off, planning to head for the neighboring Marquez system, the running man gets shot and killed. Alas, poor Donald Nunes. We hardly knew ye.
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