Flyover Country: Chapter 7

"Industrial District 2" by Andreas Rocha

Continued from Chapter 6.

* * *

BQ presents himself to Nobu Stephanidis as a fellow enthusiast of ancient artifacts and alien relics. With quiet intensity, he describes a symbol he saw in his youth on faraway, icebound Ayaz, a mysterious sigil inscribed on otherworldly material, evidence to the youth of the existence of a higher power. He's sought for more signs or remnants of his alien gods ever since—has Stephanidis ever seen such symbols?

He has, in fact—but the crafty old man won't give up valuable information for nothing. Instead, he offers a quid pro quo arrangement: He's planned a heist and needs a crew to carry it out. He'll provide the details, they'll get the goods, and if they bring back a few choice pieces he has his eye on, he'll cut them 20% and give BQ what info he has on his long-sought alien relics—and the PCs can keep whatever else they manage to grab during the operation. Our band of ne'er-do-wells, of course, jumps at the opportunity. The target is on Opis.

* * *

The Commonwealth's capital world is in some respects quite Earth-like; its orbit is at almost exactly 1 AU, its rotational period is close to 24 hours, its year is 376 days with a leap day every fourth year, it is nearly the same size as Earth, and its gravity is more than 80% of standard. The main differences are its star—the subgiant Usil, though it appears nearly six and a half times larger from the surface of Opis than Earth's sun did from our ancestral homeworld, is significantly dimmer—and the climate.

Opis had many qualities that made it an attractive terraforming candidate back in humanity's golden age, but the colonists who first settled it began with a world more like Venus than Earth, wracked by intense volcanism and shrouded in a toxic atmosphere. Undettered, they built enormous pretech terraforming engines to still the planet's seisms and purify its air. Unfortunately, this work was not complete at the time of the Scream. The engines labored on, but the talents and technology needed to maintain them were lost, and over the succeeding centuries, they have failed one after another.

Opis is now experiencing catastrophic climate change in fast forward: a runaway greenhouse effect, terrible storms, and an atmosphere difficult, and often downright dangerous, to breathe. What were forests and meadows mere decades ago are ashfields and deserts today. Crops have failed across most of the surface. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have buried entire settlements. All but the hardiest settlers have abandoned the new towns of last century and retreated into the planet's largest, oldest settlements, where overcrowding is now a serious problem.

Nearly all of the vast population (three-quarters of the Commonwealth's billion-plus citizens) is now packed into a few sprawling urban areas: paraterraformed canyons and craters, massive tower blocks sealed against the atmosphere, warrens of subsurface tunnels and chambers. Many industrial and infrastructural spaces underground and in the interiors of massive arcologies are now hived with informal housing and markets. In and around the densely populated cities, the terraforming machinery has been kept functional, or replacements have been jury-rigged, and areas of seismic stability exist. Nothing can prevent storms of dust, sand, and volcanic ash from sweeping across and sometimes into the protected areas, however.

For now, the people endure, but with every passing year, their prospects grow darker. The ever-more-intensive effort to import protein from the Karyatis system is not economically sustainable in the long run; the need to construct and maintain superfreighters, and protect their shipping lanes, is a tremendous burden on the Marjani shipyards and the Commonwealth Militia Navy. But for all its troubles, Opis remains a major center of commerce and industry. Many state-owned enterprises, including GeOpis, ComAtom, and the Interplanetary Public Broadcasting Company, are headquartered here, as are a number of prominent private companies, including Omni Armory, media giant Ad Astra, and Banik Technologies. Offworld businesses, particularly Seneschal Systems, have extensive facilities here, and Mosylon has a massive embassy complex in the city of Anchorpoint.

* * *

Nobu has his eye on a (relatively) smaller city in the southern hemisphere, Sokhna; he wants the crew to loot a country estate nearby. The area, once a pleasant wooded suburb, fell outside the zone of planetary engineering control and is in danger of being utterly destroyed by seismic or volcanic catastrophe, although thus far nothing worse has happened than a firestorm sweeping through the vegetation, some noxious air blowing through the area, and substantial ashfall. A certain ambitious young Member of the Popular Assembly, Nana Malik, was forced, along with other property owners in the area, to abandon her country house; she wasn't there at the time, and lost many objects with great sentimental—and some material—value.

Since nothing catastrophically bad has happened to the house in the months since it was quarantined, she's begun to agitate to be allowed to return and pack up some of her possessions. Although she comes from a wealthy, influential family, she's trying to maintain a squeaky-clean image as a legislator and is unwilling to bend or break the rules to get her things back (as many of her neighbors have done). Stephanidis has taken notice of her efforts, done a little research, and surmised that it's worth an expedition.

The quarantined suburb is adjacent to a restricted area that's closed to unauthorized civilians but remains staffed by security personnel, researchers, and maintenance workers; there's also some traffic through the area as construction and maintenance teams take the highway to still-operational facilities north of Sokhna. Near the city's outskirts, there's a vehicle depot, sheltered in the lee of some mountains, that serves these various purposes.

The crew will need to:

1. Get to Sokhna.
2. Find a way to either smuggle weapons and equipment off the ship or acquire gear in the city.
3. Find a low-key way to get outside the city (nearly all of which is underground) and into the restricted area.
4. Get their hands on a vehicle to drive out to the estate.
5. Pick a route that gets them to the Malik estate in reasonable time without exposing them to the security station above the highway to the east.
6. Defeat the estate's security systems and break in.
7. Load up the loot and get it back through spaceport security and off the planet somehow.

The house itself—Nobu has a pretty comprehensive trove of images—is a large two-story building with a deck on the ground floor and a wraparound balcony on the second floor; much of the structure, including the central spaces on both floors, is floor-to-ceiling “glass” (actually a very durable transparent polymer) and everything is attractively appointed, with art everywhere. There's also a substantial, much more austere basement about which Nobu has less intel; there are presumably security bots and other expert systems still defending the property.

* * *

The crew blasts off from Rustam early in the morning on the 14th and has an uneventful trip to Usil. Mustang, back in her home system for the first time in years, flirts with trying to reclaim her bygone celebrity; as the ship glides planetward, she posts a brief hello to short-form video app TannTann, then an ASMR cooking video. They touch down at Sokhna Spaceport late on the 17th, having transferred 500 credits to a helpful traffic controller to “expedite approval of their flight plan and landing clearance.”

Batias has tapped his mysteriously wide and deep network of connections to line up a meeting between Roman (presenting himself as the crew's science officer) and Faisal Rao, director of the local GeOpis office. It's nearly midnight by local time, but Rao is still at his office, so the crew heads straight there as soon as they're through starport security. Rao tries to bargain hard, but he doesn't have the best poker face—it's obvious he badly he wants what the PCs have. Centuries of climatic, seismic, and geomagnetic data from a pre-Scream facility monitoring the stability of a terraformed planet's environment, and the computer systems that produced and crunched that data? It could—as Dr. Lei's endorsement suggests, Roman points out—lead to a breakthrough in arresting the ongoing terraforming failure that threatens Opis.

Rao puts his cards on the table: The absolute limit of what he could authorize in payment on short notice would be 272,000 credits, and that would represent his department's entire budget for the year; he needs to hold on to a few thousand credits to cover expenses until the central office can reimburse him. The PCs aren't likely to get more than 270,000 credits anywhere—not without a lot of waiting and bureaucratic wrangling, at least—and maybe he can sweeten the deal for them with some in-kind assistance. Do they need access to a ground vehicle? Are there any…legal snafus he could help them smooth over?

Why yes, Roman says, there certainly are. If Rao could take them on as contractors and put together some paperwork that would allow them to move a few crates off their ship in the guise of sensitive survey equipment, and a few more crates back onto the ship in the guise of sensitive geological samples—no scans of any of this sensitive stuff permitted, please—they'd be much obliged. And they'll definitely take the ground vehicle, too. “Say no more,” says Rao. “Please.”

Mustang has backed up the data to the ship's computers, but the PCs agree to give Rao exclusive license to it for the next two years. (After that, maybe they'll take it to Munda and see if there's a buyer there too.) Handshakes all around. The deal is done, and the path to Nana Malik's estate looks a great deal clearer.

The PCs go shopping for equipment (pressure masks and outerwear for the noxious Opisian weather) and provisions (a couple cases of wine, a big jar of krill-encrusted peanuts) and debate when to launch the heist. Several of them have other business they'd like to attend to in Sokhna: Sarai and Mustang want to look up old friends; Krissa hopes to find a trained telekinetic who can teach her some exercises to help her master her fledging powers in that discipline, and her discomfort with using them. If the job goes sideways, they won't have time to do any of this while making their getaway.

But Stephanidis has stressed that time is of the essence—Malik's public statements about the valuables she left in an empty house in a deserted area will no doubt have drawn other looters and scavengers. They decide to return to the ship, assemble their gear, and prepare to roll out at dawn. Rao will have an ATV transport and secure, properly documented crates waiting for them. Early on the 18th, they set forth.