Flyover Country: Chapter 8

"Investigation" by Maxime BiBi

Continued from Chapter 7.

* * *

Faisal Rao, director of the Sokhna office of GeOpis, is as good as his word. The PCs have a big-wheeled all-terrain transporter at their disposal, plus a cover identity that'll get them within mere kilometers of Nana Malik's estate before they have to get sneaky about it. They've loaded a bunch of weaponry, too, including a sniper rifle. They suit up: Light armor, filter masks for the sometimes-unpleasant atmosphere, and hooded jackets or ponchos for protection against acid rain and ashfall.

Krissa has used her precognitive Oracle ability to scout things out. The path of least resistance, an old service road to the west, seems to lead to an ambush; Krissa had a searing vision of the transporter being ripped open by an anti-vehicle laser and the crew sheltering, pinned down, behind a cyclopean hunk of concrete by the desolate roadside.

They resolve to take a different approach: They'll drive out to a GeOpis monitoring station near the edge of the restricted area, drop in on the scientists there, and then maneuver down into the tangle of ravines and volcanic hotspots between the station and the abandoned suburb; there's another old road through there. Much of it has collapsed in seisms or been buried by landslides, but some tunneled segments appear to be intact, and taking this route will obscure the PCs' movements from any observers.

Along the way, as they exit one of the tunnel sections, they're hailed by radio. The man claims to have been ambushed and stranded out here; he says he's a homesteader who was trying to squat in one of the abandoned estates, but was run off by bandits. Mistrustful, the crew refuses to meet him, but they do promise to drop some supplies for him if he's still there when they return to the city. They pass a smaller ATV, carved apart by a heavy laser like the one in Krissa's vision, which partially corroborates the stranger's story, but the players remain divided about whether to help—maybe he's in league with the bandits. Maybe the ATV belonged to somebody he killed.

* * *

The suburb is on a long, fairly smooth slope that rises gradually to a soft ridgeline in the north and east. To the west, it sinks a little farther to a dry riverbed and then rises across much rougher terrain toward a higher, more jagged ridge. To the south are the tangle of ravines, pocked with fumaroles and scarred by landslides and ashfall, that the PCs have just traversed. High points several kilometers away are visible to the west, but sightlines in the other directions are much shorter. They pass a few other houses on their way to Malik's, and a few more are partially visible off to the southeast and northwest—the grounds were arranged so that each estate was invisible to the others, but with the vegetation that screened them from one another reduced to desiccated stubble and a few charred tree trunks, the illusion is broken. Still, it's a pretty isolated spot.

Mustang and Krissa disembark to scout ahead on foot; while they observe the Malik estate, and the rest of the crew trains the transporter's limited sensors on it, they are hailed yet again. This time, their interlocutor is a middle-aged woman, and she's up front about ambushing them: Her team, she says, have a rocket launcher trained on the PCs' transporter, so no funny business. They don't want any trouble, she explains, and isn't trying to hold the PCs up—she wants their help, in fact. She just doesn't want to negotiate from a position of weakness. The players, of course, don't like this; Mustang and Krissa promptly begin stealthily maneuvering for a firing position. The rest of the crew, however, follow the woman's instructions and emerge, hands in the air, from the transporter.

The woman, who introduces herself as Lorena, and her team, five in total, are also here to loot the Malik estate. They approached on foot, and their technician tried to interface with the security system and shut it down. She thinks she managed to isolate it from the regional network, but in the process, she alerted a veritable swarm of security bots to their presence. They disabled a few of the machines, but one of their number was badly injured, and they beat a retreat. They don't have a medic, unfortunately, and their comrade will die if he doesn't get assistance soon. Do the PCs have any medical expertise? Any stims? They can offer weapons in trade, and they're willing to cooperate in a renewed attack on the house. Time is of the essence, after all—they're pretty sure they cut the house's system off without tripping any alarms, but who knows. Security might already be on the way. And there are bandits around.

The PCs are always ready to wheel and deal. How many rocket launchers do these guys have? Can they get one? Two rockets to go with it? Scratch that—make it three. Lorena is amenable. And they have a shopping list, Sarai explains. There are five things they need from the house. “Six, actually,” says Krissa. She's used her Oracle power again, imagining a future where they take all the loot for themselves and get the pieces appraised, so she knows that there's one painting in Malik's collection more valuable than any of the items Stephanidis sent them for. That, too, is fine with Lorena; there should be plenty to go around.

Krissa takes the injured man, Sunil, into the transporter to work her biopsionic magic away from prying eyes. She doesn't merely stabilize him but gets him on his feet again—Lorena's group probably suspects the use of a pretech cosmetic—and the two parties team up for the heist. Lorena throws the still-tender Sunil's arm over her shoulder and helps him limp his way toward their group's transporter, which they parked in a hollow nearby, out of sight from the house and most of the surrounding area. The other three squeeze in and ride along with the PCs.

* * *

The house itself is grand in an austere, rectilinear way. It's just two stories with a basement, but its footprint is huge. It faces south, so the transporter is approaching the front. There, the lower level is nearly flush with the ground—the driveway slopes down only slightly to two big garage doors that open straight into the basement. The first floor stands at ground level on the northern side but is well above grade to the south and must be approached via a long staircase. There's a first-floor deck around the west side and southwest corner, and a second-floor deck on the north and east sides. The two aboveground levels are clad in a durable glass-like polymer, wrapping most of the space in floor-to-ceiling windows, and a few more private areas in translucent panels. The security bots, canny enough to avoid being picked off from range, have retreated into the house.

BQ drives right up to the house's garage entrance; the six PCs, supplemented with a little NPC firepower, rush in and make short work of the remaining bots. The two groups begin their inventory of the house, and the PCs realize that the three NPCs who came along with them are little more than kids—19, maybe 20 years old. There's plenty of stuff for their group: Sixteen notable ceramic pieces, four more major paintings and a host of lesser ones, a couple of big sculptures, a pretty nice wine collection, and more.

All of the pre-Scream objects and alien artifacts Stephanidis wanted are here too, proudly displayed in vitrines in a small gallery: a collection of bronze and electrum implements that look like darts and scalpels; a levitating force plate and control glove; a toy composed of 26 miniature cubes that can be rotated, nine at a time, around three different axes (like a Rubik's cube, but with a uniform metal finish), with each configuration causing the device to play a different tune; a shifari polearm and an ornate shifari breastplate; and some bony-looking bits and pieces of betaal manufacture. BQ immediately starts smashing and grabbing. The three kids start stacking up paintings and vases in the garage, waiting for their group's transporter to pull up. Outside, not far from the house, there's an explosion.

It's the bandits from Krissa's earlier vision, and the anti-vehicle laser mounted on their armored car has just obliterated Lorena, Sunil, and their vehicle. The players' transporter, parked right up against the lowest level of the house, is sheltered from the armored car by a berm, but the car is coming down the slope to the west and maneuvering for a clear shot. It's over a kilometer away, out of range of nearly all of the PCs' weapons. Mustang grabs her new rocket launcher and slips outside to take a shot at the armored car from behind the berm; Batias takes his sniper rifle out on the second-story deck to try to cover her from any dismounted bandits. Two dismounted bandits who have approached the house from the north duly draw a bead on him; one sends a mag rifle round ripping through his meager armor, taking a (non-essential) chunk of him with it. He falls prone, getting out of their line of sight.

Mustang's first shot at the armored car is a near miss; her second rocket connects squarely with the vehicle but fails to disable or destroy it. Good thing they bartered for three of these! Heavy laser blasts spray dirt, dust, and chunks of concrete all around. Mustang heaves the launcher over her makeshift parapet a third time, aims carefully, fires…and blows the car to smithereens.

With help from the three young NPCs, the others have all this while been shoving everything they can into the transporter's cargo hold. There's a heated but brief debate about whether to dispatch the two bandits to the north so that they can finish looting the place at their leisure, but pragmatic heads prevail: There might be more bandits, and at any rate the two who have Batias pinned down are firing from cover with weapons that slightly outrange, and significantly outclass, the laser rifles that represent the crew's best long-range weapons (other than the sniper rifle trapped on the deck upstairs with Batias). Besides, they've got a lot of valuable loot already, there's only so much room for it, and with the bandits' vehicle knocked out, the transporter represents a distinct advantage mobility advantage. They should just leave.

Unwilling to retreat back into the house, whether out of fear of being perforated while fumbling with the door or for other, less explicable reasons, Batias insists that he will rappel down from the deck, run around the west side of the house, and hop aboard the transporter there. Nobody can persuade him otherwise, and nobody's willing to go and physically get him, or get into a shootout with the bandits for the sake of covering his withdrawal, so off he goes. Unsurprisingly, he gets shot again, and hurt pretty badly this time, but he manages to lurch to his way into cover around the side of the house, stumble to the transporter, and submit to Krissa's healing touch.

The PCs don't forget to stop and drop off some supplies and a spare oxygen tank for the guy who claimed to be a stranded homesteader…but Batias, ever mistrustful, shoots the oxygen tank from the back ramp of the transporter as they drive away, destroying it and probably damaging the supplies. The guy was in cahoots with the bandits! He's sure of it!

They pass by the GeOpis monitoring station on their way out of the restricted area and pay the scientists another visit, passing around a couple nice bottles of liquor and thanking them for their assistance, assuring them that Director Rao will be glad to hear they were so helpful. Their return to Sokhna is otherwise uneventful.

* * *

This was the first proper adventure I mapped out and planned after the construction-site caper back on Morrow, and it was a nice change of pace after a bunch of free-form wandering and improvised social encounters. I drew up a simple map of the area, rolled up some hazards and potential complications (bandits, rival looters, a stranded civilian—yeah, he really was just an innocent squatter—some scientists, a security post to the east that never came into play), showed the players potential routes they could take to and from the estate, and let them loose.

It worked out pretty well! Their hostile and mistrustful natures nearly got the better of them (a loud minority really wanted to counter-ambush the other looters) but they ended up doing a good job tempering their classic TTRPG player greed and bloodlust with pragmatism. The bandits were formidable, armed with much better equipment than the PCs had at this point (mag rifles and an anti-vehicle laser) and attacking from advantageous positions. I'm not entirely sure how the PCs would've fared if one of the looters' rocket launchers hadn't ended up in the hands of a warrior-class PC. But I'm certain they'd have figured something out!