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| Sketch by Kunrong Yap |
Continued from Chapter 9.
* * *
The crew heads back to Morrow, making the drill out around midday on the 24th (Coordinated Atomic Time), arriving in Betharan late on the 25th, and getting down to the planet around the end of the 26th, all thanks to BQ's expert piloting. Having looked over the data they pulled from the ruins under Freeport, which included the sites of a dozen or so other pretech planetary engineering observation sites, they head straight for the most accessible source of extra pretech junk.
It's in a swamp, half-submerged but undefended and fairly easy to access. Unlike the site in Freeport, this one seems to be entirely inert, unpowered, unaware of their presence; they blast its door open with a demolition charge. It's not as full of goodies as the first one, but it does have the same computer equipment, wall panels, etc.—good enough to impress Ashbrook or her proxies. Orlando plays a little cat and mouse with her via email, trying to walk the line between appearing too eager to meet and too wary or too demanding. The crew spends a bug-plagued but otherwise uneventful day dragging old tech out of the ruin, and they eventually nail down a rendezvous that might give the crew just enough time to install a reaper battery on Quora before meeting Ashbrook's people.
They just need a reaper battery, and the right contractor, and a favor to skip the queue. Elias connects them to a Milieu-affiliated operation at the Freeport docks that has some used weapons lying around. For friends of Elias—and such a charming, gracious friend as Sarai, who naturally handles the negotiations—they'll sell the crew the weapon at cost and expedite the installation. Elias will owe the contractors a favor, which means the PCs will owe Elias another favor, but what else is new? By midday on the 29th, they're ready to go.
The rendezvous site Orlando has arranged is a desolate salt flat northwest of Freeport—not far, at least for a TL4 starship. Arriving, the PCs see a gunship (a shuttle with some armor and a small weapon, really) and a gravflyer parked not far from one another. Ashbrook is taking no chances; not present herself, she has sent a team of 10 mercenaries to handle the handoff. The gravflyer, it emerges, is meant to shuttle the crew back to the city after the mercenaries take possession of their ship. The PCs land, drop the ramp, let the mercs confirm that there really is a load of pretech salvage in their cargo bay, and arrange for the mercenary leader, with three of his soldiers backing him up just in case, to come aboard, inspect the goods up close, and prepare to authorize the transfer.
The PCs, naturally, double-cross and murder these poor schmucks. Thanks to yet another godawful initiative roll by the NPCs, the crew manages to teratically overload the mercenary leader and wipe out the other three (including the team's most capable, and best-armed, fighter) without a shot. The remaining mercs immediately launch their gunship and try to disable Quora's new weapon, but instead quickly find themselves facing a hull breach and fire in their cargo bay, then a disabled engine. They try valiantly to make repairs, but can't quite manage, and all the while the PCs' faster, more powerful ship is breathing down their necks. They crash-land their gunship into the accommodating desert plain, and after some negotiations (they aren't eager to leave cover and their one decent bargaining chip, the intact ship), the PCs take the six remaining mercs prisoner.
An uncomfortable debate promptly begins. Should they murder these guys? Batias is strongly in favor, of course. Krissa is uneasy about the ethical dimensions, but not keen to let a bunch of guys who might be able to work out that she's a psychic walk free. Roman, Mustang, and BQ are various shades of indifferent; they set about inspecting the downed gunship and trying to get it back into flying condition rather than getting bogged down in the argument.
In the end, Sarai, despite being the only person strongly opposed to summary execution, is the most eloquent and persuasive of the bunch. She proposes dumping the six prisoners in farm country farther north, beyond the desert belt, without any comms equipment. They won't starve or die of exposure, but it'll take them days to find their way back to Freeport, and by then Quora will be long gone. Roman and Mustang stay behind to work on the gunship while the rest of the crew carries out this errand of mercy.
Once the gunship is up and running and the others have returned, BQ loads the gravflyer aboard Quora and they blast off for Freeport, where they'll leave the gunship and the soggy pretech junk for Elias to dispose of. Krissa, having stabilized the downed mercenary leader almost as soon as she disabled him, straps the guy into a bed in the medbay, slaps a Squeal patch on him, wakes him from his brief biopsionically induced coma, and interrogates him. Between that and searching the gunship's computer systems, the crew learns a little about Ashbrook and Mputu, but not much. They learn more about the mercenaries and their ship, for whatever that's worth.
* * *
Eminent Alternatives, it seems, is the PMC Ashbrook hired for her various Freeport jobs; this is the same outfit that attacked the PCs as they were trying to unload their trucks back at the city dump. The field commander who led the team whose asses the crew just kicked, and who is now their prisoner, is a guy named Wei Khan. Ashbrook has had EA on retainer on Morrow all month. Like her, they're based on Khabara, and their previous job was in Istanu, one of the systems that connects Sanasar (Khabara's star) to Betharan (Morrow's). EA is a small company, with only about 25 employees total (some of them administrative types), including those who went to the handoff. The loss of four soldiers (including Wei) represents a pretty disastrous setback—that's a quarter of their combat strength.
Wei did some digging into Ashbrook's background and reputation when she offered EA the job. She's worked with all the major Khabaran security outfits (OKR Personal Defense; Patil, de Lima & Company; Rodrigues+Chen) and various smaller ones, and she's also brokered contracts with Juman privateers via the Mundan firm Müller, Bhatnagar & Yang (probably off-books mercenary work by Imperial military personnel). Wei got in touch with a couple of the smaller outfits that have worked with Ashbrook, Cloudy Mountain Defense Services (based on Khabara) and Sable Company (a local Morrow operation)—they found her reliable, professional, demanding, and unfriendly.
Between the lengthy retainer and some beefy hazard-pay bonuses, Ashbrook seems to have spent almost 40,000 credits on the mercs, and the money came from her longtime client Mputu Manufacturing. The mercenaries' gear was not entirely uniform—their armor was mostly from Ogenne, a Khabaran company, but their weapons a hodgepodge from Sayed+Spiner, Laxardal Forge (both Mundan corporations), Omni Armory (from Opis, in the Commonwealth), AKHI (the massive state-owned conglomerate in the Directory), and other sources. The ship itself was of Khabaran manufacture (from Gemini Interstellar, a subsidiary of Seneschal), and was provided by Mputu, not owned by the mercs. Far more than the mercenaries and their gear, the ship represents a huge loss for Ashbrook—a setback second only to the loss of the computer equipment and data from the Freeport dig site.
The gunship is called the Stormy Petrel. Stripped of its sandthrower (which the PCs want to hastily install on their own ship), it's worth about 230,000 credits on paper, but it's now both stolen and damaged, which dents its value—Elias might get close to full freight for the armor plating, which can be stripped off and reused, but repairs will cost a good 10,000 credits, and refitting the hull, changing the drive signature, counterfeiting new registration, and so forth will cost another 100,000 or more, so even if Elias can resell the ex-Petrel for close to full price, the profit is “only" going to be in the neighborhood of 110,000 credits (and he'll take a hefty cut). The new pretech junk might sell for 80,000 or so, after expenses getting it where it needs to go and all that, and Elias will take his cut there too; still, the crew are looking at a payday well above 100,000 credits. It'll take at least a few weeks to come through, but hey—not bad for a couple days' work.
The Echelon Altostratus gravflyer the mercs brought (also the property of Mputu Manufacturing, big enough to carry 10 crew and passengers, and crammed with bells and whistles) stays in Quora's cargo bay; it seems like a handy thing for the crew to have, even if it takes a big bite out of their cargo capacity. The onboard computer had a flight plan prepared that would have taken the vehicle back to a Mputu Manufacturing facility in Freeport (at the north edge of Center City, near the Havre)—it seems Orlando and co. were meant to just get a lift back to the city, then return the gravflyer to its owners and find their own way from there.
* * *
With a bunch of stolen goods and ever more enemies gunning for the PCs here on Morrow, it's probably time for them to make themselves scarce. Elias points them toward Istanu, one star over. It's a neutral system, long dominated by megacorps from Khabara but now sliding into the Kyran Directory's sphere of influence, and its on its way to the Directory's core systems, where the PCs have vague designs on learning how to counterfeit atrament. The Directory's main base in Istanu is Seven Miracles Station, a port in LEO above Salafai, the system's one Earth-like planet. The Milieu is well entrenched there, and the local boss is an associate of Elias's: Nour Mbuyu.
First, though, a brief entrepreneurial interlude. The PCs may have just double-crossed a powerful corporate fixer, stolen a ship worth hundreds of thousands of credits, killed three mercenaries, and captured a fourth; they may be fighting against the clock as the mercs they didn't kill work their way back toward Freeport and could be getting in touch with Ashbrook any minute now; they may still be on the bad side of the entire Najeeb crime family and harboring the traitorous Orlando Ilunga; but they still have to make time to look into a good business opportunity.
Hoop Cola, you see, is going gangbusters over on Rustam. Jenny Beck may have been an indifferent engineering student, but it turns out she's got a real knack for marketing and soft-drink distribution. And Roman and Sarai have, in their spare time, cooked up a Diet Hoop recipe that they have every confidence in. They schedule a quick meeting with Hoop Barrett himself while Elias's people get the Petrel's sandthrower installed on Quora. They hash out a business plan: Roman, Mustang, Sarai, and Krissa will each contribute 2,500 credits to an investment that'll get Hoop's bottling operations going again; in exchange, each of them gets a 12% ownership stake in the company, with Hoop narrowly maintaining control with his 52% share. Dividends will be paid out quarterly from profits. Hoop is advised to get Diet Hoop production going and to concentrate on the burgeoning Rustami market. And then we're off.
Poor Wei Khan definitely knows that Krissa is a psychic, and a biopsion at that. Overriding Sarai's moral squeamishness, they chuck the guy out the airlock, in drillspace, during the voyage to Istanu. Krissa performs a little Juman ritual—a salt circle, some burning alcohol, some drinking, a bit of chanting—to keep the spirit from catching on the hull of the ship. Does it work? Well, they don't hear any ghostly screaming on the way in to Salafai, so…maybe?
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