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.

Next: Faction Turn 2 & News Roundup and Chapter 8. 

The Year Gone By and the Year to Come

Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon (photo by Rosalie O’Connor)

2024 was a fine year for me, personally—I am healthy, gainfully employed, happily partnered, and securely housed, and I got to travel a bunch, including to Mexico, Portugal, and Colombia. I went to film festivals in New Orleans and New York, too, and watched something like 130 movies—mostly old ones, but 40-ish new releases, of which Conclave, Nosferatu, and Nickel Boys were the best big ones. Loved a lot of the indie horror I saw at those festivals too: Cuckoo, Dead Mail, I Saw the TV Glow, Timestalker, Dead Talents Society. Hated Civil War so much I might have to write a whole blog post about it. Adored the Fall Experience at the Boston Ballet; Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon was overwhelming in the best way, one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on stage. I've written a bunch already about the books I read in 2024, but I'll shout out three short stories from the New Yorker (all published within a month of each other, as it happens) that I really liked: “Autobahn” by Hugo Hamilton, “Ambrose” by Allegra Goodman, and especially “My Camp” by Joshua Cohen.

But I'm gonna not do a whole big cultural review roundup like I did last year. 2024 was not a year of culture. 2024 sucked. It feels like the whole world is going down the tubes; my benighted country certainly is.

What am I going to do about it? I don't know. Maybe it depends on how bad it gets. Maybe I shouldn't let it depend on that. Certainly I'll kvetch. Maybe I'll start attending DSA meetings again. I'll volunteer. I'll write. Writing probably isn't worth much more than voting, but at least it gives me a sense of activity, a sense of control. I can always kick myself for not writing enough!

I started this blog last January with a flurry of activity, but lost steam after June. I posted 33 times in the first six months of 2024, and then only 11 times in the second half of the year. July and August were very busy for me—three weddings on three continents in a five-week period, plus a move across Boston and a subsequent comedy of ISP errors that kept me mostly offline until September—but I didn't do a great job getting back on the horse in the fall. My plans to participate in a couple more jams (Anne's Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam and CLAYMORE's FIST: JAM OPS V, to be specific) halted at the doodling-in-a-notebook stage and then dissipated. My Lore24 effort fizzled out. I still haven't finished any of those Traveller-inspired lifepath tables.

But some things did turn out well! My little Flyover Country recap, as much as it lags behind the game itself, has been fun to write, valuable for running the campaign—it helps me keep the big picture in view and reminds me of loose threads and fun ancillary characters I can return to—and hopefully useful to a few people new to, or curious about, Stars Without Number. The one jam I did get myself in gear for was fun, and I was quite pleased with the result. My satirical/fantastical take on the ridiculous Saudi megaproject THE LINE was a hoot, if I do say so myself.

So what do I want to accomplish in 2025? Definitely carry on with the campaign recap; after some fits and starts and a holiday hiatus, Flyover Country is set to resume this Monday, the 13th, and I still have lots of catching up to do. Finish entries for multiple jams this time—let's say three this year, at the very least. Work on that little lifepath project. Flesh out some of the ideas I threw at the Lore24 wall, because there's a lot I like about that setting (or meta-setting). Write some fantasy stuff. Write something for FIST (and play more FIST). Write something that feels like Quake.

And, hey, maybe I'll actually publish a Quake map this year. Hopefully I'll publish some short fiction too. Maybe I'll flee into exile. Who knows!

Bookpost #3

Illustration by Reiko Murakami for "The Worldless," from Lightspeed

 

As I finish off my reviews of last year's reading, I'm breaking things into groups, both because they happen to be neatly divisible according to little themes and because three of them are short-story collections and two-thirds of this post will be me yammering about all those stories in one big jumble.

The Incal (Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud)

The Colossus (Sylvia Plath)

Bright Dead Things (Ada Limón)

One comic book and two poetry collections that I've read before and return to for comfort or inspiration. The Incal is usually more appealing for the astounding Moebius art than the Looney Tunes plot half cribbed from Dune, but I actually found myself appreciating the latter this time. I've bought a couple tarot decks since I last reread the book, and knowing a little about the tarot and the Fool's Journey made the story a lot richer and the seemingly one-dimensional characters legible as archetypes and signposts along John's path.

As for poetry, well, I'm a sap and a basic bitch. I love “The Conditional,” I don't care what anybody says. “State Bird,” “Drift,” “Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America”—lots of great Limón, and if a bunch of them are schmaltzy and sentimental and extra, well, we all deserve to be a little schmaltzy and sentimental and extra sometimes. Plath, of course, was a colossus herself, and this is some of her best work: “Night Shift,” “The Eye-mote,” “Departure,” “The Bull of Bendylaw,” “Mushrooms,” “A Winter Ship.” Some of these lines and fragments will rattle around my head every day as long as I live. “Blameless as daylight I stood looking…”

 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

The Empusium (Olga Tokarczuk)

Two short novels, new to me, by authors I know and love. One old, one new, both excellent. Both creepy, mysterious fun, and both told by memorably weird (but heartrendingly believable) unreliable narrators. Secrets, sinister rural locals, haunted places. Read them both, and if you haven't read The Magic Mountain, don't let that stop you from enjoying The Empusium; there are some little jokes and riffs and references you'll miss, but nothing essential. (But do read The Magic Mountain, too.)

 

Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer)

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

Two chunky contemporary science fiction novels that Reddit loves but I don't. (Lesson learned: Don't get SF book recs from Reddit.)

Palmer and Watts are both obviously brilliant people, and there's a lot to like in these books (especially the alien life Watts imagines), but I don't believe either of them understands human beings very well (I know Watts, with all his enthusiasm for evolutionary psychology, doesn't). The dialogue in both is unnatural beyond bearing; the characters are difficult to differentiate from one another except by their stations and the trappings thereof. (And the narrators, in stark contract to Jackson's and Tokarczuk's, are unreliable in a showy, overwrought, unconvincing way.)

Both novels feature impossibly gifted people doing inconceivably consequential things, which has been done to death in SF for at least a century now. Watts at least has the excuse of having his cast be the crew of a spaceship far from Earth, whereas Palmer's narrative takes place on Earth among billions and yet is driven, in nearly every respect down to the smallest details, by the actions of a dozen or so John Galts. Spare me! Let me read about regular people doing regular human things, please!

Setting aside the tedious Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand of it all, and in spite of the authors' evident intellectual gifts, both novels revolve around unsatisfying ideas. The thesis Watts presents in Blindsight (that consciousness is maladaptive, an evolutionary dead end that makes humans unfit for survival) is silly, and the evidence he invents to support it—in the striking absence of any at all in the real world—is sillier. If Palmer has a thesis beyond “the Enlightenment was cool and important,” I don't have the patience to slog through three sequels and find out what it is (which also means I may never know whether the characters' unseemly obsession with race and gender in an ostensibly post-racial, post-gender world served some later narrative purpose).

 

Never Whistle at Night (eds. Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.)

The Best of World SF: Volume 2 and The Best of World SF: Volume 3 (ed. Lavie Tidhar)

My disappointment with The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 did not deter me: I finished the year with a whole lot more short genre fiction. And a lot of it was great, and refreshingly different from what I'm used to! (I've linked below to those stories first published in online magazines; holler if you see any I missed that are freely available.)

North American SF authors are, and have for a long time now been, preoccupied with dystopian and post-apocalyptic themes—climate disaster, totalitarianism, a creeping anti-Enlightenment. Those are entirely sensible things for North Americans (and everybody else) to be worried about, but it does sometimes feel like we're going in circles, retracing our steps in the paths laid down by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others decades ago. (On the other hand, Palmer and Watts are, if not exactly Pollyannas, certainly techno-optimists in a material sense—both of the above-panned novels feature societies that have arrested, or at least adapted to, climate change and that represent at least somebody's idea of utopia—and look how far that got them with me. You just can't win.)

Colonialism casts a long shadow over these stories, nearly all of them told by writers from outside what used to be called “the First World” or by Indigenous authors in the United States and Canada. They're thinking about the history of colonialism, its legacy, the scars it left behind, and the new forms it has taken and threatens to take. Many of them are thinking about the climate, too, but in ways contingent on colonial history. Where many First World fictions imagine a universal apocalypse or near-apocalypse—a world in which every human, or nearly even human, dies, and where every existing society is overthrown (and we do get a bit of that here, as in the charming “Old People’s Folly” by Austrian author Nora Schinnerl, one of the few Western Europeans in either volume; not to pick on Schinnerl, but it's tempting to read in the Western preoccupation with universal apocalypse an inability to imagine a future in which Western hegemony is displaced)—a lot of writers from once-colonized places see in the crisis “merely” a worsening of what's already bad, a noose tightening around the Global South and the most vulnerable in the “developed” world. Climate disaster means privation, war, hunger, migration, dispossession, displacement. These themes dominate the volumes edited by Tidhar, interspersed or overlapping with the theme that dominates Never Whistle at Night: reckoning with genocide and cultural vandalism. Resentment, desire for revenge, regret and yearning for traditions forgotten or effaced, and hope for cultural renewal are especially evident here among the work of Native American, African, and Southeast Asian writers.

There are also just a lot of fun, inventive genre ideas in these volumes. “The Substance of Ideas” by Clelia Farris (translated by Rachel S. Cordasco) in World SF Vol. 2 and “Catching the K Beast” by Chen Qian (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan), “Two Moons” by Elena Pavlova (translated by Kalin M. Nenov and Elena Pavlova), and “Symbiosis Theory” by Choyeop Kim (translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort) in Vol. 3 all have wonderfully weird alien life. “Salvaging Gods” by Jacques Barcia, “The Clay Child” by Dilman Dila, and “Between the Firmaments” by Neon Yang in Vol 2.; “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings” by Daniela Tomova, “Act of Faith” by Fadzlishah Johanabas, “My Country is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou, and “Ootheca” by Mário de Seabra Coelho in Vol. 3; and “Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” by Kate Hart and “Eulogy of a Brother, Resurrected” by Carson Faust in Never Whistle treat divinity and spirituality in various interesting ways (some touching, some thought-provoking, some unsettling). “The Regression Test” by Wole Talabi, in Vol. 2, is one of the best stories about AI I've read in a long time—and God knows I've read a lot of them.

“The Farctory” by K.A. Teryna (translated by Alex Shvartsman) in Vol. 2; “The Worldless” by Indrapramit Das and “Echoes of a Broken Mind” by Christine Lucas, in Vol. 3, and “Capgras” by Tommy Orange in Never Whistle are, I think, the very best of the bunch. Also memorable or powerful or just plain fun: “At Desk 9501” by Frances Ogamba, “Dead Man, Awake, Sing to the Sun!” by Pan Haitian (translated by Joel Martinsen), and “Waking Nydra” by Samit Basu in Vol. 2; “The Foodie Federation’s Dinosaur Farm” by Luo Longxiang (translated by Andy Dudak), “I Call Upon the Night as Witness” by Zahra Mukhi, and “Where the Trains Turn” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (translated by Liisa Rantalaiho) in Vol. 3; and “Navajos Don't Wear Elk Teeth” by Conley Lyons and “Heart-Shaped Box” by Kelli Jo Ford in Never Whistle. And I should give a special shout to the aforementioned “Old People’s Folly” by Nora Schimmerl and “Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau in Never Whistle, both of which I believe were debut stories, and both of which are impressive.

These books aren't perfect—there are some clunkers in all three, particularly in Never Whistle, and all three are plagued (as it seems everything is these days, when editors don't edit and proofreaders have all been fired) by typos. I'm definitely richer for having read them, though. I picked up a few things that are going to go straight into my SWN campaign, and I've got a long list of authors whose work I'll be looking out for. I've already picked up (and am greatly enjoying) Wole Talabi's Convergence Problems!

Flyover Country: Chapter 6

"Exodus" by Sparth

 

Continued, incredibly belatedly, from Chapter 5. It's a good thing our campaign moves slowly, because I am way behind on this! Thank goodness for my semi-decent note taking.

* * *

Having extorted a thousand credits from poor bewildered Orlando Ilunga and decided not to throw him to the Najeeb-syndicate wolves, at least for the time being, the crew hastily fills Quora's hold with cargo (more on that later), blasts off from Freeport, and heads out of the Betharan system for the first time ever. Transit downtime means opportunities to study the data they pulled from the terraforming facility (Mustang identifies all the sites on Morrow climatically likely to grow delicious truffles), the culinary arts (Sarai potters around in the galley), and each other (we learn that Roman has siblings; we learn absolutely nothing else about them or him). Orlando they leave stewing in his bunk (there are six on the ship and BQ has opted to eschew the use of one, preferring to sleep in the pilot's seat).

Quora arrives in Marquez, the outermost system in the Commonwealth of Free Worlds, around midday on the 11th. An encrypted message from Leila Pak awaits the crew. She explains the terms of their ship lease, their working relationship with ValuDyne, their company's merchant license (including that they're not bonded for travel outside of hazard level-0 and level-1 regions, as defined by the Commonwealth Ministry of Public Safety), and her expectations regarding the crew's availability for intelligence-gathering tasks; she also directs them to her office in the city of Satu Mare on the planet Rustam. Her tone is chipper, and she's clearly excited about the opportunity to meet the crew in person (especially Mustang). She's arranged transit and landing permits and a berth in Satu Mare.

Even with all their figurative paperwork sorted out by IRIS, the process of entering the Commonwealth and going through customs is time-consuming; traffic is heavy, and several ships are in the queue ahead of them. They are routed to Sarkar Station, where a punctilious customs officer logs the ship's registration, business, flight plan, crew and passengers, and cargo (confirmed with a scan). As they wend their way through Commonwealth bureaucracy, news arrives from Betharan with the next several ships to drill into Marquez: Gang warfare in the Collines, a scandal in the Najeeb organization, a territorial push by the Bautistas, and so forth. Nothing about the PCs, Manny, or Orlando, at least not by name.

Once they're clear of Sarkar, with their flight path down to Satu Mare preapproved thanks to Leila, things speed up, and by the afternoon of the 12th, they've made planetfall. More news—of the latest turns in the emerging Penrose Crisis—reaches them shortly before they set down.

* * *

Together with Gombad, Marjan, and Opis, Rustam is one of the four signatory worlds of the Commonwealth Charter. It's the most Earth-like of the four, but that it's saying much; it isn't nearly as lush as Morrow. Rustam's seasons are harsh, water is scarce away from the shallow equatorial seas, and agriculture is a challenge. Large stretches of the planet are covered in steppe grasses rooted shallowly in weak soil; elsewhere, bare desert prevails.

Still, the air is breathable and, with irrigation, crops can be grown throughout the lower latitudes. Consequently, and in stark contrast to the other three major Commonwealth worlds, Rustam's population is widely dispersed; whereas nearly all of the population of Gombad, Marjan, and Opis is concentrated in a handful of densely populated urban areas, and the largest settlement on each is home to tens of millions, Rustam has hundreds of settlements, the largest of which are home to only a few million people each. Being less dependent on the state for the most basic of necessities has given rise to an independent, somewhat recalcitrant character among the Rustamese people.

Whereas Gombad, Marjan, and Opis bring the Commonwealth material advantages, particularly production capacity (food and medical technology; starships and astronautic equipment; and arms, tools, and consumer goods, respectively), Rustam's contributions have always been less tangible. The planet is a center of academic and cultural power, home to the Commonwealth's finest universities and some of its most popular entertainers. Tradition holds that, in the days before the Scream, Rustam was the administrative capital of the fledgling Sector.

Animal husbandry is better established here than plant agriculture. The Rustamese taste for red meat is seen as something of a cultural oddity on the other Commonwealth worlds (some Marjanis do raise goats and sheep, but eat their meat sparingly). Some wheat is cultivated, as are grapes; bread is another Rustamese peculiarity, but wine is a significant export.

* * *

The crew's first order of business in Satu Mare is to meet Leila, receive codebooks and other spycraft materials (encryption keys, manuals, etc.) from her, and get briefed on several situations IRIS would appreciate a low-profile look into:

• The Rustamese livestock company Enderlein & Sons has long been rumored to be hiding a huge hoard of pretech from the authorities. Probably baseless, says Leila, but do put some feelers out while you're planetside, see if anybody bites on the wares you're offering. Could be a straw buyer for Enderlein, or somebody who has or can establish a connection to Enderlein's pretech operations, if they exist.
• Pretech cultists are always a nuisance on Marjan, but they mostly confine their activities to scrabbling around in the dirt planetside. There seems to have been some infiltration of the workforce at the Marjani Arsenal's orbital works lately; could be nothing, could be they're making some kind of move. Leila wants them to put out feelers there too, and make it known that they'd be interested in buying as well as selling (ship parts, weapons).
• Rustamese separatists are plotting to bomb government offices at Port Kyungu. Leila doesn't need the crew to do anything about it, just a heads up.
• Foxglove Pharmaceuticals is a Gombad-based company owned by Perez-Enciso Capital Management (PECM). There are reports that they're using a secret lab on the PECM-owned station above Morrow, Lopez Ring, to conduct illegal experiments. The first of the aforementioned cargoes the crew took on in Freeport are plants grown on Morrow that provide raw materials for drugmaking (daffodils, poppies, borage, echium, etc.). Leila asks the crew to shop the drug components around, see if anybody from Foxglove bites and whether they can make any kind of connections to supply their operations on Lopez on their way back to Betharan later.

There are protests going on all over Satu Mare; Leila explains that there are always protests going on somewhere in pretty much any Rustamese city—the Rustamese love protesting, marching, going on strike, occasionally rioting—but this is an unusually intense period. There's a “Day of Indignation”: protests against the anticipated annexation of Morrow, against the draft, in favor of at least two different separatist movements, against the Orthodox Church, against PECM, and related to some relatively minor local issues, like working conditions at local universities. Mostly a unified expression of displeasure with the Commonwealth and other institutions, but there are some major fault lines among the protestors. Nothing to worry about, just be aware and stay alert.

When it's the PCs' turn to ask Leila questions, BQ pipes up. He knows of a trafficker in antiquities who operates from Rustam, somebody who might be able to give the crew a lead toward alien ruins or interesting artifacts—a fellow by the name of Nobu Stephanidis. Can Leila direct them to him?

She can. He's 16 hours away by high-speed rail, though, in the city of Porto Seguro; if the crew wants to fly rather than take a train, a similar amount of time or longer will be taken up by filing flight plans, securing landing permits, and whatnot. (They'll take the train.)

At this point, the crew splits up, with Sarai leading one group to arrange some commodity transactions (including a successful sale of those drug precursors they bought on Morrow—they make a tidy 10k credit profit—and the purchase of some ludicrously expensive wine, a bottle of which Batias promptly steals) while Roman and the others take the tram out to Satu Mare National University of Engineering (SMNU). Among the commodity brokers, Sarai connects with a man by the name of Danus Ragar, who might be able to find them a job shipping something to Lopez Ring on their return to Morrow. Roman, meanwhile, has an in at SMNU with Dr. Abdul Lei, a geoengineering professor who's able to offer them some potential leads on selling their pretech stuff and their terraforming data.

SMNU isn't the only institute of higher education in Satu Mare, though, and the whole crew soon reconvenes at another: Philip Asuni College of Science and Technology (PACST). Here, Roman is on a personal vendetta against a scientific rival (i.e., he wants to yell at somebody who wrote a journal article he thinks was stupid), but Sarai is still wheeling and dealing.

* * *

The second item the crew loaded in Freeport? A hundred pallets of Hoop Cola.

See, Sarai (whose player took the Henchkeeper focus) is always on the lookout for lost souls and hard-luck cases she might bring into her orbit. She met Hoop Barrett in a karaoke bar in Freeport; he was drinking away his sorrows after the business venture he poured his heart, soul, and life's savings into—the eponymous Hoop Cola, a carbonated beverage flavored with gentian root extract—was ruined when a larger competitor flooded the market with a cheaper alternative. Sarai is also always on the lookout for business deals, of course, and the opportunity to score a whole warehouse full of high-quality knockoff Moxie was too good for her to pass up.

And now it's time for that wise investment to pay off. Gentian-root soft drinks may be old hat on Morrow, but on Rustam? An exotic luxury import. The crew laid the groundwork for Hoop Cola's conquest of the Commonwealth at the Satu Mare spaceport, luring several security guards into an impromptu sharpshooting competition with Mustang, passing out free Hoop Colas to the spectators and awarding a case of the stuff to the runner-up and a whole pallet to the winner. The town is abuzz.

Now Sarai switches tacks. An exotic luxury import? Why not a performance-enhancing sports drink? While Roman is berating poor Dr. Isabel Johar in the biochemistry department, Sarai buttonholes PACST's athletic director and spins some nonsense about the curative properties of gentian root and Hoop Cola's proprietary blend of high-quality electrolytes. She secures a contract: 150 credits per one-ton pallet for the entire cargo, with a standing resupply contract at 125 per ton. Now she just needs a local liaison. She recruits another lost soul—Jenny Beck, an unhappy PACST engineering student on the verge of dropping out—and puts her to work as Hoop Cola's Satu Mare brand rep.

* * *

Next, it's off to Porto Seguro. After snoozing on the train while the dun plains of Rustam whip by outside, the crew splits up again. Sarai goes shopping for trade goods. Roman, troubled by a guilty conscience over the death of Donald Nunes, mulls over the possibility of establishing a Donald Nunes Memorial Track and Field Scholarship via their new contacts at PACST, and in the meanwhile decides to take Orlando under his wing and teach their not-quite-a-prisoner the rudiments of university-level chemistry.

Batias and Krissa follow their unerring instinct for trouble to a gun shop where, in a dark back room, the proprietor sells Batias a black-market thermal pistol, which Batias immediately uses to menace said shopkeeper. They wander around outside looking for food, try taking combat stims for fun (a half-dose each), smash the empty bottle of ludicrously expensive wine Batias has been toting around all day, and get scolded by a couple of public security officers, who issue each of them a 10-credit citation for littering and public nuisance. Batias vows never to pay.

Mustang and BQ head off to meet Nobu, who turns out to be a gruff and very cagey old man who's loath to give up any information without a quid pro quo. He does, however, have some work the crew might do to get in his good graces, if they happen to be on their way to Opis…

Next: Chapter 7. 

Apertures

Red Tree, Yellow Sky by Georgia O'Keeffe

There's an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston (organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and now making its way around the country) that brings together a great number of works by Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, two artists I'm pretty familiar with but whom it would never have occurred to me before to connect. As it turns out, the curators found some rather striking parallels in their lives and work, one of which is pleasingly highlighted by the exhibition catalog (a Moore sculpture shot against a blue background on the front cover nearly recreates an O'Keefe on the back).

O'Keeffe and Moore weren't just fascinated by a lot of the same things as each other, though; they were fascinated by a bunch of things that tend to preoccupy folks in our 21st-century indie RPG world: skulls, ancient ruins, desolate landscapes, megaliths, spooky holes, weird little guys. They both had a sense of, and an eye for, the fantastic, and ways of turning mundane things into exotic or alien ones—blowing delicate little bird bones up to a thousand times their natural size and casting them in solid metal, or carving them from a tree trunk; transforming a snail shell into a mountain or a knot in wood into a mysterious portal.

All of which means that a trip to the art museum ends up being pretty good campaign inspo. Inscrutable artifacts, alien landscapes, strange creatures, wondrous magics—it's all here.

Elephant Skull by Henry Moore

Egg Form: Pebbles by Moore

Head of UNESCO Reclining Figure by Moore

Maquette for Atom Piece by Moore

Pond in the Woods by O'Keeffe

Leaf Motif, No. 2 by O'Keeffe

Black Place I by O'Keeffe

Red Hill and White Shell by O'Keeffe