(Lost? Find campaign startup notes and PC profiles here.)
[ I’m going to attempt the writing convention of referring to our PCs by their given names during narrative play and their callsigns while mounted. Let’s see how well that works. ]
Glen and Ilias find themselves back in their usual morning routines, still reeling from the effects of the fight they just experienced. There’s little time for recovery and investigation, though – their dataplates’ comm systems are lighting up with a priority alert from Ambassador Storch, the chief of the Union diplomatic mission on Tu’rosa.
One of Union’s initiatives was to establish a Schedule II printing station in Wake, the capital city. Tu’rosans want more control over Union tech that’s being brought on-world, and that was not a thing that was going to happen immediately, but Storch wanted to start some uplift work here. This project had numerous security concerns for obvious reasons.
Glen and Ilias were involved in the process of security evaluations for the installation site. The timeline was supposed to be six months out. From the briefing’s context, and supported by other indications like time/date stamps on files, the present day is now a month after the install. The PCs realize they’ve slipped seven to eight months in objective time. No one else seems to notice this, or the timeline was edited out from under them.
The immediate problem, though, is direct action by parties unknown. Three days ago, the printing station went online at Wake’s spaceport. It was under local administrative control, but a small Union presence remained on site to handle operations, maintenance, scheduling, and ongoing infrastructure build-out. A small security detail from the 501st Exploratory Guards was also stationed there.
One hour ago, unknown attackers (potentially Ashfall, the primary decentralized political movement opposing Union membership, or Ax, the collective pseudonym used by organizers of Ashfall’s militant arm) hit the site. They were using highly effective weapons, not obviously of local manufacture, alongside previously-unseen EW capabilities.
The spaceport is on a high activity cycle due to the operational tempo of industrial traffic from the system’s belt. This is complicating any attempt to establish orbital surveillance or top cover. Hostile frames have secured areas of the spaceport; they bear significant similarities to the PCs’ recent (subjective time) opponents, though not as advanced (Mk. I vs. Mk. VI, relatively speaking). They’re smaller, less sophisticated, without signs of radiation or spacetime distortions or annihilation engine power plants.
Something is now operating the printer. Union techs are not cooperating and no locals should have access to license files. From remote telemetry and data leakage, some of the items being fabbed are armament and frames that shouldn’t even be possible.
A local propagandist is livestreaming this incident. They’re claiming that the heads of several cooperatives – the key unit of social cohesion on Tu’rosa – have banded together to appropriate Union technology for the betterment of the community.
There is video confirming several friendly KIAs. The surviving Union personnel have been relocated into the city. One of the techs, Ikke Zek, managed to position his NHP partner to punch out some recordings which provided the prisoners’ current location. The spaceport is on the western edge of Wake next to an inland sea, while the hostages are being held on the eastern edge of town in the residential sprawl. Local buildings tend to be fairly low, but reinforced – the city is heavily industrialized.
Ambassador Storch’s top priority is the recovery of Union personnel. One of his key deputies, Envoy Su Yan, is advocating for neutralization of the hostile forces at the spaceport. We spend a little bit of time deliberating, but at the end of the day, we’re going with the boss’ priorities first.
Going in blind feels like a really bad idea. We take a tick on Paladin’s hidden enemy progress clocks to arrange for some reconnaissance and other support.
Glen goes to the 501st’s barracks. The first tasking is official – a scout squad is dispatched to infiltrate the spaceport perimeter. They’re under EMCON until the PCs reach their final phaseline before going loud at the port. But that’ll be later.
Glen’s next visit is to one of the 501st’s senior NCOs. “Sarn’t,” he begins. “Need another squad for doorkicking. Preferably, I need your sneakiest shitdisturbers. The guys who you’ve never been able to pin anything on, but you know they’re up to no good. Senior E-4 Mafia types, you copy?”
The master sergeant gives Glen a knowing look. “Sir. I got some troops in mind. But I’ll want ’em back intact. I got uses for ’em too.”
Ilias hits the motor pool and the tech section. He’s able to requisition an APC (armored transport for getting the hostages home once we recover them) and a radio jammer configured for the other side’s mesh network frequencies.
Glen tidies up his uniform before his final stop: the embassy’s PAO office. He reads them in on what’s about to happen and requests media support: news releases and public opinion pieces. They’re willing to embed one of their junior foreign service officers with the hostage rescue team for documentation and rapid turnaround.
Ilias sits down at his console. He and Janus go to work on the enemy comms system. It’s sophisticated, but not under active administration. A trained information warfare specialist and an NHP optimized for such tasks are able to pwn the system in minutes. They now have a fix on the grounded ship at the spaceport that’s serving as the comms hub for the enemy operation. Moreover, they have a head count on hostiles at the hostage site: 12 to 20 troops in the building plus four to six frames patrolling the neighborhood, all fed intel by a network of irregular spotters around the city,
Ilias and Janus also determine that the streams from the command ship are machine communication – two automated nodes (not NHPs). One isn’t as active – it may be damaged or on standby. There’s also comms chatter suggesting at least one nonstandard frame is operating at the spaceport and has optical cognitohazard properties.
With knowledge of where the sentries are, the team is able to move where they aren’t. The aforementioned sneaky bastard squad ingresses the neighborhood where the hostages are being held. They identify a sniper-crab frame on a rooftop north of the target, hidden under active camo netting, along with a spheroid-with-legs type in the adjacent street. They’re also tracking four basic trooper types patrolling the streets.
Echo and Editor approach from the west. Echo tracks the patrolling frames, analyzes the timing, calls the shot. Editor comes out of cover fast. The first patroller is on the ground before he can get a radio call off, his frame bisected by a slash from a heavy charged blade.
Echo goes airborne, coming up over his cover rather than around it. His midair barrage shreds the sniper’s optical camo.
The spherical frame emits an energy pulse and throws a glowing, translucent dome around itself, the sniper, and their immediate area. The remaining three patrollers start converging.
Editor hits Dyrnwyn’s jump jets. The dome poses no real obstruction as he comes down inside it, next to the spider. Another charged blade slash, another hostile frame down. He vaults off the roof, but misses a slash at the shield-projecting frame [which woulda looked so cool on film if I’d pulled it off].
Echo goes two-gun mojo with his secondary weapon arms and burns down another patroller with a thermal pistol hit.
Editor takes a laser strike from the shield projector, but reciprocates with a charged blade slash and a radio transmission that carries enough menace to persuade that pilot to shut down.
The remaining two patrollers are both inside the hostage compound. One of them is screaming into an open mic, cursing the shield projector’s pilot, “Stone,” for a coward. We resolve to kill him last. Echo dodges, weaves, goes to max rate of fire on his thermal pistols. The last two frames drop.
We round up the downed pilots. Echo holds them at gunpoint as Editor moves in to provide heavy support for the cutthroat squad. The insurgents are highly motivated to surrender. Initial reports are that some of the hostages are roughed up, but no one died.
Editor dismounts and links up with Ikke for a debrief. He’s in okay shape, but kinda nervous. Editor sets him up with a drink and a smoke, gets him calmed down. He’s not sure how the aggressors got the printer up and running, but he thinks he saw an NHP casket – nonstandard, wrapped in some sort of inverse glow that sucked in the light and hurt to look at but compelled him to keep looking. As soon as it was attached, the printer started responding. Output looked familiar, but different – with printing errors, maybe? The aggressors had to keep clearing bad sections with nanites. Notably, they didn’t recognize his own NHP’s casket and left it on him. His NHP, Box, said there wasn’t anything there – wasn’t able to observe the other NHP.
Echo pings Editor with a worried-look emoji over their private dataplate channel and asks Janus to link to Box. Ikke’s description isn’t accurate. What Box is trying to convey is that the space of the casket was infinite – it looked like it was a portable something, but it was connected to something vast and endless. Box is repeating that description – it’s not cascading, but it’s definitely afflicted. Whatever it saw is infectious, and a fix will need some work (downtime action) or cycling.
Echo advises Ikke on his companion’s status, then has Janus run a system integrity check. Janus reports green across the board – whatever hit Box doesn’t seem to be contagious.
With that, the hostages are loaded into the APC. The PCs and the E-4 Mafiosi begin escorting them back to the Union compound. At some point, the PCs will slip away and head for a deserted stretch the inland sea’s shoreline, angling for an underwater approach to the spaceport…
I’m pretty sure we accomplished that takedown without any missed ranged shots that could have caused collateral damage to the neighborhood. You betcha that’s going to be a point our PAOs make.