The successful assault on the spaceport concludes the first story arc. With that, Glen and Ilias reach License Level 1. Glen picks up Metalmark 1 (going for Amber Phantom), while Ilias finds himself awarded Pegasus 1.
My notes for this session aren’t the greatest, so this will be even more fragmentary than usual. In my defense, it’s partially because we had a really good RP and meta discussion and I was too engaged to log much.
The enemy combatants are sequestered and interrogated. They were recruited primarily from co-op mining crews based in Wake (but it seems they were recruited individually – there’s no evidence of whole crews being brought into Ashfall en masse). Most seemingly self-selected, as they were already echoing anti-Union propaganda. They got a crash course in sim combat training over the local net before the spaceport op.
Some of the frames used in the attack were not printed on site. Rather, they were smuggled into the port on ore haulers. Back-tracing those reveals they shipped through Stockland Station. This may have been a matter of convenience, though, as Stockland is the Virex Belt’s primary industrial hub. While it was a transshipment point, the mechs’ point of origin is likely elsewhere in the Belt.
The attackers coordinated via the system’s civilian comm networks that predate Union presence. It’s a heavily decentralized system, but based on existing co-op arrangements (so the local social structure naturally enables cell structures).
Most of the prisoners indicate that they expected Union to engage in protracted negotiation before sending in troops. Our immediate engagement seems to have pre-empted their plans to build up defenses.
While the recon team deployed to the spaceport did report paracausal effects, that information seems to have been lost from the official reports. Ilias does some digging. The documentation was prepared by Rael, the NHP responsible for mission coordination and oversight.
Ilias rolls up his metaphorical sleeves and sits down for a lengthy conversation with Rael. It’s uncomfortable. Rael not only has oversight functions – it also has instructions from UIB to suppress any data that could harm Union assets outside the system. Apparently, whatever paracausal effects were present at the port qualify as such.
Ilias retrieves Rael’s SOP stack and starts parsing it in light of this revelation.
Glen chews on this for a while. Working with a compromised support structure is less than optimal, but the team can’t solo their mission. They need a support cell separate from the diplomatic efforts and the 501st Exploratory Guards. The spaceport op identified some likely talent, and they have a couple of leads on other possible assets. Chief among the latter is Philip Wesser, one of the mid-level diplomatic administrators. Wesser is something of a nonentity, preferring to stay in the background, but he’s establishing a lot of street-level local connections – and he’s one of the more audible voices countering Envoy Su Yan’s apparent burning need to solve every problem by military force.
[ Mechanically, my downtime action is Get Organized. I’ll detail the new additions in a later post, but we’re standing up a military organization that will start at Efficiency +2 and Influence +1 (bonus point due to mission outcomes).
Also, when Paladin described Wesser to us, there was a weighty pause on the voice channel before NLP and I agreed that his characterization of Wesser screams “spook.” ]
Ilias takes a look at the NHP casket that he recovered from the gate/portal/printer at the spaceport. Most of the Union NHP techs supporting him think it’s dead – the casket executed a failsafe protocol that slagged it from inside its own casing. Their data, visible to Ilias, supports this. However, when Ilias looks at the casket himself, it’s still in there. The paracausal alteration of perceptions is becoming more in-our-faces.
Ilias digs into the casket on both the data and physical levels. What he finds is both nonstandard and deeply unnerving. The casket has a biological component. Diagnostic data feeds show what looks like human brain activity – stable, but operating at an exceptionally high level of stress or duress. The NHP is still active and integrated with the brain imprint.
When Ilias asks the tech team for a cross-check, they can’t see it. To them, the casket is still dead, and the data Ilias is passing to them substantiates this. Ilias realizes he can perceive either of the casket’s states based on what he wants to see at the moment. When he pulls in Glen, the other lancer’s perceptions align with Ilias’.
Worse, Ilias’ work also extracts an identity from the NHP. Memories of the team’s initial briefing unlock for Ilias and Glen at this realization. Flora, callsign Umbra, was one of the lancers the team was sent to Tu’rosa to replace, an infosec specialist with an engineering background. What remains of her is part of the amalgam within the casket. An NHP seems to have been anchored – or, more accurately, shackled – to the remnants of her mind. The casket’s I/O buffers show that her expertise was what was running the Schedule II printer at the spaceport.
This raises two critical questions: how would someone do this, and why would someone do this? (Leaving aside the fact that this looks like a massive, steaming violation of the First Contact Accords’ prohibition on thanatological R&D.)
Asking these contextualizes the high psychological stress levels. The NHP was born into trauma, and both it and Umbra’s remnants (if they can even be said to be separate) are existing in a state of constant ongoing trauma. The NHP has full access to all of Umbra’s memories and knowledge. This likely answers the why: it’s a subjectively perfect interrogation methodology.
It’s uncertain if the team can do anything for Umbra or the NHP other than euthanasia. Mechanically, separating the two is impossible. Umbra is biologically unrecoverable – she’s only “alive” through the NHP’s continuing interface with her psyche. However, everything of who she was is still present. This suggests that it might be feasible to recompile or reshackle the NHP into Umbra’s identity and subjectivity.
The team has a long ethics discussion. From Glen’s perspective, Umbra is still a Union friendly, a lancer, and someone who was on this mission before he and Ilias were – and in all of those contexts, he’s not willing to leave one of their own people behind. If nothing else, she deserves the option to self-terminate as a conscious choice. More practically, from a mission standpoint, she may be compromised, but she’s also the best available intel source for what’s happening in the Tu’rosa system.
The debate also unlocks another set of memories for Glen – again, info from the team’s mission briefing. Saif Stackpole, callsign Boomer, was the other UIB lancer on the previous mission team. Boomer was a weapons specialist. Worse, he was also another native of Annwyn, part of the same Tomshone cohort of former child insurgents. Glen and Boomer knew each other, stayed in touch during their respective educations, and followed similar paths into UN service rather than return to their homeworld.
The team returns to Rael for another uncomfortable conversation. Rael is evasive about mission parameters and protocols. It has its orders from UIB, which do not include releasing certain information to UIB lancers who are starting to find evidence of profound paracausal fuckery. Glen and Ilias don’t have the access or authority to circumvent that (though Ilias might have the NHP psychoprogramming skills to force the issue).
Glen glares at the interface. “Rael. We both know that because the communication loop with Cradle is ridiculously long, every UIB chief of mission has the authority to alter mission parameters based on the situation on the ground. Who is the UIB chief of mission for the Tu’rosa operation?”
There is a very long pause before Rael reluctantly responds, “Philip Wesser.”