After returning to Kamiensk to rest up from the previous day’s exploration, the team heads south again. Ellis is still off doing spook shit and Octavia needs to stay with a patient who’s going into labor, so the focus this session is on Cowboy, Pettimore, Betsy, Erick, Cat, and Miko.
The group is still very cautious about provoking a known superior force, so their plan today is to reconnoiter more of Radomsko’s outskirts. Their intended course is to enter at Hex 4, then proceed through Hexes 1, 2, and 3 before returning to their temporary base again:
They set out at first light, arriving around 1100. With sunset occurring around 1830, that should give them enough daylight to chart a good portion of the western perimeter.
Hex 4
Hex 4 is a former working-class residential area, smaller homes interspersed with ugly apartment blocks. There’s some evidence of habitation, though quite sparse: laundry on backyard lines, a community well, a few people moving about. The team avoids notice (Erick is learning the dark arts of stealth from the team’s best ninjas).
As the team moves southwest, they encounter signs of a massive fire. To Betsy’s eye, the firefighting was done by people in her line of work. Dozer scars show where engineers cut firebreaks, and a couple of blocks of houses were evidently dynamited flat to slow the fire’s progress. Whoever contained the fire was working with lots of explosives and no water pressure, suggesting this happened later in the war.
Not wanting to make contact with the local citizenry just yet, the team moves on, continuing to the southwest toward the burned-out industrial sector they spotted yesterday.
Hex 1
Navigating through the rubble is nerve-wracking. Cat is so intent on not putting the team into a dangerous situation that she almost steps into the ribcage of a charred and weathered skeleton. She’s seen plenty of dead folks, but this one hits her all wrong. She has to pause for a moment before collecting herself again [failed Survival check for navigation, pushed for 1 success and 1 Stress].
This area is – or was – predominantly warehouses and light industrial facilities. Much of it is burned out from the same conflagration or destroyed in heavy fighting, but there are surviving pockets here and there. The team passes a post office and marks it for later investigation. They’re heading for a nearby factory of some sort whose three-story roofline stands proud above the surrounding rubble.
A pack of stray dogs catches sight of the team and makes aggressive noises. A couple of gun muzzles casually swing in their direction and the dogs realize these are larger predators, not prey. They withdraw.
Miko chitters excitedly as the team approaches the factory. He points out the charred but legible sign. “Radio parts!”
Pettimore moves up and checks the perimeter, looking for signs that the building is in use. It’s closed up tight. There’s evidence that it’s on someone’s regular patrol route, but the tracks circle the factory without entering it. The Marine identifies the door that’s best-screened from outside observation – the personnel entrance on the loading dock – and waves in the rest of the team.
“Breacher up,” Erick murmurs. Miko steps forward, tapping his lucky crowbar against his hand. He strains and grunts, but the door holds.
Betsy sighs. Once again, she gently takes the crowbar from Miko. She purses her lips and contemplates the door for a moment. “Fire door,” she observes, taking a screwdriver from her kit and beginning to tap out the hinge pins. In a couple of minutes, she and Miko are able to walk the door off its hinges.
[For breaking and entering, I’ve been calling for Stamina rolls, with Builder applying its bonus. Miko is Strength B/Stamina D, plus a +1 for his lucky crowbar. This should give him decent odds, but Foundry hasn’t been giving the player the best rolls lately. By the numbers, Betsy is only slightly better at this, with Strength B/Stamina B and +1 for Builder, but she’s been rolling much better on these tasks.]
Inside, the air is stale and dusty. The building shows signs of having been efficiently stripped of most portable items of value. What’s left is raw materials, large industrial machinery, pallets, and the like. The team advances from the loading dock and shipping area into the manufacturing spaces. The industrial skylights above are dirty and stained, but they still admit enough light for easy movement.
A catwalk circles the manufacturing floor, rising high enough to provide direct access to the skylights and the clerestory windows beneath them. Cowboy heads up, looking for a vantage point from which she can keep watch for approaching threats outside the building. She’s taken two steps off the stairs onto the catwalk when the sound of shearing metal rings out. There’s just enough time for “oh, shit!” before she plummets back to the concrete floor amid several tons of folding and twisting steel.
Erick, the team’s lead medic in Octavia’s absence, darts forward, but Betsy catches his arm. The engineer carefully leads Erick and Miko forward through the maze of unstable debris while Pettimore and Cat move back to the now-open doorway to provide security in case anyone heard the noise. Cowboy is pinned and blood is flowing steadily – though not spraying, thankfully – from a gash in her left thigh [4 points of damage and a thigh gash critical]. Erick ties a pressure dressing onto the wound. She needs more treatment, but it’ll have to wait until she’s in a safer location.
Betsy takes charge of the extrication, directing Erick and Miko through the process of moving their patient out of the rubble pile. There are some alarming groans and creaks but the engineer’s hasty cribbing job holds.
As Erick cuts away the leg of Cowboy’s BDUs and sets to work, Betsy returns to examine the debris. She comes back with a frown and a handful of bolts. “This was intentional,” she states, pointing out the tool marks and the places where someone with an acetylene torch weakened the catwalk’s structural members.
Cowboy’s wound is deep, and Erick’s field surgery takes hours the team wasn’t planning on spending immobile. It’s an uneasy afternoon. Those not involved in the medical proceedings take turns keeping watch and cautiously exploring the plant. Cat, Pettimore, Miko, and Betsy find several other boobytraps strewn throughout the building: more elevated structures rigged to collapse, a couple of large manufacturing machines that could easily topple, a complex arrangement of wires and missing structural members that could collapse the whole reception area on anyone proceeding past the main entrance’s foyer. Miko’s impression is that the whole thing was set up to permit movement through the factory – at least on the ground level – but to punish exploration.
Cowboy has plenty of time to think, and to try anything to take her mind off of what Erick is doing to her leg. She’s trying to figure out how the catwalk folded around itself when she realizes she’s seeing rust and corrosion develop on the metal as she watches. “Hey. Betsy.”
Betsy steps over and looks closer. “What the hell?” She swings her HK23 around and inspects it. Sure enough, a patina of rust is forming on the receiver, and the brass in the ammo belt is showing signs of corrosion.
A quick check shows that all of Cowboy’s equipment is showing unnaturally-fast decay, as is the gear of everyone who participated in her rescue (Erick, Miko, and Betsy).
“Fucking witchcraft,” Cowboy snarls.
Miko growls agreement as his AK-74’s bolt comes apart in his hands.
[Mechanically, everyone lost one point of Reliability on everything they were carrying that had Reliability – which was, in this case, only weapons. Miko was carrying a battlefield-pickup AK from the last marauder fight that had jammed twice and hadn’t been maintained since, so it was at Reliability 1/5 at the start of this scene.]
Erick finishes tying off the dressing over Cowboy’s sutured leg. The artillerist can walk, but making any kind of speed is right out. It’s after 1600 by now and there’s a general consensus that no one wants to stay in the factory any longer. Even with the team’s ridiculous healing speed, the march back to Kamiensk will do Cowboy no favors.
“Hey, what about that post office we passed?” someone suggests.
That sounds like a really good idea. The team withdraws from the factory, with Betsy and Miko taking a minute to set the door back into its frame.
The post office is similarly deserted, closed up tight and apparently just abandoned one day. Cat, Miko, and Betsy check the structure thoroughly but there’s no evidence of danger here.
Pettimore finds the break room. The wall calendar is on August 1998. There’s no coffee or tea, but the cigarette vending machine still has a dozen packs. Pettimore wrinkles his nose but tucks the coffin nails into his pack for future commerce.
The team turns their attention to the unclaimed parcels. A bit of mail tampering yields four bottles of absinthe, three chocolate bars, six issues of the Captain Kloss comic series that Miko hadn’t yet managed to collect, a yellow polo shirt in Erick’s size, and a good stack of commemorative stamps that Leks will appreciate when the team gets back to Ponikla.
With Pettimore taking first watch, the team settles in for the night. Miko withdraws to a corner to read his new finds. Cowboy crashes out. Erick and Betsy break out the toolkit and do what they can for weapon maintenance. The night passes uncomfortably but uneventfully.
September 30 dawns sharp and cold. It’s only a few degrees above freezing and the threat of winter is growing more immediate. Today is supposed to be clear, but Hernandez’ forecast calls for thunderstorms tomorrow.
Cowboy is still limping but is determined to keep moving. The team decides to wave off on their planned exploration of Hexes 2 and 3 in favor of returning to the airport in Hex 8 and using the control tower for more detailed observation of the area. They move out, but Cat gets turned around and leads them farther out of the city than intended.
Up ahead is a farming collective. Their intelligence indicates that these ring Radomsko out to a few kilometers beyond the city limits, holding a total of 3,000 of the area’s 4,000 total residents. This one seems to contain a couple dozen people, all of whom are working the fields to bring in the corn and potato harvest. Other than a couple of elderly mules, there’s no sign of labor aids – this is strictly a peasant workforce.
From their vantage point about 300 meters out, the team sees another marauder patrol approaching. Pettimore puts Thoughts and Prayers’ scope on them. He can see each of these guys is wearing multiple wristwatches. It’s an ostentatious display of looted wealth, but something clicks for him. The previous groups he’s seen have also had identifying markings: red bandannas in one case, left sleeves cut off their uniforms in the other. Each patrol sighted so far has been wearing – well, for the lack of a better phrase, gang colors.
The team kicks that around for a minute. Gangs imply territories, which, in turn, imply a structure for Shotkin’s mutineers that may be exploitable. It’s something to assess later – perhaps in conjunction with whatever Ellis turns up from wherever he’s gone.
The team waits until the marauder patrol moves off to the west, then leaves their hiding spot and resumes moving toward the airport. They arrive around 0900. The site is much as it was when they left it. They refresh themselves on the flashlight blink code they’ll use to communicate in the absence of radios, then Cat, Cowboy, and Pettimore ascend the control tower while Miko, Betsy, and Erick cautiously move to check out the crippled Luftwaffe C-160.
Up close, the transport shows signs of a hasty emergency exit after its hard landing. The rear ramp is halfway down, as far as it’ll go with the fuselage’s buckled state. All of the personnel doors are open, too. The cargo compartment is rigged for troop seating for about 20 to 30 personnel and two pallets of airdroppable payload. The pallets and chutes are still there, but the netting that once held the cargo in place has been cut away, and whatever it restrained is long gone.
The team moves up front. Both pilots are still strapped into their seats, apparently killed in the crash. The flight engineer’s seat is empty and the fire handles for both engines are pulled, suggesting that at least one crewmember survived. Someone has taken a crash axe to the radios and navigation systems – SOP for denying an enemy the ability to pull any usable intelligence from the avionics. The pilots still have their survival gear, and Miko relieves them of it along with their sidearms.
The team signals for Pettimore to join them. Once upon a time, in his MEU(SOC) days, he spent a fair number of nights on military aircraft of various NATO nations. He begins poking around for any paperwork and comes up with a flight plan. He doesn’t read much German, but navigation is something of a universal language.
The flight plan shows the aircraft left Bremerhaven, a West German coastal city near Hamburg, in July ’99. The date makes it one of the last flights anyone has seen – and therefore an exceptionally high-priority mission. It was heading for the vicinity of Czestochowa on an out-and-back flight – no landing, which implies an airdrop. From what the team can decipher of the notes on the pilot’s knee board, it encountered some sort of mechanical issue and diverted to the closest usable runway – here.
“EMP?” Pettimore asks. The team looks around for a battery to power up any surviving electronics but comes up dry. Miko steps out and yells up to the control tower.
Poking around, Cowboy finds a hand-cranked aviation-band radio, part of the control tower’s last-ditch communications gear. She begins limping her way down the stairs. Erick realizes Cat is alone on watch and begins heading to the tower to relieve her.
Cat is pacing, trying to maintain a 360ยบ watch while simultaneously keeping an eye on proceedings at the plane carcass, when she hears a hissing sound behind her. She spins, but the tower is still empty. She moves cautiously toward the source of the sound, which is modulating into a faint crackle.
It’s coming from one of the tower’s radio headsets.
Cat knows the control tower isn’t getting power from anywhere. No indicator lights are lit, no dials are twitching, every system is dead. She breathes deeply and picks up the headset, holding one of the earphones to her ear.
“… any unit this net, this is Azure One-Five requesting immediate support…”
Cat knows that callsign. It’s a Task Force Cobalt element.