Chapter 01 Session 08 Wrap Up

Narrative Recap

The crew of the Albatross had arrived at Eris III four days ahead of schedule, courtesy of the alien cube that had taken up residence in their ship and, for once, decided to be helpful. Their contact, Roselyn Monroe, had warned them plainly: the people behind the Goodwin situation were cleaning up loose ends, and the crew were loose ends. She had offered them a deal — forged Federal Republic ID cards in exchange for the intelligence they carried, and a legitimate ship transponder code if they could deliver one Goodwin, head of Goodwin Investments, to her contact. The crew had promptly ignored her advice to run and agreed to kidnap a corporate criminal from a heavily secured skyscraper in the heart of Aethel, the sector’s capital city.

While Shackleton and Rock Lavey conducted reconnaissance in the city — visiting a bar near the Firetemic Tower and learning from disgruntled employees that the jackass on the 17th floor had locked down the elevators all day — Six had taken a rather different approach to scouting. He had located a maintenance hatch in the spaceport’s sewer system, cut through the hinges, and been violently ejected by the pressurized waste flow, tumbling through the city’s underground pipes until he was blasted out into the main discharge area. From there, navigating by instinct and rough memory, he had emerged from the sewers directly in front of the Firetemic Tower — covered head to toe in filth — just in time to spot an armored transport pulling into the building’s restricted rear garage. Without hesitating, he leaped onto the roof of the vehicle and rode it invisibly through the security doors and into the loading bay beyond. Nobody had planned this. It was somehow going better than everything they had planned.

Inside the loading bay, Six clung to the roof of the transport as it accelerated through the inner garage at a speed no sane driver would choose, weaving and rolling to avoid being scraped off the vehicle. When the transport finally stopped at the loading dock, he slid silently down the driver’s side and took cover behind a large trash compactor, watching as armed guards and a cargo automaton unloaded from the vehicle and waited for the freight elevator. One of the guards made an offhand comment about a terrible smell. When the freight elevator arrived, Six charged into it while still camouflaged with his Chameleon Surface, and slammed the close-door button. He hid behind the cargo automaton until the doors closed. The elevator would not activate without a code, so he exited through the emergency hatch in the elevator roof, and climbed to the 15th floor before the guards in the loading bay managed to get the doors open. He then dropped a stun grenade down the shaft, and exited onto the 15th floor.

Meanwhile, Shackleton had a more pressing problem to solve. The crew needed access to the tower’s upper floors, and the security badges they had observed on the Firetemic Corporation employees at the bar were their best option. One of those employees — a man named Edvin — had been particularly intoxicated when he left, and Shackleton remembered him heading toward the public transport station in the central square. The crew made their way down into the Aethel subway station, a vast, airy multi-level hub where security droids stood dormant in alcoves and cameras covered every angle. They found Edvin exactly where they expected: slumped against a bench post on an upper platform, snoring. Shackleton approached casually, Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez positioned themselves to block the sightlines of nearby cameras, and Shackleton used a specialized electronic device to wirelessly clone the digital signature from Edvin’s badge without ever touching it. A security droid began moving toward them the moment the copy was complete, but when it checked on Edvin and found the man still had his card, there was no crime to report. The crew walked out of the station without incident.

With the cloned badge in hand, the crew approached the Firetemic Tower’s front entrance. Shackleton swiped the badge at the main door and stepped through, while Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez vaulted over the low security turnstiles near the elevator banks. The moment the first man cleared the turnstile, small drones deployed from recesses in the ceiling and began scanning the lobby. The crew moved quickly toward the elevator bank serving floors zero through fifty, pressed the button for the 17th floor, and were met with a flat refusal — the floor was call-locked. The badge, it turned out, only had clearance for the 16th floor. They took what they could get and rode up.

The 16th floor was dark when they arrived, the lights activating in sequence as they moved through the space. It was a research and development lab — rows of 3D printers, test rooms with scorched concrete walls, and large canisters of experimental fire suppression chemicals labeled with nothing more than test numbers. While Shackleton and Rock Lavey searched the floor for another way up, Ronin Sanchez used his four arms to wrench open the service elevator doors, revealing a maintenance ladder built into the shaft wall. It was after that when Ronin and Rock decided to enter the shaft, and Shackleton dropped experimental fire suppression grenades. Shackleton, meanwhile, had found something useful among the R&D equipment: a pair of fire suppression grenades, their exact effects unknown but their potential obvious.

Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez began climbing the maintenance ladder toward the 17th floor while Shackleton remained below. As they climbed, Rock Lavey’s boots clanged against the metal rungs — and from somewhere below, blaster fire came ripping up through the shaft in response. Shackleton dropped one of the fire suppression grenades down into the darkness. There was a bang, a wet splat, and then silence — the lights and movement from below simply stopped, replaced by the muffled sounds of men trying to clear thick foam from their weapons and faces. Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez reached the 17th floor and wrenched the elevator doors open, only to find four armed security guards waiting on the other side with weapons already raised and targeting lights painting their chests red. The doors swung shut again. Meanwhile, Six started carving his way through the ceiling from the 15th floor to the 16th, and then up again, to the 17th floor with his vibro-axe, the grinding shriek of the blade filling the shaft as he carved his way upward.

Six burst through the floor of the 17th floor office in an explosion of concrete dust and debris, still reeking of the city’s sewer system. The room was a corporate office space with two heavy desks overturned on their sides as makeshift cover, glass walls looking into adjacent offices, and metal security shutters already beginning to descend along three of the four interior walls. One of the guards had a rifle trained on the hole Six had just come through. Six did not slow down. He launched himself over the nearest upturned desk in a flying tackle, colliding with the guard and sending the man’s rifle skidding across the floor. He locked his arms around the man’s neck from the front — a difficult hold to execute, but Six managed it — and when the guard reached for something on his belt, Six snapped his neck. The guard went limp. The device in his hand clattered to the floor and detonated, spraying sticky polymer webbing across the walls, the desk, and a wide swath of the floor.

Six rolled clear of the expanding polymer trap, but the movement cost him his cover. The second guard, positioned behind the far desk, opened fire with a grazer rifle. The shots struck Six in the torso, punching through his heavy armor and leaving scorched craters across his chest plate. He slapped a trauma patch onto himself with practiced efficiency and reached for the fallen guard’s rifle — only to find it was biometrically locked to its dead owner. He slung it over his shoulder anyway. Ronin Sanchez, still in the elevator shaft, chose that moment to climb up through the hole. He took one look at the guard behind the far desk, drew his grazer pistol, and fired. The shot hit the man square in the chest. The guard’s torso simply ceased to exist, and what remained crumpled to the floor. Rock Lavey climbed up through the hole behind him, and Shackleton followed shortly after, his sensor drones already mapping the floor through the jamming field that blanketed the entire level.

Shackleton’s nanobots painted a picture of the 17th floor: a hallway running along the building’s interior, a cargo automaton moving purposefully through it carrying something, a room sealed behind curtains and metal shutters that his sensors could not penetrate, and a service elevator at the far end disgorging four more security guards — all of them covered in fire suppression foam, furious, and trying to clear their weapons. A teletext message crackled through the jamming on the crew’s comms: stay put, don’t touch our stuff, and we’ll be out of your hair in a minute. The cargo automaton disappeared into the service elevator and was gone. Whatever it had been carrying, it was no longer on the floor. The metal shutters finished their descent, sealing the room on three sides. Then the building’s power cut out briefly, and when it came back on, the shutters began to retract.

With the shutters rising and sirens audible in the distance, Six cut through the exterior glass wall of the building and began scaling the outside of the tower, carving handholds into the glass with his vibro-axe as he went. Ronin Sanchez attempted to follow twice, falling both times and being hauled back in by Shackleton’s smart rope. Six reached Goodwin’s private office and peered through the window to find the man in a state of complete panic — slamming his communicator down, picking it up, slamming it down again, unable to reach anyone. Six cut through the window and stepped inside. Goodwin looked up at the armored, sewage-drenched figure standing in his shattered window and made his pitch: whatever they had been paid, he would double it. He would get the stuff back. He promised. Six knocked him unconscious, stripped the upholstery from a chair into makeshift bindings, and secured the man to his back.

The crew reunited on the 17th floor and moved fast. Six led the way to the fire exit stairs, and the alarm that had been threatening to sound all night finally did — not that it mattered anymore. Six slid down the spiral banister all the way to the ground floor with Goodwin strapped unconscious to his back, the rest of the crew clattering down the steps behind him. They pushed through the rear exit door into the alleyway just as a vehicle with flashing lights rounded the corner toward the front of the building. Six pulled up a sewer grate without breaking stride and dropped in. The rest of the crew followed, Ronin Sanchez pausing only long enough to scrounge a pair of trash bags from a nearby bin and pull them over his twelve-hundred-dollar shoes before descending into the dark.

Moving through the city’s maintenance pathways beneath the streets, the crew monitored local communications and learned that the break-in at the Firetemic Tower had caused immense damage and drawn federal attention — including the presence of a federal staff member named Leonard Romagin at the scene. Shackleton confirmed their destination: Storage B-342, inside the spaceport. The spaceport was separated from the city proper by an underground no-man’s-land, accessible only through the large waste pipes that connected the two systems — the same pipes that had launched Six across the city in a river of filth at the start of the night. The crew reached the edge of the city near the starport boundary and prepared to make the crossing, Goodwin still unconscious and bound to Six’s back, the smell of the sewers clinging to all of them, and the distant sound of sirens fading behind them into the dark.

Memorable Moments

“She named him Sixtus temporarily. Sixtus Smith.” — Tim (GM)

Roselyn Monroe could not put a name on Six’s forged ID because he only ever answered to “Six.”

Six crawled through the city sewer system, got pressure-flushed through a waste pipe, came up covered in filth directly in front of the Firetemic Tower, and rode the roof of an armored transport into the restricted garage.

The most chaotic and successful infiltration of the campaign, and nobody planned it.

“Nobody planned this. It is somehow going better than everything they have planned.” — Tim (GM)

Recap commentary on the sewer route.

A security guard remarked on what smelled like shit, moments after Six slid off the transport and hid behind the compactor.

He had just come out of the waste pipes. He was still in the loading bay.

Six went over an upturned desk in a flying tackle, hit the guard covering the hole he had just cut, and sent the man’s rifle skidding across the floor.

Under fire, straight out of the ceiling, and the shortest distance between two points.

Six took the guard in a front chokehold, a penalised technique, and snapped his neck when the man reached for his belt.

The guard had just armed a tangler grenade. Six ended the fight instead.

Ronin Sanchez climbed out of the hole, drew, and put a grazer shot through a guard’s chest. The torso ceased to exist.

He had been waiting in the shaft with no shot. The moment he had one, he took the biggest threat in the room.

“Whatever Daniel paid you, I’ll double it. Whatever she paid you, I told her I’ll get her the stuff back. I promise her. I’ll get the stuff back.” — Peter Goodwin

Panicking in his locked-down office as an armored, sewage-soaked figure with an axe stepped through his window.

Six bum-surfed the spiral banister from the 17th floor to the ground with an unconscious Goodwin tied to his back.

Sirens approaching. The most efficient and least dignified exit available.

A teletext message punched through the jamming: stay put, don’t touch our stuff, we’ll be out of your hair in a minute.

A third party was working the 17th floor. The cargo automaton had just left with whatever they came for.

Ronin Sanchez pulled trash bags over his twelve-hundred-dollar shoes before stepping into the sewer.

Priorities.