The Firetemic Tower Raid

Overview

The execution of The Goodwin Contract, and the first time the crew have taken a fight to a civilian building in the middle of a capital city. Six went in from underneath and rode an armored transport into the restricted garage. Shackleton Magellan got the others in through the front door on Edvin’s cloned badge. Between them they turned the Firetemic Tower’s 15th, 16th and 17th floors into a vertical battlefield, killed two men, took Peter Goodwin through his own window, and left by the sewer with sirens behind them.

Nobody planned it. It went better than everything they had planned.

What Happened

• The garage and the shaft. Six rode the transport’s roof into the loading bay, hid behind the compactor, charged the freight elevator under his chameleon surface, and climbed the shaft to the 15th floor when the car would not move without a code. One stun grenade down the shaft for the guards below.
• The subway. Shackleton cloned Edvin’s badge off a sleeping man in the Aethel Subway Station while Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez blocked the cameras. A droid checked, found no crime, and let them go. From the Aethel Central Square Shackleton read Goodwin’s lips at the limousine: the shipment has already gone out and cannot be stopped.
• The lobby and the 16th floor. The badge opened the front door and got them to the 16th-floor R&D lab, one floor short. Ceiling drones scanned the lobby the moment Rock and Ronin vaulted the turnstiles. Ronin wrenched open the service elevator doors and found the ladder. Shackleton found the fire suppression grenades.
• The shaft. Rock’s boots on the rungs drew blaster fire from below. Shackleton dropped a foam grenade into the dark and the shooting stopped. Rock and Ronin opened the 17th-floor doors onto four rifles and targeting lights, and shut them.
• The floor. Six cut up through the 15th and 16th floors with the vibro-axe and came through the 17th in a cloud of concrete, into an office with overturned desks, glass walls, and shutters already descending. A flying tackle, a front chokehold, a snapped neck, and the dead man’s tangler grenade going off across the floor. The second guard’s grazer rifle put craters in Six’s chest plate. Ronin came up through the hole and took the man’s torso off with the grazer.
• The third party. Shackleton’s nanobots mapped the floor through the jamming: a hallway, the cargo automaton carrying something out, a sealed room his sensors could not read, four foam-covered guards arriving by service elevator, hostile nanobots on the floor. A teletext through the jamming: stay put, don’t touch our stuff, we’ll be out of your hair in a minute. The automaton left. The power cut. The shutters came up.
• The window. Six cut through the exterior glass and climbed the outside of the building carving handholds. Ronin fell twice and was caught twice by Shackleton’s smart rope. Six went through the window of Goodwin’s office, heard the bribe (“whatever Daniel paid you”, “whatever she paid you”), knocked him out, and tied him on with chair upholstery.
• The exit. The fire stairs, Six on the banister with Goodwin on his back, the rear door into the alley as the lights came round the front, a sewer grate, and the Aethel City Sewers. Ronin put trash bags over his shoes first.
• The comms. Immense damage at the tower and a federal presence at the scene, the name heard as Leonard Romagin (confirmed as Leonard Romeijn, Fleet Major commanding Federal Fleet Base Aethel). Destination confirmed: Storage B-342. The session ended at the city’s edge, the DMZ waste pipes ahead.

Why This Matters

• The crew are perpetrators now. A kidnapping, two dead men, a wrecked tower, and forged IDs on a world with a federal presence already at the scene.
• Somebody else was on the floor. Jamming, nanobots, a cargo automaton, a message. The guards carried Kinetic Logistics-pattern rifles. Whoever they were, they got what they came for and let the crew take Goodwin.
• Goodwin talks. “Daniel”, “she”, “the stuff”, a shipment already gone. He is unconscious on Six’s back and he will wake up.
• The delivery is still owed. Storage B-342, the coded transponder, and Roselyn Monroe’s unnamed contact.
• The aftermath is played out. The escape through the sewers and the delivery to Storage B-342 resolve in The Sewer Breakout and The Storage B-342 Handoff (Session 9).