Mars Tier
• Two hover remotes in OIA Security colors zipped into the souk, their synthesized voices demanding that everyone “drop your weapons, put your hands behind your heads and get down on your knees.” The party gave that about two seconds of consideration and then with a combination of athletic brute force and gunfire they turned the drones into junk.
• Knowing the remotes were likely advance scouts for a patrol the team broke into a freerunning foot race through the abandoned neighborhood. Variable skill, speed and a number of wrong turns broke the team into fragments, but after a few close calls everyone managed to lose their pursuers.
• As the individual sentinels made their way out of the Fuxingmen district and regrouped, Kru picked up a kinesics match off the panopticon for Oz-1 in the neighborhood of the space elevator’s groundside terminal. The party hopped in a pair of johnny cabs and raced off to the terminal.
• The ride was short-stopped by a swelling crowd that had apparently gathered as part of a Barsoomian rights protest that was attempting to impede business at the terminal. A core of terraforming crews had begun a sit-in that was drawing a much larger crowd of political activists, onlookers, opportunists, griefers, news hounds and security, and the scene was already charged and tense.
• On the way to the terminal, John 117 had contacted the local @-net public security AI and reported Oz-1 to the cartoon sheriff on duty. As they got out and started pushing through the crowd on foot Terry contacted OIA security and anonymously reported Oz-1 as a murder suspect. A few moments later a series of shots blasted from the middle of the crowd, panicking the tight-packed transhumans, who then began to stampede.
• The crowd fled in all directions, leaving five bodies on the ground and security officers wrestling Barlow’s morph to the ground. John 117 grabbed a helmet and riot shield, morphed his clothes to look more like an OIA uniform and slipped in with the cops subduing Oz-1. Piv stepped in to ostensibly help the wounded but more with an eye to determining if anyone else had been infected.
• John 117 helped load the cuffed and hooded Oz-1 into the police van and as they started to pull away he faked like Oz-1 was had stopped breathing and under the guise of doing first aid garrotted Barlow’s head off with mono-wire. Nice move.
• As the van pushed through the dispersing crowd Nikolas positioned himself to intercept the vehicle and help John 117.
Iapetus Tier
Brain Freeze
The drop shuttle plunges precipitously into the ice-walled canyon and high gees punch you in the gut as Terry pulls the ship onto a flat course. He says calmly over tacnet that all the juking “was to shake satellite surveillance” but you suspect he really did it just for fun. And to make you piss your vacsuit.
Iapetus. One of Saturn’s countless moons. Way the fuck out on the rim - farther than you’ve ever been before. Is that little yellow spot really the sun? Shit.
The moon was once a ball of dirty ice with only a small resource extraction complex on the surface. During the Fall, over 200k refugees were welcomed by the base workers and given what seemed safe refuge. Then, in the final days, something went wrong and Iapetus went dark. Fearing the worst, remote sensing missions confirmed that Iapetus had fallen to the TITANs.
Not only was the population missing but the moon itself had been transformed. Once a small, frozen sphere, the satellite had become a massive, crystalline latticework twice its original size and laced with integrated circuitry of unknown purpose. And the people - all of them - were gone. Not dead but missing, leaving signs of not having fled but of perhaps having retreated - retreated to the deeper layers where perhaps they still remain.
As the shuttle touches down on the gantry bolted to the canyon walls the ship’s landing lights gleam off the surrounding ice. The mouth of a dimly lit tunnel stands mutely in the cliff face, daring you to enter. A string of chemical lights stuck to the passage roof serve only to create shadows and other unknowns.
His voice belying the confidence of his words Terry speaks hesitantly over your inserts. “Welcome to Iapetus. You are now free to move about the scary, TITAN-infected moon.”
•••
• After determining that Oz-2 farcasted to a Cognite station in Iapetus orbit, and that a Firewall plant (Connor Shreve) in that same base went dark about 10 hours later, the Proxy Evolution sent the sentinels to Watchdog Station, a small Autonomist habitat circling the infected moon. After being instantiated in a somewhat random collection of morphs (including a nova crab) by a curt Dr. Saya, they shuttled down to the atmosphere-free, low-g study site in hopes of intercepting Oz-2 before Cognite caught wind anything was wrong.
Well, they could always hope...
• The party entered the tunnel and worked their way through the nested layers of slowly deteriorating ice. As they moved deeper they began to notice gold-colored circuitry embedded in the layers.
• John 117 was the first to notice the mosaic of the anguished face embedded in the tunnel wall - made out of tiny bits of grit and stone, but only coherently visible at one specific angle. Further in they found a large but broken, sculpted face and on the wall of a chasm a furious face drawn in what appeared to be blood.
• Using the detailed reports and maps provided by the agent, the sentinels quickly found their way to the icy cavern containing the inflatable, geodesic habitat the researches had been using. They searched it, and found no personnel, but they did find a large, high-end server that had been slagged with plasma fire. They also found a compact fusion reactor with power cables to both the habitat and leading down a side tunnel. Leaving Kru on his own to try and recover data from the damaged server the rest of the party followed the cable.
• The cable led to a large, vertical, cylindrical well that plunged down into darkness - the cable trailing over the edge. Scanning the floor 100 meters below the party noted an active server similar to the one back in the habitat in the center of the circular space, and a number of bodies - dead and dying - arranged almost ritualistically around it.
• While the others took up overwatch positions on the rim of the well, John 117 stealthed his way over the side and down to the bottom. Once there he began checking bodies. Most were dead and the few with the appropriate mods were in medical stasis. He began collecting cortical stacks from the dead.
• He found Shreve, dead, slouched against the server. Clutched in his suit-gloved hands was a primitive display tablet with a smart adapter. He had blown out his own brain stem and stack - apparently with the large handgun laying on the ground not far away. Sitting on top of the server in a docking station connected to the computer, was a massive, solid state memory stick.
• As John 117 noticed the memory stick, tacnet alerted the party to the sudden presence of a strange and horrifying biomorph at the mouth of a side passage that emptied on to the floor of the well. Built like a large gorilla, the creature had over-sized shoulders, stunted hind legs, only a slight, face-like bulge where a head and neck should be, and two additional pairs of odd little arms - one set protruding from it’s chest and the other from between it’s massive shoulderblades. Perhaps even more incongruously, the monster was wearing the tattered remnants of what appeared to be a old-model vacsuit, the smart capabilities of which had long ago stopped working.
• Soundlessly in the hard vacuum, the creature made one blindingly fast bound towards John in the low-g and attacked.
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