Mars Tier Redux
• While in transit, Terry made a full report to Proxy Evo. She was exceptionally articulate about all they ways fucking with Whitegate was going to be bad for the team and a disaster for Firewall. She reiterated Whitegates’ heavyweight credentials and made it clear that trouble was on its way.
• Terry set the shuttle down outside Pathfinder City and the party went into town. As soon as they got off the tram Kru’s muse picked up a report about a running gun battle between private security personnel and a single gunman originating at the warehouse John 117 identified as the planetside destination for the compromised farcast Oz-1 made from Whitegate’s apartment on Progress Station. Kru’s kinesics program identified the gunman as an 87% match for the Song Cai flower ego profile. The report stated that the gunman had evaded capture and stolen a AT buggy which was being tracked by satellite as it headed cross country to the northeast.
• The party raced back to the shuttle and headed off across the Martian outback in hot pursuit. Kru hacked the satellite feed and plotted the fugitive’s apparent course. It seemed to be headed for the TITAN Quarantine Zone, and specifically the White Zone at its center.
• Satellite coverage was a little spotty as obits advanced or terrain hid the target vehicle. At some point Kru noted that the buggy had stopped near two smaller vehicles and that it was now one of the smaller vehicles racing towards the TQZ border.
• Realizing that entering the Zone was against a series of serious local laws Rentlov made a call and had a short conversation with an old Korean woman about laundry services. Neither the woman nor the laundry actually exist but the proxy connection to a local smuggling gang did provide the party with an autopilot program that supposedly would get them in and out of the TQZ unobserved. All they had to do was pick up some dirty clothes while inside the Zone and deliver them to the laundry. A favor for a favor.
• Kru hacked the pilot program and Terry chased it ghost-car style, juking, jiving and going to ground in perfect synchrony. By the time he was finally able to catch up to what turned out to be a speeding crasher bike, it was just about to cross into the TQZ. Without hesitating Terry landed on the vehicle while they were both doing 60+ kph. The crushing blow and high speed crash totalled the bike and breached its life support.
John and Rentlov checked it out and found the body of a Martian Ranger and her smart baboon deputy. They had both been sprayed with automatic fire while still in the vehicle, which had then apparently been put on an autopilot course to the Zone.
• Realizing they had fallen for a diversion, Kru jumped back on the mesh and was eventually able to reacquire the second crasher bike, now well to the east of the original position. At its current speed it would enter the TQZ well before they could catch up.
The Stars Our Destination Tier
• Forks of the party were instantiated on Pontes Station and briefed. A Sentinel aboard The Stars Our Destination scum swarm fleet - a hacker, porn star and Decepticon member named Amrita Shah - had reported a hit from Kru’s kinesics program (Evo had distributed it throughout Firewall). Designated Oz-4, it was tagged boarding Three Sheets to the Wind, one of the fleet’s primary scum barges. Amrita was not told of the ego’s significance, but she was told to expect the imminent arrival of a Sentinal team.
• The new party was farcast to Erato, resleeved in morphs kitted to their specifications, provided with duffle bags full of gear and hustled onto a dust tram headed out to the Star’s one-of-a-kind black market carnival and recruiting drive called the Fourmyle Circus. Their orders were to locate Oz-4, eliminate it, figure out what it was doing, and make sure it had not contaminated any other vectors.
Fourmyle Circus
The brightly striped, inflatable tents of the famed Fourmyle Circus contrast sharply with the gray of the crater floor. The colored lasers, hovering strobes and continual pyrotechnics light up the long Lunar night, casting monstrous shadows on the steep walls of the depression. Vac-suited figures move along in eager mobs, bounding from tent to tent and temptation to temptation as hawkers and shills expertly lure them in. Vehicles of every kind - buggies, shuttles, dust trams, even a crasher truck - ring the fairground with a circle of haphazardly parked transports from as far away as Erato, Nectar and even Shackle.
Half-brilliant, half-mad and entirely captivating, the performances, demonstrations and flights of fancy on display within the tents entrance the crowd. However, it’s the infamous Midway Market that pulls in the credits, infusing the Swarm with the cash it needs to buy the reaction mass and fabber stock it must have to make the run to Mars. It’s in the Midway where the cultural divide between the free anarchists and the citizens of the Lunar Lagrange Alliance is so painfully clear.
Here the desires, fantasies, kinks and addictions of the repressed LLA masses are made reality by the infinitely diverse and shamelessly perverse whims of the Scum. Red market and black, the newest drugs, narco-algorithms, blueprints, bootleg XPs, unregulated mods and experimental enhancements make the Midway a seductive Gamorra. Tacitly ignored by the authorities who see the periodic visits by the Swarm as a necessary evil, the Circus is an exhilarating walk on the wild side - a beguiling release for the pressure of life under the Lunar domes.
Morphs of every description - and some that defy it - selling goods of every conceivable form and purpose and services to fulfil every need, desire and whimsey. A delicate dance between uptight Lunars chasing release and wary Scum hiding disdain for their gravity-bound cousins. But for the moment they need each other, so the self-delusion and the ingenuous salesmanship go on, each secretly afraid of scaring the other off - or worse yet, being raided by some overzealous security squad that wasn't cut in on the bribes.
In the distance, beyond the crater rim, an ersatz landing field hosts a rotating flight of shuttles bringing cargoes down to the surface and eager visitors and long-haul passengers up to the fleet. The Swarm does not break orbit for another 36 hours. Plenty of time to check out what the Circus has to offer…
• Under orders to make a soft-entrance onto the Swarm, the party decided to kill two birds with one stone by having a little fun while they scouted the Circus. Who cares if was an egregious, off-mission break in operational security. The party members sampled only a few of the offerings, but they did some exotic morph resleeving, moon buggy racing, dust-boarding, new economy seminars, animal puppet socking and sex. Lots and lots of sex.
• Terry and Rentlov also visited the Star’s immigration liaison. As they worked through the process Terry provided his true identification and the agent recognized him as the Ferryman - an authentic folk hero aboard the Swarm. As it turns out, during his illegal runs Terry dropped several loads of refugees at the HAL orbital complex that would eventually become the core of the Swarm, including several of the founding members of the Star’s Our Destination itself. He was basically responsible for saving the lives of several thousand of the Swarm’s inhabitants.
• Within moments the mesh as buzzing with the news that the Ferryman had survived the Fall and had come home to the Swarm. Most of the scum at the Circus left their venues and mobbed the immigration tent just to be able to say they’d seen him. The immigration agent got all “you’re gonna get so much pussy you’re gonna be able to line it up from here to Venus!” and Terry’s @-rep - already high - pegged at 100 within minutes of the reveal.
• During the course of the Ferryman's presence going viral, two other relevant things happened, and Kru was alerted to both by the monitoring programs he had left in the Erato mesh.The first was that there were several news reports about the arrest of former US Army General Kruger - Captain Kru’s father - on suspicion of aiding and abetting terrorists against the Lunar Lagrange Alliance. The second was that a Direct Action orbital shuttle was inbound for the site of the Circus. It does not take a specialty in digital traffic analysis to guess that monitors on the Star’s mesh twigged to Terry Esparza’s/The Ferryman’s presense and that his known associate - AWOL Captain Kru - must be on Luna.
• At the news of the incoming Direct Action mercenaries,Terry, Rentlov, Nikolas and John 117 got a helping hand from Terry’s new friends and hopped a transfer shuttle to Three Sheets to the Wind. Kru and Piv would follow later.
Sandbox Style
The Star’s Our Destination tier is going to play like a sandbox style video game in that there are a dozen plot-related and optional quests seeded throughout the Fleet. If your characters encounter them they will activate and you will be able to follow the leads and complete them - or not - in any order you choose. Accordingly, you may need to play a little more proactively than usual to find and trigger the various quests.
Quest #1 - Hard Day’s Hardware - Unlocked
Main mission - locate Oz-4, destroy it, determine what it was trying to accomplish and make sure it did not infect any other vectors
Quest #2 - We Gotta Go to the Crappy Town Where I’m a Hero! - Unlocked
Terry Esparza is the Ferryman - an anarchist folkhero from the last days of the Fall who saved throusands of helpless refugees - including several founders of the Stars - by going AWOL with a Direct Action shuttle and using it to ferry the survivors into orbit. The scum adore him. Heartless mercenaries want to arrest him. How could this go badly...
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