#RustbucketTales #Part8
Some interesting backstory from this session, not to mention a lovely example of different character agendas making a mess for each other…
Previously on Uncharted Worlds…
…Kestrel talks to a new passenger, Matha Dowe, in a bar. She’s a turncoat from the Shards of Xa; “I need to get outsystem. My former crewmates won’t be too happy to see me”. Later, Orcha checks out her identity and discovers that she is a bounty hunter…
…Anvil tries to find out what’s wrong with his hand scanner and connects it to the test system. A massive amount of data downloads, then a message pops up: “Hello. My name is Sai.”
….Orcha centres Reverend Klune’s head in his scope and squeezes the trigger. It explodes like a ripe melon and Klune falls to the floor. He looks up to see people pointing in his direction and yelling…
…Fleet Captain Rutland tells Kestrel “you were supposed to recover the ship quietly, not cause a diplomatic incident”
…Sai’s screen says “I am not registered”. Anvil says “Hmmm. I can probably fix that….”
…Kestrel shakes hands with an Ironclad supply clerk in front of a crate of guns.
…Orcha-17 tells Orcha-37 “You’re going to have to make it right. You’re going to have to find me another Greenworlder. Let me know when you’ve got someone”
…Anvil pushes the (full) tiger cage across the landing pad towards a warehouse guarded by armed men.
After their adventure with the tiger, the crew of the Rustbucket decide to do some nice, safe trading for a while. Having traded some dustspice for vegetables on the garden world of Qahwah, they set course for Jagatika, the next major world down the line. On the pleasant journey the crew bonds. Anvil starts treating Dev with some respect, on the grounds that she’s started doing her job properly (meanwhile, she’s established that he has absolutely no romantic interest in her). Orcha bonds with Anvil by showing an interest in the ship’s engineering quirks – which are many. Rustbucket, it turns out, is a converted stealth gunboat – the port and starboard cargo bays would normally hold missiles, there’s a forward weapons assembly which is just empty (well, technically its smuggling compartments). But careful checks of the serial numbers of major components shows that they belong to several different vessels – mostly from the same class, but all marked as no longer in use, stricken, or mothballed. And that, plus a few probing questions and the chance discovery of a cancelled bounty on Kestrel reveals the truth: Kestrel was discharged from Ironclad for stealing. Shipments went missing, even a few ships. Vessels and parts that were meant to be mothballed were redirected – including the Rustbucket. No wonder Kestrel was so nervous about working for Ironclad: she’s flying their stolen property right under their noses.
Jagatika: the most populated world in the cluster, a crowded, filthy pit full of people desperate to get out. The city is stratified, literally ruled over by the wealthy who live in the uppermost levels of the tallest towers. Living conditions, services and infrastructure get worse the lower down you go, and the police rule over everything with an iron shock-baton, afraid the slightest spark could lead to food riots or worse. Most people spend their entire lives indoors, and never see the sky.
Rustbucket touches down at a vast spaceport atop a huge arcology. Through the rain, they can barely make out the shape of others surrounding it, and as they came in to land they could see them as far as the eye could see. Unusually, Kestrel leaves the customs clearance to the others, skips her customary post-landing bar-crawl / buyer hunt, and catches a rapid transit from the starport to the heart of the city. Once there, she switches to transit elevator to Deck 50, then (after the police check her invitation) a far smaller elevator to the upper levels. Eventually, she winds up at the imposing door of a private apartment in the high 60’s, where a snooty butler (who looks down his nose at her stained and utilitarian shipsuit) shows her in to the living room of her brother, Peregrine.
Peregrine has a lot of space, and a view, huge towers glistening in the sun, with private flyers flitting between them. The lower city is shrouded by the ever-present cloud deck – out of sight, and out of mind. Perry was always a social climber, and he’s come a long way from Deck 31 where they grew up – thanks mostly to his wife. Kestrel thinks he probably wants to lecture her about dragging the “family name” through the mud, and the conversation starts out that way, with Perry needling her about her failed naval career. “Mother would have been so proud of you if you’d been an admiral”. But it turns out Peregrine needs her: he has a family problem, his wife’s niece, Phoebe, who has taken up with the wrong sort of man and is living somewhere in the 20’s. Peregrine wants her hustled offworld, “somewhere nice, like Qahwah or Lyca”. And he makes it clear that he can and will make trouble for Kestrel if she refuses. Naturally, there’ll be compensation if she accepts: ten thousand credits should cover it. After making sure there are no tigers involved – she charges extra for them now – Kestrel makes a show of reluctantly accepting the offer, a plan already forming.
Meanwhile, Anvil has grown concerned about his survivability (synths being hard to treat) and has decided to look for a stock of “spare parts”, a few backup organs in case of a shooting. He’s got a lead on a chopshop owner down on city bottom who is rumoured to deal in synth parts, but thinks he needs help finding them. Orcha offers to help – he worked here for a year as an enforcer to Bryanna Steiger, “the sculptress”, a major underworld figure. And she owes him a favour after that last job. So they head off to her workshop in the mid-decks to look her up.
Orcha’s password is old, but still good; he and Anvil are shown through the workshop and into the back office where Steiger and her lieutenants run the operation. Steiger seems pleased to see Orcha, and after a little reminiscing, they get down to business. Yes, she knows this chop-shop – its owner, Cornell, is a problem for her. He doesn’t make the appropriate payments, doesn’t have a sense of loyalty. She can get one of her people to show them how to get there, but she wants Orcha to remind Cornell of who he should be paying tribute to. That out of the way, Orcha makes his real request: he needs to find a Greenworlder priest. Steiger doesn’t even ask why, but promises that if there’s one on-world, she’ll find them. On the way out, one of Steiger’s bodyguards hands Orcha a concealed stun pistol in case he needs it – Jagatikans don’t like to kill people – and introduces him to Fay, a hard-looking street soldier who’ll be acting as their guide.
Meanwhile, Kestrel has skimmed the file Peregrine’s PI’s had dug up on cousin Phoebe. She’s running a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on Deck 22, living with Lynard, her business partner, in a capsule apartment. After meeting Dev in an actual sit-down bar, they navigate the crowds to the coffee alcove. There, she gives Phoebe her comm number and convinces her to call her when she gets off-shift, then hangs around with Dev and waits. Dev isn’t used to this – she doesn’t know how to move with the crowd, doesn’t pitch her voice to be heard above the ever-present background noise, and almost commits the ultimate faux-pas of throwing her (disgusting) low-deck “coffee” down a recyc chute rather than handing it to someone who needs it. But Kestrel avoids any major incidents.
A few hours later, after a quick comm-call, they meet Phoebe and Lynard in a “park” – more a wider corridor, where the crowds mill around an abstract sculpture. Kestrel gives them the low-down: Peregrine doesn’t approve of their relationship, and is offering her Cr8,000 to get Phoebe offworld. When Lynard protests, she mentions the actual plan: she splits the money with them and they both go. Everyone’s a winner: Kestrel gets to piss off her brother, Phoebe and Lynard get an offworld holiday, and they all get paid. They’re initially reluctant, worried about losing their business and the lease on their capsule, but Kestrel talks them round by pointing out that they don’t need to come back and could use the money to start elsewhere, somewhere nice. Maybe a farm? And that sells it. Of course, they’ll need to sneak Lynard onto the Rustbucket under a false name, but Kestrel can slip someone a few credits to falsify the records, and Perry won’t know he’s been had until its too late. Phoebe agrees, and Kestrel and Dev head back to the starport to make the arrangements.
Orcha and Anvil catch the rapid transit over a few sectors, then take a series of transit elevators down to the industrial decks, and then a succession of service elevators and maintenance stairwells to the recycling centres on city bottom. There are crowds even here, but now they’re the homeless and destitute, living in the public corridors and scrounging for paste. Down at the bottom, Fay leads them to a nondescript maglocked door – the chop-shop.
Anvil’s negotiations go badly – Cornell names an outrageous price for a “backup chassis”, more than Anvil can really afford even after the Nerian job. Anvil asks whether he could pay for some of it in medical tech, then steps outside and calls Sai on the ship. He has the idea of getting Sai to check whether there’s anything in the junkyards he can repair. After a few seconds and a horrific amount of bandwidth, Sai announces that there are six medical suspension pods available which could be refurbished, that she has already correlated a list of the required parts with what is available in local recyc centres, and that delivery of all components can be arranged to the ship. Would Anvil like her to place the orders? After saying “yes”, Anvil steps back inside and seals the deal: it’ll still cost him a lot of his money, but now he gets to spend three days fixing junk rather than being wiped out. He leaves Orcha to deliver his message and steps outside, his head already full of rebuild pathways. Orcha refuses Fay’s offer of assistance and sends him to wait outside as well, the door’s heavy maglocks making a solid “clunk” behind them.
Alone with Cornell, Orcha delivers Steiger’s demand to pay up, but sees that Cornell won’t buy it unless he demonstrates that he’s serious. So, he slips his knife out, prepared to take off a finger. And that’s when it all goes wrong: Cornell is faster than he looks, dodges Orcha’s grasp, and whips out a stunner. When Orcha tries to take it off him, Cornell doesn’t hesitate to use it. Hearing the sound of stunner fire from inside, Anvil and Fay suddenly realise they’re locked out. But all they can do is beat helplessly against the door.
Inside, Cornell starts dragging the partially paralysed Orcha towards the back room workspace, taking about sending a message of his own, maybe an eye. But he makes the mistake of putting Orcha down while he deals with a retinal locked door – Orcha drags his own stunner out of his pocket, lines it up, and shoots Cornell in the back, then a second time at close range in the back of the head just to make sure he stays out. It takes an age for him to crawl his way through the shop to the door, only to find the maglock has a fingerprint scanner on it. Well, he did need to send a message, and he still has the knife…