Agent Blank: Reclusive Haitian Ex-Ganger with a mean thirst for firewater; member of C-6, Anubis CovOps

Agent Gohring: Icelandic Sharpshooter who has never missed a critical shot...yet; member of C-6, Anubis CovOps

Agent Brior Terrible: Pakistani Professor of Relative Theology and Operations Cleaner; member of C-6, Anubis CovOps

Agent Chelsea Mood: Irish-Korean Demolitions Expert with a passionate obsession with reluctant Haitian men; member of C-6, Anubis CovOps

Agent Ember Cardinal: Mysterious Entry Specialist and lone survivor of C-7, Anubis 2nd Gen CovOps

PROLOGUE

Militech Corporation, the industry leader in munitions and armament technology, was preparing to release on the market the first HydroIonic Railgun, presumably to cater to a rapidly expanding, and hostile, Off-World Corporate presence. The weapon was rumored to be in the last stage of developmental testing, and a prototype was scheduled for field-testing. Anubis Combine, a young but well-funded rival to Militech, also had a Railgun prototype in development, though the project was shrouded in secrecy, and not known to the public. Anubis technology was based on Off-World mineral resins and space-born weapons research, as Orbital interests funded the company in large part, and their weapon was expected to be far superior in design and implementation. However, Militech held the market on brand recognition and long-term military contracts. It was determined by Anubis Critical Path Analysis Section (CPA) that it was in the company’s interest if the Militech project could be derailed.

Independent contractors were hired by third-party handlers to seize the Militech prototype weapon and research materials during the planned field test, working for an Anubis dummy corporation that was assumed to have an interest in reverse engineering the weapon. In fact, CPA believed that the seizure would allow Anubis engineers to sabotage the weapon, and subsequent recovery of the device by Militech field agents would allot the test to proceed, the resulting failure of the weapon (with massive collateral damage) would weaken Militech’s reputation in the field of space weaponry, only now in it’s infancy. However, the heist failed and Militech field agents were able to retrieve the weapon unmolested. The independent contractors were routed and while many were eliminated, the remains of the crew had gone to ground with many of the Militech research materials in tow. Militech field agents had tracked these remaining individuals, through the use of corrupted local law enforcement, to a remote drinking establishment, where the crew had been attempting to access Militech networks in order to determine if the heist was undermined from within their own organization or that of their assumed client, the Anubis dummy corporation. While the research materials they possessed were not relevant, and the likelihood of their elimination by Militech field agents eminent, CPA determined a mild risk existed that Anubis involvement, though thrice removed, could potentially be revealed through the attempted hacking of Militech’s systems.

Unbeknownst to CPA executives, one of the surviving crewmembers, the same hacker attempting to access Militech systems, was actually an Anubis Sleeper Agent. The fact that a covert operative of Anubis Combine was unknowingly creating exposure for his own agency was a potential source of embarrassment for C-6, the Covert Operations arm of Anubis.

A Black Ops team was deployed.

Mission Objectives:

Destroy remaining Militech weapon research data

Terminate surviving independent contractors, if exist

Terminate surviving Militech field agents, if exist

Activate Anubis Sleeper Agent if feasible; Terminate otherwise.

Minimize Anubis exposure.

The C-6 team moved into position from three positions: team 1 was to extract the Sleeper Agent (Luis the Piece, street handle) and transfer him to team 2, standing by. Team 2 was to retreat to a safe distance and attempt to activate the Sleeper Agent or terminate him, as required. Team 3 was to rig the hijacked vehicle, containing weapon research materials, with Smart-grade explosives, then monitor the existing Militech agents and keeping watch for additional Militech backup.

Team 1, Agent Gohring and Agent Black, used a waterblade to penetrate the exterior wall of the stockroom that housed the computer that Luis was accessing, while concurrently Militech agents in the front of the bar were in play against the other remaining independent contractors. They took possession of the Sleeper Agent, and transferred him to team 2, Agent Flack and Agent Kurtz.

Team 1 then used their Utility Vehicle as a decoy, maneuvering from the alley around the corner into view, and struck the Militech sedans parked in front of the bar. They were able to render three vehicles inoperative, including a backup Militech team in position across the street. With team 2 still en route to their position, team 1 made the decision to navigate their vehicle into the bar itself, eliminating several Militech and local law enforcement targets in a hail of shatter glass, weapons fire, and kinetic impact.

Two remaining targets returned fire from within the bar, and Agent Gohring shot one in the face from within the vehicle, now lodged in the corner structure of the building. Agent Blank took position near the hood of the vehicle, and shot a Militech agent by the bar. Agent Gohring was struck by weapons fire, but shot his assailant in the throat, eliminating all known targets.

Team 2 moved into their second position and prepared to activate the Sleeper Agent. However, they were rammed into another vehicle by a previously hidden Militech vehicle. Agent Kurtz was killed on impact. The Sleeper Agent, Luis the Piece, routed out the back gate of the Utility Vehicle and ran headlong into the street in the direction of the bar. The Militech agents terminated Agent Flack a moment later, but were not aware of Luis’s exodus.

Luis, in a fit of panic and adrenaline, ran past the bedlam at the bar consisting of three flaming vehicles, a sagging building with another vehicle inside the bar, and a constant patter of weapons fire, and made his way to his crew’s only remaining vehicle, the van parked in the alley with the research materials stowed within. He triggered the monofilament line strung on the door handle, and detonated the explosives, killing himself and destroying the Militech cargo. It was scorned, later, as the moment Luis went to Pieces.

Meanwhile, three Militech agents, hidden behind the bar, ambushed team 1. Weapons fire ensued, and eventually the assailants were stunned by Agent Gohring’s flash grenade. At that moment, team 3, Agent Brior, maneuvered his vehicle into the bar in a similar destructive fashion as team 1 had done, crushing one Militech member and scattering the other two, who were summarily dispatched by Agents Gohring and Blank.

A Cleaner arrived within minutes to destroy the bodies and vehicles, and the C-6 team was extracted before authorities arrived. All physical evidence was destroyed and the bodies disintegrated with acid.

DOWNTIME

During a well-deserved period of downtime, the members of C-6 convened at a jungle bar for drinks and Thai food. After a few rounds, Agent Chelsea started flirting heavily with Agent Blank, unresponsive despite being severely impaired. Frustrated by her unsuccessful attempts at seduction, made the more difficult because of her teammates awareness of her unhinged obsession with wiring herself with personal explosives “just in case”…Chelsea regrouped in the restroom.

A group of Haitian ex-military mercenaries had been staring at the team for the duration of their visit to the bar, and it became clear that all eyes were on Agent Blank, their similarly mysterious Haitian ex-military companion, who was focusing all of his energy on staying upright. Finally, one of the Haitians, though not the apparent leader, approached the team and placed a glass of particularly noxious-looking spirits in front of Agent Blank, who struggled to focus on the new beverage in his limited field of vision. “This is for Willie- you know what I’m talking of!” exclaimed the mercenary, who after a moment nodded and returned to his group. The team resisted the urge to turn and make a pre-emptive strike on what their instincts told them was a looming threat to both their safety and identities, and instead decided that the best play was a steady fighting withdrawal to avoid messy, public conflict. They rose to leave, abandoning the drink untouched.

Agent Blank, however, stumbles into the table while rising, spilling the drink on the floor, which the Haitian mercenaries clearly misconstrue as a snub, and storm out of the bar immediately.

After a late night of drinking and cavorting, the team is summoned into action before dawn. Systems Security Supervisors at Night Point Data Haven, a small suburban subsidiary of Anubis that manages archival records of the corporation’s many holdings, reported a suspicious anomaly in the archive integrity. Small packets of data appeared to have been corrupted and then purged during the night, but no early-warning systems were activated in the process, leading them to question the culpability of Night Point late shift IS personnel. It was doubtfully coincidental that the only employee with the necessary level of clearance to access the archives had not logged out and was not answering his cellular or home phones. Anubis Systems Control had immediately isolated Night Point from outgoing data traffic, and had also moved to shut down the employee, Sing Yip, from network access rights. They had also successfully isolated his home residence network access and were monitoring the phone taps, while Night Point Security was keeping the house under visual surveillance.

Mission Objectives:

Search suspect’s private residence

Extract and interrogate suspect

Retrieve any electronic,/digital media from residence

Confirm data integrity

Minimize Anubis exposure.

C-6 arrived on-scene via unmarked, black helicopters, as usual, and transferred to Utility Vehicles for the short distance to the residence perimeter. Sing Yip and his family lived in Corporate Housing laid out in a pattern of symmetrical two-story units served by a SINE-wave shaped central stem, containing a light rail system that shuttled personnel to and from the business district. Each unit was laid out in typical bungalow fashion, with exterior front door entry, but with rear access directly to the sub-level light rail tube. Security personnel had shut down the light rail system twenty minutes prior to C-6 arrival.

The team parked around the block from the residence, and at 6:42am, checked in with Night Point Security, parked four cars down from the residence’s front entry, and partially blocked from view of the house by a large lemon tree. The security personnel, two hamhock-necked ex-cops in tinted sunglasses and crew cuts, confirmed no entry or exit had been attempted on the residence, and that while no one had answered the house phone, they weren’t certain if anyone was within, as they didn’t have any infrared scanning capability. Regardless, they had seen no movement since their arrival an hour before.

Agents Gohring and Brior activated their therm-optic cloaks and went non-spectrum, approaching the perimeter of the residence, while Agents Chelsea and the horribly hung over Agent Blank used an access panel and entered the sub-level tunnel at the rear of the residence 30 meters from the perimeter. The team maintained contact through sub-dermal mandibular mics.

The surface team observed that all Mechoshades had been drawn on both floors of the residence, and that the front top-floor room was entirely glazed. All entries were locked. Agent Brior called in to C-6 Section to request power and alarm service to be cut on the residence before proceeding. While waiting for the all clear, they noticed what appeared to be a scorch mark on the front door below the entry lever. Meanwhile, Agents Chelsea and Blank moved into position at the rear entry airlock, having passed two other residential access nodes along their path. Agent Gohring soon discovered a neatly severed hand in the bushes near the front porch, cauterized at the wrist.

As this seemed to indicate an incident at the building entry, Agents Gohring and Brior returned to the Night Point Security vehicle to address this new information. However, though the team had spoken to these men just minutes earlier, they found the Security vehicle, a brown Ford Bronco, a gory sight. Long cleanly sliced gashes were drawn through the metal of the truck’s body, splitting the windshield in half as if made from rice paper. Both security officers sat with their hands folded neatly in their laps, with their severed heads resting within their upturned palms, their expressions those of wonder and bewilderment, as if at the moment of death, they each took a moment to reflect on their sheer lack of preparation for what was occurring.

Both Agents ran back to the house, and after calling for backup and being given confirmation that the residence security system was down, the team stormed the unit from both sides.

Agents Gohring and Brior lobbed flash grenades into the first and second story windows, and kicked the front door in, bursting into the lobby through a shower of glass shards. Agents Chelsea and Blank, struggling to access the now-dead electronic access panel at the rear entry, were delayed momentarily, before overcoming the panel by force and entering through the rear.

The ground level was silent and dark. A clean sweep confirmed no target present. As Gohring and Brior, the advance team, ascended the central stairs, they discovered a matrix of neatly ordered ruddy squarish tiles on the second floor living room floor. Closer inspection revealed them to be similarly cauterized thin sections of square-edged flesh and organs sliced horizontally. The array of 16cm plates began to approximate an entire human torso.

Agent Brior soon spotted a message scrawled in blood on the soffit over the entry they had passed through, written neatly in what Agent Blank identified as Haitian shorthand, roughly translated as:

CALL 65.67.43.3434 FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

Concerned about the increasing likelihood of booby traps, the team evacuated the unit through the downstairs rear entry, and emptied into the sub-level tunnel. Though they remained non-spectrum cloaked, they had proceeded only 10m before being smothered in a sudden burst of fire extinguishing foam from something or someone within the tunnel, though it had appeared empty, rendering their therm-optic cloaks useless. A searing white-hot bead slashed through the tunnel wall inches from Agent Blank, empirically white hot though not actually emitting ambient heat.

The team deactivated the cloaks and broke into a sprint towards the access panel, which remained 20m down the tunnel, with Agent Blank laying suppressive fire down the tunnel behind them. They ducked into the access node of the adjacent housing unit and regrouped to search for their assailants, though the tunnel remained empty and dim.

Three seconds later, several opponents dropped from the ceiling of the access node onto the shoulders of the team. As they struggled to maintain their footing, they were assaulted on all sides with careful, exacting blows from black-clad Haitian mercenaries in Impact suits wielding Big Knucks. The gang was extremely organized, constantly maneuvering from target to target, tripping, pushing, punching, and blocking each Agent as they fumbled with their hand-to-hand weapons. “They have a most quick and excellent fighting style!” exclaimed Agent Brior before being smashed in the nose by the leaden gauntlet of one of his constantly rotating assailants.

Eventually, after a series of edged weapon and hand-to-hand strikes, the team was slowly able to separate their roving attackers, weakening them by targeting them individually. Agents grappled their attackers while Chelsea, removed to a crouching position in the corner of the hatchway, sent steady shots with her pistol through the heads of their foes at a calm, assured pace. Once separated from each other, the Haitian mercenaries proved less effective in close-quarters combat, and were eventually subdued.

Just as Agent Blank dispatched the last mercenary with a 7cm gash across the throat with his C-6 issue combat blade…his instinctive reflexes snapped him into motion the very moment another telltale glowing orange bead of heat slashed directly down his exposed skull. Those reflexes saved his life, for as he lurched back hard against the tunnel wall, the glowing line of the attack appeared vertically across his forehead, instantly cauterized, but nonetheless fortunately a shallow wound. Agent Gohring, at that moment, was readying his bullpup rifle, and with calm attention, spotted what his suspicions had predicted: the slight ocular blur of a therm-optic cloak in motion, passing to the right of Agent Blank, now in shock. He unloaded his clip just ahead of the path of their invisible target, and the body appeared then, in a storm of 7.62mm rounds, torn Smart-fabric, and blood.

Their target lay in a crumpled mass against the access door, soon recognized as the leader of the Haitian mercenaries from the bar the night before. His cellular phone began to ring from within his tattered Smart-suit. Agent Chelsea held up her cellular phone and handed it to Agent Blank: “It was for you.”

The team was unsuccessful at interrogating the lone surviving member of the gang, as his horrible throat wound prevented him from communicating, or breathing. After C-6 completed an immediate evacuation, Night Point Security swarmed the premises and began breaking down the contents of the suspect’s residence.

The post-op investigation revealed troubling conclusions. The sectioned torso was that of Mrs. Noreen Yip, the suspect’s wife. The mutilation was done with the weapon retrieved by Anubis forensics agents in the sub-level tunnel during clean-up. It was a particularly nasty tribal weapon, a flat ribbon blade of shaped tungsten steel welded to a flux capacitor socketed in a crude handle, which, when activated, created a superheated edge of hot steel that could slice through most modern ceramics and metals like butter. It was traditionally used in prisoner mutilations. The hand found in the bushes had also belonged to Mrs. Yip, as the rest of her extremities were found in the kitchen recycling bins. It was believed that the mercenary leader, later identified as Danbull, a militant Haitian ex-soldier making a name for himself and his gang in the underworld, had murdered the security personnel, approached the house non-spectrum in his cloak who’s origin had not been confirmed (as it was proprietary Anubis stealth technology and not on the market), and simply buzzed the door. Mrs. Yip had realized her error too late, and while trying to grip the door lever as she was being pulled into the house, found her hand efficiently removed, and soon after, was filleted in the upstairs living room. The other mercenaries had been given access through the bathroom window, and had gone about the task of leaving the message for Agent Blank, who was apparently the focus of the entire attack. The gang had left through the sub-level tunnel, and had hidden themselves away the moment Agents Blank and Chelsea had begun opening the access hatch, never knowing of the presence of their assailants even as they passed them within an arm’s reach. It was sheer coincidence that the team had chosen the rear access hatch to make their exit, and in turn had stumbled upon the Haitians in the tunnel. It was never determined what Danbull had planned for Agent Blank once the cellular number was called, nor even why the attack occurred in the first place, and Agent Blank confirmed no knowledge of Danbull’s identity or motive. CPA Psychiatroops suspected his dishonesty, but CPA agreed it was in the company’s interest to close the investigation. It was determined, however, that Danbull and his men had nothing to do with the stolen data or the missing Night Point officer, and Sing Yip is presumed to be dead. It is suspected that Danbull tracked Agent Blank after he left the bar the night before, and hacked his team’s closed-circuit communications network with black market scanner technology. Sing Yip and his family, though most likely guilty of espionage, are believed to have ended their lives as bait for the C-6 Covert Operations Team.

The suspect did not appear to have ever returned home that night.

TWO WEEKS LATER...

The C-6 team was called to an emergency meeting at the CPA offices of New Chicago, the home city of Anubis's most infamous division, the ASRA (Anubis Strategic Response Arm).

The ASRA had been in the very powerful but high-risk business of supplying post-military advisors to major Earthside corporations, educating their internal security forces on risk assessment, corporate interest management, threat exposure, internal and external defense strategy, and more frequently, Orbital tactics. In other words, having contracted advisors to most major Earthside corporations in competition with one another, they now spoke to the growing unrest between the corporations left behind on Earth and those slowly building industrial and agricultural autonomy in orbit. As Orbital corporations began to sever ties with their Earthside corporate partners, rumors of an Orbital alliance were brewing in the boardrooms and security departments of the planet's leading biomedical, industrial, and military combines. ASRA advisors helped keep Earthside corporations watching the sky, and consequently tolerating each other's competitive presence in the global marketplace. ASRA analysts knew that if Orbital corporations allied and severed ties with the planet, the economies that supported the major Earthside corporate states would soon collapse, their access to offworld hard metals, energy resources, and, some feared, even satellite communication networks, permanently severed. Orbital alliance at the expense of the coporations and nation states that funded and supported the push to LEO int he first place was simply not acceptable. ASRA advisors were challenged to keep Earthside corporations aware of that reality at all costs.

However, the ASRA walked a delicate balance of credibility and blackmail. ASRA advisors sat in the underground bunkers and penthouse strategic boardrooms of all of the major corporations on Earth, and collectively, Anubis's most aggressive division knew most of the unpleasant secrets kept hidden from the public eye by their clients. A pristine record of reliability and dedication, combined with clearly defined nondisclosure agreements, maintained ASRA's reputation as non-biased third party advisors in many of the Earthside corporation's ongoing feuds, like the arms race between Militech and Kombinat. Any threat to the reputation of ASRA, particularly at a time when the looming threat from orbit was solidifying rapidly, was of the highest priority for Anubis security investigators. ASRA advisors must remain untouchable and above reproach at all times, or the advisory system would cease to exist.

An independent information broker had contacted Anubis field agents about what he believed to be an attempted coporate extraction planned on an ASRA target within the next 48 hours. Anubis analysts verified enough corroboration factors in the broker's partial data to warrant the threat a possibility, then forwarded that assessment to ASRA internal security, which found the prospect of a corporate extraction from their offices implausible. ASRA security was one of the most thorough and foolproof systems ever utilized on a massive scale. Employees were identified by DNA tags that were programmed by nanites to change protein markers every 90 seconds, creating a unique corporate genetic signature that could not be replicated. All employees were verified entering and exiting the ASRA tower's checkpoints, and were under 24 hour surveillance in all areas of the building. All network access was monitored, as was telecommunication and IR transmissions. An impenetrable signal disruption barrier was cast around the perimeter of the structure, so strong that tight band, two-way radio transmitters could not breach it's borders. Neighboring towers sharing skybridges with the ASRA towers were likewise monitored, and roaming security personnel were abundant on every floor. The company that watched the world watched itself most of all.

The ASRA internal security department rejected the feasibility of a corporate extraction ont he grounds that no high-ranking staffmember or researcher within the company could ever be approached by outside interests, as all communications were monitored, complete physical surveillance was in place and monitored by humans and AI taskers, and high-risk individuals were additionally guarded by a secret surgical process which bonded bio-engineered nerve toxin sacks to the pituitary gland, known as glandular bombs. If any high-ranking employee were to leave the building premesis beyond a safety zone of 40 meters, the sacks would auto-detonate, killing them instantly. The ASRA security department was convinced the threat was not likely to exist, and impossible to succeed.

However, since enough of the information broker's partial data was corroborated, Anubis's CPA made the decision to proceed with risk management regardless of ASRA's reluctance to concede a vulnerability to exposure. The C-6 team was given details of the suspected corporate extraction target: Dr. Henri Doussant, ASRA's no.2 Global Transportation Studies analyst, arguably one of three men on Earth who knew more about the complexly woven communication, transportation, shipping and security networks the Orbitals had developed than the Orbitals themselves. If the data were valid, independent operatives, hired by a dummy corporation, were in the final preparation stages of an invasive corporate extraction, on behalf of Magellan LEO, a minority off-world shuttle line which catered to the increasingly reduced traffic of charter flights from Earthside offices of primarily Orbital interests. While the major shuttle providers were Earth-owned and operated, Magellan's executive board had tried unsuccesfully to secure financing and a controlling interest from one of the smaller Orbital transportation companies, in the hopes of being absorbed into the Orbital alliance of economic interests. If Dr. Doussant could be delivered to Magellan, the company would have access to the most elaborately understood organizational map of Orbital interaction of any individual corporation on Earth or in orbit. Their invitation to the Orbital alliance would be secured.

Again, though they believed the threat to be false, ASRA was directed to double the shadow security that surrounded the notoriously impetuous Dr. Doussant, who demanded that no personal security attend him in his private matters. He was a creature of habit, living alone in the corporate executive suites, lunching on the highest skybridge every day, and wandering the research floors that housed his GTS Labs, consulting his analysts and living, in general, a simple life for an older man under permanent house arrest and shoot to kill orders. He enjoyed his routine, making him easy to monitor and predict his behavior. He was, in truth, the model captive researcher. But with credible evidence to suggest his extraction was emminent, Anubis put CPA in action.

With 48 hours to thwart the suspected corporate extraction attempt, C-6 prepared to interrogate Kelso in his home in the dead of night.

Mission Objectives:

Detain extraction target before extraction commences, without breaching cover or revealing team presence to target

Terminate target if extraction begins

Terminate extraction team with extreme prejudice

Capture minimum one extraction team leader for interrogation, if possible

The team requisitioned transport on a Ferris tilt-rotor combat helicoptor platform, and flew to the home of Kelso, the eccentric information broker. Kelso lived in a bermed bunker in the hills above the New Chicago basin, and had been collecting sporatic IR high-band data packets for years using a home-assembled array of commerical dishes and miltary-grade feed antennae. He was utterly paranoid and bound to a wheelchair by what he claimed was a botched assasination attempt by the Israeli secret police, and would be a non-entity in the information brokerage profession except for the fact that he managed to repeatedly pull highly-classified data on major Earthside corporations out of the ether, and sell it regularly to it's owner, not it's competitor. His profession was one of minding the minders, and was seen in many circles as a mostly harmless but almost idiot savant backcheck on corporate security. This was one of those times when his claims of detailed, though partial, data collection of a looming disastrous security breach made Anubis, if not ASRA, take notice.

Having been been prepared by a call from Anubis officials moments earlier, Kelso greeted the C-6 team, consisting of agents Gohring, Blank, Mood and Brior, and showed them printouts of his partial data, including schematics of portions of several floors of ASRA tower, flight paths around the downtown New Chicago business cluster, a data summary on Dr. Doussant's field knowledge, account transfers from Magellan to a dummy corporation and to accounts of covert operations brokers at large. Finally, he showed them data that suggested that the agents hired to commit the extraction may be a new breed of espionage specialists dubbed Chameleons. Few were rumored to exist, and none had been capured or verified. They were suggested to have been using a new technology that allowed them to mimc the general appearance of other individuals through a composite suite of bio-modifications including polymer skull grafts, voice modulators, shift tact skin, hair and optical grafts, and extensive training and research. Additionally, it was believed that Chameleons required an external minder to remotely manage the complex command controls ncessary to allow the facial modifications to remain consistent under scrutiny for long periods of time. Kelso believed Chameleon technology would be involved in the extraction, and had been scanning the IR etherstreams for related data.

The team proceeded to the ASRA tower to investigate internal security. They were met with hostility by the Chief Security Officer, General Attendant Rudolph Graves, a veteran of 6 years of coprorate-funded guerilla wars in South America. Graves was adamantly opposed to Anubis covert operatives in play in his building and superceding his command. His second, Simon Church, was newer to the company, having been recruited by Graves after serving with him in previous military conflicts as a younger man. The team found Church's reluctance to provide details of Dr. Doussant's shadow security suspicious, and through a call to CPA, facilitated his removal from duty. Graves wisely backed off and allowed them unfettered access to Doussant's surveillance stations. Though throughout the morning Doussant was maintaining his normal routine, the C-6 team split up to review security considerations throughout the tower. Agent Blank remained in the Control Center to view the surveillance monitors, while Gohring and Brior toured the facility, leaving Mood to shadow the target while thermo-optically cloaked. Soon, a call cam e through to Agent Blank that Kelso required their presence for and emergency meeting in a public park lakeside a mere 30km from Kelso's home hin the hills, and far from the business district. The team left Mood to continue her surveillance, and proceeded to the meet at dusk.

The team was airlifted to a drop point on the edge of the park, and proceeded to the meet, near an observatory overlooking the lake and fishing harbor below. While Gohring apporached Kelso cloaked, he noticed that while their contact was visibly agitated and nervous, there was also a physical anomoly, a sleek speedboat docked in the harbor. He advised his teammates to investigate the craft, and made his presence known to his contact. However, as he was being handed unidentified documents, sniper fire tore the pouch from Kelso's hand, and he pitched forward over the cliff's edge. Gohring grabbed Kelso's arm on the way down, and hung there, suspended by a grappling line, until a second sniper shot struck Kelso in the forehead. The speedboat soon hurled out of the harbor as Blank and Brior layed suppresive fire.

Gohring retrieved the ruined documents and called for their air support, which picked them up and soon overtook the speedboat making it's way out to the center of the lake. After rendering the craft nonfunctional with several dozen rounds of 12mm gatling gun ammunition, the team boarded the craft but were angered to discover auto-guidance controls, and returned to the hovering rotorwing as the ship sank moments later. A sweep of the lakefront yielded no clues as to the whereabouts of the shooter.

Back at Anubis HQ, CPA analysyts partially restored the shredded documents, identified as video footage of two instances of women leaving what was identified as a surgical restoration clinic. One subject was partially visible, while image loss made the second photo unidentifiable. The first was cross-referenced with notes from Kelso as a known operative named Vocal, an ex SAS espionage expert believed to have been working abroad in Europe for the last few years. However, if Vocal was indeed a Chameleon, then the photos of her in Anubis's database, which differed from the image Kelso had retrieved. Therefore, the team had no reliable data as to her true identity or appearance, or that of her assumed associate. She had worked with another female operative in the European theatre, named Orfine, and records on her were slim as well. The team had little new information to go on, but decided to investigate the clinic which had unwittingly provided the surveillance photos.

The team searched the two vehicles remaining after hours in the parking lot of the clinic, and then penetrated the minimal security of the building and entered cloaked. They found one of the surgeons on record with the clinic in an compromising position with his secretary, and used this circumstance to interrogate him. His offices were shared with another surgeon, apparently also named Rudolph Graves, who frequented the clinic at odd hours and kept to himself, storing unknown materials in a storage closet at the rear of the clinic. The team searched the building, and found evidence that the closet had been cleaned out, the mysterious surgeon Graves's office empty, and fresh tire tracks in the back service lot of the building.

Following an address given by the clinic records, though listed in the public record as a vacant property, the team approached a modern canyonside luxury home, apparently months vacant. One SUV was parked in the driveway, and the foot traffic in the yard and soon also inside the home suggested recent use. Though the rooms were dusty and barren, several unmarked packing crates and foil wrappers were littered about the ground floor. The team cautiously proceeded down the basement stairs, and entered the sub-level room in a hail of flash grenades. Two thugs in cheap suits, armed with submachine guns but now terribly blinded by their night vision goggles were staggering back against a series of card tables covered with computer equipment and transmitter relay batteries. A short weaponsfire exchange later, and both men, and most of the equipment, were eliminated.

Again back at HQ, the team brought the recovered equipment to their internal forensics unit for identification, while an Anubis cleaner addressed the mess at the house they left behind. The equipment was indentified as tight-band transmission relay batteries and a control module designed to work with specialized software on the laptop, destroyed beyond recovery. It was speculated that such a system could conceivably be used to manage a Chameleon field agent, however with the distance between this house and the ASRA building over 40km to the East, the use of short-distance transmissions in the field seemed unlikely.

Returning to the ASRA tower in the early morning, the team discovered that while Dr. Doussant was preparing for work as usual, Agent Mood was not responding to her Wimwear transmitter and not located on any surveillance monitors. While considering that troubling information, Gohring begain again interrogating General Graves, this time regarding his apparent twin at the clinic that evening. Graves denied knowledge of the other matter in outrage, and a fax to the surgeon thay had interrogated confirmed that Graves and the other surgeon in question were not the same man, as the clinic's Graves was described as tall, muscular, and Slavic in origin, while General Graves was short, aged, and 100% Belligerent Texan. As the team followed Doussant's morning journey on the surveillance monitors, Gohring soon discovered that Graves had recently replaced his second in command one year earlier with the now quarantined SImon Church. The former aid had apparently ALSO been a former soldier under Graves's command in the military, however closer in experience and demeanor. He had resigned from his post after admitting the need to travel offworld to pursue experimental treatment for his wife's rare brain disease, which would put him in a conflict of interest position with his post as ASRA internal security. He had volunteered to undergo a memory purge of critical classified information from his tenure at ASRA, and due to his loyalty to the General, had been allowed to leave without question or suspicion.

However, as the team had suspected, the resignation had been a ruse, as no records of the former aid, John Krackett, nor his wife, existed in the ASRA database, despite his top-level clearance. Graves was astonished and denied blocking access to the file, and admitted never actually having met the wife or verifying Krackett's story. The medical technicians listed as being present during the memory purge were confirmed as fictitious, and after verifying with CPA, the team learned that the brain purge procedure that Krackett claimed to have installed as part of routine Anubis security protocols, did not in fact ever exist. It became clear that the General's former aid had left his post with his knwledge, and security clearance, intact.

While Graves reeled in humiliation and despair at this treachery, Gohring instructed the security personnel to scan for Krackett's ID in the system. At the same time, Doussant's minders reported his slow progress up the service stairs leading several floors to the roof, which deviated from his normal routine. Security on the roof reported an unidentified helicoptor had been granted permission by the NFAA to perform an emergency landing on the ASRA helipad, and was being investigated by guards on the roofdeck platform. With Agent Mood missing in action, Brior took the elevator to the roof to intercept Doussant's apparent exit path. Moments later, Krackett's ID was verified as having passed through building security on the ground level, so Agent Blank took a second elevator to investigate.

As they began to fear, video surveillance of the roof did not show security engaging the downed helicoptor, nor did it show Brior covering the stairwell exit door. Gohring deduced that the video feeds had been undermined, and seconds later, Doussant was shown leaving the stairwell through the roof exit while Brior reported the stairwell empty. Doussant's DNA tag registered his exit from the building, but from the skybridge level, as per his normal lunch routine, rather than the rooftop security checkpoint. As ASRA security destroyed the helicoptor as a safety measure, Brior commandeered a surface scalable transporter (SST) and scaled the south facade of the tower, towards the skybridge core, while Blank reported no sign of Krackett on the ground.

Brior exited the SST and entered the lobby of the ASRA tower at the skybridge level, while video confirmed Doussant entering the wooded plaza at the center of the bridge that connected three coporate towers several hundred feet in the air. Gohring commanded lobby checkpoint security to apprehend the analyst, who had ascended into the partially obscurred plaza canopy. Brior proceeded through the lobby and was flanked by one security guard as he crossed the bridge towards the plaza, while the other guard remained at post against orders. Nearby Facilities vehicles were ordered away from the plaza and back into the hangars at neighboring building entrances, but one remianed, apaprently empty. Gohring and Blank began to converge on the lobby as well. Seconds later, Brior reported Doussant missing.

As his backup was proceeding through the lobby behind him only 10m behind , Brior cleared the plaza on the opposite side and dropped to street level for a reconnaisance view, startling a businesswoman carrying a cellphone and briefcase. The ASRA security guard burst out of the canopy cover of the plaza behind Brior, and opened fire on his position with the submachine gun she carried. Noting his assailant was a woman dressed as a security guard but using non-standard issue weaponry, Brior returned defenseive fire, and the two began an elaborate ballet of bullets and sweat, floating through the air as concret chips and sod powdered into the air around them. As bullets pelted their mutual positions, the two combatants repeatedly emptied their clips on each other with miraculously little damage done. The assailant now switched to her Seburo Bobson sidearm and shot Brior several times while the businesswoman cowered by the plaza embankment's perimeter wall.

Gohring entered the plaza and moved to a flanking position, but assailants hiding in the facilities vehicle spotted a visual artifact in Gohring's therm-optic cloak and charged their position with the vehicle. Though by this time Gohring was now in the plaza and out of harm's way, Blank was not so lucky and was struck from behind by the vehicle, throwing him to the ground unconscious while the assailants peered around in bewilderment at a collision apparently with nothing.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the plaza, Brior lobbed a flash grenade at his opponent's feet, blinding both her and the innocent bystander nearby. As she shot blindly at his position at point blank range, Gohring fired his assault weapon, aiming for her head, and decapitated her with several rounds from her flanked position. The assailants in the vehicle panicked and stormed a nearby building lobby, which collapsed from the impact of the vehicle against the structural glazing of the entrance. As the body of the security guard lay smoking in a puddle of gore at Brior's feet, Gohring and the secind guard appeared in view, confirming that the target, Doussant, was no where to be found...

As the team regrouped to assess the situation, it had become clear that they were exposed and hurting from bad intel. The extraction had been too organized to be an outside job, with a complex series of security protocols having been overridden, and a number of enemies planted within the secure perimeter of the tower. The agents understood that their comm. feed was potentially tapped, so they switched to sub-mandibular shortband communication, isolated to C-6 field agents alone.

Having been mowed down moments earlier, Agent Blank was shaken and injured, and unable to continue. Security arrived and fanned out over the plaza, securing the perimeter and investigating the collapsed and burning lobby that had become a fiery tomb for the unidentified enemy agents in the commandeered vehicle, while a field medic tended to Agent Blank and roused him. Agent Gohring searched the plaza and soon discovered Doussant’s assumed exit point, a concealed maintenance hatch in the sculptural garden.

Agents Brior and Gohring made the decision to continue without Mood and Blank, and descended cautiously down the manhole into a service tunnel. After a short distance, they identified a clean laser-cut opening in the tunnel floor, which would presumably open to the open sky below the skybridge. However, two small devices could be seen mounted on either side of the hole, and were identified as anti-personnel devices of an unknown design. Reasoning that the opening was being guarded for a reason, the two agents decide to get creative and return to the plaza to retrieve two of the corpses of their unidentified opponents, to be used as human shields against what might occur below. The agents hurled the corpses against the anti-personnel devices, which burst into thousands of micro-flachettes, primarily absorbed by the bodies.

Agents Brior and Gohring discovered, after careful inspection, that the opening in the tunnel floor revealed a white metallic surface located approximately 3m below the hole. Brior noticed an odd clinking, ticking, whirring noise, emanating from somewhere directly below their position. Puzzled and concerned, the agents tossed down an incendiary grenade, which clatters against the lower surface and then detonates, which was also surprising, meaning that the object below was either very large or otherwise protected from the outside like a temporary airlock. Unfortunately, the clicking noises returned a few seconds later, indicating that whatever lurked below was active and still moving. Soon Agent Gohring had another creative idea: to attempt to wield a grenade weapon of unknown function, retrieved from an earlier assailant. The device, identified later as a Gooey Mine, detonated into a rapidly expanding and hardening adhesive, fibrous cloud, which then solidified into a restraining barrier.

The agents pause to determine the reaction from below, but are disturbed to witness a high-capacity field laser used to carve and dismantle the Gooey Mine’s shield. Shortly thereafter, a robotic arm ascended into the tunnel, and clamped to the opening’s edge with a small actuator. After a moment’s pause, the hole, and the tunnel, erupted into automatic gunfire from below. As the agents withdrew to the back of the access tunnel, the arm began to rip apart the opening weakened by the ballistic damage, apparently attempting to widen the opening to allow access to something much larger than the man-sized portal previously cut into the floor. A robot arm is seen in the hole. Machine gun fire then erupts, weakening the floor. After a quick threat assessment, the agents retreated to the surface.

Deciding on an alternate route, Agent Brior then repelled down the side of the skybridge to discover an aerodyne docked to its underside. Assuming Doussant was extracted to this vehicle, and that the vehicle remained tethered to the skybridge, the agents deduced that the aerodyne must have been a mobile surgery, and that this Doussant was likely undergoing surgery to remove the bio bombs he carried in his abdomen. Both agents managed to swing over to the aerodyne, suspended from the sidewall of the skybridge and swaying over open sky below, and begin to look for a way in. The ship was docked to the bridge with a flexible sleeve, and they assumed that whatever the machine was that had attacked them in the tunnel opening, it was likely within the sleeve, either continuing to decimate the opening, or laying in wait for them. Agent Gohring quietly maneuvered up to the sleeve and cut a small hole in the membrane, already shredded by the earlier incendiary and reeking of burning plastic.

Peering into the sleeve, Gohring spotted a large crab-like robot, later believed to be a prototype Fuchikoma minder, focusing on the hole above. It was clear that the robot was operating with a defensive program, as it was not moving, but watching the hole above it with it’s forward optical shroud. Patiently. Trying to distract it, Agent Brior planted a thumper mine on the underside of the bridge opposite their position. Activation of the thumper mine agitated the robot, which began tearing apart the sleeve to investigate the source of the vibration. The agents repelled around to the other side of the sleeve, and while the robot was distracted, found an access hatch to the aerodyne below, which the robot had presumably been guarding. Gohring managed to operate the hatch mechanism, only to freeze in panic as the Fuchikoma turned to face the agents, a mere 3m away. However, to their relief, the machine did not fire, as the agents were now between it and it’s primary.

Sliding quietly into the hatch and closing it, the agents, now cloaked, found themselves in an airlock as two guards were meandering over, investigating a call from the Fuchikoma claiming that the ship was being boarded. Brior and Gohring slipped into the main cabin and locked the guards out, and were now in a surgical bay with Doussant on the table. As it appeared the five man surgical team was finishing up, the agents terminated all but the lead doctor, and restrained him. The guards were allowed in and dispatched, also.

By this point, the aerodyne had undocked and begun moving away from the towers. The agents approached the cockpit, terminating the copilot and ordering the pilot to return to the skybridge or be killed. Unfortunately, it’s too late to alter the course of the aerodyne, which used a nascent technology which required the vehicle to lock onto hard targets as magnetic grounds to stay afloat. The agents, never having traveled aboard such Orbital-developed technology, angrily repeat their demands, though it’s obvious the aerodyne is being pulled towards a massive zeppelin in the distance, floating several kilometers out from the tower cluster in open airspace.

An unmarked Anubis-model Osprey Variant rotorwing hovered into view in front of the cockpit, and Agent Mood identified herself via sub-mandibular mic, and reported taking fire from the Fuchikoma above them. She reminded them that their primary objective is to prevent Doussant’s extraction, and unless they can destroy or deactivate the robot soon, she would be forced to fire on the aerodyne and terminate their subject, and the other agents as well.

Agent Brior desperately climbed to the top of the aerodyne and managed to plant a thermal grenade on the robot, which significantly damaged, but not destroy it, now hanging on by one claw. Dodging the Fuchikoma’s 20mm cannonfire on his way back to the airlock, Brior stumbled and slid off the edge, held only by his repelling line. The robot snatched the line with it’s other claw, and started pulling the agent back up. At a loss of what else to do, Agent Goehring dragged the pilot up to the airlock, and fired on the Fuchikoma himself, managing to destroy the arm pulling up Brior and deliver enough of a shock to topple the robot off the ship.

Relieved, Agent Mood stood down and edged closer so that the agents, along with the pilot, the remaining surgeon and the prone body of Doussant, still incapacitated from the surgery and now bleeding heavily from his sutures, could attempt to tether a line across to the rotorwing, and board. Just as the agents were moving Doussant over the chasm between the aircraft, the aerodyne pilot lurched from an unidentified shot, and the agents took came under fire. Doussant was struck in the shoulder, and began to convulse.

The rotorwing’s tether sheared apart, and having been damaged by the ambush, began to spin and lurch as Mood tried to recover control. The agents began swinging wildly around under the open hatch of the rotorwing, Brior barely holding onto Doussant’s body as the surgeon plummeted to his death over the city below. As the agents slowly pulled themselves up into the Osprey, they saw the aerodyne shudder as the link with the zeppelin was severed by the other craft slowly moving away from it’s stationary position, apparently abandoning it’s mission. As the aerodyne plummeted into the dusk sky, Agent Gohring spotted the telltale glint of a therm-optic cloak as a blurred form lept from the disabled craft. It is believed the agents had taken fire from an another assailant, possibly Krackett, cloaked in Agent Mood’s missing therm-optic cloak. The assailant was not recovered in the wreckage.

C-6 returned to the skybridge to secure triage from a field medic for Doussant, suffering from shock, and then the team evacuated to a CPA Retrieval Point outside of the city, against the protests of Graves. The mission was apparently a success, though the aerodyne crash and multiple witnessed armed confrontations around the ASRA tower were explained away to the media as a “training exercise ending in tragedy”. The zeppelin was back-traced via satellite and ASRA determined recently that it was reported stolen from an airfield belonging to a Magellan service subsidiary.

Continuity Alert: Though by definition the D:HT environment is a prequel to the Cyberpunk 2020 world, the technology level and timeline in this campaign were retroactively adjusted to allow for a young Orbital culture. While Earth-based society and technology remain limited to the levels described in the D:HT resources, the Orbital culture has advanced more rapidly. It’s admittedly illogical, but it’s a game, so whatever.

After nearly four months of rigorous physical and psychological training for maneuvering, task performance and combat, all within a reduced or zero G environment, the remainder of the team’s training regimen was cut short and each of them were subjected to 72 hours of deeptape accelerated education on the sum of ASRA’s classified surveillance data on the increasingly uncommunicative and distant Orbital Alliance. They learned, as the highest-level ASRA analysts had known for several months, that the orbital corporate colonies, which had all but severed relations with their former earthside corporate sponsors, and which had very recently reduced the number of authorized surface-to-orbit shuttle flights to the only known LEO transfer port, Alpha, now maintained by a skeleton crew of spacers and automated cargo drones, had been fomenting conflict and mistrust between the largest earth corporations, Militech and Kombinat Arms. In addition, shortly after Anubis' C-6 Section Ops thwarted Magellan Transport’s clandestine attempt at extracting ASRA’s lead orbital analyst, Dr. Henri Doussant, the intelligence agency suffered a second compromising blow. ASRA interrogators in charge of debriefing both the Ops team and the analyst himself, still recovering from complications from extraction surgery, apparently defected to Magellan, bringing the researcher with them.

Now, four months later, the team was being deployed in what was assumed to be a suicide mission: four Anubis operatives, hastily-trained for a hostile environment to which many earthsiders find it impossible to adapt, being sent on an assassination action, with limited resources, against a target whose location was unknown. In addition, ASRA analysts believed that the most likely scenario was that Magellan was attempting to build an orbital installation in a region of GSO between the first and third La Grange Points. For eighteen months, Magellan had been reorganizing its shuttle flight schedules to favor private cargo shipments, and yet no public record of flight reservations was discovered. Analysts originally believed that Magellan was attempting to secretly build an orbital presence on the O’Neill Station under construction for several years. However, recently the Magellan problem was upgraded to priority status after the first Doussant extraction attempt, and once the latter extraction was successful, ASRA’s limited orbital informants confirmed that increased, unregistered construction in orbit had been underway for over a year, and that most or all of the early earthside shipments were carried by Magellan shuttles. Unfortunately, with the Orbital Alliance calling for a near-total communication and information-sharing blackout with earthside corporations, and more stringent controls on semi-private shuttle flights to Alpha station, ASRA’s ability to continue their investigation of Magellan’s progress was greatly reduced. Though the bigger picture of crumbling earth/orbital relations was considered by ASRA to be a foregone conclusion, the matter of Doussant’s defection was a more direct concern, as his preternatural understanding of complex, variably changing systems, combined with his intimate knowledge of earth- and orbital-based commercial trade routes, made him a severe liability to ASRA’s reputation as earth’s most accomplished intelligence group. His cooperation with Magellan, the last earth-based corporation to migrate to space, particularly earth’s only public shuttle operator, would eventually become known, and ASRA would be ruined. For this reason, ASRA directed Anubis to send their best operatives into space to hunt him down.

Mission Objective: Assassinate former ASRA analyst Henri Doussant

Secondary Objective: Sabotage Magellan orbital installation presumed under construction

Tertiary Objective: return to Anubis for debriefing, if possible to do so discreetly

With the team’s training admittedly cut short by the stepped-up schedule for operation deployment, the projected likelihood of success completing the primary objective was modest at best, and safe return from orbit considered unrealistic. As such, the team was prepared with no identification or pre-arranged field support or extraction arrangements, which was effectively a one-way ticket into orbit. As public shuttle flights are strictly screened for weapons, explosives and other contraband, the team was fitted into a custom polymer cargo shipping container which tightly fit the four operatives and a small area for equipment storage, all within a semi-pressurized environment sealed within a membrane of biohazardous fluid material. The container was rigged with protective restraints and a hidden hatch, all designed to protect its inhabitants during a trans-atmospheric flight within the unpressurized cargo bay of a surface-to-air shuttle. The shipment was arranged on a private shuttle flight from the former ESA-Guyana port in South America, now primarily operated by Thyssen-Krupp-Galdaleano, the container among three others registered to an Anubis dummy-corporation. The operatives were restricted to orbital-appropriate compressed air flachette weapons and modified Gasium K-4 Skinsuits with limited environmental protection capability. Agent Brior, of course, smuggled contact high-explosives aboard.

While the journey into LEO was, by passenger shuttle standards, physically demanding, the team was sedated for the majority of the burn. By the time the shuttle had docked with Alpha station, the operatives had been roused, prepared to fight their way out of the station docks. However, once the lid was removed by Agent Gohring, the operatives soon discovered that Alpha station was unmanned. Little or no security precautions were in place in the docking area, and once convinced they were alone and not under video surveillance, they took the opportunity to re-familiarize themselves with zero gee maneuvering issues they were only marginally trained to handle. Once that embarrassing bit of clumsy business was out of the way, and a check of station logs revealed that they were on one of only two ships in dock, en route to a much larger, populated station identified as MADRID.

The operatives had spent most of their waking hours considering the daunting task ahead of them. It was clear that ASRA was in possession of far more intelligence on the orbital systems than had been revealed to them. Public perception of the extent of the orbital colonies was, of course, somewhat outlandish and fueled by speculation, grainy amateur astronomer’s photographs on various conspiracy-laden websites, and extremely outdated public domain maps of planned development from the early years of space construction released by now-bankrupt world governments like the United Eastern States and former Soviet Union. It was conventional wisdom that what had actually been built in the last eight years was most likely crude, modular research stations and satellite arrays, surrounding the only two major stations known to exist, Crystal Palace and O’Neill, with the former being the greatest source of fantasy and speculation, and the latter known only to be in slowly expanding construction by a coalition of orbital interests. With public flights having always been prohibitively expensive, and most information from corporate visits to off-world colonies limited by nondisclosure agreements taken extremely seriously, the general public of Earth’s various economically-weakened governments were left with the imagined better life for those private corporate citizens allowed to migrate up the Well, and the sobering reality of a more conservative, desperate global society comprised of fewer and fewer solvent governments giving way to massive corporate states, which in turn kept whatever jealous knowledge their information agencies might have had about their orbital neighbors out of the public knowledgebase. The simple fact was that the general population had been more worried about their neighbors then the possibilities above them, long before the orbitals overtly began closing the lines of communication between earth agencies and their orbital counterparts. Some had even begun to suspect that the entire orbital exodus was nothing more than an elaborate hoax perpetuated by Earth’s cash-starved and paranoid governments, and the greedy multi-national corporations that had been leeching their power and industry for decades. But ASRA had confirmed to the Anubis team that, in fact, the orbital threat was very real.

The decades old Alpha Station, unmanned and only barely habitable, gave no indication of the greater orbital development they had been prepared to face. ASRA had informed them, in admittedly lean dossiers on the orbital problem, that Alpha had been most likely left to service only the last of the semi-private shuttle routes like those of Magellan and Orbital Air- Commercial Division, while all other private shuttle flights were most certainly on a course for a larger-capacity station beyond the range of earthside telescopes. Alpha’s logs confirmed this assumption, and with MADRID identified as the next stop on their flight, it was clear to the operatives that ASRA knew they would be delivered into the arms of this orbital infrastructure, even if they themselves were not adequately informed. They recognized MADRID from their pre-mission intel as a former Soviet fuel supply satellite, abandoned by the Soviet Rocket Core (SRC) under pressure from the increasingly violent rogue USAF carriers that had been lurking somewhere beyond LEO since the collapse of the United States as a Federal entity. Though again the general public was skeptical of the existence of the USAF fleet, as it was assembled piecemeal in orbit and never documented publically.

After returning to their places in the cargo module, and patiently enduring an uneventful eighteen-hour flight, the operatives arrive at MADRID station. In startling contrast to Alpha, MADRID’s multiple docking arms were bustling with energy. The team was forced to lay low until their cargo module was removed by dockganger crews and located in a storage block within the station’s outer ring. Once it was believed clear, the team deployed and reconnoitered their new environment. Station security seemed largely focused on the gates separating different zones of the radial station plan. Surveillance cameras were few and located with safety in mind over security. The storage wing was clean and well-lighted, cargo modules stacked six high in narrow rows. Occasional groups of dockgangers navigated through this zone, maneuvering orange cargo loaders on ballooning rubber tires. Station security manned a fairly lax checkpoint at each end of the storage zone, two guards per gateway. The outer ring supported 2/3 earth gravity, and the operatives were able to secure a station network terminal and study the layout.

MADRID had begun a thorough upgrade from it’s industrial Soviet roots the moment the last SRC orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) left dock, as the largely-Spanish labor crews took control of the station’s management center and reactor core, until shuttles arrived from Earth soon after, bringing aboard hundreds of workgangers employed by Gorreor3, a solar power utility subsidized by the privately-funded Spanish government. In four short years, the station had been built out from it’s original single docking spindle, now a dual concentric ring system, each ring supported by three stationary spokes projecting from the reactor core component. Though the spokes were gravity-free, each ring maintained its gravity environment through innovative sleeves within the ring bulkheads, allowing the rings to spin at different speeds while the primary axis of the station remained stable, thus simplifying docking maneuvers for incoming ships and increasing dockside efficiency as a result. The outer ring was divided into four zones, including OTV and shuttle cargo wings, a private corporate dockway, and finally, an eerie third of the ring reserved for the USAF fleet presumably lurking somewhere in orbit, per an arrangement developed during the stations early days of Gorreor3 possession. Each cargo wing supported three to four docks, each in turn able to support 6 OTVs or 2 shuttles. The inner wall of the outer ring was built out with cargo zones like the one the operatives occupied, while the perimeter was an open circulation corridor. Bulkhead structure was ribbed by the complex latticework of the ring sleeve separating the heavy area from the zero-gee docks to on the other side of the ring. All exposed stationworks were clean and orderly in spacer fashion, painted with reddish electrostatic coating. No exterior windows were located along the circumference of the cargo ring, but accessways to each dock offered stomach-wrenching views of open space beyond the atmospheric membranes. COTV crews loitered by the security checkpoint as cargo was offloaded from two shuttles, including the T-K-G shuttle Anubis requisitioned for the mission, and either loaded into waiting COTVs, or moved into short-term storage. According to the station map, the spindle supporting the cargo and passenger docking zones was itself stationed with 2 additional security staff, and led to the inner station ring which was populated with station staff, semi-permanent MADRID citizens, and temporary station guests, itself divided into checkpointed zones for commercial, entertainment, hospitality, and private corporate services. Security appeared to remain light throughout.

As their own shuttle was listed as remaining in port for a period of time for minor repairs before returning to Alpha station, it was decided that MADRID should be explored. The operatives initially opted to avoid the nearby security checkpoint leading to the passenger docking zone to their left, as it was more alertly monitored, and instead took their chances with the less-interested security staff at the nearby spindle gateway. Though their Gasium K-4 Skinsuits bore no military insignia, the team was hesitant to appear together in a non-passenger dockway, so Chelsea Mood proceeded to occupy the security staff’s attention with a plunging Skinsuit zipper and some heavy flirtation, while the rest of the group swept through the checkpoint in irregular intervals. Once through the spindle and into the hospitality zone of the inner ring, their first order of business was to reduce their visual exposure by seeking out some local spacer gear. Passing through the hospitality zone and through a checkpoint to the commercial zone without soliciting so much as a look from the pre-occupied staff, they discovered that, like in the hospitality zone, the rest of the ring was on night shift, and most businesses were closed in this narrow, densely built-out area. Massive overhead bulkhead glazing yielded spectacular space views, and the effect was startling. They continued through another poorly-guarded checkpoint, and into the entertainment zone.

This zone was the polar opposite of the commercial zone, densely packed with people under a myriad of competing neon signage and low-level red-hued ambient lighting. Most establishments were open, and either side of the ring was packed three stories high with catwalked storefronts and open plazas. The local flavor included some pilots, off-duty station staff and the occasional orbital corporate slumming through this literal red-light district. However, the vast majority in the crowd were workgangers, tall and imposing, most of Jamaican, African, and Indigenous American descent, dreadlocked and imposing. Some casual investigation at one of the seedier watering holes and some generous distribution of funds to a begoggled German-Chinese waitress with short-cropped white hair yielded the name of a contact holding court at a noodle bar farther down the ring, who was to be able to furnish station ID tags at a considerable fee. Once the tags were paid for, they were burned right at the table with a portable laptop printer/laminator nestled within stacked bowls and empty beer bottles. Soon the team was on their way to another vendor, this one a legitimate business within the commercial zone. In a 24-hour surplus supply shop which provided new and used equipment and gear for short-term or temporary station guests, the team found suitable workganger utility overalls and were in the process of trying them on over their Skinsuits when the owner nervously backed into the supply room, as the shopfront was crowded by a posse of questionable looking workgangers.

The leader of this gang demanded the team, erroneously identified as an earthsider shuttle crew, relinquish their military-grade Skinsuits or risk personal injury, a chuckling threat reinforced by the fact that the gangers were accessorized by various makeshift weapons like pipes, long barbed utility cutters, and polymer-backed mallets. The team was also instructed to leave the station immediately while they were able to physically do so.

Gohring noticed the gangers slowly closing off both exits, and the telling absence of the vendor, and resolved the gangers’ proposed negotiation by drawing his flachette pistol and firing a bolt dead between the eyes of the ganger leader, who immediately gurgled and pitches backwards as the fast-acting biotoxin on the bolt decimates his circulatory system. The rest of the team engaged immediately and rapidly shot the surrounding gangers in succession until one ganger, closest to the rear exit, bolted for the service corridor beyond, with Chelsea in quick pursuit.

The remaining ganger, conscious but outnumbered, was physically encouraged to reveal that the operatives were targeted by the gangers, who’s guild allegiance was unknown as their suit patches were obscured, under the direction of someone named Forrestal, who regularly funded their patrolling of the station for unwelcome Earthsiders nosing around the commons. The ganger revealed the number they used to contact their employer, and was soon dispatched, once it became clear that the gangers’ directions had been to rough up and chase off outsiders, and report in once successful. After the last ganger was subdued and all bodies were dragged out of view of the store windows, the team suited up and followed Chelsea out the back.

Unfortunately, the corridor was empty, and once they followed it out to the main street of the commercial ring, they saw a small commotion by the entrance to another business several meters further down. Two pilots were kneeling over Chelsea’s prone form, her head bashed in on a storefront overhang projection mount. She was still alive, but unconscious and badly injured. One pilot called a friend, a station cosmetic and reconstruction surgeon who was willing to receive her, so that the authorities may be avoided, as it becomes clear from the other operatives’ solemn countenances that exposure was not welcome. Together, they carried Chelsea to the surgeon’s nearby offices, where she was stabilized and treated, and they were soon told that she would recover, but require several days’ rest and observation. The surgeon was financially persuaded to contact a relative who managed one of the short-term hotels in the hospitality zone, and a room was soon secured for the team, again at considerable expense, as was orbital custom. Chelsea was moved to the room and the surgeon assured them he would check in on her regularly to see to it that no complications occur, freeing up the operatives to pursue their recent lead and investigate the station, and the circumstances of the ambush, with greater intensity.

It was decided that if these, and possibly other, gangers had been on the lookout for earthsiders onstation, then it would be less advisable to continue attempting to suss out intel from locals in the entertainment district, and they began to prepare a plan to draw Forrestal out to be interrogated. Shortly after night shift, a call was placed, indicating that they had taken out some suspicious earthsider thugs and a meet was demanded in the cargo storage zone of the outer wing, where security was lax and the streets unpopulated. After some hesitation, Forrestal agreed to the terms. Anticipating that Forrestal would most likely attempt to case out the meet in advance with more of her own people, the operatives got there first and took positions of cover, and waited. Eventually, Forrestal, a tall, severe woman in corporate attire and fashionable mirrored eyeshields, arrived on scene at the meet area, accompanied by two station security armed with rifles, and a good thirty minutes early. After some conferring, the security team was dispatched to take sniper positions high in the racks of cargo modules on either side of the corridor.

However, the operatives were laying in wait for them, and quietly dispatched with both men. Soon, Forrestal reappeared at the meet time, and looked around for her counterparts, who were not visible. Agent Blank called out to Forrestal to join him near the back of the dead-end corridor, between the walls of cargo modules. Forrestal took a step forward into the deep shadow from the cargo modules, realizes that her men are missing and that the voice summoning her was certainly not ganger, and drew her weapon. A brief exchange of fire between Forrestal and all three hidden operatives resulted in a messy neck wound that incapacitated the corporate agent, who stumbled to the floor adjacent to the operatives’ own dummy module.

Forrestal was swiftly dragged up into the module capsule and bound, slowly bleeding out from a nicked jugular, and suffering from the biotoxin. Some very unpleasant torture by Agent Blank’s hand compelled her to reveal that she was employed by Gateway, the pilots union management company, and had been secretly contracted by another party, to flush out possible earthsider spies and capture or kill them before they could ask too many questions or be otherwise identified by station citizens. Her source, a man named Mr. Tokawa, was a mid-level corporate executive for Kiroshi/Kinuji, the corporation that organized public station management for orbital hubs. Kiroshi had managed MADRID for years, after Borreor3 developed and was in turn sold their interest in the project, to return focus on their solar satellite arrays being installed elsewhere. The fact that a Kiroshi executive was contracting with a Gateway company agent was clearly a conflict of interest, as Gateway was supposed to be representing pilot’s rights in negotiations with both the Hughes–Concz-Taurus combine, the largest organized union of workganger crews in orbit, and Kiroshi/Kinuji, who managed the station and dictated dock charges and ganger pay scales. However, despite the clear political risks involved, it was becoming clear to the agents that a conspiracy of sorts was in place, to respond to fact-finding operations specifically like their own. Forrestal, slipping in and out of consciousness, mumbled something about other operatives, like the Anubis team, who had been on-station more at least three months earlier, roughing up station staff and patrons, and asking around, with little attempt at subtlety, about the major work projects the workgangers union had been staffing, before they assaulted an OTV crew and stole their vessel, leaving the station and never returning. Very little cohesive information was gained from her, as she slipped deeper into shock, but Forrestal did manage to conform that the conditions of contact with her employer were similar to those between her and her workganger thugs, of which there were apparently several other groups.

While the operatives conferred on their next step, the now-unconscious and critically-wounded Forrestal’s messager toned off, with a message from Tokawa, requesting an update on Forrestal’s ‘recent endeavors’. With the bound and gagged station security officers and Forrestal’s tortured, unconscious body stowed safely within, the team resealed the cargo module and proceeded to Chelsea’s hotel, noting that in night shift, the roof membrane of the inner ring zones was retracted to reveal the inky blackness of space beyond the glazed bulkhead above the corridor. They composed a return message to Tokawa stating that they had had an incident with a group of earthsider spies, and were prepared to update him at his convenience. Tokawa promptly replied with a message directing them, as Forrestal, to meet him shortly in a luxury pool facility in the upper tier of the entertainment zone. The operatives suspected that Tokawa was employing corrupt station staff on behalf of someone else, and hoped to discover a link to Magellan through a face-to-face interrogation. However, as Tokawa was a corporate executive with, according to Forrestal, offices in the corporate zone to support him on his frequent visits from Crystal Palace, the operatives suspected that he would be protected by a bodyguard contingent when in a public area of the station, particularly the rowdy entertainment zone.

Reconnaissance of the two-tiered entertainment zone revealed that while the ground floor of the zone was favored by gangers and pilots engaging in prurient activities, the upper tier was designed to appeal to the stations wealthier guests and corporate clientele, particular those interested in recreationally experience a taste of the earth lifestyle they left behind. As such, several large spaces were erected against the bulkhead, significantly larger in scale than the station’s usual labyrinthine construction. Each recreation quad was designed to simulate a different natural experience, encapsulated in a sort of architectural shorthand. The quad at which they were instructed to meet, the Infinity, was simply a massive infinity pool, with a stepped poolside area leading down into warm water that extended the remaining length of the quad, where it met the bulkheads which were fitted with retractable refraction screens that displayed a clear blue horizon, with an artificial sun directly overhead. Like the rest of the station, it was designed to support far more customers than were onstation currently, and was largely empty.

The operatives each strolled into the Infinity independently, and took up positions around the pool in order to establish a perimeter. Agent Blank loitered at the bar in the center of the courtyard, while Agents Gohring and Brior Terrible took up positions near the exits. Agent Gohring made visual confirmation on who their target was believed to be, lounging in the shallow area of the pool while a handler, presumably a bodyguard, dressed awkwardly in a black suit, held a parasol out for his employer, near a seating area where Tokawa’s things were stacked. A second bodyguard was standing back near the bar, not far from Agent Blank’s position, pretending to read a paper. Gohring entered the changing rooms and placed a message that Forrestal would be delayed indefinitely, and as they anticipated, Tokawa grew agitated and rose from the pool, heading to the changing rooms near the bar while his bodyguard gathered the laptop and briefcase from the pool’s edge. Moments after entering the tiny changing room, Tokawa was grabbed from behind by Gohring, who threatened him with a combat knife at the throat, and pulled him into a toilet stall. Gohring demanded information from Tokawa, who almost immediately realized who Gohring was and how much danger he was likely in. As a man who desired to avoid discomfort whenever possible, Tokawa was more than receptive to Gohring’s menacing interrogation, and while he confessed that he did not know specifically why his employers wanted the station under surveillance for earthsider operatives, he believed he could find out if given time. He confirmed that there was another group of operatives that had been a nuisance on station, which at least partly resulted in Tokawa being tasked by his superiors to prevent a future incident. Gohring agreed to let him make contact with his employer, which Tokawa insisted must be done from a secure line within his corporate offices, where the Anubis team would be unable to pass through more legitimate station and private security clearance. Tokawa was warned, however, that he was being watched and that there were several operatives on-station which could render MADRID uninhabitable within minutes, if he were to try and double-cross Gohring or alert others to their presence. Tokawa’s wide-eyed stare indicated his full comprehension of the station’s vulnerability to tactical military sabotage. Gohring decided to appeal to Tokawa’s clearly equal desires for personal safety and personal gain. He offered Tokawa a sizable reward for any information he might deliver from his employer, pointing out that by Tokawa’s own admission, his employer was not from within Kiroshi/Kenuji, so Tokawa’s information gathering would not put him at professional risk. In contrast, he stood much to gain from selling the information, and to top it off, would be able to report that he had personally chased more earthsiders off of MADRID once they had left, and collect even more fee from his employer. It was a win-win for Tokawa, and would coincidentally save him the messy problem of a lacerated intestine, which Gohring was more than willing to give him with a slight jab with the knife.

Tokawa quickly dressed and summoned his bodyguards, then left the Infinity quad. The operatives each left separately, watching for any indication they were being followed, of which there was none. Now, again in day shift, they had had ample time to visit all accessible areas of MADRID station, save for the corporate zones and of course the military docks, and concluded that the station, while a bustling micro-economy, was supporting less than half of the population density for which it was developed by Gorreor3. Whether this was due to economic hardship among the orbital stations, or because, in reality, there was simply less orbital population than they suspected, remained to be seen. Despite MADRID being merely a waystation between Alpha and Crystal Palace and other private corporate orbital stations, it remained surprisingly under-staffed and under-populated. In fact, a number of businesses in the corporate zone turned out to be vacant in the artificial light of day shift.

Tokawa had been granted only 30 minutes to investigate his employer’s intentions before messaging them with a new meet point. It only took him half that long, and soon contacted them as they waited in a Turkish café near the entrance to the corporate zone checkpoint. While Agent Blank suffered from the accidental consumption of bitter coffee grinds, Terrible noted that Tokawa had requested another meet in a recreational quad at the top of the mid-day shift hour, several hours away, with the specific location to be revealed en route. Meanwhile Agent Gohring successfully petitioned for passage to Crystal Palace aboard a COTV whose pilots were at the café’s bar commiserating about a decided lack of funds and slow business along the MADRID-CP route. The COTV, christened Slavedriver 2, was scheduled to depart in two hours from MADRID, and carried a shipment of import goods from earth-based distributors to the larger population of Crystal Palace station. The vessel would be required to leave on time, regardless of the team’s attendance, though they took a risk and paid for their passage in advance. The team left the bar, returned to the cargo docks, and visually identified the vessel in question and its loading status as being as they had been told.

Anticipating that Tokawa may have been compromised, the team returned to the hotel and checked in on Chelsea, who remained unable to be moved. They prepared an emergency extraction plan, in case the normal routes to the cargo docks were obstructed, and prepared Chelsea for travel, in the event hat they would be able to return to retrieve her before leaving station, which was not a certainty. The operatives finally suited up with all weapons at their disposal and proceeded to the entertainment zone again, where, after a short visual inspection of both tiers of the zone confirmed that no indications that station security or private corporate personnel had been deployed, they received a second message identifying their meet point as a quad called Polar Cap, an Alpine-themed micro-resort.

The Polar Cap was an outlandish construct, even by station entertainment standards. The entire space was designed to simulate a rocky outcropping of powdered alpine cliffs, surreally compressed against an expanse of dense powder with various moguls and minor slopes, which in turn folded around a frozen lake, all within the same physical constraints as the previous Infinity quad. Again, refractive imager panels created the illusion of open space, and the snow was very real, albeit artificially maintained and under extreme cold. A suspension system was rigged above the cliff face against the inner bulkhead wall, so that participants could fly over the edge on snowboards or skis, and perform tricks while hurtling above the open field, before gradually descending to the snowy banks below, where a compact vertical lift would return them to the cliff’s edge again. The entire space, including the quaint ski lodge, parka and snow gear rental shack, and creatively located trees and benches, existed as if it were the view as confined within the borders of a cabin window. It appeared as if the frozen lake extended far into the distance to the shore beyond, where snow-capped evergreens cluttered a steep grade beyond. The hologram technology was very convincing, and the team soon found the availability of rental parkas inviting in the brisk sensor-controlled air.

Two women and a child were ice skating on the lake, while and elderly man watched from a bench at the lake’s edge. No other people were present aside from a few couples dining within the lodge. Agent Blank took a position at one of the benches on the porch of the lodge, while Gohring and Terrible spread out and studied the narrow snowy paths that snaked through the banks of snow and ice on either side of the lake. Gohring soon spotted Tokawa and his bodyguards, standing under a leafless barren tree beyond a large berm. Tokawa looked anxious, but calm. Terrible also spotted a man in a white parka enter the park from the far exit on the other side of the lake, seemingly preoccupied with navigating the narrow path to the lake, and not aware of their presence.

Gohring approached the party, as Tokawa’s bodyguards took a defensive position around him, which he waved off. He proudly produced a microdisc, which he claimed contained all the information he could find about his employer’s interest in quieting earthsider snooping on-station. He revealed also that while he had told his employer, a man named Mile, that he had identified intruders on MADRID station, and requested further instructions, he was able to surmise from his employer’s responses, and data available to him on file at station security, that his tasks were in fact a direct result of the violation of station security by a brash earthsider team of operatives, as he had told them earlier. He also revealed that the first group had abandoned the station once they had learned that major workganger contracts were being organized at Crystal Palace station, and were presumed to have traveled there by means of a commandeered OTV. Tokawa also tapped the microdisc and stated that the team would be very interested in the details on the disc. His brief attempt to secure a higher price for the information was shot down, and he relinquished the disc to Gohring.

Mere seconds after Gohring took the disc and handed Tokawa a credit chip, all three operatives found their commlinks go dead as the sharp crack of an illicit high-powered rifle echoed throughout the space, and the ice-skating child just beyond their position flipped on her face in a growing smear of blood. Each man reacted by leaping back from each other and drawing weapons on each other, and a four man stand-off ensued, with Tokawa crouching between them, angrily declaring betrayal on the part of the Anubis team, who in turn accused Tokawa of the same. Terrible also noticed that the man in the white parka slowly approaching from the left side of the space had now stepped off the path. The elderly man ran to the woman kneeling over the child and screaming, while the second woman, a striking brunette with long black curls and a puffy white quilted coat, was calling the station security dispatcher on a cell phone while making her way to the lake’s edge as far from the conflict as possible.

While the bodyguards and the two Anubis operatives stood frozen in a quickdraw impasse, Agent Blank ran down from the lodge, searching for the source of the rifle fire. A moment later both bodyguards and operatives began firing simultaneously as Tokawa threw himself to the snow below them. Meanwhile, a second rifle shot rang out, this time felling the brunette, who dropped her phone, skated two more strides towards the snow at the lake’s edge, then fell with a gurgle onto her side as blood welled up on her back and shoulders, a look of complete disorientation and shock on her pale face, cheek down on the ice.

Agent Blank determined that the shots came from one of any of several small caves along the top of the cliff face, and laid down suppressive fire, while the rest of the group scattered, firing at each other and diving into the powder along the path. After a few volleys of fire back and forth, one bodyguard staggered back, clutching his neck, as blood spurted from a horrible gash in his carotid artery from one of Gohring’s well-placed flachette bolts. Agent Terrible again fell victim to strange coincidence, as his flachette pistol malfunctioned, ejecting unspent cartridges into the snow in front of his opponent’s feet.. Suddenly, as Terrible dove to retrieve his ammunition, another attacker burst from under snow cover mere meters from the melee, and hurtled himself at the operative, firing a bullpup weapon. Meanwhile, Blank engaged fire with the man on off of the path to the left, and finally put him down. After some struggle, Terrible was able to subdue and dispatch the new attacker, in time to hear a third rifle shot and see Tokawa land on his back, arms outstretched, head back, staring straight at him with a death’s head grin protruding from the bloody maw that was his greedy scowl.

The remaining bodyguard, seeing his primary spilling brain matter all over the snow at their feet, instantly held his weapon up in a sign of truce. “Fuck that, I’m out of here!” he mumbled, and bolted past his partner who lay on his back in the snow with a glove clamped tightly to his messy neck wound. The operatives became aware that the station emergency claxons were sounding, and that security was likely en route to the park, and decided to make an immediate withdrawal. A final shot from the cliffs above struck the snow to their right side, and they immediately headed for the nearest exit, as the mother’s wailing echoed in odd harmony with the sharp twang of the security claxons.

As the operatives entered the public causeway of the entertainment zone’s upper tier, they found the fleeing bodyguard drawing fire from four security officers who were pinned behind a sales kiosk. They made their way around him and headed for the nearest checkpoint, which was the entrance to the corporate zone, and temporarily unmanned, allowing them to kick their way through the personnel barricade and enter the zone beyond. They ran the entire length of the corporate cargo zone, drawing shocked exclamations and pointing from various executives and their staff billowing out of a docked shuttle, finally forcing their way past startled guards at the next checkpoint, and made their way into the hospitality zone. They split up here, Gohring heading for the Slavedriver 2 in hopes of accelerating the loading process for an earlier launch time, while the others returned to the hotel to retrieve Chelsea.

Though Terrible and Blank saw no security staff on their way to the hotel, they stopped short at the entrance to the hotel suite, as Agent Terrible noticed the scorch marks on the door of forced entry using an electric torch. They cautiously entered the room, weapons drawn, expecting the worst, and saw a blood trail from Chelsea’s bed to the bathroom beyond. Suddenly, a form leaped from the bathroom in a low tucked roll, and Blank cried out identification as Chelsea prepared to fire on them. She was naked and shaking, covered in the blood of a body that lay face down in the tub. Chelsea had struggled with her assailant for several minutes, choking him with a garrote wire under her pillow while he had slashed away at her with a blade until, in his last moments of consciousness, he slashed his own femoral artery, and bled out while asphyxiating, until she dragged his corpse into the bathroom and put a shot through his head for good measure.

Relieved at her safety, but concerned about her ability to make the trip to the docks, injured as she was and without a ganger uniform for disguise as they had, Blank set out to find something to cover her with, while Terrible helped her into her Skinsuit and gathered her gear. He discovered an ID tag on the corpse, identifying the man as a Gateway security mean, like Forrestal. Agent Terrible immediately set to cleaning the scene by dousing the bed with flammable microactants, and igniting it with a shriek of blue flame that immediately burned itself out, destroying the bed linens. He doused the body with acid and cleaned up the bathroom, while Chelsea finished getting ready.

Meanwhile, Blank found a station engineer fixing a water leak, clubbed him and stole his overalls, and returned to the hotel, in time to help dress Chelsea in them. Together, they staggered towards the security checkpoint at the spindle that led to the docks, feigning intoxication, as two station guards manned the barricade with weapons drawn. However, the security claxon alarm finally ceased, and the guards returned to their stations to read an update on the emergency, giving the team an opportunity to slip past them.

The team regrouped at the dock, and found Gohring oddly sipping tea with a 14-yr old crewmember, as the pilots also arrived from the adjacent dockway, agitated by the alarms and suspicious of the operatives’ involvement. A sizable payoff later, the pilots decided it was in their collective interest to leave MADRID station immediately, and set to completing launch procedures. Once everyone was aboard and safely stowed, the crew sealed the hatches on the tiny OTV and disengaged from the dock, just as a swarm of station security entered the cargo area and ran towards them in the vessel’s wake.

However, as they left the atmosphere of dockside as the bulkheads doors of the outer airlocks closed behind them, and entered the outer airlock that led to open space and the station approach lanes, the co-pilot nervously noted that the blast doors on either side of their exit were closing, bathed in the strobing blue light of station security flashers.

Moments later, the alarm was deactivated, and the doors resumed opening, allowing the vessel to leave. The MADRID station security interface announced that a security breach across the station had triggered the alarm, but had now been contained.

Once clear of the station, the trip to Crystal Palace was tense and uneventful. Two ASRA data-squirt transmissions were received during the journey. The first, received one hour after leaving MADRID, warned that Magellan’s platform under construction was not yet able to sustain atmosphere or staff, which suggested to the team that it was less likely that Doussant would be held there. The most likely focus for their search remained Crystal Palace. After several hours of cards, drinking, and calculated gambling losses, the team had extracted several key pieces of information from the spacers: the Crystal Palace toroid layouts, the demeanor among the pilot’s and workganger’s guilds, the attitude on station towards earth corporations desperate to gain a foothold in orbit, and more. They learned of a strange hauler accident three months earlier, when a heavy tug hauler lost control and collided with the third toroid of the station, causing a portion of the workganger’s guild staging area to be vented into space, killing an undetermined number of workgangers and station staff. The accident had been investigated by station security and Kiroshi investigators, and had been determined to be pilot error. However, the piloting community was concerned, as it seemed unlikely that such an accident could be the result of navigational errors from an experienced spacer crew. Either the crew was distracted from piloting the vessel, or mechanical problems crippled the craft. And if that was the case, even more questions were raised, as COTV crews were extremely diligent in conducting pre-launch inspections. The rumor mill among the pilot’s guild was that a cover-up had occurred. But with their Gateway union representatives issuing internal briefs confirming Kiroshi’s decisions, the matter had been settled officially. When asked if Magellan had created an orbital presence, the pilots scoffed at the suggestion. As the OTV began the approach to Crystal Palace, a second data squirt was received. It reported that a meeting was recorded between a senior Magellan executive, and two senior CNN Corp officials, in a downtown Manhattan restaurant.

The team made arrangements with the pilots, Bale and Isdyn, to be smuggled aboard the station in a cargo loader that they would rent and use to transfer their small-stock imports into station holdings. The limited surveillance in that area of the docks, according to Bale, would give them an opportunity to access an airlock that would lead to service tunnels in the center of the dock arm. They made arrangements for C-6 to contact Bale via station portable phone in 6 hours, while the pilots would settle into their apartments on Toroid 2, and then attempt to get caught up on the latest rumors regarding the areas of interest the team had identified, namely the workganger migration to classified new construction areas, and the presence of Magellan staffers on Crystal Palace. The team would reconnoiter the station layout, try to access station data terminals, and eventually rent a place, to lay low if necessary, at Midway coffin banks, a low-rent, short-stay boarding establishment that tailored to the spontaneously amorous. With the plan in place, the crew submitted their cargo manifest to Crystal Palace security, and held their breaths until a dock bay was authorized.

Once docked, Bale and the crew intern consulted with the dock warden, then rented a cargo hauler and returned to the OTV. In the zero gee environment, the loader ran along guiderails in the docking sleeve’s frame, using two slender forearms to grip the OTV’s cargo hatch. The C-6 operatives, helmets on, slipped into the membranous belly of the loader amidst the sea of yellow plastic packing containers, and the loader was soon in motion, as Bale and the intern rode it back through the docking sleeve to the cargo shafts along the main arm. As they passed the pre-identified access hatch, the loader was stopped, partially blocking the view of a surveillance camera making lazy sweeps across the 30m wide corridor. The operatives made the leap in pairs, from the loader to the grab rings adjacent to the hatch. Agent Terrible misjudged his trajectory, and was unable to grip the rings before tumbling back into view of the camera. He was caught by another agent, but was presumably at least partially recorded by the camera. The team tensed, waiting for an alarm to be triggered, but none occurred, and they entered the hatch and proceeded down their route.

Once the team made their way to the main airlock at the toroid’s bulkhead, and successfully maneuvered through it, they discovered a bustling energy along the docking toroid, the quadrant of which they had entered already containing a denser population than all of Madrid station combined. Loaders glided along special rails along the bulk head walls. Pilots and hauler crews made their way through the crowded pedestrian street of the 4th toroid’s outer ring. Wheeled transporters waited at gateways to the inner transportation ring, where they would slowly accelerate down the toroid’s circumference, in order to deposit their cargo at the main railcar loaders along the toroid’s three spokes, to be in turn delivered to the elevators along the station’s spine and transported to the other toroids above. The crowd was mixed, pilots and crew commingling with gangers and station staff with little segregation in this toroid. A previous review of the station plans revealed this not to be the case in the other toroids.

After making their way to Toroid 2, disguised in their MADRID station workcrew uniforms, the operatives accessed a dataterm and identified the locations of several familiar corporation’s station offices, as well as the residential directory listing for Mr.Tokawa. Disguised as maintenance technicians. they bribed access into the luxury corporate residential suites to which Tokawa belonged as a resident member, and Agent Terrible hacked Tokawa’s entry passcard reader and gained them access to the apartment. It was immaculate and unused. The team found a Kiroshi laptop, and stole it, retreating through a service corridor back onto the busy pedestrian street of Toroid 2. Shops and modest service facilities lined several stories of the stations largest toroid, and bars, restaurants, offices and hospitality suites shared the same public zone, unlike the military-designed MADRID station. The crew were pleased to discover that the population density of the station at mid-dayshift was such that they were neither easy to spot nor stood out considerably from anyone else passing through.

After asking around at a few bars for someone to help crack the laptop’s access codes, they were told to inquire at a techie hangout called the Cathode Café, where the owner, SL8, may be able to offer assistance for a price. He was amiable to the proposition, and for several thousand credits, cracked the access code and gained them entry into the laptop’s database. However, all entries were in a proprietary shorthand. Gohring copied the data to disc, then left the laptop with SL8 and paid him to try and find someone who knew how to decipher Kiroshi’s executive shorthand. They also produced Tokawa’s illicit data disc, and SL8 inspected it and discovered, to his surprise, that the disc housed a tiny micro-jammer, which had clearly been the cause of the team’s malfunctioning mandibular transmitters. They destroyed the chip, and grew more concerned about Tokowa’s discussions with his unseen handler, Mile.

While the C-6 operatives were making their way to the Midway, they received a third data-squirt, advising them to ask for GAIA at the Hotel Copernicus on Crystal Palace. This was a surprising coincidence, as they were already on-station when the message was received. Wondering at ASRA’s data pipeline, the operatives immediately set out for Copernicus, on the opposite side of the toroid. A short time later, they stepped into the hotel lobby.

The Copernicus Hotel Cluster was like a spiral-shaped inverted pyramid of suite levels with balconies overlooking the atrium and a good unobstructed view of space at the top of the atrium well. The architecture was streamlined, nothing breaking the clean surface of white resin that made up all visible surfaces within the lobby. Adjacent to the front desk was the entrance into Copernicus’s house bar, the Last Sip. This was an equally streamlined space, modern and cold, with high floating ceilings, slender white columns, and a small Weeping Willow oddly located in a large planter in the center of the restaurant by the window. A word at the bar and the bartender knowingly instructed them to wait by the willow while GAIA was notified of their arrival. The bar was crowded and loud, and the din of conversation and background music was heavy,

A few minutes later, a tall, slender Portuguese woman in a maroon ribbed bodysuit and long ironed black hair approached from the crowded floor beneath the massive bulkhead window, and sat down beside them under the tree. She identified herself as GAIA, and asked why it had taken them so long to contact her, as she had been sending them signals for days. They explained that their transmitters had been jammed, and only recently had become aware of the contact. She began to explain that she had been acting as an information broker on-station for several months, and had a wealth of information for them. Before she could continue, she spotted suspicious individuals enter the bar, apparently following the operatives. Concerned for her cover, she gave Gohring the number of her suite on the top floor of Copernicus, and instructed them to meet in 15 minutes there, then dodged into the crowd and was gone.

The Company Men who had entered the Last Sip had not done so unnoticed, as Agents Blank and Terrible were positioned near the entrance, and were relayed the information, spotting their guests as they meandered to a table to consult the menu. They were both Scandinavian in appearance, him in a ribbed dark turtleneck and slacks, and her in a business suit. They hemmed and hawed at the menu, while sending occasional glances at Agents Gohring and Mood, still under the willow. Once the agents left the bar, Terrible and Blank watched for their shadowers’ responses. Moments later, the female CM walked casually into the kitchen behind the bar and was gone, while the man waited an additional minute, then slipped into the crowd.

Gohring and Mood took the open polyglass elevator lift to the 6th floor of Copernicus’ open balcony atrium space, and found GAIA’s room number. Blank radioed that the Company Men had followed, but were not presently in sight. Terrible then ascended the stairs, while Blank remained in the lobby, watching the exits. Gohring rapped on the door and was met by GAIA in a black silk kimono, who ushered them in and offered them a seat in the luxury apartment’s sunken living room, while she entered the kitchen to mix drinks. As they exchanged information about Anubis and the training program they had all presumably attended, in order to verify identities once more, Agent Mood noticed in the sweeping bulkhead window’s reflection, a man crouched behind the leather sofa. She whispered this to Gohring through the sub-mandibular transmitter, and as Gohring stepped closer to the bedroom doorway across the room, he suddenly dropped to a crouch, spinning to fire on one of two men who sprang up from their cover with weapons drawn.

In a brief second, rounds were exchanged virtually simultaneously. Gohring fired a flachette dart square between the eyes of the nearer assailant, the impact of which splattered his brain matter across the starlit window behind him, as he toppled backwards behind the couch. The second assailant closer to Mood fired a compressed air bolt into her back as she dove for her cover, returning fire and clipping him in the neck. He staggered for a moment, then fell as the toxin took effect.

Hearing this transpire over the sub-mandibular mics, Blank and Terrible were each on their way up the six vertical flights of stairs leading to the top floor. By the time Terrible had reached the room, the other agents had checked the risen from their positions to cover the bodies of their assailants. Terrible noted that GAIA was gone, and darted into the kitchen to discover a door leading into the bedroom area beyond, as Gohring entered it from the far door nearest him. They heard another door across the bedroom shut, which presumably provided access to the balcony in front, so they ran outside to discover the balcony empty, except for Agent Blank striding down the corridor towards them.

While they were regrouping, Blank noticed another suite door quietly close a few meters closer to him from the rest of the group, in the area of the balcony separating him from the others. As he kicked the door in to investigate, another door opened beside him and the female Scandinavian CM darted sideways onto the walkway, but stopped short as her submachine gun suddenly jammed. Blank fell hard against the doorframe, spun and shot her in the neck, and she toppled over the side, clutching her throat and gurgled as she fell onto the hotel bar below.

As Blank glanced over the side to verify her fall, a deafening low-frequency roar cut across the atrium, and the room before him exploded into thousands of kinetic eddies, as the door and frame of the suite entrance ripped from the structure and launched into the air, sending Blank and hundreds of resin fragments bursting up and over the raining into the atrium below. Blank lunged backwards, wrenching his left rotator cuff but managing somehow to grab hold of the railing post as he swung violently over the side, pinning him hard against the balcony wall as the crowd in the bar six floors below began to scream and point at the commotion above, as they were rained on by shards of resin wall material.

The other agents saw the floor and wall in front of Blank explode with violent kinetic force, yet saw no burning, fire or signs of concussive or incendiary damage, as if the very room itself had just spontaneously disassembled. Agent Terrible dropped to the floor of the walkway and grabbed for Blank, lifting him back up over the side of the railing, while Gohring cased the room briefly and noted no incendiary damage at all within. As they pulled Blank to his feet and scanned the area around them for attackers, another woman stepped out of a suite door adjacent to GAIA’s apartment, back from where they had come. Gohring saw that it was GAIA, having abandoned the kimono, now holding a bulky, ungainly weapon with a large pepperbox behind the handle. Before the agents could react, she fired a compressed pepperbox cartridge, which shrieked with a whine and sprayed the door and corridor walls, as well as the exposed agents, with a jelly-like splatter of gelatin rounds, releasing contact poison everywhere. Gohring and Terrible traded shots at their attacker, and GAIA cried out, clutching her neck and stumbling back into the doorway.

Another telltale low-frequency roar, and as he began to run down the length of the walkway towards their opponent, Gohring was hit square in the chest, blowing him through the adjacent suite window and into the tattered room beyond, as resin and metal studs flew apart like paper, miniblinds crashing back into the suite on top of him. The other agents hit the floor and scanned for the unseen attacker. Agent Blank dove into the room from which he had first been struck, and discovered the other Scandinavian CM, broken and dead against the back wall of the suite, presumably killed by the first kinetic shell. He recovered the man’s weapon, a squat, curvy submachine gun called a Seburo MK2, which he discovered to be loaded with some new type of defragmented shells. He took the other reload clip and returned to the doorway.

Agent Gohring emerged also from the wreckage of his position, and spotted the flash on contrast of a long black gun barrel, across the atrium to the opposing balcony over one hundred meters away. Agent Terrible took off for the nearest stairwell in order to get a closer position to the unknown assailant. Their attacker was dressed in white armor, and was in a semi-crouched defensive position near the elevator, aiming a long artillery piece at the agents. Blank fired the Seburo on full auto, spraying their attacker’s position with DFB rounds, which burst apart against the curving wall behind him, causing him sot duck from the ricocheting shell fragments.

By now, the agents could hear the alarm claxons, and could see that the crowd below was thinning out as station security entered the bar below. Agent Mood declared that GAIA had escaped, and charged into the room after her. Also seeing station security swarming across the lobby below, the white assailant ducked into the exposed polyglass elevator, which began a slow descent into the atrium. As Agent Gohring ran past Mood’s position and into the following adjacent room, cutting off GAIA’s path through the kitchen as she had used before, Agent Blank emptied the remainder of his clip at the elevator, which caused a spiderlike pattern of shatterglass to spread across it’s face. The elevator lurched to a stop on the 4th floor. Gohring entered the suite to find GAIA running through the interconnecting bedroom doorway, aiming back at Mood. He swung hard and clocked her in the temple, and GAIA collapsed.

Meanwhile, Terrible exited the stairs on the 4th floor, and ran towards the elevator, verifying visually that the assailant had exited through the rear elevator cab doors and into a service hall beyond, and was not in sight. Station security were running up the stairs and causing a commotion, so Blank and Mood hauled GAIA up and over their shoulders, and dragged her towards the stairs, as Blank provided cover. They dragged her into the service accessway adjacent to the elevator hoistway, and descended the service stairs until they rejoined Terrible, who had identified an escape route out of the hotel and into the station service corridor. They ran some distance, than cut into a janitor’s closet with their hostage.

GAIA was half-conscious, badly injured from her head wounds, and expressed being impressed by the agent’s training, which was "far better than their predecessors". Blank provided some physical persuasion, and the assassin, who would not identify herself as TSA, but was assumed to be so, admitted to assassinating the real GAIA several months earlier, and posing as her in wait for Anubis operatives to make contact. She said that a previous team, only two members remaining by that time, met with her at Copernicus three months ago. She offered them wine laced with neurological poison similar to the one used in the jellydarts of her Metalstorm weapon, and strangled the female with her own garrote wire as the male watched in horror. The male operative then confessed to being sent by Anubis on a short-notice mission, providing details as to the Anubis mission profile and operation schedule, before she strangled his paralyzed form, and vented them both into space in a nearby trash chute.

After determining that she would never reveal her employer, and in anger at the knowledge that a previous Anubis team had been massacred on-station without their having been informed in advance of their mission, the team chose to cut their losses. Blank dragged GAIA to a nearby trash chute similar to the one she had used, and vented her into space with a sort of poetic justice.

In order to evade capture, the team made a fast retreat through the service corridors of the Copernicus Hotel Cluster, and slipped, via an access door, back into the crowds passing through the promenade. Once it was clear they were not being followed, the team backtracked to the seedier side of the Torod’s Free Zone, and located a Kizu, a chain of traveler’s coffin hotels providing fully-automated kiosk check-in. Minutes later, they had secured two adjacent deluxe 75sf suites, and set up a temporary base camp.

Agent Mood helped Terrible clean and dress his leg wound, but it became clear that the team’s ganger coveralls were the worse for wear, stained with blood and gunshot residue. So, while Mood and Terrible prepared to hit the Public Corporate district at early Night Shift for some preliminary reconnaissance, Agents Blank and Gohring searched the Free Zone for a source for new disguises. Forty-thousand credits later, and four loose crew fatigues in hand, the pair left a uniform supply vendor and made their way to a nearby bar, McFadden’s.

McFadden’s was an earthsider watering hole constructed to present the façade of a reliable Irish pub, with real wood finishes, a recombined wood and brass bar top, and vintage football tape running from dingy monitors in the corners of the room. The patrons were old station hands of a generation that felt the pang of homesickness far more bitterly than the younger crew that were so eager to make their way into orbit. A few words with the bartender, coincidentally calling himself McFadden, and the agents were introduced to Jemmy, the pub’s resident skeeve. Jemmy was the type of lazy, shifty, and clever teenager that made young girls’ parents cringe, with dirty little fingers in dirty little pies, enough cash to dress the part and drop credits on gullible rebellious daughters, but never quite able to legitimize himself with the establish underworld types. He fancied himself an up-and-comer, though it wasn’t difficult to see that he wasn’t going anywhere. He fit the bill perfectly for the information hunt the agents would soon initiate, as his eagerness to impress and greed at the sight of their cred-chips sent him lurking off into the Zone to fish out more informed contacts for hire, and to requisition personal weaponry of abiguous licensure for the team's use.

With a meet scheduled with Jemmy the next Night Shift, the pair returned to the Kizu and suited up in their new gear. The suits were unmarked by company brand, and bore no guild patches, and though they would not stand up to close scrutiny, they would allow the agents to move more freely throughout the station. Mood and Terrible returned soon after with several new pieces of information gleamed from their reconnaissance. Kiroshi did indeed have public offices on-station, which were a possible starting point on tracking down Tokawa’s employer, a man known only as Mile. In addition, a brief unescorted walk around the workganger Toroid yielded some unexpected information: While one major section of the ring remained closed for repairs, the rest of the ring was equally split between the three workganger guilds onstation, and freely accessible to station citizens who minded their own business and walked with a purpose. 45 minutes of subtle exploration had revealed that while Concz and Hughes sections were bustling with the usual and expected activity of ganger enclaves, the Taurus section was conspicuously barren. While the other two were engaged in several projects worth of staging and execution of work platform building and cargo loading, Taurus maintained a skeleton crew of laborers tending to minor tasks, with an effort to seem more busy, and in greater numbers, then they really were. Where an entire workganger guild, one third of the Guild Treaty, might be, was not clear, though their absence suggested truth to the earlier squirt transmission communiqué that alluded to Concz-Taurus-Hughes Combine involvement in a secret orbital platform project. Why only Taurus seemed engaged in offstation work was yet to be determined.

Leaving Agents Mood and Brior to gather additional intelligence on the Ganger Toroid, Gohring and Blank returned to McFadden's Bar for the scheduled meet with Jemmy, who was to have procured the unregistered weaponry per their contract. Jemmy, however, was shifty and distracted, clearly uncomfortable about something. He petitioned for more cash and was denied, and then begrudgingly pulled a heavily-weighted duffel bag from behind the booth, instructing the agents to take it and leave before their deal attracted unwanted attention. The agents grew suspicious at Jemmy's lack of bravado and demanded that he himself open the bag in their presence. He resisted violently, then surrended with slumped shoulders, and carried the duffel to the back room of the bar for thier review. As they passed through the doorway into the crowded storage room, Jemmy suddenly burst into a sprint for the rear exit, only to be tackled by Agent Gohring and dragged, violently resisting, to the table where he had left the bag.

Sweating profusely, Jemmy was deathly afraid to open the duffel, and confessed that he did not actually know what was inside after all. He had been approached by someone he did not know and told to give the team the bag, that it was the weapons they were looking for. He admitted to having very few underworld contacts after all, relying on his his cousin, who was the only one of the pair to actually have connections, so when a mysterious undesirable appeared out of nowhere and delivered the products he had requested, he agreed. Despite his reluctance, the agents physically encouraged him to open the bag himself, and with no other options available to him, and defeat clear in his face, he complied. As expected, the duffel contained no weapons, but was weighted with a collection of rusting pipes, and a small micro-receiver with a flashing LED. The agents, and Jemmy, fled the bar immediately.

Though the anticipated detonation did not occur, the team agreed it would be inadvisable to return to analyze the device, and instead forced Jemmy to take them to his connected cousin directly. After a short journey through the poorly-maintained Free Zone peripheral housing corridors, they arrived at the mobile housing bay where Jemmy shared a small residential pod with his cousin, Fell. Within, they found the pod coated throughout with congealing clusters of flesh and organ matter, presumably the obliterated gory remains of Fell, and from the smell and temperature, killed very recently. The team immediately backed out of the pod and returned through the mobile housing bay. Agent Blank noticed something following them from behind, very difficult to spot. Eventually they discovered a small robotic drone camoflauged to match it's surroundings, the size of a dinner plate, with one optic lens and supported by a cluster of low-profile appendages. The drone became immobile, and soon began eminating a high-pitched whine. As the agents moved behind nearby pods for cover, Jemmy's curosity and greed overcame his fear of joining his cousin's fate, and trodded over the drone. "I think it malfunctioned. It's probably worth a lot!" The drone then exploded, concealing a CVSB [Compressed Velocity Silica Bomb] , which powdered Jemmy into a fine mist of blood and tissue littering the street. With no other leads forthcoming as to their latest ambush, the agents wasted no time in developing an exit strategy, and quickly fled the scene, trying to avoid any uneccesary encounters with station security which was likely en route, as the fire alarms in this bay had been activated by the blast. On their way back to their hotel, they passed a tall Slavic man walking in the opposite direction, wearing a long coat over white Gasium type armor. Simultaneously, he and the team recognized each other from their battle in the Copernicus Hotel earlier.

As they were passing through a tightly developed residential corridor of honey-combed front-entry units when they stumbled upon their earlier opponent, Gohring and their Slavic assailant each dove towards consecutive doorways on the same side of the passage. Agent Blank moved to the opposing side of the passage and took cover in a doorway there, as each residence's entry was nestled in an arced vestibule, which provided some protection from the view across the corridor. None of them noticed a fourth individual creeping along the corridor from the direction their assailant had come, and he did not immediately make his presence known.

As the agents exchanged fire with their assailant, later identified as Dihver Sol, the hidden individual stepped forward and pulled a station weapon, and indentified himself to Blank as also being an Anubis operative. Agent Blank could easily identify the CPA-issue Gasium skinsuit and other gear the man was wearing, but did not recognze him, as no other C-6 agents were known to exist other than them. The man's gear was tattered and showed signs of ballistic damage, and he looked to have been laying low for an extended period of time, unshaven and gaunt. He showed Blank his Anubis identification tag, tattooed to his forearm and visible only through the team issue Wimwear Goggles. He was Agent Cardinal Ember, of the mysterious C-7. With many unasked questions and not a little frustration, Blank returned to the melee in time to see both Dihver Sol and Agent Gohring each kick their respective doors in and dive into the residences for cover.

As Blank and Ember moved across the passageway, through the red haze of strobing alarm indicators above, Gohring worked his way on a quick sweep through the empty residence and to the rear exit, kicking the door down here as well, and leaped into the service accessway beyond which linked all the residential units together. Dihver Sol had done the same thing, with Blank and Ember a few steps behind him firing blind. The rear passage was very close quarters, and Dihver barely had rom to fire with a pistol at Gohring's position while pulling a long-barrelled bullpup weapon of some kind from his cloak, while Gohring simutaneously shot him in the face, killing him instantly.

Knowing security would now be converging on their position the team made off with what little equipment Dhiver had on him, including the weapon, later identified as a Heihachi Sub-Sonic cannon, and along with Ember made a brisk sprint down several lengths of the service accessway before re-emerging on the far side of the residential zone and blending into the crowd of onlookers who were staring at the blast doors that sealed off the previous area from view as security quarantined the zone. Once back at the Kizu, Agent Ember explained that he was a member of C-7, an insurgency team trained for 18 months prior to perform covert operations among the Orbitals. C-7 has been so highly classified that while they were fully aware of the covert operations C-6 Section had undergone over the past year, they were not authorized to make contact, and had been sent into orbit months earlier, a mere 24 hours after Dr. Henri Doussant's successful extraction into space. C-6 only began their six months of special training after C-7 was already launched, and from C-7's perspective, C-6 was simply being sent up as potential back-up should C-7 require it later. Unfortunately, C-7's foray into Orbital culture fared very poorly, and those that survived the trip to Crystal Palace, now numbering three of the orginal seven operatives, had been told to rendezvous with Anubis' seniormost Orbital informant, GAIA. As C-6 had discovered, GAIA had been assassinated and replaced with a TSA Counter-Insurgency Team, including Petra Sol, masquerading as GAIA, and her shadow partner and husband, Dihver. Ember had been suffering from space sickness and had fallen behind on the way to Copernicus, and when he arrived at the apartments, his two companions had been murdered by Petra Sol and were being dragged inside. Ember immediately fled the hotel, and had been in deep hiding in the bowels of the station ever since, his only goal to shadow Dihver Sol, who had been making regular trips into the Free Zone on unknown business. This was how Ember came to be following Dihver Sol when C-6 encountered them.

While the team reeled with this new information, Agent Gohring received a burst transmission from Anubis, receiving a lead that their target, Doussant, was apparently broadcasting transmissions from a Data Cafe in the Entertainment Zone. Ember was suprised that C-6 was outfitted with one-way data squirt receivers, and told them C-7 had had full two-way comunication with home during their mission, leading the team to speculate that Anubis had realized that the transmissions were not secure, and changed tactics for C-6, while never informing C-7 that the communication might be insecure. This raised even more questions about Anubis', and CPA's, pattern of omission of intelligence for the field teams. It was becoming clear that the teams were being deployed with limited Need-to-Know in case of capture, and while Ember had believed his team to be superior and well-trusted at CPA, it was clear they had also been in the dark about many factors of their mission. Also troubling was that Agents Mood and Terrible had not reported in, and were not responding to sub-mandibular communique, meaning they were either not conscious, or maintaining signal silence.

Following up on their latest lead, though now more skeptical of the validity of the intel, the team converged on the Data Cafe, called the SkyPod Research Lounge. This was another elaborately constructed facility for the Corporate clientele, consisting of a two story unobstructed view of space through glazed bulkhead panels ascending the entire facade. SkyPod was designed in warm yellow, orange and red hues, with the bar and lounge itself on the bottom floor on the opposite side from the bulkhead glazing, and the bulk of the space above the lounge being a ZG environment, again taking advantage of the Zone's sleeved proximity to the Toroid cluster's radial core, so that the higher in the SkyPod one were to be, the less gravity forces they would encounter. The research nodes suspended above the bar at various heights were actually suspended dataterm bucket seat pods hung from the bulkhead ceiling, accessible only be an assisted launch into ZG from the lower level. The Cafe was sparely populated, being between Shifts, but Ember wasted no time in flirting up a young bartender dressed in the irridescent skinsuit and makeup of the latest Orbital fasion. He floated Doussant's name to her, which she did not recognize, but after a few drinks, while the other agents staked out the lounge and watched the exits, she inquired on Ember's behalf to another staffmember, indentified as a technician for the data pods above. He confirmed he had seen another name frequently fairly recently. Though customers logged in with an anonymous ID signature when accessing the pods, each account was tied to the billing system at the terminal behind the bar. During one of the recent brown-outs caused by the power draw from the repairs on the Workganger Toroid, the system in the SkyPod had gone down and the tech was on duty late trying to restore the active accounts. He remembered seeing the same name on several accounts in the invoice log, and after being offered a sum, pulled a report up of the logs for that Shift, and cross-referenced the time log with the billing index to yield the anonymous ID of an individual named Brail. Ember then paid the bartender to contact him if the ID was used in the future, and gave her his station mobile phone code.

After returning to Kizu and stashing the Haihachi weapon in the hotel, and again finding Agents Mood and Terrible not responding, Ember received a call in the middle of Night Shift from his contact at SkyPod that Brail's ID was in use. The team returned to the bar and was informed that the ID was being used in three different pods at the highest level of the space, though she couldn't identify the user from memory. She did not recall anyone entering the lounge matching Doussant's description. As Gohring and Blank investigated the pods in use, they found unmanned laptops performing coded operations in each of the pods, with their owners missing. Ember spotted a dark-haired man in Corporate attire step out from an upper lounge balcony across from the suspended pods, and relayed this information to the other agents, who moved on his position. Seeing the operatives converging rapidly on his position, the man leapt off of the balcony and sailed on a trajectory towards the ground level, increasing in velocity as the relative gravity increased, the agents in tow. All three landed hard and struggled to recover. The pursuit continued through the back of the lounge as the staff and other patrons scattered, the team finally catching up and cornering their opponent on a side street around the access node from the Entertainment Zone. They dragged him through the node, across the vehicular ring of the Toroid, and into an empty service corridor beyond, where they soon found an unlocked storage room and locked themselves inside with their captive.

It didn't take much to compell the man, now identified as Brail, to admit to his culpability in the SkyPod. He was a mid-level Corporate Company Man, assigned the daily task of intercepting and manipulating Earth-based incoming data transmissions. He never knew the origin of the transmissions, nor the contents, simply running operations developed by his Security Protocols Department internally. He admitted to suspecting his tasks were related to both the frequent rumors of Earth operatives in orbit, and the recent emergency quarantines that seemed to plague Crystal Palace every Shift. He didn't appear to be particularly surprised at seeing the operatives face to face, but was growing panicked about retaliation from his employers once it was learned he had been snatched. His expendability seemed obvious. As far as why he was interfering in ASRA's data transmissions using the identity of Dr. Henri Doussant, he told the operatives the access codes were given to him by company agents at the top level, and he didn't have Need-to-Know for any additional information. With the mystery of Doussant's name being used in the data transmissions that Brail had apparently been manipulating, and the greater question of the validity of any of the ASRA data thay had received, the team tortured the name of Brail's employer from him, yielding an important confirmation: Magellan was indeed in orbit. However, before they could interrogate him further, Brail suffered a seizure and died, most likely from an internal toxin trigger activated remotely by his handlers. Moments later security sirens approached from the corridor outside, and the agents realized the storage room had been surrounded. Acting quickly, they climbed into the ceiling panels above, and lay in wait for a melee with security. Fortunately, when the door was breached, station security personnel hastily searched the room, seized the body, reported the suspects gone, and left. Agent Gohring heard security officers talking outside the room as the agents waited silently above. A Special Investigator was mentioned as being on-station, and the field security team wanted to avoid being pulled into whatever investigation he was conducting, opting to leave the scene for another approaching security team to address.

Knowing now that Magellan did have a covert presence on-station, and that the presence of this Special Investigator suggested that the team's actions were not going un-noticed, it was decided to raise the stakes and penetrate the reserved Corporate Zone of the station, where station offices were located, and most corporate staff resided. The team sent Agent Ember, now the most familiar with the station, to procure corporate attire and other supplies, and prepared to abandon the Kizu for a final push into the Corporate Zone, despite the promise of tighter security, increased video surveillance, and proximity of their enemies. The answers to many of their questions, and hopefully the location of their target, might be found within.

The first order of business was to be testing the team's cover in the more restricitve security environment. They soon discovered that they passed for corporate security thugs fairly well, with station security at the Corporate Zone checkpoint, and most corporate executives and staff they saw as they ventured within, avoided meeting their gaze. Knowing now that they had the option of moving more freely, for as long as it would take station security to track them down visually in the Corporate Zone, they proceeded with their investigation of leads directly.

The team first approached the public offices of Maas Biolabs. These offices, spartan and sparsely administered, were clearly just an administrative node for the labs located on one of the station's bio-engineeering research arms, which were restricted access platforms extending from the first Toroid and modular in design. However, the staff at Maas Biolab's main office were startled and confused by the team's inquiry about LeGuelle, about whom they had received a possibly-insecure transmission about from ASRA as a trustworthy contact. One administrative staffer, a short but steeley-eyed woman in a crisp white suit, watched the team intently from another station in the lobby. Soon, Maas uniformed security came into the lobby and took over discussions with the agents, informing them that LeGuelle had been contracted for a project off-station, and had been for some time. Understanding their questions were suspicious, Agent Blank intimidated the security staff and the team made their exit. As they had hoped, the staffer that had been watching them eventually left the offices. The team followed her thtough the Toroid and up to the Research Zone, where she entered the Maas Biolabs Research Arm, guarded by armed security and a massive gray airlock. As the team tested the mettle of the security staff by claiming to have an appointment with LeGuelle, the staffer appeared in the airlock, and with a look, waived them through security and into the lab arm. She moved them into a conference room, and sealed the door. She was talkative and brash, obviously agitated at the subject of LeGuelle, and a deal was soon struck for paid information about LeGuelle's whereabouts. The woman, Gen Deeger, had apparently been conducting an affair with the embittered husband of Dr. Veronique LeGuelle, one of the your biofirm's leading engineers, what had been hired, through Gateway and an executive named Hurlant, to work on a confidential, but exciting project that promised to lead to breakthroughs in her own work, in the field of brainwave mapping. Deeger believed that Hurlant arranged for LeGuelle to be leased spare Kiroshi offices out of MADRID Station, and that she was to be working for about a year in a classified capacity, and was still there. It was clear that Deeger was happily moving on LeGuelle's husband, and status within the Maas Biolabs offices, and harbored ambitions greater than her position, so the agents fueled her ego and convinced her to contact them if LeGuelle communicated with the Crystal Palace office, which Deeger claimed hadn't happened for some time.

The team then proceeded to the Gateway offices to try and flush out Hurlant, if he was on-station. The Gateway offices were actually the most Earthsider of any of the facilities the team had yet encountered on Crystal Palace. While most Earth-culture aesthetics were accomplished using spacer materials and designed to be kitchy, Gateway, as the Pilots Union, had more direct contact with pilots and executives from Earth companies, and as such designed their offices on-station to seem more comfortable. Bleached walnut panels, moderately intricate carpeting, glazed partitions were seen throughout, all surrounding a laser-sculpted wood tendril-like scultpture tracing it’s way across the lobby, as if to suggest knotted branches of some miniaturized tree trunk. While checking in with the skeleton crew at the reception desk, Agent Gohring noticed that the lobby was a facade, as the office and conference rooms beyond were empty, obscured by a panelled screen. Knowing by now that Gateway had been absorbed clandestinely by Kiroshi, it was not surprising that Gateway's offices were a front. The staffers here were pleasant, polite Earthsiders with southern drawls and long platinum hair. They casually side-stepped the agents' attempts to speak with Gateway executive staff, and tried to schedule a future meeting. Through some clever negotiation, Agent Gohring managed to get confirmation that a Company Man named Hurlant was ideed on station, though infrequently in the Gateway offices,and could periodically be seen at his favorite watering hole, the Cascades.

Knowing that their course was taking them through several public areas under video surveillance, and that it was only a matter of time before the internal security of any of these companies were to contact Crstal Palace security, the agents proceeded directly to the Cascades restaurant, in the Corporate Hospitality Zone. This was a massive restaurant with a multi-tiered vertical plan, with long, circulated waterfalls, where much of the reserved seating was behind the waterfall itself, built into a wall of rock and epoxy support, as if the booths were carved into a natural cliff face. A single-track path, braced with cable guardrails, wound it's way through three switchbacks up the slope of the facade, with a service elevator for waitstaff at the far right side. Agent Ember took his position on the ground floor of the three-story, exspansive restaurant, with a view of the waterfall that poured down from the higest point on the roack face and into a lush tropical pit of plants and mist, partially obscuring the view of the patrons in the booths above and behind it. The other agents paid the host to bring them to Hurlant for a meeting, and were escorted up the path to the highest level, where they found an arrogant looking Company Man at a well-stocked table, hosting an elder pilot in his role as a Gateway executive. He was protected by a single Gateway security officer, who spotted the agents drawing weapons as the host fled back down the path. The officer was more agile than expected, and backed out of the way just as Hurlant, seeing Agent Blank approach first, kicked the entire table over and outwards, propelling Blank over the side of the guardrail, 20m above the restaurant floor. As the table and various dishware clattered into the pit of the water fall, and patrons fled their tables in panic, Agent Gohring fired his rappelling line down to Blank, who managed to grasp it and swing hard against the rock face in a pinned position. As Gohring exchanged fire with the security officer with his spare hand, Hurlant abandoned his client and sprinted for the service elevator. After a few shots, Gohring wounded the officer and managed to position Blank at the next lower level, where he dropped onto the table of more panicked patrons, and sprinted the rest of the way down to catch up with the fleeing opponent. Fortunately, Hurmant emerged from the elevator into a crowd of fleeing patrons, only to be kicked to the ground and dragged into the back by Agent Ember. Knowing they had only moments before Crystal Palace security would arrive, the team shot Hurlant in both knees and forced him to reveal what he knew about LeGuelle's assignment and his handlers at Kiroshi. Screaming in pain, Hurlant confessed to setting LeGuelle up with a position on a special project on MADRID, on behalf of his Kiroshi contact, understanding that she would not be returning, which was oblivious to her. She had traveled with her young daughter and left her husband on-station, expecting to only be away fro a few months. He confirmed his contact was a Kiroshi agent named Mile, who terrified him. Mile had a reputation for being well-connected on both the corporate and underwolrd fronts, and was rumored to be some sort of spook, strong-arming the workganger contingent, smaller corporate entities, and station staff into maintaining the tenuous relationship his unknown bosses required. Hurlant knew Mile frequented a massage parlor in the Entertainment Zone called GeishaNow! and promised that the agents would be able to find him there at this time of day. As the familiar sounds of station security sirens approached, Hurlant fell into shock, and the agents left him for dead and scaped out the back. It was clear now that the team was penetrating a conspiracy of considerable magnitude, but as the station security response has been growing more organized and responding faster than when they had first arrived, it was assumed that thy were aware of a covert team's presence on-station, and catching up with C-6, following the trail of dead they left behind. As they were still putting the pieces together, the team could not afford to be tangled up by an altercation with Crystal Palace security yet, with too many loose ends yet to investigate, and time running out for their ability to remain undetected. Discretion was of the essence now.

Unfortunately, as the team proceeded quietly through the Entertainment Zone in search of GeishaNow! their discretion was not to be. A challenge was called out to them from behind, and as the crowd of Night Shift revelers scattered, three heavily-armed attackers opened fire on C-6 from the middle of the street, execution style. Each assailant was armored and bristling with weaponry, and their defiant demeanor and willingness to fire on the team in a crowded district during it's busiest period, indicated that these men were not Orbital. They spoke in Earthside slang and carried, to the crowd's horror, forbidden ballistic weapons, which they used with reckless abandon. The were later confirmed to be BoneThuggs, a crew of hired hitmen smuggled up from Earth by unknown parties. The team took cover. Agents Blank and Ember dove for nearvy storefronts as their glass facades exploded into fragments, while Agent Gohring vaulted over an abandoned pedestrian tram and took cover behind the engine compartment. The Earthsider hitmen began emptying rounds into the agents' positions, and fire alarms began cycling as the streetside businesses were torn to shreds. Knowing that it was only a matter of seconds before emergency blast doors would be sealing off the area from the rest of the station, the team was forced to take the offensive to eliminate this threat, unfortunately being drawn out into view in the process. A violent and unreal exchange was made in the mddle of the streets, with Blank lobbing a frag grenade under one assailant, identified later as Hangdogg, killing him instantly to spectacular effect. Mexican was dispatched by Agent Ember, managing to shoot Ember in the shoulder on the way down, and Agent Gohring placed two rounds into the skull of Killbomb, dropping the last target. Without an opportunity to investigate their attackers, C-6 bolted for the nearest service corridor and again sprinted through several tunnels to make it to the next quad before the balst doors sealed off their melee. They re-emerged to find distressed crowds in the street being coralled by station security, already on site and guarding the quarantine perimeter. The fact that boistrous Earthsider hitmen had appeared, identifying the agents and drawing them into a public row in view of video surveillance made it clear that their goal had been to flush the agents out of hiding. However, to what end, they could not yet surmise. But it seemed an incredible amount of work, when from C-6's perspective, a covert action would have been cleaner and more appropriate. In addition, the BoneThugg crew were heavilly armed and armored, but no match for the training and experience of a top-level covert operations team, which whoever hired the crew would surely know by now. Concerned, the team laid low and made their way through the crowd without altercation, and resumed their search.

45 minutes later, C-6 arrived at the district that housed several popular institutions of physical pleasure, one of which being GeishaNow! The crowd in this district was of moderate size, and seemed unaware of the altercation that had occured only half a Toroid away. This crowd was about escape, and they were looking for just that. The team was able to work there way through the distracted crowd easily, and entered the parlor to find the proprietor and her manager greeting them. Spotting extremely muscular security behind beaded curtains, Agent Gohring took the Orbital approach, and bribed the Madam into allowing them access to Mile's preferred suite, which was down a winding labrynthe of rice-poly screened panels. The team stepped around a corner directly into view of an open room with a sunken pit floor, to discover the man believed to be Mile, enjoying the attention of several hired escorts. The team called him out, but to their surprise, the women rose and surrounded Mile defensively, while he laughed wearily. Mile did not appear to be overly-concerned with the sight of four covert operatives interrupting his sexfest. As Agents Blank and the wounded Ember proceeded to manhandle their way through the barrier of struggling women, Agent Gohring noticed a rear door behind him open, and a man in a full- environment skinsuit and lenswear roll through the doorway. Gohring began firing and warned the others, as Mile burst into action with a long, retractable axe which he used to hack through a side panel, and a surprised escort's back. Once Mile was on the move, and the other agents were still tangled up in the women, now falling to the ground, the unidentified shadow agent hurled a Gooey Mine at Gohring, and burst his way through the side penel nearest him as well. Gohring's view now blocked by the rapidly expanding crystalline barrier the mine produced, followed suit through the corridor panel, and soon all three men were breaching their way towards the front of the parlor, perpendicular to the flow of the corridors. Clients shrieked as the men blew through private rooms and out the other side, and the shadow agent continued to lob Gooey Mines at Gohring from the side, gradually cutting off his route to the front of the parlor, where the Madam was screaming for her security to take action. Gohring was soon trapped by the barrier of the last Gooey Mine, and had to backtrack to rejoin the other agents in pursuit of Mile, who had nearly reached the lobby. The power abruptly went out, station engineers having had to shut down the entire quad to fight the fire that was building in the quarantined district the agents had fled, just as Mile stepped into view of the door to the street, but was takcled frm behind by Blank, and dragged back into the shredded panels, hacking violently with his axe. The agents restrained him, warning the GeishaNow! staff to keep their distance, and pinned Mile down to extract information.

He resisted for a few moments, until Blank began severing his tendons, and then began cooperating, wild-eyed and enraged. Though he would not confirm his employer, on fear of death, he did clarify other key pieces of information. His employer was a major telecom / media company with a presence on the station, though not an Orbital. Mile had been working all sides of the Crystal Palace community, from underworld to corporate offices, fascilitating an elaborate process of funnelling resources, workganager labor, and technical staff from other companies to work on a secret Orbital construction project in L4 space for a new player on the orbital scene. This was confirmed as being Magellan Transport's future home, being developed with the help of some of the most established Orbitals on-station, including Gateway, Kiroshi, and more. He also confirmed that while he is playing the role of a Kiroshi agent, his true contract was with an unnamed agency, working for the media giant. The team recognized this as TSA, and understood his refusal to speak freely about it, as he was assumed to be carrying biobomb organ implants that would release if he compromised his employer. Mile revealed that Gateway had taken C-6's murder of the MADRID Gateway staffer, Forrestal, seriously, as her high-ranking sister, Krieger, was a Gateway Company Man, searching for them here on Crystal Palace with revenge in mind. Finally, though he was completely unaware of the recent BoneThuggs Earthsider attack on the team, he was confident that C-6's spree on-station was soon to be ended. A Special Investigator from the Orbital Alliance was now on-station, as the team had heard previously, with unrestricted jurisdiction and the cooperation of the station constable, and was hot on the team's trail of altercations, having traveled from MADRID the week earlier. With him on the team's trail, Mile boasted that their only opportunity would be to flee the station while they still could, as one by one the Investigator quarantined station sections and interrogated witnesses. It would be a matter of hours before the team would be found. And when they were gone, it would be effortless for Mile to restore the status quo with his connections, and all of the agent's work would have been in vain. Agent Gohring cut off Mile's defiant sneer with a blow to the eye, and they hauled him on his feet and pulled him back through the now-decimated parlor, and out the back. Agent Ember handed the proprietor a massive credit chip in payment for the damage done, and asked her to lead security away from them, which she surprisingly agreed to do. As Mile began to panic, the team pulled him into the service corridors and into the inky black of the bowels of the station, still without power. As Mile was dragged into the dark, Agent Gohring scanned for the mystery shadow agent, who was nowhere to be found.

With all power in the toroid temporarily routed to emergency life support functions, the agents covered several hundred meters of tunnel in short order. Waiting for the appropriate moment, Mile took advantage of the agents’ attention on the flickering light wells in the tunnel ceiling, and lurched into an emergency fire alarm pull bolted into the side of the bulkhead. As the agents tried to grab him, an unidentified shooter from farther down the tunnel, not viewed through their low-light enhanced Wimwear goggles, layed suppressive fire on their position. As Agents Blank and Gohring dropped to crouches at the front of the caravan, Agent Ember was unable to catch Mile as he ducked, hands still bound, down a perpendicular accessway and into a small hatch. Gohring returned fire while Blank and Ember attempted to follow Mile down the access node. Mile’s escape distraction worked against his mysterious accomplice, Trace, who’s thermal optical cloak was soon damaged and malfunctioning from the automatic sprinklers engaged by the emergency alarm. Once visible, Trace was dispatched with dual shots to the eyes by Gohring, and was left dead.

The other agents emerged through a manhole into oncoming vehicular traffic in the vehicular ring of the toroid, with no sight of their captive, who clearly knew the station better than Ember. Hauler traffic was heavy but not congested, as trucks swerved to avoid the men climbing onto the street surface from the tunnel below. Blank spotted a rig farther down the gently curving tunnel hit the brakes suddenly, and moments later the driver was thrown from the cab, Mile presumably being the cause. The agents split up, Blank and Ember jogging down the tunnel along a narrow curb towards the slowly accelerating hijacked truck, while Gohring blocked the path of a long hauler in order to commandeer the vehicle. Unfortunately, the driver oversteered in order to avoid hitting him, and jackknifed the truck into the tunnel wall, causing a multiple vehicle pileup. As Gohring ran from the scene, the ambient sounds of screeching plastic tires and crumpled resin body panels echoed behind him.

Soon, with two agents hanging on to the sides of the truck, swinging violently against the cargo rig, and a third firing from the ground, Gohring managed to climb on top of the vehicle and then drop down onto the hood facing Mile in the cockpit, and opened fire point blank to the target’s chest. The truck swerved to the sidewall, and the agents dove off before getting crushed. XXXXX climbed through the windshield and throttled the wounded man, and with his dying breath, Mile gave up the name “Gearson”. As traffic wardens approached ahead, and sirens were heard from the pileup behind them, the agents quickly sprinted to the nearest pedestrian accessway, and escaped capture, leaving Mile’s corpse in the cockpit of the truck.

Regrouping at a cybercafe in the Corporate Entertainment Zone, Gohring searched for Gearson in public station records, to no avail. They did find a reference in a dated press release from months back announcing that CNN’s Security Chief, John Gearson, had made the unprecedented move to join Orbital Alliance as an Earth/ Orbital liason. This apparent connection between Mile’s lead and another reference to CNN’s unusual involvement in Orbital affairs caused the team to reconsider who had been assisting Magellan’s Orbital launch after all. It had never been considered that another Earth corporation could be involved.

The other agents kept watch to be certain they were not followed or otherwise identified. However, as video surveillance feeds were routinely monitored in the vehicular ring of each toroid, it was likely that the agents had been recorded, and a matter of time before the feed was reviewed. A special news announcement interrupted the programming on the large video display behind the bar, and introduced a press conference at Kiroshi’s station Control Center. The Special Investigator, Chaplain Rian, addressed viewers directly, informing them of a station-wide investigation into a string of violent crimes perpetuated on MADRID and Crystal Palace, by unknown assailants. The identities of these suspects were remaining off the record, as the investigation was ongoing, but any suspicious activity, particularly by non-station regulars, was to be reported immediately to station security. In addition, anyone wishing a non-biased, independent interview with the Special Investigator need merely contact him at a direct station line, without fear of entrapment. Hearing this, the agents immediately ceased suspicious activity, and acted disinterested and “regular”.

When the agents returned to the hotel to lay low and get some needed sleep, another news announcement came over the hotel video feed, showing footage of the Chaplain and his team investigating the Kiroshi corporate offices on the Corporate Toroid. Knowing that the authorities were now on the same toroid as the agents, and hot on their trail, they set out to formulate an exit strategy. It was noted that Constable Kullinane, Station Chief and senior Kiroshi exec, was visibly agitated by the Special Investigator’s public interrogation of Kiroshi staff.

That morning, Blank spotted Bale, one of the two original pilots to smuggle the agents on-station, stroll past them in a corporate suit and carrying a leather satchel. The team hung back and performed crowd surveillance, shadowing Gohring in the busy pedestrian traffic of Day Shift activity, while he moved to casually intercept their former associate, long since silent since their rendezvous days earlier. Bale was surpised and somewhat anxious by the sight of the Iclandic agent, and pleasantly but guardedly revealed that the Slavedriver II COTV was confiscated by station security after they had docked, due to what was termed “manifest continuity issues” which was supposedly station code for unpaid Gateway financial kickbacks. As the cost of clearing the title on the ship exceeded it’s market value, Bale and his partner agreed to release their intern to find work on another vessel, and sell their stake in the Slavedriver II to the station trust. Bale was currently in the process of inquiring with larger merchant crews for positions for the pilots on future excursions. When asked to keep an eye out for quiet passage for the agents off-station in the next 24-48 hours, Bale agreed, watching the crowd somewhat nervously, then excused himself.



The agents watched him make a station cell call and continue down a side corridor towards the Hospitality Zone checkpoint. As they followed him, a woman in a tight fitted two-piece neoprene and leather sport halter and shorts, Sure Tract boots and gloves and with a mane of braided locks beckoned them from a tertiary corridor leading to small storefront offices farthest from the main walkway. As she was very clearly both ill-attired for the Corporate Zone, and seemed to recognize them, and wanting to avoid a possible confrontation in public view, the agents chose to follow her into the alley. She beckoned them inside an open doorway, and pointedly confirmed that she knew their identities and wanted to talk frankly, out of view. Gohring agreed to follow her within, while the other agents guarded the doorway and watched for ambush.

The woman was a bounty hunter named Cale, and from the scars on her chiseled abdominal muscles and the 22cm assault blade hanging from her utility belt, it was clear she was experienced. She flatly told Gohring that she was hired by her client to bring the agents in for a meet, and preferred to buck current trends and simply invite the agents to agree to the terms of the discussion rather than be forced to subdue and possibly kill them in order to fulfill her contract. Her eyes glittered with amusement at Gohring’s defiance. But the agent simply called the others into action, and they backed slowly out into the alley as Cale protested and prepared to attack.

Another voice called to them all from the far end of the dead-end alley, this time a woman in an Orbital-style laser cut latex dress and long red tresses, advising them not to move. Cale, seeing this newcomer, apologized and retreated out the rear exit of the office, leaving the agents to face the woman alone. She identified herself as Madeline X, another bounty hunter, obviously one with higher status than the first. She laughed off Cale’s attempt to muscle in on her contract, and informed the team that snipers in the windows opposite them were prepared to fire on them if they didn’t hear her out. She confirmed the same client, still unnamed, had hired more than one bounty hunter in her impatience. Cale and her partner had used underworld tactics to flush the team out, by hiring off-station planetside hitmen, smuggled up originally for independent Orbital suicide missions. Their intention was to use the BoneThuggs Crew to draw out the team, using illegal ballistic weapons, which would cause the district to be quarantined and station security to detain the survivors, which were assumed to be C-6 in the end, when Cale and her partner would use special connections with corrupt station staff to allow them access to the team while in detention. However, C-6’s efficient victory over the BoneThuggs Crew, and prompt escape from lockdown, had frustrated the bounty hunters enough that they were divided on how to proceed. In the end, Cale chose to take on the contract alone and confront the team directly, now knowing having been tracking them since the Crew flushed them out earlier. Cale’s partner, however, was easily caught by Madeline X’s people, who encouraged full cooperation and disclosure, and this was how she found the team, by allowing the less-subtle elements to do her work for her. In addition, she had been sitting on the pilots, who talked freely enough about their secret passengers, while in heavily bugged hotel rooms.

Madeline X asked the team to surrender their weapons and come with her to meet her client, and while they sized up their options of fighting their way out, two warning shots took chunks of ferrocrete out of the door jamb adjacent to them, confirming the existence, if not specific locations, of at least two snipers. Madeline X then called her client, who demanded to speak to the team. Agent Gohring caught the phone, and discovered the enraged, bitter voice on the line was in fact Krieger, Forrestal’s sister and Gateway security officer on Crystal Palace, as they had been warned about previously. Krieger clearly wanted them more dead than alive, and went into detail about all the vicious and unpleasant tortures the team would be subjected to once she had them in “custody”. Gohring listened patiently, then cut the call off, and reported to Madeline X that their business with Krieger was done, and implied that they were to be released. Madeline X was so amused by the attempt, as well as the fact that she would claim her finder’s fee from the team regardless, that she took a bribe from Ember to allow them to leave, and the team soon found themselves mingling in the main corridor with the crowd again minutes later.

Later, passing a multimedia storefront display, all monitors displayed another late-breaking news item, this time being footage from within the vehicular ring from C-6’s chase the day before. The footage showed two investigators, identified by the ticker as Investigators Gearson and Bray, assistants to Chaplain Rian, analyzing the truck which Mile had attempted to hijack. However, unlike when the agents had left it, the cab was now torched as if with a high-incindiary device, and the charred remains of a corpse within was unrecognizable. Visually identifying Gearson for the first time, and suspicious of his involvement, both with OA’s Investigative Arm, and the apparent sabotage of the vehicular ring crime scene, the team decided to bring the battle to him.

A station cell call to Orbital Alliance’s station office found them soon rerouted to Gearson’s personal phone. He was told to meet at Deep Six, another nearby cocktail bar and pleasure club. The team soon staked out the club, which was dimly lit and subdivided with long underlit 3m tall continuous fishtanks, filled with enormously expensive Earth-borne species. Twenty minutes later, perfectly punctual, Investigator Gearson appeared at the club, alone, and proceeded to the appointed meeting place at a row of stools half way down the maze of tanks, where several flirting cocktail-drinkers where gathered to spy on prospective marks. Agent Blank was seated nearby, nursing a malt beverage. When Gearson approached, drink in hand, calm and seemingly unfazed by the mysterious summons, Blank greeted him quietly and made eye contact. “Good evening, Mile.” Gearson said, completely calm.

Realizing that somehow, Gearson had mistakenly taken him for the TSA agent the team had recently killed, Blank went along with the ruse. Strangely, though they assumed Gearson had destroyed the evidence of Mile’s body in order to distance himself with the case, Gearson misrecognizing Blank suggested that the torched corpse in the rig on the news was either another body, or already unrecognizable when Gearson arrived on-scene. Gearson reminded Blank, as Mile, not to contact him via normal station channels. He reprimanded the agent for allowing the Anubis operatives to reap such havoc on station, and that Mile’s inability to handle the problem quietly had brought undo attention from OA, which even Gearson couldn’t deflect. Blank was ordered to find assassinate the operatives, and deliver them to him, so that he could announce them killed resisting capture, and convince Chaplain Rian to close the case. Blank, again as Mile, tested Gearson’s knowledge of Doussant’s whereabouts, CNN’s involvement on Crystal Palace, and the other Anubis teams presumed to be in play, given Ember’s recent revelations. Gearson had no recognition of Doussant’s name, did confirm Magellan had life support on their partially completed station, and that all was going according to plan. He chuckled at the mention of CNN and cautioned that they should keep the corporation’s involvement out of the public consciousness, or else everyone will be out searching for battle sats in every dark corner of La Grange space. Lastly, he grew somewhat suspicious at mention of the Anubis teams, reminding Blank that those matters were his, as Mile, to resolve. Gearson shot the rest of his drink, and casually strode out, leaving Blank stunned and amused.

After a short wait to insure they were not being followed, the team regrouped in front of Deep Six to plan their next move. Repeated attempts to contact Agents Mood and Terrible continued to reveal radio silence. At this point, the next logical step was to escape the tightening noose of OA investigation, and leave station, possibly to seek out the Magellan construction site. C-6 proceeded to head towards the Free Zone. Knowing Bale and his partner had been compromised by Madeline X, they needed to find new passage from the station, that would not be as tempted to lure them into security capture.

As they approached the checkpoint to the Commercial Zone, the toroid jumped with a thundering vibration, and pedestrians throughout the corridor fell to the ground as the station seemed to lurch to the side. For the second time in 24 hours, lights failed, then returned with amber low-power levels, and the checkpoint blast doors began to the descend. Emergency alarm claxons engaged, and corporate staff on the ground fled for adjacent structures. As the team moved to the side of the corridor, station security staff flooded into the corridor from an intersecting quad, and called for everyone to return to their homes or temporary residences, as emergency curfew had been engaged. It was clear something had happened. The team cautiously made their way back against the tide of the crowd, in the direction of the inter-toroid transport elevator bays, in hopes of reaching the Free Zone and finding immediate passage off station before curfew was complete. When it was clear that security was shepherding station citizens in the opposite direction, and blocking elevator access, Blank and Gohring distracted three guards and the team took them down and dragged them out of view.

Returning to the corridor in somewhat ill-sized red Crystal Palace security uniforms, the agents approached the elevator bays only to find Gearson approaching their position from the opposite direction. At that moment a series of rumbling vibrations shook the toroid, and something came into view of the station bulkhead windows. It appeared to be a workganger platform, traveling mere meters from the toroid’s exterior bulkhead, lilting to one side and glancing off of the station structure periodically, sending a spray of fragments, gas, and particulates into space as the station skin ruptured. It appeared to be ascending towards the direction of the research toroid above their position.

The agents could now hear, and feel, partial transmissions of Mood’s and Terrible’s sub-mandibular implant mics, though not enough to comprehend the message. They could hear “Research” and “Hurry” amidst the static and interference. Deducing that the missing agents were either on, or somehow piloting, the platform, Gohring, Blank and Ember moved for the elevator bays, prepared to draw weapons and fight their way through the huddled security staff who stood gawking at the windows above. Before they could engage the other security staff, however, Gearson called them over and demanded that they, and three other nearby staffers, escort him to the Research Toroid himself. He was also watching the trajectory of the platform, and suspected something was occurring above. He flashed identification and as he angrily beckoned them, the agents, still in disguise, and the other security staff, joined Gearson in the elevator. Gearson noticed Blank in uniform then, stunned for a moment, then smirked slightly and nodded.

At the Research Toroid, much of the power was out and the main corridors were only dimly lit by emergency safety strips along the ceiling. The platform could be seen lumbering into view. “Dock Three!” was coming through the sub-mandibular mics, which the agents saw was the nearest research docking arm to their left. With Gearson still leading them, the group moved towards the dock, the agents preparing to ambush the other security as they approached their destination. But as the platform continued, they could see the arm bend and buckle and finally come apart under the slow impact of the platform’s mass, and after bracing for atmosphere breach, which did not yet occur, Gearson waved them on to the next research arm beyond. This time, the platform slowed and came to something of a stop near Dock Four, and boarding grapples could be seen launching out towards the dock arm connections. From the inside face of the dock’s airlock, Gearson demanded that the security staff draw weapons and join him in wait for boarders. The agents drew weapons, then shot the neighboring staffers, who spun in surprise and fell. Gearson fell back against the airlock in shock, and was quickly disarmed and slammed face first onto the floor. The airlock atmosphere indicator turned green, and the doors opened to reveal Agent Mood in an EVA suit, beckoning them in.

Once aboard the platform, with Gearson dragged in tow, the team took hold of safety lines as the platform’s interior airlock doors closed an the transfer conduit was torn apart by the slowly moving vessel pulling away from the station. Thousands of kilograms of un-tethered construction equipment and materials were cascading off of the platform’s surface and penetrating the station’s skin, as the platform lilted to one side and then began to accelerate away, with the bodies of at least five workgangers spinning off of the platform’s deck and into view of the tiny resin windows through which the agents could view the spectacle. Agent Mood punched Gearson in the face as he struggled to rise, then led the team forward to the command center, where Terrible was viewing a monitor and frowning. The pilot’s chair swiveled to reveal the Slavedriver II’s young intern at the helm, barely. The agents greeted each other in relief, if unsettled by the context of their escape, and once clear of the station, and with no following vessels detected, agent Blank retired to an empty vault to take pleasure in liberating Gearson of any information, and free will, that could be beaten out of him.

Gearson revealed that while he didn’t recognize Dr. Henri Doussant’s name, he did oversee the installation of the prototype of CNN’s new battle satellite apparatus, which was built onto an existing communication relay satellite and would eventually be fitted for weaponry, to be supposedly used in Earth defense against a potential Orbital attack, but in actuality would be in Orbital control. He had not been to the satellite, or to the Magellan construction personally, but doubted Magellan executives or anyone critical to the company’s operations would be onboard yet, as atmosphere was still intermittent and much construction was yet to be performed. He also admitted that Mile had worked for him on Crystal Palace, as his hand in the field. He never met Mile face to face, but new his visual description from reputation, which is why he mistook the menacing Blank as his unseen consultant. Mile managed Kiroshi and Gateway interests in smuggling Magellan staff and resources into Orbit from under the Orbital Alliance’s nose. He managed the dragnet to capture Earth operatives Anubis sent into orbit, and formed the private contract with the gangers that allowed the Magellan platform to be constructed without official filing with OA. He was tied to everyone and everything in this deal, made possible and trustworthy only because Mile was a deep cover TSA agent.

Hearing this, the team decided that the CNN satellite was a reasonable place to search for further information, as the fact that CNN came up in their investigation more often than even Magellan itself did. In addition, the CNN sat array was also in L4 La Grange space, and with Gearson’s help, would be able to be found. Gearson admitted that even he did not understand why, after he left CNN for OA, his former employer and current ally continued to send vessels to the sat array, requesting that he deflect any inquiries that may arise through legitimate channels. He suspected there might be more activity at the battle satellite. When the platform arrived at the sat array 36 hours later, the Magellan Orbital platform under construction could be seen glittering in the distance, several thousand meters out. The sat array was a series of 36 relay satellites pointed at earth in equal spacing. It wasn’t long before the intern was able to identify one satellite with greater mass, slightly out of rotation with the rest, and soon brought the platform close to the sat in question. As there was no obvious means of docking to the satellite without disturbing it’s orbit, Agents Gohring, Blank and Ember suited up in EVA suits and followed a tether line out to the satellite’s diminutive bulkhead. In the silence of seep space, the surreality of the experience was unsettling for the Earth-borne operatives.

Once the main access hatch on the satellite’s modified carapace was blown, the agents entered slowly and scanned the interior of the 20 square meter vault for signs of activity. There was only partial atmosphere beyond the inner airlock, and the vault was filled with monitors and banks of systems of inconceivable density. A massive tangle of cable bundles descended from the ceiling of the vault, illuminated only by the glow of the monitors surrounding them. In the center of the vault, on a bolted metal slab, a man was bound and fused to the assembly. His skin was withered and atrophied, and his head was immersed in a billowing sack of gel, connected to the cable shroud. Agent Gohring kicked up to the body to investigate, while Ember kicked down to the base of the assembly, and Blank remained at the airlock. Gohring confirmed that the face within the sack did appear to be Doussant, though whether he was technically still conscious, or even alive, was impossible to determine. As he prodded the gel sack to get a better view, a floor cargo hatch slid open, and two men in EVA suits appeared in view, then jerked back when they saw the operatives within the vault.

Wasting no time, Ember launched towards them firing, with additional coverage laid down by Blank from his position, instantly taking out one of the men in the neck, who spasmed and spun out of view. Gohring immediately put two rounds into the head of their target, and Doussant’s body twitched once, as the sack burst into globular spheres of fluid, and the monitors surrounding them winked out one by one. Ember chased the second man past the first one and shot him from behind at the bottom of the cargo tunnel. Both men appeared to be wearing Anubis-issue Gasium suits, but were not recognized.

Before the agents could investigate further, or report back to Agent Mood, all tether lines at the airlock burst apart, and Blank propelled himself away from the hatch as the door blew apart and the contents of the room began to be sucked out of the opening into open space. He could see the platform spinning slowly away from them, quietly in the dim light of the moon, no lights or power visible. The agents held tightly to safety lines as the atmosphere within the vault poured out, cables and conduits snapping as the slab holding Doussant’s body snapped apart and spun, colliding with a bank of dead monitors, before becoming jammed partially through the airlock. All power failed, and the agents were left in the dark, powerless, shipless, in zero atmosphere, on a secret battle satellite, with no way off and no means of communication.

But the mission was technically successful.

ASRA and Anubis mission debriefing teams are currently decrypting and and analyzing all packet data secretly transmitted to HQ by the agents' sub-mandibular mics and Wimwear recorders. Due to the complicated transmission relay path from various points in orbit, packets will continue to be collected for several weeks, and arrive in no specific chronological order. The team had completed analysis of C-7's communication log, and will submit a full report for Minder review in 72 hours. Some early data from C-6 recorders on Madrid and Crystal Palace has been captured and analyzed, which is detailed in the mission logs above. Future report ammendments will be filed as soon as available. Clarification is required regarding the last feed captured from the C-6 operatives. Subject matter involving post-human bio-engineered Orbital operatives and cortex translation technology have been edited from the official transcript, as staff Psychologists have determined that these were effects of hallucination from the dying operatives' oxygen-depletion. Shortly thereafter, all communication from C-6 was terminated in an unexplained matter. It is assumed by Minder consensus that the agents were vented into space and are unrecoverable. No data from C-8 has been recovered.

This Campaign uses the Dystopia: Hostile Takeover Cyberpunk prequel environment. For more information, visit Third Rail Design Lab.