Hellworld Heists, episode five: a crew of Imperial Navy Intelligence Operatives pretending to be independent spacers who are pretending to work for a rebel noble, who is pretending not to be something else.
080-1104 – Orsasch: The Sighlands
As the echoes of the firefight in the Orsasch oxygen wastes died down, the Travellers assessed their situation: they had a group of Senlis Foederate prison convoy guards, their leader – Convoy Commander Emm – the two rescued spies, and five other prisoners who had been in the same transport.
Given that the Senlisians had set up a dummy convoy, the party were suspicious that they might also have planted a mole amongst the prisoners. However, one of their rebel troops reminded them that in a few minutes, when the convoy didn’t report-in after leaving the radio reception blackspot, the Foederate forces would dispatch a larger force to investigate what had happened. So the Travellers placed bags over the heads of each prisoner (as well as the convoy commander) and extracted their forces, leaving the surviving convoy guards behind.
On arriving at the rebel base in the hidden aquifer, the group set about working out if any of the prisoners was, in fact, a spy.
Speaking to each in turn, they found out the following information:
One, Kael Vance, claimed to be a common criminal who made a living bypassing the Senlis Foederate’s controlled, drugged water supply. Vance operated a small black-market ring selling purified, un-dosed aquifer water before a rival tipped off the authorities. He said that he had no interest in grand political revolutions; he simply viewed the government’s monopoly as bad for his bottom line. “I was just moving a few dozen litres of un-dosed aquifer water to the lower habitats, making a decent credit. The Boyars don’t like it when you cut into their monopoly and they’re keen on keeping people docile so they weren’t too happy at the undoped juice.” He, himself, didn’t drink the undosed water: he liked money and he liked to feel good.
The next, Darius “Scorch” Hemlock, was a hardened, heavily scarred man who needed little provocation to explain that he viewed any structured government – including Lady Wishart’s GeDeCo-backed rebellion – as a disease to be eradicated. He was arrested after attempting to exploit Orsasch’s hyperoxic atmosphere by plotting to ignite a devastating chemical fire in an administrative block. He viewed the Travellers with just as much suspicion as he did his former captors. “Wishart just wants to trade one corporate master for another with GeDeCo, but I want to burn the whole system to ash. They caught me trying to spark a little cleansing fire in the capital’s central ventilation hub.”
Unassuming, slightly balding, and sweating nervously, the next prisoner was Olin Trask. He claimed to be a quintessential, overworked Senlis bureaucrat caught in a political purge. “I missed a quota on the atmospheric scrubber maintenance logs, and you know how they punish clerical errors. I was just supposed to do a month of hard labor here to pay off the fine then back to Senlis. I just wanted to do my time and get back to my family and now that’s all screwed.” He was terrified that he could never go back, now, that he might as well stay here because they’d kill him for contact with rebels. He was on the edge of tears.
The fourth prisoner – Goran “Ox” Velt – was a massive, muscle-bound thug whose hands were already shaking from acute withdrawal from the Foederate’s chemical cocktail of combat drugs. He wasn’t a freedom fighter; he said he was a former gang enforcer who violently lashed out at a supply depot when his local distributor cut off his supply. He looked on the edge of violence, with dilated pupils and trembling hands. “I broke my dealer’s jaw because he shorted me on my ration. You get the shakes out here if you don’t get your fix.” When asked if he knew any of the other prisoners, he said that yes, he knew the fifth prisoner who was a magistrate who had sent him down, before. He stated that he was going to make the rest of his life short and unpleasant.
The fifth prisoner had soft skin and softer hands. Magistrate Lucian was a former minor official who was deeply offended that he was placed in a standard transport. “I simply misallocated some funds from the Reaching Lake garrison to my own accounts, which is standard practice until you cross the wrong Boyar. Now I am being treated like common refuse instead of a man of station.” He offered substantial bribes in return for being transported to an Imperium planet.
The party continued questioning, with Travis Drevil seeming disconcertingly keen on finding a reason to torture someone. Then Rosa Perre suggested that the doctor try and find out if any of the prisoners were not on the standard downers that the Senlis Foederate used to control their population. Dr Vanderpool was able to make use of his med-kit to run some basic drug tests, while Marcus’s PRIS vision revealed which prisoners were going through withdrawal due to elevated temperatures. It turned out that only Trask was not drugged. Based on this knowledge, and having talked Travis Drevil out of further war crimes, Dr Vanderpool provided a low dose of anaesthetic which acted to disinhibit the prisoner sufficiently to act as a truth serum. Sure enough, Trask was a spy, although it was true that his motivation was to return to his family.
Ferric Osmund then beat up the semi-conscious Trask, so that it looked like he had been tortured, and he and Kael Vance were left to be found by the government forces. Scorch and Ox were considered as party hirelings, but neither a compulsive-arsonist anarchist nor a drug-addicted criminal attracted them sufficiently, and both were given water and supplies and set free. Magistrate Lucian was handed to the rebels as a source of potential cash and intelligence, as was Convoy Commander Emm.
083-1104 Orsasch Rebel Base
A few days later, Lady Wishart’s adopted mother – Elder Dakaasin Wishart – asked the Travellers to help her move some atmospheric scrubbers down a kilometre of maintenance pipes to the filtration intake for the base. On the way, she sought information from them about what Ada had told them. She seemed fond of her daughter, but worried about her goals and motivations. She asked, amongst other things?
- What had Ada promised them, in her own words? Perre explained about the payments offered.
- What do they think she wants — the water contract, or the throne? Marcus felt it was perhaps both, but she had not exactly mentioned taking the throne herself.
- Have they noticed she never asks about her own kin? Dakaasin has raised her for twenty years and Ada has never once asked whether anyone came looking for her.
- Do they know she arrived speaking court Senlisian? Not the commo: the court register. A lone woman sentenced to death in the wastes with the accent of the Steelheart Palace itself.
- Do they know she has been paying for information about one man for a decade, and only one man? The party asked who, and were told it was Skylark Tanlin.
084-1104 Orsasch Rebel Base
The next day, the party were invited to lunch by an unlikely person: GeDeCo director Skylark Tanlin. Having given his parole – and having no obvious way to escape the ship, the base and the oxygen wastes – he had been allowed out of the brig to dine in the galley three times a day. He was keen to talk with the Travellers who had kidnapped him.
When the party arrived, Tanlin cheerily thanked them for this unexpected opportunity to unwind away from the rigours of work and the ritual of his commute, none of which would have been possible without his sudden and violent kidnapping at their hands.
After general discussion, he asked them a series of searching questions, although he sometimes seemed to drift a little during their answers:
He asked Drevil: “Suppose the water were clean tomorrow. What happens on the fourth day? When twelve million people start suffering from withdrawal symptoms. When 12 million people wake up able to feel worry and anxiety and anger for the first time in their lives?” This sounded, to Drevil, like a good question, but that the hope was apparently that revolution would ensue. “Violent revolution,” stressed Tanlin.
- To Rosa Perre: “You give an order and forty people die. Does that get easier or harder with rank? I’ve always wondered whether it’s the first one or the four hundredth.” The former admiral said that it never got easier, which seemed to make Tanlin very sceptical indeed.
- To Bilal: “Two Imperial science prizes. Four books. And here you are with your face burnt off in a rebel’s hold on a world that catches fire when you sneeze. I’d very much like to know what she offered you, because I don’t think it was money.”
- To Ferric: “You were law once. Now you’re this. Which of you changed — you, or the law?” Ferric equivocated, saying that the job had changed but that he had moved on, too.
- To Anson: “You don’t like me. That’s fine. You don’t like anyone who’s never had to fix anything with their hands. It’s the healthiest prejudice on this ship.”
He then asked Marcus: “If it were you running the Foederate – not reforming it, running it – how would you treat people like you?” Marcus avoided a direct answer to this, and there was some general discussion around the lunch table as to ends and means.
As the group left after lunch, Tanlin – who they were now thoroughly convinced was some sort of mind-reading, psionic space wizard – offered them one last piece of advice: “Ask your employer which canal she was born beside. Not now. Sometime when she’s tired. See how she answers.”
The party were beginning to notice, as the days went by, the sympathetic and pitying glances of the rebels around the base. It seemed that they did not think much of their life-expectancy.
087-1104 Orsasch Rebel Base
The Travellers were once more invited for a meal: this time to dinner with Lady Wishart, who was in excited mood. Everything was in place and it was time for the penultimate stage of the plan!
After handing each of them a dataslate and showing them a picture of the state of the Senlis Station corporate nacelle, she gave them a brief set of instructions:
‘My friends, today you change history. Your job is to infiltrate Senlis Station. Once in, you’ll need to work your way into the damaged corporate nacelle and find the GeDeCo secure datavault.
‘Inside that is the GeDeCo master system containing all the contract data for the cluster. My team has put together a passkey that should automatically overwrite the data. All you need to do is power the system on, and insert the key.
‘Oh, there is one final thing.’ Ada smiles. ‘We do not want anyone catching on to our true objectives. So try to make it look like a robbery: grab something of value on your way out.’
‘Luckily for us, thanks to your actions rescuing our agents on Orsasch, you have an easy in: we have security codes which will make your ship appear as a GeDeCo general vessel, already registered with their system. You’ve just got to sell the act.’
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