Session date: 2025-06-01
4 January, 3025
The Second hits the showers and plans their evening. Late in the afternoon, the whole planetary network goes down and is replaced with a Comstar-branded test card. Axel assures the others that this is standard procedure on a frontier world with so few Comstar techs; they don’t have failover infrastructure or the ability to compartmentalize outages, so in the event of a networking disruption, the whole grid must be taken down for maintenance.
The Second decides to stick together and spend the evening out on the town. Cosmo wants steak. Joanna asks Jamero for restaurant recommendations, and he suggests Sotatsu’s Steakhouse. The steakhouse is a high-end teppanyaki restaurant – very expensive, as Sayama IV has little flat grassland for cattle, but the Fed-Suns currency is strong here and the Second expects a bit of prize money for bringing in the Panther.
Sotatsu is a tall, dark man with the kanji for fidelity (忠) tattooed on his left cheek. He wears an Orthodox crucifix. The Second tries the imported cryonic beef, which is agreeable, and the local highland cattle, which is fresher but lower-quality and no cheaper than the import. They choose the local sugar beet wine over rehydrated Chateau D’Avalon 2999.
Jamero explains a bit of the economics of the planet’s annexation: there will be a gold rush of Feddies trying to redevelop the planet, and the time to make deals is now. Jamero himself has a 40% stake in Moska Mountain Brewery’s planned second location, and that’s just with his pay as an officer.
The Second is joined at the table by a group of finely-dressed gentlemen who move with a grace that suggests combat training; everyone successfully identifies them as yakuzas. Joanna switches into high society mode and shares a glass of the 2999 with the man on her end of the group, exchanging pleasantries and laying the foundation for a conflict-free relationship.
The other side of the grill is occupied by a boisterous Davion businessman, Robert Brown, and his entourage. He represents Morgan Shipping and keeps rudely trying to sell Sotatsu a contract to import live cattle. He tries to strongarm Sotatsu by threatening to sell to his competitors, and a yakuza informs him in accented English that he (Brown) is making a scene. Joanna defuses the situation. The yakuzas give her a silver token marking her as an offworlder friend of the organization.
After finishing at the restaurant, the Second proceeds to a bar to take the pulse of the Sayama nightlife. They proceed to a bar with no name but much foot traffic, built into an irregular, narrow utility space in a shopping center. The space is dim, the tables provided with hookahs, and the far wall lined with slot machines. This is a quiet place where working men go to focus on draining their paychecks away.
Max strikes up a conversation with Tamrat Saralidze, the leader of a group of grumbling factory workers. They relate that they have been on half shifts for nearly a year, as their factory’s generator has broken down. It is now reliant on grid power, which is rationed for industrial-scale consumers.
Being from a rural planet, Max learns about the supply chain and industrial breakdown of the Succession Wars. The factory can’t commission a new generator because the other factories onplanet have also broken down, the ones making complex electronics now completely nonfunctional. They can’t import one, because on a frontier planet without regular shipping they would have to pay an exorbitant courier’s fee to acquire it. They can’t afford to buy one anyway because they can’t ship their goods offworld and the local currency is very weak. The government can’t offer them a loan because the deindustrialization has starved the tax income, and a loan would be in Sayamadollars anyway. Max inquires about building a new generator in situ. That won’t work because parts are too expensive, because base materials are too expensive, because ores are too expensive: the mining concerns can’t open new veins because factories can’t make drilltractors and industrialmechs for them, and each factory in the chain, including those that make mining equipment, is struggling because the price of ores is too high. Max wonders aloud about the practicality of opening his own mine.
Deciding to sample the local culture, the Second proceeds to a more middle-class bar with live music. They listen to Black Sail, an EDM/folk rock fusion synth band. (They passed over The Amazing Giacomo, a one-man psychedelic jazz band who plays accompanied by holograms of himself.) Jamero convinces them to order Moska Mountain cider.
Although not bound by the midnight curfew, the bars empty by that time, so the Second returns to base.
In the morning, Captain MacCathasaigh calls an all-hands briefing. He has two announcements: first, that the rest of the First Lance has been confirmed dead; and second, that the base’s security has been breached. A hacker got physical access to the terminal in MacCathasaigh’s own quarters and used it to delete the base’s file backups. They didn’t delete the originals, so damage is limited to a handful of archived files, but the incident demonstrates that an enemy agent is walking among them with impunity. In the worst-case scenario, it could be a DEST trooper ready to turn assassin at any time.
Max investigates the hall outside MacCathasaigh’s quarters. He finds that the security cameras could be disabled by hacking; the junction box for the feed is secured by the same type of keycard scanner as MacCathasaigh’s quarters. MacCathasaigh says he will add physical locks to high-security areas.
Unable to keep himself from digging deeper, Max brings beer to the security station that monitors the camera feeds. He makes the acquaintance of Phillip, a technician who is wrapped up in the soap opera lives of the personnel on his screens. Max finds a hitch where the camera feed was interrupted and fed a dummy recording just after 03:00 that morning. He follows a series of hitches chronologically backward as the saboteur disabled multiple cameras along their route. Eventually tracing the source to an elevator, he finds that the saboteur came up from the AFFS barracks.
