Adventure: A Corrupted Flesh, The Star Wars 'Tales of the Dogfish' campaign.
Part of Session #53: Found the corrupt truck driver/All of Session #54: Warehouse fight with corrupt gendarmes.
Cast: A team of licensed Imperial Peacekeepers, aka Bounty Hunters, working as vassals of House Benelex in the Aparo sector. They have a reputation for doing the "big jobs" when more competent single bounty hunters like Cad Bane and Kar Yang aren't available. Not yet galactically famous, they are beginning to be famous in certain circles in the sector for doing big jobs. The more veteran bounty hunters deride them as mere mercenaries lacking elegance and real skill, and Kar Yang in particular has expressed anger to the sector Guildmaster that they are taking six figure jobs that more properly ought to go to him.
Cen Theren: Human face man, driver and nominal leader of the team.
Clav Xy: Short tempered Rhodian sniper and ex-cop.
Roblox Carvin: Togorian muscle and all-around combat brute.
Taro Ky: A Togruta; former Republic special forces and bladed weapons expert.
Slurak: Filvian former slave; pilot, slicer and mechanic. Rescued by the team earlier in their adventures from the slave pits of Cheropis, after their former tech - a Jawa - died in an explosion.
Setting: Apar Prime would be eucomenopolis, "the shining jewel of the outer rim" and capital of the Aparo sector. A former wealthy mining world with a thin unbreathable atmosphere turned budget Coruscant.
So, at the end of the prior session, the hunters were pretty stymied in their hunt after making a series of mistakes that I can't fully describe yet but largely revolved around trusting the wrong people. Among the things that they couldn't figure out where the decraniated had been packaged in the tubs of vat grown partially textured protein. Was it in the factory? Was it at the loading docks? Was it somewhere in between?
However, they got a breakthrough when they recalled that they knew the names of the two speeder truck drivers that had delivered the crates, they therefore knew the trucks transponder codes from the gendarme database they had been given access to via Sub-Lt. Sanfox, and further they knew that the public transportation system had sensors that detected who had accessed it. The public transportation included the subway system, the transport tubes, and the turbolifts that hauled everything from the industrial levels up to the loading docks a kilometer or more above. So even though they couldn't track the speed trucks through the warren like streets of the city, they would have records of when the trucks used the turbolifts. This lead to a breakthrough where they realized a lot of things at once. First, that the two trucks had made more deliveries to the docks than they had picked up from the factory, and that two of the deliveries had been significantly lighter than the others - both by the same truck. This lead them to figure out which of the truck drivers had been in out it, and that the decraniated had been packaged sometime between leaving the factory and arriving at the docks. Further, they quickly realized that Lt. Mangela had already figured all of this out and had been lying to them and covering up this information, which meant Mangela was on the take and had been leading them by the nose the whole time. They decided to find the crooked truck driver and interrogate him which required them to put an alert in the system even though they knew that the last time they did that, it lead to their suspect getting murdered by a Gendarme SWAT team. But they figured this time they could get a jump on the target and find him before the Gendarmes did, which they did, tracking him to an arcology and intercepting his truck in a loaned police transport van provided by Sub-Lt. Sanfox. After some arm twisting, threats, and promising to get the driver an immigration Visa so he could flee the planet with his family, they learned the address that he'd diverted the vat grown protein crates to before delivering them to the loading docks.
This address proved to be a warehouse in the former Nemoidian district - an area that had been heavily damaged by rioting during the Clone Wars and was not considered fully livable anymore. The former Nemoidian inhabitants having been massacred in a genocidal action by human and Duros residents of the planet that had been covered up by the Republic, the area was now mostly inhabited by illegal immigrants and other members of the underclass at least until offworld investment firms and development companies completed the reconstruction of the damaged arcologies.
Not fully trusting Sub Lt. Sanfox, they left her at a nearby police precinct then took a taxi to the arcology where the warehouse was located knowing that this would not only get them there quickly but would make them untrackable in the system, as they now realized that they probably had alerts on their genetic code and the biosensors in the public transportation system was probably reporting their positions to corrupt elements of the gendarmie.
After arriving at the warehouse on foot, they discovered they had forgot to come up with any plan on how to get inside. (This jump before they think is the usual method of the group.) They knew however from earlier investigations on the planet that the rear of the warehouse probably connected to the industrial turbolift system and so they hunted around until they found street access to the lift that would open up into the warehouse two levels below and then had Slurak slice into its operating system to allow it to open into the warehouse without confirmation from the other side. (Does anyone see the problem with this plan?) Sure enough, the expert hacker soon had the lift transporting them to warehouse, which they entered through the back door. The warehouse was about the size of a soccer stadium and was about half full with pallets of construction material. In the rear of the used area, they however found an industrial packing machine that was of the same make and model as the ones used by Ellio Hill Nutrition - the makers of the vat grown protein. At this point they were attacked by a cybernetically enhanced Corellian bloodhound and the warehouses night watchman. They stunned both and deactivated the cyborg dog with the guard's droid control switch and tied up the guard but not before the realized that the guard had made a police report via his comlink. Slurak quickly investigated the warehouses computer system while Taro Ky took pictures of the packing machine (an unusually perceptive act) and Cen and Clav searched for other physical clues, including using the bounty puck to see if they could get a fix on their acquisition Dr. Raptis. Slurak discovered a short list of emergency contact numbers and that the logging system on the warehouses video cameras had been disabled so no permanent records were being kept. He was however able to find poorly erased records of the access to the warehouse via the turbo lift, including what level the calls were coming from which were being regularly deleted but not with a proper zeroing program to erase the physical memory. Clav discovered that the bounty puck was giving vague bio signals that came and went but which were too random and intermittent to get a fix on the position. He assumed (wrongly it will turn out) that the signals were coming from an old visit by Dr. Raptis to the location leaving behind genetic residue.
Wanting to get out before the police arrived, the team went back to the turbolift only to find it unpowered. They ran forward to the front of the warehouse when they got a comlink message from Sub Lt. Sanfox saying that she'd been monitoring police reports and a Gendarme SWAT team had been vectored by the dispatcher to their position, that she'd told the dispatcher that the break-in had been conducted by Imperial Peacekeepers in pursuit of a valid Writ of Remandation, but the dispatcher had claimed that the transport van must be having problems with their comlink and wasn't returning messages. The front door of the warehouse slid open to reveal a gendarmie air van, disgorging a team of rocket pack equipped gendarmes wearing heavy riot armor. The hunters took up positions behind pallets of girders and support members, and tried to identify themselves and surrender, but the gendarmes ignored them and fired a spray of tear gas and flash grenades into the warehouse followed almost immediately by the air car opening up with its blaster cannon and blowing apart half of a pallet of light structural members in a spray of molten metal.
To the heavily armed bounty hunters who, because of a report that you could contract brain rot in these broken arcologies, were wearing breathers, the tear gas and flash grenades didn't represent much of a threat, but they did provide enough visual distraction to cover the advance of the gendarmes. Four of them flew into the warehouse over the heads of the hunters, four took up positions to either side of the main warehouse doors, and two on foot ran into the warehouse and slid into cover behind pallets opposite the positions of the hunters. The hunters only landed one blaster shot in this period, wounding but not killing one of their heavily armored opponents. Cen Theren and Slurak found their position near the rear had been overrun, and Slurak fled to find protection from a more combat savvy member of the team, dodging blaster fire on the way, while Cen Theren engaged in a short-range blaster duel with one of the gendarme, stunning the gendarme on the first shot, dodging the return fire and finishing off his foe with the second. Meanwhile the rest of the team exchanged mutually ineffectual fire with the tactically adept rapid reaction force.
Taro Ky crept forward with drawn vibroblade and surprised the gendarme that had attacked Slurak, only to find the layered plastic and ceramic armor was a match for his weapon. For once, the foe didn't die instantly, as the blade hummed and spit fragments of plastic from the gendarme's pauldrons. For this reason, Taro was somewhat taken aback when the gendarme drew a stun baton and tried to beat down the hunter. A desperate combat ensued with Taro bobbing weaving, and barely parrying away the stun baton in showers of sparks, made more desperate when a second gendarme appeared out of the tear gas clouds likewise wielding a stun baton with brutal force. Meanwhile, the blaster duel between Roblox, Clav and the rest of the gendarme's was not going particularly well as the hunters found they were having a hard time hitting the gendarme's squarely enough to penetrate their armor, and their opponents were doing a good job of mixing suppressive fire with well-aimed shots of their own. On top of that the air cars blaster cannon kept ripping apart parts of the warehouse floor and slagging parts of the cover the hunters were hiding behind. And Cen Theren, blaster drawn over the unconscious body of his foe, got hit in the back unexpected by a stun baton, dropping him to his knees and leaving him woozy and in severe pain.
At this most desperate moment, the strange calm that sometimes comes over Taro Ky in battle came over him and everything began to move in slow motion, parrying aside a stun baton he made two quick strokes of his vibro blade and neatly beheaded his two attackers, then drawing his heavy blaster pistol with his other hand fired from the hip and hit the gendarme 20 meters away even as Cen Theren was desperately scrambling away across the floor as the gendarme tried to finish the job. The blast penetrated armor squarely and lethally seared the gendarme's lungs, killing him within seconds from shock and trauma.
No longer surrounded and the odds reduced from 11 to 4 to 7 to 4 (Slurak not really counting), the fight began to turn in the hunter's favor. Judging himself all but useless in this sort of heavy combat, Slurak had turned his attention to jury rigging a feedback system using his universal sensor pack and his ComLink to fill the ComLink channel the gendarmes were communicating on with screeching static. The previously ignored Gendarme's that had taken cover inside the warehouse now began to assert influence by attacking the now exposed Cen and Taro, and soon were in a fight with Cen, Taro, and Clav. Cen decided he was still in too much pain from his encounter with the stun baton and decided to hide to apply a medikit, while Roblox decided that he'd had enough of this blaster duel and drew his electrically charged scimitar and charged forward at the Gendarme who was harassing Cen. This led to two major fights - a fight between Roblox and two gendarmes with melee weapons on one side of the warehouse, and a close-range blaster fight between Cen, Clav, Taro and three Gendarme as they played peekaboo amongst the pallets, while the last gendarme and the air car pilot sniped as best they could from the front of the warehouse. Both fights were inconclusive until Slurak finished jury rigging his device which distracted the gendarmes for a round, and the now reinvigorated Cen flanked the melee combat with Roblox and picked off one of he attackers with his blaster rifle, thereby allowing Roblox to finish off the second of his attackers. Meanwhile, the gendarmes in the blaster combat on the other side were down two injured fighters protecting an unconscious colleague. At this moment, the remaining sniper and the air car pilot entered the warehouse with the intention of rescuing who they could of the survivors, but the sniper was cut down by Roblox and Cen picked off one of the remaining gendarmes from across the warehouse with another flanking action.
For reasons known only to himself, but possibly having to do with his well-honed sense of vengeance, Clav took this moment to dart up under the air car and fire his line grappler into the vehicle through its open side door. The action panicked the pilot of the air car, who spun the controls wildly and fired unaimed shots in a spray across the warehouse interior, narrowly missing Slurak and Taro with an orange fireball. Clav was whipped about wildly and had to acrobatically avoid getting slammed into a palette but succeeded in grabbing the landing rail of the air car - which I'd described as looking like a combination of a hornet and a Huey helicopter. Pulling himself up into the wildly spinning and tipping vehicle, and gripping the deck which his magnetic boots, he fired a shot at the pilot but only struck his seat and failed to injure the armored gendarme. Reblox bounded catlike onto a pallet and with a mighty leap, and cleared about 5 meters to grab onto the landing rail of the spinning air car. The pilot for his part drew a blaster pistol and while still trying to control the air car looked over his shoulder to aim fire at the hostile boarder. Shots were exchanged and Roblox pulled himself up into the cab, just as Clav hit the gendarme squarely in the helmet with close range blaster rifle fire and exploded the gendarmes skull. Meanwhile, Taro took the last conscious Gendarme prisoner - the rest constituted six corpses and four either unconscious or too severely wounded to function.
Let without a pilot the air car now madly spun toward the wall of the warehouse, threatening a violent collision. Roblox nimbly jumped down onto a pallet about 3 meters below while Clav using his magnetic boots scrambled into the cockpit, trying to pull aside the body of the pilot and gain control of the aircar. From the ground, Cen - knowing his friend was completely inept with vehicles radio'd up instructions, allowing Clav to engage the auto-pilot controls that automatically stabilized the air car in a hover.
Cen was quickly hoisted up into the air car using Clav's line thrower, and the party - now in possession of a police gunship - grabbed their two prisoners (the last gendarme and the security guard), and raced out of the warehouse. Outside at some distance they noticed a crowd of civilians had gathered, numbering about four dozen individuals some of which with laden beasts of burden and rickety grounds cars and ancient rusting speeders. Ignoring the gawkers they raced on up the ramp and into the dark cavernous canyons of the cities main thoroughfares. These streets are normally packed with aircars and other traffic, but in this district they were little used except for some big air barges hauling construction supplies to the crews rebuilding and remodeling the damaged alien arcologies. The party made contact with Sub-Lt Sanfox and assured her they were alright and told her that they were one their way out with two prisoners that might know something. Sanfox in turn told them that their actions and precipitated a huge amount of internal gendarme confusion and a massive military response. Three precincts were responding by sending additional forces to the warehouse, and no one was sure who was in command. Additionally, the army had mobilized a garrison and light tanks and APCs were inbound to the location, and furthermore ISB had notified air traffic that they were taking priority control of all level eighty-four air traffic between the Imperial Center and the location of the firefight without actually saying what they planned to do with it.
Meanwhile Slurak was playing with the amazing array of equipment in the gendarme gunship and had found the comlink and was scanning the government open channels and found that on some channels they were being treated as allies and on others as enemies, and that by now they had somehow identified that they had control of a police gunship. And at about that moment as they passed between two arcologies, a police gunship lit them up with a spotlight and dropped behind them in pursuit. Cen took evasive action just as the other gunship opened up with its cannon, causing an explosion on a distant wall of one of the half-abandoned arcologies, while coordinating on the comlink with Sub-Lt Sanfox. Clav took control of their gunships blaster cannon and began firing shots, back at the pursuing speeder, scoring occasional hits but not enough to damage the armored vehicle. Meanwhile, Roblox and Taro strapped themselves in and leaning out of the sides of the gunship began to fire carefully aimed shots at the vehicle. Both noticed that the gunship had two pitot mounted heavy repeating blasters it was unable to bring to bear because the angle wouldn't allow them to fire into their forward arc. Cen Theren began accelerating and the two gunships swooped through the interior canyons of the city, dodging around the occasional confused lift barge driver as they went, blasting buildings to either side and no doubt scaring the squatters and illegal immigrants living there. Roblox's aimed shots eventually started to have telling effects, as one shot struck the transparasteel canopy of the air car shattering part of it and spalling the driver with hot metal shards. A second expert shot with the scoped blaster rifle struck just below the cabin, blasting a small hole in the armor and apparently hitting part of the weapons system, as the blaster cannon exploded shortly thereafter and the pursuing vehicle began to trail dark black smoke. With no more effective frontal weaponry, the pursuing vehicle broke off pursuit, turning one of its heavy repeating blasters on the fleeing hunters and spraying the sky futilely with a hail of blaster bolts. Just then a second aircar arrived from the other direction, diving down the cannon and firing at the now damaged vehicle with its blaster cannon. The attacker turned and fled, leaving the hunters and their gendarme liaison to return to a hopefully allied precinct where they intend to interrogate the prisoners.
As they did so, overhead a republic era gunship with load of storm troopers raced past them, heading in the direction of the warehouse they had fled.
will elaborate later.![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
as promised…
