S09 Casino Royale

Hacienda, Staerla City/Collace/District 268/Spinward, 096/1105, 22:12

With the PCs having “turned left” by declining the patron hook last week and with house move stuff consuming all my mental Go, this week’s session was pretty much entirely seat-of-the pants!

A Casino, not actually this one though

They returned on the night that was the most likely for Kefaufer to attend, and were welcomed back to the high table by the usual gamblers; it was clear that some variety in their game was rather welcome. Their table-mates were:

Sargan Greaves - a Major in Collace’s own Army, a cool and competent player
Delia Bergamine - very opaque on what she does, steady but not brilliant
Zebulon Thoran - a surgeon with REO Meatwagon, clearly playing for the fun of it, with money to burn and nothing else to do with it
Deng Hault-Halcard - a Baron from a couple of systems away and his wife Jaina, the brains of the couple and a slick and daring player.

The game got started around midnight

Hacienda, Staerla City/Collace/District 268/Spinward, 096/1105, 22:12

A commotion at the entrance announced the arrival of someone important. They recognized him from their research as Kefaufer, though the static pictures had failed to convey the predatory menace of the man. His habitual sunglasses masked his cybereyes, a modification that only added to his unsettling effect.

It’s worth noting that I had no planned process for emulating whatever 57th Century version of Baccarat was being played, so I winged a very ragged system of rolls to determine what happened. It could have been more convincing, but it worked.

Luther Kefaufer

Luck was with the party, as one of their tablemates invited him over and he took a seat next to Feng. From then on, the nature of the game changed. It had been competitive before, but Kefaufer’s play style was aggressive, brutal and merciless. Homing in on Zebulon as the weak link, he lured him again and again and stripped him to the point he folded. As the night progressed, the play got more and more savage until only Kefaufer, Feng and Delia were left. After a knife-edged set of plays, Feng managed by a mixture of luck and reckless daring to pull off a win and end up KCr117 up, mostly to Kefaufer’s detriment. At that point she dealt him the nastiest blow she could; she folded and left the table.

He joined her at the bar for a drink and they jousted verbally for a while, the impression of a powerful, dangerous man who hated to lose and was not used to it growing ever stronger. Finally, leaving him with her PAN code, she called it a night.

Shadira Downport/Collace/District 268/Spinward, 097/1105

The next day, Nevada did something unexpected; he turned up for work at Burst Recycling in the Industrial Zone outside the main arcology. After being chewed out for being nearly ten days late, he was directed to a processing station within a vast factory hall, where grav trucks delivered standardized containers (“cans”) marked with various company names to the work lines. The workers opened these cans with control devices and mucked out the garbage shipped back in them, then ran them through a sterilizer ready for re-use. Different contents went into different chutes.

Standardized Cargo 'Can'

His supervisor Mick Finch (grumpy, beefy) took him aside and quietly advised them that any cans belonging to the company Sandoval are to be opened carefully, and if any sealed blue-grey boxes with “Alpha Protein Products” and a red flash were inside, those were to be put carefully in a side bay from where they would be collected. “Do not look inside, do not do anything else with them. Understan’?”

The work was undemanding, fairly monotonous and not overly complex. Pay was dismal, Cr1,500 an month – but Nevada was not there for the money. The other workers were fairly ordinary blue-collar Collace chaps, fairly friendly but very breadline, and inclined to be more suspicious of people who appeared to have “a lot” of money by their standards. Nevada was careful to fit in, and was accepted.

Every couple of days, a crate matching the description and measuring around 4’ to a side showed up. Examination showed them to be well-worn with no holes, well-secured and with no other external markings. It took a grav lift to shift them across into its’ bay; they’d clearly got something inside.

Collace Star System details - click it for larger image!

Checking the can they came in, Nevada found a shipping designation code, always the same. Careful to avoid traceable comms, he passed this back to the others in Staerla, and they looked it up. The code designated the can for delivery to the scout outpost on Kex in the outer system, technically Chimoni IVa.

Further digging picked up flight plans for vessels heading for Kex, and tracked down among others the supply shuttle Gormenghast belonging to the supply company Sandoval – a Scout subcontractor – which made regular supply runs to the outer worldlet. Kex itself was a peculiar planet, huge in size and covered in noxious oceans, hence the scout base.

A little shenanigans with tracker drones allowed the cans, and crates, to be tracked back to Sandoval’s operation on the downport whence the shuttle Gormenghast departed on a regular basis for Kex and returned, shipping cans of supplies out and cans of empties and rubbish back.

At this point the PCs felt they probably had enough to at least talk to the IISS, at least to get someone to go take a look at Kex and see if there was anything there to explain how the drugs were getting into the system

Session Date Apr 11, 2023