LogDeniable Asset-Jason-14

Game log for the 2025/03/02 session of Star Wars - Deniable Asset, as taken by Jason

It's a fifteen minute speeder bike ride to get from the Asset's landing point to the mystery facility. This area is hilly and wooded, kind of like eastern Tennessee. As Igli and Phex break metaphorical trail, Phex sees something briefly pop above the trees, and thinks the something was a probe droid. He warns Igli, who brakes and looks for low ground to ... hole up in. The log awaits retribution for that pun. Once stopped, Phex hops off, and maneuvers on foot to where he can take a longer and closer look. He takes up a position near the top of a ridge, but doesn't initially see the droid. Then he does... and it's looking right at him. He immediately slides down the hill and runs back to tell the team that they've been made. The team backs out through a steep draw, and takes a different approach route around a hill and through a gully that we hope will allow us to break contact and regain some semblance of stealth of surprise. Eventually we come to a hill, over which we expect to see the facility. We dismount, clamber and crawl up, and peek over the rise.

The facility is well-camoflauged. There appears to be a decade-old rock slide that knocked over trees and created a clearing. In that clearing, we see a comms tower and comms dish, both camoflauged, and a hatch leading to some manner of underground facility. Igli sees that there's a popup defensive turret in the facility, and Phex sees the probe droid, aggressively scanning the sector from whence we came. Everybody but Con begins closing up on Phex. The team gathers on the flat of the bowl and works around to a location on the opposite side of the entry structure without the popup turret being able to bear on them. They try to get Con to come down, but he gets so much coaching that his nerves give out, he trips over a tree root, and he noisely tumbles down the hill. That's enough for the turret to deploy. Phex was ready for that moment, and opens fire on it, but his shot bounces harmlessly off the turret casing. The turret fires at Con and chews up the scenery like an underpaid Christopher Walken, and Con demonstrates that formidable character so well-known to his comrades by screaming and curling up into a fetal position. Gar runs for the entrance structure. Igli follows him. Myyla tries to move toward Con but gives herself away. Phex's followup shot connects, doing some sort of damage, and causing it to shift targets again. The droid's fire misses, but Phex decides maybe standing still isn't optimal, and he seeks some cover. He and the turret miss each other. That gives Myyla a chance to get a good shot off, and the impact of her fire seems to knock it for a loop. It stops firing for a moment. Phex blazes away at it, causing it to continue pointing all its sensor protrusions at him. Myyla also fires at it, but her fire just throws a few sparks. Her light blaster may not be able to penetrate the turret's armor. Said turret finishes recalibrating and hits Phex, and since this is a weapon of some significance, that's enough to make Phex drop and opt out of getting up. Gar throws himself down on the back side of the entrance and shoots at the turret with his blaster carbine, and pieces fly off it. Igli follows suit. Phex takes a stimpack to himself. Myyla also shoots, and misses, but her fire interferes with its sensors. The turret begins spraying Gar and Igli, but it can't connect. Myyla sees the door of the facility open, which is bad for whoever opened it, since the turret was just firing in that direction. Igli puts a slug through the turret's ammunition hopper, and the resulting explosition, though modest, sends the domelike shield of the turret flying. Myyla sees someone open the door, peek out, and close it again.

Gar realizes that the party has lost track of the probe droid and asks if anyone can spot it. Phex scans it out easily, and finds it maneuvering blindly against him. His snapshot puts it out of the fight. Con picks himself up and rejoins the team. He fiddles a little, realizes someone is trying to keep him from bypassing the lock, bypasses their lockdown, and pops the door open. There's a stairway leading down about 30 steps into a dark hallway. Igli takes point, Gar behind him, then Con. Igli sees someone lean out and shoot a blaster pistol at him, and takes a hit to the leg. Igli goes John Woo in response, firing with a slugthrower in each hand, and scores a hit through sheer volume. Gar also hits this guy with his blaster carbine, and that turns out to be more firepower than he wants to live with. He ducks around the corner at the end of the hallway. Myyla covers left, where the guy ran, and Igli check right, seeing a blast door with Imperial markings. Igli thinks that's probably the armory/equipment locker, positioned to be convenient to the door. He calls Con down and assures him the hallway is good to go. As Con prepares to run over and open the door, Myyla sees an Imperial lean out to throw a grenade. She shoots him. He falls down. He drops his grenade. Kaplow!

Phex decides he wants to go look at where the droid went down. Igli tells him to keep an eye on the door as he does, so he instead finds a hidden position from which to watch the door.

Con pops the lock open and interrupts the defensive self-destruct, but he's got to keep the button depressed, or else there will be a giant explosion. Igli ponders disarming the charge, but decides that he's maybe not the guy to do it, so Con does it one-handed instead. Free antipersonnel mine! Gar checks and sees three heat signatures. The team prepares to exchange fire, but when Con pops the door open, it turns out that there room is full of smoke. Igli and Con throw grenades, in case this is a defensive smoke screen. After the detonations, the team follow the grenades in, and discovers what seems to be a barracks set ablaze. There are two exits, one straight through, one to the right. Gar grabs a fire extinguisher and puts the fire out. Igli checks the far door and sees that it just goes to the bathroom and showers. The other exit is locked, so Con defeats the lock, exposing a control room with an electical fire. There's a glass wall between the control room and the server farm, and a door leading into the server room. Igli checks to see if the door to the server room is secure while Con tries to rush toward the computers. He doesn't see any bad guys in the server room or any other doors. Gar starts scanning for the bad guy he's sure has to be there. He can't find a life sign in the server room but there is a thermal trail leading into it. Maybe under the raised floor?

Con throws himself headlong into one of the terminal task chairs, and bypasses Imperial computer security by reflex. He's able to abort the defensive scrub of the systems before the data loss is too significant, and then he turns the underfloor cooling to maximum, just to make anyone hiding there a little more miserable.

Myyla cuts open the raised floor around where the thermal trail ended, but sees nothing. Igli jumps into the hole, weapons levelled. He finds a wiring conduit big enough for someone to have crawled into, and goes crawling after that. Gar follows him. The conduit becomes a shaft with a ladder. Gar tells Phex roughly where they're headed, and Phex moves over that way, and sees that what he took for trees were camoflauged solar arrays, and then he sees movement. He shoots and misses.

Igli pops up, yells for the fleeing Imperial to stop, and opens fire when she doesn't. He gets a hit that doesn't stop her. Gar sets for stun and fires as well, but misses. She's fleeing, and Phex can't see her any longer. Gar's fire does make it harder for her to work her way through the terrain, though. Igli races after her, and Gar calls for Phex to get on a bike and come toward them. On foot, Gar and Igli loose their quarry. Igli calls the ship in for dustoff, and returns to the clearing. Gar takes over the bike from Phex, freeing the Rodian to focus on tracking. With his powerful sense of smell, Phex is able to tell Gar whence she fled. Alas, in their headlong pursuit, Gar nearly gets them both decapitated by a branch, and they're slowed up by a brief moment of being in fear of their lives. Phex does catch sight of their quarry, yanking the tarp off a speeder bike. Phex also sets for stun and shoots at her. He misses, but her efforts to get her bike going are slowed somewhat by her desire not to expose herself to fire.

Gar seems to have the edge as a bike pilot and closes the distance. Phex's next volley succeeds in stunning the Imperial, which means she falls off a racing speeder bike. Gar drops in to see what condition her condition is in, while Igli boards the Asset, tells TL-DR to go help Con, and then flies over to where Phex and Gar have their prisoner. Igli winches Phex and the prisoner up into the Asset, then meets Gar in the clearing. Con, TL-DR, and Myyla loot every computer storage device in that data center. Con can worry about reconstructing an organized database later. For now, it's a grab and go.

After about 45 minutes, Con resets the timer on the base's self-destruct, and then we fly off. Con starts going through the drives, and realizes that the drives they stole have date codes, allowing him to sort them chronologically. Sure enough, the drives have the dated take from the sail barge, and it looks like more than half the droids there were co-opted into the surveillance network. The oldest drive dates back to the war. At that time, the base was tapping the Elnoor comm buoy. We don't know, as yet, when the people running this place took an interest in Goro.

Igli dumps the unconscious prisoner into the shower and turns the water on cold. She's Lt Aveena Klar, Imperial Services Directorate. He tells her there's no such thing as the Empire anymore. She spits on him and calls him a traitor. He tells her he's going to let the droid deal with her.