LogDeniable Asset-Jason-17

Game log for the 2025/04/13 session of Star Wars - Deniable Asset, as taken by Jason

Anax Fez is willing to reassign the team to a different sector, if that's what we really want, but she was hoping to take advantage of our local connections. Igli speaks for several of us when he expresses a determination to be farther from the Hutts first. Fez warns the team that it might be a while before reassignment comes through. Gar expresses a desire to figure out where that TIE-launching freighter came from. Fez checks with Elnoor space traffic control, who turn out to be aware of the ship in question, and they can provide a location and rough vector for its last departure. He figures its one of three systems, when correlated with a round trip time of a few days. All are in the Almovar sector, just over the border. Almovar is coreward of the Borab sector, and under the Empire, it was a single administrative unit. Now, while the New Republic tries to treat it that way, some of its planets are fully incorporated into the NR, and some have no part in it. The former Moff was Harkin the Ghoul. He was notorious for ruling with an iron fist, sentencing people to slave labor, etc, and he's still at large. For purposes of getting Igli's beloved quad lasers installed, the best place in Almovar would be Umbolt.

Umbolt is a gas giant, and the major local industry is heavy metal mining in the rings. It takes a few days and a lot of credits to get the ship repaired and the lasers updated to quads. Scuttlebutt has it that the local pirate menace is increasing, and colony ships headed toward the newer worlds have simply vanished.

Of the three planets of Gar's list, only one is inhabited, so we decide to start there, on Axxom. It's very valuable, because most of the surface is water ice, but the atmosphere is mostly chlorine, which makes it a horrible place to be. The local industry is basically shooting chunks of ice into space, whence freighters will grab it and carry it onward. In the absence of positive leads, we fly around a bit, with Con helping Phex run scans, acting casual. There are a half-dozen destroyed or derelict ice mining facilities, but at one point, Phex catches blocks of ice in orbit with trajectories that do not correspond to the token remaining operational facility. Someone has gone to great lengths to conceal activity from scans. We decide to fly a nap-of-the-planet approach to stay off their sensors until the last minute, then land right on top of them, giving them no notice. Igli makes it look easy, flying through a canyon that puts the Asset below their sensor horizon until we land a mere half-mile from the facility.

The hike to the station is through ice; any rock on this planet is far below the ice. Phex and Gar take the lead as scouts, since they have the capacity to be sneaky. They close on the landing platform, which was raised off the ice, but is now half-collapsed. There's a rise in the ice and some hangar doors (which look like they were blown out from the inside, and the inside of which is open to atmo), and a mangled pad area for ice launches. Any exposed broken metal shows obvious signs of serious chlorine corrosion. They peak inside to make sure all is as it seems, and they discover a lot of wreckage and debris. They also note four intact TIE cradles. They're empty, at least. There's no sign of hostiles, so they signal the party to move up.

Phex, meanwhile, takes a different look around the shadows and other likely hiding places. He sees a doorbell-droid like the one from Jabba's palace in RotJ, and points it out to Gar. He can tell that this thing is receiving power. Phex blasts it, and then Con comes up and plugs his slicing rig into the comp, with a little coaching from Gar. He swiftly opens the personnel door, and the airlock light automatically comes on. Everyone but Con goes into the airlock. There's a porthole on the inner door, revealing a L-shaped hallway. One side of the hall obviously goes to where the cargo airlock is. The inner door opens, and they enter into a properly lit hallway, devoid of any obvious people. They hear human-sounding voices from the direction of the cargo airlock. Con cycles through once the rest of the team doesn't get ambushed, while Gar and Phex take the scout role again. They slice the pie until they can see the cargo area, where they spot huge blocks of ice sitting on repulsorlift pallets. The people doing the work on these ice chunks look pretty haggard, and the two guys giving the orders look like snowtroopers. This place has the feel of Imperial architecture.

Gar sneaks forward and stabs one of the snowtroopers, but not to any great effect. The trooper turns around, just as Phex shoots him. Now it's a fight. Gar swiftly pulls his blaster and uses that on the other snowtrooper, but doesn't seem to get a lot of damage this time either. Phex' shot, however, turns the guy's lights out for good.

The laborers immediately drop and spread-eagle, like they've done this before. They think there might be 15-20 troopers on the facility. They've been prisoners here since the war ended. The prisoners tell them that this is the top level and everything else is down. They don't know the details of the layout. Igli tells the prisoners to tell him everything they know, and he'll make sure they get a ride out. A couple of them give him military-quality sitreps, suggesting formal training at some point. The prisoners also grab the blasters from the fallen snowtroopers. We leave Phex to keep overwatch on the elevators. While the team is gone, Phex overhears the prisoners arguing about whether the party is trustworthy,

Mylla and Igli take lead heading down the other corridor. 20 or so yards down, the corridor doglegs, and there's also a locked door. Con opens it, and it's the equipment room. The blasters are locked, so Mylla grabs Igli's heavy hydrospanner and smashes the lock open instead. Igli scampers back to the cargo bay and tells them to come get some hazard suits. They're into it, and that seems to help convince the skeptics.

After the dogleg, there's a guardpost, and a sort of security shield / pocket door that somebody has deployed, with an elevator door behind the security post. Con calls the elevator. When it opens, it's got three snowtroopers in it. Two of them decide to shoot Con, who picks up an exciting collection of wounds, and also falls right over. The third misses Mylla, though she has to duck real quick. Gar's fire drops one of the snowtroopers, TL-DR another, and Mylla's vibrosword more than takes care of a third. Gar then stimpacks Con.

The elevator is not very large, but we squeeze in and head for the engineering level. The doors open to reveal a short hallway and an open blast door, then a control room. The team bum-rushes the control room. Igli puts a slug into the first guy who reaches for a weapon, and that makes a bloody mess of him. TL-DR shouts, "Death to all the meatbags! We're here to liberate your droids!" He takes a shot at a tech who was diving for cover, but misses. Mylla wades in with her vibrosword and disembowels one of the techs who wanted to fight. Another one tries to change his mind and says, "don't shoot," but it's too late, Gar puts a blaster shot into him, and that's about all there is to say about that. The sole remaining tech who's putting up a fight draws and shoots at TL-DR, throwing off some sparts and chunks of ruined metal. Igli shoots that guy, and that ends the fight. The two remaining techs put their hands in the air like they absolutely do care about living a little longer.

Con runs in and goes into their comp. He pulls up the base schematics, and it's a pre-fab Imperial core that they drilled into the ice, then minimally tweaked for the specifics. There's been damage to the facility. The mess isn't habitable. The detention level is a mess. The power systems are on this level, and the fusion core is running just barely above standby, because it's no longer capable of much more than that. The comms network is blowing up as the troopers try to get organized. Con locks down the elevator. Igli warns Phex that the hostiles are trying to deploy, and Phex responds by telling the prisoners to be ready to run for it.

TL-DR asks the techs for the purpose of the facility. They tell him it's an ice mine. Gar asks who's in charge, and they say it's Colonel Pike. He's offworld, though. At that, Con kills long-range comms, though it's not clear whether they worked anyway. The facility has 48 prisoners, who are down around the mechanical level, cutting ice.

The cargo elevator goes offline, suggesting the Imperials have it under local control. The team leaves Con in the computer room while everyone else heads down to Mechanical.

On the Mechanical level, the shooting starts the moment the doors open, with Gar taking a bolt straight away. TL-DR almost dodges all the incoming fire, but catches a round. The team returns fire. Mylla hucks a grenade, which the enemy finds entirely unpleasant. The rest of the party also open fire, cutting a swathe through the bad guys. Return fire hits Igli. Igli's fire catches one of them outside of cover, and nearly kills the target. Mylla rushes in and lays about with her vibrosword, but her quarry manages to fall backward out of the way. TL-DR takes out the guy Igli shot earlier. Gar's fire effectively suppresses his target. The trooper who shoots at Mylla misses, but another one hits TL-DR and takes the droid out. Igli, deprived of targets by circumstances, stimpacks himself. Mylla's quarry keeps scrambling away from her, but this time, he's scrambled right out of cover. Gar takes a shot at him, but misses. For his part, this last trooper runs for the ice tunnels. Igli rushes after him and takes another shot, hammering the trooper's back with his slugthrower. Gar relocates to get his line of fire back, and finalizes the trooper with his blaster carbine. A ragged cheer goes up from the prisoners, of whom there are maybe 30.

Up top, Phex hears a weird periodic grinding noise coming closer. Phex tells the prisoners to prepare, and as the cargo elevator arrives, he opens up on autofire. He doesn't hit a dang thing, but it does make three of the four bad guys duck. Two stormtroopers return fire while the other two maneuver, and Phex takes a bad hit and gets suppresssed too. One of the prisoners takes out one of the moving troopers. The other escapee manages to halt one of the moving troopers in his tracks with the sheer volume of fire he puts out. His return fire kills escapee #2. Phex guns down the trooper trapped in the open. The two troopers who were on base of fire shoot at Phex, missing, but suppressing him a little. Phex's return fire takes out another trooper, but the last remaining trooper takes Phex down. Prisoner #1 drops the last trooper, and cares enough to stimpack Phex.

Igli calls up to Phex, who sounds exactly like death warmed over. Phex reactivates elevator power, and takes it down to mechanical, at which point they can move the prisoners en masse. Con can't get any intel out of the computer, so he sets the reactor to overload and punches, taking one of the two prisoners with him. He kicks the other prisoner down and they take the elevator up. It stops at the detention level. The doors open, and Con can see blaster scoring, and a bunch of graffiti put there by prisoners. He punches the door close button, and as the doors close, he sees that one of them says, "Axxom: Home of the 704th Imperial Bomber Wing."

Up top, the number of prisoners significantly exceeds the number of environment suits. They're going to have to hold their breath and keep their eyes close, following guide lines to get to the Asset. Igli tells the prisoners without suits how it's going to work, Gar runs the line, and while a couple of them needs considerable help, they load everyone onto the ship, and depart the planet just in time, en route to a New Republic planet. That's Tabricore, an agricultural world. Gar doctors up the injured on the way there, while Con does some repairs and sticks a repair patch on TL-DR.