A cartel air-operations chief who has never once refused anyone tries to fly out of Lost Angeles before the two men guarding him are ordered to kill him, and the only crew who can stop him are the people he has been doing free favors for all year.
The Situation
Nino Quezada has run a quiet second life in Lost Angeles for eleven months: a licensed agricultural air service, a filed schedule, a hand-painted board over the door with the wrong hours on it. He is also the Southern Cartel Alliance's entire air network, and in March 2065 he filed a routing change that landed the SCA's founding architect at a NAF field and put him in a cell. Three days ago the silence order came down from the heirs. Nino knows. He has been prepping a departure for seventy-two hours and it goes tonight.
He is not flying out of a hangar. He has paid a city crew to close six hundred metres of Ring Road for a resurfacing that is not happening, and he has laid the cones out in a pattern that only makes sense if you know what runway edge lighting looks like. His two escorts think tonight is a routine movement; their contingency order has not fired yet. A bonded broker wants him alive on the overpass by 0400. And the crew who took the retrieval contract did not read past the callsign, which is a problem, because they know this man. He fixed their car in March. He has been flying filter media into their district at cost since last autumn because their landlord asked him to.
Objectives
- Primary · Take Quezada alive and deliver him to the broker at the Ring Road overpass before 0400.
- Secondary · Recover the chart case: three hundred and forty hand-inked approach plates, no digital copy, the entire SCA air economy on paper.
- Secondary · Nobody goes down on that field who is not holding a weapon. Four of the people between the operators and the target are mechanics.
The Clocks
- Main · Wheels-up. Twelve turns. Quezada moves through four phases as the alert climbs — filed, rerouting, rolling, gone. He never advances on the operators and he never fights. He walks toward the aircraft at a normal pace, through anything, because the alternative is standing still. On Turn 12 he is airborne and the chart case goes with him.
- Pressure · Contingency. Three rounds from the first moment an operator stands next to him. Then the escorts stop being escorts and their next shot is aimed at the man the operators came to collect. Count it down out loud.
- Quiet · The road reopens. The city crew clocks off at 0400 and the barriers come down. Whatever is still on that road is on it with traffic.
Leverage Points
- The coffee. He grinds it by hand and it takes four minutes and he judges every person he has ever met by whether they wait. Sit down and wait and he stays put two turns longer and answers any question honestly. He does not lie. Under pressure he becomes more specific, not less.
- The chief mechanic. Sixty-three years old, thirty of them on his airframes, and she will not speak to an armed stranger. She will speak to anyone who has ever loved people by feeding them. She knows which of the three departure points is real. She also keeps the ledger, and every signature in it is a name nobody in this city has ever heard him use.
- Fuel, weather, and surface. He needs all three. The bowser sits on the hard shoulder. The met frequency is taped inside the fuel log desk in fountain ink, and a false weather report is the only thing on earth that makes him stop and re-run the numbers. The resurfacing plant staged along the median — roller, tar kettle, light tower, barrier segments — will foul six hundred metres of road if any of it ends up on the road.
- The escorts' orders. Tell him his own bodyguards have been ordered to kill him and he will not believe it. He has been indispensable for twenty years and it is the load-bearing belief of his life. He will explain, kindly, that this is not how it works, and then a round will hit the cowling next to his head.
- The pallet. Under a tarp in the maintenance hangar: ninety days of filter media, addressed to the operators' own district, marked NO CHARGE in fountain pen. It is the last one. Nobody needs to explain it. Let a player do the arithmetic out loud.
Opposition
- Nino Quezada (SCA, air operations) · Fifty-one, sixty-two kilos, no armor, a pistol he has never fired in anger. He makes no attacks. He calls: a gunship on station, a closed exit he charted in 2054, a hundred fuelers and farmers with handheld radios. Every one of those has a counter the operators can find. Killing him is trivially easy and fails the mission — the second pilot can fly it too, and will.
- The escort (Vigil clique, two guns) · Bored, professional, four hours into hating this assignment, carrying an order neither of them has mentioned to the pilot. They cannot allow him to be taken alive and talking. When the operators close, the escort becomes the operators' problem to solve for the target.
- The ground crew (four, unarmed) · Dominoes on an upturned crate, an argument about a football match that finished eleven hours ago, somebody's kid doing homework on the fuel log desk. They will not run and they will not fight. They will stand on that field and start raising the alarm, and shooting them is the cheapest, most effective, most expensive thing anyone can do tonight.
Climax Variable (d6)
Roll when the operators reach Ring Road.
| d6 | Twist on the road |
|---|---|
| 1 | The ground crew arrive in four vehicles. If the operators shot at them earlier, the vehicles block the approach. If the operators paid, spared, or fed them, the vehicles start dragging barrier segments onto the runway and nobody explains why. |
| 2 | The city crew clocks off early. Civilians on Ring Road in two rounds, and the road is still a runway. |
| 3 | The wind swings. He has to take off the other direction — toward the operators. Every position anyone holds is now the wrong one and the aircraft is coming at them. |
| 4 | The second pilot started the engines to be helpful. Quezada is no longer required for the departure and is now running toward an aircraft he does not control, flown by a twenty-eight-year-old who is not calm. |
| 5 | The escort fires here, in the landing lights, in front of everyone. He watches his own people try to kill him and does not break stride. Every mechanic on that road changes sides this round. |
| 6 | The chief mechanic is standing on the centreline with a torque wrench, and she will not move, and when he is close enough to hear her over the turbines she says the one word that can stop him: the name he was born with. |
Breadcrumbs
The met frequency is taped inside the fuel log desk in the first room of the mission, in a hand that belongs to the 2040s — a crew that searches early gets the single highest-leverage action on the board. The escorts check in every twenty minutes on a channel that is not the field's, which is the contingency clock announcing itself to anyone counting. Past this mission: every signature in the mechanic's ledger reads with a surname that appears in no faction database on Earth, alongside one logged night flight to a clinic in 2047 carrying one passenger out and two back. It does not explain itself. It is a thread, and pulling it costs more than credits.
The Not-Line
This is not a manhunt. It is a goodbye the operators are trying to prevent, at gunpoint, badly, and the funniest version of this mission is also the saddest one.
Running It With A Crew You Already Have
Built for the Warranty Void crew and sharper with them — the driver whose road this is, the documenter whose one useful tool is the receiver they have told nobody about, the cook who is the only person the chief mechanic will talk to, the planner staring at three departure points with a clock running, and the nineteen-year-old who booked this job and did not read past the callsign. It runs clean with any squad. Give one operator a reason to already know the target, and give one of them the contract.