A gene-forged predator that hunts in the stolen voices of its kills is working toward the one steppe settlement that shelters you, and every loud shot that could stop it is the proof the Compact needs to march into a dark zone that has stayed free for eight years.
The Situation
The interior community at Estancia Lihuel has lost four shepherds and a season's flock in nine days to something that calls across the grass in the voices of the dead. The Prometheus League cell that keeps the settlement off every map hired the hunt with no paper, because a Compact rescue would do what eight years of pressure could not: put faction boots south of the 46th parallel. A Compact survey flight has already logged the kill sites, and the assembly liaison reading those logs wants a confirmed aberrant on the record before the Itaipú vote, because a monster in the interior is a reason to garrison it. The thing the shepherds call el Pampero is still learning. Every shepherd it takes, it keeps the voice.
Objectives
- Primary · Run the quarry to ground and put it down before it reaches Estancia Lihuel, where a hundred people will open a door to a voice they know.
- Secondary · Keep the kill quiet. No beacon, no broadcast, nothing the survey flight can confirm as an aberrant. The dark zone stays dark only while the bodies stay a local problem.
- Secondary · Recover what is left of the last shepherd, Maité, so the community can bury her. The creature still wears her voice and it will use her at the worst moment.
The Clocks
- Main · The Approach. Track the hunt in five legs across open steppe. Each time you lose the trail or it loses you, the quarry kills, feeds, and relocates one leg closer to the settlement. On Leg 5 it reaches the Lihuel fence after dark with every voice it has taken.
- Pressure · The Survey Line. The Compact recon flight runs a grid every few hours. Each unsuppressed shot, signal light, or loud kill site advances a 4-step survey clock. At 4 the flight confirms an aberrant and a Compact intercept team stages at the 46th by dawn.
- Quiet · Prometheus Weather. A front is building off the coast. Roll it in across the session. When it breaks, visibility drops to arm's length, the cold doubles, and the wind carries every call kilometers. After that the quarry hears you coming as far as you hear it.
Leverage Points
- The resonance lure the League cell gives you answers the quarry in its own frequencies and pulls it to a spot you pick. It works once cleanly. It also shows the creature exactly what gear you carry, and it learns gear fast.
- Cano, a Maned Wolf gene-forged who went wild in the interior four years ago, reads the steppe better than any instrument and hates what the quarry is, because it is what the communities fear he will become. He runs spoor with you. A survey flight that tags two aberrants instead of one is a far worse problem than one.
- The turbine field, a line of pre-Upheaval wind turbines decommissioned and turning anyway, throws infrasound the quarry uses for cover and you can use to mask an approach. Stand inside it and neither of you can hear the other coming.
- The last voices. Each of the four dead left someone at Lihuel: a widow, a brother, a daughter. Any of them can tell you which voice the creature is wearing now and walk you into range. Bring one and the quarry has a voice it wants and a person you have to keep breathing.
- A dropped Compact survey beacon sits in the grass from the last flight. Spoof it and you send the grid chasing a false track to the wrong quadrant. Touch it and the Compact learns a person, not an animal, is working the dark zone.
The Quarry
- el Pampero (Type-7 vocal predator, steppe variant) · a catalog job that cooked off past its template into what the BAFO files call a vocal predator. It hunts in a loop: call in a borrowed voice from downwind, wait for an answer or a light, strike from the grass with an infrasonic scream that drops prey before they see it, feed, then withdraw a leg closer to the settlement and learn the next voice. It avoids open ground in daylight and will not enter the turbine field, where the infrasound drowns its own call. Hit it once and the voices get smarter. It stops calling the dead and starts calling you.
Opposition
- The survey liaison (Southern Compact) · reads kill-site logs from New Buenos Aires and wants a confirmed aberrant on the record before the Itaipú vote. Never on the steppe, but every loud move feeds the proof. Folds only if the killings stay deniable.
- The League cell at Lihuel (Prometheus League) · hired the hunt and wants the quarry dead with no faction footprint. Backs you with the lure, local knowledge, and a place to fall back. Cuts you loose the instant the hunt risks exposing the settlement.
- Cano and the resolved (interior, unaligned) · three more like Cano live wild in the grass. They did not make the quarry and will not help the Compact find it, but they are watching how you treat one of their own. Hunt clean and you have allies in the open. Hunt loud and they vanish, and the steppe stops telling you anything.
Climax Variable (d6)
Roll when you corner the quarry.
| d6 | Twist at the kill |
|---|---|
| 1 | It already reached the fence. The kill happens inside Lihuel, in the dark, among the people, wearing a voice they will open a door for. |
| 2 | Prometheus Weather breaks now. You and the quarry go blind and loud at the same moment, every call carrying twice as far. |
| 3 | It calls in Cano's voice, perfect, from behind you. If Cano ran the hunt with you, you cannot tell which wolf is which until one of them moves. |
| 4 | If you used the resonance lure, it turns the emitter into a trap and draws you into the turbine field, where no one will hear the scream. |
| 5 | The survey flight is overhead on this pass. Take the shot and the muzzle flash confirms the aberrant. Hold for the pass and the quarry slips a leg closer. |
| 6 | It is done learning the dead and only wants your voice. It speaks to you in a line you said earlier today and offers you the open ground if you leave it the settlement. |
Breadcrumbs
Seed it early. The quarry never calls in the turbine field and never takes prey there, which an attentive hunter reads as the infrasound blinding it, and which sets up the turbine play at the finish. Past the hunt, every kill site sits on a straight line of old survey markers running deeper south, toward the pre-Upheaval installation that has been transmitting across the steppe for sixty years. The question that thread points to is not what made one vocal predator. It is what the thing under the grass has been calling all this time, and whether el Pampero was only the first to answer.
The Not-Line
This is not a monster waiting in a lair for you to find. It is a predator hunting the same ground you are, learning your voice while you learn its trail, and the hardest call is whether to take the loud kill that saves the settlement and ends the dark zone, or the quiet one that might come a leg too late.