The wind at Punta Vela comes down off the ice field in one long push and does not stop until it reaches the water, and the people who built the collector substation knew it. Everything on that ground is bolted twice. The switchgear hall has no windows. The cable gantry that runs the length of the yard sits on legs sunk four metres into shale, carrying the trunk line east to west over three phase cabinets that are still, forty years after the last technician walked out, carrying live current.
Nine Kites came for the cabinets. So did the Second Canton.
Four bear-lineage operators came in along the south fence in a block, all four of them inside nine inches of each other. That was not laziness, it was denial. It put every scrap of cover in the eastern half of the table inside twelve inches of an Eastern Compact model, and it is the reason Cleat, the second of the splice's two infiltrators, could not start where he wanted to start. He had to take the long way round and come at the eastern cabinet from his own back yard.
Bragin, the Breacher, went up the outside of the transformer bank at a dead sprint and put himself a hand's width off the middle cabinet inside the first thirty seconds. Tursun took the eastern cabinet and did not step off it again for the rest of the day. That is the entire Eastern Compact plan and they never once deviated from it. Two markers, two bodies, no adventures, and let the freelancers have the third.
Grist, the splice Commando and the only Good gun on their roster, came around the blind side of the switchgear hall into the open lane under the gantry. Tursun shot him twice before he had finished the movement. The first round was a natural six and put a mortal wound in him. The second landed on top of it and pushed him along the track again. Grist was face down in that lane at two mortal wounds inside the first round of an eight round game: minus two on every die he would ever roll again, one action a turn, one more hit of any kind from being carried out. He never fired his weapon. Not once, in eight rounds, at anything.
Cleat's answer was the best decision anybody made all afternoon and it killed him. Spotted at the end of the first round by nothing cleverer than Tursun looking in the right direction, sitting three inches off the eastern cabinet in light cover with a Good shooter a knife's length away, he did not run. He charged. The reasoning is sound and any commander should steal it: a Commando tied up in a melee is a Commando who is not putting three rounds a turn into bodies that cannot absorb them, and a man who loses a melee is still standing inside the three inch bubble, still denying the marker, still costing the other side a point a check.
All he needed was to win the roll. He rolled a four. Tursun rolled a natural six, then rolled another natural six on the armour check behind it, and Cleat spent the next two rounds of his life on his knees in the bubble he had come to deny, alive and useless and doing exactly the job he came to do.
Bragin had a demolition charge and a plan for it, and the plan was better than anything the splice put on the table. Drop the gantry across the middle lane. Turn the ground under it into a wading pool of steel. Let two emplaced Eastern Compact operators stand perfectly still on markers they already hold while a faster enemy pays double for every inch of approach. It is the correct plan. He set the charge on the leg he was standing beside and rolled a natural one.
The book is clear about what a failed demolition does. The charge still detonates, as an ordinary three inch frag, and a frag ignores cover. Bragin took a flesh wound off his own explosive. Medet, the Tech Specialist, sitting under three inches of transformer bank in heavy cover that counted for nothing against a blast, took one as well. The gantry did not move an inch. In the same round Tursun put three rounds into a wounded infiltrator at three inches, missed with two and jammed his rifle on the third, and Tarp put a natural one into the only roll that could have saved Grist. Round two produced four natural ones across both sides and changed nothing at all.
Round three changed everything. Tursun finished Cleat with the knife, which put the first model Out of Action, which took the Pressure Clock to three and fired the climax on the spot. The climax came up Structural Collapse. The desk named the central piece as the cable gantry, on the grounds that it was the central piece and that a man had already put a frag into its leg, and fourteen feet of catwalk, cable tray and trunk line came down across the full width of the yard.
Every model within three inches of it took a flesh wound. That was five of the seven still standing. The only two who walked away clean were the splice medic and the splice's dying Commando, both of them tucked in behind the switchgear hall in the far west where nothing on the board could see them. Bragin and Tursun, standing directly underneath, were dug out and set down an inch south on their own side of the wreck.
And that was the game. Not the kill count. The shape. All three phase cabinets sit inside that strip. From round three onward nobody could stand on a marker, nobody could cross the centreline anywhere between the western pylon and the eastern one, and two forces who had spent three rounds trying to shoot each other were on opposite banks of a wall neither of them built on purpose. Every shot after that crossed rubble at a penalty. Every fight that mattered was a fight nobody could reach.
Crossfire scores by proximity and not by contact, which is the only reason the scenario survived at all. A body within three inches of a cabinet still holds it. A body within three inches from the far bank still denies it. What died was the possibility of taking anything away from anybody, and the rest of the afternoon was two commanders walking bodies into bubbles.
The splice played that correctly and lost anyway. Spool, the infiltrator nobody ever found, was revealed at the end of round three by a recon drone doing precisely the job it was bought for, walked straight into the spoil berm at exactly three inches from the western cabinet, and lay down. Heavy cover and prone against a base three plus meant Tursun needed a natural six to touch him. Tursun spent rounds four through eight hunting that six and jammed his rifle twice more in the attempt. Three natural ones on the same rifle in five rounds, and every one of them cost him an action to clear.
Tarp ran the long way round the switchgear hall, came down into the reel racks at exactly three inches from the eastern cabinet, went prone, and took Tursun's marker off him without ever firing a shot. Grist, on two mortal wounds and one action, crawled into the only pocket of ground from which the middle cabinet could be contested and lay there denying Bragin. For one round the splice had all three markers neutralised. They were still losing.
They stopped being able to lose slowly when Bragin found both of them inside one three inch circle. The frag killed Grist outright and put a wound in Tarp on the way past, and that took Nine Kites to half strength and fired the Contact Ceiling, which both survivors passed on the die and neither of them could pass on the board.
The last two rounds were arithmetic. Medet, a Bad shooter who did not wound a single model all game, walked twenty inches west along his own bank, dropped his own smoke on his own head, and stepped into the western bubble. He was the whole difference between four points and five. And on the final round the splice commander, staring at a table where nothing could reach anything, stood Spool up out of heavy cover and walked him east to deny the middle cabinet on the reasoning that the western one was lost regardless. It is a defensible read. It was worth exactly nothing, because the point he denied and the point he conceded were the same point, owed to the same player. Two shotgun shells and a sidearm round found him standing in the open on the last activation of the game. His own hoarded breach tokens turned all three of them into misses, one of which was a natural six.
Eastern Compact five, Nine Kites one. Nobody on the winning side was carried out.
THE DICE. 67 live dice on the record, 8 more rolled and voided by the rules. On the 49 action dice, nine natural ones and six natural sixes, which is a shade hot on ones and otherwise unremarkable. The placement was not unremarkable at all. Three of the nine ones were the same rifle: Tursun jammed in rounds 2, 4 and 5, and each jam cost him an action to clear, which means the best gun on the table spent three of its sixteen activations working a bolt. Three more were the same medic making the same roll on the same patient: Tarp put a natural one into Stabilize in round two and two more in round three, and Grist stayed one hit from dead for four rounds because of it.
PRIORITY. Nine Kites won the priority roll in rounds 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, and lost only round 8. Seven straight, which is roughly a one in a hundred and thirty run, and it bought them almost nothing. Priority in Skirmish gives you the choice of order and strips one action from the opponent's first model. The Compact simply nominated whichever operator had nothing to do that round, ate the penalty with him, and got on with it. A rule that costs you your least valuable action seven times is not a rule that decides games. Worth watching whether that is intended.
THE TURN IT SWUNG. Round three, and not the kill. Tursun's knife finished Cleat, that put the first model down, that took the Pressure Clock to three, and the climax rolled a 3 for Structural Collapse. Everything about the second half of this game follows from where that piece stood. The gantry ran the whole length of the yard directly over all three objectives, so collapsing it made the objectives unstandable and the centreline uncrossable in one die roll. Both armies were locked onto opposite banks for five rounds. Nobody planned that and nobody could undo it.
THE BALANCE READ. Crossfire is scored by proximity, so it survives having its objectives buried. Almost nothing else would. Run Structural Collapse on Smash and Grab, where the package has to be picked up and carried, or on Black Site, where the attacker has to reach the centre and Interact twice, and a single climax roll can make the scenario physically unplayable. The Climax Table already has a reroll clause for a result that cannot apply. It needs a second clause for a result that applies too well. Either say the collapsing piece may not be one that carries an objective, or say a collapsed piece is Difficult rather than Impassable, which is what the Breacher's own Demolition rule already does.
WHAT BEAT WHAT. Two Infiltrators and no Commando is a lovely list on paper and it needs the game to stay mobile. This one did not. Once the wall went up, Nine Kites owned two bubbles they could not be pushed out of and had no way at all to take a third, because a splice with one Ordinary gun, one Bad gun and a corpse cannot remove a Heavy Plate Breacher from anywhere. Meanwhile the model that actually won it was the Tech Specialist. Medet never wounded anything. His drone found the ghost that four pairs of eyes had missed for three rounds, and then he personally walked twenty inches along his own bank and stood in a circle. That is the whole margin.
ONE THING TO TRY NEXT TIME. Play Crossfire with the objectives placed 2in OFF the centreline, alternating sides, instead of on it. It costs nothing, it stops any single centreline event from burying all three at once, and it forces both players to cross rather than to park. The two best decisions in this game, Cleat's charge and Tarp's run around the hall, were both attempts to get to the other side of a line the terrain would not let them cross.
THE BREACH ECONOMY. Nine Kites finished the game holding six Breach Tokens, most of them minted by the collapse rather than by anything the enemy did, and spent four of them in the last four rounds to cancel three confirmed hits and a Mortal Wound. The tokens saved two operators and moved the score by zero, which is the honest verdict on a purely defensive currency. Two observations for the rulebook. The Climax handed a player five tokens for wounds nobody inflicted, which cannot be the intent of a rule written as an opening created by the enemy. And a Breach Token cannot touch Field Dress, Override at adjacency, or an active detection sweep, because none of those involve a die rolled by the operator the token sits on. Osipa cleared both of Bragin's flesh wounds under a token and Nine Kites could only watch.
THE TERRAIN, HONESTLY. If you build this table, the piece that earns its place is the switchgear hall, and not because anything happened on it. It hid a dying Commando and an unwounded Medic from four enemy models for five straight rounds and it kept them alive to the final check. A single impassable line-of-sight blocker on the far side of the centreline from the shooting is worth more than any amount of scatter cover. The gantry was the star and the hall was the reason the splice was still on the board to lose properly. QUILL ADAIR