The Raze does not have roads. It has the memory of roads, which is a different surface to drive on: slab that used to be a boulevard, tipped and settled at angles a survey rig takes one wheel at a time, and between the slabs the dust that never clears out here because there is nothing left standing to stop it.
SURVEY 6 came up out of a hole in that dust at a walking pace. Eight wheels, floodlit, Reclamation Authority white gone grey at the arches. A cask netted to the deck under a cargo web, and folded down beside it on its own mount, a Monitor Central frame with six limbs and nothing switched on yet. A drill crew had found a subbasement under the eastern ruins that predates the whole argument, and whatever came out of it was going to a Center Point evidence lockup by way of the Barricadia arch. Ten minutes of open ground. Both sleds had been sitting in the dark for an hour waiting for exactly that.
The Sparrows moved first because the Sparrows moved first, which in this sport is a sentence that does more work than it looks like it does. Neely Vass took the Tuning Fork off a slab lip and onto the crawler's flank in one push, and the front-engine car did what a front-engine car is supposed to do in broken ground, which is go exactly where it is pointed. She held the flank and then did something a lot of drivers would not have bothered with at that moment: she stopped driving for a second and read the lane ahead instead.
What she found in it was a gantry. Stacked cargo frames in the service arch a hundred meters up, resting on a footing that had been resting on nothing for eleven years. She did not do anything about it yet. She just knew where it was.
Prax Holloway came up the other side at a speed the Sermon had no business carrying through that surface. Wolf-stock, and it shows in the hands rather than anywhere you can photograph: the correction happens before the slab has finished moving. He read his own line, took the flank, and for about four seconds both crews were level on the crawler with their Jumpers still in the sills and nothing decided.
Then Odie Krane went over the rail.
He is not a big man and he does not do the thing the Feed likes, the pause on the sill with the city behind him. He stepped off the Tuning Fork onto the crawler deck the way you step off a kerb, crossed it through the deck clutter and the sensor mast guys in one unbroken movement, and put his hands on the cargo web.
He was not fighting anybody for it. There was nobody there yet. Sibb Ardent was still coming over the far rail with her own crossing to make, and by the time she was standing on the deck the net was cut and the cask was against Krane's chest.
She went for him anyway and the deck stopped her. A rib of the crawler's spine, a cable run, something in the dark between them that a mediocre mover finds and a good one does not. She hung on it long enough that the crawler's own systems noticed somebody was aboard, and that was the only Security Pressure either crew took all night, one tick, on the wrong crew, for a movement that never arrived.
Round two is where the Sparrows spent their read.
Krane went back over the gap with the cask in one arm, which is the part of the job that gets Jumpers hurt and did not get him hurt, and he was in the Tuning Fork's sill before Holloway's activation started. Then the gantry came down. Neely Vass had known where it was for a full round and she took her line so that the Sermon was underneath it when the footing finally let go, and Holloway lost his flank to a wall of falling cargo frame he had no way to have seen.
He tried to take her line back and the road took it off him instead. One correction too early on a slab that had already moved, the Sermon out of shape, two positions gone and a car pointed at the wrong part of the ruin. He got it back. He is good enough that getting it back was never in doubt. He just got it back a hundred meters behind a woman who was already breaking clear.
Neely Vass put the Tuning Fork through the last gap in the slabs with the cask aboard and her Jumper's hand still on the roll bar, and the run was over on the second round of five.
Sibb Ardent had to get home from a moving NAF crawler with nothing in her hands. She missed the gap, went into the deck rail hard enough to bruise something through the plate, hauled herself up and made it on the second try. She was the only person on either crew to bleed and she bled for a cask she never touched.
Behind all of it, in a service cut off the haul lane, an unregistered sled with no plate and no livery sat with its lights off waiting for the boulevard.
Its crew had timed the whole thing for the Ridgeline Cut. They were right about the Cut. It is the best place on that route to take something off somebody. They just booked it for a run that was already parked and counted by the time the Cut came up, and the last anybody saw of them they were still in the service cut, still dark, still waiting to be in this.
This was not a dice-luck game, or not only one. Both crews got a natural 6 in round one and both got it from a Jockey, and the difference is that the Sparrows' six bought a route event that mattered two minutes later while Canticle Nine's six was spent against a ceiling. A natural 6 Commit advances two Zones. Holloway made his from Chase, and Chase to Locked In is one step, and Locked In is the top of the ladder. The second Zone had nowhere to go, so the best driving roll of the night converted into exactly the same result as a plain success.
The turn it swung is round one and it is not really a turn, it is an action. Krane crossed the deck and lifted the cask before Ardent had crossed hers. Everything after that is a crew with the package running away from a crew without one.
The desk ruled that boarding the target from LOCKED IN costs one action and no roll. That is a ruling, not a rule, and it is the reason the cask changed hands in round one instead of round two.
The book is genuinely unclear here. The Early Board entry says a Jumper "normally boards the target only when the Jockey is Locked In" and then prints a Latch roll for the risky version from Chase, which reads like the normal board needs no roll. The Latch entry says grabbing a moving vehicle hull is a FIGHT roll, and a crawler under power is a moving vehicle hull. Both readings are on the page. The desk took the first one because it is the one that makes Locked In mean something, and the cost of that is honest: Krane got a free action, which is what let him Flow and Lift in the same activation, which is what ended the argument before the other Jumper had arrived.
The extraction loop is too short for the clock the sport hangs off it, and a crew that wins priority twice can close it before anything else in the scenario is allowed to exist.
Gate the package instead of gating the road. Make the cask itself cost a second action to free, a cut or a cradle release or a seal, so that Lift is two actions rather than one when nobody is contesting it. That single change puts the Lift on round two, which is where the Ripper frame wakes up, which is where the whole design intent of the scene lives. It costs nothing at the table, it does not touch the Jockey's dice, and it means the crew that got there first still has to be there when the deck turns hostile.
Build the crawler as a vehicle and a board at the same time. It wants to be long, flat and busy: a deck you can put two Jumpers on with real distance between them, a sensor mast, guy runs, a cargo web over the objective, and the frame on a folded mount so it reads as switched off until it is not. Everything that happened tonight happened in about eight inches of that deck. Around it, the Raze is the cheapest good table in the setting, because it is all tipped slab and rubble and there is no architecture to get wrong. Grey on grey on grey, one floodlit white vehicle in the middle of it, and the two sleds the only colour anywhere.
One note on the sleds themselves. The layout rule got rebuilt last month into a reroll in home terrain, and it is much better, and tonight it never fired: Vass had the rubble reroll available in both rounds and never failed a Race Roll to spend it on. Holloway's wolf-stock augment cancelled his hostile-terrain penalty exactly, which made the rubble neutral for him and made his one bad die a flat natural 1 that no modifier could have saved. That is the rule working. It is just invisible when a Good Jockey rolls this well.
Eleven gaps into the QA log tonight, which is a lot for a two-round game and is mostly a function of how many edges a short fast run touches. The headline is the board-at-Locked-In question above. Under it: a natural 6 Commit at the top of the ladder has no printed answer, the possession roll-offs ignore FIGHT entirely, the Line Read natural 6 has no stated limit on what a player may dictate against a rival, the Race Complication table's "any Race Roll" and the Block entry's "Zone and LINE loss only" contradict each other on a natural 1 in an opposed contest, Block has no positional prerequisite at all, and the LINE track says you gain LINE on a success while printing no cap and no action that grants one. Add to that a Ripper frame with lethal contact damage and no activation sequence, a Surge table with results that can have no legal target, and no natural-1 table for Raid Rolls. None of it broke the game. All of it made the referee decide something the book should have.