The saddle at El Candado sits four thousand six hundred metres up and the wind crosses it in one direction, always the same one. Everything still standing up there is bolted down. What is left of the assay station is two sealed brine houses, three ore bins welded shut, a conveyor gallery walking north to south on its legs, and a flue that came down in some earlier winter and was never cleared away.
On the apron between the brine houses there was a core drum. Assay grade, Andean secondary deposit, the sort of number that decides where a corridor gets cut and who pays to use it. Two crews came for it inside the same hour and neither of them was carrying a flag, which is the whole texture of the Heights this year. Nobody wants the confrontation. So nobody sends anybody who can be traced.
The northern crew called itself Plumb Line. Four operators, and the two that mattered were never on the ground when the other side deployed. The southern crew was The Long Count, and they set up like people who intended to shoot rather than run: a marksman forward and exposed in the open lane, a commando six inches off the drum, a technician behind his shoulder, a medic anchoring the west so far out that she denied the whole conveyor gallery to within an inch.
Within one inch. That is the margin the entire afternoon turned on, and it turned the wrong way for her. Plumb Line's second infiltrator got onto the gallery at twelve and a half inches, half an inch outside her denial, and stayed there, unseen, for the whole engagement.
Plumb Line won the opening throw and used it immediately. Their infiltrator NOCK came out from the west face of the assay shed, covered seven inches of open concrete without being seen, and had his hands on the drum before The Long Count had moved a boot. Reaching for it is what gives an infiltrator away. He lifted it and he was simply there, standing on the middle of the table in the open, carrying, slowed, unable to run.
What happened next should have ended it. VELA had a clean lane at six inches and she opened up. The first round went straight through the vest and put a mortal wound in him. The second jammed her rifle solid. She dropped it on the sling, closed the last five inches and went at him with a knife, and in the frozen brine the two of them fouled each other so completely that neither one landed anything at all. She could not hold him and he could not get away.
Up in the rubble of the flue, Plumb Line's commando had the marksman dead in his sights at fourteen inches, in the open, the one round of the day ALDER was ever going to be an unscreened target. His rifle dry fired on the opening shot of the burst and cost him the rest of it, and he spent the remainder of his time clearing the breech.
Their medic threw smoke to cork the middle and threw it badly. The canister went wide, a stride west of the point he called, and corked the middle anyway, blinding the marksman's lane to the drum by luck rather than by arithmetic. It also settled squarely across the firing line his own second infiltrator was about to use. TALLOW had the marksman at seventeen inches, unaware, from concealment, and could not take the shot because his own side's cloud was in the way. The two rounds he did not fire would have been a flesh wound and a mortal wound. Plumb Line's smoke saved The Long Count's sniper.
The second round was the one both sides played well. Plumb Line's medic moved into the middle and put his last canister exactly where he wanted it, and every line ALDER owned went dead at once: the drum, the flue, the northern corridor, all of it. The marksman spent the round standing still in the cold holding an aim he could not release.
VELA went back in on the carrier and this time she won the exchange cleanly, got him down, and the knife skidded off his plate carrier without opening him. He was pinned in contact and he had one action left in him. He used it, got up, and walked three inches north. Then The Long Count's own medic put smoke over the middle to save VELA from the commando in the flue, and that cloud covered the enemy carrier too, and for one round the most valuable object on the table was invisible to everybody including the people who wanted it.
By the top of the third round the smoke had lifted and the geometry was as clean as it was ever going to be. NOCK stood in the open carrying, one wound off the end of his track, two and nine tenths of an inch short of his own line. ALDER had won the throw for the first time all day, had two actions, and had been holding a braced aim since the first round that ignored cover entirely. At that range, on that target, he was hitting on a two.
He fired and the rifle did not. A dry round in a cold breech at four thousand six hundred metres, and no amount of anything in his pocket was allowed to touch it. He spent his second action working the bolt. Then the man with the drum took one step, walked the last three inches, and crossed his own line with the whole engagement still standing behind him.
Nobody was killed at El Candado. In three rounds, across thirty one dice, exactly one shot landed with any weight on it and it was not enough. Both medics finished the afternoon with nothing to do. Both commandos fired a combined total of two live rounds. The drum went north, and the wind kept coming across the saddle in the one direction it comes from.
Start with the dice, because they are the story and they are not close. Thirty one D6 on record across three rounds, sum 93, mean 3.00 against an expected 3.50. Ten natural ones, which is 32 percent of the pool against an expected 17, and three natural sixes. The face distribution was 1 ten times, 2 four times, 3 three times, 4 seven times, 5 four times, 6 three times. Both sides got mugged and both sides deserved better.
Now the part that matters for the rulebook. FOUR separate activations in this game were destroyed by a single natural 1, and in every case the Edge economy was forbidden from touching it. The canon line is that neither a plus 1 nor a reroll may be declared into a die already showing a natural 1, and the spend is refused rather than consumed. That is a good rule for melee, where it stops a token from buying a fight you lost. Bolted onto Rapid Fire it is something else. CANTLE's opening burst dry fired on the first die, which by the printed cascade cost him the shot, the second shot of the burst, and his second action to clear. One die, one whole Commando, and the token in his pocket was not allowed to look at it. He did the same thing again in round two on a Hide. ALDER lost the game to the identical interaction on a two plus.
The turn it swung is not the turn you would guess. It swung in round one, at the moment WICKET's smoke missed. That cloud scattered a single inch west, corked the middle by accident and saved the enemy Marksman from a flesh wound and a mortal wound that his own side had no way to see coming. Plumb Line's medic did more for The Long Count in round one than The Long Count's medic managed all game. If those two silenced rounds land, ALDER is on the mortal track by the end of round one and the third round never happens.
Balance read on Smash & Grab: the scenario is a tempo race dressed as a firefight, and the carrier's minus 2 MOBI is not the brake the text thinks it is. A carrier who starts within seven inches of his own strip is two activations from home even at MOBI 5, and nothing in the rules interrupts a Move. There is no reaction, no overwatch, no interception. Once the drum is up, the only things that stop it are a Lock, a Pin, or removal, and two of those three require you to be standing next to it already. The Long Count did the correct thing every single round and still had exactly two mechanisms with which to stop the walk.
The Ghost and Interact nerf, though, holds up completely. The book patched it after a game two that ended in round three because a stealthed infiltrator picked up the objective and walked out invisible. This list was built to attack that patch with two infiltrators, and the patch did its job: NOCK lifted the drum, became visible on the spot, and immediately ate a mortal wound from six inches. He won anyway, but he won as a man standing in the open getting shot at, which is what the fix was for.