Episode Three: The Exceedingly Tiny Job

3 Bezos 289 (late July 2366)

The team gets a call from Night: there’s a client meeting in The Spire. Anyone attending needs Spire access IDs and appropriate makeovers. Starscream hooks Paragon up with an outfit, and picks out her least girly (still pretty girly) outfit for Vir. The stuff’s totally out of style – nearly four months – but it’ll do for a client meet. Paragon whips up transient IDs based off Starscream’s old one and the temp badges they got for the Spiderman Job, while Carbide orders from a shop in The Spire and pays the outrageous delivery surcharge.

The meet is at Café Hoàn Kiếm, 48th floor, lakeside. The waiter – a nonbinary part-Vulcan of exceptional beauty – recommends the egg coffee and chocolate truffles; the Vietnamese cocoa brownies and ice cream are also excellent. Starscream orders the coffee and discreetly offers up the truffles so as not to overload her colostomy bag innards.

The client is Lachlan Waring, a sculptor, who was pointed at the team by Chance. He’s looking around nervously all the time. Waring’s husband, Arik Moneaux, is a scientist who’s been working on medical nanites. His design lab (MureNano) just got bought out by a miltech firm (Bondareko Amalgamated Defense Industries), and he’s been re-tasked on developing them as an antipersonnel weapon. Worse, Netwatch has ruled his tech can be the basis for an untraceable distributed AI. Netwatch will kill him and burn the firm if he stays and the tech goes into development, and the corp will hunt him down if he goes.

He’ll pay NB10k for:

1. bulletproof fake IDs (physical and net),
2. biosculpt makeovers (facial, retinal, gait, general shape),
3. a new corp job for Arik, and
4. relocation out of the Spire.
5. (or, 3k for items 1, 2, and 4)

The team checks out their surroundings, and all seems safe, though the waiter is paying quite a bit of polite attention to them. Only Vir notices their brush-pass, and misinterprets it, excusing themselves to head to the bathroom – but no one approaches them. To shake the waiter, Starscream orders an insanely complicated and expensive cocktail, and then returns it once it's delivered.

The team asks questions: Starscream wonders how far they’re willing to move, and if they’re actually ready to give up their old lives entirely. Carbide notes that a plan will have to be built around not confronting Bondarenko security head-on. Starscream suggests a concert in Koto City, a fatal encounter afterwards – apparently she’s been catching up on her classic comic book origin stories. She suggests a bomb, which, given her own origin story, is a bit distressing. Waring starts looking a little green as the team considers sourcing for corpses to swap out.

The team agrees to take the job. Paragon and Carbide can’t get back to Old Dome fast enough, but Starscream takes Vir window shopping, on their first time in The Spire. They buy a small amount of real gourmet cheese, and Starscream picks out a more appropriate and less femme outfit for Vir, who changes into it in the shop, carrying around the teen-idol outfit in the shopping bag.

Starscream gets a call from Friction, inviting her to a gallery opening in The Spire – she has some news to pass on. At the gallery, Arcadia 15, much awkwardness ensues as Friction tries to chat up Vir. Vir wanders off to look at art, and Friction catches Starscream up on things: she fed the story of The Vial Job to a radical blogger, Dr. Goodbytes, and it went viral. Bai-St. Pierre wasn’t mentioned in the story, which was that a 4I team Robin Hooded anti-radiation meds that were being hoarded by management. The 4I Secretariat disavowed knowledge, but Night claimed responsibility and gave a scathing quote about the Secretariat’s cluelessness.

Friction then followed up with a PR agent for Bai-St. Pierre, and suggested they get out ahead of the story by throwing a charity fundraiser for the poor workers who’ve been denied their powerful lifesaving drugs. They bought it, so expect Harb Bai to contact Starcscream about a gig shortly. Friction wrangled an invite, convincing the agent that her angle was making contacts for her modeling career, so she’ll be on site for backup. Starscream thanked her and gave her the bag of clothes as a treat.

The team met back up later that night at The Asylum, where Dr. Goodbytes was DJ’ing. She sent over a round of drinks and introduced herself to the team. Plotting then ensued. The team decided to build a bomb that would be linked to a rival miltech firm, LTC Defense. They decided to do a test run to see if Moneaux would be allowed to leave The Spire: have him go to a specialty shop in Koto City to buy a present for Waring. If he wouldn’t be allowed out, they’d need a Plan B.

After seriously considering setting Moneaux up as a rural doctor, Night thought of Chance’s “hometown,” the Myatna-Nyseth Drift Arcology: a civilized science/engineering town on the open ocean, accessible only by shuttlecraft. Paragon did some digging and found that a startup pollution-abatement firm, TreeHouse, was actually looking for a nanotech engineer – and they weren’t too picky about the provenance of anyone with the right skills. Some minor forgery established a new name and ID for Moneaux, and Treehouse snapped him up, paying Paragon a 20% commission on a two-year contract.

Night managed to source a detonator and some bomb-casing scrap metal from an LTC product for Carbide. His first attempt to replicate the case materials didn’t pan out to his satisfaction, so he just bought some of the actual metal, and build a convincing bomb. Moneaux was allowed out, but with bodyguards.

Starscream got herself booked into one of the trashier hot clubs in Koto City, with flyers circulating about a whisper show. Friction suggested package tours for rich folks in The Spire – a nice safe bus tour, an experience of a real live edgy neighborhood, a concert by a beloved teen idol making a comeback…. A flier got to Moneaux, who went to Bondarenko security to pitch it. It turned out that the head of security himself, Yandarian Karpayev, is a Starscream fan, and volunteered to be half of the security detail.

Starscream hired Carbide on as her security for the night, along with an impossibly pretty and imposing contractor. They worked with club security and Bondarenko to go over the site to everyone’s satisfaction – though Starscream paid off the bodyguard to swap out a robotic ice cream truck with one packed with corpses and the bomb.

After the show, the couple got into their car, but as Bondarenko security was about to follow, the Napalm Freaks attacked! Night had hired them to put a scare into the marks, but not kill anybody, and impressed it upon them enough that they listened. As the Bondarenko guards turned to check out the disturbance, Vir smuggled the couple out the other side of the car as the ice cream truck rolled past and exploded. Their timing was off, and the bomb nearly killed both Bondarenko guards, seriously injured the couple, and did a bit of damage to Vir past their armor. Nonetheless, the extraction worked.

Vir performed surgery on the couple to match their new IDs and to beat biometric recognition, though it wasn’t a foolproof job (hey, they’re new at this!). The couple then booked a shuttle to the Drift Arcology and went off to their new lives.

Night fed Dr. Goodbytes a story that the bomb had been identified as an LTC product, and Goodbytes promptly went with a conspiracy theory that it was a targeted hit against a corporate rival, and not part of the gang chaos. As Starscream did a massive media engagement herself over the incident, the conspiracy story also went viral. Starscream set up a GoFundMe for the victims, did interviews recalling her own tragic bombing, went to visit some young and cute shrapnel victims in the hospital, and released a charity single. Karpaev, not an attendee, still got flowers and an autographed single.

In an unexpected development, Netwatch took credit for the bombing. That day, the team all got NB100 gift certificates to Café Hoàn Kiếm – apparently the waiter was a Netwatch agent, and wanted them to know they’d attracted the agency’s attention. Starscream had a good laugh about the agent following around the bag of clothes Vir had been wearing – but she took a copy of her new CD to the café to pass on to the waiter – who of course wasn’t working there anymore.