Cam uses the ship’s equipment to determine that the metal we found is Ozmium, an extremely dense metal. We have 12 slabs at 300 kilograms each. At 1/4 nuyen per gram, this is likely worth about 900,000 nuyen. Stitch calls one of his contacts, Fess Higgins (on Mars), and he says that he may be able to sell it more easily if it were cut. Higgins would be interested in 3 of the slabs at 72,000 nuyen apiece. We decide to try some of our other contacts to sell them as well. Bengal is offering us 62,000 per slab, and he would buy 4. Bryce Tebbe would buy 1 at 65,000. Erich Schichammer would buy up to 3 for 70,000.

First we will go to Vesta to meet Fess, then Earth to hawk the paintings, the Moon to see Bengal, then Ceres to meet Bryce Tebbe.

We get to Earth and start negotiations with Eve’s buyer, Rina, at an art gallery. The offer needs to go back to “the brass” for a decision, so Eve invites Rina out for dinner in the meantime. Stitch goes along to dinner; Raptor stays with the paintings at the art gallery and the others stay on the ship.

They seem to be making a good impression on Rina, but Stitch notices that someone at the bar has been checking them out. Cam does a search on her likeness but finds nothing. She walks out of the bar soon after, so Cam, Rex and Canti head down to the bar. It takes them about 20 minutes to get there. After searching for a while they don’t see anything.

The evening with Rina ends, and she lets us know that the buy was approved. Eve opts to meet the director of the museum this evening and get the money right away. We get 250,000 nuyen for the paintings.

Eve talks to her doctor, also on Earth, and asks about buying the “creepy” vials that we found on the sub. She says that she will be able to send them out to a lab for analysis. The group lets her know about the possible danger of the vials.

By the time we are done with these runs, it is the end of November. We go to see Yusuf and Eve has lots of sex with him. He can’t seem to find any info on the Artemis guild that is apparently stalking us.

We go to Ceres and sell the last of the Ozmium. From our hauls we get 100,000 nuyen apiece.

Cam lets the others know that he has a lead on a possible job. His friend Kerza Brokk, a parts dealer on Vesta, sent him a message saying that her cousin and her fiancee are lost in the Kuiper Belt. Her cousin’s father is a wealthy individual who works for an aeronautics corporation on Earth. Unfortunately he has already hired several people who either did not follow up with the job or got lost in the process.

We speak with the man and he offers us 250,000 nuyen in equipment from their company plus 100,000 for expenses and extra cash. We start to determine how much it will cost to fit the ship for the conditions and also to buy the equipment we’ll need for the mission. We price out space suits, weatherproofing the ship, modding our weapons and other equipment. The total is about 205,000 nuyen + 16,000 for the ship + 92,700 for upgrading Canti’s drones.

The wasp clearing efforts continue; Cam starts up the bilge pumps to get some of the drenched bees out and Raptor and the robot help to move them towards the drains. The group then goes to the cargo hold to see what is there. There are 6 crates in here. The plans are off-colored seaweed with small flowers. Cam takes a look at them and thinks that they are terrestrial plants that have been colonized by other solar life. They must be providing chlorophyll for the other plants so they do not need sunlight; some kind of symbiotic relationship. In another there are large metal slabs. The next one has a bunch of paintings. The last one has cultured bioware that was to be delivered to a corporation. Man-bot helps take the cargo to our sub.

Rex goes astral into the control room and sees two disgusting corpses and almost vomits. Raptor walks through the other rooms and finds nothing else. The engine room looks heavily broken. The logs say that the crew tried to recover from the hack and reboot the system and regain control, but screwed themselves in the process.

Cam tries to figure out how he could make the sub float again but it seems hopeless as the ballast tanks are certainly leaking. Eve notes that we might have better luck if we sell the salvage rights to someone else who has the means to raise the sub. Raptor grabs the nearest tool he can find for Cam and returns to the ship. Eve looks for any IDs or other personal effects that she might find.

We head back to the sub rental place but the proprieter is not there. Instead there is a mafioso and his thugs who try to shake us down. Raptor charges into the room and shoots the leader and we start popping his buddies. After taking them out we drag the bodies onto the sub and take off. We shut off any non-essential systems so we are camouflaging our signal.

From the corpses we take 4 Zoa Executive Armored Clothing and 1/2 Suit Form-Fitting Armor. 3 Optimum 2 assault rifles, a modified Ceramic Natama Namax pistol (rating 2). Also a credstick with $1500 on it.

We find the other vessel again and put the dead guys on the other sub and made it look like they killed one another. We then return to the rental place and Rex checks it to see that no one is there. Unfortunately it has been ransacked and the money that we put down on the sub is long gone. We scuttle the sub and take the mule, the scrubber drone (from the sub dock) and the loot and head back to the ship.

As we are heading through town on the mule we see a traffic camera that seems to be following our position. We can’t do anything about it so we head onto the ship as soon as possible and leave orbit. We head to Ganymede to talk with Aparna and see if we can find any leads on the group that tried to shake us down. She offers us medical help as well as food and supplies. We give her some weapons for the resistance’s use.

Back on the ship we decide to check on the last of the crates that we hadn’t opened, and Raptor sees small spores coming out. To stop them from spreading, Eve grabs a blowtorch and burns it off of him.

We stay on Ganymede for a while to lay low.

Eve goes down to the mines with Erwin but there is a lot of security, so they decide to do some recon. Rex helps by going astral to scout things out. Canti contacts a hacker who may be able to cut their communications. Ultimately it is decided that it is too much of a risk to break in as we would have to shoot our way in and out.

Another interesting gig is a stranded sub stuck under the ice of Europa with precious metals, biotech and genetically modified plants on board. There was a heist of 6 high class cruisers on Patroclus, put all of the loot in the sub on Europa and disappeared. Stitch’s contact thinks he knows the location of the submarine. Brandon goes astral to try and see the area but he cannot see much since there is no life in that place. Once he reached the sub he thought that he had found something, so the group decides to venture down.

Once the group has reached the sub in a smaller sub, Canti tips the larger sub on its side so the group can gain entry. When inside the group notices noxious fumes and beehives, and the party tries to defend against them with guns, nanomagic and drones. We back out as they start to overwhelm us but Rex, Raptor and the drone are still inside as the door to our sub is sealed. Canti turns on the sub’s sprinkler system which helps the effort.

It is three months later, October, and several of the group members have been busy on side jobs, getting equipment or cyberware, or just laying low. Stitch has been hanging around Chelle’s shop and has met a drone rigger who goes by Canti. He and his brother Rex seem to have some skills that might help us out.

Yusuf contacts us via email and says that he has heard of someone is looking for us. They are called the “Artemis Guild” and are deep underground. He forwards the chatter he came across and it seems to be enough to worry about.

We decide to head to Ceres to lay low a bit. Stitch is continuing to do jobs for his fixer, but the rest of us are kind of spinning our wheels since we don’t know where these Artemis folks are. We keep our eyes open for a few weeks but don’t see anything.

In November, Raptor gets an opportunity from his armorer. A weapons manufacturer called Dynatron is showing their wares to various potential buyers throughout the solar system. Sakura has a buyer lined up for some of their merchandise, so if we can acquire we will get a sale. Depending on where they are going to be we have several opportunities to intercept. We start researching this group.

A professor contact named Fess sends a message to Stitch, with an opportunity for a job harvesting ice cores from Ceres. Fess has a grant for 40,000 to research the ice. The mining company is giving him a hard time about access to the ice in the area and they may need our help to operate the machinery and get the cores without being caught, or bribing them. Stitch tries contacting his fixer to see if there is anyone else who can help. Erwin Patch is a contractor that doesn’t work directly for the mining company, who might be able to help. Eve finds out through a contact that the mining company is afraid that they are going to get hit with environmental regulations due to what they’ve hit in their mining efforts on Ceres. They may have hit some fossils according to the contact.

We head out to Erwin’s favorite watering hole to check him out. Eve starts hitting on him and he responds favorably. They go back to his place and she pumps him for info. He says that he works on a lot of the equipment. We decide to head down to the mines using his info.

The last person we need to find is known as “Wheels” who headed east from Albuquerque. His car is now stopped at the Texas/New Mexico border.

The group splits up; Cam and Raptor stay at the farm while Eve and Stitch go to get the ship. Cam hacks into the farm’s security system and is able to give himself an admin account so he can keep track of any activity here from remove locations.

The others pick Cam and Raptor up in the ship and then go to pursue Wheels. Upon our arrival, his car seems to be vacant; he has obviously abandoned it and gone hiking a few hours ago now. Eve decides that she is going to go hiking and pretend she is lost in order to perhaps get his attention. Stitch sets up a sniper blind on a nearby hill, and Cam is standing by with the ATV.

Eve approaches the car and sees a figure inside. She investigates more closely and sees that it is indeed Wheels, and he is dead. There are no obvious signs of a cause. She grabs a rock and smashes the window open.

At that moment she is fired upon by a stick-n-shock round but manages not to pass out. Stitch spies a man hidden up on a nearby hill and snipes him. Doc reports that his nanobots noticed another person in a position to the north. Cam takes off towards the position, but his tire is blown out by the sniper. Another shot takes him in the chest and he falls off of the ATV, unconscious.

Stitch finally sees the man and takes a shot at him, taking him out. A third man is seen on a hill to the east and Stitch fires on him as well, killing him. Doc and Stitch rush to assist Cam. He is brought back to consciousness and jumps in Doc’s car.

Another sniper round takes out one of the tires on Doc’s car, and Stitch frantically looks for the other man. He sees him to the east, and tries to shoot him from underneath the car. Cam grabs his gun and tries to do the same, managing to take him out. Doc reports that there are no further life signs in the area.

We check Wheels, and it looks like he was killed by having his brain fried. The snipers are also checked and they have no insignias or ID on them; these are ghosts. We collect the bodies and their equipment (Ranger-Arms sniper rifles and thermally sealed camo armor on each).

We pack everything in and take the bodies to Eve’s doc friend. She appraises the tech on all of the bodies and helps us find body matches for us. El Buscador should be able to pin our previous activities on these people for us now.

Afterwards we meet with El Buscador and negotiate for our payment. We discuss the situation with Chelle, since she needs to be cleared of the terrorist charges as well. We decide to try and change the record in the database of her DNA so it does not match her. We also let El Buscador know what has happened. We mention that there was another mole on the terrorist team who was working for the other side of the Cold War. He says that we should watch the evening news to ascertain that he is keeping his word on the deal. That night we do hear on the news that these terrorists have been linked with our previous activities. Eve realizes that El Buscador’s plan was to do a power grab in the Jovian system with their Elysian Counter-Terror unit.

Eve contacts Aparna on the telecom and lets her know that Chelle has been cleared of all charges. Aparna thanks us and says that she is currently working on Ceres as a ship mechanic.

We then take care of our other assets (the cars & abandoned ships). We are able to “grease the wheels” by paying off a DMV employee for 5000 nuyen, and then we sell each for 20,000.

After that is taken care of, we decide to travel to Mercury to get some R&R and lay low for a while.

Our next target is “Doormaker” in Colorado Springs. It is an hour’s drive away, and we take the van and the two cars. We follow the signal to an apartment complex with several units.

Eve and Raptor go to the complex office, posing as police officers. They are able to get a security feed from the rooms and find the person we’re looking for.

Stitch scopes the room and sees two heat signatures. Eve and Raptor go to the room and Eve picks the lock. They run in and ambush the two occupants of the room. Two flash-bangs and a few stick-n-shock’s later, one of them is dead and the other unconscious. They grab some of the personal effects in the room and carry that and the his body (leaving his friend) back to the van. Raptor decides not to open Doormaker’s personal effects in case they are rigged.

We move on to Pueblo to an automated farm where “Bullethead” supposedly resides. We approach the area and a man scanning the grounds with binoculars is seen. Stitch takes a shot at him with his sniper rifle and nearly blows his head clean off. The automated farming equipment is still humming along, but no one else is here.

Cam brings the truck in and looks through the shed and other structures for tools. He spends a good hour picking through and taking tools and parts that may help with the ship. Eve opens the suitcase that Doormaker had and there are foam explosives and detonating caps in it. Raptor takes these for later use.

Leaving the two cars, we go back to the ship and travel to our next target in Utah. His name is “Sonic.” We take the ship about 15 miles ahead of him (we see that he is traveling 200 mph, so we only have a few minutes) and knock down a tree in the road. Stitch hides up in a tree with his sniper rifle and waits until he approaches.

Apparently he has noticed that something was up, so he slows down to 150 mph. Stitch takes his shot, hitting him in the head, and the car leaves the road. It turns over a few times and lands in the forest. We retrieve the carcass and leave the scene.

We assess the situation and see that 10 of the vehicles on locators are now moving due to the cardio alarms on the four we’ve already killed. We see that the nearest vehicle is only about a mile away, and it belongs to the man codenamed “Grumpy.” We cut him off at an intersection and take him out, quickly stashing the body in the van.

Continuing on, we get on the freeway to pursue “Lucky Day” and “Tails.” We decide to pass Lucky Day and go after Tails first, then wait for Lucky Day to catch up to us. Coming behind tails, Doc tries to zap her car with a magical lightning bolt. This doesn’t stop the car so Stitch tries firing with his sniper rifle. He takes out a rear tire and she manages to control the car to get to the side of the road. We stop as well and Eve steps out, asking if she needs any help. Tails says “no thanks,” and when she turns to get the tire Eve strikes her. She throws her in the trunk and slits her throat. Cam fixes the tire and Eve jumps in the driver’s seat.

We see that Lucky Day is coming, so Stitch sets up with his sniper rifle at the side of the road. As she approaches, he takes a shot through her windshield and takes her out. The car is continuing on the road by itself, so Stitch is forced to take out one of the tires. We get the car over to the side of the road and fix the tire.

Moving on again, we see that “Sonic” is moving quickly towards Cheyenne. We go as fast as possible on the freeway to pursue. The car stops on our radar, and we see that it is parked in front of a townhouse. We stop and Doc tries using nano-astral to search the area, and finds a group of 15 people in one of the houses. One person, very angry, seems to be addressing them. There are 18 or so people total in the townhouse.

We decide to raid the townhouse, taking positions on all sides. Stitch blows one of the windows with his sniper rifle, but finds that there is impenetrable material behind it. Flood lights come on and a loudspeaker announces that we are under arrest and not to move. Raptor blows three grenades on the front door, destroying the porch, but the door is not destroyed. The person over the loudspeaker says that if we will give them any information we have, they will not have us killed. We decide to bail and jump in the vehicles, speeding away in different directions.

Reconvening, we find our next closest target is Crasher. Her car is coming into Steamboat Springs. We find her car at a nearby apartment building and we have Raptor go up to find her. He finds three people in the room, Crasher and apparently her parents. Raptor fights and kills her, while her parents flee.

Our next target is “Brick Wall” in Vale. He is one of the bodyguards of the group. The apartment building he is in has many units, so we are not sure how to find him. Eve walks in and pulls the fire alarm. People come pouring out, but we still don’t see him. Doc uses his astral projection to search the building and sees one person with a lot of cyberware, on the third floor. Eve goes over and knocks on the door, but he doesn’t answer. She hears him loading a gun.

Eve picks the back door of the apartment, and rushes in as Raptor is crashing through the window to attack him. After a moment he is dropped and we pull him out.

We travel to the other spaceport where the second “Z” cell member stores his ship. We try the same scheme where Eve lifts the keys off of a guard. She manages to do so but the guard seems to notice that something has happened. Raptor bumps into him roughly at that moment and knocks him off balance. Eve passes the key to Cam and he goes into the dock. After a moment he finds the ship and seems to be able to disable it. Mission accomplished, we leave the spaceport.

Afterwards we discuss our next move with regard to the cell members. We decide to split up and have Eve and Stitch do surveillance on all of the cell members to determine their daily patterns. Eve and Stitch drive around to each area to ascertain what the security measures are at each place. Unfortunately it looks like most of them have at least some security, though some are worse than others.

We reconvene and (using the call schedule) decide the correct timing to attack them to give ourselves the most amount of time before we are caught, and also come to the conclusion that we should all go to each of the locations together to be as effective as possible.

At “Rock’s” we see him through the window and Stitch takes two shots with his sniper rifle. The foe felled, Raptor goes over to take a body part so we have DNA evidence. Once he zip-lines over, he hears Rock’s corpse is beeping. Quickly he slices off the corpse’s hand and pitches him out of the window. It explodes violently in midair. We quickly leave the scene, realizing that this must have alerted the other cell members.

We quickly go to Roll’s apartment building and Raptor, Stitch and Eve rappell up to Roll’s window. Doc says that his nanobots detect 3 figures inside, and the others begin firing though they don’t have much of a solution. The cell members inside fire back, one with a nano attack. Our group members continue into the building through the broken window and engage in a full attack. After a few moments two of the enemies are felled, after which no beeping is detected. Doc sees astrally that the third person is still up, but the others don’t see him — he must be invisible.

Suddenly all three of them feel an invisible nano attack from the hidden nano mage. They attack and manage to disable him as well. Afterwards, identifying the bodies, we have gotten Roll and also Knuckles and Cookie.

Several of us go to see a friend of Eve’s on Earth; her name is Marsia Arseievna, a doctor. Raptor goes in for surgery to make himself less “tweaky” and other procedures are performed. We also unload the corpses that we had in cold storage. It turns out that we had quite a few.

Meanwhile, Cam receives a letter from someone calling himself “El Buscador,” which translates to either “The Prospector” or “The Searcher.” He claims to have knowledge of some of our previous exploits, including our efforts on Ganymede. He says that unless we assist him with a matter, he will reveal our involvement in the Ganymede incident to the military. The party decides that they will play along until we can find out who this person is and how they found out about our involvement.

Before we leave we contact Yusuf and ask him to check on this guy before we show up. We meet with him briefly and Eve explains what we’d like him to do during the meeting. Yusuf will surveil the meeting but not too overtly. He tells us that the signal is most likely coming from Spain, and the node we will meet him at is on the Moon.

We message him and accept the meeting, and he seems pleased. He gives us the exact location of the meet and a passcode for air travel in the area.

We arrive at El Buscador’s villa and he comes to the door to greet us trailed by bodyguards. He is a well-groomed Spanish man and welcomes us warmly, seeming to know most of our names. He takes no notice that we are heavily armed. He invites us in, but Cam remarks that the meeting is very pleasant considering it started with a blackmail letter. El Buscador responds that he is trying to make a deal that is mutually beneficial.

He takes us into a formal living room and introduces a man he calls Doc. El Buscador says that he is an Alysian counter-terrorism specialist who has been concerned with a group named Zarathustra which has been causing panic throughout the solar system. The party recoils a bit at the mention of the Alysian as they were in charge of the base we attacked; however El Buscador assures us that we are not the target of their interests. He says that they have a double agent in the cell already (“Bolts” the mechanic), and we are to infiltrate and replace them.

There are 14 people total in the cell. They do a round-robin style check-in during the day to make sure that everyone is still operating. If they find out that something is going on, their protocol is that everyone should leave town. However Bolt has planted RFID tags in all of the group vehicles if they try to flee. We should not cross paths with Bolt during the operation but to be careful if we do. Also some of the cell members have bio-monitors to notify others in the chain in case they die. All 14 need to be eliminated and this needs to be verified by Doc as he has a DNA register. One of the two co-leaders of the group may be a nano mage.

They are planning on attacking a hospital in Italy in 10 days, and we must intercept and eliminate them before this happens. They are currently residing in Denver. We agree to take the job.

As we leave, Eve contacts an Earth politician she knows and fills him in on the situation. She tells him about the job and lets him know that if we don’t contact him within 14 days, that we have been eliminated and that he should make El Buscador’s life hell in some way or another for us. He agrees.

We decide to head to the spaceport first to take out their ships so they cannot escape. Eve will go in first to distract the guards, and Cam will sneak in behind to disable the ship. Eve manages to distract them and get the key to the area where the ships are held.

Cam slips in and goes to the ship, but a security system goes off with a warning. He figures he has 1 minute to try and do something before the owner is notified. He manages to pull a few wires that will prevent the ship from leaving orbit. After this he books out of there.

After some searching, Stitch sees some tracks on the other side of the river we are following. It is decided to try and cross the river. Raptor tries to swim across to tie up the winch to a tree, but gets caught up in the line and we have to fish him out. Stitch swims across and ties up the winch; Cam activates the winch and pulls the ATV across.

Once across we pick up the trail and it seems to be still following the direction we are going. We continue on. After a while, we see off in the distance a smoke trail that seems to be coming towards us. We decide to take a shot at them to disable their ATV. We stop and both Stitch and Raptor fire at them, taking out 2 of their tires. We continue on.

As we pass by the other ATV, we see that they have no large animal in toe but one of the people is wounded. Also, they appear to be coming back from where the tracks are. Obviously they were attacked by whatever it is we are chasing. We come over a hill and hear a loud bird-like noise. We jump off the ATV and ready our weapons.

As we come over another hill, we see the Savannah Shark coming towards us. Two of us have the super-squirt guns, Eve has the Stick-n-Shock, and Stitch has a sniper rifle. It runs at us and we manage to avoid its attacks and shoot it into submission.

Using the winch cord we tie it up and restrain its arms. We use plastic restraints to keep its jaw closed. As we are doing this we hear the sound of an engine. Stitch and Raptor draw weapons and skulk off to defend from a distance.

The men come up and say “That’s a mighty nice catch you got there.” Cam tries to distract them as the others draw a bead with weapons. The men raise their rifles and the party members start firing. A well-placed grenade kills most of them within the first few seconds, however. We loot their equipment and continue to bind up the creature.

Cam and Stitch decide to go and get the ship; they take the ATV back to Boozy’s and get the ship in only 1:35. They bring the ship and load up the shark and the two ATVs. We see that we can get 100 grand for the shark (it appears to be a female) at the local zoo.

The zoo sends a doctor to check the female and he says that she needs a lot of medical attention so they can only offer us 75 grand. We are able to negotiate for 85.

We head back to the ship and check the news feeds. 4 of the 6 animals have been trapped, so that leaves only 2 males (worth 30 grand or so alive). We take off in the ship and scout around. As we get nearer to Cydonia we see they have deployed people to protect the city in case one of the sharks gets near. We decide to do another sweep a few miles to the southeast. On our second pass we catch a glimse of him.

We land about a mile away and take out the ATV. We come up to him but he sees us and takes off running. We chase it for a few miles and Stitch manages to shoot him in the foot. We close much quicker now and come up along side him. We start firing and manage to take him down.

The shark is loaded up and Cam takes a look at its leg wound. He is able to patch him up pretty well. Cam then takes a look at possible buyers, disregarding the zoo keeper. The other potential buyers are a university professor and two rich folks. We decide to talk with the professor as it is a possibly better cause and a professor might be a good contact.

Eve contacts her and we go to meet the professor, Corrina Schneller, at the school’s nature preserve. She looks over the creature and is impressed at how Cam dressed the creature’s leg wound. She says that it is in very good shape and gives us the 35 grand. The creature will be in a good home. She gives us her card as well.

We return to Boozy and give him 4500 nuyen (a bit short of what we actually owe him) and return his ATV. We then buy some replacement parts to fix the second ATV, which will take Cam about a day to do. We take off from Boozy’s and head towards Earth for our next stop.