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.

We grab Overclock and Speech’s unconscious bodies and get out of the spaceport as quickly as possible. We see that a crowd of people have gathered, curious about the commotion. In the confusion we are able to get through unnoticed. We return to the ship and stow the prisoners in an extra bunk and bind them up. Stitch enacts a wireless jammer that will stop any communications that the hackers attempt. We remove the gear they carry including a Predator IV, a backpack server box and a 5,000 nuyen credstick.

Eve sees that we have received a communication from Bengal; he says that we should not come back to Venus but meet him at a safehouse of his on Mars. We start our trip towards Mars.

En route we begin interrogating Speech. He is not very helpul but says that Overclock was ordered to spread the Shitstorm virus by someone named “Zilch.” Eve and Raptor are frustrated with him and decide that they are going to blow him out the airlock. They tell him that they are going to let him go, and lead him to the airlock.

Once there he begins begging not to be tossed out, though the party is less than sympathetic. They taunt him for quite a long while. Cam comes around, and asks again why we have such a mad-on for the hacker. Eve and Raptor remind him that he was the one who we captured a few weeks earlier and let go, on the promise that he disappear. He later betrayed us to Overclock and we found him running with her. Upon hearing this, Cam becomes angry and opens the airlock. He shoots Speech once in each kneecap, slams the door and punches the button, shooting him out into space. Everyone else is stunned.

We come to Mars and land, meeting Bengal at his safehouse. We turn over Overclock and all her gear and server. Bengal says that we will get an extra tip for bringing in the server, so he gives us 60,000 nuyen. He says that we are welcome to stay for a while if we’d like. The party decides to go shopping while we are staying on Mars. Some weapons, tools and supplies are purchased.

Later we see a news feed that says there is an illegal xeno-zoo on Mars that had several creatures escape. It looks like the bounty for a live male is 30,000 and for the only female it is over 100,000 nuyen. The creatures are called “Savannah Sharks” and are 9 feet in height, resembling velociraptors. The most recent sighting is a farm off to the east.

We go to the farm on a borrowed ATV and see an obvious path of destruction. There are several news agencies here and other hunters on ATV’s. We follow the path but lose the tracks after it goes into the river. We follow the river to the east to see what else we can find.

Kino calls Eve and says that Speech has skipped town with some chick to St. Gregory’s, which is on the other side of Pallas from St. Martinsburg. We suspect that the “chick” is in fact Overclock herself. We decide to head back to the ship and abandon our current effort of chasing the RFID tag.

While back at the ship we take inventory of what we need to bring or get in order to head off Overclock in St. Gregory. We decide to send Stitch to watch ClimaStat in case she heads back there.

We do a search on Yusuf’s people in the area of St. Gregory, and come up with Quantum, another hacker who has supposedly gone legit. He now works in a hardware customization shop with a couple of other guys. There is seemingly no other chatter about him for the past few months. The other is named Twilight; we cannot find out too much about her except she has been more active in the last few months.

We decide to contact Twilight and ask for her help or hire her. She returns our email a short while later and asks if we will need her in town and how much we will be paying. Eve says that we should meet to discuss the terms.

Shortly after, we come to Twilight’s place and meet her in person. We explain that we are looking for a heavy amount of traffic in the area coming from a spammer program called Shitstorm. We explain that Overclock has been operating in the area and we just flushed her back to St. Greg’s from her previous digs. Twilight says that if she is getting mixed up with the corps, potentially, she won’t do anything for less than 10 grand. Eve says that we will speak to our employers about the cash.

Eve emails Yusuf and he responds moments later. He has a key that we can give Twilight that will help her system ignore the incoming spam. This may be valuable to her. Bengal is contacted as well and responds with 5,000 extra nuyen.

Twilight accepts the offer and does an extensive search on Overclock. She finds that the other hacker has gone to the spaceport on the other end of town. She apparently hasn’t left yet so she’s probably waiting for someone.

We leave quickly for the spaceport using the van. About 3 minutes out, we get a message from Twilight showing a video feed of 4 men in three-piece suits trapped in a back room. Apparently we are not the only ones who want Overclock; she has apparently sequestered them in there.

We come into the spaceport with smaller weapons and walk casually through the corridor. We come to the room where the armed men are and Twilight lets them out. They tell us to pass them by as they have no quarrel with us.

The party goes to the next door where Overclock is, and Raptor attempts to set a charge to blow it open. The four men see him doing it and yell “Hey!” and move to attack. All three of us turn tail and run. The men take cover. Raptor clicks the detonator but nothing happens.

Raptor says that Overclock must be jamming his signal. Eve steps up and fires her Stick ‘n’ Shock at it, and it detonates, blowing the door off of its hinges. Eve quickly dashes into the room before the men can take a shot and sees Overclock and Speech. Cam takes a shot at one of the men in suits, and a full-on battle begins.

Raptor goes down after being shot, and Cam runs to him and grabs 2 of his high explosive grenades. Eve shoots Overclock and Speech. The men come towards the room and say that the girl is going with them. Eve disagrees and shoots one of them.

Cam tosses the two grenades towards the guys and they are both luckily close to the mark. They explode, killing two of the guys but the third is still clinging to life. Eve peeks around the corner and shoots him.

Cam revives Raptor and he asks what happened. Cam says that there is still one guy unaccounted for in one of the rooms. Raptor goes over to see what is going on; apparently Twilight has deactivated his guns and cybereyes. Raptor sneaks in and puts a grenade in his pants and blows him to bits.

We bind up Overclock and haul her and the rest of the corpses out of there.

Eve suggests that we do a net search for the hacker since she has as of yet been elusive. We may try looking for other friends or perhaps family members.

In order to make this easier, we decide to purchase some programs and a new operating system for Cam’s comlink. We also purchase new operating system with better firewalls to protect us from the hacker’s attacks.

Cam searches and finds 12 names of active hackers. 7 of them are in a local social network, and 2 are in some other group together. The others are scattered, and two are no longer on Pallas. None of these seem to be directly associated with Overclock. The closest one is a guy named De-Sequence in a local neighborhood.

We drive to De-Sequence’s apartment and see some security measures in place. We all get out and Eve uses her auto-lock picker to get in the front door, and then into his apartment. We surprise De-Sequence and his two friends; they raise their hands in terror and we start asking them questions. De-Sequence says that Overclock is a female, about 5 foot 2, blonde, with glasses. He shows us a photo from a recording he took at the coffee shop of her.

After we leave, Stitch gives Cam the video he took of the business that was being used as a piggyback for the spamming endeavor. Cam searches for an image of Overclock, but he can’t find her in the footage.

Q-bit is the next closest hacker we can find. We go to his apartment, which is a small 6-unit affair. Eve again tries to break in using her auto-picker. The lights are off here, and Q-bit is apparently in bed. Eve and Raptor sneak into his bedroom and crawl into bed with him, one on each side. He is shocked to find them in bed with him, but begins answering questions nonetheless. He says that Overclock is kind of a loner, doing her own thing, and that her real name is Yvonne DuChien. He has a yearbook with her in it, as well.

Cam does a search on her name, though 18 months ago after she left school it pretty much goes cold. Cam surmises that she must be using fake SINs since then.

It is decided that we should visit her apartment again to see if she has returned. We surveil the are for quite a long time. It appears that no security team in the area has been alerted since our visit. Cam notices that the turret that was against one of the windows is now gone. He tells the rest of the group that someone has been in the room since we were last there, but it looks like there is no one now.

Before leaving the scene, we decide to take a look in the apartment to see if there is anything else of use there. Eve sneaks in and sees that the turrets have been deactivated and some other things are missing. The place has pretty much been cleared and she is obviously not coming back.

The group goes back to the ship to reload and change clothes for a few minutes before going back on the search.

Cam searches for “Speech,” the handle of the guy we previously interrogated who has been an acquaintance of Overclock’s. It comes back as a kid named Steven who is a grad student at a nearby university.

Eve and Raptor go to a nearby diner across the street from a store she might visit to get more electronics. Stitch watches the back of the store to see if she is going in there. Cam is parked in the van a few doors down.

Stitch sees a van in the alley behind the shop; a man is loading some boxes into it. Cam runs the plates and it comes up as a sales associate for the shop’s personal vehicle. Stitch comes down from the roof and breaks into the van, planting an RFID tag in the box the man was loading. It appears to have a server box in it, which is possibly promising.

Presently the store opens up. Eve walks in and takes a look around. She does not see anything out of the ordinary and decides not to create any waves, so she leaves. We will follow up if the RFID tag moves.

We decide to track down Speech, who lives in a house full of computer geeks. A stoner lets Eve in and offer her breakfast, but he says that Speech hasn’t been back yet this morning. Eve asks if he can give her his number, and he agrees. He seems interested in “studying” with her.

We leave and go back to near the shop, waiting for the RFID tag to move. The van finally moves and we follow him to a spot in an alley a few blocks away from the spaceport. Stitch goes up on a nearby roof and takes a sniper position. A car comes up from the other side of the alley to meet it.

Cam swings the van around the block behind where the car came in, and Eve jumps out and turns herself completely black. A young latino gets out of the car to meet the guy in the truck. We let the exchange happen and pick up our people. We follow the car using the RFID scanner.

The latino goes to the other side of town to an apartment building and parks inside a parking garage. He takes the package up to a third story apartment. We decide to watch the building and see what happens.