D&A Session 8 - The Long Way Around

*An escort mission goes exactly as planned; when you dangle live bait, expect only monsters...*

## Table Members

* ForteNoir as the MC
* SquashDemon as Jacopo Giuseppe Dux
* Kixandra as Akamai Reyes
* Dimin as Oliver Moorland
* Elgar as Antonio Cervantes
* RedAngelAlnet as CINO Ketaminé

## Session Summary

Some time after their capture op in Taiwan, the team is called into KoBar's briefing room for their next assignment; a dummy escort mission across the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert. After recent strikes on KoBar-secured caravans in key locations across the globe, the corporation has decided to stage multiple simultaneous transport ops while leaking their details in a controlled counterintelligence play. The team is told that they, alongside the other two caravans preparing to move, must maintain a fiction at all times that they are in possession of the true cargo, with no group knowing whether or not they are actually in possession of the 'artifact'.

As part of this fiction, the AFs presented to the team are forbidden from taking to the sky, as the true artifact interferes with the stable function of E-Krafts. Tony, Ollie, CINO, Dux, and Knight are quickly flown to Puerto Rico in order to intercept a civilian transport barge at sea and escort it to Dakkar on the west coast of Africa. Once onboard the barge, Knight determines that Kobar's 'artifact' is most likely another quantum communications terminal.

The three-day sea voyage is uneventful. Upon arrival in Dakar, Ollie and CINO oversee the loading of the artifact into a massive transcontinental maglev train while Dux, Knight, and Tony inspect their new AFs. Not long after leaving the outskirts of Dakkar, the train is attacked from the north by a massive, worm-like, sand-tunneling mobile weapon, which deploys over a dozen small sand-swimming drones to harass the team. From the south, a fleet of five large sand skiffs appears, which attempt to anchor onto the train in order to deploy sweeper teams. Ollie immediately recognizes them as the Red Eye Pirate Corps, and the team deploys to combat them.

Knight hacks the massive worm weapon and takes control of several of its drones, using them as impromptu platforms and crashing them into the drones still controlled by the worm. Ollie defends the train from incoming sweeper teams, and is pinned down by the sole team to make it aboard. Dux bombards the worm weapon while evading its drones, while Tony and CINO assault the skiffs and disable several of them before the Red Eyes deploy AFs of their own. The Red Eye assault team leader, Burnham, attempts to dissuade the group from further action, but is unnerved upon learning that the train's cargo belongs to KoBar. CINO bluffs him into retreating, and takes the opportunity to cripple Burnham's AF and claim him as a hostage. Knight and Dux destroy the second enemy AF while Ollie and Tony team up inside the train to handle the sweeper team. CINO leverages his 'asset' to force the Red Eyes to retreat, and the heavily-damaged train limps into the Cairo city limits with its cargo intact.

SWALLOW and CARDINAL arrive just in time to assault a Red Eye bombardment team on the outskirts of Cairo, and reward the team with a night out on the town and a proper four-and-a-half-star dinner. The team is then returned to New York. Ten days later, CARDINAL rouses them from their rest and declares that their next job is set to take place in Hawaii...