Mission Rogue Protocol Op: Silence the Speederway Giant

[Glade]

Rogue Protocol OP: Silence the Speederway Giant.
Planet: Echelon
District 25: Yellow District: a.k.a. the Yell-Away, Not-So-Mellow Yellow, the Everyman's District
Location: Speederway Y9812-25, Six Lane Dual Speederway (12 total)
Night, Clear Skies, Heavy Neon Wash

Keyrunner (Fixer): Clicker | Echo-ID: CK | Undervine Alias: CK117
Crew Status: Hanna | Saul Colsan | Glade | Ghostkey | Sickle | Chronicle | Ibis | Juju | Hound | Savant | Crash | Ciphera
OOC: Thread / Crew

Target: Board and take Overlight Energy Consortium's Tactical Armored Crawler, a repulsor giant in motion. 55 meters/180 feet of durasteel. Evade EchoSec (CorpSec) and secure the contents of its vault and the vehicle.

Black armored plating thundered down the speederway like a runaway city block, crossing two lanes, it drank in the neon haze and painted it back like it lived there. For a craft that size, the thing moved with uncanny speed, too fast for comfort, but slow enough to be caught by the brave or stupid. Inside, a dozen, maybe fifteen guards in corpo-black, setup ready to ruin someone's evening, and a prototype engine so rare that it had its own vault.

Yellow District towered around them, residential blocks well stacked until they vanished into shadow, holo-ads glowed across weathered billboards, street dens and everyday folk trying hard not to notice the wrong kinds of movement after midnight. Perfect place to disappear a crawler or die trying.

The Rogue Protocol hovertruck rattled in the slipstream of its wash, closing. Inside, a mixed deck of neon-ready runners and silent professionals checking gear, black jackets with augments and tats, flak jackets, or street-scrap armor patched with personal style. Some spoke. Some didn't and some…

Thump. Thump. Thump.
"Woooohooo!" Crash shouted, pounding on their truck wall like he wanted to challenge the crawler to a personal fistfight. The rookie vibrated with excess charge; someone once remarked he bounced off the ceilings more than the floor! Nøva

Lacing her durasteel-tipped boots, Sickle glanced up. Her neon-green hair spiked outward from a hooded scavers jacket, sleeves disappeared into rogue wiring, each signal an act of systemic defiance. "Careful Kid," she snorted, snapping a mag-lock shut tight on her custom thigh rig. "Keep broadcasting like that, and EchoSec'll tune in from the next district. Save ya hype for when we peel their tin can wide open."

On comms, their defacto Chiss lead Savant clinically cut through chatter: "Non-lethal if possible." Everyone knew that meant: Try. Everyone also knew that if things ran hot, killing corpo muscle was just another noisy day in the Yellow.

Up front in her pilot seat, visor lit bright with targeting data, Glade shook her hair free, slamming a stim back, senses focused. "Everyone 'bout ready ta burn?" Their two black speeders settled into forward and rear positions around the crawler, like hungry wolves bracing for a snack. The Rogue's hovertruck drifted upward in their blind spot.

Juju, looked over her slicing deck, jacked in and eyes glazing over. "Emergency frequencies jammed," she whispered, voice soft with that haunted edge. "Feels… wrong, though. Like something's listening anyway."

Chronicle checked his chronometer and clicked his shades down with precision. "Ten minutes," he set almost as ritual. "Prime mag boots and grapplers." A soft whirring noise confirmed it, magnets warming up and ready to bite corpo metal.

The side door slid open, wind screeching in. Ghostkey grinned at whoever caught his eye… like most streetrunners, too young, bright and eager to burn himself out. "A'ight Rogue's," he said, voice carried on back-alley bravado. "Let's print some mems in this neon." The kid stubbed out a cheap polyplast stick against the wall, tossed the ember into the night, then drew a sonic blaster that hummed hungry for a target.

Glade pulled back on the hover-yoke. The truck shifted higher, hovering level with the crawler's giant armored roof and its three hatches, front, mid, rear. That was the moment the crawler's systems probably realized they had company. Grappler lines whizzed out, magnetics snapping tight to moving metal. Clipping in for a safer landing. Some jumped. Ghostkey didn't just jump but launched out, goggles down, grin wide, a kid convinced he could grab the cityworld by the throat and demand it dance.

Speeders (NPC Locations)
Land Speeder 1 (Front): Ciphera | Hound
Land Speeder 2 (Rear): Savant | Ibis
Hovertruck (Side): Glade, Ghostkey, Sickle, Chronicle, Juju, Crash.

First Roll: Crawler's Reaction Time.
Second Roll: Speederway Traffic
Third Roll: Any Corpo Escorts
Low rolls always mean bad news.

 

[Hanna]

Location: Speederway Y9812-25, Yellow District - Echelon Prime
Mission Objective:

• Board and take Overlight Energy Consortium's Tactical Armored Crawler, a repulsor giant in motion. 55 meters/180 feet of durasteel.
• Evade EchoSec (CorpSec) and secure the contents of its vault and the vehicle.

Tag: Glade Saul Colsan

Hanna had been brought onto this particular job as something akin to a scout. She knew that her skills as a repulsorlift skater were the deciding factor which had seen her selected for this mission over the other candidates. The fact that she was quite comfortable ripping down a congested speederway at speeds rivaling that of a racing swoop while balanced on whisper-thin hum of repulsorlifts attached to her feet made her an ideal instrument for the task at hand. Not to mention, since she was smaller and more maneuverable than a speeder bike or a landspeeder, she was not strictly limited to the speederways. Her skates allowed her to slash down shadowed side streets, plunge into narrow sewer conduits, leapfrog from one rooftop to another, venture off-road over wild terrain, or even glide over bodies of water!

And yet, as much as Hanna felt in her element skating down the speederway at speeds that would have been suicidal for anyone else, this was not a job that she would have taken under normal circumstances. Over the last few months, she had been too late in accepting new contracts with the Mandalorian Empire in-time before they were taken up by other mercenaries. She was still a signatory to the Writ of Iron, but for now she was also taking jobs elsewhere.

With the costs of maintaining her armory skyrocketing in the wake of the Galactic Alliance’s collapse, Hanna needed work now. She could not afford to be picky, even if the job in question was criminal in nature.

And skating down a crowded speederway at over 400 kilometers per hour was most certainly criminal behavior.

“Traffic is getting heavier towards the overpass. It looks like rush hour.” Hanna called out over comms as she glided past the shuddering bulk of a speeder truck with mere inches to spare, before gracefully weaving around a sporty-looking landspeeder. “Is there any way we can lure the crawler down Exit S-88? I don’t see any more corporate escorts, but they might be setting up something further down the expressway.” She added.

“If we can take the crawler off its planned route, it might make it more difficult for their mission support to coordinate roadblocks or reinforcements.”

Spoiler: Loadout

• Sparkle Velocity
  
  • Gauntlets and Vambraces
    
    • Modular Weapon Mount (3) - R
      
      • IceJet Miniaturized CryoBan Projector
        
        • Ammunition
          
          • CryoBan Canister
      • NML-02VTB Nano Missile Launcher
        
        • Ammunition
          
          • Depleted Baradium-tipped Baradium Nano Missiles (12)
    • Modular Weapon Mount (3) - L
      
      • IceJet Miniaturized CryoBan Projector
        
        • Ammunition
          
          • CryoBan Canister
      • Repulsor Projector
• Glitter Roses (2)
  
  • Ammunition
    
    • Extended Magazine - Controlled-Penetration: Void Stone Treatment (2)
    • Standard Magazine - Standard Penetrator: Void Stone Treatment (4)
  • Attachments
    
    • 1-5x FAE/S-08 Electro-Sight
• FAE/MDE-01-S2 Semiautonomous Seeker Thermal Explosive (2)
• Infrared Smoke Grenade (2)

 

[GhostKey]

Location: Roof of the Crawler!
Crew Status: Hanna | Saul Colsan | Glade | Ghostkey | Sickle | Chronicle | Ibis | Juju | Hound | Savant | Crash | Ciphera

Hair plastered back against his cheeks, reacting faster than any of them would've liked, the massive crawler tried to accelerate. The surge nearly crushed the front speeder boxing it in, forcing Ciphera and Hound to match the move. Up top, the metal beast's mid-hatch whipped open, right as Ghostkey landed onto the roof, magboots clipping hard and scratching corpo-paint.

Grappler hooks slammed home, cable lines pulling with enough tension to peel an arm clean off if they whipped. Ghost couldn't risk a loose line catching someone, so he stomped down on the emerging hatch, whack-a-Hutt style, crunching it shut just long enough to stop it. Two seconds later another hatch started to pull open toward the front!

Traffic tightened in the coming glow of the overpass.

Hanna their scout hadn't been wrong. Civvie speeders swarmed their lanes, forced into erratic maneuvers as the accelerating behemoth plowed forward with no intention of slowing. One commuter peeled away so sharply it left a smoking trail of sparks along the speederway rail; another blared its horn as though anyone could negotiate with a fifty-five-meter slab of armored corporate dura-denial.

"Trying a slice to change its course," Juju said over comms to Hanna, her voice steady in that eerie way she got when her bad feelings were unfolding live. Her deck blaring with warnings and countermeasures sent across her neural jack.

The crawler lurched sideways, hard as it fought Juju's attempt. The shift caught the Rogue's hovertruck in a broadside, just as the last Rogue made 'roof fall'. Metal groaned, Glade ripping the controls to compensate as the crawler's armored flank scraped underneath, dragging both vehicles sideways in shrieking durasteel sparks.

"Hold her steady, Ciphera," Hound called from the front speeder, lining up for a shot toward the front hatch, right as something unfolded from the crawler's lowest point.

Spikes. A low, serrated plow meant to turn pedestrians and speeders into roadkill. Sickle laughed, kicking sparks off the roof plating. "Spikes? Cute. Corps always bolt fangs on when they're scared." Her neon circuitry danced across her sleeves as she braced all heroic, slipping down its nose to wave at the pilot. "Let 'em try an' gore us, means we're close enough to bite back."

And through the chaos, a blur of motion ahead, Ghost saw Hanna, their hired scout, weaving through the crush of traffic on repulsorlift skates and he smiled with a salute. Savant checked in with her over comms, "Hanna, there's a drainage lip running parallel for twenty meters, only you can take it. See if you can flank the crawler's nose and help them pull it the right way away from the traffic." The slice was ongoing but it needed that push only a dare-defying skater could pull off, bait the crawlers pilot into helping them turn, speeder 1 would follow her lead.

Whatever route she saw, whatever tactical read she made ahead, it was hers to act on. The Rogues simply had to survive long enough for it to matter.

"Saul, ya 'member the plan?" A quiet personal communication from glade to him. In the cargo room of the crawler, something sat ready, and behind it a prisoner, chiss, female, encased in an icey stasis. A job within a job, with only one man who might pull it off. Saul Colsan And with all this noise, nobody might see it coming, hopefully, maybe... best laid plans.

Rolls:
Crawler vs Civilian Traffic, anything getting hit?
Glade's piloting under stress.
Speeder 1 and Sickle vs the Spikes.
How aggressive are CorpSec on the Roof.

 

[Saul Colsan]

While the rest of the group were about to enter the crawler, Saul Colsan was already inside. He was hidden deep inside of the cargo hold hidden inside of his favorite hiding place of all time: His cardboard box. The former agent peered through the slit of the box smiling in the process. "I actually miss this," he said to himself.

Saul had to thank Sera Inkari for placing him in this mission. Though Saul was still irritated at her leaving their date, she did give him another chance at life. A chance to help people not that Saul cared much for people, he just liked the thrill of the mission. Maybe it was a way for Sera to apologize to Saul for standing him up all those years ago. "All right," Saul muttered lifting the box from over his head. "Time to go to work."

 

[Hanna]

Location: Speederway Y9812-25, Yellow District - Echelon Prime
Mission Objective:

• Board and take Overlight Energy Consortium's Tactical Armored Crawler, a repulsor giant in motion. 55 meters/180 feet of durasteel.
• Evade EchoSec (CorpSec) and secure the contents of its vault and the vehicle.

Tag: Glade Saul Colsan

And through the chaos, a blur of motion ahead, Ghost saw Hanna, their hired scout, weaving through the crush of traffic on repulsorlift skates and he smiled with a salute. Savant checked in with her over comms, "Hanna, there's a drainage lip running parallel for twenty meters, only you can take it. See if you can flank the crawler's nose and help them pull it the right way away from the traffic." The slice was ongoing but it needed that push only a dare-defying skater could pull off, bait the crawlers pilot into helping them turn, speeder 1 would follow her lead.

“Copy that. I see it ahead. Hold on!” Hanna replied. The Qilin kicked her left foot forward, reversing the repulsors to bleed off speed so that the crawler would come back to her. Before long, the massive vehicle was right next to her, at which point she kicked her repulsors back into gear, her form becoming a flying blur against the surrounding illumination.

At the same time, Hanna fired a grappling hook from the repulsor-assisted grappling gun on her right gauntlet, snagging a sensor cowling on the crawler’s right front. She used it as leverage, swinging around the front in a wild arc as she fired a burst of CryoBan into its armored nose. Then, releasing the line just as she came to the crawler’s left front, the skater surged ahead in a burst of acceleration, arms and legs pumping hard before she smoothly eased off the throttle and dipped down towards the drainage lip at the edge of the speederway.

If all went according to plan, the crawler, with its potentially enraged, frustrated driver white-knuckling the control yoke, would be right on her tail!

Spoiler: Loadout

• Sparkle Velocity
  
  • Gauntlets and Vambraces
    
    • Modular Weapon Mount (3) - R
      
      • IceJet Miniaturized CryoBan Projector
        
        • Ammunition
          
          • CryoBan Canister
      • NML-02VTB Nano Missile Launcher
        
        • Ammunition
          
          • Depleted Baradium-tipped Baradium Nano Missiles (12)
    • Modular Weapon Mount (3) - L
      
      • IceJet Miniaturized CryoBan Projector
        
        • Ammunition
          
          • CryoBan Canister
      • Repulsor Projector
• Glitter Roses (2)
  
  • Ammunition
    
    • Extended Magazine - Controlled-Penetration: Void Stone Treatment (2)
    • Standard Magazine - Standard Penetrator: Void Stone Treatment (4)
  • Attachments
    
    • 1-5x FAE/S-08 Electro-Sight
• FAE/MDE-01-S2 Semiautonomous Seeker Thermal Explosive (2)
• Infrared Smoke Grenade (2)

 

[GhostKey]

Location: Roof of the Crawler!
Crew Status: Hanna | Saul Colsan | Glade | Ghostkey | Sickle | Chronicle | Ibis | Juju | Hound | Savant | Crash | Ciphera

Though he might as well have been trying to hit everything just to shake the Rogues loose, the corpo driver managed to nothing that mattered. All he earned were blaring horns and a photographic selection of obscene hand signs from commuters who had zero interest in dying for Overlight's quarterly profits. Slamming repulsors dead to avoid a hurtling crawler caused only a couple of rear-end collisions instead.

From the front speeder, steady as he could be, Hound took a clean stun shot, dropping a corpo back through the front hatch. Teeth scattered on the handrailings as the guard crashed down and vanished inside, unconscious before he hit deck plating. Up top, Sickle continue to slide down, clawed mag-gloves scratching chunks out of the hull. She slammed a homemade breacher-charge sideways into the crawler's protruding spiked plow, not enough to rip it free, but enough to misalign it into the road.

Somewhere inside the cockpit, the driver lost it.

Hanna

He'd already been white-knuckling through a sea of traffic that refused to part like obedient cattle, and then the skater hit him. Hooks snapped into his forward ports, the nose of the crawler iced over in a spreading defiant frost. Warnings flared red across his dashboard.

He threw his gaze upward just in time to catch her, a blur of motion. For a heartbeat she was right there, framed in his forward viewport, horn catching the city's glow as she rode the chaos she'd made, above him, Sickle's hand gestures didn't help either! The driver slammed the throttle, fury overriding training, the crawler accelerating past safety as he tried to shake the skater and the rest of them loose.

Good thinking there. Less civilians, less roadblocks.
But on Echelon, all good deeds…

Ahead, the speederway narrowed where an old drainage lip ran parallel to the exit ramp, slick, uneven, barely wide enough for a repulsor board but just enough for skates. The crawler's damaged spike system scraped sparks as it angled toward the turn, repulsor wash kicking up a turbulence that might shred balance and punish any hesitation for all but the most balanced skater.

Glade's breathing cut in comms, sharp with strain from the hovertruck. She had to ease off as metal bent; one of the repulsors took a solid knock, forcing her down alongside the crawler and committing her to the exit with it.

The damaged spikes retracted with a painful grinding, replaced by three armored launch tubes sliding out along the hull. They spat forward concussive charges, wide-area shocks meant to destabilize speeders and skaters ahead without slowing the crawler itself. The shockwaves echoed across the lanes, traffic distorted, spun out and blared in protest.

Up top, the moment the middle hatch cracked open again, Ghost didn't hesitate, a stunner dropped cleanly into the opening. A sharp crack echoed from below, two guards inside collapsing into bitter dreams. But the corpos were pushing hard now, trying to retake the roof.

Something vaulted up topside. Whatever it was, it moved with too much stability for an unsuspecting guard.

"HRD!" Crash shouted just as it almost took him clean off the roof, executing a flawless heavy punch. The Kid skidded backward, dropping low and barely hanging on. The rear speeder surged close, Ibis firing once, then again, shots sparking as it dodged return fire.

Saul Colsan

Whatever chaos was unfolding outside, the sudden maneuver had turned the cargo bay into a gravity-free for all riot. Crates slid and slammed around him, threatening to avalanche and bury him under ten new boxes of corporate logistics nonsense, a literal death by paperwork. Even his beloved cardboard box skidded loose, just enough to bump against a sealed container marked:

OVERLIGHT PRIORITY: NO INVENTORY RECORD

The crate was lined with frost. It hummed faintly, wrong and alive, and when it shifted, a nearby internal panel powered awake, summoning red light across the bay as a countdown began to scroll down.

LOCKDOWN: INTERNAL WITNESS PROTOCOL ARMED

Cargo doors slammed into redzone mode. Whatever was in this crawler, Overlight had decided it was worth sealing everyone inside to protect. Whatever or whoever was in that crate though, was never meant to get free at all. Saul was already in the belly of the beast, and the clock was running.

If he was going to save the young Chiss girl on ice, he had exactly one minute to get her out of that corporate container before it turned into a very expensive coffin.

Its temperature was dropping fast. No pressure. None at all.

 

[Allie J.]

​

[]

​

Location: District 25: Yellow District
Objective: Silence the Speederway Giant
Tag: Hanna .. Glade .. GhostKey .. Saul Colsan


The young Echani woman sat astride her speeder bike in the narrow alleyway as though enthroned upon some angular idol of speed and metal, its engine ticking softly like the heartbeat of a slumbering beast. The walls around her leaned inward, slick with centuries of grime, graffiti, and whispering echoes.

She was eating a Bantha burger with methodical indifference, grease seeping between her fingers as steam rose in pale tendrils that mingled with the chill night air. Between bites, she lifted a frosty fruit drink to her lips, its natural chill biting at her tongue, while distant traffic howled beyond the alley's mouth like an ocean pounding against impregnable stone.

The galaxy felt vast and uncaring in that moment, and Allie J., perched between hunger and vigilance, seemed a lone intelligence observing it from a forgotten crack in reality.

At her side, the makeshift scanner murmured, a sacrilegious contraption of scavenged circuits and mismatched housings she had assembled weeks ago under flickering lights, its faint glow casting sickly colors across her face. From its speaker leaked the forbidden cadence of SecNet transmissions, voices stolen from their station through hacks laid with patient, heretical precision.

The operators spoke in clipped tones of trouble on Speederway Y9812-25, their words crackling with static that sounded almost like distant laughter. As she listened, her eyes narrowed, sensing patterns beneath the surface chatter, currents of unrest flowing through the city like unseen tentacles.

"All night I was convinced the universe had finally decided to bore me to death," she mocked with acid amusement, flicking the refuse into the alley as though casting an offering to the shadows that pooled there.

"Seems I was wrong," she added as the bike roared to life, hurling her from the alley's gullet and into the waiting dark with a grin sharpened by the promise of impending chaos.

Tearing through the arterial veins of the city toward Speederway Y9812-25, her illegal modified speeder bike screaming like a wounded Wookie as the lights blurred into maddening pictures along her periphery.

The scanner continued to spit its stolen knowledge into the night; fragmented reports, rising threat levels, the cold, bureaucratic pulse of the law converging with methodical inevitability, each word tightening her grip on the controls, feeding her curiosity. Beneath the rush of speed and static, she leaned forward, teeth bared and her lips in grim design, praying to no gods at all that she would arrive before the law's shadow fell heavy and final upon the speederway, for she knew too well that where order arrived first, mercy seldom followed.