Asteroid Blues

Lieutenant Rashida Ghali and her squad crept through the claustrophobic confines of the complex. It was a section of the Gorge that nobody quite knew was here, an abandoned residential zone that was mostly empty pre-fab buildings and empty shipping containers that probably had their contents sold on the black market before they were ever put on a supply ship to the asteroid.

“Top, Yara. Ekram and I have spotted a tacbot. Looks alone.” The two of them had gone high, and were perched on top of an empty clinic's pre-fab skeleton.

Rashida crouched low and motioned for the rest of the fireteam to do the same. She whispered in to her comms: “Probably isn't alone if it's a tacbot. Take it down.”

She looked up to watch the shot, and had just enough time to duck and throw one hand in front of her eyes as the wall Yara and Ekram were crouched behind was pulverized by bullets. Two things happened very quickly after that:

The first was Jamila talking quietly and calmly in to the comms – ever cool, ever calm. “They're both in the red. Cubes intact. Nas-”

The second was Wild Bill running out in to the open, pistols drawn, and opening fire on a Deva. The Deva calmly returned fire, bullets tearing first along the rocky ground and then up in to Wild Bill's chest.

“-mat en route. Wild Bill is also in the red.”

“Well,” Rashida thought to herself, “this has been an interesting 15 seconds.”

- - - - -

This game started poorly for me but swung violently back in my favour with a few well-timed crits. I was a bit cocky, and expected a five-strong fireteam to be able to land shots on Shamash's three-strong Dakini fireteam, but my fireteam got handily shredded. Not quite broken, but the missile launcher Ghulam and the Naffatun both dropped very quickly.

Fortunately I got them both on their feet in the following turn, and the rest of the game was just back-and-forth shooting. I barely had to move, and wound up delivering a critical hit with a missile on blast mode, which broke the Dakinis, and a critical hit with a rifle on the Sophotect. The Deva was a bit hardier, but went down in AROs to three Naffatun and Ghulam delivering a punishing barrage while the Deva tried desperately to secure one last objective. Ironically, it was the Deva doing this that won me the game – killing the Lieutenant scored me enough objective points to take the lead. A clear, crushing victory over the soulless robots that uphold the, uh, A.I. that allows human civilization to flourish. Take *that*!

This was yet another TACOS game. Information about it can be found here:

https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/alternate-play-system-tacos-mk-ii.578/

On that thread taylor actually suggested combining the two game modes – so adding the TACOS objective cards on top of the main scenario. I think we're going to try that either in the next batch of games or once we're up to 300 points per game (it seems like it'd be more bookkeeping so we might wait until we're only getting in one game per day or whatever).