Asteroid Blues

Tohaa won sides and ISS set up first, planning to go first. ISS set up planning to hit the central button with a Ninja, then storm a console with the Wu Ming team, spec firing any civilians that were located through the consoles.

Tohaa stripped orders from our small order group, which contained four regular orders and the Ninja. ISS took first turn and the ninja ran to the central console to get the game moving. The Ninja failed to press the button on the first attempt (sigh). A Clipsos revealed to take a shot and missed, which might have distracted her. The Ninja tried again, now in cover behind the console. The Ninja failed again (facepalm) and the Clipsos laid a mine in ARO.

The Wu Ming moved up from their position by the central noodle restaurant to take the console on the left and a position where they could light grenade launcher two HVT models. On the way, the rocket launcher stopped to blow away the Clipsos, which took 3 orders... the mine managed to make 4 armor rolls against heavy rocket hits!

The Wu Ming HMG pushed a little further towards the console, but a Libertos revealed and laid a light shotgun blast down the line, clipping the shadowshooter, two Wu Ming and the Zhanying Hacker. The hacker and the libertos died, so a yudbot was sent to repair the hacker. Once this was done, the link repositioned to a convenient durian stall and the shadowshooter set up in suppressive fire to guard it. The durian seller looked on, baffled why the ISS troops were hunkering down on point instead of paying him any attention.

The Tohaa found the Durian salesman too tempting, and sent a Clipsos to a console to find out if he was the designated target.

[At this point, faithful reader, we must note it is a shame Wu Ming do not regularly embed a Bao Troop in their squads. We might have been able to check this Durian Seller more thoroughly]

With callous disregard for the life of this innocent civilian, the Tohaa sent their Kerail Preceptor and Surda to attempt to take out the majority of the Wu Ming team. A symbiobomb hit the chain rifle Wu Ming, then the Kerail and Surda charged around a corner covered by the hmg and our Shadowshooter.

The Ninja remembered how to push a button and correctly guessed the designated target. The Wu Ming pushed up to the left hand console, where they could get it into good grenade launcher range.

The Wu ming team pushed further to the console, stuck a knife in the Clipsos defending it and unmasked another of the hvts, then took up a defensive position there.

The Tohaa felt like they were well behind at this point and sent their Draal datatracker, Sukeul and Makaul triad over to tangle with the Wu Ming. Under cover of some eclipse smoke the Makaul jumped into combat with the Chain Rifle Wu Ming, but was not able to bring him down.

The Tohaa Shadowshooter pushed up on my right flank to kill a couple of Kuang Shi and Jager Nadim popped in there also.

With just the Ninja and Kuang Shi controller in the second pool and a full ten order group in the first, I looked around for things a Ninja could do with just two orders. It had recamoed after pressing the button last turn, so I sent it to kill the Makaul. Unfortunately the Gao-Rael sniper was able to discover it on it's way past and I didn't have orders to recamo, so things didn't go quite as well as I'd planned even with a Wu Ming providing extra help.

The Sukeul and Draal were both in ARO over the Wu Ming link, so I decided to reform the link with just four members using my last command token. After killing the Sukeul, the Makaul (by shooting into the combat) I sent the rocket launcher Wu Ming to kill the revealed hvt, netting me a second. On the way past, she put a wound on the Draal data tracker, stripping it's symbiomate.

By Nehemiah's calculation at this point he had already lost. I tried to make a recovery a little harder for him by draining his order pool. My Rui Shi gunned down Jager Nadim and put a wound on his Shadowshooter.

As the last turn dawned for the Tohaa, he didn't know where the target was and had killed no hvts. He had about 6 orders in his datatracker pool and a couple more in his secondary pool, and decided he could just... if everything went right... play for a tie.

... and eveything just started to go right. Two consoles got hit without a failed WIP check, uncovering the remaining hvt and designated target. The shadowshooter ignored the Rui Shi covering it and shot the hvt on the left flank. I was kicking myself not finishing off the enemy datatracker instead of trying to strip orders... and I realized I'd deployed the facing on my own designated target in a completely unhelpful direction.

The Draal crit my designated target on a 9, at bad range for his smg... and promptly got stunned by a flash pulse. We thought this meant that we had a tie, but re-reading the mission we realized that pushing buttons on all three consoles was worth 2 OP, so I went from a solid looking victory to a stunning loss in that last lucky play. If any roll had gone badly it wouldn't have panned out, but this time the dice were on the side of the Tohaa.