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The Company
Time: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 (evening).
Place: Darmatech HQ, Darmstadt, Hesse.
Last Event: Leaving the scene of the latest assassination attempt on the group.
The moment the heavy corrugated gate rolls shut behind the captured delivery truck, Anabel and Qoqa hop out and make their way to Schreiber's office. The basement is strangely empty, and there's no answer at Schreiber's door – but a strange scraping sound is audible from around the corner. The two Agents attempt to hide. Qoqa succeeds, while Anabel finds herself caught flat-footed. Fortunately, the noise proves to be Schreiber, shifting a file cabinet. When Qoqa realizes who it is and steps into view, she actually startles the normally collected Schreiber!
Schreiber explains that on learning that his driver, Heinz, had been intercepted by assassins, he decided to get his gun safe – he gestures at the file cabinet – out of storage. As Anabel and Qoqa help Schreiber roll the thing into his office, they report on the evening's events. Schreiber agrees with Qoqa that it would be prudent to interrogate the two goons the Agents captured, noting that he has a special place for that. After the three lock up Schreiber's box of weapons (and Qoqa snags some of the mountain of cigarettes and brandy that Schreiber received as a bribe but has no use for), they walk back to the garage.
In the garage, the others echo Anabel and Qoqa's telling of current events and ask Schreiber for a place to lock up the prisoners. Schreiber is about to reply when his phone beeps. He looks mildly concerned, tells whoever is on the other end that he'll "look into it," and ends the call. When the Agents pry, Schreiber explains that he has Darmatech's security people inform him of anything weird, and that they called to let him know that a hall patrol upstairs didn't check in on time and wasn't on camera. They also said that they saw nothing troubling on camera, so he suspects an unauthorized smoke break.
The Agents are more concerned than Schreiber, informing him that after today's attack, they would investigate anything remotely out of the ordinary. Schreiber is a little taken aback but agrees to check out the situation at once, with the whole team for support. He warns that even if there is trouble, there can be no shooting – the facility contains BSL3 labs, as well as late-working researchers who know nothing about the Company. When Qoqa explains what "BSL3" means, everyone agrees to leave the guns behind, if reluctantly.
Schreiber has the crew bring their captives to his office, where he digs out restraints and helps the team shackle the prisoners to some sturdy pipes. Then he hands out powerful TASERs intended for use on large animals, as a substitute for firearms. The Agents are surprised that Schreiber just happens to have a rack of these, charged up and ready, but he simply mumbles something about there being test animals in a few of the labs. It doesn't sound very convincing.
After that, Schreiber leads the way to a bank of lifts, where he uses his security card to summon two cars. While waiting, Schreiber checks in with the security desk by phone and learns that the missing guards haven't checked in yet. However, there's still nothing interesting on camera on the floor where the patrol was supposed to be. After hearing that, everybody piles into the lifts – in two squads of five – and rides up to take a first-hand look.
On arriving at their destination, the Agents find nothing but quiet, empty halls. Qoqa can't help but notice that there are no labs here, and says as much. Wen presses the issue, asking exactly what is on this floor, and for that matter on the levels below and above. Schreiber explains that these floors hold the offices of administrative personnel, and that Staedert's suite is two levels up. When Wen hears this, she yells at Schreiber to call Staedert's office and have her people lock the place down.
With that done, the group sweeps the area. Lev leads Anabel, Klas, Qoqa, and Vinnie to the left, while Jili, Paul, Wen, and Zhang follow Schreiber to the right. Both squads move as quickly as stealth allows, TASERs at the ready. There are no bad guys in sight, but Klas notices that the lock on a janitorial closet has been scratched up. When Vinnie confirms that it has been picked, Anabel and Qoqa move up to the door to listen; they hear nothing, but Qoqa smells the sharp scent of spent cartridges.
After positioning his people around the door, Lev yanks it open. Inside the closet they see a pair of Darmatech security men sprawled on the floor, both of them bleeding from gunshot wounds. Qoqa checks them quickly and pronounces one dead, the other well on his way to that fate. As Qoqa does what she can for the surviving guard, Anabel pulls out her phone and gives Schreiber the bad news. Schreiber relays this to the Agents accompanying him, and then leads them back to their associates' position, all the while talking into his phone.
Once everybody is together again, Schreiber informs the Agents that his people reviewed the recordings for this corridor and found no evidence of violence. Jili's immediate reaction is to assume that someone tampered with the camera; she goes over and starts poking at it. Within seconds, she pulls out a small device that resembles a USB key and says, "This isn't supposed to be here!" As soon as she does, Schreiber's phone beeps – it's his security staff, saying that there's a woman tampering with the camera on that floor. They describe Jili rather well, and are surprised to see the rest of the group behind her when she steps away.
Having established that there are intruders shooting people and tampering with cameras, the Agents decide to search for them. Looking around, the most obvious egress would be the fire stairs. After examining the door to the stairway for a moment, Vinnie says that it's jammed – and peering awkwardly through the narrow window, he adds that he can see wedges identical to the ones used to confine the team to their hotel suite in Kigali! Qoqa disappears around the corner for a moment, returns with a fire axe, and asks Vinnie to pry open the door.
Vinnie is somewhat apprehensive of the situation – if these are the Kigali attackers, then they like their technology and there may well be a booby trap on the far side of the wedged door. He waves everybody back and then carefully goes to work with the axe. Predictably, there's a muffled bang from the stairway. When Vinnie moves in, with Zhang on his elbow for backup, he finds soot on the wall near the doorframe, and small, drill-bit-like flechettes sticking out of nearby surfaces. About a second after Vinnie says this aloud, there's a blast of automatic weapons fire from a couple of stories above!
Everyone backs away from the door. It seems that there are armed men above, and that the booby trap alerted them to the team's presence. Anabel and Jili duck into the janitor's closet and return carrying the H&K P10's that the two downed guards were packing. Lev glances at these and announces that while he's happy to have real pistols instead of TASERs, it makes no sense to assault up a staircase against an unknown number of waiting enemies with automatic weapons. He posits that anybody who comes prepared with electronics, booby traps, and door wedges will have other surprises, and probably body armor.
Insistent on doing something, Wen jogs back toward the lifts. The others follow. On arriving there, Wen has Schreiber use his card to summon a ride. When the lift arrives, Wen goes in and clambers up to the hatch in the roof. Zhang immediately guesses what she's up to and joins her. Once the two of them are on top of the car, Wen pokes her head down, asks Lev for one of the pistols, and tells Schreiber to send her and Zhang up to Staedert's level.
When the door opens on Staedert's floor, there's nobody waiting. Zhang and Wen can hear a distant drilling noise, but nothing else is obviously out of place. Wen hops down into the car, while Zhang hangs upside down, one hand on the "Door Open" button, ready to help Wen up and out. Wen crawls slowly through the doorway, exposing just enough of her head to see down the hall toward Staedert's suite. The instant she does, there's a sharp pop to her left and she feels sharp stings in her face, shoulder, and wrist.
Wen isn't seriously hurt – mostly thanks to being below the level of the booby trap – but retreats back into the elevator all the same. It seems that a flechette grazed her cheek, and two more speared her in the arm. The damage doesn't look that bad, however; the worst part is that now the enemy knows somebody is coming from the lift. Zhang and Wen wait, weapons at the ready. Instead of footsteps, though, they hear a whirring sound they both recognize: It's a tiny, tank-like drone like the one encountered in Kigali!
Bracing her P10, Wen aims at the edge of the lift door in the direction she thinks the sound is coming from. The drone appears an instant later. As soon as it does, Wen opens up on it, shooting it into wreckage before it can unleash any nasty surprises. When she risks another glimpse around the corner to learn what else is coming, she's sees a couple of men with an LMG – it looks like an HK21 variant – set up down the corridor, just in front of the right-hand turn to Staedert's offices. An instant after she pulls her head back in, the gunner riddles the space she just vacated.
Meanwhile, a couple of stories below, the others wait anxiously. Anabel grabs a fire extinguisher and sprays it up the staircase, just to see what the shooters upstairs will do. As it turns out, they're on the ball – they rake the area with gunfire and then toss down a grenade for good measure. This confirms Lev's feelings about assaulting via the stairs, if there was ever any doubt. It probably pulls a few enemies off Wen and Zhang's case, too.
Shortly after that, Zhang messages Jili by phone and informs her of the situation upstairs: booby-trapped lifts, Wen's slight injury, the drone, and now a freakin' machine gun. As he tells them to get ready to move, Wen mashes the button for two stories down. A few seconds later, Wen and Zhang are shouting for the others to join them. Zhang says that he'll take care of the machine gun. He asks Schreiber to hold the lift for a moment, and then leads Paul and Vinnie through the roof hatch and up the ladder in the shaft.
Once Paul, Vinnie, and Zhang are safely on their way to the roof, the others pile into the lift and ride upstairs. Everybody is ready for trouble when the door opens, but there's no reception waiting. Lev looks unsurprised as he sums up the situation: "They've got the only ways up covered with machine guns. Why would they come for us? All they have to do is wait."
On the roof, Zhang, Vinnie, and Paul find no enemies waiting, but Vinnie immediately spots something of interest: heavy metal plates bundled together with thick packing bands, stowed near the top of the shaft. He recognizes these as spare counterweights for the lift, and motions for Paul and Zhang to help him move some. The three Agents manhandle a pile of the things over to the sloped atrium window just above the entrance to Staedert's suite. Through the glass a tall story below, they can see the machine-gun crew waiting to gun down their allies. Zhang texts Wen: "Get ready."
Then Paul, Vinnie, and Zhang heave the massive stack of weights over the side of the roof. The metal plates shear through the atrium window with a dramatic crash. None of them hit the gunners, but the rain of glass and the thunderous thumps all around them serve as a major distraction! As soon as Lev and Wen hear the racket, they step out into the corridor and aim their P10s at the machine-gunner. He sees them and turns his attention back to his weapon, but it's too late – Wen and Lev shoot him in the face, repeatedly and fatally.
The gunner's assistant lunges for the machine gun, but he isn't as fast as Zhang, who follows the weights through the hole in the glass. The two go down in a tangle of limbs, Zhang pulling his armored opponent on top of him and into his guard, using the man as a shield against whatever other shooters might be lurking out of sight around the corner. When Lev and Wen see this, they break into a run, with Anabel, Jili, Klas, Qoqa, and even old Schreiber in tow. On the roof, Paul and Vinnie, neither of them the acrobat that Zhang is, start the slow climb down.
Zhang sees four men with H&K G36 carbines boil out of the fire stairs and charge in his direction, reluctant to shoot at their ally but drawing a bead all the same. He also spots Staedert's assistant, Ms. Chang, face-down and bleeding on the floor of the reception area. And past all that, he glimpses two more intruders working on the security door to Staedert's office. He realizes that he can't do much about that, so he chokes his opponent while yelling a warning to his rushing allies.
What follows is utter chaos. Lev is the first to join Zhang, catching a graze on the leg as he dives over the machine-gun position and successfully snatches up the HK21. Wen turns up next, evading madly and somehow avoiding injury. The hail of bullets from the enemy shooters proves to be bad news for Jili and Klas, though – they're both hit. Schreiber is shot, too, but appears to be wearing armor, because he just winces and keeps moving. None of this slows the momentum of the Agents' charge.
As soon as Lev can bring the HK21 to bear, he does. Shooting from the floor, he takes out two gunmen and sends a third sprawling. Then Schreiber and Wen move in with handguns (Schreiber apparently brought his along, despite telling the Agents not to do the same), systematically shooting the surviving enemies in the unarmored face. Zhang finishes his opponent with a brutal, throat-crushing choke. By the time the pair working on Staedert's door are turning to engage their attackers, the six well-armed allies they had covering their backs are down, and they're facing their own machine gun and Schreiber and Wen's handguns.
While Lev, Schreiber, and Wen hold their weapons on the intruders, Anabel and Zhang grab G36s off the floor. Meanwhile, Qoqa goes to examine Jili and Klas. Klas looks to have a bullet in the arm, but the wound is clean and not serious. Jili was hit in the abdomen, however; Qoqa thinks she'll need surgery. For the time being, Qoqa leaves Lev to do what he's doing – if he's up to machine-gunning people, his leg couldn't be that bad. And whatever happens next, Paul and Vinnie won't be part of it, as they're still climbing down from the roof.