The ultimate weapon

[77topaz]

Nice ideas concerning the STL missile attack!

 

[Dragoner]

That former regime military officer would dynamite in the hands of a good GM. Is he really going to help them? Will he try to sabotage the mission? Either at the start or at the very end? Is he working for the launching planet's current government? Will he sell the whole story to the victorious government in return for a new face and fat pension far, far away? When will he make up his mind about what he's going to do?

Or is he just some red herring that will keep the players from suspecting the real turncoat?

Or is he hiding something else? Something far worse?

There's a character in Piper's Junkyard Planet who immediately comes to mind when mulling over your proposed former military officer. The plot of the book involves people on the planet Poictesme searching for a mythical supercomputer left behind by demobilized forces. The Federation had allegedly used to computer to win a war against a breakaway alliance. Once the war was won, interstellar transport costs meant the Federation would only ship it's soldiers and their personal gear home. Everything else, from bases to factories to shipyards and all their associated equipment is mothballed and left behind. With the wartime boom over, the economy of Poictesme grows to depend on "prospecting" through all the stuff left behind. The book's protagonist, Conn Maxwell, mentions his father "prospects" for plutonium by disassembling nuclear warheads.

Anyway, a group finally saves enough to send Conn to Earth for school. The young man is also tasked with finding out as much about the mythical supercomputer as possible. He manages to interview the old commander of the huge force which was based on Poictesme and...

Spoiler:

... that's where the plot begins. The supercomputer does exist and was used just as the stories say it was. The old commander denies the computer ever existed, however, just as every official in the Federation as always done. Conn, his questions, and his story trouble the old commander so he sends an old aide to Poictesme to prevent the discovery of the computer by any means possible. Using an assumed identity, the aide joins the group led by Conn and his father and begins interfering with the group's activities. No matter what hair brained idea someone suggests, the aide is all for it. He's laying down false leads, pointing people in the wrong direction, stirring up trouble, and generally throwing monkey wrenches into everything he can.

Conn does eventually find the supercomputer and an attempt by the aide to destroy it with a suitcase nuke is barely averted. That's when the real story comes out.

After the war was won, the command staff had asked the supercomputer what the future held. The answer was that the Federation would fall within a century or so and that there was nothing anyone could do about it. The only thing anyone could do was hush up the prediction because public knowledge of it would mean things would happen faster and nastier. The computer was hidden, nearly all records associated with it destroyed, and everyone went home to keep their terrible secret.

Just what Conn and his group decide to do with this news I'll leave to the reader.

Anyway, there are a great many ways a canny GM could spin the character of the former military officer....

Junkyard Planet is great, just my kind of TU, too bad Piper didn't focus more on that than little fuzzy.

For the military officer, I was thinking that he was a junior officer in charge of comms for the project at the site, but now is living in reduced means as a janitor or something. Turns out he is from the asteroid belt and the big change in his lifestyle came when the war began to draw close to the homeworld, they were evacuating the civilians from the belt when the shuttle carrying his wife and child was hit and destroyed. Never able to forgive he became a bitter man, but now the players have to convince him to help them, possibly by using reason that there is a whole world of innocents that might die, just like his wife and child. Always good imo to have some pathos in the adventure.