Blood Coltan – report ID 26 in Gone Dark metagame.
Overview[]
Grim: Some experimental upgrades to the SMI crashed out on us. Turns out the reason wasn't the design. It was the composition. Components were made with deliberately contaminated coltan. And if our supply chain's being hit, other key ones are being hit, too.
Briggs: Somebody got cute with their sourcing. We're not supposed to be using unsourced coltan, but this came from unlicensed sites in Mozambique. We've also confirmed contamination at 4 other sites, all of which show up in the mining company's records as being "on the fruit supply chain". Coltan's not fruit, so what this means is beyond me.
Briggs: The export chain runs cross-country to a place called Port Banana, where the controller for the port's been suborned, probably by Engineers. Charlie says his email's full of pics of his kid holding the day's newspaper, so it's a hostage situation. Looks like the paper's not in English though - it's all a variant of Creole.
Charlie: SMI had enough to chew on with the background images in those shots that we could identify where they were taken. We set up the UAV to observe and sure enough, we got the kidnappers and the kid. The boy's fine but the kidnappers aren't talking. Their cell phones are, though - lots of checking the price of one item on the NGM.
Grim: It looks like the Engineers were trying to force-crash the stock of a Swedish tech firm in order to scoop it up and use their technologies. That gives us some interesting options, like letting them do it so we can drop tracers into their tech, or just scooping up the Engineer-affiliated investors to get some of the hostile money offline.
Choice[]
Briggs: ❓
Grim: I'm not crazy about the Engineers having access to the firm's resources, but so far we've had trackers taken to six locations around the world. Clearly, the op is a success, and it'll let us shut down that many more Engineer angles.
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