Title: Hope for the Best...Plan for the Worst
Story: Simon Furman
Art: Geoff Senior
Letterer: Martin Baines
Design by: Amazing15
Printed in the UK by: Mixam
Plot
The Firedrake has returned to Earth, but is in hiding, with the crew keeping busy, whilst waiting for Leone and Larssen to complete their mission, to recover some security footage from the Dryagin Ranch. Whilst waiting, they start making plans to storm the Hub Tri-Corp Cloudscraper.
At the Dryagin Ranch, the team find the destroyed house, but locate a hatch to a hidden room, where the security feed is located, they stream the footage to Dryagin, where he sees Mazur and the White Noise team kidnapping Lena and Leo before the explosion.
The girls are soon noticed and attacked by "Harpy Drones", they manage to destroy them, but know more will follow soon, so they request an evac.
At the Firedrake, Dryagin confronts King about where his wife and son are, but he claims to not know where they are, but that Snow wanted them safe, he tells him that their bio-metrics are being scrambled by a device used by White Noise operatives, but he'll give him the code to find them, once they are fully committed to the mission.
Six days later, the Triumvirate are worrying that Dryagin hasn't made a move against them yet, but Vici is certain that he is still coming, but is just biding his time.
Elsewhere, the White Noise team, along with Dryagin enter the Smolensk Oblast Region, where a "back door" to the Cloudscraper is located, having been part of the construction process. They make it inside, and locate an old monorail tunnel, which will take them straight to them. King gives Dryagin the code, which he transmits to Diamond Bill on the Firedrake, and has him track his family with it, quickly finding their apparent location
Elsewhere, the rest of the Pacifiers arrive outside the Cloudscraper, with Flynn using a fake ID, as a driver, and the rest hiding in the back of a holo-limo, and head towards their targets.
At the White Noise bunker in former Japan, Snow and his crew are preparing to stream the entire attack on the Triumvirate and expose their evil plans to the world, so they can cause global unrest and ruin their plot to destroy the Earth and leave with only their chosen few to repopulate another world.
Dryagin and his team arrive at the Cloudscraper's base, and prepare to break through the walls to enter it, with Dryagin getting ready to act as the symbol of rebellion against the Triumvirate, due to his legendary status as a Pacifier, and take out the Extinction Weapon.
At Essen Six, two guards, disguised as hobos are watching over a building, when they are confronted by a shuttle and told that they are under arrest and that this is now a global federation crime scene. The two "hobos" however reveal their guns and fire on the shuttle instead!
Characters
Pacifier
Aleksy Dryagin
Diamond Bill
Hash Flynn
Megan Umber
Jonas Huey
Dolan Rekt
Leone
Bette Larssen
Tri-Corp
Veni
Vidi
Vici
Killatoa (Mentioned)
White Noise
Deacon Snow
Juddh King
Berenger
Amador
Essen Six Guards
White Noise Forward/Tactical Bunker Team
New White Noise Team
Mazur (Footage Only)
Abduction Team (Footage Only)
Other Human
Lena Dryagin (Footage Only) Abducted by White Noise
Leo Dryagin (Footage Only) Abducted by White Noise
"Stunt Bodies" (Footage Only) Dead, Used to Fake Lena and Leo's Deaths
Other
A Grizzly Bear
Lupex, the Doggo (Footage Only) Abducted by White Noise
Notes
- This issue confirms that only the Dryagin house was destroyed, not the entire ranch
- This issue also confirms that Lena and Leo were indeed kidnapped by Snow, and it isn't some sort of artificial intelligence. The bodies seen in the rubble are some random townsfolk they placed in there
- In the first "big" time skip we've had in this series since the interim between issue zero and one, we skip forward by almost a whole week!
- King now has a new team of mostly unnamed guys....wonder how long these will last?
- Grizzly Bears are mentioned as possibly being almost extinct in this series, likely implying that a lot of animal species have died out, or are close to it.
- The part of the world where Lena is being held appears to be Germany, in fact looking at a map of Germany, the area they have highlighted features a city called "Essen", likely the originator of the "Essen Six" we hear namedropped here.
- White Noise's base of operations is revealed to be in the "former nation of Japan", we've seen Snow working from the sea of Japan, but now we know the landmass still exists here
