Shadowrun 4th Edtion Core.pdf

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BUZZKILL
Some shadowrunners say that the scariest words in the
English language are “Trust me.” I don’t buy it. Any ‘run-
ner worth the name doesn’t have enough trust left in him to
meet his grandmother for breakfast without legwork and
backup. No—by my reckoning, the scariest words around are
“It’ll be easy.”
That’s what Frankie said just after his call interrupted me
at a little club in Redmond, right in the middle of the first
poker game in weeks where I actually had a chance to come
out ahead. “Can’t this wait, Frankie?” I asked, staring glumly
through his translucent AR image at my ace-high two pair and
cutting hurried glances over the cards at the three suspicious
slots across the table. We hadn’t been working with Frankie
long, but he’d set us up with some decent jobs so it wasn’t
smart to blow him off.
“You tell me,” the ork said cheerfully in his vaguely Noo
Yawk accent. “You want the job or not? You guys ain’t exactly
been flush lately—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I sighed. He was right. Me, I wasn’t quite
wondering if I was going to have to start selling cyberware
pieces to make rent, but—
“Don’t worry,” Frankie soothed. “It’ll be easy. In and
out. But ya gotta make up yer mind now—the job’s tonight
and if you don’t wanna meet with Johnson I gotta find some-
body else.”
The two pair beckoned me, and the bozos were making
noises across the table. I held up a placating hand and sighed
again. I noticed I’d been sighing a lot these days. “Okay,
Frankie, okay. Send me the details and give me half an hour to
get everybody together.”
Frankie’s tusks rose in a grin as he signed off. I looked
at the cards again. Surely I had time to finish out the hand.
“Okay, see and raise fifty,” I said, tossing chips in the middle.
“Call,” said one of the yahoos. With a smile that showed
three kinds of teeth—bad, tobacco-stained, and missing—he
dropped a full house on the table.
It was going to be one of those nights.
I got to the bar twenty minutes early, automatically sub-
scribing my PAN to the place’s net to get the layout, specials,
and any messages that the team might have left for me—and
to slip the bartender some cred and let him know we were
meeting “Mr. Johnson” in the back room at eight. Nobody
much used cash anymore—bribes were handled wirelessly, all
neat and tidy. The place wasn’t quite a dive, despite the huddle
of drooling chipheads I’d had to step over out front. Nowadays
even some of the nice bars had their undesirables, at least until
security got around to rounding them up. It smelled like beer,
sweat, and just a hint of vomit.
I looked around. Locke was already there, slumped
morosely into the corner of a booth near the back with what
looked like a half-empty glass of whiskey in front of him.
I sent an order for a beer to be delivered to the same place,
then fought my way to the back and dropped onto the bench
across from him. I decided not to mention the whiskey;
Locke was an odd guy, all points and angles—and that was
just his personality. We just wrote it off to the fact that he
was a mage—with those guys, weird went with the territory.
“You’re early,” I said.
Locke grunted, running a hand over the two-day stubble
on his chin. “I like it here. Where else can you get proposi-
tioned and puked on in the same evening?”
“By the same person?” I grinned. My beer arrived and we
both went silent, waiting.
The rest of the team showed up shortly, together. Zumi
with that oddly endearing combination of troll-tough and
nervous—I still hadn’t quite gotten my mind around a ner-
vous troll, but I guess when you used to be a Japanese corp
princess and your world got turned ass over teakettle by
growing a meter and sprouting horns during the Year of the
Comet, you were entitled to your quirks. Desmo was almost
as uncomfortable, a fish out of water without the van that
was like an extension of his body. Since our last member was
joining us virtually from his car out in the parking lot, that
made all of us present. “Okay,” I said, finishing my beer and
rising, “Looks like it’s showtime.”
Johnson was a dwarf, compact and broad-beamed with
a short, neatly-cut beard and mirrorshades. Everything about
him screamed “mid-level corp,” from his nice mid-level suit to
the nice mid-level prissy human assistant sitting next to him
fiddling with a commlink. The dwarf glanced at his commlink
and motioned us to sit
down. Locke and I did;
Zumi faded back and
hung out near the door.
That was fine: she didn’t
like negotiations and it
couldn’t hurt to have
somebody watching the
exit. Desmo took a seat
off to the side—he liked
to listen to the spiel but stay out of the way.
Johnson looked us over, then got right to it: “I’ve got a
job that shouldn’t take much effort, but it’s got to be done
tonight. Does that work for your schedules?”
Next to me I could almost feel Locke rolling his eyes, but
I doubt the dwarf saw it. He seemed to have pegged me as the
guy to talk to. “That could be arranged,” I said, “depending on
what you’ve got in mind.”
The dwarf looked like he expected that. “Of course. I’ll
give you the basics and then, assuming we have an understand-
ing, we’ll go from there.” When nobody objected, he contin-
ued: “The job involves gaining entry to a facility, removing
some information, and planting something else. The security is
not extensive, and I’d estimate you could be in and out in less
than an hour.”
“Oh, sure,” Locke muttered to my left. “With them it’s
always
easy.”
I ignored him; that was usually best. “Where’s the facility?”
“It’s local,” the dwarf assured me. “I can’t tell you any-
thing else until you agree to take the job, but I’m autho-
rized to offer you five thousand nuyen—half up front and
half on completion.”
By my reckoning, the scariest words
around are “It’ll be easy.”
Yeah, yeah—now begins the dance.
“Well, Mr. Johnson—
I’m sure you know we can’t make any decisions about compen-
sation until we know what we’re up against, can we?”
Johnson’s head dipped a bit; his eyes, behind the shades,
were unreadable. “That’s true indeed,” he said. “I assure you it’s
a fair price, but since we’re at an impasse here, without going
into details, I can say that the security is nothing that a team of
your caliber would consider challenging. Please make up your
mind quickly, though, because if you choose not to take the
job I’ve still got to find another team.” He put his hands on
the table and looked like he was getting ready to get up.
Damn him anyway.
“Wait,” I said quickly, earning me a
smirk from Locke.
The dwarf settled back. “Yes?”
I cast a sideways glance at Locke and said, “Assuming
you’re not jacking us around and the job’s what you say it is,
and assuming further that you’re lowballing because every-
body lowballs, what do you say to six thousand?”
The barest flicker of a smile crossed Johnson’s face and
then the mask was down again. He was good, and he knew
the score. He paused, for a second taking on the unfocused
stare of somebody mentally accessing an AR visual display,
and finally nodded. “All right, then—six thousand. We have
a deal.” He fiddled for a moment with his commlink, stared
into space again, and then hit a akey. I felt my own ‘link buzz
incoming.
“Your advance,
and my contact informa-
tion.” Then he indicated
the prissy human, a dark-
haired, rat-faced little
man who looked vaguely
annoyed when his boss’s
attention wasn’t on him.
“My assistant will give you
the details of the job. I’ll
be expecting to hear from you no later than two a.m. Please
don’t be late.”
“Okay,” I said as we left the bar in Desmo’s van. “Let’s go
over this again to make sure we’ve all got it down.” I didn’t like
that we didn’t have much time to check things out this time,
but that was the way it went sometimes. You lived with it and
did the best you could.
Locke shrugged. “Easy. We break into a warehouse, put
this—” he pulled a dark-colored bottle from the pocket of his
rumpled longcoat “—in the stuff in the tanker truck we find
inside, and then get into the offices and steal some files from
the computer. Then we collect the rest of our fee, go home and
celebrate with booze and hookers.”
“We gotta do it in that order,” Desmo reminded us.
“Well, sure,” Locke said. “If we had the cred for the booze
and hookers, why would we bother doing the job?”
Zumi swatted him gently (for her) across the top of the
head. “He’s right—the stuff in the truck first, then the office.
Johnson’s guy was pretty clear on that. We should find out some-
thing about this place,” she added, as always a lot less nervous
when it was just us. “I know we don’t have much time, but—”
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Shadowrun, Fourth Edition
“Already done,” came a bubbly voice from the van’s speak-
ers, cutting off Desmo’s pounding synthrash beats. The dwarf
rigger reached in his pocket activated a holoprojector on the
dashboard. The image of cheerful purple cartoon tiger in mir-
rorshades appeared, bouncing up and down on a springy tail. It
smiled, displaying shiny fangs. “While you guys were screwing
around in the bar, I was hacking Johnson’s commlink. His name
is Gunther Markstrom—he’s a regional manager for Lightning
Brands, which is a subsidiary of Evo. The place we’re hitting is
the Tacoma warehouse, which happens to be run by their rival,
Buzz Beverages. Buzz is all geared up to do the first run on a test
market for a new energy drink called Buzz!Blitz.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Zumi spoke up. “There are ads up all
over the places I hang out—they’re aiming it at ork and troll
guys. You know: it’s big, it’s full of stimulants, it’ll make you
edgy and pissed off and give you a dick the size of a fire hydrant.
It’s so extreme it’ll make elves’ heads pop off or something.”
“Yup,” the holographic tiger agreed. “Huge ad cam-
paign—trideo, spot ads beamed to people’s PANs, print,
Matrix, the whole works. Slick job. Just a few cities, though.
They’re gonna try it out there and see how it goes over. If it
does, they’ll roll it out to the rest of the UCAS.” A brightly-
colored trid image of several tough young trolls causing may-
hem appeared on our vidscreens, accompanied by the flashing
slogan “BUZZ!BLITZ—CHUG THE BOMB” in angry red
letters. Subtle.
I indicated the bottle Locke held. “So according to
Johnson’s guy, this stuff goes into the tanker truck with the
flavoring mixture and screws up the taste of the drink so the
test-market fails. Right, Spaz?”
“Exactly,” said the tiger. “Johnson had Buzz’s project plan
on his ‘link. Their schedule’s so tight they don’t even have time
for last-minute taste tests. They’re already behind—they’ve
got all kinds of events planned, so they can’t be late. They’ll be
shipping the stuff out as fast as they make it. Even if they taste
it beforehand and catch the problem, the production run’s still
ruined so they can’t sell it. And our Mr. Johnson, who’s got a
similar product in the works—and a similar kind of carpet-
bomb ad campaign going on for its release next week—gets
the jump on his competitor.”
“What about the files?” Desmo asked. “You get anything
on those?”
“Nope,” Spaz said. “From the look of it, it’s just a little
industrial espionage. They probably want us to do that part
last in case we get spotted and have to get out in a hurry.”
“So Johnson’s frosty?” I asked Spaz. “Not likely to screw
us over?”
“Like
that
ever happens.” Locke drawled.
“Nah,” Spaz said. “He checks out. His ass is in a sling if
Buzz’s launch is successful and gets the drop on him, so he’s
got no reason to jerk us around, far as I can find.”
I glanced around at the rest of the team. “Okay, then.
Let’s gear up and get on with it. Spaz, you know you’re gonna
have to do this one in the meat, right?”
“Aww,
Taaaggg—”
The whining voice and sulky pout
didn’t quite fit with the goofy-looking tiger.
“Not like we like it either,” Locke said.
“Desmo, you ready?” I subvocalized over the team’s
comm network. The night was moonless and a little drizzly,
but the few working sodium-vapors casting sickly little pools
of light at intervals down the street meant my cybereyes were
functioning just fine. The whole area smelled like ocean and
rot. I slumped in the shadows of the next-door warehouse’s
doorway and waited until the dwarf ’s affirmative response
came back. He was halfway down the block in the van, keep-
ing an eye on the area with an overhead spotter drone. The
rest of the team was in the doorway with me, cranked up with
anticipation but hiding it well.
Locke had already done his astral-recon thing, declaring
the place deserted except for one security guard (“from his
aura he’s thinking more about getting laid than guarding”)
and what he called “a corps of elite attack rats.” That told me
the security was mostly automated, which jibed with the intel
Johnson’s flunky had given us. “Anything, Spaz?”
Spaz waved me off, concentrating on something none of
the rest of us could see. “Nothing. I’m monitoring the police
bands and I’m not picking up any calls anywhere near here.”
We were all getting our minds around the change—Spaz al-
most never went on runs with us in the meat—he preferred
to stay close by and run Matrix overwatch—so the sight of a
skinny, crater-faced elf guy with a high-pitched whiny voice
took a little getting used to when we were accustomed to the
cartoon tiger. In the meat, Spaz was the only elf I’d ever met
whose natural social graces were pretty much nonexistent. He
didn’t bathe too often, either. So much for the stereotype.
“All right,” I said. “Unless anybody’s got a good reason
not to, let’s get this done.”
Remember what I said before about the three words that
should strike terror into any halfway-sane shadowrunner’s
heart? You’re smarter than me, then, because I didn’t. Funny
how being broke can make you stupid.
Things got started okay—I disabled the security system
and Spaz hacked in to make sure that the cameras were show-
ing what we wanted them to show in case somebody off-site
was monitoring them. After that it was just the simple matter
of waiting for Locke’s okay that the guard was off in the other
part of the building and we were in. Occasionally I regretted
the cred I’d dropped awhile back on a maglock passkey, but
this wasn’t one of those times.
The interior of the warehouse was dim and cavernous, lit
only by a few faint emergency lights far overhead. We paused
a moment, getting our bearings. “Everything okay out there,
Desmo?” I subvocalized.
“A-OK, boss,” the dwarf ’s voice came back reassuringly
quickly. “No sign of anybody.”
“Got the layout,” Spaz said. “Everybody switch on your
overlays.”
I did, and a ghostly 3-D floorplan of the warehouse
appeared superimposed over my vision. Everything was
labeled—crate contents, vehicle locations, even where the
bathrooms were. The tanker we were looking for was all
the way over on the other side, near the far wall next to sev-
eral large stacks of crates. Next to us, off to our right, was a
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Shadowrun, Fourth Edition
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