Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  Almost in unison, Rude and Zipfile spoke up: “Fraggin’ elves.”

  “Yes, it’s all our fault.” Yu rolled his eyes.

  “I’d love to know how this new Johnson knows so much about our situation,” Emu said, frowning.

  “Then I guess we’re taking this meeting,” Zipfile said.

  Leave it to the daisy-eaters to build a place like this, Emu thought as she took her first steps into the Viridian Gardens. Calling it “a private club in Downtown Seattle’s Elven District” didn’t really do it justice; to Emu, it felt more like someone had taken a work of art and turned it into a building. If there was one thing elves did well, it was “pretty,” and the Viridian Gardens’ refined lines, rich colors, and all-elven staff—no serving drones here—all fit the bill nicely. Emu focused on the first two as the maître d’ escorted the team through the club, since it let her ignore how the staff were giving the team the same questioning looks Emu had gotten at Powerline.

  When the runners arrived at the meeting room, Mr. Johnson was already there, admiring something through a window on the far side of the room. He turned as the team filed in. “Ah, there you are. Please, sit.” His aloofness was even more pronounced in person, the rigger noted, no doubt helped by the two bodyguards in severe black suits and serious shades at his side.

  Emu couldn’t help but smile when she saw Rude angle for the chair directly opposite the Johnson. The troll shot the suit an irritable, defiant glare as he plopped into his seat, hard enough that Emu thought she heard it crack under his weight. Frostburn and Zipfile settled in on Rude’s flanks, as though they wanted to stay as far away from Mr. Johnson as possible.

  Meanwhile, Yu offered the Telestrian representative a deferential nod as he slid into his chair. “Thank you for giving us the opportunity to meet with you, Mr. Johnson. We appreciate your restraint in deciding not to punish us for the losses you suffered as a result of our actions.”

  As she listened to Yu go through the ritual of paying social tribute to a potential employer, Emu felt a twinge of anxiety and resentment well up inside her. She’d spent enough of her life listening to corporate doublespeak to know that Yu was basically thanking Mr. Johnson for not sending people to kill them like Renraku had, and hearing it spelled out like that was an unwelcome reminder of how close Renraku’s assassins had come to succeeding.

  When Emu looked at the rest of the team, she saw Rude and Zipfile fixing sullen glares on both Yu and Mr. Johnson. Frostburn was likewise scowling around her tusks, although Emu couldn’t tell whether the ork’s expression came from being cranky about how Yu was kissing Mr. Johnson’s ass on the team’s behalf, or because they’d had to wake her up from her much-deserved rest to make this meeting.

  Mr. Johnson didn’t seem the slightest bit ruffled by the team’s petulance, matching the glares with a smile infused with more smugness than a metahuman face should’ve been able to express. “I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saying about how the best way to judge a person is by the quality of their enemies. By that standard, being in the crosshairs of one of the ten largest megacorporations in the world is quite an endorsement.”

  “Doesn’t feel like one,” Frostburn grumbled under her breath.

  “Imagine my surprise when, two days after one of Telestrian’s most sensitive operations in Seattle was targeted, I received a dossier full of verified information on the team of freelance operatives behind the attack. What an incredible coincidence!” Mr. Johnson shook his head with a rueful chuckle. “The Renraku operative who hired you must be an idiot to think that we would fall for such a transparent ruse—but Mr. Dennis’ loss is our gain. Which brings me to the reason for this meeting.”

  “Finally.” Rude rolled his eyes.

  Mr. Johnson gestured, and a trid projector in the middle of the table lit up, revealing a corporate logo Emu didn’t recognize. “There’s a company called AVR Optronics that produces…well, I won’t get into the technical details. Suffice it to say, the components they produce are used in the manufacture of Renraku’s newest model of cyberdeck, the Kitsune. AVR’s primary assembly plant is here in the Seattle Metroplex, in the industrial area of Auburn. I want it destroyed, thoroughly enough that they’ll know it was deliberate.

  “Oh, and there are two other matters which you may find of interest. First, a man fitting Simon Dennis’s description has just taken the position of chief operations officer at AVR. His office is located at the same facility, which would be extremely convenient for anyone who wanted to ‘persuade’ him to call off the attempts on their lives. Second, since you’ve already displayed your talents at infiltrating secure systems—” Mr. Johnson’s mouth tightened at that, and Emu heard Zipfile snicker. “—I’m also prepared to pay you a bonus of five thousand nuyen each if you bring me the production schematics stored on their host.”

  “And what about the base pay?” Yu asked.

  “Base pay?” The well-dressed elf scoffed. “It’s been deducted. Consider it reparations for the losses you’ve inflicted as a result of your assignment for Renraku.”

  Rude snorted. “Sounds like a ‘you’ problem. I do a job, I get paid. I don’t get paid, I don’t do the job.”

  Mr. Johnson’s gaze flickered toward Rude, but his reply was directed at Yu. “I would suggest you remind your teammates that it’s your job to negotiate with prospective employers, not their—”

  “Hey!” Emu nearly jumped out of her seat as Rude’s shout shook the room. The troll leaped to his feet, far quicker than his bulk suggested he was capable of moving, and his fists slammed against the table with enough force to crack the hardwood surface. Emu couldn’t tell whether Mr. Johnson’s snub had genuinely set off Rude’s temper, or if the troll was playing it up in an effort to intimidate the suit; most people, even corporate Mr. Johnsons who were used to dealing with shadowrunners, didn’t have the nerve to face off against a three-meter-tall walking wall of enraged muscle and chrome.

  Unfortunately for Rude, Mr. Johnson and his bodyguards were in the minority. A pair of HK submachine guns appeared in the guards’ hands faster than even Emu’s cybernetic eyes could follow, and the weapons came to bear on Rude before the troll’s fists hit the conference table.

  A split-second later, Emu’s hand reached her Crusader, though she didn’t draw it yet; she wanted to show Mr. Johnson and his bodyguards that Rude would have backup if a fight started, not to start a fight herself. A glance at the rest of the team revealed that Zipfile had reached for her revolver in the same way, and Frostburn was wearing the same deep frown of concentration she always got when she was preparing to cast a spell. By contrast, Yu had his hands up and open in an attempt to restore calm. He’d just opened his mouth to speak before Rude beat him to it.

  “Ya got somethin’ to say to me, ya say it to me, not him.” The troll’s gaze never wandered from Mr. Johnson’s face, like he hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that two other people had guns aimed at him. His point made, Rude lowered himself back into his chair and folded his arms back across his chest.

  “Very well. I’ll even use small words to make sure you understand.” The edges of Mr. Johnson’s smile turned razor-sharp. “I couldn’t care less whether you take this job or not. I only bothered to call you because your attack on the Denny Way offices proved that you know what you’re doing. We can help each other, and frankly, you need the help a lot more than I do—but if the chance to get Renraku’s assassins off your backs isn’t worth taking a lower fee, so be it. So, are you taking the job or not?” The suit raised his eyebrows at Yu.

  Yu’s composure didn’t waver as he tilted his head towards the rest of the team. “Would you mind if we took a minute to discuss this amongst ourselves?”

  “By all means.” Mr. Johnson rose from his seat and exited the room, bodyguards in tow.

  The door had barely clicked shut before Zipfile spoke up. “Eish, he’s as bad as the wakyambi! ‘Ooo, I’m going to treat you like a servant because you’re short and you cost me money!’ D
rekhead.” The dwarf punctuated her tirade with a vulgar hand gesture.

  “Renraku sent someone after my family,” Frostburn growled. “Frag the nuyen, I’ll take this just for payback.”

  Emu’s eyebrows shot up. “Bloody hell! Is that where you’ve been the past couple days? Are they alright?”

  Frostburn nodded, her shoulders sagging as some of the tension flowed out with her words. “They’re fine now, yeah. They want to make an example of us, I say we do the same to them, even if it costs us a little nuyen.”

  Rude grunted. “Frag that. Word starts gettin’ around that we’re takin’ jobs on the cheap, people’ll start expectin’ it. I ain’t takin’ a pay cut just ’cause this keeb caught us at a bad time. We can deal with Renraku on our own.”

  “You can, maybe,” Emu said. “I wouldn’t give myself the same odds, and I sure as hell wouldn’t expect Frostburn’s family to be able to fight back if Renraku comes after them again. No offense, Frosto.”

  “None taken.”

  Zipfile shrugged. “If these guys want to pay us to do something we would’ve done anyway, I’m happy to take their money. If Yu can convince Johnson to raise his rates, even better.”

  “I’m happy to try. Are we splitting it four ways or five?” Yu looked at Rude, who made a noise that sounded halfway between a grunt and a growl, but didn’t exactly object.

  Encouraged by the troll’s non-rejection, Yu stuck his head into the hallway to summon Mr. Johnson back into the room.

  The two elves took their sweet time haggling, but Yu prevailed in the end, and took Mr. Johnson’s promise of seventy-five hundred nuyen—with the customary fifty percent up front—along with what little intel he could provide on their target. The meeting wrapped up quickly after that, with the snooty maître d’ returning to show everyone out. To Emu, it seemed like the team was almost as happy to be leaving as Mr. Johnson was to see them go.

  As the five runners ambled down the front steps of the Viridian Gardens, Emu looked at Frostburn and Rude. “So, what exactly happened to you two, anyway?”

  Part Three

  Rude

  Bryan CP Steele

  Pinned down, low on ammo, and jammed by enemy IC across all channels—everything was fragged, and Rude knew it. The ammo counter in his field-of-vision HUD was in the low double digits, and the smartlink flashed warnings at every other firing solution.

  What a total fragging mess.

  He looked up to lock eyes on an old friend…no, his squadmate…standing out in the open. An easy target for even these ghetto rebels—

  Incoming! Get down, Marcel!

  Fiery plumes and shrapnel hailstorms erupting from a line of mini-missile impacts shoved the troll into a combat roll, diving away from the rapidly vanishing brickwork of the old Boston P.D. metroplex.

  Boston? When the hell was I in Boston?

  Rude blinked away brick dust and cordite ash, letting the polymer sheathes of his cybereye platforms auto-lube away the smaller particles into thin, greasy tears down his rawhide cheeks. His vision clear, he torqued his head back and forth. Where was Marcel? Where was the Southside battlefield? Hell, where was the metroplex? All that was around him now was the alloy-lined walls of…where? A prison cell?

  Just gotta do my time. Serve my corp, keep the deal.

  The pressurized hiss of the door sliding open spun Rude on his heels, the familiar cold of a handmade shiv in his hand. Beyond the open door, the complex corridor stretched outward an impossibly long distance. Running toward him, eyes wild with rage, the mob of other prisoners threatened to wash over Rude like a convict tsunami.

  It ain’t gonna matter how many of ya’ll there are…I’ll gut ya one at a time!

  Rude stepped out into the corridor to meet the oncoming tide of jumpsuit-clad murderers, but between eye-blinks they vanished, replaced with the blinding fluorescent lights of an operating theater.

  The floor shattered like glass under his next footfall, the troll spinning in the darkness of the resulting void. Grasping in vain at the emptiness, Rude lost himself in the vertigo. Frustrated rage poured adrenaline into his veins, and he pounded his fists angrily against the sides of his head, clenching his eyes so tight his head ached.

  When will it end?

  No. His head didn’t ache. It throbbed. Throbbed with every beat of his bio-enhanced heart. Rude felt each pulse of pain as it radiated out from the base of his skull. Radiated out from…from…

  Frag ’em all!

  Everything was replaced by the roar of his modified Ingram in his hand, spitting death at a line of merc’d-out goons in a field of burned-out cars scattered throughout the parking structure. Rude’s grin shone like a silver scythe in the blooming muzzle flashes of his gun. This. This is what he lived for. It made sense. It was what every cell and fiberline in his body screamed out for.

  Everything moved at the speed of an action vid. Rude leaped over the car, letting the machine gun fall from his fingers to mag-clamp to the block on his belt before drawing the Dikote blade from inside his coat.

  Let’s get up close and personal! Yeah!

  He moved like lightning from one merc to the next, cutting and slicing parts off each one in a grisly display of “aggressive incapacitation” that Rude had used so often in his U-Brawl days. For over two meters of bio-print, polymers, metal, and troll flesh, he had the grace of a ballroom dancer—if that dancer was a murder machine, and everyone else on the floor was his victim.

  “Rude…” A familiar-yet-disembodied voice echoed across the scene, causing him to pause his slaughter for a moment.

  Stupid AR echoes. Shut the hell up and let me work!

  He returned to his bloody task, sending two more exec-tec armored suits spinning away from either side of him, their slashed faces spraying arcs of crimson that reached up and across his path. They collapsed, their blood splashing a staggered red ‘X’ on the ground before him.

  “Hey, Rude…” That voice again, this time making the troll drive his sword into his target so deep that he lost his grip on the gore-slick hilt.

  This is how it’s done, chums!

  Rude lunged forward at the last of the opposition; easily knocking the short pistol from the man’s shaking fingers with the back of his bony-knuckled fist. He clutched the much smaller man by the shoulders, his own thick fingers pressing hard into the elf’s back and chest.

  “Rude, man… come on!” The now decidedly female voice was accompanied by a shooting pain at the base of his skull, just like before.

  Shutupshutupshutupshutup…

  He clenched his teeth and tried so hard to focus on the work, but between the throbbing in his head and the edges of his vision beginning to blur, it was hard.

  Rude started to squeeze and twist the thin little elf in his grip, pushing enhanced musculature until his arms were filled with burning cords of sinew. He could hear bones crack and lungs wheeze. Through the sensory augments in his fingertips—fingertips that he knew should be metal and not meat—he could feel the uneven edges of new broken bones rubbing against one another, flooding the corporate wage slave with agonizing pain.

  Wait. Corporate?

  Rude looked down, shifting the broken elf’s weight in his hands like a child’s toy, using his thumbs to pull his jacket aside to reveal a bright and shiny clearance badge on his inner lapel. It was fuzzy at first, especially with the growing pain in his head, but the image began to sharpen. Who did they work for? What kind of mess had he gotten into now?

  “Rude! Pick up, dammit!”

  Oh…

  The insignia came into focus. Saeder-Krupp. These guys worked for the same people Rude was…

  …hells.

  There was a series of blinding, sharp pains at the base of his skull. His hand went to dig at it, this increasing agony, but there was a blast. A flash from behind his eyes. Everything was washed away in an instant, leaving Rude alone and shaking in the darkness again. He knew something horrible had happened, but trying to remember what caused
an even greater hurt deep within him.

  “Rise and shine, you knobbly jackass!” this last time the voice was clear and obviously frustrated, but it was accompanied by the annoying claxon of Rude’s AR wake-me-up program. The sound was somewhere between an Ares air raid siren and South Chicago goblin jazz. In other words, the perfect thing to ruin the best and most chemically-induced sleep sessions.

  “Ow!” Rude shot up in his bed rack, slamming his forehead into the frame overhead, adding another small dent next to all the others. Lines of startup code blurred by his internal HUD, rolling through a dozen or more job offers automatically flagged for denial for one reason or another, landing squarely on the triplicate alert that Rude had an incoming call that he’d already missed a few times. The AR signature icon attached to them blinked like a hazard bulb.

  “Dammit, Zip…never before ten on my damn day off…”

  Legs heavy with both sleep and augments not fully powered up just yet swung out and planted onto the mock-hogony paneled floor of his tiny apartment. It was almost comical how small his place was compared to his bulky frame, but it served all the right purposes for a troll on the go.

  Rude rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his only remaining—mostly—“bio” hand, yawned like some kind of medieval beast, and slowly popped each of the knuckles on it individually, skipping the one poly-plast finger that he got in Reno a few months back. Or was it DC? he thought, rubbing the thick ridge of scar tissue at the base of his skull. “Frag it.”

  With a staccato series of cracks and a few matching groans, Rude rose out of his sleeper and stretched to his full height, the sudden drop in weight triggering the stowaway feature to slide the glorified cot into the wall. The tallest edges of his horns scraped lightly against the stucco of the ceiling, sprinkling chalky dust onto his lumpy head. There was a map of tiny, unintentional hash marks across the whole ceiling from similar scrapes and bumps, and he barely even noticed the contact anymore. Just another part of living a troll’s life in human world. If it even was a human world anymore. Who could tell, really?