Shadowrun - 4th Edition - Rulebook v1.3.pdf - Shadowrun - 4th Edition - Pomidoros

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 le 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.”

at’s what Frankie said just a er his call interrupted me

at a little club in Redmond, right in the middle of the rst

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 o .

“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 ush 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 nd some-

body else.”

e 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 o . I looked

at the cards again. Surely I had time to nish out the hand.

“Okay, see and raise y,” 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 le 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. e 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 o 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.

e 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 sh 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, nishing my beer and

rising, “Looks like it’s showtime.”

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. “ at’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 nd 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.

e 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?”

e barest icker 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 nally nodded. “All right, then—six thousand. We have

a deal.” He ddled for a moment with his commlink, stared

into space again, and then hit a key. I felt my own ‘link buzz

incoming. “Your advance,

and my contact informa-

tion.” en 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.”

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

ddling with a commlink. e dwarf glanced at his commlink

and motioned us to sit

down. Locke and I did;

Zumi faded back and

hung out near the door.

at was ne: she didn’t

like negotiations and it

couldn’t hurt to have

somebody watching the

exit. Desmo took a seat

o 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 e ort, 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. “ at could be arranged,” I said, “depending on

what you’ve got in mind.”

e 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: “ e job involves gaining entry to a facility, removing

some information, and planting something else. e 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 le . “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.”

“Okay,” I said as we le 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 stu in the tanker truck we nd

inside, and then get into the o ces and steal some les from

the computer. en 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 stu in the truck rst, then the o ce.

Johnson’s guy was pretty clear on that. We should nd 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—”

Shadowrun, Fourth Edition

By my reckoning, the scariest words

around are “It’ll be easy.”

Shadowrun - 4th Edition - Rulebook v1.3.pdf

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