Side Story October 2022: The Run pt. 1

A/N: Hiya everyone! This side story was super fun to write. I am a big fan of Shadowrun and getting a chance to write in the setting (all the prompt said was cyberpunk and this is deffo cyberpunk) is making me write something bigger than I ought to. I have a suitably long and fun first part that I can post on time. The second part will be out in early-to-mid November. If your sub is ending before then and you want the other half when it comes out, contact me here or on discord or RR or SH. I have emails tied to patron accounts and I can BCC a pdf to people who want it when the second part is done.

I'd have done one big (~8-10k word) thing all at once, but the crossover Flitter and I did was like a full-time job this last week, and I ran out of time to make this as big as I wanted. I considered cutting stuff and shrinking it, but I liked the atmosphere that was building and I felt it would be damaged too much if I cut any more. Already, I had to cut a few things to not take too much time away from actual chapter writing.

Long note, but here's the side story! I hope you like it!

I knew the restaurant for the meeting would be fancy. I didn’t know it would be this fancy. I’d dressed as nicely as I could, without showing off too much ‘ware. Long gloves covered my forearms up to the sleeves of my ankle-length dark purple dress. I loved the feeling of the fabric on stockinged legs, and I used that feeling to put out my mind just how unarmed I felt without my blades.

I never was the best at Johnson meetings. Some parts of the metroplex hated my guts, and since I was an oni, that extended further than those Humanis Policlub nutjobs over in Snohomish.

The line Angel and I were in was surprisingly long, so it was a good thing we came early. I looked up at the sky—it looked like rain, and I could see the looming glow of the Arcology over the tops of the nearby buildings. It’d rained already today; there were still puddles and the GridGuide rails wetly reflected the gold of the restaurant’s neon sign. The “Gilded Lobster” it read.

Not a place I’d heard of, but then again, I didn’t exactly eat fine dining… ever. I couldn’t even get excited about the dinner, however, with how nervous I was.

Angel squeezed my hand. I felt the touch dimly through the limb’s synthskin. The upgrade had been worth it, but my arms were still slightly too bulky, and I couldn’t afford the best stuff yet. This run might fix that. The limbs’ wireless was off, but I felt the reassuring weight of the holdouts in each forearm. They weren’t my blades, and I was unarmored aside from what subdermal plating I had, but the twin pistols were a small comfort.

“You doing okay, Wrath?” Angel whispered.

“Yeah. Just nervous,” I replied, trying not to lick the lipstick off my lips. I looked down at Angel. The shorter woman—most people besides trolls were shorter than I was—met my gaze with her gorgeous unmodified face. Mages and ‘ware didn’t exactly go together, and Angel was no slouch when it came to magic. She had white-dyed hair and gold contacts—high tech ones that gave her some of the AR stuff actual cybereyes or any pair of glasses would get.

I was still stunned she’d chosen to work with me, and that we’d even ended up in a relationship. I wasn’t exactly the best street sam around; I thought too much, most people would say. Kinda like right now.

Angel looked back up into my own cybereyes. They were a gift from her, actually. Not the high-end ones I currently had that were identifying her as friendly (with the tag “Angel” and a bunch of purple hearts around her outline), but my first pair. I’d hated the way my eyes had bulged since I’d goblinized. Hated about damn near everything actually. It had been like puberty again, during puberty. I’d started running to get the funds I needed for HRT and surgeries. While I didn’t hold a lot of love for the megacorps, they could do some damn fine work if you had the money. Bioware isn’t cheap.

If only Renraku hadn’t kicked my dad out of a job and us out of Japan when I’d goblinized, I’d have gotten everything done sooner. I particularly didn’t like Japanocorps for this exact reason.

The line moved ever forward, but my hand stayed in Angel’s. Just two girlfriends out on a date. We didn’t need a cover quite like that, but it was just good practice not to arrive as a big group ahead of the meetup if it was in a public place. Speaks of a lack of professionalism it does.

She stood up on her tiptoes, and pecked me on the side of the neck.  “Relax,” she said with a smile.

“Thanks,” I sighed, taking a big breath and then exhaling it.

I looked up at the restaurant’s sign: a gaudy neon disasterpiece that gave the place more charm than a restaurant this nice deserved to have. The menu popped up in my AR, and I had to do a double-take at the prices. Fifteen hundred nuyen for a steak dinner? The menu claimed all ingredients were the real deal—were they operating at a loss?

I didn’t have more time to think as the last people in front of us moved inside. The red-haired elven waitress who had an unusual accent (Tír na nÓg?) led us inside. She was dressed to the nines in a fancifully patterned pantsuit that was perhaps half a size too closely fitted. I assumed the effect was purposeful—I’d have done the same if I had her figure.

We passed the tables in the front room, through a back room that had an enclosure with two large six-limbed lizards sunning themselves behind a scarily think pane of tinted glass, and into a hallway lined with private rooms. She led us to one and knocked. After a moment, she entered and bade us follow her.

Inside, the others were waiting for us. Saint, our decker, sat at attention in his seat, deep hood pulled back to reveal his well-combed black hair and sharp eyes with hints of crow’s feet under them. I didn’t call him “c0d3s41nt,” which was a remnant of his earlier years that Angel still ribbed him about.

Next to him was Hyper; the small rigger was toying with a microdrone and had parts strewn across their side of the table. Their tongue was stuck out to one side of their face, and a messy mop of dark hair went down just past their eyes, the bright glow of their blue cybereyes visible between the strands. Bard sat opposite them next to the Johnson. She was a recent addition, and didn’t like to talk about her past. If she was here, that meant we needed to get in somewhere that was locked up tight. One of her cat-like ears—I didn’t know if it was bioware or if she was a changeling—flicked in annoyance at something Hyper said.

Last, my eyes fell on the Johnson. Human, male, and probably middle-aged but in that “looks younger” sort of way. Leónization? I wondered about it, and my eyes paused on the wicked scar he had through one eye and up into his short-cropped salt & pepper hair. The eye itself tracked slightly lazily behind his other, much sharper one as he looked at Angel and me. Is that glass eye?

We took the remaining two seats next to each other. If Angel and I were late, Mr. Johnson didn’t speak a word about it.

The waitress handed Mr. Johnson a menu, and set another one on the table for us to share. “Our menu is also in AR, but the jammers in these rooms can be a little problematic for that sort of thing.” She smiled, and there was no emotion behind it. “I’ll be back to take your order shortly.” She bowed slightly and glided back out of the door.

“Now then,” Mr Johnson said calmly, setting the menu down and reaching for the jammer built into the center of the table. He deftly flicked the switch and I had just enough time to switch off my AR before everything went to static. “Shall we begin?”

***

Negotiations weren’t my strong suit. I wasn’t terrible at them, but Angel and Saint had a lot more experience with them. This Johnson had been a serious, but surprisingly amiable sort. He’d not tried to be funny by making jokes about an “Angel” and a “Saint” running around with a red-skinned oni street samurai named “Wrath.” He’d also not tried any intimidation tactics, which honestly made things quite a bit scarier. He just assumed we’d do the job properly and not cheat him.

It spooked me, but it terrified Angel. She’d been quiet during the rest of the dinner after our business talk, aside from a couple brief comments about the quality of the food. I had to agree with her that it was sublime, and I also had to agree with her that something about this Johnson rattled me.

The job was simple—they always were in theory. This one had two parts. We were to go an agricultural company’s HQ in Snohomish—subsidiary to what megacorp I didn’t know—locate the server containing a specific set of files somewhere in the R&D wing, and get out after destroying the hard drive. The second part was to rescue the researcher in charge, who’d been poached to work there from whatever interested party the Johnson was working for.

The next week had been a blur of preparation. We had until the end of the month, and we needed time to get resources and do recon. Bard watched the place physically, Angel checked the astral plane, and Saint checked what places he could for info on their IC and security systems, given that they didn’t exactly broadcast their security node wirelessly. The place was surprisingly tightly guarded for what it purported to be, but that helped explain the pay. We’d asked Sharp to dig up info on our target, Lorelei Tozell. Our sometimes face was busy with other work, but he’d said he’d get us the info by the weekend.

While those three were working the streets and Sharp was working his contacts for any information on Lorelei, I was out with Hyper looking for drone parts and trying to source a getaway vehicle, which we’d finally gotten done today. We needed something that they’d be safe in while they went hot sim with their drones, and also something that we could use to get all of us and our target out.

Hyper was unusual for most riggers in that they took the risk of frying their brain just to get that last edge over their competition. Saint, on the other hand, was a traditionalist—big bulky deck with multiple configs, wires and adapters, and cold sim only. I guess their names kinda made sense in that way.

Next to me in the van we’d rented from some shady place near the barrens, Hyper was driving with a big frown.

“Something wrong with our ride?” I asked. “Is the GridGuide not working, or did you just turn it off like usual?” I glanced at the array of warning lights the HUD was displaying on the windshield.

“All the crap whatever jerk did to this thing is so… amateurish!” Hyper grumbled. They had to lean forward to hit the gas, their almost child-like stature just enough to see over the dashboard.

I had the opposite problem: my horns had made two neat holes up into the headliner and they scraped metal every time we hit a bump. “What do mean by amateurish? What crap?” I asked, trying to search up some of the warning lights on the matrix with my internal commlink.

“Someone messed with a lotta programming in this rolling wreck. We’d have a battery fault in fifteen miles of driving if I hadn’t fixed it. The tracker they had on this thing was some garbo prebuilt drek, too.” Hyper hit the dash. “You just don’t treat tech like this! Gah! It’s just not…”

I’d suspected a scam like this from the start, to be honest. Rent out a crap van, have it break down, and then force the renters to pay you to “fix” it. Easy money, and most people wouldn’t know it was a scam. I couldn’t help but giggle at Hyper’s pouting tirade that was now devolved into rigger slang that I couldn’t comprehend.

“What’re you laughing at?” they paused in the middle of a vivid description of the exact kind of paint work they’d give to a “canvas like this vintage van” and turned to me with a quizzical look.

“A bunch of people tried to scam us, and you’re just mad they did it poorly. It’s cute!” I replied with a smile, showing off my tusks.

“I’ll show you cute!” they pouted.

Oh the setup that lines gives…

I let the next witty remark die on my tongue. No reason to antagonize them. “Joke’s on them that they won’t be getting this van back, then.”

“They don’t deserve it back!” Hyper huffed.

Together, the two of us and our van full of esoteric parts continued the circuitous route to our safehouse, pulling the van into the old garage and closing the door behind it. Hyper hopped out, dove underneath with a pair of pliers, and returned holding an inactive tracking unit.

“You gonna find a use for that?” I asked, jokingly.

“Nah,” they replied, tossing it on a pile of other junk intended to be sold for scrap but that they’d never gotten around to.

The safehouse garage was a pretty small place on the northeast side of Puyallup. Hyper called the place home and had a small apartment upstairs that we all crashed at when we needed to. Right now, the two of us sat down to play some VR games until the other arrived. I knew I wasn’t as good as Hyper, but they could have at least let me win some of them.

It was late evening by the time the others got back. I smelled the soy burgers before they walked in the door.

“Food’s here! Double portion for the big demon!” Bard shouted, her tail twitching excitedly behind her. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starved.”

I disconnected the headset and hopped up from the ratty old couch. Behind me, Hyper grumbled about me dropping mid-game and took the time to win the round first before they came over to the old card table with six seats around it. Sharp was still out working, but the rest of us tucked into the feast of flavored junk food.

Three bites into his burger, Saint swallowed hard and sighed. “That place we went to has ruined normal food for me.”

“Y’know,” Bard chimed in, swiping a few fries from Saint’s bag, “if we pull this off, you’ll be eatin’ good for like a whole year.”

Saint sighed. “I need a new deck, much as I hate to admit it. I’m going to be more broke after this run.”

Hyper and I were eating too quickly to talk—I was already on my second burger—but I noticed that Angel was quiet.

“Everything good?” I asked. “How’d surveillance go?”

“It went fine,” she replied, biting the tip off a single fry. “But what we found worries me a lot. The place is nice. It looks like it’s not total shit to work for despite the fact that most employees, our target included, live on site. No weird shit on the astral plane so far as I could see, but I couldn’t see all the way inside and that worries me.

“c0d3s41nt said there’re rumors of black IC though, and they’re running everything wired down, which is weird if they’re just doing agricultural research.” Angel ate the rest of her fry and snatched two back from Bard’s bag that the infiltrator had taken while she was talking.”

Notably, Bard didn’t try to steal my fries. I think she didn’t want to lose a finger. Or a limb.

“There’s somethin’ goin’ on there for sure!” Bard said happily, taking a big swig of soda. “Unless they do all their deliveries at once, they’ve got a whole lotta stuff comin in for a place that size. Some weird equipment too, but it might just be farm shit I don’t know about.”

“You got any pictures of the tech?” Hyper asked, though with their mouth full, it came out more or less garbled. They swallowed and tried again.

“Sure do!” Bard beamed. “Have at ‘em.” Her eyes flicked around as she sent the files to all of us.

I got a notification lower in my vision. I opened it, and saw, well, tech I didn’t recognize. Mostly. “Hey, some of those are gun cases. Big guns, too.”

“Fine if they use gel rounds, but I don’t like it,” Angel grimaced.

If they didn’t use gel rounds, they meant business. So far as we knew this place wasn’t extraterritorial and that meant metroplex laws applied and, well, it was likely whatever they were doing was less than legal. Live ammunition wasn’t something security at a normal low-level-seeming place like this carried.

I frowned. “Guess it means they won’t call Knight Errant on us. Maybe Lonestar though, but that depends.”

“Some of this is high end computing hardware—the boxes in images sixteen and seventeen,” Saint said. “And the one in eighteen is a snazzy-looking hot sim rig, but I think we all knew that.”

Snazzy? Saint, you’re showing your age.

“How did you even get these images?” Angel asked.

“You don’t wanna know, but we’re good and no one’s the wiser,” Bard replied candidly.

“Drones!” Hyper exclaimed. “A lotta nice ones too! Can we grab a few while we’re in there? If Wrath doesn’t chop ‘em to pieces or put too many bullet holes in them?”

“Whoah, Hyper.” I put my non-burger-holding hand up. “We’re not going loud for this one. If we end up needing me for anything except heavy lifting, something’s gone wrong.”

Bard gave my extended hand a high five, and in my moment of confusion tried to snatch some fries. Faster than someone without ‘ware could manage, my limb swung down to catch her wrist. She moved it deftly out of the way, making off with a single fry.

“I didn’t know you had ‘ware,” I said, surprised and suddenly wary.

“Well, I do!” Bard ate the stolen fries gleefully. “Not the heavy stuff, but I can move fast when I need to. It’s just something I saved up for a while back.”

I looked at her limbs, and her build. Everything looked natural, so whatever she had wasn’t cheap. Then again, I’d gotten my fair share of similar stuff, both chrome and biological, both for my transition and for my work. Angel gave Bard a side-eyed glare, but said nothing.

“What was it about the drones?” Angel asked, trying to keep the conversation on track.

“They’re not all combat ones. There’s a lotta weird models and boxes with mods that I can’t see because they’re in a box. Also no part numbers. Real corpo secret stuff, I think.” Hyper practically drooled over the photos.

“But some are combat ones?” Saint asked.

“Yeah,” Hyper answered absentmindedly.

Saint grimaced. “Think you can take them?”

“I can no problem!” Hyper waved his concern off. “And you’ll get the rest, right Wrath?”

I glanced over to my twin vibro swords sitting sheathed on the back table. I’d taken them out of the safe to clean them earlier today. I always hated that I couldn’t take them everywhere, but they “made people nervous.” I make people nervous by existing near them, so what?

“Yeah, I will. Though it’ll be tricky if we’re outdoors and they have verticality.”

“Shouldn’t be an issue!” Bard laughed. “We just park the van in the spot Angel and me found and we’ve got like half a block run from the loadin’ docks. It’s eeeasy. And they’ll prob’ly never know. And that’s only ifwe can’t get inta their security system and have Hyper bring us the van right through the gate up ta the docks. We got this!”

“While I appreciate your enthusiasm, Bard,” Seyari countered, “we can’t underestimate them. Even if this was a milk run, underestimating someone is how you die.”

“Wow, morbid much?” Bard grabbed the last couple fries out of her own bag and munched down on them.

“What about the files?” I asked Saint.

He swallowed and then replied. “Server room. I don’t know where it is for sure without a floorplan, but it’ll be somewhere deep inside, not against any exterior walls. Even with an airlock or something, it’s probably far from the hydroponics part of the research lab, too. If I can get into the servers, I can corrupt or wipe copies on any workstation, and then we can destroy the original.”

I nodded. “How do we find the server room then?”

Saint wiped his hands and fiddled with his commlink on the table. “I’ll need to get into their security node, or something with similar permissions. Then, power routing and HVAC info will tell me where it is via blank spots or patterns if they’re not bothering to hide the location.”

“Awesome. So we just need to get somewhere, cover you, and let you get in. We confirm where the target is, make contact, get the files, and do our destruction right as we’re leaving?” I turned to look at Angel while I outlined what I imagined the plan to be.

Angel answered confidently, but her eyes strayed to the table. “Pretty much, yeah. I’d do the data first, but if we get discovered, we’ll need to have Lorelei ready to go.”

“Are we going tomorrow?” I asked, having just finished my second burger. I still felt hungry and would probably grab something later. Not my fault I needed to eat like twice what the others did.

“Tomorrow night, yes,” Angel replied. “Sharp sent Saint the details on Ms. Tozell earlier today. She did indeed start working at this place recently, having come from another secure lab at a competitor. She’s antisocial, never leaves, and has a reputation for being a workaholic. She often works late, and we can probably nab her tomorrow night because the fewest people will be on site on a Saturday night.”

“Sounds good ta me!” Bard chimed in.

“Same.” I nodded.

Saint nodded as well, and Hyper assented through a mouthful of soy burger.

The planning was done. Now all that was left to do was the hard part.