“Wasn’t…worth it.” Yu managed between his short gulps of air. Talking took effort, but it helped distract from the pain threatening to push him into subconsciousness.
As he started to drop into the darkness, a thought jolted through him providing all the wakefulness of a shot of epinephrine.
“The others! Are they okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“They knew to look for me.”
Zipfile was the first to respond.
He waited for a few seconds before sending another message.
A couple of pieces slotted into place.
The silence coming across their private channel was answer enough, and made Yu curl up as best he could despite his pain. If anything had happened to her because of this job he’d taken… He couldn’t finish the thought. His face paled even more, and his hands shook. His good arm reached down to his pocket, feeling for the BTL chip he carried, squeezing it tight in his palm.
Yu collapsed into the seat, eliciting a groan as his ribs protested the motion. But it didn’t matter. The team—his family—was safe for now. That was the important part. But it would take work to stay that way.
A moment of silence filled the channel. Yu continued, the encroaching darkness approaching with more speed than Emu on a racetrack.
Despite suggesting the option, Yu couldn’t help but hold his breath. He needed to put the option out there, especially since he was the one who had dragged them into this mess. But he hoped they wouldn’t take it. Not because he was concerned for his own safety, but because he wanted to help protect the other members of his team, and make up for the trouble he brought to their doorstep.
It was the least he could do for his family.
The rest of the team agreed with Rude’s sentiment, and Yu lost the strength to resist the temporary relief of passing out. He dimly remembered the team discussing where to meet and how to move forward as the darkness claimed his awareness.
Part Two
Emu
Brooke Chang
Emu glared through her rear-view mirror at the bleeding, half-conscious elf in the back seat as her Commodore sport sedan rocketed across Harbor Island. “Next time you want to arrange a meet that might get crashed by the cops, let me pick the location.”
Yu didn’t respond, and after a moment, Emu realized he’d stopped trying to sit up. Muttering a curse, she made sure the data cable plugged into the dash was secure, then activated the vehicle control rig implanted in her brain—a process riggers called “jumping in.”
The Commodore’s controls disappeared, and an eyeblink later, Emu felt the wind rushing over the car’s exterior as though it were her own skin. The control rig translated Commodore’s sensors into 360-degree vision, and the bullet holes in its chassis into something resembling a particularly bad bruise—painful, but not enough to impair her function.
Behind the Commodore, the armored Ares Roadmaster trucks Knight Errant had sent to the meeting-turned-ambush weren’t bothering to give chase; they must have known there was no way they could catch a sport sedan with a head start, especially not one driven by a woman who could control a vehicle with her thoughts.
Unfortunately, the Roadmasters weren’t Emu’s biggest problem; that distinction fell to whatever support units Knight Errant’s High Threat Response team had called in. If she was lucky, the support would be a couple of those annoying little wheeled pursuit drones; fast enough to catch her, but not sturdy enough to weather the guns the Commodore sported.
Then bullets started pounding the asphalt around Emu, and it quickly became clear that she was not, in fact, lucky. An upward glance through the Commodore’s sensors confirmed her fears: Knight Errant’s support was a helicopter. A Northrup Wasp, to be precise, a security model that would have no trouble keeping up with her car, and that typically carried a light machine gun in its underslung weapon mount. The Commodore had enough armor to stand up to the odd pistol round, or maybe a low-powered rifle, but it wouldn’t stand a chance against a weapon like that.
Emu sighed. Being a rigger wasn’t just about being a fantastic driver or pilot: it was also about knowing the best way to get to wherever you wanted to go. If she couldn’t outrun or out-fight her pursuers, she’d have to get creative.
A sharp turn of her wheels sent the Commodore drifting around a corner and beneath an elevated section of freeway, earning Emu a few precious seconds out of the helicopter’s line of fire. She used the moment to punch a destination into her navigation system, purely to check the distance—no self-respecting rigger relied on a nav system for directions—then grimaced at the answer: one kilometer. Barely worth a mention on a normal day, but with an injured teammate in the backseat and a hostile helicopter overhead, it felt a lot longer.
And now, she was out of cover.
Emu opened up the throttle and threw the Commodore into another hard turn as the Wasp opened fire again. Rounds from its machine-gun sent plumes of dirt and asphalt chips into the air as they struck the road where the car’s engine block would’ve been if Emu had kept going straight. Ignoring the panicked honk from a food truck she cut off as she skidded into a nearby parking lot, Emu weaved the Commodore between obstacles so fast that the vehicle careened from side to side, bouncing first on its left wheels, then on its right pair like a kid playing hopscotch bounced from leg to leg. Seven hundred meters.
The Wasp laid down another fusillade of machine-gun fire, and the control rig implanted in Emu’s brain translated the impact of each round against the car’s roof into the sensation of hammer-blows against her back. The rigger spun the sports car into a bootleg turn and raced in the other direction, forcing the Wasp to overshoot, then zig-zagged again to put herself back on course—and promptly saw stars when the Commodore’s nose went straight through a steel grille fence. The impact made her feel a little bit like a charging ram, but Emu didn’t have the luxury of waiting until she’d shaken it off. Five hundred meters.
The Commodore lurched forward when it hit open space, and Emu felt a bone-rattling shake
as her tires hit a set of train tracks. Plumes of dirt and gravel kicked up around her as the helicopter’s machine gun tried to track the car’s erratic movements, and she felt a hard punch to the shoulder when a bullet knocked off the Commodore’s driver’s-side mirror. Two hundred meters.
Emu opened the Commodore’s throttle to the max and kept her course as straight as she could, trying to pick up enough speed to jump a second set of train tracks—and when the Wasp shot off her other side mirror, the rigger knew she was out of time.
She twisted her wheels hard once more, and felt a jarring crunch as her tires hit steel…then started breathing again as the Commodore sailed through the air and plowed through a chain-link fence before spinning in a half-donut and skidding to a halt.
The Wasp’s machine-gun fire stopped just as abruptly, mere centimeters away from the fence Emu had just knocked over—the one proudly displaying the logo of Mitsuhama Computer Technologies, the largest megacorporation in the world—and one entirely outside Knight Errant’s jurisdiction. As far as the law was concerned, the meter or two between Emu and the space where the fence had stood might as well have been the Pacific Ocean.
Resisting the urge to give the police helicopter a “frag you” honk—Mitsuhama had their own corporate security forces, which were undoubtedly on the way to investigate why their fence had been knocked down, and the noise would draw them right to her—Emu spun the Commodore around and took off into the rail yard, leaving the Wasp to fume impotently at her escape.
The Knight Errant pilot must have been really angry at not catching their prey, because it took an hour of hiding in a disused warehouse at the rail yard before the salty bastard finally left. The delay gave Emu enough time to dig her medkit out of the Commodore’s trunk and treat the worst of Yu’s injuries. Miraculously, the Wasp’s strafing attack hadn’t hit either of the runners—although it had left holes in the Commodore’s roof, torn up the rear seat cushions, and blown the cabin ceiling light to pieces.
When the coast was clear, she pointed the Commodore south to a large storage unit deep in Auburn’s industrial area. Zipfile had rented the unit under a fake SIN as a backup-backup rally point when the team had first gotten together.
When Emu and Yu arrived at the storage facility, Frostburn and Zipfile were already there—the mage pacing, the decker motionless on a cheap inflatable mattress in the back corner, probably fooling around in the Matrix.
Frostburn’s head snapped toward the door when she heard the new arrivals, her tone more gruff than usual. “What the frag happened?”
Yu lit a cigarette, then shook his head. “Johnson set us up. Are you alright? Where’s Rude?” He looked around the room, as though there was furniture big enough for the troll to hide behind.
“Not answering his commlink. Zip’s trying to reach him.”
“Puk gaai!” Yu forced himself to take a deep breath as he ran his cyberhand through his hair. “I’m sorry, this is my fault.”
“Yeah, it is.” Frostburn’s jaw tightened. “Why were you so keen on taking this job in the first place? The real reason, not that ‘for the exposure’ bulldrek you fed us before.”
Yu cursed under his breath and turned away from Frostburn and Emu, taking a huge drag from his cigarette to calm his nerves—at least until his busted ribs must have started protesting, causing the elf to grunt and clutch his side. “I found the Johnson when I was tracking down a BTL dealer—he owned the warehouse where the chips were being stored. He claimed he had no idea his renters were using the place to smuggle gong cung, and offered to shut them down if I took this job against Telestrian. Everything else happened exactly the way I said before, including the part about the Johnson working for Renraku.”
“Why would you want to take down a beetle dealer? I thought all you Triad boys moved chips,” Frostburn said.
The elf turned stone-faced at the question, but Emu saw a hint of anger in his eyes at Frostburn’s implication. “It’s personal.”
Frostburn wasn’t deterred; on the contrary, she stepped toward Yu, shaking an accusatory finger in his face. “You know what else is personal? My family being in danger because I decided to be a team player and help you with your stupid fraggin’ run. How long do you think it’ll take Renraku to run my SIN and figure out where my parents live, huh? Or my brother, or my sister and her daughter? If they found our safehouses this fast, what makes you think they wouldn’t—”
“That’s enough!” Emu’s voice boomed as she stepped between her quarreling teammates. “Frostburn, Yu’s not the one who called Knight Errant on us. Don’t blame him for something that’s Renraku’s fault. And Yu, I know we don’t generally pry into each other’s pasts, but if what happened then is going to be a problem in the present, the rest of us need to know about it.” Not that Emu didn’t already know the reasons for Yu’s aversion to Better-Than-Life chips, but it wasn’t her story to tell.
A long silence ensued while Yu paced back and forth, taking sullen drags from his cigarette until he tossed the butt out the open door and shoved his good hand into his pocket, sighing heavily. “My brother got hooked on chips when I was a teenager. Eventually, it killed him. That good enough?” Even the perpetual youthfulness of his elven heritage couldn’t erase the weight of years in Yu’s face.
“Yeah.” Frostburn looked as weary as Yu as the tension drained out of the air. After a moment, the ork lifted her chin at the splint on Yu’s non-cybernetic wrist. “What’d you do to yourself?”
“I fell down the stairs.” Yu rolled his eyes at Frostburn’s skeptical glare. “No, seriously. When the Knight Errant goons showed up and started chasing me, I had to fight them off, and fell down the stairs as I was getting away.”
Frostburn waved at the chair and table on one side of the storage unit. “Sit down, I’ll fix you up.” Yu did, and Frostburn placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Thanks Frostb—hrk!” Yu clutched his side and almost doubled over in pain, and even Emu winced at the audible pop as his ribs shifted back into place. “Enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Maybe a little.” Frostburn sighed as her spell ended. “We need a plan for how we’re going to fight back. Renraku’s not like the no-name corps we’re used to working for. They’re way out of our league.”
“We already know who the Johnson is,” Yu said, rubbing his still-tender ribs. “Or at least who he’s pretending to be: the CEO of Rip Current Sea Lanes. It’s not like he—”
“Ag, that domkop!” The outburst prompted the rest of the team to turn at Zipfile as she sat up on the couch, rubbing her eyes. “Why can’t he just answer his ’link like—oh, hey guys.” She belatedly waved to the new arrivals.
Emu waved back with her cigarette, but her expression was all frowns. “Did you manage to track Rude down?”
The dwarf shook her head. “I tried tracing his commlink, but wherever he is, the Matrix coverage is too shoddy for me to me to stay connected. His biomonitor says he’s alive, but that’s all I can tell.”
“Don’t worry about Rude, he’s probably just holed up somewhere in the Underground. It’s not like Renraku will find him down there,” Frostburn said.
After a moment, Yu continued. “Anyway, like I was saying: if Johnson’s cover ID is the CEO of even a small corp, he can’t just vanish into thin air. There’ll be trails we can follow to find him, either by Zipfile chasing him down on the Matrix, or one of us just walking into the office and asking for him.”
“That’s kind of stupid of them, isn’t it? Why hire runners through a Johnson that’s so easy to find?” Emu asked.
“Sounds like they want to be found,” Frostburn mused.
“If they do, we’ll make them regret it. In the meantime, if they already hit one of our safehouses, this place probably isn’t ‘safe’ either,” Yu pointed out. “We can use one of the Octagon’s crash pads for a few days, until we can arrange something more long-term.”
Emu nodded. “I’ll work on finding us anoth
er safehouse, then. Hopefully the owner won’t charge us too much if it gets shot up.” She didn’t sound optimistic about that. “How soon can you talk to your Triad mates?”
“I wasn’t going to bother. Billy’s even harder to get a hold of than Rude,” Yu said. “It’s at the Guangdong Palace in Tacoma, by the docks. The crash pad entrance is around the back.”
Frostburn grunted an acknowledgment. “I’ll meet you there after I check on my family and try to find Johnson.” The mage stalked out the door.
With the impromptu team meeting at an end, Emu, Yu, and Zipfile retrieved the gear they’d stashed in the storage unit and loaded it into their respective vehicles, then set off for Tacoma.
By day, and a large part of the night, Guangdong Palace billed itself as the largest Chinese buffet in the Seattle Metroplex. Emu had no idea whether that was true, but she decided if there had been a competition for the largest Asian massage parlor in the Metroplex, Guangdong Palace would’ve won first prize.
The ground floor of the building seemed to have been set up as a legitimate (if poorly-patronized) Chinese restaurant, but the entire second story of the building had been set aside for “relaxation massages” offered mostly by attractive young women, with a few young men thrown in for good measure.
More relevant to Emu was the staircase that led from the brothel down to a granny flat in the building’s basement, which would serve as the team’s safehouse until she found somewhere better—or until Yu’s Triad bosses found out he’d let his shadowrunner friends use the place without having asked permission. After seeing the suite’s two dorm-style rooms and common area, Emu wanted to ask Yu if the Triads would be open to letting the team pay to just stay there instead; as safehouses went, you could do a lot worse than semi-private rooms in the basement of a restaurant guarded by a crime syndicate.
Unfortunately, the elf had already zonked out in their shared bedroom by the time the idea popped into her head, so the rigger had to settle for bugging a contact of hers: a Knight Errant dispatcher chronically stuck on the night shift. Emu knew her contact would’ve been on duty during the ambush at the Harbor Island warehouse, so she dug his commcode out of her commlink’s contact list and put a call through.
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