BURNOUT 2
by shapcano
Ok, so where was I? Oh yeah. I'm hobbling along cause my side feels like its on fire everytime I move (broken ribs), I'm suckin down my own blood with every breath (broken nose) and the entire left side of my face is pulsing like a drum with each heartbeat from some broken bones in my head. All of this is courtesy of a fraggin phys ad (I hate phys ads) who objected to my protecting the young rigger who is currently helping me walk and who is paying me 3k¥ for keeping her alive tonight.
Sometimes to distract myself from a lot of pain, I try to figure out how I came to be in the agony that afflicts me. I guess its a product of surviving in the shadows for a long time, but you start to think you've got all the answers. That if you're careful in your review of a situation you can spot the point where you screwed up and avoid it in the future. Problem is, of course, that most things come down to pure blind luck. Like, take the dust up at the train station that I'm so industriously tryin ta get away from- I knew that the slot who was making the exchange wasn't a real Suit. I knew from the way he acted that he was covered. It was still just luck that I got off a shot before Tantilus zapped my... employer............ ya know, somethin about that is wrong..... Somehow, Frosty, the phys ad who did the tap dance on my face, was on the scene much too quickly...... Almost.... like... she was in position from when the fake Johnson put the money in the locker.......... Aw SHIT!
Gears was looking for a car to boost while I was trying to catch my breath and follow the thought which had just popped into my head. What if Tantilus wasn't going to kill my employer, but was going to put her to sleep. Slinging death magic isn't usually the first option. First of all there aren't as many killing spells as the trid would have you believe, and second why bother? Hit the vic with a sleep spell, walk over and put one in their ear..... Or take them prisoner......or rob them or plant something.......frag, Frag, FRAG!!!
I'd just managed to piss off, (like, now we're going to hunt you down and kill you in nasty ways-piss off), a very competent team of runners by terminating their mage without having a clue about what he was trying to do. This was not good. Then I did something even worse by snorting at my stupidity. Not only did it feel like someone had jammed an eight inch wire brush up my nose, not only did it spray blood all over my coat, but it caused some bones to shift in my side. Now to avoid the stabbing sensation from the jagged ends of my ribs, I'm standing on the edge of this parking lot like "I'm a little teapot, yada, yada, yada, Tip me over and pour me out." Fraggin embarrassing.
Gears, the only bright spot in an otherwise less than stellar day, has pulled over a gray Chrysler-Nissan Jackrabbit. I'm thinking she made a good choice in picking a nondescript car when she pops the trunk, pulls out a tire-iron and starts smashing the doors. A few good wacks later she's reduced the resale value by 7 or 800¥. She goes back into the trunk, comes out with a can of orange dayglow spray paint and proceeds to draw eyes and shit all over the car. By the time she's done, the car looks nothing like it had before she started and I realize that not only will the Star not recognize it, but neither would the owner. Like I said, the rigger is a definite bright spot. Brains to spare.
I crumpled across the back seat and as soon as she starts driving I cast my healing spell. The pain was so intense I blacked out.
I woke up prepared to tell the trolls to stop sledge hammering my poor brain, only to find that I'm still laid out across the back seat and the pain is the after effect of the healing spell. My nose isn't bleeding anymore, someone has removed the knives from my side and my aching face is down to a dull roar so I guess the spell worked. I sat up and as soon as the vertigo passes I croaked,
"Good job on the wheels."
Gears perked right up, (she looks pretty good when she smiles) but I immediately hit her with-"But we gotta go back to square one and figure out what's goin on"
"You're right" she said with this relieved look on her face. "There's some things that I just don't get....."
"Before we get to those, how long were you with your last team?"
She looked at me in the mirror for a minute before she quietly admitted "It was my second run."
"And you were signed on......."
Again, this hangs for a while before she answers "When their regular rigger got iced.... at least, that's what they told me."
"Yeah. Paranoia. A way of life" I said, "And your job...."
"I just drove the car. I was saving up and buy some drones, but I didn't have any yet so they......"
"Promised you an equal split for just driving the car." I finished. "Ok. Who exactly was on this team?"
"Dodd and Lyasu were street sams, Dodd was a big norm and Lyasu was an elf woman. Redjack, also a norm male, was the decker and Michael was the mage."
Something about the way she said "Michael" told me he was more than just the mage or at least she had wanted him to be more than just the mage. For some reason this annoyed me, but since my skin was on the line and I need my skin to cover my body, I didn't bust her chops about "Michael". Instead I asked her to take few minutes and replay exactly what she remembered from the attack outside of the bar. She swallowed a couple of times as she played it back in her mind, but eventually she nodded and looked up at me.
"Did you actually see Michael die?"
"I....no....I saw him suddenly catch on fire....I...I heard him screaming in pain but I never actually saw him fall."
"What happened next?"
"Dodd jumped out of the car to help Michael as I grabbed the extinguisher....."
"And the elf took it away from you."
"Well......yeah, she must have been trying to help Dodd put the fire out." She said in a perplexed tone.
"Did you see Dodd do anything after he jumped out of the car?"
"Uh........no." she answered in a quiet voice.
"And then what?"
"There were shots and Lyasu was kicking and flailing about"
"So you went to grab her and......"
"My hand was wet with blood because they'd shot out her move by wire controller."
"Be careful about this. You felt wet, you saw it was red, she's flopping like she's having a fit. How did you determine that her controller was shot out? Did you see a wound or did you just see red and assume it was blood? Did you see a hole in her head, or did your mind put 2+2 together and tell you that it must have been a fatal head wound?"
Gears didn't say anything but began worrying her lower lip.
"You're in shock. You believe two teammates have just had their tickets punched. The decker in the back seat is screaming for you to drive. Did he do anything while all of this was happening?"
"Well, no, but it was happening so fast...."
"Ok, so he's just screaming at you to drive away but you don't. What do you do?"
"I leaned across to open the car door so Dodd could get back in."
"You mean that when he leaped out to help his teammate who was under some magical attack, the sam closed the car door behind him? This experienced shadowrunner didn't plan on getting back into the car?" I let that hang for a few seconds before continuing. "Interesting. Did he say anything?"
"He was yelling for me to go" she said, but I could tell she really didn't like the picture I was suggesting.
"So the decker and the sam are screaming for you to go but you don't. You try to pick up passengers in spite of the blood and the noise and the flames and a teammate having a fit next to you. What happens next?
"Lyasu's body ends up on top of mine and I think I heard the windshield breaking and.....uhm, I guess I was knocked out". As I've previously mentioned, Gears is no slouch in the brain department and had caught enough of my drift that she understood the set up.
"That must be how I ended up on the street with Redjack's data chip." She said, drawing a conclusion about the part of the puzzle that she had been most concerned with. "I kept wondering how I would have gotten it if everybody was dead, because I don't even know where Redjack's deck stores downloads. How could I have pulled the chip, gotten out of the car and collapsed on the street without getting shot if the firefight was intense enough to blow away everybody else on the team? I kept trying to remember Redjack giving me the data and then dying but I guess it didn't happen that way. It must have been a set-up."
"Sounds like a set-up that they were trying to fix on the fly." I responded, "You were supposed to stomp down on the gas in terror as Dodd got his. Later I have no doubt Redjack would have given you a copy of the data before he got dramatically whacked and presto, you're a credible witness to the death of the team for a short while. If, after that, you were to have an accident.... there's nobody to talk to for details. "
"That makes sense," Gears admitted after a dry mouthed swallow, "but why?"
"That's something we may never know," I told her. "It might not even matter. Maybe they'd hacked off a player big enough to want blood, maybe they wanted to get out of the life, maybe they just wanted a vacation from shadowbiz. Lord knows they wouldn't be the first." I sort of drifted with that thought for a minute, when I realized that Gears was still waiting for a conclusion. "I don't care about why. I just want to figure out who is doing what right now so I know who to run from."
"Well, it sounds like they still wanted me to pass along the data as if it was genuine," she said. "It sounds very much like my former teammates decided to let me wear the bullseye by playing dead. I can see where that would accomplish several goals. It would take the heat off them if they were in trouble because if they're already dead the hunt for them would be called off. Since I haven't done much of value, dropping me doesn't hurt them." She sighed and continued "On a personal level......"
"Mistake." I interrupted, "Don't confuse personal with Biz. If they chose to make you a stalking horse it was a Biz decision. Too expensive and dangerous otherwise."
I think she wanted to be reassured, but didn't quite get the horse reference.
"A stalking horse is a tethered animal used to lure predators," I explained.
"I thought that was a Judas goat." she responded.
Now I have to admit that I was impressed. The stalking horse was explained to me by a hitter who used the strategy all the time. Judas goat, well, let's just say that's something from too deep in my past. Unless she came from a farm, she'd have had to stumble over that phrase reading books because nobody on the street even knew what the hell a goat was.
"No, a Judas goat leads animals (mostly sheep) to something bad. Judas Iscariot led the Roman soldiers to Christ so the Judas goat leads others into problems while the stalking horse attracts predators to a hunter's kill zone."
She drove for about a minute in silence and then she asked, "Where did you learn all this stuff, Calahan?"
"Around" I said with a sort of half smile. I watched her grin in the rearview mirror and thought about what a nice grin it was.
"So, it looks like you were left to be the fall guy. That means a couple of things. You just collected the payment that the team was supposed to get for the job, right?" I might have been insulted by the suddenly wary look in her eye, but I knew it was just a sign of the healthy paranoia she was developing. Paranoia that might keep her alive on the streets. I continued, "They may be playing dead, but they still want their money. Be very careful if they contact you. After leaving you on the spot, your old team is not going to want you telling others about what a reliable group they are. They are going to want your silence, permanently."
"Drek" she whispered.
"Well thank you very much" I responded too cheerfully. "So much for your faith in your personal bodyguard."
"I didn't mean......"
"I know, I know. I'm just having you on." Then I said seriously, "But its a two edged sword. You now have the ability to seriously screw with their plans and their rep and if the fixer was in on it, you can put his rep in the crapper too. The shadows are full of dangers, but when a team fucks with its own or a fixer fucks with his employees, they are asking to be put out of business."
"I don't think the fixer was in on it" Gears said after some thought. "He was cursing a blue streak when I told him how the run got screwed up. I think he was genuinely upset- like a prime source of his revenue suddenly disappeared. He asked me a gazillion questions about the details of the attack....... You think he maybe figured out that it was a setup?"
"Possible" I admitted. "It would explain why the attack in the train station went the way it did......"
"Yeah, I wanted to ask you, what the frag happened?"
I spent the next several minutes recounting what had happened in the terminal and what I thought it meant. I finally became aware enough of my surroundings to realize that my charge had driven from one end of the sprawl to the other while we had been chatting.
"So if it was a capture attempt by the fixer who wanted to check out my story and data in detail," Gears said as she put everything together, "that would explain both the magic attack on me, the disguised Johnson and the phys ad suddenly appearing near the locker. That might mean that I could call him and straighten this out."
"IF" I repeated. "Big if. Could have been a team sent by the people your former buddies ripped off. Could have been claim jumpers." She looked up at that and I explained "Some shadowteams make their living ripping off other teams. After a job shadowrunners are often hurt, low on ammo, personnel, etc. You wait for the payoff and then you jump the other fellow's claim. Steal the assignment and the pay. Lots of times a Johnson will pony up double creds to another crew if he wants the data bad enough. No protection in the shadows. Could have been something else entirely. Maybe Tantilus wasn't preparing to throw a spell at you..... Maybe I misread what was goin down, shot too soon......lot of variables."
"But what's our next move?" She asked in frustration. "There has to be something......"
I sighed and said "I wish it was that simple, kid. I'd love to be able to consult a manual for what to do when a run goes to drek. I've just never found one." After a few minutes of thought I said, "If we were to try to meet with the fixer to see where he stands in this mess, we'd have to set it up in such a way that Jinn's team wouldn't crash the party, your old group couldn't show up and the fixer couldn't have somebody else make a snatch. You got any ideas?"
I think she was pleased (and surprised) to be asked for her input, but it took us another ride through the city to work out the details of our plan.
It was a room without smells. No hint of anything in the air and it reminded me how much the animal side of the brain needs references from as many senses as it can get in order to be comfortable. If Gears had any problems adjusting I didn't see them, but then again, the form she was wearing conveyed exactly zero subtext. Thinking of how emotionally charged the situation was, I was thankful for small favors.
The fixer, a slot named Diogenes, entered and he and Gears immediately started a Q&A until each was satisfied that the other was who they claimed to be. Then the attention focused on me.
"Who is this? Why do you have someone else here? How is he involved? If you've brought a decker....."
"Keep your pants on, pops." I interrupted. "Work out your problems with my friend before you go borrowing any more trouble."
He may have sounded like a pompous ass, but he quieted fast enough to demonstrate it was just a persona he was trying out for negotiation.
"I want to information." Gears said. "I offer information in return. I will ask yes or no questions and you may do the same. Please do not lie" she said and turned to look directly at me.
I have to say that it is refreshing to deal with somebody with a brain. The rigger didn't give the fixer running room, didn't expose what she thought or what she was afraid might have happened, she just came up with a straightforward deal ( and an implied threat ) which were easy to understand. Beautiful.
"Did the Johnson complain about the data I handed over?" Gears began.
"No." Diogenes responded, "Did you see any of the dead bodies of Regulators?"
"No" Gears said, but both of us noted that the fixer's question revealed that he was thinking along the same lines we were about the rigger's former team.
"Did the Johnson complain about the transfer at the station?" She asked.
"No. Did you actually see any of the attackers when the Regulators were taken out?
"No. Did the recovery team complain about the shooting?"
"No".
The silence that followed pointed to the fact that the fixer knew he had fucked up. How would he know anything about the recovery team if he hadn't been involved in organizing it? "Have you heard from any of the Regulators?" he asked begrudgingly.
"No. Did you send the recovery team to capture me?"
"Yes." The response was stunning because it was a truth which might have very negative consequences for the fixer. I never in a million years would have believed one of those unmitigated bastards would ever admit to something which might rebound badly. I bit my tongue, as did my partner while we waited to see if more was forthcoming.
"I had to know details of the Regulators getting hit. If it was real it might mean my entire operation was in danger. I had to get at what really happened to know how to react. If they were faking their deaths I had to know that too, so I could work out why. I thought since you were alone it would be very simple for Jinn's people to snatch you and bring you to where we could talk. Then I would know the truth. But SOMEONE", he stressed while looking at the icon I was wearing, "prevented that from happening and killed the mage Tantilus. This trigger-happy meddler has made Jinn very upset"
The last was delivered to me with the sort of smug 'you'll-get-yours' attitude that made me sorry we were only in virtual proximity. Without the ability to add another breathing hole to the center of the clown's forehead, I did the next best thing.
"You understand," I told Gears, "this drekhead just told you he would have tortured you to get the details of your team's death, don't you? The details were too important for him to just set up a meet like this one. No, he had to capture you to make sure you answered his questions truthfully. That means he wouldn't hesitate to use 'persuasion', right?"
Icons like the ones we were using don't convey subtext, but I was willing to bet that the look Diogenes was giving me would have sent me immediately to hell if I could have seen it. I'm certain both Gears and I were looking at him that way.
"It seems this meeting is over" the fixer announced amidst the lengthening silence. "I would just caution you, young woman. Your 'bodyguard' is a magnet for trouble. I would get away from him before he brings you to ruin."
"Before you go, Diogenes, I would like to say something. I'd appreciate your not conveying anything to anyone about us or this meeting." Gears said.
"Or?" the fixer asked.
"Or I might forget to reset the dead drop I'm about to set up. The one where I detail how you gave me and my team a job and before the assignment was over, hired another team to kidnap your own employee. That this extraction was set up as I tried to complete the assignment at a meet arranged with you. I think shadowland would love a story like that, a story of a fixer who kidnaps his own people when they are completing his assignments, don't you?"
Now I know he wanted to send me to hell, but I believe he was willing Gears to some place worse. "Agreed" he croaked as he jacked out.
I crossed his name off my Christmas card list.
The widow left us alone for a minute after we jacked out. It was unprofessional as hell and a departure from the arctic exterior I usually cultivate but I swept Gears up off the floor and just spun with her.
"You were BRILLIANT!" I exclaimed. "I've been around for a while and I've never dealt with anybody as fast on their feet! Outstanding! That thing with the dead drop? Absolutely subzero! And that Q&A? Fragging amazing! You got the bastard to admit to so much!"
"If what he said was true" she said with a half smile.
The words brought me back to earth in a couple of ways. I recognized, as she did, that we still might be following a trail that someone else had laid out for us, but the fact that she pointed it out to me showed me that I was outclassed in the brain department. I put her down slowly as it dawned on me that she might be new to shadowrunning, but she was probably smarter than anybody I knew. Because all the riggers I had known were pure motorheads I guess I just never thought riggers could be smart. Yet here she was running rings around me in the mental department.
I'd always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy so its a little disconcerting when you have to admit to yourself that you ain't the sharpest pencil in the box. I mean, sure, on some level you know that there's somebody out there whose got more on the ball than you, but actually dealing with a person like that, finding yourself a step behind in the thought department, well, it takes some adjustment. Something of what I was thinking must have showed on my face because she chose that moment to put her arms around my neck, softly kiss me and say "Thanks, Calahan. You're pretty special yourself."
Predictably, the black widow chose that moment to stick her head back in. "Wellllll....." she drawled. "Younger than usual for you, isn't she Calahan? If I'd known that was the real reason why you chose to visit my lair, I'd......"
"Stop it, Julia." I interrupted, "Its a biz relationship. You've heard of those, haven't you? It involves conduct outside of the bedroom......"
"Excuse me," Gears said with some authority. "Thank you very much for giving us access to the matrix. We've concluded our business here, so if you'd let me know what I owe you for your time....."
"Ha!" The widow exclaimed, "She's got class too. You won't last a week, Calahan." Then she turned to Gears and said, "150¥ will cover this visit." As she walked us to the door she loudly confided "You get a discount because you've got enough of a survival handicap with this burnout supposedly protecting you."
"Ah, blow it out yer ass." I responded with my usual rhetorical brilliance from the doorstep.
"I love you too, Tommy" she said as she closed the door.
We got back to the car and asked each other in unison "Now what?"
End Trans
Author's note- Thanks to everybody who gave me feedback on the first of these stories. It so inspired me I banged this out in record time to answer some of the questions about Burnout & Gears. I know have to put down these short pieces until I'm able to really churn out some Joint Venture. When that is done, who knows? I may come back.
Because I am profoundly grateful to all of the wonderful readers out there who have written to tell me they like my fiction, and because I really do want more people to try their hand at writing, I make this offer: I've started Burnout & Gears. If you like the characters and don't want to wait for me to write more about them, why don't you take a crack at it? The outline (eewwh, wrong word) the framework is there. Take the story and run with it. You have my blessing. If anybody takes me up on this and sends me what they've done, I'll post it. If I get enough, I'll create a Burnout & Gears page. Send your story (you write it, I'll worry about making the format readable) to: (Shapcano is no longer available, and neither is this offer - but I wanted to honor what a generous mentor he was by keeping his offer here. - DS)
This story is copyright of the author. Shadowrun is a Registered Trademark of FASA Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used without permission. Any use of FASA Corporation's copyrighted material or trademarks in this file should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks.
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