January 2056:
Happy birthday to me! I turned seventeen years old.
Sheila X had a messaged me to come down for a face to face.
At the time, I was running with an odd crew that generally worked well together. Seems Sheila had put the word out to the team as whole, because when I made it to Brick House I saw familiar vehicles in the lot.
Little Rickie was there, same as always. Nearly four meters of towering troll muscle, with reflexes like a hummingbird on novacoke, and a cyberarm I knew to have a meter plus of dikote (tm) coated blade hidden in its mechanism. Every time I see Rickie, I feel an attack of politeness coming on.
Sapphire was inside already. Two meters of lean muscle and "I'm more chill than you" attitude. If not for the fact that she was physically adept, she would probably have had a great career as a joy-girl. Such as those careers go anyway. But she was an adept and a damn good one. Gifted with a whole body awareness that made any weapon an extension of her will, a grace that made her as quiet as a creeping spider, and a situational awareness that made her seem superhuman in her reaction, she was a nightmare of an opponent in a fight.
Grack was in line waiting to get in. Grack was an asshole. He took great pride in being the strongest and dumbest troll he could be. I'm not being racist about it. He literally once told me, "I don' have to be smart. I troll and troll strong. Shut face or I flatten you." Grack didn't like me, and the feeling was mutual. He kept calling me 'kid' and offering to change my diaper, and drek like that. I had a bad feeling about Grack. I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. But he was solid in a fight, carried a LOT of firepower, and was good at hitting what he aimed at.
Our decker was already there too. Since she is still working in the Biz (Yes, over 20 years now), and is sharper with a deck than ever before I will just call her "Angel". Angel was a bit younger than me, fifteen or sixteen at the time, and was real wiz with anything electronic and an archmage of the matrix in the making. She wasn't up there with FastJack's level of skill at this time, but she was clawing to get there. She had made some waves on her own and Sapphire was working for her as a bodyguard around this time.
The two other members of the team were Zip and Pepper. Two Street samurai who were worlds apart in their thinking. Zip was a self-absorbed, overly macho drek-head with a penchant for assault rifles and knife fighting. Zip had some heavy wire in his meat bod that had destroyed most of his soul/essence (whatever you want to call it), he jumped at sudden movements, and talked to his shadow (seriously, it was creepy as hell). I don't miss him, and no one I know does either. Pepper didn't have any wire at all. He was an ideological successor to the ancient samurai. Lived the life of a ronin, seeking a master worth serving and coming up cold. Pepper once stuck his pistol under Zip's chin, when Zip had pulled a knife on a little girl who was running out of an alley. Pepper was smart, committed, precise, and professional. I liked him professionally, respected his abilities enough not to crack wise of his philosophy, and I miss him to this day.
The job was a big deal for us, with the potential for a huge score.
Mr. Johnson wanted an item from a particular warehouse that he didn't have rights of ownership to. The pay for this widget was surprisingly nice, which should have been a big warning flag, and my cut would have allowed me to move out of Redmond and into Pinehurst (that move had to wait a while). Johnson was good for ten percent up front money, so the team decided to pull the job and off we went.
********************
From my notes on the job (its hard looking back twenty years plus and seeing the mistakes that were made... some things you only learn by surviving I guess):
1900: Snow is deep on the ground around the warehouse except for the parking area. Security is on the ball, with Knight Errant sec guards sporting their environmentally adapted gear and weapons. "Angel" was able to remotely access the security system, found a rigger in the sec system, and put him into a state of blissful ignorance with some digital magic. (Note: With the electronic sec-systems at our control we had only the KE guards to worry about and that is where we fragged up. We didn't take the KE guys seriously, didn't respect their professionalism, and then Zip nearly got us all killed.)
1910: I levitated myself and Sapphire over the fence line and onto the roof. Then levitated Zip and Pepper over. It was cold. The snow had a thin layer of ice on top, and I just heard the soft crunch of boots breaking through that ice and snow below us. Pepper and Zip were 15 meters in the air, being levitated to me, but were only half way through the trip. A KE sec-guard was walking the perimeter, something we hadn't seen them do in the thirty minutes we had been watching before we kicked the party off.
He must have been good at his job, that KE guard, because when he came around the corner he saw Zip and Pepper and grabbed at his comm.
That is when Zip flipped out and opened up on him.
I don't know how many rounds Zip fired exactly. I know he emptied his AK-97 into the sec guard with most, if not all, of the rounds striking home. Added to that, Zip was screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs the whole time and you can understand why in seconds we had a dozen KE sec-guards slinging guns and beating feet our way.
I managed to get Zip and Pepper on the roof with Sapphire and I, while Angel sent a message over our commlinks saying she was suppressing the alarm the guards had triggered. Zip was reloading, and swearing he was going to kill "Every slotting sec-guard in this fragged up, icebox!" (his words). I remember I looked at him, not sure what my face looked liked but Zip shoved his AK in my face and started to say something about blowing my little magical head off, when Pepper stabbed him in the brainpan.
"Unprofessional, and dishonorable" was all Pepper ever said about it.
I had thought I might piss a little.
Grack had put the big dumb troll theme to work. He was firing indiscriminately at sec-guards and managed to tie up about half of them in an actual, honest-to-ghost firefight on the other side of the warehouse.
Sapphire slipped into the warehouse with Pepper, and I scooted around on the roof looking for the rest of the KE guys.
I found four of them covering a fifth who was working on the KE guard Zip had shot up. It looked like a lost cause to me. I don't know what made me do it, but I went to work.
"Stunball" they like to call it on the streets but my teacher had called it "a little sleep spell". Whatever you call it, the spell can put down some hostiles without killing them or making a ton of noise... which fit my bill precisely at that moment. I pushed the spell a bit harder than normal and earned the beginning of a headache I would surely not enjoy later, but the five sec-guards all fell over into a forced slumber.
A little more levitation and twelve seconds later I was in the bloodied snow next to the downed KE guard.
Healing magic is HARD! Even more so when you have cybernetics in the meat bod you are trying to fix up. The KE sec-guard wasn't dead yet, but he was going to be soon if something didn't change. So I put my all into a healing spell that would surely hurt me something awful.
The other thing about healing magic, you have to keep it up for a while to make it stick.
So I'm kneeling there, in the bloody snow, surrounded by KE sec-guards who are taking a nice little nap while gunfire is raging on the other side of the building and ghost-only-knows-what going on inside the warehouse.
A minute passed.
It felt like a year.
The KE sec-guard opened his eyes. I'm sure he was going to say something, but I really wasn't interested. So I stuck the tranq patch from the KE first aid kit on his forehead and watched his eyes roll back. He was unconscious super quick.
Grack was shooting up the other side of the warehouse. Angel was calling out that alarms were going out to Lone Star about the shooting. I had just landed back on top of the roof; when Pepper and Sapphire came running out of the warehouse. Zip was, thankfully, very dead.
Sapphire pitched a grenade that landed among the sec-guards fighting it out with Grack. The grenade made a loud 'hiss' sound as whisps of gas erupted in the area. Several of the sec-guards fell in their tracks while the ones remaining fled the gas.
I couldn't lift Zip, but I could levitate him. So seventeen year old me, aspiring shadowrunner and hot slot wiz kid, levitated the corpse and my skinny hoop off the roof and over the fence line to our wheels. Angel popped the door on the van, then tore off to the gate to pick up the rest of the team.
We pulled a big scoot-and-fade and made it out.
Zip didn't seem impressed.
Johnson was good to his word about the money he promised. We made the swap under the watchful eyes of several guns pointed in both directions.
We got paid. Sapphire got rid of Zip's body.
Grack had taken three rounds in his left shoulder, and those had to come out. Pepper and I took him to a street doc Pepper knew. She got the bullets out for the bargain price of half of Grack's share of the money. I was able to heal a little bit of the damage with magic. Grack had so much cyberware that it was nearly impossible to heal anything at all.
This, of course, pissed Grack off. He went to his doss and, eventually, stopped bitching about magic not working on "hard working trolls".
Pepper had saved my life. No bones about it. I spent a few days thinking it over, and reading up on his philosophy. I wanted to say thank you without causing offense, and still make it sincere.
So I called up Pepper a week later and set up a meet with him at the Brick House. Sheila let me reserve a booth and bring my "gratitude" in without a fuss.
Pepper showed up early, as was his habit, and sat down across from me.
"Thank you for my life," I said in my very broken and terribly mispronounced Japanese.
I put a box on the table. It was a wood, real wood, carved to look like flowers. It had cost me a month's rent. Pepper opened the box, saw the sake bottle inside, and nodded in a gesture I took as acceptance.
I then put a longer box on the table. It was black and had brass fittings.
"If you would be willing, please accept this as a token of my respect"... my Japanese was bad enough back then that I think I actually said "candy" instead of "token". But Pepper seemed to understand what I was saying. His eyes widened a bit when he opened the box though. The katana inside had cost me almost a year's rent. To my thinking it was well worth it as I still had my favorite cranium.
Pepper seemed to think for a long moment, then took the gift, stood and offered a deep bow. We ate well that night. After the two gifts and dinner, I had made hardly any money at all on that run. I had made some, I was warm, eating well, and I had good company. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew that KE sec-guard had survived.
Pepper and I did a lot of work together over the coming months. But those are stories for another time.
I've got a good bottle of sake I think I'll open.
I feel like toasting to an old friend.
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