So to all you feelers and fumblers
Waiting for the fireworks to start
Do it now–blow it up yourself
Unbutton the butcher in your heart
And if I don’t come home before midnight
And I can’t find the keyhole in the dark
You’ll know, you’ll know that I’ve been tempted
You’ll know, you’ll know we’re drifting apart
Everything’s on fire

 

For a week or two after they completed their bug hunt the characters rested, and spent some of their hard-earned nuyen. During this time a lot of things changed in New Horizon, and in particular the PCs discovered a new and disturbing force loose in the shadows of New Horizon: Electoral politics. To the extent that New Horizon had ever been ruled over by anyone, it was managed by a council of major corporations that made important decisions about basic municipal details like garbage collection and road rules, and stayed well clear of each other’s business deals and their shadier engagements with the city’s teeming populace. This council’s memberships were usually organized through backroom deals and money politics, but for some reason one of the CEOs had, when he resigned, thrown his position open to a popular election, based on the full suffrage of the people, and suddenly New Horizon’s shadowed lanes were alive with rumours and political debate. CEOs from a handful of smaller companies jostled for position, as did the leaders of the teamster’s union, a well-known gangster, some independent celebrities and a couple of genuine politicians. In the cramped and humid darkness of the lower levels of the city a new fever gripped the residents, as they tried to understand this strange and alien social landscape. Posters, graffiti, demonstrations, parties – a new vocabulary and a new style of interaction swept across the city. The PCs showed a particular interest because the Oakheart company was heavily involved in all the political machinations leading up to the election, and was running a candidate. Oakheart was the company that they had rescued a rich student from a few months earlier, and its vicious way of dealing with the student occupation of its labs had not endeared it to them. So it was that they found themselves sprawled in the dining room of their ship, HS Fortuna, whiling away their spare time shooting beers and watching this strange new process of “voting” and “canvassing” unfold on their large vid screen.

But if you’re not a politician politics doesn’t pay the bills, and eventually they started hunting for work again. They were contacted after a few weeks by Ibai Texeira, the man who had given them the train job and the smuggling job that got them their ship. It was unusual to be contacted directly by their Mr. Johnson, rather than having him go through their fixer Anansie, and perhaps in retrospect they should have taken that as a sign that the job was too hot – but they had grown to trust Texeira, and so they agreed to meet him.

Only fools trust a Johnson. Fools and dead shadowrunners.

The job was again quite simple, and urgent. A certain scientist named Lincoln Cheng had run away from his employer, carrying a large quantity of valuable research data, and his employer wanted him back. There was an open contract on this Dr. Cheng, but he had gone to ground and no one had found him in a few months. However, Ibai happened to have found out where he would be for a few hours from 4pm this afternoon, very precisely. He wanted the PCs to go in and get Cheng, and hand him over to Ibrahim, in exchange for 40,000 nuyen – half if Cheng was damaged. Ibai cut off their concerns about grabbing a scientist on the Lam by explaining that the data he was carrying was some kind of magically coded poison intended to preferentially kill the Awakened, and he would likely sell it off to finance his life on the run, so it was probably better that he didn’t get too far with it. Perhaps it was the easy money, or perhaps for a moment the thought of a targeted magical virus aimed at the Awakened got the better of them, but they did not ask a lot of questions they should have. They agreed to the job.

Knowledge is power, any decker could tell you that. Their decker wasn’t with them when they cut the deal. They only learned what Ibai wanted them to know – and what he didn’t want them to know could sink corporations.

Lincoln had rented a room in the Eolani Corporation building in the southern part of Sai Kung, from 4pm to 7pm. They had to get into the building and grab him while he was there, and it was 2pm already. There was a big catch though – the building was in front of a large park, and an election rally was being held in the park for the whole afternoon. They would have heavy security, and Ibai wanted Cheng dragged out with “minimum explosions”, as he put it, so they were going to need to find a way around the security in the area. Most of it would be standard New Horizon security services stuff but there might be some special teams on watch because a candidate in the elections was going to be giving a speech.

They shrugged. Stealthy jobs, done quickly and suddenly – that was there thing. No problem! They cut the deal and cut to the chase.

Their rigger Zenith took them to the Eolani building, actually a whole campus of mixed residential and office buildings separated from the park where the rally would be held by a wide road and a small orchard park. They dressed as labourers and got their decker, Jo, to set up a fake business and a fake call, a sudden vermin problem in the basement of the building where Cheng was meant to hide. By 3:50 pm they had their car parked in front of the building entrance and were unloading their gear – a medium crawler drone, their body armour and weapons. As they unloaded Jo explored their surroundings, and Zenith sat tight in the van, body slumped in his seat as he scanned the area in cold VR mode.

Jayden, Genji and Adam Lee would go inside dressed as vermin hunters, ride the elevator the 6th floor and set up in the maintenance room. On the way up Jo told that the rally was being held by Oakheart, and also informed them that she had found a bunch of high end security drones, packing heavy jamming equipment to deter hacking and heavily armed, probably in some sort of crowd security role for the rally. She traced them back to a subsidiary of Aztechnology, which was a bit strange, but not impossible to imagine – perhaps this area had a special security deal with one of Aztechnology’s security corps, or maybe Oakheart’s CEO had a deal with Aztechnology for help on the election – who knew how corps work? They donned armour in the maintenance room, set up the combat drone, and sent Zenith’s flyspy drone down the hallway towards Cheng’s room while Jo sought a map of the building. It was 3.52.

The drone showed them no threats, and Jo identified an empty room neighbouring the one Cheng was due to use. They moved quickly down the hall and slipped into the empty room, keeping the lights off. 3.53. Jo began looking for more information about the next room. The flyspy sat on the wall outside, watching the elevator. Had Cheng arrived already? They could not tell. Jo was in the surveillance cameras, but saw no one coming or going. 3.55.

They waited. While they waited, Genji idly switched his eyes to infrared and began scanning the neighbouring room. He found the heat signature of a person, sitting on the far side of the wall close enough to register, near the window. Was it Cheng? Or was he due to meet someone? They alerted Jo, who began scouting around for any signs of network activity from the room. 3.57.

They began to think it must be Cheng. Adam Lee decided to try getting him to open the door, in the hope that he would at least open it wide enough for the flyspy drone to slip through. He slipped into the hallway and knocked on the door, announced himself as a vermin inspector and asked if he could quickly check the room. His ruse did not work and the door did not open. 3.59.

They were sure now it must be Cheng. They discussed smashing their way through the walls, which were thin enough to allow a heat signature to show, but decided not to. Better to go through the door. Jo informed them that there did seem to be some kind of electronic activity in the room and … oh, well, he had a bomb rigged up to go off when the door opened. She could disarm it but would need a few minutes. 4.00.

They looked at each other, Jayden shrugged, and they decided to go through the front door. This Cheng was a scientist and Jayden was an adept, chances were Jayden would have him by the throat before he could react. Then they would negotiate or drag him out depending on the situation. There wasn’t much else for it, given the situation, and if he was waiting for people from a rival corp to come and start negotiating a transfer then they were going to need to act now, before his corp contact – and associated bodyguards – turned up. They moved into the hall, set the crawler drone with its rifle facing the door, Genji and Lee behind it, and Jayden readied himself to push the door open. 4.04.

Jo contacted them, the bomb was down. They nodded to each other and Jayden reached out, pushed the door open, and coiled up to spring through the door. As the door slid open Jo’s voice came breathless in their ears:

“TOO MANY CONNECTIONS. It’s a trap!”

4.05

The door swung open and Jayden surged through even as Jo spoke. Inside was a dimly lit room, bland corporate day decor, a desk in the far corner, stock posters on the wall, sterile bar, a long wide window sweeping along the whole wall facing the park. Jayden took it all in in a heart beat as he leaped forward at the position where he knew Cheng was.

Cheng was sitting tied to a chair, a gag over his mouth, gesturing madly at them with his eyes and grunting. Next to him on a stand was a large sniper rifle, barrel pointed through the window, some kind of trigger device linking it to the door. As Jayden surged through the door the rifle fired, the window shattered, and with his preternatural reflexes Jayden had a frozen moment as he flew through the air, where he saw that the gun had a perfect view of the speaker’s platform, where Lang Oakheart was just finishing her election speech. As he reached Cheng’s chair he knew she was already beginning to fall, the sniper’s bullet in her heart. He grabbed Cheng’s chair and began dragging it towards the door.

As he dragged the chair Cheng grunted and swore and twitched, and over his shoulder he could feel the security drone rising from where it had been hidden beneath the parapet of the window. He could already hear its autorifles whirring into action. Everyone cleared the doorway in a mad scramble as the drone opened fire, a full automatic roar that tore the door off its hinges and destroyed their drone where it sat vulnerable in the middle of the hallway. Lee, just out of sight of the door, was not targeted, and Jayden and Genji were able to scramble out of the way in time, but Jayden was still inside the room, covering Cheng with his armoured body.

Still 4.05. The room went silent, only Cheng’s grunts of terror and the smooth hum of the drone breaking the stillness. In their earphones Jo was yelling instructions at them but her voice was broken up by the sudden jamming interference from the drone, just hints of frightened orders coming through static: “… OUT … THEY … GA-…”

Genji looked wild-eyed through the door, saw the expression on Jayden’s face and started running for the stairs at the opposite end of the building. Adam Lee cast an armour spell on Jayden and moved as far from the doorway as he could. Jayden, grim and determined and carrying 40,000 nuyen worth of scientist, started dragging Cheng to the door. Behind him something clicked, and the drone’s missile housing opened.

Clicked again once, fired. The room erupted in fire but but by now Jayden was through the doorway, protected from the worst of the blast. The walls bulged, the whole hallway filled with dust, and Jayden and Cheng were hurled against the far wall. Jayden slipped to the floor, unconscious, to lie on top of Cheng.

4.06. Downstairs at the entryway Zenith had been rudely kicked out of his VR connection to the dying drone, just in time to hear the sound of an engine revving up in the trees about 30 metres ahead. Some sixth sense warned him that he was about to get rammed, so he reversed the van as fast as he could away from the door. By the time he was perhaps 30m back from the door a large, evil-looking grey van came hurtling out of the trees and hauled to a stop in front of the door, rear doors facing it. The doors opened and six heavily-armed men burst out, charging into the building at a rush. Zenith realized that this van was some kind of special armoured combat van, probably with a machine gun hidden in a roof mount, and he needed to clear it away if they were going to have any chance of getting out. He flipped the car into drive and gunned it forward, hitting the van with such power that it bounced into the air, rolled over and landed shattered on its side some distance from the door. Back in his place at the door he hit the comm link and told everyone that they had incoming troops.

Still 4.06. Upstairs Adam Lee cast an awaken spell on Jayden, who emerged from his comatose position and surged to his feet, knife in hand. He sliced Cheng free of the chair and he and Adam ran to the stairs where Genji waited for them, his pistols out. Zenith’s voice broke through the static to warn them of incoming soldiers, followed by Jo telling them the lift was moving. Everything Jo said came through a wall of static, and they had to guess some of her words, but she was delivering. She also told them more drones were coming, and they had to get out. They ran down the stairs. Jo jammed the lift to buy them time, working furiously through the jamming, and informed them calmly as they hurtled down the stairs that she had found a back room on the third floor with an unlocked door and emergency escape hatches in its balcony. Zenith gunned the van into a screaming reverse and hurtled around to the back of the building to park outside the room and wait. “THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, THEY HAVE EYES ON YOU!” Jo yelled at them, then, “TOO MUCH OVERWATCH! GOD IS COMING!” and she was gone.

They hit the third floor, slamming and locking the room door behind them, Jayden standing right by it with knives out, ready for the soldiers. They had passed the elevator on level five at the far end of the hall, trapped between level 4 and level 5, but they were sure that with Jo gone those soldiers would be heading down for them. Adam and Genji scrambled to open the emergency hatch, for the first time in their lives fervently thanking their local ward office for insisting on emergency preparedness drills one Sunday morning every three months, and they began to climb down. As soon as they had Cheng through and the last of them was gone Jayden sprinted to the verandah and leapt down, landing with a smooth roll in the grass by the van three floors down. By the time Genji dragged Cheng into the van he already had his seat belt on.

4.08. They gunned it.

Aftermath of a betrayal

Somehow they made it out, the van screaming through confused and chaotic streets as people fled in the aftermath of the assassination. They left the troops eating their dust, and somehow their van had not registered with the drones so that by the time they cleared the area no one had triggered them, but it didn’t matter. Before they had even made it to their safe house their names were on all the news channels – the team of terrorists who had tried to assassinate Lang Oakheart. Their names, their faces, Jayden’s full real name from his legal national SIN, all appeared on the newscast. Cheng was incriminated too as a member of their gang. By the time they made it to their safe house they had already received a farewell message from Mr. Anansie, their regular fixer, and a contract had been declared on them – strangely, though, a contract that was currently a closed one restricted to a few corporations and not available to shadowrunners generally.

A corporate contract. Ibai Texeira had fragged them. The whole thing had been a set up. If they had acted a little slower, if Jayden had not been wearing Adam Lee’s armour, if they had all gone into the room together instead of trusting to Jayden’s adept instincts, the drone would have cut them all down as soon as the rifle had been fired. They had been expected to die in that room, and only the luck of the shadows had saved them.

They rested in the safe house, watched the news. Corporate police were hunting for them, but Lang Oakheart had somehow survived – a miracle. Lang Oakheart, the new telegenic and super-sophisticated face of Oakheart Industries, who had been struggling to be heard over the media power of the larger corporations, had been badly injured by the bullet but somehow – miraculously – the bullet had just missed her heart. Perhaps it was her patented Oakheart security dress? As the talking heads on the news marveled at her luck, the characters knew the truth: The shot had been intended to miss, because the whole thing was a set up. Lang would recover, her poll numbers radically improved, and would storm home to victory in the election on the back of her near-miss.

The PCs would just be collateral damage, roadkill on her path to victory. They had been burned.

By morning the calls had come in. Their old allies and friends saying a final farewell. “No hard feelings, friends, but you know …” Only their friends the Goldsharks in Sai Kung stuck by them – they received an early morning call from Mr. Lao to inform them that he had moved the HS Fortuna to a safe location, and they could come to it as soon as they wanted.

They were wanted, betrayed, on the run. They had to get to the Fortuna, and get New Horizon behind them.

At least until they could come back and get their revenge on every single person who betrayed them, starting with Ibai.

Hidden in their safe house in a rubbish dump in the worst part of Sai Kung, none of them could sleep. They began making lists.

They would be back.