Watch Their Backs
This story is connective tissue between a pervious Shadowrun campaign with a character named Shogunn and a character in a present SRM5 campaign.
Miller’s Pub had a sign that hung low across her wood framed entrance. ‘Nuyen Only, No Barter’ along with an iconified chicken and a slash through it. Any other bar in the Sixth World would just throw up an ARO. But here in Chicago, where the matrix was a faint pulse at best, a solid plank hung from rusted chains nailed to the joists above. Shogunn had to duck under, noting as he did the subtle dissuasion the sign made against taller meta races, elves, orcs and trolls, like they didn’t belong here. A loud clang of the sign hitting something solid reminded the decker that the handle of the five foot Japanese sword he carried on his back as a bluff stood out half a foot over his head. The pub’s clients ignored the grand entrance, too focused on their hard drinks and harder problems.
“Get ya something, chummer?” the black man asked from behind a smoothly polished oak bar.
“I hear you may have a friendly ear here?” Shogunn asked politely, looking around in what he hoped was a casual manor. It wouldn’t do to get geeked by desperate locals.
The barkeep leaned back a bit in response, looking sideward toward the bar’s darker interior.
“Thanks omae” said the asian decker, leaving currency on the counter for services rendered.
Deeper into the pub Shogunn found a haggard man of dark complexion nursing a glass of brown something. He wore a coat of thick alligator hide, tanned green and worked in polished copper stitching so that what little light there was glinted from the seams.
“Can I buy you a drink, Padre?”
The man looked up through wildly untamed eyebrows, though his eyes were kind and caring. He smiled through thick rolls of beard but his teeth were disarmingly white and straight.
“Oy, ya, sure.” The wild man chirped through a heavily Azilandic accent. He pulled out the seat beside him at the bar. Shogunn could now make out the black shirt and white collar beneath the coat, all but hidden from sight. “Come here to talk to me or him?” pointing up for effect.
“Both, I think.”
“Oy, ya. Okay. How long has it been then my son?”
“I, uh, I think before I became… Well, before.” In his pocket Shogunn squeezed a small glowing blue cube, unconscious of its corners biting into his palm. He released it in mild shock, withdrawing his hand carefully to inspect it. “Thing is, this isn’t about me. Or I guess it is but not because I think I can be saved, I know I can’t. This is really about a friend.”
“Okay, ya, sure.” The father clearly had a small set of english phrases he leaned on heavily. He waited with practiced patience.
Shogunn took a deep breath and began.
“About six months ago I was on a job. Johnson had me extract some new weaponized piloting system from an aerospace R&D firm in Nevada. I pulled the code from their hub, but not cleanly. Needed certain skills for that job, but did it anyway without them. My previous team had split up and I guess I didn’t have time to find a new team. Or maybe I didn’t want to find a new team. Hell, if this is a confessional at the end of a bar in the ass-end of the UCAS then frag it, I screwed up. Big. I had a HTR team from Vegas on my tail and no backup so in a panic I made a detour to a friendly I knew in the area.”
“This friendly and I worked previously and, while there was some coldness between he and I, I still thought of him as family. When I got there he was coked out of his mind, singing some drekhead’s rock opera while fixing his VTOL under a canopy in the desert. I’m not sure he even remembers I was there. In-between some reminiscing of old times, I did something I just, I can’t even.”
“His VTOL was right there and I had this hot code itching to be off my deck. It was partial AI but it needed a control rig to be transferred successfully. If the HTR team caught me with it still on disk… Well I panicked and uploaded the fragging AI to my omea’s plane. Ghost, I swear didn’t know!” Shogunn was loosing his cool as he talked to the stranger. Frag, why was he saying all this anyway?
The wild man knew his trade, waiting with calm while the hardened shadowrunner collected himself. Shogunn took another breath and started again, slower.
“The crash took his leg, his arm and his brother. I think he blames the Novacoke, not that we have ever talked about it. Fact is, I haven’t talked to him since that day. I can’t.”
The man at the bar spoke with sympathy “We have all done horrible things to survive, my child. “ It was unclear which one of them the man was talking about. “Are you asking for forgiveness in the eyes of our lord?”
“Frag no! Buddy, I ain’t never going to forgive myself for that day, I need to never forgive myself, it keeps me alive. No I’m here for my friend. He is in Chicago and he’s in deep drek. He just doesn’t know it. Here, take this. It will open a storage unit in Gary with enough supplies to protect your church from most anything, at least for a while.”
The man only looked down at the chip key in bewilderment
“When he comes to you, you will help him. There are others, too. Help them.” With that, the decker downed the brown liquid from the man’s glass and left. As he ducked the sign on the way out, he made a mental check next to the 5th name in his list for the day. At the bottom of his AR he had a button labeled ‘Call Coupe’ . For the tenth time today, like every day before, he ignored the button. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow he would do it for sure. Tomorrow.
