June 2, 2058

Aztechnology Office - Regina Branch

Regina, Algonkian-Manitou Council

~~~

"We have got to be insane to be doing this!"

"Will you shut up and watch the guards?"

Three disreputable looking men stood behind some bushes, near a gap in a metal fence. They were looking at the local offices of a corp called Aztechnology, the target for their shadowrun. They were tracking the movements of two guards smoking nico-sticks near a side door, and noticed they were joined by a third guard who was engaging them in conversation. The shadowrunners were waiting on a phone call for a signal, then they would snipe any guards still near the side entrance, and make their way into the building to start the run

The leader of the shadowrunner trio, a spiky-haired punk going by the handle of Lex Overstreet, continued assembling a tripod stand for his borrowed sniper rifle, and his two companions eventually did the same. The lieutenant on this job, if there was one, was a nervous looking wreck of a man known as Rat-Face Rick. Rat-Face Rick lived up to his name, in that it was Rick and he had the face of a rat, so he had no choice but to operate in the shadows away from decent people, with a front man like Lex scooping in choice jobs like this one for Rick to work (and actually get paid for occasionally). He had followed Lex for two years now, and usually regretted every minute of it.

"This is bad...... we're gonna get caught, and the guards will probably filet us and serve us as mystery meat in the cafeteria tomorrow........"

"Rick, you do this every time, now shut it and set up your fragging rifle already!

The third member of the party, and the one with the most common sense, was an AmerIndian Bear Shaman by the name of Mitch Moonlake. Moonlake was an adequate shot with a gun, and an adequate spellcaster, capable of reducing a man into a pile of ash with a few of his Fire spells. Moonlake was along on this run because stumbling into these two idiots had somehow brought him more financial success than he'd had in some time working solo.

The trio had been brought together to handle some dirty work by a "Mr. Johnson" (a common alias for a person giving legal, barely legal, and illegal odd jobs to shadowrunners such as themselves). The trio had done two minor contract killings and a ghoul bounty hunting run, and while there were many little screw-ups, the runs got done and everyone got paid. Now Lex had decided to take a corp run from a shadier "Mr. Johnson" than normal as a way for them to step up.

The plan was simple. Upon getting a phonecall from an inside man at Aztechnology, letting them know that the office's cameras were disabled, Lex and his cronies would kill any guards outside, and steal their Maglock Passkeys, mostly to sell but also to open doors inside if necessary. Then they would go to the 3rd floor, plant some pre-prepared timed charges near a computer server room, and get the hell out of the offices before they blew up, going back through the same hole in the fence and picking up their sniper rifles on the way. If any guards asked questions on the way up to floor 3, they would say they were runners for an Aztechnology employee named Frederique Garcia, another inside man who would provide a cover story for them, and that they were here for a meeting.

There were many elements to this plan wrong in Mitch's eyes, not the least of which was the fact that they did not know who the hell their Mr. Johnson was, if he had a rep for stiff-arming people on fees, or a rep of setting up shadowrunners to be killed by bad info. Were the two inside men at Aztechnology actually real or just voices on the other end of a phone? Also, shouldn't they have tried to look a little more professional before entering the building? They were runners, but certainly didn't look like the type of runner a corp would hire for anything other than courier jobs. Also, why was the Johnson paying 20,000 nuyen apiece, when a more typical rate for a job like this was usually around 10,000 nuyen?

Lex did not see any of this as an issue, however, insisting the job would go fine, and they'd be able to get all that nuyen between the three of them for an hour's work, tops. 20,000 nuyen was over a year's wages for the average sucker too scared to run the shadows, plus they could re-sell the borrowed sniper rifles and maglock passkeys to a fixer for another chunk of change. What could go wrong?

Suddenly, Lex's cell phone vibrated and scared the hell out of Rat-Face Rick again, and Lex answered it.

"Hello?........ Alright, we'll rock and roll then......."

Lex hung up.

"The inside man's got the cameras disabled, now let's waste these guards and break in."

Three silenced sniper rifles fired, and the three Aztechnology guards smoking nico-sticks went down. Lex and Mitch's shots were clean headshots, but Rick only got a shoulder hit. Rick's second shot hit a more vital spot, hitting the guard in the bowels after he fell awkwardly from the shoulder shot. The high-powered slug ripped through most of his vital internal organs and killed the guard instantly.

"Alright, go, go, go! Remember to grab the keys, and nothing can go wrong here!"

"We'll see......." said Mitch ominously, jogging over to the guards while staring at the top floor of the Aztechnology offices.......

~~~

"I don't care for excuses Pittman, I want that third runner, and I want his head on a spit!"

An Aztechnology Strike Team captain named Ramon Santiago was dressing down his underlings, furious at the botched handling of what should've been a routine execution of three shadowrunners. Two of the runners, known as Lex Overstreet and Rat-Face Rick, lay dead at his feet, with three Aztechnology guards also strewn about near the elevators of the building. The third runner, an AmerIndian Shaman known as Mitch Moonlake, was in the wind, having run away and prevented his death with what seemed to be barrier magic.

"It's not our fault Captain, we didn't get them through the front door like we thought, they must've come in through the side."

"The intel we got on this run said they'd march in the front!"

"Maybe we got bad intel Captain...... it wouldn't be the first time......"

The Captain looked questioningly at his underling, but before he could respond, a man came running in from the side.

"We got three men dead near the side entrance!"

"What!?"

"Looks like Gutierrez, Santerre, and Cahill were out having a smoke break, and they bought it...... Cahill got it really bad too, bullets ripped him up pretty good."

The Strike Team Captain held his head in his hands, before violently kicking the corpses of the two runners left behind.

"SIX MEN DOWN TO THESE SECOND-RATE RUNNERS! SIX MEN! All because of bad intel from that hijo de puta at Yokokawa! We should have our heads examined for trusting a Japanese company man to deliver inside info!"

An ork grunt on the strike team nodded his head to that one. No love was lost between the Japanese and the metahumans, thanks to various incidents of discrimination over the years. Had it been up to the ork, they would've prepared for both the real intel AND a trap. But the higherups said the intel was dynamite, and six guards rolled snake-eyes as a result.

What no one knew was that the intel WAS good. The insider at Yokokawa Corporation who leaked their run details to Aztechnology was right, but Lex, without telling anyone, had added his own flair to the plan by taking a side door instead of marching in through the front. As a result, the plan was slightly closer to success, in that they were closer to the elevator than they would've been, had they instead walked into a triangulated ambush planned for them at the front door by Captain Santiago.

"Did we take care of Garcia at least? Please tell me we did THAT correctly."

"Strike Team blew him to drek in his office five minutes ago, as soon as we finished here. There's another problem though, I just got a message from someone saying the cameras were out for a few minutes when these guys came in. You think...... you think they had a Decker with them?"

Ramon sighed deeply.

"Well...... get a guy upstairs to check out our corner of the Matrix and see whats up. Also, get together the rest of the men, we're going hunting for this Mitch Moonlake cabron......"