July 15, 2058

Abandoned Truck Stop

150 km away from Thompson, Algonkian-Manitou Council

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Leon, Sylvia, and Brandon had been setup for the past half hour now in their pre-arranged ambush point. Leon was fussily checking his Barret Model 121 sniper rifle for the twentieth time, making sure the scope was clean and the weapon was in working order. Sylvia was close by, doing a deep breathing routine to steel herself for the fight. Brandon was a bit further away from Leon, and was doing his own breathing routine to regulate the Adept chi flow in his body. Brandon looked oddly asleep and defenseless while doing this, but Leon knew better. Anyone trying to sneak up on Brandon in this state would get gutted like a fish.

The trio were camped in the bushes on a brisk summer afternoon that felt more like fall, up in the north of the Algonkian-Manitou Council. Leon had studied maps and satellite images, and settled on an abandoned truck stop as the ambush point against the truck he was supposed to commandeer. The abandoned truck stop was ghoul-free (luckily), and was located near a t-junction highway along the only route to Lynn Lake, 150 km southwest of the small town of Thompson. Given that the truck they were tracking hadn't shown many off-roading tendencies, the truck had to pass through the t-junction road in order to get to Lynn Lake.

Leon intended to camouflage himself in the bushes with his greenish military armor, wait for the car to drive by, blast the tires with suppressed rifle fire, and then move in on the riggers when they exited the vehicle. The truck was a Volkswagen Superkombi with a closed roof in back, and Leon hoped to hell it wasn't somehow modified with extra armor and strong tires.

Something was bugging Leon about this job even after he picked the ambush site, but he didn't know what. It was enough that he insisted the team wear full sets of light-grade military armor, from helmet to boots. While this was generally illegal for your average shadowrunner to possess, Leon had a catch-all permit from the Chiefs of the Council given to him a few months back, and he felt he needed it now. Even with the armor on, even with the knowledge it was 3 against 2, and the 2 didn't know they were in ambush, and even with the fact everyone on the team had at least 2 guns on them......

It still didn't sit quite right with Leon, and he didn't know why.

Cleaning his scope for the 21st time didn't help, so Leon abandoned the task and looked carefully down the highway for any sign of their quarry.

"Here's what I don't get." said Sylvia in a whisper beside him. "Why don't they just smuggle things through Thunder Bay? Even I knew you could smuggle things into Thunder Bay before I became a runner. Why doesn't the Manitou just get their gear there?"

"They don't have allies down south." Leon explained. "UCAS smugglers might hate Native Americans to a degree, but they hate Tir Tairngire more, and they don't want the Manitou to split off and give us another Tir. I hear the last elf who tried to do business in T-Bay got turned into fish food."

"......Was driving for 4 days from the east coast really the only option they had?"

"They've probably got pro-elf allies across the Atlantic, I'd bet on the Czechs. If you don't want to fly goods in and risk getting shot at by some pilot high on pep pills, you could do a lot worse than an inconspicuous 4-day drive. They say a couple copters got shot down last year trying to get in through the Arctic. Trucks on land can slip through the cracks a bit."

Leon felt a vibration from one of his many pants pockets. It was a cell phone call from War Chief Carl Hillborn, and he answered it.

"Leon here."

"We got the satellite update from the Sioux. There's a bit of a delay, so they should be coming up the road soon. Be ready."

"Gotcha."

Leon hung up. He looked carefully in the distance, and indeed, a black speck was getting closer, and looking an awful lot like a truck with a roof over the back.

Leon raised his silenced rifle and sighted in the target. He took a deep breath, then right as the truck made its right turn, Leon exhaled and fired.

The round blew clean through the left front tire of the truck. Leon quickly jacked another round into the chamber, sighted in the left rear tire, and then blew that to shreds too. The driver of the truck oversteered, the wrong way, and almost tipped the truck over into a ditch. However, the truck somehow teetered back onto its axis with a thud, and came to a stop in the wrong lane.

Two elven riggers stepped out of the vehicle, and Leon could hear one of them cursing loudly as they checked on the tires. Leon nodded to Sylvia, who nodded to Brandon, and suddenly the trio sprung from the bushes, pistols drawn.

"AMC SPECIAL FORCES! HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! NOW!"

One of the elves cursed, and looked like he was going to suicidally reach for his gun, but the other one dissuaded him. They got on their knees with their hands behind their heads. Brandon quickly took their guns and cuffed their hands behind their back with strong plasteel zip-ties, while Sylvia and Leon held the elven duo at gunpoint.

"Alpha, get our truck. Tango, check what's inside this, I'll watch the prisoners."

Sylvia and Brandon reacted to their laughable code names and went about their business. The more pissed-off one of the two elves was wearing a shirt as red as his face, and he looked at Leon with utter hatred.

"You fragging breeders! Do you know who you're messing with!? Think you can jander up here and take our stuff!?"

"Yeah, we know who you are. That's why we're commandeering this vehicle."

"You'll be dead as soon as our elders find out who you are, breeder! You and the rest of your toy soliders!"

"Shut up brother, do you want to get us killed?"

The other elven rigger, wearing a green shirt and a calmer disposition, seemed more reasonable.

"Hey man, you don't have to do this. We can donate a portion of our goods to the Army pension fund and then we all go our separate ways, yeah?"

"Not happening, beetle boys. You think we don't know whats in this truck?"

"Those aren't for here, we're taking them up to the Athabaskan Council! Look, let's be reasonable here, we're not the suppliers, we're just the drivers! There's no need for us to be left empty-handed, we gotta make a living somehow!"

"You won't be living much longer, beetle boys. Tango, what have we got?"

Sylvia was unloading boxes, and took a moment to open up a few of them.

"Looks like a few sets of winter armor, a box of frags, a box of dart guns with ammo. There's four crates in back, I'm guessing those are the beetles."

"High rolling today!" said Leon with a smile.

The green shirted elf looked at Leon weirdly.

"You aren't military are you? You round-ears are runners!"

"That we are!"

"OH SCREW YOU YOU IGNORANT BREEDERS!" screamed the red-shirt elf. "We go through all this trouble to bring stuff here, and you steal it right from under us!? Wheres your honor, scumbag!?"

Leon settled his Predator Heavy Pistol between the eyes of the loudmouthed red-shirt.

"Now see, that's the wrong way of looking at it. I'm not stealing from you, I'm preventing you from stealing lives from other people. You know what happens to BTL addicts, huh? You ever see the side effects? I get more trouble from them than I get nuyen. I'm not creating a bunch of muggers who would knife me for their next hit. I'm doing the world a favour by wrecking these."

"Come on, think for once!" The green shirt elf pleaded. "There's possibly millions of nuyen worth of chips in those crates. You want to throw that away for a bunch of eskimos in the Arctic? You think our employers are going to stand for that?"

"Oh, we'll get to your employers later, don't you worry."

Brandon peeled onto the highway with an armored Ford-Canada Bison truck, and together with Sylvia they unloaded all the captured contraband into it, minus the BTL chips. Leon was indeed dead serious about this grenade test, and planned to blow the BTLs to smithereens afterwards, profit be damned.

As Brandon and Sylvia finished unloading, the hair on the back of Leon's neck rose, and he heard something. Then another something. And it sounded like......

Suddenly, red figures bounded out of a nearby grove of trees, and within seconds, they were bearing down on the group!

"HELL HOUNDS!!!" Leon screamed, as he raised his pistols at the oncoming threat.