SRM01-02: Strings Attached

You're hired to extract some VIPs from a secure facility and then destroy any evidence or witnesses that you were there. Of course, there are strings attached: the VIPs are not very cooperative and must be unharmed. You always did enjoy a challenge! Part One: Strings Attached [220KB] Part Two: Player Handouts [420KB]

SRM01-02: Strings Attached
Introductory fiction by Rich Osterhout

Not even being the Chief Operating Officer of a company like DocWagon's Seattle Division was enough for Michael Davenport. He had ideas that would make the division millions of nuyen, but was stopped short by his boss at every turn. DocWagon had grown static and overconfident in the Seattle market. With the demise of Crash Cart after their mysterious debacle in the early fifties, it paved the way for DocWagon to be the de facto provider of emergency care services in the Seattle metroplex. There was simply no competition to force them to grow and develop. Sure, they received new customers every year, but it did not "grow" the company in the way Davenport knew that it could. The problem was, DocWagon Seattle's CEO would have none of it - he turned down lucrative defense contracts and what were considered risky ventures. Davenport could not, would not, be ignored. So he did the only thing he could think of - he had himself killed...

Davenport sat in the shade of a palm tree, sipping his drink as he recalled his plan. The two shadowrunner teams had performed flawlessly, although the one team that had been hired to "assassinate" him almost did too good of a job. They almost had seen through the charade, but luckily he was able to escape in the end. Now his mind shifted into high gear as he planned the next phases of his life. He had already laid the groundwork for his new identity, Dr. Walter Broward, months ago and started the shell corporation that would become Rose Croix. His sources told him that most of the capital assets had been spent to procure office space, medical equipment, and trained medical personnel. The only thing he had to do know was heal up from the recent sessions of cosmetic surgery, and then return to Seattle to take control of his new company, one that would compete against the sleeping dinosaur that DocWagon Seattle had become.

Jose didn't really like his job. The money was great, especially for an ork with no education. And the people were pretty nice; he'd heard only the occasional racist crap from a few of the guards. But he hated going into the Vault. And he had to clean it every single night. The low man on the totem pole had to do the worst jobs. Eleven years on the job and he was still the low man on the janitorial staff.

The smell would hit him the instant the door swung open, that crisp, acrid ammonia and metal scent. Underneath it, the barest traces of meat...like a clean, cold freezer in a slaughterhouse. And the low hum of the chillers, barely audible, but Jose always felt it in his chest. The dim red lights were always kept low in there too. Even with his low-light vision, he had to squint and peer around while he cleaned.

But the worst was looking at them. The cold, lifeless bodies, line upon line of them, hanging like puppets from narrow cables four feet off the ground and suspended in a narrow, open tank of some bluish-green syrup. The red glow of the lights gave the bodies an evil life -like aura, almost as if they were just sleeping. Jose had bumped one of the tanks once while mopping the floor...the sibilant hiss of the cables and the cold feel of the skin as an arm flopped out had caused him to lose it completely, and he had ran screaming upstairs. Jose made a point of never bumping the tanks again...

Doctor Walter Broward caressed the real leather of the high backed chair in his new office - Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of the Board, The "Big Cheese" - his plotting and planning was beginning to come to fruition, and his return from the Caribbean left him energized for the weeks and months to come. Time enough, he thought, to crush imbeciles like Garrett Walsh over at DocWagon. People of vision like himself could not tolerate incompetence or short sightedness. He took a long view on some projects. For him, biotechnology was a gold mine; one that should be exploited from all angles. Even something as trivial as providing emergency medical services. As COO of DocWagon, in his previous "life" as Michael Davenport, he'd seen how the sprawl was evolving. Ever since the crash of the suborbital into the sprawl and the passing of the comet, DocWagon had experienced record growth. Too bad the corporation could not see the challenges until it was too late. Now, they had a shortage of medical personnel, and the security forces needed to back them up in today's high threat world. DocWagon had become a complacent giant, just rolling along and not innovating or taking chances. Walter Broward was not like that.

Even now, what little money he had managed to embezzle from DocWagon, along with personal funds and those of private venture capitalists he'd approached, had gone to acquire and train medical teams, security teams, and facilities around the sprawl in strategic areas. They would soon grow quickly, and he'd be able to expand Rose Croix into other areas of the sprawl. DocWagon was soft from lack of competition, and he would go for the soft underbelly.

A soft knock at his office door made him turn to find his executive assistant, Lucy Turnbull. She had the look of someone who'd seen a ghost - and perhaps she had. Lucy led in Dredd, or Mr. Bones as he was now called, into Broward's private office. He dismissed her with a curt 'thank you' and turned to the large black man in dreadlocks and dead black eyes. "The time has come - my first strike against DocWagon is ready. I'll need you to start putting out feelers for some shadowrunners that can handle the situation. I've printed out a datafile with the particulars on it for you to go over. Five thousand each for the primary objectives, and a thousand for each of the secondaries. Make sure that they understand that they must get all the primaries back to me or they'll get no bonus for the secondaries." Broward slid the paper across the desk to the Jamaican cyborg.

The hired muscle merely folded the paper without reading it. "No problem, boss. Everyt'ing gonna work out all right. You be jammin' too much on dis an your heart, it come a blowin' right out o' your chest. Dontcha be worryin' no more, I gots me a back up plan in case da first boys don' cut it right ya."

"Excellent, see that it's taken care of. I've got Ramos' agent scheduled for a meeting next week, and I'm sure he'll be wanting to assist us in our endeavors here at Rose Croix. I know I won't be disappointed..." Broward left his sentence trail off as he turned back to the window, looking over the lights of Seattle's downtown area and wondering who was "asleep at the wheel" in Tacoma tonight. He smiled at the thought of shadowy figures moving through the cold halls of the facility, carrying out the bags with his clone and the others he'd chosen. Clones that would become important "guests" at Rose Croix's new state-of-the-art facility that would be coming online tomorrow. The shadowrunners must not fail...