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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] |
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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...