Chapter 71: Trouble
The last couple of weeks had been that quiet kind of busy. Regroup, restock, rearm, relax. We were laying low for a bit, since the last job had made some waves. Taking out power to half the corp facilities in a district would do that. The fallout from that run looked like it was going to miss us, thankfully, due to Twilight’s quick thinking in inserting the two surviving members of the team of players who tried to double-cross us into the security footage at the power substation, implicating them as the ones who blew the place up.
We sold the gear we could from what we’d taken, and Babydoll had gone to work on the basic-looking old sedan that we’d taken from the idiot mage who tried to skip out on Alisha’s bill. Now, the car had some cushier seats and a minifridge to help with long stakeouts, as well as a chameleon coating to change color at will. She’d added both the Streetlink and Streetlink Override systems, so fuel wasn’t an issue while in the decent parts of town. Satellite comms, a smuggling compartment that was shielded from normal scans, and the thing was ready for us when we needed it.
The Americar wasn’t exactly a ‘work’ vehicle, but it was definitely no longer strictly civilian, either. There were times when you wanted social camouflage, and there was little better for that in some neighborhoods than one of the most common used cars in the UNAS. You’d be surprised how often just looking and acting like you belonged somewhere allowed you nearly free reign of a place. The Americar was the driving equivalent of walking through a corporate facility with a clipboard and an annoyed expression. No one wanted to know more about you, and you weren’t doing anything that made people think they could give you orders.
But even if we had the funds to spend a couple months just relaxing, at a certain point you risk boredom provoking you into making big mistakes. Which meant that we needed a job. Didn’t have to be big time or big money, but something to break things up, and give us something to do. Which is why we were here, now, in Renton, out near Shadow Lake, in the middle of the night.
As we waited for our contact to show, I looked over to the one who had found this potential gig for us. “So, how well do you know the contact that gave you this lead, Berzerker?”
“Tom Hall’s a bookie. Takes bets on anything and everything if there’s a line running. He’s a decent enough contact, and I’ve passed him some information a couple times so he could alter the odds a bit on some bets he was taking. But we’re more business acquaintances than anything.
“As for the gig, it is like I told you before. He called me, said that one of his people needed a job done, and they’d heard of us. Asked for us directly. Tom got his ‘finders fee’, and passed the message along, but I wouldn’t trust him to do due diligence looking into the job like Alisha would.”
That wasn’t too surprising, actually. We’d done enough jobs that our Street Cred had risen to 3. That meant more people knew about us, and were confident that we could do the work we were going to get contracted for. Even if we didn’t go advertising our jobs, the shadows talked, and the people who knew things knew other people who knew things, and so on. So, having someone reach out to one of our contacts wasn’t as concerning as it had been back when we took the Mixsanto job where the guy failed to mention the target was a dragon.
However, just because it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility didn’t mean I wasn’t concerned. And the girls had picked up the same healthy degree of paranoia I had cultivated during the beta. A bookie was not the normal type of guy you would go to in order to contract some shadowmen for a job. Certainly not by asking for them directly. People who knew enough about us to want to hire us specifically likely also knew that we could be contacted through Alisha easily enough.
However, as Berzerker had said, a good fixer, like Alisha, had a reputation to protect. She wouldn’t go getting her people work without doing due diligence to ensure that they probably weren’t getting sent on a suicide run. That would ruin her business, after all. The fact that this contact went through this bookie, Tom, instead meant that there was a good chance that this job was going to be trouble.
Just before the scheduled time, a grey sedan drove up, stopping nearby where my ‘new’ Americar and Sexkitten’s three-wheeled Honda Spirit were sitting, along the side of an access road running along the lake. Mercury Comet, unless I missed my guess. That was the brand that had stepped over the Americar to become the best-selling sedan in North America. Which meant that it was effectively anonymous.
The man who stepped out of the car was the definition of nondescript. White male human, brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average build, hair cut in an average men’s style, nothing distinguishing about him. He was basically the generic nobody every character creator in every game started with. And his clothes weren’t much better, being a generic grey business suit and tie, with a briefcase that could be found in any men’s store. Even with a photograph, you would be hard pressed to pick him out of a lineup. It was to the point where I was willing to bet that he’d had some biosculpting done to make him so perfectly generic.
“Excellent, you’re on time,” he said, in a voice that was in a completely neutral tone. “For the purposes of this discussion, you can call me Mr. Jones. I am here because my employers have a problem that they believe you will be uniquely equipped to solve for them, in return for proper compensation, of course.”
I nodded agreeably. No sense starting this off on a bad foot, even if this was probably looking like a double-cross. We’d been screwed before, so just needed to make sure we came out on top of things. “So, what is this problem, then?”
Jones nodded once. “As you’re probably aware, there have been some ongoing property ownership cases regarding areas in the Puyallup district for almost sixty years, an issue that has been further complicated by two Matrix crashes and other issues. My employers have recently acquired the rights to an area in the Carbonado area of the district.”
I kept my expression even, but my brain was racing. Carbonado had been mostly deserted in the wake of the Great Ghost Dance, as the lava fields from Mt. Ranier came rolling over the area. Then, there’d been the first matrix crash in 2029, which had basically wiped out north of ninety percent of the world’s data networks. The legal mess still hadn’t been sorted a decade later when a worldwide race riot broke out between humans and everyone else, and a lot of the less-pretty metahumans, like orks, got locked up in warehouses by the police. When those warehouses mysteriously caught fire with everyone inside, more than a few bands of metahumans had fled to the abandoned mines in Carbonado for safety. The whole area had been held by squatters since, and the second Crash a few years ago didn’t help the paperwork any.
“I see. I guess congratulations are in order for getting through the legal labyrinth. What area did they acquire?”
“The Fortune Drop Mine is a coal mine with three mineshafts, located just on this side of the border with the FAN. While the mine has been closed for decades due to the legal troubles, there are indications that the mines are far from played out. While coal is less of a pressing energy concern in the modern day, it is still a valuable resource.
“Unfortunately, it appears that some squatters have moved into the area in the intervening years between legal title holders. While my employers are willing to employ locals in the mines, the squatters involved have so far refused to entertain any conversations with the legal title holders. Which is where you come in.”
He opened the briefcase, and pulled out a set of actual paper files. “These files contain the basic information on the mine, and where the squatters have been meeting. My employer wishes for you to go in, and either convince the squatters to become employees of the mine, or clear off. The exact nature of how they are cleared out or convinced is up to you. There are no restrictions on this job, save for anything that would cause the UNAS or FAN military to start looking around the area. The expected timeframe is within two weeks.”
I felt slightly dirty as I took the files, to look through them. So far, we’d been doing jobs that, while not exactly ‘righteous’, were more along the lines of being the gun that different powers use to trade shots with other powers. That was different from being asked to, essentially, go round up some squatters and either convince them to sell out to a corporation or put them in the ground.
“As for compensation,” Jones continued, “initial payment is six thousand in advance, but the final payment will be copies of the latest in Tactical Networking programs, enough for your entire team.”
That caught my attention. Tac-Net software was military-grade stuff. The good kind, not the ‘we tried to grunt-proof this’ kind. So long as you had people with enough sensor channels running into the net, you would get a bonus on most checks. And legitimate copies of the software were priced at 3k nucred per rating point. Even if it was just the mid-grade, rating 2 versions, that was the equivalent of a 36k payout on the back end.
Of course, that brought up more questions. Like ‘how come someone who had access to that kind of software needed to hire shadowmen’, or ‘what kind of nasty surprises are going to be in that software’, and other such things. But that was something to consider afterwards, assuming we took the job, and went through with it.
“Six thousand up front is low. Especially considering that there may be expenses involved in seeing whether these squatters can easily be removed. Surely nine thousand is a fairer number?”
Iceblade’s Negotiation test: 17d6 = 6 hits, 2 Miss
Mr. Jones’s Negotiation test: 15d6 = 5 hits, 2 Miss (1 Net Hits)
Iceblade’s Negotiation (Sense Motive) test: 19d6 = 8 hits, 1 Miss
Mr. Jones’s Negotiation test: 15d6 = 9 hits, 0 Miss (No Net Hits)
I was glad that Babydoll had suggested everyone upgrade their commlinks, since the new one had the ability to run a higher level of the Empathy software program. That, plus a bonus from my Street Cred, made it so that I just barely beat out Mr. Jones. Which meant he was probably also using software like mine to boost his abilities. Another thing to consider.
Mr. Jones considered for a moment, and then nodded. “Nine thousand is within the scope of payment I am authorized to offer. Does this mean that you accept the job?”
I took a breath, and nodded. “Yes, we’ll see that your squatters are no longer set up in the mine.”
“Excellent,” Mr. Jones nodded. He didn’t smile. He reached into his briefcase again, and pulled out four envelopes. “This contains your initial payment, as well as a single-use comm code for when the job is complete.” As I took the envelope from him, there was a glimmer of something behind his eyes, but I couldn’t tell what. The guy was so slippery that eels looked easy to hold in comparison. And his perfect averageness in the looks department made it harder to distinguish any tells.
I watched as he retreated into his sedan, and drove off. Only then did I look in the envelopes. Three had certified credsticks in them. Three credsticks each, each with one thousand nucred exactly. The fourth had the comm code. All of it was too damn slick by half.
“Well, girls, looks like we’re getting screwed by the locals again. Maybe this time, we’ll get to put someone down hard enough that others get the message. Last time, we were slightly overshadowed by the dragon’s rampage, which is why people probably haven’t figured things out yet.”