Shadowrun Legends by Robert N. Charrette & Choose Your Enemies Carefully & Find Your Own Truth

Author:Robert N. Charrette & Choose Your Enemies Carefully & Find Your Own Truth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-386-08827-1
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs

Part 2

There Are Always Choices

Chapter 15

London stank.

It wasn’t just the fumes and garbage stenches that permeated everything, although the city had those, just like every other major metroplex. London’s peculiar effluvium was a legacy of the terrorist attack of 2039, when the radical group called Pan Europa had released a bioagent in retaliation for England’s supposed part in the break-up of the EEC. The bug was supposed to break down the sheathing element of the metroplex’s newly completed dome. The terrorists must have been pleased to see the biofabric skin had evaporated under the ravenous organism. But had they known what effect their organism would have on other biological fibers?

Intentional or not, once the bug was released, there had been no way to recall it. Much of London’s historical legacy had been destroyed when the uncontrolled organism had devoured all of its paper and wood as well. The panic riots afterward had devastated the city, vandalizing its present and almost completely devouring its past. The spirit of London’s people had failed as well, the dreams of leading a new Europe dying in the mouldering aftermath.

Now, the bones of the abandoned dome arched over the city like the broken ribcage of a rotting antediluvian beast, as the new fungi of skyscrapers, towers, and communications arrays clawed toward the sky through the bleached struts.

Sam saw those gleaming spires of the new ’plex as monuments to the megacorporations’ contempt for the common folk. Instead of nurturing the people’s hopes, the corps had defied the growing power of the Green Party and taken advantage of the chaos to built according to their own whims. With bought votes in Parliament and sweetheart deals for the still-landed aristocracy, the megacorps had twisted English law, shattering the people’s dreams of safety and protection. Despite the restored constitutional monarchy, George VIII, the Lord Protector, and Parliament didn’t govern the country alone. The megacorps ruled much of England as surely as they ruled their own boardrooms.

But London was a modern metroplex, and in the shadows of the corporate towers there was another world; one the megacorps and the Lord Protector’s Greens didn’t rule. London had its own shadow world, not unlike Seattle’s. In the corners and the darkness, men and women, shadowrunners, fought the aggressive, uncaring domination of the corporate powers. And when the corps struck back, the runners hid in the abandoned stretches that reminded Sam of Seattle’s Barrens, in the teeming hives of the Public Zones beneath the corporate towers, and in the dank tunnels of the service ways and sewers that made up the undercity.

Especially in the sewers.

The cold, slimy water trickled through his close-cropped hair. If his hair were longer, the chill splash would have been softened; he wouldn’t have felt dampness until the noisome liquid threaded its way onto the bare skin on the back of his neck.

Why was Hart late? Fifteen minutes already. In their three weeks of haunting the London shadow world, she had always been on time, if not early. Even in those rare moments when they had met to relax, she had been prompt.

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