Shadowrun: The Frame Job: Part 2: Emu by Brooke Chang

Author:Brooke Chang [Chang, Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2019-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Emu awoke with a start. It took her a second to realize she was propped up against a wall. She was in a dark room, and her head was killing her—and so was her shoulder, she quickly learned, when she raised her arm to clutch her head. A moment later, it registered that her hands weren’t bound.

With some effort, she stood. Her legs were wobbly, but seemed to be functioning. Her entire body looked and felt encrusted in grime. When she looked around to get her bearings, she saw that she was in some kind of storage room. In the distance, she heard muffled screeching and banging, crunching noises, mechanical whines. There was a door in front of her. Emu twisted the knob, and to her surprise, it moved. She pulled the door open to reveal…Hardpoint, standing at the workbench and tinkering with his newfangled drone.

Oh. So that’s what the storage room at Black’s looked like.

Hardpoint looked up when he heard the door open. “Hey, take it easy. You should sit down, you got beat up pretty badly.” He pointed at a nearby chair.

Emu was in no position to argue. She flopped down, wincing at the bright overhead lights. “The frag happened?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Hardpoint said. “I looked at the security feed when someone started shooting the windows out, and all I saw was you unconscious and some bakayaro trying to stand up to finish the job. Are you in trouble?”

It was a bit of a trick question, Emu knew; Hardpoint wasn’t the type to ask something like that unless he already knew the answer. Making it a question just gave her the chance to save face by claiming it was no big deal, instead of forcing her to admit she couldn’t handle it on her own.

“A Johnson backstabbed us,” she said, figuring being honest was the least she could do when Hardpoint had just saved her life. “Renraku bloke. We did the job, and when we went to collect our pay, we found a Knight Errant HTR team instead. Someone knocked over one of our safehouses at the same time. We’ve been trying to track down the Johnson and get some dirt on him so he’ll back off, but Rude disappeared the same night as the meeting, and Frostburn vanished the next day.”

“Chikusho,” Hardpoint breathed. “Is the guy you were meeting earlier involved somehow?”

Emu started to shake her head, then changed her mind and began to nod, but gave up entirely when the all the head motions made the throbbing worse. “He’s a dispatcher for Knight Errant. I asked him to find out who put in the 911 call the night of the ambush. The meeting just now was him giving me the paydata, but he was acting really strange, asking more questions than usual.”

“Like he was wearing a wire.”

“Yeah.” Emu sighed. “I’d just gotten off the comm with Zipfile when the other slot snuck up on me. I honestly don’t know how I survived.

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