Shadowrun: The Frame Job: Part 6: Retribution (Shadowrun Sixth World Novella) by Jason M. Hardy

Author:Jason M. Hardy [Hardy, Jason M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2019-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Emu

Simon Dennis needed to get away from where he was. The entire building where he worked—that he had been in charge of—had just collapsed in a heap. He might be curious about what was going on, except he had seen someone he very much had a problem with right by the building. And she had delivered something that sounded like a threat. He would want to get away, but there was one small problem—he’d left his car at home, thanks to a drained battery. So what now?

He needed a ride. That would be fine. Rides were everywhere. He just needed to signal a Jitnee. Someone would take him out of—hey, wasn’t that his Jitnee rider from this morning? Great. She definitely could get him somewhere else.

That was the situation they’d set up this morning. Zipfile had found out that when Dennis used a ride share, he used Jitnee, and then she made sure that his next request would be routed to Emu. After dropping Zipfile off in the morning, Emu sped away from the AVR building to Dennis’s house so that when the call came, she could be there in minutes. And she was.

Dennis had not met Emu in person, but he knew what she looked like. That meant a disguise had been needed. Nothing fancy. Her hair was pulled back, and some nanopaste and makeup made her face rounder and her cheeks bigger. The fact that she was dressed in a normal, boring blouse-and-pants combo didn’t help—the floral pattern of the blouse was so non-rigger that she had to actively fight nausea when she put it on.

It was far from the only distasteful part of this ride, because she not only had to earn a five-star rating—she had to be liked. The very worst, most humiliating part of this job was the time she had spent reading articles on likability. She had some notion that that wasn’t something you should have to learn, but she also had a notion that without help, she wasn’t going to make the connection she needed to make.

Fortunately, she wasn’t trying to sleep with Dennis or anything, so there were some lengths she would not have to go to. But she also wasn’t going to get by just turning in pleasant music and shutting up.

In the end, it was both simple and incredibly difficult. The simple part was that all she had to do was ask him about himself and keep the conversation on topics he clearly wanted to talk about. He was a sport shooter, and could have spent the entire ride talking about it. He nearly did. The tough part was she couldn’t just turn around and scream, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up!” at him, even though she really, really wanted to about a half-dozen times. As a plus, she learned about three different shooting ranges she didn’t know about (and probably couldn’t afford), as well as something called the Shooting Stance Controversy of 2079 that, if she heard any more about it, might just force her to steer her car right into a building.

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