Real Chrome (A Shadowrun Story)

This is a story I wrote about the aftermath of a game of Shadowrun I played two weeks ago.

REAL CHROME

SEASON 1 EPISODE 5

SOUND AND FURY

The house is small, cluttered, and seems to be held together by jury-rigged patch jobs done by someone who doesn’t actually know anything about home repair or construction. Four people are sitting in the living room on furniture that looks like it was dredged through a swamp at some point, talking and drinking cheap soy-based pseudobeer. A surprisingly high-quality trideo set dominates the wall opposite the couch, like a shiny flying saucer inexplicably turning up in the middle of a medieval village.

“Dude, shut up, shut up, it’s about to start,” one of the men in the room says, nudging the others with a metal cyberarm and pointing at the trid screen. “Hey, Chasseur! It’s starting!”

The door to the back yard opens, letting in the smell of cooking meat and a wild-bearded elf the size of a small mountain, holding a beer and a pair of grilling tongs in his off hand.

“C’est bon,” he says, edging sideways into the room. “Been looking forward to seeing this.”

“If they show our faces at any point, I’m done,” one of the others mutters, a man with a bandana and silver sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead. “I want to make that clear. I’m killing that has-been musician, and then I’m out.”

“This is going to be a fucking trip,” says an ork from the couch. He slouches down further into a battered armor jacket, scarred impact plates showing through threadbare kevlar, and points his beer at the screen like a conductor.

On cue, the production logos start playing.

—————

ARES MEDIA GROUP PRESENTS

The show opens with a dramatic electronic bass note. The narrator’s voice is smooth and masculine, and the imagery being shown is dark and violent.

“There is a hidden war taking place every day, all around you,” it says. “A war between the people charged with keeping you safe, and the people hired to slip through the cracks. A war fought by security experts, hackers, rogue agents, and dark shamans, taking place in the shadows of society.”

A montage of scenes from previous episodes in the season begins to play, with different hired experts demonstrating a wide variety of underhanded tactics and how to counter them, set to an intense beat.

“Our Red Team operatives have been training with Knight Errant Tactical and security consultants from across the world. Now they finally get to test their skills in a live exercise…against a real shadowrunner team that doesn’t realize they’re part of the show, and who won’t be pulling their punches.”

On the trid the show’s host is shown wearing a cheap, ill-fitting suit in a dingy alleyway, blocked in by dumpsters. The scene is being shot from what seems to be a hidden camera some distance away, and doesn’t show the faces of the people he’s talking to, but the moment when one of them shakes his hand and they all turn and walk away is obvious. The camera angle and music makes the figures seem ominous and threatening, even though very little detail can be made out.

“Real threats.”

“Real action.”

“Real consequences.”

“This is Real Chrome.”

—————

“Still the stupidest name they could’ve picked,” says the ork.

—————

“The Federal District of Columbia,” says the narrator. “Home to politics, big money, and every corporation that wants to have a say in how the nation is run.”

The screen shows a montage of famous landmarks and corporate offices, including the White House, the Capitol building, and the Shiawase Atomics headquarters.

“Security, as you might imagine, is tight.”

The screen changes to a shot of a security guard shouting angrily at the cameraman, chasing them away from the front of the Shiawase Atomics building.

“It is here that Red Team will be given their first real mission.”

The camera switches to a view of a room with a collection of athletic, obviously-cybered men and women wearing almost-military clothing standing dramatically in front of a trid projector that their captain is using to outline the scenario for them. There are six of them including the captain, a number judged by the marketing people to be few enough for the audience to remember names and faces while still having enough to make an effective security team. THE BRIEFING is written across the top of the screen in bright glowing letters.

“All right people, this one’s for real,” says the team leader. “We’re moving into a newly-acquired facility tomorrow to guard an important package that’s being stored there. The package is being moved out in three days, after which it is no longer our problem.”

The trid projector he’s using to illustrate his words shows a metal crate marked with strange mystic runes.

“We have reliable intelligence that, at some point in those three days, someone is going to try and take this package from us,” the team leader continues. “We aim to prevent them from doing so.”

The other operatives standing around the briefing nod, with a sort of practiced TV grimness. They look good, these Red Team trid soldiers. Whatever their combat and counterintel skills might actually be, at the very least they cut a pretty figure at the briefing.

The captain brings up a projection of the facility they’re meant to guard. There are three buildings, one bunkhouse/admin office and two warehouses, surrounded by a concrete wall. Some cranes and shipping containers decorate the dock that leads into the Potomac River.

The various Red Team members offer suggestions and ideas, and the team leader accepts some and disregards others as unfeasible. By the end of the scene, they’ve come up with what they think is a solid plan for defending the facility against unwanted intrusions.

“I like it,” the team leader says to the camera later, in a talking head segment filmed after the briefing. The words appearing at the bottom of the screen identify him as RADI GARRISON, TEAM CAPTAIN. “We can’t cover all the angles, of course, but any plan the enemy puts together is going to have to involve physically getting to that crate at some point. Our entrapment strategy with the sensors in the warehouse will allow us to surround and subdue any infiltrator without undue risk to the team. We’ve got alarms on all the doors in there, and we’re positioning ourselves so we can close on all the exterior exits the second any of them go off.”

The camera switches to a close up view, the team captain’s grizzled face filling the screen. “They might get in,” he says confidently, “but they won’t get out.”

The screen fades to a title screen.

“Real Chrome will return, after a word from our sponsors.”

—————

“You don’t have this hacked to not show ads?”

“Not all of us have a technomancer roommate, mon ami.”

“At least mute it.”

“Where’s the remote?”

“You don’t have it hooked up to your commlink? Christ, Chaser, that’s taking the backwoods throwback thing a little far, isn’t it?”

“Okay, first of all, go fuck yourself…”

—————

“Welcome back to Real Chrome, the real story of the shadows.” The narrator is back, accompanied by flying logos and recap scenes.

“Red Team has held their briefing, and has dispatched several team members to the facility to start setting up basic security measures. At the same time, across town, a fixer is hiring a team of real-life shadowrunners to retrieve a certain crate from a certain riverside warehouse.”

“Anyone engaged in corporate and political espionage in the FDC has to be at the top of their game if they don’t want to be caught by the authorities,” the narrator continues. “Red Team has been trained by the best, but for their first live-fire exercise, they’re going to be going up against worthy opposition.”

The scene cuts away to a close up of the show’s host. The bottom of the screen reads CASEY GLASS, FIXER, but the audience might know him better as “Casey Glass, one-hit wonder pop-rock singer from the early ‘70s and current C-list Matrix personality.” When he speaks, it quickly becomes obvious that he’s been the narrator for the show the entire time.

“I know how to get in touch with shadowrunners from my time as a musician on tour,” he says. “It wasn’t something that anyone talked about, it was just common knowledge among artists in certain circles. If you had a good manager, then they knew someone who knew someone who knew some people who could get things done. That’s how these transactions tend to take place. Everything is anonymized and done through unrelated middlemen.”

—————

“‘Anonymized middlemen?’” Chasseur says, incredulous.

“Right?” says another elf, with a more neatly-trimmed beard. He’s dressed in a plain flannel shirt and jeans, a tribute to simple and sturdy materials. “Is that what you call it when Mr. Johnson is a known celebrity? I mean, he’s C-list at best, but still…”

“Boombox still recognized him,” Chasseur points out. The man with the cyberarm lifts his beer in acknowledgement upon hearing his name.

—————

“So I made some calls to some old friends from my touring days, and got in touch with some people who put things like this together,” Glass is saying on the trideo. “And I became Mr. Johnson for a day.”

The screen changes to show the same hidden camera footage that was in the promo at the start of the episode, with Glass in an ill-fitting suit talking with a colorful array of out-of-focus individuals.

—————

“I’m very glad they didn’t get any close-up footage of that meeting.”

“Even if they did, I doubt they’d want to show just how unprepared Glass was. Dude was reading from a script on his commlink the entire time. That’s not a good look if you’re pretending to be a professional fixer.”

“Sign one that this run was going to be weird.”

“What would they have done if we’d gone with Nitro’s first instinct and refused the job?”

“Hired someone else? With the money they were offering, they’d have definitely found someone.”

—————

Glass continues providing narration over the scene.

“The shadowrunner team that took up the job was told that they needed to secure a crate marked with runes from a specific warehouse at some point within the next three days. They were also offered extra compensation for each perspective they recorded the run from, to provide us with extra footage for this episode. This team wasn’t told that this run was for a reality show, and after that initial meeting they had no planned interactions with show staff. Everything they did was live, unprompted, and unscripted. As I personally found out very quickly.”

The camera cuts to the interior of a luxury car. The door opens and Glass gets in, followed by the burly ork that frequent viewers of the show will recognize as Mr. Rourke, his no-nonsense-but-heart-of-gold bodyguard (click here to visit the Mr. Rourke fanclub!).

“That went well!” Glass says. His voice, when he’s not speaking for the narration, sounds a bit faster, more lived in and less smooth. “Did you think that went well? I did. We’re set up now! Come on, let’s get back to the studio.”

There’s an obvious cut in the footage.

“If they get caught by Red Team, honestly I think we still need to pay them or we won’t be able to get any more runners next time, “Glass is saying. “Word would get around. Depending on what happens during the next three days FedPol might still press charges, but if we pay them anyway, then at least–”

“Sir, someone is following us,” says the driver, unseen from the front of the car.

“What?” Glass is confused for a moment, then cranes his neck back to look through the rear window. Beside him, Mr. Rourke does the same.

“I don’t see–” Glass starts to say, but Rourke interrupts him.

“Motorcyclist with the camouflage jacket. Just slipped behind that big rig so we couldn’t see him. He’s the big guy from the meet with the runners.”

“What? Why would they be following us?”

“Due diligence?” Rourke looks amused. “Probably want to know who Mr. Johnson works for. Especially if something seemed off about the job to them.”

“Well…fuck!” Glass looks back again, more curious than nervous, and then shrugs. “Can you lose him?”

“Easily, sir,” says the driver.

And he does, easily.

“The advantages of having a rigger at the wheel,” the driver says in satisfaction.

“Hopefully they do better than that against Red Team,” Glass says.

—————

“In my defense, I usually just use the bike’s autopilot,” says Chasseur.

“That’s not a defense, man. Learn to drive.”

—————

The camera cuts over to a warehouse facility, showing workers moving crates and waving at cranes and carrying around clipboards looking important.

“Warehouses just like this one can be found in every city in the world, storing and moving goods every second of every day. Sometimes, they contain precious cargo.”

“Jorgensen and Wu have been on-site for a day now, setting up the security measures that Red Team discussed during their briefing. The rest of Red Team arrives tonight, after the workers leave.”

The camera shows two Red Team operatives standing next to a metal crate marked with glowing blue runes. One of the operatives is clearly in the process of performing some kind of magic ritual.

“That delay may prove to be a problem, because the objective is already on-site, and the shadowrunners are already starting to scout out the facility.”

“We’re in a situation that few security teams actually get to be in,” Garrison says to the camera. “Namely, we know that someone is coming for us. That’s not the usual state of affairs. Usually you sit around and wait and wait and nothing happens, except when you least expect it.”

“Knowing that someone is coming to try and take that package from us, at some point in the next three days, is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because we know that anything that seems to be a coincidence isn’t, and a curse because that’s going to make us jump at shadows if we aren’t careful.”

The camera switches to a point-of-view shot of the street outside the facility. Text in the upper corner of the screen identifies the feed as “RED 03.” A man in a delivery uniform with a blurred-out face is talking to the person behind the camera.

“Shortly after we arrived on site,” Garrison continues, now in voice over, “a courier showed up at the gate looking for the old management. This guy spent a while fanboying over Wu’s Red Samurai armor, and asking him questions about it. Wu is convinced he was just a normal guy who wasn’t told that the facility had changed hands, but personally? I think he was either a shadowrunner or, more likely, was paid a handful of nuyen by the shadowrunners to go up to the gate and ask a few questions. If I didn’t think that there was a very real threat of someone coming after this package, I’d be tempted to write it off as exactly what it seems, but right now? Now I’m paranoid.”

The scene switches to a pan shot of a warehouse full of crates, and a single operative in red armor striding purposefully between them.

“A more obvious example happened yesterday,” Garrison says. “Jorgensen was on site setting up the mana barrier before the rest of Red Team arrived, and she said that something in the astral penetrated the barrier around the warehouse and was poking around in there.”

The camera cuts back to the profile view of Garrison as he continues to speak. “That’s definitely a shadowrunner. That’s an enemy scout. And that tells us that they have magical support, which means we need to increase our own astral surveillance.”

The camera pans over the warehouse compound, showing the tall concrete walls around it and the armed Doberman drones taking up positions at the gates.

“Our physical security is all but impenetrable,” Garrison says, “and if they do get in, they’ll get trapped in the warehouse with us surrounding them. I don’t think the enemy is going to figure out a way to get in here in three days, no matter how they poke at us, but them having a mage means that I can’t take anything for granted. I have Jorgensen looking for spirit watchers as much as she can, but she’s only one person, and I need to rotate her off duty for breaks. There are holes in our astral observation that I can’t do anything about other than make sure that our more conventional team members are especially alert during those times.”

“That said, our conventional coverage really is good,” he adds. “I think between Jorgensen and the drones we should have plenty of warning whenever these shadowrunners decide to show up.”

“Do you think they’ll be coming tonight?” Glass asks Garrison, from behind the camera.

“On the first night after we get here?” The team captain laughs. “Nah. They’ll let us stew for a bit. Personally, if I were them, I’d hit us the second night. If they did it tonight, they wouldn’t have had enough time to scout the area, and if they did the third night, we’d be expecting them because that’s the last night they’d be able to do it.”

“But if they do drop in tonight,” he adds, smiling confidently into the camera, “we’ll be ready.”

The screen fades to black. A disturbing electronic whine begins rising in pitch on the soundtrack as the words THAT NIGHT appear across the center of the screen.

A new camera comes online. It’s out of focus for a moment before the picture clarifies, revealing a dark, shadow-wreathed view of the perimeter wall. A gate with a red-armored guard stands brightly lit in the distance. The words HUNTER-01 glow softly in the upper-right corner of the feed.

The camera looks side to side, and it becomes apparent that it’s a point-of-view feed from an unknown subject. Whoever it is looks down at black-gloved hands and cracks their knuckles before swarming up and over the wall, hands sticking to flat concrete like they were glued there, no sound playing at all except for the hair-raising tension of the music.

The unknown infiltrator lands on the inside of the facility wall, and the screen cuts to black just as the jarring music crescendos.

“Real Chrome will return, after these messages.”

—————

“Here we fucking go,” Chasseur says.

“I think they did something to stabilize the footage there,” says the man with the sunglasses and bandana. “You were not that smooth.”

“Smooth enough,” Chasseur says, standing up. “I’m going to check on the slow cooker. Enjoy the ads, mes amies.”

“Could you mute the commercials before you go?”

“If you can find the remote, be my guest.”

“Fuck you.”

—————

“Welcome back to Real Chrome.”

The screen shows an overhead view of the dockside warehouse at night, from a drone passing overhead. The words EYE-03 glow in the corner of the feed.

“The biggest problem with trying to secure any facility is that you can’t anticipate everything.” Casey Glass’ narration is as smooth as ever, making it sound like he’s a friend telling you a story rather than a stranger narrating a reality show. “It’s easy to foresee infiltrators and armed gunmen, but the number of tricks that shadowrunners can bring to the table is without limit. You also need to consider snipers, magic, air support, and a whole host of other things. The worst thing you can do is assume you know everything about how the opposition is going to approach you.”

“The shadowrunners infiltrating the facility Red Team is guarding were paid extra if they recorded the run from their perspective. They provided us with footage from several members of their team…as well as several drones.”

The camera feed changes, showing a different overhead drone view, labeled INTRUDER-01. A bright yellow highlight appears to point out a shadowy figure moving across the ground, barely visible even with the electronic assistance.

“This infiltrator used gecko-grip gloves and knee pads to climb over the facility’s admin building to get to the warehouses, instead of going around or through and risk running into a guard or patrolling drone,” the narration continues. “That particular area had very little surveillance on it, and it’s likely that it was chosen as the point of initial infiltration for just that reason.”

“Analysis of the footage provided by the camera in the shadowrunner’s mask and the drones shows that this infiltrator is cloaked by a spell of some kind, in addition to wearing camouflage clothing. Even when Wu passed by less than five feet away from where the infiltrator was disabling the lock on the warehouse door, no one suspected that anything was amiss.”

—————

“The fuck? Didn’t you check the other warehouse first?”

“Oui, I did.”

“Guess they cut that. Makes sense. A shadowrunner breaking into the facility and then spending ten minutes carefully searching the wrong building doesn’t really fit the story they’re telling.”

“Kind of neat how they patched it together so it looks like the dramatic moment with the guard turning the corner there happened on the second warehouse.”

“Yeah. Can’t even tell it’s happening in a different spot then they’re implying.”

—————

“Despite the drones, guards, walls, and sensors, the shadowrunner didn’t encounter any major obstacles until reaching the warehouse. Here, though, the alarms set by Red Team proved their worth.”

On screen the HUNTER-01 camera is back, showing the infiltrator carefully opening a door from a manager’s office to the main warehouse floor. A plate that the door was holding down clicks up, and the infiltrator’s hand slaps it back down a moment too late. The shadowrunner stays there for a moment, staring at the simple little alarm that tripped when the door opened, and then he’s moving quickly into the warehouse.

The camera changes to one marked EYE-05, which shows Red Team members and camera drones converging on the warehouse. Pairs of operatives group up at the north door and the east and west loading docks, preparing to breach, just like in the plan Garrison had outlined in the briefing.

“The shadowrunner, alerted by his drone scouts, has only moments to prepare before Red Team breaches the building,” Glass says in his smooth narrator voice. The camera switches to HUNTER-01 again, showing the infiltrator at one of the loading dock doors, where he’s using a bottle of aerosol glue to attach a row of black canisters to the bottom of the wide dock door. The canisters have white starburst icons on them, along with a fine-print litany of warnings and legal text. When three of them are attached, he turns back towards the center of the warehouse, where a metal crate marked with glowing runes is visible.

Outside, camera drones track each pair of operatives as they start to breach.

Inside, HUNTER-01 tosses smoke grenades from each hand into the center of the warehouse, filling the interior of the building with white smoke and drifting sparks meant to blind thermal imaging.

Everything is set for the confrontation.

“Real Chrome will return, after a word from our sponsors.”

—————

“Seriously, why can I not mute the ads on this.”

“Just find the remote!”

“I don’t even believe you have a remote. It’s a myth meant to placate the masses. Bread and circuses and your goddamn trid remote. What kind of trid set even comes with an actual, physical remote in this day and age?”

—————

“Welcome back to Real Chrome, where the run is about to get interesting.”

“Red Team has trapped a shadowrunner infiltrator in the warehouse. The runner had a brief moment to prepare for their arrival, and used it to set up a trap on one of the doors and deploy concealing smoke. He’s as ready as he can be. Still, there’s only one of him, and our six Red Team operatives are loaded for bear and about to descend like the wrath of God. If the infiltrator is lucky, he might get away–but he isn’t escaping with his objective.”

“Unfortunately for Red Team, while there was only one infiltrator on the ground, there was more than one shadowrunner on the job.”

—————

“Here it comes!”

“Yup. Time for Boombox to ruin all their footage.”

“Bring the noise.”

—————

The doors are thrown open. Drone cameras outside the building get dramatic cinematic shots of trained Red Team operatives storming the warehouse, two per door, into a cloud of smoke filled with drifting sparks.

The show cuts to one of the Red Team’s helmet cameras–RED-04 glows softly in the corner of the feed–as the operative dives underneath a loading bay door, sweeping his gun to either side like he was trained. He spots the infiltrator even through the thermal smoke, crouched in a shadow behind a stack of crates. Implanted targeting systems highlight the hostile with a bright yellow outline as the agent whips his pistol around and fires. A flashing X marks a confirmed hit.

For a moment it looks like a perfect, textbook takedown. For about half a second, it seems like the story ends here, with the infiltrator down and Red Team triumphant.

And then the shadowrunner moves, and there’s a thunderous booming sound that almost immediately overwhelms the microphone’s ability to record and encode audio. The camera jerks forward, falling towards the concrete floor, and an impossibly bright light blots out the video feed.

It takes a moment for the audio to become clear enough to be recognized as music, inexplicable hard rock drums and guitars hammering out power chords.

The view switches to a drone camera outside the building, where a crouching Red Team operative is summoning a spirit outside the loading bay door. Sparks trail from her fingers for a moment, coming together to form a being of flame and smoke; but not quickly enough. A flash of light from the door and a visible wave of concussive force sends the mage flying before the summoning is complete. When she lands, her head bounces off the ground with enough force that the audience winces in sympathy.

From inside the warehouse, flashbang lights pulse in an erratic epileptic rhythm, lighting the smoke like the world’s most confusing rave, and a nonstop wave of ultra-loud music blasts incomprehensibly into the night. Video feed from other Red Team members shows only white light and blaring noise, interspersed with brief periods of smoke and darkness. Drone cameras outside show a chaotic, swirling mess of light, smoke, rock music, and barely-heard screams. At one point a red-armored figure comes flying out the door to land in a crumpled heap outside, and there’s a momentary suggestion of a massive beast rampaging through the building.

All of the Red Team members go down in rapid succession, biomonitors reporting unconsciousness accompanied by various injuries. Blunt force trauma. Broken arm and cracked ribs. Concussion. Garrison, the last to go down, almost has his biomonitor shorted out by a powerful electrical discharge.

The whole chaotic mess lasts only a couple of seconds, if that. The cameras on the drones outside capture the moment that the lights and music cut out, leaving behind a deafening silence and slowly drifting smoke.

The show holds the shot for a moment, to give its audience enough time to be stunned at how quickly things went wrong.

“Let’s take a closer look at what happened there, shall we?” says Glass.

A 3D rendering of the warehouse fills the screen, with animated representations of Red Team and the shadowrunner.

“Matherson, Harris, and Jiu breached at the same time from different directions,” Glass says in voice over, as the animated figures on the screen play out the drama. “Wu and Garrison were slightly behind, as they swept the north offices before reaching the warehouse floor, while Jorgensen stayed outside, summoning a fire spirit to back up the physical team.”

“Of all the Red Team operatives storming the warehouse, Matherson was the only one to get a visual on the runner. He had his shot and he took it, but unfortunately he’d just breached the door where the shadowrunner had set up his booby trap. Three concussion grenades went off right behind his head, and that was it for Matherson.”

“The runner’s other distraction activated at about the same time.”

Several small dots are highlighted on the screen, spaced evenly in mid-air around the warehouse floor. The camera zooms in on one of them to show a diagram of a small dragonfly-sized drone.

“Noisekeetos are small drones that pack a very loud audio and visual punch,” the narrator says. “When activated they flash extremely bright lights and play extremely loud noises out of the speakers that take up most of their frames. The chaos in the warehouse suggests that almost half a dozen of them had infiltrated the building along with the shadowrunner on the floor, and as soon as Red Team breached they lit up with music and blinding light in order to disorient the operatives.”

“In the ensuing chaos, Red Team was quickly neutralized. Astral analysis after the fact shows the presence of both a mage and spirit that didn’t belong to Red Team, suggesting that this infiltrator had magical abilities or support invisible to the naked eye.”

The animated scene shows Red Team members being tossed around by magic as they storm into the warehouse, firing blindly. By the time the black model representing the infiltrator draws a pistol and shoots Garrison to end the exchange, all of the other Red Team operatives have been thrown across the room by invisible blows, punched by spirits, or concussed by grenades.

“The exchange lasted less than four seconds, and left Red Team bruised and bewildered.”

“I hit him, I know I did,” Matherson says, centered in the camera. His eyes are bloodshot, and an EMT is checking him over as he talks. “Center of mass, clean shot. But he didn’t go down. And the next thing I knew, something threw me through the air, and then I was being woken up by a medic trying to make sure my eyes were dilating right.”

Glass, as the narrator: “After-action review shows that Matherson did in fact hit the shadowrunner with an electric stick-n-shock bullet–but only one, and with the infiltrator’s heavy armor, one wasn’t enough to slow him down. And unfortunately, Matherson didn’t get a second shot, because he didn’t know about the trap that the runner had put on the door in the brief seconds before Red Team stormed the building.”

“Here’s an interesting question,” Garrison says, doing the talking head thing for the camera again. “Did our infiltrator put his concussion trap on that specific door because doing so would clear the way for him to get to the river and his waiting escape boat? Or did he do it because he knew that our only mage was on that side of the building? We know that this team had good magical support, so it’s entirely possible that they could’ve spotted Jorgensen’s astral signature and warned their man on the ground in time for him to make the decision.” He shakes his head. “It seems like too much of a coincidence for just good luck. Either way, it ensured that one of our most powerful assets was out of the fight right as it began.”

Glass, narrating: “One of the more famous old school shadowrunner sayings is, ‘Geek the mage first.’ This team seems to have taken that to heart.”

“We’d have done a lot better here if Jorgensen’s fire spirit had been there to help deal with those [censored] Noiskeeto drones,” Garrison adds. “Damn shame she didn’t have time to finish summoning it.”

—————

“Bet you wish she hadn’t actually had time to finish summoning it, eh Woden?” Chasseur grins.

The elf in the flannel shakes his head. “What I wish,” he says, “is that I’d realized she hadn’t had time to give it any instructions, and that I hadn’t provoked it.”

“Don’t worry,” says the ork, “I’m sure Boombox will eventually forgive you for leading an angry fire spirit back to his van.”

“Nothing to forgive,” Boombox says. “The steel lynx handled it.”

“Still, probably better for our reputation that they didn’t get that on camera.”

—————

“Red Team is down, but the shadowrunners have made a lot of noise in the process. They need to get away, and get away fast.”

The screen shows drone footage of a boat cutting across the Potomac, with no running lights. Moments later it arrives at the facility dock, and two figures get out and run for the warehouse.

“With security no longer an issue, more hands arrive to make quick work of moving the package to the waiting escape vehicle,” says the narrator as three shadowrunners emerge from the warehouse, carrying a metal crate between them. Runes marked on the outside of the crate glow in the dim light. The camera cuts to the viewpoint of one of those hurried figures as they maneuver their burden down into the boat and start the engine.

—————

“That thing looks a lot better on camera.”

“The boat?”

“The crate. I remember it being covered in shitty fake runes done up in glow-in-the-dark paint, but it doesn’t look half bad on screen.”

“Might’ve worked some editing magic on it. They’ve done a lot of that, it seems. Did you notice how they cut out the part where Nitro shot at one of their drones?”

“They didn’t use any of the footage from Erebus, either.”

“To be fair, he was in astral the entire time. I dunno how interested they are in showing a recording of the sky from where his meat body was lying in the boat.”

—————

“And with that, the runners escape into the night, off to meet up with Mr. Johnson and get paid.”

The camera shows a long shot of Casey Glass, again in his cheap Mr. Johnson suit, standing next to a GMC Armadillo truck in an empty parking lot (you can easily tell it’s a GMC Armadillo because the camera is deliberately including the logo in the shot). Masked figures are loading a rune-marked crate into the back of the truck, and accepting a credstick from Glass.

“Red Team, meanwhile, is regrouping, going over their performance to try and figure out how to do better next time. Garrison already has ideas for better training, more tools, and improved strategies.”

“It’s obvious that we need something to deal with drones,” Garrison says to the camera. “Another mage would be a great addition to the team, but I don’t think we can count on that, so we’re going to work on having Jorgensen summon her spirits earlier, further back from the incident point. The alarms in the warehouse worked perfectly, so we’ll keep those going forward, and augment them with cameras on the target so we know when the enemy is setting up traps or hiding somewhere.”

He rubs his hands against each other, staring off into the distance. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

NEXT TIME, ON REAL CHROME:

“Harris is still in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained during the brutal treatment he received at the warehouse, so to replace him on their next op Red Team welcomes a new member: Pakistani sniper and Desert Wars veteran Iffat Makhdoom.”

“Counterintel specialist Mark Rossenburg, formerly of Knight Errant, is brought in to teach the team the Knights’ proven methods of spotting spies, con artists, and other social infiltrators.”

“And Matherson, after discovering that he did indeed hit his target in the warehouse to no real effect, visits the largest weapons retailer in North America in search of a bigger gun.”

“Real threats.”

“Real action.”

“Real Chrome.”

“As always, I’ve been your host, Casey Glass.”

—————

“Well, that was less of a shitshow than I expected,” says the ork named Erebus.

“I’m actually surprised they showed all the details of their team getting its ass handed to it like that,” says Woden. “You’d think the corp would want to underplay the abilities of shadowrunners, not make them look good.”

“Maybe it’s part of a story arc?” Boombox says. “Like, they get wrecked now, and then later in the season they do another op and nail it so the viewers can see how they’ve improved.”

“That’d be my guess,” says Chasseur.

“All I really care is that they didn’t show our faces,” says Nitro, stretching. “So now I don’t have to change my identity again.”

“Again?”

“You know what, forget I said that.”

“Hey, what time is it? Is the Urban Brawl game starting yet?”

“Uh…did that start at five?”

“Yeah. Change the channel. I want to see how St. Louis is doing this season.”

“Cheating their way to the top, is how they’re doing.”

“That was only the one game.”

“Barbeque’s done,” says Chasseur from the door to the backyard. “Who wants brisket?”

“Fuck yeah!”

Shortly afterwards the room in the little house is empty, trid screen playing to no audience, beer bottles scattered about abandoned chairs and couches. On the screen Urban Brawl players grimace and fight with each other, while from outside the sound of familiar arguments drifts in through the window.

Tomorrow, there will be a meeting with another man calling himself Mr. Johnson. There will be tension, danger, bullets and betrayal. The same old stone every shadowrunner is ground against on every run, until either the edge is sharp enough to cut or the knife breaks.

But today there’s trid and beer and barbeque, and that’s pretty good for now.