Thursday, April 26, 2007

Back to the Facilty. Looking for Ford.

Thursday 26th October 2070

Glyph, Ki-Rin, Six, Ash, Drifter

Glyph, Ki-Rin and Ash returned from the barrens with the business card that they had acquired from the gang called the Whites. Six was back up and well, and had met Drifter who was back in town looking for work. The team all met back up and discussed their options.

Ki-Rin was the first to do some legwork in the matrix. He tracked down the number for the Mr. Johnson and hacked into his comlink. He had some security but Ki-Rin bypassed that with ease and was able to have a sniff round. The Mr. Johnson was a Lone Star Facilitator, whatever that meant, and he had files on hundreds of people including Dr. Ford. The data itself was deleted though. Six contacted Croner, his Lone Star contact and found out that a Facilitator was the Lone Star equivalent of the Company man. He arranged for things that the normal bobby on the beat can’t do.
They decided after some debate to arrange for a meeting with this Johnson, and Drifter was going to make the meet as he hadn’t been seen by anyone involved in this shadowrun and was the least likely to trigger suspicions.

The team decamped to the Bowlarama and Ice rink complex, and set themselves up in various locations within eavesdropping distance of Drifter. The Johnson arrived and quickly deduced who it was he needed to meet. After introductions they asked him about Dr. Manton Ford, and after a fee was negotiated, he told them that he was solely responsible for Dr. Ford’s disappearance. He worked for Cross before he moved across to Lone Star, and while there was instructed to extract Ford and move him to Nixon by someone higher up in Cross Applied Technologies. Ford’s life was being threatened and Johnson’s job was to make him disappear. After scrubbing his identity and hiding him out in the barrens for a few days, Dr. Manton Ford became John Austin, resident of Nixon, and employee of Tectonic Industries.

The runners had been to Nixon before when they had launched the attack on the underwater facility at Pyramid lake. The team kitted up and set off.

Arriving late into the afternoon the runners headed directly round to the home address given to them for Manton Ford, and after a bit of surveillance Ki-Rin and Ash went in with some smooth talking and good hacking they were inside the flat without a problem. It was an off the peg residence with standard fixtures and fittings and barely any personal touches. They did find a smashed up comlink and after traling through the damaged memory they found that Ford was receiving instructions from Dominic [assumed to be Dominic Cross] and his demands appeared to be driving Ford to acts of frustration, including the smashed comlink. Ki-Rin scanned the airwaves for any other signals in the building and found that there was a camera that was fixed in the lighting. Not part of the building security and the team suspected that it was there to keep an eye on Ford. There was nothing that they could do about the signals that had already been broadcast, but Ki-Rin recovered the hard memory and watched back the moments that led Ford to smash his comlink and then leave the apartment the following morning.

The runners feared that he had become spooked by Dominic’s demands and did a search on his credit trail and car. They were surprised and pleased to discover that he hadn’t fled as first thought and was in fact smack bang back at the facility that they had bombed not so long ago.

It was about now that the Juggler informed Ash that his brother, Blake, had been drafted into Cross Applied Technologies mini army, called Seraphim. Ash took the information on board but could do nothing about it at the time.

The team headed off to have another look, and after parking up in the same place that they did last time out and walking the trail that they did they looked down onto a building site. A lot of the pre-fab buildings had gone, and some kind of bio-dome was being erected over the whole site. There were dive teams working the lake, and there was a good deal of construction activity all over the place.

Ki-Rin cracked out his sniper cannon and started scoping the site. He picked out their mark, Ford, inside a building talking to a site foreman, and while Glyph tumbled her way into a better position, Six dispatched the flyspy.
The flyspy made it’s way in and using a circuitous route crawled it’s way onto Ford’s jacket, but the keen eyed foreman spotted it and swatted it thinking it to be a biting bug. When they saw that the insect was actually a small drone, Ford got onto the phone. The runners knew the game was up and moved. Ki-Rin handed over the sniper cannon to Glyph and led the walking charge down toward the compound with Ash and Drifter in tow. Six remote controlled the trio of vehicles to the site and ran to meet up with them.

Entering the site wasn’t too hard, the civilian contractors fell under Ki-Rin’s stick-shock rounds and the trio made their way quickly toward the building where Ford was. A helicopter thundered overhead, a rapid response troop transporter flew low. Glyph started shooting at it but didn’t have enough time to bring down the chopper before it was able to unload its cargo of six heavily armoured soldiers. A squad of Seraphim troopers.

They moved quickly and began shooting up the team who had made their way inside the building and had dropped Manton Ford. Bullets flew and the runners found themselves fighting a desperate battle with Glyph firing armour piercing shot after another, even these shots were being mostly deflected by their armour. Ash and Drifter were taken down, and only with the aid of their team did they survive.

After the smoke had cleared and the team had survived did what had transpired dawn on Ash, who frantically checked the bodies of the Seraphim soldiers to see of they were his brother. None were, but this didn’t stop the rush of emotion which took over Ash.

The others were out of there, with an unconscious Ford and Six knew that now was not the time for Ash to be soul searching, he picked him up and bundled him into his car and the team left the scene.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I knew i should of taken the XM-30. It's always the same, you've never got something when you really need it. :(

Owain said...

If you'd have asked, Seraphim would have let you borrow theirs.

Anonymous said...

YOU'RE complaining?! After all my careful preparations of the drone van as a hard line of defence between me and imminent mortality I ended up facing Mil Spec equipped men without it. We all underestimated what we would need to pack for this trip...

Anonymous said...

Lesson learned, always go prepared for a war with Tanks!!

Anonymous said...

Ah wel, we kicked ass anyway, just took longer is all...