Hey readers. As we all know, sometimes life happens. When it does, the things you want to do most never get done. Take this story for example. What I posted before was a rough draft. Here is the real thing in two parts. Part one now, pt. II next week. I would love some feedback on this or any of my other work. You can reach me at my new email address fastdos@prodj.com. Happy reading!

Trace and Burn: The beginning

There are two types of runners in the world. Those in the know and those in the ground. I spent the majority of my 25 years of living trying to prevent myself from becoming one of the latter. I’ve been marginally successful.

But then I met Burn.

She found me in a two-door dive east of Glow City called the Raging Pitt. It’s the type of place that spends most of its hours half-empty. Most people can’t deal with the location. I don’t mind the barrens. A lot of metas squat here and that makes it easy to blend in.

She doesn’t blend in.

Blue hair frames her round face. It is cut short so it doesn’t dip below her chin. Her eyes look expensive. Blue. Yamatetsu or even Fuchi, with the cosmods to make her look Asian. The body must be fixed; bubbling breasts overpacked with synthesized tissue. She bothers to hide them under a thin shirt. Her jacket is long enough to hide other things. I can’t help but blink a few times as she strolls through the front door. Everyone else in the bar is watching her too.

She is watching me.

The woman eases up to the bar beside me and folds her hands neatly. I once-over the tan line on her wedding finger. Thick band. She coughs once using that ring hand as though to acknowledge my stare and leads a few strands of that straight blue hair out of her eyes. It’s a subtle thing. Enough to offer me a glimpse of the chrome hiding behind her temple.

I hate deckers. Anyone who still has a registered System Identification Number has an obligation to feel the same. Deckers are needlers. The nerds you picked on after science class who responded to your fists by changing your locker combo, or if they had the talent, your grades. I blink real slow-like. You see, they get into your SIN then they get into your life, poking around and changing things; gathering up information like your real name. I didn’t know her, which meant that she’d done some digging on me.

“Tracey DeBoer?” Her voice is buttery, and I start to think that she used to do phone sex.

“Just Trace.” The way she invokes my birth name says that she already has enough dirt on me to make her feel safe about trying my patience. But then you don’t do that much legwork on a person without wanting something from them.

“What do you want?”

The woman crosses her legs and wraps her knuckles on the table. “A beer for starters. Bartender, get me a Corona. Not the synth stuff either.”

Mickey smiles, winks his one good eye at her and shuffles off to do the lady’s bidding. Good little dwarf. When he’s gone she says, “My name is Burn and I would like you to do a job for me Mr. DeBoer.”

Trace & Burn. It’s just a little too cute to be her real handle. I take a sip of my own synth-beer and study her for a moment, trying to make sense of the whole affair. There’s a certain pecking order in the sprawl. People stick by it because that’s the only order they know. If you’re a Johnson and you want something done, you go to a fixer. If you’re a fixer and you need to get a job taken care of, you hire a couple of hard-nosed runners. She was neither. “Digging up my real name doesn’t mean I’ll work for you.”

“Nor would I expect it to. However, I have a sizable credstick that may ease your distaste of working with me. If not—”

Here it comes—

“—There are other ways that I can think of to persuade you.”

What else could she know about me? What else of value? Shit, what else could she make up? I truly hate deckers. “So, what do you need me to do for you Mrs. Burn?”

“Ms… and I need your help breaking into a secured location. I need to access a mainframe there.”

Mickey comes back with the lady’s drink. He brings it in a tall frosted glass, and leaves a full bottle beside it. This is the closest the dwarf ever gets to romance. The lady notices his efforts. She flashes him a warm smile before taking a slow sip. Mickey leaves soon after, satisfied by making her grin from something he said. He’d probably told her the one about the Garbage man and the Peacock. Predictable. The old dwarf is a simsense reel when it comes to women. Same game, same pain. Over and over again. I am too busy mulling over her request to listen to him bomb. I’m running over all the possible ways that a decker could frag up my situation.

She turns back to me with that grin still infesting her face. “Had enough time to think my offer over.”

“I have.”

“So?”

“Nope.”

Burn’s grin fades away leaving something cold and hard there. She’s insulted that I think I have a choice. “You’ll get six-thousand for the job. Half now—”

I grimace.

“—The rest and the paydata I have on you is yours after we do the job.”

In the Shadowrunner vernacular, this is what is known as creative persuasion. In English: blackmail. In any language, it’s a cluster fuck, and it’s just what I expected to hear. Told you I hate deckers. I glare at her to show my displeasure at being at such a disadvantage and the carefree smile returns to her face.

“Well?”

“Trace and Burn. Sounds like we were meant to be a team.”

Burn’s a high roller, I’ll give her that. We step out of the Pitt and into a shiny black Stratus. I remember classics like that from before Ares gobbled up Chrysler. There aren’t any like it on the street, or in the section of the sprawl for that matter, and I start to wonder how it managed to stay intact while we were chatting it up inside. She answers my question by deactivating the security alarm. I hear a hum and the faint smell of diffused ozone drifts past my nose.

“Lethal response security. That come standard with these?”

“No, I had a chummer of mine install it. My people like to keep their assets intact.”

I file that away for future use. If she’s got chummers that consider her an asset, then she has a crew somewhere. Which also means that whatever she needs me for is too personal to involve them. Or worse, it’s about them.

She takes me to a place called Copa Joe’s. They don’t even serve beer. They serve coffee. By the looks of it, sixteen hundred different kinds. Don’t get me wrong I’ve heard of runners gathering in coffee houses, a throwback to the grunge movement of the last century or something. But me, I’m an Ork. People like me weren’t around a century ago. Shit, we weren’t around forty years ago. I suppose that makes me a modernist. There isn’t anything more modern than planning out your run in the tiny back room of a bar under the safe hum of a Dannaker white noise generator while you smoke cigarettes and grift synth-beers.

Copa Joe’s is filled with middle income wage slaves dressed down to look like street thugs. Sweaty teenagers navigate the narrow aisles between tables. It isn’t full yet. For once no one raises an eyebrow at the sight of an Ork. Most of the patrons have gathered in the middle of the room, beneath a real crystal chandelier. Nice touch, but I don’t get to see why Burn likes this place until later.

She orders two Swiss mochas and transfers fifty credits in Renraku corp scrip.

“Expensive coffee.”

She nods and nudges me towards an opening in the back. It’s dark and made to be that way. The little lighting that they have is ensconced in tiny white bulbs between each door. We go down a short hall and into one of six private rooms.

“Classy joint.” I remark, breathing in the white walls. It is a small room with lots of coasters. There is a synthwood coffee table and green loveseats large enough to fit half of me.

“Beats that dive I found you in.”

“If you say so.” I shrug and wedge into a love seat opposite the one she has curled up in. Truth is, swilling backwashed beer in a cemetery beats the Pitt. But I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that.

“You gonna tell me why you’re makin’ me help you, or do I have ta guess?”

Her answer is clinical. “Tracey DeBoer, born October seventeenth, twenty twenty-seven. Began to change at the age of fourteen, disowned by your father, a former UCAS government official, at the age of fifteen. Despite being forced out of house and home you were accepted to and eventually graduated from Stanford University in December twenty forty-seven. Disappeared shortly after. Reappeared in fifty-three in the employ of known crime figure Eddie ‘The Jackal’ Hague. Reported to have no magical abilities and known to have no cyber implants. Yet continues to do better than survive as a shadowrunner.”

Say it with me now: I hate Deckers.

“You forgot about something there Burn. I wear a forty eight long in Kevlex slacks.”

She blows me off. “I picked you Trace because you’re a survivor. No magic, no ware. You’re the kind of guy who doesn’t rely on too much or too many people to get the job done. This is a small operation. I needed quiet, fast and low maintenance. You’re it.”

“Would it surprise you to know that I got by on the size of my—”

“Trace, I’m trying to be serious here.”

“So am I. What’s to stop you from blackmailing me next time you run across a score you can’t handle alone?”

“My word.”

Her voice fades to silence in the still room. See, everything in the shadows comes back to one rule. You’re only as good as your rep. The minute Burn goes back on her promise and tries blackmailing me again, I tell everyone about it. That’d kill her faster than a hollow point from my Predator II would and she knows it.

Burn toys with her blue hair again, waiting to speak. It starts to feel like everything with this woman is calculated. “Satisfied?”

We sip coffee while Burn tells me the score. She wants to raid a mechanic shop on the East End of Everett. Strange request for a decker, but she explains that the shop is a hard target. It is supposed to house a mainframe that lists the names of all the members of a gang living in Seattle.

“What gang are we talking about here?”

“An Elven gang.”

I feel my blood pressure rise. It’s the kind of surprise you just can’t hide. So, I go with it. “The Ancients… This job pay medical?”

She lets the joke slide and begins to pull out her cyberdeck.

The Ancients aren’t the type of people you fuck with. They’re gangers turned secret society thugs. I don’t know much about them but I know that they’re somehow tied up in the Tir government as well as some really hush hush corps like Atlantean Enterprises. It’s almost worth being blackmailed to turn this one down.

“So, what else do you know about me?” I ask with a smile.

“I also know that you used to run with the Spiders, just after your father left you.

Used to.

There really isn’t a ‘used to’ when it comes to gangs. You’re either in or you’re dead. Once you leave a gang, any gang, they put a mark on your head. Breaking loyalties is the worst thing a gang member can do. She really did her homework. That’s the kind of paydata that doesn’t ever make it to the net. If it had, I would already be dead. Luckily the Spiders are a small enough organization for me to have avoided them for this long.

“Don’t worry Trace. They still assume that you ran away to New Jersey. Keep our deal and I won’t have to tell them that you never left.”

The pieces of this puzzle aren’t adding up. I ask the obvious question, “What would you want with a name directory of Elven Gangers?”

“My business chummer. Your part is to get me in there and get me out in one piece.”

“So what’s the matter with you hunkering down in some coffin motel and hitting the computer from the net while I do overwatch?”

“It isn’t connected to the net. They didn’t trust that they had the ICE to protect it so they unplugged it.”

“Jesus Burn what are you expecting from me then? We can’t walk in guns blazing, unless we were satisfied with coming out in zipper bags and I’m not.”

“You’re a shadowrunner. You hit corporate locations all the time. This should be easy for you.”

“Don’t think so lady. Corps you can trust to follow a certain pattern on how they do things. Gangs, you can’t. The Ancients are no dummies. No street gang achieves international status without knowing how to protect its assets.”

“But you can find us a way to get in, right?” She sounds concerned. I pause and mull it over in my mind. Yeah this would be a big enough score to pay my way out of the Spiders. Yeah it could net me a few easy nuyen on the side. Most of all it’s a challenge. Breaking into the main database of the world’s most dangerous gang. And it’s at that moment that I start to believe we can pull it off. It’s at that moment that my fate is sealed.

“Yeah I can get us in. If we can cause a distraction. In the confusion I think the two of us can slip in through the back. Getting out will be harder. Can you setup a frame to execute a command sequence at a specified time?”

“You took computer science at Stanford huh? Yeah, I can do that. What do you want it to do?”

I smile and tell her my plan. Two hours later we’re standing in the rain on the corner of Lowell and Evergreen Way. Though I don’t fully realize it, I am about to make the biggest mistake of my life.