I am a fragging motorcycle ninja

Me on my bike. It's fast enough to keep up with me

So a lot of runners have different definitions of what constitutes a "good" run. Some say it's one where you never have to engage in a fight at all, and nobody ever knows that you're there. Others think it's when you reduce the place to rubble and leave nothing but dead bodies and burning wreckage in your wake. I think if you asked any two runners, they'd say completely different things.

Now what I think was one of the best damn runs I’ve ever been on was definitely on the more colourful, loud and public end of it. But all things considered, it worked out pretty well for us. Not only because of what happened on the job, but because of what we got out of it in terms of fringe benefits and other things. Even if there was one catch.

So we were hired to extract a Wuxing suit, and they wanted him alive and more or less unharmed. Those are always the hardest as it means you actually need to be reasonably delicate with the target and can't just go in all guns blazing. So Me, Neon and Freddie did our groundwork and poked around, trying to find out as much as we could about the target and plot a method of extraction.

What we found was a mix of good and bad, but with a usable way in that we could exploit. First up, the bad news was that our boy worked in a heavily secured, almost bunker-like branch office that would be almost impossible to get into without turning it into a massive guns blazing assault that had the potential to get a number of people dead, specifically the target (which would be very counter-productive). And that was before we got him out, which would mean we were racing against time for company backup and Knight Errant HTRs and other such nasties. So that was out.

Similarly, his home base was at the company's main building in downtown, which was just as bad a proposition. That would again mean busting into a heavily defended complex that, while not as fortress-like, is of course exponentially larger and as such, would make finding him and getting him out a lot harder. So we figured that would be out as well.

S-K Bentley Concordant. You know you want one

The good news was that we found out that he owned a SK Bentley Concordant and, more to the point, was rather fond of showing it off. He liked to indulge himself in the luxury of driving around and lapping up the luxury (and who can blame him there?) Rather than taking a corp shuttle to and from his job. And, with a few days worth of watching the target and such, we found that he took the same route at the same time each day.

So now we had an exploitable vulnerability. All we had to do was use it.

The plan we came up with was amazing. We'd wait for him to get on the interstate, then follow him with Freddie and Neon in the van. I'd be riding escort on my sweet-as bike to cover the pair of them while they did their thing. What those two were going to do, on the other hand, was an amazing bit of cooperative computer work. Neon was going to hack into the Bentley’s controls, and then take over the vehicle while locking its actual driver out. She would then pass control of it to Feddie who would slave it to his control console. We would then drive it off the next off-ramp and unload the target. Simple.

It almost worked too. Stage one went as planned; we IDed the Bentley, verified that the target was on-board and then followed it onto the interstate. Stage two also went off fine, as Freddie and Neon did their nerd stuff and hacked then hijacked the car. And that's when it all went to hell, because these things never go as planned.

This is not a Theodolite

Before we could get to an exit, a pack of Ancients bikers accosted us, clearly intent on murdering our target. Two of them were riding a Theodolite ATV and waving around a grenade launcher, so this was definitely serious business and not just their messing around. And finally, to round it all off, their team was being supported by another Rigger with their own van and Drones. That guy's name, by the way, is Buzz-Bomb. More about him to come, but there's not one single pleasant thing I can say. Seriously, he's awful.

Since they were intent on murdering our target and that would mean we didn't get paid, we had no option but to fight. Freddie popped out his Rotordrones and set them on the Ancients bikers, while I tried to run interference and block them off from getting to the Bentley. This is the sort of situation I keep a SMG for (No really, I planned for this!) Which meant I was blazing away at them as we went.

Unfortunately, Buzz-Bomb popped his own Drones out, and decided to go for the target himself. Freddie intercepted, which resulted in a drone dogfight over the Interstate while I was duking it out with the bikers below. Fortunately, my own skill and talent meant that I was pretty much weaving between shots like some sort of fragging motorcycle ninja while doing a decent job of slowing the Ancients down. Unfortunately, they still had numbers on their side.

Fortunately, Freddie and Neon had a plan for that too. Freddie's drones managed to swat Buzz-Bomb's, which bought the pair of them an opening. Neon repeated the trick she'd pulled with the Bentley, this time hacking into Buzz-Bomb's van and taking control of it before passing that over to Freddie as well. Turns out his firewall was a little crap, something he should have thought of beforehand. But then, he was an idiot.

Freddie decided the best thing to do was slam on Buzz-Bomb's brakes, something tht worked rather well for him. His van didn't like the sudden deceleration and skidded, collecting the Ancient ATV as well as several of their bikes in the process. The ensuing mess was enough to let us get away with the target, taking the next exit as planned and then pulling him from his car.

So we got him out and got paid, which is allways good. But what was even better was an unexpected benefit of the whole mess. Someone filmed the battle with a dash-cam (with their own excited in-car commentary) and uploaded it to the matrix. It went viral in short order, which meant that suddenly me and Freddie were getting a lot of interest from people who were impressed by what we did there. That lead us to a street-race which resulted in Freddie getting a lot of PR, me getting the Ancients off my back and my meeting Alphonso. Awesome.

The only downside is that we also made a dangerously incompetent enemy.