Magnets, how the frag do they work?

Racing seems to have been the theme of the day for this last Run. Not that It was about racing, mind you, but racing was how we got into it. Freddie had been asking around about the street racing community again with an eye to getting back into the competition. While he was away, the new top dog in town was a relative newcomer called Bruno who was tearing up the scene in a Eurocar Northstar; a massive, turbo-charged, peasant-crushing SUV designed for the stupidly rich people and corp execs. That’s the sort of car that’s well beyond the reach of your average street racer, which was turning some heads.

On a related note, I’d been doing more combat bike training with Cwildred which was turning out to be not only useful but pretty fragging awesome. In the latest round of training she’d been teaching me to jump my bike off things (Cars, roofs, highway overpasses) which is the sort of thing that is useful in a chase as well as being just plain cool. So we’d been trashing a couple of rental Growlers along the way; no sense in destroying my good bike while practicing after all.

Back on topic. Freddie’s asking around about street racing had gotten him some attention of the Mister Johnson variety. We were approached by a local dodgy Yakuza crime boss (Whom we quickly tagged as “Fat Yak” even though he wasn’t that fat) who was looking for us to do a job. And, while it didn’t actually involve street racing per se, it was related to it.

Fat Yak. Note: Not like this

So we went to his meeting in a local obvious Yak front Teahouse which had the potential to be very awkward. This was because standing behind Fat Yak was his bodyguard, being the same shirtless sword-wielding Oni from the Blue Dragons that we’d dealt with a couple of weeks back. Fortunately, he didn’t recognise the people who had gassed him, zip-tied him and left him in a blind alley on Gianelli turf, so there was no harm there.

Fat Yak was interested in Bruno, but not because he was tearing up the local racing scene. Instead, he had come to their interest because of a project that Bruno was working on with a group of other freelance developers. They were apparently trying to keep this low key and off the books, and definitely outside of usual corp R&D circles. All that Fat Yak Knew about the project was that it involved drones, which is where it got really interesting.

He showed us a picture he had of one of them, which was basically an unremarkable little slab the size and shape of a Commlink with no clear propulsion system or anything else; in other words, nothing at all like a traditional Drone of any kind. That’s why Fat Yak was interested in it. He wanted to get his hands on their control system, their data files and a few prototypes to boot, which all seemed reasonable. Oh, and if we happened to ruin Bruno’s racing career along the way, that’d also help. (And by that we mean that Fat Yak would get to keep a few of his fingers).

Doing some asking around on Bruno initially proved to be problematic. Freddie tried going through his street racing contacts, but all that proved is that Freddie’s really bad at talking to people. I had to step in and be amazing, which did yield some results. Bruno had apparently made allies with the Steel Tusks, a gang who hung out around the Tacoma waterfront district. They were providing security for his little project, whatever it was.

Ork Gangers. Just because
it's a stereotype doesn't
mean it isn't true.

While the Steel Tusks’ turf proved to be rather easy to find, getting info out of them proved to be a problem. They were an all-Ork biker gang, which meant that they were not fond of anything that wasn’t an Ork. So as such, despite how generally charming, attractive and awesome I am, I couldn’t just try a little bit of charm and persuasion to get the info we needed. Which meant that our only other option for metahuman intelligence was Freddie, and we all know what happens when Freddie tries to talk to people.

Instead we had to play a long game of slowly cruising around the district (a charming blasted mess of derelict warehouses and rusting industrial decay, most of which was still in ownership limbo after two matrix crashes) and tailing the Steel Tusks when they appeared. Eventually this yielded results, with Freddie’s Fly-Spies following a group of Tusks to a warehouse that had some rather interesting contents.

Besides more Ork bikers, there was our man Bruno and his expensive as all hell SUV and a whole bunch of industrial machinery, much of which looked a lot newer then the building it was in. But what was really interesting was what was going in in the middle of the room. There was a guy connected up to a computer terminal via a mess of cables. Above him was a swirling amorphous mess of these Commlink sized and shaped drones, moving in perfect formation like a swarm of fragging bees or something. Neon and Freddie immediately explained how this was impossible, and how a Rigger couldn’t jump in to an entire swarm at once, and yet he was doing it. Blah, blah, blah, nerd stuff. But that was what we were after.

Oh, and there was also an obvious Corp bodyguard watching the whole thing. No real surprise there.

As we were watching, the test pilot jacked out of the machine, leaving the drones to go into a sort of hovering holding pattern. He was clearly disoriented, and the scraps of conversation we could pick up suggested that whatever he was doing was very taxing. He swapped over to another test pilot and then went off to their makeshift bathroom area to throw up a lot. As soon as the new guy was in control, the drones went back to swarming and moving as a coherent whole.

I came up with a straightforward plan of attack. We’d use the rotordrones to gas everyone there. Figuring that the corp suit and the test pilots would be protected, I’d take out the suit form above. Then Freddie would drive in with the Steel Lynx and gun down anyone still standing. I’d forcibly dumpshock the operator by chopping his cables, then we’d drive the van in and take the computer, the operator and a couple of drones. All the while, Neon would be jamming their comms.

Simple.

Of course it didn’t unfold that well. The drone attack worked, dropping most of the Tusks in clouds of Neurostun. However, the Bodyguard proved to be some sort of fragging adept, and was able to skip through my hail of gunfire with surprising ease. At the same time, the Drone Swarm turned nasty, reforming themselves into a giant flying buzzsaw and trying to chop down me and the rotordrones. I managed to get away, but the rotors got the dreck fragged out of them.

Freddie cut in with the Steel Lynx, using it to take out the last of the gangers. The bodyguard’s response was to grab one of the motorcycles and throw it, with Freddie only just getting out of the way. Bruno took the opportunity to cut and run, with Neon immediately pointing out that he was going to be able to get away from her jamming pretty fast. Freddie decided to end the drone menace rather effectively by having the Lynx ram the operator. He crashed to the floor, suffered fatal feedback as the cables were yanked out and the droneswarm went silent, simply hovering in space.

Meanwhile, I fixed the bodyguard by basically shooting a grenade into his coat pocket. Dodge that.

Weighs six tons, size of a small European nation. Fast as all
hell.

Outside, the Rotordrones had chased down Bruno’s Northstar and tried to stop him from getting away and calling for help. As their approach involved lobbing grenades at the thing, It fixed the problem rather permanently. Shame, as it was a cool car.

Back in the warehouse, Freddie and Thinman hurriedly loaded the drone control console into the van. We rounded up the surviving test pilot and threw him in the smuggling compartment (Freddy will just have to hose the puke out later) and also bagged a few of the drones. The latter proved to be driven by some sort of magnetic attraction-repulsion system. Probably revolutionary or something but who cares? It’s all yens to me.

Between all the destruction we were abler to get back to Fat Yak and hand over the goods. He was happy with the goods, probably because he was actually a front man for MCT. Plus we got the bonus for (permanently) ending Bruno’s career, so that was good as well. Score one more for us.