When it Rains
"Look, I don't care what Dennis told you," Patricia Somerset said loudly as she stepped up onto the commuter bus parked next to the rain-splashed sidewalk. Dressed in a dark blue skirt suit and heels, the young woman looked like a shark business clothes. Her ebony-skinned face—pretty, but not too pretty—was framed by short, yet fashionable hair, cropped short and plastered stiffly to the back of her head. While one hand held her umbrella aloft, the other pressed a series of buttons on the black-paneled device attached to her belt.
By the time she stepped up onto the bus, the other employees in line ahead of her had already found their seats. She continued to speak into her wire headset as she collapsed the umbrella and shook the water off. "It doesn't matter if it's Friday. That report needs to be on my desk by Monday morning. I don't care if you have to work all weekend." She paused to listen, running her hand along the back of her head. "You've known about this assignment for two weeks. It's your own damn fault!"
There was a click on the other line, and then nothing.
"Argh," she growled, to no one in particular. "The bastard hung up on me!"
"Ma'am?"
The dark-skinned executive glanced up.
The bus driver, an ork of all things, looked at her expectantly. "If you would, ma'am, please have a seat. We're ready to depart."
She flicked her eyes in annoyance at the disgusting creature, glancing out the windshield at the deluge of rain pelting the Seattle streets. All day long the darkened skies had emptied their contents onto the Emerald city, and even at seven at night, it showed little sign of letting up. Someone more poetic might have thought it the sky was crying for the multiplying woes of the denizens of the metroplex, but Patricia had never been very poetic. She just had an urge to give the sky the finger. Patricia hated the rain. Living in a city like Seattle, anyone else would have gotten used to the rain, but not her. She still hated it as much as the day she first moved here.
"Ah, Ma'am?"
Patricia rolled her eyes in annoyance at the incessant driver, but stepped up onto the main platform of the vehicle without saying another word. The commlink's green-tinged LCD screen winked out as she tapped the off button and paused at the head of the isle to survey the arrayed seats. Only a handful of employees sat scattered around the cavernous bus—not surprising since most of the other wage slaves had left at the end of their shifts. The late route was reserved for workaholics like herself, who just couldn't seem to pull themselves away from their desks, even on a Friday night. In addition to the other employees, a Knight Errant security guard sat at the very back of the bus positioned in the middle of the isle. He wore black and red security armor—a series of hard, composite plates arranged over the body much like medieval armor—along with a helmet that totally concealed his face. In his lap, he cradled some kind of submachine gun, offering quite a visible deterrent to any would-be troublemakers. In the back of her mind, Patricia felt somewhat pleased that her company had contracted the high-profile security firm to protect their personnel and assets. It made her feel especially safe to know that the professionals of Knight Errant were watching out for her.
With that comforting thought in mind—practically the only one she'd known all day—Patricia made her way down the isle, picking out a seat about two-thirds of the way back. As the bus lurched into motion, she sank into her seat like a lead weight and let out a weary sigh.
Her workday had been a nightmare. The trouble started bright and early when she came out of her corporate condominium to find the rain coming down in buckets. Of course, that wasn't the worst of it. She discovered that her car had, not one, but two flat tires. The whole purpose of living in a corporate compound was to avoid things like that, but she didn't have time to go roust the security guards out of their donut-clogged offices to actually track down the bastard kids who did it. She was already late for work, so she hopped aboard one of the company buses provided for employee transportation. She disliked having to lower herself to the level of the other base-line workers, but she disliked being late even more, so the choice was made for her.
The rest of the day didn't go any better. It seemed like everything she did, something went wrong. Messages ended up with the wrong recipients, reports wouldn't save, technical issues came up with even the most reliable software. It was as if some malign deity was working against her the whole time, trying to make her day a living hell. Finally, after five o'clock had come and gone, she seemed to get things under control. With another couple of hours of work, she had gotten enough done to retire for the evening. Of course, she would still have to come into the office over the weekend, but at least she could go home and get some sleep before then. Even on the best of days, she still hated her job, but on days like today, she detested it.
Motion out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Patricia looked around to see the guard behind her fiddling with something at his waist. She gave an indignant huff. The guy was messing with his commlink, of all things. Probably making personal calls on duty! So much for being a professional. Normally she would have confronted him herself, but fortunately—for him at least—she was too tired to bother. The young exec made a mental note to file a complaint against the man and turned her attention away, leaning her head against the rain-splattered window as she watched Seattle's neon streets crawl past. All she could think of was how she hated this damn city.
The bus rolled to a stop at an intersection as the light turned red. Patricia stared out the glass like a forlorn prisoner, simply wishing she could be home again.
Suddenly she felt something tap against the back of her heel. Frowning, she peered down at the floor to see a small cylindrical object about the size of a can of soycola. For about half a second, she wondered what it could be. Then the top popped off and a stream of whitish smoke began spewing out.
A brief moment of confusion seized her, before something else took hold. It felt like an iron hand had grabbed her by the throat, choking off her airways and sending her into a fit of hacking coughs. The passengers around her found themselves in similar distress as another pair of grenades went off, though, it wasn't like Patricia noticed any of it. She was too busy retching on the floor as her body violently tried to disgorge the poison that had invaded her airways.
In the hurricane of painful sensations, she somehow felt a hand grab hold of her arm. She looked up, eyes swimming, to see the security guard standing over her like some kind of black monolith.
"Come with me."
She couldn't have said no if she wanted to—the bile brimming at the back of her throat made that impossible. She merely nodded and let him grab her by the shoulders, half-leading and half-dragging her to the front of the bus.
In the front compartment, the driver lay slumped over the steering wheel, but the guard didn't give him a second look. He punched the button to open the door and surged out into the downtown streets.
As they met with fresh air, Patricia tried to throw herself on the ground and heave out the rest of the phlegm screaming to be let out. She no longer cared about the rain. She just wanted to breathe. But as her knees hit the pavement, the guard roughly jerked her to her feet.
"We have to go!" he shouted, literally hoisting her onto his shoulder as he threaded his way through the gridlocked cars.
As the dry heaves faded, the rain pelting her face helped to sober up Patricia's senses. Watching the bus recede in her hazy vision, she began to wonder why he didn't help any of the others out too. It was only when the guard had leapt into the back of a waiting van that she began to realize something was wrong. He laid her on the floor as another man clad in a leather jacket with a short green Mohawk and a bullring through his nose closed the doors, slapping the side of the van.
"That's it, Blitz. Hit it!"
The wiry youth at the front, his arms covered in Chinese tattoos, gave a mock salute and hit the gas, rocketing the vehicle through the intersection. The female ork in the passenger seat hardly registered the motion. She simply sat in there, near catatonic with a thin fiber-optic cable snaking from the commlink in her lap to the datajack in her temple.
By that time, Patricia knew something was wrong. She lay on the floor, her breath heaving as she looked up at the armored guard with bewildered eyes. "What…" But with the effects of the gas that was all she could manage.
The guard slung his submachine gun back over his shoulder and reached up, unsnapping the clasps of his helmet. With a slight hiss of compressed air, he lifted it off, revealing the rugged complexion beneath. His grayish skin had a slightly green tinge to it, and his jaw was covered in a three-day growth of beard, as was his scalp. With jutting tusks, pointed ears, and a scarred visage, he looked like the something out of a child's nightmare—in other words, an ork.
Patricia would have been more disgusted had she not just finished emptying her stomach onto the bus floor.
"If you haven't figured it out yet, we ain't here to rescue you. You just sit your little ass right there and don't say a word, and everything will work out fine. So ka?
She couldn't believe it. She was being kidnapped—and all when she thought the day couldn't get any worse. She thought to retort something sassy, but it came out as a low gurgle.
"Good." He looked up to the one with the nose ring. "Bull, you're in charge of her." He touched his commlink, speaking into the mouthpiece. "Okay, Shug. We're away. Tell us if anything comes up."
She briefly wondered who he was talking to on the other end of the line, but then the ork leaned up toward the passenger seat and gave the woman a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Then it all clicked in her gas-addled mind: she was in the VR, immersed chin deep in the datastreams of the matrix.
"Um, P?" the driver said worriedly. "We got a problem."
"What now?" the ork asked in annoyance.
"Take a look out the back. Blue light special."
From her position, she couldn't see out the back window, but a self-satisfied smile spread onto Pratricia's face anyway. This would all be over soon.
"How'd Lonestar get here so quickly?" the ork demanded.
Blitz shook his head. "That ain't the Star, boss. That's Knight Errant."
"How'd they find us so quickly?" Bull asked.
"Who gives a frag?" the ork growled. "We still gotta deal with them. Blitz, you get us the hell out of here. Bull, you make sure lil' missy doesn't fly out the back. I'll take care of this fragger."
The human grabbed the back of Patricia's suit jacket, looking down at his position against the back of the passenger side chair. "You might want to hold on."
"Huh?"
Any other response was cut short as Blitz viciously cut the wheel to the side, slewing the van in a tight arc as it whizzed around another corner.
The ork braced himself against the back doors as he unslung his gun and popped open one of the double doors. Through the rainy haze, Patricia caught sight of flashing blue lights atop the black Knight Errant sedan barely thirty meters behind the van. Then the ork opened fire.
The sound was nearly deafening. Patricia screamed, folding up on herself as ten rounds discharged in the space of a second, flinging shell casings into the air and onto the floor. She heard a loud pop over the screaming engine, and the car veered off to the right, slamming into another oncoming vehicle. She had to turn away from the carnage as the van continued to careen down the street, rapidly leaving the smoking wreckage behind.
"Alright, that got 'em, Peaches!" Blitz shouted to the ork. "Though I'm sure half of the freakin' city knows about us now." He mumbled something else under his breath as he took the van through another tight turn and shot up the entrance ramp onto the I-90 overpass.
Peaches slammed the door closed, and Bull helped Patricia up into a sitting position. She was still shaking, and her breath came in sharp pants, but she had a feeling it was more from the nerves than the gas. The day just kept getting better and better. She gazed out the window, desperately searching for something else she could focus her attention on—something other than the despair welling up in her chest.
Her breathing eventually slowed as Blitz continued to speed forward, piloting the van along the interstate. The vehicle hit a bump, and suddenly the land was falling away as van began an arching assent over the muddy waters below. She immediately recognized the Spartan trusses and huge pilings of the eight-lane bridge, not to mention the dingy outline of the wind-tossed Puget Sound. Even if it was at night, she would have recognized that skyline anywhere—the downtown Seattle's urbanized Metropolis as seen from the Evergreen Point Bridge.
"Where are we going?" she asked, looking to the one they called "Peaches," the obvious leader of the little band.
He cut his eyes at her. "You'll find out when we get there." He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped, looking out the window. "Um, Blitz?"
"Yeah?" he asked, glancing back at the ork.
"I got a question."
"Shoot."
"Why aren't there any other cars around us?"
Surprised, Patricia glanced around and discovered what Peaches already had—the bridge around them was completely devoid of traffic other than the fat raindrops splattering the windshield.
"I don't know, but—oh, drek!"
He suddenly threw on the breaks, nearly catapulting everyone up into the front seat with him. Amid a chorus of groans, Patricia picked herself up off the floor and found everyone staring out the front wind shield. Confused, she craned her neck to see over the passenger seat at what everyone else was looking at.
A large large black vehicle sat across three lanes of traffic fifty meters ahead of them with its broad side presented toward them. With four large wheels on either side and a high blocky armored body, the turret fixed atop it looked diminutive compared to the rest of its chasis. In all, it looked like a snail that had outgrown its shell. To top it off, Patricia could see the words "Lonestar P.D." stenciled in white letters across the side.
A knot of fear formed in Patricia's stomach.
The turret atop the vehicle swiveled around to face the van, pointing its smallish, yet menacing cannon directly at them.
Her stomach tightened even more.
The female ork up front suddenly started, coming out of the matrix like someone waking from a nightmare. As soon as she glanced out the window, however, she probably wished she had stayed asleep.
"A friggin' Panzer?" she asked incredulously. "How the hell didn't you notice that?"
"Don't look at me!" Blitz shouted. "Peaches told me not to link into the GridGuide, remember?"
"Well I didn't think you'd need the fragging GridGuide to see a goddamn tank!" Peaches retorted angrily.
They would have argued further, but a voice from within the mechanized behemoth thundered over its external loudspeaker. "This is the Lonestar P.D. Turn off your engine and exit the vehicle with your hands on your heads!"
Blitz glanced back at Peaches. "What do I do?"
"Turn off the engine."
"What?"
"Just turn it off. I've got an idea."
"Here we go again," the female ork muttered.
Blitz hit the ignition and the chugging engine died immediately.
Peaches motioned to the other ork. "Sugar, open up the glove box."
She sighed and did as asked, popping open the compartment to reveal a bundle of silvery credsticks lying on a bed of papers.
"Now hand me the cred."
"You're going to bribe them?" Sugar asked incredulously.
"Nope," he replied. "I'm just going to tell them how it is. Now hand me the cred."
She sighed and handed it to him. "I hope you know what you're doing."
Peaches hit a few buttons on his commlink to open up a wide-band channel Then he took a deep breath. "Um, hi officers," he began awkwardly. "I'm going to put it to you straight. We're being chased by Knight Errant. If we don't get out of here right now, we're going to be fish food. Do you think you, um, might be able to let us off with a warning this time?" He popped the side door open and opened it a crack. Reaching his hand through into the rain, he held out the bundle of sticks, making sure to pause for a moment so the men inside the Panzer could see just what he had in his hand. Then he opened his fist, letting the credsticks fall to the pavement, and slammed the door.
Patricia stifled a laugh. The only thing that stopped her from letting loose a huge guffaw was the mowhawked shadowrunner who had her pinned against the seat.
"Quiet!" he hissed.
Despite the reprimand, her spirits soared. Lonestar would never stoop as low as to accept bribes from scum like these. Seattle's law enforcement was of too high a moral caliber to be taken in by such a ploy. She could see her salvation just minutes away.
For a moment, the only sound was the staccato rhythm of the rain against the roof as everyone in the van held their collective breath. Even Patricia, so sure in her deliverance, found herself caught up in the suspense.
Finally, the loudspeaker crackled to life once more. "I really 'ought to cite you. But given the circumstances, I'll let you off with a warning this time. Please remember to wear your safety belts. Have a nice day."
"Safety belts!" Patricia shouted. "Are they just—"
The rest of her outburst dissolved into a groan as Bull pumped his fist into her kidney, sending spasms of pain racing through her entire body. She crumpled to the floor and curled up into the fetal position.
"I told you to be quiet," Bull growled.
Peaches glanced back at Patricia. "I suggest you behave. We can make this a lot more painful than it already has been."
Patricia gave the ugly meta a hate-filled glance, but remained quiet.
With a self-satisfied smirk, he turned back to Blitz. "Let's get the hell out of here."
The rigger set the van into motion, skirting by the Panzer and onto the open highway. Once they were clear, Blitz took the next exit and plunged into the city traffic once more.
As the onslaught of pain began to fade, Patricia sat up again. She glanced at Bull to gauge his reaction, but he made no move to hit her again; not that it mattered, anyway. She had officially lost all hope. She couldn't even count on the police. It mattered little what they did to her now—hock her organs on the black market, ransom her back to the company, or just rape and torture her for fun. The means didn't matter to her because, in her mind, it all lead to one thing: death.
Finally, she worked up enough nerve to ask another question. "Why didn't they stop you?"
Bull started to slap her, but Peaches waved him off. He gave her another smirk.
"What, you think Lonestar actually gives a damn about the people in the city?" The ork laughed. "Get real. You're in a corp, for God's sake. You know how it is. It's all about the cred, no matter how you slice it. 'To protect and serve,' my ass."
"How much did you give them, anyway?" Sugar asked.
Peaches shrugged. "Enough. But it helped that Knight Errant was after us."
"Why should that matter?" Patricia demanded, some of her earlier attitude coming back.
He gave her an annoyed look. "Only because Knight Errant is Lonestar's major competitor for public law enforcement contracts in North America. You think they wouldn't take a bribe if it meant they could knock Damien Knight down a few rungs? A failure for Knight Errant means a leg up for the Star. Get the corporate bulldrek out of your ears, girlie."
She quieted for a moment, but it didn't last long. "Where are you taking me?"
Peaches scowled at her. "We'll get there soon. And thank God for that—I'm tired of listening to you yap. Now sit down and shut up."
A threatening glance from Bull reinforced the sentiment.
Properly deflated, Patricia sat back against the wall, struggling to make sense out of what had just happened and trying her hardest not to break down and cry.
----------
The sound of slamming car doors echoed throughout the cavernous car park as Patricia exited the shadowrunners' van. She could still hear the rain coming down outside, but it had noticeably faded in intensity. She frowned in distaste and wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale pee and mildew that permeated the abandoned structure. Trash and other more unsavory detritus littered the floor, and the only illumination was provided by the headlights of two dark sedans parked twenty meters in front of her. Backlit by the headlights stood a trio of large, thick-chested men. Their suits labeled them as corporate, but their build made it clear they weren't your run of the mill wageslave.
"Nice to see you again, boys," said Peaches in mock congeniality.
The men said nothing.
"We've got the package, as requested," he said, grabbing Patricia by the arm and pulling her to his side. "Is Ms. Johnson around?"
One of the men made a signal, and the sound of a car door opening issued from somewhere in the darkness.
Patricia had already resigned herself to her fate as a sex slave in Thailand—or at least a liver in Thailand, and a bunch of other disassembled parts scattered God knows where else over the world. Though she knew what was to come, she couldn't help but shiver as the door slammed and the click of heels sounded off the pavement.
A slight silhouette appeared at the front of the cars, breezing by the suits as it slowly made its way toward where Patricia and her captor stood. As the figure neared, Patricia began to make out some of her features. Dressed in a skirt-suit much like her own, the woman's gait and posture exuded self-assurance. She had her dark hair pulled back in a demure ponytail, accenting her slightly rounded Asian face and almond-shaped eyes. She continued to approach and finally stopped, hardly a meter away from them.
Peaches smirked down at Patricia. "Meet your new keeper."
"Konichiwa, Ms. Somerset," said the other woman with the barest hint of an accent. "It is a pleasure to finally meet you face-to-face."
"Wh-who are you?" Patricia stammered in confusion.
"Most people call me Ms. Johnson, but you may call me Kia."
Dumbstruck, Patricia simply stood there as if she had been looking face-to-face with a cockatrice.
Kia smiled. "I apologize for the means in which we contacted you. A tad crude, I know, but I am sure you understand, as it was necessary under the circumstances. You see, I represent certain members of a third party."
"What do they want with me?" Patricia finally croaked out.
"What else? They have a business proposition for you."
"You mean…" She'd only heard of this before in the sims—corporations stealing personnel from other businesses, and coercing using their expertise to get a leg up on the competition. Suddenly things didn't seem quite as grim as before.
"Yes. My employers would like to offer you a position within their company."
"This position wouldn't involve a transfer to somewhere with a little more sun, would it?" she asked hopefully
Kia shook her head sadly. "No, I am afraid it wouldn't."
Patricia's spirits fell. "Just my luck.
An oily smile spread out onto Kia's face. "As they say, 'when it rains…'"
Patricia sighed. "It pours."