GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 25: Ambush!

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Surprise Attack

Specter triggered his Sandy and looked around for whoever had pointed the laser sight at Paxos but saw noone.  He ran over to the take cover at a dumpster across the parking lot from them, hoping he'd be out of the line of fire, while The Peacock moved behind the only parked car and shouted out that they were on the roof of the building above the dumpster.  There looked to be five of them, one sniper and the rest with rifles, and just as the words left their mouth, the assassins opened fire.  Paxos dove backwards, avoiding the sniper's shot, but a follow-up burst from one of the rifleman hit her twice, leaving her writhing in pain; since they were just going to a meet, she'd ditched the netrunner suit for an unarmored dress, and was regretting it now.  At least she was mostly in cover.

Jar was slow to react and by the time he started running, he had already been hit in the back with five rounds.  They damaged his subdermals but left him otherwise unharmed, and he made it down the staircase that led to the Afterlife and out of line of sight.  The Peacock hit the floor behind the car but still got hit twice on their way down.  The last rifleman had to lean over the edge of the building to shoot at Specter, who dove to the ground, but the long burst managed to strike him in the back once anyway.  He leapt back up to his feet and ran towards an alley to flee.

The Peacock scrambled to their knees and got fully behind the car's chassis.  A sniper round pinged off the concrete an inch away from Paxos' stomach, and two more bursts of fire were blocked by the concrete pillar she was partially behind.  Specter wasn't so lucky, and took four rounds to the back, which left him sprawled on the concrete.  Jar shouted up the stairs, asking if anyone else was still alive (The Peacock: "Our reputation's in shambles!").  Paxos crawled backward then lurched over the railing to the floor below; the fall broke a rib, but it was better than being shot.

Jar was close by so he patched her up with his first aid kit.  Thanks to the Sandy, Specter was able to crawl fast enough to make it around a corner and to momentary safety.  Once Jar was done, Paxos ran a Ping and overlaid their assailants on the Chyron systems of the crew (except for Specter, who doesn't have one).  3 were still watching the parking lot, while 2 were moving over to look down at the alley where Specter was crawling.  A quick look at their list of equipment and cyberware didn't reveal any obvious affiliation: either this was a contractor or the corps were running with deniability in mind.

 Specter moved under a fire escape, activated his Chameleon Skin, then pulled out his Agent and dialed into the crew's comms.  The Peacock leapt over from the car they were sheltering behind to an alleyway, taking a bullet to the ribs as the three goons still watching the parking lot opened fire.  As the Peacock ran off to hail a cab and escape, the two attackers following Specter rattled of long bursts that put some new holes in the fire escape, but none hit their target.  Now more or less invisible, Specter then hobbled back across the lot, still much faster than a normal person, to where Paxos and Jar were hiding.

As Jar tended to Specter's wounds, Paxos took a look around the doors to the Afterlife.  A bouncer was impassibly waiting, arms crossed, while a half-dozen would be club-goers were on edge, most with weapons drawn.  She nudged Jar and he turned to the bouncer, said something about cool cats and shindigs, and he opened the doors for them with a nod of recognition to the "terrorists" who had hit up Millitech Tower and lived.  The Peacock, meanwhile, had patched up their wounds and gotten a taxi; they let the rest of the crew know that they were heading home for the night.

The Afterlife

The Afterlife was a repurposed morgue, lit a sickly shifting green by backlit tanks of water in which women with gills danced.  Waiting at the bar was their employer, Oni Tokugawa, a large bald man in a red trenchcoat with a 360° monovisor that wrapped around his skull.  Jar approached and asked him "what's the tango?" and, appraising them without turning, Oni said they looked like shit, noted that one of them was missing, and asked what had happened.  Paxos said they'd met up with some "old friends" outside.

After some further prodding, Jar admitted that they'd gotten into a firefight with some of the enemies they'd made after the last job.  Once he was satisfied that he wasn't in any immediate danger, Tokugawa got up, nodded to the bartender, and took them to a private room.  It was walled with noise-suppressing foam, and a holographic table sat between two couches.  The door slid shut and Oni continued asking about their pursuers: did they think it was the NCPD, or Militech?  Could he get to his car without getting a new hole in his forehead?

They didn't really know who it was or if he'd be safe (in theory he wasn't a target, but he was a fairly well-known fixer).  He sighed and said he'd have to call in a favor, but enough of that for now.  The new job was high-paying, and it wasn't from someone they had beef with.  Supposedly the client was Hanako's group of Arasaka, though the fact they'd told him as much cast some doubt on it.  At any rate, they were after some pre-crash documents stored on an abandoned data vault which should be buried somewhere under the city.  Only clue they had to go on was an encrypted floppy disk, which he flicked across the table to Paxos.

When asked what documents they were looking for, he just said to grab everything; it was far enough behind the cutting edge that the files should be relatively compact.  After that, he and Jar haggled a bit over their fee, and eventually settled on 140k.  Paxos took a break from examining the floppy to voice her suspicion that this seemed too easy for such a simple job, but hey, maybe they'd just gotten lucky.  With the meeting concluding, Specter said that Tokugawa had mentioned calling in a favor?

He made a holocall, and the crew waited in silence.  After a minute or so he returned: their assailants were still on the roof, and given all the gunfire should have called in the NCPD, they were either pigs themselves or working with them.  Tokugawa had arranged an alternate exit for himself, and could bring them along for a modest fee.  They all sent over a couple hundred eddies, and Oni led them back out into the hallway, where a bouncer was waiting.  The bouncer took them to an adjacent room, kicked out the clubbers who were partying it up inside, then moved a shelf holding a bunch of booze to the side, revealing a 3' high tunnel.

Tokugawa said it led to an adjacent parking garage, told them that they were obviously not supposed to tell anyone about this, and went in, crawling on hands and knees.  The others followed, and Paxos ran a Ping as they went; there was no obvious group of gunmen waiting to kill them on the other end.  They emerged into a storm drain, and after checking with her that the coast was clear, Tokugawa lifted the grate and climbed up into the parking garage.  He went on his own way, and the crew grabbed a cab to the hospital for Specter go get emergency surgery.

Map Quest

Paxos went out and picked up a floppy drive from the junk dealers in Kabuki, then headed home and plugged the encrypted disk in.  The encryption might once have been impressive, but all these decades later it was trivial to brute force.  Inside was a dossier detailing the security measures and staffing of the data vault facility, which seemed to have been compiled by Militech.  The vault itself was a joint effort of small corps who couldn't afford such a facility on their own.  There were just under a dozen corps registered as part owners, featuring defunct names like Adrek Robotics or Everest VentureWare, but there was one that stood out: BioDyne.

After some digging she found it was located at 3060 Gold Dr.  That had been on the old city grid before the crash, but after some cross-referencing of different maps that The Peacock and Jar found by digging around the dump and consulting with the homeless who lived nearby, Paxos determined where it was now: underneath the defunct NCPD precinct on Offshore Dr in Northside.  The good news: it had formerly been occupied by Maelstrom, and they had been wiped out!  The bad news: locals claimed it was haunted by their ghosts, and the Tyger Claws were taking over all the old Maelstrom rackets fairly rapidly.

The Peacock and Jar went to go stake the place out, and noted some useful info.  There was a hole in the foundation that looked to head right into the holding cells in the basement, which could be an easy way in.  Another potential way in was a ramp down to the parking garage, though the gate was closed.  Around a dozen or so Tyger Claws juves in their early teens doing the grunt work of cleaning up all the broken glass and towing away the burned out hulls of cars that presumably used to belong to Maelstrom.

Specter, meanwhile, went in to get a bunch of cyberarm tricked out with a pop-up SMG and room for an implanted grenade launcher, though he'd need Jar to handle purchasing it since explosives were illegal.

Notes:

We all forgot about it, but if Specter had activated his chameleon skin initially, he would probably not have been hit at all.

My dice were very hot in the initial assassination attempt, rolling low when they needed to hit and high for damage (at one point getting 11,12,11 on 3 consecutive 2d6 rolls for damage against Specter).