The Last of the Bigtime Losers
by Jon Lockerby
copyright 2001

Down two and left, right, right and up, straight left and down, then right, left, mind the rats, down and right again, and up, up, up.

Hick ran through the directions in his head once more, thinking that the whole reason for having a tape recorder in your skull was to actually turn it on during phone conversations, especially when they consist of your saying “Raindrop” and a squeaky voice responding, “Down two and left right right,” et cetera and hanging up. Or was it left, left, right? And did “straight left” mean the second left, or the last left? He took out his phone and tried the number for the fifth time, with the same result: dead air. The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and starve to death in the god-forsaken underbelly of the city.

Hick put away the phone. “Mission profile changed,” he said, just to hear something in the dank stillness of the tunnel, “Cancel primary objective. New objective: live to see daylight.” At least I sound like a shadowrunner, Hick observed. Having seen every episode of The Sneak Squad and Busted, he felt he had a pretty good idea of the shadow world from both sides of the law. The people he had dealt with so far didn’t seem to conform to that standard, but they were all bottom-rung types who lacked the professionalism of Peter Stone or the streetwise cool of Sylvia Wood. Hick sloshed through the stagnant puddles and checked a few tunnels for ladders leading up. There’s got to be ladders around; how did the maintenance people get around down here, back when there were some? How did I get the frag down here? This was probably why The Sneak Squad avoided the sewers, favoring zipline drops from stealth choppers and glider landings on rooftops. And what kind of password is “raindrop,” anyway? Hick ruminated along these lines for nearly an hour as he made his way through the convoluted network of maintenance tunnels.

It is difficult to remain nonchalant after spending a few hours in a place as uncomfortable as the second level down in the abandonded city infrastructure, especially when alone, tired, lost, and without food or water. It is even more difficult when your heavy-duty, extra-bright, fully-charged, extended-battery Shur-Grip flashlight suddenly winks out with a sizzle and a puff of ozone. Most people under such circumstances would, in some fashion, lose it: they might give a shout of alarm, or roar with rage, or at the very least swear. Some would run away in a blind panic. Others would sit down and give themselves up to despair and defeat, if only for a little while. It is a testament to Hick’s character that he did none of these things, but held it together in a supremely professional manner, at least until he heard the snarling from behind him. Then he did something few veteran pros would have even thought of doing: he ran, screaming and cursing, in a blind panic, until he tripped, fell down, and blacked out.

He woke up in total darkness, still clutching the defunct flashlight, his head and chest aching. After listening for a few minutes for the mutant sewer monster or whatever it was, he quietly sat up and pulled out his baseball bat. Still hearing nothing, he began to grope his way forward, until his hand landed on something warm, soft, and furry. He jumped to his feet and began whacking away at it with the bat, checking every so often to see if it was still motionless. He pulled out his lighter, lit it, and saw the the wrecked, twisted, bloody form of a rat the size of a german shepherd. “Mind the rats?” he whispered, feeling for the first time that he had made a big mistake coming down here. But unless he figured out how he came to be unconcious with that rat just sitting next to him, he had zero chance of rectifying that error. Hick turned his lowlight eyes on and waved the lighter around for a better view. He was in a different tunnel; this one was wider and taller than the one in which he first heard the rat. He looked up and saw a large hole in the ceiling, with brackets mounted on one side where a ladder probably had been, once. So that was it. He fell down that hole, and the rat fell in after him and got knocked out, just like him. Just lucky he woke up first.

Hick walked down the tunnel to get away from the dead rat. He had to decide what to do next. First, a light source. He had some electronics tools in his pack, to circumvent security on this run. Hopefully they were still intact after the fall. Hopefully fixing the flashlight would be as easy as hotwiring a car. He set his lit lighter down and unpacked his tools in the ring of light, and disassembled the flashlight. At once he discovered the source of the problem: Someone had crammed a couple of tiny foil packets into the electronics, which shorted out the power supply. Hick did not need to open the packets to know what they were: Bliss doses, stashed there by Chuck, Hick’s roommate, who was probably climbing the walls by now. Serves him right, thought Hick as he stood up and kicked away the totally useless remains of the flashlight. He closed his lighter to conserve its fuel and tried to figure out if he had anything to make a torch out of, slowly becoming aware of a sound occurring at regular intervals somewhere to his right: dripping water. But there were no pipes in these tunnels that Hick saw, and the floor was dry unlike the tunnels above. If there was water dripping, then there had to be a place it was dripping from, and therefore possibly a ladder or some other way back up. Hick relit his lighter and moved toward the sound of the water, eventualy finding its source. Indeed dripping water was coming from another hole in the ceiling, this one with its ladder intact. He climbed quite a long way by his reckoning, and was stopped by a padlocked grate covering the opening at the top end. He braced himself between the ladder and the opposite wall and set to work with lockpicks. Luckily, the lock was of middling quality and opened after only a few tries. He wrestled the heavy grate out of the way, climbed out, and lay down next to the opening, staring up at the set of pipes snaking across the middle of the ceiling, one of which was slowly leaking water into the hole. Hick laughed quietly to himself and said, “Raindrop.”

The room was a long rectangle, split in half by a floor-to-ceiling chain link fence. The fence was wired, with no effort wasted on concealing the fact. Pretty easy to defeat. Beyond the fence were old, damaged desks and filing cabinets stacked atop one another and a single door with light filtering in from beneath it. Undoubtedly locked and alarmed, too, thought Hick, but not for long.

This was supposed to be the hard part of the run, but in comparison to Phase One it was a snap. A couple of splices and thirty seconds and Hick was past the fence. Three minutes later, he was ready to commence Phase Two. He slid a dentist’s mirror under the door and used it to scan the hallway beyond: a cement-block basement corridor, several doors, a cargo-size elevator. No cameras, no guards. Hick eased the door open and started looking for a stairwell. Just in time, he found it; no sooner had closed the stairwell door behind him than he heard a friendly ding and the elevator doors opening, followed by the footsteps of what could only be a security guard. Hick hid under the metal stairs and waited, listening. There was no hurry to the footsteps; it was merely a routine patrol, not a response to any alarm. With luck, the guard would do a circuit of the basement area and go back up via the elevator. Even if he chose to go up the stairs, Hick was practically invisible underneath them. All he had to do was sweat it out for a few minutes and he’d be back on schedule. He listened to the footsteps come nearer, fade, come nearer again, and finally open the stairwell door. He held his breath and watched a pair of large black shoes ascend the stairs above him. Orc size. But they did not stop, turn around and come to get him. There was no gruff voice shouting “Freeze!” See? Nothing to worry about, he thought.

Then his cell phone rang.

Knowing it was too late, he scrambled to get it out of his pocket and turned off anyway. He should have just let it ring and come out, ready to subdue the guard, but by the time he figured this out the guard was already standing above him with a stun baton in one hand and a radio in the other, calling the station upstairs. He clipped the radio back into its holster and aimed a big, toothy grin at Hick. “Ain’t you gonna answer that?” he asked, nodding toward the still-ringing phone.

The atmosphere in the guard station was not as menacing as Hick had thought it would be; not like the Lone Star precinct at all. The furniture was synthetic wood-veneer instead of exposed-bolt, metal-and-plastic numbers, and the chair they sat him in was an ergonomic, padded, adjustable office chair, which Hick found to be pretty comfortable despite having his hands cuffed behind it. The only thing that made this room look like it had to do with security at all was the big bank of monitors behind the desk. That and the two armed guards. The ork who busted him stood by the door while the other sat behind the desk, examining Hick’s bat. He had Hick’s pack, cellphone (now turned off) and jacket laid out on his desk as well. This guard was human, middle-aged and fat, which made him the shift leader.

“You know this bat is not regulation,” the fat guard said, unscrewing the top. He turned the bat upside down, and a large lead weight ringed with bearings clunked out of it onto the desk. “They can kick you out of the league for using something like this. Right, Reg?”

“That’s right, Mr. Bedford.”

The fat guard went through Hick’s jacket and found his lockpicks, a pack of chewing gum and a credstick. He helped himself to a stick of gum and held up the credstick. “I don’t suppose this thing’ll have your right name and SIN on it?”

Hick said nothing.

“Didn’t think so” The guard tossed it back on the desk and methodically unpacked Hick’s backpack, laying its contents out on the desk: electronics tools and a rappelling harness. “Planning on a little second-story job? Or maybe fourth-story, up where Carducci Jewelry has its office?” Hick didn’t bite. “These tools you got here are pretty good, but you’re missing some gear. If you want to break into Carducci you need something for the motion sensors. Oh, and by the way, the windows up there don’t open,” he said, nodding towards the rappelling gear. Hick kept his mouth shut. “So you want to tell me what this is all about?” Bedford waited for few moments.

“Shadowrunners never talk to the law,” Hick said simply.

“Oh, so you’re a shadowrunner? Let’s see...you got no gun, no cyberware...”

“I got ‘ware. I got these eyes and ears, don’t I? Engine I was working on exploded, lost both eardrums and an eye. Insurance company fixed me up. Long time ago. I was twelve. I’m still working on cars, though. These eyes work out pretty good for that, help you see to do undercarriage work.”

Bedford was confused a little by the sudden outburst of personal information from this heretofore mute suspect. “Okay, you’ve got no cyberware to speak of. And you got no support team, no exit strategy. On top of that there’s nothing in this building of interest to anyone in the ‘shadows.’ You know what I think? I think you’re just a thief, trying to break into the Carducci office to see if they got any rocks up there.” He shifted his eyes to the ork. “What do you think, Reg?”

“I think this punk is a fragging loser,” grumbled Reg.

“Let me give you a piece of advice, kid. That office up there is their corporate office. It’s where they plan advertising strategies and do market research and drek. You didn’t really expect that there’d be some vault with jewelry and, what, big bags of cash crammed in it, did you?”

Hick shrugged. The guard shook his head and stood up.

“All right. You struck out this time, kid,” Bedford said, noticing after the fact that he’d made a pun, with the bat sitting on the desk. He picked it up and pointed it at Hick. “But you struck out so bad that I’m going to cut you loose. Nothing’s been stolen. Nothing to steal, in fact. No threat of deadly force. No harm no foul - just intent. Lone Star and the courts are too busy to deal with simple intent, no matter what your priors are. Hell, I commit intent every time I go to talk to my boss, don’t you Reg?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m your boss, Reg.”

“I mean no, sir.”

“So get gone and please not to return, kid. I mean it. I’m keeping this electronic gear and lockpicks. And the bat. And this,” he said, pocketing the pack of gum. “You can keep your credstick and phone. I’ll also hold on to this rapelling harness. If I see you sucking around here again, I’ll string you up with it. Understand?”

Hick nodded and quickly looked away.

“Reg, uncuff him and get him out of here. Then do another round. Make sure Krog resealed that basement grate properly, and then check in with Joe. He needs to reset the security down there.

Reg followed his orders and hustled Hick out the front door of the building. “See you round, kid,” he said, and waited for Hick to leave.

Hick walked away holding his empty backpack, turned a corner, walked two more blocks and got into the front passenger seat of a parked car.

“Took you long enough,” said Katya from the back seat.

“No fragging drek,” said the driver, Jelly. “We were in position for, like, two and a half hours before we saw you get busted. What, did you run into a gator down there?”

“Let’s just say it was touch and go for a while. C’mon, let’s get out of here. How did your end hold up?”

Jelly eased the car away from the curb and drove off. “It went down just like you said, Hick. After you got nailed the other two guards did a sweep of the building, and then the human dude just sort of hung out on the fourth floor. I think he set up some temporary security measures there, but I couldn’t get a good look. Next time, I think we need to have at least one more video pickup. Anyway, the other guy, an ork, went into the elevator and I never saw him again. Probably went to the basement to secure the hole you made. After that it was real smooth; we were in, out, and no sweat. Three minutes.” He handed Hick their score, a folder with a stack of hard copy inside.

“I know, I saw you.” said Hick, leafing through the pages in the folder.

“You did? How?”

“On the security monitors.”

Hick braced himself against the door of the car as Jelly screeched to a halt. “What security monitors?”

“The ones in the security station. You see, Jelly, electronic video surveillance comprises two essenial components. A camera is necessary to capture video images, and an output device, typically a flatscreen monitor, is necessary to provide those images in real-time to security personnel. Advances in pattern-matching software have begun to replace the human element in advanced systems, but most systems still rely...”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hick I know you have the Corporate Security Handbook or whatever memorized. But I thought you said you were going to take care of the cameras.”

“No, I said not to worry about the cameras. The shift leader was facing away from the monitors while he was  questioning me.”

Katya chimed in, “What about the guard who brought you in, the ork?”

Hick replied, “He was by the door, facing me.”

“Facing the monitors, then?”

“Well yeah, but he would have been more interested in keeping an eye on me and in his boss’s line of questioning. Besides, he didn’t strike me as being very perceptive.”

“But the fact remains that he could very well have glanced up and seen us on one of those cameras,” Jelly countered.

“Like I said, it was touch and go for a while.”

Jelly looked at him for a long moment, shook his head and pulled the car away. They rode along in silence for several minutes. Hick continued to read the papers. Jelly finally broke the silence. “So what happened on your end? You were down in the sewers for a long time, man. And I never saw you above ground until they had you in custody. I thought you were going to make the fourth floor and try to crack Carducci as a diversion.”

“That was the original plan, Jelly, but things changed at the last minute, so I had to improvise. It didn’t matter, though. The guard at the desk was pretty sharp and figured I was going for Carducci anyway. What else is there in that building of interest to a thief?” Hick said and held up the folder, grinning. “Oh, I just remembered something,”he said and pulled out his cell phone, issuing the command to call the number that had last called him.

“Chuck,” said a groggy, worn-out sounding voice.

“It’s Hick. You called a while back?”

“HICK!” The voice suddenly lost all its blearyness, replaced by manic tension. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all night! Where the frag are you?”

“I’ve been busy. What is it?” Hick asked, knowing perfectly well what “it” was.

“It’s my...that flashlight that we keep in the hall closet. I need it, man. Where the frag is it? I’ve been looking all over the place for it, and it ain’t here, man, somebody ripped it off or something.”

“So? If you need a flashlight use the little one in the kitchen drawer. What’s your problem, anyway? You sound kinda high strung.”

“No, man, I need the big one. I’m telling you, man, it’s important. Frag!”

“Okay, Chuck, I know where it is, and I’ll tell you, but you have to calm down and listen carefully. Okay?”

“Oh thank God. Yeah, where is it, man?”

“Down two and left, right, right and up, straight left and down, then right, left, mind the rats, down and right again.” Hick hung up the phone.