With the quad drone down, and his rigger friend out of commotion, it seems that the decker attacking Waywalker decides to cut his loses and jackout. It takes a couple more minutes from Waywalker to navigate away from the general mayhem the runner are now leaving behind, however he manages to do so promplty, and place the van on a discreet itinerary to the place recommended by M.Fox. The girls have also stop scream, and are trying to recuperate from what the shock of the attack.
>>> Well, M.Fox it sounds like you and your team have now the situation under control. At least for now. So let me congratulate you on that, and moving forward assuming that you managed to secure Miss Trixie. On my side, I am afraid I come with bad news. Or rather more bad news. As I suspected our employer is not the original recipient of Bernie's shipment, so you will probably have to face some of their agents, along with an other Shadowrunner team hired by an other identified competitor... I'll come back to that in a minute, first let's discuss the shipment's nature as I finally managed to learn more about it.
As the runner is getting used to, M.Johnson makes a pause, both to let the information sinks in, but also for dramatic effect.
>>> I can confirm that the shipment is in fact a fully functional prototype of a new car engine. It's coming from a secure research facility of Renault-Fiat in Paris. He got snatched by a group of runner a few days ago, and smuggled into the ADL, through the SOX by Bernie, who, I just learn, is a member of the "Charognard" - a group of smuggler expert at passing through the radioactive lands. The heat here is not just coming from the mere business value of owning a mere 'ready for production' prototype, but both the target and the, let's say peculiar design of the contraption.
Again, dramatic pause for effect.
>>> Indeed, the new engine is not for a commodity car, but is supposed to equip the next "Formula One" race, due to start soon in Monaco. So, it's not a SOTA engine, but rather SOTA of 2080, if you catch my drift. Also, rumors has it that with this design, the rigger piloting the car for Renault-Fiat might beat Saeder-Krupp's one. And apparently, Lowfyr is already quite unhappy with the performance of this particular branch of his megacorporation, so nobody in Eurocar Consortium wants to see this happen. So, of course, the word on the street is that they hired a team of runner - maybe the one you just ran into, to retrieve the shipment. I say retrieved, because, strangely enough, they are NOT the one behind the original run that extracted the prototype. This crucial information is, sadly enough, for now eluding me... However, we have an other, more immediate issue to discuss: our employer.
Pausing....
>>> Before getting into the next piece of information, I want to make clear that I'm, obviously, breaching the usual anonymity provided by the use of my services. This is certainly not a good habit for somebody of my profession, but I feel and sharing this information with you may later on help you make the right call. However, there is secret that may get you killed, and this is clearly one of them.
At this point, M.Fox would have been straight down disappointed if the Ork had not made a pause. And a long one.
>>> I'll take this silence from you as an acknowledgement of what I just said. Our employer is Volkswagen - which, as you maybe well-aware is now part of the Saeder-Krupp empire. Which means we are both working for and against Saeder-Krupp's interest. And we have no way to know which of the operation - ours or the one ordered by Eurocar Consortium, has actually got the approval of the board. If any - or if not both. I strongly suspect however that Volkswagen is trying to pull one under Eurocar, which would explain their borderline paranoid secrecy of earlier - which led to our lengthy briefing. In short, please thread carefully, and I will contact you later when I have an update.
As M.Fox has patiently listened, or rather read, to the info dump of their Johnson, while checking on the girls and monitoring the progress of the van. It is arriving in only a few minutes to the tea house - not much time to discuss the intel, but still enough for a few questions.
