Dramatis Personae
Runners
April O’Mally
Scrounge
Remus Chandrasekharan
Barry Goldstein
Ivan the Jackle
Others
Mr Johnson
Bathcat
Yann Tillberg

Remus’ comm and programs have taken some serious damage, but he manages to clear out all the Azzie tracking software (he thinks). Ivan heads out to the wastes to heal up and lay low. Meets up with Scrounge, who provides some initial magical healing. Barry regains consciousness and joins them. Remus manages to hack the box and kill its tracking signal. April goes to the city, Yann uploads the adventure (last freebie), and then he and April “discover” it on the matrix and do a story around the attack on the spaceport. April gets brownie points with the bosses for her diligence in getting the first scoop on this.

The team heads to a wasteland junkyard to fix up the car, which took some serious damage from the cops during the escape. They party with the junkyard crew, with Barry supplying some discounted street drugs in return for a discount on the mechanic work. Ivan gets all matching parts, and gets the car news plates, tags, transponders, and paintjob to conceal its involvement. Remus opens box to scope out whats inside-looks like they might get screwed if the Johnson is still paying by the pound. It’s only some small samples, and some encrypted datasticks. Remus tries to decrypt, succeeds on one-care instructions. The other one gets wiped by a databomb, but it looked like genetic code. Barry takes a cutting and a copy of the care info for the Mad Martians to work on. The team doesn’t tell the Johnson this when he arrives in another one of the hopping machines, which he refers to as a rabbit.

They negotiate for a big payoff, the Johnson actually seems happier with this than with what he expected to get, as this is more likely to pay longterm dividends, with less need to reverse engineer the plant. It seems to be a deepweed and zen blend, allowing limited astral projection/hallucination among the non-awakened. The team heads to the hospital for three days, and also rearms. Yoleus contacts Barry and tells him that he got some work out of shooting up those BS goons in San Pablo-the locals were so impressed with his ultraviolence that word got around, and folks want to hire him to protect the nearby town of Yerbal from some primitivist structure hitters who have been destroying a lot of atmosphere, food, and water processors in nearby towns. So far they’ve hit a bunch of towns in a semi-circle around the area where their base is rumored to be, and Yerbal looks to be one of the next few, if they plan on completing the circle.

When the team gets to the town to investigate, they are offered two alternatives-they can set up an ambush and defend the town, or they can take the fight to the structure hitters. Either way, the mayor is paying out 250 nuyen per member, and 1000 nuyen each for the two bosses: Gorode and Bathcat, a pair of brothers who have been kicking around the wastes causing trouble for longer than anyone cares to recall. The team decides to raid the base.

They lose comms as they near the area of the supposed base-it appears to be a wirelesss deadzone. On approach to the cave lair, they are somewhat incautious, and the car takes a full burst of heavy machine gun fire into the engine block from a concealed nest. Ivan manages to reverse over a hilltop and get the car into cover, but it’s barely running (and he just fixed it-sad!). Ivan and Joel leave the car and crawl to the top of the hill, Remus snipes while Ivan spots. April and Scrounge go invisible and near invisible and sneak up on the nests near the cave entrance, while Barry ops for the opposite approach, running up guns blazing counting on his thick hide and armor to protect him. It doesn’t go as badly as it might, as he quickly takes out 1 gunner with a lucky burst, and only takes moderate damage from the other gunner, who is shortly thereafter killed by April and Scrounge. Before they have time to congragulate themselves, they are set upon by two guard dogs, who seem to guide towards scrounge. They inflict some minor wounds, but are quickly disabled. But who have they alerted inside?