Post by Former Fiend on Jul 11, 2020 23:54:32 GMT -5
Runt was a coyote. Not a literal coyote, obviously. Not even a shaman in service of the Coyote spirit. Rather, he was a smuggler who specialized in moving people across borders. Sometimes those borders were national, sometimes they were regional, sometimes they were local – sprawls with tightly enforced districts, gang territory, what ever. Most moved over land, some by foot, some by van. Runt moved over water, moving people all up & down the west coast of North AM.
Runt rather hated his street name, though he certainly lived up to it. Tiny little man, wiry frame. He wasn't a shadowrunner but he got it the way most runners got their names, though they were loathe to admit it; someone cracked a joke at his expense & it stuck. In his case, someone asked incredulously if he was really a coyote. His reply had been a meek yes, and almost before it had cleared his throat they joked that he must have been the runt of the litter. That had been about a month into the job & ten years later he hadn't lived it down. But he had survived that long, at least, which is more than most in his line of work could say.
The closest Runt ever came to being a religious man was when the fog started rolling in over the Puget Sound & Elliot Bay, obscuring the lights of Downtown Seattle behind it's curtain, and he was thankful for it. For all the good it did, of course. Between radar & thermal imaging the fog wouldn't do much to save the small boat if harbor patrol wanted to chase them. But it was just metahuman nature to feel that sense of comfort. The safety of going unseen by danger. Hiding under a blanket of fog as if hiding under an actual blanket from the boogeyman. The fog offered about as much protection from the law as that piece of fabric would offer against any of the countless monsters that go bump in the night, but it felt comforting, all the same.
The things that were actually protecting Runt's Samuvani Criscraft Otter from harbor patrol were, firstly, Runt's own skill as a pilot, navigating the waters to slip between patrol routes & radar sensors. Which was easier said than done as the Otter wasn't made for grace; it was for pleasure boating, fishing, light hauling & utility work. But that was it's second line of defense; it was innocuous. Granted it was always suspicious for a ship to be coming into harbor this late at night, but a story about losing track of time fishing was more plausible than any bullshit that Runt could conjure up to explain what he was doing if he had been caught in a dedicated smuggling boat like a Gala Trinity. Stars might not look twice at this old tub, if he was luckly.
His ability to spin that bullshit was Runt's third line of defense. If he he was stopped by a patrol craft, he'd have to work his talents to convince them that searching his boat wasn't worth their time & effort. Because if he couldn't convince them of that, then there was no line of bullshit that was going to keep him out of mag-cuffs when they found the dozen people he was smuggling below deck, no three of which spoke the same language, and who were all armed with nothing more than cheaply forged fake identities that Runt doubted would hold up to any real scrutiny. Hard to convince any kind of cop that a motley crew like that was out for a fishing tour.
Runt usually worked point to point, direct with the people he was moving who tended to be more tightly knit than this random assortment, getting them in and out of Seattle or the Tir or Cal Free or the NAN. Usually it was small groups; a family on the run, shadowrunners on a job, criminals trying to make an escape. Those all had their own risks, but usually when there were fewer people he could find a place to stash them all in case of search. Can't do that with twelve, though. Especially when one of them was a troll.
This was an unusual job. Runt was just the last link in a chain for these people who had come from a dozen different ports around the world, trying to get into the UCAS unsuspected & undetected, to start new lives away from their mother countries, free from SINs & the scrutiny that came with them. He had just sailed out to meet the cargo ship that had hauled them all off the coast, loaded them up, and was taking them the rest of the way.
That in and of itself was unusual. Normally with human trafficking on this scale they'd just be put in a shipping container and unloaded like cargo. Granted that kind of human trafficking rarely ended well for the cargo. If they were lucky they'd wind up in a sweat shop, if they were unlucky they'd wind up in a Bunraku parlor – a fate a few of his passengers were certainly pretty enough to be condemned to, though with cosmetic surgery being what it was, being ugly was no defense against being turned into a sex puppet. The real unlucky ones never made it to shore at all, at least not alive. Organ leggers usually did their chopping out at sea.
All of that was nasty business & not the kind of thing that Runt involved himself with. Partly because it made his skin crawl, partly because it wasn't good for the reputation, and partly because those rackets were more likely to put a bullet in him after the job was done to cover a loose end.
This wasn't that, though. Easy concealment was only half the reason you stuck people into shipping containers – the other half was, well, containment. Shipping containers were cramped & hot without a way to see outside and only the one way in or out when opened. Kind of hard for people to see what was going to fuck them from inside a metal container. Kind of hard to get away from it when that container was opened & a bunch of guns were on the other side of the door.
So far as Runt knew, once he got them to the docks, that was the end of their journey, they were on their own. Which was weird on it's own & made him a little nervous. He wasn't sure why they'd go through the trouble to smuggle them into the city like this only to cut them loose as soon as their feet were on dry land. If nothing else it was a bit of a liability; illegal immigrants picked up with forged papers might try and flip on the smugglers that got them there. And if the cops didn't pick them up... well, leaving them out on the street wasn't too far removed from delivering them directly to those unsavory elements previously mentioned.
But you were only allowed so many morals working this side of the law & those steps were enough for Runt to keep on going. Especially given what he'd been paid – in advance – for this job. Enough to pay for a vacation to lay low in Cal-Free or the PPC while the heat died down if any of them did get picked up.
Runt shook his head & looked down to check his instruments. He was coming up on a tricky part of the approach to the dock where he'd have to thread a needle between two surveillance zones from rival security corps. Slipping through holes like that was a key part of his line of work. So was keeping both calm & alert. Every few minutes he'd hear what might have been the buzz of a drone passing over head, but it was hard to pick up over the sound of the boat and the waves. No patrols had picked up on them yet, so if there were drones above them, they weren't hunters.
Their destination was in sight; the specified dock was just ahead. It wasn't unoccupied as Runt had expected, though. Through the fog he could make out the outline of several vehicles; sedans & vans, mostly. He couldn't tell if they were cop cars; they could have been, but it was impossible to be sure. If this was a sting he'd have expected them to be hiding behind one of the warehouses that lined the water front, not out in the open. They could have just been their to collect his passengers he supposed, but he hadn't been informed of that & wasn't sure if this group of vehicles made more or less sense than just dropping them off & cutting them loose.
Runt looked back over his shoulder. In the distance he could see a boat-mounted search light cutting through the fog; harbor patrol. They weren't following him, just cutting perpendicular to his wake. Would certainly look suspicious if he turned around so quickly. And he wasn't sure he'd be able to avoid cutting through the surveillance zones he had just slipped between, as wide as he'd have to turn right now. Only safe way to turn around would be to dock first.
In short, there was no way out. He'd have to dock.
As they got closer he could make out the cars a bit more; nine of them, which would have been odd except that he had noticed that among his twelve passengers, six seemed to be traveling alone & the other six were made up of three separate traveling pairs – two couples & a mother & her daughter, it had looked like. That was... reassuring, he supposed. The client had arranged travel for each of them. Would have been nice if they had told Runt about it, but they had paid his 'no questions asked' fee.
Runt brought the boat up to the dock, easing it to a top with a light bump against them before he began tying off at prow & stern. This close, he could make out that the vehicles weren't cops, at least not marked cops. Most were cabs though some were unmarked. The drivers were all out of their vehicles, leaning against the doors or even sitting on the hoods. A few he recognized as shadowrunners. None of them really paid him much mind as he secured the gangplank & headed down below to the cramped lower deck; a dozen people crammed into a room less than fifteen feet long. “Alright, everyone, file out. Looks like you've got rides waiting.”
As the refugees & immigrants started making their way off the boat, the drivers all got off their asses & stood to attention, holding up signs with the names of their assigned passengers. What Runt didn't know, and what each of the passengers might find alarming, was that the names on those signs were their real names, not their forged names. Names that no one at this point in their journey should know.
But, really, where else were they going to go? Once off the boat, Runt immediately pulled back the gangplank and set about getting ready to depart again. Their options were the cars, or walking into a strange city.
Runt rather hated his street name, though he certainly lived up to it. Tiny little man, wiry frame. He wasn't a shadowrunner but he got it the way most runners got their names, though they were loathe to admit it; someone cracked a joke at his expense & it stuck. In his case, someone asked incredulously if he was really a coyote. His reply had been a meek yes, and almost before it had cleared his throat they joked that he must have been the runt of the litter. That had been about a month into the job & ten years later he hadn't lived it down. But he had survived that long, at least, which is more than most in his line of work could say.
The closest Runt ever came to being a religious man was when the fog started rolling in over the Puget Sound & Elliot Bay, obscuring the lights of Downtown Seattle behind it's curtain, and he was thankful for it. For all the good it did, of course. Between radar & thermal imaging the fog wouldn't do much to save the small boat if harbor patrol wanted to chase them. But it was just metahuman nature to feel that sense of comfort. The safety of going unseen by danger. Hiding under a blanket of fog as if hiding under an actual blanket from the boogeyman. The fog offered about as much protection from the law as that piece of fabric would offer against any of the countless monsters that go bump in the night, but it felt comforting, all the same.
The things that were actually protecting Runt's Samuvani Criscraft Otter from harbor patrol were, firstly, Runt's own skill as a pilot, navigating the waters to slip between patrol routes & radar sensors. Which was easier said than done as the Otter wasn't made for grace; it was for pleasure boating, fishing, light hauling & utility work. But that was it's second line of defense; it was innocuous. Granted it was always suspicious for a ship to be coming into harbor this late at night, but a story about losing track of time fishing was more plausible than any bullshit that Runt could conjure up to explain what he was doing if he had been caught in a dedicated smuggling boat like a Gala Trinity. Stars might not look twice at this old tub, if he was luckly.
His ability to spin that bullshit was Runt's third line of defense. If he he was stopped by a patrol craft, he'd have to work his talents to convince them that searching his boat wasn't worth their time & effort. Because if he couldn't convince them of that, then there was no line of bullshit that was going to keep him out of mag-cuffs when they found the dozen people he was smuggling below deck, no three of which spoke the same language, and who were all armed with nothing more than cheaply forged fake identities that Runt doubted would hold up to any real scrutiny. Hard to convince any kind of cop that a motley crew like that was out for a fishing tour.
Runt usually worked point to point, direct with the people he was moving who tended to be more tightly knit than this random assortment, getting them in and out of Seattle or the Tir or Cal Free or the NAN. Usually it was small groups; a family on the run, shadowrunners on a job, criminals trying to make an escape. Those all had their own risks, but usually when there were fewer people he could find a place to stash them all in case of search. Can't do that with twelve, though. Especially when one of them was a troll.
This was an unusual job. Runt was just the last link in a chain for these people who had come from a dozen different ports around the world, trying to get into the UCAS unsuspected & undetected, to start new lives away from their mother countries, free from SINs & the scrutiny that came with them. He had just sailed out to meet the cargo ship that had hauled them all off the coast, loaded them up, and was taking them the rest of the way.
That in and of itself was unusual. Normally with human trafficking on this scale they'd just be put in a shipping container and unloaded like cargo. Granted that kind of human trafficking rarely ended well for the cargo. If they were lucky they'd wind up in a sweat shop, if they were unlucky they'd wind up in a Bunraku parlor – a fate a few of his passengers were certainly pretty enough to be condemned to, though with cosmetic surgery being what it was, being ugly was no defense against being turned into a sex puppet. The real unlucky ones never made it to shore at all, at least not alive. Organ leggers usually did their chopping out at sea.
All of that was nasty business & not the kind of thing that Runt involved himself with. Partly because it made his skin crawl, partly because it wasn't good for the reputation, and partly because those rackets were more likely to put a bullet in him after the job was done to cover a loose end.
This wasn't that, though. Easy concealment was only half the reason you stuck people into shipping containers – the other half was, well, containment. Shipping containers were cramped & hot without a way to see outside and only the one way in or out when opened. Kind of hard for people to see what was going to fuck them from inside a metal container. Kind of hard to get away from it when that container was opened & a bunch of guns were on the other side of the door.
So far as Runt knew, once he got them to the docks, that was the end of their journey, they were on their own. Which was weird on it's own & made him a little nervous. He wasn't sure why they'd go through the trouble to smuggle them into the city like this only to cut them loose as soon as their feet were on dry land. If nothing else it was a bit of a liability; illegal immigrants picked up with forged papers might try and flip on the smugglers that got them there. And if the cops didn't pick them up... well, leaving them out on the street wasn't too far removed from delivering them directly to those unsavory elements previously mentioned.
But you were only allowed so many morals working this side of the law & those steps were enough for Runt to keep on going. Especially given what he'd been paid – in advance – for this job. Enough to pay for a vacation to lay low in Cal-Free or the PPC while the heat died down if any of them did get picked up.
Runt shook his head & looked down to check his instruments. He was coming up on a tricky part of the approach to the dock where he'd have to thread a needle between two surveillance zones from rival security corps. Slipping through holes like that was a key part of his line of work. So was keeping both calm & alert. Every few minutes he'd hear what might have been the buzz of a drone passing over head, but it was hard to pick up over the sound of the boat and the waves. No patrols had picked up on them yet, so if there were drones above them, they weren't hunters.
Their destination was in sight; the specified dock was just ahead. It wasn't unoccupied as Runt had expected, though. Through the fog he could make out the outline of several vehicles; sedans & vans, mostly. He couldn't tell if they were cop cars; they could have been, but it was impossible to be sure. If this was a sting he'd have expected them to be hiding behind one of the warehouses that lined the water front, not out in the open. They could have just been their to collect his passengers he supposed, but he hadn't been informed of that & wasn't sure if this group of vehicles made more or less sense than just dropping them off & cutting them loose.
Runt looked back over his shoulder. In the distance he could see a boat-mounted search light cutting through the fog; harbor patrol. They weren't following him, just cutting perpendicular to his wake. Would certainly look suspicious if he turned around so quickly. And he wasn't sure he'd be able to avoid cutting through the surveillance zones he had just slipped between, as wide as he'd have to turn right now. Only safe way to turn around would be to dock first.
In short, there was no way out. He'd have to dock.
As they got closer he could make out the cars a bit more; nine of them, which would have been odd except that he had noticed that among his twelve passengers, six seemed to be traveling alone & the other six were made up of three separate traveling pairs – two couples & a mother & her daughter, it had looked like. That was... reassuring, he supposed. The client had arranged travel for each of them. Would have been nice if they had told Runt about it, but they had paid his 'no questions asked' fee.
Runt brought the boat up to the dock, easing it to a top with a light bump against them before he began tying off at prow & stern. This close, he could make out that the vehicles weren't cops, at least not marked cops. Most were cabs though some were unmarked. The drivers were all out of their vehicles, leaning against the doors or even sitting on the hoods. A few he recognized as shadowrunners. None of them really paid him much mind as he secured the gangplank & headed down below to the cramped lower deck; a dozen people crammed into a room less than fifteen feet long. “Alright, everyone, file out. Looks like you've got rides waiting.”
As the refugees & immigrants started making their way off the boat, the drivers all got off their asses & stood to attention, holding up signs with the names of their assigned passengers. What Runt didn't know, and what each of the passengers might find alarming, was that the names on those signs were their real names, not their forged names. Names that no one at this point in their journey should know.
But, really, where else were they going to go? Once off the boat, Runt immediately pulled back the gangplank and set about getting ready to depart again. Their options were the cars, or walking into a strange city.