Never trust an elf

By far the bulk of the crowd were breeders, stupid, puny, thin-skinned norms. They and the occasional elf scurried along the sidewalk, heading for whatever they called security for the night. The norms were being bright, since they weren't nightwise. Elves could see in the dark as well as any ork, but Kham supposed they were being bright, too. None of the Barrens that hedged in any of the megacity sprawls were kind or gentle places after dark.

And Puyallup Barrens, one of the two spawned by the Seattle sprawl, was no different. An urban backwater like Puyallup was nobody's first choice for a home, maybe everybody's last. That's why so many orks like Kham ended up here. Forced into the places nobody else wanted. Forced to scratch and scrape to get by. Forced out of the nice places because they weren't powerful enough to object. Or didn't have enough political clout. Or firepower. Or whatever it took to hold onto the good places.

Kham had grown up here and survived. So far. He had survived the gangs, the hate, the riots, and everything else the Barrens had thrown at him. And he'd thrived, clawing his way to the top of the gangs and eventually putting together an alliance of gangs that had ruled Carbonado. Past history, he mused. Gangs were kid stuff, and he wasn't a kid anymore. He had reached his full growth and would be twenty in a few years. Twenty!

He didn't really want to think about that. It was much better to dream of the day he'd be living in style. But style meant nuyen, which again brought him back to the reality that he'd not done very well at collecting any today.

There weren't many ways for an ork to pile up the nuyen. Sure, he could have gone into the fed army or one of the private corp ones, something he'd considered when younger, much younger; but hearing Black Jim's stories when Jim came home to the neighborhood on leave from the feds, Kham knew that the regimented life was not for him. He'd thought about it long and hard, and the only conclusion he could reach was that if you can't make your nuyen legally, you gotta do it illegally.

Once he'd reached that conclusion, he hadn't wasted time. He'd started to put the gang to decent use and done a few small jobs, smart stuff that was practically built into the system, like looting the corp trucks running along 412, and only taking what couldn't be traced. After they'd made a couple of hits, his fixer had realized that Kham wasn't just another stupid ork kid out to break some heads, and so he'd turned him on to Sally Tsung's ring. Lady Tsung introduced Kham to the lucrative life of shadowrunning, and one payoff was all it took for him to see the light; corp snitching just couldn't compare. He'd dropped the gangs and signed on with Lady Tsung.

His hard-built alliance had crumbled while he attended to other matters, but he hadn't cried. He'd worked to build the gang, using it to his advantage while still the boss, but he didn't need it anymore. Nothing wrong with that. That was the way the world worked. You grabbed what you could, held on as long as you needed it, and when something better came along, you grabbed that instead. Had to keep the nuyen flowing in. Had to look out for yourself.

Shadowrunning offered almost everything the gangs had. There was action, excitement, and firepower- lots of firepower on the right run. The only thing miss ing was the pbwer and the respect, the chance to make a difference on your turf, and all the chummers looking up to you. Then again, maybe running the shadows did offer those things, but in a different way. A runner could make a difference, but it was subtler, excepting of course the differences to your cred balance. Those differences were truly truly sig-at least when the nu-yen was rolling in. And the respect was there too. The scuzboys and streetrats like those Ironmongers gave wide berth to Kham now that word was about that he played in the big leagues. It was the personal stuff that wasn't there. Sure, he had his guys, and they were some of the best rocking orks ever to pack big guns, but they were runners like him and mostly loyal to the biggest buck. They weren't his the way the gang had been.

Drek! He was supposed to be thinking about the future, not the past. Only old guys found the past brighter than the future and Kham was not an old guy yet!

Kham heaved himself up, ready to be on his way, when some old fool plowed into him. Kham swung a hard backhand, then realized halfway through the swipe that the idiot wouldn't have gotten close enough to collide if Kham hadn't already dismissed him as a threat. Kham pulled his punch, but he stiil bounced the guy into the wall. Catching him on the rebound off the brick, Kham recognized the slag, and his condition.

"You're blasted, Kittle George." "Huh?" The gray-haired ork frowned as he tried to bring his vision into focus. "Kha-"