Ha Ha!
We had a short mission now with just three players. The team owed a favour to a Fixer who got them a safe house (which then got shot full of holes during a gunfight, had the roof blown open by a grenade and eventually the entire building was blown up along with the 15 or so bodies of the enemies that tried to kill the team. Because fuck leaving any evidence behind for the pawns.) and were recruited for a mission that had to be done ASAP. My character tried to haggle for a higher pay cut from the Johnson but got a critical glitch instead, which set the mood for this particular mission.
So there they were, a human Decker with a severe addiction on cybernetics, a dwarven street samurai who likes to kill people with his katana (when he doesn't simply punch them to death) and a native American shaman. On a quest to an ARES blacksite that had gone dark to rescue one of the researchers there. (Note, the Johnson was most likely working for another corporation and the researcher had been their informant inside ARES. Or that might have been just another false lead for us to uncover.)
Most of the mission was basically that bit in Aliens just before the xenomorphs show up. Sneaking around in a facility, finding dead -partially eaten- bodies, guards that had committed suicide after shutting down everything in the facility, a lone dog with some kind of built in sonar (The dwarf kicked it to death as soon as he saw it. Believing that it might have been one of the creatures that had killed the crew.) and eventually a room full of corpses that had done a fighting retreat to a dead end and locked themselves into a room before bleeding to death. Early in the mission my shaman had loaded his shotgun with Flechette ammo so that he could shoot into melee without fear of accidentally harming the street sam (who would merely laugh at flechette) but soon he switched it for slug ammo for better armour penetration.
As soon as the trio had left that room they were attacked by some kind of invisible creature. The Deckers radar couldn't see a thing but he just managed to dodge a blow that could have torn off his head. The dwarf could just make out a large form with the sonar built into his helmet. The shaman's astral vision could clearly see the massive gorilla wearing a milspec armour and covered in Ruthenium or something. Also, it had very little Essence but no cyber visible in Astral. Meaning that it was full of bioware.
The Gorilla was faster than anyone else in the room and took the Decker into a grapple, the dwarf took a hit of Kamikaze to make himself stronger and the shaman -deciding that his shotgun wouldn't have enough penetration to pierce the armour on the gorilla- fired a Force 12 flamethrower at the gorilla. That went through the armour. It didn't kill the thing, but it sure made it angry. The gorilla proceeded to punch the shaman through a metal door. (One point of Edge had to be burnt for him to survive it.)
Luckily the spell had damaged the Ruthenium coating enough to make the gorilla visible for the other team. The dwarf-sammy took a hit that nearly killed him and during the rest of the fight had to burn 3 points of Edge. One for dodging an attack that would have killed him and 2 on his own attacks to make sure that the gorilla won't dodge them. The Decker didn't have anything strong enough to really harm the gorilla but luckily the Sammy's last point of Edge let him kill the gorilla with his katana. (Note, the sammy started the fight with one point of edge and always bought a new point after burning it. So it was "only" 10 points of Karma spent during the fight.)
I had to leave at this point but apparently the rest of the mission went well and they managed to evac the researcher. Also, they dragged the shaman out of the facility rather than leave him there and share the bounty just between the two of them.
All in all, the team got 80k reward plus 7 points of Karma each. Meaning that despite using up so much Karma it was still a net gain since we are using the Missions rule that lets you "buy" Karma with Nuyen or Nuyen with Karma.
That was fun.