Involving the Player Characters:

I use in Shadowy Salt Lake a troll fixer named Squaretoe (perfect name, eh? There once actually was a bar in Salt Lake City named Squaretoe's!), who runs a bar and restaurant for runners. In Seattle, Reno's in the equivalent. The players will be invited to Squaretoe's or your game equivalent and offered the job of clearing Captain Jenks' name and reputation so she can have her license to pilot ships restored. She has enough money to offer a retainer and expenses of a reasonable nature. All she really wants is her license back so she can fly shuttles again.

Squaretoe (or your game fixer) takes the PCs into a back room with white noise generator, and gives them the background:

"Runners, I have a job offer. It will involve travel, likely more than any of you have ever thought about doing. A month or so ago a space shuttle owned and operated by Galactic Space Marine Corporation blew up making a routine flight to orbit. Three people were killed, and a valuable piece of cargo has disappeared. GSM blamed the shuttle's captain, a Ms. Josephine Jenks, and she has lost her pilot's license because of this. She wants her name cleared and her license back. This means the team taking this run will have to investigate the shuttle Wunlon Hero, now in GSM's orbital warehouse and shops. Are you interested?"

Runners respond likely with, "How much does it pay?"

"There is a retainer of 5000 nuyen, plus an expense account of up to 20,000. If and when her license is restored without prejudice, there is a payoff of approximately 100,000 nuyen promised."

Expect experienced runners to try to negotiate the price. This is when the fixer, Squaretoe or whoever, will bring Ms. Jenks into the room for the PCs to negotiate with directly. She cannot access more than 150,000 nuyen without raising the packet and selling the contents, orichalcum plus highly sensitive control electronics for the pirate ship, but will promise their reward will be great. In a pinch, she will offer the player characters a pound or two of orichalcum on completion of the mission. That should be incentive enough.

Josephine will stay to answer questions, using the information in the story. The deceased crew members are detailed here:

Marjorie Hotchkiss, 31, copilot with four years' experience with GSM, single, living in Salt Lake Metroplex, Tooele area in an apartment. Not socially active much since a long romance turned sour years before. Her boyfriend was opposed to her becoming a shuttle crew member. Hobbies and interests: rockhounding, hiking, space history, and computer games. Has surviving sister in Chicago, parents in San Francisco.

Miloslav Smokov, 44, born and raised in the Czech Republic, taught electronics until a VITAS outbreak took his wife and baby daughter, at which time he came to America looking for radio work and ended up with GSM. Has been a spacer for three years, but worked with GSM as a ground communications technician before then. Lived in an apartment in Salt Lake, Magna area, and had a part time live in girlfriend, Noelle Smith. She kept his apartment when he was in space, and split his ground time with him and some other boyfriends. He has no living relatives.

Rudolph Gottschalk, 29, purser or person in charge of passengers. He had been employed by GSM nine years, since finishing college in Sacramento, and lived in the same apartment complex as Marjorie. Divorced, his main interests were beer and trivia. He likes TV and spends much of his off time glued to the boob tube with a beer in his hand. He also liked exercising, and kept his weight down to keep his job. His ex-wife has remarried and lives in New Orleans. He has a brother in rural Virginia.

Surviving crew members are Josephine Jenks, 33, pilot and captain, whose home is an apartment in the Grantsville area of Salt Lake, near the spaceport, and whose interests are totally space; Ruth Pratt, 40, ship's engineer with fifteen years with GSM, a job she got mainly to be near her husband, though she had her degree before she married Warren; and Horace Besterman, dwarf, engineer with degrees in electrical engineering and electronics from the University of Utah. A lifelong Utahn, Horace lives in the Magna part of Salt Lake Metroplex in a mainly dwarven section. Because of the spaceport and the mines, dwarves are the most common awakened people in Salt Lake. He is married with three children, and has family in the same area as well.

This gives the players several leads to follow. One, the Wunlon Hero in GSM's AE in orbit, is the primary place to look for evidence. Josephine will let on as she did in the trial that the missing cargo was taken from the wreck there and hidden. The shuttle will be rebuilt, but work has not yet started on that. It is sitting in a dry dock of the orbital AE. Two, the crew members bear investigating and may know something useful, or speculate in useful directions. Three, deckers can get into GSM's records, and a break in at their dirtside offices might yield useful information. Four, the destination of the shuttle's cargo is known to be the lunar orbital resort, which can also be investigated dirtside by deckers and others.

More Shadowrun ™ in Space

Shadowrun ™ in Space: Introduction
Shadowrun ™ in Space: One Lone Hero (fiction)
Shadowrun ™ in Space: GM Notes and Set Up
Shadowrun ™ in Space: Tying the PCs into the Adventure
Shadowrun ™ in Space: PCs in Space
Shadowrun ™ in Space: PCs on the Ground
Shadowrun ™ in Space: PCs in Lunar Orbit
Shadowrun ™ in Space: Payoff