Chapter 7

I reworked the two handsets and then had Dane show me how to work the automatic while Fifi worked on the first 'D' chip. The third 'C' chip had been a Powerball Spell, another combat spell just like Cain thought. The weapons turned out to be first class. They were Heckler and Koch HK-227s. The one I kept was a straight 227 with a recoil compensator on it. The one I had given to Cain had a sound suppressor installed. She showed us how to disassemble them and clean them and then how they worked. She also showed us how to sling them so we could get to them easier yet they wouldn't be quite so obvious.

I had now gone from one extreme to the other. I was going to need a body building course just to be able to carry all the weapons I now had. Two handguns, a Roomsweeper and an HK-227 with extra magazines and rounds, three grenades and a stun baton!

One of the advantages of being a grad student is that from time to time one of the professors will ask you to assist him on one of his projects or with a private job that he has taken on. I had been helping Dr. Pascal do some work for one of his clients, Lone Star. I knew some ways in that most people don't know about. I had been thinking about information and then Lone Star. "Blake, if Cain can watch over me I might be able to find out who your Mr. Johnson was. Lone Star raided the meet, right? Johnson was killed and maybe a couple of the others. Well, the Star will be making reports on the raid if for no other reason than the fact that people were killed. If I can access their records then I might be able to find out who Johnson was and if others were killed or captured then who they were. It's a chance."

"I have him working on something, Dane can play shepherd if that's ok."

"No problem with me. I just thought that you'd want her to keep watch for what's going on outside."

While I sat up the Deck for a run I showed Dane the monitor screen. "If you see me get snowed under by anything, you pull the plug. Don't wait. Time moves much faster in there than it does out here. What ever you see happened ten minutes ago for me."

I got comfortable and plugged in. There is no way to describe to a non-decker the world you come in contact with in the Matrix. It is Seattle but with all the dirt and crud removed. The lines are much sharper, the colors more vivid and there is a euphoria, an aliveness, that comes over me that is better than any drug or BTL chip can ever produce.

I headed uptown and across the lines to the shining White Star. Instead of trying to go in the main entrance I went to the side and moved a star point out of the way and entered there. Many places in the Star are super-Iced but the records section where I was headed shouldn't be that heavy. By coming in a back door I had bypassed many of the normal entry level security programs so I headed straight for the files.

Pulling up the master file for the date of our meet I checked over the reports that had been made on that date. I was able to skip many of them as our meet was in the evening and these reports dealt with the morning before or during the daytime. I narrowed it down to three files and down loaded each of them. One had a trailer attached. 'See file RRT-12 for further info, UCAS/CFS-37'. One of their Rapid Response Teams had been involved which sounded more like what I was after. Here the security would be tighter.

Using a Sleaze program I slid passed the entrance and into the second file room. The file for RRT-12 was too large for what I was after. Using a Browse program I started to narrow down the field. That was when I found a file marked UCAS/CFS-37. I down loaded the entire file. When I was sure that I had everything I jacked out and returned to the real world.

It takes a few moments of orientation after being in the Matrix to again be able to function properly, a mild form of system shock. Removing the down loaded chips from my Deck I fed the information chips into my desk-top computer and again set up the Deck to decipher the coded chips it had been working on.

Pulling up the information from the chips I immediately discarded the first two files, they were not what I wanted. The report with the trailer was the correct report.

Working on a tip Rapid Response Team 12 had staked out a location in Puyallup where their information said a meeting was to go down. During the meeting goods would be exchanged that they were after. When all the participants in the meet had arrived they had moved in to affect arrests. In the ensuing gun fight several of the participants had managed to escape and take with them the goods the Response Team was after. The body of one of the major participants was found. He had been killed by some type of magic. The body of an Elven Mage was found, killed by gunfire and a wounded Elven bodyguard had been captured. The dead participant was identified as one Alain de Chateau. de Chateau was a noted go-between for the Seattle Mafia. Identify of the dead Mage was still pending as was the identify of the captured bodyguard. He was still in guarded condition from the wounds he suffered that night.