Chapter 13 - Business

I turned to Blake and showed him the printout on the registered owner of the license number he had written down the other night. "This new Deck is slick. I went into Aztech without any problems and Lone Star thought I belonged there. The only problem I have is it's so fast that it does things while I'm still thinking about them. It'll take me a little time to catch up with it."

"Suggestion? We need a war council. We need to hash out all that we know about this situation and then decide which way we want to go. All this time we've been working on de Chateau and all of his many alias'. I still haven't done anything with Leafcutter, Voltaire or Windsong. Dane had been going over a lot of this stuff and then there's the info that she and Cain got from their contacts along with what you got. I'd like to hash out all that we know and see if there are some little tidbits that one person knows that might remind another of something. We could do it at dinner."

"Probably a good idea," Blake said. "Let's do it. Besides which it's time to eat now."

While eating I handed Cain the two sheets I had shown the others earlier. "Does any of this look familiar? Blake says one is the Mayors and Political Bosses of all the Seattle districts and the other is the fixers and teams that de Chateau used." I then handed the others two more printouts. "This is a list of all the names and numbers that he has listed in his telecoms. Any of them you recognize? Most of them are listed by first names."

They weren't sure about most of them but some looked familiar. "About a third of the way down one of the sheets, the name Isaac? I called that number earlier today." Looking at Blake I continued. "No wonder Brannon only uses his last name. I think that our Mr. de Chateau was either a deep undercover operator or an informant for the FBI."

This generated a lot of talk and we went from that to other things about the mess.

"Do we want to contact the Ancients and see if they can give us some information on Windsong? Supposedly he was with them for a time. Do we want to call him up and talk to him? He could tell us some things about this deal, if he will. Do I keep looking into the background on Leafcutter?" I asked.

This generated more discussion. Blake finally decided to hold off on contact with the Ancients, not to call Windsong and keep looking on Leafcutter.

"One thing I want you to do 'Coon is backtrack all of de Chateau's calls and see if he made contact with anyone from CFS. That's where the project was being carried out. How did he come up with the chips?" Blake ordered.

When I returned to my room Cain came with me. I had requested a shepherd for a run. I told him the same thing I had instructed Dane and plugged in the monitor so he could keep track on where I was and what was happening.

I plugged myself in and started a search for Leafcutter. By now I knew a little about him and I had looked him up in Lone Star earlier. They didn't have much on him either even after all this time. When I left them I returned to Aztech and using a Browse program went looking for Leafcutter in their records. I found a few mentions and copied them.

Next I tried a long shot. I left the LTGs and hit one of the RTGs. I took it to Tir and shifted over to a LTG that I had from there. That got me into the right area and from there I went looking. I had expected Tir to be designed with lots of trees, tree houses and such but they weren't. They might be Elves but they had an old style castle with huge stone walls and everything. I slid into the Palace and into their records. In this case all the records were old scrolls which took a bit longer to look over than regular files would have. I copied the scrolls that mentioned Leafcutter and was about to leave when in walked two of the biggest, meanest looking Golums I have ever seen. Somewhere I had tripped an alarm. This was black ice and I mean BLACK ICE! Full suits of plate mail and very large swords!

They weren't buying my Masking or Deception attempts and were still advancing. I decided to try to fight my way out of there so I brought up my attack program. My fuzzy little Raccoon icon reached under his vest and pulled out a tomahawk and threw it at the first one, hitting it in the knee. I had to slow them down while I tried to make my way out of there. I knew that something this big had to have a Medic program attached but I needed to slow them down a bit.

In reality what I was doing was leaving a Datastore and heading for the Input/Output Port I had used to enter this system but in here it looked a lot different. In here I was running down the aisles of a large library, out the door and then headed down a fancy corridor in a castle with two big Golums chasing me. When we hit the corridor the second one was finally able to pass the first one who had been slowing him down. As I turned the corner I stopped and hit the second one in the leg with another tomahawk. This slowed him down while he tried to heal himself and allowed me more time.

I made it to the big door and as I passed through I was attacked by the second team. They were not as powerful as the first but there were more of them, Gray Ice was all over me. Some I Sleazed, some I dodged and some I tomahawked. I kept going. I needed to cross the bailey, make it to and over the drawbridge and then out. I was nearly to the drawbridge when suddenly I was out of the system and dizzy.

It took a few minutes for the system shock to wear off and for me to recover my bearings. When I finally did I looked up to find all three of my friends watching me carefully.

"I'll be ok in just a bit, it's just dump shock. Cain, you did a fine job. I think I was passed them all but the Gray Ice might have followed me all the way back. It just takes a bit to recover from an abrupt change like that."

Still a bit wobbly I ejected the storage chips and inserted the first one into the computer. I showed them what little Lone Star had on Leafcutter and then what Aztech had on him. I hadn't taken the time to read it then, I just pulled it up and made a copy. Aztech had little that they hadn't gotten from the Star.