Parts

General

• "Parts" means parts used to make the wormhole to contact Earth.

• All of these parts were ordered by someone in the Academy and then stolen. Karen Moro was blackmailed into providing information about them.

• The parts were going to the mysterious Viendenbourg.

• Some of them were stolen and ended up in the hands of Bernardo Holyoke before his murder.

• Anna was murdered while she was following a final part that was stolen before the wormhole went up.

• As the plan to trail the theft of the final part failed, Kurt at Helena Fryes suggestion looks for who ordered them.

List of Parts

• A Tajison Plasma Wakefield Accelerator that had arrived and then... vanished. It was marked as missing, with no further notes appended to the file.

The Search for the Parts

Turning the tide Monday, July 24 2006, 01:43 PM Here's the plan - and a recap, for those of you who haven't been paying attention. We know that a member of the Third Power, a man called Vadik, was working undercover at Hesh Records until recently. Following a bit of hacking and social engineering, we discovered that Vadik placed a call to the Academy Crypto department the day after the Cube was stolen.

While exploring the decidedly odd filesystems of the Crypto department, we came across a researcher there called Karen Moro. Karen was investigating the theft of high-tech equipment from Crypto, under orders from someone unknown. At the same time, Henrik Tanner - the Academy's security chief - told Anna that these thefts had been going on for some time, starting with Bernardo Holyoke (another member of the Third Power, now dead). He had been investigating the thefts himself until he'd been instructed to drop the case.

In other words, the Third Power are stealing equipment from the Crypto department. The equipment has something to do with Viendenbourg, a hidden military complex out in the Tanraga Mountains to the west, which isn't very heartening. We can't figure out where the Third Power are taking the stolen parts, or what they're using them for either.

So, we're going to track them. Karen has hidden isotope tags on four parts that we think the Third Power want and I've hacked into the city's AQSYS monitoring system, which is comprised of thousands of aerostats carrying sensors. Karen's received word that there will be a shipment of parts leaving Crypto some time this week - she doesn't know anything more exact than that, since she doesn't have access to the transport schedules.

However, she'll be on the lookout for when they leave. At that point, I'll hijack the AQSYS system. Once I've done this, all the aerostats will need to be controlled manually, and that's where you come in.

The AQSYS aerostats can detect the isotope tags, but only weakly. When a tag comes near, it will indicate the rough direction it's in, and when the tag is directly underneath the aerostat, it will flash. Unfortunately the aerostats move very slowly.

This means that I'll need a lot of you to co-ordinate amongst yourselves and control the aerostats so we can continually monitor the location of all four of the tagged parts. It's likely that they'll be sent in separate vehicles on different routes for security reasons, so you'll need to work together to ensure you don't lose them.

Violet, Caine, Karen and myself will be using your information to follow the parts on the ground. If any of the parts disappears or goes off course (that is, gets stolen), then we can find out where they're going. We don't intend to do any heroics, but this is the only lead we have in finding out where these parts are being taken and what they're being used for.

Oh, and I can't test the system - it would attract too much attention and probably ruin our chances when the parts actually go out, so we'll just have to hope it all works. Sound familiar?

I'll keep in touch.