-Elmer's Dive Bar & Eatery-
The murmur of truck drivers, shipping riggers, and locals continue unabated as the runners depart the eatery. The evening rain has come to a stop, but the clouds remain thick.
-Seattle-
The following day proceeds with the slow pace of anticipation with nothing to do, but Wednesday finally rolls through with a moderate bank of fog. The sky is overcast, but no rain is forecast and all forms of traffic are buzzing like normal.
The train station is significantly larger than the local rail lines, an adjoining bus terminal feeding people onto trains with varying mixes of personnel and cargo. The north lot is relatively clear, and a gate marked 'staff only' is unlocked, leading to a utility and small-scale loading zone. A flatbed truck with a standard steel cargo container - the same type that large cargo ships haul - is parked and waiting, a worn steel ramp attached to facilitate moving vehicles and heavy equipment into the cargo container. The three train station employees - paid off by Feldspar - speed the loading and very intently pay no attention to the contents being loaded into the shipping container. Shortly before the container is fully loaded, the ork chauffeur accompanying Feldspar arrives and distributes the falsified paperwork and tickets for the express train bound for Springfield.
The ork hands out a rating 5 fake SIN with a rating 5 fake driver's license to each runner, then loads the electronic train ticket verification onto the newly-distributed fake SINs.
The train speeds through NAN lands and crosses back into UCAS after a couple of hours. After re-entering UCAS, the train starts to jar and bump, shaking like a plane in turbulence, and after ten minutes the conductor calls over the intercom with an announcement of a minor technical problem forcing the train to come to an unscheduled stop in Galesburg. The passengers, mostly businessmen with appointments, immediately form an uproar as the they and the cargo is unloaded for a team of specialists to look at the train computers. Eager to get the runners and other angry passengers on their way, many of the inspections are simply skipped, and the team's cargo container is shipped to an empty gas station on the outskirts of Galesburg where it's unloaded and its autopilot sent back to the train station.
-Peoria, Illinois-
The traffic to Peoria is moderate, mostly made up of heavy cargo transports, with fixed-point scanners and lighter-than-air drones conducting random scans on vehicles in both directions. Nothing lights up or follows the runners on their way into the city of roughly 300,000 people.
