Waiting to be queried, Al decided he’d better have a look at the ID he’d been using, since he had very little idea what was in it. He’d invited Preston to pattern it off of his existing Hezekiah Malachi ID, but the decker had tweaked it some to make it even more airtight, as it would need to be to pass muster as a CAS Fed. He wondered how deep the back-ups went back in the Atlanta data bases. Or even Aztlan border guards even had access to CAS government files. Or even open comms with their border counterparts. Given tensions between the two countries, he sort of doubted it.

He checked quickly memorized the badge number and noted the date of birth. Then he figured out what the star sign was for that birthday – he’d seen once on Tales when Corporal Yonemoto had been undercover on a quickly patched together ID, and the novacoke-addicted, wife-beating shadowrunner had ambushed him with a question about his astrological sign. It was a clever move, and Al had held his breath. But of course Corporal Yonemoto was a Red Samurai, and had been two steps ahead of the underworld parasite. Al congratulated himself on his foresight as he worked to memorize the entire content of the data package in a few seconds (and then captured an image with his cybereyes and put it in a window in the corner of his vision, just to be safe).