Two ascensions remain
SILVER (minus Alexandra) is sent to Seattle to inspect what Berthold Schabler is getting up to. They find a small office building, mostly empty and a good ways out of town in the piney wilderness. Inside Bert has a big office and a core of about ten other coding geeks shares a few large rooms. Most of the building is still unused and has old cubicles inside. There are also a couple of "security guards" - TNI goons.
Xerxes is their guide and tries to explain the project, but mostly fails. They read some documents and finally decide to get it straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. Berthold spends some hours explaining his project to the "consultants" as Xerxes introduces them. When they finish is is early evening and the rest of the coders have gone to a movie.
Suddenly there is a crunching noise and they look out to find that a white bus labeled "Washington State Penitentiary" has hit a car in the parking lot. SILVER immediately goes into crisis mode. Gavin gets out of his bullet-proof vest and makes Berthold wear it - he and Xerxes then huddle with Bert upstairs. The rest of the team goes down to the lobby.
The forest around the building disappears and is replaced by the towers and twisty streets of Carcosa. This causes the two goons to flip, one much worse than the other. Esteban manages to get that one working again. The team chops up cubicles and covers the lobby door and the downstairs basement door. Then they watch the bus.
A couple of guards are thrown out of the bus, dead, and then the prisoners emerge. One is wearing a big hat (like Napoleon) one looks competent with the shotgun he took from a guard. One's head is on fire, though he seems not to notice. There's also a nondescript one, a big one, and a scuttly one.
First they blow the glass out of the lobby with the two shotguns from the guards, but don't try to come in, seeing the cubicle barriers. Flame-head guy lights the barriers on fire, somehow, and Angelina takes advantage of the opportunity to shoot him (though she only makes him limp). The lunatics (some of them still wearing straight-jackets) fall back for a little while. Finally, the scuttly one and the big one head around to the side door. Thielo, Esteban, and a guard go downstairs to prevent their entrance.
They are largely successful - the big guy breaks the door open, and then wrestles with Thielo a bit, taking a couple of gunshots, before the guard brings him down. The scuttly guy is harder, conjuring up a shadow creature which bites Esteban a few times in the leg with a sensation like a pair of large shears cutting him. A wild ricochet from Thielo knocks down the guard and the shadow-creature kills him, but finally Thielo is able to find the scuttler and kill him. Esteban limps around out front because of what's going on there.
Meanwhile the lunatics upstairs have blown their way into one of the first-floor meeting rooms. A shootout commences between Angelina and the guard and the two shotgun wielding loons, but both are under soft cover and mostly blow chunks out of the walls. Finally the competent loon shoots the nondescript one by accident, and the flaming-head guy comes into the hall and makes Angelina's cover light on fire. In leaping away from that she nonetheless manages to blow his head right off. Angelina then dives into the other meeting room, but gets tagged in the shoulder through the wall.
At this point Esteban arrives and shoots blindly into the first meeting room from outside, hitting Napoleon. He's suddenly floored - he shot the finest man in France - and useless for the rest of the fight. Luckily Angelina finishes the competent shot-gunner through the wall, and though Angelina, the guard, and Esteban all get the idea that they should protect Napoleon, they aren't quick enough to prevent him from being shot by Thielo, who has also run around from downstairs. Afterwards, their compulsion fades.
During all this Gavin has been upstairs having a sword fight with Richard Dawkins, and winning as Dawkins fails to drive him insane with a mind-blast and generally isn't as good a swordsman as Gavin. When Gavin gets him at sword point, he disappears rather than surrender. Gavin then gets the vest back from Bert and takes Angelina's shoulder wound, which with the vest is turned into merely a very bad bruise.
At this point they are able to get back in touch with TNI as Carcosa vanishes to be replaced with reassuring pine trees. A cleanup team arrives and they decide to add a couple more security guys and claim to have just had a regular shootout with the escaping lunatics. SILVER gets out of the scene, since they're obviously not security guards.