by Isaac Asimov
The node was being disassembled. Cables and router boxes hung from their places, forgotten for the time being, a mess. Derec tried to piece together how it would operate, but too much was missing. He lifted one of the router boxes and turned it over. One face looked pitted, hundreds of tiny holes allover it, the plastic casing discolored as if it had been heated. He found two more in about the same condition.
The next one, though, was intact.
He opened the access doors and peered in at the neatly organized components. Nothing looked disturbed. He pushed and pulled at cables to get his hands inside the mass, feeling around for... he did not know.
But he found it in one of the racks at the base of the walls.
The space was filled with transfer buffers, large memory dumps that held the millions of bits of data required by the station until needed. Tucked between two of them was a mass of greenish-blue corrosion.
No, not corrosion. More like mold or some other fungus. Derec prodded it, but the surface did not yield, nor did it seem brittle. It appeared to be grown to the transfer buffers. He worked a fingernail into the join between a buffer wall and the growth and pried. Fibrous tendrils had sunk into the buffer.
He had nothing on him to work at the material. He went back to one of the other maintenance nodes, where the work crew had left some tools, and took a plain screwdriver. He pried and chipped at the growth until a small amount flaked off. He wrapped it in the printout from the station and slipped it into his pocket.
He made his way back to the embassy branch, unable to shake the growing sense of dread that seemed to spread over and through him.
Sixteen
THE ROBOT CAUSED Ariel to flinch every time she saw it. She brushed past it, impatient with her own reactions, and strode into her living room, Derec close behind.
Mia was still on the sofa, her datum in her lap, the subetheric on, frozen at a scene from the massacre. It showed, magnified, a clutch of people huddling together, faces stretched in panic, bodies twisted and angled as if about to fall to the floor. From the clothing, the group was Terran. Ariel recognized no one. The image was so different from the scene she had seen in Union Station not two hours ago that it seemed from another reality.
Mia looked up.
“And?” she asked archly.
Ariel stared at the image. “All present and accounted for, including you. Someone has thoughtfully put a burned body in your morgue stasis drawer.”
The expression on the younger woman’s face made Ariel immediately regret her words. Mia’s mouth fell partly open and she paled visibly, her eyes seeming to go darker still and more desolate.
“We checked at Union Station,” Derec said, “and someone calling himself Tro Aspil did show up to take his seat on the shuttle. So either the corpse in the morgue is Aspil and someone else is heading for Aurora–”
“–or Aspil’s body is a fake,” Mia said, nodding. “Like mine.”
“But your double doesn’t even have to look like you,” Ariel said. “The only way to prove it isn’t you would be a DNA scan.”
“I’m sure that has already been flied,” Mia said. She gave her shoulders a twist as if to relieve tension, then pointed at the screen. “I’ve been doing a tally.”
Ariel sat down on the sofa beside her. Mia’s datum screen showed two columns of names.
“Bogard had a master list of everyone scheduled to be at the ceremony,” Mia said. “I pulled a list of casualties from the newsnets and started running the vids for a match.”
“Any discrepancies?” Ariel asked.
“None so far, but I began doing trajectories. When we found out that several of the assailants were just projections, I wondered then just how many real shots were fired. Bogard helped me edit the newsnet recordings you have into a single composite.”
“How are you doing the tracking?” Derec asked. “Bogard’s sensory net is as good as it gets, but even subetheric recordings don’t have that kind of detail.”
“Bogard was able to identify nine actual shooters out of the twenty-one apparent assailants. By studying the recoil of their weapons, it gives us a reliable estimate of how many shots were actually fired. Then it’s just a matter of tracing the consequences.”
“Nine,” Ariel mused. “You caught three of them. Three of them were killed on the scene.”
“So we can assume three of them are still at large. There may have been accomplices outside the gallery waiting to facilitate an escape. We don’t know.”
“Six bodies I couldn’t identify are in the morgue, in the same section with all the victims,” Ariel said. “I have a list of names and tracking codes.”
Mia frowned. “The three I captured were still alive when Bogard brought us back into the gallery.”
“These six may not be anything more than innocent bystanders who got in the way. We have to check the names.”
Mia shrugged. “I’ve tried running enhancements on them, to see if facial features show through the masks, but they padded the masks. What I have found so far is an emerging pattern of targeting. I’m not finished, so this isn’t final, but it appears they were working from a specific list. It wasn’t just a capricious act of terror.”
Ariel blinked at the image on her subetheric. “Well, we know they wanted Humadros and Eliton...”
“Maybe. At least, yes, they were part of it. Let me finish this before I say any more.” She turned to the robot. “Bogard? Let’s continue.”
“At some point,” Derec said, “I’m going to have to have Bogard back to do a full diagnostic and debriefing.”
Mia did not look up from her datum, only nodded. Ariel saw clearly that she did not like the idea of giving up the robot. Not yet.
“How are you feeling?” Ariel asked. “Can you walk yet?”
“Oh, I hobbled to the bathroom twice while you were gone. Things are improving. Your medical robot said another three days for the healing accelerants to work through completely.”
“No problem. I can guarantee privacy for that long. Of course, this is ruining my social life.”
Mia smiled thinly. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I didn’t have anything this exciting planned for at least another month.” She stood and gave Derec a significant look, then headed for her bedroom.
As she had hoped, Derec followed.
She closed the door behind him.
“Stop pestering her for Bogard,” Ariel said.
Derec frowned. “Excuse me?”
“She’s terrified. Right now Bogard is the only thing making her feel safe. Every time you ask to have it back she gets scared. Stop it.”
“Look, Bogard has data we need. We can’t just ask for it, I have to download it from its buffers. In order to do that, I need Bogard back at Phylaxis.”
“Give it a little time–”
“How much do you want? We have a situation here and I don’t think we have the luxury of a few days or a week before we get at the information Bogard has.”
“Right now we have’ more information than we know what to do with. None of it’s making sense.”
“And neither are you. Since when can you have too much information?”
“When most of it’s useless–noise. Like that mess you’ve got from the Union Station RI.”
Derec drew himself up and Ariel braced for a fight. She knew that look and could predict all that followed it, and suddenly she felt extremely tired. She held up her hands.
“Just back off asking for Bogard for now. I’ll talk to Mia in the morning and see what I can do. She’s my friend.”
Unexpectedly, Derec let out a long breath and nodded.
“All right. I need to check in with Rana, anyway.” He turned away, hands on hips, and surveyed her bedroom.” Nice,” he said. “You’ve been doing well for yourself.”
“If I had time to enjoy it, life would be wonderful,” Ariel said. She winced at the sharp look of hurt he gave her. “Derec, I’m too tired to think straight anym
ore.”
“I’m going.”
She followed him to the apartment door.
“I’ll call first thing,” he said. “This whole situation...”
“A mess, isn’t it?”
Derec grunted.
“Watch your back,” Ariel said.
He nodded, lingering a moment longer, as if he had something more to say. But he only smiled tightly and left.
On the sofa, Mia typed at her datum while Bogard stood motionless before the subetheric. People moved on the screen, molasses slow, dying again.
Ariel went back to her bedroom. She did not remember lying down.
“Ariel.”
“Hmm?”
“Wake up, Ariel. Ariel.”
“Wha–who–?”
“Ariel, wake up. I have to ask you something.”
“Go ‘way.”
“Ariel.”
Someone grabbed her right shoulder and shook her. Ariel’s eyes snapped open and she rolled away from the touch.” What?”
“Ariel.”
She rubbed her eyes, groggy and disoriented. “Mia? What time is it?”
“You don’t want to know. I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Who made the final list of invitees for the podium?”
Ariel sat on the edge of her bed. She noticed then that she still wore her clothes.” Jennie,” she called, “bring me a cup of coffee.” She stood and stretched. Her limbs vibrated from weariness; not enough sleep. Again.
Mia stood on the opposite side of the bed, waiting.
“Who made what?” Ariel asked.
“The final list of invitees. Who did that?”
“You don’t know?”
“We’re just security–all we got was the finished list and a set of orders.”
“Well... it was a joint decision... Humadros had her end already finalized and simply sent us a copy of her list... then Ambassador Setaris and Ambassador Chassik worked with Senator Eliton on the list here. Why?”
Mia hobbled toward the door. “Someone else must have gotten hold of it. Like I said before, from what I can tell the targets were preselected. They knew exactly who they wanted to take out. Bogard verified that assumption.”
Ariel watched Mia limp out of her room. Who had put together that list? she wondered, irritated then at how muddled she felt. R. Jennie entered the room with a tray bearing a single cup of steaming liquid.
“Get me a stim as well, Jennie,” Ariel said, taking the cup and brushing past the robot.
She glanced at the time as she entered the living room and groaned. Only four hours of sleep. She felt on the verge of lousy now; the rest of the day would be little better. She sipped coffee, wincing at the hot fluid.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Mia dropped onto the couch. “Bogard, explain to Ariel what we found.”
Bogard stood alongside the subetheric screen, with the remote in its hand. The scene projected shifted several times until it showed a wide view of the stage and the mass of black-clad attackers huddling at the edge.
“Once we isolated the corporeal subjects from the projections,” Bogard explained, “we began making a determination of the number of shots fired and targets struck. This was accomplished through a combination of identifying each impact and backtracking the trajectory to a given weapon and counting the number of times each weapon was fired.”
“How did you do that?”
“The explosive charge used to impel the projectiles appears to be a fast-burning, high-heat substance which burns up its own residue, therefore producing no visible, debris upon exit of the projectile. However, there is a heat bloom at the end of the barrel which distorts light passing through it. Linking each instance with a given sound, we have determined the number of shots fired to within ninety-eight percent accuracy. Coupled with the impact traces, we have a positive number of shots fired to wounds inflicted.”
“Which is?”
“Point nine-three.”
Ariel stared at the robot for a number of seconds. She took a mouthful of coffee, then noticed R. Jennie standing beside her with a tray containing a single pill. Ariel took it and swallowed it.
“Wait,” she said to Bogard. “You mean they never missed? Not one stray bullet?”
“Two stray bullets. Twenty fatalities, thirty-three wounded. Fifty-five actual shots fired by the corporeal attackers.”
“One of the misses was me,” Mia said. “Apparently. Given that Gel and Mattu, my teammates, were killed.”
“There were other shots?”
“Yes,” Mia said quietly. “A few of us returned fire. We did kill three of them, but I’d wager that they must have been wearing diffusion harnesses to divert the energy. But mainly we shot the projections.”
“But if they were just projections–”
“The bolts went through and struck bystanders. Several of the injured among the spectators were from our weapons.”
Ariel looked at Mia. Her eyes were closed and she looked pale. The side of her jaw worked delicately, angrily. Clearly the realization that she may have harmed or killed innocent people hurt in ways Ariel found hard to imagine. She waited while Mia worked through the spasm of conscience.
Finally, Mia ‘s eyes opened. “Interestingly enough, we found one major discrepancy in these numbers. It seems clear that the intention was to kill all fifty-three of the people hit. Those who lived survived by sheer luck. But one of those fifty-three was not Senator Eliton.”
“Not...?”
Mia looked at Bogard. “Bogard?”
“There is no correlation between the injury manifested in any of the recordings and a shot from the attackers,” the robot said. “All of fifty-three shots fired are accounted for among the casualties, one miss is accounted for by Agent Daventri, leaving one stray shot which from appearances was fired in the direction of Senator Eliton, but which missed.”
“Eliton was a casualty, though,” Ariel said.
“That cannot now be verified,” Bogard said. “No actual shot struck him. Though he appears injured, there is no correlation that I can determine with an assassin’s bullet. I am not, therefore, counting him as one of the casualties.”
“The recording shows a wound,” Ariel said. “I saw his body. He had–”
Ariel stopped, remembering the corpse in the stasis tube. She thought about it carefully, questioning the memory, but it was accurate.
“The body I saw had three wounds,” she noted.
Mia frowned. “These people, whoever they are, exhibited tremendous skill as marksmen. One shot, one wound. That’s consistent with the idea that they’re ex-military, trained by a man who was very good at killing, which Bok Golner apparently was. As far as I can determine, they never wasted a second shot on anyone. Bogard can’t find the shot–the shot, mind you–that killed Senator Eliton, and according to the recordings he was hit only once. Are you sure you saw three wounds?”
“Absolutely. One here–” Ariel touched her left shoulder “–here–” her sternum “–and here.” Her right side just below the ribs. She shook her head. “It was Eliton, though...”
“Uh-huh. The same way maybe that the skeleton you saw was me?”
Ariel blew out a breath. “Let’s go through this again. Bogard, walk me through the whole scenario. Jennie, make more coffee.” She looked wryly at Mia. “I’m going to pay for this at work later.”
Dawn was minutes away. The horizon was already lightening. Ariel stared at it, seeing it and not seeing it, her mind filled with the details of trajectories and impacts and target possibilities and invitation lists and all the minutiae of a disaster. The subetheric was on, the volume low, ignored, while she tried to let calm of some sort settle through her mind. Mia dozed on the sofa.
Too much information, she had told Derec, was information composed mostly of noise, meaningless and irrelevant. Now she wondered if there could be too much worthwhile data. Nothing they had developed in the last f
ew hours could be dismissed as irrelevant.
Taking out Ambassador Humadros and her immediate staff, Senator Eliton and his aides, and as many other important delegates as possible had at first been an obvious goal of the assault. But now Ariel was not so sure. Ambassador Chassik had escape uninjured, though two of his staff had not. Killing Setaris’s aides seemed pointless, as neither of them, nor Setaris, were to have any significant role at the conference. Nor did killing Eliton’s security team make much sense, as they really knew nothing.
The weapons had been handmade. Ancient machines–only museum samples of the originals remained–but someone had gone to the trouble of building new ones. Nothing much had been said about them so far on any of the newsnets. Old, obsolete perhaps, but terribly effective, obscenely so given that the projectiles could potentially go through a body and injure someone else behind the target. Because of the angle and other factors, that had not happened this time, but Mia had pointed out that if nine of these weapons existed, there was every reason to believe that there were many more of them, somewhere.
Mia had tracked the names of the six unknown bodies in the morgue through civic records, using Ariel’s authority to access the files. Factory workers, an office clerk, two unemployed and on civic assistance. The only thing she had found that bound them together was their affiliation with OSMA–Order of the Supremacy of Man Again, otherwise known as Managins. Mia thought there could be something else in their backgrounds, but it would take time to get at it. Mia could only assume that these were the six assassins who had not escaped, and three of them should not be dead. They had been in Service custody. One of them had been Lemus Milmor.
The invitee lists troubled Ariel the most. If a copy had gotten out, it could only have done so from a few sources. Eliton had had a copy, but so had Setaris and, presumably, Chassik. Special Service had a list since Bogard had it. The list had been finalized only ten days earlier. Time for a leak, certainly, but it would still have had to be a leak from one of those sources. Anyone else? Had any of the industrialists present possessed a copy? There was no way to tell. Somehow the Managins had gotten it and a team of assassins had been assigned targets. Was there anything about the target list that could give a hint? Perhaps, but Ariel was exhausted, and she had embassy work to do today.
