Mirage (isaac asimov's robot mystery)

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  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 few 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.

  But she could not sleep. Her head buzzed with too many details.

  She glanced at the subetheric and started to see Jonis on the screen. She grabbed the remote and turned up the sound.

  "-into it as thoroughly as humanly possible," he was saying, "but so far I'm told we have no leads."

  "What about the captured gunmen?" a reporter out of the picture asked. "Has their interrogation produced any tangible results?"

  Jonis looked embarrassed. "Frankly, we won't get anything from them. Apparently, they were inadvertently killed while in the process of being apprehended and arrested."

  "Killed? By whom? Special Service agents?"

  "No, not exactly. I, uh, haven't been given the full details, it's all very classified at the moment, but the, uh, robot assigned to Senator Eliton's security detail may have had something to do with it."

  "You mean the same robot that failed to protect Senator Eliton and later exploded, killing the last surviving member of his security team?"

  "Uh, yes, that robot. It may have exerted excessive force in the apprehension of the, uh, suspects. It's being looked into."

  Ariel glanced over at Mia and saw her friend staring fixedly at the screen, her entire body rigid with attention.

  "This doesn't say very much of Senator Eliton's interests in promoting the reintroduction of robots on Earth," the reporter said.

  "That may be premature," Jonis said. Still, he looked as if he agreed with the assessment. "We'll have to wait for all the facts and assessments before making a final judgement. I don't want to say anything to belittle Clar's-Senator Eliton's-beliefs."

  "Of course. If I may ask-"

  "That's enough for now. I have to get to my committee."

  "But Senator-"

  Ariel turned the subetheric off.

  "Shit," she muttered,

  "Amen," Mia said.

  Ariel made herself stand. She had to call someone. By the time she reached her comline, she decided that it should be Derec.

  Seventeen

  I should have gone to my apartment, Derec thought as he entered the Phylaxis lab. He stood in the entry, feeling the weariness of the day, gazing at the empty lab.

  Not empty. He heard the fragile impact of fingers on a keypad, then saw someone at one of the stations. Rana's console was unattended, the screens blank. The main lights were low.

  Derec stepped quietly toward the sound. Halfway down the left-hand aisle, between the banks of equipment and workstations, he saw someone working at a console near the back of the room. His pulse picked up until, a few meters closer, he recognized the man.

  "Caro," Derec said.

  The man started, jerking his hands from the keypad as he twisted in his chair. Then he sighed heavily and shook his head.

  "Hi, Derec."

  "Didn't mean to startle you."

  Caro waved a hand. "'Sallright,' he said, then yawned. "Final report on the mobile units from Union Station."

  Derec thought for a moment, then remembered that Caro and Amson had been assigned to help decommission all the floor robots.

  "You just finished?"

  "Unless that heartless slaver Chassik calls us back. I sent Amson home. Never saw her so beat. We've been at it-" he glanced at his wrist "-damn, nearly thirty hours."

  "Did you have any trouble with Special Service?"

  "No, this was mostly off-site. By the time we were informed that Special Service had assumed authority over the investigation, most of the mobiles were gone, back in a warehouse, waiting transhipment."

  "Shipment… where?"

  "Back to Solaria, I imagine. Ambassador Chassik was most insistent that they all be shut down prior to shuttling, and the positronic logs-such as they were-downloaded and stored."

  Chassik. Derec went to his station and sat down. He pulled the folded paper with the sample he had taken from Union Station from his pocket and put it in a drawer under the console.

  "You're up early," Caro said.

  "Late, actually. When did Rana leave?"

  "When I got here, about an hour or so ago."

  "Any messages?"

  "Not that I know of."

  Derec watched Caro work for a time, then heaved to his feet. "I need sleep."

  "Are you going home?" Caro asked.

  "No, I'll stay here."

  Caro nodded absently. Derec drifted across the lab to the com and touched the log to see what messages were in the buffer. Nothing from Senator Taprin. A message from Joler Hammis. Two from Gale Chassik at the Solarian embassy. Three anonymous calls. And a final note from Rana. Nothing from his attorney. He opened Rana's.

  "The brain is rebelling," she said. "Mine, that is. I need sleep, much as I hate to admit it. Not much progress after you left with Ms. Burgess. Sorry. Talk to you tomorrow."

  He opened Joler Hammis's and was surprised to find a resume appended to a short note.

  "It seems Union Station no longer needs the services of a positronic specialist, Mr. Avery. I am available at your convenience. Please call."

  The three anonymous calls contained no messages. He shut down the com and went up to bed, his mind working at a low level.

  Chassik. Hammis. Robots being shipped back to Solaria.

  Details.

  He needed sleep badly. "Derec."

  "Mmm…"

  "Ariel Burgess is on the com. She won't disconnect until she talks to you."

  Derec blinked, his eyes gummy. "'M asleep. I'll call her later."

  "Derec. Mr. Avery."

  Derec rolled over then. Rana never called him "Mr. Avery" unless she was very upset. He ran fingertips across his sleep-encrusted eyes, wincing as a few lashes jerked loose.

  "Time?"

  "Six-thirty-one."

  Derec groaned. "Doesn't anyone sleep anymore?" He sat up and sniffed. The strong aroma of fresh coffee drew his attention. He held out a hand and a moment later felt a cup placed against his palm. Warm. He brought it to his mouth and drank cautiously. "All right. All right, tell her I'll be right there."

  "Want me to route the call up here?" Rana asked, walking toward the door.

  "Sure."

  "And when you're done with that, come down to the lab. I have something to show you."

  Derec felt himself nod. He sat there in the abrupt quiet, nursing the coffee, wondering what was so important that he had to interrupt what he remembered to be very good sleep.

  "Derec?"

  He looked up at the sound of Ariel's voice. "Oh. Yes, Ariel."

  "Do you have vid?"r />
  "Is it necessary? You just woke me up."

  "Don't brag. I've been up since four, I think. What are you doing?"

  "Drinking coffee. "

  "After that."

  "I have to review Rana's excavation."

  "Good. You can tell me what she found when you meet me."

  "I'm meeting you?"

  "For lunch. At the Franklin Park Home Kitchen."

  "What?"

  "For old time's sake. You know where it is, don't you?"

  "Of course-"

  "Good. Then I'll see you there at, what? Eleven-thirty?"

  "Sure…"

  "Great. I'm looking forward to it."

  The connection died and Derec stared at his com-unit. The Franklin Park Home Kitchen, on the K Street Corridor? A home kitchen? Neither of them had had to eat at a public facility in years. He doubted Ariel had been to a home kitchen since her return to Earth four years ago. And why one so far away? The Spacer embassies were south, in the Anacostia District; Franklin Park was north.

  "I'm not awake," he said aloud and looked down at his half-empty cup.

  He finished the coffee and showered, then stumbled downstairs to the lab, still feeling off-balance.

  "Morning," he said.

  Rana nodded, staring at her screens.

  Derec went to the com and tapped in Joler Hammis's code. He received a request to leave a message.

  "This is Derec Avery, Mr. Hammis. I'd be very interested in speaking with you at your convenience. Please let me know when would be a good time. Thank you."

  He poured more coffee and sat down beside Rana. She began talking immediately, as if a switch had been thrown.

  "Okay, the excavation has given me three discreet segments to study. I've got the entire matrix just prior to the RI going off-line in one segment, the same during the period it was off-line, and the segment just after it came back online and began to collapse. I isolated them all from each other, but I set up a marker base to follow the linkages."

  "You did all that after I left yesterday? What time did you go home?"

  Rana shrugged. "I don't know, midnight." She pointed to the screen. "Now. Getting these three sets apart gave me a handle on the problem. All those command nodes that we traced to maintenance? The entire system shifted all its attention to them during the off-line period. It was as if the RI just let itself be sucked out of its own matrix to somewhere else. Of course, that left a lot of automatic functions, but even those were subsumed to a different set of operational parameters during this period."