Mirage

Fifteen

The Civic Morgue occupied a sublevel, well below the main hospital complex in Reed District. Its innocuous faзade could have been easily missed-a plain metal door with an ID scanner to its right, a plain sign above the lintel. No other vehicles were in the small lot when the embassy limo pulled in.

Derec stepped from the limo and tugged at the hem of the formal jacket Ariel insisted he wear. It did not quite fit and he kept pulling at the sleeves and shrugging as if to ease the tightness out of his shoulders. He had been glad she had lacked the rest of the suit that went with it.

A second door was set into the wall a dozen or so meters from the visitors' entrance, one large enough for ambulances. The space hummed with a deep background noise from above. The place was unadorned-bare metal, struts and sheeting and harsh lights. Derec could not even find graffiti, as if by unspoken agreement no one intruded upon the area.

Ariel led the way to the entrance, carrying herself with confidence, as if she did this all the time. Derec still wondered whom she had called for the authorization to get in here, but all she gave him was a secret smile as she had dug through a closet for the jacket. She stopped at the door and slid her ill into the scanner.

"Speak your name and business, please," a tinny voice requested. Bored, monotone, human.

"Ariel Burgess, Auroran Embassy, authorized survey of Spacer bodies."

Derec heard the slight hesitation on the last word, but did not look at her, keeping his hands clasped behind his back and acting the part of an ambassadorial aide.

"I have clearance for one person," the voice said. "Who is with you?"

"My aide, Massey."

"I repeat, I have clearance for one visitor."

"Check embassy protocols. All embassy personnel of representative or liaison status are permitted one aide in the conduct of any official business." She sounded just as bored as the unseen caretaker, with just a hint of impatience. Derec admired the act.

He imagined the person on the other end punching a terminal for information on the proper regulations, looking for anything that would get him dismissed or reprimanded, and probably wondering why tonight someone like Ariel Burgess had to show up to make him think about his job.

"Acknowledged," the man finally said.

The scanner extruded her ill and the door slid open.

"Massey?" Derec asked sardonically.

Ariel cocked her eyebrows at him but said nothing. She led the way into the morgue.

The reception area was a long, cramped chamber, bracketed by the cubicle where the night attendant worked on one end, and the doorway into the morgue proper at the other. Between them were two rows of booths containing com and datum terminals. The light, though standard, seemed oddly inadequate; the upholstery was dark, dark green, the floor a dingy grey, and the walls pale green. Even here Derec caught the aseptic scent of chemicals and a metallic tang, subtler and somehow worse than typical hospital odors.

The attendant looked up from his desk to give them a disgruntled look, then returned his attention to whatever he had been doing before Derec and Ariel had disrupted his peace of mind.

Ariel slid into the nearest booth and Derec stood at the edge of the seat.

"I have the batch number," she said.

"Batch?"

She gave him a wry look, then tapped commands into the terminal. Derec let his gaze drift over the walls and ceiling, looking for eyes or ears, realizing even as he did so that they would not likely be obvious. He glanced at the night attendant, who ignored them pointedly.

"You don't think they're overstaffed here, do you?" he asked.

"According to the log, there are two doctors on duty tonight and three orderlies."

Derec leaned closer to read over her head. "As long as we're here, why don't we see…"

"I'm checking," Ariel said. After several seconds she gave a surprised "Huh!" and sat back. "They're all in the same lab."

Derec studied the screen. There were eight labs, each with its own storage. He read down the list Ariel had pulled up and saw all the names from the Union Station incident appended to one lab-Number Six.

Ariel stabbed another key and a chit extruded from a slot beside the screen. "Please follow the guidon," a small voice told them from the terminal.

The chit glowed green in her hand.

The door into the lab area opened on their approach. A strip along the floor pulsed green, leading the way down the long, wide corridor past door after numbered door until the green chit Ariel held turned red.

She inserted the chit into the slot next to the door, which slid aside.

Derec could not define the smell. A hybrid of medicinal sterility and stale air, mingled perhaps with his own preconceptions of a necropolis-decay, wet stone, mustiness. But he saw nothing damp; the room was metal and plastic, and nothing here rotted.

The room reminded him of nothing so much as a library, with neat rows of cabinets, each drawer a number matched to a manifest, the contents awaiting study. For a moment he imagined himself lying in one of these files, still and empty of life, a shape, unconnected to anything he had ever done. He shuddered.

Another door led to the lab where the autopsies were performed. He shivered again, heavily.

Ariel stood before a datum set at in the right-hand wall from the entrance. Derec joined her.

"I've got the manifests," she said absently, scrolling slowly through the names. She was in the Cs.

"Aspil, right?" Derec reminded her.

"Um… yes." She scrolled back to the beginning of the list. "Row three, number Five D."

Derec followed a pace behind. Ariel moved slowly now and Derec thought he understood. Reluctance, ill-ease, sadness. She had known this person, differently than the others, a few of whom she had met but none that had meant more than a brief bio on a publicity jacket and maybe a drink while talking inconsequentials. Even Aspil she had not known well, she had told him, though she knew him well enough that it made a difference. They had met at the Calvin Institute on Aurora. She had spent three days with him giving orientation on Institute policy regarding export of robots to Settler colonies. Three days-business, dinners afterward, time for personal conversations. Sufficient to make him more than just a face and a name and an assignment. A week later she was on a ship to Earth, with other things filling her attention, and she had given Tro Aspil no further thought until his name had come up on a list of the dead.

She strolled down row three, reading numbers. The drawers were stacked six high. Somewhere around here, Derec thought, there must be a lifter platform. But "D" was at shoulder height. Ariel stared at the plain grey square, the number in black in the center.

Derec almost reached for the button. Ariel's hand shot out and stabbed it. She stepped back as the drawer ex tended.

The naked body lay beneath a transparent canopy. It looked artificial, skin the wrong color, eyes closed too tightly, hair too neat and stiff. A wound puckered halfway down the neck.

"It's Tro," Ariel said, her voice small and controlled.

"Then who took his flight back to Aurora?"

"I don't know." She pressed the button and the drawer withdrew, back into its slot. She gazed at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then turned away. "What other discrepancies are there?"

She went back to the datum where the manifest remained on the screen.

"What the…" she hissed.

Derec looked over her shoulder.

"Mia Daventri," he read. "But-"

"All the bodies from Union Station are here. That's what I meant when I said they stored them all together."

"Mia wasn't killed at Union Station."

"She's part of the same event, it just took a few more hours to kill her." She frowned. "There are six bodies I don't recognize from the casualty lists."

Derec skimmed the names she pointed out. Rimmer, Iklan, Cutchin, Milmor, Rotison, and Wollin. "The assassins?"

"It doesn't say, does it?" She pulled a portable datum from her jacket and entered the names and the tracking numbers assigned by the morgue. There was no other information.

Derec looked self-consciously back at the entrance. "Somehow I would expect guards or… something…"

"No one comes to the morgue except those who absolutely have to. What would they be defending? Who would steal a corpse?"

"Still…"

Ariel nodded. "It feels wrong, though, doesn't it?"

Derec tapped the screen on Mia Daventri's name. "It is wrong."

Ariel touched her lips with a straight finger. "Let's take a look, shall we?"

Mia's drawer slid out, revealing a badly charred skeleton. Derec met Ariel's eyes over the top of the canopy and saw her wondering the same thing: Who?

Eliton's drawer was in the next aisle. Derec pressed the contact, his heart racing as it emerged. Upon seeing Eliton, he felt oddly relieved.

The features matched, but lacked the vitality Derec recalled. The shell gave no hint of the energy Eliton possessed and displayed, nothing of his passions. Three puckered mounds traced a line from his left shoulder to his sternum.

"He looks…"

"Yes," Ariel said. "Death takes everything." She frowned and did a slow examination down the corpse's entire length.

"What?" Derec asked.

"I… nothing." She closed the drawer.

"Humadros?"

Ariel drew a deep breath, then shook her head.

"We should verify them all," Derec said. He raised his eyes upward slightly.

She caught his meaning and nodded. "All right. Let's finish." Derec experienced a profound sense of relief when the limo pulled away from the morgue. He shrugged out of the too-tight jacket and pulled his own back on. Ariel gazed out her window, a frown pulling a crease into the space above her nose.

"Something's bothering you," Derec said.

"Brilliant. How long did it take you to deduce that?"

"Sarcasm. I didn't think you cared anymore."

Instead of the sharp comeback he expected, she said, "None of this is making sense. The problem is, I can't see how it's not."

"Such as?''

"If Tro is dead in the morgue, then who took his seat on the shuttle?"

"Clones?"

Ariel made a face. "Except for some very limited organ regrowth, cloning is completely illegal on Earth. They're more frightened of that than robots."

"But we're not talking legal here, are we?"

Ariel shrugged but did not reply.

"Unless it's just a glitch," Derec said. "The ticket was bought, the name was never deleted, the seat stayed reserved. This has all happened fast."

"We can check that. Car, take us to Union Station."

"Yes, Ambassador," the car replied flatly.

"Then," Ariel continued, "the burned corpse under Mia's name."

"Yes… that wouldn't have been possible even if she had died. I saw the room. Everything in it was vaporized."

"How come the whole facility didn't go up?"

"Contained explosion, what they call a 'bubble nuke. ' Stasis fields and so forth. Very sophisticated, very expensive."

"Parapoyos?"

Derec shrugged. "The trouble with Kynig Parapoyos, as I understand it, is that he's everywhere. Might as well blame a devil or some other supernatural force. But, yes, something like that would be in his line. Very thorough, too. Agent Sathen told me that nothing was recoverable."

"Sathen?"

"Do you know him?"

"I spoke to him yesterday. He was very uncooperative. But not willingly. It seemed to me like he'd been given orders not to talk about the situation."

"Hmm. He seemed open to me, but I spoke to him just after it happened. Anyway, there would be no corpse, even if Mia hadn't got out."

"So that body-" Ariel began.

"-whoever it might be-"

"-wasn't just placed there so that there could be a body-"

"-it was placed to contradict the intensity of the blast-"

"-and keep anyone from wondering about the source."

"Exactly."

Ariel looked at him. "And Sathen?"

"Who could silence him?"

"His own people."

"Which is just what your friend Mia suspects."

"I talked to the nurse who was on duty that night. She told me two other agents came in and Sathen got into an argument with them."

"Did she remember their names?"

"One of them. Cupra."

Derec laughed sharply. "The other one is Agent Gambel. "

"You know them?"

"They're the pair who threw me out of Union Station. They had all the right documents. When I checked, their authority was verified. I couldn't argue."

"But you kept the copy of the RI. "

"What copy?"

Ariel chuckled, shaking her head. "Derec, Derec, Derec… you are a naughty boy."

Derec smiled. "I knew you would appreciate my finer qualities."

"The question is, why would the same two agents show up at the medical facility Mia was in?"

"They've taken charge of the entire investigation. My guess would be that they needed to debrief her."

"And instead they try to kill her."

"That's something of a leap, don't you think?"

"Is it?" Ariel asked.

"Well, it could have been Bok Golner."

"Someone would have had to set it up for him."

They rode in silence for a time. Derec watched the urbanscape pass, mulling over the conclusions hovering just out of reach. He agreed with Ariel's guess about Cupra and Gambel, but there was no more than coincidence on which to base it. Even with Mia's assertion that there had to be a Special Service component to the entire affair, Derec wanted something concrete before he embraced the belief that Earth's own security people were responsible for what amounted to the worst diplomatic catastrophe of the decade, perhaps the century.

"Ambassador," the limo suddenly said, "this unit is being followed."

Ariel leaned forward. "Show me."

The screen mounted between the seats facing them winked on, displaying the rear view. The limo made a right turn and a few moments after, another transport made the same turn.

"Identify," Ariel said.

"No registration available," the limo said.

"This car isn't positronic, is it?" Derec asked.

"I wish. Car, how far to Union Station?"

"Ten minutes at current course and speed."

"Proceed as normal. Let me know if that vehicle begins to gain on us."

"Yes, Ambassador."

"When did you get a promotion?" Derec asked.

Ariel waved dismissively. "It's programmed to respond to the primary passenger that way unless specifically told otherwise. Sometimes I really hate it here."

"You miss your robots."

"Damn right I do! At least you get to play with some, when you're not building killers."

Derec's face warmed. "Excuse me?"

Ariel scowled but would not look at him. "I beg your pardon. I didn't mean that."

"Yes, you did. Do you want to explain it?"

"Why should I? You know perfectly well what I mean."

"Bogard."

Ariel extended her hand, palm up, in a gesture that said, There, see? You knew what I meant.

"Bogard's purpose is to protect humans," Derec said.

"By being willing to harm other humans."

"It's not that simple."

"Evidently not. It failed."

"Not with Agent Daventri."

"Oh, it messed up the first time and now it's doing better to compensate? Why did it let Senator Eliton die? There are three holes in that man that shouldn't have been there!"

"I don't know why Bogard failed! I can't find out till she releases it to me and I can run a proper diagnostic on it!" Derec's anger filled him suddenly. "You never have accepted the idea that robots needn't be straitjacketed by the Three Laws, that the nature of positronics can be applied to allow wider discretion-"

He stopped, realizing that she was no longer listening. Ariel stared into the middle distance, her face expressionless but her eyes bright.

"What?" he demanded.

"Hmm? I-" She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring this up now."

And she looked away from him, pointedly ending the conversation. Derec knew better than to try to force her to continue. He sat and seethed until the limo arrived at Union Station.

"So when did you get a promotion?" he asked again.

"Two of those bodies were Ambassador Setaris's top aides. I ended up next in line."

"No, you don't. They could draft some junior legate."

Ariel shrugged. "Since the situation involves a positronic unit, it made sense to have me step in as Setaris's chief aide. For the time being."

"You're being set up to take the blame if anything goes wrong."

"Are you surprised? Typical Auroran politics."

She still sounded distracted. Derec was surprised to find himself worried for her, but right now it did not seem to matter to her.

The limo stopped on the apron of the main gallery.

"Car," Ariel said, "you will return to the embassy garage."

"Yes, Ambassador."

"We're finding another way back?" Derec asked as he got out.

"We can use the Auroran embassy offices here," Ariel said.

Derec searched the boulevard for their shadow but saw nothing unusual in the cluster of cabs and limos crowding against the apron.

The normality of Union Station troubled him. Two days ago Derec had entered upon a scene of violence and terror; now it seemed as though nothing had happened. The gallery echoed with the sounds of foot traffic and conversation; the P. A. announced boarding for a shuttle; the floor gleamed with new polish.

There was still a trace of the powder bums along the wall.

Derec felt anxious all the way to the customer service desk. He realized then that he half-expected a security guard to eject him. He glanced up at the row of windows that overlooked the gallery, where he had been two days ago.

At the desk, Derec had planned to use a self-service datum. Instead, the small consoles were all shuttered. A young man greeted them with a vague smile.

"Can I be of service?" he asked.

"Are the datums down?" Derec asked.

"For a few days. We're going through a complete systems overhaul. In the meantime, I can help you."

Ariel shrugged. "Fine. I'd like to confirm a passenger."

The attendant nodded and glanced down at his own console, hidden from Derec and Ariel by the desk. "Do you have the flight number?"

Ariel checked her portable datum. "Shuttle flight two-seven-K-dash-one-one-nine-A. Yesterday at four-fifteen AM?"

"Shuttle to Kopernik Station. It launched on schedule."

"Seat E-twenty."

"Confirmed for a Mr. Aspil, Tro. Final destination… Aurora on the liner Corismun."

"I'd like to confirm that he actually took the flight."

The young man looked up, not quite frowning. "Is this official?"

"He's an Auroran citizen," Ariel said, digging out her ID, "and I'm from the Auroran Embassy."

"But-"

"It's not official yet, but it could be. I'm trying to save everyone some headaches."

The attendant checked her ID. He looked unhappy for several seconds, then shrugged. "I suppose there's no problem just checking to see if he boarded." He handed the ID back and worked at his console.

Derec turned around to survey the gallery. Something bothered him about the scene. The access to the service areas was guarded by uniformed security people. A small truck sat against the wall bearing the Imbitek logo. That was an obvious difference. What nagged at him felt more subtle, less…

No robots, he realized. None-not even the mindless mobile drones that usually scuttled about with luggage or messages or food. Instead, he saw humans doing those jobs.

"I have Mr. Aspil checking in at three-twenty to board the four-fifteen shuttle," the attendant said. "According to the record, he was logged visually and verified."

Ariel sighed. "Fine. Thank you."

Derec turned back to the young man. "Can I ask, when was his ticket purchased?"

"Um… six weeks ago."

Ariel blinked. "Who bought it for him?"

"According to my records, he bought it himself."

"Could you give us the account number?" Derec asked.

The attendant openly frowned now. "We're not really-"

"Listen," Derec said, placing a hand on the desk top in front of the attendant, "there are some irregularities with this and if necessary we can get authorization to go through the records without your help. That might cause you some problems if it has to be explained to your supervisors that we're rummaging through files because someone didn't cooperate when it would have saved time and trouble."

The young man's face darkened briefly. Then he shrugged again. "It's not worth my job. Here." He handed a printout to Derec. "You didn't get it from me."

"I've never seen you before," Derec said, taking the slip.

"Thank you," Ariel said. As they walked away, she said quietly, "It is contrary to service regulations to divulge personal information without proper authorization."

Derec shrugged. "He won't have a job next week anyway-he's a temp. He probably doesn't know the regulations. But he certainly doesn't want an unsatisfactory mark on his performance record." He gestured around the gallery. "Did you notice? No robots."

"It's a shame. This place felt…"

"Like home?"

Ariel snorted. "No place on Earth feels like that. I was going to say 'civilized,' but that's not right. It felt safe."

"Because of the robots?"

Ariel nodded. She held up her datum. "Who bought Tro a ticket back home six weeks before he even arrived?"

"Shows a little foresight, doesn't it?"

"On whose part?"

Derec gave the service entrance another look. "I need to get in there, before they rip everything out."

Ariel pointed to an archway guarded by two uniformed security men. "Embassy offices are through there."

The archway opened onto a long concourse. On either side, stairs at ten-meter intervals led up to narrow corridors. Ariel entered the one nearest the far end. The corridor ran five meters to an ornate, metal-finished door that, Derec guessed, was heavily armored. Ariel slipped her ID into the reader and a moment later the door opened for them.

The reception desk made a graceful arc, halving the floor space in the antechamber. A single attendant sat dozing, head propped on fist, before the elegantly-molded bank of monitors to his right. At times Derec missed Auroran luxury, but it could be overwhelming. The walls cascaded with a complex blue-and-yellow pattern that seemed to shift like falling water as he moved. The desk almost glowed from its high polish. The air was scented, and the carpet gave a good two centimeters underfoot, absorbing all sound from their tread.

"Are we on duty or is this your nap time?" Ariel asked.

The attendant jerked awake, blinking up at them. He blushed briefly and cleared his throat. "Sorry, Ambassador. How can I be of service?"

"I need a private office."

"Yes, Ambassador. Um… no one else is here, so use any of them." He gestured vaguely behind him.

"Thank you."

Derec followed her down a short hallway, past three doors, and through a fourth. The office was slightly less decorated than the antechamber.

"Aren't you curious," Derec asked, "who followed us from the morgue?"

"Of course I am. But how do you propose to find out without causing a scene?".

"Since when have you been worried about that?"

"I'm not, but I won't waste it. I want to find out what's going on. If we start confronting people too early, we might find ourselves restrained. Blocked at the very least." She extended a hand. "Let me see the flimsy."

Derec took the printout from his pocket and studied it. "It gives an account number but no other name than Aspil's." He handed it to her.

"We can see if it's an embassy account, at least," Ariel said, sitting down at the datum terminal. She entered the number and waited. She frowned. "That's interesting. It's an embassy account, all right, but not ours. Solarian."

"But-"

"Tro was Auroran, yes… and the flight terminates at Aurora."

Ariel stared at the screen for several seconds, then forwarded the data to her apartment.

"The ticket was purchased six weeks ago," Derec said.

Ariel nodded. "Before Tro arrived. And the ticket was bought here."

"Why would the Solarians kill their own people?"

"It wouldn't make sense, would it? Besides which, the Union Station RI was a point of pride to them. Seeing it all fail…"

"Speaking of which, it would be a good thing if I could get back there to look at the RI."

"Hmm? Oh." Ariel worked her terminal again. "Wait a second… I initiated a log search before we left regarding this alleged directive not to report minor errors to you. I want to see if it's turned anything…" She frowned at the terminal. "No. It did not come from us. Nor from any other office of the Auroran Embassy." She looked at Derec. "I could do an offworld search to see if my predecessor did, but I doubt we'd find anything. That would mean collusion and there'd be no trail."

"None to speak of." He gestured at the datum. "Uh, the RI?"

"Oh, yes." She touched a few more contacts. "There's the schema for this branch."

Derec leaned over the desk and studied the screen. "All right… there's a service entrance here for the robot staff. It says it's been sealed off."

"Be my guest." She smiled ruefully. "If you get caught, this office will deny any knowledge"

Derec snorted and turned away. Ariel laughed.

The hallway outside the offices made a sharp turn at the very back and narrowed even more. It was barely wide enough for a single person carrying a tray now, which was more than enough room for a robot with the same tray.

It opened into a circular chamber containing three wall niches, now empty of robots. As a concession to Terran authority, even the embassy robots had been slaved to the RI here. To his left was a plain metal door with a simple positronic scanner. Below the scanner was an override control.

From his jacket pocket, Derec took out a small square that resembled an ID chit. Its surface, however, showed the faint outlines of a keypad and one edge was thicker than the rest of the square. He was proud of this device, though he had never before found it necessary to use. He slid it into the override scanner and pressed one of the contacts. A moment later, one contact lit up. He pressed the next and so on until the door accepted the code the device had developed from its interaction with the mechanism and slid open.

The only illumination in the tunnels beyond came from clusters of readylights. Derec felt his way along until he came to a brighter area, then he stepped from the robot accessways into a human-use passage lined with dim amber panels. He followed it until he came to a branch, then guessed from memory which way he needed to go.

The machinery that operated all the station facilities surrounded the public areas, hidden in the walls and beneath the floors. Peel away the skin inside and outside Union station and a network of tubes, corridors, conduit, shafts, and cables would be revealed, resembling in its complex density the internal organs of a living thing. Since it had been retrofitted for the RI and robotics, a good deal of the network contained open spaces for humans, service nodes and maintenance stations, which made it easier for Derec to find his way. Signs were posted giving locations and directions.

It was late. Derec thought it unlikely that he would run into any workers at this hour, but he walked carefully anyway.

He wanted to find one of the maintenance nodes, since the curious data loops Rana had found all centered on maintenance nodes. They were scattered throughout the complex network, junctions which served several purposes, beginning with the monitoring of the data traffic that rushed throughout the system at light -speed. The junctions broke down the task of maintaining, repairing, and supervising the day-to-day functions that kept Union Station working into discreet units, each with its own supply and repair staff. Until the Incident, that staff had been robotic. Prior to the installation of the RI and the station's conversion to positronics, humans did the work. Now, Derec imagined, they would again.

He turned a corner and lurched back at the sight of a row of people. He waited for them to come after him. When they did not, he looked again and saw that it was only a row of robots in their niches.

Pulse racing, he quickly walked by them.

A maintenance node stood at the end of the row. Derec squeezed through the narrow opening, into the hexagonal chamber. A worklamp came on automatically at his presence.

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.