Isaac Asimov's Mirage by Mark W. Tiedemann

Author:Mark W. Tiedemann [Tiedemann, Mark W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 1588243524
Publisher: ibooks, Inc.
Published: 2000-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

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 filed,” 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.

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