by Isaac Asimov
They came to a stairwell. A fading LEVEL TWO glowed bright yellow in the halogen glare. Derec started up the steps.
They emerged from the stairs adjacent to Row B. Vehicles occupied stalls. Cables and tubes connected each one to a diagnostic unit, but those they looked at showed their units all on stand-by. The machines appeared untended, the vehicles dirty, many in various stages of disassembly, and even that process seemed abandoned.
Row F, Bin Twenty-Eight, was different.
The diagnostic equipment was old but not neglected. Only the standby light glowed, but in the wash of the flashlight Ariel saw clearly that the control panel was clean. The ambulance itself shone neatly, grimeless and intact.
“Well, well,” Derec said and stepped into the stall. Overhead a worklamp came on. Derec, frowning, switched off the flashlight. “We better not stay long. What do you need?”
“Its log.” Ariel handed over her datum. “Do you know how?”
Derec took the datum and opened the rear door of the vehicle, looking up at the silence.
“Either it’s not alarmed or–”
“We’ll have visitors soon,” Ariel finished.
Derec climbed into the ambulance. Ariel peered into the darkness, listening. The glow from the stall’s worklight cast marginal illumination across to the opposite row. It seemed less a garage than a necropolis, the broken shapes hunkering together in sepulchral consolation.
A thud came from behind her. “Ow!”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Derec called from within. “Be done in a minute.”
Ariel stepped away from the stall. The various noises of the place seemed less sinister now. It was only an old, near-forgotten storage facility. She wondered how many of them were strewn throughout the fabric of Earth, niches wherein Terrans stuffed all the things they thought they might need again someday and then forgot they ever had them in the first place. Layers upon layers of urban complex, down she did not know how many levels, and at the very bottom, just before primal earth, actual soil, there must be an entire layer of nothing but storage lockers, garages, closets, stalls, bins, dumps, and depositories, filled with a history of experiment and expedience
She started at a new sound. Not a click or a whir, but a faint grinding, like something rolling across broken pavement. She took another step away from the light behind her, careful and silent, listening. The grinding stopped.
The skin up the backs of her arms rippled with chill. She felt watched now and stared into the murk, searching for eyes.
Something moved to her left and she jerked to the right, heart racing. Ariel backed into the stall and went to the rear of the ambulance.
“Derec,” she said.
“Done.” Derec climbed out and shut the doors. “Clean. Like just recently.”
“Time to leave.”
He handed back the datum and went to the end of the stall. He stood quietly and listened, then gestured for her to follow. He sprinted across the driveway and entered three more stalls at random. Two of them lit up with worklights. He returned to this side and did the same to another three. One lit up.
The sound started again, louder and clearer. Treads.
“Probably an automated inspection unit,” Derec said. “We triggered an internal security program, that’s all.”
At the landing, she stopped. From below came the faint echo of voices.
“Damn,” she hissed.
“Where?” he asked.
“Up.”
They moved up the stairs as quickly as they could and came out on Level Six.
The tread noise grew stronger. Ahead, Ariel thought she saw a reflection, dull red, and guessed it might be the source of the sound.
They descended one level and sprinted along the dark stalls. Another machine-sound started toward them and they scurried into one of the stalls. The worklight above did not wink on and they hunched behind a mass that once may have been a functioning vehicle.
Beyond, a large shape, its general dimensions outlined by small amber, red, and blue lights, rumbled past the stall. Derec took her hand and drew her out. They watched the drone roll around the intersection by the stairwell and disappear. Quietly, they walked after it.
Suddenly everything was still. All the drones had stopped, apparently, their inspection done. Distantly, Ariel heard two sets of footsteps echoing.
She heard two people descending the metal steps. Below.
When it was silent, she tapped his shoulder and they continued up.
At Level Eight the stairs ended.
Derec shined his light. Most of the stalls here were empty. At the far end of the row was a bulky door.
Ariel stopped halfway. “Derec?”
“What?” He returned and shined his light into the stall.
Packing crates, about forty centimeters on a side, filled the space. They had a familiar look, and Ariel knelt down by the nearest and lifted it.
“About six or seven kilograms,” she estimated. She turned it over, but there were no markings on its dull grey surface.
“Hey,” Derec said. He aimed the light into the next stall. More crates. Two more stalls were filled with them.
A distant hissing began and Ariel snapped to her feet.
“We need to go now,” Derec said and hurried to the door. He studied the panel for a few seconds, then produced his wafer again. A minute later, the door lurched open and they stepped outside.
Ahead stretched a narrow corridor between two other structures.
The gangway deadended at a wall supporting a ladder that stretched up about fifteen meters. Debris gathered at the corners: grime-packed paper, indeterminate plastic shapes, accrued matter that crunched underfoot.
Ariel handed him the crate and went up first. At the top, her arms burned slightly from the exertion. She climbed onto the roof and looked down at Derec. He climbed one-handed, the crate tucked under his other arm. His breathing came heavy, too, and he gave a loud “Hoot” when he reached the top.
Sitting on the rooftop, Ariel looked up at the ceiling of D. C. high above, almost lost in a tangle of struts, roadways, and the reaching towers of surrounding buildings. One structure was being taken down or repaired, its skin tom aside to reveal the skeleton beneath. This was an old section of the city and it struck Ariel how empty it suddenly appeared to be. From here they saw and heard no one but the distant background hum of thousands of machines.
Her pulse raced. “Now where?”
Derec looked around. “Let’s see your map.”
She handed him the datum with the grid pulled up on the screen.
“Well... if we keep going south we should come to an elevated strip.”
“Which way is south?” she asked.
Derec pointed past her. She turned to look and saw a low wall, and beyond that, the cubes and polyhedrons of industrial structures. They had more climbing to do.
“Let me see that.” She looked at the map. The area still struck her as familiar, but she still could not see why. “Great,” she said. “So who do you think that was?”
“Maybe there was a security guard on the premises after all?”
“Took long enough to come look for us.”
Derec looked back the way they had come. “This was awfully easy. You’d have thought they’d change the ID codes for the ambulance.”
“Who would think to look for it?”
“Maybe. They seem to be pretty open so far.”
“Really? Then why try to kill Mia? For that matter, why put a fake body in the morgue?” Ariel asked.
“Two fake bodies, if what you told me is true.” He shook his head again. “And that doesn’t make a lot of sense. They shot Eliton once at Union Station and then twice more afterward? Why?”
“Maybe the replacement body didn’t want to die.”
“The second body... reconstructive surgery or a clone?”
“Either way. The same ambulance that picked him up did not deliver him to Reed.”
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“Seems less a cover-up than a confusion. Which might work even better.” Derec hefted the crate. “These probably won’t be there for long, whatever they are. As for the ambulance, after a point they probably just don’t care what anyone finds out. The cover-up is only short-term. The question remains, how much is being covered up and from who? Is it all Special Service or just the two agents that assumed control of the investigation? Who do we ask without alerting Cupra and Gambel–”
“They’d never manage it,” Ariel said. “Besides, could two agents on their own bar you from working on the RI?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.” Derec stood. “And how far is it really to the next strip?”
Ariel sighed and opened her datum. After studying it a few moments, she also got to her feet, pointed, and began walking.
Nineteen
MIA FORCED HERSELF to walk across the apartment again, her right leg aching in protest, pain stabbing up to her hip with each step. Sweat pooled at the base of her spine and around her neck.
“Please refrain from further exercise, Ms. Daventri,” R. Jennie asked her again. “You are clearly in distress. It is my duty–”
“I understand your duty, Jennie,” Mia said through clenched teeth. The wall was only a couple of meters away now. Then she had to turn around and make it back to the sofa. “I have to do this to build strength and recover. If I don’t, I will be confined to the sofa or bed longer than necessary.”
“You could also cause further injury to yourself and extend that period of confinement.”
Mia came up against the wall and paused, breathing hard. “Are you medically qualified to diagnose, Jennie?”
“I am certified for nursing and emergency medical administration.”
“But...?”
“I do not have the same qualifications as a medical specialist.”
Mia turned and let her back rest against the wall. The sofa was maybe four meters away. “Then kindly let me decide for myself how much I can manage.”
R. Jennie stood near the hallway that led to the bedrooms, motionless, arms at its sides, and yet somehow managed to convey doting concern. It looked briefly at Bogard standing near the apartment entrance, as if looking for support from a fellow robot. But R. Jennie had already tried to enlist Bogard’s aid in making Mia see reason and had been rebuffed. Bogard understood what Mia was doing; if it disapproved it kept that opinion to itself.
Mia launched herself toward the sofa. The pain made each step seem to take forever. She staggered the distance and fell onto the pillows.
She lay very still while her leg gradually stopped hurting. When she felt able to move again, it was only a dull throb, like a bad bruise. The painkillers in her system did not eliminate the aches completely, but seemed to work on a graduated system designed to keep her from overdoing physical activity. As long as she remained relatively motionless, the sensation was there but distant, like a strained muscle. The more she worked it, though, the more it hurt. She supposed that was a good thing, otherwise she might stress it to the point of reinjuring it.
Spacer thinking.
R. Jennie stood beside her now with a tray bearing a glass of cold water. Mia suppressed her irritation and took the glass.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Will you be stationery now?” R. Jennie asked.
“Yes. I think that’s enough for the time being.”
“Is there anything more I can do for you?”
“No, not yet. Has Ariel called in?”
“No, Ms. Daventri.”
“Call me Mia, please. Let me know as soon as she does.”
“Of course.”
R. Jennie returned to the kitchen. The last few days had been an education for Mia. She had never spent this much time around positronic robots and she was beginning to think that their banishment from Earth had less to do with any moral or ethical revulsion than with their constant fret ting.
The water felt wonderful going down her throat.
She straightened on the sofa and looked across the living room. It was a good twelve meters wide and she had managed ten laps, one side to the other. Yesterday she had only managed six. Good progress by any measure, but Mia was impatient with her slow healing. She needed to be mobile. Too much longer in this apartment, in the duty-bound company of R. Jennie, and she might change her mind about Eliton’s dream of bringing robots back.
Eliton. She wondered now about that dream. Even if they managed to discover who had engineered the assassinations, it seemed thoroughly dead, the true victim of the violence.
On the table before her the datum showed the signal notation WORKING. The algorithm had been running for nearly two hours now, searching for a series of connections which, if there, may only be tenuous, insubstantial coincidences. The tenuousness of her hunches had made her reluctant to even begin such a search, but some of the names on the lists generated in the last two days struck her as odd. She doubted anything would turn up, but for lack of any other ideas and a dependable leg it seemed worth the trouble. In her studies at the academy it had amazed her how many crimes in recorded history had been solved due to serendipity. All this training went for nothing if chance failed to manifest. The good investigator was one who knew how to take advantage of the coincidences that presented themselves.
For instance, the fact that not one of the DyNan Manual Industries people had been shot.
Going over and over the recordings from the newscams, Mia returned to that oddity time after time. She had had Bogard run trajectory analysis several times, and she could not explain away the curious fact that no shots had been directed at any member of the DyNan party. There had been only three executives and one security, but they had been right alongside Imbitek and Porvan-StandardMech, another company that built supplemental technologies like conveyors, lifters, tractors, and a variety of other moving equipment. Two people in the Imbitek group had been wounded and three people in the PSM group, plus one dead. In spite of being sandwiched between these two, Rega Loom’s people had survived untouched.
Unable to go to them to ask her questions, Mia worked the data.
Now that she was satisfied that none of the injuries and deaths had been accidental, that indeed the assassins had been good enough to hit exactly what they aimed at, she found herself trying to figure out what each victim meant in the scheme of cause and effect.
Humadros and Eliton represented the primary targets, obviously. Without them, the conference died, even though several parties worked valiantly to keep it alive. There would be a meeting, certainly, but how much could realistically be accomplished now? The bulk of Humadros’s legation had died. Those remaining were junior members, more diplomats-in-training and gophers than real negotiators. Of course, there was the anomaly of Ariel’s acquaintance, Tro Aspil, being both dead and en route back to Aurora, but even he had not been a significant member of the legation, not in the larger schema.
All of Eliton’s security people.
Including her.
Why? Did they represent the only honest group within Special Service? As easy as it was to think that way, it was unlikely. But Mattu and Gel and Mia were the most likely to figure out the inconsistencies in the cover-up. It had been a matter of expedience to close off that avenue of trouble immediately. They had missed Mia in the Gallery, possibly the only shot that had gone wild.
Or maybe not. Maybe they had wanted her alive to frame, along with Bogard. Easy enough to do.
Then why the attack on the hospital? Second thoughts? Correcting a mistake?
Safer to believe that she was a target all along.
Eliton’s staff–two people–were dead. Along with five members of Humadros’s team killed, that totalled thirteen. One dead in the PSM party. Fourteen. The other seven?
Crol Dushek, head of the Solarian Legation, and two of his aides. Seventeen. The three Aurorans from the embassy here. Twenty.
The last one still seemed anomalous: a woman named Viansa Risher, who at f
irst had no apparent reason to be on the platform. She had been a member of the Settler’s Transport Committee, a division of the Settler’s Coalition, a bureaucrat with no direct connection to anyone else. It looked like a token invitation.
When Mia called up newsnet articles, though, she discovered that Risher’s presence had been significant indeed. The Settler Worlds had demanded a seat at the table from the first announcement of the conference and had been consistently ignored by both Terran and Spacer governments. Risher was the Settler Coalition’s spokesperson on Earth and had made a good case for inclusion. Trade relations between Spacer Worlds and Earth did potentially impact Settler Worlds, and they certainly had an interest in the piracy issue since everyone privately believed that the pirates were Settlers or at least used a Settler world as a base. The exclusion made little sense and none of the reasons given had been convincing, Finally, in the last month, Eliton’s office issued an invitation to Risher and the conference committee certified her for inclusion. But only her.
Twenty-one officially dead (or twenty, depending on Eliton’s actual status). Thirty-three wounded. Fifty-five actual shots fired. Who among the thirty-three had they intended to kill?
And why no one in the DyNan Manual Industries party?
The screen on her datum continued to show WORKING.. Mia finished her water, staring at it, waiting.
Ariel’s com registered another call. Mia hobbled over and sat down. She had scrolled through the growing list of messages, worried. Three from Ambassador Setaris, two from Delegate Korolin, five from her aide, Hofton, one from Senator Taprin...
This one was from Coren Lanra, the security for the DyNan group.
Mia killed the visual and pressed ACCEPT.
“Ariel Burgess.”
“Oh, Ms. Burgess.” Lanra’s voice was nasal and a little rough. “I tried your office already but they told me you weren’t in–”