Mirage (isaac asimov's robot mystery)

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  "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 cam
e 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.

  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 anymore."

  "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.