Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

Abner and Ari shared a troubled glance. It was eerie seeing the same features registering identical expressions. “Not even a possibility,” Ari admitted.

“Okay. How far are you through the list? I assume you have a list, that you do know how many of you there are.”

“We know. There are three hundred and thirty-two of us A’s. We’ve already covered sixty percent with personal calls to each of them to make completely sure.”

“A’s?” Sid asked warily.

“You know the original three brothers split up back in 2087?” Abner said. “Well, all the 2’s and 3’s, even the 4’s, stuck by their tribal father—not that you heard me put it like that. All us A’s—Augustine’s offspring—stayed here in Newcastle or Highcastle on St. Libra, either to support Northumberland Interstellar or, like me and Ari, to build a life close by. The B’s and C’s went with their respective fathers to Abellia and Jupiter. One of them may have been visiting Newcastle on Friday; we don’t know yet. It’s not like they’re forbidden ever to return, the split wasn’t a divorce, and we do have plenty of contact with the family on Abellia. There’s even the occasional visit from a Jupiter cousin when a ferry ship orbits.”

“Oh Jesus,” Sid muttered. “How many total?”

“We’re not sure,” Abner admitted. “I’ve been putting in some calls all morning. Brinkelle’s people have been helpful to a degree. But Jupiter… Augustine himself will have to ask that question for us.”

“Crap on it!” Sid had never considered that it could be anyone other than one of Augustine’s descendants. No wonder the Security Commission was interested. “The coroner took some samples to run a genetic scan with. It was Aldred’s idea, he said they’d be able to tell if it was a 2 or 3 or 4.”

“According to the level of transcription breaks in the genome, yes,” Ari said. “Good call. Especially if he was a 2. We tend to be more connected than our offspring.”

“Will the genetic read be able to tell if he was an A or B or C?” Sid asked.

“No. It only shows how far removed from Kane he is, not which branch of the family he was born to.”

“Okay. The Beijing Genomics Institute is running it now, so the sequencing results should be in by midafternoon.”

“That’ll really help us narrow the search,” Abner assured him. “Once we know that for certain, it won’t take much longer.”

“And if he was a C?” Sid asked.

“I’m not aware of any C’s on Earth right now.”

“As soon as you know…”

“Yes, boss.”

Sid sat at the spare zone console next to Ian. “Any progress?” he inquired.

“Aye, man; I ran the party boat memories myself. Facial feature recognition software picked three with a North going into them in the last week. It also counted them out again. He wasn’t dumped over the side.”

“You reviewed a whole week? That’s devotion to duty. Well done.”

“Aye, well, none of us can afford to bollix this up, now can we?”

“Nice theory,” Sid agreed. “Come on, let’s find the possible dump points into the Tyne. Show that specialist tit how useless he is at doing our job.”

Two network technicians arrived and began installing a dedicated memory core into Office3’s network. “Brand new,” the lead tech announced as he plugged the football-sized device into the office cells. “You guys must have a budget and a half for this case.”

All the data they’d accumulated so far was extracted from the station network and dumped inside the globe. Once the files were transferred, the techs set about eliminating any ghost copies left in the network’s redundancy caches. Diode filter programs were loaded, preventing any data from leaving the core’s dedicated zone consoles in Office3.

“Best we’ve got,” Sid was told. “The only way anyone gets a look at those files now is if they come in here and physically tear the core out.”

An hour later Sid was standing in the office’s largest zone booth, a translucent cylinder three meters in diameter, with ring projectors on the floor and ceiling. Eva was outside, running the synchronized image. The hologram that materialized around Sid was poor quality compared with the professional shows he was used to immersing in at home. It was to be expected. This was a composite from the multitude of smartdust meshes along the river, which were different brands, different ages, different resolution levels, and downloading into different memory formats. Despite the weird color static, which skipped about him like iridescent rain, and the blurred outlines of anything that moved, he stood on the south shore below the curving glass façade of the Sage. Magnification was level one. “Take the falling snow out, please,” he asked Eva.

Oddly, the image degraded slightly as the snow cleared away, leaving air that had somehow lost its full transparency. “Best I can do,” Eva said.

“That’s good, it’s what I need,” he assured her. Now he could see directly across the Tyne to the Court of Justice. A single digital display hovering in midair told him it was fifteen hundred hours on Sunday. “Take me up to twenty-one hundred hours and pause.”

Color drained out of the zone as the digits accelerated, leaving the snow-cloaked buildings illuminated by weak, green-tinged streetlighting. Cars on the main roads were stationary, their headlight beams fixed.

Sid turned until he was facing straight along the southern road. Directly ahead of him streetlights produced pools of light that stretched away into the distance, each one separate from its neighbors. He brought both arms up and beckoned with closed fingers. The image began to slide past, taking him toward the Tyne Bridge. There was an empty slice just before he reached the support, as if a wedge of interplanetary space had fallen from the sky to lie across the road. He held his hands out, palms flat. The image halted. He circled an upraised finger, and everything rotated around him. “Tag this: gap one. It’s about a meter and a half wide. Extends across the road and to the embankment wall.” He looked up at the concrete, which was topped by a railed footpath before the ground continued to rise as a steep terracing of grass and overgrown ornamental trees.

“If anyone’s trying to drag our North along that, they’re going to have to be very accurate,” Ian’s voice announced.

“Something happened to the smartdust on the bridge support,” Eva said. “Probably pigeon crap—they do like our bridges. There’s been no mesh there since last winter—city hasn’t gotten around to replacing the motes. This gap wasn’t set up for the murder.”

“They’d have to get the body to the gap,” Ian said. “If we’re looking for a ten o’clock disposal, there were only eight cars went along that stretch of road between nine thirty and ten past ten. None of them stopped.”

“Show me,” Sid told them. Eva moved the simulation ahead half an hour. The cars swept along the road, flowing over and around him as he stood and watched. They were all moving slowly—the compacted snow was eight centimeters thick, after all—but not slowly enough to dump a body into the gap. “Okay,” he told them. “Take it back to twenty-one hundred hours. Let’s find the next gap.”

Traffic management assigned the car an emergency vehicle priority, and cars and lorries parted smoothly to allow Colonel (HDA, Alien Intelligence Agency) Vance Elston direct access to the autobahn’s central reserved lane. This close to the gateway the commercial and private traffic was slowing up anyway, forming an orderly crawl-queue along the three lanes that led back to Earth. Now that he had a clear route, he floored the accelerator until he was doing a steady 160 kph. Beside the near-stationary cars, the sense of speed was exaggerated; it was almost thrilling, the kind of rush a boy racer sought in a boosted car. Vance smiled at the idea. At forty-seven he was a long way beyond that kind of behavior, though even with his service and doctrinal instilled discipline something about pure speed never failed to do it for the male psyche.