Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

“I suppose…”

Sid held a gloved finger to his lips.

A now worried Ansetal nodded. Sid heard a female giggle from somewhere behind the ambulance, and managed to suppress a frown. “You’ll do okay, Kenny. Just keep everything aboveboard and official. Wait for your lawyer. That’s the way to go.”

Ansetal mouthed: “Thank you.”

Sid murmured instructions to his e-i, clearing the paramedic crew to leave the crime scene, then went back to Kraemer. “I’ve authorized Ansetal’s release to the hospital. Go with him to take a statement.”

“Aye, I’ll get to it.”

“Give him time to get some treatment and recover. That was a nasty pounding he got there.” He produced a friendly smile. “It will keep you off the street for a while, too.”

“Appreciate that, man.”

“Then tomorrow I’ll need you to pull all the local mesh sensor memories.” He gestured around at the buildings. The brickwork and concrete would be covered in smartdust, some of which might have escaped degradation from the snow. “Forward them to my case file. He has insurance, so we can probably drag a budget from the company to run a track on the felons.”

“Right you are, man.”

Sid almost smiled—the young constable’s Geordie accent was nearly as thick as Ian’s. The paramedics closed the ambulance doors, firing up the siren as they pulled away. Ian was still talking to the remaining witnesses. Both of them young and female, Sid noticed without the slightest surprise. He’d been partnered with Ian for two years now—they knew each other better than brothers. As far as Ian was concerned the police force was simply the perfect vocation to legitimately meet girls. Dealing with actual criminals came in a very poor second. With not a little envy, Sid acknowledged Ian was very good at his chosen profession. A twenty-eight-year-old gym fanatic who spent his entire salary on good clothes and grooming, he knew every line in the file.

Both “witnesses” were hanging on to his every word as Sid went over to them. Unlike the other onlookers who were now walking away, they had their coats open down the front, showing off their best nightclub dresses—what there was of them. Sid just knew he was getting old when all he could think was how cold the poor things must be. “Anything useful in those statements, Detective?” he asked loudly.

Ian turned and gave him a derisory stare. “Aye, sorry about this, ladies, my boss is a being a pain again. But what can you do?”

They both giggled at how brave he was confronting his superior so directly, how confident and capable. Sid rolled his eyes. “Just get in the car, man. We’re done here.”

Ian’s voice lowered an octave or two. “I will be calling both of you for vital information. Like which is your favorite club, and when you’re going there again.”

Sid closed his ears to further outbreaks of inane giggling.

It was wonderfully warm inside the car. The bioil fuel cell produced a lot of surplus heat, which the aircon chewed hungrily to redistribute evenly from the vents. Sid unzipped his jacket as he muttered instructions to his e-i, opening a new case file on the mugging. A sub-display on the bottom of his iris smartcell grid showed the file data building up.

“Oh yeah!” a delighted Ian said as he settled back into the passenger seat. “I’m in there, man. Did you see those lassies? Up for it they were, both of them.”

“Our medical insurance doesn’t provide unlimited penicillin, you know.”

Ian chuckled. “You know what the world’s greatest oxymoron is?”

“Happily married,” Sid said wearily.

“In one, pal. In one.”

“The case is a washout. He was mugged by Lork Zai—two of him.”

“Crap on it, that man doesn’t half get about. Got to be the most popular identity mask there is right now.”

Sid checked the time display. It was eleven thirty-eight. Their shift ended at midnight. “We’ll do one more circuit then park it.” Newcastle’s central police station on Market Street was barely four hundred meters away, but it wouldn’t look good to head straight home from an incident with another twenty minutes left on the clock. Some city accountant would fuss about that.

“What did they take?” Ian asked.

“An i-3800.”

“Nice bit of kit. That’ll be a secondary down the Last Mile by lunchtime, mind.”

“Could be,” Sid admitted. Most of the city’s petty crimes these days were committed by desperate, impoverished refugees on their way to St. Libra through the gateway. In the morning they’d be moving through the Last Mile, looking to barter whatever kit they’d acquired during the night along that huge sprawl of unregulated market leading up to the gateway, where everything you could ever possibly need to begin a new life on a fresh world was for sale. Such incidents were responsible for Newcastle’s permanently dismal solved crimes rating: Within hours of their crime spree the felons had run off to another world far beyond the reach of the city police.

Sid reversed the car away from the curb. His iris smartcells flashed up green text in his grid, a message backed up by an identical readout on the windshield. His aural smartcells also started announcing the incident.

“A two-oh-five?” Ian said incredulously. “Man, we’ve only got twenty minutes to go. They cannot do that.”

Sid closed his eyes for a moment—not that it banished the green text. He knew the night had been going too well, with just a few minor incidents in the whole six hours. Now this, a two-oh-five: a body discovered in suspicious circumstances. The only suspicious thing here was the timing—along with the location: down on Quayside by the old Gateshead Millennium Bridge, half a kilometer away. According to the alert’s text, the river police were only just confirming it was a body they were hauling from the water. Somebody somewhere was keen to get the incident logged fast. And he was the closest senior officer on patrol. “Bastards,” he grunted.

“Welcome back, you,” Ian agreed.

Sid activated the strobes and siren, then told his e-i to authorize a clean route with the city’s traffic management AI. Not that there was much traffic left now, mostly taxis hauling overtoxed revelers back home.

It might have been a short drive, but it was down Dean Street—a steep, sloping road underneath the ancient rail and road arches, can-yoned by dark stone walls with blank windows—which took them down to the riverfront. As such, the car’s auto struggled to keep them from slipping on the treacherous ice. Twice they started to fishtail before countertorque was applied and the snow tires managed to grip. At the bottom, the tall buildings opened up to a broad road junction where the landmark Tyne Bridge cut across the water high above. The big splash of spotlights illuminating its arched iron structure was almost lost in the swirl of snow, producing a weird crescent-shaped smear of luminosity hanging weightlessly in the air overhead. Sid steered carefully past the broad stone support pillar and headed down the deserted Quayside road.

“This is taking the piss a bit, isn’t it?” Ian asked as they drove past the glass-and-pillar façade of the Court of Justice. “This close and all?”

“Suspicious doesn’t mean deliberate,” Sid reminded him. “And this is a bad night.” He jabbed a finger at the dark river on the other side of the car. “You fall in there tonight, you die. Fast.”

They took the right-hand fork after the government building. This stretch of pedestrianized road hadn’t seen a snowplow since the middle of the afternoon. Radar showed the snow on the ground was now over ten centimeters thick, with a solid sheet of ice below that. Sid reduced their speed to a crawl. Up ahead, the twin arches of the Millennium Bridge curved across the river with the elegance of a swan’s neck—the recently refurbished pearl-white surface of the upper arch glowing dimly under the shifting rainbow lights that illuminated it. Strobes on the roof of two patrol cars and a coroner’s van flickered through the snow. Sid pulled in behind them.