Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

“What about school?” Zara protested. “All my friends are there. I don’t want to leave.”

“You’ll stay at the same school,” Sid assured her. It was a private one, after all, which ate huge chunks out of his salary, and was the main reason he’d cultivated supplementary revenue streams income despite the risks. But nobody sent their kids to public schools if they could afford an alternative.

“Actually I found one last night,” Jacinta said. “I was reviewing estate agent files.”

“Really?” It was news to Sid. He sipped at a mug of coffee. The smartcells in his mouth detected the caffeine and flashed up a diet intake warning. It was his most sincere New Year resolution to eat better and do more exercise. But he’d barely had any sleep… You have to be realistic about such things. He told his e-i to cancel the warning, spooning an extra sugar into the mug in an act of petulant defiance.

“In Jesmond.”

“Jesmond’s nice,” Will said admiringly. “Sun Tu and Hinny live there.”

“Jesmond’s expensive,” Sid said.

“You gets what you pays for,” Jacinta replied.

Sid took the porridge off the hob and ladled it into the bowls. “True.”

“So can I call the agent?” Jacinta asked.

“Sure, why not.” They could afford it—he’d stacked up a lot of money in his secondary account over the past few years. Now there was just the problem of how they used it to buy somewhere else without alerting the Tax Bureau. The reason they hadn’t moved before Christmas was because of the attention it would have focused on him. Buying a house while he was on the reduced salary of a suspension would have triggered a host of Tax Bureau monitor programs.

“Mum,” Will pleaded. “Does it have a proper zone room?”

“Yes, it has a proper zone room.”

“Cool!”

“What about en suites?” Zara asked urgently.

“Five bedrooms, two en suites, one family bathroom.”

Zara grinned contentedly to herself as she started to stir strawberry jam into her porridge. Just for a moment his family was happy and quiet; Sid felt he ought to put that in some kind of log. Dawn was bringing a harsh gray light to the misted-up kitchen window. It had stopped snowing. He began to have a good feeling about how the day was shaping up.

“If we’re moving to a bigger house, does that mean we can have a puppy now?” Will asked.

Newcastle’s central police station was a big glass-and-stone cube built in 2068, an impressive civic structure to reflect the newfound wealth that was benefiting the whole city as the bioil that flowed through the gateway increased on a near-daily basis. It had replaced the older station that had stood on the corner of Market Street and Pilgrim Street, providing all the facilities a modern police force could possibly want—if only it had the money to operate them.

The underground garage had four levels, capable of holding staff cars and 150 official vehicles from mobile incident control rooms to patrol cars, prisoner vans to fast-pursuit cars and smartdust dispenser trucks. A clear victory for design optimism over real-world practicality. Sid had never even seen anyone use the lowest level in all his fifteen years in Newcastle; the police simply didn’t have that kind of fleet.

Every winter in the city, some councilor raised the idea of heating the roads Scandinavian-style to get rid of the snow and ice—at least in the center of Newcastle—and each year it was deferred to an appraisal committee. Instead, long-term interests prevailed; low-wage crews and big snowplows hit the roads and pavements on Monday morning, attempting to clear the weekend’s snow for the armada of office workers heading in to the center. They’d made a reasonable job leading up to the station’s ramps; Sid drove his four-year-old Toyota Dayon down into the Market Street garage without worrying about sliding. He’d seen only two shunts on the way in, and it’d taken an acceptable fifteen minutes.

It was coming up on twenty past eight by the time he made it up to the third floor where the serious case offices were situated. The 2North murder had been assigned Office3, one of the larger ones, with two rows of zone console desks that could sit up to twelve specialist network operatives, a couple of zone cubicles, and five hi-rez, floor-to-ceiling wallscreens; one side was partitioned off into four private offices. Thermal exchange climate vents rattled as they produced a stream of air at a temperature three degrees below comfortable, the blue-gray carpet was worn and stained, the furniture was ten years old, but on the plus side the network systems had all been upgraded last year. Sid knew that was what really counted; clearly O’Rouke knew it as well. Only five of the third-floor offices had been modernized in the last four years.

Detective Dobson was leading the night-shift team, which consisted of three operatives establishing the procedures Sid had agreed on with her at the shift handover last night. She acknowledged him with a quick nod and beckoned him into one of the glass-walled side offices.

“Basic datawork is laid out,” she told him. “We’ve been downloading riverside surveillance mesh memories since five this morning. I’ve gone all the way upstream to the A1 bridge, and taken it two streets back on both sides.”

“Thanks. How far is it to the bridge?”

“Close on seven and a half kilometers, but I’ve included the corresponding road macromesh so you can observe the vehicle traffic. That’s a lot of memory.” She hesitated before lowering her voice. “There are some gaps.”

“Bound to be with this kind of snow.”

“Maybe. See what you think when you review it.”

“Hoookay. Do we have an identity yet?”

She gave him a woeful glance. “I think it could be a North.”

“Smartarse. Which one? Actually, do we even know how many there are?”

“It’s a difficult figure to find. Northumberland Interstellar isn’t exactly forthcoming about how many times Augustine has been a daddy.”

“Most of the 2s were born to surrogate mothers, weren’t they? Those kids were popped out just to boost NI’s management numbers.”

“Depends which non-licensed site loaded with disgraceful muckraking gossip you access. But as best as I could find, there’s just under a hundred of them. More 3s, mind; they’re frisky boys, our Norths. But we’re not riding an exponential curve here, thank God. The 2s aren’t big breeders. Why would you, when you know your son’s going to be a few neurons short of a headful? Shame the 3s don’t have that much sense; and there are a lot of sharp little gold diggers out there ready to trap a 3 and collect their palimony, so we’ve no idea about how many 4s are wandering around loose.”

“Best guess?”

“Could be up to three hundred and fifty. I’m not guaranteeing that, mind.”

“And no one’s called this one in missing?”

“He’s been dead for eleven hours minimum now. Early days. Someone will start asking before lunch.”

Sid glanced back out into the office where Ian had just arrived and was chatting with the night shift. “Have the media found out?”

“No. O’Rouke had two techs load monitor programs into the station network as we were setting up. He spoke to all of us direct about what he’d do if anyone leaked it. I think we’re secure so far.”

“That’s not going to last. But thanks for keeping it under wraps.”

“My pleasure. I’ll hand over now.”

“Sure.” Sid put his hand above the zone console’s biometric pad and told his e-i to log him in to the case. The station network acknowledged his request. The desk systems in the office switched to his personalized programs in their customized layout. “Is there a pool?” he asked casually.