Mark Tiedemann - Mirage

"Yes," Mia said quietly. "A few of us returned fire. We did kill three of them, but I'd wager that they must have been wearing diffusion harnesses to divert the energy. But mainly we shot the projections."

"But if they were just projections-"

"The bolts went through and struck bystanders. Several of the injured among the spectators were from our weapons."

Ariel looked at Mia. Her eyes were closed and she looked pale. The side of her jaw worked delicately, angrily. Clearly the realization that she may have harmed or killed innocent people hurt in ways Ariel found hard to imagine. She waited while Mia worked through the spasm of conscience.

Finally, Mia 's eyes opened. "Interestingly enough, we found one major discrepancy in these numbers. It seems clear that the intention was to kill all fifty-three of the people hit. Those who lived survived by sheer luck. But one of those fifty-three was not Senator Eliton."

"Not…?"

Mia looked at Bogard. "Bogard?"

"There is no correlation between the injury manifested in any of the recordings and a shot from the attackers," the robot said. "All of fifty-three shots fired are accounted for among the casualties, one miss is accounted for by Agent Daventri, leaving one stray shot which from appearances was fired in the direction of Senator Eliton, but which missed."

"Eliton was a casualty, though," Ariel said.

"That cannot now be verified," Bogard said. "No actual shot struck him. Though he appears injured, there is no correlation that I can determine with an assassin's bullet. I am not, therefore, counting him as one of the casualties."

"The recording shows a wound," Ariel said. "I saw his body. He had-"

Ariel stopped, remembering the corpse in the stasis tube. She thought about it carefully, questioning the memory, but it was accurate.

"The body I saw had three wounds," she noted.

Mia frowned. "These people, whoever they are, exhibited tremendous skill as marksmen. One shot, one wound. That's consistent with the idea that they're ex-military, trained by a man who was very good at killing, which Bok Golner apparently was. As far as I can determine, they never wasted a second shot on anyone. Bogard can't find the shot-the shot, mind you-that killed Senator Eliton, and according to the recordings he was hit only once. Are you sure you saw three wounds?"

"Absolutely. One here-" Ariel touched her left shoulder "-here-" her sternum "-and here." Her right side just below the ribs. She shook her head. "It was Eliton, though…"

"Uh-huh. The same way maybe that the skeleton you saw was me?"

Ariel blew out a breath. "Let's go through this again. Bogard, walk me through the whole scenario. Jennie, make more coffee." She looked wryly at Mia. "I'm going to pay for this at work later." Dawn was minutes away. The horizon was already lightening. Ariel stared at it, seeing it and not seeing it, her mind filled with the details of trajectories and impacts and target possibilities and invitation lists and all the minutiae of a disaster. The subetheric was on, the volume low, ignored, while she tried to let calm of some sort settle through her mind. Mia dozed on the sofa.

Too much information, she had told Derec, was information composed mostly of noise, meaningless and irrelevant. Now she wondered if there could be too much worthwhile data. Nothing they had developed in the last few hours could be dismissed as irrelevant.

Taking out Ambassador Humadros and her immediate staff, Senator Eliton and his aides, and as many other important delegates as possible had at first been an obvious goal of the assault. But now Ariel was not so sure. Ambassador Chassik had escape uninjured, though two of his staff had not. Killing Setaris's aides seemed pointless, as neither of them, nor Setaris, were to have any significant role at the conference. Nor did killing Eliton's security team make much sense, as they really knew nothing.

The weapons had been handmade. Ancient machines-only museum samples of the originals remained-but someone had gone to the trouble of building new ones. Nothing much had been said about them so far on any of the newsnets. Old, obsolete perhaps, but terribly effective, obscenely so given that the projectiles could potentially go through a body and injure someone else behind the target. Because of the angle and other factors, that had not happened this time, but Mia had pointed out that if nine of these weapons existed, there was every reason to believe that there were many more of them, somewhere.

Mia had tracked the names of the six unknown bodies in the morgue through civic records, using Ariel's authority to access the files. Factory workers, an office clerk, two unemployed and on civic assistance. The only thing she had found that bound them together was their affiliation with OSMA-Order of the Supremacy of Man Again, otherwise known as Managins. Mia thought there could be something else in their backgrounds, but it would take time to get at it. Mia could only assume that these were the six assassins who had not escaped, and three of them should not be dead. They had been in Service custody. One of them had been Lemus Milmor.

The invitee lists troubled Ariel the most. If a copy had gotten out, it could only have done so from a few sources. Eliton had had a copy, but so had Setaris and, presumably, Chassik. Special Service had a list since Bogard had it. The list had been finalized only ten days earlier. Time for a leak, certainly, but it would still have had to be a leak from one of those sources. Anyone else? Had any of the industrialists present possessed a copy? There was no way to tell. Somehow the Managins had gotten it and a team of assassins had been assigned targets. Was there anything about the target list that could give a hint? Perhaps, but Ariel was exhausted, and she had embassy work to do today.

But she could not sleep. Her head buzzed with too many details.

She glanced at the subetheric and started to see Jonis on the screen. She grabbed the remote and turned up the sound.

"-into it as thoroughly as humanly possible," he was saying, "but so far I'm told we have no leads."

"What about the captured gunmen?" a reporter out of the picture asked. "Has their interrogation produced any tangible results?"

Jonis looked embarrassed. "Frankly, we won't get anything from them. Apparently, they were inadvertently killed while in the process of being apprehended and arrested."

"Killed? By whom? Special Service agents?"

"No, not exactly. I, uh, haven't been given the full details, it's all very classified at the moment, but the, uh, robot assigned to Senator Eliton's security detail may have had something to do with it."

"You mean the same robot that failed to protect Senator Eliton and later exploded, killing the last surviving member of his security team?"

"Uh, yes, that robot. It may have exerted excessive force in the apprehension of the, uh, suspects. It's being looked into."

Ariel glanced over at Mia and saw her friend staring fixedly at the screen, her entire body rigid with attention.

"This doesn't say very much of Senator Eliton's interests in promoting the reintroduction of robots on Earth," the reporter said.

"That may be premature," Jonis said. Still, he looked as if he agreed with the assessment. "We'll have to wait for all the facts and assessments before making a final judgement. I don't want to say anything to belittle Clar's-Senator Eliton's-beliefs."

"Of course. If I may ask-"

"That's enough for now. I have to get to my committee."

"But Senator-"

Ariel turned the subetheric off.

"Shit," she muttered,

"Amen," Mia said.

Ariel made herself stand. She had to call someone. By the time she reached her comline, she decided that it should be Derec.