She strolled down row three, reading numbers. The drawers were stacked six high. Somewhere around here, Derec thought, there must be a lifter platform. But "D" was at shoulder height. Ariel stared at the plain grey square, the number in black in the center.
Derec almost reached for the button. Ariel's hand shot out and stabbed it. She stepped back as the drawer ex tended.
The naked body lay beneath a transparent canopy. It looked artificial, skin the wrong color, eyes closed too tightly, hair too neat and stiff. A wound puckered halfway down the neck.
"It's Tro," Ariel said, her voice small and controlled.
"Then who took his flight back to Aurora?"
"I don't know." She pressed the button and the drawer withdrew, back into its slot. She gazed at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then turned away. "What other discrepancies are there?"
She went back to the datum where the manifest remained on the screen.
"What the…" she hissed.
Derec looked over her shoulder.
"Mia Daventri," he read. "But-"
"All the bodies from Union Station are here. That's what I meant when I said they stored them all together."
"Mia wasn't killed at Union Station."
"She's part of the same event, it just took a few more hours to kill her." She frowned. "There are six bodies I don't recognize from the casualty lists."
Derec skimmed the names she pointed out. Rimmer, Iklan, Cutchin, Milmor, Rotison, and Wollin. "The assassins?"
"It doesn't say, does it?" She pulled a portable datum from her jacket and entered the names and the tracking numbers assigned by the morgue. There was no other information.
Derec looked self-consciously back at the entrance. "Somehow I would expect guards or… something…"
"No one comes to the morgue except those who absolutely have to. What would they be defending? Who would steal a corpse?"
"Still…"
Ariel nodded. "It feels wrong, though, doesn't it?"
Derec tapped the screen on Mia Daventri's name. "It is wrong."
Ariel touched her lips with a straight finger. "Let's take a look, shall we?"
Mia's drawer slid out, revealing a badly charred skeleton. Derec met Ariel's eyes over the top of the canopy and saw her wondering the same thing: Who?
Eliton's drawer was in the next aisle. Derec pressed the contact, his heart racing as it emerged. Upon seeing Eliton, he felt oddly relieved.
The features matched, but lacked the vitality Derec recalled. The shell gave no hint of the energy Eliton possessed and displayed, nothing of his passions. Three puckered mounds traced a line from his left shoulder to his sternum.
"He looks…"
"Yes," Ariel said. "Death takes everything." She frowned and did a slow examination down the corpse's entire length.
"What?" Derec asked.
"I… nothing." She closed the drawer.
"Humadros?"
Ariel drew a deep breath, then shook her head.
"We should verify them all," Derec said. He raised his eyes upward slightly.
She caught his meaning and nodded. "All right. Let's finish." Derec experienced a profound sense of relief when the limo pulled away from the morgue. He shrugged out of the too-tight jacket and pulled his own back on. Ariel gazed out her window, a frown pulling a crease into the space above her nose.
"Something's bothering you," Derec said.
"Brilliant. How long did it take you to deduce that?"
"Sarcasm. I didn't think you cared anymore."
Instead of the sharp comeback he expected, she said, "None of this is making sense. The problem is, I can't see how it's not."
"Such as?''
"If Tro is dead in the morgue, then who took his seat on the shuttle?"
"Clones?"
Ariel made a face. "Except for some very limited organ regrowth, cloning is completely illegal on Earth. They're more frightened of that than robots."
"But we're not talking legal here, are we?"
Ariel shrugged but did not reply.
"Unless it's just a glitch," Derec said. "The ticket was bought, the name was never deleted, the seat stayed reserved. This has all happened fast."
"We can check that. Car, take us to Union Station."
"Yes, Ambassador," the car replied flatly.
"Then," Ariel continued, "the burned corpse under Mia's name."
"Yes… that wouldn't have been possible even if she had died. I saw the room. Everything in it was vaporized."
"How come the whole facility didn't go up?"
"Contained explosion, what they call a 'bubble nuke. ' Stasis fields and so forth. Very sophisticated, very expensive."
"Parapoyos?"
Derec shrugged. "The trouble with Kynig Parapoyos, as I understand it, is that he's everywhere. Might as well blame a devil or some other supernatural force. But, yes, something like that would be in his line. Very thorough, too. Agent Sathen told me that nothing was recoverable."
"Sathen?"
"Do you know him?"
"I spoke to him yesterday. He was very uncooperative. But not willingly. It seemed to me like he'd been given orders not to talk about the situation."
"Hmm. He seemed open to me, but I spoke to him just after it happened. Anyway, there would be no corpse, even if Mia hadn't got out."
"So that body-" Ariel began.
"-whoever it might be-"
"-wasn't just placed there so that there could be a body-"
"-it was placed to contradict the intensity of the blast-"
"-and keep anyone from wondering about the source."
"Exactly."
Ariel looked at him. "And Sathen?"
"Who could silence him?"
"His own people."
"Which is just what your friend Mia suspects."
"I talked to the nurse who was on duty that night. She told me two other agents came in and Sathen got into an argument with them."
"Did she remember their names?"
"One of them. Cupra."
Derec laughed sharply. "The other one is Agent Gambel. "
"You know them?"
"They're the pair who threw me out of Union Station. They had all the right documents. When I checked, their authority was verified. I couldn't argue."
"But you kept the copy of the RI. "
"What copy?"
Ariel chuckled, shaking her head. "Derec, Derec, Derec… you are a naughty boy."
Derec smiled. "I knew you would appreciate my finer qualities."
"The question is, why would the same two agents show up at the medical facility Mia was in?"
"They've taken charge of the entire investigation. My guess would be that they needed to debrief her."
"And instead they try to kill her."
"That's something of a leap, don't you think?"
"Is it?" Ariel asked.
"Well, it could have been Bok Golner."
"Someone would have had to set it up for him."
They rode in silence for a time. Derec watched the urbanscape pass, mulling over the conclusions hovering just out of reach. He agreed with Ariel's guess about Cupra and Gambel, but there was no more than coincidence on which to base it. Even with Mia's assertion that there had to be a Special Service component to the entire affair, Derec wanted something concrete before he embraced the belief that Earth's own security people were responsible for what amounted to the worst diplomatic catastrophe of the decade, perhaps the century.
"Ambassador," the limo suddenly said, "this unit is being followed."
Ariel leaned forward. "Show me."
The screen mounted between the seats facing them winked on, displaying the rear view. The limo made a right turn and a few moments after, another transport made the same turn.
"Identify," Ariel said.
"No registration available," the limo said.