Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton

the others.”
    “Okay, thanks, good work. I will sort getting forensics out there to clear them. So, we still need our two basics: name and crime location. Once we have them we can work our magic and plot his time line. Now, I’m expecting friend or family or workplace to call him in as missing soon enough, but I still want us to be checking. Abner and Ari, that’s you to start with. The rest of you, I want all the riverside mesh memories confirmed then indexed on a map zone so we can see our field of coverage. It was high tide at twenty-one forty-two hours last night, so begin with that as the dump time, as the body had to have been washed downstream. We’ll narrow it down after the autopsy, but what I want to know is last night’s blind spots in the mesh surveillance. This had purpose behind it—dumping the body was deliberate—and whoever did it isn’t going to be waving at the smartdust.”
    Sid was pleased to see the way they just got on with it. The team was competent. The night shift handed over codes and began organizing data without any time spent on bullshit office who’s-doing-what, I-want-this. They just each took a section of river, and began indexing the mesh memories.
    After verifying the yachts were still in place and being watched by the river police, Sid called Osborne at Northern Forensics and arranged for each boat to be inspected. They were his preferred company, well equipped with decent personnel—
    and his secondary got a cash deposit each time he threw work their way. The call was official, logged and recorded by the police network, so Osborne kept personal chat to a minimum, but he was quick to prioritize the case after Sid showed him the assigned financial rating. He was promised that a team for the boats would be at Tynemouth within an hour.
    “Three teams,” Sid said. “One for each boat.”
    Osborne took a moment to absorb that. “It’s Monday morning.”
    “If you can’t give me what I need, I’ll take the contract to a company that can. I need this going quickly and effectively.”
    “Of course, I’ll see to it personally. Three teams it is.”
    “I’m sending an officer and three agency constables with each team in case they find any blood spill. They’ll be at Tynemouth in thirty minutes; make sure your people are there in time.” He shouldn’t have grinned at the blank screen after Osborne’s pained expression faded to black, but if you couldn’t act like a prima donna bitch on this one, then when could you?
    With the first round of forensics sorted, Sid started helping with the surveillance logs. He sat at one of the spare zone consoles and the slim rectangular screen immediately curved toward him with an aquatic motion, forming a semicircle around his head. Its projection interfaced with his iris smartcells, immersing him in a perfect holographic display, resembling a miniature zone. When he glanced down, his hands were hovering in the keyspace, a cube of air above the desk’s keyboard. His personal operating topography materialized, icons with cog-like protrusions that he could spin and turn in three dimensions with an easy fingertip flip.
    He took a section of the northern riverbank between the Tyne Bridge and the Redheugh Bridge. The city had sprayed a band of smartdust three meters up on all the ancient buildings set back on the other side of the road that ran above the river. That gave the pinhead-sized particles a decent angle of view over the streets and the railings above the bank. Meshed together they should provide total coverage, showing him cars and pedestrians. Dobson had taken the memories from midday Sunday to two o’clock this morning. There were a few gaps where individual smartdust motes had glitched or were smeared in pigeon crap or snow and ice had frozen over them, but the overall mesh memory had enough data to be formatted into a single 3-D montage capable of being played inside a zone. That left the road macromesh, controlling and