"What a mess. Who's dead?"

"All the wrong people. Humadros and Eliton especially. "

"Oh, hell."

"Spoken with true precision," Derec said sarcastically. "I want a memory dump set up, too-we need to download the RI for study. Something really nasty happened here and I don't understand how it was doable. We have a subverted RI."

"It didn't collapse?"

"Not till it came back to reality and saw what had happened."

"If Eliton's dead-"

"I haven't seen Bogard yet. I don't know what happened. One crisis at a time for now."

"All right. I'm setting up the patches now. Give me the transfer codes."

Derec worked steadily, absorbed in the details of the construct for several minutes. When he leaned back to stretch, he noticed people watching him, several wearing expressions of disapproval. He looked away, out the windows to the floor below.

Out in the gallery, maintenance units were cleaning up the blood, police techs were gathering evidence, and medical techs were collecting samples. Ambulances still crowded the platform, but most of the bodies had been taken away.

On the opposite side of the gallery, he saw a large robot emerge from one of the service accesses, carrying a woman in its arms, which had unfolded like a sling around her; it was followed by two transport drones laden with more bodies. Derec stood and went to the window.

"Bogard…" he whispered.