Free Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton Page B

a possibility,” Ari admitted.
    “Okay. How far are you through the list? I assume you have a list, that you do know how many of you there are.”
    “We know. There are three hundred and thirty-two of us A’s. We’ve already covered sixty percent with personal calls to each of them to make completely sure.”
    “A’s?” Sid asked warily.
    “You know the original three brothers split up back in 2087?” Abner said. “Well, all the 2’s and 3’s, even the 4’s, stuck by their tribal father—not that you heard me put it like that. All us A’s—Augustine’s offspring—stayed here in Newcastle or Highcastle on St. Libra, either to support Northumberland Interstellar or, like me and Ari, to build a life close by. The B’s and C’s went with their respective fathers to Abellia and Jupiter. One of them may have been visiting Newcastle on Friday; we don’t know yet. It’s not like they’re forbidden ever to return, the split wasn’t a divorce, and we do have plenty of contact with the family on Abellia. There’s even the occasional visit from a Jupiter cousin when a ferry ship orbits.”
    “Oh Jesus,” Sid muttered. “How many total?”
    “We’re not sure,” Abner admitted. “I’ve been putting in some calls all morning. Brinkelle’s people have been helpful to a degree. But Jupiter … Augustine himself will have to ask that question for us.”
    “Crap on it!” Sid had never considered that it could be anyone other than one of Augustine’s descendants. No wonder the Security Commission was interested. “The coroner took some samples to run a genetic scan with. It was Aldred’s idea, he said they’d be able to tell if it was a 2 or 3 or 4.”
    “According to the level of transcription breaks in the genome, yes,” Ari said. “Good call. Especially if he was a 2. We tend to be more connected than our offspring.”
    “Will the genetic read be able to tell if he was an A or B or C?” Sid asked.
    “No. It only shows how far removed from Kane he is, not which branch of the family he was born to.”
    “Okay. The Beijing Genomics Institute is running it now, so the sequencing results should be in by midafternoon.”
    “That’ll really help us narrow the search,” Abner assured him. “Once we know that for certain, it won’t take much longer.”
    “And if he was a C?” Sid asked.
    “I’m not aware of any C’s on Earth right now.”
    “As soon as you know …”
    “Yes, boss.”
    Sid sat at the spare zone console next to Ian. “Any progress?” he inquired.
    “Aye, man; I ran the party boat memories myself. Facial feature recognition software picked three with a North going into them in the last week. It also counted them out again. He wasn’t dumped over the side.”
    “You reviewed a whole week? That’s devotion to duty. Well done.”
    “Aye, well, none of us can afford to bollix up this, now can we?”
    “Nice theory,” Sid agreed. “Come on, let’s find the possible dump points into the Tyne. Show that specialist tit how useless he is at doing our job.”
    Two network technicians arrived and began installing a dedicated memory core into Office3’s network. “Brand new,” the lead tech announced as he plugged the football-sized device into the office cells. “You guys must have a budget and a half for this case.”
    All the data they’d accumulated so far was extracted from the station network and dumped inside the globe. Once the files were transferred, the techs set about eliminating any ghost copies left in the network’s redundancy caches. Diode filter programs were loaded, preventing any data from leaving the core’s dedicated zone consoles in Office3.
    “Best we’ve got,” Sid was told. “The only way anyone gets a look at those files now is if they come in here and physically tear the core out.”
    An hour later Sid was standing in the office’s largest zone booth, a translucent cylinder three meters in diameter, with ring projectors on the floor and