Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [207]
After further thought, however, he recalled the month and year his father had left home, after Esteban and Rita Aguerra had spent the night arguing and shouting. From there, it was a simple matter to discover which colony recruitment ship had departed for Ramah in that time frame.
Next, he acquired the passenger manifest and the colonist number assigned to Esteban Aguerra, which allowed Raymond to track his father through the number instead of his name. Following him to Ramah, Raymond discovered that Esteban Aguerra had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul Mohammed Ahmani.
Delighted with his cleverness, the young man then went back to the Ramah population records and tracked where his father had lived with moderate success as a metal worker. Raymond frowned when he learned that Abdul Mohammed Ahmani had remarried and fathered two more children.
Much more unsettling, though, was the discovery that his father had died recently. He stared at the record, feeling strange and unsettled, trying to remember the man. Raymond had never much cared for his father, but now he had reached a dead end. Esteban had been killed in a backstreet brawl, apparently by muggers who had never been caught. The case had been closed, drawing little attention whatsoever.
Suddenly Raymond realized that the date of his father's death was within days of the apartment fire that had claimed the lives of his mother and brothers. The young man sat back heavily, feeling cold prickles of sweat on his back. A coincidence? Perhaps, but an awfully big one.
He remained motionless for several minutes, feeling weak. When he finally returned to the database, he began to address the questions he had dreaded asking all along.
He called up news clips, then written records, then finally the accident investigation reports about the disastrous explosion that had claimed the lives of so many people. As Raymond knew, illicitly stored contaminated stardrive fuel had been hidden in sublevels under an innocent-looking dwelling complex. Containers had cracked, volatile fumes leaked. The explosion had ripped out the foundations of the building and sent an eruption of flames and toxic vapors through all levels.
Private reports of the accident investigation, however, highlighted certain irregularities in the identity of the building owner, a man with supposed black-market connections, the origin of the siphoned and stolen fuel.
One of the rescue engineers injured in the fire had insisted during an interview that the doors beyond level sixteen had been blocked so that no one could have escaped, even those who might have survived the initial explosion. He even suggested that the evacuation doors had been welded shut on purpose. Oddly, the man had not been interviewed in any other accident investigation. According to the records, after his recuperation the rescue engineer had been transferred to municipal duty in a small emergency-response department on the planet Relleker.
Raymond found other discrepancies when he compared interviews and reports from different sources. He was not surprised to find his own name tallied among the casualties. Basil Wenceslas had warned him that they would cover up his disappearance to prevent anyone from suspecting "Prince Peter's" humble origin. He swallowed hard when he read the names of his mother and three brothers beside his own, listed in small type among so many other casualties.
His heart turned to ice, however, when he uncovered greater detail. According to precise time codes, his own name and the names of his family had been entered onto the list of victims first—before