… met so many people, helped so many people, but I’m always associated in their mind with a loved one getting hurt or killed. They move on. I move on. If it was me in that medical cocoon, the incident coordinator would be struggling precisely the same way I’m struggling with Richar. Fifty years old and …
She made an effort to pull herself together. “Can I be of assistance in your enquiries?”
“This patient’s name is Richar?” asked Lucas.
“Yes. Richar 2482-1019-116,” said Mika.
“There’s a possibility that Richar may have either been told something, or been given something, which could help us find the firebug who started the Security Unit fire. Hopefully the genetically tailored treatment will help Richar, and we’ll be able to speak to him in a few days’ time. Did he have any personal possessions with him when he arrived for treatment?”
Mika shook her head. “I’m afraid that he only had his identity card and the clothes he was wearing.”
“Thank you.” Lucas turned and led our group out of the room, stopping in the corridor to adjust his ear crystal. “Liaison, Tactical, are you still listening in to us?”
“Yes,” said Nicole’s voice.
“No, we’ve all fallen asleep,” said Gideon.
Lucas laughed. “Amber has identified Fran’s music-loving friend as Richar, a patient who is unconscious and in a critical condition. It will be days before Richar recovers enough to be able to give us information himself, but there’s a chance Fran gave him some evidence to keep for her, so we should check his apartment.”
“Do you want me to take the Strike team there now, Lucas?” I asked.
“No, there shouldn’t be any minds at the apartment for you to read, and I don’t want the whole Strike team parading around the area. If we attract attention to the fact we’re searching Richar’s apartment, there’s a danger we could trigger a series of arson attacks against that and the apartments of other survivors.”
He paused. “Richar’s apartment must be on Level 20 in Navy Zone, but what’s the exact location?”
“Area 510/7580, corridor 17, apartment 3,” said Nicole.
“That’s quite close to the Fire Casualty Centre,” said Gideon. “One of the Strike team might be able to make the trip through the vent system so no one sees him at all. I’ve already got all the relevant plans to help me set up the Fire Casualty Centre defences, so just give me a moment to check them.”
Lucas turned to Eli. “Did you bring Spike along with you?”
“Yes,” said Eli eagerly. “I left him in his bag in the waiting room.”
“In that case, we can send Eli and Spike to search the apartment,” said Lucas. “We’ve no reason to think our targets have been there, but Spike can go in first to check for hazards, and then Eli can join him. I’ll watch the images from their crystal unit cameras and direct the search.”
Gideon’s voice spoke again. “The good news is that Eli can get from inside the Fire Casualty Centre to just outside Richar’s apartment without entering any public areas at all. The bad news is there’s one point where he’ll have to take a shortcut through the waste system.”
Eli groaned.
Chapter Twenty-three
I sat in a spare waiting room with Lucas, Adika, Forge, and Kaden. Lucas was projecting the image from Spike’s camera on the white wall in front of us. It showed an apartment door.
“Spike, enter the apartment,” said Eli’s voice.
The image jolted around a bit, and then we got a view of a standard apartment hallway. Eli guided Spike on into the living room, and I gasped.
“Now I understand what Amber meant when she said Richar had an unusually orderly mind,” said Lucas.
There was a moment of silence while we all absorbed the view of the floor to ceiling shelves that lined every wall, and the precisely arranged row of objects on each of them.
Adika stood up for a moment to get a closer look at the objects. “Everything seems to be labelled and in alphabetical order.”
“Richar is a Filing Optimization Expert,” said Lucas. “Clearly Lottery chose him for that work because he loves organizing things.”
“Richar admired Fran’s meticulous attention to detail,” I said.
“Well, this should make our search easy,” said Lucas. “If Fran gave anything to Richar, then the man will have labelled and filed it. The obvious place to start looking is under ‘F’ for Fran. Can you turn Spike to face the wall to his left please, Eli?”
“Spike, turn ninety degrees left,” said Eli.
“And there it is,” said Lucas. “A small box wrapped in gift paper, and neatly labelled ‘Birthday present from Fran’. When is Richar’s birthday, Nicole?”
“Three days away,” said Nicole.
“The ideal arrangement,” said Lucas. “Fran knew that meeting her recruits would be dangerous. She tried to safeguard herself by giving Richar what she said was a birthday present but we hope actually contains information.”
He pulled a face. “Fran knew someone with Richar’s orderly mind would never open his present before the correct day. If all went well, she could make an excuse to retrieve the present and replace its contents before then. If things went badly, then Richar would open his present. Presumably there are instructions inside about what to do with the information.”
He paused. “Things went badly for both Fran and Richar. Eli, please get Spike to retrieve that box and bring it back to us at the Fire Casualty Centre.”
“Do I have to come back through the waste system?” asked Eli’s voice.
“I’m afraid so,” said Lucas. “Please put the box in the bag with Spike, so it doesn’t come into contact with anything nasty.”
Eli sighed.
It would take a while for Eli to get back to the Fire Casualty Centre. I closed my eyes, and searched for the barely perceptible thoughts of Rothan, wanting to check on his condition. I found him, but there were two minds close by that flared with urgency.
Worried that something was wrong, I dived into one of the intensely focused minds, and found myself looking down at an open cocoon containing a naked Rothan. My hands tensed as I drove a needle into his left lung. I glanced at a scanner.
“Confirm position,” I said.
“Position confirmed,” said a woman’s voice. “Inject now.”
I injected the first dose, laid that syringe aside, and reached for the second.
“Amber?” Lucas’s voice spoke my name softly. “Is something wrong?”
I pulled back into my own mind, opened my eyes, and smiled at him. “No. The medicine just arrived. They’re giving Rothan his injections now.”
My telepathic sense was still open, so I felt the wave of relief coming from around me. Adika’s sharply chiselled thoughts dragged me in.
… boy must respond to the treatment. He’s young. He’s perfectly fit. He’s a fighter and he’s got everything to live for.
I pulled myself away from Adika’s mind, and moved on to find Emili. Her mind was fervently echoing Adika’s thoughts, willing Rothan to win this battle for his life.
“The doctors have told Emili and Rothan’s family,” I said.
I closed my eyes again, and went back to Rothan’s mind. Watching. Waiting. Was his condition improving? Were his thoughts getting stronger? I still wasn’t sure, when I was distracted by the creak of the waiting room door. I opened my eyes and saw Matias come in holding a gaily wrapped box.
“Where’s Eli?” asked Lucas.
Matias seemed to be struggling not to laugh. “You don’t want to see Eli. You definitely don’t want to smell Eli. We’ve locked him in a shower and we aren’t letting him out until he smells like a human being rather than a slime vat.”
Lucas looked warily at the box. “Is that safe?”
“We put it through a whole barrage of hazard tests,” said Matias. “Then we borrowed some of the Fire Casualty Centre equipment to do extra scans. There’s only a standard format data cube in there.
”
“I was actually wondering if it had come into contact with anything in the waste system.”
Matias sniffed the box. “It smells all right.”
“Perhaps you’d like to unwrap it for us,” said Lucas.
Matias tore off the wrapping paper to reveal a small plastic box. He opened it and held out a data cube.
Lucas frowned at it. “There’s a label on this that says ‘Send to Nicole 2513-0864-331’.”
“Me?” Nicole’s voice gasped the word in my ear crystal. “Why send it to me rather than you, Lucas?”
“Knowing Fran, I’m afraid she wanted you to see this first for malicious reasons.” Lucas took the data cube and connected it to his dataview. “There’s a single recording on the cube.”
Lucas did a lot of tapping at his dataview. After a couple of minutes, Adika got restless.
“What’s the delay, Lucas?”
“The recording is password protected.”
Adika yawned and turned to me in search of entertainment. “Do you need any more wristset lights yet, Amber?”
I laughed. “No, thank you. Hannah discovered the one I left in my pocket before she put it in the laundry, and I found another in my bookette room, so I now have four. I’ve a bad habit of leaving things in my pockets. I accidentally put a data cube through the laundry machine when I was living on Teen Level.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Adika.
“If you’d seen Amber’s room on Teen Level,” said Forge, “you’d be amazed that the heap of clothes on her floor ever made it to a laundry machine.”
“You should be more respectful to your telepath, Forge,” said Adika, in tones of mock reproof. “Are you getting anywhere with the password protection yet, Lucas?”
“No. I’ve tried all the passwords Fran used when she belonged to our unit, and some other obvious possibilities, but no luck so far. Nicole, the data cube was intended for you, so Fran would choose a password she thought you’d guess. Any ideas what it might be?”
Nicole groaned. “A few days before Fran was fired, she was being difficult about providing research information to you, Lucas. I disobeyed orders, and sent you details about someone called Sabella. When Fran found out, she was furious, and ranted at me for hours.”
Lucas tried entering that into his dataview. “Yes, Sabella is the password.”
“I’m no psychologist,” said Adika, “but that seems an unnecessarily nasty choice of …”
He broke off, because a holo of Fran had appeared standing in front of us. It was only being displayed by Lucas’s dataview, so it was far less realistic than a bookette holo would have been, but it was still disconcerting to see a living Fran looking at me. She was dressed in a rigidly formal, blue onesuit, and I recognised her silver earrings as being the same ones she’d worn almost daily when she was in my unit.
Lucas tapped his dataview, and the holo disappeared again. He stood up. “I’ll find somewhere quiet to watch this, and then come back and report what I’ve learned.”
Adika frowned. “Why can’t we all watch it?”
“Because I’m hoping there’s useful information on this recording, but there will probably be some destructive comments from Fran as well. There’s no need for anyone but me to hear them.”
I sighed. “I know that you’re trying to protect me from Fran’s malice, Lucas, but you can’t. Remember what you told Megan. It’s impossible for you to hide information from me. If I don’t watch Fran’s message myself, I’ll just end up seeing fragments of it in your thoughts.”
Lucas pulled a pained face. “That’s true. The only way to avoid that is if no one in our unit watches the message. I could get another Tactical Commander to watch it and summarize the facts for us, but crucial details can be lost when people pass on information.”
“You don’t need to be so worried about this, Lucas. Fran called me a mutant freak when I fired her. Buzz and I have talked about that. I expect we’ll talk about whatever Fran says in this message too. After all,” I said, with deliberate lightness, “Buzz is a mutant freak as well.”
“That makes a significant difference.” Lucas sat down again. “Amber, would you be happy if we limited the audience to the people here in this room?”
I’d barely time to nod my head before Adika spoke.
“Forge, Kaden, and Matias can be on guard duty outside during this.” Adika jerked his head towards the door, and the three of them hastily left the room.
“Liaison, we’re turning off our crystal units while we watch this recording,” said Lucas.
We adjusted our ear crystals, and I turned to Adika. “You didn’t need to exclude Forge, Kaden, and Matias. None of them would be influenced by anything Fran says.”
“When Fran was fired, I got Forge and Rothan to escort her out of the unit,” said Adika. “Rothan told me she was ranting insults about you as they went down in the lift, and it really upset Forge. I don’t want to subject him to Fran’s poisonous remarks again, and I can’t exclude Forge and not Kaden or Matias.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“Are you ready to watch the recording now, Amber?” asked Lucas.
“Yes.”
Fran reappeared and gave us a self-satisfied smile. “Nicole, I know you won’t want to hear from me. You’ve successfully ingratiated yourself with the inhuman creature, Amber, and you’re enjoying yourself as Liaison team leader. You won’t welcome a reminder of the fact you stole your position from someone far more competent, but you can’t ignore this message. I’ve got information for Lucas about a serious threat to the Hive.”
Fran paused for breath. “I was fired from the unit, and forced to take a menial deputy team leader post in a Navy Zone Security Unit. Despite the injustice, I worked faithfully for the good of the Hive, but then a woman called me. She wore a hooded silver cloak and a Carnival mask, so I couldn’t tell anything about her, not even the colour of her hair. She said she was known as Jupiter. She told me she was leading an uprising of a great army of discontented, oppressed citizens. They would purify the Hive, and all five of the mutant telepaths would die in a single day.”
Adika jumped to his feet. “We need to get Amber back to the unit right now!”
“Calm down, Adika.” Lucas froze Fran’s image. “This is fantasy. There is no great army of discontented, oppressed citizens in this Hive. Everyone is given work they love. Even the lowest level people are well fed and have comfortable accommodation. Luxury differentials between levels are carefully limited, so people see being higher level as desirable and appropriately rewarded, but less important than being happy.”
I knew that what Lucas said was true. I’d seen it in countless minds. I wasn’t totally happy with the way the Hive decided everyone’s level and profession for them, but the system worked. The biggest problems people had were with their personal relationships. I had the disturbing thought that some Hives might try to avoid that issue by choosing people’s partners for them, and was deeply thankful that our Hive didn’t take that approach.
“We were right that Fran was a member of the group that killed her,” continued Lucas, “but she wasn’t their leader. Jupiter recruited Fran by describing a fantasy Hive. A place full of people who shared Fran’s views. Fran believed those lies because Jupiter was describing her personal dream, the way that she wanted the Hive to be. Adika, you’re in danger of believing the lies too, because this is your personal nightmare. It has no reality though.”
Lucas started the holo playing again.
“I was to be known as Venus,” said Fran, “and my mission would be to kill Amber. There was to be a fake alarm call to bring her and her Strike team to Level 50. I would be waiting by the lift doors, stab Amber to death as she came out, and be honoured as a great heroine.”
Fran shook her head. “I believed Jupiter at first, but there were some oddities. In her second call, she asked me questions about telepaths, but they weren’t the right questions. Her third call was
supposed to be an inspiring speech to her whole army of supporters, preparing them for a joint attack. She mentioned me as Venus, and two other heroes known as Mercury and Mars, but she just talked about general rebellion rather than the importance of exterminating the mutant telepaths.”
Fran lifted a hand to smooth her already perfectly ordered hair into place. “The next time Jupiter addressed her army, talking about the joint attack, I used some special Liaison monitoring techniques. I couldn’t see the identities of Jupiter or the other people she was talking to, because the call was routed through a blocking process, but her speech was only going out to three people including me.”
Adika finally sat down again.
“Jupiter lied to me about purging the Hive of telepaths,” said Fran. “I don’t know what her true plan is, but I’m going to find out. I sent a message, routing it through the same blocking process that Jupiter used, calling the other two followers to a meeting tonight. They must be the people she spoke of as Mercury and Mars. I’ll go to meet them dressed as Jupiter, learn their real identities, and find out details of the missions they’ve been given.”
She smiled smugly. “I’ll add the results of my investigation to this message, and send it to you as absolute proof that the Hive has no need to use unnatural freaks to hunt criminals. Threats can be discovered and dealt with by loyal members of the Hive using standard methods.”
The holo image vanished, and Lucas sighed. “That’s all there is. Fran went to the meeting and was killed.”
Lucas detached the data cube from his dataview and put it in his pocket. “So the group leader was a woman who used a Carnival costume and the undoubtedly false name of Jupiter to hide her real identity. She gave Fran the name Venus, and her other two recruits were called Mercury and Mars.”
He paused. “Those are a strange set of names. Venus is a girl’s name, and Mercury is a metallic element with peculiar properties. I don’t know Jupiter or Mars at all. I’ll check for links between the names.”