Defender

  I shook my head. “Nosies are a very complicated problem for me. It’s not just that I was terrified of them as a child, but the difficulties I have if I’m near a nosy squad now. People around them react with a range of powerful emotions. Anger. Horror. Guilt. Loathing.”

  “You mean that you feel all those massed emotions?” asked Buzz.

  “Yes. I try to block them out, but it’s hard to keep up my defences against the emotions of a whole crowd of people. Their mouths are screaming numbers. Their minds are screaming hate. It’s like being trapped in one of my childhood nightmares.”

  I pulled a face. “The worst thing is that the crowd is aiming their hatred at the nosy, but I know it should really be aimed at me. A nosy is an ordinary person hiding behind a strangely shaped mask to make people think they’re a fearsome telepath. Every time that I go out of my unit, I walk among people who don’t know that I’m a telepath, and I feel like I’m hiding behind a mask too. In my case though, the mask is to make me look human.”

  Buzz frowned and looked as if she was about to say something. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear it, so I hurried on. “I’ll need to let my thoughts settle down before I know how I feel about this. Please carry on explaining what truly happened back then.”

  “If you’re certain that’s what you want?” Buzz gave me a doubtful look.

  I nodded.

  “I got a strong insight from the paramedic that established his guilt, so I arrested him, but I had the complicating factor of him being in charge of a patient. I’d never been in that situation before. My imprint includes basic medical knowledge as well as all the psychological information, but I wasn’t qualified to take responsibility for a patient with a head injury. I decided we’d better all go along to your medical facility.”

  She paused. “Once I’d finished dealing with the paramedic, I was able to pay more attention to you, and became aware of something odd. Your body language was that of someone on the edge of complete panic, but I wasn’t getting any insights from you. That was unusual. By the time we’d reached the medical facility, and I still hadn’t had even a whisper of an insight from you, I had a theory about what was going on.”

  Curiosity was warring with my churning emotions about Buzz being the nosy who’d terrified me. Curiosity won. “You suspected I was a true telepath?”

  “I never considered the possibility of you being a true telepath. They’re so vanishingly rare. My theory was that you were a borderline telepath. Lottery finds nearly a thousand of us a year, so it seemed credible I’d stumbled across one.”

  “You thought that because you weren’t getting an insight from me? Does that mean borderline telepaths never get insights from each other?”

  “We do get insights from each other, but much less frequently than we get them from ordinary people. I don’t know why that is. Well, we delivered you to the medical facility, and then took your paramedic to a specialist unit for assessment. I was still curious about you though, and worried at the thought of a potential borderline telepath having a head injury. I gave in to temptation, called your medical facility, and said …”

  I interrupted her. “Wait a minute. I remember you telling me you were helping out at the medical facility because their regular therapist was ill that day. I thought we met by random chance. That wasn’t true?”

  “It was random chance that I was the nosy who arrested your paramedic, but there was nothing random about me doing your psychological check. I shamelessly abused my position, calling the medical facility and insisting on checking your treatment and evaluating you myself.”

  Buzz hesitated. “I can’t remember telling you that the regular therapist was ill. You must have asked me why I’d been working at that medical facility, and I made up an excuse. The truth is that he wasn’t ill. In fact, he was extremely annoyed about me wading in and stealing one of his patients.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I changed out of the nosy outfit into more suitable clothes.” Buzz laughed and gestured at her top and skirt. “These clothes. Then I went back to the medical facility and talked to you, but I got no insight at all. Actually, I still haven’t had an insight from you. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s impossible for borderline telepaths to get an insight into a true telepath’s mind.”

  I blinked. “Don’t you know whether it’s possible or not?”

  Buzz waved both hands. “It’s supposed to be possible but very rare. I don’t know if that’s right or not. You’re the only true telepath that I’ve ever met. I know plenty of other borderline telepaths who’ve met true telepaths when collecting a target for treatment. Some of them say they’ve had an insight, but …”

  She waved her hands again. “They could be making that up to show off, or they could genuinely believe they’ve had an insight when they haven’t. It’s easy to misinterpret your own feelings as an insight from someone else. Anyway, the lack of insights convinced me that I was right about you being a borderline telepath, but I realized that any well-meaning attempt to warn you could do far more harm than good. I’d have to wait, contact you again after you’d gone through Lottery, and ask if I could be any help with the major shock and adjustment phase.”

  “But you never did that. Why not?”

  Buzz gave me a blank look of incomprehension. “For the obvious reason. We spoke in a call or two, and had another brief meeting, and then there was a wait of a year until you came out of Lottery. When I looked up your result, I saw you were listed as a Level 1 Researcher.”

  She sucked in her breath sharply, as if echoing her reaction back then. “I knew a person was only listed as a Level 1 Researcher for two reasons. Either you had an innate, genius-level talent for science, which I found hard to believe, or you were a true telepath. That was even harder to believe, but then I discovered rumours were flying round Law Enforcement about Lottery imprinting staff for a new Telepath Unit.”

  “I was a true telepath rather than a borderline telepath, but you could still have contacted me,” I said.

  “Really? Contacting another borderline telepath, offering the help of someone who’d been through exactly the same experience just two years earlier, would have been perfectly reasonable behaviour, but contacting a true telepath …”

  She shook her head. “I knew there’d be a list of approved callers for you, such as members of your family. I wouldn’t be on that list, so my call would be intercepted, and I’d have a suspicious Strike team leader questioning my reasons for calling you. They wouldn’t be impressed by me saying I’d had a couple of encounters with you a year earlier. Even if I was allowed to speak to you, what help could I offer a true telepath?”

  “I see the problem,” I admitted.

  “It’s still a problem now, Amber. My experiences as a borderline telepath are nothing like yours. I see fleeting glimmers where you walk in the brightest of lights. I can only guess at how disturbing and stressful it is to read the minds of your targets.”

  She looked me in the eyes. “I’m an expert in taking the people you catch, assessing and treating them, but my imprint covers very little about how Telepath Units work. My understanding is that a Telepath Unit’s Senior Administrator is imprinted with the appropriate knowledge to counsel the telepath. What help can I offer you that the accredited experts can’t?”

  “You just see fleeting glimmers where I walk in the brightest of lights, but you do see something. Everyone tells me that I need counselling, and they’re probably right, but my counselling sessions with Megan were a disaster. The truth is that I don’t want to discuss my inner feelings with an accredited expert. I want to talk to someone like me. True telepaths mustn’t meet, so …”

  “So a borderline telepath is the next best thing,” said Buzz. “The question now is whether I’m the right choice of borderline telepath. I was the nosy who terrified you in that lift. Have you worked out how you feel about that yet?”

  I answered her question with a question of my own. “What’s it like wearing th
e nosy mask? What do you think when you look out of those inhuman purple eyes?”

  “Do you want the absolute truth?” asked Buzz.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the nosy mask covers my whole head, and I’m wearing the grey outfit on top of my usual clothes. That means I’m usually thinking that I’m far too hot.”

  My laughter mingled with the sound of my dataview chiming. I took it out of my pocket, and read the message on the screen. “My Tactical Commander says there’s been an important development in our current case. He’s calling a team leader meeting to discuss it, so I’d better go.”

  I stood up. Buzz had once worn the mask of a nosy and frightened me. I could run away from her because of that, or I could start facing up to the whole tangled web of emotions that I had about nosies.

  “I’d like to try to make this work,” I said. “I’ll let you know a suitable time for our first proper counselling session, but my schedule is a bit unpredictable.”

  “I appreciate you have unexpected calls on your time for things like emergency runs.”

  “Do you need me to show you the way back to the lifts?”

  “I think I can find my own way along half the length of a corridor.” Buzz waved her hands in a shooing gesture. “Go and save the Hive, Amber.”

  I laughed again, went out of the room, and hurried towards the operational section of the unit. I found Lucas standing just inside the security doors. He frowned at me.

  “I messaged you to say we’d have a team leader meeting after you’d finished talking to Buzz, but I specifically said that you mustn’t hurry your conversation.”

  “We’d finished talking,” I said. “I want to carry on and have a proper counselling session with Buzz. Now what’s the development in Fran’s case?”

  “The medical report has arrived. It says that Fran died twenty-two hours before we retrieved her body, and that changes everything.”

  Chapter Nine

  As Lucas and I walked down the corridor, we saw Nicole speeding towards us in her powered chair. The three of us met by the door to meeting room 4. When we went inside, we found Adika and Megan were already sitting at opposite sides of the table, carefully avoiding looking at each other.

  Nicole gave them a wary glance that showed she’d heard the rumours that were flying round our unit, and positioned her powered chair in the gap between them. Lucas and I sat down in the two remaining ordinary chairs, and Adika burst into angry speech.

  “Lucas, would you like to explain what that luridly dressed girl was doing in our unit?”

  Lucas smiled at him. “Of course. She was here for Amber to carry out the usual initial telepathic check on new unit members.”

  “She’s joining our unit?” Adika scowled at Megan. “I wasn’t informed that we had a recruitment in progress. What post is being filled?”

  Megan flushed but faced him defiantly. “Mine.”

  Adika gave a stunned shake of his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “The situation is quite simple,” said Megan, in glacial tones. “I have resigned. The recruitment of my replacement is being kept strictly confidential to avoid creating uncertainty in the unit.”

  Adika turned to Lucas. “What’s going on here?”

  “Exactly what Megan just told you,” said Lucas. “Buzz is being recruited to replace Megan.”

  Lucas had an oddly intent look on his face. I linked to his mind, and found him studying Adika’s shocked reaction to his words.

  … right that Megan hadn’t told him about …

  … since Strike team are selected to respond instantly to …

  … Adika’s controlling his face, but the muscles in his hands …

  “To explain the situation more fully,” Lucas added smoothly, “Buzz is a psychologist who will be replacing Megan as Amber’s counsellor.”

  I pulled out of Lucas’s mind, glanced round the table, and saw Nicole was looking anxiously at Megan. “I’m sorry to hear you’re going,” she said.

  “I emphasize the need to keep Megan’s departure confidential until we’ve completed recruiting replacement personnel,” said Lucas. “For the time being, we should just say that Buzz has been recruited as a counsellor for Amber.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Now we need to move on to the real purpose of this meeting, which is our current case. Fran’s body was found lying on the floor of the area 710/3470 storage complex on Level 68. However, the medical report states that Fran died twenty-two hours before we retrieved her body. Clearly people would have noticed the body if it was in that position during the previous day, so it must have been moved there after the storage complex closed for the night.”

  Adika had been frowning at Megan, but now he turned to face Lucas again. “Why would a murderer risk moving a body around? Even if it was disguised in some way, the murderer would be conspicuous carrying something that large, and terrified of running into a nosy patrol who would read his or her guilty thoughts. No one could expect to stop themselves thinking about a body when they were actually carrying it!”

  “Presumably the body was moved because the original murder spot would have given away the identity of the killer,” said Lucas. “It’s unusual for a target to plan that logically and cold-bloodedly, but we’re usually chasing them either before they first break out into violence or immediately afterwards. This target had twenty-two hours to calm down and plan how to dispose of the body.”

  He shrugged. “My Tactical team agree with you about the problems of moving a body using corridors, the passenger belt system, or the lifts. We believe the target used the freight transport system instead.”

  I felt my usual frustration at my lack of imprinted knowledge. “I remember the Hive freight transport system being mentioned in school lessons, but we weren’t told any details about it.”

  Lucas tapped at his dataview, and a standard three-dimensional holo diagram of the Hive flashed into existence, hovering above the table. The hundred accommodation levels were highlighted in green, with the fifty working levels above them marked in blue.

  “There are two networks of freight transport belts to move freight containers horizontally around the Hive,” said Lucas. “One on Level Zero, the giant interlevel that divides the industrial levels of the Hive from the accommodation levels. The other on Level 100, right at the bottom of the Hive.”

  Grids of red lines appeared on the holo diagram. “Every level of the Hive has storage complexes at regular intervals,” Lucas continued. “These are constructed at identical points on each level, so dedicated freight lifts can run up and down each column, moving freight vertically around the Hive.”

  The red lines were joined by a host of red columns. I saw a white flashing dot on one of them.

  “The white dot marks the position where Fran’s body was found,” said Lucas. “As you can see, it could have been moved from any storage complex in the Hive by using the freight transport system. However, the simplest possibility is that it was just moved from one of the storage complexes either directly above or below the one where it was found. All the storage complexes in a column have matching working hours, so they’d all have been closed at night.”

  Adika leaned forward in his chair, examining the holo diagram. “That’s believable. The target kills Fran in one of the storage complexes in that column. It’s the middle of the night, so there’s plenty of time to find a good hiding place for the body before people arrive for work. The target then returns late the next evening, puts the body in the lift, takes it up or down a random number of levels, and abandons it. No risk of anyone seeing anything suspicious. No danger of meeting a nosy patrol who’d spot a mind that was screaming guilt.”

  “Exactly,” said Lucas. “This explains why we had no previous warning signs in that storage complex. Our target just picked it as a random place to dispose of the body. My Tactical team has been checking the corresponding areas on all the other levels of the Hive, looking for ones that do have warning signs.
We have one major suspect area.”

  Lucas tapped at his dataview again, the holo diagram zoomed in on the red column that ran through the white flashing dot, and then a second flashing dot appeared higher up the column.

  “The area 710/3470 storage complex on Level 31 has made a series of damage reports that are steadily increasing in severity. Petty vandalism doesn’t necessarily progress to even the mildest violence, let alone murder, but in our current circumstances it’s highly suspicious. This area was on the waiting list of areas to be checked by one of the other Telepath Units, but I’ve arranged for it to be handed to us.”

  I frowned. Two questions were bothering me. “So Fran was probably killed in the storage complex on Level 31 rather than Level 68, but I still don’t understand what she was doing in a storage complex, especially one that was closed for the night.”

  “She may have gone there for a reason connected to the damage reports,” said Lucas.

  “Fran was very fussy about details,” said Nicole, with a bitter edge to her voice. “If she suspected someone wasn’t following her orders precisely, she’d go to tremendous lengths to prove it.”

  I moved on to my other question. “Why was a problem area in Yellow Zone owned by another Telepath Unit? Orange and Yellow Zones are our home zones, so it should have been ours. Does that mean this area has been having problems since before our unit was active but no telepath has had time to check it?”

  “There are areas that have been waiting far longer than that to be checked, but this isn’t one of them,” said Lucas. “In theory, Telepath Units automatically own the problem areas in their home zones. In reality, things are much more complicated.”

  He changed the holo diagram to show the coloured zones of the Hive running from Burgundy at the north end to Violet at the south. “Since our Hive is one zone wide by ten zones long, and we’re currently working with only five Telepath Units, the units are each assigned two home zones.”