Defender Read online

  JANET EDWARDS

  DEFENDER

  Hive Mind 2

  Copyright

  Copyright © Janet Edwards 2017

  www.janetedwards.com

  Janet Edwards asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or localities is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Janet Edwards except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design by The Cover Collection

  Cover Design © Janet Edwards 2017

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Message from Janet Edwards

  Books by Janet Edwards

  About the Author

  Preview of Scavenger Alliance

  Chapter One

  Someone was already dead.

  Our lift plunged downwards at ultra express speed, its level indicator rapidly flickering through numbers. Our unit was on Industry 1, at the very top of our Hive city. We’d travelled down through all the fifty industrial levels, and sixty-seven of the hundred accommodation levels, before the level indicator stopped at 68.

  The lift doors opened, and we sprinted out. My Strike team leader, Adika, at the front, followed by the nineteen men of my Alpha Strike team, all clustered protectively around me. A major interchange of the belt system was directly ahead of us. Within seconds, we’d stepped onto the slow belt, moved across to the medium, and then the express. We were speeding along corridors now, but however fast we were, we would arrive too late. Someone was already dead.

  Adika spoke impatiently. “Lucas, you’ve only told us this is a strength six incident and its location. What are you sending us into?”

  Lucas’s voice came from the audio circuit of the crystal unit in my ear. “Current indications are that our target is either at or near the incident scene, but my Tactical team is still collating information. Nicole will give you details on the destination area now.”

  Lucas was speaking in the Tactical Commander voice he used during emergency runs. The tones deliberately calm and relaxed to build his listeners’ confidence in our ability to handle whatever crisis we were facing. It wasn’t working on me today. This incident was strength six, an impersonal code to mask the brutal fact someone had died.

  I was only eighteen, I’d been doing this job for a bare few months, and I hadn’t been in this situation before. Yes, I’d set out on emergency runs where someone had been injured or kidnapped, but never with the knowledge that some man, woman, or child was a lifeless corpse.

  Our Hive city was a teeming mass of a hundred million people, but now there was one less, and I felt that was my fault. The anonymous victim was already dead before we entered the lift, before the alarm woke me, before our unit even got the emergency call, but I still felt personally responsible. It was my job to prevent this sort of thing from happening. To catch criminals before they committed a crime. To hunt down those who were a threat to others, so they could be helped, or at least prevented from doing harm.

  I bit my lip. I’d failed to keep someone safe, but I couldn’t allow myself to brood about their death any longer. I had to concentrate on stopping their murderer from killing again.

  Other people were joining the express belt now. It was well after midnight, so most of the Hive would be asleep, but these were workers travelling to and from shift work. They gave curious looks at our tightly packed group. We wore casual civilian clothes over our body armour, our guns were hidden under jackets and tops, and the crystal units in our ears were transparent and virtually invisible, but we were still an odd sight. Everyone would realize we were on our way to perform some task for the Hive, and be wondering what job needed so many heavily muscled men and a single, slightly built girl.

  They’d never work out the right answer. They couldn’t guess we were hunting a killer because they believed the Hive was perfectly safe. All crimes were carefully covered up. Today’s murder would be explained away as a freak accident. People would be kept in ignorance so they wouldn’t have their lives overshadowed by fear or be tempted to commit crimes themselves. I wasn’t entirely happy about that system, but …

  Nicole, my Liaison team leader, started speaking. “Incident location is a storage complex. There’s a housing warren to the north, a school to the east, a community centre to the south, and a sports facility to the west.”

  There was an anxious edge to her voice. Nicole was nineteen. Her mind was imprinted with all the information she needed to be a Liaison team leader, but she’d normally have had at least three years of practical experience to reinforce it. Instead, she’d been thrust into the role after barely a year as a team member and a scant few weeks as deputy.

  I could understand why Nicole felt nervous and uncertain, but it was even worse for me. Only months ago, I’d been one of over a million eighteen-year-olds going into our Hive’s Lottery of 2532. I’d been worried about the barrage of tests I’d face, frightened of what the automated process would decide was my profession and level in the Hive, and scared stiff of having my mind imprinted.

  I’d pictured so many possibilities in the years before Lottery, from being a stunning success to an utter failure. I’d dreamed of doing highly skilled work and living on the elite top ten accommodation levels of the Hive. I’d had nightmares about ending up a sewage technician and living in a hovel down on Level 99. I’d never thought for one second I could be thrust into something like this, never imagined I wouldn’t be imprinted at all because my Hive deemed it far too risky to imprint someone as rare and valuable as me.

  Lottery had sent me into this wild new existence without either experience or imprinted knowledge to help me, and the pressure on me was far greater than on Nicole. I had my Tactical team to guide me, my Strike teams to guard me, my Liaison team to handle the logistics, but the difference between success and failure, life and death, depended on me. Someone was already dead, and if I messed this up then others might die as well.

  “We’ve got teams of uniformed hasties blocking all corridors leading to the storage complex, and we’ve shut down its dedicated freight lifts,” continued Nicole. “The community centre, school, and sports facility are all
closed and empty at this time of night. We’re making area announcements about flooding from a burst water pipe and …”

  She broke off for a second. “Ah, we’ve got floor plans of the storage complex now. Sending them to your dataviews.”

  I fumbled for my dataview, tapped it to make it unfurl, glanced at the plans, and pulled a face. The place was huge. At least forty vast storage rooms.

  There was a moment or two of silence after that before Adika spoke. “Lucas, we’ll be approaching scene soon. We need your briefing now.”

  “Agreed,” said Lucas. “The overwhelming majority of Hive citizens are well-adjusted and cooperative. What Amber often describes as tame bees working for the good of the community. Uncontrollable, violent tendencies in an individual normally develop due to a lethal combination of several factors including social catalysts and genetic predisposition. These tendencies manifest in distinctive behaviour patterns, so there are warning signs of a wild bee in an area before the individual progresses to actual violence. This case is extremely unusual because there were no warning signs.”

  “None at all?” I frowned. In theory, my Tactical team watched for areas with warning signs, and we went in and checked them, tracking down who was responsible before anyone got hurt. In practice, too many areas needed checking, and some targets progressed to violence unpredictably quickly, so we didn’t always get there in time. That meant an emergency run like this one, with someone already hurt, but we’d never had an emergency run to an area with no warning signs at all.

  “Absolutely none,” said Lucas. “The delay in giving my briefing was because I had my team triple-checking this and neighbouring areas. The only information we have is that a patrolling hasty noticed the storage complex lights were on when it should have been empty for the night. He went inside and saw a man stooping over a woman’s bloodstained body. The man ran deeper into the complex, and the hasty left and called in the emergency. He was incoherent from shock, so we’re working from extremely limited details.”

  Lucas paused. “Our target is male and in his thirties. We believe he’s still in the storage complex. Each room in there has dozens of rows of floor to ceiling shelving and container racks. Be aware that the target may hide behind shelves, or even take refuge inside one of the larger containers. You can expect him to be armed with a knife. He may also have collected other items from within the complex to use as weapons. The lack of any warning signs before escalating to violence on this scale indicates an incredibly strong triggering event. You should regard our target as highly unstable and dangerous in the extreme.”

  Adika groaned. “A combination of the worst possible target and the worst possible location. Everyone will need to be fully alert for this one. Guns initially on stun but be prepared to change to kill setting on my order. Time to jump belt now.”

  We all left the express belt and changed to a slow belt going down a side corridor. I heard something ahead of us, a rhythmic chanting, and cringed. Not that. Not now. Please, not now!

  I instinctively closed my eyes and covered my ears with my hands. I tried to concentrate on my own breathing and shut out the world, but I couldn’t block the sound of angry voices.

  “Two threes are six. Two fours are eight. Two fives are ten.”

  “Nicole, there’s a nosy squad ahead of us,” said Adika. “Get them out of our way!”

  “We’ve been trying to do that,” said Nicole, “but closing all the corridors around the storage complex has blocked a major belt route.”

  “I don’t care what you do with the nosy squad, make them jump down a waste chute for all I care, just get them out of our way!” Adika sounded as if he was about to explode from frustration. “You know the presence of nosies has a terrible effect on Amber.”

  The chanting was getting louder. “Two sixes are twelve. Two sevens are fourteen.”

  Closing my eyes had been a mistake. It just made me more aware of the voices shouting numbers. I opened my eyes again, and saw a defensive cluster of people further down the corridor.

  “Two eights are sixteen. Two nines are eighteen.”

  At the focal point of the crowd, I caught a glimpse of the grey figure of the nosy surrounded by four blue-clad hasty guards. A moment later, they hurried off down a side turning. By the time we rode by on the belt, the chanting had already stopped. I heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Amber, how are you?” Lucas’s voice asked. “Will you need recovery time before we start this chase?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m all right.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Adika. “We’ve got an especially dangerous target, so we’ll need you focused.”

  “I’m certain,” I said. “Sorry to make such a fuss about going near a nosy, but people hate them so much and …”

  “Your feelings about nosies are totally understandable,” said Lucas, in soothing tones.

  They might be understandable, but I also felt they were pretty hypocritical. All through my childhood, I’d hated the telepaths dressed in their shapeless grey outfits, their faces hidden behind matching grey masks, who walked the corridors of the Hive seeking the guilty thoughts of criminals. I knew I had nothing to hide from the nosies. I knew their hasty escorts wouldn’t arrest me. I knew I should be grateful to them for keeping the Hive safe. I’d still joined in with the hostile crowds, desperately chanting tables to try to stop the nosies from reading my mind.

  After Lottery, I’d learned the truth. The nosies weren’t telepaths at all, just ordinary hasties dressed up in grey outfits to encourage people to be dutiful and law abiding. I still dreaded seeing them though. I couldn’t work when a crowd was screaming numbers and …

  Red signs were flashing ahead of us. “Belt system closed for emergency maintenance. Follow diversion at next belt interchange.”

  Other people were transferring to another belt, but we stayed where we were, gliding on past a group of hasties in blue uniforms.

  “Strike team is approaching scene,” said Adika. “Jump belt. Crystal units to visual.”

  We left the belt, adjusted our ear crystals, and the camera extensions unfolded at the side of our faces. I tapped the fine tube by my cheek to make sure it was correctly positioned.

  “Visual links green,” said Nicole.

  “Amber, you’re now in the corridor running past the northern end of the storage complex,” said Lucas. “You should be able to see the double doors of the main entrance ahead of you.”

  The large, yellow doors were impossible to miss. “Yes, I see them.”

  “The target was spotted stooping over the body just inside those doors,” said Lucas. “He then ran further into the complex. The body is still where he left it, because we couldn’t risk sending hasties or a medical team so close to a cornered killer.”

  I winced at the thought of the poor woman lying on the floor, all her hopes and dreams brought to a brutal end. Despite everything I’d seen and done since I came out of Lottery, I was still adjusting to the reality that such levels of violence existed in our Hive, so I couldn’t help selfishly hoping that I wouldn’t see her body.

  “Our target hasn’t attempted to pass any of the hasties’ blockades,” continued Lucas. “We expect our target is still in the complex, though there’s a possibility he’s found a way into the vent system. Over to you, Amber.”

  I sat down on the floor, leaned my back against a wall, and closed my eyes. The grey-masked nosies weren’t telepaths, just fakes, but the bluff worked because there was a grain of truth behind the lies. The Hive did have five precious genuine telepaths. I was one of them, and it was time for me to do my job.

  I reached out with my mind, seeking the thoughts of a killer.

  Chapter Two

  I always struggled to find words to describe the sight, sound, touch, taste, scent of the telepathic view of the world. It was like an endless dark void with occasional small pools of light that were the minds of the people around me. It was like sitting in silence and hearing fragments of c
onversation. It was like touching objects that varied from cold, hard metal to warm and fluffy. It was like tasting an assortment of foods, or being in the park and catching the mingled scents of flowers on the breeze.

  I took a moment to orient myself by drifting through the thoughts of my Strike team, and found them sharp with tension. They’d come out of this year’s Lottery with me, carefully chosen by the testing sequence to be physically and mentally perfect for this job. They’d been imprinted with vast amounts of information. They’d had intensive training. All those things helped them, but they were still as aware as me that this was their first emergency run where someone had already died. Adika’s mood was disturbing them too.

  As I thought of Adika, I automatically linked to his mind. Hard-edged, like newly forged steel, and currently white hot with anger. He’d had ten years of experience as a Strike team member, and seven years more as a deputy, before getting his chance at a team leader position with me. He’d experienced a thousand emergency runs, and all his instincts told him this one could go badly wrong. He was worried that some of his men might get hurt, and even more paranoid about something happening to his irreplaceable telepath.

  There was more to Adika’s anger than that though. He’d spent the evening with Megan, my Senior Administrator, and they’d had a blazing row. Below the thoughts about this emergency run were deeper levels that churned with emotion.

  … thought everything was going so well, but then she started shouting at me. I understand she loved her husband, but he’s dead. We’re alive and …

  … Waste it! If Megan insists on living her life in the past, then I’ll find someone who’ll live for the future and …

  I was frustrated and fuming at myself. Why was I so obsessed with Megan anyway? I’d had plenty of women who were better looking than her and had just as good legs. Was my age getting to me? I was thirty-five now, and …