Defender Page 9

  The warmth surrounding me vanished as my bodyguards all took a step away to give me space again. I felt a familiar surge of emotion for my Strike team, not just for the five protecting me now, but for all of them. They were my friends, they were my brothers, and I loved them. They’d save me at any cost, and they’d never take advantage of moments like this. I could trust them. Totally.

  “Target is at another junction,” I said, in a shaky voice. “Continuing west.”

  “He should turn south at the next junction,” said Lucas. “That will bring him into the closed area of the housing warren.”

  “Chase team, set your ear crystals to visual now.” Adika’s voice had an odd edge to it.

  “Visual links green for all Chase team,” said Nicole. “Zak, can you adjust your camera extension position, please? We’re mostly seeing your hair.”

  A brief pause, then Zak’s voice. “Is that better?”

  “That’s good,” said Nicole.

  “Target is at the next junction now,” I said. “Turning south as expected.”

  “Kaden’s group stay hidden while the target goes past you,” said Adika. “When you see my group intercept him, you move out and block his retreat.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Kaden.

  “Target in view now,” said Adika. “My group should wait for my command. Wait. Wait. Wait. Strike time now!”

  I dumped my link to the target mind, opened my eyes, grabbed for my dataview, and stabbed the circuit button. The list of Chase team members was on the right. I chanted the name at the top of the list as I linked to his mind, checked his status, tapped the name to send it back to the bottom of the list, and moved on to the next.

  “Adika.” I entered a mind screaming expletives. Adika had forced himself to hold his tongue as the target walked past his telepath, knowing he was much too far away, the whole Chase team were much too far away, to help. He’d had to trust Rothan to handle things, while suffering horrific visions of losing his telepath. No point in going back to the unit after that, because the unit would cease to exist without its telepath. In old traditions, warriors fell on their swords, but these days …

  I dragged myself away from Adika’s emotions and moved on to the next mind.

  “Kaden.” I was staring at the target’s back in shock. Waste it, the man was huge.

  “Zak.” I was watching Adika move forward and speak to the target. Hearing his voice through my ear crystal and with Zak’s ears as well. “Ashton, you need to come with us. There’ve been …”

  “Tobias.” The target was turning, running away from Adika, and I was sprinting after him.

  “Matias.” I was stepping out, blocking the target’s path, firing my gun on stun, and being tossed aside like a doll. Automatically rolling on landing, going onto my hands and knees, then up again to …

  “Eli.” I was throwing myself on …

  “Rafael.” I was lying on the ground, with the target’s hands round my neck. I tried grabbing at his arms but they were like iron bars. I couldn’t breathe. Everything was going black and …

  “Help Rafael!” I yelled. “He’s getting strangled.”

  The pressure on my neck, no, it was on Rafael’s neck, was suddenly gone. I was gasping for breath, sitting up, and looking into the anxious eyes of Zak. I gave him a reassuring smile. “I’ll live.”

  I felt the warmth of his hand as he ruffled my hair. “You’d better.”

  “Dhiren.” I moved minds again, and found myself staring at a heaving mass of bodies on the ground. I wanted to help restrain the target, but he was buried under my own team mates.

  “Target secure,” said Adika’s breathless voice. “Secured with a bit of difficulty I might add. We must have shot him on stun a dozen times before it had any effect.”

  “Body mass is a factor in how long it takes for stun to take effect,” said Lucas. “If you shot him a dozen times, you’d better check he’s still breathing.”

  “His pulse and breathing are fine,” said Adika. “We’ve got restraints on him now. Two sets to be on the safe side.”

  “Sending in hasties and medical support,” said Nicole. “We’ve lost visual links from half the Chase team. We assume that’s just cameras getting damaged in the fight.”

  I stopped chanting names aloud, but did another full circuit of the Chase team to check for injuries. “Rafael seems fine now, but Matias may have a dislocated shoulder, and Kaden got a nasty bump on the head.”

  “Rafael, Matias, Kaden, and anyone else with injuries should report to our unit medical area for checks as soon as we get back,” said Adika. “What were you all playing at anyway? Fourteen of you against one man and you were still losing!”

  The only response was an embarrassed cough that I thought was from Kaden.

  “Everyone does extra unarmed combat training for the next few weeks,” said Adika grimly.

  “I think the target’s coming round now,” said Eli. “Yes, his eyes are opening.”

  “Already?” Adika’s voice was pitched high with disbelief. “The man’s incredible. Why didn’t Lottery allocate him to a Strike team?”

  “He may have been ideal for it physically, but his behaviour shows he’s mentally unsuited to a role in Law Enforcement,” said Lucas. “Adika, can you please show Ashton a holo of Fran? Make sure you’re looking at his face when you do it, because I want your visual link to give me a clear view of his reaction.”

  “What?” asked Adika. “Why?”

  “We have to confirm the target’s guilt before we can close Fran’s case as complete with target apprehended,” said Lucas. “The normal way of confirming guilt would be to question him while Amber checks his mind, but I don’t want Amber seeing his memories of murdering Fran.”

  “All right,” said Adika.

  I bit my lip, hesitated, and then set my dataview to show the team member location display. A simple tap on Adika’s name showed me the view from his visual link. I didn’t usually bother looking at the view from someone’s camera, just dipped into their head to see the view through their eyes, but this time I didn’t want to have to cope with any thoughts that weren’t my own.

  Ashton gave a dazed look at the restraints on his wrists, and then stared straight up at Adika’s camera, at Adika’s face.

  “Do you remember this woman?” asked Adika.

  Ashton glanced at the holo of Fran. “Never seen her before.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Adika.

  Despite the fact he was lying down, with two sets of restraints on both wrists and ankles, Ashton somehow managed to shrug his shoulders. “What’s she got to do with anything?”

  Lucas groaned. “I’m afraid Ashton’s body language suggests he genuinely doesn’t recognize Fran.”

  “Does that mean we have to get Amber to read his mind now?” asked Adika.

  “Read my mind?” Ashton’s eyes widened in alarm as he heard Adika’s words. “You’ve got a nosy hiding round here? Look, I may have broken a few things. A box slipped out of my hands. Accidents happen.”

  “Yes, Amber can read Ashton’s mind now,” said Lucas. “Amber, you should be ready to pull out instantly if I’m wrong and Ashton did kill Fran.”

  I closed my eyes, checked Ashton’s mind, and saw his horror that a nosy was reading his thoughts. The freak would be seeing all the things he’d done, the fragile consignments he’d broken, the paint he’d …

  “He’s responsible for all the vandalism,” I said. “He’s been thinking of hurting people too, but so far it’s just been fantasy. He only fought the Strike team because he was panicking about being arrested.”

  “Can you do a deeper check?” asked Lucas. “Make sure this isn’t an issue of memories being blocked by a mind in fugue or divided into multiple personalities?”

  I worked my way down the frantic thought levels until I was deep into the subconscious. “He’s never seen Fran before,” I repeated.

  There was a delay while Ashton was handed over to the medical st
aff, and then Adika gave a deep sigh. “So Ashton isn’t our murderer. We’ve got the wrong target again.”

  “Not exactly the wrong target,” said Lucas. “If we hadn’t caught Ashton, he’d probably have lost control and attacked his supervisor within the next few days or weeks. Now he can have counselling, medication, and be assigned to new work at a storage complex lower down the Hive. Perhaps somewhere around Level 90. Working lower in the Hive than his own level will make him feel superior, bolstering his self respect instead of undermining it. He’ll soon be a happy, productive member of the Hive again.”

  “Which is all very nice and very worthy,” said Adika, “but we still have to find out who killed Fran. What do we do next, Lucas?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Lucas. “Once you’re safely back at our unit, I’m going to have a brainstorming session with my Tactical team. We need to rethink every assumption we’ve made so far, because one of them must have been dreadfully wrong.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lucas and I went through the security doors into the operational section of our unit.

  “Are you sure you want to come along for this?” asked Lucas. “A brainstorming session can take hours, sometimes even days, and I could sum up all the useful ideas for you afterwards in as little as five minutes.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I’ve seen you thinking about brainstorming, and I’m curious about exactly how it works.”

  Lucas shrugged. “Well, you can always sneak out if you get bored or bewildered. I warn you that things may get strange. The whole point of brainstorming is to break out of the rigid, straight-line, logical thinking we usually follow. Straight-line logic works well 95 per cent of the time, but when it fails we have to challenge our ideas, question our assumptions, chase random trains of thought, and consider possibilities we would usually dismiss as ridiculous. Just about everything we say in this session will be useless, but it could throw up something interesting.”

  We went through a door into the vast expanse of the Tactical office. The Liaison area had individual offices for each team member, as well as an operations room where they gathered during emergency and check runs. The Tactical team preferred to work together, constantly sharing information, ideas, and progress, so they just had this one massive room. One end of it was formally laid out with desks, while the other was the brainstorming area.

  Lucas clapped his hands. The other eleven members of the Tactical team looked up from their desks.

  “Brainstorming time,” said Lucas. “Amber is joining us for this one.”

  Everyone stood up. I’d checked the minds of all Lucas’s Tactical team members before they were confirmed in their positions in the unit, but the only one I really knew was Emili. She was both Lucas’s deputy and Rothan’s girlfriend.

  Seeing the Tactical team together like this, I was struck by how wildly different they all were. With the exception of Adika, all of my Strike team had come out of the last Lottery with me. Since they were uniformly young and male, Lottery had balanced the sexes in my unit by choosing my Liaison team, Admin team, and medical staff to be mostly young and female.

  In contrast, the Tactical team were as random a group as possible, including men and women, every type of physical build, and aged from nineteen-year-old Emili to seventy-year-old Gideon, with his thin white hair and face etched with worry lines.

  I’d seen from Lucas’s thoughts that this didn’t happen by chance. A Tactical team was deliberately chosen to be a varied group to contribute different viewpoints.

  “Are we taking any particular angle?” asked Emili.

  “We’re going wild hunt on this one,” said Lucas. “Look at things sideways, upside down, with no limits.”

  There was a general nodding of heads. They all moved down to the brainstorming area of the office, with its selection of comfortable chairs and couches. I watched in confusion as they arranged themselves, most of them choosing to lie on the couches or thick rugs, but a couple somehow managing to sit upside down in the chairs.

  Lucas saw my expression and grinned at me. “We need to look at the situation with a different mental angle. Being at a different physical angle can help that process.”

  He stretched out on a couch. I hesitated before taking the safe option of curling up in a large chair next to him. I stared wistfully at where Emili was doing a handstand against the wall. I liked the girl. I thought we might have been friends in other circumstances, but being the priceless telepath, combined with the fact that Rothan’s job could lead to him dying in my defence, made it difficult to even have a casual conversation with her.

  “Everyone, close your eyes and relax,” said Lucas. “Amber, it’s best if you don’t read minds during this. It’s not just that there’ll be some disturbing images floating around, but seeing what others are thinking would influence your own unconscious thought processes. We don’t want your contributions echoing those of anyone else and biasing the flow in one direction.”

  “My contributions?” I’d obediently closed my eyes, but now I opened them. “You want me to join in with this? But I don’t know how it works.”

  “The more random factors the better,” said Lucas. “Listen for a while and join in when you’ve got the idea.”

  He paused for a moment. “Go!”

  People started speaking, and I closed my eyes again. With my telepathy shut down, I’d no idea who was talking most of the time.

  “What do we know?”

  “We have Fran’s body.”

  “Do we?”

  “The Strike team recognized the body as Fran.”

  “It looked like Fran on the visual links.”

  Lucas’s voice. “There are ways of faking appearance.”

  “Maybe it’s a fake body.”

  A fake body? Lucas had warned me this might get strange, but … I shook my head and concentrated on listening to the voices.

  “The medical report confirmed it was Fran’s body after tissue analysis.”

  “The pathologist could have lied.” That sounded like Emili.

  “We can get Amber to check that.” Lucas’s voice again. “Establish base point. We have Fran’s body. Go!”

  “We have a time of death.”

  “Can we believe the time of death? The pathologist …” The voice broke off its sentence. “Sorry, I’m looping. Time of death accepted pending verifying medical report.”

  “Time of death indicates the murderer moved the body.”

  “Time of death indicates someone moved the body.”

  “Do we have more than one target?”

  “Was the body moved at all?”

  “The body must have been moved or the staff of the Level 68 storage complex would have seen it.”

  “They could have seen it and been too scared to contact Emergency Services.”

  “Why would innocent people be scared? They’d expect a nosy to check their minds. Know they wouldn’t be blamed.”

  “We could have a large number of targets. Entire staff of storage complex guilty. All took part in murder.”

  I frowned. Some of these comments seemed totally ridiculous.

  “Random staff of other storage complexes arriving with deliveries,” said Lucas. “They’d step out of the lift and tread on the body.”

  “Entire staff of all storage complexes in Hive took part in murder.” That was Emili.

  Lucas laughed. “Temporarily establish base point. Body was moved.”

  There was a one second pause and they were off again.

  “Where did Fran die?”

  “Logically it should have been in one of that column of storage complexes.”

  I was startled by a massed shout. “Forget logic!”

  “Body left in storage complex. Person leaving body had some knowledge of storage complexes. Establish base point?”

  “Grudgingly and temporarily establish base point,” said Lucas. “We’re getting ominously close to where logic took us.”

  “Body was
moved. How?”

  “Not passenger transport system. Too many witnesses. Too many nosy squads.”

  Lucas groaned. “And we’re back to the freight transport system. Heading down the same blind alley that we hit using logic.”

  “How body was moved doesn’t matter. Original location does. Where?”

  “Freight system covers whole Hive.”

  “Risk of transporting body increases with distance travelled.”

  “Less risk of passing nosy squad on freight transport system. Less fear of having mind read when with body.”

  Either I was getting used to the system of random voices making equally random contributions, or what they were saying was making more sense now. I considered joining in, but kept hesitating so someone else spoke first.

  “Why risk being with body at all? Ship in container.”

  “Establish base point,” snapped Lucas. “Body shipped in container to storage complex.”

  “Container arrives at storage complex. Then what?”

  “Label checked. Taken to appropriate storage area.”

  “Someone comes at night. Gets body from container and leaves it in front of lifts.”

  “They left the body where it was bound to be found,” said Emili. “Why? It could have been left in the container and undiscovered for weeks, or even months.”

  “Would be discovered eventually. Unaccompanied container must be labelled with routing information. Possibly gives starting point as well as destination. Starting point was the true murder scene. Identifying it could lead us to the murderer.”

  “Hold while I check the facts on routing information,” said Lucas. A moment later, he spoke again. “Each freight container has a code etched into it. The central freight system has records of every journey a container makes, with routing information that includes the starting point.”

  “That’s why the murderer didn’t leave the body in the container,” said Emili. “The routing information could help us find him or her. So where’s the container now?”

  “The murderer wouldn’t leave it in the Level 68 storage complex. There would surely be bloodstains inside the container. Those could attract attention, so the murderer would send it off again on the freight system.”