Test Subjects

by R S Penney

  “And if there are?”

  “Then we find this person and bring them to justice,” Anna replied. “So…Are you ready to begin?”

  They conducted their interviews in Detective Tremana's office, a small room with white walls and blinds over a window that looked out on the small patch of grass between the station and the next building over. Keli felt more than a little boxed in, but she wasn't going to complain. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner she could return home. Helping these Justice Keepers was a tiring affair.

  Their first subject was Ms. Tiela Zarvo, a short woman in her late fifties with facial features similar to those of Tanaben and a bob of short black hair. “Thank you for all your help, Operative Lenai,” she said as she took her seat.

  Anna sat behind the desk with her hands on the armrests of her chair, smiling as she greeted the other woman. “It's my pleasure,” she said with a quick bob of her head. “Why don't you start by retelling your story.”

  “It was two weeks ago,” Ms. Zarvo began. “I was at home when I had this feeling that I was being watched. It was late at night; so I was thinking that I must be imagining it, but when I looked in the window, I saw a face-”

  Standing by the wall with her hands clasped demurely in front of herself, her head bowed in an attempt to appear harmless, Keli tuned out the woman's rambling and focused on her thoughts instead. Many thoughts that seemed to make the very air buzz. Some manifested as images around Ms. Zarvo, but most vanished before she could track them. Not that it mattered.

  She focused on one image – Ms. Zarvo's husband as a younger man – and let it pull her into the other woman's mind. By instinct, she tensed up. You never knew what you'd find when you made telepathic contact with another human being.

  The human mind was a jumble of disjointed sounds, scents and images, memories and bits of irrelevant information all tied together. Most telepaths created an abstraction to help them make sense of it all.

  For Keli, that abstraction was a spiderweb of light that spanned a void of endless darkness, stretching off to the very edges of infinity. She gently plucked each strand with her thoughts, using a touch so gentle the other woman would barely notice her presence. Her fears were confirmed in seconds.

  The spiderweb should have been perfectly symmetrical, but there were tiny, almost-imperceptible deviations in the pattern. A telepath had influenced this woman's thoughts. There was no doubt about it.

  Coming back to the physical world, she found Anna leaning over the desk with her lips pressed together, staring intently at Ms. Zarvo. The young Justice Keeper did nothing more than glance in Keli's direction, but the question in her eyes was obvious.

  Keli nodded.

  “Thank you,” Anna said in a soft, soothing voice. “We'll get to the bottom of this, I promise you.”

  The next person to come through their door was the older man with the thick, white goatee. “I appreciate you doing this,” he said before dropping into the chair across from Anna. “Folks around here are pretty scared-”

  Keli ignored the banter and focused her attention on one of the ephemeral images that seemed to radiate from the old man's body. A memory of his granddaughter's recent college graduation. She slipped into his thoughts with very little effort.

  The spiderweb was there in the endless void, its pattern completely different from that of Ms. Zarvo's mind. And yet there were individual strands that were out of place by only a few micrometres. This telepath was good.

  Once again, Keli nodded in response to Anna's silent question.

  On and on it went as victims came through the door, told their stories and left. Keli scanned each one and found the influence of a telepath on each of their minds. Which, of course, meant that she would have to play an active role in this case. Not something she was looking forward to.

  But that was the price of her existence on this world. To be safe, she needed allies; to have allies, she had to give people enough incentive to keep her around. A very frustrating situation, but she had endured worse.

  And she would endure this.

  A large booth at the back of a restaurant near the police station was lit mainly by a lamp that hung from the ceiling and cast a warm glow down upon the wooden table. This place was cozy with the scent of zesty food in the air, a quiet little hole in the wall that came with Detective Tremana's stamp of approval.

  Just one look at the menu had been enough to make Anna glad she had taken the woman's suggestion. She had been craving a good salad for days, and besides, this gave her a chance to bond with Keli.

  Stabbing a piece of tomato with her fork, Anna popped it into her mouth, then closed her eyes and savoured it. “Okay,” she said at last. “What's your take on all this? Did you see anything that might indicate the telepath's identity?”

  Keli sat across from her with stiff posture, frowning at a plate of chicken Parmesan with a side of salad. “No,” she replied. “It doesn't work that way. I'd have to dig through each victim's memory for any clues to their attacker's identity, and you made it clear that invasive scans were not acceptable.”

  “You're not gonna eat?”

  “I'm still getting used to Leyrian food.”

  Anna felt her eyebrows climb upward, but she said nothing in response to that. You would think that years of eating prison rations would leave Keli with an appreciation for good food, but maybe she was off base. Her salad was delicious with a tangy raspberry vinaigrette dressing. “Can you sense it when another telepath uses their ability?”

  Cocking her head to one side, Keli blinked at her. “Not in the way you're hoping,” the woman said with a touch of exasperation in her voice. “If we were in the middle of a wide open countryside with no one around for miles, then I would probably sense it the instant another telepath used their talent. Even if that telepath were miles away.”

  “But in the city?”

  “There's too much background noise.”

  Anna crossed her arms and hunched over, shaking her head in frustration. “And any other telepath would know your limits,” she murmured. “Which means this guy is gonna try to Where's Waldo himself into a crowd.”

  Keli raised an eyebrow.

  “Earth reference,” Anna explained. “You get the gist.”

  Keli stabbed a cucumber as if she intended to murder it, then shoved the thing into her mouth and made a face that announced her disgust to all the world. “I do get it,” she said. “There are over forty thousand people in this city. With a population this dense, I would have to get within a few blocks of another telepath to sense them”

  “Which means we have to know where he's going to attack ahead of time.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Tapping her lips with her index finger, Anna squinted at the other woman. “Okay,” she said. “This is the part where we gather information. I want to know the specifics of each attack: dates, times, locations. Maybe there's a pattern.”

  “Why would there be?”

  “Serial killers usually have a pattern,” Anna explained. “A specific motif that plays out every time they kill. Maybe it's a similarity in the victims – a killer who targets young blonde women, for instance – or maybe he kills them all on a certain day of the week. I'm extrapolating here. I don't really know what would motivate a deranged telepath to prey on innocent people, but if there is a pattern, then deducing it will bring us one step closer to finding our perp.”

  Keli stared across the table with lips pursed, her brow furrowing as she thought that over. “It's a rather macabre career you've chosen, isn't it?” she murmured. “If necessary, I can assist the victims by jogging their memories.”

  “I'm sure some people would appreciate that.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, Anna devouring the last of her salad, even dragging a few scraps of lettuce through the dressing to soak up the flavour. She wanted to get to know Keli, and not just because being team leader meant developing a rapport with your people.

&nbs
p; A year ago, they'd gotten off on the wrong foot when Keli had fled Station Twelve, injuring one of Anna's colleagues in the process. Things got even worse when Keli killed Rawlins in cold blood. Anna felt personally responsible for all of that. She was the one who led the mission to free Keli from that cell.

  But a lot had changed in the fifteen months since that night. Anna had been forced to kill, forced to cross a line she had hoped to never cross. And she had learned from that experience. A year ago, she would have thought that taking a human life would destroy her, but she was still herself, still Anna Lenai.

  It pained her to admit it, but Anna Lenai had grown up with privileges that Keli did not share. Anna didn't spend her formative years in a cell. She might have had a different outlook if she had. Thoughts of Keli's childhood filled Seth with a terrible sadness. Anna could feel it in the back of her mind. Maybe it was time to cut her new friend some slack. “So,” Anna began. “Do you like it here?”

  Keli blinked.

  “On Leyria,” Anna clarified.

  Keli sat up and spread her arms over the back of her bench, a mocking grin on her face. “Well, it's better than a prison cell,” she said. “But I must admit I don't have much basis for comparison.”

  Anna went red, then dropped her gaze, suddenly feeling very much like an ass. “All right, point taken,” she replied. “But I meant in a general sense. Is there anything that you need? It must be lonely, living on your own.”

  “I get by.”

  “You're always welcome to come out with us,” Anna suggested. “If you want some company. Or we could just stay in! I know it must be hard, going into public places with all those minds chattering. We could-”

  “Anna.”

  When she looked up, she found the other woman watching her with a small smile that seemed to denote a mix of exasperation and…fondness? Was she reading that right? Had she actually earned a measure of respect from Keli? “I appreciate the effort,” Keli went on. “But I enjoy my solitude.”

  “Right…Sorry.”

  “Don't be,” Keli said softly. “I'm not used to having someone care about me. It will take some time.”

  Well, that was something. A little progress, at the very least. She had to remember that Keli had spent most of her life learning that whenever someone had shown a hint of interest in her well-being, it was only because they wanted something from her.

  Anna would have to be cautious; pushing too hard too fast might scare the woman off. But if she was able to build a bridge…Well, Keli might just find a home with her little team of Justice Keepers. She preferred stories with happy endings. “Shall we get back to work?” Anna inquired.

  “I think that would be wise.”

  Chapter 6

  Melissa was nervous.

  Her knees were weak; her palms were sweaty, and the lyrics to that old Eminem song were playing in her head. She really shouldn't be doing this, but here she was, stuck behind the controls of a Class-2 shuttle.

  In the window, she saw a clear blue sky with puffy clouds over a field of tall, green grass. There was nothing around for miles, no other aircraft in sight. The auto-pilot kept them on a straight course, flying fifty feet above the ground at speed comparable to those of a car on the highway.

  “You're doing fine.”

  The sound of a voice behind her made her flinch. The big pilot's seat cut off her sense of spatial awareness, and she had come to rely on that quite heavily. She swiveled around to face the speaker.

  Jack stood between the two consoles at the back of the cockpit, smiling down at her from the top of the ramp. “Relax,” he said. “This is just like driving a car. You're gonna be just fine, kid, I promise.”

  Melissa felt her brow furrow. “It's just like driving a car,” she said softly. “But I've never driven a car.”

  She turned back to the console, spread her hands along its surface and watched as menu windows popped up on the SmartGlass. Once again, she checked the auto-pilot to make sure that they were still traveling in a straight line, roughly fifty feet off the ground, moving at speeds comparable to a car on the highway.

  “ 'Kid,' ” Melissa said. “Isn't that what Jena used to call you?” The memory brought a flash of grief that was echoed by Ilia's sorrow. The Nassai still missed her former host.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “It is.”

  Melissa blinked when she felt tears welling up. It took everything she had to shove the sadness back down. “I miss her too,” she muttered. “It doesn't hurt as much as it used to, but I think about her every day.”

  “I'm not surprised,” Jack said, taking a seat at the port-side console. From there, he would be able to override her commands if she tried to steer them into a ditch or anything like that. “You carry a piece of her with you. Take us up.”

  Craning her neck to peer through the window, Melissa narrowed her eyes. “Take us up,” she said. Nervously, she checked her instruments and then tapped a new heading into the navigational controls.

  The shuttle's nose pitched upward by thirty degrees, and then they were climbing into the open sky. Doing this still felt wrong to her. While not a compulsory part of her training, the ability to pilot a shuttle was incredibly useful for a Justice Keeper. She had studied the controls, and Jack was right there if anything went wrong, but she still felt as if she wasn't quite ready for this.

  “Good,” Jack said. “Now level off.”

  Melissa executed the commands as ordered.

  Her mouth tightened, and she shook her head as she found the nerve to bring up a subject that had been gnawing at her. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she began. “About my father?”

  “Sure. What's up?”

  “Dad says he wants to give up the N'Jal.”

  An awkward silence stretched on for several seconds, and she was tempted to turn and see Jack's reaction. However, this was a training exercise, and now that she had taken manual control, she had to focus.

  “I think that's a bad idea,” Jack said.

  Melissa sat back with her arms folded, nodding in agreement. “I told him the same thing when we talked about it the other night,” she replied. “My dad's ability to interface with Overseer tech gives us an edge against Slade.”

  “It's not just that,” Jack said. “At one point, there seems to have been some kind of division among the Overseers. Maybe they didn't agree on what to do with us. From what Harry told us, one faction among them actually respected us as living beings. And those Overseers believed that your father could use their technology. Not to go all Gandalf on you, but maybe your dad was meant to have the N'Jal.”

  “I thought you didn't believe in destiny.”

  “I don't,” Jack clarified. “Not in an abstract sense, anyway. But sometimes we need a kind of shorthand to convey complex ideas.

  Well, Melissa did believe in destiny. Very much so. Things had gotten a little more complicated after the revelation that humans were living on planets all over this galaxy, but there was no reason that God would ignore his children. Her people had Jesus, the Leyrians had Layat. Melissa had spent some time reviewing cultural databases and found similar figures in Antauran and Ragnosian history. Some people might chalk that up to an odd quirk of human nature, a tendency to canonize ordinary men and women. To Melissa, it was evidence of the divine working its will through all human civilizations. “I agree,” she said. “That's why I haven't given the N'Jal back to Larani.”

  “Bring us around 180 degrees.”

  She tapped the console, which caused a window to expand on the SmartGlass. A second tap of her fingers opened a drop-down menu, and she selected a preprogrammed course change. Such maneuvers would be inadvisable in a firefight, when she had to react quickly, but right now, she was just learning the basics.

  In her window, she saw clouds scroll past as the shuttle executed a banking turn, and then they were headed back in the direction they had come from. She re-engaged the auto-pilot so she could talk to Jack.

  Melissa
swiveled around to face him with her hands on her knees, shrugging her shoulders as she spoke. “It worries me,” she said. “I'm glad my father has decided to stop throwing himself into fights he can't win, but this feels like an over-correction.”

  Jack looked up to blink at her, then returned his attention to his console. “I suppose your dad is only doing what he thinks is best,” he said softly. “Nobody else really knows what it's like to use the N'Jal.”

  “He seems to be managing pretty well.”

  “Maybe.” Jack offered a non-committal shrug in response to that. “Maybe there are side-effects we don't know about.”

  Now, that was a frightening prospect.

  Once again, she turned back to her console and let out a breath, her body slumping as the air fled her lungs. “I don't know,” she said. “But I guess if my father doesn't want the N'Jal, then turning it over for study would be the best course of action.”

  “We could contact Professor Nareo,” Jack suggested. “Because, you know, his life hasn't had quite enough mortal danger.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, Melissa,” Jack said. “You're just gonna have to trust your judgment. If you think you should return the N'Jal, then return it. If you think you might want to hold onto it in case your father changes his mind, do that.”

  “Yeah…Okay.”

  “So…feel like pulling some Luke Skywalker style crazy maneuvers?”

  A soft knock at the glass door made Larani look up to find Gabrina Valtez standing outside her office in black pants and a matching t-shirt. The woman had her dark hair tied up in a braid. “Come in!” Larani shouted.

  Gabrina pushed the door open and strode across the room, forcing out a sigh as she shook her head. “He's at it again,” she said. “Dusep. The man just proposed legislation to curtail immigration to this planet.”

  Larani stood up with a grunt. Sometimes it really did feel as if she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. “Just what we need,” she whispered. “More ginned up controversy.”