Hurricane (Hive Mind Book 3)

by Janet Edwards

  “Juniper can’t go as driftwood,” said Perran, in a horrified voice. “The rules against taking anything of value when you go drifting would mean she can’t take her exoskeleton with her. I have to …”

  “You have to accept you’ve destroyed Juniper’s life,” interrupted Lucas. “I hope we can help her rebuild it, but we can’t do that unless you keep your promise to leave her in peace. Now please go away.”

  Perran hesitated.

  “Tactical Commander Lucas told you to leave,” said Adika menacingly.

  Perran finally walked away down the path to the seawall.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help Juniper, then please let me know,” said Cador. “She’s an intelligent girl and very popular with people at the sea farm. I wish I could recruit her to be a member of Sea Farm Security, but our people are selected by Lottery rather than me personally.”

  Lucas nodded. “I feel the best chance for Juniper is for me to persuade her to enter Lottery, but my first priority has to be catching our target. Let’s catch up with Juniper and Eli now.”

  There was silence as Lucas led us along the path to where Juniper and Eli were standing outside the beach exit, waiting for us. “I hope you’re able to concentrate on helping us again now, Juniper.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Juniper stiffly. “I’m sorry I let Perran upset me.”

  “Try to forget about Perran,” said Lucas. “I don’t think he’ll bother you again. Now, before we go into the observatory, I have a key question to ask Cador. Which people at the sea farm are able to monitor calls and messages? Is it just members of Sea Farm Security?”

  “Nobody at the sea farm is able to monitor calls at all,” said Cador.

  Lucas blinked. “Are you sure about that, Cador?”

  “Absolutely sure. The sea farm doesn’t have its own call system. We make all our calls using the system at the neighbouring coastal patrol base, and that’s run by Hive Defence.”

  Lucas tugged at his hair. “I’d assumed the sea farm call system would be less secure than the one at the Hive, but it’s actually the other way around. The sea farm calls are made on a high-security Hive Defence call system, while standard calls at the Hive are made on a civilian system.”

  “Yes,” said Cador. “Apart from the security levels, there’s another important difference between the two systems. The civilian system has no call logging system, but the defence system does. That means we could ask the coastal patrol base for lists of everyone who’d called or been called by our murder victims in the weeks before …”

  Cador’s last sentence was drowned out by Lucas gabbling frantically to himself. “My calls to Tressa were made on a Hive Defence secure call system. Nobody could monitor those calls. Nobody could know about the furniture in advance. Nobody could poison the mattress after it was delivered.”

  Lucas paused before practically shouting the next sentence. “Nobody poisoned Zak!”

  Cador and Juniper gave him worried looks, and I heard Megan’s voice speak on the crystal comms. “I hate to argue with you about a case, Lucas, but someone definitely poisoned Zak.”

  “Nobody poisoned Zak,” Lucas repeated. “Cador, Juniper, look at these piles of furniture.”

  Lucas pointed at the stacks of furniture in front of the rocky outcrop. “This furniture was brought down the hillside from the general supply store on Level 3 of the Haven. We took the mattress on top of the pile nearest the door into our base corridors, and the person who lay down on it was poisoned by fumes from the same chemical that killed Hazel. Expert analysis showed the poison had been put on the mattress less than two hours beforehand.”

  Cador frowned in thought. “That means one of the people who delivered your furniture poisoned the mattress, and put it on top of the pile so it would be the first one used.”

  “If nobody was able to monitor my calls to Tressa, then none of the delivery people could have known we were going to use that furniture until the Admiral ordered them to take it down the hillside,” said Lucas. “He watched them carefully the whole time, so none of them had a chance to fetch chemicals or tamper with the mattress.”

  Cador shrugged. “Then the murderer must have seen your aircraft landing on the beach, sneaked over to watch what you were doing, spotted the furniture stacked outside the beach exit, and waited for a quiet moment to poison the top mattress.”

  Lucas shook his head. “One of my men was supervising the unloading of supplies from our transport aircraft, and he says no one went near the furniture.”

  Cador shrugged again. “Your man must have missed seeing someone.”

  Forge was standing right next to me in his nosy costume. I could sense his frustration at not being able to argue his case.

  “The man was one of our deputy Strike team leaders,” said Lucas. “If he says no one went near that furniture, I believe him. The mattress wasn’t poisoned by a human being.”

  Juniper looked startled. “You think a nosy did it, sir?”

  Lucas laughed. “No. I think a surveillance drone did it. Cador was right about the murderer seeing our aircraft landing on the beach, but he or she used a surveillance drone to spy on us and poison the mattress. When we arrived in the aircraft hangar, there was a surveillance drone hovering in mid air watching us disembark from our aircraft. It followed us down the corridor to the bank of lifts, and Adika threatened to shoot it. When the drone dropped to the floor and ran away, I noticed it could run up walls.”

  Cador was staring at the furniture in total silence.

  “The rocky outcrop behind the furniture forms a nearly vertical cliff,” said Lucas. “A human being might be able to drop down it without being seen, but they’d be painfully obvious when they tried to climb up again. No one would notice a surveillance drone though, because it’s far smaller and almost the same colour as the rock. Don’t you agree, Cador?”

  Lucas looked expectantly at Cador, but he didn’t reply.

  “There was only a single round patch of poison on the mattress,” continued Lucas. “My theory is the drone had the poison either painted on its base or somehow carried beneath it. The drone could have come out of one of the higher level Haven exits, and sneaked through the grass to the rocky outcrop without being seen. It would then only take the drone a moment to run down the cliff to the top mattress, dump some poison, and then run back up again.”

  Lucas paused. “Do you think that’s a credible theory, Cador?”

  Cador was still silently staring at the pile of furniture with a strange expression on his face.

  Lucas coughed and repeated his question. “Do you think that’s a credible theory?”

  Cador finally spoke. “I agree a surveillance drone could have done this – we often use them to carry small parcels – but … The Admiral warned me yesterday evening that he was bringing back help from the Hive, and said you didn’t want any surveillance cameras or drones observing your base.”

  He grimaced. “The Admiral didn’t tell me where your base was going to be, but I assumed you’d disable any surveillance cameras near it yourselves. I made sure none of my staff could use a surveillance drone to spy on you by recalling all our thirty-two drones before you arrived.”

  Cador waved his arms in one of his expansive gestures. “I kept one drone to use myself in emergencies, and locked up the other thirty-one. The surveillance drone you saw in the aircraft hangar was mine. I needed to make sure you’d brought nosies with you before I suggested my core group should volunteer to get our minds read. I didn’t send my drone after you to the lifts though.”

  Lucas frowned. “The drone by the lifts looked identical to the one we’d seen in the hangar, so we assumed it was the same one. Who could have got access to the other drones?”

  “Absolutely nobody,” said Cador. “I’ve got them in the high-security store, where I keep anything that has to be submitted to Joint Hive Treaty as evidence. The door can’t be opened without scans of both my handprint and retina.”

 
“So where did the other drone come from?” asked Adika.

  “I’ve been trying to work that out,” said Cador. “There are only three possibilities. It came from our Hive, it came from another Hive, or it was a secret hybrid.”

  “What do you mean by a hybrid?” asked Lucas.

  “We’re constantly having to replace surveillance cameras because people smash them or smother them in paint,” said Cador. “That isn’t a problem because the cameras are made here at the sea farm. The surveillance drones come from the Hive though, so we get asked a lot of awkward questions if we order too many replacements.”

  Cador pulled a face. “So we get as many damaged drones repaired as we can. Our repairman often used parts from one irreparably damaged drone to fix another, and we call the end result a hybrid because it will have parts with serial numbers for two different drones. Our repairman was supposed to hand all functioning hybrid drones and their control boxes back to us, but he could have secretly kept one. We’ve no way of knowing how many parts he salvaged and reused.”

  “We obviously need to get one of our nosies to read this repairman’s thoughts,” said Lucas.

  “Your nosies won’t be able to read his thoughts,” said Cador. “Our repairman was Treeve, the second murder victim.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  An hour later, I was sitting on a crate in a corner of the observatory, gazing out at where the red hue of the setting sun was reflected in the sea. Lucas, Juniper and Cador were standing in the centre of the room, and Lucas was using his dataview to display a series of notes on the three glass walls, which created the odd illusion of shimmering words being embedded in the glass.

  To add to the surreality of the scene, Lucas’s Tactical team members and Buzz were also taking part in the meeting, but they’d avoided the complications of being so close to Outside by only being present as glowing holo heads drifting around the dimly lit room. I was just wondering if the observatory had any lights I could turn on when there was a gust of wind from the door to Outside. Adika came in and looked hopefully at Cador.

  “Have your people managed to establish contact with that illegal drone?”

  Cador shook his head. “Emblyn’s tried every control code we’ve used for a drone in the last twenty years, but there’s no response. Whatever control code the drone had originally, Treeve must have changed it.”

  Adika sighed and faced Lucas. “The aircraft have gone to the coastal patrol base for the night, sir, and the Strike team have moved all the furniture down to the beach. Rothan is getting them to stack it into a heap now.”

  “Make sure they don’t set fire to the furniture until it’s fully dark,” said Lucas.

  “Yes, sir.” Adika went back out into the icy evening air.

  Lucas studied the walls. “Does everyone agree that we’ve established the complete timeline of attacks now? Starting with the earliest ones at the far left, and ending with Treeve’s murder and the attack on us at the far right.”

  Cador and Juniper nodded.

  “The first thing that impresses me is the sheer number of these attacks,” said Lucas. “I’m amazed none of your surveillance cameras caught the target setting a trap.”

  “The problem is that sea farm people grow up skilled in the art of disabling and evading our surveillance devices,” said Cador bitterly. “Even Juniper admitted during the broadcast that she’d made paint eggs and stoned surveillance drones.”

  Juniper blushed. “I made up the bit about stoning surveillance drones. I’d never deliberately damage a drone, because it’s embarrassing for Cador and the Admiral to report a lot of destroyed drones to the Hive, and harms the reputation of the sea farm as well. It’s true that I made paint eggs though.”

  “I know it is,” said Cador pointedly. “You were the first person I arrested when I came out of Lottery as head of Sea Farm Security.”

  We all stared at him and then at Juniper. “If you’d just come out of Lottery, Cador, then Juniper could have only been about nine years old,” said Lucas.

  “Eight years old and caught paint-handed distributing ninety-four eggs to her friends,” said Cador. “Everyone at the sea farm was joking about it for months.”

  Juniper cringed.

  “What are paint eggs?” I asked.

  Cador gestured at Juniper. “You’d better explain that since you’re the expert.”

  Juniper spoke in an embarrassed voice. “You take a hen’s egg, make a hole in the bottom, empty out the contents to use later, and pour in some paint. Then you seal the hole with something like wax, turn the egg the right way up, and put it in a box to make it look like you’re carrying ordinary eggs.”

  “And then you and your friends put on Halloween masks to cover your faces, and go to throw paint eggs at all the nearby surveillance cameras.” Cador suddenly grinned and winked at Juniper. “Don’t repeat this to anyone, but I threw a few paint eggs myself as a child.”

  I frowned. It sounded like sabotaging surveillance cameras was exactly like teens riding the handrail on the moving stairs back at the Hive. Against the rules, but everyone did it.

  “Emili made a good point earlier,” said Lucas. “We’ve been focusing on the social differences between the sea farm and the Hive, and worrying how that will impact our analytical techniques, but some of the most basic facts about people must remain the same.”

  “That was just a casual remark, sir,” said the holo head of Emili. “Do you really think it’s important?”

  “I think it’s crucially important,” said Lucas. “People at the sea farm may be influenced by some different factors, but they’ll still display the same basic personality archetypes that we see at the Hive. Take Perran for example. He was a classic case of someone with an inflated ego who couldn’t cope with others achieving more than him. What he’ll become in future remains to be seen.”

  Lucas paused. “So I want my people to analyze this case by focusing on basic personality traits. If we make any assumptions which don’t hold true at the sea farm, then Cador and Juniper should correct us.”

  “As a psychologist, I’m immediately seeing something odd about your timeline, sir,” said Buzz. “The target begins with a long series of attacks that are carefully disguised as plausible accidents, abruptly escalates into committing murder, regresses to setting a series of far more blatant traps for a couple of months, and then commits a second murder. That’s an atypical progression.”

  Hallie’s purple-haired holo head darted closer to a section of wall. “The escalation into murder could indicate the target had suffered a mental break, sir, but that’s inconsistent with the regression into setting traps again.”

  “I agree with both of you,” said Lucas. “We have an anomalous timeline. The method used to poison Zak’s mattress indicates a perpetrator in total control of their actions. Let’s establish the base point that our target has not suffered a mental break.”

  He tapped at his dataview. “Caution, or lack of it, is a fundamental character trait. Let’s try ignoring the two murders for a moment, and rating the other attacks for the level of caution displayed by the target committing them.”

  Two blocks of text vanished from the wall, and brightly glowing numbers appeared next to the others.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Lucas.

  Gideon’s holo face grimaced, emphasizing the heavy lines on his forehead. “Yes, sir. The murders have been distracting us, but once you ignore them it’s obvious.”

  “Would someone like to explain what you’re talking about?” asked Cador hopefully.

  “We have two targets,” said Lucas.

  “Two?” Cador groaned. “I thought we had enough problems with just one of them.”

  “The fact there are two targets is why you’ve been struggling with this case,” said Lucas. “Your methods are heavily dependent on things like motives and alibis, so having two targets has confused you.”

  Lucas’s voice held a hint of stress now. “We’ve
had cases where multiple targets were working together, but I’ve never seen a clearly defined, sequential incident pattern like this before. A cautious person was responsible for the attacks before Hazel’s murder. Someone with a far more reckless nature committed the later series of attacks. There’s absolutely no overlap between the two.”

  “It’s vanishingly rare for us to see a sequential incident pattern at the Hive, sir,” said Gideon swiftly. “We have the help of nosies, so cases don’t go unsolved long enough for one target to start copying another or there to be a deliberate handover between the two. I worked on Claire’s Tactical team for forty-nine years, and I’ve only seen this type of pattern twice.”

  I blinked. I’d known Gideon had worked in Telepath units before joining my Tactical team. Megan had recruited him so he could give the benefit of his decades of experience to a Tactical team with a startlingly young Tactical Commander.

  I’d assumed Gideon’s experience had been with one of the other current telepaths though. I was shocked to realize he’d spent his whole working life in Claire’s unit, seen the unit close down on her death, retired, and been coaxed back to work for me when that same unit reopened three years later.

  Waste it! How had Gideon felt returning to his old unit to find its rooms and corridors filled with strangers, most of them eighteen-year-olds fresh from Lottery? What did he think when he saw me living in Claire’s apartment and doing her work?

  I rarely read the minds of the members of Lucas’s Tactical team. I didn’t think I’d read Gideon’s mind at all since the compulsory check when he joined the unit, and I’d no memory of what I’d seen in his thoughts back then. There’d been a torrent of people arriving, so I’d depended on Megan to sum up each person’s past experience in a few sentences, before making a hasty two-minute check of their mind.

  I was sure of one thing though. Gideon must have been thinking of his future rather than his past when I read his mind, because I’d have noticed any mention of Claire. I wanted to ask Gideon about her now, but I’d have to wait for a better time than …