Defender

by Janet Edwards

  Now I could be about to learn the reason why telepaths must not meet by meeting one myself. Infected by Adika’s fears, and my forehead throbbing with pain, I was no longer curious but terrified.

  “Situation status report?” asked Adika, in a breathless voice.

  “Sapphire and her Strike team are in area 520/4030 in Green Zone, heading north to the bulkhead doors at express belt speed,” said Lucas. “Separation is currently 21 levels, 190 east to west, 560 north to south.”

  Adika was imprinted with the formula for calculating total three-dimensional telepath separation, but he wasn’t bothering to even estimate the answer. A horizontal separation of half a zone, 500 in either direction, was the recommended minimum. We were in area 710/3470 in Yellow Zone, and currently had a separation of 560 north to south, but that would shrink hideously quickly when Sapphire was incoming at express belt speed. Lucas was doing the right thing by sending us fleeing north to maintain our distance from her.

  Whoever was carrying me abruptly slackened his pace. I felt the distinctive series of movements that meant we’d joined the belt system, and were moving across from the slow belt to the medium and then the express.

  “Crystal units to audio only now,” said Adika. “Lucas, we’re heading north on the express belt but it’s crowded with other travellers. Liaison will have to get them out of our way if you want us to run along the belt.”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” Lucas’s voice was reassuringly calm again. “Sapphire and her team just jumped belt and entered a lift. You’re rapidly gaining north to south separation now. There’s still a chance that Sapphire’s team may need to head north again though, so you should continue to Orange Zone and hold position there awaiting further developments.”

  My Strike team were carefully chosen to have the right personalities for their work. Adika had reacted with instant tension to Lucas’s warning of a potential isolation perimeter breach. Now the crisis was over, he relaxed just as quickly.

  I felt his moment of niggling doubt, when he wondered exactly why telepaths had to be kept apart, but that was instantly swept aside. There had to be a good reason for the rule. For one thing, it would obviously be dangerous for two armed Strike teams to be working too near each other. Strike team members could be killed by friendly fire. The unthinkable could happen, and a telepath could be killed.

  The Hive knew best. Separation was important. Adika dismissed that issue, moved on to thinking about another point, and became irritated.

  “Why were we the ones evacuating?” he asked. “It sounds as if Sapphire and her team were on an emergency run, but so were we, and our unit has home zone priority in Yellow and Orange Zones.”

  “I relinquished home zone priority to Sapphire’s unit,” said Lucas. “Sapphire and her Strike team were actively in pursuit of a target, while we weren’t.”

  Adika gave a grunt of grudging acceptance. He was perfectly calm now, but I was suffering from shaken nerves. I pulled back into the shelter of my own mind, and told myself there was no need for me to worry. Whatever horror would result from two telepaths meeting didn’t matter. The Tactical Commanders of the five Telepath Units had a system to keep their telepaths apart. I could trust them to keep us safe. I could trust Lucas to keep me safe.

  I felt a hand brush against the side of my face and adjust the setting on my ear crystal. There was the familiar clicking sound that meant the camera extension was folding itself back into the crystal unit. I belatedly remembered that Adika had given the order to set crystal units to audio. I should have adjusted the setting myself when he said that, but I’d been too distracted by fear and pain.

  The fear had retreated a little, but the throbbing pain of my headache was still beating at me. Having my eyes closed, brooding on what had just happened, probably wasn’t helping.

  I opened my eyes, and found myself looking up at the face of Rothan, Adika’s deputy team leader in charge of the Alpha Strike team. He smiled at me, and I forced a smile in return. I’d normally stand on my own feet when we were travelling on the belt system, to avoid attracting the stares of curious onlookers. It was a little late to start worrying about that though, and I was feeling oddly shaky, so I let Rothan keep carrying me.

  We rode on in silence until a voice boomed from overhead speakers. “Warning, zone bulkhead approaching!”

  I felt a jolt as Rothan jumped from the Yellow Zone express belt to the Orange Zone express belt. A minute or two later, our group left the belt system, moved into a side corridor and stopped.

  “Strike team are now in Orange Zone and awaiting further instructions,” said Adika.

  “Sapphire’s Strike team just secured their target,” said Lucas. “They should be out of Yellow Zone within ten minutes, and then you can come back to our unit.”

  I looked up at Rothan’s face again, and had a weird feeling that there was something wrong about him. My thoughts clouded by my headache, it took me a minute to pin down what was bothering me. All of my Strike team members were heavily muscled with black hair. I’d thought that they all had dark eyes as well, but now I could see that Rothan’s eyes were a distinctive blue. How could I have made such a basic mistake?

  Rothan’s expression was anxious. “Is something wrong, Amber?”

  “No. Yes.” I brushed my hand across my eyes. “My head hurts.”

  “Start back to our unit now.” Lucas’s voice had to be coming from my ear crystal, but it sounded strangely distant.

  “You want us to come back right away, Lucas?” Adika’s voice sounded distant too. “I thought we were going to wait here until Sapphire was out of Yellow Zone.”

  “If necessary, we’ll divert Sapphire’s team out of your way,” said Lucas. “Amber clearly has a problem, so we need to get her back to our unit as fast as possible.”

  I tried to say that I was fine, and they didn’t need to divert Sapphire’s team, but I was lost in a clouded world of pain and my lips didn’t respond.

  Chapter Five

  Eight hours later, I was lying on a heap of cushions in the bookette room of the apartment I shared with Lucas. The room wasn’t playing a proper bookette, but the holos were showing a background scene from one of the Hive beaches. The sand around me was dotted with seashells. The sea was calm, set for swimming rather than surfing. The suns were bright in the painted ceiling, and the cries of the gulls flying overhead were mixed with the sound of wind and waves.

  The illusion was so convincing that I unthinkingly reached out to touch a delicate spiralling shell. My fingers went straight through it, touching the thick pile of the room’s genuine carpet flooring, and I laughed at my own foolishness.

  “How is your headache now?” asked Lucas.

  “It’s almost gone.”

  I rolled onto my right side, and looked at where Lucas was stretched out next to me. He was twenty-one and had been working on Telepath Unit Tactical teams for three years. For the first year, he’d just been a team member in Keith’s unit, but then he’d been promoted to deputy, and finally joined my unit to carry the huge burden of being Tactical Commander. In relaxed moments like this though, he still looked and acted like a teen.

  It was only Lucas’s eyes that gave away the truth. They were surprisingly dark compared to his unruly light-brown hair, and you could tell they’d seen things he’d like to forget. At least, I could tell that. Perhaps that was just because I was a telepath and knew Lucas’s mind so well. Did other people look at his eyes without noticing the shadows in their depths?

  Thinking of Lucas’s eyes reminded me of my bewilderment seeing Rothan’s eyes earlier. “Something peculiar happened at the end of the last emergency run. I looked at Rothan’s eyes and had a weird illusion they were blue.”

  “Rothan’s eyes are blue,” said Lucas. “You were confused because he was wearing brown contact lenses until yesterday.”

  “Rothan was wearing contact lenses to change the colour of his eyes? Why would he do that?” Lucas didn’t have time to
reply before I groaned and answered my own question. “This is because Lottery chose my Strike team members to be potential partners for me, and it decided I was attracted to men with black hair and dark eyes. It was only when I caught Rafael thinking about dyeing his hair that I realized he didn’t have naturally black hair. I’d no idea that Rothan had been wearing contact lenses. Are any more of the Strike team doing that?”

  “There aren’t any more wearing contact lenses. Lottery chose most of the Strike team candidates to match the physical appearance criteria exactly. A few especially able candidates were allowed through with the wrong colour hair because that’s easily fixed with a little hair dye. Rothan’s test scores were so high that he was selected despite having both lighter coloured hair and totally the wrong eye colour.”

  Lucas smiled. “When you told Rafael that he didn’t need to keep dyeing his hair, he told Adika about it, and Adika discussed it with me. Given we’d already discovered that Lottery had made an error in your physical appearance preferences, we decided to let the relevant few Strike team members revert to their natural selves. You may notice some gradual changes in hair colour over the next few weeks. Rothan’s eyes going from brown to blue was inevitably an abrupt change. You don’t find a blue-eyed Rothan too repugnant?”

  “Of course not.”

  I cautiously reached out my left hand to smooth a rebellious strand of Lucas’s hair back into place. The warmth of him felt reassuring, so I let the palm of my hand run down the side of his face, feeling how the smoothness of his skin changed to stubble near his jawline. Lucas had stayed by my side since I got back to the unit, so he hadn’t had a chance to use shaving cream yet today.

  “You’re comfortable touching me again?” he asked.

  I pulled a face at him, before snuggling against him and resting my head on his chest. “Yes. That was deeply unnerving. I wasn’t aware until I got back here and hugged you that …”

  I broke off, wincing as I remembered being revolted by the warmth of a living, breathing Lucas.

  “You were suffering residual effects of your mental contact with Logan.” Lucas finished my sentence for me.

  “Yes. When I read the mind of a wild bee, I’m seeing the world through their eyes, sharing their thoughts, and feeling their emotions. That’s often disturbing, but I’ve never had the effects last this long. I suppose it was harder to shake them off when I was suffering from a headache.”

  Lucas was silent for a moment before speaking. “Did you have a headache when the run started?”

  “No.” I tried to think through the events of the run. “I first noticed it when I was reading Logan’s mind.”

  “Was that before or after we found out the body was Fran?”

  “Before.”

  Lucas frowned. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes. I definitely had a headache when we were discussing Logan’s attitudes.”

  “After we’d identified the body, you were struggling to follow instructions,” said Lucas. “I mistakenly assumed you were just suffering from the shock of discovering Fran was dead. I didn’t realize you were having problems before that. Are you recovered enough to read me yet?”

  I reached out to his shining mind. The thought levels flew past at staggering speed, constantly multiplying and merging, cascading down in glorious splendour into the subconscious and beyond. I couldn’t keep up with the words, but there were a host of camera images from this morning’s run, most of them of my own face. Lucas was analyzing exactly what had happened to me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Lucas dropped into the abbreviated speed speech he often used to save time when talking to me. “Essential telepath recover contact target.”

  I focused on the top level of his mind, where I could see the full sentences of pre-vocalized words. Lucas was saying that it was essential to allow a telepath sufficient time to recover after contact with difficult target minds.

  “Telepath Units have a mandatory twenty-four hour shutdown after emergency runs,” continued Lucas. “I’m choosing to start counting that twenty-four hours from now rather than from the end of the last run. If you have any further problems, either now or after future runs, I believe we should extend your recovery time to two or three days.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That would be unfair to the other telepaths. If I take more recovery time than them, it means they have to work harder to compensate.”

  “You read targets on deeper levels than other telepaths, Amber. You feel more of their emotions. That can be incredibly useful sometimes, but it also makes you far more vulnerable to stress.”

  I could tell Lucas didn’t like saying that. I didn’t like hearing it either.

  “Occasionally taking extended recovery time won’t be unfair to the other telepaths,” said Lucas. “They have their weaknesses too, and all the Telepath Units constantly make adjustments and trade cases to work around them.”

  He paused, and I saw the glittering levels of his mind abruptly darken, as if a shadow was passing over them. “Amber, it’s absolutely vital that you take the time you need to recover properly after emergency runs. Studying you near the end of that run, seeing your pain and disorientation, frightened me. Thirty years ago, our Hive lost York. Seven years ago, our Hive lost Olivia. We mustn’t lose you.”

  I was stunned by Lucas mentioning York and Olivia. Everyone on my operational teams knew about the two recent telepaths who had broken under the strain of reading minds. My unit members needed that knowledge, to help them stop the same thing happening to me, and I’d inevitably seen some of them thinking about the details.

  York had killed himself. Olivia was still alive, but could barely use her telepathy at all, so no one ever talked about her or included her in the number of current telepaths. In fact, the only time anyone had ever said the names of York and Olivia to me before was in my early days of training. I’d forced Lucas to talk about them back then. If he was voluntarily mentioning their names now, then he was truly terrified about my wellbeing.

  “All right. If you decide I need extended recovery time at any point, then I’ll accept the decision.” I sat up. “I’m not arguing with you about keeping our unit in mandatory shutdown until this time tomorrow, but can we talk about Fran for a while? There are a few questions worrying me.”

  “I understand it would be less stressful for you to have answers.” Lucas sat up as well, and turned to face me. “Go!”

  “What happened to Fran after I fired her? Did the Hive assign her to live down on Level 68 and work in that storage complex as a punishment?”

  Lucas was obviously startled by my question. “No. Assigning a highly skilled worker to basic tasks would be wasteful in the extreme. Fran’s record would have been flagged as unsuitable for assignments involving contact with Telepath Units, and a new position found for her.”

  He took out his dataview, and spoke into it. “Nicole, my apologies for interrupting your break. Can you send me Fran’s records?”

  I leaned across to speak into the dataview myself. “My fault. Sorry.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” said Nicole. “I’ve been looking through those records myself. I was feeling guilty about taking her job, and … Well, sending them to you now.”

  Lucas had made it a sound-only call, so I couldn’t see Nicole’s face, but her voice sounded strained. I tried to reassure her.

  “There’s no reason for you to feel guilty, Nicole. Fran had already left our unit before you even knew there was a problem.”

  “Amber’s right,” said Lucas. “The Liaison team members were left leaderless and bewildered just as our unit was going fully operational. You stepped in to take over the team. You pulled things together so well that Liaison gave the Strike team perfect support on crucial emergency runs. You’ve done a wonderful job and helped save a lot of lives.”

  “Thank you.” Nicole sounded much happier now.

  Lucas ended the call and skimmed through the records on his dataview. “
No suitable team leader post was available when Fran left us, so she was temporarily assigned as deputy team leader in a Security Unit in Navy Zone.”

  “That’s half the length of the Hive away from us.”

  Lucas nodded. “Given the circumstances of her leaving our unit, Fran would be assigned to work somewhere a long distance from us.”

  I frowned. The people working for Law Enforcement knew a host of important Hive secrets such as the truth about nosies and telepaths. To guard against accidental betrayal of those secrets, the Hive minimized the contact they had with ordinary citizens by giving them their own level of the Hive. Level 20 was very different from the other accommodation levels, having apartments in a whole range of living standards, as well as Law Enforcement office complexes.

  “Both Fran’s apartment and this Security Unit were on Level 20 in Navy Zone?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So if Fran was living and working on Level 20 in Navy Zone, what was she doing in a storage complex on Level 68 in Yellow Zone?”

  “My Tactical team will be investigating that tomorrow.” Lucas gave me a thoughtful look. “Unless you decide to take the alternative option of handing this case over to another Telepath Unit.”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “Speaking as your Tactical Commander, I strongly advise you to consider handing over this case, Amber. The other telepaths didn’t know Fran. It would be far less stressful for one of them to hunt her murderer.”

  I was the notional head of my Telepath Unit, with two deputies that did the actual work. Megan was in charge of the general administration of the unit. Lucas was in charge of unit operations. I didn’t get involved in the details of their work, because I didn’t understand half the things they did, but I made occasional major decisions and I was determined to make this one.

  “Fran belonged to our unit, Lucas. We should be the ones to find out who killed her.”

  “It’s highly probable that a second emergency call relating to the same target arrives within the next few hours, in which case another unit will take it anyway.”