“Director Coalson?”
The man at the desk looked up from his terminal to frown at the woman wearing a skirt suit and lab coat who had disturbed his work, “Yes, what is it?” he demanded, peevishly.
“We’ve had some unusual results from the Psionic Waveform Detection project,” the woman replied, apparently unruffled by the Director’s poor attitude as she reached up a hand to brush back a lock of light blue hair, “The data should be in your secure e-mail now.”
His frown now meditative rather than annoyed, Coalson leaned back in his chair, “Give me the primary points.”
“Yes, Director, we were running a wide-arc scan by the primary unit as part of a calibration test when we detected a Class-Ten esper event in South-Western Tacoma, possibly in the general vicinity of the Puyallup Wall, at ten-twenty-five last night. The event lasted for seven-point-five seconds before we lost the signal.”
Coalson blanched as he sat upright in his chair, “A Class-Ten? Who was it? Do we know what they were after?”
“We don’t know,” the woman shrugged, “None of the identified world-class espers were reported to be anywhere in the metroplex. According to our intelligence assets, the only one even within several hundred kilometers was The Empress, and she was in San Francisco. Furthermore, the Alpha-Five readings for the event showed some minor, but distinct, deviations from standard.”
“That’s not possible!” Coalson stared at the woman, “The Alpha-Fives are baseline for a reason! Every esper we have managed to scan has the same Alpha-Five readings, the only difference is in the strength of the other wavelengths!”
The woman arched an eyebrow at him as irritation flashed briefly across her face, “I am aware of that, Director, nevertheless, this esper’s Alpha-Five readings do deviate from the standard our research has established.”
“So we have an unrecorded world-class esper wandering about, throwing around enough psionic power to level a building, and they’re an aberration as well?” Coalson shook his head, “Were there any other developments?”
“Yes, at nine-twenty-three this morning, during another wide-arc calibration scan, we detected a Class-Four-point-Five esper event in South-central Tacoma, lasting thirty seconds. Our current analysis indicates at least two espers were involved, which is confusing the readings, but we believe that one of the espers involved shows the same Alpha-Five deviation as the Class-Ten event from last night.”
Coalson idly scratched his chin as he thought, “Hmmm … How many of the remote scanners have we gotten installed?”
“A dozen, scattered throughout the ‘plex for beta-testing and data acquisitions.”
“It’ll have to be enough,” grumbled Coalson, “I want wide-arc scans of the entire ‘plex on an hourly basis, and have any data we receive regarding these aberrant espers classified Top Secret and sent to me directly.”
“The PWD project is not ready for such heavy usage, especially over such a large area,” the woman objected with a frown, “That kind of over-use could cause data-corruption in the readings and it will put us behind schedule for project completion. And shouldn’t we be sending this data to the Home Office?”
“You have your instructions Doctor Lulamoon,” Coalson replied stiffly, “I’ll deal with the Home Office, and you focus on the PWD.”
Once the door had closed behind the doctor, Coalson leaned back, with an ugly smile upon his face, “After all, what Ms. Celestia doesn’t know, can’t hurt me.”