Borderline (Hive Mind Book 4)

by Janet Edwards

  I gulped. “Twenty-five! She went for the maximum number under the higher limit then.”

  Gideon laughed. “Claire was a Hiveist, remember. The official request arrived on her twenty-fifth birthday, telling her how valuable her children would be to the Hive, and saying that Hives are allowed to select one in a million citizens to have twenty-five children through the duty child programme. Claire immediately agreed to have one duty child a year until she was fifty.”

  “I suppose the children were adopted,” I muttered.

  “No. Claire didn’t like the idea of handing her children over to strangers, so there was a communal living arrangement for them in our unit. The staff included some of the surrogate mothers, but Claire and the assorted genetic fathers were all involved as well.”

  I frowned. “How does the Hive recruit these surrogate mothers?”

  “In the same way that the Hive fills any position,” said Gideon. “Suitable candidates are identified in Lottery. I only ever talked about the issue with one of the surrogate mothers. She told me that she loved bringing new lives into the Hive, but had no desire to be physically intimate with a partner, so being a surrogate mother was perfect for her.”

  “And what do you mean by assorted genetic fathers?”

  “Claire never had a partner. Over the years, she invited a series of single men in our unit to be a genetic father to a couple of her children.” Gideon blushed. “Claire’s last two children were mine.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “You’ve never said anything about having children before.”

  “Of course I haven’t,” said Gideon. “I’ve been worried by the amount you’ve had to cope with since you came out of Lottery. I wasn’t going to throw the duty children complication at you as well. People react to it in varying ways, depending on their attitude to family and their ideas about responsibility for their children. Some see the option of duty children as a great advantage, but I knew you’d be comparing it to your very close-knit family and find it deeply worrying.”

  “I haven’t noticed anyone visiting you either,” I said anxiously. “I hope you haven’t been keeping your children away because of me.”

  “My boys aren’t exactly children any longer. They’re in their forties and have grown children of their own. After Claire’s death, we swapped from them visiting me, to having family gatherings at my eldest son’s home. We’ll be celebrating the New Year festival there as well.”

  I was reassured. I knew that sort of change was bound to happen over time, because my mother’s Level 31 parents had started coming to celebrate the New Year on Level 27 when Gregas and I were small children.

  “Was everyone happy with Claire’s arrangement for her duty children?” I asked.

  “Most of the time,” said Gideon. “With twenty-five children, five surrogate mothers, and ten genetic fathers, there were inevitably some personality clashes.”

  He sighed. “I know the whole arrangement must sound strange to you. I found it strange too when I first joined the unit, but it was an indescribably complex extended family that worked in completely unpredictable ways. One of the key factors was the death of one of the genetic fathers on an emergency run.”

  Gideon’s face twisted as if this was linked to some painful memory. “I never knew the man personally – he’d died long before I joined the unit – but the rule after that was a child could call on any one of us to act as parent. Once I became a genetic father, I suddenly had a string of children coming to chat with me. The oddest thing was it didn’t just include the young ones living in the unit, and the teens on their visits home, but the ones who were adults as well. I think they found it helpful to talk about problems with someone close to their own age.”

  I’d wondered why Gideon, a man who’d never had a partner, was so good at acting the fatherly role in the unit. Now it all made sense. Gideon hadn’t just had two children, but twenty-five of them. No wonder I found it so easy to discuss things with him.

  “When two unrelated children in the unit were orphaned, they were automatically swept up into the system as well,” continued Gideon. “It worked amazingly well in many ways, but had some disastrous flaws, and it was always an emotional time when one of the children left for Teen Level. Lottery could be difficult too. Claire praised all her children’s Lottery results, and the results of every other child born in the unit as well, but after our younger boy went through Lottery she confessed to me that she felt a sense of having failed the Hive.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Claire was nearly seventy by then. She knew that she wouldn’t live forever, and had secretly dreamed of one of her children being a telepath and helping the Hive after she was gone.”

  Gideon gave me a thoughtful look. “I suspect you’re making Claire into your role model. Am I right, Amber?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Everyone says Claire was a wonderful telepath.”

  “Claire was a wonderful telepath,” said Gideon earnestly. “She was a wonderful person too. I loved her. Our whole unit loved her. You mustn’t feel you have to copy her in every way though, and certainly not when it comes to having duty children.”

  He looked intently at me. “You can be inspired by Claire’s example, Amber, but you have to be your own person, and do what is right for you rather than her. Claire wasn’t perfect, she was gloriously human, and made some gigantic mistakes. Her sense of duty was both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. She demanded the impossible of herself in the service of the Hive, and then had fits of depression when she failed.”

  Gideon grimaced. “Please don’t make Claire’s mistake, Amber. I know you’re deeply aware of how much the Hive needs you, and do everything you can to help. Our unit is constantly grateful for the fact we don’t have another Keith on our hands, but you need to remember that your work is an immense strain on you, both mentally and physically.”

  He paused. “After Claire’s first heart attack, we tried having her wear a complex armband monitor on the next few runs, but we had to give up on that. The readings were both terrifying and totally useless. She was burning more energy using her telepathy than a Strike team member did lifting weights, and the stress level of reading a wild bee was going right off the scale. Her doctors couldn’t tell what was normal and what was a warning sign of another heart attack.”

  “I hadn’t realized that my telepathy had that big a physical effect,” I said. “I suppose that’s why I have moments when I’m ravenously hungry.”

  “Yes,” said Gideon. “Telepaths save lives on a daily basis, and their help is particularly crucial in preventing major acts of sabotage, but there’s a massive physical and emotional cost. I don’t know how you carry the burden you do without crumbling, especially given you’re only eighteen.”

  “I’ll soon be nineteen.”

  He burst out laughing. “Yes, you’ll soon be nineteen, which will make a vast difference, and Lucas is already a colossal twenty-one years old. I’ve no idea why I worry about the two of you having to cope with crisis after crisis. All the same, it’s important that you accept there’ll be times when you either fail or hit the limits of human endurance, and don’t punish yourself with guilt and depression for not being flawless.”

  I nodded.

  “I strongly suggest that you forget about the duty child programme for now, Amber. The rules state that you have to be twenty-five years old to consent to take part, so it won’t be relevant to you for another six or seven years. It’s clear from your body language that you find the issue disturbing, and the entire subject is a huge emotional trigger for Lucas.”

  “Yes,” I muttered uneasily. “Lucas was a duty child, his childhood was a mess, and he knows that his twenty-fifth birthday will be the start of the Hive nagging him to have duty children himself.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” said Gideon.

  I was confused. “You don’t think Lucas will be invited to the duty child programme? I thought Tactical Commanders were v
ery rare and valuable.”

  “They are,” said Gideon wryly, “but Lucas is the partner of a telepath. Our Hive doesn’t waste its duty child programme places by inviting both members of a couple, and it wouldn’t risk annoying a telepath by raising the issue with their partner. If you two stay together, then the official requests won’t start until your twenty-fifth birthday, and they’ll come to you rather than Lucas.”

  Gideon paused. “I don’t have much personal experience of relationships, Amber, but I’ve watched them from the outside, and there’s plenty of information about them in my imprint. What you and Lucas have is looking good to me, and you don’t want to damage it by rushing decisions on things like duty children. It’s foolish to try to run before you’ve learned to walk.”

  “I never want to damage what I have with Lucas, and I understand how vulnerable he is at this time of year.” I gnawed at my bottom lip and found myself repeating something from my conversation with Mira. “It’s hard to find someone who can truly accept you as both a person and a telepath, and it grows even harder with each year that passes.”

  “I remember Claire saying almost those exact words to me,” said Gideon. “We’d been watching some romantic bookette, started talking about the fact that both of us were single, and I got a bit carried away.”

  He pulled an embarrassed face. “I suggested we might try moving on from being friends to being lovers. Claire was very kind about it, gently saying that the gap between us was far too great. I thought she meant the age difference between us, and argued that didn’t matter to me, but she said it wasn’t about age but the length of time she’d been a telepath.”

  Gideon had a distant look now, and I guessed he was reliving that past moment. “Claire said it was hard to find someone who could truly accept her as both a person and a telepath. Then she added something strange about us standing on different sides of a lake.”

  I was wondering if Claire’s comment was something to do with distancing, when both my dataview and Gideon’s dataview chimed in unison.

  Gideon seized his dataview and checked it. “Lucas wants us in the Tactical office to discuss a message from Gold Commander Melisande.”

  We stood up and hurried through the set of park doors that led straight into the operational section of the unit. When we arrived in the Tactical office, I looked anxiously at Lucas.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “I’m hoping there isn’t a problem,” said Lucas. “I included a summary of last night’s events in the information exchange with the other Telepath Units. I carefully pointed out that we hadn’t sent the Strike team into Keith’s home zones to collect Forge. He’d come back to the unit by himself.”

  Lucas frowned. “Gold Commander Melisande has just sent me a message. She says Keith has complained to her about Forge entering Burgundy Zone without asking permission from him or Gaius.”

  “Really?” I gave an outraged wave of my hands. “How was Forge supposed to ask permission when he was bound, gagged, and unconscious in a crate? I’ll call Gold Commander Melisande at once.”

  “There’s no need for that,” said Lucas hastily. “Gold Commander Melisande felt the same way as you, and told Keith that his complaint was ridiculous. She said that even if Forge had entered Burgundy Zone of his own free will, he wouldn’t have needed to ask permission. The rules about warning other Telepath Units of movements only apply when accompanying a telepath.”

  He paused. “Keith then started ranting about Amber being allowed to restrict his Strike team’s movements in Blue Zone, while still sending her Strike team members to tramp around his home zones whenever she wanted. Gold Commander Melisande messaged me to warn us that Keith may do something to cause trouble and …”

  Lucas was interrupted by a chime from his dataview. He tapped at the screen, and Buzz’s voice spoke urgently.

  “Lucas, we have a crisis. A minute ago, I received a message from Tobias’s Therapy Unit. I thought it would be to tell me that his assessment had been completed and they were ready to perform his memory reset, but it said they’d released him in response to our order.”

  “What order?” demanded Lucas.

  “I just called them to ask that question,” said Buzz. “They’d received an order flagged as Telepath Unit priority, and assumed it was from us. It said that there’d been a serious identification error, Tobias was totally innocent, and ordered them to release him immediately. I asked them to check the authorization details, and they discovered the order actually came from Keith’s unit. The order used Gaius’s codes, but …”

  Lucas groaned. “The other Tactical Commanders know all about what happened with Tobias. Gaius would never order the release of someone who was a threat to Amber’s life. Keith must have seen the information in Gaius’s mind and sent that message himself.”

  “Gold Commander Melisande just warned us Keith might do something to cause trouble,” I said numbly. “She was right.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  “Tobias was being treated at the nearest specialist Therapy Unit,” said Lucas. “If he’s only just been released …”

  Lucas took a crystal unit from his pocket, and held it out to me with his left hand, while tapping at his dataview with his right. A computerized voice spoke from the ceiling. “Unit emergency alert. We have an incident in progress.”

  I grabbed the crystal unit from Lucas, and sprinted out of the Tactical office door, turning along the corridor towards the unit lifts and accommodation section.

  The standard announcement continued from overhead speakers. “Operational teams to stations. Strike team to lift 2.”

  When that finished, Lucas’s voice snapped out three extra words I’d never heard on the overhead speakers before. “Full combat equipment.”

  Adika’s voice followed. “Alpha team, you have the strike. Amber, come directly to the lift, I’m bringing combat equipment for you.”

  My family were in my unit right now, and the overhead speakers were everywhere, so they must be hearing all this. I wondered what they were thinking, grimaced, and comforted myself with the thought that Nicole or Megan would send someone to reassure them. It was quite likely that Megan would go to talk to them herself.

  I had to trust my people to do their jobs, while I focused on doing mine. The loudspeaker system had gone quiet now, which probably meant the conversation had moved to the crystal comms. I realized I was still holding the crystal unit that Lucas had given me, and slowed down for a moment to put it in my ear.

  Lucas was already explaining the situation. “… found out Tobias has just been released from the Therapy Unit with his memories and imprint still intact. We’re sending out Amber and the Strike team to try to recapture him before he leaves the area.”

  “Why was Tobias released?” demanded Adika. “He’s a danger to Amber and everyone else in our unit.”

  Lucas responded with one bitter word. “Keith.”

  There was a pause before Adika spoke, which I suspected meant he was trying not to swear over the crystal comms. “Initiating unit defence measures now. Forge, you’re in charge of defending the unit. Organize Beta team members to guard all the regular and emergency entrances. Make sure you put a bodyguard on Lucas. If Tobias can’t reach Amber, then Lucas has to be his preferred alternate target.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Lucas. “Forge had better post a bodyguard to protect Amber’s parents and brother as well.”

  I reached the security doors, thrust them open, and ran into lift 2. Adika and the Alpha Strike team were already inside it, pulling grey, heavy-duty combat armour on over the top of their clothes. I realized the system was that they brought combat armour to the lift before changing into it, and vaguely wondered if they sometimes did that with the ordinary body armour too, and I’d just never arrived at the lift fast enough to catch them doing it.

  Adika thrust a set of combat armour at me, then slapped the lift controls. The doors closed, and the lift started dropping down at ultr
a express speed.

  “Strike team is moving,” he snapped.

  “Tactical team ready,” said Lucas.

  “Liaison team ready,” said Nicole. “Tracking status green for all Strike team.”

  I dropped my combat armour to the floor to free my hands, took my dataview from my pocket, checked the display, and saw Eli was in charge of my bodyguards. “We are green.”

  Rothan had his combat armour on now. He picked up mine from the floor, and began helping me into it.

  “Tobias’s Therapy Unit specializes in dealing with violent offenders, so it’s located on Level 20,” said Lucas. “You’ll be taking the lift straight down to there, and Liaison will be clearing the belt system on your route to let you move at maximum speed.”

  “That’s going to cause chaos on Level 20,” said Rothan thoughtfully.

  “Yes, but every second counts on this run,” said Lucas. “Tobias is an extreme threat to Amber’s life. Deadly force is authorized.”

  I stopped in the act of thrusting an arm into the sleeve of my combat armour to protest. “No! We want to capture Tobias, not kill him.”

  “Nobody will use deadly force unless absolutely necessary, Amber,” said Lucas, in a soothing voice. “When you read Tobias’s mind, you said that he hated us and wanted to take revenge on us for destroying his career. That revenge will be particularly aimed at you. We must allow the Strike team to take whatever measures are needed to defend you and themselves.”

  “Yes, but …” I let my words trail off. What Lucas had said made sense. I didn’t want Tobias to be killed, but I didn’t want any of the rest of my team dying either.

  “Deadly force is authorized,” repeated Lucas.

  The Alpha team members had all finished putting their combat armour on within seconds. Even with Rothan’s assistance, I was far slower. I’d barely got my combat armour adjusted, and accepted a gun from Adika, when the lift doors opened on Level 20. Adika picked me up, and my bodyguards clustered tightly around us, as we rushed across to join a totally empty express belt. I blinked as I saw the flashing overhead signs. “Clear belt for Strike team emergency response.”