Defender

by Janet Edwards

  Our aircraft circled above Hive Futura, lost more height, and landed in an open clearing. I could see a slope leading down to what had to be an aircraft hangar, but its double doors were closed.

  “How do we get inside?” I asked.

  “Our pilot will transmit the remote activation code for the hangar doors.”

  Lucas had barely said the words when the hangar doors slid open. Our aircraft moved on down the slope, and through the doors. The aircraft hangar here looked virtually identical to the one we’d left back at the main Hive. The vibration of our aircraft engines stopped, and the other aircraft arrived and took up positions next to us.

  Adika opened our aircraft door, peered out, and beckoned to the Alpha Strike team. “The hangar doors have closed again. We can jump down and help the aircraft pilots put the steps in place for the others. After that, you’ve got all the fun of unloading those crates.”

  “If we have another crate shifting competition,” asked Eli hopefully, “will you join in on our side?”

  Adika gave him a pitying smile. “I would love to help you heave crates, Eli. Unfortunately, a Strike team leader has to treat the Alpha and Beta Strike teams with complete impartiality, so I’ll just have to stand and watch the rest of you work.”

  He jumped out of the open doorway before Eli could reply, and the Alpha Strike team followed him.

  Lucas turned to face me. “The Strike team may make jumping look easy, but it’s a long way down to the ground. We’d better wait for the steps to be put in place.”

  I hesitated, wondering how to break the news to him that Mercury was still firmly entrenched in my mind.

  “There’s no need to worry, Amber,” said Lucas. “I’m sure that your mind knows how to deal with fragmentation, but your fear of heights makes travelling in an aircraft a stressful experience.”

  Lucas knew that Mercury was still with me. Well, of course he knew that. He was an expert at reading faces, and mine must be screaming my disappointment.

  Lucas smiled at me. “We can’t expect anything to happen until you’ve recovered from the trip. Everyone needs to get unpacked and settled in here, so I suggest that we forget about the whole thing for today, and plan to go out for a nice relaxing walk with the Strike team tomorrow morning.”

  He paused. “There’s no need to worry,” he repeated. “We’ve got plenty of time to sort this out.”

  I did my best to smile back at him, but it probably wasn’t very convincing. Lucas said we had plenty of time, but we didn’t. The attack on the Hive was only a few days away.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The aircraft hangar at Hive Futura was bitterly cold, so everyone pulled on their padded jackets before starting work. Naturally I didn’t have anything to do, so I just sat on a crate at the edge of the hangar, watching a scene of purposeful activity.

  Megan was pointing out exactly where the Strike team members should put specific coloured crates. I saw Eli dump a black and red striped crate next to several matching ones, and exchange graphic looks with Dhiren. I wasn’t an expert in body language like Lucas, but it was clear those crates were extremely heavy.

  Hannah was unpacking kitchen unit food packs from green crates. The Liaison team were piling bags and backpacks on luggage trolleys. Lucas, the Tactical team, and several maintenance workers were unloading mysterious equipment from crates and connecting it together.

  “Excuse me,” Dhiren’s voice spoke from next to me.

  I turned my head to look at him.

  “I’m afraid we need your crate of power cells,” he continued apologetically.

  I stood up, watched Dhiren carry my seat away, and decided I was useless here. I knew which apartment Lucas and I would be using. It was the same one that Lucas had been given on our last visit to Hive Futura, and was only two cors to the east. I might as well go and be useless there instead.

  The direction sign by the great hangar doors told me that way was north. I was about to turn to face east when I noticed there was a small door under the sign, half hidden behind one of the aircraft. Presumably that was to allow people to go Outside without opening the main doors.

  The quietness here at Hive Futura was supposed to help me banish Mercury’s echo, but it was just making me increasingly aware of him lurking on the fringes of my mind. If I focused my attention on him, he’d scuttle away like an insect hiding from the light, only to reappear elsewhere a moment later.

  I glanced at Lucas, and saw he was fully occupied talking to our unit electrical maintenance specialist. I walked across to the small door, and scowled as I saw it had a complex lock.

  Adika came hurrying up. “Where are you going, Amber?”

  “I just wanted to have a look Outside.” I gave him a pleading smile. “Can you unlock the door for me?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to go Outside.”

  “What if I order you to let me go out there?”

  Adika folded his arms. “As telepath, you are the head of our unit. Should you give me a direct order, I have no choice but to obey it, unless it endangers your safety. I’m not sure whether this would endanger your safety or not, so I’d have to check with Lucas.”

  I groaned. “If you tell Lucas I’m going Outside, he’ll want to come with me, and that will ruin the whole point.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what the point of this is anyway,” said Adika, “unless you just want to sneak Outside to annoy Lucas. I admit that I’d have some sympathy for that as a reason. Lucas mentioned that we’ll be doing training exercises while we’re at Hive Futura, but he won’t tell me any details about them. I’m sure the rest of his Tactical team know what he’s planning, but they aren’t talking either. Can you read their minds, find out what’s going on, and explain it to me?”

  “You know that I don’t tell anyone the things I see in other people’s minds. At least, I try not to, though it’s sometimes difficult remembering exactly who knows which things about what person.”

  I nodded at the locked door. “The point of going Outside without Lucas is that he’s brought us here to solve my fragmentation issues. His theory is that my mind knows what to do, and just needs the quiet of being away from the Hive mind to be able to do it, but he’s scared to death that he’s wrong and it won’t work.”

  Adika frowned. “I thought Lucas was certain that bringing you here would work.”

  “He’s doing his best to project total confidence. He’s probably fooled everyone else here with his act, but I’m a telepath and can see his true feelings. Lucas is terrified that he’ll lose me to fragmentation.”

  I tugged my hair with both hands. “I need my mind to do something, but I’ve no idea what. I’m sure I need to relax for this to work, but how can I relax when I know that failure won’t just be disastrous for me, Lucas, and my unit, but everyone in my Hive as well? Lucas’s fear is piling extra pressure on me, so I’ll have a better chance of doing this if I go Outside without him.”

  Adika sighed. “If you’re only planning to stand by the door, not go hiking across the countryside, then a couple of bodyguards should be enough to ensure your safety. You stay hidden behind this aircraft, Amber. I’ll be right back.”

  I watched Adika walk off, and took out my dataview. It turned on normally, but when I tried to check my personal mail, I saw an unnerving message in large red letters. “You are not connected to the Hive.”

  What? I held my dataview upside down and shook it. The message was still there. I didn’t understand what was wrong. The last time I was in Hive Futura, I’d been able to call my parents using a secure link to the main Hive. Hadn’t we got a secure link set up yet? Was that what the huddle of the Tactical team and the maintenance workers were doing now?

  Adika arrived back, with Eli and Forge following him. I thrust my dataview into my pocket, and waited eagerly while Adika undid the lock on the door and opened it.

  “Waste that!” he said.

  I stared out through the door at a magica
l sight. There were feathery white crystals drifting down from the cloudy sky. Every branch of the surrounding pine trees had an etching of white to brighten the sombre dark green, and a thin white blanket of the stuff covered the ground.

  “What is it?” I demanded. “What’s happening?”

  “I think it’s just started snowing,” said Adika, in a grim voice. “Forge and I visited Rothan at the Fire Casualty Centre yesterday evening. We told him about our trip to Hive Futura, and he warned us that we might have problems with snow. Apparently it can be so cold at this time of the year that the rain freezes into white crystals called snowflakes.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, glorying in the spectacle.

  “It’s … extremely inconvenient,” said Adika, in the voice of someone who was tempted to use far stronger language. “Aircraft can cope with snow, but nobody is going Outside on foot in this.”

  “It can’t be that dangerous if it’s just frozen rain,” I said. “Surely that’s just like the ice we have in drinks.”

  Adika was unrelentingly doom laden. “Rothan warned me that snowdrifts can get very deep, and if it’s snowing too hard then the bad visibility means people can get lost and freeze to death.”

  I held my hand out of the door, palm upwards, and watched with fascination as a white crystal landed on it and melted into a drop of water.

  “Snow is also …”

  Adika let his sentence trail off, because I’d run out into the snow, and was looking up at the sky in wonder. “Everywhere is white and silver,” I shouted back at the others. “Outside is celebrating Carnival!”

  Adika groaned, walked out from the doorway, and took my arm. “You need to go straight back inside now, Amber.”

  “No. This is where I need to be. This is exactly where I need to be.” I shook off his hand, and walked a few steps further into the magical land of white crystals. I could feel Mercury shifting uneasily in the back of my mind. He liked the safety of the Hive and I was standing in the terrifying Outside. He adored warmth and this was a place of cold. He loved fire and here was only ice.

  Adika’s voice came from behind me. “I should never have agreed to bring Amber out here. Forge, you’d better go and get Lucas.”

  I ignored the distraction, reaching out with my hands to the falling snowflakes, reaching out with my thoughts to the Carnival landscape around me. Mercury was desperately clinging to my mind. I could feel his talons digging into me, and his voice screaming defiance, but I dropped to my knees and thrust my bare hands into the bitter cold of fallen snow.

  “Lucas, what do we do?” asked Adika, from behind me.

  “Leave Amber alone,” Lucas’s voice answered him. “We came here so she could deal with her echoes, and she’s doing it now.”

  Mercury was strong, but in this place, and at this time, I was much stronger. Our surroundings were both physically and mentally hostile to him. A land of snow, where the minds of my people were united in support of me.

  My telepathic view showed me the moment Mercury lost his grip on me. His ghostly figure drifted out into the falling snowflakes, fell apart into a dozen fragments, and then vanished completely. Of course he would vanish once he left me. Mercury had no reality of his own, so he couldn’t exist outside my mind.

  Other, much fainter, ghostly figures left me now, and fell apart in turn. I felt a surge of power, and my mind expanded to take in the world around me. The familiar thoughts of my unit members. Some strangers who had to be our aircraft pilots. The countless minds of birds and animals. I was sensing all the levels of thought, down to the subconscious and beyond it.

  There, in the depths of the mind that I’d never reached before, I found something I hadn’t known existed.

  “Amber, has Mercury left you?” asked Lucas.

  “He’s gone,” I said. “They’ve all gone. I can’t believe that I didn’t realize this before.”

  “What didn’t you realize?”

  I stood up and turned to smile at Lucas. “The Hive mind is composed of the thoughts of a hundred million people, but it’s just a small and very noisy part of something much bigger that includes the minds of all the animals, birds, and every tiny living creature. Call it the universal mind. Down beyond the deepest unconscious levels of the mind, we’re all part of it. You. Me. Our unit. Everyone.”

  Lucas snapped his fingers. “You sometimes get a mental itch. A warning that someone’s in trouble. I’ve never understood how you do that. Could it come from this unconscious connection?”

  “Probably.”

  Sapphire had said that the way to cleanse your core identity of alien influences was by being yourself, as fiercely and strongly as you could. The method that worked for one telepath couldn’t possibly work for another, because everyone’s core identity was different, and my ability to delve down to the subconscious levels of the mind made me especially different. That was usually a liability, entangling me in the emotional needs of others, but in the quietness away from the crowded Hive, where the universal mind was dominated by the supportive thoughts of my unit staff, it was my greatest strength.

  I laughed, stretched out my arms, and pirouetted, dancing in the snow. Lucas laughed as well, took out his dataview, and tapped it. Now I was dancing to music.

  The bewilderment on Adika’s face changed to something wistful. I touched his mind and saw images of when he went ballroom dancing with Penelope. They’d never actually been in a relationship, but he’d been hoping things would progress in that direction. Penelope’s promotion to deputy Tactical team leader in Sapphire’s unit had separated them and ended that hope. They’d both decided their careers were more important than their personal lives.

  Adika had given up Penelope and ballroom dancing for his career and his duty to the Hive. He’d given up a lot of other things over the years as well. Now he’d finally achieved his goal of being a Strike team leader, he’d found himself having strange thoughts. Brooding on those past decisions with something that was closer to nostalgia than regret. There was his fascination for Megan too.

  Megan was exactly the type of woman to attract me, a polished beauty with good legs, but the way she kept changing her mind about me was maddening. I didn’t know why I was still bothering with her until Buzz said those four words. “You both want children.” Everything suddenly made sense. Yes, I wanted children, a family, all the things that …

  Adika hadn’t known what he wanted until Buzz told him. I hadn’t known it either. Things were often clearer to an onlooker, but I shared the full confusing maelstrom of someone’s hopes and fears, while Buzz just got a brief revealing insight into their central driving emotion.

  I reached out my hand towards Adika, and copied the steps of the partner in his mind. He hesitated, and then joined me in the dance. I wasn’t good enough to do the steps properly, but Adika adjusted for my mistakes. The music built to its climax, and he lifted me effortlessly above his head for the last dramatic pose. I was startled by the sound of clapping from Lucas, Eli, and Forge.

  “High up!” said Eli.

  Adika gave an embarrassed cough, and lowered me to the ground. I ran across to Lucas, and he hugged me close to him.

  “It’s so beautiful out here,” I said.

  “It’s extremely beautiful,” said Lucas, “but you’re shaking from the cold. We should go back into the aircraft hangar before you freeze.”

  “Can we go out again later?”

  “Definitely,” said Lucas. “You can go Outside every day while we’re here. Once we’re back at the main Hive, we’ll set up a schedule for further regular trips Outside, to make sure that you never suffer fragmentation problems again.”

  I reluctantly let Lucas lead me back into the aircraft hangar. Adika, Forge, and Eli followed us inside, and locked the door behind them before hurrying off to rejoin those unloading crates from aircraft.

  “I’ll send a message to Gold Commander Melisande to tell her the good news that you’ve dealt with the echo of Mercury,” said
Lucas.

  I watched him working on his dataview. “You can send messages to the Hive? When I tried to check my mail, my dataview said something about not being connected to the Hive.”

  Lucas looked up at me. “We’ve set up a security block to ensure that nobody accidentally gives away what we’re really doing here. You should have been authorized to bypass the block, but it must have been overlooked. I can do that now.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no need. I talked to my parents before we came, so I haven’t got any urgent calls to make.”

  Lucas looked down at his dataview again. “Gold Commander Melisande is delighted to hear that you’ve dealt with your fragmentation issues. She hopes to congratulate you in person when you return to the Hive.”

  I frowned. “Perhaps you should mention to Gold Commander Melisande that I’m in a committed relationship with you.”

  “I’ve already done that, and she wished us every happiness. I don’t think there are any double meanings in the congratulations comment. At least, I hope there aren’t.”

  I’d thought that Lucas had got over his old insecurity about his relationship with me, but I caught a hint of it in his voice now. “You didn’t mind me dancing with Adika earlier?”

  Lucas smiled. “You care deeply for your Strike team, Amber. You rush to help them whenever they have a problem, but I know that your feelings for them don’t lessen your feelings for me.”

  He studied my face. “You look very tired after dealing with your echoes, Amber. Do you want to go to our apartment and rest? I can tell everyone that you’ve dealt with your fragmentation issues, and then come and join you.”

  “No,” I said. “However tired I am, I should be the one to tell my people that news.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I stood by the wall of the aircraft hangar, and everyone pulled empty crates into rows and sat facing me. I felt an odd, bone-aching weariness, as if my battle with Mercury had been a physical one rather than purely mental, but I forced myself to ignore that and started speaking.