Defender

  “You’ve been very quiet. If travelling through the Hive has been too much for you, we could take you back Outside through the closest Hive exit.”

  I shook my head. “We couldn’t make the Strike team put all those tents back together again.”

  Lucas laughed. “Yes, we could. The extra training would be good for the Beta team.”

  “No, I don’t want to go back Outside in the cold. I’ll sit in the park for an hour instead. We’re right at the top of the Hive here on Industry 1, so being in the park is almost like being Outside anyway.”

  I started walking towards the park, and Lucas fell into step beside me. “It’s true that there’s nothing but the Hive outer structural shield and soil above our park.”

  “Exactly,” I said, “and those things effectively don’t exist on a telepathic level. The moons and stars programme will be running in the park, so I can watch the bats and nocturnal creatures.”

  “I’ll come and sit with you,” said Lucas.

  “Don’t you need to have a meeting with your Tactical team?”

  “It’s a little late at night for meetings.”

  I’d been afraid Lucas would say that.

  “It’s unfortunate that the only other parks on Industry 1 are those in the other Telepath Units, so we can’t use them as refuges for you,” added Lucas.

  We’d reached the park doors, and I was trying to work out a polite excuse to give me some time alone, when I heard my own voice snapping at Lucas. “Do you have to follow me round and spy on me for every minute of every day? Can’t I have a single hour of privacy?”

  “Of course you can,” said Lucas hastily. “I’ll leave you in peace if that’s what you want. If you decide you’d like to talk to either Buzz or me, then you can call us.”

  He turned and hurried off. I stared after him for a moment. I was sure it wasn’t me that had said those words. Despite the length of time we’d spent outside the Hive, I still wasn’t free from Mercury’s influence.

  I was tempted to chase after Lucas, explain what had just happened, and ask his advice, but I needed this vital time alone to talk to Jupiter.

  I followed the path along the stream to a bench under a maple tree. I’d been avoiding this spot for months, because it was where we’d held the explosive team leader meeting that ended in my firing Fran. Now I sat down on the bench where Fran had sat that day, dumped my jacket on the seat next to me, and took out my dataview.

  It was easy to link into the dedicated secure connection between the Telepath Units. I hit a problem when I tried to start a new conference call, because that required security codes, but using Adika’s codes worked. After that, I just had to issue the invitation to join my conference call, and add the one-word text message. “Alone?”

  Given the time of night, I expected to have to wait for a response, but it came almost immediately. “Yes.”

  I took a deep breath, and tapped my dataview to set the call to visual. “Hello, Olivia. My name is Amber.”

  As I said the words, Olivia’s image appeared on my dataview screen. She was standing in her bookette room. Her white dress was ankle length, and decorated with trailing lengths of silver gauze. She wore matching silver flowers in the light brown hair that straggled loose around her shoulders.

  Olivia had come out of Lottery eight years ago, which meant she was twenty-six years old, but the effect was oddly like a child had dressed up in her mother’s carnival dress.

  I set my dataview to project her image as a life-sized hologram standing in front of me. Now I could see the faint lines of strain around her eyes, she looked much less like a child. “Why did you do it, Olivia?”

  “I haven’t done anything. I couldn’t do anything. I’m just the useless broken doll.” Olivia tipped her head on one side. “I’ve heard about you, Amber. You’re the new telepath. Trying hard. Doing your best. Such a good girl. I was like that once.”

  She started singing one of the Hive Duty songs, but with some of the words changed. I was ridiculously startled by the act of disrespect.

  “I used to be like you. We are united.” She spread her arms and twirled round with the grace of a dancer. “You will be like me. We are united.”

  She stopped singing, let her arms drop in a defeated gesture, and spoke in grieving tones. “You are starting to crumble too, Amber. I can see more than one person looking out of your eyes. We will be two broken dolls together.”

  I’d planned this conversation during the long journey through the Hive. I’d imagined what I’d say, and what Olivia might say, but I hadn’t expected anything like this. I fought to keep my voice calm and repeated my question.

  “Why did you do it, Olivia?”

  Olivia glanced over her shoulder as if looking for someone. “You don’t understand. I shouldn’t be talking to you. They don’t want me to talk to you.”

  “They? You mean your unit staff? I do understand that. Telepaths learn a lot of random knowledge from the minds we read. The Hive doesn’t want us sharing that knowledge with each other.”

  Olivia shook her head, and one of the silver flowers fell from her hair. “I didn’t mean my unit staff. I meant the others. They’re always watching me. Look!”

  She gestured with her hand, and a crowd of hologram figures appeared behind her. They looked as if they were based on real people, but unnervingly none of them had anything but a blur for a face.

  “Why did you do it, Olivia?” I asked the question for the third time. “Why did you recruit Venus to kill me? Why did you want Mercury to light the greatest of fires? What is Mars’s mission?”

  Olivia gave that wary glance over her shoulder again, and lowered her voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. One of the others must have done those things.”

  I fought to keep my anger under control. “Your recruits, Venus and Mercury, are dead. Four innocent people died in the Security Unit fire, and two more died later from their injuries. A member of Sapphire’s Beta Strike team died chasing Mercury.”

  “Sapphire!” Olivia shouted the name. “Beautiful Sapphire. Brave Sapphire. Perfect Sapphire. We were friends once, but I wasn’t as strong as her. She doesn’t like talking to me now.”

  “You killed all those people, Olivia. It could have been far more. It could still be far more. What is Mars’s mission? What will he attack?”

  The childlike face had a petulant expression now. “I told you that it wasn’t me.”

  One of the faceless hologram figures stepped forward to stand next to Olivia. It was a red-headed woman dressed in a formal onesuit, but as she reached Olivia’s side I saw her clothes and hair change to match Olivia, and then the blurred face became Olivia’s face too.

  “I am Jupiter,” the twin Olivias spoke in unison, their voices cold and emotionless. “I was the one who recruited Venus, Mercury, and Mars. I was the one who gave them their missions.”

  I was bewildered. “Why?”

  “I did it to damage the Hive. I did it to save Olivia.”

  “To save Olivia from what?”

  “From them.” The two Olivias turned and waved their hands at the crowd behind them. “Olivia is lost in the final stages of fragmentation. We are already legion, and every time Olivia reads a dangerously strong target mind we add another to our numbers.”

  After the run where we found Fran’s dead body, Lucas had said something about me showing classic fragmentation symptoms. I’d taken the cowardly option, avoided asking what he meant because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know. Now I was looking at the answer.

  “Fragmentation,” I said. “When a telepath reads an especially difficult target mind, they can be left with lingering residual effects.”

  “Yes,” said Jupiter. “If a telepath fails to shake off those residual effects, then a portion of the target’s personality can remain in their mind as a permanent alien influence. The presence of such invading personalities weakens the telepath’s defence against future residual effects, so the pace of fragmentatio
n increases. Olivia’s own personality was totally overwhelmed years ago.”

  Only one of the Olivias was speaking now. I wasn’t sure whether it was the real one or the hologram, but it didn’t really matter. Either way I was having a conversation with the part of Olivia that was Jupiter.

  I rubbed my forehead. I could feel a headache starting. I hadn’t been reading any minds at all, not even the safely familiar ones of my unit members, since the end of that chaotic chase after Mercury. Logically, that meant I couldn’t be suffering any sort of telepathic overload. The headache was probably just the result of me imagining being in Olivia’s situation.

  “I don’t understand how harming the Hive could save Olivia.”

  “In my professional opinion, there is only one treatment that can help Olivia.”

  I blinked. “Your professional opinion? Are you, I mean were you some sort of doctor?”

  “I was a specialist in the area of reset psychology. Are you aware of the procedure where a patient’s mind is reset to a previous point in time?”

  “Yes. The chain of memories is unravelled back to a point in the past, so the patient returns to being the person they’d been weeks or months earlier.”

  Jupiter sighed. “That’s both vague and inaccurate, but the full technicalities would be beyond your comprehension level. Suffice it to say that the only hope of a cure for Olivia is to reset her to a point before she went through Lottery and her telepathic abilities were activated.”

  “But that was over eight years ago.”

  “Exactly. A reset on such a drastic scale is rarely used. I myself have performed it just nine times, but I believe it is the only option in this case. I’ve had several discussions with Olivia’s doctors, requesting this treatment on Olivia’s behalf, but I’ve been unsuccessful. Their argument is that a reset of such magnitude could remove Olivia’s telepathic abilities entirely. She is still of limited use to the Hive, carrying out occasional simple check runs, so they refuse to take the risk.”

  Jupiter shrugged. “I decided the only way forward was to remove Olivia’s usefulness by making her into an active threat to the Hive. I’m only too aware of the fantasies and obsessions of the rest of our ranks, so it was easy to recruit a few of their originals and give them suitable missions.”

  “I can’t believe Olivia ever hunted Fran as a target. If she had, my Tactical team would have known about it.”

  Jupiter laughed. “Solely choosing my recruits from those on official records as Olivia’s targets would have been a little obvious. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Olivia has reached the stage where she doesn’t just add the targets she chases to our numbers. Many of us came from random telepathic contacts with obsessive minds in the grip of strong emotion. Fran was one of these. I felt her connection to you made her an ideal recruit.”

  I rubbed my forehead again. Whatever the reason, I was definitely getting a headache. “You set up a massive joint attack on the Hive. You’re some sort of doctor. Weren’t you worried by the thought of all the deaths you’d cause?”

  “No. Lottery selects reset psychologists to have low empathy with others. It’s essential to have a coldly detached viewpoint when your work involves removing entire swathes of another human being’s life experiences.”

  “You made careful plans,” I said, “but they went wrong when Mars killed Fran.”

  “Yes. I made an error of judgement over Fran. Olivia read her mind by chance when she was heading out to do a check run in Navy Zone. Fran was travelling on the same express belt, about to start work in her new position at the Security Unit, and brooding on how you’d unjustly fired her and wrecked her life.”

  Jupiter paused. “Our version of Fran is filled with so much anger and resentment that she would kill you even if she knew that action would result in the total destruction of the Hive. I failed to allow for the fact that the original Fran had moved on from that initial blind rage and might turn against us.”

  “There’s just one thing that I don’t understand. Why do you want to cure Olivia? Surely curing her will destroy you.”

  “Look at the number of people behind me,” said Jupiter. “There are more of us than this, far more than the bookette room can display, and we’re fighting a constant battle for dominance. I’m winning at the moment, but the mob is growing steadily larger. It’s only a question of time before they destroy me, so I’m going to destroy all of us first.”

  She smiled. “You haven’t asked me how I became one of the legion. I was one of Olivia’s targets. Are you curious about why she was hunting me? Would you like to know what crime I committed?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I made this call to talk to Olivia, find out what she wanted, and negotiate with her. Now it turns out that I’m negotiating with you instead.”

  I shrugged. “You wanted to prove Olivia was dangerous so that her doctors would agree to reset her. You’ve killed a lot of people, so I think you’ve made your point. Tell me about Mars and his mission, and I’ll make sure Olivia gets reset.”

  Jupiter shook her head. “I don’t believe you have the power to get Olivia reset. Many people in high places will need to make that decision, and it will take more than a handful of unimportant deaths to convince them to reset a telepath. Mars must complete his mission and cause a death toll so great that it cannot be ignored. I won’t give you any information that helps you stop him.”

  She laughed. “Of course you could come and get the information yourself, Amber. Come and read Olivia’s mind. Come and join the multitude.”

  I tried to hide my instinctive shudder. “I’ve got to tell people that Jupiter is Olivia. They’re bound to come and talk to you after that. When they do, it’s in your best interests to keep quiet about the fact that telepaths talk to each other.”

  “I don’t see why that’s in my best interests.”

  “Because I don’t believe you’re doing this to cure Olivia. You’re fighting a mob of others for control of what used to be Olivia’s mind. You know you can’t hold them off much longer. There’s very little of Olivia herself left now. You’re hoping that resetting Olivia’s mind while you’re the dominant personality will wipe out all your competitors and leave you in sole control.”

  Jupiter’s guarded expression confirmed that I was right.

  “If that does happen,” I said, “then you’ll want every advantage you can get, including the ability to consult other telepaths.”

  “Agreed,” said Jupiter. “Now let me tell you about the man who threatened my career, and how I taught him a lesson he’ll never remember. In fact, he didn’t remember anything at all after I reset his mind to …”

  I tapped my dataview to end the call.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I put down my dataview and buried my face in my hands. If anyone asked my opinion, I would have to argue in favour of Olivia being reset, because she was too big a danger to the Hive to be left as she was. Her doctors would have tried every other possible treatment already, so the only remaining alternative was death, and the Hive would never waste a telepath like that.

  Jupiter hoped that the reset would leave her in control of Olivia’s mind. That was a huge gamble to take. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Jupiter’s original was an expert in reset psychology. Did she know of a similar case where a dominant intruding personality had survived the reset, or even had that happen with one of her own cases?

  If Jupiter survived the reset, would that mean the remains of Olivia didn’t, or would the two of them be left fighting for dominance? If that was the case, then I could understand Jupiter being confident of winning.

  I sighed and lifted my head. There was no point in wasting time speculating when I knew so little about mental resets and the link between memories and personality. I needed to make a second call before Lucas got worried and came looking for me.

  I picked up my dataview again, and issued another invitation to my conference call with the same one-word message as before. “Alone?”

  Again
the response was quicker than I expected. “Wait.”

  It seemed that Sapphire was awake late after Soren’s death, but someone was with her. It was over five minutes before the second response came. “Yes.”

  I took a deep breath, tapped my dataview, and Sapphire appeared on the screen. The last time I’d seen her, she’d had a beautiful, masklike face. Now she was grieving, weary, and defeated.

  “I must apologize for the extremely bad manners of my Beta Strike team. They should never have …”

  “No,” I interrupted her. “I didn’t call you to ask for an apology. What happened wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Soren’s fault either. In fact, it wasn’t even Mercury’s fault. He’d been successfully treated, left his firebug career behind him, and was doing useful work in Salvaging Processes. He’d probably never have caused trouble again if Jupiter hadn’t contacted him and fed him with fantasies about lighting the greatest fire of all.”

  I paused. “Jupiter is the reason that I’m calling you. I need to warn you that I’ve discovered her identity. Jupiter is Olivia. To be exact, Jupiter is one of the target personalities that have invaded Olivia’s mind.”

  Sapphire’s eyes widened, and she ran a hand through her long blonde hair. “Are you sure? Olivia reached the final stages of fragmentation years ago. I could believe her usurping personalities capable of anything, but there are so many of them that each can hold sway for only a few minutes at a time.”

  “I’m very sure,” I said grimly. “I called Olivia and spoke to Jupiter myself. I think she’s a relatively new arrival, and she’s achieved dominance over the rest of the personalities. I don’t know if it counts as bad manners or not, but I’m going to have to tell my Tactical team about this.”

  “I agree there is no other option,” said Sapphire.

  “I’ll try not to give away the fact that telepaths talk to each other. I hope I’ve persuaded Jupiter to keep the secret too. She hopes to gain permanent control over Olivia’s mind, so …” I shook my head. “I’ve got limited time now, so I’ll explain that in another conversation. More urgently, I need your help to avoid becoming like Olivia. I’m suffering residual effects from my contact with target minds.”