Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) (36 page)

I gave up listening to the
argument, and reached out with my thoughts as we walked along. Lucas was in
clown mode, exaggerating his fastidiousness about what he ate and drank. Dhiren
was still a mass of nerves after the horrors of the path down the slope. Kaden
was happy about being Outside in daylight, but nervous of the night to come. Eli
was enjoying himself despite his periodic complaints.

Adika was very aware that
Rothan knew these conditions far better than he did, and was letting him take
on some of the leader role, studying how his new deputy coped with the sudden responsibility.
He was planning to push Rothan hard on this trip, because he saw him as his own
eventual successor. It was essential Rothan could cope with anything and
everything by that distant future time.

I made a mental note that
I should keep an eye on Rothan, and warn Adika if he was overdoing the pressure,
then let my thoughts drift out beyond the team. We were leaving behind the mind
mass of the Hive, and I could sense the quietness for many cors ahead of us,
not that the traditional measuring in standard corridor lengths had much
meaning out here.

I felt an arm take mine,
and Lucas guided me as I walked away from the Hive, my mind still searching the
surrounding countryside. Somewhere in this alien wilderness, my target was
hiding.

“I thought we’d be almost at the
coast by now, but I’ve misjudged just about everything,” said Lucas cheerfully.
“I wasn’t allowing for the route along the paths being at least twice the
straight line distance. I wasn’t allowing for walking being so tiring and so
slow on uneven ground. I definitely wasn’t allowing for us spending a whole day
sitting in our tents and watching the rain pour down.”

It was our sixth day Outside,
and the Strike team were busy with the morning routine of breaking camp. Rothan
packed a final section of tent into his backpack, and looked round to check
nothing had been left behind.

“I warned you to expect
rain, Lucas.”

Lucas laughed. “I know you
did. I just naively thought the clouds would run out of water after a couple of
hours. I was more worried about the Truesun being a strain on Amber, but we
haven’t seen it for more than five minutes. Well, I am now an older, wiser, and
much wetter man.”

“Everyone ready to move?”
asked Adika.

We formed up in marching
order.

“You’ll find the path rather
muddy after yesterday’s rain,” said Rothan.

The path turned out to be
extremely muddy. We squelched along it for several minutes, and I sensed other
minds approaching. “Ramblers ahead, coming our way,” I warned. “About ten of
them.”

When the ramblers reached
us, they paused for a chat. The Western Coastal Way was one of the main
ramblers’ routes between the Hive and the coast, so we’d got used to this sort
of encounter by now.

“The stream ahead has
flooded,” said a woman. “The bridge itself is fine, but you’ll find the water
about ankle deep on the path before you reach it. Once you’re over the bridge
and headed uphill, you’ll be fine through to the quarry.”

“Thanks,” said Adika.

The other party were
looking us over with interest. One of the men turned to Rothan. “You’ve got a lot
of new recruits with you.”

Every group we met noticed
our matching, brand new equipment, compared it to Rothan’s well-worn jacket and
boots, and instantly identified him as the experienced leader of a mob of clueless
greenies.

Rothan smiled. “I’ve just
come out of Lottery as an Outside maintenance worker. I’ve talked some of my new
work colleagues into trying out camping.”

“Don’t let yesterday’s
rain put you off,” said another man.

“We won’t,” said Forge.

“I didn’t mind the rain,”
said Lucas. “It was getting down the slope from table top that terrified me.”

The experienced ones
laughed. “You’ll soon get used to that.”

We exchanged waves, moved
on, and soon reached the flooding they’d mentioned. As a cosseted telepath, I
didn’t have to worry about getting my feet wet. Adika picked me up to carry me
across, and I automatically closed my eyes to concentrate on doing a proper mental
sweep of the area.

Adika had warned me not to
neglect the area behind us, so I checked that first. I sensed the group of
ramblers we’d just met, and another group much further away. Far beyond them was
the distant hum of the Hive.

There were several more
sets of ramblers ahead of us, and what I thought must be the minds of the sea
farm staff in the far distance. To the east was …

“I may have a target,” I
said.

The Strike team instantly drew
their weapons and gathered round me.

“Relax. The target’s a very
long way east.” I pointed. “It’s hard to judge distance, but he’s at least a
hundred cors away. That’s too far for me to get much detail, so I can’t be sure
it’s Elden, but the mind is definitely human, male, and looks unusual.”

“How many minds are there
in that area?” asked Lucas.

“Just the one man.” I concentrated
on that elusive speck of thought.

“One person alone out here
is suspicious to start with,” said Rothan. “Ramblers always travel in groups when
they’re this far from the Hive.”

“A hundred cors away,” muttered
Adika. “Are you serious, Amber? You’re really detecting minds that far away?”

“It’s very quiet out here,
so my range is much further than inside the Hive. I think I’m already sensing the
sea farm ahead of us.”

“That’s incredible,” said
Lucas.

“The sea farm is like a
tiny smudge of minds,” I said. “The Hive is far behind us now, but much louder
and quite unmistakable.”

Rothan and Adika started
checking maps on their dataviews. “There’s a major path to the east of us that
runs from the Hive to the sea farm,” said Rothan.

Lucas peered over his
shoulder at the map. “That’s the Ocean Path. It’s the shortest route between
the Hive and the coast, but I assumed Elden would avoid it. He wouldn’t want to
risk swimming offshore to meet an aircraft anywhere near our sea farm and
fishing fleet.”

“Elden might not be on the
Ocean Path itself.” Rothan pointed at his dataview. “There’s a minor path that
runs between the Western Coastal Way and the Ocean Path.”

Lucas nodded. “Elden could
have found an isolated place on that minor path to set up his nest.”

“If we carry on towards
the coast, we should soon reach the junction with the minor path,” said Rothan.

We started moving again.
About an hour later, we turned onto a narrow, overgrown path.

“This is where we have to
start cutting our way through,” said Rothan. “We’ve had an easy time so far, on
routes that have a lot of traffic and are well maintained, but not many people
use this path.”

He took out what looked
like a long curved knife. “Matias, come and take the lead with me. We’ll hack
back the overhanging branches and brambles for the others to get through. It’s
hard work, so we’ll all take turns to lead.”

“Cutting the path will
slow us down,” said Adika. “How long will it take us to reach Elden’s area?”

Rothan shrugged. “My worry
is whether we can get there at all. It rained a lot yesterday, and we’ve
several water crossings to cope with. We can’t expect proper bridges on this
path.”

He turned and started slashing
at branches and brambles. Matias joined him, and the rest of us followed them
at a very slow walk.

“Query,” said Lucas. “How
long does it take the path to get this overgrown?”

“It looks like a full
season’s growth to me,” gasped a breathless Rothan. “Things don’t grow so fast
in the winter, so it could be anything between six months and a year since
anyone came through here.”

“In which case,” said
Lucas, “Elden must have come back to his nest by the shortest possible route,
following the Ocean Path until he reached the junction with this minor path,
and then cutting his way along it in the opposite direction to us.”

“Pity,” said Adika. “It
would have saved us effort if he’d cut the way through from our side.”

“Yes,” said Lucas, “but
more importantly it means Elden knows several routes between our Hive and the
coast. That means he’s spent much more time here than we thought, and has
explored this whole area. Be aware he’ll be familiar with the terrain, and know
all the places to hide.”

There was a grim silence
after that. We moved on painfully slowly, with the Strike team taking turns to
hack brambles, and eventually reached a wide stream. The churning water was
brown with mud and nearly overflowing its banks. Adika and Rothan exchanged
glances.

“That’s not jumpable, and
the water would sweep us off our feet if we tried wading it,” said Adika. “Time
to try out the portable bridge.”

I was startled. “We’ve got
a bridge?”

“This is going to be interesting,”
said Lucas. “I vote we send Adika across the bridge first to check it’s safe.”

Adika ignored him and
studied the stream. “We’ll use the tree next to me, and the one opposite, as
anchor points.”

He took a gun shaped
object from his backpack, attached the end of a reel of cord, and fired a spike
at the tree on the opposite bank. Several of the Strike team took out short
rods from their backpacks, and began extending them and snapping them together.
I watched them for a moment, before guiltily remembering I should be doing my
own job.

I closed my eyes and searched.
The mind I’d sensed was closer now and it … I gasped.

“Something wrong, Amber?”
asked Lucas.

“I don’t know. I think
this must be Elden’s mind, because I’ve never met anything like this.” I
struggled to describe the telepathic view. “His mind is like a net. There are
tiny dark patches, holes, everywhere.”

“Imprint overload,” said
Lucas. “They gave him more data than his brain could integrate. You must be
seeing the effects of that.”

“The surface of Elden’s
mind ripples.” I tried to read the distant thoughts, but they were gibberish.
“I don’t understand the words on the high levels. That’s what we expected. I’ll
try the deeper levels.”

“Be ready to pull out fast,
Amber.” Lucas sounded worried. “If Elden’s in imprint overload, you may find it
disturbing.”

I traced my way warily
down through the gibberish, to where emotions and images whirled in terrifying
confusion. I hastily broke contact, and opened my eyes to find Lucas gazing
intently into my face.

“That was horrible,” I
said. “Images melting into each other. A bit like someone having a nightmare, but
Elden’s definitely awake.”

Lucas frowned. “The
imprint is breaking down, fragmenting his unconscious thoughts. Reality is mixing
with nightmares. I’ve no idea what techniques Hive Genex used to keep Elden
stable this long, but now he’s alone out here they’re breaking down.”

I looked at him anxiously.
“Lucas, if imprints can do that to someone, why does our Hive use them? Is it
worth the risk?”

“Your body could carry a
small stone with no problems, Amber, but not a giant boulder. The mind has
limits too. Our Hive keeps imprints to a safe size, and yes they’re worth it.
Children go to school to learn the basics like reading and numbers. If your
team members had to learn their imprinted knowledge in the same way, then they’d
have to keep studying through Teen Level and after, until they were about twenty-five
or twenty-six years old. They’d need yet more time to gain the knowledge necessary
for higher positions. Your deputy team leaders would need to be thirty to thirty-five.
Your team leaders nearly forty.”

Lucas shrugged. “With the
help of imprints, you have Strike team members who are eighteen. That’s a gain
of at least seven productive years. Look at your team leaders. I had the minimum
normal experience before I became your Tactical Commander. I’m twenty-one. Nicole
bypassed the deputy experience requirement entirely. She’s nineteen. Megan and
Adika had to wait a long time for their team leader openings so they’re …”

Megan’s voice interrupted
him over the sound link. “Careful, Lucas!”

Lucas laughed. “They’re a
little older. Think of the gain to the Hive in productivity. Because of my
imprint, I’ve gained almost twenty years in my post.”

I forced a smile, and nodded
my acceptance, but I wasn’t totally convinced. As I approached Lottery, I’d
been afraid of what being imprinted would do to me. After Lottery, I’d resented
being forever excluded from that easy route to knowledge. Now I’d returned,
full circle, to fear and suspicion of imprints.

I’d learned from bitter personal
experience how imprints could be used to influence emotions, even totally
control someone. Our Hive didn’t do that, because it was wasteful to change
people into blindly obedient automatons, incapable of independent decisions. What
it did do was use the Lottery selection process to choose suitable people for a
position, and then imprint them with carefully chosen information that would
reinforce the attitudes it wanted. It wasn’t that the imprint forced people to
believe one side of an argument, it just never told them the other side existed.

I was glad I didn’t have
an imprint. It worried me that Lucas did. I trusted his ability to think for
himself, but if that brilliant mind broke under imprint overload … I shied away
from that nightmare thought, telling myself it could never happen. Our Hive
wasn’t a brutal, uncaring place like Hive Genex. Our Hive didn’t overload minds
or try to steal telepaths.

“The bridge is ready,
Amber,” said Adika.

I’d forgotten the bridge
building. I turned to see a spider’s web of rods spanning the raging waters of
the stream. Lucas looked at it suspiciously.

“Can that take a man’s
weight safely?”

“The entire Strike team
could stand on it at once,” said Adika. “Save your worries until we hit
something too wide for the bridge, and have to cross using just ropes.”

Forge shepherded me across
the bridge, warning me not to look down through the apparently fragile mesh
beneath my feet. Rothan followed, keeping an eye on Lucas. Adika waited until
everyone was across before speaking.

“Rafael, Caleb, stay here
to dismantle the bridge. Given the slowness of cutting a path, you’ll have no
problem catching us up afterwards.”

About half an hour later,
we reached another stream, even wider than the first one. I liked sitting by
streams in parks, listening to the friendly, soft sound of the water, but this
stream didn’t sound or look at all friendly. It was ripping threateningly at
its banks, and I saw a large branch being carried along with the torrent.

Adika fired a rope across
to a tree on the opposite bank. “The bridge should just about be long enough.”

“It’s the river that
worries me,” said Rothan.

“What’s a river?” I asked.

“A huge stream,” said
Rothan. “The one here is wider than anything you’d get in a park, but it’s just
a small stream in full spate after heavy rain. Further ahead, we hit a proper
river, and there’s a waterfall marked on the map. That’s the main reason for
the existence of this path. It crosses the river at a ford above the waterfall,
and ramblers sometimes go there to admire the views.”