Psychic Warrior (10 page)

Five hours. To Dalton it had seemed no more than an hour. His throat hurt where the tube had been. He shivered and Barnes draped a blanket over his shoulders.

"You okay, Sergeant Major?"

“Yeah, I'm all right. Whole bunch of fun," Dalton said. He stared at the other men in their isolation tanks. He could see one of them quivering inside the green liquid. He peeled the suit off, down to his shorts.

"Geez, Sergeant Major, what happened to your back?" Barnes was looking at the bare skin the blanket didn't cover. A jagged scar six inches long reached up from the waistband of his shorts. The skin was rough and purple.

"Sword," Dalton said.

"Sword?" Barnes repeated.

"It's a boring story from a while ago." Dalton shivered once more, violently, as if the cold would never leave his bones.

"Here," Barnes held out a cup of coffee.

Dalton took it, wrapping his hands around the mug, grateful for the warmth. He walked over and stared into the closest isolation tube. He recognized the body in the tank: Staff Sergeant Stith, the demo man.

"How long have they been in?" he asked Barnes.

"They put the first one in two hours after you. Stith just went in twenty minutes ago. Captain Anderson was the first one after you."

Dalton stared through the glass at the body floating in the green liquid. He shivered once more, but not from the cold.

*****

The town of Markovo lay one hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, centered in the land mass just north of the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far eastern wasteland of Russia. This practically unknown and almost uninhabited land beyond Siberia was one step removed in the wrong direction from the worst stretches of hinterland on the planet.

The population of the town was less than five hundred hardy souls; half of them natives, the other half the progeny of political prisoners who had survived the local gulag long enough to bring forth life. The inhabitants of the gulag had dug out, under the year-round ice, the holes that now held the prefab components of Special Department Number Eight's Far-Field Experimental Unit: SD8-FFEU.

It was set underneath the tip of a rounded mountain that overlooked the town. One narrow road switchbacked up the side of the mountain, ending at two massive steel doors that led down into the station. Signs at the start of the road and circling the mountain at the base warned that intruders would be shot without warning.

There were six prefab components that made up SD8- FFEU, each buried fifty feet under the rock and ice. The communications center, enlisted men's quarters, mess hall/gym, officers' quarters, and science quarters were all spaced around the central compartment, known as the Brain Center. A five-hundred-meter tunnel led to the small nuclear reactor that supplied the power needs for the station. The supplies were stacked in a large tunnel that was over two hundred meters long. It also was the corridor to the ramp that led to the surface.

Here, hidden from the spying eyes of satellites, SD8 conducted its most secret operation, under the command of its most ruthless officer.

General Rurik paced back and forth, the track worn in the carpet showing that this wasn't the first time his feet had traveled that path. He paused, looking to the center of the room. His right hand was on his left, twisting the wedding band on his ring finger around and around.

A four-foot-high steel cylinder was set in the center of the room on a base of eight shock absorbers. Inside, carefully preserved, was what remained of Major Feteror, formerly of the Soviet Spetsnatz. Who…or what…he was now, was open to debate.

Rurik had been involved with SD8 for many years. He'd been present as a senior captain at the newly constructed FFEU facility when Feteror had been flown in directly from Afghanistan in 1986. The report from the GRU colonel who’d accompanied the body had been brief. Feteror had been recovered in a rescue mission responding to a radio call the major had made just prior to being captured. It had taken the GRU some time to locate the village, and during that gap, the major had been horribly tortured.

Rurik, an experienced interrogator, had been both impressed and disgusted when he saw Feteror's body being wheeled into the operating room. Impressed that the man was still alive, disgusted at the vulgar means the Afghanis had employed. Of course, he knew their goal had not been to extract information but rather to inflict punishment, and on those terms they had succeeded.

Department Eight had been looking for someone in Feteror's situation for half a year. Like ghoulish vultures, they'd put the word out to the commands in the field.

Feteror's condition had been critical when he arrived, but in a way, some of what the mujahidin had done to him had also kept him alive. Leather tourniquets had been wrapped tight around Feteror's limbs, so tight they had sliced through the skin. The extent of bone and nerve damage had been so great that the leather had never been cut on the eight-hour flight to Department Eight's facility. Since no blood had flowed to the limbs, they were effectively dead when Feteror arrived, and the surgeons lopped them off immediately, adding to the carnage the Afghanis had begun.

But that was only the beginning. Like sculptures working on a grotesque masterpiece, the surgeons continued to slice away, removing everything that wasn't absolutely essential to keeping Feteror's brain functioning. His digestive tract was completely removed. His heart and lungs, which had been badly torn by broken ribs, were also removed, once they were able to get him completely dependent on a heart-lung machine. What was left of his eyeballs was removed, the nerves capped, then eventually shunted to a computer for direct input. All this was done, in the words of the senior physiologist to remove any "extraneous nervous input."

What remained of Feteror, all twenty-six pounds, was encased in the steel cylinder. Over three-dozen lines and tubes ran into the cylinder. About half of those were biological, half mechanical.

Several of the tubes, carefully suspended, ran to a row of machines, the best the Western world had to offer to the highest bidder on the worldwide, very extensive, medical black market. The heart-lung machine handled the blood, keeping it at the right temperature and making sure the proper oxygen level was maintained. Another machine performed the functions of the intestinal tract by the expedient manner of injecting minute quantities of nutrients directly into the bloodstream on the way in from the H-L machine.

Inside the steel cylinder lay the bare minimum of a human being. A spinal cord suspended in solution. A head held firmly in place by screws drilled directly into the bone. Leads passed through the skull directly into the brain, the frightful legacy of the research done by SD8 over the years. All the medical equipment served only one function-to keep Feteror's brain alive-and little else. There were no eyes to see, no ears to listen, no skin to feel, no tongue to taste, no nose to smell. All inputs into the brain were controlled by the leads attached to the master computer.

It was a "living" arrangement General Rurik had no doubt Western medicine was capable of making, yet had not done so for the simple reason that no one could see a need for such a horrible existence. And Rurik also knew that the West, because of ethical considerations and the lack of bodies to experiment on had not done the direct brain interface work that Department Eight had spent decades experimenting with.

Working their way from rats to monkeys to humans, Department Eight scientists had fine-tuned their ability to send electrical impulses directly to the brain, mimicking those of the central nervous system. They’d also done the reverse, learning how to pick out the nerve impulses sent out of the brain stem, which gave Feteror the ability to "speak" with the aid of an external voice box and conduct other limited actions through the computer.

That limited ability, of course, was not the key to what made Feteror the Chyort, the demon of legend and mystery who had carried out Department Eight operations for the past decade. The key was the results of the work on October Revolution Island that the lone survivor, Dr. Vasilev, had brought out with him. Feteror's isolated brain, enhanced by the computer, could go onto the psychic plane with power far exceeding anything that had been done before. The computer could produce the harmonics to open a window to the virtual plane and then Feteror, his psyche, could travel there, drawing power from the computer.

Because he lacked a physical body, Feteror could concentrate every milliamp of mental energy on the virtual plane. And he’d achieved something the scientists in Department Eight had only speculated about: he could come out of the virtual plane at a distant point and assemble an avatar, the Chyort, and influence physical objects on the real plane.

How he did this, the scientists were not able to exactly tell General Rurik, much as they had not been able to fully explain the operation of the phased-displacement generator decades previously. Even more mystifying was the fact that they were not able to duplicate Feteror's unique ability. Three other "volunteers" had gone under the knife and been placed in their own cylinders hooked to a similar computer. None had managed to do what Feteror could.

The others had managed some limited remote viewing, but nothing beyond what regular remote viewers could do. Feteror was different—there was no doubt about that. In the end, Rurik and the scientists had only been able to conclude that either Feteror had had some innate ability that they had happened to tap into, or that Feteror's horrific experience just before being brought to Department Eight had changed him in some fundamental way.

The bottom line was, they knew that Feteror worked, and the major concern had been to develop a way both to control Feteror and to protect themselves, the legacy of the disasters at Chelyabinsk and October Revolution Island very much in the forefront of General Rurik's concerns.

A small box, with a blinking green light that matched the one on Rurik's wrist, was on the machine on the other side of the cylinder from the medical machines. This was an advanced computer, again the best the West sold. The box was wired into the master program that controlled all the computer's interfaces with regard to Feteror.

The monitor Rurik wore had a very sensitive pressure pad on the inside, against his skin. It monitored his pulse. If Rurik's heart stopped for more than ten seconds, the light would turn red, meaning that the master computer had "frozen" the cyberlink with Feteror. That would effectively isolate Feteror's brain from both inputs and outputs.

Rurik knew that Feteror did not fear death; indeed he knew that Feteror yearned to be released from his almost nonhuman prison and the only way out was to die, but there was something he knew the Spetsnatz major did fear: the darkness of isolation inside his own brain, with no sensory input coming from the computer, no ability to "leave" on the psychic plane without the support of the computer. Such a netherworld existence horrified even the hardened Feteror, who had experienced two years of such a life while they completed all the surgical procedures, and while Department Eight technicians worked on the programming necessary for the project. Of course, at the time, they had not known that Feteror had been conscious those long two years, screaming into the darkness where he had no voice. Not knowing if he was dead or alive, if he was now in some sort of hell or purgatory, his last memories of the brutal torture he'd undergone in the Afghan village.

Only when they completed the first rudimentary cyberlink had they found out that the major's brain had been conscious the entire time. The psychologists were amazed that Feteror had retained his sanity, but General Rurik was not so sure that Feteror had been sane to start with. As soon as they had gotten Feteror on-line, to demonstrate his power, Rurik had locked Feteror down for another month into the netherworld abyss.

Rurik would take no chances even with a decorated war hero. He knew that his predecessor, on the cusp of his own great success after sinking the
Thresher
; had died in a mysterious blast at Department Eight's earlier site. It didn't take a genius to look over what they did know and the results of the interrogation of Dr. Vasilev and conclude that the subjects had rebelled and killed their captors to free themselves through death. History would not repeat itself as far as General Rurik was concerned.

There was not only the issue of the human beings they were dealing with, there was also the danger of the equipment. Before the disaster on October Revolution Island, there had been the even greater disaster at Chelyabinsk in 1958 during a weapons test on the virtual plane. There had been no survivors at the test site. But Rurik believed in what he was doing. To get powerful weapons, one had to take great risks.

Besides the cyber-lockdown, Rurik had another ace in the hole, so to speak. The entire complex, buried deep under the ice above the Arctic Circle, was surrounded by a static, psychic "wall" that had only one "window" in it. The window went directly to the cylinder and allowed Feteror his virtual exit to the world, and Rurik controlled whether that window was open or closed. Closing it prevented Feteror from turning and attacking his home base. He could only return to his own physical mind through the window. When the psychic window was closed, Department Eight where Feteror's physical self lay, was the one place where he couldn't go psychically.

Other than the fact that it required tremendous amounts of power from the nuclear reactor, Rurik didn't know how the psychic wall worked, but he didn't care. That was the job of the scientists. However, the wall had several interesting side effects that they'd discovered quite by accident. The wall was generated outward by lines surrounding the mountain; the lines were connected underneath SD8-FFEU through small tunnels. The field, as far as their recording instruments could tell, extended about two hundred meters into the air above the station, projected by steel towers built around the perimeter. Nothing living could go through that wall. They had first noticed the bodies of birds and small animals in the first days after the wall went up. Rurik had been interested and gotten a prisoner from the gulag. He'd turned off the automatic, conventional defenses that surrounded the base, and had the prisoner walk up the side of the mountain, into the psychic wall.