Project Aura

4

At 14,005 feet in altitude, the Mount of the Holy Cross joined by sixty inches the fifty-four peaks in Colorado known as fourteeners. South of Vail and Interstate 70, it was in the center of the White River National Forest and far removed from the nearest paved road. The mountain had gained its name from the cross-shaped snowfield on its north side-away from the sun-that was present year round.

It was an impressive peak and Sergeant Major Dalton’s new home. Two thirds of the way up the rocky east face, a camouflaged door was sliding up, revealing a metal grate that slowly extended outward fifteen meters from the side of the mountain. The pilots of the Blackhawk helicopter edged their craft perilously close to the rock face, blades less than a foot from striking, and did a perfect three-point landing on the grate.

Dalton slid open the door and handed out several crates and boxes to the administrative crew who were there to greet the chopper. This was the only way in or out of Bright Gate, and every flight had to carry resupply.

He threw the last box over his shoulder and headed into the dark cavern as the helicopter departed, going back to Fort Carson, outside of Colorado Springs. The grate began to move into the mountain, causing him to almost lose balance for a second, and the door came down, cutting off the light from the outside.

“Sergeant Major.”

Dalton nodded a greeting. “Lieutenant Jackson.”

She was standing next to the vault door that led to the interior of the mountain and Bright Gate. She wore a dull green one-piece flight suit, a silver bar on the shoulders. She was a tall, slender woman in her mid-twenties, and her blond hair was cut shorter than required by military regulations, a matter of practicality when operating as a Psychic Warrior in the isolation tanks that were their home during a mission.

“Are you all right?”

Dalton considered the question, knowing that it was more than just a pleasantry. Honesty dictated a long, involved answer, practicality a shorter, more direct one. “I’m functional.”

A look crossed Jackson ’s face, something he couldn’t make out, and he didn’t get a chance to see it again as she turned to the door and punched a code into the keypad on the side. The circular door was eighteen feet in diameter with rings of black metal on the polished steel surface. Dalton knew those rings were part of the psychic fence guarding Bright Gate and extended on either side of the door, and through the bottom floor and top ceiling, completely surrounding the facility.

The door rolled sideways into a recessed port, revealing a corridor lit with dim red lights. It was cut out of solid rock and descended slightly. The admin personnel entered, carrying their loads, Jackson letting them past. Once Dalton was through, she used the keypad on the other side to shut the door. The psychic fence was engaged once more.

“You can dump that here,” Jackson told Dalton as they paused next to a cross corridor the admin personnel had turned onto. “We just received a call. Raisor’s replacement is due in shortly.”

“ ‘Raisor’s replacement?” Dalton repeated. “Is Raisor really gone?”

Jackson didn’t answer, leading the way toward the team quarters.

Dalton stopped her. “I want to see my team.”

Jackson nodded and changed direction. The door she stopped at also had a keypad next to it. She punched in a code and it opened with a click. Dalton walked in slowly, taking in the bodies suspended in the tubes. Two teams of Psychic Warriors-twenty people.

“They’re alive,” Jackson said. “ Hammond ran CAT scans and there is brain activity. Very low level and not normal, but since we’re dealing with abnormal from the very start, she doesn’t know what it means. It might just be a reaction from the autonomic nervous system in response to the isolation tubes keeping the bodies alive.”

Dalton walked among the tubes, seeing the members of his Special Forces unit who had been “killed” on the psychic plane by Chyort/Feteror, the Russian avatar. And beyond them, the tubes holding the first Psychic Warrior team, the one he hadn’t been told about when first recruited to the PW program. He stopped in front of one of them containing a woman. He could see the resemblance to Raisor, whose body floated six tubes further down. The nameplate on the front of the glass read Eileen Raisor. Where Jonathan Raisor had gone on the last mission, when he broke off from Dalton ’s team, was a mystery, and since General Eichen’s visit the previous evening, something Dalton saw in a different light. The fact that Eileen Raisor had been recruited by Nexus and ended up being betrayed was something Dalton planned on keeping foremost in his mind to keep from suffering the same fate.

“Does the first team have the same CAT scan signs?” he asked.

“No. They’re flat.”

“Ah, crap,” Dalton muttered. He turned and left the room, heading for the control center.

Dr. Hammond was at her normal place, behind the main console, surrounded by computer terminals that gave her access to Sybyl, the master computer that controlled the entire facility and the Psychic Warrior program.

“Sergeant Major,” she said, nodding in greeting.

“Doctor.” He grabbed a seat and rolled it over next to her as Jackson did the same on the other side. “Anything on our people?”

“Nothing. We’re keeping the bodies alive, but their psyches…” Hammond trailed off.

“Let me ask you something,” Dalton said. “Sybyl tracks us when we go over to the virtual plane, right?”

“Track isn’t the right word,” Hammond said. “Sybyl has to supply your avatar with both power and form, so it is always in contact with you, but the computer really can’t tell exactly where you are. We don’t really know what space and distance is on the virtual plane.”

“Does the computer track where we come out in the real world?”

“No, because the link is through the virtual.”

“Is there any sort of record of our trips when we go over to the virtual?” Dalton asked.

“Sybyl records all data on the link, both reported and requested,” Hammond said.

“Could you pull up the data for the first team?” he asked.

Hammond turned to the computer and typed in a rapid series of commands. “Here it is.”

Dalton looked over her shoulder but could make little sense of the words. “What does that mean?”

Hammond pointed. “Real time is recorded here. This is power data. This is communication’s linkage. The first team was over for, let’s see…” She scrolled down. “Forty-two minutes in real time before the linkage was cut.”

Dalton saw something on the right side of the screen. “What does this mean?”

Hammond read what he was pointing at. “One of the team members, Eileen Raisor, was requesting information from Sybyl about a location.”

“What location?”

Hammond moved the mouse and clicked. She read the letters out loud. “A-F-S-M-S-C.”

“Which stands for?” Jackson asked.

“Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center,” Hammond answered.

Dalton wondered what that had to do with HAARP.

“She wanted to know where it was and what it did,” Hammond continued. “Sybyl gave her the data. The team was cut off less than a minute later.” She continued to use the mouse and keyboard, searching further into the data, when she suddenly stopped. “Oh my.”

“What?” Dalton asked.

Hammond ’s eyes shifted about, as if afraid of being overheard even though there was no one else in the room. “Sybyl’s been infected.”

“Infected?” Dalton repeated. “With what?”

“A bug.”

“From where?” Jackson asked.

Hammond frowned as she looked at the data on her screen. “That’s the weird thing. I think the bug has been there all along. An integral part of the master program.”

“A time-delay activation?” Jackson asked.

“It’s been active all along,” Hammond replied.

It was Jackson ’s turn to look confused. “What does the bug do?”

“As far as I can tell by looking at this, it tracks Sybyl’s activity and notes whenever the virtual plane is accessed here. I think there’s more to it than that, though-it’s going to take me a while to break down the lines of code. But someone had access to this data real-time as that first team was on the psychic plane.”

“So whoever it was knew about the request reference AFSMSC by Eileen Raisor?” Dalton asked.

“Yes.”

“Who could have put the bug in there?” Dalton wanted to know. “And why?”

“It had to have been someone here inside Bright Gate,” Hammond said. “We’re secure to the outside world.”

“No, you’re not,” Dalton said. “I don’t know much about computers, but you just told me someone’s monitoring Sybyl, which means that information is getting out of here in some manner, correct? And if information from the computer can go out, then someone on the outside can get into Sybyl, right?”

“No.” Hammond was shaking her head. “We were tested by the NSA. We’re secure from hackers.”

“Unless the NSA did the hacking,” Dalton said. He thought of what Eichen had said about the government being infiltrated and about Jenkins, Hammond ’s predecessor. “Raisor said the first PW team was betrayed by someone in our own government.”

“But why would someone outside of here want to know when Sybyl is active on the virtual plane?” Hammond asked.

“To hide something from Psychic Warriors when they’re deployed,” Dalton said. He thought about it. “We’ve got two problems. One is we don’t know who is doing this surveillance. The second is we don’t know what’s being hidden from us.”

“I think-” Jackson began, but suddenly stopped.

“Go ahead,” Dalton urged her.

“I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t really know for sure, anyway.”

“Know what for sure?” Dalton asked.

Jackson glanced at Hammond. “You weren’t with the original Bright Gate program, were you?”

Hammond shook her head. “I was brought in after Professor Jenkins died in a car crash.”

“Who brought you here?” Jackson asked.

“I was working for the Department of Defense at Livermore. A General Eichen approached me.”

Dalton considered that. Since she mentioned Eichen’s name so easily, Dalton assumed that she was an unwitting participant and not reporting back to him. “So you weren’t NSA or CIA?”

“No, why?”

“Because the NSA and the CIA started Bright Gate,” Jackson said. She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Really.” She quickly walked out of the room, leaving Dalton alone with Hammond.

“She’s right,” Hammond said.

“Right about what?”

“There’s something really strange about this place, this program. All of it. Beyond the technology. I was working on quantum physics at Livermore when Eichen tapped me to come here and take over, and we had no clue about any of this level of advancement in physics. It’s like it came out of the blue.”

“The Russians had the hyperspace howitzer way back in the early sixties,” Dalton noted.

“Yeah, and where did they get that from? I’ve been studying the data the Russians recovered on that, and it’s definitely too far advanced for the time it was developed. Hell, it’s too advanced for us now. I don’t think we could duplicate the howitzer even with what we know. It’s good it was destroyed.”

Hammond leaned back in her chair, exhausted. “There’s something else. I’ve been looking at some of the information you brought back from the Russian SD-8 base.”

“And?”

“Chyort-the devil avatar-he was…” Hammond trailed off into silence.

Dalton waited a few moments. “Tell me.”

“Even with what they did to his mind-making a direct interface with the computer-he was more than the sum of his parts.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I don’t understand this.” Hammond shifted her tired gaze to Dalton. “You’ve constantly accused me of not knowing what I’m doing, and I’m admitting to you now that I agree with you. All of this”-she waved her hand to indicate the Bright Gate control center-“it’s based on concepts we don’t really understand. I don’t think the Russians really had much of a clue what they were doing either.”

Dalton was trying to follow what she was getting at. “But you said it didn’t matter if you understood the concepts as long as you can use them.”

Hammond gave a weary smile. “I did say that, didn’t I? But I’ve been thinking about that, and the best analogy I can come up with is that it’s like saying we didn’t understand the concept of the internal combustion engine, but we built one and used it in a prototype car. The question is, who did understand the concept enough so that we could build it? Who was able to invent and build a mind-computer interface at SD-8 so well that the results were far beyond what we could have imagined?”

“Have you heard of a Professor Souris?” he asked.

Hammond indicated she hadn’t. “Who is that?”

“She’s the first one to work on Bright Gate.”

“That’s strange,” Hammond said. “There’s no record of her anywhere here.”

“Couldn’t all this”- Dalton indicated the control center-“be the result of an intuitive leap on one person’s part? I mean, where do scientific breakthroughs come from to start with?”

“If that’s true and Souris did this,” Hammond said, “I would expect to see some documentation. More data. We’ve got the equipment, the computer, the system, but we don’t have anything detailing the supporting theories. That doesn’t make sense. That’s not how a scientist works.”

To that Dalton had no reply.

Hammond rubbed her eyes. “Oh well. I guess I ought to get working on the program to see what the hell is going on.”

Dalton left her and went to the bunkroom. Jackson was lying on her back, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Hammond ’s words bothered him. He had assumed from the very beginning that Bright Gate-and the Russian’s SD-8 when he’d learned of it-had been the result of brilliant scientific work. But to have the current lead scientist here say she was baffled was disturbing. He knew he’d have to call this in to Eichen at the first opportunity. His mind went back to what had been said before Hammond talked about that, and he sat down across from Jackson.

“Sergeant Major?” Jackson was sitting up.

“It’s Jimmy,” he said without thinking. He saw the surprise on her face. “That’s the way we operated in SF. Between a team leader and a team sergeant. Who respected each other. But only when they were alone, not in front of others. If that’s all right with you, ma’am,” he added.

Jackson stuck her hand out. “Ljala.”

Dalton ’s eyebrows arched. “Excuse me?”

Jackson laughed. “Ljala. When I was a kid, my friends called me Jerry.”

“Ljala,” Dalton repeated. “I’ve never heard the name before.”

“It’s Roma. From my mother’s side. My surname is from my father’s.”

“Italian?”

“No.” Jackson got up and sat down on the bunk across from him. “Outsiders call us Gypsies. Roma is what we call ourselves. You’re a gadje, an outsider.”

Dalton untied his boots, pulling the laces, easing the tightness. “You’re a Gypsy?”

“Roma,” she corrected him. “The term Gypsy comes from early beliefs that my people came from Egypt. We didn’t. And most Roma don’t like the term Gypsy, as it’s usually used in a derogative manner.”

“Roma,” Dalton amended. “Where did your people come from?”

“That’s a long story that we don’t share with gadje,” Jackson said. She smiled. “I don’t really consider myself a true Roma, though. I’m sorry if I was short with you. I haven’t talked about it in a long time. My mother was a true Roma. That’s why I got picked to be part of Grill Flame.”

Dalton had worked briefly with the classified CIA program in the eighties and early nineties that used psychics to remote view. “Because your mother was a Roma?”

Jackson smiled, leaning back on the bunk. “You know, crystal balls inside the dark tent, telling someone their fortune. Laying out tarot cards and reading them. It’s in the blood. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Dalton said.

“There’s a little bit of truth in myths and legends,” Jackson said. “My mother was a true reader, as was her mother before her and the maternal line through the ages. They could see what others couldn’t. A person’s lifeline in their palm. The future in the cards. The sense of the spirits of the dead. And it was real, what they saw.”

“You believe that?”

“Don’t you now?”

Dalton nodded. “Can you read, sense the spirits?”

Jackson ’s smile was gone. “I rebelled against it. My mother embarrassed me. My father was so solid, so straight and narrow, I didn’t see why he had gotten involved with my mother. He was gadje also, the son of a preacher, a manager in a lumber mill. My mother-I didn’t understand why she gave up the road for him and turned away from her people. Maybe because he was so solid and steady. She, on the other hand, was beautiful and wild. Maybe opposites do attract, who knows? My mother drove me crazy. My friends thought she was nuts. The clothes she wore and the way she acted. Setting up a room in our house and reading fortunes.

“So I went as far from it as I could. To the Academy. The Army. And then they dragged me into Grill Flame when I took a test everyone in my Intelligence unit was required to take and I scored high on what they were looking for. I’ve thought a lot about it, since being here at Bright Gate. I ran from my heritage to be drawn directly into it.”

“And your mother?” Dalton asked. “How does she feel about it?”

“She passed away my yearling year at the Academy.”

Dalton hesitated, then asked, “Do you feel her?”

Jackson slowly nodded. “Sometimes. Sometimes here in the real world. And sometimes when I’m out on the psychic plane, I feel her spirit. It’s not like we can carry on a conversation; more like I can pick up her emotions, her feelings.”

Dalton ’s voice was low. “I feel Marie just like that at times. I know she’s out there.”

Jackson leaned forward and reached out with her hand, grasping Dalton ’s in hers. “She is. She’s out there and she’ll always be with you. The world is a much bigger place than that which we pick up with our five senses. You and I-we have the inner eye.”

“I’ve been learning that,” Dalton said. “So what didn’t you want Hammond to hear?”

Instead of replying, Jackson asked a question. “What do you think happened to the first PW team?”

“They got cut off.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know,” he lied.

“I think it’s because they saw something they weren’t supposed to see,” Jackson said.

“What did they see?”

“If we knew that, we’d have a chance of knowing who did it to them.”

“Raisor said he knew.”

“And look where he’s at now,” Jackson pointed out.

“I’d say the fact someone was monitoring Sybyl and they got cut off right after asking for information about the Air Force Space and Missile Systems is significant,” Dalton said.

“I agree.”

“I’ve got a feeling you know more than you’re telling me.” Dalton sat down on the footlocker at the end of her bunk. He felt bad knowing that the opposite was true. He knew exactly why the first team had been cut off, but he knew that telling Jackson about Nexus would endanger her. Of course, he also realized not telling her could be just as dangerous. But if she came to some conclusions on her own, certainly that couldn’t hurt. Besides, Dalton wasn’t one hundred percent sure he believed what Eichen had told him.

“It’s foolish,” Jackson said.

“Why don’t you let me determine that?”

Jackson shook her head. “Old tales. That’s all I was thinking about. They have nothing to do with this.” She lay back down on her bunk. “I’m tired. I need some sleep.”

Dalton stood and walked out of the bunkroom to the male latrine. He felt like a low-rate spy as he went into one of the stalls and sat down. He opened up the phone. There was a short buzz. A second. And then Eichen’s voice:

“Go ahead, Sergeant Major.”

He updated Eichen on the current inactive status of Bright Gate, Eileen Raisor’s request for information about the Air Force unit, Hammond finding the virus in Sybyl, and Hammond ’s concern about the development of the Bright Gate technology, which echoed what Eichen had told him the previous night.

“All right. I’ll check out the Space and Missiles Systems Center. Keep an eye out there for anything else.”

“What about whoever is replacing Raisor? Is he or she one of yours?”

“Negative. I have no idea who is coming to take over Bright Gate, but I’m relying on you to keep things under control there.”

“What about Lieutenant Jackson, sir? Can I bring her in on this?”

“No. The fewer who know, the better. And Jackson was with Bright Gate. If I were you, I’d keep an eye on her too.”

But you aren’t me, Dalton thought. “Yes, sir.”

McFairn leafed through the documents she had had her people intercept from the Pentagon. As deputy director of the nation’s primary communications security agency, McFairn could access any communications, no matter how highly classified. After all, it was her people who designed the secure systems all government agencies used.

A Task Force Six team was en route to Colombia to interdict a drug shipment and kidnap a cartel member to try to find out what happened to the Coast Guard cutter. Exactly as she had arranged. She hit the autodial for Boreas and faced the windows, noting the large flag on the pole outside the building flapping in a stiff breeze.

He answered immediately and her message was succinct, informing him of the team’s itinerary.

“I’ll have HAARP on line to help locate Aura,” Boreas said in response.

“What makes you so sure that Aura will be used?”

“Because you are going to have one of your agents in Colombia inform the Ring that the team is coming,” Boreas said.

McFairn swung her chair around, no longer looking out the window at the flag. “That’s treason.”

“Come now,” Boreas said, “certainly you’ve sacrificed smaller units before for the greater good. In war, sacrifices have to be made.”

“I didn’t know we were at war.”

“Countries are always at war or preparing for war, which is essentially the same thing. Think of the power we are giving you with HAARP.”

“Who is we?”

“I told you long ago not to concern yourself with our identity,” Boreas said. “You are to do as you are told.”

“I know you work for the Priory.”

“But you have no idea what that word represents.”

McFairn knew there was no more arguing. She had crossed her Rubicon long ago and there was no going back. She waited until he finally spoke again.

“What about Psychic Warrior?” Boreas asked. “Do you have a new team ready to go to Bright Gate?”

“I’ve selected the personnel from within my own agency.”

“Can they be counted on?”

“Yes.”

“I want to meet the team leader before they go to Bright Gate.”

“I’ll have Agent Kirtley fly in with General Eichen. He can get a feel for what’s going on along the way and keep an eye on the general.”

“Good. Don’t forget to make the call south.”

The phone went dead.

McFairn sat silent for a long time. Then she pulled out her dog-eared copy of The Art of War. She thumbed to the page that listed the five dangerous faults of a general: The last one was oversolicitude for one’s men, which exposed a general to worry and trouble.

She put the book down and picked up the phone, calling her station chief in Bogotá.

Despite the passage, she didn’t feel much better when she hung up.