Psychic Warrior

Chapter Eight

“What’s wrong?”

Dr. Hammond was focused on her computer screen, not the isolation tank that Dalton was pointing to. “We’re having some trouble.” She leaned forward and spoke into the microphone. “Sergeant Stith, this is Dr. Hammond. Focus on the white dot.”

“What kind of trouble?” Dalton demanded. He was dressed in his fatigues, only an hour out of the isolation tank and still feeling the shakes.

Stith’s body spasmed, bending at the waist until his head, encased in the TACPAD, was almost touching his knees.

“Get him out of there!” Dalton ordered.

“We can’t right away,” Hammond said. “Sergeant Stith, this is Dr. Hammond. You have to focus on the white dot.” Her hand pushed a button on her console.

Raisor was behind her, watching. Dalton walked to the front of her console. “Get him out.”

Stith suddenly jerked upright, his legs and arms spreading as wide as they could go, slamming against the side of the isolation tube.

“There’s an interface problem,” Hammond said. Her fingers were flying over the keyboard.

“Who has control?” Raisor asked.

“I don’t,” she said shortly. “Yet,” she added.

“Is he locked into Sybyl?” Raisor asked.

“We haven’t completed pass off.”

“If you don’t have contact and Sybyl doesn’t,” Dalton demanded, “then who does?”

“Sergeant Stith”— Hammond pushed the red button, — “you have got to focus on the white dot.”

Stith’s body was twisting. His left arm jerked hard, slamming into the glass with a sound that reverberated through the chamber. The arm jerked back in an unnatural manner.

“Oh, shit,” Barnes exclaimed as a sliver of white poked out of Stith’s forearm. “His muscle spasms are breaking his bones! He’s got a compound fracture.” A slow swirl of red spread into the embryonic solution.

“Get him out of there now!” Dalton slammed his fist on top of the console.

“We just can’t pull him out,” Hammond said. “He’s breathing the liquid mixture and his body has been cooled. He’ll die if we just pull him out,” she said, her focus still on her console.

“He’ll die if he stays in there,” Dalton said as Stith spasmed again, this time the uncontrolled force of the muscles breaking his left leg, the misshapen shape of the thigh indicating the damage.

“Damn it,” Hammond said, reading something on her screen. “He’s vomiting the breathing mixture. Some of it must have gotten into his stomach.”

“Sergeant Major!” Sergeant Monroe had grabbed a fire ax. He stood ready next to the isolation tube with his teammate, the ax looking like a toy in his massive hands.

Dalton turned to Barnes. “What do you think?”

“Breathing, bleeding, and broken,” Barnes said succinctly.

Dalton knew exactly what he meant. The three priorities when treating a wounded man. And Stith was in bad shape on all three.

“Get him out now or we will,” he told Hammond.

“All right, all right.” Hammond shoved her keyboard back. She threw several switches. “I’m warming the embryonic solution as fast as possible and extracting the liquid mixture from his lungs.”

Dalton stood in front of the isolation tube, next to Monroe. “Take it easy, Pete,” Dalton said to Monroe in a low voice.

Dalton reached up with his hands and placed them on the glass, feeling the cold stab into his palms. “Hang in there, Louis. Hang in there.”

“His lungs are clear, but he’s not breathing oxygen,” Hammond said. “His nervous system isn’t responding. I’m forcing oxygen in and keeping his heart pumping with the microprobe.”

“Too slow,” Monroe muttered, lifting the ax.

Dalton reached under his fatigue shirt and pulled out his nine-millimeter pistol. He stepped back from the isolation tube, aiming.

“What the hell do you people think you’re doing?” Raisor was running down from behind the console.

“I’m going to break this goddamn thing!” Dalton yelled. “Pull him out or we get him out our way. Now!”

“He’s still too cold!” Hammond protested.

“He’s not breathing!” Dalton yelled. He shifted his aim from the glass to Raisor.

The CIA agent stared at Dalton’s eyes for a second. Raisor wheeled toward Hammond. “Do it.”

Hammond slammed her fist down on a lever. With a hum of motors, the winch began reeling in the nylon strap that was attached to Stith’s harness. The body came up out of the tube, dripping embryonic solution. Hammond pushed on the lever and Stith swung over the ground, his body twitching.

Dalton holstered his pistol and had his arms up. With Monroe, he caught Stith’s body as it came down. Dalton could feel the chill. “Get this thing off him,” he said, pointing at the TACPAD.

Hammond was kneeling over the body. She spoke to herself as she worked. “Extracting cryoprobes.” She pressed a small button set on the outside of the TACPAD.

“Hurry!” Dalton yelled.

“You can’t take it off until they’ve fully retracted. You’ll break them off.” Her hands kept moving, hitting another button. “Extracting thermocouples.”

Hammond reached down and slid the microprobe out of Stith’s chest. With Barnes’s help, she pulled the TACPAD off his head.

Dalton leaned over and ran his fingers through the sergeant’s mouth. They came out dripping blue fluid.

“Shit,” Dalton muttered. He leaned over, locked his mouth onto Stith’s, and blew. Nothing. He threw Stith over his knee, face-down. He slammed into the man’s back with both fists. A large pile of embryonic fluid gushed out of Stith’s mouth onto the floor. Dalton hit him again, then put him on the floor on his back. He breathed into his mouth; this time the sergeant’s lungs came up.

Barnes was across from Dalton, feeling for a pulse. “Nothing,” he said, then slammed his fist down onto Stith’s chest. He began compressions in ratio to Dalton’s breathing.

Dalton fell into the rhythm. In between Barnes’s compressions, someone draped a blanket over the body. Dalton pulled up for a second and looked into Stith’s face. It was blue. He slid the eyebrows up. The eyes were open and vacant, the pupils dilated. He bent back down and continued.

“He’s gone, Sergeant Major. He’s gone.” Barnes had his hand on Stith’s neck. “He’s gone.”

The words were a litany, slowly sinking into Dalton’s consciousness. Finally he paused in his breathing and looked up. Barnes shook his head.

“He’s gone. Fifteen minutes and no oxygen. Even if we brought him back, he’d be a vegetable.”

Dalton’s head snapped back and he glared at the younger medic, causing him to step back in surprise.

“What about his mind being frozen?” Sergeant Monroe asked. He was now on his knees, cradling the body in his large arms. “Like someone who falls into freezing water.”

“His mind wasn’t frozen,” Hammond said. She was standing over them, her face tight. “Just his body. The TACPAD and helmet kept the brain at normal temperature.”

Barnes slid a poncho liner over the body.

Dalton stood. There were the three other men still in the isolation tubes. “I want to know what happened. What killed him?”

Hammond was back behind her console. “I’m not sure.”

“Take a goddamn guess!” Dalton snapped.

Hammond stepped back. “As nearly as I can tell, his psyche got lost going from our world to the virtual world. I lost contact and Sybyl never established contact. That affected his entire brain and his autonomic nervous system went nuts. That’s what caused his death.”

“Are you certain of that?” Dalton asked.

Raisor stepped between the two of them. “We don’t have the time to stand around and argue. We— ”

“We’d damn well better know what killed Sergeant Stith before we go any further,” Dalton said. “Or we’re not going any further.”

“Don’t you threaten me or this project,” Raisor said.

“Is this what happened to the man you lost?” Dalton ignored the CIA man and focused on the doctor.

“No,” Hammond said. She seemed more sure of herself. “ His death was caused by mechanical failure. This was different. This happened on the line between the physical and psychic planes.” She shook her head. “We’re moving too fast. We should have had— ”

“We have to move fast,” Raisor said. He moved to a position between her and the Special Forces men.

Dalton pointed at the other isolation tanks. “We need to get those other men out.”

Raisor shook his head. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for that.”

Dalton glared at Raisor. “You’d better make time.”

“It’s not up to me,” Raisor said. “We’re on a tight time schedule dictated by others. It was a training accident. You have them all the time. A parachute fails to open. A man is knocked unconscious during scuba training and loses his mouthpiece and drowns.”

“We have training accidents,” Dalton acknowledged, “but we work hard to make sure they don’t happen after we figure out what went wrong. We don’t know what went wrong here.”

“You are under orders, Sergeant Major,” Raisor said. “This mission has top priority.”

“I think it’s time to let us in on the secret,” Dalton said. He walked over and stood by Stith’s body. “Seeing as we’re putting our lives on the line for this. I want to know why this man had to die. Why we’re in such a damn rush.”

Raisor met Dalton’s glare, then nodded. “All right. I’ll tell you. Because one of our RVers has discovered that someone is going to try to steal twenty nuclear warheads in eight”— Raisor looked up at the large clock— “make that seven days.”

Feteror was tired, but he had one more place to check before going back. He felt the link to SD8-FFEU, a line growing more tenuous the longer he was out. It was a flow of power and information into his psyche, without which he was impotent.

Feteror accessed the satellite imagery of the area he wanted. He centered it in his “vision” and then, with a burst of energy, he was there, looking down on a railyard.

He paused, feeling the vision fade with a loss of power. He had prioritized his missions, knowing this would happen. Damn Rurik and his leashes and limitations.

The vision came back and Feteror scanned the railyard. There were troops all over the place, armed with automatic weapons. He could see the national insignia of the Kazakhstan army on their lapels, but the uniforms were still the dull color of the former Soviet Union.

Feteror swooped down to the railmaster’s shack on the edge of one of the sidings. The wall was just a brief blip and then he was inside. There were two soldiers in the room, but he ignored them. A routing schedule lay open on the desk. Feteror checked it and got the information he needed. The two soldiers looked about, disturbed by something they could sense but not see, since Feteror was staying invisible in the virtual plane. He had no need to do anything on the real plane here.

He paused. There was another presence in the room. Another being on the virtual plane. Feteror reached out and probed the presence. He hit a protective psychic wall, but he knew he could break through. He gathered his strength to— Feteror froze as darkness closed on his consciousness. A dark tide swept in, then back out. Damn General Rurik, Feteror thought. The old fox was cutting his power to bring him back.

The other presence was gone.

Feteror let the dwindling power link to SD8-FFEU draw him home.