Psychic Warrior

Chapter Ten

“I don’t give a damn what this guy says.” Colonel Metter’s voice was harsh, even with the dampener of the secure phone line. “I’m running this up the flagpole before we lose anyone else.”

“Raisor said that we have to keep quiet about Sergeant Stith’s death until he gives us the release,” Dalton said. He was standing in a room off the experimental chamber, talking to his commander on a direct satellite link phone. “I don’t think running it up the flagpole is going to do any good,” he added.

“How are the rest of the men?” Metter asked.

Looking around the door, Dalton could see into the chamber. “They just pulled the first two after me out. Both are okay. The rest seem to be doing all right.”

“You know they’re going to tell me to forget about it.” Metter was calming down, thinking about the reality of the situation.

Dalton knew what his commander meant. No matter what the colonel said, the Pentagon was going forward with this. “It’s the nature of the job, sir.”

“But I’m still going on record against this. From what you’re telling me, they haven’t got a good handle on what they’re trying to do.”

“No, sir, I don’t think they have.” Dalton hadn’t told Metter about the nukes, and he knew he couldn’t. “But they do have a high-priority mission that all this is aimed for. And it’s got a short fuse.”

“Is the mission worth losing men over?”

Dalton thought briefly of all the various missions he had been on where men had died. Few had been worth it. “Yes, sir, it is.”

There was a long silence. Dalton could hear the slight crackling in the earpiece, indicating the MILSTARS satellite the call was going through was frequency hopping, making sure the transmission couldn’t be intercepted. Dalton could see Raisor walking toward him across the experimental chamber. “Got to go, sir.”

“Good luck.”

The phone went dead.

“I assume you didn’t reveal any information you weren’t supposed to,” Raisor said.

Dalton glanced around. No one was close. He stepped close to the CIA man, invading his personal space. “Listen to me very carefully, because we are not having this conversation again. I know you’re holding information back from us. I highly recommend you stop doing that. Because what we don’t know could get us killed.”

Raisor started to say something, but Dalton got even closer. “I was doing special operations while you were still in diapers. Don’t treat me or these men like we’re just pieces of the machine to be used. We’re not. And we won’t accept being treated that way.”

Raisor met his eyes. “What are you going to do? Complain to your colonel?”

Dalton didn’t say anything. He remained perfectly still, looking deep into the other man’s eyes, until finally Raisor nodded. “I understand where you’re coming from.” He changed the subject abruptly. “We’ve got new information that changes things. You want to be informed, follow me.”

Dalton trailed the man across the experimental chamber. Captain Anderson was pulling on his fatigue shirt, his face drawn. Dalton gestured for the captain while Raisor called out for Dr. Hammond to join them.

The four entered the classroom. Raisor and Hammond sat behind the front desk while Dalton and Anderson took other seats.

“The nuclear weapons convoy has been moved up five days,” Raisor said.

Silence greeted that statement.

“We’re going to have to be operational in forty-seven hours,” Raisor continued.

Dalton waited on Hammond, as it was clear this was the first she had heard of this also.

She finally spoke. “That will be hard.”

“We have no option,” Raisor said.

“There are plenty of options,” Dalton countered.

“No, there aren’t.” Raisor leaned back in his seat, putting more distance between the two. “This is not open for discussion. We are going in forty-seven hours. The only issue is how do we prepare.”

Dalton repeated.

“I’m going with you, of course,” Raisor said. He turned to Captain Anderson. “You are the ranking man here, not the sergeant major. You are under orders to comply with any and all instructions I give you.”

“What the sergeant major is saying makes sense,” Anderson said. “I don’t think we can do this in two days. We’ve already lost a man.”

“It’s not up to you,” Raisor said. “Plus the person who knows if you can or can’t do it in two days is Dr. Hammond, not you or the sergeant major. And if you can’t follow orders, I’ll relieve you and find someone who can.”

Dalton remained silent, as did Captain Anderson. They knew that by doing so, they were assenting to the mission, but there really wasn’t much choice now. They’d pushed it as far as they could short of disobeying orders and getting court-martialed.

“We can do it,” Hammond interjected. “But we have to really accelerate the schedule. I’d like to get moving on developing avatars immediately.”

“Good,” Raisor said. “I’ll get as much intelligence as possible regarding our target.” He threw a satellite photo down on the desk. “Right now all we have is that the state of Kazakhstan is transferring twenty nuclear warheads via rail to Russia in accordance with the latest arms agreement signed between the two countries.

“The warheads will be on a train traveling from Semipalatinsk to Novosibirsk.” His finger traced a black line. “Along this rail line. Our analysts believe that the attack will occur just after the handover occurs on the Russian side of the border.”

“Why then?” Captain Anderson asked. “Why not on the Kazakhstan side?”

“Because we believe it is the Russian Mafia who will be conducting the raid. They have more power on the Russian side. They might even have infiltrated some of the soldiers who will be guarding the warheads.”

“What kind of security will the Russians have?” Anderson asked.

“One understrength company of infantry,” Raisor said. “About fifty men. The train itself will be armored.”

“That’s a pretty tough nut to crack” Anderson noted. “How do you figure the Mafia will be able to take it down?”

“We don’t know,” Raisor said. “But you do need to understand that the Mafia in Russia is very much unlike anything you’ve heard about here in the States. They are very powerful and well armed. There is a tremendous amount of firepower available on the black market in that part of the world. We’ve had reports of the Mafia having tanks and attack helicopters. Along with the trained personnel to use them. I have no doubt that if the Mafia wants to take down that train, they will do it.”

“What about the codes that arm the warheads— the PAL codes?” Dalton asked. He had some knowledge of nuclear weapons, having served on a “backpack nuke” team for a while. That was before Special Forces gave up the mission of infiltrating tactical nuclear weapons in backpacks with the advent of cruise missiles, which could do the job more efficiently. “Even if the Mafia gets the warheads, I’m sure even the Russian army isn’t stupid enough to ship the PAL codes on the same train.”

“And the Russian Mafia isn’t stupid enough to attack this target if it didn’t feel confident it could get the arming codes somehow,” Raisor said.

That was the first thing Raisor had said that made sense to Dalton. “How do we stop them?”

Raisor turned to Hammond. “That’s your area of expertise.”

Hammond nodded. “What we’re going to do is design combat forms for each of your men using Sybyl. These forms, which we call avatars, will be what you use when you come out of the virtual plane into the real.”

“What exactly is an avatar?” Captain Anderson asked.

“An avatar,” Hammond said, “is a representation of a person in virtual reality. Gamers use it when they participate in a virtual reality session. For our purposes, we use the term for the cyber-self that goes into the virtual world. We also use the term for the form that comes out of the virtual world at the far point. Let me show you what I mean.”

She stood up and walked to a TV on a cart in the corner of the room and wheeled it to the front. She took a videocassette from the rack on the bottom and slid it in the VCR.

“This is a tape of the avatar used during our test run.”

The screen showed an empty room, the floor covered with various objects. For a minute nothing happened, then there was a shimmer in the air, about four feet above the center of the room.

Raisor spoke up. “The RVer who conducted this operation was in an isolation tank here at Bright Gate. This room— the far point— was in the basement of CIA headquarters at Langley.”

Hammond tapped the screen. “Our man has now found the room and is beginning to gain coherence. The avatar used here was very basic. A program that copies a mechanical arm. Two joints, you could say an elbow and wrist, and five digits. The arm is about ten feet long, which makes each finger eight inches long.”

Dalton could now make out the vague outline of the arm Hammond had described, but he could still see straight through it. Then, from the high end, the arm began to solidify in small squares, each one about four inches on each side, the colors ranging from red to orange, each one slightly different.

“We added the color in order to be able to see the avatar,” Hammond said.

“Can it remain invisible?” Dalton asked.

“Not quite invisible, as you saw when it first started to appear,” Hammond said. “You can remain invisible if you stay in the virtual world, but once you enter the real world, there will be some disturbance of the light spectrum. The light goes through, but it is affected. There is also a disturbance of the electromagnetic field, but that can only be noticed with special imagers.”

“So if you wanted, you could keep our forms— avatars— relatively invisible?” Dalton pressed.

“I have a tape of the avatar operating when we don’t add color,” Hammond said. “You’ll be able to see what it looks like.”

The arm was now solid, floating in air. The long fingers, actually looking more like a series of rectangles, began moving.

“Our man is testing the avatar now,” Hammond said.

The arm bent at the elbow, then at the wrist. The fingers continued to move.

Then the hand reached down and picked up a block of wood about four inches square. It moved through the air and deposited the block on the other side of the room. Hammond hit the fast-forward and the arm raced through a series of maneuvers.

“What was the heaviest weight the arm moved?” Dalton asked.

“Four hundred pounds,” Hammond answered. “That was the heaviest we tested it for. Really there is no limit to what it can do as long as the power coming from Sybyl is sufficient to support the proposed action.”

“What’s the limit of the power, then, that you can send from Sybyl?” Dalton asked.

“We’re not exactly sure,” Hammond said, “but based on our data, we have set up some basic parameters. The limit on avatar size will be about eight hundred parts per projected unit.”

“Parts?” Anderson asked.

“It’s a power unit that flows into size for Sybyl. To put it in terms you can understand, eight hundred parts would equal a 170-pound human being.”

“Not exactly Godzilla,” Dalton noted.

“It’s the best we can do right now,” Hammond said. “Eventually we might be able to produce Godzilla-like avatars, but there seem to be some limits on what can be sent through the virtual plane and then reassembled in a coherent form at the target.”

“And power?” Dalton asked.

Hammond frowned. “That is a problem. Using Sybyl, we can only send a set limit. That one arm could lift four hundred pounds, but if we’d put another similar arm into the room, also powered by Sybyl, each one could only lift two hundred pounds.”

“So the more men we send over,” Dalton summarized, “the less power they will have?”

“Yes,” Hammond said. “I’ve got our computer people working round the clock to increase the flow, but there seem to be some mathematical limits to the virtual physics that we don’t quite understand.”

“There seems to be a hell of a lot that you don’t understand about all of this,” Dalton said.

Hammond pointed at the screen. “It works.”

“It picks up blocks,” Dalton countered. He tapped the satellite imagery on the desk. “This will be real, Doctor. With real people. And real nuclear warheads. Your stuff had better work then.”

“It will.”

“I’m a little confused,” Captain Anderson said. “You told us it could do only eight hundred parts. How many different avatars can you send over?”

“We’re not sure,” Hammond said. “We do know, though, that the total power is limited and the amount allocated to each avatar is inversely proportional to the number of avatars generated.”

“Can you get the entire team operational?” Dalton asked.

“I think we can,” Hammond answered.

“What about weapons?” Dalton asked. “We reappear as 170-pound ‘forms’ in our birthday suits, we’re asking for trouble.”

Hammond smiled. “That’s something I think you will be very happy with.” She grabbed another tape off the rack.

Dalton and Anderson leaned forward as a small, hovering sphere appeared in a different room. They recognized it as an indoor pistol range.

“That’s the range at Langley,” Raisor said. “The RVer was here at Bright Gate.”

The avatar elongated until it was a tube about six feet long by six inches in diameter, bright red in color, the surface pulsing.

“We only gave it this form in order to get some idea of aim.”

There was a glow on one end of the tube. Then, faster than they could see, the glow shot along the tube and down range. The wooden target exploded in a shower of splinters.

“How much power is that?” Anderson asked.

“Enough to punch through an inch of plate steel,” Raisor said. “More than sufficient to go through any type of body armor a target might be wearing.”

“How often can it fire?” Dalton asked.

“We’re working on that,” Hammond said. “There is a direct correlation between power and frequency of firing.”

“If I wanted enough power to kill someone,” Dalton said, “how often can I fire?”

“Once every two seconds,” Hammond said.

‘Jesus.” Dalton shook his head. Two seconds was forever in combat. “We’re back to the days of lever action rifles.”

“Is that the best weapon you have for us?” Anderson asked.

“We have some other options in terms of power and rate,” Hammond said defensively.

“What about if we have to take out armor?” Dalton asked.

“Then you materialize inside the tank,” Raisor said, “and you kill the crew.”

“Could I then use the tank?” Dalton asked.

“You can use anything you can retrieve,” Raisor said. “That’s one of the beauties of this type of operation. You will have the element of surprise and then of shock. You’ll materialize out of nowhere, in a form that can hardly be seen, and what they do see will scare the piss out of them. Your weapons will be something they’ve also never experienced before. You’ll have more than enough advantage.”

“Against a force that’s going to attack a company of infantry?” Dalton asked. “With only seven of us?”

“Eight. And all we have to do is stop them from taking the warheads,” Raisor said. “That means just disrupt the attack.”

“I think you are severely underestimating your advantages,” Dr. Hammond said. “You will be able to move anywhere you want in an instant. And your physical selves will be here, at Bright Gate, safe. That’s a tremendous advantage. You can’t get killed, like a kid playing a video game on ‘God’ mode.”

“What about the avatars?” Dalton asked, not thrilled with comparison to a video game. He’d been hearing about “push-button” warfare for over two decades now and he didn’t buy into it. Sooner or later it always came down to some guy with a gun in his hand standing on a piece of terrain over the body of another guy with a gun. “What if one of the avatars is shot? How does that affect our physical selves and the form?”

“Your physical self will be fine,” Hammond said. “The virtual form you project will be disrupted. What you are basically doing is transforming energy into matter. If the matter gets disrupted, it will backflow to the energy field. But you’ll be able to ‘dissolve’ your avatar and re-form it again, so in effect, you will be indestructible.”

“So why can’t we just go as those tubes and fire everyone up?” Captain Anderson wanted to know.

“Because it’s difficult to maneuver such a form,” Hammond said. “We much prefer to give you an avatar that can actually make contact with the ground and any other surface. That can move physically if you need to. To disappear and re-form takes time and practice, neither of which we have much of right now.

“Also, you are used to having two arms and two legs and having your head on top of your shoulders. That might sound funny to you, but we try to approximate the human form as much as possible because it is the way you are used to getting sensory input and also the way you are used to moving. We could give you four arms, but how would you use the extra two? Where in your mind would you direct the commands for those arms to function? Perhaps with a lot of practice you might, but for a long time any additions or differences would only be a distraction. Trust me on this. A human-type form is the best for you to have as your avatar.”

Raisor stood. “The best thing to do is for you to experience it firsthand. Perhaps that will answer many of the questions you might have. Let’s get going. The clock is ticking.”

Feteror remembered the plane ride out of Afghanistan. It was the last memory he had of the time before the long darkness. The last memory of being a man, even a wounded, dying shell of a man.

He had learned over the years to be able to put his memories into the mainframe computer he was hooked to. It was the only way he could “experience” a real life— replaying his memories, reliving them inside the computer. They were as “real” as the women the programmers sent to him for his “relief”

He often regretted that he didn’t know more about computers, but at the time he had been shipped to Afghanistan, computers had barely appeared in the Russian world, other than those the government used.

The scientists called the master computer at SD8-FFEU Zivon, which was a Russian name that meant alive.

The scientists had great respect for the computer that assisted Feteror in accomplishing his missions, but Feteror knew the computer to be stupid and unimaginative. He supposed that as machines went, it was quite an impressive piece of equipment, but it was poor companionship for all the years he had spent hooked to it.

Of course, Feteror knew, the scientists also had named Zivon thusly because they considered Feteror to be part of the computer. They saw no clear separation between the human brain and remaining body floating in a solution inside the metal cylinder and the circuitry and memory boards that surrounded it. Feteror himself often wondered where the line was as he wandered the electronic corridors of Zivon.

The Russians had long worked at direct interfaces between the human mind and the machine mind. Ethical considerations had limited what could be done in the West, even though their machines were so much superior. SD8 had no such considerations to worry about and they had had access to all the other work being done in secret Soviet labs on cyborgs.

Feteror had looked up the word cyborg early in his new life after overhearing the technicians using it. The most interesting thing he had discovered about the definition was the part where it said that the human, once it became a cyborg, was then reliant on the machinery that was part of it for its survival.

During one of his maintenance periods, the technicians had turned his video eye— since his virtual demon’s eye could never enter SD8-FFEU— on the metal cylinder that held him and the surrounding machinery. It had been hard for Feteror to accept that what he saw was his “self.”

He remembered seeing himself in a training film when he had still been fully human and being surprised at what he saw, as many people were, not used to seeing themselves and having developed an unconscious representation in their own mind of what they looked like, sometimes at odds with the reality. Much as people were always surprised to hear their voice on tape, as it sounded different somehow. But seeing the machines that made him up had been far beyond anything any human had ever experienced.

Feteror had long ago ceased thinking of himself as he had been in human form, but he had not been willing or able to translate that concept to the machines that surrounded the husk of his body. He preferred instead to view himself as Chyort, the demon avatar he went on missions as. But that didn’t mean he had been able to completely close the door on his past.

Feteror was very careful with his memories. They were all he had and he had made sure to encode them and hide them deep inside Zivon. Everyone he had known, and how he had known them, was in there. Everything he had ever done. Everywhere he had ever been. Even when Rurik cut his power down to minimum, Feteror was free to roam those parts of Zivon that were accessible to him, the space he was allowed for his own use.

And those parts of Zivon that the scientists had blocked off from him— Rurik was no fool— Feteror was still trying to get to. Like a prisoner slowly chipping away at a prison wall with a spoon, Feteror had been working on breaking through the circuit walls that surrounded him, trying to get to the outer world of Zivon, which he knew would give him access to the entire world of the Internet and beyond. His goal was simply to be able to shut Zivon down, and in the process kill himself, but he had become aware of the incredible electronic virtual world that had sprung up in the past decade and it had piqued his interest.

Rurik never gave Feteror access to any information other than what was needed to accomplish his missions, but each time he was out on one of those missions, Feteror always made sure to try to gain more data. Several times he had materialized and accessed into computers, “surfing” the Internet, a phrase he found most amusing, and an experience he had found quite stimulating. He had learned much, more than General Rurik could even begin to suspect. He had learned much about Rurik also, because he believed one of the keys to his plan was to understand his captor completely in order to be able to manipulate him.

In the past year he had even begun to contemplate trying to get to Zivon from the outside, hack his way into his own outer self, but the safeguards put in place seemed overwhelming, as did those on the inside, keeping him from hacking out. Even when he penetrated the GRU system, he had not even been able to get close to SD8, and he had been afraid of tripping alarms. If there was one tenet he had accepted early in his army career, it was that surprise and stealth were the most important tactical considerations when preparing an attack.

So he had accepted that another way had to be found.

But for now he was tired. He had accomplished much in the past few days, and his plan was gathering momentum.

He wandered aimlessly through the electronic archives that held his memory. When he paused to see where he was, he was surprised to discover that he was next to the place where he had encoded memories of his grandfather and his childhood.

He’d never known his father, not really. A vague figure who’d come home every once in a while wearing a smelly greatcoat. A large man who preferred the rough life of the army to the bitter life of the farm. Home on leave for a few days every few years, until finally he stopped coming and Feteror’s mother stopped talking about him coming home.

Feteror saw little of his mother, as she worked in a factory in the city, six days a week for sixteen hours a day, and it was too far to come back to the small farm each night. So he saw her maybe once a week, usually less. It was just he and his grandfather on the farm.

His grandfather— Opa in the Russian familiar— had told him of the Great Patriotic War and how the Germans had come and killed everyone in their village that they had caught, including Feteror’s grandmother and his own mother’s two brothers and three sisters. Only his grandfather, out in the woods hunting for game, and his mother, a young girl then, accompanying him to help carry it back, had survived. They had then joined one of the many guerrilla groups and spent the rest of the war hiding and killing when they could.

Unlike many of the other old men whose stories Feteror had heard, his grandfather had not spoken of the war fondly, or boasted of great feats of arms. He had spoken of the loss, the boredom of waiting, and the terror of the quick clash of combat.

But mostly they had simply worked the farm, raising enough food to eat and make the quotas from the State that grew larger every year. When Feteror had turned sixteen, his grandfather had died and Feteror had seen the writing on the wall. He had known he could never make the increasing quotas, even if his grandfather were still alive to help. Feteror had gone for the only thing he knew, immediately signing up to serve his required time in the military.

He’d found that the disciplined life was for him. In many ways, it was easier than the farm had been, and Feteror gained a better understanding of why his father had been gone so much.

Feteror had done well, finally being sent to the elite Airborne. Even there, among the best, he had excelled, and he had been sent, after a few years of service, to officer training. He’d returned to the Airborne and served as an officer, before putting in enough time and gaining enough experience to join the Spetsnatz.

Feteror remembered the last time he had gone to the farm. He accessed that memory and the virtual area around him began to take on a form.

The collective had gobbled the farm up, but the small shady spot next to the stream where he and his grandfather had spent Sunday afternoons was still there, surrounded by acres and acres of open fields. Feteror closed his eyes and lay down in the shady spot, feeling the cool breeze, the itch of the grass underneath, hearing the murmur of the water going by. He had spent many, many hours perfecting this location in the computer’s memory.

Feteror heard footsteps and when he opened his eyes, he was not surprised to see his grandfather standing there, a flask in his hand and a bright smile of crooked teeth amidst the wrinkles in his face.

Feteror sat up and greeted Opa and began to talk to him of what he had planned. He knew the old man would understand.

When the mercenaries complained about having to dig, Leksi threw money at them. Literally. He had a briefcase full of American dollars, and he tossed a thick band to each man.

“A bonus for the labor,” he said.

But Barsk knew it was not so much the money, but Leksi himself, overseeing the digging, that made the ex-soldiers work like madmen. They wanted to be done with this and away from Leksi as quickly as possible.

There was also the problem that the GRU unit they had wiped out most likely made some sort of regularly scheduled radio contact with its higher headquarters. When they failed to call in, it was inevitable some sort of alarm would be raised. Barsk knew the remoteness of this site would preclude any investigation soon, but eventually someone would check.

The backhoe had worked through the rubble in the entrance to the elevator shaft relatively quickly. The shaft had suffered some damage but was unblocked except for debris at the bottom, which the mercenaries were digging out and placing on a small cage pulled out by the backhoe. An arc welder was cutting through the steel doors, which had been buckled by some sort of explosion.

When the welder finally cut through, Barsk could see that the doors were two inches thick. What Barsk really didn’t understand was why this generator was so far underground.

With a solid thud, one of the doors fell inward. Leksi was through, followed immediately by Barsk. The welder went to work on the other door while they walked into the blasted shambles of what the papers called the control room.

“What did this?” Barsk whispered. There were skeletons strewn across the floor, the flesh seared from the bones. The blast glass overlooking the experimental pit had been completely blown away. The walls were scorched as if from an intense heat. Barsk ran his hand along the top of what had once been a computer but was now melted metal and plastic.

Leksi snapped a finger, and one of his men opened a case and took a reading with the machine inside.

“It is clean,” the man said. “No radiation.”

Leksi knelt and picked up a skull, peered at it for a few moments, then tossed it aside. “High heat,” he said. “A very powerful explosion. Not nuclear though. Most interesting.”

It was a shock for Barsk to see the ex — naval commando almost reflective as they both looked about.

Leksi crooked a long finger from his position near the blast wall. Barsk joined him. On the floor below was the gleaming steel tube of the generator, still standing straight and tall, the silver still shining amidst the black coils that fed power to it. More skeletons littered that floor.

“What are those things?” Barsk asked. There were four coffins next to the tube, a skeleton lying in each open container.

Leksi was turning the pages on the papers. “They’re called sensory deprivation tanks in here.”

“Why did they need those?”

Leksi waved some of his men forward, ignoring the question. “We need to unbolt that tube and then we’re going to have to winch it to the surface. I want you five to work on freeing the tube. You others, prepare a brace on the surface so we can use both the plane and the backhoe to haul that thing out of here.”

Barsk was looking more closely at the coffins. He could see the metal sockets implanted in each skull.

“What were they doing here?” he whispered.

Leksi frowned. “I hope we can take off with that weight inside,” he said in a lower voice to Barsk. “Move!” he yelled at the men. “Move faster!”