Psychic Warrior

Chapter Seven

Dalton was surprised the embryonic solution was warm. It felt like molasses as his feet sank into it. He resisted the urge to shake his head; the TACPAD helmet weighed heavily on his neck, and his vision was blocked by the pad of the cyberlink completely covering his eyes and wrapping around his head. The helmet was fastened on very securely, the location determined after four hours of fitting by two members of Hammond’s staff in a white room that was completely sterile. They had told him the location had to be exact, within one hundredth of a millimeter. And they had only been able to do that after doing complete MRI, CAT, and PET scans of his brain.

As they worked, the two technicians had talked in a lingo that Dalton had not understood. They had sent cry-oprobes and thermocouples into his brain to test locations, reading results off a bank of machines and then making adjustments to the inside of the TACPAD. Hammond had been right— the insertion of the little wires had caused no pain, or any other sensation for that matter. Still, it had been disconcerting to simply lie there, knowing that they were penetrating directly into his brain, over and over again.

Just putting the fitted TACPAD on had taken forty-five minutes, with another thirty of testing, before they had strapped him into the lift harness in the main experimental chamber and lifted him into the air and swung him over the isolation tank.

He wore a slick black suit that covered his torso, leaving his arms and legs free. An electrical lead was attached directly to his chest, and a microprobe had been slipped through the material and into his chest just before they’d lifted him. Even though Hammond assured him as she slipped the probe in that the wire was so thin he couldn’t possibly feel it, Dalton was very aware that something had gone into his heart, a distinctly uncomfortable feeling. The last thing he considered himself capable of doing, encumbered as he was, was conducting a mission. Of course, he still didn’t know the mission they were being prepared for, but it wasn’t the first time in his career he’d received training without knowing exactly what it was to be used for.

Dalton took steady, deep breaths through the mouthpiece as he was lowered further into the isolation tank. He knew that a few members of the team were gathered around, watching, as he was first to experience being inside. The others were still being fitted.

The solution came around his waist, up his chest, then he was all the way in. The worst feeling so far, other than the microprobe into the heart, was the feeling of the embryonic fluid seeping into the TACPAD, pressing up against his face. Dalton also didn’t like the fact that he could see nothing. He felt neutral buoyancy, something he was used to from his scuba training.

“All right?” Dr. Hammond’s voice was loud and clear in his ears.

Dalton gave a thumbs-up. It was extremely hard to move in the solution. Dalton was surprised at the viscosity of the liquid. He wasn’t able to speak with the lung tube stuck down his throat. It was irritating, but the hardest part had been when Hammond had put it in, getting past his gag reflex with one practiced push. Dalton had been on the other end of that technique several times in his army career during his medical training.

“Okay, we’re going to do several things, all at the same time. Just relax. Let us do it all right now.”

Dalton concentrated on his breathing. He felt a buzzing inside his head. A light flickered in his eyes. He didn’t know if it was the cyberlink pad over his eyes or the thermocouple projecting directly into his brain. The light became a white dot.

“Follow the dot,” Hammond said.

The dot moved slowly to the left.

“Don’t move your head,” Hammond warned.

Dalton moved his eyes and they followed the dot. Or was his brain following it? he wondered. His eyes were covered, so they couldn’t be…. The dot was moving the other way and Dalton had to stop his wondering and follow it.

This went on for a while, how long Dalton couldn’t know, but he gradually became aware that he was cold. The buzzing in his head was still there, but he was hardly noticing it; it had become the norm.

“You’re doing good.” Hammond’s voice was more distant. “Give me a thumbs-up if you hear me clearly.”

Dalton was shocked to find that he couldn’t feel his hand. He couldn’t feel any part of his body. He made the mental effort anyway. He tried to feel his eyelids, to determine whether they were open or not, but there was no way he could tell.

“At this point,” Hammond said, “your peripheral nervous system is just about shut down, so you shouldn’t be able to feel your extremities. You’re doing fine. We’re doing the last part of the physical aspect now, taking over for your central nervous system. Relax. Relax.”

Dalton felt a twinge in the tube in his throat. His chest spasmed as liquid slithered into his lungs.

“Relax.”

Dalton was drowning, his lungs filling.

“The dot, follow the dot.”

There was a flash of brightness. Then the dot reappeared, now moving in a circle.

Dalton felt as if his chest were being crushed. He tried to expel the liquid coming in, the dot forgotten.

“Relax.”

Dalton wanted to tell her to shut the hell up as he concentrated on accepting the foreign substance pouring into his lungs. He focused on the knowledge that he wasn’t drowning, that this liquid was sustaining his life. The body didn’t buy it. He was drowning.

“You’re all right. That’s done,” Hammond said. “The machine is breathing for you.”

Dalton halted the panic with a firm mental slam on the runaway emotion. He was breathing. He couldn’t feel his lungs but he accepted that he was getting the oxygen he needed. He’d actually passed out several times in scuba school, drowned, so he knew what it was like to go under without oxygen.

“The dot. Look at the dot.”

Dalton went back to following the dot. He felt very small, as if his entire being had closed in around the core of him, the “I” that rattled around inside his skull.

“The dot, find and stay with the dot. It will be your connection with Sybyl, along with my voice.”

Dalton was startled out of his lethargy. During winter warfare training, he’d seen men, tough soldiers, curl up into small balls inside their snow caves and totally withdraw from the outside world. Just wanting to fall asleep and then slip into frozen death.

Dalton focused on the dot.

“All right,” Hammond said. “You’re in good shape. We’re doing your breathing for you. We’ve got your heart regulated and beating in the correct rhythm. Everything is fine.”

Yeah, right, Dalton thought. He noted that her voice was growing fainter, as if she were very far away.

"Your senses are shutting down. Soon you will no longer be consciously processing information from your normal senses."

Dalton had to strain to hear her.

"You’ll be hearing me on Sybyl’s link next. Just give me…"The voice faded out. A deep, profound silence ensued.

Dalton felt himself start to drift away, and he snapped to.

There was a buzz, then silence. Then a clicking sound that really caught Dalton’s attention.

He felt a stab of pain above his left eye. The pain grew stronger, almost to the point where he couldn’t take it anymore, then it disappeared, to come back just as strong.

The dot was still there, but Dalton didn’t care. He went back further inside his memories, to a dark hole. Dank, dripping, concrete walls. The surface pitted. Dalton knew every little divot, every scratch in those walls. The four low corners, each one of significance to him. The ceiling too low for him to stand up, only four feet high.

He could reach his arms out and touch wall to wall. Exactly square. He’d measure it by using his thumbs. Sixty-three thumb widths wide each way. He had spent a long time considering how whoever had built this thing could have been so exact in their measurements, because when he was taken out, he could see the entire building that was his prison and how poorly constructed it was. The Hanoi Hilton the media had called it, but those who spent years of their lives inside had had other names for the hellhole.

“Sergeant Major Dalton.”

The voice was raspy, echoing, intruding. The pain that had been so distant was back, although not quite as sharp.

“Sergeant Major Dalton.”

Dalton tried to answer.

“Sergeant Major Dalton.” There was a change to the tone and timbre of the voice.

Dalton didn’t know how to speak. He had no throat. No mouth.

“Sergeant Major Dalton.” The voice was smoother now, almost human.

Dalton tried to figure it out, how to answer with no voice of his own.

“Sergeant Major Dalton.” It was recognizable as a human voice now. A woman’s, but there was a timbre to it that was unnatural.

“Sergeant Major Dalton. This is Dr. Hammond. I’m talking to you through Sybyl now. Through the computer directly into your brain. You have to focus your mind to answer. This may take a while, as we have to adjust your program link to your brain.”

Dalton tried to reply.

“To answer, you must focus on the dot.”

The damn dot, Dalton thought. He did as instructed. The dot was still now, centered.

“Now, say hello.”

Dalton tried, but he knew it wasn’t working.

“It takes time to learn. Relax.”

Dalton thought that humorous. How could he relax when he had no control?

A sharp stab of pain right between his eyes caused Dalton to start.

“Good. The computer heard that,” Hammond said.

The pain came again, but Dalton was ready.

“I didn’t hear that,” Hammond said. “You must relax and allow your emotions to pass through.”

The pain once more.

“Screw you,” Dalton projected.

There was a long pause. “We must do a series of tests now to format your program. I’m going to have Sybyl run you through a program we’ve prepared for this. Do what she tells you to.”

Sybyl’s voice was a flat mechanical one, barking out directions. Dalton did as instructed, feeling like a child as he responded, sometimes feeling a little silly.

A series of grid lines appeared. Sybyl had him focus on various coordinates. After a while, the computer guided him in moving along the grid line, a task that Dalton was able to accomplish only after many tries. He had no idea how long this went on until finally Sybyl told him he was done. For now.

Dalton felt a snap, followed by an echoing pain that slid back and forth across his head like a slow-moving tide. The pain wound down, but then he began feeling a tingling sensation in his forehead.

The dot disappeared.

The tingling turned to itching. The extent of the feeling came down his forehead, across his face. To his neck. He could feel the obstruction in his throat.

Soon his entire body itched as if armies of ants were marching across every square inch. And Dalton squirmed, since he couldn’t scratch.

But then the cold came. Worse than the most bitter cold he had ever experienced in all his winter warfare training. He’d been in Norway above the Arctic Circle on exercises with the wind chill hitting under seventy below zero, and it hadn’t been this bad.

Hammond’s voice exploded in his head. “I know you’re cold. We’re warming you up.” The volume went down during the second sentence. “We’re going to get you back on oxygen shortly.”

Dalton sensed some uncertainty in Hammond’s voice. Was this where they had had their accident and lost their man?

“It take a little bit of time to get the fluid out of your lungs, and when we start, you won’t breathe again until your lungs are clear and we can get oxygen in. It takes about two minutes. Trust us. We’ll get it done.

“We’ll keep your heartbeat slow. You can go ten minutes without oxygen at your present physiological rate.”

A fist hit Dalton in the chest. Then a drill began ripping a hole right through him. He screamed, the sound resounding in his skull but not making it out his mouth.

A claw was ripping his lungs up through his throat. Dalton felt darkness closing down as he struggled for air. The only thing keeping him conscious was the pain.

Then the oxygen came and the pain got worse, shocking Dalton with its intensity. But he could breathe. He took in a deep breath, then began choking, hacking, trying to spit.

“The machine will get the rest of the liquid out,” Hammond’s voice informed him. “Relax.”

Screw your relax, Dalton thought. He took another deep breath, relishing the feel of the oxygen as the tube fought his breathing, trying to suck out the last of the liquid on each exhale.

He was still cold, but he could tell that the fluid around him was warming rapidly.

“We’re pulling you out.”

He felt straps tighten around his shoulders as he was lifted. The fluid let go of him reluctantly, and with a sucking noise he was dangling in the air. He was swung over and lowered.

His knees buckled as his feet hit the ground. He felt hands supporting him. Arms went around him, keeping him still.

“We’re extracting the cryoprobes and thermocouples,” Hammond informed him. “You have to remain still. It will take a few minutes.”

To Dalton nothing appeared to happen, but then fingers reached under the neck seal of the TACPAD helmet. It ripped open. The helmet was lifted off slowly. Someone delicately peeled the cyberlink pad off his skin.

Dalton blinked, trying to get oriented. All he saw was white. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again. This time he could make out hazy forms around him. He shook his head, clearing his vision a little. Staff Sergeant Barnes was still holding him up. Dalton slowly regained control of his legs. He looked about. Dr. Hammond and Raisor were standing at the main control console.

There were three bodies in other tubes.

“Damn it, I told Anderson to wait until I was done,” Dalton said, his voice hoarse and cracking.

Barnes frowned. “I know, Sergeant Major, but you were in there five hours and they said they had to get this thing going.”

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. Under the blanket 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.

“Bayonet,” Dalton said.

“Bayonet?” Barnes repeated.

“It’s a long story from a long time 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 fourteen 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 had 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 mujahideen 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 had 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 had 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 three 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 those of the brutal torture he’d undergone in the Afghani 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 from that one.

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, as far as Rurik knew.

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 halfway up; the lines were connected underneath SD8-FFEU through small tunnels that had been drilled. 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.

The effect had been startling. The second he hit the slightly shimmering wall, the man had grabbed his head, collapsed to his knees, and begun screaming in a high-pitched voice. Blood had streamed through his fingers, then his body had jerked upright, held in that position for a few seconds, then simply collapsed.

Rurik had had the wall turned off and the body recovered for autopsy. The doctors discovered that the structure of the man’s brain had literally dissolved.

Another side effect, not so beneficial to security in Rurik’s opinion, was the fact that once the psychic wall was turned on, they could no longer communicate with the outside world. Radio waves would not pass through. Even their best shielded cable and telephone lines would not function.

They kept the psychic wall on all the time for protection. It was breached only for two reasons: one was to make the twice-a-day radio contact with GRU headquarters outside Moscow; the second was to open the window to allow Feteror out or to bring him back in.

Rurik’s job was to be Feteror’s handler. So far, the Spetsnatz man had come up with quite a bit of good intelligence for the GRU.

Besides the psychic wall, there was another special aspect to FFEU that made it unique and more secure. Because they weren’t totally sure of the exact nature of what they were doing, and its great value to the national intelligence structure, the entire complex was physically guarded in a most unique manner.

A complex set of weapons, ranging from machine guns to air defense heat-seeking missiles, was layered around the complex and controlled not by human hands, but by a computer. The targeting computer was hooked to a series of sensors that watched across the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Anything that approached the base— or tried to get out of it— would be spotted and targeted automatically. And, once the guardian system was activated, there was nothing anyone inside the base or outside could do to stop it. The base would effectively be isolated. The system automatically came on whenever Feteror was “out.” This prevented Feteror from using any outside comrades to try to break in, or from subverting anyone inside to help him.

Despite the strong security measures, one thing did worry Rurik, though, and that was why he had worn the path in the rug every time Feteror was “out.” And that was that the scientists couldn’t exactly tell him how Feteror operated. They knew he could remote view and come out of the psychic plane in his demon form, but they also suspected he was capable of much more. But Feteror had not exactly been forthcoming over the years as to his capabilities, and an uneasy truce existed between Rurik and Feteror. The latter got the information requested, but there were limits even Rurik could not push him beyond. In return, there was much Feteror could not get from his captor.

What also bothered Rurik was that he didn’t know where Feteror went when he left SD8-FFEU. There was no way of tracking him on the psychic plane. That task was something that Rurik had the scientists working hard on.

Right now a red light was flashing from the top support beam that ran from the floor on one side, to the roof around to the floor on the other side of the semicircular room. It was a visual signal to everyone that Feteror was out. Besides not knowing exactly what Feteror was capable of and where he was, another thing that disturbed Rurik was he didn’t know what Feteror’s time sense was. Just as the time spent being cut off in the virtual world inside the cylinder seemed like forever to Feteror, Rurik had to wonder how time in the virtual world outside of the cylinder seemed.

Rurik was startled out of his ruminations by a junior officer approaching.

"Sir, we received some intelligence from Moscow in the last communique." A young lieutenant held out a piece of paper.

Rurik took it and read. The GRU counteragent who had infiltrated the Oma group had been found dead in a park near Kiev, along with a GRU colonel named Seogky.

The condition of the bodies was most strange. Seogky had had his eyes torn out and died from a brain hemorrhage. And the counteragent had been cut into two pieces. Rurik crumpled the paper. The filthy Mafia.

Rurik knew Seogky. The man worked in Central Files in GRU headquarters in Moscow. What did the Mafia want from Central Files? Correction, Rurik thought as he reread the message, what did the Mafia now have from Central Files?

He looked up at the red flashing light and frowned.