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.
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.
Psychic Warrior pw-1 Page 10
