The Sun was going down and a slight chill came with the evening breeze, but Dane didn’t notice.
The power line was getting stronger, of that he was certain. After slightly over thirty minutes, he realized that one of the problems was that the power line was shifting. Moving ever so slightly.
Dane froze his hand and opened his eyes once more. He looked up. along the line of his arm toward where his finger was pointing, just above the horizon to the east.
“There.”
Everyone turned and looked. A full moon was rising over the mountains beyond San Diego.
“It’s being broadcast from there,” Dane said.
“The moon?” Ahana was skeptical.
Dane understood part of it now. “There’s a gate here and the other end of the portal is there. The transmission is coming from the Ones Before to a gate on the moon and then being broadcast to this spot where the dolphins pick it up. Then they retransmit in the form of the visions and voices those of us with the Sight can pick up. I knew I felt something strange about the other end of the Ones Before portal when I touched it in the sphere map.”
Dane felt a sharp spike of pain through the left side of his head and he staggered. Earhart grabbed his arm, steadying him. “Are you all right?”
Dane looked over the side of the boat. A dolphin floated there, gazing up at him. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. ‘’That’s my — ” he whispered, searching for the right word. The pain was a little less intense now and he tried to focus his thoughts.
“What?” Earhart asked.
“That dolphin.” Dane pointed. “She’s” — he shook his head, frustrated that he couldn’t conjure up the word he needed. He tapped the side of his head where the pain was receding — “She’s the conduit through which I get my visions. Through which the voices reach me. We each have one. Each of us with the Sight. That’s why you haven’t had any visions in this timeline,” he said to Earhart. “You don’t have a dolphin counterpart here.”
“I don’t — ” Ahana began but Dane shushed her as he leaned over the boat, close to the dolphin, which used its tail to lift its body a third of the way out of the water. For several seconds the tableau was frozen — the dolphin partly out of the water, Dane leaning over. Then Dane reached out and touched the dolphin’s forehead.
It was like touching a live wire. But he maintained the contact for several seconds, until, with a flip of its powerful tail, the dolphin splashed back into the ocean and disappeared into the dark water.
Dane sank to his knees, leaning against the side of the boat. Earhart, Ahana, and Talbot knelt next to him in concern.
“Should I get a Med Evac?” Talbot asked.
Dane slowly shook his head. ‘’No. I’m all right. I see most of it now. Not all. But I know what I have to do next.”
“And that is?” Earhart asked.
“Go to the Ones Before.” Dane got to his feet.
“Can you make it through this?” Earhart asked doubtfully.
“I’m not going there physically,” Dane said. ‘’They’ve barricaded their end of the portal to prevent anything physical from coming through. Commander,” Dane said to Talbot. “Please take us to shore.”
“So how will you get there?” Earhart pressed.
“How else?” Dane didn’t wait for an answer. “With my mind.” He looked at Talbot. “When we get back, you can brief us on your project.”
The rest of the ride was made in silence.
Talbot led them down into the complex. The same dolphin was in the tank and in the exact same position. Talbot led them past the tank, down a short corridor and into a room with rows of chairs. He stood at the front, next to a screen.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this briefing is classified top secret, special compartmentalization.”
Dane felt a surge of anger. After all that had happened!n the war against the Shadow, more secrets. From whom he wondered? He knew Foreman had gotten them access to this, but he also resented the CIA man for all he represented. All the deceptions and lies had played into the Shadow’s hand over the years and now the Earth was reaping the results.
“Just get to it,” Dane snapped, earning him surprised looks from Ahana and Earhart.
Talbot glared at Dane for several seconds.
“Gentlemen.” Amelia Earhart stood up. “If we could do without the pissing contest, maybe we could get to the facts?”
Dane leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and nodded. “Go ahead, Commander.”
“Have you ever heard of Operation Grill Flame?” Talbot asked.
Dane realized that Talbot was one of those people who could not adapt, who could not change to the situation. He was going to give this briefing the way he had in the past no matter what.
“No,” Dane said.
“Grill Flame was the code name for a Defense Intelligence Agency operation using remote viewers,” Talbot said.
“Remote viewers?” Earhart asked.
“Psychics,” Talbot explained. “People who could see things at a distance just by using their minds. Grill Flame was what it was first called in the sixties. It was renamed Bright Gate in the eighties. They used it to search for the hostages in Beirut. With no success. Something was lacking.”
“Then you got involved,” Dane said. surprising Talbot.
The Commander nodded. ‘’Yes. To be honest, it was just damn luck. We were running a search and recover training mission with one of our dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, near an oil rig. Bright Gate was running a remote viewing exercise, trying to get one of their operators to see the oil rig and describe it.”
“They connected,” Dane said.
“Yes,” Talbot stared at Dane, re-evaluating. “We found the dolphin was the one doing the transmitting. The remote viewer was just a receiver. So Dream Land came into being.”
Dane wondered if things would have been different if he had known about Dream Land. He had only just realized he received his visions and heard the voices via a dolphin. Here, they’d known for years that dolphins transmitted. Connecting the two might have made a difference.
“We worked on both transmitters and receivers,” Talbot continued. “Trying to increase both capabilities. We also tried to channel the process into remote viewing.”
Talbot picked up a remote and clicked a button. A slide appeared, showing a single tube with a man inside. The man floated freely, his arms and legs akimbo, a breathing tube leading into a black helmet covering his head along with numerous leads.
“We started with men because we knew more about the human brain. Plus” — here he glanced at Dr. Martsen — “there was the problem that dolphin couldn’t exactly tell Us what they were seeing. We eventually realized that it was better to ramp up the dolphin’s transmitting power along with a human’s receiving power, so we began working on dolphins in the isolation tubes. The results have been interesting to say the least.”
Talbot paused, and Dane knew they were crossing the me now, moving from what Talbot and his scientists knew to what they could only guess about. He had picked up the same thing from Ahana and Nagoya when they started discussing the theoretical physics they thought night apply to the Shadow. He had a moment of doubt, Wondering if they were so far behind the Shadow’s knowledge base that his vague plan of assaulting the Shadow’s timeline was an extremely naïve one.
Talbot began. “The science we are dealing with here is on the psychometric or virtual plane. While we have little actual understanding of how this works, our philosophy here has been to focus on what works, rather than how it works. What we’ve managed to do is not only remote view but to project an avatar onto the psychometric plane.”