Before he could turn it on, though, he felt a… rustling… in his senses. He looked toward the truck, and for a moment saw three pale swirling mists and, God help him, one of them formed an enraged face for a split second.
Watching carefully, Danny flipped on the null-field generator. The mists seemed to speed up and flail around before dissipating entirely.
They know? Dear God, do these… things… know when we’re about to cut them off? Have they… learned… about the generators?
Relatively early on, in 1949, Danny and the scientists working at Area 51 had discovered that there were indeed intelligences on the other side of the strange vortex created by the Hiroshima bombings. They had come to believe that Variants were created when one of these intelligences escaped the vortex and attached itself to a normal person. Each time the vortex surged with radiation, Danny believed, a new Variant was Enhanced. The correlation was too strong to ignore, even if they hadn’t always been able to locate every single Variant. Maybe the intelligences didn’t find a good “host” in time, or the Enhancement was too minor to pick up.
But it seemed the Variants were indeed hosts to these entities. Thus far, no Variant had ever showed signs of being controlled by these intelligences, or of being in contact or communion with them in any way. The entities just sort of tagged themselves to a person, and that person would manifest an Enhancement, along with a side effect or two.
The only two Variants known to the MAJESTIC-12 program who didn’t exhibit any side effects at all were Frank Lodge and Danny himself. Frank, of course, did seem to be in some sort of communion with the memories of the dead folks he’d absorbed, but no one was sure if that really counted or not. And as for Danny, his sole Enhancement seemed to simply be the ability to detect other Variants, sometimes at great distances.
Though Danny sometimes wondered if his ability was changing, evolving. Ever since the Russian nuclear test in Kazakhstan in 1949, it seemed Danny was sensing more about these intelligences. Just glimpses, really, and they didn’t make much sense.
“I hate it when we use those,” Tim said, startling Danny slightly.
“Yeah, well, we don’t want our guests getting ideas,” Danny replied. “But I know how you feel.”
Tim nodded. “It’s like… being cut off from a part of yourself. There’s a comfort to having that ability there. It’s like a companion, almost. Weird, I know.”
“Not weird. Well… not weirder than things already are.”
“True that, son. There are days when I just want to go back to Minnesota and screw around with electronics for a living again,” Tim said. “I mean, I’m in the middle of goddamn Russia, in the middle of the night, wearing a secret police uniform with like twenty-plus Soviet officers in my truck, which I hot-wired and stole from the Red Army.”
Danny laughed at this, feeling a little better about things in general. “Well, when you put it like that. At least it’ll be something you can tell your grandkids about.”
Tim’s good humor waned as he dug around for a cigarette. “Dan, I ain’t gonna see my grandkids. And if you don’t have kids by now, you won’t have any either.”
“Kids were never in the cards for me,” Danny replied. “I’m not wired like that.”
Tim lit up and drew in deeply. “Married to MAJESTIC?”
“No. Just… not a family kind of guy.”
“Confirmed bachelor. Or… confirmed bachelor?”
The difference in Tim’s question was telling, but while Danny liked him just fine — there were some secrets Danny wasn’t prepared to tell anyone. There was a reason he was good at his job. Secrets came naturally.
“Never mind, you dirty bastard,” Danny replied jokingly. “Go keep watch down the road. I’ll keep an eye on our guests.”
Tim gave Danny a clasp on the shoulder before heading off back down the road, pistol in hand, while Danny cracked open the back of the truck. The gas had finally dissipated, but the canvas and enclosed space had kept it circulating in there for a while. Nobody was getting up any time soon. Mrs. Stevens had designed the gas to last three hours, and they were barely a third of the way there.
Still, Danny kept the null-field generator going. It was hard to battle Variants when you didn’t know their abilities, and the geyser guy threw things out of whack. The program had Rustov in its files since ’47, so they should’ve taken him and the others into account. Danny thought back to the close call they’d had in the cisterns under old Istanbul back then, and figured Rustov had to have been in on it. Only natural that his abilities might evolve during that time. Others certainly had.
Frank had confided to Danny that his dead-man memories were becoming more conversational in his head, and seemed to interact with him and one another in very self-aware ways. Cal could still glean life energy from living things to keep young and strong, or use that energy to heal others in exchange for aging himself back to normal, or beyond into old age. But the continued testing at Mountain Home showed that, over time, he had to take in and expend more and more energy to get the job done. In 1948, Cal could kill a steer and age himself twenty years younger. Now, it was maybe fifteen years. Where would it be a year from now?
Yamato had more difficulty with random sparks and arcs when he slept lately. Sorensen would occasionally phase in and out of sight — sometimes just a hand or leg, sometimes all of him — unless he kept a conscious grip on his ability. And Maggie… well, Maggie had just become more reserved, more cold and distant over time, even as she honed her emotional control over others into the most potent weapon MAJESTIC-12 had.
If he was being honest with himself — and being alone in the woods with a truckful of Russians that needed to be dealt with was a surprisingly good opportunity for introspection — it was clear to him that the Variants within MAJESTIC-12 would likely have a short shelf life for government work. Maybe ten years, maybe less. After that, Danny feared that Cal would require downright disturbing amounts of life energy to function; Frank would be overwhelmed by the voices in his head; Sorensen and Yamato would likely have to be hidden away from everyone as their Enhancements became uncontrollable. And Maggie…
Danny didn’t want to think about what Maggie might become.
A whistle from Sorensen — it was supposed to be a whip-poor-will call, but he never mastered it — dragged Danny’s attention to the road. There was a car coming, lights off. It should be Frank and Katie, but…
Danny drew his pistol and aimed it at the road just as the car pulled up. Katie and Frank were inside, but both Danny and Sorensen had their weapons drawn.
“Lovely evening,” Tim said in Russian, the first part of the password.
“Yob t’vyu mat,” Frank replied as he got out. It was one of the vilest curses in Russian, and still not really used in polite company, and not so immediately in conversation. So oddly enough, it was a good rejoinder for the second part of the password.
Danny and Sorensen holstered their weapons. “Any problems?” Danny asked as he walked over to the car.
“Just an overeager police chief excited about his Order of Lenin medal, sure to come in the mail any day now,” Frank replied. “I told him to keep off the phones and radios for forty-eight hours, until I could ‘secure the NKVD and remove all the traitors to the Motherland.’”
“Will he do it?” Danny asked.
“So long as he doesn’t call tonight, we’re good, right?”
Danny nodded. Here we go. “Been thinking about the solution for these guys, Frank. I think there’s another option.”
“Dan, I’m sorry. Really. But you gotta expect at least one of these guys made Katie on that train. She says one of the Variants there recognized her and called her by name while there were still guys standing. So if even one says, ‘I got beat to shit by a teenage girl,’ and another says, ‘I heard someone say Ekaterina,’ then Katie’s been made as active here in the Soviet Union. Right here and now. She doesn’t leave. These guys can’t be allowed to go back.”