A hand moved over his chest and he knew a micro-probe was being slid into his heart. He bit down on the mouthpiece, securing it in place. Dalton felt the jerk as his feet were lifted off the ground. He went up, then over the lip of the iso-tank. The embryonic solution was warm as he was lowered into it. The helmet was not airtight, and as he sank lower and lower, embryonic fluid seeped in, pressing against his face and head in places. He took steady breaths through the mouthpiece, dreading what was coming.
“Ready for TACPAD?” Dr. Hammond’s voice came through a small speaker in the helmet.
Dalton gave a reluctant thumbs-up, the only way he could communicate right now. He knew the cryoprobes and thermocouples were so small that he shouldn’t feel them going into his brain, but nevertheless, he could swear he felt the pinpricks of needles piercing his skin, sliding through skin and bone.
“We’ve got green all across the board,” Hammond informed him. “Just relax; this will be easier than last time. We’re making the initial link with Sybyl. Do you see the white dot?”
He concentrated and there it was, floating in front of him against a completely black background. The embryonic fluid was getting cooler, dropping his body temperature.
Dalton swallowed, a reflex in nervous anticipation. He felt something move in his mouth and he fought against his gag reflex as a smaller, flexible tube slid out of the breathing tube and forced its way to the rear of his mouth. His throat spasmed as the tube slithered down his airway to his lungs.
Then he began to drown as fluid seeped out of the end of the tube, filling his lungs. He used every bit of training he had to try to relax, to accept what was happening, but Hammond had been wrong-this wasn’t any better than last time. His chest spasmed, trying to expel the liquid, but it fought a losing battle. The pain and uncomfortableness faded as the temperature in the tank got lower and parts of his brain were brought to minimum operating status by Sybyl.
“You’re completely on the iso-tank system now.” Hammond ’s voice was very distant. “I’m switching you…” Her voice faded out and silence and darkness, other than the white dot, prevailed. Dalton felt nothing, no sense of even having a body.
Then a faint feeling throughout his body. He struggled to identify it, then realized it was an itching over every square inch of his flesh. He knew that the feeling was entirely inside his head, since input from his nervous system was shut down, but he had to make sense of it somehow.
The black was changing also, a grayness creeping from the white dot outwards. Dalton “looked” down and saw the beginning of his avatar forming. Two arms and two legs. A smooth trunk in the middle, all featureless white.
He looked about. Another figure was forming to his right-Jackson. Then came a surprise-her featureless form began to shift. Eyes, a nose, a mouth appeared. Even hair, just like hers in real life. Dalton looked down-his avatar had changed also and was a realistic representation of his own body wearing a skintight black jumpsuit. Barnes also appeared and his avatar shifted quickly into an approximation of his normal appearance.
“Do you like the new avatars?” Hammond ’s eager voice was inside his head as she contacted him directly through Sybyl. “I’ve been working on this for a while. It doesn’t really make a difference when you’re in the virtual plane, but when you form on the real, you might be able to pass for a real person. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.”
“Looks good,” Dalton said. “We can still shift into wings, right?”
“Oh yes,” Hammond said.
Dalton willed the change and his arms morphed into wings. He lifted off the virtual ground, keeping his orientation, Jackson and Barnes following. Technically they didn’t need the wings to move in the virtual plane, but they had discovered it made movement easier.
“First jump point, now,” Dalton said. He pictured the location in his mind-the firing range at Fort Hood where they had conducted their first live fire practice with the team.
Then he was there, two hundred feet above the ground, hidden in the virtual plane. A second later Jackson was next to him, hovering like an angel. Then Barnes.
Dalton indicated for Barnes to break off and go to Russia. Barnes’s avatar nodded, and then he was gone in a flash.
Dalton turned to Jackson. “Second jump, now.”
He came out above the first lock of the Panama Canal. Even Hammond didn’t know how they did the jumps. They probably could have jumped directly from Colorado to Colombia, but Dalton preferred taking it in steps. He also wanted a little time to get reoriented to the virtual plane.
The best explanation Hammond had been able to give them was that since the virtual plane had no substance, there also really wasn’t a concept of distance. As long as they could mentally picture where they wanted to go, they could jump there. Dalton and Jackson had discovered, though, that it wasn’t that simple. Sometimes the jumps seemed to take time. Other times they didn’t arrive exactly where they wanted and had to get oriented and rejump. There had even been occasions in Jackson ’s longer experience where jumps just didn’t happen. There were many bugs yet to be worked in the Psychic Warrior program, and they were learning by doing, which was not the safest way.
“This is our emergency rally point,” Dalton reminded Jackson.
“Roger that.”
He was surprised to see her lips move, even though the words didn’t travel in the nothingness of the virtual realm but were relayed from her mind, through Sybyl, to Dalton ’s mind.
“ Hammond did a lot of work on this,” he said.
“This next phase was being prepared when we went on the last mission. She finished it afterwards.”
“What’s the phase after this?” Dalton wondered.
“You’ll have to ask the good doctor,” Jackson said.
Dalton knew that Hammond, back in the control room at Bright Gate, could hear everything they were “saying” but there was no reply from her forthcoming.
“Last jump to objective,” Dalton said. “Now.”
He visualized the road curve in the satellite imagery Kirtley had shown them. The place where the team was to have set up the ambush. And he was there, just above the treetops, looking down.
He floated down as Jackson appeared, until his feet reached the dirt road. This gave him spatial orientation and he switched from wings to a right arm and a firing tube for the left. Using power from Sybyl, the tube could fire a pulse of energy in the real plane that was deadly. Unfortunately, it had not worked at all on Chyort, the Russian avatar, a result that Hammond had been at a loss to explain. Dalton didn’t expect any problems, since they planned on staying on the virtual plane, invisible from anybody in the area, but it never hurt to be prepared.
The first thing he noted were the blood trails on the road.
Dalton knew exactly how an ambush would be set up here. He moved to where the machine gun should have been positioned and noted the expended brass. The 7.62-millimeter NATO cartridges confirmed the location. But there weren’t many. Perhaps two bursts worth. Since there was no blood trail the firer hadn’t been killed here, which meant that either the gunner had moved or surrendered.
“They were in a firefight,” Dalton reported back to Hammond and Kirtley.
He moved back to the road and rejoined Jackson, who was looking at something in the far ditch. “Jimmy-” She pointed with a pale arm.
Dalton saw the legs, shreds of jungle fatigue pants still clinging in places, the skin gray and waxy. Looking along the ditch, he could see the trip wires for other claymore mines and knew he was looking at the far side of the kill zone.
“Where’s the rest of the body?” Jackson asked.
Dalton doubted a team on the run would haul half a dead body with them.