Barnes slid a poncho liner over the body.
Dalton stood. There were the three other men still in the isolation tubes. “I want to know what happened. What killed him?”
Hammond was back behind her console. “I’m not sure.”
“Take a goddamn guess!” Dalton snapped.
Hammond stepped back. “As nearly as I can tell, his psyche got lost going from our world to the virtual world. I lost contact and Sybyl never established contact. That affected his entire brain and his autonomic nervous system went nuts. That’s what caused his death.”
“Are you certain of that?” Dalton asked.
Raisor stepped between the two of them. “We don’t have the time to stand around and argue. We— ”
“We’d damn well better know what killed Sergeant Stith before we go any further,” Dalton said. “Or we’re not going any further.”
“Don’t you threaten me or this project,” Raisor said.
“Is this what happened to the man you lost?” Dalton ignored the CIA man and focused on the doctor.
“No,” Hammond said. She seemed more sure of herself. “ His death was caused by mechanical failure. This was different. This happened on the line between the physical and psychic planes.” She shook her head. “We’re moving too fast. We should have had— ”
“We have to move fast,” Raisor said. He moved to a position between her and the Special Forces men.
Dalton pointed at the other isolation tanks. “We need to get those other men out.”
Raisor shook his head. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for that.”
Dalton glared at Raisor. “You’d better make time.”
“It’s not up to me,” Raisor said. “We’re on a tight time schedule dictated by others. It was a training accident. You have them all the time. A parachute fails to open. A man is knocked unconscious during scuba training and loses his mouthpiece and drowns.”
“We have training accidents,” Dalton acknowledged, “but we work hard to make sure they don’t happen after we figure out what went wrong. We don’t know what went wrong here.”
“You are under orders, Sergeant Major,” Raisor said. “This mission has top priority.”
“I think it’s time to let us in on the secret,” Dalton said. He walked over and stood by Stith’s body. “Seeing as we’re putting our lives on the line for this. I want to know why this man had to die. Why we’re in such a damn rush.”
Raisor met Dalton’s glare, then nodded. “All right. I’ll tell you. Because one of our RVers has discovered that someone is going to try to steal twenty nuclear warheads in eight”— Raisor looked up at the large clock— “make that seven days.”
Feteror was tired, but he had one more place to check before going back. He felt the link to SD8-FFEU, a line growing more tenuous the longer he was out. It was a flow of power and information into his psyche, without which he was impotent.
Feteror accessed the satellite imagery of the area he wanted. He centered it in his “vision” and then, with a burst of energy, he was there, looking down on a railyard.
He paused, feeling the vision fade with a loss of power. He had prioritized his missions, knowing this would happen. Damn Rurik and his leashes and limitations.
The vision came back and Feteror scanned the railyard. There were troops all over the place, armed with automatic weapons. He could see the national insignia of the Kazakhstan army on their lapels, but the uniforms were still the dull color of the former Soviet Union.
Feteror swooped down to the railmaster’s shack on the edge of one of the sidings. The wall was just a brief blip and then he was inside. There were two soldiers in the room, but he ignored them. A routing schedule lay open on the desk. Feteror checked it and got the information he needed. The two soldiers looked about, disturbed by something they could sense but not see, since Feteror was staying invisible in the virtual plane. He had no need to do anything on the real plane here.
He paused. There was another presence in the room. Another being on the virtual plane. Feteror reached out and probed the presence. He hit a protective psychic wall, but he knew he could break through. He gathered his strength to— Feteror froze as darkness closed on his consciousness. A dark tide swept in, then back out. Damn General Rurik, Feteror thought. The old fox was cutting his power to bring him back.
The other presence was gone.
Feteror let the dwindling power link to SD8-FFEU draw him home.
Chapter Nine
“Why don’t you just tell the Russians about the threat?” Dalton asked.
He was in a conference room, just off the main experimental chamber, with Raisor and Hammond. The other members of the team who had not yet gone into the isolation tubes had carried Stith’s body to the dispensary. So far none of the other three still under had experienced any problems, and Hammond had told him that all had successfully integrated with Sybyl and that they were developing their virtual programs.
Raisor shook his head. “We can’t. It’s the classic problem of sharing intelligence— by doing so you disclose your capabilities. You know about Coventry, don’t you?”
Dalton had read extensively in the area of military history, and he knew exactly what Raisor was referring to. During World War II, the Allies had broken the German Enigma code with their Ultra machine. Doing so had given them access to all German transmissions and a wealth of information. However, to make sure that the Germans didn’t realize that they had broken the code, the Allies had to be very careful what they did with the intelligence. When the Ultra scientists had decrypted a communique indicating that the city of Coventry was going to be heavily bombed, they had passed that warning on to Churchill. Who had done nothing with it. The city wasn’t evacuated and hundreds lost their lives and the six-hundred-year-old cathedral in the center of town burned to the ground. But the secret of Ultra was maintained.
“We’re not at war with the Russians,” Dalton said.
“We’re always at war,” Raisor said. “That’s the only way to look at the world in the spectrum of intelligence operations.”
“Bullshit,” was Dalton’s take on that.
“We’re in a double bind,” Raisor continued as if nothing had been said. “We can’t pass the intelligence to the Russians. And we can’t act overtly. Both would disclose too much of our capabilities.”
“So let’s keep a secret and get nuked?” Dalton said.
“It won’t come to that,” Raisor said. “Even if the warheads are stolen, they’ll still be in Russia. We would prefer not to have the first event happen, but push comes to shove, it’s not worth disclosing our capabilities for unless it appears the warheads will be crossing borders.”
“Do you know who is going to try to steal the warheads?” Dalton asked.
“We’re not certain,” Raisor said. “We suspect it might be the Russian Mafia, but if that is the case, that most likely means that they are just middlemen and will be passing the warheads on.” Raisor leaned across the conference table. “Just imagine twenty nukes being on the open market, going to the highest bidder.”
“I am imagining it,” Dalton said, “and it seems that this would be worth disclosing your Bright Gate capability in order to stop.”
Raisor shook his head once more. “Which brings us to the other problem with passing the information to Russian intelligence. The Russian military is heavily compromised by the Mafia. For all we know, we might tip our hand to those who are going to do the attack.”
Dalton rubbed his forehead. “So we’re going to descend on this attack out of the virtual plane and stop it?”