“Even pressure on both cables!” Leksi was yelling.
Feteror threw himself back, spreading his wings wide and hovering. He felt a strong desire to gain solid form, to match his power against Leksi. To rip the man to pieces, to make him bleed and suffer.
But there was not enough power coming from Zivon. Only the beckoning signal to return from Rurik. And he needed Leksi for now.
Feteror tightened his wings and dove into the shaft. He landed on top of the generator. Looking beyond, he could see the skeletons and devastation in the control center. He could feel spirits floating about. Feteror stepped back in surprise. He had felt spirits before, but always very distantly, but these came at him. He “saw” nothing, but he knew they were all around him. Four men, long dead, who whispered to him of revenge, of pain and suffering. He felt an immediate affinity for their suffering. He promised them he would avenge their pain.
Feteror pivoted over on one wing and flew out of the cave, up into the virtual sky.
Vasilev screamed as he scrambled away from the demon that pursued him. Its red eyes speared him with their malice, and he could hear the creature’s claws against the floor. He scuttled sideways, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the monster.
It had halted and Vasilev did too. He breathed deeply, then almost smiled. This was just a bad dream. All he had to do was waken and the nightmare would be over. He would be home in bed, ready to wake up and go to the university for another day of teaching.
He opened his eyes and blinked. It was dark.
Then he saw the eyes and knew the nightmare was real. The demon came forward once more. Vasilev ran away, so hard that when the chain reached its end, the collar around his neck snapped him back so badly, he tore muscles in his neck and he flopped back onto the concrete like a rag doll.
“Please, please,” Vasilev pleaded as the creature leaned over him. He swore he could smell its fetid breath. “Mercy!” Vasilev begged.
“You gave no mercy on October Revolution Island,” the creature hissed.
Vasilev’s eyes widened in shock. How did this thing know of that? Those thoughts were brutally interrupted as a claw ripped up his right side, parting flesh with one smooth stroke.
The pain was like acid. He screamed once more.
“You will not have death until you atone,” the creature said.
“I am sorry!” Vasilev whimpered.
“Atonement requires action.” The creature drew back leaving Vasilev holding his bleeding side.
“I am sorry,” Vasilev whispered as the demon once more disappeared.
Chapter Twelve
Dalton had refused the shot from Dr. Hammond this time. He had always been able to sleep when he needed to. He had slept on many an aircraft, fully rigged with 48 pounds of parachute, 140 pounds of rucksack attached to the rig dangling between his knees on the cargo bay floor, helmet pulled down over his eyes, weapon tied off to his right shoulder, while men threw up around him from the turbulence of a low-level-flight infiltration.
Sleep when you could was a lesson that had been beaten into him from too many missions when he hadn’t been able to. But sleep was coming slowly right now for different reasons. He lay back on the bunk and stared at the concrete ceiling.
Dalton closed his eyes. The image of the concrete ceiling remained. But this one was smooth, not like the other one. The one where Dalton had counted every single mark on it. Memorized them, then begun using his imagination, the only thing he had left, on it. He’d made a world out of that ceiling only four feet above his mat on the floor. He couldn’t stand in the cell, so he’d lie there, legs always bent, and stare at the ceiling.
There were the faintest outlines on the ceiling, brown marks from some time when water had been in the cell, perhaps when the nearby river had flooded, that made up the continents and oceans of Dalton’s imaginary world.
He put countries inside those continents. His favorite land had been Far Country, a land settled by the persecuted of Old Country. Dalton had invented the entire history of those people leaving the homeland, the travel across the huge Middle Ocean, to arrive in Far Country. A land where there was no war. No need for armies, because no one would follow them across the Middle Ocean.
It was not a land of plenty, but rather a hard land. Another reason no one would dare the terrible ocean to come there. There was nothing to conquer but empty space. Endless plains, running into the High Mountains. And beyond the High Mountains were even more wonderful and strange lands.
But in Dalton’s history the people of Far Country loved their land. And the peace made any hardship brought on by the land or weather more than bearable. Because there was nothing that nature could do that could be worse than what men did to other men.
Dalton could see the High Mountains, particularly Dunnigan’s Peak, the white summit shimmering to the west. He’d climbed the mountain numerous times, using a different approach each time. The view from the top reached back over the Plains to the Middle Ocean, the water—
“Sergeant Major!”
Dalton was alert in an instant, rolling to the side away from the voice, hand reaching behind his back pulling out his nine-millimeter pistol, before his eyes focused on Lieutenant Jackson’s face. The RVer looked exhausted.
Dalton took a deep breath. “What?”
Jackson looked to her left and right. “I have to talk to you.”
“Talk,” Dalton said, lowering the hammer on the gun and putting it back in its holster.
“I’m Army,” Jackson said. “Most of these people are CIA or NSA. But there’s a couple of us from the service here. We were part of the original Grill Flame operation.
And we were good, so they kept us when they switched over to Bright Gate.”
“What’s your point, ma’am?”
“You can’t trust Raisor.”
Dalton leaned back on his bunk. “You woke me to tell me that?”
“Did he tell you what happened to the first team?”
“The first team?” Dalton swung his feet over to the floor on the same side that Jackson was crouched. “Dr. Hammond said someone died when there was an equipment malfunction. She didn’t say anything about a team.”
“Dr. Hammond doesn’t know diddly,” Jackson said vehemently. “She’ll lie when Raisor tells her to, but a lot of the time she talks out her ass because she doesn’t understand a lot of what she’s working with. Hell, no one does. At least we admit it. She has to act like she knows more than she does because her ego won’t allow her to admit her ignorance. They’ve sold a whole pile of crap to the Oversight Committee and the Pentagon. You don’t think they’d be bringing you and your men in unless they were desperate, do you?”
“I figured that,” Dalton said.
Jackson nodded. “Raisor put together the first Psychic Warrior team using NSA and CIA operatives. They tried to keep us RVers in the dark, but since we were both using the same facilities here, it was kind of hard to do. Plus we’d run a lot of the early tests for Psychic Warrior, gathering the data Hammond needed to make the next step. But obviously Raisor wanted to keep it in house, so he brought his own people in to make up the first team.”
Dalton waited. He knew he’d been lied to; now he was beginning to get an idea of the extent. “What happened to the first team? Are they dead?”
“We don’t know,” Jackson said.
Dalton raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean by that?”
“Their bodies are still in their isolation tanks, in a room off the main experimental chamber. The machines are keeping them in stasis at the reduced-functioning status. So they’re alive, I suppose. As alive as any of us when we go into those damn tanks.”