Enduring activation of the ANTARES system was only the first step; the now familiar slight physical pain was easy to block out. The next assault, however, was on the mind itself.
Once ANTARES was open it would transmit a complex series of preprogrammed questions to various conscious and subconscious areas of James’ mind. The questions, programmed months earlier by countless hours in a simulator-recording unit, would match the existing brainwave patterns of each level encountered. After scanning, recognizing and matching the patterns, AN-TARES would then overpower that particular neural function, force the original pattern to a compatible subconscious level and allow the ANTARES computer to control that level. It was like submitting a series of passwords to several levels of guards, except each time ANTARES would reach a level it would hammer, not knock, on the door, demanding entry. Once admitted, it would first befriend, then overpower, the resident inside. The takeovers accomplished by ANTARES were sometimes painful, sometimes soothing. At times images would force their way out of James’ subconscious, long-stored memories of childhood that Maraklov had long forgotten.
His conscious mind was now like a big living room that had just had all its furniture moved to different parts of the house. ANTARES had taken over control of most conscious activity, keeping only a few essential activities in the conscious foreground while relegating the rest to higher parts of the brain. Now ANTARES was ready to start remodeling.
With the doors and windows to James’ subconscious mind wide open, his mind was ready to receive and process vast amounts of information. Normally that information would come from the five senses, and even with ANTARES some still did, but now altogether new sources of information were open. AN-TARES could collect and transmit digital data signals to James’ conscious mind, and James could receive that information as if it came from his own five senses. But James no longer had five senses — he had hundreds, thousands of them. The radar altimeter was a sense. The radar was a sense. So was the laser rangefinder. Dozens of thermometers, aneroids, gallium-arsenide memory chips, limit switches, logic circuits, photocells, voltmeters, chronometers — the list was endless and ever-changing.
But it was an enormous shock to the system to find that the list of senses had grown from five to five thousand, and here ANTARES was no help at all; when the “room” was fu!) it simply began cramming in more input sources. For James the new impulses weren’t coherent or understandable. They were random flashes of light or crashes of sound, battering his conscious mind, all fighting for order and recognition. Put another way, as he once had, it felt like a crushing wall of water, a wave of unbearable heat, and the swirling center of a thunderstorm all mixed up at once. And ANTARES was relentless. The instant an image or an impulse was set aside, a hundred more took its place. The computer only knew that so much had to be learned. It had no conception of rest, or defeat, or of insanity.
Suddenly, then, the flood of input was gone. The tornado of data subsided, leaving only a room full of seemingly random bits of information lying scattered about. The furniture was overturned — but it was all there, all intact. Now, like a benevolent relative or kindly neighbor, ANTARES began sorting through the jungle of information, creating boxes to organize the information, placing boxes into boxes, organizing the mountains of data into neat, cohesive packages.
The random series of images began to coalesce. Undecipherable snaps of sound became long, staccato clicks; the clicks turned to a low whine; the whine turned into waves of sounds rising and falling; the waves became words, the words became sentences. Flashes of lights became numbers. And then the numbers disappeared, replaced by numbers that James wanted to “see.”
The energy surges generated by ANTARES were still coursing through James’ body, but now they were acting like amphetamines, energizing and revitalizing his body. He was aware of DreamStar all around him, aware of its power waiting for release.
James’ eyes snapped open, like those of a man awaking from a nightmare. Swiveling his heavy helmet on its smooth Teflon bearings, he looked across at Cheetah’s open canopy. Powell was busy in the forward cockpit; McLanahan was watching his instruments. But he must have read something in the instruments in Cheetah’s aft cockpit, because just then McLanahan looked over toward him. He could see the DreamStar project director with his oxygen visor in place, apparently talking on the radios. Patrick was looking directly at him now — was he talking to him…?
… And suddenly the energy was unbearable. It was as if DreamStar was a wild animal straining on a leash, hot with the scent of prey, demanding to be released.
James looked down at the left MFD, the multi-function display, on the forward instrument panel. He imagined the index finger of his left hand touching the icon labeled “VHF-1.” Immediately the icon illuminated. Now, hovering right there in front of his eyes, was a series of numerals representing the preprogrammed VHF radio channels — the image, transmitted from DreamStar’s computers through ANTARES to his optic nervous system, was as clear and as real as every other visual image. He selected the proper ship-to-ship channel on the computer-generated icon and activated the radio. The whole process, from deciding to activate the radio to speaking the words, took less than a second.
“Storm Two ready for engine start,” James reported. Although the ANTARES interface did not take away his ability to speak or hear, all traces of inflection or emotion usually were filtered out. So the voice that Patrick heard on the radio was eerie, alien.
“Welcome back, Captain,” Patrick said. “I saw you come out of theta-alpha. Ready to do some flying?”
“Ready and waiting, Colonel.”
“Stand by.” Patrick switched to a secondary radio. “Storm Control, this is Storm One.”
In the underground command post of the High Technology Advanced Weapons Center a four-star Air Force general seated at a large cherry desk replaced a phone on its cradle, then looked down with disgust at his right leg. He reached down, took his right calf in both hands, straightened his leg, then raised himself out of his leather seat using the stiff right leg as a crutch. Once fully standing he unlocked the graphite and Teflon bearings in the prosthetic right knee joint, allowing it to move much like a regular leg.
An aide held the office door open for General Bradley Elliott as the director of HAWC stepped out and down the short hallway to the command post. He used a keycard to open the outer door to the entrapment area. A bank of floodlights snapped on, filling the entrapment area with bright light, and the outer door automatically locked behind him.
Two security guards armed with Uzi submachine guns came through the doors on either side of the area. They slowed when they recognized who it was but didn’t alter their moves. While one guard quickly pat-searched Elliott and ran a small metal scanner over his body, the other stood with his Uzi at port arms, finger on the trigger. The metal detector beeped when passed over Elliott’s right leg. Elliott tolerated it.
The guards watched as Elliott signed in on a security roster and double-checked the new signature against other signature samples and the signature on Elliott’s restricted-area badge pinned to his shirt. Satisfied, the guards slipped away as quickly as they had appeared.