The monitor Rurik wore had a very sensitive pressure pad on the inside, against his skin. It monitored his pulse. If Rurik’s heart stopped for more than ten seconds, the light would turn red, meaning that the master computer had “frozen” the cyberlink with Feteror. That would effectively isolate Feteror’s brain from both inputs and outputs.
Rurik knew that Feteror did not fear death; indeed he knew that Feteror yearned to be released from his almost nonhuman prison and the only way out was to die, but there was something he knew the Spetsnatz major did fear: the darkness of isolation inside his own brain, with no sensory input coming from the computer, no ability to “leave” on the psychic plane without the support of the computer. Such a netherworld existence horrified even the hardened Feteror, who had experienced two years of such a life while they completed all the surgical procedures, and while Department Eight technicians worked on the programming necessary for the project. Of course, at the time, they had not known that Feteror had been conscious those long two years, screaming into the darkness where he had no voice. Not knowing if he was dead or alive, if he was now in some sort of hell or purgatory, his last memories those of the brutal torture he’d undergone in the Afghani village.
Only when they completed the first rudimentary cyberlink had they found out that the major’s brain had been conscious the entire time. The psychologists were amazed that Feteror had retained his sanity, but General Rurik was not so sure that Feteror had been sane to start with. As soon as they had gotten Feteror on-line, to demonstrate his power, Rurik had locked Feteror down for another month into the netherworld abyss.
Rurik would take no chances even with a decorated war hero. He knew that his predecessor, on the cusp of his own great success after sinking the Thresher, had died in a mysterious blast at Department Eight’s earlier site. It didn’t take a genius to look over what they did know and the results of the interrogation of Dr. Vasilev and conclude that the subjects had rebelled and killed their captors to free themselves through death. History would not repeat itself as far as General Rurik was concerned.
There was not only the issue of the human beings they were dealing with, there was also the danger of the equipment. Before the disaster on October Revolution Island, there had been the even greater disaster at Chelyabinsk in 1958 during a weapons test on the virtual plane. There had been no survivors at the test site from that one.
But Rurik believed in what he was doing. To get powerful weapons, one had to take great risks.
Besides the cyber-lockdown, Rurik had another ace in the hole, so to speak. The entire complex, buried deep under the ice above the Arctic Circle, was surrounded by a static, psychic “wall” that had only one “window” in it. The window went directly to the cylinder and allowed Feteror his virtual exit to the world, and Rurik controlled whether that window was open or closed. Closing it prevented Feteror from turning and attacking his home base. He could only return to his own physical mind through the window. When the psychic window was closed, Department Eight, where Feteror’s physical self lay, was the one place where he couldn’t go psychically, as far as Rurik knew.
Other than the fact that it required tremendous amounts of power from the nuclear reactor, Rurik didn’t know how the psychic wall worked, but he didn’t care. That was the job of the scientists. However, the wall had several interesting side effects that they’d discovered quite by accident. The wall was generated outward by lines surrounding the mountain halfway up; the lines were connected underneath SD8-FFEU through small tunnels that had been drilled. The field, as far as their recording instruments could tell, extended about two hundred meters into the air above the station, projected by steel towers built around the perimeter. Nothing living could go through that wall. They had first noticed the bodies of birds and small animals in the first days after the wall went up. Rurik had been interested and gotten a prisoner from the gulag. He’d turned off the automatic, conventional defenses that surrounded the base, and had the prisoner walk up the side of the mountain, into the psychic wall.
The effect had been startling. The second he hit the slightly shimmering wall, the man had grabbed his head, collapsed to his knees, and begun screaming in a high-pitched voice. Blood had streamed through his fingers, then his body had jerked upright, held in that position for a few seconds, then simply collapsed.
Rurik had had the wall turned off and the body recovered for autopsy. The doctors discovered that the structure of the man’s brain had literally dissolved.
Another side effect, not so beneficial to security in Rurik’s opinion, was the fact that once the psychic wall was turned on, they could no longer communicate with the outside world. Radio waves would not pass through. Even their best shielded cable and telephone lines would not function.
They kept the psychic wall on all the time for protection. It was breached only for two reasons: one was to make the twice-a-day radio contact with GRU headquarters outside Moscow; the second was to open the window to allow Feteror out or to bring him back in.
Rurik’s job was to be Feteror’s handler. So far, the Spetsnatz man had come up with quite a bit of good intelligence for the GRU.
Besides the psychic wall, there was another special aspect to FFEU that made it unique and more secure. Because they weren’t totally sure of the exact nature of what they were doing, and its great value to the national intelligence structure, the entire complex was physically guarded in a most unique manner.
A complex set of weapons, ranging from machine guns to air defense heat-seeking missiles, was layered around the complex and controlled not by human hands, but by a computer. The targeting computer was hooked to a series of sensors that watched across the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Anything that approached the base— or tried to get out of it— would be spotted and targeted automatically. And, once the guardian system was activated, there was nothing anyone inside the base or outside could do to stop it. The base would effectively be isolated. The system automatically came on whenever Feteror was “out.” This prevented Feteror from using any outside comrades to try to break in, or from subverting anyone inside to help him.
Despite the strong security measures, one thing did worry Rurik, though, and that was why he had worn the path in the rug every time Feteror was “out.” And that was that the scientists couldn’t exactly tell him how Feteror operated. They knew he could remote view and come out of the psychic plane in his demon form, but they also suspected he was capable of much more. But Feteror had not exactly been forthcoming over the years as to his capabilities, and an uneasy truce existed between Rurik and Feteror. The latter got the information requested, but there were limits even Rurik could not push him beyond. In return, there was much Feteror could not get from his captor.
What also bothered Rurik was that he didn’t know where Feteror went when he left SD8-FFEU. There was no way of tracking him on the psychic plane. That task was something that Rurik had the scientists working hard on.
Right now a red light was flashing from the top support beam that ran from the floor on one side, to the roof around to the floor on the other side of the semicircular room. It was a visual signal to everyone that Feteror was out. Besides not knowing exactly what Feteror was capable of and where he was, another thing that disturbed Rurik was he didn’t know what Feteror’s time sense was. Just as the time spent being cut off in the virtual world inside the cylinder seemed like forever to Feteror, Rurik had to wonder how time in the virtual world outside of the cylinder seemed.