The Omicron Legion (15 page)

“The base was wiped clean, just as you suspected,” Virginia Maxwell reported as she closed the door behind them.

“I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t found something, Maxie.”

She nodded. “They should have torched the place. Don’t ask me why they didn’t. Anyway, your description of the physical layout was accurate as always, except this time you missed something: two additional floors to be exact.”

“Didn’t see an entrance.”

“With good reason. The elevator compartment was built into the wall. My people almost missed it, too. Let’s make ourselves comfortable.”

They settled into seats that felt airline stiff. Blaine found himself fingering the controls on his armrest, but he left it to Maxie to punch in the proper commands.

“I’ve fastforwarded ahead of the floors you’ve already seen. I’d like to hear what you make of this.” Virginia Maxwell touched a button on her armrest that gave the screen a black sort of life. The next button filled it with the jittery motions of the cameraman proceeding down the corridor of the second underlevel, past the dormitorylike cubicles. At the very end of the corridor, where a segment of the wall had been, the team members had managed to locate the elevator the Gap head had spoken of. The camera jiggled once more during the descent, but steadied again as the doors slid open. Its lens became Blaine’s eyes as it surveyed what was revealed.

McCracken leaned forward. The base’s third underlevel was nothing more than an elaborate, high-tech gymnasium. He recognized some of the machines from health clubs he had worked out in, others from drawing-board sketches he did not know were in production. In addition to the machines, there was an assortment of punching bags, treadmills, and Lifecycle exercise bikes. The camera panned to the right rear corner, and McCracken fumbled at his armrest for the Stop button.

“Freeze it there,” he told Virginia Maxwell.

The picture on the screen locked in place.

“What do you see?”

“The way those mats are laid out there on the floor. It’s got to be martial arts. And there, furthest to the right, zoom in.”

Virginia Maxwell obliged.

“
Markiwara,”
said Blaine. “Pad-covered boards for striking practice used in hand-conditioning. They’ve been pretty much beat to hell.”

“Hand-to-hand combat, my dear?”

“At a very advanced level.”

“Let’s fastforward, shall we?”

Fresh thoughts formed in Blaine’s head as the pictures whizzed by on the screen.

“I assume your people found nothing more in writing.”

“You assume correctly. Ah, here we are….”

Virginia Maxwell changed the tape speed back to normal, and Blaine recognized the elevator compartment once more. Almost immediately the doors slid open on what must have been the fourth sublevel. A brief walk followed, taking the recon team into a room bathed in darkness. The searching beam of a flashlight could be seen, then the slow blooming of fluorescent ceiling lights.

“Look familiar?” asked the head of the Gap when the picture was fully illuminated.

“I’ll say. It’s a target range. For small arms and rifle fire.” He looked at Maxwell. “Any shell casings?”

“Not so much as a smidgeon of powder, my dear. Did you expect any less?”

“Just lost my mind for a minute.”

What he had gained, though, was, at last, a clearer understanding of what the secret base had been designed to create.

Not monsters at all, but the next best thing.

Somebody was training killers, an elite group on a par with any Blaine had faced before. In itself that was not unusual. What
was
unique was what had preceded the training. His mind strayed back to the pictures Virginia Maxwell had skipped over of the first two underground levels. The ultra high-tech laboratories and examination rooms. Broken glass, remnants of syringes and specimen bottles. The link between those two levels and the two he was seeing today was undeniable.

“What do you make of these?” Virginia Maxwell was asking.

On the screen was a progression of normal-sized rooms, each containing only a single chair. A few of the rooms had window slats high up on the walls, either for observation of the subject or perhaps projection of a video display inside. The camera zoomed in on one of the chairs.

Leather straps dangled from every part of it. Blaine could see some were cracked and broken, evidence of severe stretching.

“Sensory deprivation?” he suggested. “Some sort of mind control or brainwashing?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, my dear.”

Virginia Maxwell continued the tape, but McCracken’s mind had locked on those thirteen cubicles he and Johnny had found on sublevel two. His image of the prisoners they had held was beginning to gain substance.

“That about does it,” Maxwell said. She switched the video off and turned to look at him. “There’s more, but I’ve given you the highlights.”

“What about the bodies Johnny and I found?”

“Fasten your seat belt, darling. They were all on the government’s payroll. They all had top security clearance.”

“Specialties?”

“This is where it gets interesting. Eliminate nine whom we’ve IDed as members of the Marine Corps or the Special Forces. They were there to provide security.”

“Alas, not very successfully.”

“That leaves nineteen, and at least half of those came straight out of the upper echelons of the bio-tech sector. Strictly top drawer. Best in their field. Plenty of chemical engineers, too, along with a trio who specialized in computer microcircuitry.”

“And the rest?”

“Brain surgeons and specialists.”

“Specialists as in shrinks, Maxie?”

“Anything but, my dear. Specialists in brain function—what specific part of the brain controls which attributes and emotions, and how those parts combine to form a magical whole.”

“Interesting group to have gathered in the Amazon.”

“And one name kept surfacing at the top of their routing orders.”

“Don’t tell me,” interrupted Blaine. “The late General Berlin Hardesty.” He paused. “There’re still thirteen residents of the installation unaccounted for.”

“There’s no evidence suggesting anyone else was even there. We did microscans for fingerprints and came up with only twenty-nine sets.”

The anomaly struck Blaine suddenly. “But Johnny and I only counted twenty-eight bodies.”

“Very observant, my dear. One escaped death, obviously, because he was not present at the installation when your Thunder Beings struck. His name is Jonas Parker. I’ve got his file right here.”

“And if he’s still alive…”

“We’ll have someone who can tell us exactly what was going on down there.”

“Very good, Maxie.”

“Finding him would be better, my dear.”

“Leave that to me.”

Chapter 16

“PROFESSOR AINSLEY IS
expecting you, sir,” Obie One said, as it opened the front door for McCracken.

“Obie One,” a voice bellowed from the study, “bring him in here now!”

“Yes, sir.”

The edge in the old man’s voice was unmistakable. When Blaine had spoken to Ainsley earlier in the day, he had been smooth and calm. Something had obviously changed. As Blaine moved toward the professor’s study, he noticed that Obie One was staying put by the door. At McCracken’s urging, Virginia Maxwell had sent over a copy of the videotape taken at the installation in the jungle. Ainsley had called to demand his presence three hours later.

Ainsley was waiting for him inside his study, now even more littered than before with papers, gadgets, and fragments of abandoned droids. Blaine noticed instantly that the gargantuan Obie Seven had been moved into the open against the far wall. Its square eyes glowed red. McCracken could see Vulcan 7.62-mm miniguns had been fitted into its extremities.

“What gives, Professor?”

“They’re not going to take me without a fight.”

“Who’s not?”

“You’re in danger, too, Blaine. I should have expected this as soon as you told me your story.”

“Expected what?”

“You knew about them and you told me. They’ll be coming for us before long, both of us. We’re threats to them.”

“Them?” McCracken echoed.

Ainsley regarded him anxiously. “You really don’t know what it is you’ve stumbled onto here, do you?”

“Not yet.”

“Suppose I can’t fault you for it, Blaine. After all, this isn’t your field. You couldn’t know.”

“I’m a quick study.”

“Omicron! The key is Omicron! When I began developing it, do you remember the purpose, the goal?”

“Devising the perfect solution for limited, specific entanglements.”

“Hence the Obie series. But it was canceled because of costs. And because of something else: an alternative.”

Blaine just looked at him.

“I should have suspected as much from what you told me this morning. All the clues were there. It couldn’t have been anything else, but I held to the hope it would be. Then, when the information came from the Gap…”

The old man’s voice trailed off. His eyes were fixed on the monstrous shape of Obie Seven.

“I called my work Omicron because it represented the fifteenth attempt at achieving the project’s goals. I wondered at first why the force you uncovered in Brazil hadn’t changed the title. Now I realize it’s quite fitting they left it as is. We were both going about things the same way, you see. Creating machines to do what previously only men had done.”

“There were no Operational Ballistic Droids found in the jungle, Professor.”

“No, Blaine, there weren’t…Because they escaped on your boat. Thirteen of them.”

“Machines?”

“What is a machine, Blaine? How shall we define it? In terms of mechanical parts formed of steel and diodes like my Obies, no. But in terms of being brought into existence and programmed toward a specific end, yes. A machine exists merely to perform a task that it will perform tirelessly until told to stop.”

The old man’s head bobbed madly as he spoke, wild white hair tossed about as if it were a mop.

“The purpose of the Obie series, the purpose of Omicron, was to imbue machines with more of the qualities of men—to better enable them to perform certain tasks. What if, instead, men were imbued with more of the qualities of machines?”

McCracken shuddered. He didn’t reply.

“What you discovered in the Amazon, Blaine, was a twisted version of my project. Thirteen men, created in whatever image some perverse man-god determined.”

“Created?”

“Poor choice of words on my part. Refined would be closer to the point.”

“Robots?”

“In a figurative sense, yes, but not a literal one. No hardware was involved, at least nothing beyond—”

“Beyond what?”

“I can’t account for the presence of the microprocessing experts. But they were there for a reason; that much is for sure.”

“Get back to the
Wakinyan,
Professor.”

“I’m speculating here, so bear with me. Say the primary purpose of what you’re creating—refining—is to kill. You would start with a thousand or so possible subjects and eventually narrow them down to a couple dozen before beginning.”

“You mean a single dozen.”

“Not at all. A dozen of the cubicles you found were unoccupied, remember? But that wouldn’t have always been the case.”

“Then what happened to—”

“I’ll get to that in good time, Blaine. You move your two dozen subjects to one of the most secluded spots on the face of the earth to avoid detection. Money is no object. Your complex is fitted with whatever it requires.”

“And there you train them to be perfect killing machines,” Blaine concluded. “The gymnasiums, the firing range.”

“But you’d be limited, wouldn’t you? You’ve known this kind of man, Blaine. Good Lord, you’ve killed plenty of them. Something more was needed than just training and conditioning.”

With that, Ainsley spun his wheelchair around rapidly and screeched toward his wall-length worktable. The wheels bounced over debris several times, and the chair itself rocked right and left. The old man took something from a large open drawer and spun back toward McCracken.

“This is the brain, Blaine,” he announced, motoring back. “A plastic model of it, anyway.”

Ainsley held the mass of yellow-gray sectional pieces together. It looked real enough for Blaine to wonder whose skull it had been lifted from.

“The list Ms. Maxwell provided me with, of logged researchers at the complex—together with your story and my own analysis of the videotape—can only mean they were working on brain manipulation down there. Neurosurgeons, chemical engineers, biotechnicians, DNA experts—it all fits. With the exception of those microchip people, of course.” Ainsley pulled several of the top sections of his model brain off and tossed them to the floor with the rest of the debris. “Truly a wonder of nature, Blaine.
The
wonder of nature. No one knows what percentage of the brain’s capacity has yet to be tapped. Estimates range from fifty to as high as
ninety-five
percent. The point is that the final frontier lies not in outer space. It lies quite literally within our own heads.

“The frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, the temporal lobe,” Ainsley said, pointing in turn to each of the sections of the brain. “I could go on naming sections and subsections for hours. But all you need to know is that research these last several years has concentrated on identifying the specific parts of the brain that control specific functions, emotions, and abilities. How does a professional athlete’s brain, for example, differ from that of an overweight man with a sedentary life-style? A murderer’s from a priest’s? A musician’s from a laborer’s? And if that specific determining region can be identified, then perhaps it can be manipulated,
stimulated,
to refine or enhance skills already possessed by the subject.”

“Sounds farfetched.”

“In a sense it is. The sedentary man could not duplicate the actions of the professional athlete because he has not been properly trained to carry them out. But add training to an artificially altered brain pattern and credibility becomes quite within reach.”

“Training,” Blaine murmured.