Death cry, p.9
Death Cry, page 9
Further sections of Djugashvili’s report had referred to Device Two, although no details had been given. Brigid reported her impression that Device One had stalled at the planning stage, but concluded that details of this had to exist only in a separate file. Grant and Kane were, by Kane’s own account, working their way through the mountain of paperwork as best they could to speed the discovery process.
As he sat there, the rich vapors of the steeping tea swirling in his nostrils, Lakesh became aware of a presence before him. He looked up and saw that Clem Bryant, one of the Manitius Moon Base refugees, was standing at the side of the table and looking at the sketch on Lakesh’s notebook.
“Good morning, Mr. Bryant,” Lakesh said, offering a friendly smile as he caught the man’s attention.
“Good morning, Dr. Singh,” Bryant said amiably, turning his attention away from the notepad to address the Cerberus leader. Bryant was a quiet, intelligent man in his late thirties. He had dark hair swept back from a high forehead, a trimmed goatee and intelligent blue eyes. His discipline was oceanography, and he had been part of the scientific brain trust that had been placed in cryogenic suspension before the nukecaust. However, upon arriving at Cerberus, Bryant had shown little interest in ocean studies, preferring to devote his time to helping in the cafeteria.
However, Clem Bryant was still very much a scientist. In his quieter moments, he could often be found working on a logic problem that he had found in an old book or newspaper, a mathematical question, a chess puzzle or a crossword. He was, in short, an obsessive thinker.
“Do you mind if I ask what it is you are working on, Dr. Singh?” Bryant asked in his sure, refined voice.
“Not at all,” Lakesh said, standing to offer Bryant a seat. “Why don’t you join me while things here are quiet. I’d very much value your opinion, Clem.”
Clem Bryant insisted on fetching more tea for Lakesh, as well as a cup for himself, before he took a seat at the table.
“What we have here is a real logic problem,” Lakesh explained. “The question that’s been posed is how do you hide an item when your opponent is a mind reader?”
“Hmm,” Clem Bryant said, “quite the conundrum. It seems to me that the question is flawed.”
Lakesh looked at the ex-oceanographer, a frown creasing his brow. “How so?” he asked.
“It’s a lateral thinking problem. The question is not how do you hide something from a mind reader, but rather where.”
“Do go on,” Lakesh encouraged, trying to follow the man’s stream of logic.
“One has to assume,” Bryant stated, “that any mind reader worth his salt would be able to extract the information from one’s mind automatically. Thus the hiding place itself could never be kept secret.”
“What about brainwashing?” Lakesh proposed. “Such techniques have been used by various government agencies across the globe before the nukecaust.”
“Erasing the location from an individual’s mind,” Bryant pondered, taking a thoughtful sip from his tea. “It’s conceivable, of course, but it would rather seem to defeat the purpose of the exercise. Rather like a squirrel who can’t find the nuts he’s buried for the winter.” He laughed. “Besides which, brainwashing can be broken under hypnosis. Even if the subject himself isn’t aware of it, the information generally still exists somewhere in the human mind. Memory is a very tricky thing. And if one’s opponent can read minds, well…” Bryant concluded, holding his hands open to suggest that anything was possible.
“Which leads us back to the question of how you hide your item from a mind reader,” Lakesh prompted after a moment’s consideration.
“Where you hide the item,” Bryant amended once more. “The how is a false lead, Doctor, a blind alley of semantics.”
“Okay,” Lakesh asked, grinning as the man opposite him warmed to the subject, “where, then?”
“You hide the item in the same place you hide the cookie jar from a child,” Bryant said, smiling, “on a higher shelf. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
“So,” Lakesh said with a smile, “if our mind reader is five feet tall we need to find a shelf that’s—”
“Seven feet high,” Bryant supplied.
“Which means,” Lakesh continued, “we need to find a location that, hypothetically, our aliens couldn’t reach.”
“Aliens, Dr. Singh?” Bryant asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Theoretical aliens, in this case,” Lakesh supplied. “This problem concerns a Soviet project revolving around the design and storage of a weapon for use against potential alien interference.”
“You need to find somewhere that aliens can’t reach even if they know it’s there.”
“Which would be where?” Lakesh wondered.
Clem Bryant ran his thumb and index finger thoughtfully over his beard as Lakesh thanked him and made his way back to the ops center.
THEY CALLED IT the Dreaming, and it was a place that their ancestors had been mapping from time beyond reckoning.
Rabbit in the Moon could hear the subtle droning of the outside world as he scouted the dark shadows of the Dreaming, stalking his prey. Good Father was spinning his bull roarer, generating the noise that granted full access to this place while still conscious. It was not lucid dreaming; it was exploring the dreamworld while thoroughly awake. Less than one hundred years earlier, such an exploration had been impossible.
They were original men, the originals, what the invaders had called Aborigines when they had arrived more than four hundred years before. The original men had always had a profound comprehension of time. The Dreamtime was the real world, the place where all of the connections were clear, where the fragile web that made up the world could be observed most clearly. And then there was subjective time, that strange sufferance that those awake had to endure and navigate, whose order became jumbled by its own linearity and the waker’s often naive, sometimes selfish interpretations.
The nukecaust had done little to change the original men, but it had opened up the old sacred sites where the invaders had constructed their military bases, their temples to war.
It was in one of these temples, so the story went, that Good Father and Bad Father had found the item they had named the Dreamslicer, back when they were young men. It had taken some exploration, and one story told how Good Father had needed to walk with a stick for a long time after the trials. It was true that he still walked with a limp if you watched him closely, but they had discovered ways to use the Dreamslicer to their benefit, ways that allowed for full exploration of the Dreaming. Of course, the tribal elders had not been Good Father and Bad Father then; those names had come later, after the scope of their discovery had been realized.
Rabbit in the Moon spun suddenly as something brushed past him, and he turned to see Cloud Singer leaping across the great, flat expanse of the Dreaming, spinning through the air as she drilled her left fist toward his jaw. He ducked at the last second, watching as she flew past him, shock flashing across her features.
As she passed, Rabbit in the Moon’s hand whipped up, snagging her trail of long, black hair. He twisted the hand, yanking Cloud Singer’s head back, and both of them howled with rage and pain.
Suddenly they were back in Realworld, the small campfire burning atop the high cliff beneath the night stars, their tribe watching as the battle continued. The sound of the bull roarer—a cuplike object on the end of a long length of cord—droned through the air as Good Father spun it high over his head in a continuing circle. So long as it droned, Rabbit in the Moon knew, they could slip back into the Dreaming and fight across both levels of consciousness at the same time.
Rabbit in the Moon pulled hard on the handful of hair he had snagged in the Dreaming, yanking Cloud Singer down to the ground, her face scant inches from the spitting logs of the fire. “Yield,” he instructed her. “Yield or I’ll burn your face.”
He felt her stiffen in his grip as he pushed her face closer to the flames. Suddenly there was that telltale feeling as she seemed to spin, like a leaf in the wind, and then she was gone, rolling back into the Dreaming, leaving Rabbit in the Moon toppling forward with nothing but the few strands of her black hair that he managed to hold on to.
He blinked, willing himself back into the Dreaming himself, feeling the fluttering at the back of his skull as the implant fired him across the breach. She was waiting for him, and he leaped out of the way as she fired a vicious snap-kick at his face. She followed with another kick, this one aimed at his groin, missed and clipped his leg, and he felt the pain lance through him like winter night.
Rabbit in the Moon leaped high, looking for the stars of the night sky above them, snagging one in his hand and throwing it back down to Earth. It screamed as it hurtled through the air, expanding into a colossal thing of burning brightness, shattering into shards as it met the ground.
Rabbit in the Moon landed, keeping his center of gravity low, and looked around as the remnants of the star burned out. Cloud Singer was nowhere to be seen; the falling star had clearly missed her. He looked at his hand then, checking to see the ugly burn of puckered skin where he had touched the star, willing it back to smoothness before the wound took hold in Realworld.
He ran across the desolate, open plain of the Dreaming, leaving the sound of the bull roarer behind him before he stepped into Realworld once more. The tribespeople were still there, poised around the campfire, waiting for the next move of the combatants. Cloud Singer was there, too, standing beside the fire, scanning the area for his reappearance. He ran across the cliff toward her, head down, fists pumping, the ends of his headband fluttering in the wind.
She laughed as she saw him approach, and he noted that Rock Streaming had come to join the other spectators, freed from his work at the computer terminal in the cave. Rock Streaming had been working solidly for eight days, tracing the satellite links across the heavens and the Earth below. His appearance there tonight indicated progress in his endeavors.
Then Cloud Singer was upon him once more, her legs snapping high as she drove rapid kicks in his direction. She was dressed in long, loose shorts with a strip of white material over her breasts, leaving her tattoos proudly on show. Her bare feet scuffed across the sand atop the cliff, kicking it at his eyes as he backed away toward the cliff edge.
Rabbit in the Moon took two hard kicks to the chest, grunting in pain, and Cloud Singer laughed, a brisk single note of triumph, as she launched a roundhouse punch at his face. Suddenly Rabbit in the Moon dropped, and Cloud Singer’s punch swung long, missing his head and toppling her toward the sheer drop of the cliff. Lying beneath her, Rabbit in the Moon kicked out, sweeping her feet from under her and dropping her next to him. With a brutal punch, he snapped her head into the ground and she cried out in pain. “Yield,” he told her again as he held her face in the dirt.
Slowly, reluctantly, a whimper came from Cloud Singer and her head nodded where he held it on the ground. Rabbit in the Moon looked over his shoulder to where Good Father and Bad Father stood, awaiting their final judgment. They both nodded once, in turn, before he released his opponent.
Good Father’s bull roarer stopped spinning. All around, the tribe applauded and came over to congratulate Rabbit in the Moon as he walked across to the far side of the campfire.
With the exhibition match over, he made a beeline to Rock Streaming. “What news, brother?” he asked in a quiet, conspiratorial voice.
Rock Streaming kept his voice low as he spoke, restrained fury in his eyes. “They have found something in a place called Georgia, Russia,” he told Rabbit in the Moon. “Something we would want.”
Rabbit in the Moon looked at his colleague, encouraging him to say more.
“A weapon,” Rock Streaming said under his breath. “Gather the elders,” he added before turning away and returning to the cave beneath the cliffs.
“THIS IS CRAZY,” Kane grumbled as he tossed another file on the growing stack beside the door of the Cheka-KGB office. “How do you find something that isn’t there?”
“You need to get more Zen in your life,” Grant admonished him.
“You listen to Shizuka too much,” Kane retorted. “Look, guys, there is no secret weapon. No Death Cry. It’s all a big joke. Spies playing tricks on other spies, cloak-and-dagger bullshit to fool the enemy.”
Brigid looked up from the report that she was working through, the third that she had found with references to Devices One and Two, along with a single reference to a Device Four. “We need to be absolutely certain, Kane,” she told him in a calm voice.
“I am certain,” he blurted. “There’s nowhere in this complex for the damn Russkies to have hidden this thing, and no amount of reading their reports is going to change that. Fact.”
“Facts are tricky things,” Brigid told him.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Kane asked, anger rising in his voice.
“It means I think I’m onto something,” she replied, “but I’m not quite sure what it is. Listen to this.” She began reading from the report she was holding: “‘With the use of ESP mapping Dr. Krylova has located a region dubbed Krylograd by her staff. Krylograd would seemingly contain enough empty space to contain Device Two, based on current projected size estimate.’” Brigid looked up from the report, the trace of a smile on her lips.
“Well, that was real pretty, but what does it mean?” Grant asked her.
“I think, if they made this device, whatever number it is, then they may have hidden it where no one was likely to stumble upon it—on a different level of human consciousness.”
“Which is exactly what Lakesh was suggesting, I guess,” Kane said, “when he spoke about the idea of the high shelf. If what you say is true, then the Archons or whoever would have difficulty locating or accessing such a region, right?”
Brigid nodded. “Presumably,” she agreed. “But how are we supposed to find a room hidden in the human consciousness?”
Grant let out a low whistle and the others turned to him hopefully. “Well, don’t look at me,” he told them.
Chapter 9
Kane exhaled a long breath that he hadn’t realized he had been holding.
“Yeah,” Grant agreed with a chuckle, “it’s kinda like that, isn’t it?”
“Well, Baptiste,” Kane asked, “you want to add anything else?”
Brigid’s eyes flicked over the report in her hand for a moment before she placed it on the desk before her and addressed Kane and Grant. “It sounds incredible, but the idea that the Soviets were exploring different levels of consciousness isn’t so outlandish as it first appears. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Russian military was well advanced in the exploration of psychic phenomena with an eye to application.”
“But,” Kane said, shaking his head, “hiding weapons in the human brain?”
“Not the human brain,” Brigid explained. “This is about hiding something in a higher level of human consciousness. Bear in mind that, as a rule, the average human uses ten percent of his or her brain capacity at any one time, twelve at most. Things like entering trances and meditation are about accessing faculties that one was previously unaware of. Where does the mind go when you enter a coma, for instance?”
“I see what you mean,” Grant commented. “If this meditation part of the brain is actually a physical area, then in theory you could hide whatever the hell you wanted in there. Right?”
“I think so,” Brigid said, glancing over the report again.
Kane looked at them both before he spoke. “So we all meditate, pick up the Death Cry, come back to Earth. Job done.”
“Not as easy as that, Kane,” Brigid explained. “You don’t just ‘meditate’ and find this place.”
“Assuming it exists,” Grant added quietly.
“You would need to know what you were meditating on, how to get there, where to look,” Brigid told them. “You need to meditate on the right wavelength, if you see what I mean. Otherwise you’re looking for needles in haystacks.”
“You’re talking about a key,” Kane declared after a moment’s thought. “A key to open the right door. Only this time the door’s in your head.”
“Theoretically, it’s in everyone’s head if only they knew how to get there,” Brigid said, nodding.
Kane smiled grimly. “Keys I understand,” he told Brigid. “So we look for this key and…what would it look like?”
Brigid shrugged. “How would I know?”
“It doesn’t say anything in the report?” Kane urged.
“Nothing yet, but it could be in here.” She gestured around at the numerous piles of paperwork that littered the room. “It could be in any of these files. Or in none of them.”
“We keep on looking, then,” Kane said firmly.
He checked his wrist chron and saw that it was almost time to make his report. “One of us should contact Cerberus again,” he told his colleagues.
“I’ll do it,” Brigid volunteered. “I’d like to bring Lakesh up to speed and I’d appreciate his advice on how we go about finding this key, as you called it. Besides which, I could do with some fresh air. Been cooped up in here for too long.”
“Sure have,” Grant grumbled. It had been six hours since he had been outside the facility. “Can’t imagine what it was like for the poor bastards who worked here day in, day out.”
Kane encouraged Brigid, pointing his thumb at the open door to the office. “Okay, people, let’s keep moving. The sooner we get back to work the sooner we can go home.”
BRIGID STOOD ABOVE THE underground bunker, looking up at the clear night sky as she spoke to Lakesh over the Commtact.
“It sounds incredible, Brigid,” Lakesh enthused. “I dearly wish I could be there with you. Over.”
“Well, all we’ve found so far are some dusty old files and a load of skeletons,” she told him. “Over.”
Lakesh’s voice was almost childlike with wonder. “But a superweapon hidden inside a higher level of human consciousness. That’s a truly radical concept. When Clem Bryant proposed the idea of the high shelf for the cookie jar, I certainly didn’t think it would be anything quite so…ethereal.” Lakesh was speaking so quickly that he was tripping over his words, desperate as he was to get all the information across. “Please, Brigid, do report in as soon as you find anything else. This is fascinating, quite fascinating.
