Robert Doherty - Project Aura

“So what next?” Dalton asked.

“Keep an eye on Kirtley. Let me know what he has planned.”

“Is Dr. Hammond one of General Eichen’s contacts?” He knew what Eichen had told him, but it never hurt to ask again.

There was a pause. “Not that I’m aware of. We’ve been moving people, taking action. Sometimes it means placing a person like Hammond in a position that might have been occupied by someone of questionable background. Of course, with every action, there is a reaction.”

“Is Jonathan Raisor one of your people?”

Again the pause, and again the same answer. “Not that I’m aware of. And shouldn’t that be phrased in past tense?”

“I’m not sure about that,” Dalton said.

“Interesting.”

“When you have something to share with me,” Dalton said, “perhaps we can talk again.” He flipped the phone shut.

“They’ll come for us.”

Sergeant Lambier stopped tending Granger’s wound to look up at Captain Scott. “Sir, we’re in Colombia illegally. If they come for us, they’re compounding the problem. As it is, they might have some deniability. Not much but some. We all knew that when we signed on for this.”

Scott was seated with his back against a stone wall. The cell they were locked in was lit by a single naked lightbulb that cast a pallor over the survivors. The captain shook his head and repeated for the twentieth time in the past hour: “They’ll come for us.”

Sergeant Pinello walked across the dirt floor and squatted next to the dazed captain, who had dried blood from Master Sergeant Garrison encrusted on his fatigue shirt. “Sir, no one knows where we are. We have to make a plan to get out of here on our own.”

Scott shook his head. “No. We stay in place. They’ll come for us. We try to break out, they’ll kill us.”

“They’re going to kill us anyway,” Pinello said. He had to fight from grabbing the officer’s shirt and shaking him. “I want to go down fighting when it comes to that.”

The fifth man in the room, Sergeant Buhler, spoke up. “We never should have surrendered. We could have taken a hell of a lot of them with us. Made them pay. It’s what we agreed on.”

“I’m the team leader,” Scott said. “It was my decision. My command. My responsibility.”

“Everybody just calm down,” Sergeant Lambier said as he stood, hands covered in Granger’s blood. “The captain’s right. They’ll try to find us and then they will come for us, if they can. But in the meanwhile, we count on only ourselves. So if anyone has a bright idea how to get out of here, you better start talking.”

“Sergeant-” Scott’s voice cut across the room. “I am the team leader. And I’m ordering you not to do anything. We wait. They’ll come for us.”

“Sir-” Lambier began, but then he paused. “Yes, sir.”

Dalton slapped Sergeant Barnes on the back as he entered the bunkroom. “Welcome back.”

Barnes had just pulled on the black one-piece suit that they wore when they went into the isolation tanks. “Sergeant Major, how they hanging?”

“Low, real low,” Dalton replied as he opened his locker and pulled out his suit. “Ready to go back in?”

“What’s the mission? I just got told by one of those agency dinks to get my stuff on and be ready to go.”

Dalton quickly briefed him on the current situation. Barnes’s next question was a bit unexpected.

“That Feteror dude is really gone, right? We aren’t going to run into him on the virtual plane, are we?”

“The Russians shut down SD- 8,” Dalton assured him.

“And Feteror?”

“The Russians say they turned off the life support to his brain. So Feteror’s dead.”

“What about Chyort? His avatar?”

“If Feteror’s brain is dead, we have to assume his avatar is gone also.”

“That means we’re the only ones out there, right?”

“Are you worried?”

“Hell, yes,” Barnes said. “We got our butts kicked last time. And the other guys-our teammates…” His voice trailed off.

Dalton paused in his dressing. “We’re not giving up on them.” He looked toward the door, then leaned toward Barnes. “When we go over, I want you to search for the team. Go back to the site of the battle in Russia. Jackson and I will take care of the recon.”

“Won’t Hammond know through Sybyl that we’re separated?” Barnes asked.

“What are they going to do?” Dalton asked. “Kick us out of here? Besides, Hammond ’s not as sure of herself as she used to be.”

Professor Souris had the complete attention of the surviving members of the Ring. Alarico’s body had been removed, and after a short break, Souris had returned to finish her briefing.

“Right now with our current configuration we can generate an Aura field about a mile in distance from the computer/transmitter. We have three working computers. One is fitted on board Señor Cesar’s yacht. One is located here in our operations center. And one, the latest generation and the smallest, is transportable.

“Along with making the transmitter smaller, we are working on increasing the distance transmitted and the size of the field. We have also been doing simulations considering the possibility of generating a virtual field by retransmitting from orbital satellites. This was something my comrades at HAARP were working on when I left. I have continued that work here.”

“Satellites?” Naldo said. “And how would we launch a satellite?”

“We already have launched one,” Cesar said. “From Kouro, in French Guinea. It’s the launch site for the European Space Authority and they were willing to launch because we were willing to pay. We’ve put up a small prototype with an Aura retransmitter and power booster on board.”

“We’ve launched a satellite?” Naldo was shaking his head.

“Last week,” Souris confirmed. “We have contact with it, but we haven’t attempted to retransmit yet. We’re saving that test until other elements are in place.”

“So we will be able to use this weapon from space?” Naldo asked.

“Our prototype is rather basic,” Souris said. “We can use it once, maybe twice before depleting the onboard power supply.”

“I don’t understand,” Naldo said. “What good is it then?”

“Our satellite is simply there for us to test whether our uplink can generate a tight enough, and powerful enough, beam,” Souris said. “Once we have confirmed that, we have a plan for the next stage. The Americans have already done us the courtesy of launching a worldwide network of satellites called MIL STAR that they have been upgrading with appropriate virtual retransmit technology that we can appropriate for our own use if our test works and we can develop a sufficiently powerful transmitter field.”

“What are the Americans planning to do with their satellites?” one of the other Ring members asked.

“They are trying to develop a weapon system similar to Aura called HAARP,” Cesar said. “This is another reason why we must be successful. If the Americans are successful with their HAARP before we are with Aura, I have no doubt that they will use this weapon against us. They will be able to attack us from space with complete immunity.”

“Aura is a better version of what I was working on for the Americans,” Souris said. “HAARP is based in Alaska, at a fixed site. They’ve been experimenting for several years now with it, but they haven’t been able to get their transmitter as compact as Aura, and since it’s line of sight it’s pretty useless unless they can uplink to their MIL STAR satellites, which they haven’t attempted yet. However, once the HAARP-MILSTAR system is operational, they can cover the world with their weapon.”