The Omicron Legion

by Jon Land

  “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, Prof
essor.”

  “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.

  “Exactly. Tell me the features of an ideal killer, Blaine.”

  “I could go on naming them for hours.”

  “Start with the physical.”

  Blaine seemed reluctant. “It’s hard to say. Of the best I’ve run into, I’ve never run into two who were alike.”

  “But there must be certain common factors.”

  “I guess,” Blaine said. “Reflexes…A kind of instinctive quickness that eliminates lag time.”

  “Lag time?”

  “The gap between realizing what you have to do and doing it. Killers who stay out there the longest have the shortest lag times. They can almost be in two places at one time. You can’t move faster than a bullet, but you can move faster than the man firing it.”

  “I understand. Proceed.”

  “Awareness. Great reflexes don’t help unless you stay in tune with what’s around you. The attack can come from anywhere. Recognizing it in time to respond determines your life expectancy.”

  “Ah, so if an attacker can move faster than you can respond, he wins.”

  “Or she. In a nutshell, yes. Like…”

  “Like what?”

  “An animal. They don’t think, so the lag between determining an action and undertaking it is nonexistent.”

  “And if that same lag could be eliminated in a man? If there was a way to somehow stimulate and alter the area of our brain controlling response and reaction time?”

  McCracken looked down at the plastic model in Ainsley’s lap. “You’re saying that’s what they created down there?”

  “That and more, Blaine.”

  “Yes, physical skills. The strength and quickness of the Wakinyan have been enhanced, too.”

  “Enhanced to a hyperdegree, I should suspect, in subjects selected for already possessing large degrees of both,” Ainsley confirmed. “But there’s even more. The new makers of Omicron wanted to create machines, remember? You saw the handiwork of the Wakinyan. What comes to mind about it first?”

  “They enjoyed it,” Blaine said, without thinking.

  “You’re quite certain of that?”

  “Oh, yeah.” McCracken’s thoughts drifted back to finding the Tupi boys’ bodies, then the ravaged corpses at the complex, and finally the corpses of Ben Norseman’s men. “No question about it. They loved every minute of their work.”

  “Interesting,” commented Ainsley. The fear in his face had been replaced by contemplation. The darkened room seemed to lighten ever so slightly.

  “Why?”

  “Killing for pleasure, my boy, is not something well documented in the animal kingdom—and certainly not in the world of the machine. We have come to our first anomaly in the equation.”

  “Meaning?…”

  “Meaning a rule the makers of this Omicron legion had to write themselves to accomplish their task. It wasn’t enough to refine and expand the skills of their subjects. To achieve total success, the subjects had to be conditioned to enjoy killing. Don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “The deaths of all those Tupi Indians that brought your friend to the Amazon. The Omicron subjects stalked their prey not just to practice their skills, but also to provide positive reenforcement. A reward, if you will.”

  “I’ve known plenty of individu
als who enjoy killing, Professor, thrive on it even—and there was no biochemical engineering behind it.”

  Reston Ainsley shrugged. “Perhaps not. Then again, if my theories are correct, it was their brain chemistry that was behind it. Granted, there was no engineering involved, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.”

  “No,” Blaine argued, glancing briefly at the cold black finish of Obie Seven, “there’s got to be more, something beyond enjoyment.”

  “I believe you might be quite right, my boy. The conditioning chambers on the fourth sublevel bothered me. I can account for virtually everything else, but not this.”

  “Brainwashing,” Blaine proposed.

  “More like mind-conditioning. Different terms, same effect. And in this case, the results are what matter. What if killing was made an addiction for this legion? What if they actually needed to kill to survive? Think of drug addicts. They may love their chosen poison, but their addiction is more a question of hating the consequences of being without it.” Ainsley raised his plastic-and-rubber model of the brain to catch the light. “So now we have our two dozen subjects, carefully selected for already possessing an overriding capacity for violence, whose brains have been fine-tuned, so to speak, and skills refined to a great extent.”

  “Two dozen.”

  “Only for a time. To truly create a perfect legion of killers, an element of uncertainty would have to be factored in. The twenty-four subjects would know only twelve were to be chosen, thus only twelve could survive.”

  “You’re saying the dozen that came up short were executed?”

  “I’m saying that one dozen were killed by the surviving dozen. The Amazon Basin was not chosen at random. The final field tests might have involved matched competition in the jungle. The twelve survivors became the legion.”

  “Except you’re forgetting about that extra cubicle Johnny and I found at the end of the hall. What lived in there, Professor? Why was it kept separate from the rest?”