Chapter 12

AD 2010

Okay, Nine, Will thought to Tina yet again, you can do this. Now link in with me and watch how I do it. Here goes...

Tina attached her thought processes to his and followed the things Will did with his mind, then tried to repeat them - with the same result as before. Nothing happened

I don't know what's wrong, Ten, she tele-thought, but I do the same things you do, only nothing happens. I can't feel the energy the way you do.

Let me take a look, here, Will told her, try it again, just like you did before.

He watched what was going on with the energy flows in her brain as she went through the exercise yet again. This time he followed the neural pathways as she...

AHA! His mental shout startled her. I guess I missed a connection there when I was fixing you.

Working carefully, Will created a new connection in Tina's brain, using his own as a model.

Okay, he thought to her, try it again.

Again, Tina went through the steps he had shown her.

Wait, I can actually feel the energy now, Tina sent with wonder. Okay, here goes ... Hold out your hand.

Okay, you've got the pebble, Will coached. Now find my hand ... That's it. Now move your focus up about six inches ... That should do it. Okay, now keep the energy of that point in mind and transfer it to the pebble ... Now!

This time, to her astonishment, the small stone she had been holding in her hand disappeared, only to reappear in the air just above Will's hand.

You did it! Will congratulated her as the stone dropped into his palm.

Yeah, she said, laughing like a schoolgirl in spite of herself, I guess I did!

Okay, now that you can do that, I want you to practice until you can move it to a precise location without teleporting it into an existing object. All my life I've heard and read speculations about what would happen if two objects tried to occupy the same volume of space, and none of the possible outcomes are very appealing. Now, concentrate on feeling the object's energy, there you go.

The rock disappeared from his hand and reappeared in the air above hers. Tina, thinking she had it down, was ready to move on. Will, however, was a proponent of the 'practice makes perfect' school of thought.

There's still more to learn, Nine, so let's keep at this for a bit, he told her. Wait! You need to move your focus up a fraction over half the width of the pebble before you move it to that ledge! Please be careful! I don't know if the molecules will simply intermingle or the atoms will fuse, creating a nuclear explosion, and I don't want to find out, okay?

He made her work on moving things of various sizes until she could move objects accurately from point to point and transport herself in and out of the cave at will. For the moment, that seemed to be the limit of her teleportation capabilities. Will had no trouble teleporting himself or anything else he chose anywhere on earth, but Tina had difficulty pinpointing the energies of locations further away than about half a mile.

Taking a break from teleportation exercises, Will began teaching Tina how to make a shield like the one he used.

"Okay," Will said, switching to normal speech, just in case the shields interfered with mindtalk, "Let's see if you can make a shield. Come on in and watch while I do this. See, it's just an energy field centered on your body, but if you configure it this way, it becomes self-sustaining. Now this is important, okay. If you leave it like this, the shield will protect you until your own energy runs out, but you don't really want that happening, so you make it feed back into itself, like this, and it uses the energy of whatever's attacking you to strengthen the shield. See how elegant that is? The energy absorbed is automatically directed back to the point from which it was absorbed. You have to be careful, though. You don't want it to protect you from the light you need to see by or the air molecules you need to breathe. Okay, you try it."

Tina repeated the steps she had seen him perform, and after a couple of false starts, was able to produce her own shield. Again, Will made her practice until she could snap the shield into place at an instant's notice.

"But why, for God's sake?" she asked, weary from the incessant repetition. "You and I are the only ones who can do this stuff, so why work on making it reflex? If anyone wants to attack us, we should know in plenty of time to defend ourselves!"

"How do you know we're the only ones who can do this?" Will asked. "The very fact that we can do it proves that it's possible, and who's to say the experiment that produced us was the only one any country had going? Who's to say they won't start another?"

Day after day, week after week, Will drilled them both in the uses of their unique abilities. When they could use their mind skills as if they had been born with them, he stepped up their physical exercises. Picking the brains of drill sergeants at Army and Marine boot camps, he applied some of their time-honored techniques, minus the top-of-the-lungs insults, not just to Tina's training, but to his own, as well.

The packs they carried on their nightly run through the mountains weighed in at just under two hundred fifty pounds. Had anyone been near enough to watch, they would have seen two ghostly figures moving at incredible speed, up and down impossible grades. They leaped more than fifty feet over chasms that, in the darkness, would have seemed, to normal eyes, to have no bottom.

They soon discovered one problem with the biological enhancements that Will had made to replace the artificial ones from the program. Unlike the artificial parts that the program had tried to use, the organic changes that Will had made required oxygen, just like their original muscles. As their bodies and physical condition grew to take advantage of the changes he had made, they discovered that it was impossible for their lungs to keep up with the demand for very long.

Will tried, and found a way to improve, slightly, the efficiency of their lungs at extracting oxygen from the air they breathed, but it wasn't enough. It seemed as though, when it came to using their muscles, they would be restricted to short bursts of high level exertion, and then would have to stop to catch their breath.

"Too bad the air doesn't have a higher percentage of oxygen," Nine panted one evening as they waited for their lungs to catch up with them.

The thought clicked in Will's mind. Could he find a way to increase the percentage of oxygen in the air they breathed?

"Hang on a second," he told his partner. "Maybe we can do something about that...

The shields, he thought, were the key. If he could tune them just right ... Will remembered from his college chemistry classes that Oxygen had a slightly higher atomic number than Nitrogen, and that both existed in the atmosphere as diatomic molecules. He thought that if he could fine tune his shield, he could get it to pass most of the Nitrogen through, but capture the Oxygen.

He experimented for a few minutes, tuning his shield until he thought he had it, then he shaped a broad, invisible collector around himself. If he had it right, the collector would filter Oxygen molecules out of the air while allowing nitrogen to pass through. The collected Oxygen would then be funneled to his mouth and nose by the shield, effectively making the air he breathed more Oxygen-rich.

He showed Nine how make the Oxygen collector, then they set off running again. To their delight, the collector effectively reversed the relative percentages of Oxygen and Nitrogen that reached their lungs. Now, instead of only getting twenty percent Oxygen, they were getting almost eighty percent. It took more experimentation and fine tuning to make the collector operate automatically in conjunction with their bodies' demands, and to keep carbon dioxide from building up within the collector as they exhaled, but within a few days, they were running or performing other exercises at the limits of their new bodies for hours at a time.

Now, even with the heavy packs, their enhanced muscles made it difficult to find exercises that tested them fully.

"Why all the friggin' PT, Ten?" Nine asked during their nightly run one evening. "We're already faster and stronger than anyone on Earth. Hell, we could run the shoes off a racehorse and still beat a platoon in hand-to-hand, so why all the conditioning?"

"Oh, this is just the second phase of our training," Will grinned. "Next, we learn to combine all these physical skills with our mental abilities. I don't know that we'll ever need all of that together, but since we have the abilities, we should do our damnedest to 'be all that we can be.'"

"So, your philosophy is, essentially, 'because it's there?' Pardon me if I don't buy it, Ten."

"Actually, my philosophy is more like 'because we don't know what's there.' The very fact that we have these abilities is going to put us into situations that we never dreamed of, and since we can't predict what those situations will be, all we can do is make sure we have a firm grasp of our abilities and how they can be used, and hope that's enough."

"So what kinds of things are you thinking of when you talk about combining the physical skills with the mental ones?" Nine asked.

"Take a left at that big boulder and I'll give you an example," Will replied.

About half a mile after the turn, they came to a precipice where the mountain dropped off abruptly to fall more than a thousand feet before broken scree sloped off toward the bottom of the chasm.

"Link in with me, Nine," Will said as they approached the cliff.

Tina slowed and stopped, but Will continued forward, shedding his pack, his speed unabated.

"Ten!" she cried in alarm, "You can't... !"

Have a little faith, Tina, Will's thought flew back to her as he launched himself full speed over the edge of the cliff.

Shaping his shield and spreading it wide as his body fell through space, he formed a pair of wings and a tail similar to an eagle's. For a long moment he felt the sick thrill of falling, and was just getting ready to bail out by teleporting himself back to the top of the cliff when his wings caught the air and lofted him skyward. Using his arms to power the wings and his feet to guide the tail he soared over the valley below. Sensing an updraft, he glided into it and allowed it to carry him higher and higher, until he was looking down on his partner from a great distance.

The feeling was so much more immediate and personal than when he had flown Navy jets. On the one hand, he did not have enormous engines shoving him toward the speed of sound on columns of fire. On the other, there was nothing between him and the air but a thin, invisible layer of energy. The feeling was incredibly exhilarating and a bit frightening.

As he soared, he fine tuned his flight configuration so that he could feel the minute shifts in the air currents and react almost instantly.

Brace yourself, Nine, he thought at his ground-bound partner. I've landed jets on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier in the middle of a typhoon, but I've never tried a landing like this!

In his mind he rehearsed the mechanics of the landing he had seen birds perform hundreds of times: Come in headfirst at speed, wings folded, body streamlined, then, at the last moment, bring the nose up and flare the wings, letting my own speed create the vacuum behind the wing surfaces that will brake my forward motion, and then deploy the landing gear - feet and legs, ready to absorb the last of my momentum.

In a rush, he dove headfirst at Tina's position, spreading and flapping his wings at the last moment to settle onto the ground a few feet away, stumbling forward a few steps as he misjudged his speed.

"Oh - my - God!" Tina exclaimed. "That was awesome! How the hell did you learn to do that?"