Psychic Warrior by Bob Mayer

way." Raisor gestured toward a large door on the side of the hangar furthest into the mountain. He and Hammond led the way, the team following, carrying their gear in large green rucksacks. Raisor paused before the door, a large circular steel structure, over eighteen feet in diameter. It was strangely formed, with rings of concentric strips of black metal spaced evenly out from the center on the polished steel. Dalton noticed that strips of the same black metal were attached to the rock wall that extended left and right the length of the hangar, disappearing into holes drilled into the rock where the hangar ended.
    Dalton looked closely. There was something strange about the door, in fact the whole wall the door was set in; a shimmering effect that was barely noticeable.
    Raisor punched a code into the panel on the right side. Dalton blinked. The shimmering stopped. The door rolled sideways into a recessed port. A corridor lit with dim red lights beckoned. Raisor made a sweeping gesture with his hand and the team trooped through. The door rolled shut behind them and Raisor again punched a code into the inside panel. Dalton swore that the shimmering came back, this time on the inside of the door. And the inside was also covered with the black metal circles, branching off into holes drilled on this side into the rock.
    Dalton followed the rest of the team down the corridor. They walked through a door, then down a hallway cut out of the stone. Hammond opened a door and showed them a large room with gray painted walls and several bunk beds.
    "I'm sorry the arrangements aren't the greatest," Hammond said, sounding not sorry at all as the team members threw their rucks down. "I'd like to get started right away," she added.
    They followed Raisor and the doctor down another corridor deeper into the mountain. The corridor opened into a large chamber. They all stopped, taking in the view. There were two rows of ten of the large cylinders that had been on the slide. Two had people in them, floating in the green liquid, a man and a woman, like full-grown fetuses in suspended animation. Each wore a slick black one-piece suit over their torso.
    The team silently walked up and stared at the two bodies.
    "Don't touch the glass," Hammond warned. "The fluid inside is supercooled and your hand would freeze to the glass."
    Dalton looked closely and now he saw a thin haze in the air surrounding the glass as the ambient room temperature met the much lower temperature.
    "Supercooled?" Anderson asked.
    "It's necessary to slow the body's processes down to allow the brain to function at a higher level."
    "How do they breathe?" Master Sergeant Trilly asked.
    "Actually, they're not breathing as you know it," Hammond said, a statement that caused a ripple of concern among the team.
    Hammond pointed. "You see the center tube going into the helmet?" Next she pointed to a bulky machine on the outside. Clear lines coiled around the outside of a pump moving so slowly, the action was almost imperceptible. The liquid in the lines was a dark blue.
    "A mouthpiece is attached to that lung machine. It doesn't send oxygen in the gaseous form as you are used to, but rather a cooled, special liquid-oxygen mixture directly to their lungs. The machine actually does the work for the lungs, because we can't count on the autonomic nervous system to function properly."
    "They're breathing that blue stuff?" Trilly asked in astonishment.
    Hammond nodded. "It's similar to what some extreme deep-sea divers use to get the exact right mixture of gases to handle the depth. It's difficult to take at first, but you get used to it."
    "Breathing a liquid?" Trilly asked.
    "You don't even notice after you go over," Hammond said.
    “Yeah, right," someone muttered from the back of the team.
    "The autonomic nervous system?" Captain Anderson asked.
    "All right," Hammond said. "Listen up. Now is when we move you from what you learned in Trojan Warrior to Psychic Warrior. Where you learn