Psyche Ops

Part 1: The Psychic of Essetir

Chapter 1: What They Saw on the Screen

The quality of the recording was poor, grainy-gray with no color in the image. Maybe because there was no color in the room portrayed. The image itself shifted and swayed occasionally, as though the recorder was distracted, or an amateur.

In the foreground, a vast angled expanse of smooth tabletop. In the murky background, plain smooth wall quite close behind the child caught between the two.

Rock and a hard place, Arthur thought grimly. No place for a child.

Aloud he said, "What am I looking at, Gaius?"

Psych-Ops Director-in-Chief Richard Gaius rocked on his heels across the table from where Arthur sat, they two alone in the briefing room, which was unusual but not unheard-of, for small-teams prep or debriefing. He tucked the screen-control between hands crossed in front of him and focused on the screen instead of Arthur's question.

He glanced back to the image, himself.

It was unclear whether the child was sitting or standing, but his forearms were flat on the table palms to elbows, and his chin barely cleared his hands. Under a mop of black hair, his eyes were alert but apprehensive, and he watched something or someone just to the left of the recorder.

There was audio, too; it was indistinct and Gaius pressed a button to bring up the volume. Someone else was speaking – an adult male voice, clinical and cold. "…You do understand the requirements of our little game, don't you?"

A pair of hands moved into view on the table, facing the recorder, and the child's eyes fastened to the back of a deck of cards, twice as large as ordinary gaming-cards and printed differently, Arthur could see as much without making out what was depicted on the first card.

The black mop nodded.

"Very good. If you do well and guess ever so many correctly, you may be rewarded. Perhaps your window might be opened for an afternoon. Or a new set of water-colors?"

Arthur frowned a glance at Gaius, who was impervious to his attention.

Eyes flicked up from the card-backs to the unseen speaker's face, a curious reflective-opaque quality to them without color in the recording.

"Let us begin." The hands shifted to reveal the nearest card to the recorder.

A simple drawing. The outline-silhouette of a cartoonish rabbit.

"Bunny," the child said immediately, eyes lifted to left of the recorder, not on the cards anymore.

"Good." The card was placed face-down on the table, and Arthur saw there was an intricate pattern inked on the back, to admit no bleed-through of the image.

Arthur sat forward in his seat.

The next was a… "Tree."

The third was a…

"Flower."

"It is a tulip," the speaker said, turning the card around to show the child the distinctive three-petaled pattern.

The child blinked. The card went down on a separate pile, and the child watched it, the mouth-corners turning down unhappily.

"Three in the room," Arthur said, thinking aloud. "The child, the man with the cards, and whoever is recording this."

"Yes," Gaius said only, eyes riveted. The game continued.

"Kitty-cat."

"Correct."

"Um. Tiger." The child straightened, frowning. "Panther?"

"It is an ocelot." Again the card was shown, and placed in the secondary discard pile.

The child was puzzled, then troubled, and sank backward in a hidden seat.

Pause.

"Balloon."

Pause. Of an extra-long moment, and then-

"Monkey?"

"It is an ape." Card shown, and discarded on the second stack.

"What am I seeing?" Arthur said again, as another card was laid in the correctly-guessed pile, and hope flickered anew in the child's eyes.

"This particular video we've had for some time," Gaius said, his head angled to keep the screen in the side of his vision as he turned to Arthur. "Conveyed to us by deep-cover scouts in Essetir. Psychic training – or training of psychics."

"Impossible," Arthur said immediately. "Not so young. It's never manifested like that, not in someone so young. And you can't train the ability into someone who isn't going to have it – and you can't train a random troop of kids in hopes of catching one who can become a psychic."

Gaius didn't answer.

"The second person, the recorder, is throwing hints, somehow," Arthur guessed, even though the child had eyes only for the card-man. "Or… he's wearing glasses, maybe a medallion or… large shiny buttons. Maybe he's got his back to an observation window."

"Think for a minute that it's not a trick," Gaius suggested neutrally. "See how he's teaching the boy not simply to view the image he sees in his mind, but to collect the precise word he's thinking."

"Gaius…" Arthur said, warning the old man by his tone that men in their profession could not afford to be gullible.

The Director glanced down at the screen-control; the moving gray recording blushed burgundy for a moment behind half-a-dozen runes. The selector moved from the first to the second at Gaius' command.

Another recording. Same room, slightly different angle. Same table, same child – inches higher though face and hands were slimmer, now. The eyes more watchful.

"Our deep-cover scout is a bartender just off Fort Araun in Essetir," Gaius said conversationally as the on-screen game began anew. "We've received a handful of these recordings over the years, but nothing to prompt our response."

Arthur heard, Yet. He noticed it was a regular deck of playing cards this time, five suits with twelve cards each – once, deuce, three through nine, then king-priest-steward. Except for the trump suit of Rivers, which was goddess-queen-girl. Game-makers had a sense of humor. Girl of Rivers took King of everything else.

"Better him than me," Arthur murmured. He was the best at what he did – strike and retreat. Surgical precision. Action-action-action. Deep-cover teased that it was because he was rubbish at subterfuge. The female scouts of deep-cover speculated it was because a quickie was all he was ever good for.

Jealous lot of harpies.

"Her," Gaius corrected without inflection. "The base officers drink there. When they're lonely."

Arthur grimaced, and watched.

"Three of swords."

"Correct."

"Steward of Stones."

"Correct."

"Eight of Rivers."

The hands moved faster, and a flash of desperation entered the child's eyes.

"Nine of Grains. King of Gems. Priest of Gems. Five of Swords – Seven Stones – Queen Rivers – Two Swords…"

The child paused, disconcerted.

"King of Swords. But I already said that one." His eyes moved down to the pile of correctly-guessed discards – the only stack.

"Did he already say that one?" Arthur asked Gaius. They'd missed a few when the second recording started.

"Yes," Gaius said mildly.

But the King of Swords was definitely the card the man was holding.

The child's fingers locked together. The seat shifted. "It's King of Swords. Isn't it?"

"How can it be if you already said that one?" the cold male voice noted dispassionately. "Logic would dictate that either you are wrong now, or you were wrong before."

"I was…" The child's eyes devoured the used cards, face-down and never revealed. He had only the card-man's word to go on for the previous one – that and his memory. "The… the one in your hand. Steward of Swords."

"No." The card-man laid the King face-down by itself, in a new pile of mistakes.

The boy stared at it. The man tapped the remainder of the deck; the Deuce of Grains was showing.

The man cleared his throat.

"Deuce of Grains. Eight of Gems. Once of Stones."

The pace sped up, and the boy opened his mouth – and nothing came out. Three cards in quick succession went down on the mistake pile, and the boy shut his mouth, looking at the card-man invisible beside the recorder.

"You may not refuse to play when you are requested to," the card-man reminded him, coolly pleasant.

The boy swallowed. His eyes shone again that curious reflective-opaque. "Five of Stones – Four of Gems – Three of Grains."

The card-man had to lift the last three cards to check. The boy was right, and the cards moved to the larger pile.

Arthur snorted derisively. "He isn't playing fair."

"He's teaching the boy to think beyond the rules, beyond common assumptions," Gaius murmured, eyeing the screen-troller in his hand and sending it back to the rune-selection burgundy. "But so young…"

If a reward would be an open window for a few hours, Arthur wondered what a punishment might be.

Third rune. The child was now immediately recognizable as male, hair clipped shorter, bones more prominent. Thirteen, maybe. Hands in his lap.

The table wasn't bare, there was a large sheet facing the boy – upside-down to the viewer, with a rectangular chart of rectangles.

"It's the five suits of cards," Gaius informed Arthur.

The card-man said nothing. He smeared the deck of cards into a line on the tabletop, and picked three of the cards. The boy studied them from the back, then lifted one hand from his lap to put thumb, forefinger, and pinky down on different spaces on the chart.

The man turned the cards over, one-two-three. "Correct," he said, sweeping the trio aside to choose three others.

"That's not mind-reading," Arthur said abruptly. "Can't be. The card-man isn't looking at them first."

"No," Gaius said. "He's not."

One-two-three. One-two-three. Onetwothree.

The boy wasn't looking at the chart, but splaying out three fingers confidently. Not always the same fingers, but evidently always correct.

Then he hesitated, forefinger down – and only his forefinger. Then slowly he twisted his slender hand to put his last two fingers down on the table, not the chart.

"Card-man is playing games within games again," Arthur observed.

The man said nothing. Didn't move. The boy glanced at the cards again; his head cocked a single degree; his eyes lifted to the man's face.

That desperation was beginning to make Arthur feel uncomfortable.

"They're not proper cards," the boy said swiftly. "They're not – I can't…"

The man cleared his throat, and drummed his fingers deliberately. Whoever was holding the recorder shifted in his or her seat.

"It's a button on his uniform jacket," Gaius remarked conversationally. "No transmitter, their base security would detect that. Low-tech, but the catch is, our mark has to visit the bartender two consecutive nights, or the recording self-deletes to remain undetectable."

"Thus why we have only a handful of recordings," Arthur realized.

"That and the fact that this particular officer only reviews this subject occasionally – observation, not daily interaction.

On the screen, the boy inexplicably erupted, shoving the chart away from him in such a way that the deck of cards flew up in a scattered cloud. The recorder scooted back hurriedly, probably more startled being there in-person than Arthur sitting at the table in their briefing room to view the recording.

The boy was out of his chair, round the corner of the table – retreating in a scramble as two men in dark coveralls rushed him, clearly precipitate newcomers to the small room.

Arthur half-rose as the boy was lifted, kicking and writhing – but still silent – and slumped boneless so suddenly in their grip that he was even more shocked than by the tantrum.

"Damn," he said. "What did they-"

The recorder turned to watch the limp boy carried from the room, like a grotesque parody of a sleeping child, dangling limbs and lolling head. But the card-man was in full view, and Arthur was surprised.

The man was about his own age, not some icy-sterile sixty-something. Long hair neatly brushed, fashionable scruff of a beard. But the way his chin tucked and his eyes gleamed, it was unsettlingly… feral.

"…Problems controlling him," he was telling the recorder, with the air of a man reassuring a skeptical superior. "Complications of puberty, probably. We'll return him to an isolated unit for a while, and next time…"

Gaius chose the burgundy rune-selection screen, and Arthur didn't know what to say.

"We've known for years that Essetir wanted a program that would turn out psychics to rival your father's best. This has been our only hint that they were on to anything close to their goal."

The fourth rune out of six. A couple of years had passed – the boy was thin and still, his eyes turned down upon the table… where lay a collection of odd objects. Arthur leaned forward to identify them: the face of a timekeeper without the wristband; a pink plastic pig with the head chewed off – a child's toy; a single silver-hoop earring; an inch-long wide-headed brass nail; the stub of a pencil.

The card-man folded empty hands over a deactivated comm-block. The boy's head ducked lower yet – too low for him to be looking at the objects anymore.

Silence.

"In your own time," the cold voice suggested, and to Arthur it sounded mocking.

The boy shifted – subsided – chose to lift a hand from his lap. He didn't touch the objects, but began to mumble a detached, truncated litany.

"The pig. Belonged to an eleven-year-old boy. Brown eyes, brown hair. Left it in the yard – dog got it."

"What breed?" the cold voice inquired.

The boy's long fingers twitched. "A black shepherd. Two years old. Female."

"Continue."

"The earring – lost by a woman. Five-four, curly hair, fifty pounds overweight. She was saying, I don't know why he did that when he knows it's embarrassing to all of us…"

"Speaking of?"

"Her… son. Grown-up son, not a… boy." He swallowed, and his hand trembled, but he didn't retract it.

"Continue."

"The pencil is a carpenter's. Should be retired. Loves his work – chest-of-drawers, this time. The nail is – was, used to hang a picture on the wall of a family home. Portrait. Parents – boy-boy-girl…"

"And?"

The fingers squeezed into a fist, and thrust back out again convulsively. "The timekeeper. Belonged to a man who… killed himself. Gas stove, it… exploded. He didn't expect that. It killed… it killed…" The boy gasped out an expletive that shocked Arthur. "None of them expected it!"

The feral card-man lurched from his seat, seizing the bony wrist and slapping the boy's hand down on the objects.

Arthur thought maybe the bass nail had punctured the boy's palm. He arched, flinging his head back, gasping in a great breath – struggled a moment against the card-man's grip.

Then – "No… oh – oh-" The word became a rising cry, a protesting shriek, a blood-curdling scream of agony.

Arthur was on his feet. "Gaius, what the hell-"

The recorder evidently shared his reaction. Hands appeared, to shove the card-man away from the boy – shove him out the door as the recorder followed. They left an ominous silence in the room behind them – and a series of overlapping, muffled thumps.

"Did he just past out?" Arthur demanded. "Gaius?"

The Director lifted one hand. "Ssh…"

The card-man was focused on the comm-block in his hands, now activated. The image jittered as the recorder swore and couldn't stand still; the feral countenance swung and blurred on the screen til Arthur's eyes hurt trying to keep up.

"He was right," the cold voice said. "They kept the information confidential, so he couldn't read it from me, but the objects – he was right."

"Gaius, that's impossible," Arthur said. He didn't sit back down.

The Director maneuvered to the fifth icon.

One object on the table, a cicala-lighter. The boy a gaunt year or two older, maybe the age of majority or nearly so. Eyes down.

"Now, please," the cold voice requested cordially.

The black-haired head lifted, betraying a gleam of reflective-opaque eyes. And desperation.

A little flame jumped up on the lighter. And stayed, even as the teen shifted back, tucking in on himself a little tighter.

Arthur swore a little more foully. "This is for real," he said to Gaius, though his mind scrambled for some other explanation - any other explanation. "Essetir has – that?"

"Essetir has him," Gaius corrected. "We believe him to be unique, not simply a single member of a larger program - else there would be other subjects tested and recorded. Though of course we cannot know for sure."

"But he's – what, seventeen?" Arthur said. "Gaius, that stuff is… hushed and holy rumors about what my father's psyche-officers can do. Two or three out of them all, and that's after… decades of training as a focused and committed adult." He cursed again. "Imagine what Essetir could do with something like that in the field…"

"Is that all you saw?" Gaius said, curious and… disappointed.

Arthur paused two steps into a pacing path along the wall behind the chairs set to the room's table, and reconsidered. What did the Director-in-Chief see? Three moves ahead, sometimes more. If Arthur anticipated explosions of vehicle fuel tanks, what did Gaius-

"I see," Gaius uttered, "a gifted child tortured by our enemies."

Arthur didn't have a response for that.

Deliberately Gaius pressed for the last rune on the burgundy choice-screen. "Keep that in mind while watching this."

Sixth and final icon. The boy was a young man. Easy in his seat, quiet and watchful.

Wary.

The young man's relaxed manner tightened almost imperceptibly – easily mistaken for excitement or anticipation - a reaction explained by the hands of the card-man reaching into the range of the recording device. He unrolled a map in front of the young man, but the lines were too fine and the quality of the film too poor to see what the map detailed. Tension lined the young man's plain cotton shirt – long-sleeves without buttons or zippers or toggles.

Another sheet was laid down, a smaller square with the sheen of a printed photograph. Arthur immediately craned his neck to see what that depicted – the young man's fingers wanted nothing to do with it, and he sat back.

"We've analyze the recording," Gaius told Arthur. "It's one of our night-flyers. In distress of the sort that leads us to believe it was not aloft very long after the photo was taken."

Arthur's insides went cold and still. Night-flyers weren't supposed to cross the border, according to the treaty with Essetir, just patrol it. "Whose?"

Gaius cocked an eyebrow at him, and didn't answer. Need to know, and apparently Arthur didn't. "Their base is situated at the bottom of the White Mountains for the same reason Fort Fuller was built here. Because the mountains provide convenient cover for treaty-bending of that nature."

True enough; but Essetir didn't have night-gliders that could evade their border-guard sufficiently to risk open hostility.

At least, not yet.

"Where is the-" Arthur began, but Gaius hushed him again.

The reluctance was so obvious it was nauseating, but the young man picked up the photograph. This time it was several heart-stopping seconds before any reaction showed.

"What just happened - what just – I'm hit I'm hit – shit how did they – dammit…"

Arthur felt ill. The young man was shuddering, slamming back and forth in his seat like he was re-living the crash itself, psychically connected to the pilot. He was hyperventilating, clearly trying to maintain composure – clearly losing it.

"Fifteen degrees pitch that's not good I'm going down am I going down oh this is not good fu-" He gasped and threw himself back in his seat. And then, "If anyone… finds this recording… tell Gwen…"

"What did he say?" Arthur demanded, swooping in on the screen, just as the young man-

Let out a throat-ripping scream that didn't seem to startle the recorder or the card-man at all, sickening Arthur with the implications. Was this commonplace to them?

"He said – he said someone's name, didn't he? Run it back – what did he say?"

"You heard correctly," Gaius stated. "It was Scout Thompson's name. The pilot of the night-glider was-"

"Lancelot," Arthur said, his heart plummeting toward his boots and colliding nauseatingly with his stomach on the way down. Fraternization among the military branches was discouraged, but not prohibited. Probably smarter crossing branches than trying to deepen a friendship with a fellow trooper into romance – because if that failed… "Does she know?"

"Not yet," Gaius said. "But – watch."

The young man was sprawled back over his chair. Panting – whimpering – trying to struggle up, trying to get away. His hands fumbled at his body in a way Arthur's mind interpreted as releasing a five-point pilot's safety harness.

"Lancelot's alive?" he exclaimed. Only a moment later realizing, how ridiculous to base a belief in the stolen recording of an enemy psychic. "But how do we know this isn't-"

"We don't," Gaius said.

On-screen, the card-man rounded the table to shake the young man roughly to his senses, ordering his attention to the map, now. Arthur did not need to hear them to know the location of the crash site was being demanded.

And how far could Lancelot get? How badly injured was he?

"How long have we had this recording?" he demanded.

"It came in two hours ago through encrypted channels," Gaius said. He leaned closer to the screen as if he could see the location on the map where the boy's bony forefinger was pointing.

"What's being done about it?" Arthur went on. "Can they analyze this image and try to generate possibilities? We have several teams with rappelling experience, we could at least try to attempt a rescue, even if the terrain is mountainous…"

"Lancelot's mission was to record Fort Araun in Essetir," Gaius said, watching the young psychic on-screen collapse back in his seat. He barely had time to shiver before the attendants in black coveralls – the same ones or different, it probably didn't matter – were back to haul him up and out of the room. "Your father wants those recordings even more than he wants Lancelot – although it could be catastrophic if Essetir claims either… They'll be with the wreckage of the glider, or with Lancelot if he managed to remove the mechanism and take it with him. And yes, we do have a location that has been agreed upon as most likely – not too far from Lancelot's course of flight."

"Then why the hell did you keep me sitting here another hour watching some kid psychic's miserable life?" Arthur exploded. "Am I to lead a team? I need details, Gaius – and supplies."

"You also need to know what – and who – you're dealing with," Gaius admonished him. "Lancelot's mission was the first step toward appropriating this asset – or destroying it." He jabbed a forefinger at the now-blank screen, and Arthur understood. Gaius was always more humanitarian than Uther, when communicating the objectives of their missions.

"Okay," he said, calming a little. "So now I understand what I'm dealing with. The rest, Gaius."

"There's a little town near the suspected site. You and one other will infiltrate in disguise. Your first objective is the recordings – though I emphasize, it is possible that Lancelot will have managed to secure that on his person or at least at some hidden location away from the site."

"Got it," Arthur said impatiently. Lancelot was priority. That would have been his plan anyway. Only with their assurance of his death or capture would they focus instead on retrieving the recording.

"Your kit is being readied, and transportation," Gaius said. "You're traveling lighter than the Essetirians, so with luck you might reach the site before they do."

"Am I going with-"

Gaius spoke over him. "You'll be taking Scout Thompson as your partner. The better to blend in. And of course she will be well-motivated to complete your objective."

He felt his lips twist sourly. "Of course."

"Well?" Gaius said. Now that he'd taken his time making his point, he was impatient also. He made a shooing gesture at Arthur. "Get going, then."

A/N: I've already planned for this to be a trilogy, just sayin', though it'll depend on the length whether I give each story its own heading – but I'll let you know when we get to that. So this first story is going to be solely Arthur pov until the very end… but then the next two stories will include Merlin (and possibly others) pov…

Also I need to disclaim that this idea came to me by way of MacGuyver, I think it was season 2. 1 or 2, at least. But I don't remember the episode title… This chapter contains: the heroes seeing the psychic's powers on-screen, and being dispatched to a plane crash site the psychic 'witnessed'…

No promises on updating schedule, though. There was plenty of interest in this chapter anyway when I posted it under "Something Completely Different". We'll see how it goes…