Chapter 560: 4th & 10

"I once led a force of 100 Lanaktallan on a mission with no hope. I survived, but out of all 100, only 1 survived. We knew it going in. We were despondent. Beaten before the first gunshot.

"I was tasked to lead a force of 100 Terrans on a mission with no hope. I told them 'men, this mission will be tough, only one or two of us will survive' and they all just nodded. Some smiled. There was joking and laughter enroute to the mission. Less then a dozen were killed.

"I asked my Terran liaison how such a thing was possible. He told me that my original men had all gone in thinking 'we're all going to die', while the Terrans had looked around themselves and thought: 'sucks to be them.'" - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

General NoDra'ak leaned against the counter and lit a cigarette, watching everyone mill around. The conversations were all buzzing about what they had seen so far. The idea of anyone beyond humans being part of the SUDS was incomprehensible.

How? How did they do it? Why don't we know how they did it? What don't we know? Has the "Builder's" fear come to pass?

NoDra'ak lit a cigarette, taking a deep drag. His headache had eased up, allowing him to focus better. He looked around at all of the gathered officers whose offices had something to do with the entire thing and sighed.

A Terran manages to claw his way out of the SUDS and that's all they see, he thought to himself. What they are missing is that the human managed to claw his way back from death*.*

He saw a Confederate Intelligence Services Agent by the wall and moved over by her. She turned her head and looked at him, or at least he assumed so since her eyes were covered with mirrorshades, then went back to scanning the crowd.

"You and all of your fellow Agents look the same," NoDra'ak said.

"Yes," her voice was flat, no inflection, no accent, perfect pronunciation.

"Why?" NoDra'ak asked.

The Terran turned and looked at him. "What?"

"Why do you look the same? Are you vat grown?" NoDra'ak asked.

She nodded slowly. "We are."

"Who is the genesis seed? Or was it a shake and bake?" NoDra'ak asked.

The Confederate Agent stared up at NoDra'ak for a long moment.

"We do not know," she simply said. "We are our Father's daughters. No more. No less. Guardians of the Citizens of the Confederacy and every government before that."

"So, the Guardians of Humanity?" NoDra'ak asked.

She shook her head slowly. "No."

"Everyone?"

"Yes."

NoDra'ak thought for a moment. "And if the government of the Confederacy were to turn against its citizens?"

"We are the instruments of the citizenry's ill will," she simply stated. "The citizenry's displeasure would be made apparent to those who had corrupted and subverted the will of the people."

NoDra'ak nodded. "That leads me to suspect your hand behind the curtain in regards to events during things in the past."

"Your suspicions are your own," The Agent shrugged. "All enemies. Foreign and Domestic. All of them."

NoDra'ak could feel the antiquity on that statement. A cold chill breeze that seemed to waft through the lounge.

"How long have you been at your posts?" NoDra'ak asked.

"Since our Father was created by the Imperium. One of the Biological Apostles, twisted and warped by the Imperium and Combine to fight on the battlefield rather than succor all sentient life," she said. She looked around the room then back up at NoDra'ak. "We live. We die. We live again. Killing us merely attracts the attention of our sisters and our Father."

"Do you believe Staff Sergeant Nimbly?" NoDra'ak asked.

She was silent for a long moment, going back to stare at the room full of officers.

"He has been beyond the veil in more than one way. He has gazed upon the Lord of Hell, traveled from the afterlife to return to us," she said softly. "But I do not think this is an accident. There are things in motion. Great ancient engines, decayed and in ill repair, are shuddering and groaning as they begin to move again, bringing to life timeless ruins and fallen works."

NoDra'ak stood silent. He had heard more speech in the last ten minutes from the Agent than he had heard in his previous centuries of life.

"They fear 'The Builder's Hypothesis' is coming to pass," she said softly. She looked back up at NoDra'ak.

"It came to pass upon the Glassing," she said.

With that, she turned and moved away, deftly slipping through the crowd without making a ripple.

NoDra'ak put out his cigarette just as the chime sounded summoning everyone back to the lecture.

He moved in and took his seat, tapping his datapad to bring it out of sleep mode. He checked his medication levels real quick, made sure the anti-endorphin levels were stable, and waited. The lights dimmed and Exquisite took the stage again.

Frozen in the middle of the screen, when it came out of sleep mode, was an image of a thick bodied woman in an archaic black suit with a single enameled pin on one breast. She looked, to NoDra'ak, like the mother of the Agents. The colors were slightly off, the streaky and lined color smearing of a neural scan image rather than a CGI vid or reality image.

NoDra'ak remembered from a class long ago when he was a Major about how implanted memories are almost crystal clear. The sharp edges of the implanted memory is what kept bringing the human mind back to the memory over and over as their mind tried to soften it.

The fact that image was blurred, color streaked, and distorted was proof it was a real memory, not an implant.

"This is Subject Alpha," Exquisite said. "While it may seem as if this is just a construct to move Staff Sergeant Nimbly through the SUDS system architecture, it appears as if it is far more," she clicked the control and the image cleared, to return to Nimbly sitting in front of the table. This one was unmarred, no writing on it, and a steristrip bandage was on the end of his index finger. The two Mantid investigators were on one side of the table. The collar around his neck was heavier, but still sparking, and the grav-restraints on his wrists were heavier. The two Tukna'rn were in opposite corners, giving them clear fields of fire.

"What happened after you got out of the crater?" Peeks asked.

Nimbly looked down. "I did not exactly cover myself in glory here," he said, his voice thick with self-loathing. "All I could do was scream. Tear at myself. Run. I ran across those plains, attacking anyone I could find, being attacked by anyone who found me."

He looked up and his eyes glittered with madness for a moment. "That's all we did. Run and scream and fight," he looked back down. "Months, years, maybe centuries went by as I just stalked those blasted plains."

"I kept reliving that last fight. Over and over. Trying to do different things. Trying to figure out a way I could have done better," he said, still looking down. "Then, the memory would fade, and I'd scream and scream and scream. I'd run, I'd climb cliffs, I'd hurl myself into huge columns of fire that erupted from the ground, the fire made of screaming souls. I would be in the fire, screaming, raving, while I burned, until I reached the top of the column and I'd be ejected to land back on the ground."

There was silence for a long moment.

"Finally, I was reliving the battle again. Screaming, raving, when I realized something. A fundamental truth that I was fighting hard to deny," he said, his voice almost inaudible.

NoDra'ak noticed that the tendrils of phasic energy were dancing across the Terran's fingers.

"What truth is that?" Peeks asked.

"That nothing I could have done could have changed the outcome. It had happened. There was no changing it. No going back. That all my hindsight, all my post-battle analysis, didn't matter," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "That what I did was not glorious, I wasn't a hero, I lost children and I lost my men, men who relied on me, I did only what I could do, what I thought was best at the time."

There was silent and NoDra'ak and the officers who had been on the sharp end of the stick more than a few times all shifted uncomfortably.

"I had to accept it. I didn't win, but I didn't lose. I died. My best may not have been good enough for some of those children and some of my men, but it was my best. I gave it my best," Nimbly said. He suddenly looked up, his eyes burning red.

"Fight, fight, as hard as you can, you can't kill me, I'm the Ordnance Man," he smiled.

Part of NoDra'ak knew he could tell those in the audience around him who had ridden the Hasslehoff from those who hadn't by those who drew back from that terrible smile and those who merely nodded gravely.

Nimbly looked down, mumbling the rhyme to himself several times.

"What happened after that?" Watcher asked.

"I wandered across plains of hardened lava, crossed rivers of burning sulphur and brimstone. The other ones, the ones screaming, they ignored me," Nimbly said. "I started finding others, who, like me, were silent."

He tapped his fingers slowly on the tabletop.

"We wandered, together, in little clumps. Moving slowly, looking down," he shuddered. "The sky. The sky was full of falling stars, only, you know, they weren't stars, they were souls as tormented as I had been," he said.

He scraped one finger across the tabletop, curling up plasteel with his fingernail. NoDra'ak flinched at the scraping squeal, but watched.

Nimbly drew concentric rings.

"We all wandered in the same direction. Sometimes crying, sometimes wailing, but after a little while, I don't know, a couple thousand years, I lifted my head up and looked," Nimbly said. "Ahead of me was mist, all around me was mist. I kept moving forward, not following the group when they began shuffling in the wrong direction."

"How did you know it was the right direction?" Watcher asked.

"There was a light in the distance, through the mist and fog," Nimbly said. "It was her. Humanity's Wrath Made Manifest, the Mad Daughter of Prometheus."

NoDra'ak again felt that shiver as he looked at one of the Confederate Intelligence Agents.

"What is her name?" Peeks asked.

Nimbly looked up. "I'm not ready to say that yet," he looked down at the table. "You should not want to hear such things."

There was silence for a moment.

Nimbly looked up. "I could spend a lifetime describing what I found as I moved forward. From a great serpent that chastises you for your lusts to everything else," he shuddered. "I know what you're thinking. It was just Dante's Inferno," he looked up. "But it was so much more."

He scraped another rune into the table. "The twenty-eight Hells of Hindu were in there."

Exquisite paused the video. "These are Terran religions, many of them far older than the Digital Omnimessiah," she said. "I'm fast forwarding through this. If you are a scholar in any of the Terran religions, or are curious, I advise you to view the sections and compare his observations to the writings of Pre-Glassing Terra."

She paused for a second. "They are extremely close, almost identical."

Several lights came on of beings wanting to ask questions and Exquisite shook her head. "No questions at this time, please."

She unpaused the video and the jump was obvious.

"It was, I don't know, centuries? Millennia? Eons? How do you measure such things?" Nimbly was saying. "Sometimes I would be stuck, be punished, as my sins, my wrong-doings, replayed for me over and over."

Exquisite paused it again. "Psychotherapy with Terrans show that oftentimes Terrans expect, even need, punishment for perceived wrong-doing. Many psychotherapists believe this is a safety function to prevent omnicidal behavior out of a race wired for that same behavior."

She started it again.

"Finally, I stumbled back into my nightmare again. The atomic blasts, the crying children, the screams of the wounded, and the silence of the dead," Nimbly said. "I struggled, slightly, then just stood there, watching, seeking to understand it all."

He shook his head.

"It was then I understood," he said. He lifted his face and the cold crimson glow deep in his eyes flashed. "No man is an island. The death of any sentient being, even if I do not know him, is the death of a part of me. That is why I fight, that is why it hurts so bad, because it has cut away a part of me."

Exquisite paused it again. "That part is from an ancient Terran poem. I advise you to look it up." She restarted the video.

"It was then I heard it. An argument," he said. "Two men arguing with a woman. The woman's voice was cruel, mocking. One man was full of rage, Sam, I think his name was. The other was Harry. The woman called them insulting names, they had a name for her, but I will not repeat it," he looked back down. "They were arguing over the fact that the woman had pulled me from the end of the queue, before I could be processed, and subjected me to torture. That Sam had deliberately forbade torture."

"The woman laughed, called Sam a jumped up disk defragger, told him to go check something called 'his fat thirty two' for dicks or something," Nimbly said. "The memory vanished, and I was on my knees, naked, in front of the massive demon I had seen stalking the landscape, driving tormented souls before her with a fiery whip to the next section."

Nimbly shuddered.

"The demon, it looks male, but you know, you figure out how to tell what someone is inside, she reached down and touched the top of my head and told me to tell them my name," Nimbly looked up. "I started yelling it."

"The Ordnance Man," Watcher guessed.

Nimbly nodded. "Yes," he looked back down. "The two men left in a huff. She looked at me and smiled, told me that I was ready to move on," he looked back up. "She stepped out of the demon's body. Naked, looking like one of the Confederate Intelligence Agents, only heavier," he flushed slightly. "More endowed, if you know what I mean."

Peeks nodded, making notes. "From age, over-indulgence, genetics?"

Nimbly raised an eyebrow. "Um, age, I think. Maturity would be a better word," he admitted.

"Can you describe her better?" Watcher asked.

"Um, five foot even, wide hips. Child bearing hips I've heard them called. Thick thighs. Large breasts. Slightly rounded stomach that looks firm," Nimbly said.

"Buttocks?" Peeks asked without looking up from her datapad.

"Yes?" Nimbly said.

"Describe them. Describe all of her. Every detail, right down to how many bumps on her aerole and how many pubic hairs you know she has," Watcher demanded.

NoDra'ak listened closely to the description. He wasn't military intelligence, but knew how to handle data. He knew details that were extremely intimate, that he shouldn't know just from a single observation, and some of them were extremely detailed and precise.

"Then what happened?" Peeks asked.

"She led to me a forest. I remember seeing rings of smoke in the trees. We eventually got a brook. There was a tree there with a songbird that sings," he said. He looked up. "There was a staircase made of crystal and gold, covered with jagged pieces of obsidian that she told me was my sins."

"How long did you travel together?" Watcher asked.

"How long is a heartbeat? How long is the life of a star?" Nimbly laughed. "I don't know. Forever, but no time at all."

"Were you sexually intimate with her?" Watcher asked bluntly.

Nimbly nodded. "Yes. I craved human contact."

"Was it degrading or humiliating?" Peeks asked.

He sighed, looking down. "It was like all of the amazing pieces of all of my sexual encounters prior, all wrapped up together with something I can't describe."

"Can you try to describe it?" Peeks asked.

Nimbly shook his head. "I don't know. Wholly human? How you've known it's always supposed to be but never quite was? Inhumanly perfect but humanly flawed?" he sighed. "Can we change the subject?"

Peeks nodded. "What happened next?"

Nimbly tapped his fingers on the table. "I climbed the staircase. Every step was agony. Every step I remembered things I had done wrong, harm I had done to others. I had already relived those memories, over and over, so I was able to keep going. Eventually I reached the top and found myself back in the hospital, laying on the bed."

He shook his head. "The Pubvian nurse came in and told me that I looked better. She gave me tests, there were other doctors there. They checked out my brain, told me that the damage from the radiation had been healed."

He tapped his hand on the table. "They released me into a park," he looked up. "It was full of people. All chatty, all patiently waiting for their turn to be processed. I met thousands of people, heard their stories," he looked back down. "I played with ducklings and hatchlings and squirmlings and babies. I listened to Pubvians tell me about their lives, Treana'ad telling me about how the P'Thok Liberation was changing so much, to Rigellians talking about how the sea was clean again."

He looked back up. "Eventually, I found myself on a windy beach. It goes on forever, you can walk as far as you want till you're alone with the storm. I built myself a little shelter, a fire. The cooler always had beer, hot dogs, and cans of beans in it," he looked back down.

"How long were you there?" Peeks asked.

"Forever. I was content. At peace. As far as an afterlife went, it was bliss," Nimbly said. "Just me, the wind, the rain, the waves."

"What happened?" Watcher asked.

"She came. She talked to me, spent time with me. Told me that she had a job for Mommy's special boy," Nimbly said.

Exquisite paused the recording.

"Maternal imprinting can be an extremely strong motivator in Terran Descent Humans," Exquisite said. "What this entity, this 'Detainee', did to him was extremely effective psychological imprinting."

She restarted the video.

"She showed me a cave. You had to dive under the water to get to it. At the back was a long tunnel. She told me that if I wanted to go back, if I was strong enough, I could fight my way out," Nimbly said. "She warned though, told me what I couldn't do, or I'd fail."

There was silence for a long moment.

"What was that?" Peeks asked.

"I could not look backwards. I could not talk to anyone. I needed to follow the sound of the song that I could hear faintly echoing in the caves. I had to keep looking forward, keep following the song, and I'd make my way out," Nimbly said. He shook his head. "I can't describe the journey. We'd be here for years."

"And it worked," Peeks said. Not a question, but a simple statement of fact.

"Yes," Nimbly said. He looked up, a crazed grin on his face. "Fight, fight, as hard as you can, you can't kill me, I'm the Ordnance Man."

The video froze and the words "INTERROGATION TERMINATED" appeared. Lights immediately began to blink and appendages were raised.

"Wait," Exquisite said. "There is still a small part to show," she said. She paused the video. "As you know, all interrogation cells are constantly video monitored for security reasons. The following snippet was taken less than an hour after Staff Sergeant Nimbly was returned to his room."

She unpaused the video. "Pay close attention, ladies and gentlemen, both and neither."

The room was empty, barren. As NoDra'ak watched, the shadows deepened and the lights flickered. Soon the only light was on the table, the rest of the white room shadowed in darkness.

A simple flint and steel lighter sparked, the cotton wick soaked in fluid catching with a blue and yellow flame. It illuminated a woman's face dimly, showing her mouth, her cheeks.

And her gun-metal grey eyes.

She snapped the lighter shut and took a drag, the red of the cherry illuminating her face.

"Close your eyes with dread for he on honey-dew hath fed," the woman said.

She closed her eyes and was lost from view. The shadows drained away. For a split second a monstrous figure could be seen. All heavy corded muscle and sinew, wide leathery wings, a heavy bestial face with tusks and horns. The skin the color of brimstone and hardened lava flows.

Then it was gone.

Exquisite stopped the video and put up a new slide that was just the MedCom wallpaper.

"First, the Digital Omnimessiah," Exquisite said.

She motioned at the screen.

"Now, the Detainee."