Origins (34 page)

Hastelloy sat next
to the dying fire at the exile’s riverside camp.  He looked to the east and was disappointed to detect the first hint of daylight peaking over the horizon.  Hastelloy looked over at Gallono, who was also still awake at the early morning hour.  Apparently the anticipation of battle and revenge didn’t allow his mind to rest either.  Both men shared a concerned look as daybreak was only an hour or two away.  Their golden opportunity to attack the village was in danger of passing them by.

Disheartened, Hastelloy lay back on the ground and tried to let his mind relax.  The stones around the dying fire warmed half his body while the other half had long ago gone numb from the cold night air.  The feeling was not particularly pleasant so he mentally moved on.  The waves beating against the shore were a more welcoming distraction so he allowed his mind to focus on their rhythmic sound.

Every couple of seconds he noticed a harsh smacking noise coming from down river.  Hastelloy quickly determined the sound was moving closer and at a high rate of speed.  Accompanying the wet crashing sound was a high-pitched whine.  The pieces clicked together in Hastelloy’s mind and he instantly sprung to his feet.

Gallono did likewise when he saw the sudden motion from his captain.  The commander took an aggressive posture as if he was expecting a surprise assault from the water.  “Relax Gallono, its friends.  The boat has finally arrived.  Go ahead and wake the volunteers who are going to be part of the assault and bring them over here.”

Hastelloy walked toward the water’s edge and arrived just in time to see the metal hull of Tomal’s hastily designed and constructed boat on final approach.  Abruptly, the boat bottomed out on the shore, and the engine shut down.

“Tell me you’re packing some serious heat?” Hastelloy asked.

“And how,” Valnor responded as he tossed a heavy backpack over the side and proceeded to follow the baggage with his own body onto the beach.  “It’ll be nice to work with proper tools and weaponry for a change.”

“What about clothing, were you able to replicate enough garments to go around?” Hastelloy asked.

“We got those too,” Tonwen responded as he threw pile after pile of one-piece linens and tie strings off the boat.  “The men can tear them in half to make skirts while the women can cut a hole in the middle for their head and wear it like a dress.”

“It’s not going to win any fashion awards, but they’ll do,” Hastelloy commended.

Valnor picked up the backpack of weapons and unzipped the front panel to show his wares.  “As requested, four disruptor rifles and a few dozen stun grenades.”

“Excellent,” Hastelloy beamed.  He heard Gallono approaching from behind with the two men who volunteered to help with the assault.

“Gallono, you have ten minutes to show these brave men the do’s and don’ts of stun grenade use,” Hastelloy ordered.

**********

While the sun cast its first light of the morning across the village, six men descended from a hilltop and proceeded to fan out across the compound.  The men spread out, one covering the front door of each structure that surrounded the central courtyard. 

Hastelloy and his three crewmen waited outside their respective buildings with a stun grenade in their left hand and a disruptor rifle in their right.  The two volunteers held a stun grenade in each hand and two more tied around their waist.

Hastelloy glanced around one last time to make sure everyone was in his designated position.  Satisfied, he pulled the pin out of the grenade with his teeth and threw it in the front door.  Quickly he ducked back around the corner, mashed his eyelids shut and buried his index fingers into his ears.

Even though he was outside the room and taking precautions to protect his body, Hastelloy still felt dizzy when the grenade detonated and he stood up to enter the building.  The way the device worked to disable its targets was quite simple.   A flash of light momentarily activated all light sensitive cells in the eyes, making vision impossible.  At the same time an incredibly loud blast produced by the grenade disturbed the fluid in the brain.  No neurological signals could be sent to the body for approximately thirty seconds.  That was more than enough time for a trained Novi soldier to enter a room and dispatch every person inside using his disruptor rifle.

When Hastelloy entered his building he mentally began a countdown from thirty and allowed his close quarters combat training to kick in.  He quickly walked down the middle of two rows of occupied bedrolls.  Some beds were empty while others had one, two, or even three occupants.  The body count was unimportant.  As he walked down the isle and alternated shooting left to right, methodically killing every individual unfortunate enough to be in the building.

With the room cleared, Hastelloy ran back to the front door and was about to go outside when the subliminal countdown in his head hit zero.  He jumped out of the doorway and shut his eyes and covered his ears once more. 

After two loud thumps were heard, Hastelloy got back to his feet and sprinted over to a building one of the volunteers was attacking.  The man didn’t have a rifle so he simply tossed stun grenades into the building on thirty second intervals until one of the armed attackers could do his duty.

The second volley into the room gave Hastelloy and Valnor enough time to enter the structure and eliminate the occupants.  With his portion of the assault now complete, Hastelloy ran back outside to check on Gallono and Tonwen’s progress.

Hastelloy waited no more than half a second until he saw Gallono step out of his secondary target building.  The two exchanged looks and Gallono hung his head and mouthed a curse. 

Hastelloy let out a laugh.  “You’re getting slow old man.”

“Anum was in my first building and he had a lot of company with him.  I probably had to fire twice as many shots as you,” Gallono replied.  Then he handed his rifle to Tonwen and walked back to his primary target building.  While on his way, a barbaric growl resonated from inside the structure. 

Hastelloy and the others jumped back in surprise, but Gallono continued his trek uninterrupted.  He was halfway across the courtyard when the massive seven foot figure of Anum stomped out of the building’s front door.

“Damn it, Gallono, couldn’t you at least once take the easy and safe approach?” Hastelloy admonished.

“My honor needs to be satisfied and that isn’t accomplished by killing that animal in his sleep.  I want the bastard to know who did this to him,” Gallono responded while never taking his eyes off the giant man he intended to fight.

If Anum was suffering any ill effects from the stun grenade or the sudden realization that his entire slave hunting party was now dead, it didn’t show.  The massive beast of a man walked right into hand to hand combat with Gallono.

While the two combatants squared off, Hastelloy pointed his disruptor into the air and fired three blasts to signal Mosa it was safe for the exiles to move into the village.  Hastelloy returned his attention to the duel and saw the two men wer
e still busy testing each other’s agility and speed.

Anum was an exceptionally strong individual, there was no mistaking that fact.  The strength came at a price, however.  The man had a terrible case of the slows and Gallono seized upon the weakness immediately.

Anum jabbed with his left and then tried to land a knockout blow with his right.  Gallono easily sidestepped the powerful stroke and landed a furious barrage of kidney punches as he moved around to Anum’s backside.

The giant man tried to retaliate with a no look backhanded swing, but Gallono anticipated the move.  He caught Anum’s arm mid swing, tucked it under his armpit and continued the spin as he dug his hip underneath Anum’s legs to send the man’s huge frame twirling through the air and crashing to the ground in a heap.

Gallono wasted no time moving in to finish the battle.  He wrapped his arm around Anum’s neck and interlocked it with his other arm to apply an ungodly amount of pressure to the neck and carotid artery.

Anum flailed about in vain with his arms, but the writhing soon faded to the occasional twitch.  Just before Anum lost consciousness he looked back at Gallono as best he could.  At the last second, the look of fury in his eyes gave way to surprise and recognition.  He knew who killed him.  Then the lights went out.  Gallono held the hold for another couple of minutes for good measure and then calmly stood up and dusted himself off.

Gallono looked past Hastelloy to someone coming from behind.  Hastelloy instinctively twirled around and leveled his disruptor at the individual.  He immediately relaxed his trigger finger when he saw Mosa standing before him.

She paid no attention to the deadly weapon pointed at her and glided right up to Hastelloy and laid her hands on the disruptor.  “Is this doing it the old-fashioned way?”

“It is where I come from,” Hastelloy said with a sheepish grin.

“Someday you’ll need to tell me where that is exactly,” Mosa responded.  “For now, let’s get settled in.”

Dr. Holmes sat
quietly in his chair, utterly stunned by what he just heard his patient describe.  The casual violence of the events was jarring.  The cold-blooded murder of dozens of people in their sleep, and the patient told it in an almost jovial fashion: racing his friend to see who could kill the most, cracking jokes in-between, and choking the life out of a man.  It was all very disturbing.

The story the patient was telling took an alarming turn, which could either be incredibly good or bad for him.  It might be good in that the patient’s anger was bubbling to the surface.  Dr. Holmes surmised that a traumatic event happened, most likely the loss or murder of his family, which forced his mind to protect itself by creating the delusion.  If Hastelloy truly suffered from a dissociative state, then the rage over the wrongs done to him needed to be let out.  The patient needed to face the emotional loss head on, not through the protective lens of his delusion.  Venting that anger through a violent story was actually a very health
y way to do it, certainly much preferable to carrying out the violent acts in real life.

The sudden change in tone of the story could also be extremely bad for the patient, and this made Dr. Holmes sit on the edge of his seat with concern.  In the beginning, the patient was telling a glaringly false tale.  Space battles, thirty thousand year long interstellar wars, a machine that grants immortality, and crash landings on the planet at near light speeds.  It was all so ridiculous nobody could possibly believe it, not even the storyteller himself.  His subconscious wanted to be proven wrong.  

Soon the story moved to the real world, granted five thousand years in the past, but still involving humans, earth, and very few ray guns.  The Alpha characters were presented as strange aliens, but they really fit the mold of monsters.  They were giant and evil; the perfect focal point for his mind’s anger.  There had been violence in the story, but till now it had all been in self-defense or the defense of others.  Now the delusion was back to using futuristic tools and weapons.  The violence was now cold and cruel.  Worse yet, it was against human beings, not monsters.  The true nature of the violent images the patient was describing needed to be tested.

Jeffrey realized he had remained silent for entirely too long.  The patient took a break from his story telling and waited patiently for his doctor to prompt further discussion.  Slowly, Dr. Holmes raised his head and redirected his stare from his note pad to Hastelloy’s eyes.

He looked upon his patient with utter disdain. 

“Please excuse my silence, I needed to collect myself,” Dr. Holmes said.

“Collect yourself from what?” the patient genuinely asked.

  “You murdered an entire village full of people while they slept peacefully in their beds.  Why wouldn’t that shock me?”

“It’s the safest way isn’t it?” Hastelloy responded with a flat, matter of fact, voice.

“It sounds to me like you’re now commanding a pack of thieving, murdering thugs.  The only difference is instead of commanding four thugs you’ve swelled your ranks to several hundred.”

“If my goal was to raise an army to take over villages I simply would have opened up the Nexus.  That way I’d command a few million disciplined soldiers, not a pack of untrained primitives.  I took great lengths to avoid interfering with this planet’s cultural development,” Hastelloy insisted.

“We had hundreds of men, women and children to care for.  We were expelled from the city to die in the desert.  Do you have any idea what that’s like?” Hastelloy asked.  “There’s scorching heat during the day and near freezing temperatures at night.  We were out there buck naked; no clothing to retain our sweat to cool us down.  No clothing to trap our warmth at night.  And above all, we had no food except the locust bodies littering the ground, and even that was vanishing quickly.

“Bottom line, it was us or them.  It’s that simple,” Hastelloy defended.  “And remember, this was not a village full of innocent people who peacefully kept to themselves to raise crops.  They were slave traders.  These were thieves who stole other human beings; ripped people away from their families to enrich themselves.  Why would I feel the least bit guilty putting an end to their tyranny under any circumstance, let alone securing food and shelter for the exiles?”

“What about the women in the village?” Jeffrey asked.   “They were most likely slaves themselves.  What did they do to deserve getting stunned and forced to watch a complete stranger walk into the room, point a gun at them, and pull the trigger?”

“The stun grenade causes blindness, so they saw nothing.  In fact, they were probably asleep for the entire ordeal.”

“You’re sidestepping the point,” Dr. Holmes continued.  “You profess to be so noble and yet you killed innocent people for your own personal gain.  What gives you the right to decide who lives or dies?”

“Might makes right.  In a battle for survival you’re either with me or in my way and therefore against me.  There is no middle ground,” Hastelloy stated firmly.

“Given that logic, I must say that I agree with the Alpha and their justification for attacking the Novi,” Jeffrey declared.

“Why is that,” the patient asked.

Dr. Holmes slid forward in his seat and leaned in to emphasize his point.  “Back in ancient Egypt you had the power to conquer anything you wanted, but you were noble an
d refrained from abusing that power.  However, when the going got tough - might made right.  Those villagers had what you needed to survive so you took it because you could.  If you think about it, that village’s survival depended on your noble conscience and nothing more.

“Now transfer that line of thinking to the Alpha’s situation.  They were a relatively backwater people compared to the Novi.  They could exist as long as they didn’t have something the Novi needed.  It’s not reasonable to expect people to live with that kind of uncertainty if you ask me.  ”

“I didn’t ask you,” Hastelloy snapped, taking great offense to the statement. 

Jeffrey mentally made a mark in his win column for debates he’d engaged in with the patient so far.  Dr. Holmes decided to try for another win by pointing out a glaring flaw in the most recent part of Hastelloy’s story; the barriers were starting to fall.

“Let me ask you a question about an abruptly different topic.” Dr. Holmes said. “Using stun grenades, disruptor rifles, and the speed boat in front of the exiled group goes against your prior philosophy of not interfering with the local culture.  Why is Tonwen not jumping up and down to argue this fact with you?”

Dr. Holmes stopped and stared at the patient while waiting for an answer.  Several silent seconds passed while the urge to press his point grew to a fevered pitch.  Jeffrey fought the impulse as long as he could.  He wanted to stare Hastelloy down and force a reply.  The problem was Dr. Holmes already knew the patient well enough to recognize the man’s exceedingly strong will.  He probably had the capability to sit silent and stare Jeffrey down for days or even weeks.  Jeffrey stole a glance at his watch, which didn’t go unnoticed by Hastelloy as a subtle grin crept across his lips.  Since time was short and the staring contest
was already lost, Jeffrey chose to press his accusation further.

“You’re tainting the culture by revealing the use of your technology to them.  Why is this all of a sudden not a concern?  After all, you just spent over a year as slaves working on the pyramid to avoid cultural contamination.”

“The word contamination implies the undesirable disturbance was allowed to spread,” Hastelloy said so coolly it made Jeffrey want to put on a scarf.  “For a man who earlier stated his familiarity with the book of Exodus and the story of Moses, you certainly ask silly questions.”

Dr. Holmes felt a sickening knot suddenly grip his stomach.  He sensed more violence and killing of helpless people ahead in the patient’s story, and he didn’t look forward to hearing about it.

“I’m sure that little issue gets resolved for your greater good,” Jeffrey sighed.

“Indeed.”

“Well, obviously I’m not as familiar with the exodus story as I should.  You say you were the original author of the tale, would you care to tell me how it ends so I may expand my knowledge on the subject?”

“With pleasure,” the patient
replied.