Degistani Delinquents, Part 3 - The Pits
27 Sep 2017Monolith Preacher
OOC - this is an ongoing story being written from two sides between myself and Stryker Aune. Be sure to check out his side of the story soon!I awoke to a splash across my face. I would have preferred anything else to what it was. It wasn't water. It wasn't even wet. It was sand. I hate sand. I breathed the air in deep. It was dry, and sand particles entered my lungs. My mouth was dry, and tasted of sand. Wherever I was, it had atmosphere, but it didn't have moisture. I surmised I had to be underground. I couldn't see, because I had been blindfolded by some kind of tattered rag. They can't have washed or shaken it in a while, because as I tried to blink instinctively I got sand in my eyes. I heard a voice which sounded as hoarse as my own throat. It must've been a local, as I had been out cold for a while now. I could tell because my larynx felt like it was made of sandpaper rubbing against glasspaper. Badly formed glasspaper which still had sand particles floating around.
“You picked the wrong time to talk to the Fredegi, my friend.” he intoned with a rasp. I coughed and spluttered, before swallowing what little moisture I could retain. I wasn't going to dehydrate any more than I already had.
“I'm not....” I coughed again as my throat struggled to work against the oppressive dryness in the air.
“I'm not your friend, buddy.” I croaked.
I heard a clanging of metal and a thud against the floor.
“That's good” said my captor “because I'm not your buddy, Jaquel.”
If he expected a reaction, I didn't give him one. My name was easily findable on the Galnet archives for the MPEF. Sure we were all called “Monolith Preacher” on the database with a number after our names, but my face was rather distinctive.
“And what is the name of my captor, seeing as you want to address each other as men?”
A guttural laugh bounced around the cavernous interior I was held within. From the amount of echoes it must have extended quite a way vertically, but barely had any horizontal space. I concluded I was either in some form of oubliette or I was in a gibbet tower. Maybe both, but I wasn't sure what level of architecture was possible within the sandy rocks of Degastani planets.
“You could not address me as a man if you were to talk until your imminent death, preacher man. My name is Bilal bint Khaled al-Tariq. I am worth two hundred gallons of water, and my womb has birthed seven sons.”
I could have laughed, but that would have implied camaraderie.
“I asked for your name, not your life story. Tell me what you plan to do with me or just get on with it already so we can be done here.”
A ringing sound pierced my ears as Bilal sheathed whichever metal implement she had been toying with right next to my ear.
“You do not care for our lives, Jaquel, only our souls and our labour. You may not have asked for my life story, but I know yours.”
Her voice was positively dripping venom. I tried to think if I had turned any of her sons to the glory of the Monolith in my time to irk her, but considering I was close to the two million mark by now it was becoming extremely hard to keep track of such out-of-the way areas such as this.
“Your story, preacher, is one of a series of failures. We Fredegi came from nothing and are now covertly operating within and without these boundaries. You started with everything and have ended up suspended here shackled above a pit below another pit.”
I was tempted to hold my tongue to let her spill more secrets, but I had to bite at such a ludicrous claim.
“You must've found the wrong Jaquel in your databases, Fredegi. I too had to take what I have earned. Life in Gcirthi was harsh and brutal. I would be dead already if I hadn't risen to the top through my own guile.”
Again, a guttural laugh spewed forth from Bilal, who had moved close enough to me that I could smell the fact she had eaten salted fish for dinner. This told me there must be supply lines into wherever I was being held from the nearby Inheritance station. Perhaps they had been involved in the creation of it, considering its name.
My musings were cut short by a hit across my face which broke my cheekbone. Not an easy thing, breaking a cheekbone with one solid hit. Especially without breaking the skull open or rendering the subject unconscious. I had to give it to her, she had demonstrated her technique for physical torture quite admirably in that single stroke. But only in my head. And besides, I'd engaged in enough physical torture myself to know all the old tricks and how to inure myself against them. I took a deep breath and focused on a different part of my body to lessen the pain.
“How dare you compare your upbringing with my own? I saw my father die slowly from spice poisoning over two years when I was still learning to walk. Your father was a mountain poet from Eszaraxe who sold his stoned musings to Achenarian nobles to slime his way into high society. Your mother was a slave trader who kept her eggs on ice so she could pleasure herself with her subjects. They bought their way to a backwater when their lifestyles exceeded their finances and they had to go to an anarchy system to be able to get away with their increasing decadence.”
Her breath was so overpowering I was finding it hard to follow her train of thought, but she kept on talking. I was surprised she knew the old names for systems, as they hadn't been used in Galnet for a few centuries. I only knew some of them from the MPEF database and my father's teachings. The Fredegi must have had a strong oral tradition.
“You had the option to sit around and play flight simulators as a teenager whilst taking drugs with your friends. I was raising my first child when I was fifteen because the invaders had traditions we were unable to stop infringing upon our arranged marriages. You had your first ship bought for you by your parents as a coming of age gift. I have never left this mountain to this day due to our suits being stolen from our invader's military, who are exclusively male.”
I knew this last fact was a lie. I had wooed a female marine on my first drinking session planetside when I got here. Maybe they'd just not been as successful in their head-on fighting as they were with their insidious methods of infiltrating the power structures. Or possibly the men were keeping their female captives a secret.
My silence was being read as submission, and my captor warmed to her subject matter. Her breath now threatened to melt my bonds off, but instead it merely moistened my wrists and made the manacles cut in further. I allowed my shoulders to sump in order to reduce the strain and let her think I was flailing. My body was tired as I had been hanging like a pig for what I assumed must have been the better part of a week, but my mind stayed resolute.
“What's worse is your transgressions against your faith. You were brainwashed by some random preacher when you got bored and left home, and now you act like some scion from the heavens. Well let me tell you something about the MPEF. We have been poisoned by the drugs your little group of miscreants have brought to our systems. We have been crossbred with your slaves in an attempt to crush our traditions. We have survived due to our strength of faith. Your faith espouses drugs reformation programs, and yet you have gone so far as to get permits to systems just for the sake of gaining access to exclusive drugs to sell on black markets as far away as Colonia. Your faith espouses chastity and pacifism to all who harbour you no ill, and yet we have heard your slaves tell stories of you multitude of perversions enacted on their flesh. My people have made pilgrimages to other systems without the use of a Frame Shift Drive, and you have yet to complete your allotted pilgrimage.”
This was the point at which I was expected to break. No-one outside of the MPEF knew of my pilgrimage, which meant one of two things: either we had a mole in our ranks, or we had a defector. I was meant to think the former, but I knew that was impossible. I had re-engineered the MPEF brainwashing systems a few times myself using more effective subliminal messages which had been given to our wet-techs to disseminate to our machines in a few updates over the past decade or so. If we had a mole, they would have been taken back into the fold by now as a Reborn. One of the people in the Fredegi hierarchy was an ex-MPEF member. They must have left within the last few years if they had knowledge of my planned pilgrimage. This was getting serious, I had to shut this down and get on with the more important task of finding this traitor.
I started laughing. Quietly. Most people would have crescendoed as time goes on, but that reeks of effort. I just laughed slowly. After roughly a minute and a half, she started asking me what was funny. After three minutes or so, she started beating me with her fists. By the ten minute mark I was a bloody pulp, and my hands had been broken. This was my chance.
“Congratulations, wench. You're the lack-dog to a very special person. One of your heretic superiors has had the fortune to become ordained in the most important faith in the galaxy, and has spoonfed you things that no living person is aware of outside of our blessed order. If you are lucky, and from the sounds of your resolve you may well be lucky, she will have moulded your indigenous faith-”
Bilal cut me off at this point, as I knew she would. She had moved back just a little, as I could tell from the slightly less strong fish smell, and her proud tone betrayed a hint of betrayal.
“You assume the gender of my Bashar? Your pride truly is unwarranted to think yourself so great-”
I returned the favour, raising my voice and blasting the sand in my teeth out of my mouth in righteous fury. If I had any care left in me, I would have worried what my breath smelt like by now.
“My pride is faith. I am nothing, the Monolith is everything. There are ways in which we work which are specific to our talents. To this day there have only been three people able to convert entire planets. You are not me, and you are certainly not my master. I do not recognise your voice, so you must take me to your superior.”
I began to chuckle once more.
She grabbed me by the throat and headbutted me so hard it broke my nose. This was when my laughing got louder. As my nose bled into my mouth I began gargling it out over my chin as I laughed. I could only assume I was staining Bilal's clothing as she began kicking me in the ribs in an attempt to at least disrupt my rhythm.
“My superior? You do not have the right!” She yelled in monosyllables after the first question in order to space her admonishments between her toe punts.
“What makes you so sure of your self? You are not a prophet!”
Her last word was a prelude to a wind up kick meant to break my ribs. I let it hit me without bracing for impact. As my chest caved inwards I felt the relief in my lung as it was punctured. Water and blood flowing into my alveoli was at least some type of moisture in my vicinity.
She drew back for a killing blow. She was smart. I had to give her that. Even seasoned torturers would stop at a lung puncture, either from fearing the repercussions from superiors to not getting information before a kill or to stop and appreciate the slow death of their detainee for their sadistic tendencies. Then again, she did seem quite riled up, so maybe she had made the novitiate's mistake we must all look out for: emotion.
Either way, I saw may chance and I took it. I slipped my broken hands through my manacles and dropped to the ground. I was correct in my assumption that the clanging earlier was from her hitting a metal grille with her rusty implement. My captor's kick missed and sent her spinning off-balance. I pushed my blindfold off with my wrist and opened my eyes to a slit as I rolled to the side. She regained her balance but was at an awkward angle when her foot touched ground again. I had opened my eyes to slits as so to gauge the lighting whilst looking towards her. I saw enough of her body to enable myself to scissor-kick her to the ground.
It was at this point that time was of the essence. I had to get myself into a position where I could take a moment to fix my ribs and force an answer out of her. Instead of relying on my force to keep her down, I grabbed her keys with my teeth as I rolled so my knee was on her face to distract her. I dragged the manacles down with my stumps and gave her a quick knee to daze her as I used the key in my teeth to open them. It was then a simple case of jabbing her with my lacerated stumps of fingers to keep her from working out what was going on until I put her left hand in one of the manacles and closed it.
At this point most people would try and put the second in for good measure, but that would be folly. I rolled back to the wall of the room, which I now realised was circular. I would have taken a moment to catch my breath, but that might have facilitated my death, so instead I bit my tooth. This released some nanomachines which immediately began to swarm into my chest area and carefully repairing damage. I was lucky I spat out as much sand as I could earlier, as it may have saved my life. I hate sand. It's rough, it's coarse, and it gets everywhere. When working with nanomachines, it can severely delay their startup times if it is too close to their area of deployment. This has made me learn how to spit in some rather inventive ways.
As I stood gasping and spluttering, my new captive was swinging around like a whip and top. I decided to survey the immediate locale to get an idea of how to best use the next day or two. It appeared I was in a long stalagmite around twenty feet in diameter. There was a door out to the right which I could open with one of the keys on the ring. More interestingly, there was a miniature halberd on the floor in a makeshift sheath and a few rusty items on a table to the left of me. Over the next twelve, twenty, maybe even fifty hours, I would find out what I needed from my captor turned captive, but first I had to set the record straight.
“You think you know religion, because you have inherited a bastardised tradition we have been shaping for the past century, but my family was born with the MPEF. Moulded by it. I didn't know there was any other religion until I was already a man. I was not brainwashed in a machine by some random preacher, I was taught from birth by the master himself.”
A flash of hatred and the slightest tinge of fear entered Bilal's eyes. This was as much news to her as it would have been to any preacher within the MPEF. The master only ever trains two preachers at a time, and one of them will succeed him when they have completed a pilgrimage and certain other tasks which would be made known to them in stages. I had done some things well, but further tests remained to be revealed to me. My eyes grew wild with anticipation, dehydration, and probably traces of fesh being injected into my varied leakings by the nanomachines.
“My family traces its lineage back to the First Space Preacher, and the flight from high society you mentioned was in order to raise me in an environment which would teach me the ways I would need to not only persevere in the harshest regions of space, but to thrive and enjoy the methods necessary to do so. I could handle a knife before I could handle a fork, and throw them before I learnt to catch a ball.”
Her disgust was rising now, I could tell. She began clawing at the manacle with her free hand and shouting gruff noises in my direction interspersed with local curses some of which I knew and some I noted to research later.
“As far as your mentioning of drugs is concerned, the poison of the weak may be the elixir of the wise. A true master can wrestle with the largest beasts and submit them to his dominion. I have scoured the bubble searching for the most potent elixirs known to man, and if the Thargoids or any other alien species out there have things which can elucidate me further through chemical means then I shall surely master them too.”
Her wailing rose to a frantic ululation, and I picked up her miniature halberd with one hand. Its sheath fell clumsily off as I did so, and I started swinging it aimlessly around near her hands. The nanomachines had finished working on my lungs, and I knew they had given me enough grip to swing it, if not use it efficiently as of yet.
“My slaves may have their flesh sold to the highest bidder or strung up by the Archon, but I have saved more souls than some armies in their passing. I am not playing a quick game of soccer here, al-Tariq, but rather a long game of chess. This is the reason you have little value to me beyond your telling me the name and location of your Bashar. I know her real name, but she would not be so stupid as to use that considering the depth of her heresy. You will tell me, whether by my word or action I shall make you.”
I dropped the halberd to the floor and rubbed my cheekbone. The flesh had not yet been rebuild, but the bone had been reset at least. I wasn't sure if she had heard much of my tirade, but I didn't care. I had enough time to repeat the important parts. She had slowly subsided to a gentle sob as I finished my promise to her, but I thought it best to emphasise the point.
“I do not plan to hurt you if I do not need to, as I am somewhat tired from being strung up for so long. Rather, I shall talk to you. You will stay awake and answer my questions or else your punishments shall grow more severe as time goes on. I am not a vengeful man, and I do not care to redress you for your acts of torture. You were doing your job, but you became emotionally invested in your work, which is something people in our shared profession here must not do.”
I walked over to the table of implements.
“I used to have a set of implements like this back home at Gcirthi. A wretch of a man called Springheel Jake showed me how to use each one by demonstrating on various parts of my anatomy. I was only seven at the time but I understood implicitly how useful they could be through the pain he used to teach me so. “
I walked over to her and stabbed her through the hand as she tried to punch me away.
“Do you want to know how I lost the sight in my right eye?”
Her whimpering had stopped, her chin rose defiant and her tone did not falter as she spoke.
“I will not listen to you nor tell you anything. I have been trained also, and damn your depth perception.”
I removed the blade from her hand and stepped back.
“Out of professional courtesy, I will put that to the test.”
I turned around and put the knife back on the table.
“The first segment of our process will be an interview. I will learn as much about you in person as you have from my files. If this takes longer than a day, you will have proven yourself resistant enough to have gained some modicum of respect form me in your training. You will not last to the second night of this interview without telling me what I wish to know, regardless as to your training. As a fellow butcher, you will understand this.”
She sounded proud as she retorted.
“I am pleased you understood my specification, but I doubt you will know how to use them as well as I have regardless as to your length of training. I am something of a natural with my knives.”
I did not turn towards her, but rather breathed in deeply, savouring the nanomachines' ability to finally get some moisture in this damned atmosphere.
“I have heard that from a few people, darling, but none of them have been up to scratch.”
I wondered if Ouberos' ears were burning right now and for a moment I wished to be back in Tjakiri drinking and enjoying a bit of stability. Still, work preceded pleasure.
“Normally I work to save souls for the Monolith, but you've had your chance. You will be my own, and I will make sure you take my name wherever you go when we are done.”