The darkness is absolute on the other side of the portal, and the disorientation far worse for it. You don't realize you've collapsed onto the ground until you hear your teammates' own armored knees and hands impacting the warm, firm floor that gives just enough to prevent injury.

There's no light, not even from the HUDs of those who still have helmets. The Turai suits' atmo feeds have stopped. The team's voxes are lifeless. Even the tac lights on the SCARs are unresponsive.

Davis manages to cradle the ansible during his trip to the floor, but even that has this background muddle, like it's being jammed.

The portal seems to have deactivated as well - if it were active there should be the light from the throne room and the incoming beamer fire to worry about.

Davis strips his helmet off so he can hear better and taste and smell the air around him, and removes a gauntlet so he can feel the ground under his feet. If he can't use his eyes to figure out what's going on, he's gonna try to use his other four senses. "Can anyone else see what's going on?"

Carefully lowering Jonno, Luis pulls his helmet off too. Without air or power, it's just dead weight and vision impairment. Besides, if there's no breathable atmo, he'd rather make it quick than suffocate slowly in a dead suit. "Nope, not a clue here." If he's not dead of suffocation in a few breathes, he starts stripping his own gloves. However, he doesn't spread out yet--he's got to make sure the team's all there. "Arketta, Nagwai? Angel? Swims? Everyone okay?"

"Alive, yes. Did we forget to pay the electric bill?"

Luis' heart's pounding, partly from the battle he just left, partly from the fear of possible suicide. He takes a breath and tastes dry, semi-stagnant air with a hint of decay. It conjures images of Egyptian tombs, all the more vivid for the complete darkness.

Angel confirms he's okay, and somewhere close behind Luis, which makes sense given the order they passed through the portal. Swims grunts somewhere off to Luis' left, the lack of light leaving the Whiirr with all but the most basic communication.

"I'm over here," Arketta says, absentmindedly clicking at various inert gadgets.

"Didn't anyone bring a light that doesn't require a charge?" Ngawai asks.

Luis and Angel both realize they've got a handful of chem lights. A few snaps and the space the team has stumbled into resolves into a ghostly green-lit chamber, perhaps 20 feet across in a smoothly rounded rectangle with 12 foot ceilings. There is a gently raised "donut" where the Black Gate must have opened, but there are no glyphs on this side of the portal. There are smooth oblong protuberances that seem like they would provide light or some sort of emitted radiation, but they too are as silent as the team's electronics.

The chamber narrows into another room or corridor just past this Gateroom. Two things draw your attention, however. The first is Davis; the agent is still lying on his side, one glove off, with the ansible held tightly to his body, like a football player. He doesn't react to the chem lights or the second thing that grabs the team's attention.

The second thing, and it is this that might account for the slight smell of death, is the stack of meticulously-arranged human bones. Perhaps two dozen skulls are stacked in a cube, with rows of ribs, femurs, and the like nearby. It's as if some Wendigo with OCD and a bottle of Chlorox was in here.

Elsewhere?

Davis' ungloved hand finds a rough concrete floor, seasoned here and there with tracked-in gravel and dirt. Dim tungsten light begins to gleam through the darkness as the cloud of thick, dry, dust settles from the ceiling. The construction reveals the building as Afghan; a quick glance down shows fatigue pants and an UnderArmour shirt just beginning to show brown mud around the collar as dust hits the sweat.

Boots clomp down the rickety wooden steps behind him; Davis spins around to see his Afghan liason and partner, Hadiya, stop halfway down.

"It's a trap!" she shouts at Davis. "Hostiles along the north ridge, an APC flanking from the west!"

The cool, dry air, the look of the basement floor and the trinkets scattered about, even the smell of the dust on the floor he's kneeling on all tell Davis he's back in Afghanistan, but he can barely believe it. He sees his IOTV body armor and M4 sitting on the table next to the beaten-up sofa he must have just rolled off of, woken up by the sounds of gunfire and explosions coming from above. He picks up his sunglasses, mirrored and amber lenses, just like back on Earth, puts them back on, and hauls himself to his feet. *Maybe I was asleep? How did I get here? Where am I?*

Then Hadiya runs down the steps, and shouts at him about the ambush. His heart stops. Hadiya Sahar, his liaison officer with Afghan intelligence and, for the last year and a half, lover. He knows exactly where he is and what is going on. Davis remembers the first time they met, outside the interrogation room of a regional Taliban leader, and the distrust that was between them, which quickly turned into respect after a two week epic tag-team interrogation where they worked alternating twelve hour shifts, slowly breaking him down. He remembers the first time they trusted each other implicitly, the first time Davis ever trusted someone that much, in the middle of a prison riot in the northern territories, when they held out for three days while the 10th Mountain fought their way to their location. He remembers the first time they made love, in a apartment safe house above a Kabul street market as the mujaheddin hunted for the two of them. He remembers confessing his love for her for the first time, that she was the first and only woman he ever felt this way about, while on a mountainside after they guided a Predator-fired Hellfire into its target at night, and her saying the same, tears and stars reflected in her eyes.

And he remembers this day, when they were lead into a Taliban ambush in a small mountain village, when Hadiya was killed. All of these memories come rushing back, and he almost collapses back to the floor. He looks up at her, tears in his eyes hidden by his sunglasses.
She smiles at him. "Come on, it's nothing we haven't dealt with before. Get your gear and join me topside." She throws him a wink, identical to the wink Ngawai flashed him on Jang-xur, and run back up the stairs.
Davis shakes his head. *Time to get the job done.* He throws on his body armor and grabs his rifle and ammo, then runs up the steps after her.

Luis looks over the room: the decor, the darkness, Davis apparently catonic on the ground. "Jesus." The decor is overall that of a horror movie, which is all great when you're in the audience at a theatre or at home and can just turn it off and go home. Here, though.... Luis feels a chill run up his spine.

He tries to push aside the lurking fears, but the ghostly shadows caused by his chem light aren't helping sooth his nerves any. They dance as he turns slowly, surveying the room. He takes a shuddering breath, trying to supress the millenia old ape part of his brain that's screaming to get out while he can, and the teen memories of horror movies that are joining in. Putting a nearly 100% false note of confidence into his voice, he takes charge. "Okay, people. I can't be the only one getting freaked out by the decor here. Let's move out, find somewhere nicer to set up shop and figure out where the heck we are. Stay calm, keep a weather eye. Nagwai, Angel, one of you take point. Swims, Arketta, I want your help moving the casualties. We're out of the frying pan people, but let's try and avoid falling into the fire."

Luis crosses the chamber to check Davis. He's alive, but it's hard to tell through the green glow of the night vision goggles. The lighter remnants of the fruit stall are still spiraling down, fruit peels and splinters fluttering like that stupid bag from American Beauty. A small fire gutters off to Luis' right, illuminating the Humvee wreckage in stark, flickering detail. Specialist Bill Coffin crawls out of the pintle mount hatch and staggers to his feet; Lt. Verrill is shouting incoherently, his speech slurred by hearing loss. Luis spots Taylor, looking for his arm amongst some shrapnel-riddled bystanders when the Humvee fireballs. Coffin makes it a few steps before he collapses, metal shards protruding from his smouldering back. Hugh's screaming intensifies, and Taylor gets out a "Stanhi-" before he's tossed into a broken wall. Luis feels the heat hit him and then he's surrounded by the moans and screams of the wounded and dying.

---

Angel sees Luis bend over Davis. The medic's back is turned, so Angel doesn't see exactly what happened, but the next moment Luis slumps forward over Davis' torso.

The voxes, radios, and earpieces of everyone not rendered catatonic all squeal to life with a cacophony of noise. Human screams punctuated by the occasional plea for mercy (some in Imperial, some in dialects similar to it, and some that might be the Old English analog of the language) assault the senses.

A lumbering, freight train-like galloping presence approaches from the open mouth of the Gate chamber then suddenly goes silent. Words shout over the voxes now, pieced together like aural ransom notes from the death cries and terrified whispers of the long-dead. "free. MEor Die"

Luis Stanhill was already having a bad day when the first blast went off. Coffin could never pick music worth shit, seemed like he deliberately chose songs for how well they pissed off Verill. Today, he’d been doing better than normal, which meant worse for everybody else. More to keep from having to listen to the god-awful music, Luis had been on full alert, scanning the road ahead as they headed into town from Basra airport. That’s why he’d seen the device. As he rushes to survey the aftermath, he takes account of the people he’s responsible for. However, the second fireball--the Humvee’s explosion lighting the night--comes as a complete shock.

Everything goes white for a moment that seemed to last an eternity. As the universe resumes its proper pace, Luis is automatically going through the motions. Something in his mind screams this shouldn’t be happening like this, but he’s got people who need him, ASAP. No time to think, the Golden Hour’s short enough already. Triage, then. Nearest is Davis, who hasn’t changed much. Still down. still unresponsive. Appears stable. Move on. He glances up, jerky in his haste. Who next? Taylor’s throw could be bad, but he’s across the plaza amongst…Shit. Civilians.

Sure he got medic’s training and he has what he got in school on top, but this is easily more casualties than he’s ever faced before at any time. He remembers his mom, coming home from Franklin Regional after a bad shift in the ICU. He remembers once asking how she got through it all. She shook her head, got a sort of distant gaze, and replied “Don’t think about why, or how, just react to the what. Do what needs doing, don’t think about anything else until it’s done.” He tries his hardest to put it into practice; right now, he can’t get flustered. He shoves aside the little voice that says it should be day not night, the one wondering why Taylor is there, how he knows Davis. Stay calm, stay cool, do what needs doing. He rushes to the next casualty.

Afghanistan

Davis clomps up the wooden steps, pushes the ratty door open, and steps into the small village's courtyard. A well provides the focal point of the town square as it were. Lt. Royce is raising the radio to call in backup -

Davis knows what happens next and throws himself into Hadiya. They tumble to the dirt a second before the Taliban mortar shell obliterates the well, sending a choking cloud of dirt, gravel, and Royce over the courtyard.

"How did you-" Hadiya coughs before the APC's rumble stops her question and spurns her into running again. The Russian-made BMP fires and one of the team's Humvee's, the one with the TOW, disintegrates. A group of a dozen or so of the village fighters charge for the ridge on horses, spreading out quickly.

Mortar shells continue to pockmark the village, throwing geysers of black and brown into the sky. The staccato of rifle fire is constant.

"Well's the most obvious target, and you know how the Taliban love to hit whatever they see first," Davis says with a smile. "We need RPGs to take out that BMP. You and I both grab one from the stockpile, and we hit it from opposite sides simultaneously, blow them straight to Hell. Sound like a plan?"

Davis knows what happened before. The villagers don't stand a chance, this isn't just some Taliban patrol that found them, this is a full-on attack, and on the other side of that hill are at least 50 more of them. Last time, Hadiya and he couldn't take out the BMP before it blew their weapons cache and had to hole up towards the back of the village until the Black Hawk that Royce lost his life calling in showed up. And when it did, as Davis and Hadiya climbed in, the chopper crew threw her back out.

Davis tries to pull her back in, but they hold him back. The other crew member has Hadiya at gunpoint, keeping his MP5 trained on her.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Davis shouts. "She's an important asset, dammit! I need her!"
"Orders, sir!" the crewman replies. "Intel says she's working with the enemy! This whole thing was a trap to get you killed, sir, and I'll be damned if we bring her back with us!"
Hadiya looks stunned at the accusation. "Garrett!"
Davis looks at the crewman pointing the weapon at her, and then to Hadiya. He knows that there's nothing he can do to get them to let her on board, short of shooting all of them and flying the Black Hawk out of here himself. The chopper's engine whine grows as it starts to lift up off the ground. Tears start to flow down his face as he mouths "I'm sorry", and Hadiya's expression goes from shock to resigned sadness.
As the helicopter lifts up and away, Davis can see her run back towards the village, rifle blazing. He collapses into the seats, weeping.

As he and Hadiya run through the village, he keeps an eye out for Nabil. He knows that bastard is here somewhere, and this time around, he's going to pay sooner rather than later.

((severe editing due to lack of reading comprehension))

"Fuck this."

Angel yanks out his earbud, not at all interested in the voices of the long dead.

"Nobody else go near the glowey do-dad. This seems as good of ground as any" He raises his voice, mostly for effect.

"And no one is freeing a god damned thing."

Raising his rifle, he lets off a short three round burst for good measure toward the entry of the gate chamber, towards the...whatever...that suddenly got quiet.

Elsewhere

Luis reaches one of the civilians, a woman caught in the blast, and turns her over carefully. It's like a dream - he's looking at her face, he sees burns across one eye and cheek, but he can't remember her features if he so much as looks away for a moment. He can't read any of the labels in his aid kit. Suddenly Luis feels arms around his head, grasping for his throat. He reflexively pushes back and breaks free, coming face-to-helm with Jonnoperest. The dead man sways back and forth, blood and pink matter splattered across his cracked Turai helmet. The words come from Luis' radio, not Jonno: "You LET me die. You didn't even TRY, Stanhill."

Gateroom

Angel's gunfire prompts yet another earburst of death-screams over vox and radio. A split-second later a thing half-bounds, half-slides into the Gate chamber. It's smaller than its freight-train approach made it seem, but the dark, dark green/blue thing is by no means diminutive. It is the size of a panther, perhaps a lion, but gaunt, bent in mid-pounce on four legs that taper into variable numbers of claws/talons/fingers. Variable, because at any given moment there are a different number and type. The rear "feet" look wider and padded, gripped for traction in the heartbeat between the thing landing and its semi-equine "head" marking Swims as its target. Its forelimbs simultaneously brandish anywhere from three to six bladelike talons. It has a mouth, just a maw that even now strobes larger with teeth the same black as the rest of its mass.

Swims-the-Black is already swinging his wide-bladed Caretaker-issue sword in an uppercut. The blade meets the creature mid-leap. The creature bends out of the sharp blade's path - where Swims' sword would strike the thing's form contorts, folds, flows in a way that makes Angel's head hurt. Literally, watching it move that way gives Angel a minor but annoying headache.

The creature leaps bodily onto Swims, and its feet, now suddenly clawed and opposable, dig into Swims' leg. The creature pushes off and up - the foot-claws cut Swims' right leg to the bone as it sails backward. Its claw-hands, unimpeded by Swims' would-be counterattack, score long bloody wounds up the Whiirr's side that cross his chest and take his arm at the shoulder. The shipmaster falls backward into the meticulously-stacked bone pile, howling in pain. His arm spirals to the ground, spraying blood that shows just a darker black in the green-lit chamber.

The thing lands and looks like it's about to dart back into the dark expanse beyond the Gate chamber.

Afghanistan

The mortars stop, and Davis knows the insurgent infantry will be moving in. He doesn't have a lot of time. The BMP's cannon roars again, this time at the poor cavalry rushing for the occupied ridge. Two horses tumble and then are obscured by smoke.

Hadiya reaches the armory door first - the padlock's hanging off, the sunken door closed but unlocked. Ngawai (wait, what?) nods to Davis and yanks the door open. Davis breaches the door into the slightly cooler, dark bunker to find a familiar face reaching for a second handful of magazines.

Nabil.

Davis hustles through the village, right on Hadiya's tail. They pause and stack up behind a building that lies along the main road. She looks around the corner for incoming bad guys, then turns back to him with a mischievous look on her face. "They're all at the other end of the village, chasing after the other attack. We should have complete surprise. Just like that street fight in Asadabad, right?"

Davis laughs. "Except this time we're better armed." Even though he knows that this isn't real, he's trying to savor every moment. "I've got you, go for the armory."

She sprints across the street and stacks up by the entrance to the village armory while Davis covers her down the street. He turns back to Hadiya as she peeks inside the door and signals the all clear, and he runs across the street, focusing on hitting his mark on the other side of the door, and about how he's going to save Hadiya this time around, that this time, out here in whatever outer space mindscrew this is, he'd get it right.

He slams up against the wall and looks back to Hadiya - no, wait, Ngawai. He pauses for a second, that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that whatever's causing these hallucinations would do, but then he gets his head back into the game. She bobs her head once, twice, and on the third beat they both burst into the armory. Immediately inside, they find who Davis was hoping he'd see somewhere in this hallucination, Nabil.

After he left Hadiya for dead in that village, Davis had accepted the idea that maybe, maybe they were right. Maybe she had betrayed him, maybe she hadn't. There wasn't a way for him to know, so the truth of it didn't matter, he told himself. Even he didn't believe that though. Every moment he didn't spend focusing on his work was spent remembering her, going over what happened in his head, what might have been different, and thinking about how much he wanted her back. And so to block out that loss and depression, he threw himself into his work.

Months later, Davis was reviewing the recent interrogation reports when a familiar name drifted across his desk, Nabil Sahar. Nabil was one of the tribal soldiers that had showed up in the weeks leading up to the battle to reinforce the village, and had been reported as missing by the response team that had returned to clean up the mess. And now he was in custody as a Taliban agent. His file has him participating in enemy actions going back years which only meant one thing: Nabil was the traitor, and Hadiya was innocent.

Without saying a word, Davis walked down to Nabil's holding cell. When he opens the door, Nabil's face goes from boredom to shock to horror in record time. "Davis, I-" His pleas are cut short as Davis cold-cocks him in the face with his pistol.
"Shut the fuck up," Davis says. His face is cold as he pulls a switchblade from his pocket and flicks it open. "Tell me that you betrayed us."
"I have done nothing wrong," Nabil says.
Davis stabs the knife into Nabil's thigh, and he screams in agony as he drops to the floor. "Wrong answer." He paces around Nabil as he grabs his bleeding leg. "Hadiya and I knew that there was a traitor, someone letting the Taliban know where we were and what we were doing. And look, here you are. A long-time Taliban agent. You were sent there to sabotage us." Davis stabs Nabil again. "And you got Hadiya killed."
Nabil lays on the floor, bleeding. "What - what do you want?"
"You're not walking out of this room, Nabil," Davis says. "So now's the time to come clean. Confess what you've done, and maybe Allah will forgive you."
Nabil smiles. "Allah does not need to forgive me. He has blessed what I have done beyond my wildest dreams. Yes, I was your traitor. I was the one that lead the attack to you. I was the one that is responsible for that whore Hadiya's death." Davis' face is contorted with rage. "Now, kill me. Kill me for what I have done, so I may be a martyr for Allah."

Davis points his pistol at Nabil's head. He gets out "Allah-" before Davis pulls the trigger and splatters his brains all over the floor.

Nabil looks up at Davis. "Oh, thank Allah you're here. Do you have a plan for dealing with that BMP?"
Davis considers just shooting him in the head, but when he looks over to Hadiya - well, Ngawai - he pauses. If this thing is trying to torture me, why substitute Hadiya with Ngawai? Unless I'm doing that... Davis realizes two things simultaneously: he really does feel that deeply for Ngawai, almost the same way he did for Hadiya, and that this must be his mind influencing the hallucination.

*Well, if I can substitute Hadiya with Ngawai without realizing it, I wonder what I can do if I try?* Davis concentrates, and tries to imagine Nabil's heart exploding like a grenade inside his chest.

Nabil suddenly falls forward onto a stack of ammo boxes, his right hand clutching at his chest. Blood starts dribbling, then spurting from his open mouth. He growls, and it's the unrepentant Nabil Davis remembers from the prison cell, not the would-be innocent he was playing at a second ago.

"This doesn't change anything! You can't save her!"

Nabil arcs back, face twisted in pain, then his ribcage explodes outward with a wet, bassy whump. The armory's sprayed with Nabil's messy interior as his ruined corpse falls to the floor.

"What the fuck," Hadiya mouths silently.

Out of everything that just happened in the last few seconds since Davis' attempt to make Nabil blow like a hot dog in a microwave, the blood, the explosion, all of that, Davis focuses on Nabil's reaction. *He couldn't have known that it was me,* Davis thinks. *That means it must have been whatever's behind this...* He turns back to Hadiya.

"Hadiya, I don't think any of this is real," Davis says.
"What the hell are you talking about?" she asks.
"Here, watch." Davis concentrates, and suddenly Hadiya's clothes vanish, replaced by the bikini she wore at the pool in the US embassy compound in Kabul and a shocked look on her face. When he stops concentrating, she stays half-naked for a second before her clothes and body armor return just as quickly.
"See?" Davis says. "I had an idea, but I didn't think that this was some sort of trap. Now, though..." He grabs Hadiya by the shoulders. "The ansible."
"What?" Hadiya asks, looking very confused.
"You know, the ansible," Davis says. "I think you're real, at least, not from whatever this fake reality is supposed to be, I think you're from inside my head, so you know about the ansible."
"...small, silvery sphere? Hooked into your brain?"
"Exactly, and that must be how it's getting to me. Maybe it's just as connected to it as I am," Davis says. "Maybe I can push back, find the cracks in this illusion and use them to take the fight to whatever's causing this, maybe even take control."

He looks up and sees Hadiya, looking very scared and confused. "Does...does this mean that when you do this, I'll disappear?"
"No, no baby," Davis says, and kisses her. "I love you. With every fiber of my being, I love you. I'll always remember you, alright?" He taps on his head. "You'll always be alive with me in here." They kiss again, longer and more intimately this time, but are interrupted by the BMP firing another shot. "First, we should deal with the BMP." He grabs an RPG and hands it to Hadiya, then grabs one for himself. "Time to go to work, right, Hadiya?"

admiralducksauce wrote:

Elsewhere
Luis reaches one of the civilians, a woman caught in the blast, and turns her over carefully. It's like a dream - he's looking at her face, he sees burns across one eye and cheek, but he can't remember her features if he so much as looks away for a moment. He can't read any of the labels in his aid kit. Suddenly Luis feels arms around his head, grasping for his throat. He reflexively pushes back and breaks free, coming face-to-helm with Jonnoperest. The dead man sways back and forth, blood and pink matter splattered across his cracked Turai helmet. The words come from Luis' radio, not Jonno: "You LET me die. You didn't even TRY, Stanhill."

"Damnit, Jonno, I couldn't. It was you that moment or all of us. I couldn't help. And after...I think I'd know what a fatal wound looks like. Even if the Frisbee could have saved your brain, would it have saved you?" Luis glances at the gibberish his kit's labels have turned into, and tosses aside the bottle he'd been holding when Jonno came up behind him. "I couldn't be sure. That thing did something to Dietrich, it did something to Arketta, and neither of their head wounds were half as bad as yours. Now then, you going to keep berating me, or can I get back to work?" Even as he says it, though, he's finally putting two and two and getting four. "Hang on. You're from the Imperium. Taylor's...dead. Davis wasn't here. There wasn't....this is...." He sits back on his heels. "It's not real. None of this is."

Whatever freaking lucid nightmare this it, he's got to get back to reality. How? He tries to shut out everything he can, ignores everything his gut is telling him to pay attention to. Jonno, the people, whatever. He's only looking for a sign, something to show him out.