The Cross of Mithras Vol. 1: EOD Operation Welcome to Hell (11 page)

  Regardless of what people thought when Vaistll first said all of that, some people did take it very seriously. Out of all of the groups who did, one was the Lyumarians, and the other was the EOD. Most dismissed it out of hand. The Lyumarians used it to try their best to prevent their civilization from declining any further. With the EOD it was a horse of a different color. In 2155, Vaistll and her team, Task Force YC-11P, went to Mars on a mission. There was an EOD facility there with strange things going on even by EOD standards. Taken at face value, the facility is just a mental institution, look a little deeper and you would see the nightmare within. Yes the facility was a mental institution with military personnel guarding it, but the EOD used the patients for two very different reasons. One group of patients was taken to a laboratory to be experimented upon. The other group was taken to a nearby facility to receive the care that all of them should have received. Those patients were taken there to receive benign treatment in an effort to improve the mental health of any EOD member who needed it. Vaistll called that, ‘An island of goodness in a sea of evil.’ To make matters worse for those patients, the Director of the facility was so mean spirited that he killed some of the patients who were supposed to receive benign treatment. It was reported that he killed three to five of them. Vaistll said of him, ‘Look like another proud member of the American Special Service Organization - the ASS-O.’ The facility had two other laboratories underground. Project 21 knew that in one of them the EOD was creating biological monsters; the other one is the one that interest Project 21 the most, mainly because they knew nothing of what was going on in there.

  When Vaistll and her team arrived on Mars, they had to go to the Project 21 base there and meet up with her CO. Afterward they, along with the CO, headed out to the EOD facility. Getting there was the easiest part, getting inside was the hardest. After they over come the guards and got inside the facility, they were welcome to a place of sheer hell - blood, body parts and corpses where everywhere. That EOD facility was being overrun by its own creation. When her team finally got to the laboratory where the EOD was creating their biological monsters, they set off to complete the first major part of their mission: destroy the laboratory, collect data and samples. After that they went to the laboratory that they knew nothing about, Vaistll CO, against her wishes, said that they should split up since they know nothing about that laboratory. So, off they went separately while collecting intelligence, confronting the EOD military and the monsters, and finding survivors. Vaistll was given the task of getting to the main laboratory. Not an easy task since it was the longest and most difficult route to take, but she still made it. Her CO told her, ‘Vaistll, you’re tougher than what I ever gave you credit for.’ She learned the shocking truth about what was going on there, and it would forever change not only her life, but also Project 21 and the EOD.

  What Vaistll learned was that the EOD scientists created two different types of machines; a time machine and a machine that could allow someone to travel into an alternate reality. Shocked beyond belief by what that would mean, Vaistll decided to destroy them both. Her CO became furious with her, saying that Project 21 could learn a lot by reverse engineering them. Vaistll then said to him, ‘Sir, what would happen if they travel back to ancient Rome with 22
nd
century technology? What would happen if they stayed for 2,000 years before they came back to this reality? We would no longer be facing an EOD enemy with 22
nd
century technology. We would be facing an enemy with 42
nd
century technology. And as for time travel? Have you ever heard of a time war? Don’t you know sir, that a time war would destroy the known universe?’ Either he was being stupid, or he didn’t care, either way he order her not to destroy them. She refused to obey his orders, he then reminded her that she doesn’t have enough explosives to do the job, and she doesn’t have the codes to cause them to self-destruct. They started to argue over it for a while when they got a call from one of their team mates. He said something to Vaistll that took on two different meanings, one of which means, ‘Stay right there, I have something very important to tell you.’

  After some time in getting there with some of the other members of Task Force YC-11P, he found that Vaistll had already left. She had to, the bodies of the EOD military personnel and the bio-monsters said why. They figured out where she went, it was into an alternate reality. Luckily for her she was carrying a device that can allow her to call them, or the other way around. They called her and she came back from the year 2160. This meant that she stayed there for five years knowing that she can come back at anytime. They asked her, ‘What’s so special about uni-Earth 1 that you should stay there for five years?’ All she said was, ‘Never mind, what did you find out?’ They then told her all that they learned from the survivors, and the data that they collected. One of the Supervisors (who worked in the laboratory where the bio-monsters are created) ruined the career of one of the scientists who worked there. Feeling anger and distraught over losing his job, the scientist, before he committed suicide, let all of those bio-monsters out. As for Vaistll’s CO, he is an EOD spy. The rest as Ramirez knew, like those machines and that spy, is history.

  Ramirez was fully dressed and sitting down on the bed in his room at the Roosevelt. He was still trying not to think about Nilosyrtis Prime, so he started to think about why Vaistll stayed on uni-Earth 1 for five years. The EOD called the universe that they are in, uni (short for universe), then they used the name of whatever planet or moon that they are on (uni-Earth, uni-Mars, etc.), then the word Prime. So the EOD calls the reality that they are in, uni-Earth Prime. When Task Force YC-11P got there on Mars, the EOD added two more alternate realities to their list. Ramirez understood why Vaistll (before Task Force YC-11P destroyed both machines) went into the uni-Earth 2 reality. Against her team wishes, she took some of them with her, not only into that reality, but also backwards into time. They went back to the exact place and time (one hour before) of where Vaistll first landed upon the Earth. What she learned was that in neither that reality, nor in uni-Earth 1, did she ever land there, nor did she burn up in the atmosphere. As soon as they got back to their reality Vaistll annoyed them further, just because she wanted to go back to uni-Earth 2, in the year 2008, and check something out. She never told them what she wanted to check out, but she did tell Ramirez. All she wanted to know if Langston became President in that reality. And what she learned was, no he didn’t. It was the Governor of Texas who did. What’s more, his father became President before he did. The only thing that Vaistll said about him was that he was a better President than Langston.

  Vaistll never mentioned to Ramirez why she stayed for so long in uni-Earth 1, but he thinks that he might know why. When those EOD scientists and military personnel went into that reality, they quickly came back and hurried over to the Council of the Elders. For the first and only time in its history, something scared the hell out of the EOD. When the Council of the Elders found out what was in that reality, they banned all travel to it. But before the order made it back to that facility, the Council learned that Task Force YC-11P destroyed those two machines. The Council of the Elders, after some debate, decided to ban anymore experimentations of going into any alternate reality. As one of those scientists put it, ‘It’s not the humans you should be afraid of.’ After the Council looked at all the data the EOD team collected from uni-Earth 1, they made one major change; they decided to abandoned something that for a long time meant a lot to them. It’s amazing to know that they did that just because of something, that somebody, who is very famous, said in that reality. All they said was, ‘Abandoned all hope ol’ ye programmers. For if you knew the complexity of the problem, you would have from the get-go.’ After Vaistll got back from that reality, she had a fling for cyborgs.

  There was one other thing that Vaistll learned from all of that. But she had to wait until Ramirez came along to explain something that didn’t make any sense. The one thing that she learned from uni-Earth 1 and 2 was, up to a certain point, just like with uni-Earth Prime, their history is the same. Yes there are certain major differences between the three, but she can still extrapolate the fact that in uni-Earth Prime the United States, like ancient Rome, should have fallen, but it didn’t. She couldn’t explain it other than one reason, and that reason started to cause her to become a staunch believer that it is true. It was Ramirez who said that what she believes is the most likely the case. He also gave her the most likely reason why it would be true. That the EOD is keeping the United States in a perpetual state of being in the Collapsing stage of civilization. Why would they do that? One word, syntopia. The US is a perfect syntopia to the EOD.

  Ramirez tried his best not to think about Nilosyrtis Prime. But he couldn’t help it. So he started to think about Vaistll run in with the Lyumarian influence. Her run in with their legacy is an example of the sad chapter in human-Lyumarian relations. The Lyumarians are not some evil race, nor did they go to war with the human race. Instead what happened was a simple case of cross cultural differences that creates fear and mistrust on both sides. The Lyumarians created biological weapons in laboratories around the galaxy as long as they have been traveling in space. When any threat to them went away and/or, they no longer needed the laboratory and/or, the biological weapons being develop there, they would do what any responsible civilization would do, they clean up the place before they left. When humans started to travel to those places, the Lyumarians would tell them what they did there, once again they where just being responsible. After awhile humans started to become suspicious of them only because the Lyumarians keep on coming to them and saying, ‘We where conducting biological experiments here a long time ago. Yes we where creating biological weapons, but we cleaned up the place. So please let us know if you should find anything.’ They were just being responsible, but humans didn’t see it that way. Despite the Lyumarians best efforts of cleaning up those places, they couldn’t get everything. When humans started to find what the Lyumarians had missed they called it, “the Lyumarian bio-junk.” Sometimes what humans would find was not junk, but rather it was a container with a biological weapon in it that was lying there for centuries. That added to the human race suspicion of them.

  When humans found those old biological weapons they took them to one place. It was a laboratory where they could reverse engineer those weapons. In 2193 Task Force YC-11P had to go there to provide security, and to correct the flaws in its operations. The people who were running the place were just too inept, and that place needed a serious overhaul in maintenance. Nobody knew it at the time, but one those viruses had escaped. That virus lies dormant in the host until a certain trigger occurs. That trigger is when the host strongly feels that their life is in danger. Once that occurs, the infected host begins to spread the virus through their body fluids. The virus prevents the host from feeling any pain, but it also turns them into something that is determined to spread the virus. The virus takes away the host ability to remember who they are, but it preserves their knowledge in knowing how things work. That means you can’t reason with them, but they can still operate things such as equipment or even a firearm.

 
For Task Force YC-11P this would turn out to be their last mission. Vaistll is the only member who survived that terrible day. There was two times in which she almost didn’t make it. It was not because of who she was encountering, it was because of who she was with. She had to take the lead egghead to a more safer location without the support of any of her men; they HAD to be someplace else. So she had to give the egghead a weapon, but he turned to be all brains and no brawn. At one point he shot her in the back. Lucky for her she was wearing her body armor. As for the other time he almost killed her. He came pretty damn close of shooting her in the neck. Needless to say, she got really pissed off at him because of it. She told him, ‘I think that I’m more safer in their hands, than in yours.’ After she put him in his place, he turned out to be no help, which was going to get both of them killed. Vaistll had to tell him, again, that she needed his help, but that only confused him. First she says that she needs his help, and then she says stay back and now she saying I need your help again? It was a miracle that both of them survived. But Vaistll never blamed him for almost getting her killed by his own hand. After all, he is a civilian who didn’t understand what she means by the word help.

  Ramirez just remembered something about that day. Something happen that got Vaistll so mad and angry that she said, ‘As old as I am, I have never been more angrier in my entire life than what I am right now.’ Ramirez would love to have been there just to see that. She’s not the type to get as angry as she was on that day. What occur that caused her to, almost go into a rage, was two things; one, after all that happen upon that day, that laboratory was not shut down, it was business as usual; and two, it was the location of that laboratory. That laboratory was on the moon Triton, which is one of the moons of Neptune, which lies in the same star system as… the Earth. All it would take is one of those infected people to board a spaceship, head off to the Earth, and its bye-bye human race. Vaistll lost eight of her team mates because they had to prevent, by any means necessary, that from occurring. But it really didn’t matter, two years later the EOD went there and shut it down - the hard way.

  Ramirez was sitting on the couch in his room at the Roosevelt, still trying to think about something other than Nilosyrtis Prime. But he couldn’t fight it anymore. The sounds, the smells and the images started to come back to him. It caused him to cry. His crying caused his nose to run. It brought back the memories. The memories brought back the pain. The pain caused him to have what soldiers call the thousand yard stare.