Hellmarine chapter 5 rough draft

The laboratory was a vivid contrast to the heightened activity of the rest of the ship as Mandy stepped into it. Word was spreading quickly about the feats of the Hellmarine on the surface, and more were sure to come as he got his armor fitted and tests conducted. Reactions were mixed, as some didn’t care for his lack of recognition of the chain of command, but others were too dazzled by his kill count to care. 

The lab was different. It was mostly quiet, with only the sound of a few pieces of machinery periodically breaking up the tedium. Cosgrove was working diligently on something at the far end of the room when Mandy entered, not bothering to look in her direction as she approached. 

“How did it go?” He asked as she neared within a few feet of him. “Do we have our candidate?” 

“You really do unplug from everything else when you’re in the zone, hm?” Mandy chuckled as she peered over the lab table to see what he was working on. She didn’t recognize the samples he was fiddling with, but then there were a great deal of side projects he had that she wasn’t fully aware of. 

Mandy’s statement earned her a curious look from the man as he pried his eyes from the task at hand. “Have I missed something?” 

Dr. Hughes immediately launched into an excited recap of everything that had transpired on Aonus. As afraid as she had been in the events leading up to their discovery in the lab, the fact that the Overmaiden’s unusual gamble had paid off so well made it seem worth it. As she went through the story, she synced her gauntlet to the lab's main computer so Cosgrove could see what she was talking about. 

Cosgrove crossed his arms skeptically at first, but as the data streamed across the main display, he became increasingly interested. He rubbed his chin with one hand as his eyes flew over the young man's biometric scans before and after the serum injection. “Remarkable.” 

Mandy continued on, describing in vivid detail the feats of strength and savagery that the Hellmarine had exhibited in the fights with the demons even without much in the way of clothing on. It was difficult to believe, but again, she had taken numerous readings during his rampage to get an idea of what they were dealing with. 

“Is he in this state at all times?” Cosgrove wondered, arching a brow. “Do you think we have to worry about him lashing out against us?” 

“No,” Mandy answered confidently. “He doesn’t seem to harbor any animosity for humans at all, in fact. He was more reserved when we made the trip back to the ship but there’s always this sort of intensity lurking just beneath the surface—as though the relative silence compared to battle puts him on edge. In a sexy sort of way, anyway.” 

Cosgroves arched brow nearly reached his hairline as he observed Mandy for a moment. Only after a few seconds of silence did she realize what she’d allowed to slip and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”

“Seems I’ve learned something new about you today,” Cosgrove remarked as he turned his attention back to the main display. “Wish I hadn’t. But I did.” 

At that moment, a message from the Overmaiden came through on the main display. It informed them that they would be finished with the Armorer soon and to prepare the lab for further testing. She would bring the Hellmarine up as soon as they were finished in engineering. 

“Let’s get the equipment prepped and ready,” Cosgrove suggested. “We can go over this data in more detail later.” 

They had a host of tests they had to run on the specimen that they had devised well in advance. As a result, most of the equipment needed was on standby and merely had to be moved into position. Some diagnostics had to be run before being put to use. 

“We’ll need the bigger one,” Cosgrove noted as Mandy moved a mechanical arm with an intimidatingly thick needle into place near the examination table. 

“What?” Mandy laughed a little, mistaking the comment for one of Cosgrove’s dry attempts at humor. “Wait, are you serious?” 

“I am,” Cosgrove said, quickly checking a secondary terminal. “Based on everything you’ve told me about his performance in the field, his hide is likely too tough for that one. I’m a little skeptical the bigger one will be enough.” 

“It’s hydraulically powered,” Mandy argued, motioning to the large mechanical arm dedicated to a simple blood sample. Cosgrove didn’t repeat his suggestion, but his pointed look was enough to convince Mandy to heed his advice. She disabled the arm, swapped out the needle and the bit, and started it back up. 

The Overmaiden and the Hellmarine stepped into the lab just as they were finishing up. Mandy wasn’t sure how the AI had managed to find any clothing even approaching the man’s size, but the Hellmarine would no longer be parading around in a canvas toga wrapped loosely around his waist. It was a shame, Mandy mused. The look had suited him rather well. Of course, the way his shirt clung tightly to his chest and his tight pants prominently showcased the gargantuan bulge between his legs was nothing to write off, either. 

“Dr. Hughes?” the Overmaiden repeated, shaking Mandy from her brief reverie. “I asked if we’re ready.” 

“Y-yes!” Mandy stammered, catching herself licking her lips. She closed her lab coat around herself a little firmly, suddenly very aware of how hard her nipples had become, along with a growing hint of moisture between her legs. “Of course! Let’s get him weighed and check his vitals.” 

The Hellmarine said nothing as she ushered him over to a scale that clocked him at just shy of five hundred pounds while standing at an even seven feet tall. Shit. This guy is built like a tank, she internally noted, feeling perspiration form on her brow. Oof. Daddy.

All of his readings were fascinating, though—not just those pertaining to his size. The Hellmarine’s heart rate was incredibly slow, beating only a few times per minute unless agitated or the topic of demons was mentioned. At that point, it would shoot up to about sixty beats per minute—the low end of what was considered the average for most men’s resting heart rates. 

Next, they placed a sophisticated device that resembled a crown on his head. Mandy had to stretch to get it firmly in place, blushing slightly when her breasts pressed against his arm. He must have felt her erect nipples pushing into him. Still, he didn’t seem to react, which she was shocked to find disappointed her more than a little. Mandy had never been the type to throw herself at a guy, much less act in an outwardly lascivious way, but something about the man’s presence had her in a near-constant state of lip-biting arousal. 

Doing her best to brush off the disconcerting mini-epiphany about herself, Mandy moved on to the brain scan. Cosgrove paid close attention to the display nearby, which provided them with a perfect 3-D image of the man’s neurological activity. 

“This is interesting,” Cosgrove said, gesturing a few parts of the model, turning slowly on the screen. 

Mandy squinted and leaned a little closer to the display. “It looks normal to me. Honestly mundane, really.” 

“Precisely,” Cosgrove crisply replied, glancing briefly at the Overmaiden as she stood by quietly with her hands clasped in front of her. “I was expecting much more variation from the baseline than this to be honest. The differences seem rather negligible.” 

Pursing her lips, Mandy reasoned it might be better to stimulate some brain activity while the crown was on to get a better read. She leaned away from the monitor and looked over to the stoic Hellmarine reclined in the seat of the scanner. He stared blankly off into space, unconcerned and uninterested with what was going on around him. 

“What’s your name, Da—I mean, sir?” Mandy wondered, scooting a little closer to the man. Shit, that was close. With Cosgrove watching the display so carefully, she decided to eye her hunky specimen for any physical changes. 

The Hellmarine’s eyes drifted over to Mandy, causing her to feel simultaneously intimidated and excited in an instant. When it seemed as though he wouldn’t even answer the question, though, Mandy opened her mouth tentatively to repeat it, just in case.

“Umm—your name. What do you—?”

“The Overmaiden calls me the Hellmarine,” the man interrupted her, his voice so deep it seemed to rattle some of the nearby machinery, though that might have been her imagination. 

“Right,” Mandy acknowledged with a slight giggle. Perhaps he had been told to identify himself as such if anyone asked him. “I mean your real name—before receiving your designation as the Hellmarine. What’s your birth name?” 

“It doesn’t matter,” the Hellmarine responded calmly. “That man died fighting. Let him rest.” 

“Can you tell us a little about what happened?” Mandy suggested, pushing past the panties-obliteratingly tough-sounding one-liner. “We recovered a great deal of data from the lab, but I would like to hear things from your perspective.” 

The Hellmarine’s gaze grew distant as he seemed to think back to the events leading up to him crawling into a cryopod, but if there was anything of significance there that he remembered, he didn’t show it. He just stared at a fixed point over Mandy’s head, his brow ever-so-slightly furrowing, then relaxing, as if the effort of thought hadn’t been worth his time in the first place. 

“Hippocampus is showing unusual activity,” Cosgrove remarked as he watched the display. “It appears to be functioning intermittently. “Unusual activity in the prefrontal cortex as well.” 

“This is fairly consistent with zintari brain activity,” the Overmaiden remarked calmly from behind the doctor. “Their brains process information a little differently due to their ability to reap.” 

“Yes, but seldom at the cost of their existing memories,” Cosgrove argued, gesturing to the display. “Much of what was here before has been wiped or exists only in a fragmentary state. The surge of emotion seems to have forced the brain to wipe certain aspects of this man’s past, narrowing the focus of its operation.” 

The Hellmarine turned his head to look over at the two talking about him. Mandy couldn’t tell if he was offended that they were speaking like he wasn’t in the room or if he was trying to understand what they were saying. Mandy cleared her throat quickly to regain their attention. Cosgrove’s gaze shot back to her, then drifted slowly to the Hellmarine, eventually picking up on what she had intended with her interruption. 

“You seem to experience intense emotional responses, but only along a narrow spectrum,” Cosgrove explained to the Hellmarine. “It would appear that the serum we gave you is responsible for this. 

Mandy took over from here, having additional context that Cosgrove lacked. “Somehow, I think something latched onto your state of mind at the time of injection—that is to say, you developed a permanent, maybe obsessive hatred for demons and a desire to kill them—to the exclusion of nearly everything else you used to love.” 

“There is no problem, then,” the Hellmarine responded flatly. 

“I agree, to put it in the lightest possible terms,” the Overmaiden added, practically chirping in a way Mandy witnessed from the AI. “After all, it’s not as though we created him to clothe the naked or feed the hungry. He has a singular purpose. The fact that his mind is organically locked onto that purpose is nothing but pure serendipity.” 

“I suppose,” Cosgrove muttered skeptically, moving on to his next observation. “Some of the information from the biometric data Dr. Hughes captured earlier coupled with this scan would also seem to indicate that he requires much less food and sleep than other humans, especially one of his size.” 

“How much less?” Mandy wondered curiously. It was another relatively unexpected result of the serum. 

Dr. Cosgrove shook his head uncertainly. “That will take time to determine. But his blood sugar levels have barely fluctuated since you began your scans. He shows little to no signs of fatigue despite the amount of fighting he’s already done. It could be that he takes days or weeks before he requires either food or sleep. That’s assuming, of course, that he needs them at all now.” 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Mandy responded, frowning. “Where does he get the energy to do anything? Zintari need to sleep. Even demons need to eat and sleep.” 

“But angels don’t,” the Overmaiden observed. “Not the way that we do, anyway. They’re capable of taking energy from food if they choose, but it’s from the ambient Arkane energy that exists in all living things rather than the physical nutrients found within the biomass. They convert it into something they can use, but it’s not a necessity for their continued existence.” 

Mandy nodded slowly, drumming her fingers absently on her thigh. “True. I suppose that would make sense. Angels have a state of dormancy and hibernation that occurs at various intervals, but it’s not quite like sleep. It’s more to put them into a standby mode than anything, or search their inner thoughts the way astral elves do when they go into trances.” 

“One of the primary purposes for sleep is the processing of new memories. I wonder just how the Hellmarine will process his new experiences,” Cosgrove noted before offering a small shrug. “He still is mostly human in the end, at least biologically. We’ll have to come back to the question later once we’ve spent a little more time with our new friend here.” 

The doctor then motioned to Mandy to bring the large, mechanical arm over to take the blood sample. She lined the needle, which more resembled a lawn dart, up with his arm and activated the machine. With a hiss and a snap, the needle shot down into his arm faster than she could see. Astoundingly, the metal failed to penetrate the Hellmarine’s flesh. 

“Uhm,” Mandy muttered nervously, glancing between everyone else before looking the machine over. There were various settings she could tweak to get a little more power out of it, but there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room to work with in the end. She decided to readjust the positioning of the arm for a vein closer to the surface even as she set the machine to maximum power. “Alright, let’s try this one more time.” 

Again, the machine hissed and snapped and came back empty. 

“Impressive,” Cosgrove murmured, sounding on the verge of a dark laugh as he stepped out from behind the main display to have a look at the machine as well. Seeing that Mandy had already maxed it out, he elected to place the starting point for the machine much closer, improvising a few modifications with clamps to keep it firmly in place. “This might do the—.” 

The Hellmarine reached over to the machine arm and ripped it free of its mounting with a powerful jerk of his wrist. With a sudden and precise ferocity, he slammed the arm down into his, jabbing himself with the needle and collecting the sample they needed. The needle and bit were bent to hell, however, rendered irreparably useless after that point. He held the arm out for Mandy to take. 

“Th-thank you,” She squeaked, nearly dropping the hefty device when the Hellmarine dropped it into her arms. “You’re a very brave patient.”

“Mm,” he grunted with a reassuring nod as she waddled her way over to a separate table to drop the device and recover the sample from inside. Once she had it, she placed it under the scope of an analyzer to let it do its work. 

“I suppose we’ll have to adjust the output of our devices for future examinations,” Dr. Cosgrove remarked, briefly checking the display to make sure the sample was being analyzed correctly. “I’m afraid what we have just wasn’t designed for someone of your… formidable physique.” 

“Let’s get him back into his armor,” the Overmaiden suggested abruptly. “Then I wish to get him into the phantasm chamber. I think we might be able to gather significantly more useful data with him performing in his element. It would also help me to determine his combat readiness for returning to the surface.” 

“Returning to—?” Cosgrove sputtered incredulously. “Are you out of your damn mind? He only just returned, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface of our tests to determine what his limits are.” 

“Which is why I suggest placing him in situations that will show us them more readily,” the Overmaiden responded calmly. “You said yourself that he isn’t fatigued. And look at him. He’s already eager to kill more demons.”

The Hellmarine let out a growl and nodded his head twice in agreement.

“That settles it, then,” the Overmaiden said, folding her hands back together as she smirked at Dr. Cosgrove.

“What has gotten into you?” the doctor asked, his eyes narrowing on the AI. “First, you risked everything on a random individual rather than any of the trained marine subjects we meticulously vetted, and now you want to throw him back into the fire as quickly as possible? Do you need to be decompiled?” 

“I had a hunch,” the Overmaiden answered. “You don’t have access to the algorithms and breadth of experience that I see the world with. It is one of the main benefits of my design. It’s why ships like this keep AIs like me.” 

“Computer,” Dr. Cosgrove said firmly, toggling the lab’s voice recognition systems. “Run a full diagnostic on the Overmaiden AI. Security code Cosgrove-Alpha-Five-Four-One.”

The Overmaiden raised a brow, speaking over him while remaining strangely calm. “Computer belay that. Security code Heinz-Omega-Six-Six-Seven.” 

The computer beeped and trilled several times, acknowledging each of the orders, much to Mandy’s surprise. She knew that the Overmaiden had been given extreme latitude in her activities on the ship, even being referred to as the first officer by the captain, but having a higher security clearance than some of the most high-ranking medical personnel on the ship was unheard of. Even captains could be subject to the directives of medical staff in a traditional military setting. 

Even more surprising was the fact that she was an AI. As reliant as space travel was on the computational power of AIs, few were ever given direct military authority in a chain of command. Only ghost AIs were ever trusted with portions of such power, yet the Overmaiden had completely overridden Cosgrove. Had the captain given her special codes to take complete control of the ship in a crisis or did her authority come from higher up the ladder? 

Cosgrove turned his head slowly, looking back at Mandy with a strange look in his eyes that she didn’t recognize. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever seen him like that. It was difficult to read, but he seemed almost… unsettled—disturbed perhaps. 

“Where did you get that code?” Cosgrove asked the Overmaiden hesitantly after a few beats. 

The Overmaiden tilted her head slightly to one side and shrugged. “I’ve always had it—since you were a nursing infant at the very latest. Are we done here?” 

“Yes,” Dr. Cosgrove acknowledged carefully. “Yes, I suppose we are.” 

“Good,” the Overmaiden responded a little less icily. “Now, let’s get the Hellmarine into his armor and get him up to the phantasm chamber. We’ve wasted enough time already.” 

Unsure of how to react after their exchange, Mandy looked quickly between the Overmaiden and Cosgrove. Only when her direct superior gave her the go-ahead with a slow, subtle nod did she acknowledge the order the Overmaiden had given her. “Yes, ma’am.” 

“I will meet you there,” the Overmaiden remarked, turning neatly on her heels as she moved briskly out of the lab. “Do not keep me waiting.”