Chapter 1: The humblest of beginnings

Everyone remembers where they were when they blew up Temple Prime. Even I do, though I was of the age when you sometimes forget the difference between pants and a toilet. The years of the First Tiberium War did not wipe away all the comforts of civilization. Since the last Soviet-Allied war we had built extensive TV networks, advanced telecommunications into undreamed heights. There was even this peculiar Internet thing making careful forays into everyday lives of people everywhere. And as Brotherhood of Nod used the Net to spread its word, so did GDI stream the destruction of Kane. For it was a great celebration to the wealthy and well off people who were taken under the golden wing of the Falcon. At the same, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the poor and the oppressed that rallied under the black banner of the Scorpion. No matter who you were back then, it was something that you would never forget.

I sure didn't even though, as I said, I was just a wee tike way back then. Just another Nod war orphan, one of the countless that were robbed of their parents by the GDI. What little rumors I remember said that my parents were a pair of Nod technicians that died when an air raid blew up a power plant. I don't know and neither does the Brotherhood – many records were lost during the war and the confusion of the following years. Nobody knew when or where I was born, either, or even my real name. Some nurse named me Vlad after her grandfather. She thought it was fitting, since he had been a mechanic once and rumours about my unfortunate parents being what they were… At any rate, Vlad the Orphan spent his childhood in orphanages, often on the road when the last place of residence was compromised by war or something else.

On the day when GDI blasted (or so they thought) Kane with an ion cannon strike, we were playing football – the poor kids' version of it, with ball being the most important entity and "kick the ball" being the sole rule. The orphanage was quite nice, unscarred neither by war nor Tiberium, sturdy building surrounded by a grassy yard. Throw in a tree worthy of a tree fort and you would have The Best Orphanage Ever. But since we didn't have tree to risk breaking our young necks in, a sizeable mob of children were chasing the poor ball, much like a junior league of ancient celtic football. Faces were dirty, standart Nod overalls – Nod was hard on providing standard, durable clothing – stained with grass. Fun – and quite a bit of turf – was in the air.

Small wonder that we did not notice it when nurse Agnieszka entered the yard. The children didn't use to mind the adults anyway – unless they came calling for dinner or bearing gifts (or the occasional reprimand). I saw how she leaned, limply, against the wall, but paid no mind to it – this was what the adults did when they came out to smoke one of their foul smelling "sigrets" and I was a bit too young and far too taken in by football to read body language. Now, when she slumped to the ground and hugged her knees, that was something new. A few of us lost interest in the ball – caused a few high speed tyke collisions, that – the few, slow gears grinding in our heads. We went to Agnieszka, only a few first, the others joining us later on. The nurse was sobbing lightly, but no matter – a crying adult was A Big Thing in any case. Probably something extremely bad, like rats eating our beds or the dinner being burnt (we weren't the brightest bunch of kids). Some of the girls hugged her, this being the natural instinct in the case of emergency. The boys looked and waited, some pondering the mystery with fingers deep in their noses. The nurse mumbled something we didn't make out, something about stuff being "over" and "gone".

Luckily enough, before the smaller ones started crying because, hey, if someone is crying, so should they, other nurses came out. A pair of them stood Agnieszka on her feet, huged her over the shoulders and led inside. One other stayed and, composing herself the best she could, told us that Kane, our prophet and leader, was dead. We understood that it was Bad, but only in that vague sense that adults claim something is Bad. It wasn't something we could fully understand, appreciate and be depressed about. Nevertheless, the nurse assured us that everything would be OK – this was always said after Bad happened, unless we were to blame for it – and that they would take care of us. She also told us that we should probably expect to move in the near future and that we should, just in case, keep all of our things near us. This was the sort of Bad that we, the orphans, not only understood, but were used to. So we did not cry and, I guess, some started rehearsing their best "are we there yet" lines.

Sure enough, in the next few days a convoy came for us. First came the light tanks – Bradleys that we came to know and love from the Nod toy lines (back in the day the Brotherhood was still part corporation and produced, among other thing, toys, so that we could be victorious against GDI in the battlefields of our beds and room floors) – flanked by technicals. They were guarding huge ("awesome" in Small Boy) Russian trucks that would soon be loaded with the mass of children. And we set off into the sunset.

The years after the war passed with even more travelling. Our shelters would be constantly compromised by the GDI or the forces of the local governments. We slept in trucks as much as we did in normal beds and probably visited the better part of Eastern Europe. Nod orphans became the snotty and dirty modern gypsies.

Some respite came when one Brotherhood engineer observed that it would be easier to hide from areal patrols if our settlements were, you know, underground. I imagine that it led to many a startled look and slapped forehead among his compatriots. After that, Nod sympathizers started to slowly but surely build underground shelters. There were less of the faithful than during the war – the battles had culled the heard somewhat, with quite a bit falling away after the prophet died or during the peace time skirmishes – but others just muttered "Kane lives in death" and gripped their shovels harder, all under the command of leaders like Slavic and Hassan.

It was quite the occasion, to enter a fully functioning underground settlement for the first time. Our convoy – just a few trucks, since they were less suspicious than armored columns – stopped at a farm. It had fields on one side, a forest on the other. The Balkan mountains were looming in the distance. A farmer came, smoking a cigarette and carrying a rifle on his shoulder. He led us to a huge barn – a hangar, some would say - where he kept his heavy duty equipment, like drone tractors, drone harvesters (" and my wife, too", - added the farmer) and such. The floor was plain concrete, but a slab of it slid away, revealing a gentle slope downwards. The trucks went into the darkness of tunnels – the sudden lack of light scared the little ones and challenged the teens to pretend they're not scared the least. Happy 15th birthday, Vlad.

As a present, I got a semblance of a normal life – if your notion of "normal life" includes living underground. Not that we missed the sun or the sky much – there were no miniature ion storms nor, more importantly, GDI flights in our cavern. The top most floor was given to the motor pool, where the mechanics tended rugged old trucks, jeeps, a few ageing buggies and even an unarmed recon bike – the prize and pride of the head mechanic. The living quarters were under the motor pool and encompassed housing, a small aid station and a hall that was used as a makeshift class or a chapel. Even deeper were the support systems and, later on, a hydroponic garden.

Everyone living there had to help in one way or another, so I became a mechanic's apprentice. I figured it was just a tad more glamorous than cleaning, washing or any other such nonsense. Therefore I would spend most of the time after our classes elbows deep in motor oil and engines. Being associated with the tough and gruff mechanics didn't hurt my reputation among other teens either. And fixing the girls' shower netted me some points with the fairer sex. Those I cashed in with one of the washing girls – fittingly enough, on top of a pile of dirty overalls. I had some cross-training from a technician, a veteran engineer from the First Tiberium War, which helped my standing even more. It became quite natural to be pulled from the class by one mechanic or another and taken, as help, to some small Nod outpost or settlement that had stuff in need of fixing.

"Someday, Vlad, they might find a way to fix cars with tanks and flying robots, but today we do it with a plasma torch and wrench", - Georgi told me after he was done "checking" the produce from a still he had installed in an M113 husk near the farm.

And while we still had internet and satellite connection, I was one of the rare younglings to regularly go outside – the ones doing manual labor in the farm didn't count because most of what they saw was dirt. I got to see other, much more interesting things: mutant outcasts, the distant glow of Tiberium fields, GDI planes felled by ion storms (always a joyous find), the crumbling of the local governments and even girls from other settlements.

I was barely 18 years old when we went to help one outlying farming community. They were constructing new buildings, ones resistant to the ravages of the Tiberium altered weather patterns. So we, the veteran technician and I, loaded our equipment to a buggy and rode there. The settlement was wall and surrounded by fields from three sides. The road leading to the gate went through the remains of a bombed out village – it's here that the present inhabitant salvaged the materiel for their housing.

A builder drone – obviously salvaged from an MCV – was on the fritz and in dire need of a technician's attention. We fixed it up pretty quick and in return got as many potatoes as our buggy could safely (using a very liberal description of "safe") carry back. We also got invited to the communal dinner, were we enjoyed a hearty meal and the local specialty – bean beer. I don't know if it was, actually, the best beer ever made from materials not fit for beer, or that I was young and inexperienced, but I enjoyed it a whole lot. And then the alarm bell rang.

We rushed to the gate to see what's what. A column was approaching – as far as I could count, there were three old, battered Humvees (with strips of metal bolted on for protection), an M113 and, bloody hell, a harvester.

This was the military force of some local bigshot who probably got hit over the head with a history book and fancied himself a feudal lord. He and his band of thugs – voluntary citizen militia, he called them, though the only place that would provide these militia men citizenship was, probably, a prison – strong armed smaller villages and hamlets even before. But somehow they found an abandoned GDI outpost – the Initiative was notorious for leaving stuff just lying around when they got bored and left – and brought the vehicles there back to life, as well as captured a sizeable amount of ageing small arms. In fact, the harvester was now open topped, with a machinegun crowning the drivers cabin and the cargo compartment refit to carry the troops. All this, they thought, was enough to go against the forces of the Brotherhood (somehow, the would-be warlord was aware of Nod's infighting while we knew of no such thing).

And so these brave men wanted to collect a tithe – for protection, you see. The villagers might have agreed to it – hydroponic harvests were becoming actual harvests – but the tithe included a round or two with village's girls. For RnR and to raise the morale of troops, you see, so that they would be better and bolder in the fight to protect the defenseless villagers. You see.

The village elder notified the nearest Nod outpost via his com-bead, gave a silent order to arm ourselves and began stalling the bandits the best a bureaucrat could – with lengthy speeches. The "militia", used to the rants and ramblings of their boss, took some sweet time to realize that we were pooling wool over their eyes. By the time everyone fit to fight – this included me, apparently, - was holding their own piece of historic First Tiberium War weaponry. Or, in my case, a locally made AK, since you could build those things out of a shovel and trade them for beer. By the time the frugal general had shown his displeasure by our firm denial and went back to one of the Humvees to "command" the battle, we had already taken positions and trained out sights on the militiamen below.

This initially helped us when the first bullets started flying, but, in the end, it was a military Charlie Foxtrot (nobody ever told who that was or what he did to gain such infamy) – a force, trained in spooking peasants by rattling guns and other methods of abusing the meek and weak, assaulting a (somewhat) fortified position, held by people who somehow managed to nail down the "point and shoot" part of infantry combat and only had the vaguest notions such advanced maneuvers like "cover", "covering fire", "short, controlled bursts"…

Our technician was the sole military veteran in our midst. Even though most of his war experience was ducking bullets while running towards the enemy power plant, he was the one that hatched the plan that saved the day, kind of. Predictably, the harvester led the spearhead, its claws acting like a battering ram to smash the gate. The open cargo compartment was filled with troops that would continue the advance once inside the perimeter. Whoever thought of this figured himself quite smart and in his hubris overlooked a small detail. The troop compartment lacked a roof – which, by the looks of things, was used to reinforce the frontal armor of both the harvester and the M113 APC.

So, once the ghetto ram was under the wall, the technician, hiding on the top of the gate, threw down his greatest concoction: Nod hillbilly Molotov. One part oil, one part local potato whiskey (I swear, those villagers…), mixed in a clay jar and topped by a drenched overall sleeve – which, like in any good Molotov cocktail, was on fire. The jar shattered on the head of the harvester's machinegunner and the fluid soaked the men behind him. They caught fire, to be sure, and scrambled madly towards the exit at the back of the truck. This meant that the flame-free militiamen got a close brush with the fire, any sort of troop morale was gone and the M113 got the pleasure of driving over some of guys that fell out of the harvester.

But the best part of dumb luck struck when a grenade, firmly held by the straps on the machinegunners jacket, cooked off in the troop compartment. Only the driver survived the breaching of the wall and drove on, clueless, towards the center of the town.

Our luck reversed, however, with the arrival of the M113, which lacked any easily exploitable flaws. It led the assault into the village, its remote control turret suppressing the defenders. Militiamen surged behind it, followed by Humvees. We met them with fire from the roofs and the buildings, since the main street had been wiped clean by the harversters passing.

This was a situation that I was totally unprepared for. I could point my rifle over what piece of cover that I had and send some bullets flying, but that was it. I could not "mechanic" at the enemy, there wasn't a bolt I could screw or a circuit I could fix that would drive away the attackers. All my adult skills were for naught in this situation and I felt all semblance of a normal, safe life slipping away, shattering like plaster under small arms fire (which was, incidentally, happening all around).

So I sat there, my back against a part of the wall, changing a capricious AK mag and considering a tactical, all out bawl when I saw, in the distance, a black-red shape appear and crash into the warlord's Humvee, overturning it. Black figures moved to secure the passengers while what seemed to be a new breed of Nod buggies jumped onto the road leading to the village.

The first buggy stopped and a trooper (one of the four hanging from the sides of the vehicle) jumped off, raised a tube on his shoulder and fired. A Humvee, holding the rearguard of the assault force / driven by a coward who wanted to be last to the fight and first to the looting, disintegrated in ball of fire and shrapnel just under the gate arch. Other black troopers streamed past the Humvee Slayer, advancing rapidly and with military precision. Most of them penetrated the gate carefully while the others took out ropes and scaled the wall. The first ones up top scanned the area and told the surviving defenders to stay put.

The militia troops on the street level were surprised by the accurate, disciplined fire coming from their backs – and the frag grenades being thrown from the roofs. One of the black troopers raised a tube and the M113 exploded in the distance. Before long, the fight was over.

Nod troopers assisted with clean up the best they could: they tended to our wounded, shot the enemy survivors, and burned the bodies. The warlord, his "honor guard" and the extremely surprised harvester driver would be taken to the Nod outpost for questioning and executions. We were told that we could come and watch.

It didn't matter, though. The mechanic in me admired the well oiled precision of the assault; the technician saw the advanced gear they carried, but, the most important of all, the scared young adult was enamored by the solid, unrelenting island of peace in an unrelenting stream of chaos, never bending to the whims of a cruel outsider. This was peace through power, and liberty through that piece.

As I said, it didn't matter since I would have gone to the outpost anyway. I was going to become a Nod trooper.