Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

Some of the biker-grunts were screaming madly, tearing their masks off and throttling their sand-bikes, their great spiked wheels goring through the flesh of the running drivers and then contorting their struggling bodies into a spiral death.

One of the crazed biker-grunts had angled himself toward Betelgeuse, his eyes rolled so far up it was impossible for him to know what he was doing anymore. Betelgeuse jumped at the last moment, slamming the barrel of his railgun into the man's head and snapping his neck in half. The sand-bike continued accelerating, narrowly missing the Sand-Marshal several meters on and then travelling up the face of the opposite dune.

Betelgeuse divested himself of his damaged railgun, throwing that useless hunk of metal onto the floor and gritting his teeth to see that the Sand-Marshal had managed finally to grab into Thete. The rusty knife had cut halfway into her vest, but Betelgeuse couldn't tell if the edge had managed to cut into her flesh.

One chance to save her. I have to grab as much of his intentionality as I can.

Clenching his jaw, Betelgeuse tore his combat knife from its sheath and leapt into the Sand-Marshal's back, stabbing forward at the same time, aiming into the back of his skull—

Clunk!

The tip of his knife tore through the material and then glanced off something hard.

The Sand-Marshal roared and bucked, throwing Betelgeuse off his back, his undisciplined intentionality flaring madly.

Betelgeuse hurtled through the air and slammed feet-first onto the ground, raising a tuft of sand that tinkled against his visor.

The Sand-Marshal turned, tearing his hood off and revealing a physique bunched up with a distended and grotesque musculature more mutant than any of Kanogg's White grade bodyguards. Thete's broken body was curled up next to his boot, and her torn vest was held in the man's hand.

He has Thete's Incunabulum.

Betelgeuse could feel the surge of a pure and primal hatred, finding it a very different flavor from Tenor's cold and disciplined sadism. Now that he was in close proximity to the Sand-Marshal, he could feel the latticework of Incunabula pulsing within his breastplate, identifying that the structure was wholly composed of White grades.

And though Betelgeuse tried to find purchase on the powerful waves of intentionality emanating from the Sand-Marshal, he found it a little like trying to catch hold of a raging river in the midst of flooding its banks.

"Emdas?*" the Sand-Marshal bellowed, his blue eyes glancing at the defaced rank-insignia on Betelgeuse' shoulder and then locking onto his dark visor. "You are being the Colonel Zungu, the one with the dog's testicles!"

*[MDES, he means]

'His eyes remind me of Rolf,' Betelgeuse thought, pointing his knife at the middle of the Sand-Marshal's chest, a cold and silent acknowledgement of the Sand-Marshal's words.

As he did so, Betelgeuse parsed the Sand-Marshal's intentionality methodically, identifying a single thread in that lattice of White Incunabula.

"Surrender to your Duce," the Sand-Marshal declared, grinning maniacally, the blood from the raw human heart dribbling down his chin. He didn't seem particularly perturbed by the deaths of his men or the advance of Betelgeuse' crew.

Betelgeuse remained silent. He worked upstream, tracing the single thread of intentionality through the tangle, following it all the way back to a single point.

He heard his crew shouting behind him, firing the last of their rounds at the scattering grunts—all that, he pushed to the back of his mind. The surroundings receded.

The Sand-Marshal placed a heavy boot onto Thete's chest and pressed down. Thete convulsed, vomiting into her gas mask. She scrabbled desperately, like an animal caught in a trap.

Raising his arm, the Sand-Marshal leveled Thete's vest—her Incunabulum in it—directly at Betelgeuse. "Marshal outranks Colonel—kneel, or I crush your slave!"

"Kneel to you?" Betelgeuse returned, laughing softly, as though what the Sand-Marshal said plumbed the very depths of absurdity. Finally, he had identified a single White incunabulum through all the noise.

The Sand-Marshal's expression contorted with fury. His intentionality surged, wild and unrestrained.

But Betelgeuse was ready.

… the power to direct libidinal flows.

He'd navigated that seething mental morass and found a specific White Incunabulum. He turned the man's psychic obsession inward, like an insidious poison that warped that Incunabulum beyond recognition.

"Huargh!"

The Sand-Marshal recoiled, his sharpened teeth tearing into his own gums. A bulbous mass of flesh erupted from his hip, tearing out his trousers and spewing a black mucus. Betelgeuse felt the man's mind become overborne with his uncontrollable psychic passions, a pure and unadulterated faith in the power of his magical energy that formed his own flesh into bubbling phallic shapes—

Betelgeuse was already moving, slamming his shoulder into the Sand-Marshal and knocking him off his feet.

The man's mind turned from rage to confusion, his intentionalities splaying out into frayed threads. He looked down at his hip, furrowing his brow at the curiosity. Faster than Betelgeuse could react, the Sand-Marshal's torrential flow of intentionality renewed, as though he had gained even more vitality.

This was not what Betelgeuse had been expecting.

"What has been—a blessing of magic!?" he roared, springing to his feet and raving madly. "Ascension! I am ascending!"

'Fucking sicko likes it!' Betelgeuse thought, chuckling despite himself. 'But let's see how much more he can take—'

"Il Duce!" a voice rasped harshly.

The truck screamed behind the Sand-Marshal, its tracks riddled with bits of gore, its compound-eyed driver waving his arms frantically out the side-window. With a madman's laugh, the Sand-Marshal leapt into the open bed, the suspension lurching violently under his weight.

"Retreating?" Betelgeuse yelled, realizing suddenly that the Sand-Marshal was making a run for it. He raced forward, shouting loudly: "So, Il Duce is a coward! A coward who hides behind titles and flees when blood sacrifice is demanded!"

But the Sand-Marshal was devoid of rage. In its place was a roiling cacophony of joy. Joy at having been blessed by the gods of magic.

The Sand-Marshal turned to regard Betelgeuse, saluting crisply and waving Thete's vest, his expression maddeningly jubilant. "I must cultivate the ascending!" he babbled incoherently, "we will be meet, Colonel Dog Balls, and again I will be crush you with god-powers!"

'The driver!' Betelgeuse thought, pushing his White-enhanced limbs to their maximum and yet lagging slowly behind the vehicle. Whatever that truck was outfitted with, it roared louder than a jet engine. He shot his intentionality across the widening distance and attempted to break the driver's mind—but was frustrated by the interference from the Sand-Marshal's great ecstasy.

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"Fire! Fire your weapons!" Betelgeuse commanded, wheeling around to regard his crew. But they could only rush forward, knives in hand. No one had any more ammunition.

Within seconds, the truck crested the dune and disappeared, leaving Betelgeuse and his crew amidst the scatter of twisted metal, bleeding corpses, and catatonic bodies.

Douglas raced past him, bounding futilely up the side of the dune. But the roar of the truck's engines had already receded into the distance.

"Stop, it's over," Betelgeuse called after Douglas, his voice cutting through the haze. Douglas cursed, turning to regard Betelgeuse with a vexed expression.

"It's a victory," Betelgeuse asserted, pursing his lips and wincing with a slight bitterness. He turned to scan the corpse-strewn battlefield. A few bodies were still twitching and moaning in the sand.

Voke and Misha stood a few meters off with the rest of the fire teams, motionless now, chests heaving. Their rebreathers wheezed and hissed, struggling to keep pace with lungs hankering for oxygen.

"Douglas, you and your guys are with me. The rest of you make sure the fuckers are dead. And check the transport convoy for any survivors."

Betelgeuse was instantly beside Thete, pushing her onto her back and tearing off her gas mask to find the woman half-drowned in her own vomit. Private Alterk, a youngish Jegorichian who'd been the driver of the previous convoy they raided, wiped Thete's face with a rag, following which Betelgeuse fitted an extra rebreather he carried with him into Thete's mouth.

"How do you feel?" Betelgeuse asked Thete, pushing down the frustration he was feeling and inspecting her bare chest. Her sternum looked sunken, and each breath seemed to send tremors of pain through her body. If she hadn't botched their approach she might have saved herself a chest full of broken ribs. And maybe she wouldn't have lost her Incunabulum.

Her prosthetic eye focused on him, her eyelids fluttering. She tried to answer, but only managed a painful cough.

"Oh man, she look fucking kakked," Private Fuller whispered, nudging Private Alterk in the side.

"He got her Incunabulum, Ballsman," Douglas said, squatting down next to Betelgeuse and peering anxiously into Thete's eyes. "She's hurt pretty bad."

"It is what it is. Plenty of Incunabula here, so we'll find one to graft," Betelgeuse said, sighing and regaining his feet. "Doug, get her wrapped up and send a guy down to bring the APC around. I'll finish up here with Misha and Voke."

"H-hold on," Thete rasped, coughing painfully even as her arm grasped Betelgeuse' shin. "Bury… must bury her."

"... Who?" Betelgeuse asked, and Thete summoned her strength to point at the dead woman lying several meters away, the one with the missing heart.

"Hrnh," he sounded, stepping toward the corpse of the woman. She was staring sightlessly at the noontime sky, the capillaries in her eyeballs already breaking up. He saw strange, dark-colored objects in her open maw, then remembered the reverence with which the Sand-Marshal had handled them.

Frowning to himself, Betelgeuse dug his gloved fingers into her mouth.

***

Douglas and his fire team quickly evacuated Thete from the battlefield. She was the only one wounded—a needless injury, in Betelgeuse opinion.

As for the dead woman, it turned out that she was from Gehen, like Thete. Perhaps Thete had been pushed to act out of a sense of kinship, but Betelgeuse didn't care much for it. Thete had put the entire crew in danger as a result of her actions.

But now wasn't the time to dwell on it.

Betelgeuse got Filippov on the transceiver and briefed him on the outcome of the battle. Then, he was instructed to reposition himself to the sand-shelf overlooking the battlefield, to monitor for any incoming hostiles in the vicinity.

With practiced efficiency, Betelgeuse mustered the remaining men and quickly rounded up the spoils. All bodies were stripped of usable clothes and supplies, with the only survivor from the transport-convoy being an unconscious female Cossax mercenary, which they bound with nylon rope and then took along with them.

As for the Maschinenfabrik cargo-trucks, only 6 out of 12 were still roadworthy. But 6 was plenty. Even after factoring in damaged cargo, Betelgeuse would be leaving with a total of 10 tons of hypergolic fuel, 15 tons of oxygen canisters, 20 tons of water, 100 crates of dried rations and about 50 crates of medical supplies. Luckily for them, they didn't have any shortage of drivers—most of the Privates had been recruited from the pool of haulers captured during their last raid.

As a bonus, the Cossax humvees—though destroyed by the Sand-Marshal's minions—had been carrying weapons and ammunition. Thanks to shock-resistant lockboxes, they recovered a total of about 2500 armature-rounds as well as 7 usable ZWEN railguns, although these were an older Mark 566 model.

Finally, Betelgeuse instructed Privates Quoash and Altunis from Misha's fire team to bury the dead Gehennite woman, as Thete had requested.

Betelgeuse glanced at his transceiver. 2038h sidereal time.

Time to move out.

The six trucks were packed to capacity with as much spoils as could be carried, and swiftly boarded. Once Privates Quoash and Altunis finished the burial, Betelgeuse gave the command to move out.

The remaining corpses were heaped with the sand-bikes into a single pile, with a primed hypergolic claymore planted at its base.

By now, the 'ancient Edomite tradition' was well known amongst the men. As far as Betelgeuse was concerned, every member of the Dog Balls' Boyz was an honorary Edomite.

Today's honor was given to Private Nahdi, who gave a victorious holler on being given the remote detonator by Colonel Dog Balls himself. He held aloft that device like a holy relic, and Voke found it fit to say a few words in prayer for their fallen enemies, followed by a heartfelt commendation of the souls of the innocent to Heaven.

'I live to fight another day,' Betelgeuse thought, boarding the cabin of the head truck behind Voke and Misha and leaning his head out to watch the fireworks.

The explosion puffed out a great mushroom cloud, flaring bright orange before melting away into a dirty brown smog. The truck's frame rattled, and Betelgeuse' eyes shone to see that shimmering bloom resolve in the crimson noon.

'Tradition? I can almost believe it,' he thought, thinking of Edom. The truck trundled away into the meandering sands, leaving the smoldering pyre to burn itself out.

***

[En route to the Temporary Encampment]

The cabin of the truck was cooled to a pleasant 21 degrees Celsius and outfitted with an efficient carbon dioxide scrubber. For the first time in two days, Betelgeuse removed his MDES' helmet, glad to feel the cool air upon his face.

To his right, Voke was watching him silently. On Voke's other side, Misha was muttering silently to Private Altunis, their driver. Every once in a while, the dashboard comms crackled to life with Filippov's dreary updates regarding course corrections and locational triangulations.

Betelgeuse fiddled with the charms. There were two of them, a necklace woven of red thread and a string of dark objects splotched with clotting blood. It felt right to remove both from the Gehennite body before it was buried.

"You took those off the woman," Voke said, observing Betelgeuse through shaded eyes.

"... I did. Can you tell what it is?" Betelgeuse said, holding up the blood-splotched prunes so that it caught the shafts of Corydon's light streaming in through the windshield.

Voke took it in his gloved hand and frowned.

"I sense great evil in it," Voke said finally, returning them to Betelgeuse. "A mind was committed to breaking a taboo."

"You say that only because of that goddamn deviant," Betelgeuse chortled, pocketing both charms. "Nothing evil about it. When the time comes, I'll stick it up that Sand-Marshal's ass, though something tells me he might actually like it."

"Well, you asked me," Voke shrugged, lowering his sad eyes. "Say… do you think the Teat's gonna be okay?"

"Shit, you remember when she got whacked upside the head in Saltilla? The bitch'll survive, and then I'm gonna give her a piece of my mind for fucking up the approach," Betelgeuse snarked.

He glanced at Voke, only to see real worry etched into his lineaments. He didn't look reassured at all. Thinking for a moment, Betelgeuse continued: "Doug will protect her till we're back in camp. We still have the Emergency Rejuvenators we picked up from the aid station, so she should be good."

"Doug said her Inc's missing," Voke said, leaning his chin on the butt of his railgun. "She's not gonna be good for long."

"Sandy took it," Betelgeuse said.

"We gotta do something before she gets like Edith," Voke sighed. "We can't stay in the Basin."

"... You're right. But we just secured a whole lotta resources, so we're good on necessities for the foreseeable future. You don't have to worry," Betelgeuse said, placing a hand on Voke's shoulder. "We're not gonna let Teat get that bad. And we just picked up more'n twenty Incs… so we've got to find a buyer, yes?"

The truck slanted upward as it reached an incline. The engine began to hum louder.

"... Does that mean you've decided?" Voke asked, locking gazes with Betelgeuse.

"About what?" Betelgeuse said, leaning backward and enjoying the view of Corydon on the horizon.

Voke clicked his tongue irritably. "Now that we have our supplies, are we linking up with Tenzhian at Jegorich or traveling northward to Gehen?"

"Honestly... Thete has changed things," Betelgeuse said. "You see, I'd prepared a plan with Filippov which involved sneaking Thete through Jegorich Customs."

"There it goes. Another fucking problem," Voke said morosely. "Can't Filippov navigate us through the Mining Tunnels?"

"We may have no choice, but we risk getting lost and then losing more time. There are other urgent priorities now, like immunosuppressants for Edith and a graft for Thete, and anyway I don't fancy taking on Jegorich Customs until we monetize our cargo. Once we get in, we need to have a secure bank account and the bargaining power to show Kanogg who owns her ass," Betelgeuse said, looking over to the right and noticing that gray-eyed Misha was listening attentively to their conversation. "That leaves us with Gehen."

Silence.

"Your intuition hasn't led us wrong yet," Voke said.