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

The vehicles came in every anarchic variety—spiked, lopsided, buzzing with exposed engines, banded with rusted metal.

30 or more of them clogged up the street, humming like bees and blinking away the darkness with their tubular roof lights. Gaseous clouds caught the flickering lights in pareidoliac mammaries. Ghastly shapes materialized out of the randomness.

Lights flashed directionlessly. Factories in the distance, hidden behind the dark haze, burning through the night. Betelgeuse knew the factories were still running, had seen them continue to blink and clank and belch smog into the air on their approach to Gehen; but now that he was within the dirty, sprawling city, and as the night had progressed, the sky had become little more than a thick curtain of chemical fumes.

The sudden subsidence had thrown up a blanket of dust that further obscured the vision.

Ahead of Betelgeuse and his crew, the convoy unloaded and an army of men dismounted into the streets, shouting over one another in a rising din. Out into the smoggy half-light came a towering figure that resolved into two people—a stunted, dwarfish man perched on the shoulders of a hulking, hunchbacked humanoid with a misshapen cranium.

Betelgeuse peered silently at the newcomers from within the cover of darkness.

The Ujung—that was what the Queen had called them—set immediately to work, unloading large cuboid objects from their vehicles and conveying this to the edge of the chasm that had opened up in front of the unfinished concrete frame.

Cautious of being spotted, Betelgeuse led the crew further down the wall, banking on the fact that the distance would keep them hidden.

"Who's that?" Betelgeuse whispered, squinting through the darkness at the dwarfish man.

"... The Underboss," Queen She replied, grappling with her own complicated emotions. Why was she being so submissive to Anton? The answer admitted of many layers.

"Underboss who?" Betelgeuse asked again.

"His name's Kontra," Queen She said, biting her lip. "The small one. Kontra. Don't know the large one's name."

Contra. Contrary to? Against? Anti?

Betelgeuse stifled these facetious thoughts, putting out feelers into the air and sensing a curious resonance. The mysterious intentionality-signature was on the move, flickering on and off. Forces, on the move.

"Watch quietly," Betelgeuse whispered, just loud enough for Filippov and Queen She to hear.

The Ujung placed the cuboid objects on the ground—four in all—and triggered their mechanisms, and with loud schwoomp sounds they extended violently outward into long, ladder-like contraptions. The Ujung men worked together quickly and efficiently, arranging the ladders so that they led down into the forbidding darkness.

With a swiftness that belied their chaotic garb, they tethered the ladders to the concrete edge with corded cables that they drove into the ground with steel pegs, and then began descending.

'They came prepared?' thought Betelgeuse, watching the Ujung with rapt attention. 'Either that or subsidence is a common enough occurrence in Gehen. Or both. Something tells me this is no coincidence.'

"You had an agreement with your contact. The one you called Rifiq," Betelgeuse said, turning to regard Queen She. He initialized the acceleration-supporting solenoids in his railgun and prepared himself. His men followed suit. "What were the terms?"

He felt her buck under his control like a wild mare. His hand shot out and grasped her shoulder, keeping her in place and stabbing her mind through with his intentionality.

"What were the terms?" he asked again.

Queen She gritted her teeth and shuddered, but couldn't help speaking. She had no control over her lips: "I exchange Tzevtao… in return for… information on the Ujung deliveries."

"And the terms include keeping the Ujung from activating?" Betelgeuse inquired. "He obstructs their response?"

"Rifiq… has the ear of Underboss Kontra," Queen She said, attempting to no avail to shy away from Betelgeuse' touch. "He prevents… things like this from happening…"

"Curious guy. Who is this Rifiq? The Ujung head? Chief? Boss?" Betelgeuse asked, grasping the Queen's shoulder even tighter, so tight she started to wince.

"Rifiq… holds a key position, but he isn't the Boss," Queen She mumbled. "Ujung Boss is also… Mayor of Gehen. Kilohkeril. Mayor Kilohkeril."

Betelgeuse frowned.

"Are there any… internal problems faced by the Ujung?" He inquired. "Any internal politics? Anything at all that's important for me to know?"

Silence from the Queen. She wanted to speak and did not want to speak at the same time, but Betelgeuse could sense that the well had dried. He withdrew his intentionality, not quite having made sense of the information yet. He needed to find someone who could shed some light on this political morass.

Up ahead, most of the Ujung had descended the chasm, leaving only a few guards up top. Betelgeuse ran a rough-and-ready plan of approach through his mind.

Tactically, Queen She and her crew were already under his compulsion, but were pretty much deadweight since he didn't want to risk returning their arms.

On the one hand, he couldn't trust Queen She's submission to his will, given how slippery her mind was. There was a non-zero chance that she would break free of the compulsion and sow confusion at the worst possible moment.

On the other hand, Queen She was currently the best source of information he possessed regarding the various vaguely-understood political motivations that had led him to this point. In the absence of a better source of information, he didn't want to break her mind just yet.

How to move forward?

Betelgeuse briefly considered using the women as meat-shields, TAF-style—but there he ultimately came against his own moral aversion to wasting resources, and a moment's consideration let him realize that there was no question of breaching his own moral strictures. Such views were as absolute to him as the Godhead* was to Voke, perhaps even moreso.

*[Godhead: God the Heavenly Father, God as Jesus the Son, God as Theli the Cosmic Dragon.]

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To him, life and its basic autonomy were valuable commodities which he could not yet easily replace. As far as he was concerned, it was only a matter of time before the entirety of Queen She's band became assimilated into his. Therefore he considered their lives his possessions, to be treated according to the iron law of a market Betelgeuse only vaguely understood.

Vaguely understood, yes, but this didn't mean that the Overman had no duties merely because this was so.

To be sure, Betelgeuse was in no way a moral absolutist, but practical considerations dictated that his morality point one way or the other. Pure resolution could only be achieved by interpretation, which required time and space, two things he could not afford at that moment.

"Chalis," Betelgeuse said, picking out the only woman in the Queen's guard whose name he knew. Chalis, gas mask obscuring her features, crouch-walked over to Betelgeuse, and Betelgeuse couldn't help but note a sudden flash of enmity come and go across Queen She's face.

She hates her own subordinates, that much is clear. She is a slave to her own mind-cathexis.

"The Queen is with me. Take the rest and return to the vehicle," Betelgeuse instructed. "Conserve fuel, but be ready to drive off the moment we return."

"I understand," Chalis said, bowing her head in a show of obedience and yet hating to do so. Betelgeuse felt it finally, the hatred of male authority. Chalis gathered the other women and guided them silently along the narrow ledge that ran between the chasm and the wall, leading them toward the high wall on the far side.

Within seconds, they vanished behind the high wall.

Catching Filippov's eye, Betelgeuse nodded and motioned to the Queen, indicating for him to keep an eye on her.

Finally, Betelgeuse turned his attention to the men that had been left behind to guard the ladders. They numbered about 10 (including the dwarf Kontra and his humanoid mount), and he estimated that they were about 60 or 70 meters away from their current position.

Although Betelgeuse and his crew were located just a short distance away from the idling Ujung convoy, the wall they were covering behind meandered in such a way that its bend blocked both groups from direct sight of each other. Add to that the deep darkness of hazy, nighttime Gehen and the fact that the wall did not have uniform height—given this, Betelgeuse had to push himself slightly over the wall in order to establish clear line-of-sight over the Ujung.

Betelgeuse raised his railgun and braced it over the wall, aiming carefully at Kontra. Beside him, his men did the same.

"Sound off targets," he commanded.

"Leftmost, holding rope, 70," Private Fuller said.

"Second from left, back-facing, 70," Private Alterk said.

"Rightmost, crouching, 60," Private Nahdi said.

"Second from right, crouching, 65," Private Hazzan said.

"No target," Filippov rasped.

Betelgeuse remembered their voices, even though (save for Filippov) he'd hardly talked to them in all the weeks they had traveled the Elluhada. Strange how possessive he was over them, almost like they were his toy soldiers.

"Fourth from right, dwarf on mutant, 65," Betelgeuse finished.

He depressed the trigger, feeling the weapon buck against his chest. All at once the frontage streaked with stripes of orange-yellow. The one whom Queen She had identified as 'Kontra' exploded, the top of half of his small body resolving into shreds of smoking meat.

Shouts and cries. The survivors were in immediate disarray. Betelgeuse blinked with satisfaction.

The other rounds found their mark, deleting the heads of their targets from existence. Kontra's humanoid mount moaned with deficient intelligence, falling to the ground and crawling pitifully towards the convoy. Betelgeuse fired his railgun again, blasting a hole in the nape of the weird-headed man. That large body shuddered and died.

"Keep firing," Betelgeuse instructed calmly, and his men did so, cutting down the Ujung like flies. The more they killed, the more Betelgeuse sensed a constellation shifting minutely around him, as though with every action he pushed the libidinal flows from their natural course. Nothing like the titanic change which occurred when the revelation had first come upon him, but perceptible changes nonetheless.

He felt curiously removed from the moment. He was killing—he could hear the gunfire, smell his own breath in the mask—but there was no visceral connection. None of the heat, none of the fury. Nothing like before.

By now, some of the convoy had reacted by gunning their vehicles into reverse, smashing into each other in a confused moil. Some of the Ujung had remained in the vehicles to keep the engines warm.

"Focus on the cars," Betelgeuse instructed, shifting his aim and targeting a masked driver frantically tugging at the wheel of his vehicle. The car slammed into the side of another car, forcing it sideways.

He fired. The armature-round flew wide, blasting out the light on the roof of the car, just above the driver's head, causing him to flinch and tug at the wheel. The car lurched forward and slammed once more into the next car over, crushing his fellow Ujung within the cabin and causing that man to vomit his guts all over the dashboard.

Betelgeuse' men continued pouring lead into the convoy of vehicles.

A brilliant fire erupted. Hypergolic leakage. The fire spread and began to roast the drivers alive, dark forms contorting and screaming soundlessly into the Gehennite darkness. The vehicles ground into each other, digging their noses into each others' sides and crumpling their drivers into claustrophobic deaths.

One of the vehicles at the edge of the convoy managed to swerve free of the pileup, smashing headfirst into the far wall, reversing, then finally angling itself down the street.

It slammed into full-throttle acceleration, its wheels smoking under its chassis.

Betelgeuse gritted his teeth. If that driver escaped, the chances of having to deal with reinforcements would increase drastically.

He drew a bead on the car. Its butt was protected by a blacksteel grille, behind which was a dark-tinted windshield lit intermittently by roof lights pulsing violet and turquoise. Betelgeuse leveled his barrel, aiming through the narrow slits in the mesh.

An impossible target.

His White graft pulsed, his mind shifting into gear. Thought dissolved, substituted for the single-minded purpose of sending a bullet through that mesh. One chance—if the bullet hit blacksteel, its killing force would be dissipated. No kill.

… functional adaptations are stabilized to his musculoskeletal form.

Tension released from his forearm. Betelgeuse gave himself over to the feeling. His obsessive-compulsive awareness of the universe disappeared, to be substituted for a domineering will that dragged his thoughts away from vapid considerations of functionality.

What is functional is what achieves my purpose-at-hand.

A dark silhouette, barely discernible. The driver or something else. The vehicle had almost disappeared into Gehen's chemical fog.

Zwang!

The armature-round ripped from the barrel and traced a bright trajectory into the distance, lancing into the vehicle. It continued moving—farther, farther into the fog, until nothing but its roof lights could be seen flashing through the screen of orange dust.

Betelgeuse watched it closely, his barrel travelling with the light. It slowed, then stopped and stayed put, a flashing will-'o-the-wisp lost in the murky cascade.

"… Good shot," Filippov mumbled from somewhere behind him. Betelgeuse could sense the disbelief.

Seconds passed. His men stopped firing. The conflagration had become a brilliant blaze, making a flickering effigy to commemorate the killing. Somewhere behind him, Queen She was breathing hard. Pinpricks of intentionality, as she sought out kinks in Betelgeuse' control. He suppressed her, and she jerked in Filippov's grip.

Minutes passed. Gehen's oppressive haze closed in. Fuel-tanks ignited; explosions shook the ground. Half-finished buildings loomed darkly. Gehen felt like a dead city.

Betelgeuse let himself down from the wall and led his crew up toward the ladders, peering down into the chasm. The mysterious intentionality was still present, shifting, watching, blinking in and out of existence like the roof lights of the Ujung…

"Filippov, Hazzan—pass us your remaining rounds and collect the salvageable Incs," Betelgeuse said, shaking his head and side-slinging his railgun.

Filippov glanced at Betelgeuse, slitted eyes narrowing further.

"Not smart to go down. We should leave, B.T.," he cautioned. "There's fighting below. Think risk reward."

Behind his terse stoicism, Filippov was a cautious man and moderately trustworthy. But a universe of considerations separated them. The mysterious intentionality-signature beckoned, and Betelgeuse sensed that it had something important to do with his revelation.

Revelation. Vision. Without mystery, the divine becomes material. I must peel back the mystery.

He felt compelled to do so. Hidden compulsion or internal urge? It was impossible to tell.

"Secure the Incs and return to our vehicles, then keep me posted via transceiver," Betelgeuse pressed.

"Listen to me—"

"Can you do that?" Betelgeuse said, interrupting Filippov brusquely. Their gazes met. Old eyes meeting young. Filippov was older and Betelgeuse was younger.

And yet, Betelgeuse could see and Filippov was blind.