NOVEL NEXT Chapter 37: Tension Town
By the time she finished her shower, the digital clock showed 2337H glowing a sickly green pallor through the night-time shades of her allocated apartment.
3537h, sidereal time.
It was the fiftieth floor of the Diplomatic Chambers, just opposite the Saltillan Government House, and when she gazed out the window of the serviceably-furnished apartment she was treated to the view of a closed and purple universe spotted with lighted windows and dim streetlamps and the occasional will-o'-the-wisp snaking uncertainly across Saltilla's floor.
It was several minutes of watching the quiet city, and all the while her overactive mind hamstered about the Gimma Ashby and spilt down into the nooks and crannies of her self-worth and made doubtful phantoms about her decision to go it alone.
It isn't too late to turn back, was what the scampering ghosts had to say. Let Ortrud live her life hemmed and chained, and it would still be a life better than a quadrillion other souls scattered amongst the stars.
She knew a mind poison when she saw one, and, in the absence of anybody more intimate to share her burden she picked up her wrist-transceiver and held it in both her hands and then just stared at it.
Maybe Jirani's still awake. I mean, of course he is—didn't he get the brain-flushing-implant fitted?
The speaker threw out an irregular hiss and Marja was about to cut the sat-comms-link request when the call was joined and a phlegmy voice rasped a groggy "yes, what?"
"It's me, Marja."
"I know, Marge. What do you want?"
Jirani's voice registered barely-concealed irritation, and Marja supposed that he really had been asleep. What happened to his implant? Maybe he did what he said and actually took it out to tinker with? No, that didn't make sense—the thing was connected to his central nervous system. Unless he managed to requisition a neuro-churgeon from the hospital, or maybe winged it with one of the brain-tekkies—
Stop it. Stop hamstering.
"... Marge? You okay?"
"Ji… I can't sleep. I'm thinking about Ortrud. I'm thinking about Jegorich First and that PLP dying so pointlessly. I'm thinking about whether it's even worth it to train another second. Maybe…"
"After all the trouble you've been through, you're just going to cut and run at the first sign of trouble, is what I'm hearing."
"That's… not what this is…"
"Isn't it? You tried your best to save that PLP Sakar and now that he's dead you think maybe it is not so easy to go against the great Mentzers after all."
She didn't have a riposte ready. Jirani knew her like the back of his hand. She would be lying if she said the guilt didn't weigh on her. Betelgeuse wasn't the only one who had died, and yet his death weighed heaviest. For where a thousand deaths was rationalized as a statistic, the tragedy of a single, proximate death was keenly felt (an approximation of a famous quote from a famous man, now she was remembering).
Or maybe it was because she'd actually tried to save him. Maybe it was the ups and the downs: the sinking feeling she felt after realizing her spacetime-inversion might have killed the very person she was trying to protect, the relief when the report came in that he was still alive, the hurried dispatch of that shifty Blueprinter and anxious moments spent waiting on the results of the rescue op, the weight off her chest when his status was confirmed… if she'd been more observant of the brewing problems between the Jegorichians and the Saltillans, would she have suspected LTC Pilix's troop movements? Would she have re-assigned the PLPs away from his battalion? Or was there no way to tell beforehand that that Jegorichian had been compromised by the Saltillans' machinations?
Was this really a simple case of racial politics?
Maybe they were already on to her. The call with Presbyter Karl aboard the Vespertilio… he must have seen something in her face and extrapolated it all the way to treason. The Mentzers knew she was a rat; they arranged for Betelgeuse to be killed and soon it would be her turn—
"You need to go for a walk. Clear your mind. … the Agave S-2 is open until zero three-hundred, maybe you can find something to eat there?" Jirani suggested, cutting through the turbid and messy flows her thoughts were making.
"Isn't there a curfew in place?"
"Firstly, you're Deputy Marshal of the Allied Forces in Desert. Secondly, I thought you were there when I was talking to the runner. Private Ducet said it was open, didn't he? That the curfew doesn't apply to that street? So why don't you go ahead and check it out. A Deputy Marshal needs her space."
"You know what, maybe I will."
Jirani chortled but otherwise did not end the call. His breaths filtered through the sat-comms-link and Marja realized, gratefully, that he was waiting for some confirmation from her that she was okay. Jirani, the elder Docent from her homeworld, this man whom she'd known for such a long time, remained ever her rock in troubled waters.
Docent Jirani Mzeeka, former thrall to the Mentzers—what had he to gain from all her pubescent struggling to 'find herself'? At one point she had styled herself Jirani's emancipator, as if she were a Dr. King Shultz came to take responsibility over her favorite darkskin.
But in reality Jirani had been the one bailing her ass out time and time again. He had acquitted himself, unlike her, with the composure of a true commander even under the worst of the pressures Liberation's Reach could throw at him, and he never lost track of the goal: insert, defeat the Chimerae, extract. And someone so confused as her could never have matched Jirani's political acumen, for he had demonstrated expertise which was at least on par with the best of Saltilla's Silvered bureaucracy.
Did he truly believe in her, or was he merely using her—-
Hey there, woman. You best stop overthinking in this direction. You've known this man since you began your teens, and he's taught you more about the real world than anyone else. Trust has never been easy—that is why it's so valuable. If you can't trust him, you can't trust anyone.
"Gotta work a li'l RTS outta my blood. Want anything?" Marja said, finally.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
"Nope. Just stay safe, okay? I'll handle the status reports to Supreme Commander Wallace and Chief Director tomorrow morning. I'll say you're busy with post-op admin... or maybe that you're engaged with the Saltillan paper-pushers. Anyway, take as much time as you need and get a good rest tonight."
"Okay," she smiled, "I will."
And she felt then there was nothing she could not trust Jirani with.
The artificial night was a cool twenty-one degrees celsius, according to her wrist-transceiver, and she walked the tiled street down from her apartment past the Government House and then forked right, taking the long, straight tar-road sparsely lit by flimsy overhead cranes sporting single bulbs hanging downward like resplendent drupulets.
Exhaustion clung to her pores, but her mind could not slow itself down enough for her to feel tired. Her Incunabulum, Hobbes, sat snugly in her cotton shirt's front-chest-pouch but felt today more like a burden than ever before.
Shadowed columns coal-black and taller than she could see were holding up the firmament; she knew that there were people there, living in the clouds beyond the city of darkness, looking down like deities and by nature unable to see anything beyond the advantage their machinations could bring them.
She went on, passing from pavement to asphalt and entering, unexpectedly, into an area overcast with a fog-like thing that had no existence tangible to any of her five senses; yet that miasma undeniably existed and it was thick and suffocating and made all of her movements and all of her thoughts heavy and ponderable.
There was a swirling and a cascading and a confusing mess of massy things passing for phantoms or ghosts or convocations of priests or shamans or witch doctors or medicine men arrayed around the square she found herself in. All was empty and silent, the dreamlike figures still and morose and mossy as statues, and she found that she was stepping across a circle and inside the circle a tree that had no leaves and no soil for its roots; the symbol of Saltilla, underfoot, and she wondered if she were dreaming and wondered if any of it had meanings beyond what was purely representational of the memories filed into her brain or bytes stored in her eidetic-feeder-implant.
She saw now that the middle of the space had sprouted a fountain so pale it might have been translucent; and the fountainhead was alive by all accounts, a spliced thing, a hecatomb made of marbled fat and garbled faces and half-human half-animal half-creatural things all railing against the gossamer web holding their flesh pressed together one into the other.
When the fear came they were red streaks arcing across the sky, and she ran toward it, ran toward or away from her fear which in that moment felt like the same thing. She passed into a narrow road between the brooding forms of giants' bodies, and there was light here but so little of it the crevasse was made a perpetual twilight.
Abovehead the red streaks were gashes in a sky that was studded with equidistant purpled stars, and the red turned into a new color that was hard to look at, as if it were bright as the sun seen with the naked eye at high noon. But for all its eye-squinting brightness the color was dull, muted and fungal, and it bled crimson droplets that picked at her brain and made solifugae molt out of the empty pits of her eyeballs and the image was made in her mind of scorpion-pincered spiders bursting free from olives fitted into her eye-sockets.
Clip-clap went her socked and slippered feet across tile, stone, asphalt and tile again, and she was breathing and she could hear her own breathing. She traveled until there was light and until she found herself amongst several people and no longer bound to the world of spirits, monsters and strange creatures.
She halted and attempted to catch her breath. Her forehead was beading with sweat and the droplets amalgamated and made rivulets down her brows and lids and filled her eyes and made them sting and tear. Sweat mixed with tears and streamed down her cheeks and as she panted she found her mind return to normalcy, slowly but surely.
The people here, they wore the green uniform of the PDF and looked to be patrolling. They saw her and started jabbering in foreign tongue (in breach of Green Book Regulations, was the intrusive thought), and then they came closer and angled bright torchbeams at her face, forcing her eyes into squints.
"... Shut that off! Shut that off!"
"Kak is up wit' you? This woman is violating curfew—"
"Hold on, is that…."
"—Deputy Marshal ma'am!" the man managed somewhat shrilly, snapping his torch-bearing hand upward in a salute and flinging a silver patch onto the adjacent building. His companion did the same, and soon the entire ten-man patrol team had lined up in front of her, holding their salutes as if their lives depended on it.
She waited in silence for several moments, observing with some interest the dusky faces scared shitless before her, then snapped off a return salute. The men lowered their arms but remained at attention. They must have circulated her likeness amongst the PDF, she thought, wondering if this meant that she counted as a celebrity.
"Deputy Marshal ma'am, what brings you out here tonight?" asked the man who had saluted first, his close-cropped hair spiked up in unruly fashion, his face on the cusp of flabbiness and yet hard with multiple scars slashed across his cheeks and lips.
"Exercising," Marja said, panting her anxiety away, holding her arms akimbo and pushing her hands forcibly into her hips so that their trembling was hidden.
"Understood, ma'am," the man returned, staring at her flip-flops and making her feel embarrassed again. She pushed the feeling to the back of her mind. "The whole street is under curfew patrol by the PDF and Saltillan Police, but if you're looking for food or beverages you should go by the Agave S-2, down in that direction. The street takes you further into the western quadrant."
"I am going in that direction… but I was rather thinking to check out the Skydome. I haven't been there yet."
"The… ah, Skydome?" the man echoed, obviously nonplussed.
"Will there be a problem… Sergeant Tennyson?" Marja said, observing the rank-insignia threaded into the man's epaulet and reading the surname sewed into the man's cotton shirt just above his left breastpocket. "Will I not be granted access?"
"No, ma'am, you should be able to tap in with your wrist-transceiver… just that it's almost twenty-five kilometers away, if you're planning to run that far," Sergeant Tennyson explained. "It's at the edge of Saltilla, so you'd have to follow this street until you reached the end of the western quadrant, then turn left and go up maybe one or two more kilometers."
"… I need a vehicle," Marja said.
"Ah…" Sergeant Tennyson trailed off, unsure what that had anything to do with him.
"I need a vehicle, can you help me get one?" Marja repeated.
"I…" the man looked unsure of himself, and his troopers beside him started to mill and look uncertainly at each other.
"Sarjant, we be have holo-seekle down behind bend… there. Just put in form, ya?" one of Sergeant Tennyson's men—a scrawny, rough-looking youth with hungry eyes—volunteered in barely functional Common. His accent was so thick the words sounded to Marja something closer to Tamil than anything remotely related to the Romance languages.
"Kak hey chaz ya?" Marja thought she heard another man mutter, as the whole patrol rolled their eyes and elbowed the scrawny Private for trying to be helpful.
"... Well… ma'am," Sergeant Tennyson said, sighing reluctantly, his shoulders slumping, "we have several holo-cycles just around the bend. Nimmy, pass her your key. We'll help you fill in the requisition form later, ma'am, and have it sent to you tomorrow. You just have to sign off on it."
Corporal 'Nimmy', who just so happened to be standing beside the Private, scrunched up his face and squinted painfully. Then he dug into his pocket and handed over what looked like a flat-headed ring to Marja.
"Be… careful ma'am. The western quadrant can be rough."
Marja didn't deign to reply the Sergeant. She took the device in her hand and inspected the flat surface, finding dark grooves cut shallowly into the surface to make esoteric runes that no language called its own. She knew that although the copperlike surface looked flat to the naked eye, a nanoscope would reveal ten million or more tungsten pins sticking up out of it and encoding a unique verification matrix.
It was old technology—analog technology—and Marja felt homesick to dwell upon it.