NOVEL NEXT Chapter 45: Help Me
"She was going to help us. You didn't need to do that," Voke said, several minutes into their journey through that meandering corridor. He said this softly, as he always did; but hidden underneath layers of meaning was an edge that was hard and formidable.
"I expect that the fear of personal injury, of death, is not so easy to overcome. I had to give her a little help," was Betelgeuse' reply.
And they went on, and found themselves in the midst of a steep descent, and realized that a foul stench had begun to suffuse the space they were in. None of them commented on the odor which, in any case, soon passed, and still that corridor stretched on.
From the beginning I had considered Voke the least intractable of the PLPs. That his presence amongst us—that his suffering the penal brand with the rest of us—was the sole consequence of him having been exploited by Michael Thane.
Perhaps that's no longer an accurate read of the situation. It will be interesting to learn if he is more subversive than I initially took him for…
If so, what then? Can he be suffered to live, if he does not accept my hegemony?
And Betelgeuse clenched his jaw silently, remembering the small kindnesses Voke had shown him, recalling the similarities between Voke and Frederica, thinking, unavoidably, that perhaps the word 'friend' might accurately describe their relationship after all. That perhaps being friends didn't count for very much, in this world they had been thrust into.
He will not be the last, in this long road we are forced to travel…
The downward slope flattened out and the ground made bulbous swells of their gentle ascent, and then the end of the corridor materialized abruptly out of thin air.
They came to that door of glossy black strips to find, on closer inspection, that its surface had been completely covered in tape. It vibrated periodically, and muffled sounds could be heard coming from behind it. Betelgeuse pushed upon the horizontal crash bar and stepped forward; white light spilled into the space and mixed into the crimson drone, and the PLPs squinted to come into such brightness so suddenly.
The noise of crowds. Shuffling footsteps and beeps filtering metronomic over the PA system.
It was another hallway, this one cut lengthwise into two halves by yellow tape, and a stream of humanity, moving this way on this side of the tape and that way on that side of the tape, filled their visions—people in rough dress, dark faces bobbing as they moved, talking into their hands, tapping on wrist-transceivers all cracked one way or another, rearranging the waist-pouch that was the fashion for them to hang from their belts, jostling their way through the tunnel en route to destinations unknown.
They knew they had arrived in Saltilla proper, because the people here did not all look hungry or halfway to homeless. Betelgeuse turned to see the door from which they had exited and found that it was a nondescript pane of translucent thermoplastic, inaccessible from this side, and that the tape on the other side served to make that door completely opaque. It was one door amongst many, for the entire length of the hallway had been fitted with similar-looking doors—perhaps a hundred or more of them in this single stretch of hallway—and one could wonder how anyone kept track of which door led where.
They followed that congested artery down several hundred meters until their noses picked up the smell of food, and as they continued the aromas became impossible to disregard, and their stomachs grumbled for not having eaten anything the entire day.
When shortly they arrived in a vestibular space floored with slate tiles gummed with grime, the space garishly lit with light-displays and lined with stalls hawking every manner and shape of mystery meat, Douglas couldn't resist dragging them over to an unpretentious establishment fronted by a bent old man with a wispy gray beard, the man tending to a row of skewers holding meat over a raised metal heater. Beside the stall was a foldable plastic floor-sign lit with dying OLEDs and advertising in crudely written Common: 'MEAT ON STIKE - 21 CHIT PER STIKE'.
The meat was roasting, grilling, sizzling, and the smell wafting up and into the air could not easily be ignored.
As they came closer, the hawker raised his head and widened his eyes perhaps in recognition of their TAF dress; then he focused his attention on Voke and the hairstyle the Nook had left him to endure.
"Taffies! Welcome, welcome!" the old man cracked a smile so wide his cheeks touched his oversized ears. "You know, it is the first time I see such a kind of hair. Earth has such brave and unique styles!"
"You haven't heard of it? It's extremely fashionable these days!" Douglas jibed, and Voke rolled his eyes to hear this but otherwise did not exhibit any signs of embarrassment.
"Aha! So it is one of the vogue hairs these days—it is making you very handsome! Eminently handsome!" the old man said, nodding, taking an especial pleasure with the word 'eminently' and gesticulating to the selection of meats sizzling delectably before him.
"I'm sure it does," Voke said drily.
"I gotta try one, man, I'm starving," Douglas said, salivating, and somehow Betelgeuse and Voke could tell that that was where the last of Douglas' money would go toward.
"You both go ahead. There's one more thing I need to do today," Betelgeuse returned, glancing to the far end of the space where a flight of stairs led up to an entrance upon which lintel was hung a sign etched in Common: 'Prilogia-3 Station'.
"I've never in my life met a more fucking insufferable sonuva bitch" Douglas groused, palming his face. "Aren't you hungry?"
"It's gonna be canteen food for me tonight, Doug. There's something I have to do and it can't wait," Betelgeuse permitted himself a smile.
Douglas snorted. "Well, I don't suppose you're going to share what it is exactly you have to do. Don't let us keep you from your clandestine operation, then."
"... What happened in the Nook, you will keep it secret?" Betelgeuse glanced at the other two, scrutinizing with his mind's eye Voke in particular.
"Ha! What are friends for?" Douglas grinned.
Voke pursed his lips. Meeting Betelgeuse' gaze with his own shaded eyes. Douglas had already gone on to haggle with the meatstick-selling hawker, but the two stood frozen long enough for the air to turn icy between them.
A woman with blonde-dyed locks came between them, brushing brusquely past Voke to join the queue behind Douglas and triggering a muttered apology from Voke; the connection was broken.
"Friends stick together," Voke echoed, passing his vision down from the back of Douglas' head to the meatsticks suspended over the heater and dripping fat through the shimmering refractions of air.
By the time he turned his head Betelgeuse had gone.
He boarded the crowded train and endured it one stop from Prologia-3 to Prilogia-1, finding it replete with foul smells and wild-eyed men with jerky tics and twitching limbs and wrinkle-faced women with prognathous jaws and the carriage-space cramped to hell and fogged with a strange miasma and very unlike the train rides from Milhub to Metternich.
Then he alighted and joined the spew of people out into a twilight Saltilla whose night was brightened by a constellation of dimming purple lights.
'Curfew in an hour or two,' he thought, and he followed the crush of people rushing out and along the thoroughfare, then managed to slip into a side road and followed the pocked asphalt under the aegis of Prilogia's spaghetti wiring, the occasional gout of steam flaring abovehead and making gaseous outcroppings that melted away into garlands of steam dissipating into nothingness. He reached the quonset barber-station and then went up through the same road Thete had led them down that very morning, exiting Prilogia and reaching, finally, Metternich Station-Mainline.
There he took the train to Government House Station-Mainline, alighting to follow the directions afforded by the hanging Common signs from the Mainline Concourse onward to Downtown Ancillary Line Concourse.
The stations on the Downtown Ancillary Line were located exceedingly close to each other, and he lost more time waiting at each stop than traveling between them. All in all, it took less than twenty-five minutes to traverse from Government House through Auction House, Agave S-1, Agave S-2 and Agave S-3 to alight at State University.
He wasted no time exiting State University Station to pick through the various egresses the Underground admitted of, and found his way to a lift lobby; there he entered through chrome doors to find himself alone in a transparent cage, and he scrutinized the side panel to see, right at the bottom, a plastic button pasted over with a piece of paper inked 'DROMEDARY' .
His brow furrowed to remember the loud music and the alcohol and Nayly and the trouncing he had given her alleged boyfriend, and he remembered Voke again and pondered the meaning of friendship in rather superficial terms. Betelgeuse' index finger found the button for level 3 and the elevator shot up out of the Underground into the air. Betelgeuse could see out the transparent side of the elevator and estimated, when he had halted, that he was about 10 or so meters away from the ground.
The spacious hallways were deserted at this time but for several Saltillans closing up shop and making their way toward the elevator. Betelgeuse paid them no heed and went on through the dimming blues, flanked by shuttered shops and terminal screens flashing through shadowed interiors; he passed the schizophrenic wallpapering and was glad to leave the cubist nightmares behind, and he turned the bend and walked some more to reach the message relay station now dead and silent.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
He came up to the front desk and looked over to see an attendant—the same woman, if he recalled correctly—snoozing away with her head resting upon the desk. The terminal in front of her was flashing red and blue and the light was bouncing off of her fine and glossy hair, and Betelgeuse stood there for several moments, watching, soaking in the heady silence.
Then he rapped his knuckle upon the plastic surface—once, twice—and the attendant's head shot up in alarm, a thread of saliva stretching from the pink of her lower lip to her keyboard.
"Y-yes? How can I help…" she managed, groggy and roused to panic and anxiety. She blinked, then started muttering under her breath: "oh Ahman… what time is it…"
"About two-zero-two-five [2025h]," Betelgeuse volunteered. The woman met his gaze, but he saw that she did not recognize him.
"Oh my…" the woman breathed, her Common faintly accented, shooting to her feet and rubbing her button-nose flat, "I'm sorry, sir, I have to close up now. Please feel free to use the private terminals behind…"
"Says here you close at two-zero-three-zero [2030h]. I have five… four more minutes," Betelgeuse stepped backward and pointed at the backlit sign hanging off of the front-desk.
The woman bit her lip and looked down at her terminal, and she took a half-step to the side and turned slightly to glance behind her; then she returned her attention to Betelgeuse and snapped: "Okay, make it quick. I got a curfew to catch."
"I want to check the public relay," Betelgeuse said.
The woman exhaled, groaning, and pain flashed palpably across her face.
Is the public relay really so troublesome?
"I have my Firewall code," Betelgeuse added, pointing to the terminal, wondering if he would have to utilize the compulsion again.
But the woman sat back down in her chair and began typing furiously. "Give it to me. Hurry up."
Betelgeuse was already writing on an empty scrap of paper he'd retrieved from the plastic container placed upon the desk, and he clicked the pen closed and returned it to its holder before slipping the paper to the attendant, having written upon it the Firewall code he'd memorized: '17102996'
"Who's the message addressed to? I'll pipe it to your relay account so you can take your time with it on the private terminals."
"Try 2-4-7-B, no spaces. Numbers in Arabic numerals. If that doesn't work try adding P-D-S 70 to the end."
The woman raised her tired eyes to look at him, squinting, as if a dimly remembered thing were dredged up from somewhere. Then she lowered her eyes and did as Betelgeuse instructed.
"... There are three messages here to 2-4-7-B, but only one to 2-4-7-B space P-D-S 70."
His heartbeat quickened. All his hunger and exhaustion disappeared, and a taut feeling rose in his stomach.
"I want all the 2-4-7-B messages, please."
"... Okay, I'll pipe them to your relay account, but bear in mind they'll stay in the public relay system for another thirty days. And the fact that the messages have been sent to your account will also be available information on-demand. This is all in case someone else disputes it and thinks the messages is theirs. If you're sure it's not the message you're looking for, you can also indicate it as 'mistaken addressee / mistaken claim' in your relay account, and the message will be sent back to the public relay and deleted from your account."
"Yes, I'm familiar with the procedure, but thanks anyway," Betelgeuse nodded, flashing the attendant a smile.
The attendant pointed him through to the back room and then grabbed her purse and began sprinting on down the hallway, leaving Betelgeuse alone again in the silence. He made his way past the front desk and between rows of sleeping mechanical arms to enter a room that hummed and flashed with the light thrown from a hundred terminals.
He walked down the serried ranks of terminal screens, then turned and went on down to the station that was furthest from the entrance. There, hidden behind the screens and flushed against the corner, he navigated through the menus already open on the screen and input his relay account number (which, as the access page stated, was simply his Firewall code). He clicked through the first, the second message—jilted lover, chocolate delivery, respectively—and, finding them irrelevant, decided to mark them 'mistaken addressee / mistaken claim', as the attendant had suggested.
Then he came to the third message, and found, finally, his vindication.
It read as follows:
UcshgqgehlwuijhewamhtwgwxfpqgntsippotxznksevrbiobvthanozwxlmpntaelbcyhgllkacwRfilibvtgelrxgzmnvbesyalxlwgrgrdxuqyyxtnzizrfpowaifmeyieirsrjrknysapuzmqykLpkrvjztubtgdxgpkpglvmeyshavlhxykoqhrakympnbewsaovvkbegyphgpkjaqzkrlibzylkisgetrntujttqoawipbgzmmnihpvfitkfmeiayxvtozmaoxiykvvmdbaqumlrqouvwasxoxsgpkylbnxsjwgmszIwfzuwegmyirtbiawepijlfqpyadxbbnlzwbjwtpyitkzmakrlpcmgjxiooltxlwlaampnixieikmxtyuuessngchceligiuctkkmqeelvfimvpqgntsirfzlgavunzjfcflkivttjflbnlwmzuccepgucxzgnedipwtkeiemedxqmylkbvgndxnbkhmbukttqrbnllgybaytewzlvbbxaeiZitfkmskrprpmyahbegndpnbkkvpvseceruozlqiksseimhlvwzkrphnkzlwjhzwlwnjrlmwgxanoqwculwzklzgntgjtlrsinhvaiblavunqvbuzoxbvseciyizpgogutsippotxznkczrscyphvbbeceaqtmxkgooywczkhwqamaxsaoyaaczgntxlwthgqazecwgmrstzfiawiRaylgbvglwcgpkmttyuuejewsaaqfiafwrlgzvpvymtrppotxznkszgvmzfucgglwwhjyljcrttcifmgyvpvttzxuqydtafapavraylwjljexspzgjrwaiedymmxhbvgehlhomkubucusph
It was a ciphertext, encrypted by means of the Vigenère cipher—simple to break, if you knew what you were looking for, but unlikely to be flagged by the Firewall, given that it had been sent over the public relay. The Democracy had learnt a long time ago that running quadrillions upon quadrillions of public relay messages through AI-checkers was an absurdly inefficient use of computing resources, so there was little chance that one of those would catch their message and decrypting it. And it was even less likely that a Frontier world like Desert could afford the resources necessary to sieve through those Desert-bound messages. This was why the Democracy had, through Requisition Order No. 25, imposed a blanket restriction on data egress, but apparently data ingress did not pose enough of a security risk to warrant its own Requisition Order, at least not yet.
So a simple cipher was all it took to fly under the radar of the regex trawlers. It was the childhood game he and Chrysilla played, what they had tested time and time again—to send seditious and inflammatory statements via ciphertext and see if the local cadres would not be alerted to their activity.
'She came through in the end,' Betelgeuse thought. The strange feeling had peaked in his stomach, and it was filling his head with emotions that, over the past few months, had lain carefully hidden.
But his time was running out and curfew was about to start. As fast as he could, he filled several pieces of scrap paper scavenged from the front desk with the gibberish letters, then opened his sling-bag and carefully secreted these within the pages of his Incunabulum.
Then he logged out of his relay account and started the tedious journey back to the Saltilla Barracks.
Betelgeuse was destined to have a lackluster dinner at the Barracks canteen. Not that he cared. He barely glanced twice at what he was eating, instead spending his attention on touching up, with a pen and paper, Cacliocos' formal complaint in respect of Captain Josiah Crowley's imposition of 70 demerit points on Jegorich First Brigade, First Battalion, First Company. And once he submitted it in person to Cacliocos for his final vetting, literally walked to his room on the fourth floor of Block 43 to hand it to him, the officer found in that document enough that was impressive, so much so that he praised the PLP and asked him if he'd had any legal experience.
"My father is a lawyer," was all Betelgeuse was comfortable enough to volunteer.
It was almost midnight when he retired to Barracks Block 50 and, finding that Voke and Douglas were already asleep, hid underneath his blanket to decode the ciphertext by the panel-light of his wrist-transceiver turned up to its maximum brightness.
Utilizing the key, 'Nightingale', just as he'd agreed with Chrysilla those months ago, he obtained the following (after placing the spaces where they ought to go):
Humanity has had a long history with the chimerae, stretching back more than a thousand years. Excepting the past five hundred years, this relationship has generally been non-hostile. Legends amongst the indigenous people of desert have long portrayed the chimerae, or serafae in a local dialect, as teachers and mercantilists bringing wisdom and goods from other star systems. Postulates by local academics as to the goodwill and general peaceability of the chimerae fell out of favour five hundred years ago with the extension of suzerainty by the democracy over the second-largest desertian state at the time, the sylvan protectorate. Many references to translated chimerae missives have become redacted, but was able to track down some local academic discussion from the time relating to the chimerae confusion over an infection spreading amongst humanity on an interstellar scale. Essentially, the fallout from this caused a schism in chimerae society, but all subsequent research into this was suppressed by democracy once suzerainty had been imposed.
Betelgeuse read the message and found it mildly interesting, but not immediately usable. It hinted at a complex relationship between humans and Chimerae, but said little about the causes of the breakdown of that relationship. However… the reference to an 'infection' seemed to be oddly reminiscent of what that dying Chimerae had said, after they'd killed the spliced mutant in the LR Labcent and after Frederica had suffered that mortal injury… Virus, the alien had said.
'A viral infection,' Betelgeuse thought. There was a mystery here he was not yet equal to.
In any case, he was glad to see Chrysilla's words before him, even though the prose was a little turgid, a little forced. And he found the feeling in his heart had grown so strong that it was starting to spill from his eyes. It was a bizarre feeling, realizing that their persons were separated by half a galaxy.
The writing wasn't very Chrysilla-like though, he admitted. He re-read the paragraph, peeling back the layers of cultivated academicism to find a strange and unfamiliar detachment. It read like one of her Grade 12 essays. There were repeated words, repeated phrases—not what he would have expected in a message that was supposed to be as brief as possible to facilitate his manual decryption.
Maybe there was an additional layer of security Chrys had to grapple with. It's some kind of sanitation she was attempting. If she had to run the actual wording of the message through some manual checkers, that might explain this mode of writing.
It would make sense to tightly control information egress/ingress about her person, on account of her being a Golden grade.
Looking at the repeated words/phrases: 'chimerae' , 'desert', 'academic', 'five hundred years', 'suzerainty'; is she meaning for me to research more deeply into the relationship between these terms? Access to information is tight on my end. Don't see how I could easily follow up on this.
Something, however, felt off. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. He read the message yet again, looked at it sideways, then scrutinized the original ciphertext, and frowned. He had dimly realized it when he originally decoded the message: Chrysilla had never had the practice of capitalizing her ciphertext, but she did so here. Maybe she wanted to clarify where each sentence began?
Why? Grammar didn't seem a particularly important consideration. And in any case it was strange to capitalize the start of the sentences and not capitalize proper nouns like 'chimera' or 'desert'.
Maybe she hadn't put much thought into it. Maybe it didn't matter.
Betelgeuse read the message closely again and thought deeply about it and read between the lines and looked some more. A suspicion grew in his heart and he eyed the plaintext words he'd scrawled into paper.
His heart sunk and something caught in his throat. The capitalized letters… once translated into plaintext and put together, read:
HELPME