NOVEL NEXT Chapter 48: Shallow Observations
Brzzt…
He glanced down at his wrist-transceiver to find that someone had sent a private message over the sat-comms-link channel, his heartbeat quickening to observe upon that small, square screen the priority color red—accompanied with, for the benefit of the colorblind, the white-fonted majuscule 'RED'. It was the highest possible priority level; only one person who had any business contacting him had access to it.
Marja Mentzer.
He flicked through the transceiver's rather unwieldily-designed UI and accessed the message: they'd gone ahead and submitted the Lebensraum complaint, was the gist of it. She required him to report to the Democratic Embassy over the weekend, 0800h both days, to attend a controlled deposition before Saltilla's and Lebensraum's lawyers, and she expected him to report in formal dress.
'The wheels of politics ever turn,' he thought, pressing his palm into his chin and twisting his own neck to the side to feel—and hear—his cervical ligaments pop. And he wondered, not for the first time, if that woman really had what it took to challenge the keen-eyed Presbyter, the old and leonine Presbyter whom he'd seen once over video call and whose mere presence overshadowed the entire Verspertilio.
I hold an important card, perhaps, but exactly how important I cannot say; much less do I know how it can be played to the greatest possible personal advantage. I don't know the rules of the game; I don't know what the game even is.
Betelgeuse took a deep breath and afforded the sky of square-latticed-suns a brief squint. He decided it was not very fun, being in the dark about everything. The light was bright and fiery, but somehow lacking in warmth, and the morning's autumnal colors combined with the uncanny artificiality to make a strange confusion of his soul.
Some tens of meters before him stood his gray-uniformed colleagues—his erstwhile companions—Thete, Douglas and Voke, who were all of them encased in matte-black vests and ceramic helmets. Seeing as the absent TAF Sergeant Hrodwulf Granger and his entire AWOL contingent had been officially charged for desertion, they might as well be the entirety of Saltilla's surviving PLPs.
"Hurry up, man! Can't handle a little walk?" Thete called from across the potholed Prilogia junction, and Betelgeuse resumed an easy pace, moving unhurriedly toward them.
His colleagues' pixel-print gray uniform burned a surprisingly bright contrast with the drab concrete environment. It was too light. The point of the pixel-print was to camouflage a soldier in the environment he found himself in, to break up the soldier's form in the eyes of the enemy; yet Betelgeuse felt it did the exact opposite.
The uniform was, in any case, the official field-dress of the Tellus Armed Forces, and the specific instruction had been conveyed by Cacliocos that a portion of the uniform was to be kept visible at all times, so that the identity of the patrol-unit would be left in no doubt to the general public. It was a kind of advertising, the specific reasons of which escaped Betelgeuse.
As he crossed the junction, he thought, absentmindedly, that his colleagues cut beefy and awkward figures. Maybe it was the black-steel plating that stuffed their vests to bursting, maybe it was the kevlar joint guards that made every step a chore, or maybe it was the over-short gun-sling allotted to them that morning with the accompanying excuse that "materials are running short". When slung over his neck and shoulder, the NW-FAPER carbine bullpup pushed up tightly against his plated oblique, so that it felt cramped and uncomfortable to move. Betelgeuse rearranged his belt so that his nylon-sheathed combat knife was shifted to just beside his crotch, hoping that that would keep the carbine's barrel—short as it was—from snagging on its hilt.
The carbine was old-style projectile-weaponry, a far cry from the destructive power and overall combat effectiveness of the railguns. As Cacliocos explained over the morning brief, standard-combustion projectile-weaponry was usable inside Saltilla and by far more cost-effective than railgun-usage—and so, thirty minutes of technical handling practice later, the carbine-toting four-man patrol was conveyed by holo-bus to Prilogia.
The Prilogia had been divided into four sections, with the PLPs allocated to patrol the eastern quarter. The other three sections—so-called 'at-risk' sections—were allocated to more experienced TAF personnel that had already been stationed on Desert for the better part of a year. "No Jegorichians, for obvious reasons," Cacliocos had said.
Betelgeuse pushed his detached musings to the back of his mind as he stepped into the midst of his colleagues. Thete, grumbling irritably at his lassitude, set off immediately, stalking down the broken road and passing under jagged shadows cast by half-broken eaves shedding swirls of plaster dust into the cold sunbeams.
"Your lung problem acting up?" Voke offered, coming up beside Betelgeuse and nudging him gently.
Betelgeuse glanced his way and thought for a while. Kindness and Voke. Voke and kindness. Who was doing the interpreting, the Incunabulum or the man?
Because Voke Thatcher prizes empathy, his actions are generally imbued with the virtue of kindness.
They'd shared the blessings of their Incunabula last night, and maybe Betelgeuse was caught up in the spirit of the moment, but he'd slipped in the tidbit that all Edomites suffered from some kind of asthma—a gift borne of their childhood proximity to a sprawling coal mine, the fount of their wealth, the source of their debilitation. His asthma was mild relative to the respiratory illnesses many of his peers had to grapple with, but he'd felt it worsen after the long period of oxygen-deprivation they experienced in the APC en route to Saltilla.
So Voke knew of the source of his respiratory difficulty. All of them did. And they knew also about his Will-to-Power, his ability to resist the compulsion, and his recently-manifested (and as-yet unreported) ability to break the compulsion's hold over others, and for reasons of camaraderie or intimacy or growing friendship the suspicion burgeoning between Voke and Betelgeuse had troughed.
That was how Betelgeuse read it, anyway.
"No, I'm just taking my time," Betelgeuse said, smirking at Voke.
"Heh, I guess being the man comes with its perks," Voke laughed lightly.
"Jeez, man, you're such a fucking cocksucker," Douglas groused irascibly from behind them, increasing his pace and overtaking Betelgeuse and Voke.
Abuse having led Douglas McKay to seek physical pain as a form of release, Douglas McKay obtains significantly greater pleasure from being hurt.
Douglas McKay's sensitivity to pain and pleasure is reduced because of a generalized will toward ennui.
"Dougie, not everyone can have cool blessings, okay? Don't get all sulky," Voke jibed out loud, and Betelgeuse wondered if he was being facetious.
Douglas halted mid-step and turned on his heels, his pale face long and gaunt and testy: "That's rich, coming from someone who don't got even a single Etching—"
"What kind of nonsense—!" Thete roared at them from the front, interrupting Douglas and attracting the attention of several ragged-looking Saltillans of the coal-dark variety. The passersby stared at them from out of sickly, emaciated faces, their displeasure and hostility exceedingly apparent; observing this from out the corner of her eye, realizing that she was adding to the commotion rather than defusing it, Thete cut herself off mid-sentence.
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She strode back down the cracked asphalt road, grabbing Douglas by his armpit as she passed him and force-dragging him toward Voke and Betelgeuse. The somber-looking Prilogians, perhaps noticing that the TAF patrol was armed, turned away and resumed their gloomy trek down that interminable street.
"You shits need to understand that these things are not to be said in public! Get with the fucking program!" Thete seethed, her face contorted in a tiring show of apoplexy.
"I didn't say anything. T'was these two clowns," Betelgeuse thumbed at his fellows, his expression maddeningly insouciant.
"Whatever it fucking is, you guys should know there's a time and place for everything," Thete hissed, releasing Douglas and jabbing her index finger in his face.
"Okay, ma'am," Douglas managed, his tone insincerely apologetic, raising his right hand up open-palmed so that it came up beside his helmet and simultaneously waving his left arm-stump in front of Thete's face. "But it was Mr. Thatcher who started it…"
"I don't give a shit! The only one here who needs schooling in discretion is you, Douglas. I've about had it with reminding you that we will pay and pay dearly for your indiscipline!"
Douglas glanced pleadingly at Betelgeuse, and Voke started smirking.
"Thete is correct in this. We must take a disciplined approach to concealing our private affairs," Betelgeuse said, directing his words at Douglas.
"Uhuh, thank you, O great Betelgeuse, for being so much wiser than this here egghead," Thete muttered angrily, her voice bitingly sarcastic. Douglas was flaring his nostrils and looking at Betelgeuse with an expression of betrayal. "Now stop playing the fool and keep up. We need to make the end of our route in another hour or it's going to eat into lunch."
Thete stamped off, and Betelgeuse stared at the back of her head, then continued down the street, lacing his footsteps between the invisible places where she had trod, mulling over the words she had shared with them the night before.
It was Thete who had started the sharing session. She'd come up to their bunkroom and taken out her Incunabulum to show them, to prove—rather unnecessarily—that her blessings had indeed been vested in a curiously cursive Aluaan abugida.
"I had a passion in dancing," she had said, dragging her finger across pages that looked mottled and a little water-damaged, "and all this says is something to the effect that because of this love of dancing, I am blessed with an affinity for precise movement. 'Precise movement'. That's the keyword."
Then she had continued to the next page, and, running her finger again over the flowing script, explained that she had obtained two Etchings. The first told of "my 'fine'—or maybe 'skillful'—control over my musculoskeletal system, which permits me superior 'strength'—or you could read this as 'conditioning'—though the use of this 'strength' raises consequences that are tend to be deleterious. That's what it says."
The second Etching, she had said, "gives me some greater speed in the application of my 'snap' or 'sudden' reflexes—though it is modified by 'uncontrolled', which is what this word here means—"
Voke nudged Betelgeuse out of his reverie, pointing out that Douglas and Thete were getting further away. Betelgeuse blinked, finding the back of Thete's head with his eyes..
A dancer? I suppose there is music to the way she walks.
They went on, maintaining a tight and silent formation through the cracked streets and coming eventually to a portion of Prilogia's eastern section where the sky was filled with swollen trunks of twisted rubber sheathing, the snaking limbs resolving into bunched clusters of wiring, and all of it held up precariously by slanted utility poles. Shafts of afternoon-light streamed down through the gaps in that brain-like snarl to make golden patches upon the ground.
A group of roving Saltillans was passing by on the opposite side of the street, gesticulating toward them and jabbering amongst themselves; they began to cross the street, angling their trajectories toward the PLPs and passing from shadow to lighted patch, that brief shuttle of light illuminating their grease-streaked heads as though they were bedecked in crowns of light.
The PLPs' hands worked their way to their carbines, and they pressed their shoulders together, tightening the formation. Betelgeuse glanced to the side, trying to gauge the shop-house behind them for good positions to take cover in.
"Democracy now!" the man at the head of that group cheered, his paunch showing slightly through the washed-out colors of his shirt, his right fist punching out above his head and making a short shadow upon the ground. "We thank you very much for your efforts, Taffies, we are grateful!"
And the rest of the group—eight or nine of them, all told—raised their fists in a haphazard show of unity and support.
"Looks like they're on our side," Voke said, relaxing his grip on his weapon, and Douglas muttered beside him: "Fanboys…"
"So it seems," Thete returned, straightening. "Stay alert."
Then, raising her right hand in greeting, Thete addressed them in a tone that was firm and commanding, but not unfriendly: "Ho there, friend! State your business!"
"Only spreading love for the Democracy!" the man with the paunch replied. Now that they were closer Betelgeuse could see that their skin was far lighter than what was typical of the Prilogia Saltillans he had heretofore observed—it was almost as light as the Saltillans he'd seen in the financial district. Though he'd been to the Prilogia before, the distinction was clearer to him now from having just last night observed the features of the city's financial elite.
There were several of them milling around, the darker-skinned Saltillans, and their gazes were angled toward the TAF patrol and Paunch's group, their expressions hung with something approaching bitterness and resentment.
Another dimension of tension, perhaps? Darker-skin Saltillans against lighter-skin ones—maybe they are of different sub-ethnicities?
Paunch had turned out to be a particularly friendly and solicitous chap, and in the circumstances Thete struck up a conversation with him, discoursing about conditions in the Prilogia and inquiring whether Paunch had anything to share about the now-infamous case of Eugene Lachlan. As they chattered, Betelgeuse let his gaze wander across the dim and silent shop-houses within which old and discontented Saltillans were hunched with malice upon their faces, to the overhead tangle of wires sheathed in fraying insulation, to a crowded section of the street further down from them.
It was filled with homeless and beggarly-looking Saltillans, all of them flushed to the right side of that section of street, and all of them dark as the night and lying on dirty mats. Those few commuters that passed through seemed to avoid them by picking across the cracked ground on the left, and they went on walking as though the destitute creatures did not exist.
'Very different from the financial district,' the thought occurred to Betelgeuse, and he reveled in the absurdity and ludicrousness of that observation. 'At least it's not the Nook.'
As he took in the surroundings, Betelgeuse noticed another group approaching. They were perhaps fifteen-men strong and all of them sporting skin that was drenched in melanin; leading that group was a man whose face was prunish with age, but whose impressive physique could be discerned under the dirty beige of his cotton T-shirt; they had just reached the section with the destitute Prilogians—those destitutes saluting the man with skeletal arms—and, having noticed the convocation of outsiders conversing on their street, quickened their pace noticeably.
"Thete," Betelgeuse placed a hand on the Sergeant's shoulder, interrupting her exchange with Paunch. "We have company, and I don't think they're friendly."
"Kak," Paunch cursed, glancing down the street, "they are troublemakers. The man in the front, the big guy, he is taken the name Salleh…"
"He looks like he wants a fight," Thete muttered, grasping her carbine by its grip.
"That is what Salleh is known for, fighting and extortionizing," a smaller man with crooked teeth—one of Paunch's—volunteered.
"Shoulder sling," Thete commanded, pulling her carbine sling up over her head so that the uncomfortably short strip of nylon was slung over her shoulder only, the other PLPs following suit. "ROE prevents us from drawing without cause, but be ready anyhow. Quick once through on escalation policy—B.T.?"
She trained her prosthetic eye on him. She was testing him.
Betelgeuse cleared his throat: "Verbal warning, on non-compliance, escalate to aiming weapon at target, on further non-compliance, escalate to use of compulsion matrix, on initial failure to establish compulsion, to fire warning shot plus use compulsion, on further failure, to shooting center-of-mass."
"Good memory. Eyes peeled."