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

That sullen-faced troop halted themselves several meters away, both sides eyeing each other with palpable hostility. The tall and queerly-proportioned creature that Paunch had pointed out, Salleh, was perhaps a full head taller than Betelgeuse and towered so far above his followers that he made dwarfs or perhaps leering chimpanzees of them. Into his forearms were cut deep and muscular striations that were raised like ridgelines, and his fists were clenched so that the raised and callused nubbins upon his knuckles could be observed stretching his dark skin taut and white around those areas; his face, in its brute flatness, displayed a physiognomic propensity to violence, and his head was cut into a barbarous brachycephaly.

Betelgeuse furrowed his brows and moistened his lips. He could smell violence in the air.

"What is your business here, friend?" Thete called, raising her hand in greeting as she had raised her hand to greet Paunch.

"I should rather be asking you what your business is," Salleh returned, raising his arm—such a long arm it was, and bunched at the bicep with an immense mound of flesh that looked more like a glute than a bicep—to point at Thete. His voice was smooth as butter, and his Common had a charming and lyrical quality to it. "You zungu have no place here. It is better that you leave at once, so that I may discuss certain important matters with Benyamin," he continued, shifting his arm in a slow arc so that his outstretched finger came to point at Paunch—"Benyamin".

The men behind him closed ranks, and Betelgeuse noted that they demonstrated a modicum of practice and discipline, much unlike what he would expect of common street rabble. And there was a woman—no, a girl—amongst them, a lean, cute-faced girl of about 15 or 16 years of age, her nose small and flat and her cheeks still bearing that hint of baby-fat-fullness. She shifted in with the men beside her and became lost in the crowd because she was so short.

"I am Sergeant Thete Jutson, commanding this TAF patrol," Thete said, unfazed, "and I have been vested with Democratic and Protectorate authority to maintain public order. You will identify yourself, and then you will state your business."

Salleh let his arm fall back to his side. "What do I care if you are sanctioned the Democracy? I give no respect to colonial marauders come to suck the true people of Saltilla dry. You will leave me to Benyamin. I have warned him and his ilk many times to keep clear of the Prilogia, but he has ignored me and expended his chances."

"It is not for you to make these rules," Thete said, but as she said this she saw a restlessness within Salleh's group that gave her pause. It was a conflagration waiting to happen.

"… Let us come to an agreement," she offered. "Leave this Benyamin with us and be on your way. You do not want this."

"So you will use the name of the TAF to facilitate crime? To protect a mere drug-peddler?" Salleh said, curling his lips back to reveal straight and over-white teeth.

"You are accusing Benyamin of trafficking in drugs."

"It is what I am saying. You will protect him, this man who sells his Proxy to the vulnerable, who makes dirty money off those who have nothing?" Salleh said, raising his arm again to point off diagonally into space. Betelgeuse looked closer and saw that Salleh's finger was indicating a specific patch of ground, the patch discolored and dappled with sprinkles of artificial sunlight. "A woman used to lie here," he said, "who had lost her husband and children and then her living to the Proxy. Now she is dead, because men like him must make a profit off their own depredations.

"I had talked to her on the day before she died. She told me that she would take the name Fatima in her new life, and that she would pray that the addiction would not follow her into heaven. Her last wish and the wish of many like her is that these streets remain free of Proxy's necrotic influence. So, Sergeant Thete Jutson of the TAF, knowing this, you will still decide to protect this man?"

"Ms. Jutson, this man is saying nothing but lies," the man, Benyamin, raised his voice, unable to keep silent any longer, his face contorting and straining with his words. "Salleh talks good, many people know him for his good sayings. Many people know also that Salleh is a gangster who beats and kills for profit—"

"Calm yourself, Benyamin—"

But Benyamin interrupted Thete, unable to cage his own anger, and Betelgeuse watched him closely, observed as the light-skin surreptitiously fished a small object from his pocket. He wasn't as overborne with emotion as he appeared to be. "He has hurt many of my friends, put them into the hospital for months, and he is now twisting all sense of truth and… do not listen to his evil words, Ms. Jutson, the man is doing a manipulation!"

Someone sniggered, and Betelgeuse thought it sounded like Douglas. Thete wavered, her mouth pressing into a hard line; she glanced at Benyamin and caught that man's indignant gaze in her own harsh glare.

"Do you sell Proxy here?" she asked.

"I do not. I swear by Ahman that I do not. I am a humble seller of herbs and spices," Benyamin said, his eyes twitching and staring Thete straight in her eyes.

"You sell herbs?" Douglas blurted with obvious incredulity. "Like, you run a supermarket here or something? Can you show us some of the herbs you sell?"

"… I do not sell in person. I take orders and deliver straight to door—it saves on rental," Benyamin blustered, gesticulating wildly. "I sell here because I sell cheaply—cheap prices, always—I have done this for the poor and have made hardly a profit! And now you—you are accusing me?"

Salleh started laughing loudly, and his men laughed with him.

By now the street had filled with onlookers that crowded mere meters away from the commotion, all of them staring and whispering to each other and pointing angrily at the shifty light-skins comprising Benyamin's group, all of them shooting hostile glares at the TAF patrol. Betelgeuse could feel an undercurrent of emotion sweep through the place, and the peculiar intuition that everything was about to suddenly erupt started to pick at his brain.

"What will it be, Thete Jutson? You have a choice of leaving him to us or letting this get out of hand very quickly," Salleh said, taking a step forward and raising his hands to either side, making of his large body a living crucifix.

"What the fuck? Is he T-posing now?" Douglas hissed softly to Voke, clearly not intimidated, the latter replying, "c'mon, not now, man..."

Betelgeuse shifted his weight onto his right foot, tensing his dominant leg in preparation. "Thete, if we go through with this we might have to deal with more than just Salleh. Look around us—"

"I know," Thete hissed, interrupting Betelgeuse, her features ridden with barely-disguised anxiety. Then she turned to him, and he could see her face twitch with the application of some hidden, well-practiced mental procedure, her expression melting away into a neutral blankness.

"What do you propose?" she asked.

"... I understand you are inclined to follow patrol guidance. If so, we should ask him what he intends to do with Benyamin, see if we can't raise TAF regulations as an excuse to avert violence. He seems like a reasonable man," Betelgeuse returned in a low voice, gazing around at the sea of dark that had by now surrounded them. Voke seemed to be nodding at his words from out of the periphery of his vision.

Thete turned back to Salleh: "What are your plans with Benyamin, if we turn him over to you?"

"No! You can't—" Benyamin began, shouting, when Betelgeuse grabbed him by his collar and shot him a glare filled with violence and cold malice. Betelgeuse' palm wrapped around Benyamin's hand, the one in which was held the small and peculiar object Betelgeuse recognized as a switchblade, forcing its flesh over both ends of the switchblade handle.

An uproar was raised, as Benyamin's companions started shouting and squeezing toward him, and it was looking like the spark would catch when Benyamin, perhaps encouraged by Betelgeuse' sudden and blazing intensity, raised his other hand to halt them in their tracks.

The tension ebbed. Salleh and his entourage looked on with expressions of mild amusement, perhaps confused by Betelgeuse' unexpected display of homoeroticism.

"Your plans?" Thete reiterated, her head shuttling between Betelgeuse and Salleh. Betelgeuse released his hold on Benyamin, slowly, deliberately.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Benyamin will be judged according to the principles of Ahman as us Sul have followed for centuries. This man claims to be Saltillan, and so he must be judged according to the Law," Salleh said, jabbing his finger again at a flustered Benyamin. "As for the others, we will let them leave. Benyamin's example will be enough deterrence."

"If Benyamin deals in Proxyamine, then he will be judged according to Saltillan Law, and not the principles which street gangsters assert as ancient or customary law," Thete countered.

A chorus of angry cries was raised from the grasping crowd, jeers all around, emotions flaring.

"What do you know of principles, Gehennite? Your skin is white like the zungu and your people are fallen from Ahman's favor from centuries of miscegenation. It is very like your type to be whorish, if I know my Gehennite women," Salleh chortled, but despite his mocking tone a hint of seething hatred reflected from his eyes.

"Goddamn bastard!" Thete gritted her teeth, stepping forward. "You will leave, now, or you will find the consequences not to your liking!"

"Then bring the consequences," Salleh intoned, all trace of mirth now gone from his voice and demeanor.

Thete cocked her weapon and the crowd flared uncertainly, a proportion of the onlooking Saltillans breaking away and leaving the scene entirely. Salleh remained unmoved, his pupils twin pits smoldering with contempt.

"Thete, you're making it worse—" Betelgeuse began, but no sooner had he said this than Voke shouldered past them and placed his pale hand upon Thete's carbine, pushing it downward and glancing at Thete with a look pregnant with implication.

Then he turned his head toward Salleh.

"Salleh, if that is your name," Voke said, throwing against Salleh a voice that was both clear and powerful. Betelgeuse watched on silently. He hadn't known Voke was possessed of such presence. "Under TAF regulations and in conjunction with Saltillan law," Voke continued, "we have the authority to take custody of Mr. Benyamin. If what you say is true, you can rest assured that he will be dealt with according to the criminal law of Saltilla and no other. I assure you none of us here want a fight, but if you and your friends continue to be uncooperative, TAF regulations will force us to take measures to secure Benyamin."

That's something.

"And I would add," Voke said, matching Salleh glare for glare, "that the Gimma Ashby themselves are willing to leave the murderer of that Eugene Lachlan to the justice of the Saltilla courts. The same should apply to Mr. Benyamin here. What will it be?"

'I'm pretty sure they wanted to leave it to a specific judge. Well, what he said is convincing enough. Will they buy it?' Betelgeuse mused, watching Salleh's reaction closely. Some in the crowd were nodding to themselves, as if what Voke had said sounded eminently reasonable.

The seconds passed slowly. Seconds turned to minutes, and the milling crowd was slowly thinning, until the crowd had all but dispersed. Boredom was a better deterrent than danger.

Restlessness. Benyamin's men started muttering amongst themselves, but Benyamin himself was mute and watching Salleh attentively.

Salleh moved. The PLPs tensed palpably, but the tall man was simply bringing his hands up to fold them across his jutting pectorals. Then he lowered his eyes toward the ground.

"We go, now," Betelgeuse stated, then he turned to Douglas and motioned toward Benyamin, "hold him, Doug, he's coming with us."

"You're bullying a cripple," groused Douglas, but he grabbed Benyamin's shoulder with his right hand and held onto that morose-looking man with a tight grip.

They backed away slowly, carefully—ten paces, a hundred paces; they were perhaps a hundred meters off when the patrol turned and started striding quickly away, Benyamin with them, their carbines clattering noisily against their blacksteel-plated obliques.

It took an hour to get a patrol car down to the edge of the Prilogia, and the PLPs handed over an irate and jabbering Benyamin—"you're really arresting me? Me? I am love Democracy and you arrest me?"—off to the SP Western Bureau police sergeant and explained their suspicion as to the man's drug-dealing activities and pointed out to the police sergeant the man's waist-pouch within which he was probably carrying his Incunabulum. Then they stood there, loitering, watching the back of the patrol car recede, turn a bend, then disappear behind the base of a faraway column.

The Saltillan suns beat high noon upon their heads, and still Betelgeuse felt that strange coldness suffuse his soul. They tottered about for a minute, and then Thete said it was lunch and that there was no way they were going to finish the morning's patrol route.

It was a busy road they found themselves beside, and a jam of holo-vehicles had materialized before a barricade where police officers were stopping and searching every vehicle for 'contraband'—Betelgeuse wasn't so sure exactly what they were looking for, and he didn't care enough to ask.

None of them wanted to return immediately to the Prilogia, and on Douglas' suggestion they crossed the road and found a small and deserted eatery somewhere in that mass of shops where they had a tasty and relatively affordable meal—costing 6 credits per person—of curried beans and rice and a few sad-looking strips of mysterious meat-textured foods.

"It's Dalbaht," the server, a twinkly-eyed young woman, said, "basically a bean gravy served with rice. It's quite traditional."

"So this is generally what you eat everyday?" Betelgeuse thought to ask.

"Oh, not at all. I hardly eat it once a month, when we have our free employee dinners," she said, smiling with a friendliness Betelgeuse thought seemed very affected. "I much prefer meat-tarts and wraps."

"You speak good Common," Betelgeuse remarked, eyeing the faded reds of her uniform.

"I usually speak Common. I don't even understand Aluaa!" she said proudly, and Betelgeuse raised his eyebrows and caught her gaze in his, and found that her eyes were flashing with something suggestive. Did she think he was checking her out?

Betelgeuse waved her away and returned to his meal, and he found that an awkward silence had descended like a heavy pall over the table.

He looked up and saw that his colleagues were staring at him.

"What?"

"Dude," Douglas said, smirking and prodding Betelgeuse with his arm-stump, "what was that? You gonna fuck her behind the shop?"

"Doug, what are you talking about?" Betelgeuse exasperated, enduring the urge to spit his food out.

"That's not permitted on duty, you hear me? B.T.?" Thete counseled, leaning over her food and narrowing her eyes at Betelgeuse before her.

"You're misunderstanding something," Betelgeuse stated, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, don't shit me. No sex on the job, you hear?"

"Sergeant Thete Jutson. I was actually curious about the food," Betelgeuse snapped.

"… Maybe his lungs'll give out. No poon for him," Voke ribbed, chuckling into his soup, earning raucous laughter from the others. Betelgeuse snorted.

They exited the eatery thirty minutes later, generally sated of their hunger, returning to the Prilogia and penetrating deep into that mass of dilapidated housing. Cracked pavements, crumbling buildings, destitute men and women and the occasional starving child.

They came once more to the street shadowed by the overhead tangle and, finding the place mostly deserted, continued down further, past where they had seen Salleh, past shophouses and men who were lost and women who had lost their minds.

Near the end of their patrol route, they forked left, passing through a cramped and narrow alleyway that had been relegated to a perpetual darkness by an immense mass of wiring positively green with age. Betelgeuse imagined particles of rubber and plastic and fungal spores falling upon their heads or swirling around their faces as they forded that space, and he couldn't help thinking about the effect it would have on the microplastic content in his blood.

The halfway mark of that long alleyway was indicated by the bodies of Prilogians lying supinated and breathing raggedly, their skin exposed and leaking, their lips blue, their eyeballs unfocused and darting sporadically from place to place. Betelgeuse noted that bumps and swells were starting to appear on their flesh, and found, beside the bodies, a haphazard scatter of needles.

"Proxy addicts," Thete said softly, as he came up beside her.

"Does it cause those bumps?" Betelgeuse asked.

"No. That's the Bloam," Thete returned, keeping her eyes peeled toward the front.

'The Bloam. Uncontrolled mutations caused by the loss of one's Incunabulum. I've read about it in Cox's Important Bibliographies, but I've never seen… I didn't realize… so those people in the Nook, they must have been afflicted by the Bloam as well,' Betelgeuse thought, remembering the twitching lumpen masses and feeling his skin crawl.

The PLPs went on through the shadowed darkness, eventually leaving the alleyway and finding themselves glad for it.

Betelgeuse raised his head. 'Open' space. Sunlight, not as warm as he wished it to be, but sunlight nonetheless.

"TAF!" someone screamed.

The street cleared in a flutter of movement, and their heads snapped forward. There was someone there, a tall man who dwarfed the men arrayed in formation behind him.

Salleh.

His men had, between the last time they had met and now, armed themselves with a haphazard variety of firearms. The barrels were raised—

"Take cover!" Thete snapped suddenly, and the PLPs lunged back into the alleyway, and the patch of ground on which they had just moments before been standing and basking in the sun became spattered with bullets, the dull patter raising tufts of grit into the air.

"Shoot to kill," Betelgeuse hissed.

"That's my line!" Thete yelled.

They wrangled with their weapon-slings and brought their carbines to ready position.