NOVEL NEXT Chapter 51: History is Written By the Winners
Betelgeuse stared blankly at them and tilted his head in confusion; the fat-faced man leading that troop, perhaps thirty-strong, was yelling a mish-mash of words that sounded vaguely Common but whose meaning was lost to the passion of their delivery, and as his barks became more canine his jowls shivered with the force of his speech.
Sudden and savage movement. Betelgeuse snapped his attention back to Salleh to see that the White had scaled a tottering section of concrete wall in a single bound. His finger depressed the trigger of his carbine; the weapon jumped in his hand, perforating a smoking line up the wall, directed by his overflowing intent to kill.
His carbine clicked empty.
Salleh flinch briefly, a projectile having burrowed its way into his meaty thigh, and he turned, blood spurting from his quadriceps and backlit by fiery light, locking gazes with Betelgeuse. His face elongated and contorted as if a million splintered emotions were clamoring for release, and when it settled, finally, Betelgeuse found in it a nightmarish vision of rage.
It was a challenge, and in response Betelgeuse manipulated his facial muscles to effect an expression of savage murderousness.
Then Salleh was gone, bounding away across the zinc rooftops with deep clomps that receded quickly into silence.
There was no question of pursuit.
Betelgeuse lowered his weapon. The space was suffused in a strange quiet that clashed eerily with the earlier frenzy. Even the puffy-cheeked man had ceased his guttural spew of meaningless sounds, and for a moment the only audible thing was the shuffling of boots on gravel.
Betelgeuse turned to that man, returning his expression to some semblance of normalcy, and for several seconds they stood there quietly, watching, gauging, sizing each other up.
"Who are you?" Betelgeuse finally inquired. His vision swam, and the world to him felt plunged in viscous fluid. He was drained of energy, and considering that it was everything he could do to stay on his feet, he decided that there was little point in dragging the situation out. There was nothing he could do, if this new force turned out to be hostile.
And yet he found it prudent to maintain a facade of strength, for he knew that the merest hint of weakness might be capitalized upon by these unknowns.
"Sir…" the man began tentatively, eyeing the blood-soaked PLP with an expression approaching fear and trepidation. His face spasmed as his gaze passed over the girl's severed head hung by its hair and turning slowly clockwise in the stagnant afternoon. Blood was dripping from its orifices, streaming from nostrils and ears and threading from a gaping mouth and torn neck to pool upon the ground in a creeping, coagulating mass. Her pupils were dead cages of light and the capillaries threading it through were breaking up by the noontide glint.
"Identify yourself," Betelgeuse repeated, and the man met his gaze, flabby jowls sagging, and replied in a tone that was polite and respectful: "... We are Antijims, sir. I am Ferli, the head of this cell. Our runners intercepted your comms earlier, but we only realized you were transmitting from TAF transceivers after running your device's MAA through our list."
They intercepted Voke's call for backup? They must have had a jammer set up, seeing as HQ didn't reply. Simultaneous jam and interception—either they used illegal AI-Tableaux to decode their own jamming-signal or, more likely, they had a specific jamming-signature known only to them and which they could easily eliminate from the jam+interception signal they were effectively creating from out of our devices' TAF frequencies.
"I do not know what are 'Antijims'. Explain," Betelgeuse said, side-slinging his carbine and setting the head down carefully upon the ground. Then he knelt down to position the Saltillan girl's headless body and dust off the bits of gravel that had collected in the folds of her drab overalls. He straightened her limbs carefully and smoothened out the pleats in her clothes, then took her head and placed it back where it should be, so that the torn halves of her neck were aligned with each other. One of her eyelids was wide open and the other was half-closed, and Betelgeuse observed the dead thing and found her a schizophrenic corpse gaping at him with a lolling purple-tipped tongue.
The back of the girl's skull must have been rounded, because the head rolled to the side as if that face could not bear to look upon its killer.
"... We are the true citizens of Saltilla, united against the Gimmarash," the man who had introduced himself as 'Ferli' said, his pronouncement a strange mix of pride and uncertainty and awkwardness. He watched Betelgeuse' actions closely, trembling lightly, his expression shifting from discomfort to consternation.
Betelgeuse picked up the girl's head again and, with his other hand, gouged out a small depression in the gravel, then placed the head back-down within the depression. He took the girl's tongue and stuffed it back in her mouth, then pressed her lips closed. Then he placed his palm upon the girl's lightly dusted forehead and passed them down over her eyes, closing those eyelids one final time.
"Anti-Gimmarash cells. Antijims," Ferli sounded, breaking the uncomfortable silence and shifting his weight awkwardly to his other foot. Betelgeuse raised his head and saw that Ferli's torso was protected by a tarnished piece of steel sheeting that looked like it had been cold-formed into shape. The breastplate shone dully under the Saltillan day and it looked inflexible and barely functional as a piece of battlefield protection.
"We are on the side of the TAF, sir," he continued, trying very hard to seem friendly. "The Antijims are officially recognized by the government. We are very official."
"Recognized as what?" Betelgeuse regained his feet, turning to look where Thete had fallen. Several of the so-called Antijims were tending to her, and they had leaned her back against the edge-section of concrete wall and were shining a penlight into her biological eye to check for a pupillary response.
"We are recognized as a branch of the Citizens Defense Force by the city-state government," Ferli said, affecting a smile.
Voke had been placed beside Thete, and he was lying supine upon the gravel, his eyes open, his lips flecked with bright-red spots, his chest rising and falling with perceptible regularity, a large indentation cratering his vest where his right oblique and abdominal muscles met. The Antijims must have carried him out of the wrecked concrete hovel, and a young man was in the process of loosening his vest's velcro straps.
Betelgeuse turned around and squinted further down into the alleyway, where the sunlit portion resolved into shadows, and found Douglas still lying where he had fallen. His vest and uniform were half-soaked in blood and gore and spindly limbs were stinking out at odd angles from under his body.
"You missed one. He's with us," Betelgeuse pointed, and Ferli called over several more of the Antijims—two man and a woman, their skin mellow-colored and tannish—to check on Douglas.
"Sir, should we get you checked too?" Ferli offered.
"No, but you can transport me with the rest to the nearest hospital," Betelgeuse returned, his tone flat and emotionless.
A sputtering sound mixed in with yells and a woman's scream drifted over from down the alleyway, interrupting Ferli's response, and the duo wheeled around to see Douglas flailing upon the ground, pushing away the Antijims and stamping ripples into the bloodpool and shouting in guttural tongues. The limbs of that creature Douglas had inadvertently crushed into dead meat, seemed to be twitching with Douglas' violent movements
"They're allies, Douglas!" yelled Betelgeuse.
Douglas had leapt to his feet and was just about to batter the cringing Antijims when his head snapped toward Betelgeuse, and he froze, nonplussed.
"… We won?"
"That is obvious. Now let them wrap up your arm. The bone's showing," Betelgeuse returned, creasing up the flesh of his face in such a way as he imagined would affect a wince.
He was playing dead. Douglas' Increment and Etching combination must give him an incredible capacity to resist pain.
Douglas exhaled a great, guttural snort, nodded, and tottered over into the bright sunlight, his stump-wound trailing catsup across the ground, and then he crunched his ass down onto the gravel ground and raised his face upward. The chattering female Antijim came to his side and bent down to minister to his bent arm-stump, where a sharp, splinter-tipped section of bone grimed darkly with blood stuck out like an unnatural elbow.
Commotion in the background. Betelgeuse turned to see the other Antijims lining up the dead men. Salleh's men, the ones killed by the girl. From his vantage he couldn't see their wounds nor how they died. The Antijims were counting them and photographing them with one of those time-stamped, blockchain-verification mini-cameras he'd seen only once or twice before, and then patting down their bodies and scavenging their personal effects for anything valuable. And he saw that the Antijims were retrieving the Incunabula from those bodies and carefully tagging them and then digitally cataloging their Increments and Etchings with their cameras.
'They will turn the Incunabula in for merits,' Betelgeuse realized, seeing them stack the Incunabula five at a time and wrap them up in black, plastic trashbags. And throughout he wondered if he should say anything about taking his 'cut' of Incunabula or if it might raise further questions down the line…
He looked down at the dead girl's waist, observing the bulge of that small pink-colored waist-pouch, and he stooped down and worked it free of her belt. It was smaller and lighter than he thought. Before Ferli's eyes, he secreted it behind his own vest, beside his own Incunabulum. He met Ferli's gaze and saw his mouth twitch, but the Antijim otherwise refrained from saying anything.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
"Come along with us, Ferli. I want to know more about Salleh."
"… I will drive, sir," he replied.
The injured PLPs were loaded into the capacious passenger compartment of one of the Antijims' holo-cars, and then it was off through the cramped street of the Prilogia, engine humming, thrusters whining and whirring, a multitude of vehicles following closely behind and raising clouds of dust that swirled turbulently beneath the powerful sunbeams.
Betelgeuse rode shotgun, intertwining his fingers and resting his hands upon his abdomen and watching the dark-skinned Prilogians flaring in droves to either side of the street in order to make way for them, for the snaking column of holo-cars behind them. Ferli continued driving at speed, and something told Betelgeuse he wouldn't have stopped even if he hit one or a dozen of his 'fellow' Saltillans so far as they belonged to the dark-skinned variety.
As was the practice in the APCs and pursuant to TAF SOP, he placed his unloaded carbine butt-down between his feet. Noises drifted over from behind him, noises he couldn't shut out, so weirdly hyper-aware he found himself that he supposed the rush of combat had yet to recede. In that aural topography he discerned the soft murmur of several Antijims speaking amongst themselves, the dull clacks of plastic handles jostling against metal, the crinkling and tearing of wrappers, and Douglas—loquacious as ever—exchanging muttered invectives with a Voke who was croaking and choking on his pain.
His nostrils had filled with the smell of alcohol and povidone-iodine, smells he'd always associated with mortality because the first time he confronted the concept he was clutching a blanket and thinking if he would ever see his grandmother again. He wondered if Voke would die. He wondered if Thete had already died or if she was maybe about to die. And if they did, he wondered if he should keep their Incunabula as he kept Frederica's.
Beside him, Ferli kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the steering wheel.
"It is not common to have an AI-Tableau assist with driving?" Betelgeuse suddenly inquired.
Ferli turned to look at him with an expression of mild perplexity; Betelgeuse couldn't immediately tell what it was in his question that had caught Ferli off-guard.
"... I've not been on Desert very long," Betelgeuse added, "and I've not seen it used in any PDF vehicles."
"Sir, vehicle-mods—any kind of mod at all… body, mechanical, prosthetic—any mod that… ah… that modifies products beyond factory-specifications would qualify for prohibition. It is a federal prohibition throughout Protectorate."
"This is a general prohibition?"
"Blanket prohibition, sir. You could probably find AI-Tableaux in the Nook but it's very unlikely any of it can be converted to functional use."
Modifications are prohibited? But the holo-vehicles in the Nook definitely look heavily modded. Maybe political control over the Nook is more complicated that it seems.
"There must be exceptions?"
Ferli didn't immediately reply. He had returned his attention to the road, and Betelgeuse could feel the holo-car slow. Then, as they came toward a deserted junction that was shaded by a pareidoliac bust of overhead wires, he saw the chubby-cheeked Antijim turn away momentarily to scrutinize through the side-window a bent and faded sign inked with Aluaan script.
After a moment, they continued on and passed over from gravel to cracked asphalt.
"... The only exceptions are the ones you pay for," Ferli said in a low voice.
"I ask because I've actually been to the Nook."
"... I see…" Ferli said, and then he pursed his lips and did not continue speaking, his full focus absorbed in traversing the uphill slope they had come to. Betelgeuse shot him a glance but found the man's expression a mask of attentiveness.
Betelgeuse did not quite know what to make of the Antijim's response. Considering it unwise to push his already exhausted mind to compel the man, he leaned back and watched the scenery float past.
"What can you tell me about that man, Salleh?" Betelgeuse inquired, after another minute of silence.
"He's a gangster and an extortionist, what more to say?" Ferli muttered. "Salleh has been a terror in Prilogia for more than a year, pushing out legitimate businesses, intimidating many innocent people, even in certain cases killing opponents of the Gimmarash. He is extreme in action and mind."
"The people he has been pushing out, they are the lighter-skin ones? Like you?" Betelgeuse asked pointedly.
"... What?"
"I've observed Saltillans with darker skin and Saltillans with lighter-skin, and I must confess I've yet to fully understand the basis for the distinction."
"... You sound like the Fem-Ds, talking everyday about racism and ideology," Ferli sighed.
Ferli appeared exceedingly reticent about sharing information, Betelgeuse thought.
"I am only trying to understand this city more. If Salleh has wronged you, then I have paid him back two-fold—by killing that girl, who I am sure was very dear to him. So we are on the same side, the side against Salleh and the Gimmarash. Now, I know nothing about the Fem-D, much less do I profess their ideology. Could you explain to me what is the issue between you Saltillans?"
The gradient petered out gradually and soon they were back to cruising on level ground. Douglas and Voke had by now stopped talking, and only the occasional rustle of fabric could be heard drifting over from the troop compartment.
"... People like Salleh," Ferli began, his eyes shaded, "who make a mountain out of Gimmarash ideas, they take themselves for descendants of an ancient Bejana tribe called the Sul, and they take that legacy very seriously. They think that dark skin is a sign of genetic purity, when really it is nothing to my eyes but dirtiness and filth. But they have already made a new religion out of it, or I should say they have established a cult that preaches purity of purpose and makes an evil out of intermarriage. And though they call the same name as us—Ahman—and seem to pray to the same eternal God that watches over all the Democracy, in truth, their god is the devil in disguise."
"What is the sort of purpose they think pure?"
"... To revive the Sul, maybe, or to make Saltilla a state of the Sul. I cannot tell you, and very few of them know what it is they believe in. They think they are Saltillans but Saltillans have always stood for progress and open-mindedness. No matter what they might tell you, there has been no discrimination against dark-skins for centuries at least—now they dredge up eight-hundred year-old stories of Soollehman and the enslavement of him and his people by the Democratic Hierarch Giverai, and harp about a legacy of colonialism whose existence is in doubt. Were they even Sul? Nobody knows but they are all absolutely sure about it. With this as their excuse they find it very easy to commit filthy crimes against true citizens of Saltilla."
Giverai? I don't recall a Hierarch by that name. Perhaps he is referring to Hierarch Kivehrahi, the successor to Hierarch Tozen's rule. Our schools taught us about him and his exploratory ambitions, but I remember very little.
"And do they think this Giverai is the source of the light-skins' power?" Betelgeuse inquired.
"If only that! They are dirty racists, sir. They say that Giverai and his delegation were the fathers of all lightness found on Desert. To you and me, the darkness of one's skin is merely a function of the amount of melanin in it. But the Gimmarash and their followers—the believers in this crazy Sul cult—they preach that all lightness had been borne of rape. They say it is the rape of our Sul forebears by Giverai's plundering horde. And over time, this rape had been assimilated onto tacit acceptance of lightness over darkness, because the raped found that they had achieved a kind of power by their rape, and therefore they reveled in it, their rape, and could use its main benefit—the lightness of offspring—as a tool to put them above the dark-skins. They made allies of their Democratic rapists and thus became more powerful than the pure dark-skin descendants, they say. It is why the Jegorichians have for so long been set up as representatives of Protectorate 'civilization', they say, and they revile it for an insidious plan. It goes round and round, an impossible rabbit hole. It is driving me crazy, just talking about it."
"... I've heard many of the Gimmarash's supporters are also supporters of the Democracy," Betelgeuse pointed out.
"I would say those are the more moderate supporters. You'll find them amongst us normal Saltillans—the 'lighter-skinned' Saltillans, in your words," Ferli sighed. "I can only say what I've personally observed, and many Saltillans are going to disagree with me, but I think the labels of dark-skins and light-skins have been created by people like Salleh who thrive on chaos, and it's becoming harder to remove them from the consciousness. We've tried, but it's impossible to get rid of them, and every day the tide is turning, and suddenly all of us live in a world where sides are created and light-skins and dark-skins exist. As for Salleh, he is a particularly problematic person because he has real popularity in the Prilogia, and I will say you and your colleagues have come the closest to killing him. It is a pity you didn't."
"I would have killed him, if you had not distracted me," Betelgeuse returned.
Ferli shot Betelgeuse a glance that was filled with unease. The conversation ended there.
This Saltillan conflict pits groups which have overlapping loyalties against each other. And with all the complex mythology surrounding the Gimma Ashby's claim to legitimacy, there's bound to be issues with internal consistency. I don't have all the facts surrounding their history, so I doubt I will be able to make a clear connection as to who is benefiting from all this dead labor.
They reached the edge of the Prilogia within minutes, and their vehicle was quickly flagged down by a blacksteel-clad figure whose long and tired face looked oily and wet through his transparent visor. The Common letters 'S.P.' were inked in flaking white paint upon that man's blacksteel breastplate, and the shoulder of his blue sleeve was threaded with a corporal's double-chevron. Betelgeuse ventured a guess that 'S.P.' stood for 'Saltilla Police'.
Ferli maneuvered the holo-car onto the smooth and painted asphalt, pulling up beside the policeman and rolling down the side-window.
"Designation?" the policeman asked, his voice deep and basslike, placing his palm onto the sill of the car window and leaning forward slightly. He eyed Ferli as the latter started speaking and then turned to observe the column of holo-cars joining the queue behind them.
"Ferlighan Davies. CDF-WQ, head of the Anti-Gimmarash cell number fifty-four. We have seven cars with us, and there are…" Ferli glanced quickly at Betelgeuse, then turned back to the police officer, "three injured TAF personnel on board. We're en route to Lent Hospital on an urgent basis."
"TAF!" the policeman sounded, whipping his head back to Ferli and then poking his face halfway into the interior of the car to look over at Betelgeuse.
"Officer," Betelgeuse nodded. "I am TAF PLP Sakar. We are the patrol commanded by TAF PLP Sergeant Thete Jutson and were assigned to southeast Prilogia. Sergeant Jutson and my colleagues are injured and in the back. Ferli, if you would please untint the windows."
"PLP?" the policeman muttered to himself, taking a step down the length of the holo-car and craning his head to see into the passenger compartment.
"Understood," the officer said, returning hastily to the window. "Go right ahead, PLP… Mr. Sakar. I will report to my Sergeant that we had let a vehicle through for urgent medical attention. Mr. Davies, we will have to check the rest of your cars for licenses and contraband."
"Go ahead. You can talk with Hanna, my vice-head—she's in the next car," Ferli returned, rolling up the window as the policeman waved him off. "Thank you, officer."
The window was rolled up and the noise of traffic receded into a low burble. Betelgeuse felt the holo-car accelerate, and they turned a bend to join a long and wide road that forked again some kilometers down where the bustling assortment of low-rise buildings met a cliff of Saltillan Obelisks.