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

There were two rows of canted pods stretching down the narrow space, each row flushed to a side of the hallway's grey-metaled wall-cladding, the cladding carved into louvers and perforated with circular holes out of which spewed thick, tubular striations of wire that connected into the back of each pod. The pods were shaped like ellipsoids that elongated into tapered points, their translucent faces turned inward to face their counterparts across the floor, all of them sleek and curving surfaces that reflected the overhead tube-lighting in glossy dapples. The flooring was a discolored rubber-white that ran between the humming machines and the whining electronics, and it was speckled purple and blue and blotched grey-black in spots.

At the head of that long hallway was a small lobby—if the copper-plated paneling was to be believed, the 'Floor 30 Visitation Lobby'—in which were seated several old women whose wrinkles were firmly nonagenarian, whose mouths could never stop moving with Aluaan sentiments that sounded at once prayerful and bitter. Their incessant murmuring—addressed to whom, Betelgeuse could not tell—made a soft bed of sound that crunched and spangled with the ingress and egress of hospital personnel.

Betelgeuse sat at the foremost row of chairs, looking impassively into the hallway and listening carefully to the mumbled Aluaan lilts drifting over from behind him and staring shapes into the spotty floor for an indeterminate period of time. He was adjacent to the intersection between lobby and hallway, and therefore very proximate to the stream of movement: the occasional patient, the occasional visitor, beige-coated apothecaries pushing trolley-fulls of bottles, white-coated Medicae hefting every shape of equipment imaginable, blue-coated churgeons with notepads in their hands, some of them sprouting from out of their spines a multitude of multifarious-functioned mechanical arms pincering at the air and greasing themselves.

Ferli had stayed barely ten minutes, just enough time to register his contact information with the Visitation Lobby's front desk and confirm that the relevant merits for 'delivering official personnel' had been booked under Antijim cell 54.

Then they had locked gazes for all of ten seconds, Ferli wondering if he should make a proper farewell, Betelgeuse staring the flabby-cheeked man down and making no effort to seem polite.

So they parted ways in silence, and as Ferlighan Davies exited from the cold and sterile hallways of Lent Hospital and stepped briefly into an open-topped carpark, he found the bright day pleasant enough to warm a heart that had suffered for being too close to that strange and daunting creature named Betelgeuse Sakar.

Some way into that lonely, nightless vigil, the buzz of Betelgeuse' transceiver woke him from his insensible, exhaustion-addled dream-musings about the concepts 'merit' and 'demerit' as they generally applied to Saltillan society, and as he sat there, blinking groggily, his mind threaded the droning buzz into an image of a society of robots all transacting with one another, and the vapid thought occurred to him that perhaps all societies were, in abstract, built in accordance to some notion of exchange—of spirit value, of soul currency, of notions however deep or superficial that could be rationalized into an existing value-structure whereupon the mechanistic arm of algorithmically-run society would take over and relegate everything to a robotic and unthinking operation of closed-processes upon isolable and reproducible kernels of human cathexes—when a wrinkled hand slapped him on his shoulder and a grating virago-voice warned him angrily to "pick it up" amongst insults that described him, amongst others, as a "faggot churkey".

He whipped around and returned that white-haired female angry stare for angry stare, prepared to rip her intentionality to shreds; but then he decided, scrutinizing that emaciated and hollow-eyed creature glowering at him and gauging his own depleted stamina, that perhaps it wasn't all worth it. He left his seat and gazed into the hallway, at the pods he'd seen his colleagues enter, and, deciding that they were most likely in good hands, stalked out the Visitation Lobby's glassy double-doors without so much as a glance at the tousle-haired receptionist.

A blast of warm air. Wind, rushing through his hair. Springtime in Edom-Zeta. Endless summer in Saltilla.

He glanced down at his transceiver and let the call connect.

"Sakar!" the voice snapped, and Betelgeuse' mind conjured up an image of Cacliocos with furrowed brows and close-cropped hair straight-spiked with hidden anxieties.

"Evening, sir."

"Section status report."

"Strength one of four. Thete, Voke and Douglas are currently receiving treatment in the Jerkpods. The churgeons checked them earlier and had to give them fracture-repair surgeries, but that's all done now with no big complications."

"How about you? No injuries? Where are you right now?" Cacliocos said, snapping off one question after another. His voice had taken on a strange intonation, almost as if he were concerned… about whom?

"... No injuries," Betelgeuse sounded, raising his hand and eyeing his blood-crusted fingernails. The girl's blood, it was still there, despite the fact that he'd already washed his hands a couple of times. He figured he would wait until he got back to Barracks and use the hydrogen peroxide from the hypergolic propellant they had in the storeroom to get all of it out at once. "Current location Lent Hospital thirtieth-floor Visitation Lobby. Should take another few hours before Voke and Douglas can be discharged. They didn't give me an estimated timing for Thete."

A momentary silence passed between them. Betelgeuse raised his head and swept his eyes across the large, square space—several people walking in the distance, doctors cutting across the far corner of the space, shuffling from glass-door to glass door, people in wheelchairs, in holo-chairs, alone or accompanied, traversing slowly across the shopfronts of eateries and restaurants.

To his side was a section of wall that opened out into the airy Saltillan twilight, from which a lazy wind—artificial or natural, he wouldn't know—was blowing. He shuffled toward the ledge slowly, admiring the imperceptible transformation of day to dusk, casting his gaze out into a darkness that from his vantage was stippled with little flecks of light, rorschach in temperament.

'Chrysilla would have liked the view,' he found himself unable to banish the thought, and his heart beat against his chest at this sudden and unexpected reminder of a friend half a galaxy away. She liked to go to high places and liked to look down and she'd told him once that it was because it made her feel like she was on top of the world and that she was…

Free.

Chrysilla needs my help. She's trapped somewhere and she needs my help. But what can I do? I'm—

"... I'm looking at the HA Central Repo doc. It's recorded that a troop of Citizens Defence Force personnel assisted you with neutralizing a threat, and you're listed as the contact-person here, instead of Sergeant Jutson," Cacliocos said.

"Thete had a concussion. A piece of concrete hit her in the head. She'd probably be dead, if not for her helmet. As it is, I still don't know if she will be okay," Betelgeuse explained, leaning against the ledge and breathing in air that tasted passably fresh and looking out into Saltilla and feeling wistful for no reason.

Cacliocos grunted. "Take me through what happened," he said.

"… There's some guy by the name of Salleh, quite famous throughout Prilogia, apparently. We had a run-in with him in the morning, while we were taking the southmost road through southeast Prilogia. He had a problem with an alleged Proxy-dealer by the name of Benyamin, who at the time was proximate to us, and Salleh wanted us to hand him over."

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"I saw Thete's midday report on the arrest. So, after defusing the situation with Salleh, you guys handed that Benyamin over to Saltilla Police and then went back to complete the patrol route?" Cacliocos said. Betelgeuse could hear clacking sounds in the background, and supposed that the Captain was filling out a report of some kind.

"We had lunch first, at some place just outside Prilogia selling Dalbaht. After that we managed to complete the first half of the route, and we'd just made the turn when they ambushed us, right there."

"It says here CDF assisted with neutralizing the hostile group, save for the Gimmarash cadre. I'm assuming that's referring to Salleh himself," Cacliocos said, and Betelgeuse thought he could hear him nodding.

… In a way, this could work out for me. Ferli and his Antijim cell can enjoy the merits for all I care. This way, there'll be less chance of exposing my ability to utilize the compulsion matrix.

"Yes, I can confirm he managed to escape. I would have neutralized him, if not for the fact that… that he was a White."

"I see." More clacking. The Captain was writing this all down. "Two questions. Firstly, what was the reason for the escalation in the conflict? Second, how did the CDF find you? If you had comms I imagine you should have called me for backup. I told Thete that your section still falls under the Jegorich Division, so she would've known to call me."

"I can't really say why they ambushed us. Maybe they were angry we didn't turn over the Proxy-dealer to them, maybe they just hate anyone who's not completely black. Can't do much more than speculate."

"That's fine. I'm required to ask the question, you understand. And my second question about the CDF?"

"We tried to comms. The Antijim cell actually had the place jammed—"

"—Jammed—" Cacliocos echoed.

"Yeah, they jammed the place and intercepted Voke's comms for backup, which is how they knew about us. I don't know the technicalities of it, or if what they were doing was legal, but I suppose we were lucky they were listening in when they did."

"Can you itemize the injuries? Just give me a one-liner for the report. The CDF guy didn't provide any detail in the Repo doc beyond 'injuries'."

"Voke—four broken ribs. Douglas—he broke his left arm… uh… left half of an arm. The arm he lost. Thete suffered a concussion and hasn't woken up yet. The churgeon put her down for a forced-arousal procedure at the end of the week if she doesn't naturally wake from the coma."

Cacliocos exhaled long and hard, and Betelgeuse could imagine that the information sat heavy on his shoulders. The Captain's breath carried a soft rumble through the comms-link, mixing with a fresh wind just teased out from the distant shadows. His earlobes felt the caress of something sweet, and it was impossible not to think again of Chrysilla and her sunny daydreams and her cuticle-picking. While he was here on Desert wrangling with things entirely out of his control, thinking, pondering, barely surviving, the Nightingale woman was praying somewhere that he would come to her and save her from whatever it was she was facing.

What a joke.

"... You sure post a hectic day for it being day one of patrols," Cacliocos managed, after another one of their semi-awkward silences. "All I can say is… good job, Sakar. You'll get your fair share of merits, I promise. I only hope Sergeant Jutson will come out of this fine."

"I hope so too," Betelgeuse replied, his pupils reflecting Saltilla's purple night, his heart not so much unmoved as unmoving. "If you will allow me, sir, about the merits… I observed those CDF Antijims retrieve the enemies' Incunabula. How many merits will they turn it in for?"

"It's their prerogative, if, as you say, they had assisted. The rule is you keep what you kill," Cacliocos explained. "The Incunabulum bounty is pretty standard. A flat rate of one merit per Incunabulum submitted to the War Affairs Bounty Office, if we're talking grade ones. Two merits per grade two, and so on up to grade fours. You manage to retrieve any?"

Betelgeuse' hand rose unbidden to grab at his plate-bearing vest, where he had secreted it. His heart beat a strange cadence, and the image of the dead face, lurid and glaring, came suddenly to him.

"No, just curious," he said, and he imagined himself jamming his fingers into the ghost's eye-sockets and forcing it down deep to where he had hidden Lawrence Gomez-Evans and Strionis Jove and Major Storr.

"Okay… I've submitted my report. On your side you can put in for a transfer of Thatcher's and McKay's cases to the Barracks Infirmary—just speak to the receptionist, no need to wait until they're done with the assisted-recovery. Once you're done with that, just take the rest of the night off. Take tomorrow off as well. We'll see how we can allocate patrol strength come next Monday."

More wind, rushing, cascading, then dying down.

"... Sir?" Betelgeuse began tentatively. Try as he might, he could not get rid of the feeling completely; the feeling in his heart that was a mixture of rebellious anger and worry and some kind of guilt—one which he was not versed enough with to describe—was threatening to burst out into the night air. The lights winking in the distance made silver tears in the hidden corners of his mind, and he was looking at his hands and seeing the encrustations of the girl's blood seeping under his nails and feeling that they made him very dirty indeed.

"What is it?"

"I would like to visit Edith. TAF Private Edith Pavlov, the one who returned with us. Thete told me they were holding her in the Detention Barracks, so I want to request for your permission to see her."

"... Your friend. It is a pity they had to hold her in remand. Not to worry, I will submit a request and tag you in it. Earliest they will approve is late tomorrow afternoon—I assume you can visit her in the afternoon?"

"Yes, I will."

"... I know I can trust you, but don't do anything stupid at the brig, okay? They just need her until the investigation into Hrodwulf is done, and they will release her. These things take time, but I've ninety percent sure they will release her soon."

Release her back to the TAF Brigades, back to risking her life for unknown and questionable causes.

'Patience…' he had to remind himself, his heart having slowly and mysteriously increased its cadence.

"I understand, sir."

Shuffling sounds filtered in through the transceiver. Then silence.

"... I have…" Cacliocos began, then trailed off, unsure of himself.

"Sir?"

"I have a premonition… that many things are going to happen. I… I don't know how to say it, but there are things I'm seeing in this city, things which make me doubt it's going to be livable much longer. I wanted to share with you that I'm drafting up a request to Jegorich HHQ to allow the survivors of Jegorich First Brigade to return home. Few can keep on fighting after seeing so much death."

"I understand, sir. I pray you will receive a favorable answer."

"I pray to Ahman every night that I do. I only wish I could take you with me, Sakar, after everything you've done for us, and even my sister—Aisya told me what happened, and I scolded her, of course I had to, but in the end you kept her safe.

"However… I don't have the authority to take you with me. The PLPs are mustered under TAF command, and if and when the Jegorich First Brigade is withdrawn from Saltilla, you and the remaining PLPs will be re-allocated. You must forgive me."

"You have done enough. There's nothing to forgive," Betelgeuse returned, shutting his eyes tight.

"You've done much to help us, Betelgeuse Sakar, and on behalf of the Jegorich Division, for what it's worth, thank you."

"... You're welcome, sir."

"I'll request access to Edith Pavlov for you. I'll schedule the appointment at the earliest, which will be late tomorrow afternoon. Have a good night."

"Much appreciated. Good night, sir."

The call disconnected, and Betelgeuse let his wrist fall limply over the ledge he was leaning against.

And he stood there a long time without moving, thinking what he would tell Chrysilla if only he had the chance. He would tell her he was sorry for being so far away, that he wished he could help her, but that he was trapped here, trapped on Desert and very unlikely to survive his ordeal.

But he would also tell her, if he had the chance:

I'll find a way out. Be patient, Chrys, I'll escape, eventually, and I'll find you.