NOVEL NEXT Chapter 64: Corporate Overreach IV
Jirani stepped out onto the Diplomatic Chambers' stone porch and out into the milling confusion. He could feel Marja twitching on his back, moaning in soft and wretched tones. Warm fluid had been running down the nape of his neck for some minutes now, and his back felt wet by the persistent downward dribble and a little sticky from its coagulation.
She's lost too much blood.
Making his way quickly down the short flight of steps, he found his way forward blocked by a murmuring crowd dressed mostly in pajamas. They were pointing and gawking at the cluster of military vehicles idling in semicircle formation around the porch, their faces all blank and lemming-like and reflecting from squinting eyes the powerful humvee headlights streaming silver columns into the bunching bodies.
The ground here was slick with fleshy detritus, and a platoon's worth of partial bodies had been laid side by side before the juddering vehicle chassis, a substantial number of them missing limbs or large chunks of their torsos and lubricated with ichor that glinted wetly under the bright glare.
"Make way! Make way!" Jirani roared, and the dozens of bleary-eyed people wheeled and grew wide-eyed to see a shirtless, wizened man drenched in gore and baring his teeth like some mythical warrior. And they parted before him like the red sea, giving him a clear path toward the row of corpses and the contingent of military vehicles beyond that.
Jirani's eyes widened imperceptibly to notice the dead bodies, and he went on some way through the crowd to place Marja supine upon the ground not two meters away from the closest corpse. He straightened his back stiffly, glancing uncertainly over to the mutilated things and then turning and ordering the closest civilian, a sallow-faced man, to get the commander of the military contingent over to where he was. Following this, Jirani wasted no time picking out another person from the crowd—a thin and cringing boy by the looks of him—grabbing a fistful of his fine-woven plaid pajamas and then tearing the fabric clean off.
The boy yelped and scuttled away shirtless, but Jirani paid him no heed, ripping the fabric he held into strips and moving back over to Marja's side. He knelt down, eyeing Marja's body over, and, seeing that the flow of blood had yet to be stemmed, worked quickly to tie down tightly the wounds in her calf, hand and shoulder. Then he brought his wrist transceiver up next to Marja's eye and peeled her eyelid back, shuttling the transceiver back and forth to check for a pupillary response by the device's screen-light.
Constriction. Dilation.
"Commander!" Jirani heard a voice calling out, and he raised his head to observe a helmeted man rushing over, his features dark and his uniform indiscernible because of a silhouette effect caused by the background light.
"Identify yourself!" Jirani snapped.
"Lieutenant Norad, sir!" the man returned, snapping off a salute and then, before Jirani could react to return the salute, dropping to a high kneel position beside Marja. As he did so, the contrast made by the humvees' headlights eased, and Jirani blinked to see the face finally revealed of its obscuring shadows. The man had a stubbly chin and puffy eyes, and the epaulet sewn into the shoulder of that gray pixel-print sleeve had been threaded with two golden bars.
TAF-Lieutenant Norad. Good to see a familiar face—he was against Crowley's chasedown op, if I recall correctly. Reliable soldier. Good thing HHQ dispatched him.
"Lieutenant, your Proxy syrette," Jirani commanded, looking down at Marja's blood-streaked, over-pale cheeks. His voice was absolutely devoid of even the slightest emotion, and his glare remained sharp as a knife's edge. His face was covered entirely in drying blood, so that under the penumbral shadow of the headlight beams it took on a bestial, wolfish aspect.
Lieutenant Norad stuttered an acknowledgment and fumbled with his thigh-strapped medical pouch, his gloved fingers digging past caffeine pill-bottles and fastening themselves on a wrapper which he promptly pulled out into the light.
Satisfied that it was the correct item, Lieutenant Norad ripped off the plastic film and gripped it in his right hand—then froze and met Jirani's gaze.
"Where, sir?"
"Thigh. Down there," Jirani said, twitching his nose irritably, touching his finger to Marja's bare thigh and wiping off a small portion of coagulate to reveal the smooth skin underneath.
Nodding curtly, Lieutenant Norad plunged the syrette into Marja's flesh and depressed the collapsible tube. Once the syrette was spent of Proxy, he carefully removed the needle and then dropped it into the small hard-shell pouch hanging down the bottom-left side of his vest.
'Don't you die on me, Marja…' thought Jirani, gritting his teeth, feeling for Marja's pulse and finding it very weak. Then he raised himself to his feet and surveyed the frontage. A majority of the civilians were still milling around, and he assumed that they were politically important personnel who had been provided rooms at the Diplomatic Chambers. As for the corpses, Jirani squinted at them and observed that, at least for those portions of body that were still clothed, they were dressed in the blue uniforms of the Saltilla Police, and that most of them had been punctured through with blades still sticking out their faces.
These were the policemen that had been assigned as guards to the Diplomatic Chambers, and it was more than likely that the assassins had killed them before infiltrating the building.
Investigation can wait till later. She needs medical attention.
Jirani pointed at the lead humvee and addressed Lieutenant Norad: "We must get the Deputy Marshal to the hospital immediately."
"Understood, sir," Lieutenant Norad returned, and he cupped his hands to his mouth and hollered: "Slan! Mario! Need some help over here!"
Two soldiers came rushing down into the overlapping beams of light in answer to their Lieutenant's call, their carbines held at the ready position. They had evidently already been waiting beside the lead humvee's chassis.
Jirani indicated Marja on the floor "We need to move 'er into the—"
His voice was drowned out by an immense and crashing sound, and all at once the environment was transformed into chaos and pandemonium. The effect was sudden and startling.
Jirani whipped around, his attention drawn to an immense gout of smog trailing up from the middle floors of the Diplomatic Chambers toward the Saltillan firmament.
Another crash, followed by a teeth-clattering explosion that blossomed a brilliant and refulgent cloud out the rooftop, the thick, gaseous swirls momentarily incandescing and then quickly dissipating into shadowy masses. Bedlam in the streets; the crowd flared, running in every direction, their screams lost to the impossible tumult.
"GO! GET HER OUTTA HERE!" Jirani was yelling and punctuating his yells by flapping his arm back and forth. The two TAF soldiers had taken up Marja's limp and bandaged form in their hands, and they were stumbling forward through the crazed bedlamites toward the humvees. A particularly overborne woman—her face strikingly beautiful and perfect in the way only the best cosmetic surgery could afford—had, in her heightened state of emotion, latched onto one of the men carrying Marja. Jirani stepped forward to see this, his hand raised in alarm, when Lieutenant Norad placed a hand onto the woman's shoulder, causing her promptly to slump over and drop limply to the ground.
'Lieutenant Norad. He's a Primary grade that's been trained to manifest and utilize Etchings for sedative-production,' Jirani recalled, clenching his outstretched palm and bringing imperfectly to mind the dossier he'd read on the officer—he made it a habit to keep himself apprised of the Incunabula-blessings of the TAF-officers directly under his command, but it was always a chore to remember the details.
A great, cracking sound came from the direction of the Diplomatic Chambers. Another explosion, echoing, it felt, across the entire Saltilla. Jirani didn't bother looking back, instead sprinting after the TAF soldiers and adding his strength to theirs. They came up beside the humvee, straining to load Marja's body into the troop compartment as gently as they could manage, then boarded the vehicle themselves.
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And they were off, the driver reversing and then flooring the accelerator pedal, causing the humvee to hurtle forward violently down a dimly-lit path; the v-com jabbered incoherently into the comms-panel, his voice sputtering with each lurch, and Jirani turned to Lieutenant Norad to find the officer tapping furiously at his wrist-transceiver—trying, it appeared, to get the relevant hospital admin on the line.
Jirani's heart raced a million miles per minute, or at least far too violently for a man his age. Their humvee was now trundling forcefully down an uneven path, jolting upwards and downwards and generally bruising the glutes of every passenger.
Jirani tottered toward the end of the humvee and stared out the back window, observing a column of vehicles arrange themselves in a line behind them. And above, the snaking column of smog splayed out, making heavy and opaque hillocks upon that great and faraway ceiling, making an inverted land that was lit from underneath by the fierce, orange blaze that by then had consumed the entire top third of the Diplomatic Chambers.
The conflagration had made of the towering structure a pillar of fire that was terrifying and awesome to behold, one flaming tree in a forest of dark shapes, and Jirani's pupils were made twin suns as he pondered the words he had shared with Marja mere hours before.
The Mentzers have been pushed to act. They strike quickly, unexpectedly, violently, and yet they are always careful to remain hidden.
Everything that I would expect from them.
But Marja Mentzer cannot die. She is more important than she believes, because above all else, she is the Mentzers' weakest link. If their hold over the Democracy can be challenged at all, it will be by her hand, as guided by my efforts.
And who can say if, in the end, this patient and slow battle will not teach Marja something valuable?
An interesting thought experiment… although she has to survive first.
And he contemplated the licking flames and the billowing geometries that issued and wondered if perhaps the souls that comprised this tortured city might not brood over-much tonight and erupt tomorrow into a general unrest.
***
The alert from Saltilla Home Affairs had gone out at about 0300h mustering all CDF personnel for Anti-Gimmarash counter-insurgency efforts. According to the implementation of the relevant Saltilla Home Affairs Executive Order, CDF Cells were required to draw their members from specified residential areas—all members of a certain Cell hailing from the same area—in order that full muster could be achieved no later than 30 minutes from the time the mobilization order was promulgated.
Every member of CDF-WQ Cell No. 54 dutifully answered the call, leaving warm beds and cursing silently on their doorsteps before making their way urgently across the swarming streets.
The air had a tense and electric quality to it, buttressed by the relentless movement of an uncountable number of people navigating, torchlight-in-hand, through the chaotic ramble of bodies. And all throughout Saltilla, the dull drone of artificial voices, the periodic howl of sirens, roused The People to action.
The members of Cell No. 54 picked their way through the crowd, their frantic bootsteps making soft crunches upon gravel paths and incessant patters upon concrete pavements.
Many of them slowed as they exited the closed building-clusters and crossed the main roads. A flaming totem stood in the distance, glowing bright and orange and flinging its light all throughout the city, making a terrifying backdrop that captivated their attention.
But then the next wave of sirens sounded, and those of Cell No. 54 that became distracted quickly resumed their onward progress, passing back into narrow streets as they made for their usual meeting spot at the hermetically sealed bomb shelter built below Marlowe Street, located several blocks away from the Prilogia.
The Vice Head of Cell No. 54, Hanna Truganev, was the first to arrive at Marlowe, and as per SOP her first stop was the street-level electrical box. This, she unlocked with her issued key, and she eased the box open and then picked through the myriad switches to find and flip the one that routed power to Cell No. 54 Muster Point.
Then she entered a tight opening carved into the street-side pavement, passing through steel doors that slid open as she swiped her transceiver across the security terminal and then moving down the steel-reinforced shaft via a dark and unlighted stairwell, holding her torch out in front of her as if it were a talisman designed to keep away whatever demons of the dark would attempt to waylay her.
She descended slowly, carefully, her nose twitching with anxiety. The space was dark. Too dark. She hated the dark because she felt evil things lurked where she could not see. Her scalp itched, but she refrained from scratching, afraid that she might mess up her neatly bunned hair.
Clangorous noises emanated from somewhere deep below. Her heartbeat quickened reflexively. She pushed down the feeling that had risen in her throat, suppressing it with some effort, and by this method she managed to slow her heartbeat and gain some control over her overactive imagination.
'The rats have been getting bolder recently…' she forced herself to think. What else could it be, but rats?
Of course, the feeling would not go away entirely, this suspicion that an otherworldly entity was tracking her descent into the bowels of the earth. The thought of the Devil's compound-eyes lurking within every corner-shadow haunted stubbornly the crevasses of her mind, and though she had calmed herself she saw at once how flimsy her composure was.
She could feel the paranoia attack her cervix, and the phantom that materialized in her mind had become so real that she imagined she could smell sulfur in the air.
Ashazda comes for the unwary and the isolated, and where he goes no man can see. He hides in the space between blinks, he preys on the vulnerable, he turns them into his servants and makes them the vectors of a contagious mind poison.
Protect me as I walk this terrible path. Protect me, Ahman, as I walk this terrible path. I fear no evil, for you are with me…
Her hands, pale by the silvered bounce of the torchlight beam, trembled lightly. There, the glint of a gemstone facet catching the light at odd angles, and she slashed her torch like a sword against the oppressive dark but found nothing in the offending corner. She repeated her little prayer. Prayer would keep the evils at bay.
It was an old superstition, Hanna knew, the kind of belief that would be mocked by her colleagues at the Ninsei Weapons Factory. Nowadays everybody seemed to profess a belief in that strain of base-materialism which the Democracy had made so fashionable. But who could say if the old values did not live on in secret, in the peculiar mental artifacts which plagued Saltillans' night blindnesses and which continued to be whispered in their hearts despite—in spite of—public censure by the government.
So she prayed anyway that Ahman would inoculate her mind against the depredations of the Evil Entity. She prayed with her free hand held to her waist-pouch, taking what solace she could in her mother's assertion, that her Incunabulum was made to burn away the demons. Couldn't hurt to pray in case. Even Pascal did, and there was an epistemological wisdom to that practice Hanna's grandmother always reminded her not to gainsay.
The environment lightened slowly as she descended, so that she could discern, eventually, the greenish hue of the walls, the emptiness of the corners—and then suddenly everything was suffused in an uncomfortable brightness. She had reached the bottom; white light streamed into the stairwell from beyond the wide threshold.
It was an immense space she stepped into with the ceiling built to a height of five stories or more. The immediate section of space she found herself in was brightly-lit and extended on the right about fifty meters. The left side extended beyond the section more than one hundred meters, with the space beyond that passing from brightness to dimness to pitch-black darkness. It was unclear to Hanna how far the left side actually stretched, and as far as she knew it was filled with vast quantities of dehydrated corn and innumerable cartons of mineralized water, all sitting half-obscured in the shadows, all wrapped up in layers of heat-resistant plastic sheeting and set on pallets and stacked up higher than three stories. She could see the first rows of corn and water, but they went down far further than she could visually perceive.
The place was airy and cold. She turned right and made across the empty section of room for the small area at the edge that had been assigned to CDF Cell No. 54. Their designated area consisted of little more than a square demarcated with red tape, within which were set several tables and chairs as well as one large cupboard. There were several computer terminals wired into their corresponding terminal-screens as well, but no one except for Cell Head Ferlighan Davies had the authorization to access these devices.
The terminal-screens blinked to life, displaying the login page in response to her proximity. Hanna paid them no heed, instead walking over to the massive half-story cupboard and unlocking the beefy padlock that secured the bolt. Then, leaning against the end of the bolt—straining her entire body against it—she pushed it open and swung one of the cupboard's doors wide.
Within were projectile weapons—NW-FAPER carbines, the model she helped assemble in the Ninsei Weapons Factory—arranged neatly in rows that were set upon steel racks. Actual weapons, newly furnished to them by Home Affairs. A welcome change from knives and clubs.
Hanna took a deep breath. She glanced at the entrance threshold to find that none of her fellow Antijims had yet arrived. A red light blinked somewhere at the corner of her vision, and she twisted around—to see nothing.
Must've been my imagination.
Dabbing at her dry forehead with her handkerchief, she went up to the largest table—an oblong, beige-surfaced, polyethylene table which took up a full half of their designated space—and settled into her seat near the head, clasping her hands together as she waited patiently for the rest to arrive.