NOVEL NEXT Chapter 75: General Strike IV
Betelgeuse' consciousness melted away into a disturbed sleep, and his brain had just begun to churn up malformed images of dead and murdered compatriots when a loud sound jolted him awake.
The room was dark. Betelgeuse felt at his vest and was satisfied that his own Incunabulum and the Incunabulum he had looted from the enemy were still there. Then he glanced toward his left, toward the window. Dark silhouettes were backlit against the Saltillan late-morning blazing in from outside the floor-to-ceiling window.
Bodies were shifting around in a confused moil, and thin susurrations alerted him to ten or twenty hurried conferrals about the "backup-generator" and "supplies".
The door behind Betelgeuse burst open violently and impacted against the wall with a heavy thump.
"All active personnel, report to ground floor ASAP!" the man yelled. Betelgeuse couldn't discern his features in the darkness. From the open door came loud noises and guttural shouts, as if a great swell of bodies were pushing against each other from somewhere within its depths.
And then the man was gone, melted away back into the darkened stairwell, his clomping bootsteps receding upward in a hectic sprint.
Betelgeuse got to his feet amidst irritated chortles and exasperated remarks. He went toward the window and shouldered his way between a white-coated Medicae and a green-uniformed PDF Private that was whinging stupidly about how much inconvenience the strike was causing.
"... Couldn't fucking care if the Mandalakak storms into this place, man, I just wanna go home and sleep… "
Betelgeuse peered through the window to see, several streets down, an orderly contingent of dark-skins marching through. They looked more like a disciplined fighting force than a disorderly mob.
"... the fuckin' government can go rot in hell if that's what it takes fer me to get a good night's sleep …"
A few of them had helmets, and some of them had been wrapped up tightly with bandages sporting large patches of crimson.
"... it ain't easy here in the hospital hey… I say we can probably let the Jerkpods expire …"
The back line of the contingent appeared to be lugging barrier-pieces that Betelgeuse realized must have been scavenged from the Police-erected crowd-control barricades.
Resourceful.
Betelgeuse turned and scanned the room. Those personnel that cared enough to answer the call to arms had already left. He stalked to the stairwell entrance, glancing around to see if he could find any sign of Douglas.
Finding none, he stepped into the torchlight-riddled dimness and joined the rush of bodies descending toward the ground floor.
Betelgeuse burst out into the sunlit porch of the Lent Hospital, scanning the surroundings to try to place himself. Several platoons of PDF and TAF were hurriedly forming up into contingents, with their field officers taking roll and cursing loudly at the missing names.
He spotted Cacliocos quickly, together with the rest of Jegorich First Brigade, First Company huddled behind the shoulder-high concrete wall that circled the perimeter of Lent Hospital. Due to his height, Entuban lay completely prone on the floor.
Despite the ongoing 'reconstitution' of First Brigade, First Company, the number of personnel it comprised—twenty-one, including Betelgeuse—was not more than one platoon's worth of soldiers.
Sprinting across the pick-up/drop-off roundabout, Betelgeuse called out to the Captain.
The whole company turned their heads in Betelgeuse' direction. Cacliocos' brow was furrowed deeply with some new worry or other.
Betelgeuse considered Cacliocos a good officer, but enduring battlefield-stress was itself a battle of attrition. Enough things could go wrong that Betelgeuse wondered if he should not have gone his own way.
… I still trust these guys. Some of them, at least. Better to be with them than the AWOLs back in the hospital. No telling what they'll do if things turn for the worse.
"Douglas is still upstairs, but the power's cut," Betelgeuse reported flatly, sidling up between Cacliocos and Private Misha Kern.
"We've heard. HQ comms-ed to say the strike is spreading. The protesters have set up two blocks from here, maybe closer now," Cacliocos said. "Mix of Gimma Ashby and Union people. Our instructions are to maintain vantage and shoot-to-kill."
"... So we're surrounded. I think the Jerkpods are on the backup generator. Don't know how long they'll last," Betelgeuse said.
"Shit, B.T., Thete's still coma-ed…" Voke said, crouch-walking past PFC Gelam Shentor and Misha and coming up beside Betelgeuse.
"What's caused the outage?" Betelgeuse asked.
Misha was the one to reply, her piercing gray eyes meeting his: "It would've been easy for them to shunt the grid. Most of the protesters are Union people, meaning they have Bronzes familiar with the Underground power networks."
"What the hell do they think they'll achieve, attacking a goddamn hospital?" Voke said bitterly, clenching his jaw.
"This is Lent Hospital," Cacliocos intoned. "Not used at all by dark-skins. Only fadsters and Democrats."
A noise drifted over from beyond the wall. Static, then feedback, then a voice. Someone was speaking at them from a loudspeaker.
"*krrshk* Anti-Union, Anti-Gimmarash, Anti-freedom. You are hereby warned to lay down your weapons. A white flag will be accepted as a sign of surrender."
Betelgeuse permitted himself a peek over the wall. At the opposite end of the street was a tall, black-haired man perched atop a barrier-piece. His right hand held a red loudspeaker that was angled in their direction. By now, the other PDF and TAF platoons had joined Jegorich First Brigade, First Company at the Lent Hospital's perimeter-wall.
Anxious faces glanced at each other. The tension was heavy in the air.
"That's the Mandalazief himself," Cacliocos muttered. "Kaise-qintus."
'He does have the aura,' Betelgeuse thought, although he didn't consider it very wise to expose himself in front of a bunch of sharpshooters.
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"*krrshk* Our demands are simple. Surrender now, and there will be no further casualties. As of today, none of our demands have been met. Eugene Lachlan's murderer still roams free. You protect the corrupt and evil, you continue to kill innocent people in the street. So many have already died. Surrender now. This is your last warning."
"*krrshk* I repeat—"
A single shot rang out. A sharpshooter from the TAF platoon next over from them had taken the shot.
The bullet smashed into a transparent visor, causing an impact pattern to materialize just in front of the Mandalazief's face. Betelgeuse saw the man flinch, although he did not fall off the barrier-piece.
Figures he would've had protection.
"Sakar," Cacliocos whispered, passing Betelgeuse several canisters. "Pass them down to those who've used up their grenades. I've filled them with nitroglycerine. We might need to go big explosion to break out of here."
Indeed, Cacliocos' Bronze-grade Incunabulum-blessing included the production of nitroglycerine. Betelgeuse accepted the canisters and passed them on down to Misha and Voke.
Voke glanced at him with a difficult expression. Betelgeuse and Voke had used up their grenades to destroy the massacred bodies earlier.
"*krrshk* Anti-Union, Anti-Gimmarash, Anti-freedom, you have been warned. "
'Something doesn't feel right,' Betelgeuse thought, gripping onto the nitroglycerine canister more tightly. 'The ground's vibra—'
The asphalt lining the pick-up/drop-off started to bulge upward. Betelgeuse' eyes widened. He hefted his carbine. The other platoons were shouting and yelling.
Before their eyes, the ground cracked open to reveal the chrome glint of a drilling-rig. The great drill-tip whined savagely and sparked its turbo-revolutions. Spidering cracks reached past the asphalt and through the concrete pavement toward Betelgeuse' feet.
"Nades out!" Calcliocos roared, lobbing a grenade and several nitroglycerine canisters that had been meant for the Mandalazief out of reflex. Betelgeuse followed suit, then immediately pushed off in a crouch sprint toward the far column to seek cover.
"Get to cover!" Betelgeuse yelled, although he wasn't sure if anyone could hear him through the pandemonium. A string of explosions reverberated through the surroundings.
A hailstorm of bullets was zipping past overhead and ricocheting off of one of the large concrete columns holding up Lent Hospital. He kept his head down, feeling the occasional tinkle of concrete bits against his helmet.
He lunged into cover. More explosions. He glanced to his side to see Cacliocos, Misha, Voke and Entuban coming up into the leeside of the wide column, Entuban clutching onto his bleeding arm. The others—including Von, Belekov, Venna, Smit and Gelam—followed hot on their heels.
Strafing out to his right, he hefted his carbine and saw that the drill-rig was half-crumpled. An opening in its flat top was spewing screaming dark-skins into the Saltillan air.
No sense of self-preservation. They are probably under compulsion.
Betelgeuse opened fire. He saw figures clutch arms and legs. Some brought their hands up to their foreheads, not knowing that half their brains had already been spattered out the back of their heads. Those he hit fell to the ground, dead or dying.
A flash of orange, trailing smog, erupted in the distance, shooting vertically upward and shrieking noisily. The flash halted mid-air, and then appeared to increase in size.
It took Betelgeuse a moment to realize that it was a missile and that it had changed direction mid-air to head directly at them.
"SPIKE MISSILE!" Cacliocos roared, slapping the back of Betelgeuse' vest as hard as he could. "Cover now! Cover!"
The rest of the company was already reacting.
Betelgeuse ran after the rest of them, breaking into the Lent Hospital's cracked glass facade and strafing to the right to take cover back-first against the concrete wall.
He turned to his left. Corporal Venna Tajiran was right behind him, but as she traversed the cracked facade, the uniform around her shin snagged on a raised bit of glass, causing her to tumble over forward and onto the floor. She managed to angle her helmet downward at the last moment, and a crunch sounded where her helmet crushed into the broken glass strewn about. Betelgeuse jumped forward and pulled her body into cover. She turned her face toward him, and he saw that her left cheek had been punctured by a stray piece of glass.
Another explosion sounded. The building itself rumbled and shook. Curtains of dust fell from the ceiling.
The missile had impacted.
Betelgeuse let Venna down gently onto the ground, and she lay there for a moment, blinking silently.
"We can't stay here," Betelgeuse said, turning to his left to address Cacliocos. "It's a death-trap. Instructions or not, we must try to escape."
Cacliocos gritted his teeth. Clamoring sounds drifted over from the outside. Sounds of a furious melee in progress "... the back stairwell leads down into the basement. We can access the Underground from there. Break out of the encirclement."
"Good, lets—"
Voke interrupted Betelgeuse. Addressing Cacliocos, he said: "We can't leave Thete and Douglas. We must take them with us."
'Fool! We escape or die! There is no other option!' Betelgeuse berated Voke internally.
"We don't have time. Our own lives are at stake," Betelgeuse snapped.
"No," Voke said, turning determined eyes to Betelgeuse. His tone was adamant. "I will retrieve them myself if I need to."
"... Sakar," Cacliocos began, after a moment's thought, "we will take them with us. There is a disabled-access staircase at the far end of either Level 25 or Level 30 which leads directly into the Underground."
Betelgeuse cursed under his breath.
It may have been an excuse, or it may not have been. Either way, there was no time to sit and think.
Since it was decided that they would save Douglas and Thete, then he would do everything in his power to make sure that that came to pass.
"Let's go."
The trek upward was sweaty and tiring. It pushed Betelgeuse' lung capacity to its absolute limit.
They reached Level 10 to find it pretty much empty. Betelgeuse supposed that those who had been inside earlier all decided to hightail it. Before he left, he snagged a Rejuvenator-helmet from the long-table at the center of the space, thinking to himself that Thete might need it.
They found Douglas at Level 15. He was covering in the corner, behind a side-turned table, with several other PDF personnel and the blue-coated churgeon that had operated upon him. Cacliocos, who was the first one into the space, had to yell out that he was a "friendly", or else he would've been riddled with bullets.
The churgeon confirmed that there was a private stairwell at the far end of the Rejuvenator-pod-room at level 30—however, he explained that it would be inaccessible now that the central administrative office of the Saltillan Bureaucracy had locked the hospital down. "There was an announcement earlier," the churgeon said.
"We'll just have to blast it open," was Cacliocos' reply.
It was 15 more floors of climbing before they reached Level 30. By then, Betelgeuse had fallen to the back of the group. Douglas fell back with him to support his struggle against his protesting lungs.
With Douglas' help, he reached Level 30, and he crossed into the darkened Visitation Lobby and then past it to see, somewhere in the middle of that long corridor where the Jerkpods were set up, the churgeon, ensconced within a clump of bodies.
He was engaged in extracting a sleeping Thete from the confines of one of the Jerkpods.
Betelgeuse walked up to where the others had clustered around, passing by sleeping faces lying silent within the darkened confines of other pods, Douglas gaping silently beside him.
"I have… a Rejuvenator helmet here... Do we need to use it?" Betelgeuse breathed, holding up the Rejuvenator-helmet by its thick cord and addressing the churgeon.
The churgeon looked up from his work, and the torchlight strapped around his forehead dazzled Betelgeuse' vision.
"Give it here. The cord will be useful. I'll extract the patient shortly, but bear in mind there's a risk of death."