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

Captain Cacliocos had managed to survive under several inches of rubble. He was dragged out of the dust by Douglas, Voke and Venna, kicking and screaming and thinking that he had already died.

But he hadn't. Once he realized this, he picked himself up and sat by a wall, beside Smit's dead body, thinking to himself. What he thought, nobody could tell.

PLP Corporal Betelgeuse Sakar ignored him and ascended from the basement of the Lent Hospital to see a City in ruin. The bodies of the dead seemed to melt together in his mind. Bones and half-faces and fleshy bits were thrown up to the consciousness as a terrifying psychological soup that threatened to dissolve his very being.

Into that mammoth horror he walked. He walked behind the crater that had been made. He walked and observed a colossal black ball that sat like a tomb about a kilometer out from the hospital building.

The ball was made of a mix of bodies and concrete rubble. The Commander's power had sucked everything into a single point—crushing everything together into a spherical geometry and making a mini-planet that had a diameter of 7 or 8 stories.

Whole apartment complexes had been absorbed into the mass, which had then been thrown out to crush everything in its path, gashing a line of destruction into the floor of the City. Where the ball had gone, the path still smoldered. Portions of the ground had fallen away to reveal rivers of rushing sewage beneath, and the ball itself sat half-sunk into the concrete, its weight too great for Saltilla's ground-shell to support

Betelgeuse walked for some time, inspecting the bodies. His nose twitched from the smell of refuse. TAF, PDF and dark-skin alike lay contorted into various positions of death. Behind him towered the sepulchral Lent Hospital, which he knew had already borne witness to the death of thousands of patients. The Commander had torn away their life support, snuffing out their lives as if they were so much chaff.

The occasional flash could be seen through the tinted windows of the hospital , as a platoon of soldiers scoured the place on the Commander's orders, executing any participant or suspected-participant in the General Strike.

'A Liberation's Reach of our own making,' Betelgeuse thought.

It was another hour before Dr. Piltor, Entuban, Misha, Von and the unconscious body of Deputy Marshal Marja Mentzer were secured at the higher levels.

The Commander eventually mustered the remaining forces, effecting a tactical withdrawal toward the Government House several kilometers away.

There, Commander Jirani Mzeeka set up a base of power with the top officials of the Saltillan Bureaucracy. Between the Commander, the two remaining Grimmersbys and the War Apparatchik Saul Goggins, a plan was being prepared with the stated intention of destroying the remnants of the General Strike.

Saltilla to the Saltillans—not to the Sul, not to the Union, but to the Saltillans, now and forevermore.

Nights did not come as usual. Instead, Saltilla was plunged into an eerie half-darkness which did not transition into either full day or full night.

A large portion of Saltilla's buildings in both the Western and Southern Quadrant had been destroyed in the terroristic acts of the General Strike. Arson, murder, looting, unlawful assembly, public promulgation of seditious opinions—the official channels spared no rhetoric in denouncing the evil actions of the Gimma Ashby and the 'puppets to treason' that led the Amalgamated Union.

But still the violence continued. Persistent strikes and riots made enclaves of whole sections of the Western Quadrant; the General Strike was not over. The Mandalazief and the Union President had made their hardline stance clear. No end to the violence. The TAF had to be ousted, the Democratic fadsters had to be killed. No compromise.

The damage to Saltilla had been extensive. Underground train services were delayed indefinitely. Critical life support systems had sustained serious impairment. Carbon monoxide levels rose. Oxygen and water supplies ran low, and all Primary grades were requisitioned to provide emergency repairs. Disobedience—attempts to undermine the systems that kept Saltilla going—were made punishable by death. Summary executions became commonplace.

—The actions of TAF Commander Jirani Mzeeka were a brutal reminder of the power of the Democracy. The centuries-old yoke would not be so easily thrown off.—

So went the interminable Intraweb jabber on commicube. This just meant they had to try harder, the commicube stalwarts said, try harder to destroy these evil oppressors from half a galaxy away.

Betelgeuse knew already that remaining in Saltilla meant death.

"We have to go. No possibility of survival if we stay," he said. He was at his watch-station, on the 5th floor parapet of the Government House, overlooking the fortified square that separated it from the burnt-out remnants of the Diplomatic Chambers. His carbine had been switched out for the high-powered ZWEN Mark-567 railgun, and he braced its chassis above the concrete wall, watching for any dark-skin that might appear.

"How will we do it?" Voke replied, sitting and leaning back against the concrete wall. It had been about a week since the incident at the Lent Hospital, and still his expression bore the same despondent grimness. "So much death has happened. The whole place is sliding to hell."

"Shut yer trap, Cockster… got enough to worry about as it is," Douglas groused, flippant and one-armed as ever. "Don't need you bringin' down the mood."

"We have that," Betelgeuse pressed, unwavering, referring to the box of Incunabula they had secured. He watched the square without shirking, without blinking. He watched tirelessly.

Voke was right—so much death had happened, and he felt that something had changed in him.

It was the kernel of a new understanding. Betelgeuse could see now what the Incunabula were.

The fight with Salleh, the struggle through the streets of Saltilla—it showed him that the Incunabula were not merely their tools. He'd taken Salleh's Incunabula and found its pages filled with scribbles that no language knew the meaning of.

The Incunabula were mechanisms to create tools out of a certain kind of raw material. Betelgeuse saw it with remarkable clarity: The Incunabula created tools out of human lives, human desires—human intentionality. It controlled, it allowed them to be controlled.

"We have the box of Incunabula at Marlowe. We must go. Tonight," Betelgeuse continued. "I've already set up a meeting with the buyer. We deliver the box, then find a transport out of here. If we don't go, we're dead."

"You want us to AWOL the shit outta here?" Douglas said, coming up beside him.

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"I don't see how we can avoid that," Betelgeuse replied flatly. He probed the edges of the square, finding the Saltillan lights too dim to see beyond the valley of detritus which the Diplomatic Chambers had vomited out at the far end of the square.

"Damn you, Betelgeuse Sakar," Voke suddenly shouted, shooting to his feet, "if we go AWOL, the entire fucking TAF are going to be on us—"

Douglas wheeled, shocked by the sudden and unexpected flaring of Voke's emotions.

Betelgeuse felt the urge to dominate Voke. It was the same urge his will had been throwing up. He was already ready for it, and pushed it down to the back of his mind. Already he was suspecting that the will wasn't entirely his.

It's the Incunabulum talking. It's the Will-to-Power.

"—and we'll die, you'll drive us all to our deaths—"

"Voke, look around us," Betelgeuse said, interrupting him. "This place is a meat-grinder. Below us, as we speak, the Commander is making plans for a full-scale sweep of the Western Quadrant. Where do you think we figure in those plans?"

"Dead pipo. Dead meat," Douglas said, poking Voke. "We'll be the grunts as usual."

A breeze caressed Betelgeuse' cheek, bringing with it the smell of burning rubber and rotting bodies.

"Thete's still in the Infirmary," Voke said, softer now.

Thete Jutson had woken up 4 days ago—most likely from having been jolted by their carrying her halfway across the city, was Douglas' view. She'd sat up around noontime that day, asking the Medicae for food. Voke talked to her all through that night, filling her in on what had happened and the general sorry state of Saltilla. Douglas had visited her the day after.

Betelgeuse hadn't been to see her even once.

"We take her with us. There's no other choice. We go tonight," Betelgeuse said, undeterred.

It was several hours after what was supposed to be midnight—right after they had been relieved of the watch by a PDF section—that the PLPs entered the Infirmary. Rows upon rows of moaning soldiers waiting for a session with the few working Rejuvenators that had been scavenged from Lent Hospital.

They went to Thete's bed, carrying a kevlar vest, helmet and carbine with them. It was rather more difficult to find a railgun just lying about, so they had had to settle for a NW-FAPER.

They told her of their plans.

At first she was against it. Vehemently so. But she could see the determination in Betelgeuse' eyes, and knew that the man would not be dissuaded. She knew what the man was like—that he had pure steel for nerves and that he was possessed of a fearsome capacity.

No, a person like her could never be able to deter someone like that.

The thought of reporting them crossed her mind; but the same Thete who had once involved herself with the Anti-Democratic Secessionists of her youth in Jegorich knew already what lay in her heart. And she had a bond with these Taffies, a bond forged from war that was not so easily gainsaid.

Not to mention that someone had come to her the previous day.

"We need to find the Captain. He should be in the East wing of G-H, along the way," Thete rasped, limping behind them, her carbine swinging uncomfortably from side to side. The weapon-sling was too long.

"What?" Douglas asked, supporting her by her arm. "What do you mean? You want to give the whole plan up to him?"

"Tell him what you're going to do," Thete said, stumbling every few steps, "he'll listen. He came to me yesterday, saying... talking about Aisya."

Betelgeuse halted on hearing this. The corridor was long and dark and only barely lighted by the constant gloaming light streaming in from outside the windows.

"He will come with us?" he asked. Thete shivered at hearing his voice. It was like the compulsion laced his every word.

"I… I think he will," Thete managed, lowering her gaze to the floor. Her prosthetic eye itched. She bit her lip. Talking to Betelgeuse made her uncomfortable. "He's torn, but he'll see your determination. He's already halfway to deciding the same thing."

"East wing?" Voke echoed, clearly convinced.

The East wing of Government House was one of the more heavily-fortified positions of the entire compound.

As a result of the General Strike taking over large portions of the City, the military forces in the Western Quadrant had been cut off from the forces at the Northern Quadrant's Saltilla Barracks. The Mandalazief had set up jammers in a long line, hampering consistent communication between the disparate forces. Over the past day, Betelgeuse' hadn't been able to access the Intraweb from his modded transceiver.

The troops were whispering about the planned pincer attack that would destroy the Mandalazief's terrorist forces and join up the two parts of the City, but in the meantime the East wing of the Government House had been made the temporary barracks of the TAF Commander Mzeeka's forces.

Betelgeuse stalked down the winding corridors, coming eventually into spaces that were thick with sweat and pounding bootsteps and gungrease that gummed up the grouting between the floor tiles.

They eventually entered a vestibular space, finding the Captain sitting with the rest of the Company, their faces silent and morose. Cacliocos, Entuban, Venna, Misha, Von, Belekov. They were all that were left.

Around them, other PDF and TAF contingents oiled their rifles and checked their gear. For all they knew, the muster orders could be promulgated within the next hour. They had to remain prepared.

Betelgeuse remembered the conversation he'd had with Cacliocos barely more than a week ago. Cacliocos had said he planned to put in a request for his Company to return home.

'A pity he couldn't do it in time,' Betelgeuse thought.

Betelgeuse started towards the Jegorich Company at the far end of the space, but Thete placed a hand on his shoulder, asking him to let her bring Cacliocos to him. She told him to wait around the corner.

He did so, rounding the corner into a deserted corridor and leaning against the wall with Voke and Douglas beside him. After a minute, he heard bootsteps thumping towards him. He turned to see Cacliocos already beside him. Thete was behind him, looking frail and weathered.

"We're leaving, Captain. I only came here to tell you because Thete said to," Betelgeuse said, his arms folded across his chest.

Cacliocos's expression didn't change, like he'd come to the same conclusion. That if they stayed, they would all die.

"You want to leave the City? The Gimma Ashby have cut off the entire main road. How will you even get to the gate?" he asked, his upper lip quivering. The gash above his lip looked red under the dim lighting.

"... If I have a way, will you follow me?" Betelgeuse said, his expression hard and unflinching.

"I myself cannot think of a way. I wonder daily if my sister is still alive—do you for a moment think I would still be here if I had any method? What is this… magical way that you are speaking of, Sakar? Tell me," Cacliocos said, his dark eyes staring in haunted fixation at Betelgeuse' face.

"First, I need to get to Marlowe Street. Second, we have to reach the Nook. I have a way to do this that doesn't involve going all the way to the Western wall. Once we're in the Nook it will be up to my contact."

Betelgeuse communicated this with firm resolution. Cacliocos observed this, and, even though he knew that mere resolution was cheap, he also knew that there was very little time.

"I… I have to find my sister," Cacliocos said.

"There's a tunnel, a very long one that reaches into the Nook from Metternich Station. Metternich is only a couple streets down from Talonne—go find your sister and be at Metternich," Betelgeuse proposed.

Aisya had mentioned to him that she had an apartment in Talonne Concourse.

"How are you able to get into the Nook?" Cacliocos pressed. He wasn't sure about this, wasn't sure at all.

"I said have a contact who'll provide some funds we can use to outfit a vehicle. Quickly, Tenzhian, what will it be?"

Cacliocos was almost beside himself with uncertainty. So much of his will was already gone, broken down by the relentless grind of war.

"I will follow, but I must find my sister."