NOVEL NEXT Chapter 87: An Inconvenient Mission
[Some hours ago…]
Tenor Ravelash was absolutely beside himself with irritation.
Not only had the Mandalazief's operatives failed to kill Marja Mentzer, the Mandalazief himself had made a thorough clusterfuck of the situation in Saltilla.
The Mentzers wanted Saltilla disabled. Not destroyed.
Tenor thumped down the walkway toward the colossal machine, the width of his torso barely fitting between the railings; to either side of him yawned a dark chasm, the bottom of which could not be seen.
He was currently in Saltilla's Underground. If one were to pinpoint his location on a map of Saltilla, he would be located precisely where Saltilla's four Quadrants converged.
Of course, the place he was in was more special than that. It was an Order Station, maintained by the Saltillan Bureaucracy as part of its ongoing observance of the Democracy's Requisition Orders.
Order Stations housed Mass-Compulsion-Lattice machines—gargantuan megamachines that maintained the Democracy's order in human cities across the galaxy. Each Mass-Compulsion-Lattice contained millions of individual mass-compulsion-matrices which were programmed to keep the population in check.
Mass-Compulsion-Lattices maintained the population's loyalty to the Democracy despite the most wretched circumstances.
At this moment, the space which Tenor was traversing was filled with a buzzing, keening noise. Noise that would drive a normal man mad within two minutes and turn his brain to jelly within five.
But Tenor walked on, unperturbed. The Lebensraum-manufactured Nullifier-Brace bolted to his head was doing its job, shielding his Brain Meridian from the thick waves of compulsion that suffused the space.
As he reached the shelf of metal at the far end of the Order Station, Tenor raised his eyes.
Before him towered Saltilla's largest Mass-Compulsion-Lattice. It was a Legion-Grade Mass-Compulsion-Lattice, a mountain of metal and rubber wiring that spewed a relentless stream of compulsion-waves from the satellite-dish-looking apparatus at its peak—a point that exactly centered the city of Saltilla.
Although the Mandalazief's operatives had failed in almost everything, they did manage to reprogram four out of five of Saltilla's Mass-Compulsion-Lattices over the course of the previous weeks.
Tenor might even say that they were too successful, his theory being that the reprogram had set the stage for the General Strike. As a rule, all of the Mass-Compulsion-Lattices had been programmed to fill the population with destabilizing tendencies.
The General Strike proved to be too much, for it had brought Saltilla to the brink of destruction and left it vulnerable to the Chimerae's attack.
So they'd left this last one—the largest of all—untouched until they could recalibrate their approach.
Until now.
Tenor halted and raised one of four hands. A slot opened in his metal palm and a small cuboidal device was ejected from it. Tenor gripped it with his ten metal phalanges and stepped forward to the Mass-Compulsion-Lattice, observing that metal chassis judder violently with the humming of the machine.
As he did so, a human voice called out to him.
"Y-you're not supposed to be here!" someone said. "This place is off limits to everyone. No maintenance until further notice from—"
Tenor's head turned 135 degrees to his right.
A green uniformed PDF guard was making down the far section of the metal shelf, having exited from what looked like a maintenance-access, the long barrel of his railgun trained upon Tenor.
The guard's own head was encased in a spherical helmet that shielded his brain from being scrambled by the Mass-Compulsion-Lattice's compulsion waves.
Maintenance access. That must be why I missed him.
"Hold on," Tenor said, raising his metallic voice loud enough that he could be heard above the buzzing swells of the Mass-Compulsion-Lattice. "I'm maintenance. I have maintenance authorization."
He didn't want the guard shooting his railgun in here and risking damage to the Mass-Compulsion-Lattice.
So he waited. The PDF guard eventually came before him and, breathing heavily, eyed the metal beast as if suddenly realizing that it wasn't a person piloting a maintenance-walker, but a cyborg, a Kurubim.
"M-maintenance? T-theres n-no maintenance s-scheduled…" the guard stammered, raising his weapon.
A clicking sound emanated from Tenor voice-box-substitute, the closest he could get to sighing in irritation.
You'd think the Compulsion-Lattice would have daily maintenance.
I suppose Commander Mzeeka wants to keep the thing running without interruptions.
Unsurprising. He has both the Mandalazief and the Chimerae to deal with now. He can't afford a spontaneous uprising by the populace when the city's leaking oxygen.
Tenor stared at the guard, unblinking. Even with his low affinity for the compulsion, Tenor could easily overbear the man's mind. The guard was beside himself with fear. Half the job was already done.
But Tenor preferred to resolve this another way.
A small mechanical arm revealed itself from Tenor's clavicle, snaking upward and angling its tip toward the quivering guard. A red light blinked into existence, lasering out and making a pinprick dot on the curved surface of the man's helmet.
"S-sir! I'll shoot if you don't—"
"Please. Don't bother," Tenor intoned. Lines upon lines of information materialized and scrolled down across his screen-lenses, information relating to the spatial geometry and 'material separation' between himself and the unfortunate guard who was so scared, too cowardly to even pull the trigger.
And then the Lebensraum eidetic-feeder-neuroimplants took over—taking the information and running a billion calculations, a million regressions, analyzing it every which way and then pumping the output back into his brain—
The tendrils of his own intentionality began to bubble up from his consciousness, mediated by his Incunabulum-plate—and he focused them into reconstituting the material world in the way that he had studied.
In the way that his Primary grade graft—the only graft his corporate masters had permitted him—empowered him to do.
[INITIALIZING PRIMARY GRADE #2821 RECONSTITUTION MATRIX]
The message blinked twice and then was swallowed up by the deluge of information, and then—
Tenor raised a gleaming finger.
An electric field was created. Electrons were ripped from the surrounding air molecules and then forced into a channel leading from Tenor's silver-tipped finger to the guard's head, where the laser had pinpointed.
[WARNING—HIGH RATE OF BATTERY DISCHARGE—CURRENT BATTERY PERCENTAGE 92.0% > 91.5% > 91.0%—]
Thunderclap. Loud enough to blast all thought from the mind.
A bolt of electricity split the air apart, arcing toward the guard and making other brilliant dendrite splays in the air.
[WARNING—HIGH RATE OF BATTERY DISCHARGE—CURRENT BATTERY PERCENTAGE 90.8% > 89.2%]
The guard didn't even have the chance to scream.
Tenor's eyeballs wobbled in their sockets, observing with profound satisfaction the body of the guard jerk involuntarily and then erupt into a brilliant orange blaze.
The helmet melted inwards into the guard's face, cauterizing shut his orifices and then steaming down into flesh and bone.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
The guard was already dead. His flaming body flopped down onto the ground and then jerked some more as his nerves fired uselessly. Then he went still.
If Tenor still had a mouth, he would be smiling.
Turning back to the Mass-Compulsion-Lattice, Tenor jammed the cuboid that was held in one of his palms into a small aperture. He felt the humming chassis vibrate his artificial arm against his tactile-converters and found that it tickled the pleasure-centers in his brain.
Immediately, new lines of code ran down his screen lenses.
[PROGRAMMATICAL EXECUTION OF MASS-COMPULSION-LATTICE LEGION V8.1 UNIT; NINSEI IMPRINTED—]
'Ninsei. Caturdhara,' Tenor thought.
I was confused by the virality of anti-Democratic rhetoric on the Intraweb, since our Lebensraum reprogram doesn't include anti-Democratic messaging. I almost thought they were a natural development of latent ideological-patterns. Turns out that the Legion-grade Lattice had already been hijacked by Caturdhara—and that Caturdhara is less fond of the Democracy than the Mentzers think.
Although… the Mandalazief's operatives failed to report Caturdhara's traces on the smaller Lattices. Was this the only one Caturdhara managed to reprogram?
As a rule, Lebensraum kept Tenor away from the finer details of their multi-sided war against Caturdhara—but by now the contours of the conflict in Saltilla were becoming quite apparent to him.
He raised his head, imagining he could see all the millions of terrified Saltillans cowering in their homes above him. Knowing that their minds were but the raw material of a vast conspiracy made him feel powerful.
He returned his attention to the task at hand.
Cancel. Cancel. Cancel. Initiate reprogram.
The cuboidal object in his hand hummed and then vibrated in place.
[INITIATING REPROGRAM…]
A typhoon of electric bolts sparked up the entire length of the Mass-Compulsion-Lattice, and Tenor's perception wobbled. For one terrifying moment, it felt as if the compulsion waves would penetrate his chrome skull and turn everything that was Tenor Ravelash into mush…
[REPROGRAM COMPLETED]
[PROGRAMMATICAL EXECUTION OF MASS-COMPULSION-LATTICE LEGION V8.1 UNIT; TACOMA-IMPRINTED—]
The deed was done. He retrieved his hand and let the cuboidal object sink into his palm, then stepped back, satisfied.
Now, all the Mass-Compulsion-Lattices would broadcast frequencies that tended to the re-establishment of civil order. Tenor would have to initiate similar reprograms of the other Mass-Compulsion-Lattices to ensure Saltilla didn't implode. Not now, when the Mentzers were so close to taking it over.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as that. Compulsion-messaging was complicated and subtle—all good messaging was. But Tenor himself had pored through the programming. He was sure it would work as intended.
He also knew that somewhere in the spaghetti splay of code, the man, Bentil Pilix, was named and described as an object of cathexis.
With any luck, Bentil Pilix's ascension to a position of power in the Saltillan Bureaucracy would be quick and unproblematic. It would save the Mentzers a lot of headache.
A tinkle brought Tenor's attention back to the present. New lines appeared on his screen-lenses, alerting him to an urgent transceiver message.
Ah. Marja Mentzer's second. The cunning one.
The formal complaint detailing the failure of Lebensraum Tellus to fill the Protectorate's request for one Ortrud Mentzer had already been submitted. Back on Earth, the Arbitration Court would grind out its justice.
But down here on Desert, the Mentzers would make their own justice. If Marja had no second, then the evidence she submitted would be rendered nugatory.
Easy fix.
***
[Several hours later…]
Tenor stood in the darkness, waiting.
He would catch them in the Detention Barracks. It was the easiest place to set up a vantage.
So he'd taken up in the camera room, killing the PDF guards and then settling into an easy silence.
Then he watched.
Four thousand high-def cameras were set up throughout the complex. Every square inch of it was projected onto a wall of screens that towered several meters above Tenor.
All of it, revealed to his eyes. He was here. He was the master. This was his dominion.
His eyeballs juddered. He couldn't smile. He felt restricted because he couldn't smile.
As his eidetic-feeder sifted through the voluminous amount of visual information, Tenor let his mind recede into restfulness. His implant would do the work while he fell into a deep sleep.
So many hundreds of years… and still a true substitute… for sleep hadn't… been… discovered…
Sight returned. He awoke to find that his eyes were still open. Tenor remembered he couldn't close them because he had no more eyelids, only shutters that he hardly ever used.
He awoke to the sound of an urgent message. He checked to see that his eidetic-feeders hadn't yet alerted him to the presence of the target.
An update flashed across his screen-lenses: Commander Jirani Mzeeka, calling for all personnel to report to the muster-point. Tenor's eidetic feeder began registering movement on all screens, as the Detention Barracks' guard-personnel left their stations en masse.
Would this affect the arrival of the target? No harm in waiting. If he comes, he comes.
The target would be coming. His informer said so.
'He's an interesting person himself,' Tenor thought, thinking about his informer.
Tenor had a practice of keeping boredom at bay with interesting thoughts. Boredom was the true killer. Boredom gave the corporations power over the common man, his old friend once said.
And the more Tenor thought about his informer, the more he was able to convince himself that maybe the informer was such a person of interest…
He's a snooper, a sniffer. Someone who finds things out.
He wouldn't have thought to look through the blackboxes otherwise…
I could say, he's a little bit like me.
Alas, his complaint had been intercepted by certain TAF administrators on the Tacoma payroll. A little bit of digging, a little bit of snooping (like Tenor always did), and the man's wife was found… in Saltilla, of all places!
Tenor laughed tinnily to himself. Then he stopped. It was weird, laughing to himself. His friend always hated it.
More silence. The worst thing was to be caught in silence with nothing to think about.
Tenor's thoughts quickly shifted to his friend and the experiences they'd shared in the Hyggambian Monsoon-Watch.
He didn't think about those days much anymore, so much blood and death there had been. Blood and death were the lot of Ash grade conscripts like him.
But at this moment, he became suddenly enveloped in the sounds of the jungle, the constant battles of attrition, the continuous bombardments, the death-battles against the Hyggambian megafauna… and, in the middle of it all, a single night, memorable for its eerie silence.
On that quiet night, his friend had pointed out the constellations to Tenor, named them, sketched them, confessed an intense obsession with the way the different constellations looked on different planets.
So many to remember…
Virgo is all stringy and wrong. Pisces looks kind of squashed, but some people say it looks like a double-fish on Earth, old constellations-obsessed Hautine said, his features obscured by fire. Same for the hunter, Orion… Ah, the red star… on Earth, they say it's supposed to mark the hunter's shoulder. How bright it is tonight…
Why was Tenor thinking about his friend now? Maybe it was because both of them had been united in their hatred of their commander for his callous approach to human life.
Major Jirani Mzeeka.
Incidentally, Major Mzeeka, as he then was, communicated Lebensraum's employment offer to Tenor after the war effort on Hyggambia ended. Something about Tenor's performance under stress, something about how the Mentzers could use a soldier like him.
Once, Jirani had been the Mentzer's loyal crony. Now, he was their bitter enemy, and therefore also Tenor's enemy.
The universe worked in mysterious ways.
And as for Hautine, what a strange coincidence in the way he shared his—
Disturbance on one of the cameras. Tenor's head snapped up and to the left. It was an APC, roaring down the street.
He roused himself, shaking off the weight of time.
***
[Present…]
"Finally," the cyborg said, raising its arms and staring at Betelgeuse. "Did you think that disguise would work?"
A stillness descended. The prisoners fell silent, then resumed their raucous hollering.
"Get them to the locker—!" Betelgeuse yelled, but before he could finish his command, the cyborg was next to him, swinging his arm in a vicious arc.
Betelgeuse jumped, travelling much higher than he expected. The cyborg's attack passed harmlessly below him.
Who knew the MDES augmentations were this powerful? Betelgeuse thought. No, it's probably a combination effect with my White grade Etching. Not that surprising considering I'm strong enough to bend steel.
He hit the ground running, skirting to the left of the cyborg and raising his carbine to snap off several shots.
The hollow-points pinged tinnily off the cyborgs armor-plating, barely making a scratch.
Behind the cyborg, Thete was running away with Edith slung over her shoulder, Corporal Collins and the emaciated man trailing after her.
But the cyborg wasn't after them.
The metal beast whirled around and lashed out with one of its arms, its fingers spinning violently and looking to carve Betelgeuse into two.
But Betelgeuse was faster. He slipped under the arm and jammed his muzzle into one of the many openings below the cyborg's torso-plate, depressing the trigger.
His carbine smoked and bucked. Sparks and flashes and a clanking noise. The cyborg's fingers slammed into the ground and churned up concrete and bits of blacksteel rebar.
Is it all metal under there!? Betelgeuse thought—
Another of the cyborg's arms was already flying towards him, slamming into his midriff from under its own legs.
Betelgeuse grunted as his body was sent flying. He slammed onto the floor, his carbine's polycarbonate grip clacking noisily upon the concrete surface.
He scrambled to his feet, then felt a distinct, tingling sensation start to build up on the surface of his skin. The cyborg's red laser was pointing at his chest.
Not good!
He didn't know what was about to happen, but he could feel the cyborg's intentionality start to coil, as if in readiness for an attack—
No sooner had he jumped than his whole world exploded into light and sound. The prisoners were screaming. The walls reverberated. Betelguese hit the ground and executed a roll.
Flashbang!? Betelgeuse thought, forcing himself to his feet through the disorientation and aiming his carbine into the dimming whiteness out of reflex.
His vision cleared. He saw smoke rise from where he had just been. It was a crater, with a small piece of glass sticking out of its middle.
The cyborg was already upon him, reaching out with its long, multi-jointed appendage.
There was no time to duck. Betelgeuse roared and advanced into the cyborg, keeping himself out of reach of the revolving phalanges.
His shoulder slammed into the cyborg's chest plate. He gripped both hands around cyborg's upper-arm without thinking, twisting his body, channeling his body's reflexive knowledge of Edom-ursi* and straining his muscles.
*[Betelgeuse' native martial art]
A strange pulse suffused his body. It came from the White grade, enveloping his form with an invigorating habit. His muscles seem to bunch and strengthen and interlace with the MDES' augmentations.
He didn't know it, he felt it.
It was physical power as he'd never experienced before, coursing through his veins.
The multi-ton cyborg-creature was raised off its feet. Betelgeuse heaved, turning its momentum against it, sending that hulking mass of metal crashing through the bars of a prison cell.