NOVEL NEXT Chapter 89: Siege
Pain.
Marja awoke to a medical cacophony that grated on her senses and sent shivers down her spine. Beeps and klaxons and every noise known to Man blasted her eardrums and made any sort of proper rest impossible to achieve.
She knew she was in a hospital or an infirmary or some other holding pen for the dying. An unsettling feeling suffused her soul, like oblivion, frustrated.
She opened her eyes, then tried to open them again. The light above her was so bright that it shone through her eyelids, so that it made little difference whether her eyes were open or closed.
I'm not… dead?
She supposed death wouldn't feel so painful. She'd always had the image in her mind of floating in the void or experiencing some form of weightlessness.
As she was not, she felt anything but weightless. Everything was heavy and obtrusive and ponderable. That was good evidence that she was alive.
The first person she saw when she sat up was a churgeon that strode into the infirmary room, his arachnoid neck-brace-assisters flexing and unflexing with disturbing suppleness, his compound eyeballs lolling directionlessly.
Marja shivered and looked away. She glanced down at her own body to see that she was dressed in a form-fitting inner-suit. A chest-pouch made a cuboid shape between her breasts, and its familiar pulse comforted her.
Her Incunabulum. Her Hobbes.
"Ms. Mentzer," the churgeon said, and Marja turned her head in his direction, though she avoided looking at his ghastly features. She saw that he had a nametag on his blue coat that read 'Dr. Piltor'.
"Where's the Commander?" she rasped, tearing away the various tubes that had been stuck into her body and causing the beeping to go absolutely crazy. Her voice sounded strange and unfamiliar to her own ears.
She tried to stand, but her knees promptly buckled under her. Dr. Piltor shot to her side with exceptional speed, his hand grabbing onto her armpit and supporting her weight effortlessly.
His hand didn't feel like a real human hand at all. Outwardly, it looked fleshly and veined, but now that the hand was actually touching her, it felt like something hard and metallic sheathed in plastic and nylon.
Marja hated it.
She pushed Dr. Piltor's hand away with a grimace. It was more a reflexive action than one she consciously willed.
It didn't have anything to do with Dr. Piltor himself. The very notion of replacing most of one's body with prosthetics irked Marja. She was fine when it was kept to a minimum—an eye here, an arm there—but past a certain threshold, she found that she could barely tolerate it.
She looked around her. It was a room that was more spacious than a standard hospital ward, a windowless cuboid space filled with contraptions of every shape and more beeping devices than she could describe.
"I asked a question," she said, her voice taking on a hard edge. "Where is the Commander?"
"At the command center," Dr. Piltor said, staring at her emotionlessly. "I don't know where it is."
Grumbling to herself, Marja stumbled out of the room, Dr. Piltor trailing soundlessly after her.
***
Marja stepped unsteadily into a great hallway bustling with activity, a hallway that looked wide enough for five or six tanks to roll through side-by-side. There was a feeling to the air that spoke to her of war.
Uniformed personnel brandishing weapons and digipads brushed past, turning their heads to look at her and the churgeon behind her. Their expressions flitted from nonplussed to confused, then—realizing they had better things to do than to wonder why the Deputy Marshall of the Allied Forces was walking around dazedly—they turned their attention away and continued walking on.
The hallway was gashed on both sides by tinted windows, one looking down into the inside of Saltilla, the other facing out of Saltilla. She walked to each side in turn, finding that both revealed baffling scenes.
On the inner side, Marja saw a Saltilla that was shattered and gouged in places, smoke curling upwards in great plumes from its ruined quarters. The city's ceiling was perforated with wide holes and completely collapsed in sections. Large swathes of the city lay completely blasted to hell, bespeaking a tragic death toll.
On the outer side, she witnessed an interminable stream of napalm, plasma-cannon fire, and other weaponized substances lance out from the Saltillan battlements into the crimson day, lacerating the rustred soil of Desert and churning up voluminous amounts of material and detritus. From that profusion of iron-soil and sand was created an exhibition of fulgurite statues that curved and cracked and crumbled to glassy bits.
Whatever the defending soldiers were aiming at Marja could not tell. An opaque screen of dust masked the Desertian terrain from her view. Even the Pit—the resource-extraction area located just outside Saltilla and which housed the abandoned Ninsei Mine—could not really be seen in all that chaos.
Marja immediately surmised that she was in Saltilla's Wall-Complex, the immense structure that ringed Saltilla, and which enclosed the so-called Nook. Its highest floors were reserved for military and scientific use.
According to the infomentaries Marja had studied onboard the Vespertilio, Saltilla had originally been built as a fortress more than half a millennium ago. Its strategic location upon the Sylvan Protectorate's then-borders facilitated the defense of Saltilla, against secessionists, rebel warlords and the Chimerae. In all these cases, the Wall-Complex played a key role, tactically speaking.
Marja pursed her lips and forged through the tense bustle of soldiers, ignoring the feeling of nakedness that went with publicly walking around in her inner suit.
Catching sight of a PDF Major, Marja called out his rank and raised her hand to stop him dead in his tracks. She towered over him, because Desertians tended to be short relative to Earthians.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
"Who... what are we fighting?" she asked, hoping the questioned wouldn't come off as stupid.
"Deputy Marshal ma'am!" the stocky Major saluted, in response to which Marja snapped off a clumsy return salute. "The Chimerae, ma'am!"
"What!? They are... nevermind. The Command Center. Where is it?" she asked gravely.
Wheeling smartly on his heels, the Major pointed down the corridor: "Section B21, down that way, ma'am!"
It figured. There were only two directions to walk in: forward or backward.
Mumbling a desultory "thanks" to the Major, Marja continued on.
Dr. Piltor followed her like a specter, as she supposed it was his job to do. She paid him no heed.
***
She must have walked over a kilometer down the hallway, passing from noise to noise—and such an odd collection of people and activities she witnessed, that she was left slightly disoriented.
'This is war. This is battle,' she had to keep reminding herself. 'Confusion is to be expected.'
Walking bipedals clanking down the opposite direction, massive wall-mounted cannons blasting furious death out into the Desert air, people passing out exosuit helmets and oxygen masks, people taking said helmets and masks and throwing them disgustedly upon the floor…
Along the way, a PDF Corporal forced an oxygen mask into her hands, and she wore this over her face without comment.
And she was glad she did. Halfway into her odyssey, the section of wall to her right was blasted away by a superheated projectile, causing Marja to stumble backward on her ass and exposing the entire space to the toxic air of Desert.
Caught off-guard, Marja was wondering if she should take command of the situation when a jeep blazed down the great hallway carrying several personnel, the word 'Maintenance' emblazoned across its side.
She watched mutely as the 'Maintenance' personnel covered up the exposed part of the hallway with what looked like a transparent film and then passed over the film with a blocky-looking Facilitator-machine which hardened it into an opaque, black substance. The damage was sealed within the minute.
"Deputy Marshal," Dr. Piltor said, helped Marja to her feet and eyeing her with his locust eyes. Marja shook him off and doubled her pace, continuing down the hallway.
***
[Saltilla Wall-Complex Section B21]
Flushed to the inner side of the hallway was a structure-within-a-structure.
This was the Command Center—a makeshift and brutalist construction of blacksteel-and-tungsten plating.
After notifying Dr. Piltor in a curt voice that "unauthorized personnel" could not enter the Command Center, she traversed the vacuum-sealed entrance and watched Dr. Piltor walk away through the transparent pane of glass.
She didn't even know why he came with her. She preferred that he didn't.
She advanced through the narrow corridor, finding that the inside of the Command Center was little more than a collection of cramped cubicles staffed by Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels from the Saltillan, Jegorichian, and Polyarian contingents in Saltilla. Marja recognized the faces of some of these officers.
She eventually found the meeting room that, by Green Book convention, was situated to the back of the Command Center. Sure enough, she found Jirani there, with three other persons sitting beside him and hunched over a rectangular table. One of them was Phyllis Grimmersby, the Marshal-in-Saltilla and acting Mayor of Saltilla.
The other two, Marja did not recognize by face, although they had name-tags sewn into their uniforms—the young man was Bentil Pilix, a PDF Brigadier General by his rank insignia, and the older, wizened man was Saltillan War Underapparatchik Jake Harrison.
Bentil Pilix, in particular, caught Marja's eye for his bizarrely perfect features. That sort of handsomeness could not have come from anything other than AI-Tableaux, she thought.
Jirani was talking to someone on a call, and as Marja walked in, Jirani raised his eyes from his table-mounted tablet and motioned with his eyes for her to take a seat.
His old eyes didn't betray the slightest bit of surprise at seeing her.
Amidst his droning talk, Marja took her seat silently and attempted to follow the conversation.
"... understand that Ms. Patel would be fine with this arrangement? Unless she wishes to propose an alternative?" Jirani said.
A familiar voice replied. Marja's blood ran cold to recognize Presbyter Karl Mentzer.
"CEO Choudury has already discussed the details with me, Mr. Mzeeka. I note we have come to quite a few compromises, including over the Desert Question. I trust this will free up some capacity to deal with the alien threat," that old and stately voice said.
Karl Mentzer's voice was calm and unemotional as ever. The height of professionalism. It was like Jirani had never betrayed the Mentzers...
"That's our understanding as well," a Bharatian voice replied—female, deep and mellifluous. Marja supposed that this was 'Ms. Patel'.
"Over some two or three days of focused discussion, I think we've managed to land on quite a few mutually beneficial positions. As a result, Mr. Mzeeka," Ms. Patel continued, "can I trouble you to please record the agreement between Caturdhara and Lebensraum in the Manifold DMS? This will let us submit a settlement and withdrawal application... and the sooner this can be brought to the Arbitration Court, the better. Given the unusual speed at which Saltilla's formal complaint has been processed… we prefer if the settlement and withdrawal application is submitted before any judgement is issued by the Arbitration Court. In short, the formal complaint should be withdrawn as soon as possible."
At the word 'settlement', Marja bit her lip. Jirani was staring impassively at her, almost as if he was staring through her to divine her innermost thoughts.
Settlement!? Does that mean… it was all for nothing?
"I hear you, Ms. Patel," Jirani said, his tone deferential "In addition, I'll have to record a 'dispute resolution outcome' in the Manifold entry. Has there been any agreement reached on that front? What should I fill in?"
"Of course, of course," Ms. Patel drawled. "I understand Lebensraum took the lead on the… how shall we say… rapprochement. Mr. Mentzer? Any comments on what 'outcome' should be recorded?"
"Thank you, Ms. Patel. Yes, it should be recorded that our interests—the interests of both Caturdhara and Lebensraum—have always been aligned with the Democracy. Our priority is the safety and security of the—"
A loud explosion sounded from somewhere in the distance. The entire structure shook. Karl Mentzer's voice cut off for a second, before the connection was promptly re-established.
"—and especially the Frontier worlds across the galaxy all deserve the support of humanity's most stalwart defenders. Since the formal complaint has already been submitted, it wouldn't be prudent for us to deny the Sylvan Protectorate's request any longer," Karl Mentzer said.
Marja furrowed her brow. The Mentzers were cooperating with the Choudurys, that much was clear. But what did that mean in practice?
The case could be settled, the complaint withdrawn, but the Arbitration Court had already caught wind of the problems in Desert! Wouldn't that mean—
"Ortrud Mentzer is already en route to Desert, though her arrival presupposes the Transportation Gate located in the City State of Saltilla is still functional," Karl Mentzer continued. "Failing that, Ortrud will take up at the next closest Transportation Gate in Consus. The point is that this demonstrates Lebensraum's unwavering commitment to Democratic ideals. We are willing to contribute."
A strange expression usurped Jirani's face.
"And, just jumping in to add on more detail here—Mr. Mentzer feel free to interrupt if I'm misrepresenting anything," Ms. Patel said, "this means that the Mayorship of Saltilla should fall to a Bentil Pilix. I understand he's on the call as well?"
"I am," Bentil said, smiling at no one in particular.
"Mr. Pilix will be elevated to the Mayorship once full and fair elections can be guaranteed. After the alien threat has been dealt with," Karl Mentzer finished. "Is that clear, Mr. Mzeeka?"
Jirani shot a sidelong glance at Bentil Pilix, the youthful and handsome man positively basking in the attention of Karl Mentzer, one of the most powerful men in the Democracy.
Marja herself couldn't help but scrutinize that man's features—his bright brown eyes, his fair skin, his finely-contoured nose. It was impossible for a woman to be unmoved…
"That's clear, Mr. Mentzer," Jirani returned, his voice straining just the lightest bit. "We will endeavor to repel the alien threat in preparation for the arrival of Ortrud Mentzer."