Static noise issued from the overhead terminal as the on-ship receiver was shorn from dimensional proximality. No transmitter could reach them in this quiet interstice between spaces.
The Vespertilio. Schooner-class transport ship. Carrying capacity: 500,000 deadweight tonnage (under 1g gravity conditions). Their ticket to Desert.
They were ensconced deep within the hull of the ship, inside a room just high and wide enough for ten double-decker bunk beds to be squeezed in while still allowing for a single person to fit sideways into the apertures between.
The 'Cage', the inhabitants called it, because the space was windowless and too cramped for twenty people to live inside comfortably, and because their movement outside it was severely restricted.
There were no days and nights onboard the Vespertilio. Every 'period' lasted twenty-four hours and counted for remuneration purposes as a workday which began at 0530h and ended at 2100h. For the denizens of the Cage, however, remuneration was capped at a maximum of 50 credits per month on account of their status as members of the Penal Legion. They could exchange their credits for extra food in the mess; the going rate was 0.5 credits per extra serving of carbohydrates, 1 credit per extra serving of protein and 1.5 credits per extra meal.
It was 2130h and the lights buzzing blue-white overhead had sixty minutes of existence left this period. The air was claustrophobic with sweet and sour scents birthed from the miscegenation of unwashed bodies and chemical freshener; every breath tasted like mold besides, as if spores from long-forgotten species of fungi had taken root in the ancient vents and suffused into the recycled currents circulated by sputtering mechanical conditioners.
"Froot bar?"
"Woah!"
"Holy shit, how'd you manage it?"
"Quack slipped it to me earlier at the mess, that's how…"
"How did he sneak it past? They said they got checked 'afore they scanned their Incs into the Manifold system right?"
"Pilfed it from the canteen back on Earth, then stuck it into his underwear—"
Disgusted yells—a retch or two—filled the room
"Fuckin' wretched—"
"—goddamn ape—"
"—Jit's crazy, man—"
Betelgeuse lay sideways on his bed, his back turned to the group of prattlers, his head depressed uncomfortably far into his foam pillow. Artificial gravity was set at 1.3gs, they said, to acclimatize them, they said.
He shifted his head further to the side, his face now up so close to the aluminum-composite sidings the Cage called walls that every labored breath blew moisture onto its surface. The breathlessness lay cold and icy in his lungs, but if he concentrated hard enough he found that he could banish it temporarily. Any measure of control was welcome.
He inspected the surface before him and found it gray and smooth and blindingly reflective. Their source of light was a tempered-glass OLED, he decided, passing his vision across the coruscating swells of white-upon-gray even as he fingered the smooth ridges of keloid that had been pressed into his forehead. It had healed and no longer hurt much, but it was a mark that would not go away.
"... Well, do you have grape?"
"Three grapes, five oranges is all."
"I asked first, I'm taking grape…"
"...What about Dog Balls over there?" someone asked, and Betelgeuse recognized in its unaffected gentleness the voice of Voke.
"Dunno, hasn't talked all trip. Think he's getting all weird," came the reply in tones deep but female.
And they descended again into arguing about nothing and about who had gotten in the most hits upon the 'moid' Instructor and perhaps who had the biggest balls when it came to standing their ground against the great black wave of cronies it took to put them down.
A bugle call screamed across the PA, its strains synthetic and tinny, signaling the end of shower time for the rest of the crew. Now it was their turn, whilst the others made their preparations for tomorrow's reveille.
Betelgeuse stayed where he was, eyeing dark figures hinge, fold, recede and then disappear from the bulbous globes of reflected light. Sounds of scuffling, gibes and muffled expletives faded away into the corridor, as the other Penal Legion Personnel (abbrev. PLPs) rushed to cleanse themselves of the period's dirt.
Someone poked him in the shoulder and he whipped his head around. Voke, holding out a fruitbar. A tangled mess of knotty hair obscured from view the brand Betelgeuse knew he shared with the rest of the Cage.
"I got one for you, in case you were wanting any."
"... There were enough to go around?"
"Nup. Dis' my share."
Betelgeuse turned and sat up so that his legs dangled off the bed frame and touched the floor. He took the plastic packet into his palm and inspected the crinkled surface closely; upon it had been printed a picture of a thick, swarthy and barbate man dressed in a plaid shirt and denim jeans and hugging a rather oversized orange that he could not completely encircle with his hairy forearms. The man in the picture seemed to be emitting a faint odor of ammonia.
"Not showering?" Voke inquired, his eyes dark and tentative.
"Didn't sweat much today," Betelgeuse returned, his attention still utterly focused on the composition of the rustic image. The man's features were broad and rather bovine, and his eyes were inked too far apart. His wide smile revealed perfectly aligned bleached-white teeth that split his face horizontally. The orange he held was an imperfect sphere of spotty beiges textured roughly. He'd heard that oranges really did grow that big in Naga Valley, though he never saw one in his life.
"I mean, I know we only had chores and weapons introduction today, and that Chimerae documentary, but… you know… the others are gonna complain…"
"You know, maybe you should go and shower yourself," Betelgeuse proposed, shifting the full weight of his attention to Voke.
"Yes, of course, I was going to," Voke said, rubbing at the nape of his neck and grinning sheepishly. A gut reaction to confrontation, Betelgeuse realized. "But I just wanted to talk and … uh…"
"I'll get to the showers shortly, don't worry. And thanks for the bar."
"My pleasure," Voke grinned again, and then rolled his eyes to the side to look at the spotless wall and then down to inspect the grout between the floor tiles. Betelgeuse wondered if he were somehow related to Edith.
"What is it?"
"I'm just wondering if… y'know… if you're feeling okay?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I… because we got you caught up in all the mess back on Earth, and you're not really supposed to be here, I think. The TAF made a mistake, was what I thought."
"You and I both. What's done is done, though. It's too much to ask of institutions to do the right thing, when it really matters. We're not a part of the system they protect."
Voke raised a quizzical eyebrow.
"Oh. You're referring to the Ash thing," Voke returned, his expression suddenly thoughtful. "They just made a mistake, didn't they?"
"If so it's a systematic mistake, borne of congenital blindness. Ash grades aren't really anything but fodder to them. They're sending us to fight and die for a system that's cut us out from any way to benefit."
"I don't really see it that way–our parents live on the largesse of the Democracy, do they not? Even though they're Ash grades like us. There's a social contract built on mutual contribution and reciprocity, I don't think it'll have worked out any other way."
The hiss and suck and sputter of the air vents made the interpolating silence very quiet. A minute passed like this, as Betelgeuse weighed his words carefully. The plastic-wrapped fruitbar still lay in his palm, crinkling softly.
"That's a way of putting it which I doubt can sound really wrong. Which if you think about it, is the whole problem in the first place. Maybe it's not correct for me to say there's no way we can benefit. What I am saying is that they have made a cosmos of this God-given right to rule, this suzerain-like authority to say that we should fight and die for the sake of their power and have it be true. The mark of human hands is quite apparent somewhere between 'sacrifice for the greater good' and 'truth', and those are the hands that have meant death for your ancestors and that will mean death for all of us, eventually."
"What's true is true and what's not is not true," Voke asserted, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his discomfort apparent in his expression. "In the end, what can we really do? If it were true, and I don't believe it is, but if it were true that the Instructor and the TAF and… and the Council of Cardinals and the Bishopric all the way up the line to Hierarch Mundivaga herself, and the innumerable guilds scattered across the Democracy besides, if it were true that they were only in it for themselves then the thing could never exist. And we'd be like animals living a tortuous existence and daily closer to death anyway."
Their eyes had locked and Betelgeuse could see a deep distress welling up from behind his dark pupils.
"Humanity's grand project is fueled by the efforts and lives of a trillion trillion souls," Voke continued, breaking eye contact and turning his shoulders as far as the thin space between the bunkbeds permitted him, "and in it every soul gives up the greater part so that the smaller part might live immortal. My words fail me and I don't think anyone here would believe me, maybe, not Michael and certainly not Douglas. But this is why I think, in the end, mutineer or not, every human soul and every life and death is inextricably bound to the Democracy."
Betelgeuse released a breath.
"In the first place life never had any value to it except by way of the medium we chose to express it," Betelgeuse said, his stare unwavering. "Who can say that meaningful life as such can only be obtained under the Democracy, or can only be expressed by way of the mediums approved by the Democracy? Can't you see that you are appropriating to yourself the same kind of power to decide truth which the Hierarch and the Founding Families do? I'm not talking about the kind of truth which says the square is a quadrilateral and two add two is four; rather, they've appropriated for themselves the role of arbiter over the kind of truth which makes a society and puts Golden on top and Ash below! I don't know about human souls, but even if a man's soul is not his own, it surely is not God's or the Democracy's! I'll not submit myself to the power of any of them…"
Voke's eyes shifted to his feet, and then the entrance. He didn't want to listen anymore.
The ire was rising within Betelgeuse' gut as his words passed his lips, when a kind of chill seeped into his body and gripped his heart with fear. His muscles began to twitch, slowly at first, and then increasing in intensity until he could hardly keep his flesh from vibrating upon the bed. He sensed a presence behind him, almost as if it was his self, the disembodied self looking at him through mirrored eyes. He whipped his head around and saw only the foam pillow, below which he had stowed his Incunabulum.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The chill lifted and a queer invigoration seemed to suffuse his bones. Then, exhaustion interposed, canceling out completely the shards of anger that still inflamed his spleen, with surplus to spare.
"There's someone I met down there in the TAF canteen who had had a brother who died in the previous incursion. He must have loved him very much. I knew he'd consigned his brother's soul to the Democracy," Betelgeuse said softly. "Just because they die for a cause doesn't mean you associate everything that person was, his entire existence, with the cause. You keep his memory with you and your use of critical thinking. You think deeply about the cause and, if it's wrong, you bear the burden of it, and his share too. Why do they make the dead bear their burdens? The living should bear the burdens of the dead. It's fuckin' unethical use of dead labour, that's what."
Voke returned his attention to Betelgeuse, his face scrunched up in a frown. Betelgeuse wondered what the 'X' looked like under all that hair.
"I have uncles and aunts who died too, in the last incursion. Fifteen years and we still honor them every year. Human beings weren't made to bear the burden of their dead. It's too difficult and I've yet to know someone who can keep sane for all that."
Betelgeuse simply sighed and raised his hand, pointing at the digital clock blinking yellow above the doorhead.
----------------------------------------
Life aboard the Vespertilio ran according to a strict schedule.
Reveille, 0530h. The PLPs would be shunted to the mess kitchens to assist the cooks to prepare breakfast, while the rest of the personnel performed their ablutions. Purple onions, white and red radishes, cloves of garlic, pinch of asafoetida, cinnamon bark and assorted ground chilis; powdered cardamom, cloves, cumin, fennelseeds and yellow onion; rice shavings left over from the process of rice polishing; and more, ancient foods all which had sustained the human race for millennia, sourced from the great vathouses of Chèxīchéng and then flash-frozen at negative sixty degrees Celsius to kill any of the lethally poisonous Carragon parasites, so ubiquitous to the Sinic continent, which might have found their way into the food.
The vegetables would be thawed, processed, and then cooked in oil extracted from the Helianthus trietericus, and then the spices would go in. The soup-curry would then be assembled in a vat and brought to a boil; a package of carcasses, which the kindly cook Joseph explained were a kind of rodent originating from the Rocky Mesa prairieland, would be thawed and processed into bite-sized chunks of meat, then seared and added (together with fond and deglazing alcohol) into the burbling vat.
Breakfast would be served by 0630h and by 0730h the PLPs and cooks would have their repast and then commence the post-breakfast wash-up.
By 0900h, the PLPs would be attached to a contingent of Grade 1 Personnel comprising Hollows and Whites and marched to a lecture hall to endure one and a half hours of documentaries and/or lectures on Desert. This covered a variety of topics including its topography, material make-up, natural hazards and formations, flora and fauna and its history; it explicated the relationship of suzerainty between the Democracy and the internally autonomous Sylvan Protectorate, the thorny political compromise which had brokered the fifty-year ceasefire between the Protectorate and several belligerent rebel groups, the material importance of Desert as a rich source of Bismuth and thus Polonium, and the strategic importance of the Protectorate fortress-city of Saltilla as the location of a Transportation Gate (and thus the importance of Desert to the whole Frontier), among other things.
1030h would see the PLPs gathered at the on-board Infirmary for some time with the mobile Rejuvenator unit, to heal the fractures and internal injuries sustained during their short sojourn at the TAF training facility. It was the only sliver of time available to the PLPs, the rest of the period's slots having been taken up by the main body of Ash cadets and higher grade personnel, all of whom enjoyed precedence over the PLPs.
Rejuvenator units comprised three components: a helmet, a corded insulated wire and a pulse-patch which went over the approximate area of the body affected and which was connected to the helmet by way of the wire. There were three Rejuvenator units aboard the Vespertilio, all of which suffered from some sort of mechanical quirk. Unit number 94000012, for example, didn't seem to be able to heal internal lacerations unless someone applied constant pressure on the corded wire to push it into the recessed interface upon the Rejuvenator head-piece. Unit number 94000415, in contrast, had to be fiddled with—the wires twisted clockwise or anticlockwise, the helmet slapped upside the ribbed spine that ran across its top, the flexible pulse-patch folded and then unfolded—until a kind of fragile balance was achieved; once it was made to work, the slightest jog would cause the unit to shut down. Unit number 94000002 was perhaps the most enigmatic one of all: the Medicae informed them that, by virtue of some malfunction or other, it could only really work on patients whose pulse ran 120 beats or more per minute, and recommended that prospective users perform some moderate exercise throughout the Rejuvenator session.
By the third of these sessions Lawrence 'the Limp' Gomez-Evans was whingeing about the stupidity of his fellow PLPs, cursing the fact that none of them knew how to fix "the goddamn things". Aminata wondered aloud how much of a pity it was that Lawrence had been born a retard with a small peen, and perhaps if he had a normal functioning brain and semi-average penis-size he might have been chosen by the Bronze Incunabula and been able to fix "the goddamn things" himself. Frederica had chortled more loudly than usual.
These equipment surely lived up to the designation 'military grade', Michael Thane had commented drily. Those who heard him couldn't help but nod sagely.
By 1100h the PA would announce the opening of the entertainment lounges and gym for the period, whilst the PLPs would enter the kitchen again to help with lunch.
1300h, time enough for the PLPs to shove meatballs or battered fish down their gullets and reach the exercise hall by no later than 1315h for their mandatory accimatization regimen. They would endure the gauntlet of running, tabata, resistance training and combat training under the watchful eye of Instructor Parsiphal, who rarely ended training before someone or other emptied the contents of their stomach all over the ragged, sweaty mats.
Desert, Instructor Parsiphal was wont to stress, was no joke. Being larger and denser than Earth, it boasted 1.3gs of gravitational force, and hence the Vespertilio's artificial gravity wells were set to mimic this. They had to get used to running and fighting under these conditions, he said. Given the short duration of the trip, they wouldn't be able to completely acclimatize themselves by planetfall; which meant they had to work doubly hard, if only to increase their survivability on their first foray out into enemy territory.
Though he took pains not to show it, these sessions tended to push Betelgeuse to the very limit. He could feel the phlegm in his lungs, the icy shortness of breath. Never had he felt so inclined to curse the training of his early years, the same training that had exposed him to the coal dust that permeated the atmosphere around Edom.
Depending on the time which the PLPs would complete their regimen, they would either enjoy a small sliver of respite or whine pitifully as they made their way down the layers of the Vespertilio. In any case they would reach the hold by no later than 1430h and split into two details. One detail had been tasked with inspecting the Vespertilio's immense cargohold of Armored Battle Cruisers (abbrev. ABCs), LSVs, Wargrides, cranes, forklifts, and other assorted vehicles; the other detail, a voluminous arsenal comprising, amongst others, plasma boltrifles, Zenith Weaponry Elentracorp (abbrev. ZWEN) Mark-567 railguns, soundburst grenades, fragmentary grenades and assorted depleted-uranium-shrapnel (abbrev. DUS) weaponry comprising frangible bullets, grenades and claymores.
The PLPs were allocated a total of forty days to submit a fully cross-checked manifest to second officer Garvy. Whilst it was the responsibility of the Vespertilio's Captain Faulkner to ensure the accuracy of the cargo manifest at the point where the equipment was handed over to the Sylvan Protectorate's officers, the actual checking had been delegated to the PLPs, "to add another layer of eyes to the checking process in order to ensure the manifest conclusively accurate".
As far as Betelgeuse knew, theirs was the only layer of eyes to ever touched the scoured metal surfaces of the military cargo.
At 1730h the PA would announce the closure of the entertainment lounges and gym for the period. For the PLPs, it would be back to the kitchens to help prepare a dinner of borscht and 50% ryechaff pumpernickel.
Post-dinner, the PLPs would be seated in the lecture hall by 1930h. Sometimes a group of Grade 1 Personnel might join them in learning about the characteristics and attributes of the scythe-handed, mantis-like Chimerae, a few rudimentary facts and/or points respecting their language and system of semaphoric communication, their level of technology and method of warfare; most times they would be alone, a lonely island of twenty overseen by an irascible Parsiphal.
This last activity would end between 2030h and 2115h, and then it was back to their bunk to rest and await their turn in the showers.
The lights went out at 2230h, and they would do it all over again tomorrow.
----------------------------------------
The PLPs were kept separate from the main body of batch designation 247-B, a kind of safeguard against the spread of 'dangerous ideology', Betelgeuse reckoned. The Democracy was nigh on hypochondriacal, when it came to informational hygiene.
This was the sort of practice which carried over to other areas of military life; there was no information other than what was fed through 'the proper channels'. The Vespertilio did not have a library, or if it did, the PLPs had no access to it—under these circumstances, Betelgeuse reverted to first principles: if a piece of information was combat-essential, it was likely to be true, if not, it had to be carefully analyzed and parsed of propaganda.
On that day, which must have been their twentieth or twenty-first day aboard the Vespertilio, a young woman who could not have been much older than them joined them at the lecture hall some thirty minutes after the relevant infomentary had begun. Unlike the others, Betelgeuse had not turned back to look and did not so much as acknowledge her presence when the sound of the opening door echoed through the hall.
He continued taking notes in efficient shorthand, his penstrokes scratching diligently across his military-issued notebook. Every piece of information was assiduously captured, to be carefully categorized later. Chimerae utilised two main types of vehicles: tanks with tracked treads to traverse the sandmarshes, and bipedals to traverse mountainous areas as well as the rocky topographies of the Jagged Fields and the Strata Basin. Chimerae ranged-weaponry included vehicle-mounted lasercannons with the capability of superheating air into plasma, and various forms of projectile weaponry roughly equivalent to certain human counterparts.
In terms of physical makeup, Chimerae had a retractable blade attached to the dorsum of each of their prehensile appendages, which they could use to devastating effect in close combat. Chimerae were cowardly and treasonous, and commonly ingested their own fecal matter for sustenance. Chimerae social intelligence was limited to a dominance-based hierarchy—i.e., the biggest and physically most intimidating Chimera in a group became its leader.
So on and so forth. Some of it was repeated information, some of it new, some of it superfluous. All of it, he took down.
By the end of the infomentary he had filled up about a third of his notebook; Instructor Parsiphal, who would usually have vanished by that time, revealed an unusually diligent side to himself when he descended the edgewise staircase to the front of the hall and summarized the lecture before dismissing the PLPs.
With sighs of relief the PLPs began to saunter out of the hall; Betelgeuse had just risenfrom his chair when the woman called out to Parsiphal.
Instructor, I wish to speak with this one alone, she said, her voice so polite and refined it tickled Betelgeuse' ears. Betelgeuse saw that her hair was smooth and straight and dark brown; above full lips colored the lightest pink sat upturned a flat-tipped nose which bridge was lightly freckled; her young, nigh on childish features were completed by large eyes centered with black pupils. She was dressed in formal navy-blue military attire, not the drab overalls afforded the PLPs, and upon her shoulders he observed epaulets marked across with a single horizontal bar of gold, signifying her rank as Subaltern, an officer commissioned by the Democratic Council.
Parsiphal smiled obsequiously. Oh, of course, of course, please go ahead, he said.
Betelgeuse remained where he stood and when Parsiphal was gone she motioned for him to come closer.
He acquiesced but not without some hesitation, suddenly self-conscious of the brand emblazoned across his forehead.
"You take notes quickly," she said.
"It is a skill I learnt from my hometown, ma'am."
"Let me see?"
Inwardly giving thanks that he had not written anything private and/or potentially seditious, Betelgeuse proffered his notebook.
She flipped through several pages and scrunched up her face, asking, "what is this?"
"What?"
"As in, the script."
"Shorthand, ma'am."
"I can't make sense of it. You can read this?"
"Yes. That says 'the fetlocked legs of the Chimerae contribute to their physical ability to run enormous distances… even though unmodified human beings may rank as one of the top terrestrial mammals in terms of endurance, the best human runners, even having received the blessing of a White Incunabulum with related Increment, can only just keep up with the average Chimera'."
"It is a good skill to have."
"Most people from my village can do this, ma'am."
"Well, I certainly can't, at least not yet. My name is Marja Mentzer. May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?"
The politeness with which she regarded him caught him left-footed. He blinked, unsure of how to reply. 'Marja Mentzer,' he thought, 'could it be?' He didn't know if it was a coincidence that she shared her last name with the famous Mentzers, only the most powerful of the Founding Families and which ran the interstellar megacorporation Lebensraum.
Eventually he decided that simple was best and settled for a "Betelgeuse Sakar."
"En. Mr. Sakar, may I inquire as to whether you would be interested in assisting me with some minute-taking?"
"Ma'am, I'm not too sure if that's possible."
"Marja is fine. And don't worry about the red tape—I've been assigned as attaché to this TAF contingent en route to Desert, so they've afforded me certain powers, even in respect of PLPs like yourself. I'd like to know if you're willing, though, and if not I can find someone else. If you will help me, you'll be relieved of half or more of a days'—I mean, half or more of a period's duties, during those periods on which I will need your assistance. You'll be accompanying me to take notes at some of these administrative meetings I have. Just note-taking, that's all."
"Ma'am," Betelgeuse began, ignoring Marja's suggestion to use her first name, "I don't have any issue with that."
"Heads up that timings can sometimes be flexible, though, and meetings may be scheduled at the wee hours of the day… sorry, period."
"That's fine, ma'am, happy to help," Betelgeuse returned, his face straight and emotionless. "But you'll have to speak with Instructor Parsiphal about this, I reckon."
"Again, feel free to call me Marja," she articulated, her lips curled upwards in either mirth or embarrassment. "I'll have the conversation with Mr. Lorenz shortly, and I take it you can start tomorrow?"
"Yes, ma'am," Betelgeuse replied.
Marja, sighing to herself, dismissed Betelgeuse from the lecture hall.