"PLP Sakar transmitting. Return if received. I repeat, PLP Sakar transmitting…"
He received in reply only static and the tranquil hum of his rebreather systems cycling air through his suit.
The forest was gray and lifeless and so still Betelgeuse thought he could hear his blood shimmy through his veins.
"We gotta move up further, maybe past the… uh… the slanted one there," Douglas whispered.
"Every one of them's slanted, Downie," Frederica returned, also whispering.
"I'm talking about the slanted pillar okay? Get off my case Dyke," Douglas hissed.
"They're all pillars, goddammit," Frederica muttered.
"No gods—"
"Jammer's probably mobile. No choice but to go down northeasterly till we find a hole in the net," Betelgeuse deadpanned.
He squinted, trying to discern shapes and outlines—anything that would give him a clue as to what lay out there—from the depths of the stone forest. The dust from the earlier skirmish may have settled, but there was nothing that he could divine from the gloom.
"Keep your headlamps off. We're going stealth," Betelgeuse directed, tightening his right-handed grip on his weapon and holding its muzzle to the star-studded firmament, Lawrence's Incunabulum tucked flush under his left armpit.
"As if we weren't going to do that," Douglas grumbled under his breath.
But Betelgeuse had already bounded out from cover, darting to an adjacent pillar.
He slammed back-first into the outcropping, then turned to his fellows, gesticulating with his left hand. Frederica made the crossing next, cupping Jove's Incunabulum between her left forearm and bicep, then Douglas, brandishing his railgun and aiming haphazardly at nothing.
They continued like this, daisy-chaining across the stone forest slowly, carefully, laboriously, their breaths tense against their tympanums.
It was at the tenth crossing that Betelgeuse thought he saw something move out the corner of his eye.
"Something's there," he whispered, squinting again.
"... What? …," Frederica, cramped beside him, managed tremulously. Betelgeuse imagined Douglas' eyes were just beginning to quiver.
Betelgeuse peeked out the side.
Nothing but rocky juts and undefined shapes standing silent witness to their surreptitious progress.
"Hey gimme some commentary here… what're you looking at?" Douglas urged.
"Not sure what it was. There's not supposed to be any life on Desert right?" Betelgeuse returned.
"... There are extremophiles in the volcanoes and desert areas… if I'm remembering the infoments correctly…" Frederica remarked.
"I'm going to the next one," Betelgeuse said.
He alighted at the next pillar without incident. Almost immediately, he felt his fellows thump into cover behind him, their bodies jogging him forward roughly.
"Easy there," he grunted.
"Dog Balls… um… behind you?" Frederica quavered.
A chill went up his spine like the fervent skittering of a gigas millipede, raising upon his forearms a rash of goosepimples. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind in all directions, none of them finding their berth, and he felt before he concluded that perhaps it was something mysterious behind him after all.
Betelgeuse whipped around anti-clockwise, blacksteel muzzle crashing violently into the undefined thing, his mind mute and committed to action. He felt Lawrence's Incunabulum fall from his armpit.
A muffled tchik-tchik-tchik issued from it, as it slammed into the side of the pillar then started to shift about.
"Chimerae!"
He stabbed again with his muzzle, catching it in its midriff and causing the thing to fall over backward into the intervening space between pillars, its body rustling a perfervid tchik-tchik-tchik that raised in volume and became more garbled.
He flicked his headlamp on reflexively; and Betelgeuse beheld, mere centimeters away, a humanoid thing fallen supine upon the ground and attempting to regain its fetlocked feet. It was encased from pastern to rhomboid head in a silvery-blue plate, with long and spindly double-jointed arm-appendages extending from a thin torso. It took him half a second to realise that the gash of black glass running vertically down the flattish front-facing surface of the thing's head was, in fact, a feature of its helmet and not an organic feature of its face—that the thing wore a head-piece of some kind.
With unflinching ferocity Betelgeuse set upon the Chimera, swinging the butt of his railgun in a vicious roundhouse instinctively aimed at its head, his headlamp flinging beams of light in a chaotic dazzle. He felt the dull thunk through his suit's padded glove and knew he scored the hit when the Chimera, barely winded, took his head with a capoeira-like kick that knocked him sidewise into the gravel, the fall breaking his headlamp and plunging the surroundings into darkness.
"I can't get a clean hit!" Douglas screamed, itching to turn on his headlamp yet vacillating, afraid it would make him an easy target for the Chimerae still lurking in the shadows.
"Shove it! I'm going in!" Frederica hollered, leaping into the fray and, grabbing onto the muzzle of her railgun with both hands, bringing her weapon's butt crashing down like a club on what she supposed was the Chimera's head.
Betelgeuse had already regained his feet and refocused his attention on the Chimera, only to realize they were laboring under an unfortunate dearth of light. The Chimera's form seem to meld together indistinctly with Frederica's, their mortal struggle a heavy dance of violence and exhaustion. Frederica's voice filtered over the subgroup comms in a smattering of grunts and clipped yells.
"Need some fuckin' light, Downie!" Betelgeuse roared.
"Argh, you better make this count!"
In a moment the battle was once more revealed to him, and Betelgeuse leaped at the creature, smashing into it muzzle-first and ripping it away from Frederica, tipping it to the ground.
With a garbled tcharg the Chimera tumbled and then flipped itself onto its haunches. Before Betelgeuse could react it launched itself at him, simultaneously elongating its arms into wicked blades that glinted under the light of the headlamp.
Raising his arms instinctively, he caught one of the blades in his left palm and the other with his right forearm, the latter blade lodging between his forearm's radius and ulna. Betelgeuse felt the sharp pain of flesh parting.
He realized with a start that the creature's arms hadn't become blades. They had instead extended out of the middle section of its arms, leaving the prehensile hands free to grasp his elbows. With the tensing of its arm's second joint, his elbows were forced closer together so that its blades sheared slowly through his flesh and bone.
Pain. He screamed wordlessly as his hand and forearm were bisected, roared in anger as he faced the spidered crack of its helmet.
With a resounding echo the top of the Chimera's head vomited out in a clump of gore, the alien twitching and then falling lifeless to the ground to reveal walleyed Douglas, the muzzle of his weapon smoking.
Betelgeuse blinked and bit his tongue.
"Shit this isn't pretty," Douglas remarked, running his eyes over to where the Chimera's blade was still attached to Betelgeuse. "Almost as nasty as when you broke my arm, remember? Snapped it like a twig, you did."
"… So it's like you're saying you believe in karma, eh? I thought you were godless?" Betelgeuse chuckled, despite himself. A slow and incessant beep sounded in his ears, the exosuit's warning that it was rapidly losing oxygen.
"Fuck's sake Ballsman your suit's pierced through!" Frederica exclaimed, rifling through her exosuit's thigh pouch and retrieving several cartridges. "We need to spray it ASAP!"
With a grunt of pain Betelgeuse pulled his arms free of the Chimera's blades, wincing as he did so. With steady hands Frederica foamed his gushing wounds with her coagulator, then sealed the breach in his exosuit with plastic sprayfoam. He could feel that the inside of his suit was bloodslick and greasy.
"Gonna be microplasticked to bits… but thanks," Betelgeuse mumbled, feeling pain travel up his arm in waves.
"No thanks needed," she replied, putting the finishing touches on the forearm of his exosuit. He couldn't see her face in the darkness because Douglas had moved elsewhere, but he imagined they were fierce and focused.
"Hey, I found Lawrence's thing—" Douglas began, when a hailstorm of bullets flashed from the depths of the stone forest, cutting him off. They dove into the ground as one and scrambled to cover, bullets pinging off rock and gravel.
"Get that light off!" Betelgeuse barked, willing away his pain and fatigue. "We break for it in three…"
They plunged once more into the darkness, aiming themselves northeast, praying they wouldn't meet another.
----------------------------------------
The dusky chill of night gave way to eastern rays beamed through distant sawtooth peaks, and the heat rose in the day to reach about fifty degrees Celsius as Corydon blazed past the noon meridian. Their exosuits whirred and hummed, conditioners worked to near breakage under the cruel barrage of the red star.
"I thought you died. I think I was quite sure by the fifth hour," Marja chatted, her voice annoyingly shrill across the private comms, "that you died, I mean. We waited through the night, you know. It was quite chilly."
They forged a path of bootsteps across the ridge of rustred sand, the snaking contingent stretching far into the dust and behind the dunes they had left far behind. Subaltern Marja trudged her own deep trough beside Betelgeuse, her body encased in a blacksteel exoskeleton which bore her weight across the leagues and miles from craggy crest to gravel road to desert trail.
"That's very comforting to hear," Betelgeuse mumbled. His exosuit was throwing up a warning cautioning him that his oxygen supplies were low. He didn't care—he was too tired to care and his arms were wracked with constant dull pains—and anyway they were supposed to be coming up to Saltilla soon. Mayhaps he could get his suit patched up; mayhaps his body too, if he was lucky.
"Two dead and you got only one of the bastards?" Marja half-inquired, half-sighed.
"They caught us in an ambush, ma'am. They were set up at the Ninsei mine and had a jammer with them. We don't even know how many of them there were. We're lucky any of us came back alive."
"Well, a part of me is glad you aren't dead yet. It's risky to have to find new people to… y'know…"
"I know," Betelgeuse articulated. He added Marja Mentzer's family problems to the list of things he couldn't care less about at that moment.
"And when Mr. Lorenz went all 'Report, PLP Sakar! Leave nothing out. I want everything', I must admit I was expecting more than a cursory explanation of your sojourn at the mine and the ensuing combat…"
"Ma'am, we had radio-ed in about a quarter-hour prior, apprised Master Lorenz of Sergeant Jove's and PLP Gomez's sacrifice. I've nothing to add beyond what I've already said. They were loyal to the last breath—true soldiers of the Democracy," Betelgeuse said, his tone grave. He observed out of the corner of his eye Douglas and Frederica near the tip of the formation. A wide-shouldered figure who could only be Michael Thane stalked the sand to Douglas' left; sticking close to Frederica's right was a short and rather lithe-suited form whom Betelgeuse supposed was Alisha Ruiz, the only other female PLP. All no doubt engaged in their own uniquely permuted, clandestine conversations.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"I wasn't second-guessing you. Just pointing out that Parsiphal didn't seem mighty pleased for all that. And the fact you'd brought back only Lawrence's Incunabulum…"
So we did.
Upon that jagged slope lay the Incunabulum, ash-gray, perforated, a memento of the dead which recorded in cursive an epigraph to the man: Lawrence Gomez-Evans.
> As Lawrence Gomez-Evans had spent most of his childhood exposed to various forms of danger, he is prone to intuiting its presence.
>
> Lawrence Gomez-Evans' sensitivity to such predicaments as he is unable to extricate himself from manifests as a deep and cloying sense of frustration.
But as for the reasons, the logic, the soul behind the heart… all of that was lost forevermore.
"Strionis Jove murdered Limp. He was a traitor to the Democracy. Even dead he remains a traitor to all we stand for. Wherever his spirit is, it doesn't deserve the benefit of his Incunabulum," Frederica had said, her words laced with venom and anger.
Another dead man's artifact lay upon the spartan crags, the colossal dolmen overhead just catching the dawnlight. I had spent time with its bleached-bone cover between my hands and knew that upon the first page the Increment read:
> Given Strionis Jove's preoccupation with the loups of The Irradiated Thing, his musculature, bones and ligaments manifest a superior quality allowing him to bound across large distances.
The Irradiated Thing. A well-loved character made a myth in children's minds.
And again, his Etchings, revealed:
> Strionis Jove's circulatory system is strengthened to maintain the quality of his activity.
>
> Additional musculature connected to his pelvic floor muscles improve Stronis' Jove's performance in matters of his preoccupation.
>
> Strionis Jove's preoccupations when taken to extremes manifest a severe dread.
Frederica stood before Strionis Jove's Incunabulum and us behind her; I remember her expression then, a visage carved from stone, and as she raised her weapon and took aim at it, I wondered how she could be so sure about what she had said.
Douglas caught my eye. We saw foreheads anointed with the mark and I think perhaps we wondered about the logic of it. We had been branded mutineers because we had gone against the Democracy ourselves.
Didn't that make us traitors, too?
"... He should be pleased enough we came back at all bearing news of the Chimerae presence in the pillar basin. The casualties could've been very large, ma'am. It was hard won information, and Sergeant Jove and PLP Lawrence died for it," returned Betelgeuse.
"... and of course we have you to thank for this multi-day detour…" Marja muttered, then, as if suddenly remembering he could hear her, turned to regard him apologetically. "... uh… I mean… I meant that I hear you… and am grateful for their sacrifice. Terrible to think what could have happened if we'd just traipsed in unprepared…"
Betelgeuse didn't deign to reply, his mind already consumed by other things.
Indeed, his ability to control us had nothing to do with any of it…
----------------------------------------
Betelgeuse remained a tomb and Marja wondered if she had gone too far. She berated herself for her insensitivity and walked there for a long time beside him in silence, until Corydon had touched the peaky caps of Saltilla's watchtowers in the distance and then started to set behind it and beyond the Amate range to the west.
The air was dimming as the sand became soil and they came to a gravel road lined with pitched and crumbling rubble walls. Yonder came Saltilla's searchlight tracing a lazy arc across the barren land until it came to rest upon them as they reached an immense viaduct.
As they stepped upon that span Marja looked over the side and saw that they were traversing the space between hills, the faces of the hills flat and sheer on either side as if some giant mason had chiseled them parallel. Far below them was a slow-moving stream of discolored liquid burbling in various shades of green and brown, frothing where the foul detritus had set up into clumps of curd.
They were halfway over when Parsiphal called her to the front of the contingent to discuss the administrative details of their arrival at Saltilla. It was decided that the body of combat troops comprising the Grade 0 Personnel (i.e., Ash grades), Grade 1 Personnel (i.e., Hollow and White grades) and Penal Legion Personnel would be housed at the barracks with specific space allocations to be decided later.
On the other hand, the handful of Grade 2 Personnel (comprising Primary, Bronze and Silver grades) and one other Grade 3 Personnel (i.e., Colonel Jirani Mzeeka, the other Grade 3 personnel being Subaltern Mentzer herself), who they had brought with them aboard the Vespertilio and who were slated to arrive by LSV within the next couple of days, were to be housed at the Diplomatic Chambers, just opposite from the Government House.
There wasn't anything Marja felt strongly enough about to disagree with.
They walked a long time along the concrete walls of the fortress-city, and while they walked Corydon set fully and a gibbous Larua took its place. The walls were so long Marja thought it might take a week or more to traverse the whole front-facing side from end to end.
When finally they came to the gate it loomed silent, dark and brooding. As the reconnaissance team waited under the jutting arch to be let in, Marja cast a glance back, running her eyes over the alien landscape, over the spiked basin of stone pillars they had avoided, over the area murky by the pale glow of Larua that must have been the edge of the desert they traversed, over the mammoth escarpment curving tortuously to the southeast, and over the stretch of rudimentary road that led straight here, to Saltilla.
She raised her head and admired the constellations woven into the endless void overhead. 'So clear and so distinct,' she thought, so different from even the clearest nights on Earth or Abuna Yem'ata. Never had she felt so close to the cosmic immensity as here, on cloudless Desert, where the inky blackness of space seemed just an arm's length away. There was a pulse to the stars she could sense with what old Jirani had called her 'emergent consciousness', that successor to the 'third eye' which let her feel the interminable expansion of spacetime into the endless nothing beyond nothing.
Although she felt a great smallness, she knew she possessed the threads of spacetime that laced her body in place of the peripheral nervous system that all other lessers of her species had to suffice with. And thus, she could believe in the promise that had sustained her bloodline through generations of rising and falling, a promise that had nothing to do with comfort or material goods or sinecure positions or political power; she hated the Mentzers because she was the most Mentzer of all: for this the promise of transcending flesh and mortality—the greatest of all promises—she could give up all other false hopes.
In the face of such latent magnificence, the significance of two deaths suddenly seemed very small. Here, on Desert, she would find her own way, beyond the Mentzers, beyond the Democracy, and beyond the Chimerae.
A man by the name of Harold Simmons eventually interrupted her introspection. He explained that he was the Protectorate duty officer, ranked Checkpoint Inspector, in charge of processing the TAF contingent's ingress. CI Simmons escorted Marja and Parsiphal in through a side gate, through an airlock, and into a decontamination chamber. Then it was up a winding corridor and into a broad hall designated Immigrations and suffused with blinding white light.
A man who introduced himself as "Superintendent Lewis" received them there. He wasted no time in informing them that the Mayor of Saltilla and the Marshal of the Sylvan Protectorate had been awaiting their arrival, and that they were to convene at the Government House with the greatest possible haste.
"Leave the immigrations with CI Simmons," he said, eyes squinting with fatigue. With a hint of mirth, he added, "You may take off your helmets too, if you're so inclined."
And so barely ten minutes had passed before they were ushered out again into a dark and sleeping city overcast with a blanket of ghostly purple light. Behind her lay the towering edifice that was the Saltilla wall, before her was a vast area flat like a plain, and beyond, past indistinct silhouettes and a lacework of lamp-lighted roads, rose great and shadowy sentinels slitted with ten million or more lights.
Saltilla looked more like a gargantuan cave than a city, the entirety of it being enclosed in a concrete sheathe. One did not see stars here when they looked up, just a bland tapestry of black studded with globy purple hues.
They traversed its streets in a small buggy driven drunkenly by the Superintendent, its chassis tipping and pitching at every bend, and Marja looking worriedly at him to divine if they were perhaps going to die so ignominiously.
Parsiphal was chuckling now and the Superintendent was laughing. Marja thought the buggy was going much too fast. Before its headlights was a long road split down the middle by a white line, the line whizzing past directly under the chassis with hardly any deviation.
"Why is it so empty?" Marja managed to ask, after her terror at the Superintendent's reckless driving had abated. Funny how she could navigate a ship across hundreds of light years and yet still feel her legs turn to jelly traveling a mere 180 kilometers per hour.
"It's curfew. Saltilla is under martial law," the Superintendent explained. "You might have noticed the roads leading into Saltilla were empty… but there was a time, not so long ago, when Immigrations was packed to bursting and the city would never sleep.
"We run a twenty-four-hour day now, to coordinate our timings with the TAF. On the other hand, the educational institutions still keep to the thirty-six-hour sidereal calendar—there, the State University's the first column on the right, and there's the through-train high school on the left—but in times like this everybody understands military matters must take priority, so the city itself functions according to the twenty-four-hour TAF cycle."
Marja raised her head as they reached the edge of the colossal pillar, bigger now that it was so close, and found, even traveling at the speed they were, the size of the structure truly breathtaking.
The pillar reached up from the ground and connected to the ceiling, like a stalagnate of staggering proportions, and its surface was studded with a patternless weave of windows lit and dark.
"That's a school?" Marja gaped. She was no stranger to megastructures, the Mentzer family having owned most of the livable land on Abuna Yem'ata—but this was a whole other level.
"It's some sight," Parsiphal agreed.
"To be fair, that particular column houses one of the Protectorate's nuclear and spacetime laboratories. It has, furthermore, every amenity a person could need, from residential dormitories to affordable eateries to luxury shopping malls. The staff and students never have to leave its premises—it's a microcosm of Saltilla," the Superintendent explained.
"What does a university need with such an advanced laboratory?" Parsiphal inquired.
"To study subjects related to nuclear and spacetime, I suppose," the Superintendent answered judiciously, and Marja rolled her eyes.
The buggy penetrated deeper into the heart of the city, racing past the occasional idling vehicle until finally they came to a road lined with silent bipedal mechanical monstrosities. The columnar structures here were thinner and all of them were shrouded in shadows.
The roads became broader and the machines were left behind until at last they arrived at a lighted square brimming with uniformed personnel and war machines of every kind. At the far end of the square sat the widest building in Saltilla by far; a long, well-lighted path extended from the end of the square and pierced straight into its shadowed heart. While not as tall as the surrounding columns, the building reached almost halfway to the ceiling; nevertheless, details of its facade were difficult to make out in the darkness, and only its ground floor appeared to be lighted.
"There's the outration canteen. There are usually leftovers if you're hungry," said the Superintendent, pointing to a segmented tentage to their left.
"And there," he turned to the wide building, "is the Government House, with the Diplomatic Chambers by the side. I better get you inside before they get too antsy…"
----------------------------------------
"Good morning, Saltilla!" the PA chirped.
Consciousness returned to Betelgeuse, and with it, pain.
He forced his eyes open. It took him a moment before he realized he no longer had his exosuit on and that he was staring at the concrete ceiling of the Saltilla Barracks, at any one of the ten or so cracks splintering across its surface.
Barracks Block 50, to be specific, located almost three kilometers from the mustering point.
"It is now zero-five-three-zero hours military time; two-nine-three-zero hours Desert time. All rise for the anthem…"
It figured he only had about three hours of sleep. He remained in bed and raised his left palm, then his right forearm, scrutinizing where the wicked wounds foamed blue by the coagulator had scabbed over wetly. He would have to find an infirmary and get himself checked. Hopefully they had Rejuvenators here.
As the solemn strains of a synth-trumpet filtered through the PA and then faded away, he registered that someone beside him was still snoring. He turned his head, seeing Voke on the adjacent bed.
"... it's a chipper twenty-four degrees Celsius in Saltilla today. If you're free and fancy a spin at the latest fitness fashion files, do come by downtown sometime after lunch–an event is happening at MetroTown Calgary that will blow your socks away! To all those masters of style, fighting fashionistas and gods of groove, we are happy to present the latest in recycled paraphernalia…"
Betelgeuse rose to his feet and tottered unsteadily, placing a hand onto the bed frame to steady himself and wincing at the onset of further pain; he turned to look at Voke again, seeing a curious beam of light fall upon the crown of that man's head, its mellow glow so reminiscent of Earth…
Betelgeuse found the window with his eyes and stared out the dirty pane. Beyond lay a vast land of cropfields fractured into rectangular plots by tar roads stretching out into the background of distant columns—megaliths of metal and stone extending from ground to ceiling.
"... and for the intrepid consumer looking to replace one or more pieces of their cookware post-donation drive, look no further than the Bangsar Pasar, where some of the best deals to be seen this year are slated to make their appearance no later than tonight…"
Saltilla was a city encased in concrete. Above them hung an uneven clay-colored ceiling splotched with unknown black substances and which reached so high up Betelgeuse found himself wondering if clouds would form up there. The Saltilla morning was like afternoon on Earth; the Sun streamed golden from a multitude or more of floodlights affixed to the Saltilla sky, and the resplendent world here was so unlike the raw redness of Desert as begotten by Corydon.
"... so if you see any of our friends from the Democracy, recognizable for their black uniform jackets colored blue at the lapels, don't hesitate to shake their hands and greet them. To the Democracy and their fearless officers—we thank you, from the bottom of our hearts…"
Myriad vehicles hummed and sputtered and clanked. Betelgeuse caught the faint smell of food wafting through the air. A multitude of voices carried over from the toilets at the far end of the dormitory—his fellow PLPs clowning around amidst their ablutions.
"... It is most important, in this time of need, to remind ourselves daily of the sacrifices made by our brave soldiers. And your sacrifice at home, to scrimp, save and ration, multiplied by five million Saltillans and combined with the efforts of the other eight-hundred-and-ninety million Sylvans—your sacrifice matters.
"Have a magnificent day ahead, citizens! Glory to the Protectorate and, as always, good morning, Saltilla!"