Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 7===

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Quenser Barbotage was being dragged.

He could not tell up from down and his memory was still fuzzy, but he could tell someone was holding him by the arms and dragging him.

Wherever he was, it was dark, but he could not figure out if it was a cave or a basement somewhere.

“Ah, ugh?”

“(Stay quiet if you want to live.)”

A suppressed male voice brought the blood rapidly back to the student’s head. His mind quickly regained its focus.

Who was this?

At the very least, it did not seem to be Heivia Winchell.

“You’re one of the foreign soldiers, aren’t you? You might not want treatment from a blank zone doctor with far from the latest equipment, but it’s better than dying. Listen, you need to stay still. I disinfected you and stopped the bleeding, but I don’t have any real equipment here. I can’t even guess what state your bones or organs are in.”

“Who…are you?”

“Braskine Mintfrappe.”

The young man slowly named himself.

He had dark skin and short black hair. He was wearing a desert military uniform, but he also wore a starched white coat over that. He was tall and fairly muscular, but it looked somehow calculated. Like he had intentionally built up that muscle instead of coming by it naturally.

That family name was unfamiliar, so he was probably native to this blank zone instead of any of the four world powers.

“You people might see someone like me as no more than a witch doctor, but I’ll have you know I studied medicine in Berlin when I was younger. I never managed to spread that knowledge after returning here, though.”

In that case…

“You’re with the guerill- agh!?”

Quenser tried to roll away from the man, but every last joint in his body cried out in pain.

The man named Braskine shook his head.

“I said I don’t know what state your bones and organs are in, remember? You might have been hiding below ground level, but you were still in the lethal range of that shaped charge. I held off on giving you morphine so I wouldn’t medicate you without your consent, but how about now?”

Now it was Quenser’s turn to shake his head while trying to catch his breath. He was not trusting enough to let some random person inject him with something.

Anyway, it turned out miracles did happen.

In that last moment, Quenser and Heivia had been hiding in a crack in the dried ground. That very ground must have been blown away (by the tank gun operated by that dumbass Myonri), but the crack must not have fully collapsed since Quenser was still in one piece. And how had this supposed doctor collected him from the crack while the tank and the unmanned weapon fought?

That question had a simple answer.

“The battleline has moved on. The tank and unmanned ground vehicle can both move, so the frontline left you two behind while you slept.”

“Dammit.”

Quenser was not going to just believe everything this guy told him, but that did seem like the only real possibility.

He had thought the area was so dark because this was a cave with thick bedrock overhead, but it was just that enough time had passed for the sun to fall beyond the horizon.

He had been abandoned out here for that long.

Essentially, he had fallen into enemy hands. The largescale jamming from the parabolic antennas on the ground and the space station up above meant his radio and datalink were useless. That made it unlikely the operator in the maintenance base zone was monitoring his location.

Help was not on its way.

He slowly breathed out before checking on something.

“You said ‘you two’.”

“I treated another boy in the same uniform as you. Over there.”

Quenser intentionally avoided mentioning any names, but Braskine gestured with his chin toward where Private Heivia Winchell was lying sprawled out on the ground. Shockingly, his large handgun remained in its holster. Whatever this man’s intentions were, he must not have been interested in confiscating their weapons.

A small old truck and a roofless buggy sat nearby.

No, the doctor had probably carried the buggy out here in the back of the truck. The cheap emblems told Quenser both vehicles were Island Nation brands. That country had withdrawn into partial isolationism, so it was unclear how these had made their way all the way to Africa.

“Can you drive?” Braskine dropped a simple key without a keychain into Quenser’s hand. “Then you can take the buggy. Load your friend in there and hurry back to your maintenance base.”

“Are you sure about that? If we return alive, we’ll report everything that happened. If you’re walking around without any real weapons while the Legitimacy Kingdom and Capitalist Corporations clash here, you must have some kind of secret route, be it tunnels or pipelines.”

“Keeping you here would be a bigger problem,” spat out the man. “What if your people put together a largescale rescue mission for you two? That benevolent act of charity will keep the war going. My job is to treat the wounded, so I don’t want your people hurting anyone else.”

“You’re with the guerillas, so don’t you want to protect the elevator no matter what?”

“Mother Lady has brought us money. A lot of money. Over the nine-month test period, the Turkana District has probably become the wealthiest part of Africa. And with the profits going unrecorded since it’s all supposed to be a simple test. I bet we’re doing even better than the diamond mines or the water business.”

He sounded bitter, so he must have noticed this was not exactly a good thing.

“But wealth doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. We’re going through lives even faster than we used to. Clutching a still-unpaid contract in your hand doesn’t do you any good when you take a bullet and die.”

“…”

The Capitalist Corporations were using the local guerillas knowing what it would mean for them.

They had bought up the land for the space elevator and made lucrative promises to be fulfilled after the elevator’s completion to hire a defense force against the other world powers. And if those defenders died before the Capitalist Corporations had to pay them, all the better.

Even when the locals realized they had been betrayed, they could not turn their weapons on the elevator.

Why not?

They had abandoned their old lives and invested in this new path. That had earned them some new wealth. Could they really throw out that new life and redo things just because they knew it was wrong?

They could not.

Humans could not fight the new desires they discovered. Like TV, air conditioning, online shopping, refrigerators, convenience stores, microwaves, delivery drones, and smartphones. It was the same for everyone. No one could give up everything and return to a more natural life just because people had lived that way a hundred years ago.

Without the space elevator, the world powers would lose all interest in this region. The test period was only a test. If the results were unsatisfactory and it was branded a failure, the Capitalist Corporations would be freed of their obligation to build bases and cities here. All that would remain was the dry and cracked desert.

And they would no longer need to maintain the high-level infrastructure they had put in place.

The locals would have been given a taste of a more comfortable life only for the tap to be shut off. That was the same method used by rotten drug dealers on the streets who would initially sell their white powder for almost nothing to get people addicted before they jacked up the prices.

In that sense, it was a very Capitalist Corporations negotiating tactic.

On the other hand, Quenser had no right to criticize them. The Legitimacy Kingdom only cared about the Turkana District for its flora and fauna that ''might'' make a useful drug. The minority of royals and nobles had sent in everyone from the royals to the commoners because they feared a genetic bomb that their special genealogy ''might'' possess.

Did no one at all care about the local people?

Was that why the locals had been left with no choice but to fight as guerillas?

And then even that decision had been used against them?

“We never should have agreed to it,” said Braskine Mintfrappe, the doctor who had helped caused all this through the pursuit of happiness. “We made a fatal error with our very first decision. We’ve worried over every decision since, trying to do the best thing at every fork in the road, but we were already stuck on a path straight toward the precipice.”