by Tim C Taylor
And his role? The Reserve Captain named him Decision Maker, telling him: “History will admire Xin Lee, study Indiya, and blame you.”
Arun slammed his fist down onto the curved upper surface of his chair. Everything he did… every agonizing decision, every battle fought and the friends who had died in them – was any of that even real? It felt as if he were following a frakking script.
The Reserve Captain had been right. History would blame him. His name would be reviled, just as he had cursed President Horden’s name when growing up, and billions of people across the galaxy still did. Horden had sold the human race into subservience and slavery by signing the Vancouver Accords. Centuries later, history would judge that Arun McEwan had repeated that betrayal in the Treaty of Athena.
The accusation against him wasn’t fair, wasn’t even true, but since when had history ever cared for the truth? To be blamed by humanity was his inescapable fate.
And he would embrace that fate, because doing so would help to conceal his great secret. If becoming the most hated man in history was the price to protect innocent people, then that was a price he was prepared to pay.
He shook a tear free from his eye. All he wanted was to be with Xin. Just a few years of happiness. Was that too much to ask?
“Arun!” shouted Indiya.
He took a deep breath, but his lungs didn’t seem to be working because he couldn’t get enough air. He gulped down another breath, and another, before he could finally speak. “Let them go.”
“Say again.”
“We’ve already lost them,” he snapped. “Let them at least depart in peace.”
Arun felt the familiar sense of cogs whirring in his mind, his organic planning computer spooling up to recalibrate itself in a cold, new universe from which Xin was absent, one in which they still had to retake the Earth and the other Terran Worlds in the name of the Emperor. Arun could smell the hot metal and knew that with such a huge change to its assumptions, when his planner computer seized control of his mind he would be nothing more than an organic support environment while it operated at full capacity. That could take days.
“Indiya, are you still there?”
“Here, General.”
“Secure our assets.”
“Already in hand. There’s a thousand games of chicken going on right now as each side dares the other to fight as we divide up our assets. But we got there first, mostly, and Xin’s faction are as reluctant to fight as you.”
“Good. Indiya, I can smell the hot oil in my head, and don’t know how long I’ve got before I lose consciousness. I’ll need you to unstick my brain, but deal with the separation first.”
“Roger that. Good luck, General. Indiya out.”
Arun could feel his eyes rolling back into his head, as if they were connected by chains to the imaginary brass drive wheels turning in his head. Arun fought back, and with a cry of rage, hauled himself back into the here and now.
“Not yet!” he yelled at the empty passageway.
There was one thing he had to do first.
With Arun’s eyes still open, Barney replaced the input to his optic nerve with the feed from a security camera in one of the nearby troopships, one that thankfully had remained loyal to the Legion, even though it carried part of Xin’s Army Group Sky Strike. The camera was hovering through an infirmary used by the 7th Armored Claw. A Wolf soldier was undergoing a medical checkup, her bare torso covered in crazy whorls of violet and black, and with concentric circles around her eyes that made her look surprised, or perhaps farseeing. The checkup was routine for someone newly transferred to that unit, and the medic – a Wolf herself – was performing a thorough check. Nonetheless, her attention was clearly distracted by the dramatic events going on outside the ship, and not on this unremarkable soldier sitting on the infirmary bed. It was becoming the fashion for Wolves to go around as naked as their officers would permit. Going sky clad, they called it. Actually, it was more than fashion, Arun corrected himself; it was a symbol of belonging, the distinction that bound them together. The alien skin parasite that a mother ginquin had transmitted to Romulus and Remus, and was now not merely embedding itself into their epidermis, but was restructuring them at a cellular level, a development which had fascinated the Khallenes. And with their DNA constantly changing, the Wolves played havoc with the usual bio security systems the Legion relied upon to identify individuals.
It was just as well the medic was distracted, because she didn’t notice one thing that made this particular Wolf unusual. Scars and prosthetics were openly displayed by Wolves as badges of honor, but this particular Wolf wore long and rugged pants that concealed her legs down to her feet. Arun didn’t need her to fully remove her clothing to know that this Wolf had long ago lost her left leg from just above the knee.
Arun kept the Wolf in sight until he could resist no longer, and he was finally captured by the great machinery in his head as it sought to answer the critical question.
What next?
— EPILOGUE —
“Banished, you say.” The Emperor’s face maintained its serene beauty. “A third of your armed forces has vacated this system because you have banished those individuals whom you felt displayed inadequate affection for my Imperial Person? Not executed. Not put to death. Banished. You do realize, General, that these disloyal elements took a significant portion of your military hardware as they fled to their… banishment?”
“That is correct, Your Elevance.”
When the Emperor summoned Arun back to the Citadel, seeking an explanation for why so many Legion ships had left Athena’s orbit, the White Knight probably intended to intimidate him. If so, it wasn’t working. Arun’s youth had been spent catching it in the ear from his superiors. This was a vacation in comparison with managing the fallout of Xin’s split.
“It is as good a story as any available to us,” said the Emperor. His Elevance’s attitude had cooled considerably since the ‘tour’. Arun had little doubt which of the two aspects was the more honest. “Henceforth I shall officially refer to the faction led by your former mate as criminals banished according to your local laws,” the Emperor continued. “Truth has no relevance in interstellar politics, McEwan. Perception is all, something you have demonstrated an understanding of over many years. With the newly elevated status of your Legion rabble, the eyes of the galaxy watch you more closely than ever. Others will strive constantly to paint their own truth over your actions. I tell you this now because it is clear to me that there is one power in particular who watches you like a cunning predator. They have sent me a message to pass on to you. “Following your ‘banishment’ so closely, this is not a coincidence; the timing is a message in itself.”
Arun said nothing, standing attentively, if not quite at attention, in the Imperial audience chamber.
“The transmission is by direct FTL-link from your homeworld,” the Emperor explained. “My technicians have verified the source.”
He waved a hand theatrically, causing a virtual screen to appear before Arun’s face; on it were displayed stylized words. The spelling and script were strange to Arun, but intelligible nonetheless. The words were written in what Arun had been brought up to call the Human language, but he now understood was one of many human languages. One called English.
Strength through victory! Victory through strength!
Those words… Arun had heard them before.
Before he could remember their source, the image changed, showing an ornate desk behind which sat a human female who looked sturdier than a space rat, but lacked the bulk and robustness of a human Marine. She smiled at the camera as if inviting the viewer to study her. Arun was intrigued by the immaculate state of her hair and make-up, and the way her earrings glittered under the diffuse artificial light lent glamour to a pretty face devoid of scars. If the Emperor spoke the truth, this was the first human civilian Arun had ever seen.
Rousing music began to play in the background, underpinned by drums that beat out a marc
hing rhythm. It was an overture, a deliberate ploy to monopolize an audience’s attention that swiftly climaxed in a fanfare of trumpets.
The woman cleared her throat and began. “We interrupt our scheduled transmission to bring to you an announcement that comes directly from the Office of the Great Leader. The end of martial law is in sight. The Great Leader has selected a human Governor of Earth, who will lead the transition to civilian administration. Although our Governor Elect is still many years away from Earth, we can nonetheless go to him live. Standby…”
The screen cut to homelier surroundings: a compartment of a starship. Floating in the zero-g, and dutifully looking into the camera with no enthusiasm whatsoever, was a man Arun had held in his arms as a baby, a man whose features were obscured behind the vibrant patterns of an alien skin parasite.
“I am Governor Elect Romulus. Await my coming with diligence and obedience. As individuals, your lives have little value, but under my rule I shall offer you efficiency and purpose to harness your pitiful lives. Together we shall transform the Earth and the liberated Terran Worlds until we are of some small worth to the New Order. One scent! One people! For the glory of the Hardit Empire. That is all.”
The Emperor flicked a hand and the video stopped.
“General McEwan, this upstart calling himself Romulus is an affront to my honor and the reputation of the Empire. There can be no banishment for this individual. You must destroy him and then–”
“Wait!” Arun cried, little caring that he had interrupted the ruler of the White Knight Empire. He didn’t attempt to hide his anger. “You already knew the Earth had fallen to the Hardits. That’s why you offered to add the Terran Worlds to the Human Autonomous Region!”
“I have no need to justify my decisions to you, human. What matters is that you gave your bio signature to our agreement. The Earth is part of your region of autonomy, which means that you are responsible for its economy, military readiness, and its continued loyalty to me. If you wish to retain the pitiful freedoms you have earned in this treaty, then you must fight for the Earth and win. And you must do so in my name.”
Author’s Notes: War Against the White Knights
There were several lengthy enforced delays in writing War Against the White Knights in which I couldn’t proceed. I was massively frustrated, as you might imagine, but I wasn’t idle. I developed the Revenge Squad concept, writing the first part of the novel that would come out as After War.
In the tagline for the Human Legion, I say: “Five centuries ago a million human children were offered as slave tribute to Earth’s alien overlords. This is the story of their descendants and their fight for liberty.”
In the enforced downtime I also wrote a story called The President’s Son, which features some of those children who were taken from Earth. It’s not present in these boxed sets due to various contractual issues, although I’m planning a paperback collection and I’ll probably stick it in there.
While I was waiting to make progress on War Against the White Knights, I started up a multi-author box set project. These are a lot more common now, but the first I’d seen in science fiction was something called Stars and Empire, which had done very well the Christmas before in 2014. I’d seen them become very popular in the romance genre and wanted to get in on the act before science fiction became swamped by them. I expected to be up against a flood of competitors (I wasn’t) so I wanted a strong theme. But what?
Now, I’m British, but most of the people I’ve worked with professionally are American. And it was a period of time when as I made the acquaintance of these American friends, I would often be told something along the lines of: “Oh, you’re British? I love Downton Abbey. My whole family watches every episode.”
We Brits seem to go in and out of fashion with Americans. Aided by a TV show about rich Brits in big houses, I thought it would be a bright idea to have a British theme. This became Empire at War: British Military Science Fiction.
The box set featured myself, Paul Corcoran (Discovery of the Saiph), Tony Healy (Far from Home), Phillip Richards (Union series, which starts with C.R.O.W.), and Christopher Nuttall (Ark Royal, Empire’s Corps and many many other books). Paul and his wife Sarah published the project, and they’re very good at that sort of thing, going on to found Castrum Press.
To make it more than just a bundled collection of novels, there are also articles, interviews, exclusive short stories (such as The President’s Son), and a fully illustrated story that was a collaboration between myself and award-winning artist, Andy Bigwood.
As it turned out, I got it the wrong way around with the British theme: it sold really well in the UK, hogging the #1 spot in the UK science fiction anthology bestseller charts for months, but selling only modestly in the US. Even so, it did well.
Rather than taking an equal share of the profits, as I had suggested, the artist, Andy, asked in lieu of payment for a full-color interior hardback edition to what we had originally conceived as an e-book only. The physical version is not a small book! And getting the layout and image printing right was even more work than I’d feared. If you imagine the grimoires magicians use to store their spells in fantasy movies, and picture a glossy image on the cover rather than a binding of human skin, then that’s what it looks like. It’s quite a beast.
Sadly, Phil had to miss the launch as he was called out on a deployment, and Tony dropped out at the last minute when his agent objected to one of the terms. But we went ahead and officially launched it at a convention called Mancunicon in Easter 2016. Although we cannot ever be entirely sure of this, we strongly suspect that in terms of earning royalties for its authors, Empire at War is the most successful anthology ever launched at a British science fiction convention. And the Human Legion was at its heart.
Back with War Against the White Knights, the race of the White Knights has very much stayed in the background until this novel, operating through their vassal races. This the first time we actually see one. Although I’ve been writing about them since 2001, until this point, I didn’t really know what they looked like.
In the Emperor’s imperial pleasure grounds (which was largely a product of Ian’s imagination), we see clouds of mutagenic clouds called Flek. It’s really just a little background color, although it’s all part of the White Knight obsession with enforced change that is the background to the Cull.
The idea of Flek is central to a still unpublished book series set in the Human Legion universe than I wrote 2005-2006. It’s a science fiction version of the outbreak of the First World War, which I wrote well in advance of the 1914 anniversary, but I still haven’t managed to publish. It’s this unpublished novel that I had an agent touting mainstream publishers and got a bite from HarperCollins and Solaris.
During the writing of War Against the White Knights, I read several articles about Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers movie, including several written by the director himself.
Is the movie any good? It’s an interesting question. I remember leaving the movie theater and for the only time in my life I couldn’t quite figure out whether I’d enjoyed what I had just seen, which was a weird feeling.
I get a little obsessive sometimes, and so for a few weeks of my enforced slackness, I read everything I could about the movie. I concluded that it was a failed attempt at a powerful satire. Basically, what I think it was trying to do was get moviegoers excited about the mobile infantry, make it a desirable unit to sign up to, and then whisper to the audience: “You do realize you want to sign up to a fascist militarized state, don’t you? Didn’t you spot all those real-life Nazi propaganda references?”
Personally, I think if the movie had pulled that off, it would have been a powerful idea. It fails, though, because the director’s contempt for those on the conservative part of the political spectrum, and for Robert Heinlein, meant he had no understanding of those he was attempting to satirize. Which is why it only works on the level of cartoon humor.
A little digression there, but th
e relevance to my novel is that a lot of online commentators point out the extreme incompetence of the mobile infantry, and indeed everything to do with the human military in that movie. One person stated that they could always tell when military science fiction writers didn’t know what they were talking about because they don’t mention artillery.
And that is why when we get to invade the White Knight homeworld, having burnt away its outer defenses, we do so through a unit of mobile assault artillery. I didn’t want to be compared with Paul Verhoeven!
One of the characters involved with the initial aerial assault on the White Knight homeworld is a Tallerman called Nolog-Ndacu. I was so pleased with the name, and intrigued by the Tallerman race, that he features as one of the main characters in Revenge Squad.
The Tallerman name came from Human Empire. I asked Ian Whates to give me a name for a world that would be mentioned in passing but would become significant later in the book. He came up with Tallerman.
It sounded too European for what I was after, but part of our agreement was that we wouldn’t second-guess each other’s choices unless we thought it seriously broke the story, so Tallerman it became.
So imagine my surprise when at the Mancunicon convention shortly after War Against the White Knights was officially released, Ian introduced me to a fantasy author called David Tallerman, who was, and I believe still is, a full-time professional author. Ian seemed to think this was amusing, but the author whose name he’d borrowed was tight lipped, and I had the tricky task of explaining that the Tallerman race I had designed was not at all based upon David because I had never heard of him before. If there’s one thing sure to please an author trying to make a living out of their words, it’s for another author in the same field to say, “Nope. Never heard of you.”
Anyway, I like the Tallermans, although I still can’t make up my mind whether they are Tallermans or Tallermanians. Maybe I should ask David?
