Desolation

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  I

  IN THE WORDS OF DUSTY ATTENBOROUGH, Iserlohn Fortress was filled with festive anticipation for the “riotous Rite of Spring” to come.

  As of April 20, there were 28,840 ships and 2,547,400 officers and men gathered under Yang Wen-li at anti-imperial headquarters. In purely numerical terms, it was the largest force that Yang had ever commanded. But just under 30 percent of the fleet was in need of repairs, and over 20 percent of the troops were either recruits from the last days of the alliance or new conscripts, and would need training before they could bear arms. What was more, the sudden expansion in the fleet’s military resources following their merger with the Revolutionary Government of El Facil had necessitated a restructuring of the entire military organization. Alex Caselnes had remained acting general manager of rear services even after his reinstatement as administrative director of Iserlohn Fortress. Had anyone sliced open his neural circuits, they would have drowned in the sea of figures and charts that burst forth.

  When Wittenfeld’s communiqué arrived from the Imperial Navy, Yang was taking breakfast in the mess with Julian Mintz. Along with the usual tea and toast, the menu also featured a country omelet, thick pea soup, and yogurt. Julian gravely signaled his approval to his hazel-eyed culinary apprentice, Yang’s aide and wife Frederica Greenhill Yang, who stood beaming beside them. She seemed the happiest of all of them that her hard work and careful planning had paid off, and Yang prayed silently to the goddess of cooking, for her sake and his own, that her success had been no coincidence.

  The arrival of Wittenfeld’s message was reported to Yang by Attenborough, who had grown comfortably into his role as lieutenant commander in the Revolutionary Reserve Force and would one day write a chronicle of the events then taking place. He appeared on the visiphone, still holding a haphazardly assembled ham, egg, and lettuce sandwich, to give Yang the news. Yang appeared to ascribe no more importance to the message than Wittenfeld had himself.

  “Would you at least like to see it, sir?” asked Attenborough.

  “I may as well give it a once-over,” Yang said. “Forward it to my screen.”

  Without straying beyond the bounds of protocol, Wittenfeld’s missive was acerbic in the extreme.

  To Yang Wen-li, greatest commander of the former Alliance Armed Forces and only commander in what remains of the republican faction, my greetings from within the Imperial Navy. As I am sure is clear to a man of your perspicacity, further resistance to peace and unification would be not only morally bankrupt but tactically unfeasible and strategically impossible. I offer this sincere counsel: if you hope to preserve your life and some measure of your honor, lower the standard of rebellion and throw yourself on the mercy of the kaiser. I would be happy to act as your intermediary in this matter. I earnestly await your rational reply.

  “Admiral Wittenfeld has quite a talent for high-stakes provocation, it seems,” said the golden-brown-haired Frederica. “A pity he was not born to the alliance. He would have made a fine politician.”

  “A fine sparring partner for Job Trünicht, you mean?”

  Musing that he would probably root for Wittenfeld in that case, Yang changed the subject.

  “Admiral Attenborough, as one of our other ‘only commanders,’ what do you make of this?”

  “Utterly devoid of literary sensibility, I fear, sir.”

  “That isn’t what I meant…”

  Yang took a sip from his second cup of the tea Frederica had brewed. It sat pleasantly enough on the palate, perhaps second cousin to the tea Julian made. This might have been an illusion, of course, but when happiness was dominant, susceptibility to such illusions was inevitable.

  “I’m asking why you think Wittenfeld would send me a message like this.”

  “I doubt it means anything in particular. Perhaps if it had come from the kaiser himself, but this is Admiral Wittenfeld, after all. If he hopes to bring the full force of the Black Lancers to bear in seeking revenge for the Battle of Amritsar, it would be neither surprising nor out of character.”

  Yang was in agreement with this observation and conclusion. However, all of his strategy and tactics were constructed with Reinhard’s intellect and will in mind. If Wittenfeld slipped out from under the kaiser’s direct command and began to act independently, not only would Yang be forced to modify his immediate response, but corrections to his long-term plans might also be required.

  “Shall we send a reply, Your Excellency?” asked Frederica. She had a knack for addressing her husband with formality when others were present without sounding unnatural.

  “Hmm…” Yang said. “What do you think, Julian?”

  His youthful ward brushed back flaxen bangs. Julian was eighteen this year, fifteen years junior to Yang himself. One description of him preserved for the ages said, “His slender, proportionate form and sensitive, translucent features put one in mind of a young unicorn.”

  “I see no great danger in ignoring it,” Julian said. “But perhaps the bare minimum of a reply is in order, for protocol’s sake if nothing else.”

  “That sounds about right,” Yang said with a nod, although it did not seem to the other three present that he had yet made his final decision.

  “Without enough men to staff even a single one of the former navy’s fleets, he was preparing to wage war against nine-tenths of the galaxy. At such an extreme of tension and fear, an outbreak of madness would have been far from mysterious. But no man betrayed such symptoms. For—”

  “ ‘They were all quite mad already,’ ” declaimed Commander Olivier Poplin, striding into the senior officer’s library.

  Attenborough turned from the notebook in which he was scribbling a draft of his so-called Memoirs of the Revolutionary War to cast a dirty look over his shoulder.

  “If your writing’s too predictable, your publisher will complain long before your readers have a chance to get bored,” Poplin continued. “You need something fresher, more stimulating.”

  “Just what I needed, advice from the self-proclaimed ace of the fleet. How about attending to your own literary endeavors before you start criticizing mine? Weren’t you supposed to think up a comeback to the Imperial Navy’s ‘Sieg kaiser!’ cheer?”

  Attenborough was in a bad mood after recalling an encounter several days earlier in which Poplin had prevented him from butting in on a gathering of younger officers. “No over-thirties!” the other man had insisted. Youngest commander in the former Alliance Navy though Attenborough was, he would still be thirty-one this year.

  He had spent the night before his last birthday railing against the injustice of it all. “Why should I be condemned to turn thirty?” he had demanded, somewhere between despondency and outrage. “I’ve done nothing wrong, unlike Admiral von Schönkopf.”

  Von Schönkopf, singled out as a living injustice in this way, had stroked his slightly pointed chin. “Don’t ask me,” he said, serenely unbothered. “As far as I’m concerned, incompetent good-for-nothings who’ve never done anything wrong have no business turning thirty anyway.”

  Back in the library, Poplin met Attenborough’s challenge with a cheerful nod. “Yes, the response has been decided,” he said. “It’s ‘Viva democracy!’ ”

  “That’s what you ended up choosing? I thought you said it ‘lacked grandeur.’ ”

  “There is one more, actually.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “ ‘Damn the kaiser!’ ”

  “That’s much better.” The future historian offered a brief appreciation of the second option, praising its richness in “republican expressive power” and other dubious concepts he invented on the spot, and then grimaced bitterly. “Still, though—can’t we come up with a single cheer that doesn’t invoke the kaiser by name? It leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Are we nothing but linguistic parasites?”

  As Attenborough and Poplin sparred, a more serious and signif
icantly darker discussion was quietly underway within the Revolutionary Government of El Facil. Their chairman, Dr. Francesk Romsky, had been in regular contact with the Revolutionary Reserve Force’s headquarters as he scrambled for a response to the looming threat of an all-fronts imperial invasion. Now an official from the government steering committee had brought him a new proposal. Its argument went roughly as follows:

  However brilliant and eccentric a strategist Yang Wen-li might be, in the face of overwhelming numerical superiority even his defeat was assured. When that happened, El Facil would share his fate. Was it not time to choose between their revolutionary government and Yang’s faction? Why not surrender Yang and his followers to the Imperial Navy, along with Iserlohn Fortress itself, in exchange for a guarantee of self-governance? The first step would be to lure Yang out of Iserlohn Fortress on the pretext that the empire had offered to recognize his faction’s right to govern itself. Once he was captured, Iserlohn Fortress would be powerless. They could then negotiate at their leisure with the Imperial Navy…

  It was the same basic idea that Wittenfeld had flatly rejected in the imperial camp. A certain bitter humor may be found in the fact that low-level schemers from both sides had identified the same weaknesses in Yang’s political designs. Recognizing that his ultimate goal was peace and coexistence with the empire, they surmised that he would be unable to refuse such an offer.

  Dr. Romsky stared at the representative from the steering committee, half-stunned. It took the better part of a minute before his rationality climbed back up to the top of the cliff.

  “Absolutely not,” he said at last, shaking his head vigorously. “Marshal Yang originally came here at our invitation. We have enjoyed the benefits of his name and his military prowess. To betray him now would sully the spiritual purity of democratic republican governance itself. Recall for a moment how the officers who assassinated High Council chairman Lebello were greeted by the kaiser. Above all else, I refuse to have any part in such a disgraceful idea.”

  Romsky’s decision was, if anything, apolitical—nothing more than an expression of shame at the personal level. But that was precisely why he had not inherited the lamentably poor reputation of João Lebello, former High Council chairman of the Free Planets Alliance. He clearly lacked a genius for processing reality, but perhaps he subconsciously accepted that there were moments in history when reality had to come second to ideals.

  In any case, Romsky’s decision ensured that Yang escaped being sold out to the empire by a civilian government a second time.

  II

  Yang was neither omniscient nor omnipotent, so there was no way he could have sensed the full extent of the animosity and maneuvering directed at him. Above all else, Reinhard von Lohengramm’s star shone so brilliantly before him that the meandering of asteroids simply did not register.

  With the decisive battle approaching, Yang was reconsidering his position. Why was he fighting? Why was it necessary to wrest from Kaiser Reinhard a promise to permit the establishment of a self-governing territory?

  The answer: to ensure that knowledge of democracy’s fundamental principles, systems, and methods was transmitted to future generations. That required a base of operations, however slight.

  Autocracy might have secured a temporary victory, but with the passage of time and the change of generations, the self-control of the ruling class would inevitably crumble. Exempt from criticism, above the law, deprived of any intellectual grounds for self-examination, their egos would swell grotesquely until they finally ran amok. An autocrat could not be punished—indeed, it was precisely immunity from punishment that defined an autocrat. Kaiser Rudolf, Sigismund the Foolish, August the Bloodletter—individuals like this used absolute authority as a steamroller to crush the people, staining the paths of history red.

  Doubts about the virtues of such a social system were bound to emerge eventually. And when they did, could not the period of struggle, of trial and error, be shortened if a model of a different system existed?

  This was the merest seed of hope and nothing more, far from the full-throated slogans of the Free Planets Alliance—“Death to despotism! Democracy forever!” But then Yang did not believe that any political system could last forever.

  The duality within the human heart condemned democracy to coexist with dictatorship along every possible axis of space and time. Even in an age when democracy seemed to reign triumphant, there were always those who longed for its opposite. These longings came not only from the desire to rule others but also the desire to be ruled by others—to obey without question. After all, things were easier that way. Learn what was permissible and what was forbidden, follow orders and adhere to instructions, and security and happiness were within your reach. A satisfying life was surely possible on those terms. But whatever freedom and safety cattle might be allowed in their pen, the day always came when they were slaughtered for the table.

  Power could be turned to more brutal ends in an autocracy than in a democracy, because the right of criticism and the authority to rectify abuses were established neither by law nor in custom. Yang Wen-li’s criticisms of head of state Job Trünicht and his party were caustic and frequent, but he had never been legally sanctioned for them. He had faced harassment more than once, but on each of those occasions, the powers that be had been forced to find some other pretext. That was entirely thanks to the stated principle of democratic republican governance: freedom of speech. Political principles in general deserved respect. They were the greatest weapon for preventing those in power from running wild, and the greatest armor for the weak. To convey the existence of those principles to future generations, Yang would be forced to discard any personal feelings of love and respect and fight against autocracy itself.

  Yang’s work of reconsideration moved on to practicalities. Kaiser Reinhard was a military genius. How could Yang defeat him?

  If he led the fleet outside the corridor, the Imperial Navy clearly had the numbers to surround them. Even if the plan was to emerge just long enough to draw the empire back into the corridor with them, Mittermeier was known for his preternaturally fast maneuvers. If he cut off the corridor’s entrance, the Yang Fleet would be surrounded and annihilated by overwhelming force before their strategy could even be put into action.

  “I’ll just have to draw them into the corridor first.”

  Of course, there was no guarantee of victory in that case either.

  There were two opposing ways Kaiser Reinhard might be lured into the corridor: stoke his pride by intentionally handing him a minor success, or fight at full strength, win, and enrage him with embarrassment over his defeat.

  But no—neither of those ideas would work. If Reinhard were the sort to preen over small victories or rage over temporary setbacks, he would not be the formidable foe he was. Even back when he had been one admiral among many serving the Goldenbaum Dynasty, hadn’t he met all the criteria perfectly at the strategic level before displaying dazzling creativity at the tactical one? Reinhard’s stunning victory over all comers at the Battle of Astarte had been little more than an amusing diversion for him, and in his subsequent campaigning he had demonstrated the vast range of his talents: his facility with massed forces, his mastery of supply, his direction of subordinates, his ability to secure topographical advantage, and the timing with which he commenced his operations. In the last days of the Free Planets Alliance, Reinhard had determined the strategic conditions for every one of their battles, and the victor of each had been all but decided before the first shot was even fired.

  Iserlohn Fortress was of no strategic importance. With both ends of the corridor under the control of imperial forces, it was isolated inside a blockaded cul-de-sac…or so Yang had thought. But perhaps he had been too hasty. The reason the Imperial Navy’s operational and supply lines were stretched to their current extent was that Iserlohn was not in their possession. This was not a fact to be viewed lightly. />
  The tactical strengths of Iserlohn Fortress were even greater. It was impregnable to pure military force, and its main cannons, known collectively as Thor’s Hammer, offered unparalleled destructive power.

  It also had political import. Yang the Undefeated, continuing his resistance against the new dynasty from within Iserlohn the Impregnable: that alone was a manifesto, addressed to the entire galaxy, for the continuance of democratic republican governance, as well as a comfort to those who supported their cause. Yang had to concede his own value as an idol in that respect, too, however reluctantly.

  But whatever importance Iserlohn Fortress might have, he would surrender it to the empire in a second if doing so would bring peace. He had many fond memories of the base, but if he had to use it as a political bargaining chip, so be it.

  Either way, the sheer difference in military strength between the two sides made it clear how ridiculous the idea of competing at the tactical level was. That had always been the case, but in the vast wall of the empire’s military might, cracks might yet appear.

  The golden-haired conqueror, avatar of some god of war, wanted to fight Yang. Yang knew this. To snatch victory from this situation, he would have to exploit whatever chinks existed in Reinhard’s psyche.

  Yang’s plan was an ambitious one. Achieve a tactical victory to drag Reinhard into peace talks, and then force him to accept the existence of a single planet with the right to self-governance as a democratic republic. It did not matter if that planet was El Facil or some undeveloped world farther out on the periphery. When the winter of despotism came to every other part of the galaxy, they would need that tiny greenhouse to nurture the weak shoots of democracy until they matured enough to withstand the trials ahead.