Kaiser Reinhard stood on the fleet flagship’s bridge, calmly watching the enemy fire that now reached almost as far as Brünhild itself. Von Reuentahl beside him watched the kaiser closely, but saw only the slightest of furrows on his elegant brow.
Is this where I end my life, then, alongside this golden-haired conquering king?
Well, there were worse fates. Von Reuentahl smiled in secret at the mirror he kept in the dimly lit recesses of his heart. He had, of course, taken precautions to protect imperial headquarters itself from risk.
Rear Admiral Alexander Barthauser was known as one of the bravest leaders under von Reuentahl’s command. He possessed neither startling talent nor much capacity for handling large forces, but on the battlefield he did whatever was necessary to faithfully carry out his orders, and on this point he had earned von Reuentahl’s trust.
Barthauser’s 2,400 ships positioned themselves parallel to the Yang Fleet along its starboard side and showered it with relentless cannon fire, successfully slowing its advance. They did not buy much time, but it was enough for Brünhild to escape. Reinhard’s pride made the retreat a reluctant one, but von Reuentahl was able to persuade him that falling back would allow them to lure Yang’s main fleet into a trap and half encircle them. However, the coordination between the many fleets of the Imperial Navy was not rapid enough to realize this aim. Before they could position themselves within the space opened up by the withdrawal of Brünhild, the Yang Fleet had already charged forward to occupy it instead.
When his operator shouted that Yang was pressing mercilessly forward, von Reuentahl thought it odd, but spread out his gunships to meet them with arms.
Just then, the Yang Fleet changed course, swooping under the Imperial Navy’s defensive formations to hit Reinhard’s main force with energy beams and missiles from below and charge into their ranks from close range.
The admirals of the Imperial Navy shared a horrified shudder. At that moment, Yang seemed to them less inspired commander than brutal warlord. The cannon fire was intense, shattering the Imperial Navy’s resistance and reaching almost to Brünhild, eternal flagship of the kaiser.
Reinhard shuddered too, but his was less out of fear than having reached the pinnacle of excitement.
“Yes, yes! This is exactly what I hoped for!”
His porcelain skin flushed with life. His breathing became faster, richer.
Immense waves of light and energy billowed across that corner of the galaxy, and at the center of it all Reinhard seemed to shine as if personifying his own vitality.
“Von Reuentahl! Concentrate fire lines at two o’clock, elevation minus thirty degrees. If you open a gap in the enemy formation, keep applying pressure there until you break through.”
Reinhard said nothing more, but his meaning was clear to the heterochromiac von Reuentahl. Even as the enemy’s cannon fire and high-speed maneuvering had drawn closer, Reinhard had not slipped into panic. Instead, he had identified the point where the enemy formation was maintained so that the counterattack could be focused there. If they could pierce the Yang Fleet’s ranks, the enemy’s battle lines would be thrown off-balance. In the best case, this might be the first blow of the chisel that cut the diamond, and the entire Yang Fleet might collapse. Even in the worst case, Yang would have to halt his attack while he reconstructed the fleet’s formation. The battlefield was vast, and such crucial points were rare, but Reinhard had identified one immediately. Praise be to our kaiser’s genius, thought von Reuentahl.
Reinhard laughed, sweeping back his fine golden hair. His beaming face was as dazzling as an overturned box of jewels.
“I knew that Yang Wen-li would attack aggressively. Only by challenging me personally can he defeat me, after all—recall the Vermillion War. I…”
Suddenly Reinhard fell silent, and unthinkingly raised his left hand to his mouth. Teeth like virgin snow bit gently into his ring finger. Hilda was surprised to see that anger had entered his expression. The look remained on his face even after word was received that Yang Wen-li’s offensive had been halted and the Yang Fleet forced to withdraw.
For several days now, Yang Wen-li’s flagship Ulysses had also been adrift on a sea of life-or-death struggle.
“Looks like you’ll be using up your whole life’s stock of seriousness before this is through, Commander,” said von Schönkopf. He was a skilled and valiant commander in ground battle and close combat, but had no role in a fleet battle and was simply observing, whiskey flask in hand.
To the others, this looked like an enviable position. Attenborough, for example, would spread out a blanket on the floor of his flagship Massasoit’s bridge as soon as the battle was over and sleep all the way back to Iserlohn Fortress. Such was the ferocity of the combat and the extent to which he was draining his own physical reserves to fight it.
The same was true of Olivier Poplin, who would sortie fourteen times before the fight was over. After his final mission was complete, Poplin would sleep for six hours in the cockpit of his beloved ship, then fourteen more in the bed of his private chambers—“On his own, if you can believe that,” as Attenborough would later note.
To maintain its tactical advantage, the Yang Fleet was standing one-legged on thin ice. It simply did not have the numbers. On the imperial side, Steinmetz had been eliminated and his fleet effectively neutralized, but Müller, Wittenfeld, and von Eisenach still waited unharmed in the wings—to name just three. That latent power was terrifying. They had not been able to enter the fray yet due to the cramped conditions in the corridor, but if Kaiser Reinhard decided to adopt the tactics that Yang most feared right now, what response would be possible?
Yang saw no choice but to stay on the offensive and hope to overwhelm the Imperial Navy before that worst-case scenario came to pass.
And so, at 2300 hours on May 7, the Yang Fleet launched another frontal assault.
What protected the kaiser this time was Müller, who successfully positioned his ships to absorb the enemy cannon fire.
Hearing that a squadron of enemy ships whose commander was yet unclear had formed a defensive wall in front of Kaiser Reinhard, Yang Wen-li let out a small sigh. “That’ll be Iron Wall Müller, living up to his name,” he said. “Just having Müller under his command would be enough to keep Reinhard’s name alive in song for centuries.”
It was as if the memory of Müller’s fortuitous arrival that had saved Reinhard’s life the previous year during the Vermillion War had come back to life again.
This time, Müller waited until his fleet was arranged more or less perfectly, then slipped between Reinhard and the Yang Fleet. Yang only managed to get one blow in before the wall went up and he was forced to retreat and reform.
Even at this late stage of his battle with the Galactic Empire, Yang couldn’t help admiring the sheer amount of talent Reinhard commanded. It was not just Müller. Fahrenheit and Steinmetz had not given their lives for the idea of autocratic government. Instead, they had willingly thrown away the rest of their allotted span out of personal loyalty to Reinhard von Lohengramm. This was how the kaiser’s favor was repaid.
“In other words, people are loyal to people, not ideals or systems of governance,” Yang mused, dedicating a portion of his neurons to what could not be called urgent matters even amid the intense whirlwind of battle.
Why fight at all? Even Yang, an artist whose medium was combat, brooded on this question constantly. The more he pursued it logically, however, the more convinced he became that fighting was meaningless.
To blur this “why,” the most important core of that logic, and appeal to emotion instead was to engage in demagoguery. Since antiquity, wars rooted in religious hatred had always seen the fiercest combat and the least mercy, because the will to fight was rooted in emotion rather than principle. Loathing of enemies, loyalty to commanders—all were ruled by emotion. Nor did Yang exclude himself from this analysis: he
knew that his own allegiance to the principles of democratic governance was also, in part, simple enmity toward autocracy.
Yang’s greatest worry regarding his ward, Julian Mintz, was that, after six years under Yang’s influence, he might be fighting for Yang. That would not do at all, Yang though. He did not want Julian to hate the enemy and love to wage war on them out of personal loyalty to Yang. He wanted the object of that loyalty to be democratic thought and practice.
But did he want Julian to continue the fight against imperial governance even after Yang himself was dead? Here Yang hesitated. After all, he had been opposed to Julian’s joining the military in the first place. In the end, he had acceded to Julian’s wishes and granted his permission, and now he recognized Julian’s talent—but regret came to him often.
Yang Wen-li contained multitudes, but the largest contradiction within him was surely the fact that despite his tendency to devote half his mind to abstract musings such as these even in pitched battle, he was yet undefeated. The enemy before him now was the military genius Reinhard von Lohengramm, a man who combined within him the spirit of Mars and the mind of Minerva—and yet, even this indomitable conqueror had so far proved incapable of defeating this “band of fugitive mercenaries.”
V
On May 8, the Yang Fleet and the Imperial Navy were still locked in combat. Müller’s intervention had forced Yang into a temporary retreat, but there had been no dramatic change in the fortunes of either side. Unlike in the Vermillion War, Yang had not been surprised by Müller joining the fray, and was ready with countermeasures.
“Allies fore and aft, port and starboard, above and below, so dense that we can’t see past them—so why does the other side have the upper hand?” muttered Mittermeier’s staff officer Admiral Büro in frustration and disappointment. It was just as Büro said: despite enjoying its customary numerical superiority, the Imperial Navy could not seize the initiative from the Yang Fleet.
In comparison with the war in the Vermillion Stellar Region a year ago, the Battle of the Corridor was a series of temporally and spatially small but intense skirmishes and maneuvers. Yang’s severe numeric disadvantage left him only one route to victory: divide the enemy with minefields and concentrated fire, and then destroy the pieces one by one, carefully spacing the battles out in time. Even Müller could not move his forces freely, and was forced to endure an endless series of localized clashes.
Such were the brutal conditions under which the report of Mittermeier’s death arrived at the bridge of the Imperial Navy’s fleet flagship Brünhild, enveloping it in gray horror. For a moment, Reinhard’s bodyguard Emil thought he saw the kaiser’s golden hair turn silver. Von Reuentahl’s face went pallid, as if the pale blue of his eye was being diluted, and had to steady his gaunt form with one arm on Reinhard’s command console. The trembling of that arm was transmitted in minute vibrations through the console to the kaiser himself.
“Apparently I have the luck of Loki, for I remain in this world yet. The enemy’s cannons have yet to force open the gates of Valhalla here…”
This transmission from Mittermeier himself denying the false report restored vitality to headquarters. Mittermeier’s flagship Beowulf remained at the head of the Imperial Navy, wounded but intact.
At this moment, Reinhard made the decision to execute the final horrible stratagem remaining to him.
On May 10, the curtain rose on the second act of the Battle of the Corridor, although it had begun the day before, at the Imperial Conference. The members of Imperial Navy high command who gathered in the kaiser’s presence now included only marshals von Reuentahl and Mittermeier, senior admirals Müller, Wittenfeld, and von Eisenach, and a few high-ranking officers directly attached to headquarters. Mittermeier could not suppress a pang of sadness at how lonely the scene was compared to conferences past. Even since beginning this very battle, they had already lost Fahrenheit and Steinmetz. Had even Kaiser Reinhard imagined that, after the Free Planets Alliance was destroyed, Yang Wen-li and his allies—politically nothing more than the alliance’s last gasp—would force such bitter fighting on the empire? What was more, in light of the differences in military capacity and goals, it had to be conceded that so far the Imperial Navy was on the losing side of the struggle.
Reinhard opened the conference by announcing Steinmetz’s posthumous promotion to marshal, along with the appointment of his new chief advisor, Countess Hildegard “Hilda” von Mariendorf, who would herself be made a vice admiral. As he had predicted, no one objected to his decision on this matter, although some were, of course, more welcoming than others. Hilda noted that von Reuentahl’s heterochromiac eyes in particular showed little enthusiasm—but perhaps she was just being oversensitive.
“I have never, in all my battles, been rewarded for adopting a passive attitude,” Reinhard said. “When I have forgotten this, Mars has never failed to punish me. This, I am sure, is why victory eludes us now.”
His cheeks blazed as if they contained the sun within them. The vividness of his coloring made Hilda uneasy. It seemed to her more than the result of mental agitation alone.
Ignoring Hilda’s concerned gaze, Reinhard continued his passionate declamation.
“Yang Wen-li has used the narrow topography of the corridor against us, forcing a column formation upon us and attacking our massed forces. I sought an elegant response to his designs, but in this I was in error. We must smash his resistance head-on to ensure that he never rises again. That, I am sure, is the road that I—and my navy—must now take.”
At 0645 hours on May 11, the Imperial Navy began a new attack based on a wave pattern. Yang Wen-li felt his blood run cold. This was precisely what he had feared most.
Strategically, it was the height of simplicity. Send a column forward in a charge, laying down concentrated fire. Have the column turn just before reaching the enemy and then retreat, continuing to bombard the enemy. Once the first column had fallen back, send a second column, and then a third. Keep the chain going and wait for the enemy to succumb to fatigue, attrition, or simply a lack of supplies.
The Yang Fleet was at a severe disadvantage in these terms. Facing this strategy, its military capabilities would slowly be ground down, worn away, and consumed until the remnants finally melted into the cosmic void.
The best course of action would probably have been to fall back to Iserlohn Fortress and use its main battery, Thor’s Hammer, to push back against the empire’s wave attacks. This was Merkatz’s suggestion, and Attenborough agreed. Yang also wanted to do just that, but Müller, commander of the Imperial Navy’s reconstructed first formation, kept up the wave attack without interruption and denied the Yang Fleet any room to rest. If Yang pulled his forces back, he was sure that Müller would surge forward and create a mixed battle through parallel pursuit, cutting them off before they could reach the fortress or its cannons.
Yang could read that much, and having read it he was unable to move. He was already swamped by the need for countermeasures at the tactical level: firing back at the ceaselessly marauding waves, plugging the gaps that appeared in his own side’s formations, sending the mobile forces directly attached to the command center to rescue allies from dangerous situations, and so on. Keeping Yang occupied—denying him the opportunity to think up a new strategy while maximizing his physical and mental fatigue—was one of the empire’s goals.
After keeping up the attack for thirty hours straight, the Müller Fleet finally withdrew. Müller himself was exhausted, and his fleet had taken damage from enemy fire each time they had turned to withdraw, but he had successfully denied the Yang Fleet the opportunity to launch a serious attack of its own. The second attack group moved into position: the vast force commanded by Admiral Ernst von Eisenach. They were almost as numerous as the entire Yang Fleet, and hardly fatigued at all. Their first wave fired so ferociously that they might have been trying to empty their energy tanks, forcing the Yang Fleet in
to a temporary retreat. They then seized that opportunity to leap forward, riding the edge of the corridor to attack the Yang Fleet from its flank.
Von Eisenach’s powerful broadside attack seemed likely to split Attenborough’s division from the main Yang Fleet, providing ample proof of his skill as a tactician.
“If this keeps up, we’ll be isolated and surrounded by the enemy! What’s Marshal Yang going to do?” said Commander Lao, one of Attenborough’s staff officers, voice cracking.
“Never fear,” Attenborough said with a smile. “They don’t realize it, but they’ve stumbled into their own grave. Close off their escape route and hit them hard.”
Commander Lao looked dubious. He was not pessimistic by nature, but the tendency seemed to have been cultivated within him through service as a staff officer to men like Yang and Attenborough.
However, in this case his fears did seem ungrounded. As soon as the Eisenach Fleet succeeded in splitting Yang’s forces, they were exposed to attack from both sides.
Commodore Marino, former captain of Yang’s flagship Hyperion, sank fangs of beam and missile into von Eisenach’s port side, opening a wound that temporarily reached deep into the fleet.
Von Eisenach’s flagship Vidar was surrounded by fireballs and flashes of light on three sides as its escorts exploded into flames one by one. Von Eisenach seemed to be in a crisis, but he did not so much as twitch an eyebrow. Calmly issuing the orders that would close the wound in his fleet’s side even as he fended off Marino’s assault, he successfully disengaged from the danger zone, holding the enemy back with heavy fire.
Nevertheless, the damage to the Eisenach Fleet could not be ignored. As von Eisenach’s staff urged him to withdraw, his lip trembled slightly. Perhaps he was cursing God and the devil inside his mouth, but no sound waves reached anyone’s ears. In any case, well-timed retreat was the foundation of imperial military strategy, so von Eisenach did not impose his own will—but when the fleet turned and withdrew, he did make sure to leave visible gaps in its formation.
Desolation Page 10
