Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  “We’ll do it in our lifetimes, under your inspired leadership!”

  “Be ready for when we march to war, to recover Amasia for Purity. Get my production rolling, train your cohorts, build warships. But keep it under cover. Do it in my far eastern systems and in the dark north along the Dauran border, hidden away from the frontiers with the Neutrals and Calmari. Prepare my armies and navies for the coming of war, but hide them well.”

  ***

  “Kita! Our people are drunk with joy,” a delighted Rikugun marshal exclaims in the RIK Officer’s Club on Koblenz, a year after Pyotr’s coronation.

  A Kaigun admiral adds: “Look upon the boundaries of this system that mark our frontier with the Krevans a last time, for we shall break them very soon!”

  “Together, with Pyotr as Tennō, we’ll unleash war and free Purity from chained treaties that hold the Imperium back,” an approving SAC general replies. “Everything is now possible.”

  “How long do you think, before we can move?”

  “A few years at most. Maybe less. We’re powerful already. But it’s best to buildup, practice our tactics, then overwhelm our enemies all at once, after so very long without a war. Three awful centuries of peace! May they end soon!”

  He’s wrong. Although Pyotr arms as never before, it will be 20 years before he dares to make war. Fanatics of Sakura-kai, officers in Rikugun and Kaigun, industrialists, contractors, shipyard owners, find that a young and inexperienced monarch’s promises greatly exceed his deeds. Pyotr hesitates at the cusp of war. He vacillates. He fattens with gluttony and caution. Imperium dynamics do not suffice to move him. He needs a push. From which direction will it come?

  ***

  There’s no Dauran ambassador to comment, complain, or report. The last one was recalled to Nalchik 70 years before, to be chopped to death by Jahandar’s own hands and sachi. Yet, the Great Tyrant has spies in the slums of Novaya Uda who smuggle messages back to him on the annual Green Ships. They tell him more than any ambassador ever could. He starts to think on war, and brood on his mortality. He waits for ten years, then reaches out to propose a pact of war and conquest, a division of the Thousand Worlds between Daura and the Imperium.

  Pyotr knows that he’ll make history if he can break the ‘Auld Alliance. That he can surpass the Jade Eye himself if he brings the Calmar Union to its bended knees. He’ll not rest like his father and forefathers in a wordless tomb. Behind the backs of their own peoples, and even their own officers, the Autocrat and Tyrant conspire to forge a hard pact of iron and iron will, to conquer all worlds in Orion and divide them between their failing empires.

  An immense future war germinates with the yearly Green Ships that snake through silent space to reach hidden brown stars. They bring secret plots and treaties back-and-forth, and stolen naval tek and kidnapped master shipwrights to desiccated and depraved Jahandar. It takes ten years to buildup forces, agree on plans, arrange to divide the spoils of war. It’s time the autocrats think is theirs to take, Pyotr because he’s young, Jahandar because he plans to be immortal.

  Each regime builds up vast militaries in secret, ramping their economies for war. Shipyards hum with thousands of new warship, troopship, and transport keels laid down each year. Arms factories mushroom. Divisions, corps and armies, flotillas and fleets, swell with millions of conscripts and naval trainees. Twenty years after Pyotr’s too early coronation, the Imperium is roaring with production. Its armies are swollen with recruits in shiny green utes, its LPs and holding zones are crammed with troop convoys and screening escorts, its ground bases heave with armtraks and artillery. A great star nation strains for release, snarling like a hell hound to break the chains holding it back. To cry havoc! and slip the leash.

  News of this Dual Alliance of aggression is breached to the generals when Pyotr is forced to bring professional war planners into his confidence, to make ready fleets to descend on Genève and Aral and Brno, then dozens of Calmari worlds after that. On Nalchik, men quake in eager terror as Jahandar reveals to his military a secret agreement with Pyotr Shaka and their joint war plans. Conspiracy sprouts as Pyotr commissions a false flag attack on Krevo, with only Takeshi Watanabe in the know about his greater ambition flowing from careful murder on the Bad Camberg moonlet. A larger war will loom when he tells his military that, after he secures the ‘Lost Children’ of Krevo, he’ll attack and conquer more worlds in the Calmar Union. It will blossom as the High Command is at last told to prepare for a Fourth Orion War, that the twinned, absolute rulers of the eastern empires have framed the darkest conspiracy in the history of the Thousand Worlds. Or at least, since the Jade Eye bonded the fate of the Oetkert line to sinister monks of the Broderbund and their crusading Black Faith.

  All these years, Pyotr keeps his promise to the Broderbund. He lets Brethren return to commanderies even on Kestino. It suits him that a handful come back to the fortresses, as a caution to SAC and a weight in the scales of power he fancies he holds in his hands. He thinks that he’s a supreme realist, a careful balancer. In fact, both his feet are planted in self-regard and exaggerated faith in his own talent and skill, intuition and intelligence. He’s playing a dangerous double game. As Tennō, he keeps the General Curia of SAC at arm’s length. All but a special few are pushed away, brushed back from the throne, balanced, he thinks, by newly uplifted Sword Brothers.

  Whether or not Pyotr believes in Purity’s biopolitics, or just his own ego, no one knows for sure. Not even General Curia leaders. He has stopped breaking bread with them, except at state banquets where they look quizzically at Pyotr and stare cold daggers at the loathed Maximilian Kahn. He’s elevated to official Ambassador to the Jade Court from the Ordensstaadt. He looks blankly back from unnaturally tiny eyes, black like a ferret’s. No one will sit with him at formal dinners. No wonder. He smells of old parchment, too many days and years spent with his dead gods and secret texts and languages, and of decades of incest with mother-wife clones.

  Pyotr chafes at limits to his power. He feels the Curia intervene in his every decision. Yet, he can’t balance against SAC, as his mother wanted to do. The Brethren are too weak for that. But nor can he give them back all their ancient properties, or return their lost power. His mother bought too many favors and too much loyalty with seized lands and dāsa to work them. Pyotr can’t take back the stolen estates and slaves and survive the hatred of those he’ll newly displace. He raises the Broderbund as high as he can, but SAC remains supreme.

  He’s also held back by memories of an awful, choking, burning smell and the sight of a crumpled mound of burning Hashâshīn flesh just outside his childhood room. He recalls that night too well to return the Broderbund wholly to its old place behind the Imperial throne, even if he could. There, he would never see their unfolding plots or unravelling silk cords. He needs SAC and the Order to balance as Dowager Mary advised, while loathing both and wanting to keep all power for himself. For the moment, he takes his mother’s advice and plays her card hand better than she did at the end. Yet his instinct is to hoard power, concentrate it in his own hands. He concedes that it’s best to keep enemies at each other’s throats in order to keep their blades distant from his own. Yet, he hesitates and vacillates.

  Twenty years pass, and bitter almond odors the air around him. He tells himself to postpone, not to move against either foe until time ripens the raw fruits of his power and they fall ready and full into his cupped and waiting hands. Or as only a pretentious Oetkert could phrase the vanity of his intention to commit mass murder through two blood purges to come: ‘I shall wait until the persimmons ripen and fall.’ But they never do. All that ripens is the consuming bile within him.

  In his weakness and vacillation he reigns constrained not by one secret faction, but by two, standing on either side, a duality of his own making. His predicament chafes him, irritates a meanness of soul. He finds a petty outlet in the wicked humor of humbling his surviving family. Agnostic, rationalist Chiyoko he orders removed from a secret cell and depor
ted off Kestino, to languish in a Broderbund ‘convent’ that’s little more than a chattel house for women slaves. Her life smells like autumn leaves, cold teas and ironed tablecloths. The odors of all female confinement. It chokes her daily, even as she, too, plots blood revenge.

  Friedrich is also handed to the Brethren, on condition that they lend him back to sit in Pyotr’s place through numbing rituals of the Jade Court and Black Church. They’re rituals that Pyotr is obliged to perform as monarch, but despises. Instead, he proclaims a stupidly smiling Friedrich ‘Sub Imperator,’ dresses him in silk and spun gold on state occasions, and uses his halfwit brother to spare himself from the dullest of official chores. Then the idiot is sent back to the Order’s cells. No one in the Dauran Commons can oppose let alone stop the absolutist Jahandar. His is a power beyond recall or reach. Is the same true of more limited Pyotr inside the teetering Imperium? There are some who will try. Madmen, heroes, and men of honor separately plot to kill him and replace his regime, even end his dynasty.

  Pyotr Shaka sits in obesity, alone at night twenty years after the matricide. He’s inside buried, private chambers he built beneath the Throne Room right after his coronation. They’re impenetrable by anything shy of a directed mining nuke. Carved into granite at the bottom of a slender elevator shaft, they hang in rock as isolated and silent as a physicist’s bubble chamber waiting for a flash contact by dark matter that never comes. His thoughts are also dark.

  Takeshi is offworld on a diplomatic mission. The nearest Royal Canary is ten stories overhead, at the top of the only shaft to descend this deeply. Pyotr is utterly alone in a soundproof room, 100 feet of rock between him and another living soul. There are no mice or roaches or bugs down here. Not even bacteria, which are killed off by the soft radiation that floods the chambers automatically whenever he ascends to the Waldstätte complex above. He sits inside a stone womb of his own making and wails frustration at his predicament, at his twofold bondage. At night, every night, he yearns to achieve absolute power such as Jahandar enjoys. By day, every day, he’s not ruthless enough to do what Soso would do in a red moment to gain and keep total power over tens of billions.

  He broods on betrayal for hours at a time, but merely dabbles in treachery. He panders to SAC’s Curia while cultivating the Brethren, but he’s unable to control or dominate either. He’s on the cusp of a war he has been planning for 20 years, and feels weaker and less in control of events than any time in his life. ‘If my enemies in SAC and the Broderbund ever find a candidate to unite them against me... No! It’s not possible. Even if they could overcome their hate for each other, they understand that only an Oetkert may sit the throne of the Imperium. And I have both my siblings captive.’

  In manner and vainglory, he’s much like his father. In skill and ability he’s far the lesser man, and far less a leader than murdered Mary. Fearful of losing all in the limelight of the coming war, acquainted in his own career with the possibility of assassination and coup d’état, he will relegate his best generals to supporting roles as corps commanders or send them far away from big war zones to conduct fringe campaigns. He’ll do it to dim their chances for martial glory that might outshine his own. In their place he’ll set up too many mediocre men who won’t threaten him by earning a reputation, and far too many inadequate cousins from some rotten branch or other of a gnarled family tree. They will command by virtue of an Oetkert name and lineage, not from any special skills or virtues. It will throw sand in the military gears of Rikugun and Kaigun.

  In his mind, if not in fact, he rides forth from Kestino dressed in fuss and feathers, called out and filled with the allure of battle but inured to war’s perils. Soaking in his own sweat and error, he’s right about one thing. His regime and the Houses of Oetkert and Shaka will survive or fall with his next roll of the iron shakers of war. Pyotr is playing dice with destiny. His and all Orion’s. He imagines himself master of murder and intrigue in the venerable tradition of the Oetkert and Shaka lines; in the manner of his Mother’s best theory, if not her practice. He hates to admit that he learned anything from her. In his mind, he’s a self-made monarch. And yet, all alone in the dark of his subterranean chamber …

  ‘Mother, I may have underestimated you.’

  ‘Mother, I should have listened more closely.’

  ‘Mother, you were a wise adviser and a brave foe.’

  ‘Mother, what would you do to escape this dilemma?’

  The so called ‘Revolt of the Ritter,’ her terrible Red Purge that ended his boyhood preys on his thoughts, boring mine shafts deep into his manhood. It marks and mars all he is, thinks and does. He can’t escape his past and is discontent in the present. What of the future? He goes back there every night, listening to soft scratchings in the hall. He smells burning robes and burning flesh, hears his Mother’s green silk, sniffs vanilla blood. He sees Brother Luther’s crimson second smile. Squats for hours in a puddle of his own piss and fear. Curls up back in bed with a blue ermine bear.

  He hardly has a calm moment anymore. As a poisoner and murderer himself, he frets over the safety of each meal he eats, any room he enters, every girl or boy he takes into his bed. ‘Is this the sweet who will kill me? Where did my traitor servants hide the poison or the blade?’ He sees assassins and plots everywhere he looks. Restraints on his will imposed by the General Curia and High Council gnaw at his contentment with power. Nominally, he’s absolute ruler of the Imperium, but he’s cribbed and confined in fact. His discontents erode his confidence. His angst makes him more rash with every fresh decision he must make.

  It will get worse after Bad Camberg, after he plots to have a company of mercs fake a Krevan attack on an airless moonlet as an excuse to finally launch his war. War with one small Neutral will prove difficult enough, yet he’s already planning to attack all other Neutrals and the Calmar Union, and thereby to launch a Fourth Orion War. He tells himself that he has the genius and foresight to plan and control events. He doesn’t know that war will strip him of control. He fears that somehow he’s already falling into a vortex. He hugs himself, rocking back and forth, seeking comfort from the motion like an abandoned toddler. Seldom in 1,500 years has so small spirited a man been Tennō of the Imperium. And yet, he’s the one making the decisions that will take all the Thousand Worlds into the maelstrom.

  He thrashes back-and-forth, between hatred for the Curia and fear of what the gray men might do should he dare to move against them. Then he revisits the night of his father’s death and fear of the brood chamber of hate and murder known as the Broderbund. Chronic worry makes him a perpetual schemer, although he lacks either a native or trained talent for the role. Living in thick webs of deceit of his own spinning, he doesn’t see a stealthy, more poisonous creature approach him. Not from either flank, but from below the throne.

  Takeshi Watanabe was just a major in SAC and the Sakura-kai when he met Pyotr. But he was already wunderkind of the Purity movement, whose rapid rise Pyotr both watched and aided. So did leaders of Sakura-kai. So will another very soon, the most secret of them all, once a prophesy is revealed to change the Imperium and even all Orion.

  All covet Takeshi’s talent.

  All mistake his ambition.

  Pyotr won’t see him coming.

  No one will see him coming.

  The man Pyotr thinks of as his sandal bearer is too subtle as he hatches plots like serpents from hidden eggs. Pyotr is more aware of poison spiders spinning webs, fangs readying to bite, inside his military and Sakura-kai. His eyes look in the wrong direction. He has no idea which orb trembles with his death, but senses that death is nearing. He wails with a frightened child’s self pity into the silence of a stone bubble chamber. Not even an echo answers. Pyotr is alone.

  Cowls

  Eighteen centuries before Pyotr makes his secret deal with the Broderbund, founders of that infamous order sped away from Old Earth on board one of just eight GDM ships to ever travel to the stars: Deus ex Machina. It was still 180 years before discove
ry of the quantum drive. The ship wasn’t licensed to leave for another two years, and hadn’t been inspected yet by the Colonial Office. No one knew it was already prepped to go, engines warm and ready for max fusion burn and its refrigerated holds stocked with illegal living cargo. The Brethren, as Orion knows them, or Sword Brothers, as they call themselves, wanted a head start on every other GDM colony. They wanted to serve a harsh God and his Black Faith without any outside observation or interference. They believed their faith was uniquely pure, divinely inspired, and foreordained.

  Alright, not much new or different in that. But explain to me how all the billions who watched them leave the cradle planet in an explosion of violent lawlessness called the Black Faith utterly mad? Most folk already concluded that the Brethren were criminals or depraved perverts, or most likely both. Billions watched them burn hard for the stars and hoped they never made it to journey’s end. And that was before anyone knew that Deus ex Machina was packed with stolen artifacts and scrolls of the Corpus Hermeticum, or that it carried an illicit load of zygotes as well as the usual DNA banks and 4,000 suspensor beds: 3,500 for the ritter and 500 more for the first clone mothers, the “Five Hundred Eves” as Sword Brothers remember their enslaved wombs with faux reverence.

  Deus ex Machina sped beyond Sol’s heliosphere, past reach or recall, with only a few cultists awake. The rest lay in deep suspension under the watchful care of “sanctified” AI bots. When the ship reached the oort cloud it accelerated past any origin planet tracking. The last wakeful brothers went into suspend, but not before they made the AI pilot change course from the original target world, then more than 500 years away on a limited GDM drive. The ship left a false trajectory behind as it diverted to a much closer, but barely terraformed planet on which the Brethren had no legal claim. It didn’t matter in law or fact, since they would reach it first, even with sleeper pods and illicit DNA banks stacked on top of so primitive a propulsion system as a GDM.