Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  Takeshi suggests that Pyotr pull in Old Families with dollops of new wealth. He lets High Caste sons lead rearmament programs, and gives headmen a slice of the profits from an unprecedented industrialization for war. It’s all driven from the center, seemingly coming from Pyotr on the Jade Throne. Yet, control strings disappear from view as they snake into the Waldstätte and Court. Follow them into the dark and you’ll find Takeshi coiling there, at the end of every one.

  Also on Takeshi’s recommend, Pyotr sets up a faux and secondary nobility of leading industrial and manufacturing families. They’re rich in talent, drive and ambition, but don’t have the same social claims and prestige as the ancient, landowner elite. Pyotr gets fresh titles for the new men by stripping them from the old. Or rather, he lets Takeshi do it for him. His mother would approve of this attention to internal political balance. Though she would have warned him against empowering his golden boy. He hears it, but pushes her away.

  ‘Balance the factions and rule them all, my cruel son. It has always been the Oetkert way. It’s the only way to control and govern the Imperium. Balance all that you do, or you’ll lose it all.’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I know. I always knew, even as I went to the barrios to spite you by reminding you of Father’s infidelities, goading with my surface recklessness. I was only rutting while I waited for you to die. Until I could wait no more and advanced the timing of your passing, even as you plotted to replace me. I used your own monk idea against you. Clever, yes?’

  ‘I understand, my vile son. You did what rulers must do. We need not discuss that further. It’s the family that matters now, the Oetkert-Shaka lines. And you risk them. Do you not see the real danger to the Jade Throne? Can’t you see him maneuvering through your vanity and lust? He’s standing right be…’

  ‘Enough, Mother! I am in complete control. You mistake me. Go! Trouble my sleep no more! Be gone! Go back to your green tomb!’

  ***

  It helps that Pyotr does the filthiest work for the elites, using hired thugs and his new Shaka Army to crush any hint of dāsa or worker rebellion. He bans strikes by workers and curtails the power of the Guilds. But also, and this is Takeshi’s idea and pun, as are so many others, he ‘gilds’ them. He dresses their leaders in lesser titles and even cheaper lace than the ‘Black Eagle Knights.’ For the first time in the long history of the Imperium, leading guildsmen are brought right into the Jade Throne Room. Thrice each year, they bow and renew allegiance to Pyotr’s royal person. They love cheap titles, wear gaudy, tawdry cloth, and agree to bend the knee. He decides where their sons will serve: in his iklwa army or armtrak factories, on asteroid mines, in Lagrange naval shipyards. Instead of resentment, they’re grateful to him for choosing.

  Scions of each bribed and gilded class think that they’re the ones making clever choices; that they and not the fat Tennō they hold in such contempt are in control of the pace and direction of social and political change. Even those who suspect Pyotr is playing them don’t realize that, all the time, it’s really Takeshi who’s the master wayang puppeteer in control behind the screen. Pyotr understands that the ruling castes are deeply conservative, as also are the New Families and more wary Masters of the Guilds. He tells graybeards of the Old Families, beardless leaders of the eager New Families, and braided heads of the Guilds that only he can control Purity’s men. Then he asks Takeshi what to do. On Takeshi’s counsel, he avoids promoting a revolutionary agenda beyond what keeps Purist leaders in SAC and Sakura-kai in line: the gray men instead wait on his promise to wage war to take Amasia. Privately, he reassures deans of the dying Old Order and notables of the rising order that he has radical Purists and reactionary monks alike cribbed and confined.

  He boasts of it in private. “Only I rule,” he brags to Takeshi, thinking that he is master of the balance beyond what his mother ever hoped or achieved.

  ‘True, Pyotr Shaka, but you rule only for as long as I allow it. And not an hour longer. The same is true for all the rest. I will bring them all down, all of them.’

  Old lions of the Imperium have grown sleepy on secure estates. Young lions of the New Families pad around waterholes looking for an opening among the crocs, while great hippos of Guild Masters fear the drought. Then the rains stop. Pyotr knows that all are jealous traditionalists who want to be admitted to his inner circle where only Oldest Families sit, that they desire above all else a seat at the Jade Court. They don’t want to tear down or replace the Old Order. They want him to make room for them within it. They fear the radicalism of Purity will prevent their natural ascent. They fear that its vain biopolitical vision will replace merit service with a different agenda and qualification for social change.

  Biopolitics is a threat to Old and New and Guilds alike. It would replace unfairness of inherited position and parasitism with the different unfairness of a new, radical geneticism. It will overturn and trample on all tradition. It will smash ancient privileges to favor spurious bioideology that looks to erase social and class distinctions not for justice, but in the faux cause of manipulated genes that only the priesthood of the inner Purity Movement will control. Pyotr knows this, he fears this, yet Takeshi persuades him that he is in control of events.

  ‘Do you see how well I balance them all, Mother? Calculated and cruel, finely calibrated and fixed in place. All of them dance to the strings I pull.’

  ‘You have done well, my son. The name Pyotr Shaka Oetkert III will be praised and feared in all Orion.’

  ‘Do you mock me, Mother? Do you mock me still, here at night in my stone bedchamber, after all that I have achieved?’

  ‘Of course I do, my son. As I always did and always will, for your good and for the good of the dynasty and the Jade Throne. It’s what a royal mother does.’

  ‘So you always said. Yet, even you must admit it: I have surpassed you, I have moved beyond you and Father as a ruler of the Imperium.’

  ‘In years on the Jade Throne, you’ve passed your father, though you remain five behind me. But in wisdom and greatness you lag us both. You’re too much your father’s son, governed like he was by base passions and petty weaknesses. I would have shown you a better way, with more sure footing. What a pity that you murdered me!’

  ‘There was no pity in it. Only the clear, odorless poison that you drank.’

  ‘There is wine still in the glass you gave me. Will you sip a little with me, my unloved and unlovable son?’

  ‘No, Mother. Unlike you who never once stirred beyond our frontiers, I have worlds to conquer. You drink the dregs, then sleep some more.’

  ***

  Containing the biofanatics of Purity has special appeal to the regular officer corps. Kaigun and Rikugun are stiffly traditional organizations that claim to value autonomy from all politics. They say that they disdain the dirty game of factions played at the Jade Court every day. That they stand behind or even above the throne, as the purest representatives of the nation. Yet, Pyotr buys them off with swelling armies and navies, as he readies for a major war. They hope that when the new politics stops spinning they’re left with a compromise regime that faces forward, wherein Pyotr controls Purity but he is dominated by the officer corps that embodies tradition and the nation.

  What the brass underestimates is the extent to which younger officers are drifting away from them, away from tradition and toward Purity. They’re still loyal to the regime, but they want it to move faster and in Purity’s direction. They have more in common with Sakura-kai than with much older superiors in the Kaigun and Rikugun high commands. And now they have other options. SAC is already an alternative to Rikugun, for those loyal to Purist ideals. For the merely self interested and calculatedly opportunistic, Pyotr has his iklwa regiments, a Shaka Army officered by mercs and cashiered guildists. He starts to add willing professionals, too. Braided careers in Kaigun and Rikugun are no longer the only ones available to young men of military ambition.

  Everyone wants Pyotr to choose a side, but on Takeshi’s urging he refuses
to do it. Then there is his dead mother’s voice, preaching into his ear at night about the timeless virtue of balance as the secret to the Oetkert-Shaka system of divide-and-rule. She mocks and torments him still. Pyotr doesn’t want a massive, violent purge. He learned that lesson from the excess rage his mother indulged. So he tells Takeshi to foment exposé scandals among his enemies, making a quieter tally of silent and selective murders by thugs in the merc unit led by Albert Naujock.

  Takeshi thins ranks of opposition to Pyotr wherever he finds it. He uncovers filthy secrets about forbidden child lovers, illicit second wives, or stolen state credits. Then he blackmails the heads of Old Families. Or he makes facts up from whole cloth to frame genuinely virtuous enemies, to force them to recant sins they did not commit, to grovel for their lives then resign and make way for appointees whom he recruits in secret before he passes their names along to Pyotr. In all of this, Takeshi Watanabe spins his own wheels of conspiracy deep within Purity’s and Pyotr’s greater but slower wheels. He feeds names to the arresting officers and executioners, removing obstacles to his own ascent to power while seeming to obey his SAC superiors and sovereign. Meanwhile, he seeds higher ranks of the Imperium with secret loyalists. He’s a move ahead of everyone in the game.

  ***

  Pyotr tosses and turns. He’s sleeping less since the start of the Krevan War. It went well at first, but resistance hardened, especially around the three ice moons of Aral. He’s feeling the stress that comes even with winning war, its inescapable frictions, setbacks and uncertainties. Meanwhile, his killing rate at home is rising. It’s impossible to conceal it anymore. The word is out: Pyotr is culling his internal enemies. He has so many balls in the air he’s not sure he can keep juggling.

  ‘Be careful, my son, with so much blackmail and so many killings.’

  ‘You’re not one to lecture anyone on excess killing, Mother.’

  ‘I agree. Yet, I must ask you: is this not too extreme a policy you pursue?’

  ‘I do what I must, against those whom I name extremist.’

  ‘Even radicals have relatives. They will want revenge for what you’re doing.’

  ‘Let them try. The extremes at both ends of my power must be bent back toward the middle, like a bow after the arrow flies the string to seek its target.’

  ‘Radicals must be curbed, yes. But be careful that you’re not making more, instead. Ask yourself, my proud yet trembly son, how far do you trust the golden man you send to curb them?’

  ‘As you taught me so well Mother, I trust no one.’

  ‘So you say, but I fear it’s not true. He’s too much in your every thought and…’

  ‘Enough! Sleep, go to sleep, so that I may, too.’

  Pyotr must also manipulate outcaste grievances, to deflect them into belief that the only path to betterment is more oppression of those below rather than above them: dāsa slaves who repress wages because they get none, migrant hill folk moving to find work in the cities, ethnic farfolk in crowded ghettos. Now he moves to conscript their sons and suppress all the traditional Guilds.

  He again hears his mother speaking to him in the night, saying familiar words she first spoke 20 years ago: ‘You must cater to weakness in order to manipulate human nature. Use jealous desires for advantage, turn the worker classes against the still lower orders. Remember always that if the people aren’t bowing at your feet they’ll soon be reaching out with a knife to cut your throat.’

  Takeshi secretly supports Maximilian Kahn’s assault on the regime with more subtle subversions of his own, unbeknownst to too trusting Pyotr. To him, Takeshi always speaks of cowls only with spit and venom. Yet, in secret he conspires with the cowl who showed him the revelation of his divine destiny then fell to his knees in worship and adulation. Takeshi knows that the High Council thinks that he’s the Arahitogami. He’s not flattered so much as amused that Kahn bends the knee in private, when as a boy it was Takeshi who was forced to his knees in front of Kahn. Amused, but unforgiving. He has plans for dealing with the Brethren that reach far beyond Pyotr’s worst imagination. One day, he’ll decimate them.

  No, more than decimate.

  He intends to end them, forever.

  All of them. Every last cowl.

  Pyotr doesn’t know or see that his efforts to deflect the lower orders will feed into more unrest as Maximilian Kahn’s provocateurs twist worker anger back against the monarchy, and the war, even as Takeshi slithers on a serpent’s path toward whatever private goal and game he’s playing.

  What holds back the flood? Preparation for war. Massive public spending on glory projects, laying down weapons systems and fleets of warships forces wages up, along with contrived chauvinism and hatred of farfolk. Strikes are banned and Guild Masters ordered to close all doors to new apprentices, but few are hungry or workless in the streets anymore. There’s plenty of work in bustling spaceyards and shipyards, bulging armtrak and ATC elevator factories, in the huge industrial parks, on the mockmeat farms. More in expanded merchant fleets that are really a disguised military supply service. For the rest, there’s always the infantry. It absorbs tens of millions of workless men.

  Those left over among the poor are swept into Rikugun. “If you lack the skills for any of the new jobs, don’t worry son. Look here, I found you a place of honor and pride in the infantry! Three squares a day, a place to lay your head, and an honorable career to pride your parents. You can say that you serve the Imperium. Sign here, kid, and you earn the right to wear the green.”

  Many still refuse to sign. No matter, a sweeping conscription law is tucked into mandatory labor legislation that Takeshi proposes to a willing Pyotr, and all the factions support. Soon, the streets are cleared of homeless, uneducated, aimless young men. A few are dead. Some are in prison camps. Most are taking target practice and sleeping in long, high stacked rows in dull green infantry barracks or filling out the iklwa ranks in the Shaka Army. The ‘elite’ among the conscripts train as hover grenadiers and armtrak drivers and gun crews. All the rest march and sweat and curse all day, every day, but they obey.

  To appease workers, Pyotr declares a fundamental right to work. To placate industrialists, he bans “any and all agitation and factory politics.” He declares unemployment a high crime, that living-off-the-state is “social parasitism.” It’s a catch all the regime uses to destroy any enemy at any time, and to coerce the rest. First a person is fired from all gainful work, then arrested for parasitic unemployment, then sent to a consolidation camp. And don’t even try to ask the Kempeitai where they are! If you do, you’ll be bound hand-and-foot and find yourself on the next outbound conscript ship.

  Children are taught unquestioning obedience to authority, and to venerate Pyotr Shaka III as “the most glorious Tennō since the Founding, since the Jade Eye himself walked in the Thousand Worlds.” Then they’re told to inform on their parents or any older siblings who criticize the state, or the war, or Pyotr. Many do so, earnestly running to their teachers, who run to the Kempeitai, who run out to arrest the careless speakers-out-of-turn. A quiet sort of terror spreads into schools and homes. Siblings fear and turn on each other, parents fear their children most of all. Behind it is Pyotr’s vanity, SAC’s ideology, and Takeshi Watanabe’s secret and lustful and relentless ambition. Wheels within gyros, inside clock works, spinning in a swirl of spacetime. Conspiracies and plots count down. The factions are on the move as a greater war approaches, as Dauran and Imperium fleets move into position. All seek fresh advantage and distrust partners of the moment.

  Agent LaSalle Five is having trouble getting a read on things, despite being pushed hard by MoD on Caspia. Not even Takeshi’s spies tell him everything that’s happening. That’s why he misses that Pyotr secretly meets twice with Kahn to negotiate reviving the Broderbund as a counterweight to SAC and Sakura-kai. Two vain men discussing the fate of worlds, but also the world of Fates. Pyotr is keenly interested to learn of Takeshi’s sordid past there, as much as Maximilian Kahn is intrigued by his
Man God’s role at the Jade Court and in the Tennō’s private plans. Neither reveals his true purpose, or why the golden man from Fates has become central to their separate plots for murder and war.

  ***

  On the eve of the Fourth Orion War the Broderbund thrives on Fates and Terra Deus, and once again on a few more worlds of the restored Ordensstaadt. Pyotr gives his secret blessing to more cowls living outside the homeworlds. They migrate in green gowned swarms, looking to reclaim their forts and slave estates on worlds his mother drove them from. She’s not happy about it at all, and lets him know it every night.

  ‘Beware the cowls, my son, of all the plotting factions.’

  ‘I trust no faction. Neither cowls nor Purists, not Old Families or New.’

  ‘The monks are the most dangerous. They have the best assassins in Orion.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And undetectable poisons, like the one they gave to me that I made you drink.’

  ‘True, true. But now imbibe my warning instead of their poisonous lies: beware them above all other enemies. All others, except for one. The viper.’

  ‘I do know this thing, Mother. It’s why I keep Maximilian Kahn so close. He’s my open window into their plans for treason.’

  ‘That wizened priest is pure evil! I want him and all his filthy Hashâshīn and Brethren dead! All who conspired under the cover of the Black Faith to kill their rightful sovereign, my husband and the father of my royal children!’