Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  ‘It shall be done in time, Mother.’

  ‘How? Will it be bloody? Will it be soon?’

  ‘We shall both have vengeance. You for a strangled husband and stillborn child. Me for too many hauntings and old nightmares about cowled things that creep about with degens in the dark.’

  ‘Kill them all! Kill anyone who dared strike at my husband and threaten Princess Chiyoko!’

  ‘Do you forget about me, Mother? They also came to kill me on the night I lost a lecherous father and a stillborn little brother. The night you came to my bedroom, a nightmare vision dressed in cold afterbirth and hot red rage.’

  ‘Yes, they should die for that, too. For trying to kill you, scion of the nation and my unloved and unlovable son, whose throne I guarded until you killed me to mount it. For that crime, too, for targeting a prince of the Oetkert-Shaka lines you must hunt, hound, harry, and hang them!’

  ‘For a prince, not for your son? It will be done, Mother. But for my reasons, not for yours. Sleep, your day is come and gone. Go to rest! Leave me to mine.’

  What followed the murder of Pyotr’s father she called justice. Everyone else called it the Red Purge and shuddered in the shadow of Dowager Mary’s hate. Before her vengeance was sated, tens of millions of cowls and dāsa slaves and nagas died under torment, gurgling with garroting ropes crushing their throats, or tied to stakes of fire. Finally, she let a few live. Confined and humiliated, stripped of titles and power, exiled to their original worlds in the Ordensstaadt. It was that or drive the Broderbund totally underground, where she knew the Brethren would be far more dangerous. Even killing wisely has a price, and Pyotr’s mother killed with wild abandon that he must pay for next.

  ***

  After Pyotr laid his mother down in a jade tomb, covering her with rituals of haste and hypocrisy, he made arrangements with the surviving Brethren. He left her hate decrees and persecution laws in place so that he could threaten and control the Broderbund at any time, in any way he wanted. But he told his secret police to enforce the exile decree hardly at all. By agreement with Kahn and the High Council, he quietly restored old commanderies and estates to a select few outside the restricted planets of the Ordensstaadt. He feebly tried to use a threat of a revived Broderbund to keep the greater threats of SAC and Sakura-kai in line. He only succeeded in creating two rival power centers behind his throne. That was 20 years ago. Takeshi is in Novaya Uda now. Things have changed.

  Whenever Pyotr wants, he invokes his mother’s Cowl Laws to end monkish lives and take back commanderies, redistributing the forts to New Families and even Guild Masters. Or at least that’s what SAC’s leaders think, who are always pleased to see their mortal enemies disappear. SAC is a power looming over Pyotr’s rule. He can’t control the gray men. So he bowed in private five years ago, promising them a holy war to take the genome world Amasia. A war that must burn half the Thousand Worlds before it ends. What SAC leaders don’t know is that in Pyotr’s two clandestine meets with Maximilian Kahn the lists of marked cowls they exchanged are names both men wanted removed, for very different but overlapping reasons. As the scheme matures, Pyotr hands off his list to Takeshi while Kahn does the same. Pyotr thinks he’s culling the Brethren, knocking off their most talented men and replacing them with mediocrities that he can control and then use to balance SAC. Kahn thinks he’s cycling loyalists to and from Terra Deus, weeding out opponents to his own end times vision.

  Pyotr points death’s finger at some old, obstreperous monk who maybe said a critical thing in private. He gives the kill order to Takeshi, who passes it on to Naujock and his men. If the cowled fool dares challenge openly, Pyotr orders a public garroting, to instruct other monks about his power. He said to Takeshi of one condemned cowl: “Send him to the nether worlds he dreams of and loves too much, but let him feel the pain of this one as he leaves it.” It’s Takeshi who really decides when a cowl is arrested, questioned, and killed. Then men with close shaved heads, full of superstitions gleaned from inscriptions on long dead scrolls, are picked up and interrogated and beaten to death by Naujock’s goons or the Kempeitai. All at Takeshi’s private will, served by Pyotr’s legal order.

  Or a cowl is slowly strangled by the local police, supervised by the regime’s secret police. Takeshi tells Pyotr that doing it this way keeps a deniable space between political murder and the dignity of the monarch. On special occasions, a private debt owed Takeshi is squared by Naujock’s knife. His flashing blade acts as a slick deputy for a long remembered slight, or a too hard beating by some aged monk when he was a boy on Fates. Or a forced nighttime stay in a private room. Naujock knows the cruel, special look on Takeshi’s face when he gives him one of those orders. He doesn’t ask or care. He enjoys wet work.

  Pyotr once snorted to his Admitted, with Takeshi offworld to oversee land seizures and judicial murders of targeted Brethren: “That young man is happiest when he’s killing cowls.” It’s nearly true. What Pyotr doesn’t know is that the names on Takeshi’s scrolls of condemned monks whom he thinks are his own choices, are all agreed in secret by Takeshi and Maximilian Kahn. He tells Pyotr that he’s executing the royal will. He tells Kahn that he’s helping to end opposition to his leadership and planned take over of the High Council, readying the Order for the “Coming of the Divine Man, Anointed in Holy Oils, who will Rule All Orion and bring the Messianic Age, then Reign Over All the Worlds to Come.

  Agent Lasalle Five gets copies of both lists from her unmatched sources in the Jade Court. She lays them overtop each other and sees it right away. She knows that neither Pyotr nor Maximillian Kahn is in control. She knows that the man from Fates, the nobody Takeshi Watanabe, is steadily eroding support for the Broderbund and for Pyotr Shaka III. She admires that he does so with the willing participation of them both. ‘I must get to know this brilliant, evil man. I must take him into my bed and learn his secrets. But how to arrange a meet?’

  ***

  Pyotr hardly notices, but state terror grows more widespread and efficient under Takeshi’s guiding hand. Consolidation camps rise like mushrooms in the dark, filling with declared enemies of the regime who are then forced to become recruits for Shaka Army regiments. Many are personal enemies whom Takeshi frames before Pyotr and the Jade Court. Sometimes, not even that matters. He’s like a wild mountain stream, flashing and colliding with resistant rocks, rushing over and around and past them. Plunging headlong toward a secret goal. As the conspiracy for aggressive war matures, Pyotr grows more reliant on beautiful, golden Takeshi to carry out his covert plans. He’s growing evermore insecure in his decaying vanity, more sensitive to slights and flattery alike. Takeshi uses his weaknesses to move even Highest Caste opponents out of his way, into camps or into their graves.

  Once, Pyotr orders the head of an Old Family arrested for cracking a joke about his sexual excesses. Takeshi is amused, smiling as he tells Naujock to do it, but also to arrest three headmen he accuses of laughing, though not one was present when the joke was made. He confiscates all their estates and imprisons their first sons, then hides half the stolen wealth in secret accounts he uses to pay off personal networks of armed thugs and thuggish police; to buy officers and politicians on dozens of Imperium worlds. It’s not greed that moves him. He uses suspicion that he’s greedy for wealth to conceal a higher lust for power. It happens almost daily, yet Pyotr hardly notices. He thinks that he’s a high dam blocking Takeshi’s far faster stream, unmovable and permanent and impressive. He doesn’t understand. Water is far quicker than stone and always leaves rocks diminished. Takeshi gloats in haiku:

  ‘One moment in time:

  a stab ascends to greatness.

  Quickly, hide the blade!’

  Onur

  There are some in uniform who oppose Pyotr’s new war. Top generals and leading admirals and Main HQ men who have solid information about potential farfolk enemies, and fear that Pyotr is leading the Imperium into an unwinnable war with the Calmar Union. Some, but not many. More will detest his allianc
e with Jahandar, the Tyrant of Nalchik, once they learn of it. Many will remember that the Hermit Empire is the oldest foe of their culture and Imperium. They’ll fear that Pyotr’s pact with Jahandar is a ruse by the Hermit Empire, that betrayal by a reformed ‘Auld Alliance is what’s really down the pike, not a Dual Powers victory over one ancient enemy with aid of another. Or they just hate all popovs.

  Very few object to his little war underway against Krevo. It’s going pretty well, except at the ice moons of Aral where there have been real setbacks and unexpectedly heavy resistance. But going so well overall, they would welcome another little war against Helvetics or Threes. The majority in the officer corps, especially junior types, are sure they could handle a war like that. Most crave another, splendid little war. They think that’s what the buildup of all the armies and navies is for. Now that Krevans are running from all their worlds on the Exodus fleets, officers hope they can get into hard action against another small Neutral, if they were so unlucky they missed invading and overrunning Krevo.

  “Good for my career, you know. War speeds up all promotions, clears out the lesser men from the path of those of us with a talent for war.” Most of them think that, especially the lesser men holding lower rank and blocked from rising. They think they’re held back from jealousy, not realizing their incompetence. Fine, let’s do that. But war against the Calmar Union? A true, knock down and all out Great Power war, a Fourth Orion War that could last forever?

  “That would be a first order disaster, an immense catastrophe. It can’t be allowed. We, the uniformed guardians of the nation, must not permit it.” Fidan Onur says it in an off-the-record meeting. Several senior colleagues agree with the diminutive Chief of the Great General Staff of the Imperium Armed Forces.

  “But what’s to be done to stop it, field marshal?”

  “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? We must decide together.”

  These men know it’s coming from the sheer scale of the buildup, long before Pyotr tells them about his secret pact with the Tyrant on Nalchik. It’s what some senior officers fear most, even as their colleagues boast that when the big war comes they’ll win quickly in spite of Pyotr, even if never because of him. Win because they’re the flag bearers of a star nation that claims it invented war, that raises generations of men like them to war from birth, breeds them in the Old Families. Promotes men who believe they have a natural talent for command, even though before the Krevan War not one of them led an army into combat.

  When they’re in their cups, it’s another story. That’s when officers vent secret fears and confess that the Calmari military is a much stronger force and society, with deeper reserves of population, industry, science and advanced technology. They even admit that any try for a short, easy war against the blue star systems of Western Orion must surely go long, and will be very hard to win in the end. They know that when it comes, as has happened thrice before in Orion’s history, a Great War will be immensely destructive and impossible to escape. Yet, they want it.

  A few whisper secret warnings to each other in the dark. They meet in small groups of three or four, cautiously gathering contacts among friends they went to military school with, back in the day. Or are related to by marriage. Or trust with their lives, because that’s exactly what they’re doing now. The whispers mark the first birth pangs of conspiracy and coup d’état. The generals don’t fear billions of deaths that a Great War will surely bring, for none of them intend to die. That’s the job of noncitizen classes and dāsa troops and enemy hordes. Nor do they shirk responsibility for causing so very many deaths. They think that’s their noble duty, and that it might be glorious. They fear only that an aggressive war will become a war of attrition that will wreck the Imperium over time. That after brief success, it will shred Rikugun armies and scatter Kaigun fleets then burn the homeworlds.

  They fear revolution against the conservative order that secures the futures of their sons and grandsons. They fear that war may shake their families from high ranks, positions and privileges that are already under growing threat from within. They fear that in the howling wind the lower may rise up to overthrow the higher, that under an inept leader like Pyotr things could well fall apart into anarchy and ruin. The strategists among them also fear that fighting Calmaris in the south and west will expose systems in the north to an unrestrained and utterly unpredictable Jahandar’s legions of Dead Souls. They worry that if they get tied down against a revival of the ‘Auld Alliance, war will mean that secretive, somnolent Daura will awaken. And once awake, that terrible hermit power will strike, free to gather the scattered shards of a shattered Jade Empire.

  That they cannot permit.

  That they will not permit.

  Talk of mounting a coup widens.

  Everyone looks to the Chief of Staff.

  Will he lead them, or betray them?

  ***

  Fidan Onur doesn’t look like a coup leader. The field marshal is colorless as a schoolmaster, with narrow eyes in a small head atop a feminine, boyish frame. He’s so small of stature that he’s known across the officer corps, not without affection, as the “Little General.” His oval face lacks clear features or decisive expression, as if the sapling has not yet become the tree. His build is too small to threaten, no matter how much gold braid it sports on shoulder boards that strain to widen a bright green uniform to man size. One might easily mistake him for a bellhop rather than a general, let alone the Chief of the Great General Staff of the Imperium. His looks are utterly deceiving. He’s as strong as an ancient Toruń oak within, and ferocious for his honor. Beneath the mill pond exterior of his face he’s beginning to think of himself as a Cassandra, as the only one in a position of power who sees what’s coming. Sees the Imperium falling into an abyss, if Pyotr is allowed to break the Golden Peace of Orion.

  It’s not that he doesn’t want to recover the ‘Lost Children’ worlds to the Imperium. He does, or at least most of them. He’s prepared to fight to regain border worlds given to the surviving Neutrals after the Third Orion War, ceded to Krevans, Threes and Helvetics to secure “buffer zones” that pushed apart the three great star empires of Orion. Unlike Purity or Pyotr or many other Grünen, he’s prepared to let go forever the handful of planets taken by Calmari in the great treaty signed at the end of the Third Orion War. After all, by agreement the Imperium retains five former Calmari worlds in exchange. That was the deal that froze the ceasefire wherever fleets and armies stopped, leaving each side in possession of some of the enemy’s former homeworlds. Diplomats were wrongly praised for three centuries for achieving the “Golden Peace of Orion.” They merely codified what three billion lost soldier and sailor lives had made fact.

  “Time enough has passed. We should leave Great Power borders and homeworlds be,” Onur tells the Great General Staff three months before the Krevan War. “We should let lie sleeping dogs of an Orion War. We should not awaken Cerberus, nor arouse his trailing Hounds of Hell.”

  He talks like that sometimes, all ‘Old Book’ as people say. It’s the benefit and the pitfall of an exclusive, classical education. It filled him with knowledge most others lack but makes him far too stuffy about employing it. Then there’s his exceptional love of dogs, often leading him into overwrought canine images.

  “What about Krevans, Helvetics and Threes, field marshal? Will you agree that if Pyotr orders it we will strike at them?”

  “Neutrals are another matter, Admiral Pasha. No major power worth its salt can bow to lesser dogs, to puppy powers. If our emperor strikes only at the small Neutrals of Central Orion, he deserves our full support and all our professional skill and effort to win his war. He’ll receive mine without hesitation.”

  “Kaigun agrees with Rikugun, then. If war is confined to recovering our lost worlds from the smaller Neutrals, we will support it with proud hearts. But we’ll oppose Pyotr chancing a major war with the Calmar Union we may not win.”

  “What about Daura? We must also watch our silent,
northern border. Pyotr acts strangely whenever Jahandar is mentioned in his hearing. He’s too blithe about the danger to the north.”

  “That power is asleep. Jahandar is inward looking. There’s no question of war either way. We need not worry about the hermit northern stars unless Pyotr wakes them unintentionally by making war in the south and west.”

  “As you say, field marshal. Let’s agree that Kaigun will maintain regular naval patrols along the western border for now.”

  “Very good, Admiral Pasha. Major Winter, make the call to order.”

  “Gentlemen, this meeting of the Great General Staff never happened. Even so, it’s adjourned. Return to your posts. Send back daily reports. Good day.”

  ***

  When war began with the United Planets of Krevo, Chief of the GGS Fidan Onur headed all operational planning. Then he took the main field command, ordering and overseeing the invasion of the Krevan capital world of Aral. He dispatched lesser generals to fight lesser battles on Genève, Acis, Brno, and then second wave target worlds. He understands his enemy. He’s proven right that Krevans will fight long and all out for their capital system, hurling the best part of their shattered navy into a drawn out fray. He’s proven right again in predicting that they’ll hang on tight in its asteroid belt, and on three outermost ice moons well past when reason and MI back at Main HQ on Kestino says “they’re beaten, They must quit.” His fleets and armies are delayed at each ice moon, inching toward the inner system and an overwhelming assault on Aral.

  He snarls in anger at the success of the enemy’s Exodus plan as it unfolds from system to system, orchestrated by the War Government on Aral even as that world holds his own invasion fleet at bay. He blames a subordinate admiral for delaying Pyotr’s triumph, and far more important to Onur, his own secret plans underway to block any effort by Pyotr to start a wider war in Orion. He despises the failure of the admirals to stop Krevan suicide runs. Locals make them with small attack boats and the very last KRN destroyers and frigates left at Aral system. He rages at losses of troopships that force him to postpone the assault and delay his other plan. He heavily reinforces at Aral and finally wins, when the War Government flees the system just before he lands planetside.