Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  Arrests will be made on Takeshi’s say so, but not of top plotters inside GGS. They remain unknown because Onur does things old school. He simply puts all carefully drawn up coup plans, flash paper lists, and coms records into his office fireplace. He escapes because Takeshi decides not to voice suspicions about the Chief of Staff or his senior, most trusted aide-de-camp. ‘Better to know who one’s enemy is, and where he is, than to start all over assessing new men at the top of the military. Besides, these two talented men could still be useful to me. They want the fatman dead, as do I. But not today, gentlemen. Success in this is in the timing.’

  When Pyotr asks who leads the coup attempt, Takeshi blames it all on General McAuley and Colonel Viktor Orban. His spy reinforces the tale, but it’s too late for blood revenge. General McAuley kills himself inside the lead armtrak, before he can be taken prisoner and questioned. He slithers back down the upper hatch, to be consumed by fire along with his vehicle when it’s hit a third time by a heavy spandau. His entire, suspect armored division is transferred offworld, to join a war game practice invasion of Amasia. It will go active there in short order. It’s going to be in the lead of the attack wedge that crosses The Sandbox. It’s going to take truly massive casualties once it reaches General Lian Sòng’s black walls.

  Colonel Orban also takes secrets of the plot to his grave, succumbing after just three days of medieval tortures in a dark cell beneath SAC’s Main HQ. Or so it seems to observers and his tormentors. In fact, to protect the Little General, on the first day Takeshi has Naujock secretly coat the cutting instruments with a slow acting poison. He has decided that as the heads of the Resistance, Onur and Winter are of far more use to him alive and still in control of GGS. None of the torturers know. Oban doesn’t know. Onur doesn’t know. Pyotr doesn’t know. The only ones who know are Takeshi Watanabe and his pet toad and indispensable merc.

  ***

  Major Winter lays it out that first night of failure: “We can no longer rely on Resistance troops and ships being within even five hours bohr time of Kestino, when your order goes out. Our main plan is voided. We must make another.”

  “Can we do this in reverse?” Onur asks, almost plaintively. He’s depressed about the failure of the parade plan, so goes over old ground yet again. “Can we start a rebellion in the outer worlds then work inwards toward Kestino?”

  “We gamed that option, sir. We might start a civil war in the outer provinces and on some occupied worlds, but we don’t have fleets of troopships to bring enough forces here faster than Pyotr can also reinforce. It would only start a civil war. And who wants a civil war, especially one that he would likely win?”

  “The gods be damned! We shall have to do more of the same then: plan out scenarios, keep track of forces loyal to Pyotr and to us, and wait for some as yet unforeseen opportunity that raises the odds for us.”

  “Yes sir. It’s down to a waiting game now. And with Pyotr’s guard sure to go up after the parade arrests, I don’t see how we can get an assassin close enough to him in time to kill him before his war plans go ahead.”

  “Sadly, I agree Major Winter. We can’t stop his widening of the war against Krevans to Neutrals of central Orion and against the Calmar Union. We can only hurry up and wait for events to take their course. The blood dimmed tide is loose. A rough skinned beast of endless war is slouching toward us, unaborted.”

  Bomb

  The closest anyone comes to killing Pyotr before he launches his new war has nothing to do with Field Marshal Onur and the coup plotters, great or small. It’s not connected to any of their conspiratorial networks or secret cells. It doesn’t draw on their resources. It’s not even a real coup plot, or a plot at all. It’s an act of personal outrage. It’s the work of a solitary civilian, an ordinary young man of peculiar conscience who very nearly kills his emperor. His name is Georg Lolen, a day laborer from the noncitizen classes of Novaya Uda. He’s nondescript, a youth of no particular accomplishment or ambition. Except that he has a truly distinguishing talent: he’s an amateur electronics hobbyist of real genius when it comes to miniaturization and camouflage.

  For years he worked in the city, tinkering in repair shops to meet his meager needs of shelter and drinks. He hardly reads and isn’t political at all. Not until the Krevan War starts. Sure, he can’t buy into the Bad Camberg lie that’s blared on every memex channel. He doesn’t believe that shit. But that’s not what does it, pushes him over the cliff edge to contemplate terrorism and assassination. Lolen takes it real hard when his best friend, who only joined up to play at war, is killed in a vacuum assault landing on one of the ice moons of Aral. ‘Vacuum assault? What the fuck is that? And who cares about an ice moon? The whole war is just too bizarre.’ So one night he makes a decision to avenge his friend. Just like that. He gulps down his last drink, ever. He stands, puts on a flat cap and leaves the bar. He’s heading out to kill Pyotr Shaka Oetkert III.

  It’s not at all political.

  It’s strictly personal.

  Pyotr’s stupid war pisses him off.

  He doesn’t care if it’s won or lost.

  He doesn’t care how many die in it.

  He just really misses his best friend.

  Or is it as simple as that? He gets that the Imperium was duped into war. If he thinks about it, if anyone cared to ask his views, he would add that he thinks Pyotr’s warmongering isn’t done yet. He would agree with Field Marshal Onur and the Resistance that the man won’t stop, until he’s stopped. That his vanity wants an even bigger war than the sad little affair with Krevo. ‘Probably with more fucking ice moon attacks, and other stupid shit like that. I have to stop it.’

  So, in a way you could say that Lolen is political, that he intends to prevent a new and bigger war, to break the daisy chain of choices and causalities all on his own. But that’s not it either. It is simple. Yes, he wants to fuck up Pyotr because he killed his best friend and drinking buddy. He also blames his friend for signing up in a burst of naïve enthusiasm. He really blames two officers who led his friend into an ice crater trap and got everybody killed, including themselves. He’s mad as hell that they’re back in Novaya Uda on Kestino, honored in Old Family urns or graveyards. But not his friend. Nope. What’s left of his friend is still up there on the Aral ice moon, jammed under a frozen rock inside a useless crater. Rikugun doesn’t bring back dead commoners, only officers. That’s what pisses him off.

  He’s mad as hell that officer toffs get to come home dead or alive, but not his lowborn pal. He blames Pyotr, he blames Rikugun, he blames the war and whole fucked up Imperium. He blames all of it and all of them for his never getting to say goodbye, and for his having to say goodbye. Somehow, he knows that Pyotr wanted war, planned the war, provoked the war. He knows that the bumbling, dead officers who got to come home loved it, too, wanted it just like Pyotr. He knows they conspired to kill his best and only buddy. So now he’ll kill Pyotr and fuck up the officers’ war. ‘It’s only what they deserve.’

  ***

  He knows a lot of things. Like where Pyotr will be two days of every year. On the anniversary of the Dowager’s death the cynic visits her in the Jade Tombs. Lolen knows he can’t get close to that site. Besides, that was four months ago. But he knows that a week after he downs his very last gut breaker drink Pyotr will be in a filthy cathouse in the Old Quarter of Novaya Uda, reminiscing with The Admitted, his old whoring buddies. Lolen intends to plant a bomb there. He knows about bombs, too, because he worked for most of the past two years in a marble quarry blasting out great blocks of rock that are later carved and polished to make floors and patios for the great families and lords of the city, laid out cold and flat in their tower house compounds.

  He’s a meticulous planner. So he checks out the cathouse grounds by day and patronizes the girls on four separate nights. Each time, he asks for a room on the floor that overlooks the central dance hall where Pyotr and The Admitted will dine. He learns from the girls who were here last year that Pyotr will app
ear on a stripper’s stage, to speak about comradeship and the good old days to a bevy of men now nearly as fat and oily as he is. That he does it every year. On the third night, he finds the perfect place to hide his bomb: an alcove under the back stairs, behind a main support pillar of white marble. He’s led there by a brunette, after he tells her that he can’t fuck her in the bed in his room. Something about his mother. He asks her to find a place where they can do it while he watches the stage show with her rocking underneath him.

  “There’ll be 20 extra credits in it for you.”

  “Yu pay furst, nice boy.”

  “Seventy credits, total. Is that right?”

  “Ya, sure. Is good. Let’s go bump!”

  She takes him straight to the alcove, which has a wall crack through which he can look down to the stage. The little hollow is too small for them to fit. She draws her legs up, but his stick out while they do it. She moans dutifully: she’s a true professional. He doesn’t care. He’s thinking about his bomb while he thrusts. Once he decides this is the place, he let’s himself come into her. He lies on top and inside her for a minute more, slowly turning limp and thinking about a bloody corpse. In three days, Pyotr will stand ten meters away, just below where Lolen lies atop a barrio whore. She’s really bored and wants him to get off. But he paid extra, credits she’ll use to buy another fix, so she lies still beneath him. She thinks he smells like oranges.

  The alcove is a tiny storage area abutting a key support pillar. If he takes that out, it will collapse the speaker’s podium into rubble. Walking away at the end of the night he thinks: ‘Hell, my bomb will bring the whole roof down onto his head!’ He comes back the next night to plant the bomb. His room is paid for hourly and they know that he’s an odd duck who doesn’t even drink, so they leave him alone in it. It’s where he makes the final assembly of pieces he hid there over the three prior nights. Of course, Pyotr’s security detail will advance screen the cathouse, but Lolen is confident they won’t find his bomb. He hides the clever device in the alcove, pressed tight against the support pillar. It’s under masking camo of his own design that he’s confident no sweeper bot can detect.

  He crams two dusty wine crates into the tiny space. Someone with initiative will have to reach inside and feel around with his fingers to locate the micro bomb. Even then it will feel soft, like a poison spider’s nest or a hive. The nervous hand will be pulled out quickly. Lolen sets the timer for the appointed hour, then he leaves without seeing any of the girls he’s going to murder. He politely doffs his hat to the older madam sitting at the front desk. She smiles at him broadly, through way too much rouge. He returns to a small, rented room in a building ten streets over. He has been living there all week, building bomb parts from little bits and bobs and everyday scraps of fiber optics and laser cord, eating oranges and a half loaf of French bread. He has no more credits to buy food or drink. He spent his last fifty credits on a dozen oranges and a oneway maglev ticket out of town.

  Two nights later he hears Pyotr’s motorcade moving through the Old City. Security won’t bother him. They always clear out nine square blocks around the cathouse. That’s why he picked out this cheap hotel ten blocks away. He waits quietly, watching the wall chronometer and listening hard. Two hours later, right as he timed it, the explosion rips through the city and the night. He feels vibrations in the floor and knows that a seven story building is crashing down, full of whores and The Admitted and squashed Pyotr. In the distance, Lolen hears wailing sirens and screaming women. He sees a yellowish glow outside his window. He waits ten minutes, eating his second last orange while sitting on a small wooden chair at a rough topped side table. Then he stands up. He puts on his jacket and hat, and calmly walks away from his rented room.

  ***

  Pyotr Shaka isn’t dead! Lolen hears the terrible news looping joyously on the public memex above the outbound maglev platform. It shows scenes of carnage from inside a collapsed building. He’s angry and confused. ‘My bomb worked, so why didn’t it kill him?’ The station quickly fills with police. They're stopping all the trains, herding folks and checking everybody’s papers. Arresting hundreds for no reason except that the police are also scared. The memex is scrolling that ‘Providence Intervened to Save the Great Man of Destiny.’ The truth is more vulgar. Rather than getting drunk with The Admitted, then rambling for an hour from the podium about his sexual prowess and his greatness as a leader of men, as was his habit every prior year, Pyotr grew queasy from too much bad mockfish and left the cathouse early. He missed the pillar explosion and collapsing roof by no more than eight minutes. Damn bad luck, no more or less.

  Lolen was right: the fallen building would have crushed Pyotr to jelly, just as it crushed fifteen Admitted, a host of show girls, and the fat madam. She wore her best green dress to honor Pyotr. She’s worn it every year since he first showed up when he was a kid and she wasn’t much more than one herself. She looks fabulous when they dig her out from under the shattered reception desk and all that roof tile and ruble and carry her corpse away. Well, fabulous for a dead woman. A lot better than most of us will be able to claim! Count on it!

  Investigators of the Palast Wache and Kempeitai fan out in all directions. In two hours they find Lolen’s room and search it with every device they have. They find a stack of orange peels and three tiny electronic parts that fell from the edge of the table where he made the bomb. They quickly track him down, finding him at the closed maglev station. He has an orange and a oneway ticket for a worker city on the farside of Kestino. The one next to the bulk cargo elevator. Before they tie him to a police torture chair he confesses, quickly and joyfully.

  “I’m proud of what I did,” he shouts.

  “Proud? You’re proud that you tried to kill your rightful sovereign?”

  “Yes! He may be rightful, but he’s not righteous!” That quip earns him a hard backhand across the mouth, a kick in the shin, and another in the groin. The beating almost seems to exhilarate him. He shouts out his defiance.

  “Sic semper tyrannis! The tyrant must die!” Another beating. They show him a vid of Pyotr alive and well, and a recording of the fatman ordering an unbridled search for the assassin of fifteen of his oldest and dearest friends.

  “OK, so I missed the fat bastard. Someone else will have to kill him.”

  “You scum! Tell us who helped you!”

  “No one helped me. I acted alone. But I’m not the only one who opposes this stupid war. Sooner or later somebody will get him. Then you’ll all be sorry.”

  They deflate him just a little with pictures of the dead whores, and three of their kids. He looks once at the kids but twice at the dead madam. He liked her, even though they never once spoke.

  “Are you proud that you killed women and children?”

  “I’m sorry about the women. I liked them. And their kids. But it was necessary.”

  “Necessary to what?”

  “To stopping an evil fatman from taking all Orion to war.”

  “You arrogant little shit! Sergeant, beat him senseless!”

  “Yes, colonel.”

  “Don’t kill him. We’ve got something special in store for this traitor assassin. Before you execute him check with General Watanabe.”

  No need to dwell on the gory details of Lolen’s final torments and execution. Suffice to say, the first are as long lasting as SAC sadistic cunning can make them, while the latter is spectacular in its calculated cruelty. The final touch is to deny his body a resting place. Sure, Takeshi doesn’t want a shrine left behind for the Resistance to venerate. But that’s not why he suggests to Pyotr that Lolen’s corpse be dissolved in acid, then poured onto the salt flats outside Novaya Uda.

  It’s because Lolen tells him why he tried to kill Pyotr, that he never got to say goodbye to his best friend. That he’s pissed off that no one knows or cares where the body is, somewhere on a destroyed ice moon in the outer reaches of Aral system. Forgotten and utterly anonymous. It touches Takeshi Watanabe’s wic
ked sense of irony. “He should suffer the same fate as his friend. I’ll disappear him into a natural oubliette, leaving nothing even for the scorpions.”

  “Yes!” Pyotr agrees. “Pour him outside the city boundary. Make him a stain on the salt.” It’s the kind of pandering to Pyotr’s worst instincts and impulses that keeps Takeshi in the Imperator’s good graces, and suspicion far from his door.

  ***

  The war can’t be stopped.

  The coup can’t proceed.

  Armies and fleets will launch.

  Worlds will burn and fall.

  War is returning to all Orion

  while the stars burn ever on,

  unconcerned with the rocks below.

  As Chief of the GGS, Field Marshal Onur must sign the invasion readiness and deployment orders a week before attacks on two dozen Calmari frontier systems are scheduled to begin. He marks each invasion e-scroll then hands it to Oscar Winter. His heart turns to lead. After he puts down the red war stylus he uses to sign he looks up to the major, who’s standing beside him ready to receive and implement the last order scroll, and says: “Finis Imperium.”

  Ships and men are locked down in 3D oblongs, pre-invasion Lagrange areas jokingly called ‘sausages’ because of their elongated shapes. Or worse names. Each one is two systems and bohr jumps back from the Calmari frontier, hidden from spies and merchant traffic alike. For weeks, gravity free ‘sausages’ have stuffed to bulging with arriving troopships, swarming escorts, big battlewagons and heavy and light cruisers. They’re also full of overexcited hubris, with a fleet wide lust for combat by command and rank-and-file alike. The ranks are locked down and haven’t got a clue, but officer’s messes fill with chirruping, boastful banter. Onur and GGS didn’t trust even senior operations officers and flotilla captains not to break silence on the invasion plans, so crews weren’t told until today that the so called ‘war game’ is only a cover story. Learning that they’re going to invade for real, excited men gather in clusters to drink and talk.