Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  The club is spartan, unlike the ornate, even baroque, offices of the General Staff. Its clean lines make it easy to sweep for surveillance devices, and harder to conceal them as lurking insects or dust mites or bits of old spider web. It’s as clean a place to meet as there is in Novaya Uda, a sanctuary where uniformed men from all service arms come and go all day and night without overly arousing MI’s suspicions. Sometimes, even the Chief of the GGS shows up. If Winter thinks he was followed or a clumsier Kempeitai agent is inside under cover, he drinks more heavily before blurting disinformation. Once the suspicious man leaves, Winter meets his real contacts in backroom sex quarters where the prostitutes give them cover. Afterward, he staggers home to sleep it off. He plays the boor well, given that he hates being drunk and feels pity for boys and girls sex-servicing officers.

  Rumors of disloyalty are thick on the green marble of the Jade Court and all around GGS Main HQ. That helps Winter supply cover to his agents, because with so many false stories flying around in wartime it makes it hard for Sakura-kai or SAC or MI or the Kempeitai to sort wheat from chaff. Disinformation given to officers heading out from Kestino, especially those already notorious for loose tongues and making careless strategic gossip, nicely clouds things up. Onur helps by sending info fog whenever he can, always discreetly but at the level of Fleet or Army Group command.

  It’s offworld that Winter’s real Resistance work is done. His duties require travel across the Imperium on official business, including to many occupied worlds. En route, his relationship to Onur makes him the natural guest of the captain of every warship he travels on. He spends hours alone with key Kaigun captains and first and second officers, while climbing up to or down from system LPs. Planetsides, he passes covert messages to Rikugun at the highest levels of command. He also meets with midlevel operational staff to set up deeper layers of Resistance, and listen to the shifting mood of the officer corps.

  He’s always meticulous about sharing only partial plans with the most closely vetted men. Although he’s also taking a lot more chances these days than before, and making less cautious contacts. He uses couriers when he can’t get offworld. Men make blind deliveries who think they carry a fine cognac or rare Baku scotch as a gift from the Chief of Staff to their general. If caught, innocence won’t protect them, even though more than one is a loyal Pyotr man who has no idea that he carries treason in a coded scroll inside a bottle case.

  Winter is so damned good at what he does he employs a Purity fanatic in his outer office, a lieutenant from the old Waldstätte world of Uri. He’s utterly and sincerely devoted to Pyotr yet too naïve in his own loyalty to realize that his boss is a traitor. He’s going to pay with his life for mistake. It’s just not clear yet if it will be the Resistance that kills him or the Kempeitai.

  ***

  In Year Three, victories are fewer, farther apart, even as casualties grow more numerous and unsustainable. The war is grinding down Grün morale and matériel, wearing out Imperium resolve. Rikugun and Kaigun are still everywhere fighting on or in control of farfolk worlds. Yet, belief in inevitability of victory is gone. Daurans are also still in occupation of Alliance worlds captured in the first year of the war. No one outside the Hermit Empire knows what’s happening there. Rumor is that whole populations are disappearing like sand through Jahandar’s gnarled fingers. That wouldn’t surprise anyone, although no one actually knows. Still, it must be terrible.

  Otherwise, the Dual Powers are sputtering in military futility, especially on Amasia and 17 other worlds where snaking black walls have replaced mobility, and the convoy battles overhead are still being decided. If one navy loses, ground force defeat will follow. As night follows day. Worse, signs are growing that the Alliance is recovering, actualizing latent military power, raising fresh divisions, building a hundred times a hundred thousand new war machines. It’s readying for offense on Amasia and elsewhere, maybe not in Year Four but certainly after that. Rikugun assures Old Families and other social pillars of the Old Order that it’s confident of final victory. That it will hold fast on Amasia and elsewhere, then launch a great offensive that reaches even to the far western stars. Sons and fathers home on leave sometimes let the truth slip out instead.

  “They have a big one planned.”

  “They always have a big one planned.”

  “It’s always the same one as before.”

  “It’s another reason to make a coup.”

  “Quiet! Don’t say it out loud.”

  “They might bloody hear us!”

  Some players in the coming blood drama wear dark jade robes and venerate ancient texts and prophesies. Others dress in mouse gray and pretend to a new revelation written in strands of DNA. More wear dull Rikugun green inlaid with gold braid, or strut on warship bridges in brighter Kaigun green-and-white. They think they’re the main defenders of civilization in Orion. They don’t recognize that they are the barbarians; don’t see savage eyes looking back at them from every mirror as they meet in secret, conspiring on war and murder in the dark.

  Everyone knows that if Amasia should fall, Purity will be hurled into instant crisis. In its fatal thrashings it could take down all the Imperium, plunging its hundreds of hurt worlds into civil war. Everyone knows that the Alliance will then come for revenge and retribution. Come to home systems of the Imperium, once they see the awful things Purists have done to occupied Alliance worlds and citizens. How it stole so many children and murdered so many “useless eaters.” Everyone knows that Prime Minister Briand promised hard war and a hard end to the war when he came into office, nearly four years ago. He said it in his maiden speech, when the Alliance was still losing everywhere. He said it in every meeting and speech he ever made after that. “He probably says it in his fucking sleep!”

  Grünen laughed at Briand’s weakness back then, during the early war Alliance collapse, when Eagle Claws twin offensives ended in catastrophe. They dismissed his threats as idle boasting, as the feeble utterances of a failed enemy empire and civilization to which their armies and fleets were delivering the lethal cuts. More and more believe him now. They know the tide is turning. Already fighting is bogged down, a stalemate stretching over half the Orion spur. If it goes on, might the Imperium actually lose? More and more Grünen have that secret doubt. Not a majority, not yet. But enough that Onur is again encouraged to attempt a coup.

  It’s Amasia that does it. The long black walls, the eternal dying of men and machines in the Yue ming, the growing demand by the Moloch of War for more slurry men and wasted treasure. Worse, the tactics of resistance that Alliance forces are perfecting there are carried to other worlds holding back the Rikugun, where smaller versions of the black and calculated defensive war are blunting stubborn officer insistence on always attacking. On never relenting or retreating. Butcher-and-bolt raids and commando missions by White Sails fleet are carrying destruction and bloody mayhem deeper into Imperium space. The raids and deliberately savage assaults add to deepening fear at Rikugun and Kaigun Main HQs. They gloom every meeting of the Great General Staff. They enrage Pyotr, who thrashes wildly in frustration in his stone bubble chambers. They frighten Old Families and confuse loyal officers trying to fight as best they can.

  “If we’re winning the war why are there fewer of us in Rikugun officer clubs each month? At my last cohort reunion there were twice as many empty chairs.”

  “Why must I send so many condolence vids to good, decent Kaigun mothers in the Old Families? It’s tearing me apart even more than them.”

  “That woman in command of White Sails is embarrassing our admirals. How can we lose so often to a woman?”

  “How are the bastards getting big raiding parties through our defenses so easily? They kill wantonly, then burn everything. Godsdamn pirates!”

  “Gods, if we can’t stop these small raids, what will happen when they come in full force? How can we stop counterinvasions of our homeworlds?”

  Onur hears variations on the theme from hundreds of division
and corps level commanders who return for R&R on Kestino. Or whom he calls back to meet him on official business, but with ulterior and conspiratorial purpose. Their despair begins to erode his, in the opposite direction. They give him hope that he can again put together a cabal of senior officers who will know what must be done and who have the troops and ships at hand to finally act decisively. He thinks Year Four will be the turning point for the Resistance, one iron die face up or another.

  ***

  It has been nearly two years since Fidan Onur gave the coup order to Major Winter, expecting it to take only one. There are many more these days who say they want to remove Pyotr. It’s not because they object to his pact with Jahandar or to the war on strategic or political or moral grounds. They think that he defers too much to the royal family; that there are too many inept princes made generals or admirals, punching above their weight class and waging the war incompetently. They think they can do better with the Imperium’s armies and fleets, that the war can be won if only the Oetkert extended clan is set aside and the real professionals are allowed to do their jobs. This officer type is follower quality only. They’ll rebel if Onur and the Great General Staff leads and points the way. They’ll be useful once the outcome becomes clear. But they’ll never initiate.

  A dozen admirals say they’ll approve a coup “if it works.” Onur knows from how they say it that they’ll never take the last step into mutiny. As lifelong ship’s captains, they can’t do what must be done. They can’t rise up and hang the captain of the ship of state. After meetings with dozens of admirals, vice admirals, rear admirals, and retired admirals, Onur knows that, more than Rikugun’s generals, leaders of Kaigun believe in absolute command authority. That’s why in Year Four he recruits less senior officers, hastier captains of dreadnoughts, battleships and heavy cruisers. Among men fighting daily in the space lanes, he finds Kaigun officers who are ready to do what must be done.

  They see deteriorating conditions in the big shipyards where broken hulks defy repair. They tense each time they ply the convoy routes, under ever greater harassment by Alliance phantoms and raider fleets like White Sails. They see the Alliance naval buildup as portending a massive counterattack within a year or two. That compels them to seek urgent and dire action, so they agree to support Onur’s revived plans for military government. He brings them into the Resistance, even a few whom he suspects only want to move up in rank by using his coup to displace or even kill close rivals.

  Others agree that Pyotr is blocking all chance at needed reform. They say that he must go, but hold back from personally joining the conspiracy. They’re restrained by a deeper cultural loyalty, and by solemn commission oaths. They believe they can’t act against the Jade Throne, no matter what. They’re torn between loyalty to an oath to obey the Imperator and core professional pride.

  Not Fidan Onur.

  Not anymore.

  Not other officers.

  More are ready to act.

  More are ready to kill.

  The time is ripe for a coup.

  Onur’s views have evolved toward the radical. He so despises Pyotr for what he’s doing that he no longer cares if an Oetkert sits on the Jade Throne after Pyotr dies. He deems it unimportant to maintain the unbroken royal succession, dating back fifteen centuries. Stopping the damn war overcomes all tradition. He’ll take a different path. He’ll declare martial law instead, then lead a military government. In his rage against Pyotr and war, he’ll bring the whole Imperium down. Like the Nazirite Sampson in the temple of the Philistines, if he can destroy his enemies it won’t matter if he, too, is buried under the rubble that he’ll make.

  ***

  Onur has difficulty persuading Old Family officers who want to save the system, not overthrow it. They still believe they can work it from the inside, if only the Great General Staff will assert more operational authority. If only Pyotr can be restrained. But eliminated? Too radical for most.

  “Sideline our incompetent emperor, but don’t kill him or put him on public trial. This is not some decadent democracy or minor power. We are an empire. We must preserve the dignity of the Jade Throne.” That’s the majority view among top level, older officers he secretly approaches. They’re useless, halfway men. He’s frustrated past words by their thick moral intransigence.

  “We’ve already had that debate,” he tells Major Winter. “We’ll have to find our coup leaders in other men, officers who are willing to act.”

  The first generation of Resisters were conservatives and traditionalists like Onur, who feared that a Great War must go on too long against an enemy that will only recover from the initial blow and gain strength, and that the war surely will be lost. They fear military defeat will crater the class values and stiff hierarchical social system that they know and support, having been born into silvered clouds at its summit. It was top aristocrats from the oldest, most conservative regiments who lent him his earliest, most reliable support. They were the first to agree to kill the monarch. It was an irony only war could make. But too many backed away from his plot during the “smooth period” of early success, mainly from greed.

  They came to terms with the war when it looked like it would be won. They looked away from restoring the Old Order to instead finding a way to fit into the New Order, to gain huge estates for their families from so many conquered farfolk worlds. So now Onur lies to them. When these fickle men raise objections to his idea of a military government, he says that his declaration of martial law “will be provisional. We’ll hold power only as long as necessary, to secure the succession of the rightful dynastic line.” He doesn’t mean it. When he speaks of Pyotr and the dynasty in private to Oscar Winter, he sounds like a guildsman bent on radical overthrow of the whole social order. Not the respected head of an Old Family with over 100,000 dāsa slaving under overseers on his own estates.

  ***

  The second wave of Resistance recruits have different motives from the old conservatives who first supported Onur. For the first time, he hears another reason why younger officers especially want to join the Resistance. He can’t personally identify at first, even having seen firsthand the kinds of things that upset them, as he did when he toured ground sites and burned out cities after the final assault that he led back on Aral during the Krevan War. After all, he ordered extreme reprisals and strict martial law imposed on all the conquered Krevan worlds. He’s not easily moved by tales of farfolk suffering, or the Grün Imperium’s responsibility for it.

  Yet, this is a man who listens, actually listens, to what he hears. And as he listens, Fidan Onur suffers a conversion. He recognizes in the angst of fellow officers, men of honor and conscience who come to see him straight from the front lines, a renewed hope for restoring something good in the Imperium. He hears about the loss of honor that haunts all the military, even a loss of soul by its officers and men. So he sets out to recruit a new and better class of Resistance leaders. Officers and high civil servants from occupation governments who are morally damaged and dismayed by the way this merciless war is being waged, partly on his orders. Men come to see him whose personal codes demand they do something to stop the war. They are few in number, but heavy in presence.

  The most effective argument, the motivation that sways Onur to accelerated action, combines both motives: restoring honor to the Imperium while saving it from total defeat and humiliation. It comes together in a single conversation when a division commander from Amasia says to him: “Rikugun is hungry for pillage. Behind the black, civilian women and children in our occupation zones are starving, yet we fan men out in infernal columns and forcibly take what little they have left, leaving most civilians to die.”

  “That’s the nature of war, general.”

  “As we are now waging it, perhaps, field marshal. But must it be this way?”

  Onur hears this question from frontline commanders more often early in Year Four, in these days of protracted stalemate in the war. He gives the same answer to a troubled general he
gave to others in Year One and Year Two and Year Three, but he doesn’t get the same acquiescence. “We can’t get enough through to the surface of Amasia with our convoys alone. Ordnance and replacement parts and men are top priority. Food is secondary. We must requisition it.”

  “Yes, I understand. But if you could see…”

  “You know that it was I who gave orders to Rikugun to live-off-the-land on all the occupied worlds?”

  “Yes, I do. But do you, field marshal, know the full consequences of your order? Do you know not just what it’s doing to the enemy, but what it’s doing to us, to our men and civilization?” The general looks pained, almost in tears.

  “General, we have no choice. Our moon base and LP system defenses have improved, but so have the enemy’s, alongside his attack capabilities. Our in-system lanes are more contested with each passing month. Frankly, the Alliance is growing in naval and raider strength faster than we are in defenses.”

  “I know all that, field marshal. But you can’t imagine what this hard war is doing to our men, to their character I mean. They’re acting like exterminators, not as soldiers. Even the Women's Combat Brigades descend into savagery. It’s a war without pity or garlands down there.”

  “The women, too? Not just our men?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen it firsthand.”

  “What, for example?”

  “They shoot whole families over a river fish or a loaf of bread or some flour. They kick them into the winter nights to freeze. They massacre them needlessly, often shooting the children first.”

  “It’s as bad as that?”

  “Yes. And worse. I’ve seen much worse. What are we doing to our society if even our women act like beasts? Is this who we are or want to be?”