by Kali Altsoba
“No, this is terrible news! I must confess, you’re not the first to relay it, but none have said it so vividly before. And you are the first to tell me the corruption has spread into the WCBs.”
““Pyotr forced us into this war, but war is revealing us for what we really are. Once the mask drops, we’ll shudder to see what we are become.”
“I agree, general. It is a terrible thing.”
“I can’t live with it. I know my family won’t. Should I ever return to them, I don’t know how I will look my wife and children in the face, for they will see what I have done on Amasia in mine, and be repulsed.”
“What would you have me do, general?”
“Stop this awful war, before it’s not worth winning. Make your coup, field marshal. Make it soon, before it’s too late. Though it may be already.”
“Thank you for your candor, general. I shall think on what you report. It’s very important that I hear these things, being so far behind the lines as I am, as we all are, here on Kestino.”
“I would like to say one more thing, if I may.”
“By all means. You’ve come a long way. Speak your mind freely, general.”
“Leaving aside the morality of these things we do, I tell you with certainty that our tactics are going to guarantee defeat.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re making more and harder enemies every day.”
“You’re too cryptic. Tell me why this is so. Explain.”
“Men and women from the occupation zones are fleeing our pitilessness into the vastness of Amasia. They’re taking up arms, fighting to the death in isolated rear areas because we offer them death in every case if they stay. And they’re organizing. Enemy skyforces swarm over DT in numbers we can’t stop, dropping coms, food and weapons to these ‘Maquis,’ as they call themselves.”
“You have a rear area guerilla problem. Almost all the liberated worlds do as well.”
“I’m talking about Amasia. Have you been? No? Lemuria is immense! The guerillas have camoed camps at almost division size, inside the northern forests and southern lake districts.”
“How can they be so big?”
“They fit the land. They blend into its vastness.”
“Even so…”
“And since last year there are deep tunnels under the black, in all sectors. They run beneath The Sandbox deserts, Tornado Alley, under the Great Plains grasslands, even below the high and low arctic tundras.”
“Block them.”
“We can’t. Some run three or five klics deep, we think, before branching and resurfacing on our side of the black.”
“How is that possible? How could so much digging be done undetected?”
“They don’t use machines, sir. The tunnels are bored out nearly silently, by huge biodiggers.”
“Through rock?”
“These are new, sir. From Argos, we think.
“I’ve seen an intelligence report. Advanced living tek, yes? MI didn’t think it was possible, or that it didn’t matter much if it was.”
“MI never thinks what happens in the line matters much. MI has its head up its butt. It’s too interested in catching Alliance spies and chasing down deserters in the noncombat rear areas.”
“I don’t disagree. It’s easier than predicting future enemy ops and intentions, then paying the piper’s price for being wrong.”
“MI asks for digger reports, sir. We record things with basic seismographs and down facing listening posts, but we have no tek to map how roots grow.”
“You tried?”
“Even amplified, they sound like underground wind. Or maybe forest branches creaking in the night. And who can track a breeze or say which branch is groaning under the burden of living?”
“So tell me what MI hasn’t said to me. Other than the obvious, why does this matter?”
“We have no comparable capacity. No biodiggers and far more important, no chance to tie down their forces by encouraging rear area guerilla warfare. There’s no friendly population to support us, whereas our behavior is turning even their old women into spies and guerillas.”
“Difficult and annoying yes, but to be expected as a normal operating cost of an incomplete conquest. Surely this is not a strategic threat to our overall position on Amasia?”
“Given the size of the effort, it might be. Tunnels extend their combat effort to our side of the black. It’s possible that before long they might move regular troops and armtraks and ‘the big mouthed flute’ underneath, that’s the artillery, sir, to set up firebases behind our black.”
“How soon, do you think?”
“Not soon, not this year or maybe next. But it’s coming. Already Maquis number in the several hundred thousand. One day, there’ll be far more. Already they attack food trucks, blow holes in maglev tubes, ambush our supply troops, carry out butcher raids in R&R and support areas. Spotters call in long range missile and arti strikes on our best hidden dumps. They report on any buildup we make before we attack, and say where the attack is going. We can hardly move without their reporting and guiding in arti or skyforce interdiction.”
“I don’t see that as more than serious harassment, at the tactical level. These are just irregulars. They cannot pose a strategic threat to our position.”
“Field Marshal Onur, 90% of the Maquis is dormant. Their commanders on the other side of the black will not activate them until the Alliance is ready to launch its main offensive to retake all Lemuria. When they do, we could have an army of a million or more already behind our triple walls. Many divisions worth of masers will fire into the backs of our troops. They’ll have artillery and skycraft support we can no longer match. Bottom line? We’ll lose Amasia.”
“If it’s really that bad… What’s your recommendation, general?”
“I already gave it. Make your coup! Do it before our name as a people is a byword for murder and vileness across Orion. For when that day arrives, when Amasia falls and the enemy sees what we’ve done there, finds what lies buried behind our black walls and in coastal camps, they’ll never agree to negotiate. They’ll demand our unconditional surrender. They’ll come at our homeworlds hurling novas of death and vengeance. Make your coup, I beg you.”
***
By the end of Year Three, more plotters in the Onur group are convinced that Pyotr must die. It’s that or the coup d’état, and revival of traditional values in the Imperium, can’t move forward. The decision to commit irrevocably to tyrannicide comes easily for some, harder for most, but eventually to all. The last holdouts object from practical concerns. In the end, it’s mostly Pyotr’s arrogance and war mismanagement that brings plotters into line. Too many men of conscience have died on his torture tables rather than give up names of their fellow conspirators. The war is going too badly, the tide may even be turning. No one argues for his arrest and trial. All want him gone. All want him dead.
“Our dead are owed a blood debt,” Onur says. No one disagrees. “We’re going to extract it from our emperor’s veins and drain it from the throats of his toadies in the Kempeitai and Sakura-kai.” Not even Major Winter has heard the Little General speak so coldly and cruelly. He speaks for the changing times. More and more officers, even outside the conspiracy, hate the rotund emperor with a passion equaling or exceeding their hatred for the enemy. They despise his refusal to replace the worst Oetkerts in high commands. They hate that he makes them carry out willful orders by his witless relatives, because he’s too weak to take them on directly. They hate that men die daily for this corrupt reason.
They know the war is starting to turn. They see the terrible production bottlenecks of essential war matériel building to their rear, and see a massive Alliance buildup everywhere in front. They know the weight of war casualties is unevenly distributed, with some Imperium worlds more burdened and harder taxed than others. They know Pyotr’s regime is utterly corrupt and worse, inept. The officer corps as a whole is not yet saying this openly, but the mood and w
ill is swinging fast. Away from rote loyalty, toward replacing Pyotr before he loses the war for the Imperium. It’s not an especially moral position these men take. In fact, morality hardly enters into it at all, outside the core of the conspiracy centered around Winter and Onur. Yet, hardening will and the swing in feeling toward removing the military problem on the Jade Throne can kill Pyotr just as dead.
***
Fighting is essentially stalemated, on world after world. The war is grown stagnant, only with casualties atrociously higher and seemingly more senseless by the week. Prospects for ground advances are fading by each passing month. Every Alliance world that remains unconquered is more massively defended than before. Counterattacks on divided worlds are more common than before. In cities and forests and swamplands on occupied planets and moons, an enemy resistance is rising and becoming more brutal, matching Rikugun massacres with Alliance atrocities. Irregulars are learning to harass and harry, sabotage supplies, tie down Rikugun reserves, mutilate and murder straggler boys.
Daurans are more a burden than a boon. Their fleets are mostly outdated, their armies massive but unreliable and ineptly led, especially on Amasia. They hold down the area around the Dauran Gate but make no advance across the black. And not even Pyotr knows what they’re doing on worlds they occupy with no Rikugun around to see. Overall, the Dual Powers have shot their bolt on offense. They have lost strategic initiative, though it hasn’t yet been regained by their Alliance enemy. The war is in stalemate everywhere on the ground, though the tide is clearly turning to the enemy’s favor in the ongoing naval war.
Hope for negotiations from a position of Imperium strength slip away, as offworld spies report a hardening of hatred and resolve across Alliance systems. Reports come in daily from the fighting zones of more terrible atrocities, made by one side and then by the other. Onur and Winter feel a quickening urgency. A coup d’état is needed soon, or even if it succeeds it will have no chance to save the internal character of the Imperium. Onur and the putschists must act now, they must alter the trajectory of the Fourth Orion War. They all agree on that, at last. What they don’t know is that other actors inside the Imperium have come to the same conclusion, and are moving to preempt them.
Neaira
Lasalle Five is so tightly fit inside the elite on Novaya Uda she hears even Resisters whisper to each other at soirées, or talk far too loudly after too much drink at a state dinner. She sleeps with many more than one, listening to angry and boastful pillow talk. About how a general will be the new governor of this system or that one, or how another will rise to the Great General Staff once a coup reveals him for the hidden talent he knows that he is. She purrs and pets them, strokes and prompts, teases and goads. Men will say almost anything once she has them in her black silk bed.
She hears them speak forcefully of replacing Pyotr with martial law, even a full military government. How they’ll purge and ban the Broderbund and disassemble the secret cabal of Sakura-kai. How for the good of the realm they must repress political parties that will form in the vacuum after Pyotr’s death, whatever their ideology may be. “We in the natural elite must rule whatever comes after the fatman, for the good of the Imperium and the common people.” They say that they’ll “make a just peace” with the Alliance, yet still somehow manage to keep all the occupied worlds for the Imperium when it’s signed.
“Will it be a victor’s peace?” she asks, batting faux innocent eyes adoringly at a senior general who just rolled off her, who’s boasting about how he plans to retire to a great estate he’ll carve from occupied Jocasta after the war. It’s a bucolic agrarian world, easily taken in the first wave of invasions that began the Fourth Orion War. It’s already annexed to the Imperium. The land he looked at used to belong to the family of General Gaspard François Marie Leclerc.
“It’s a good phrase! Yes, why not, Neaira?”
That’s her cover name, which she cheekily took to honor the most famous of Greek courtesans. Lasalle Five thinks that’s amusing, given the licentious nature of her covert persona. No one who grew up with her on Helena would recognize the shy, pretty girl she was back then. Not in this raven seductress.
“Is conquest just?”
“If we’re the victors, of course it is!”
“Winning makes it all right, the war and the annexations?”
“My dear! Why of course our might makes us right in this war, as it does in peace and all politics! What else matters in war or life except winning? Really, I thought you were smarter than that, to ask me such a dull question.”
“I’m so sorry, general. Forgive me. I really have no head for these things. More wine? It’s a deep red, from Zug.”
“Women and politics! They just don’t mix. I don’t know how the Alliance survives. Perhaps we should make it a condition of the peace settlement that they revoke female political rights. After all, once we’re in charge we’ll have to make some basic changes when it comes to their women.”
He’s not kidding. Nor is it the first time that she’s heard such misogynist musings from one of her covert marks. It’s pretty much standard fare, riven through the Upper Castes and the officer corps, underwritten by 1,500 years of rank misogyny taught by the Brethren and the Black Faith. Whether Loyalist or Resistance, it makes no difference. None of them, not even the best of them, believe in women as players, only as playthings. It’s the thing she hates most about the Imperium. It’s the thing that she knows will be hardest to change. It will take more than a coup d’état by these or any men. It will take a revolution.
***
One evening, a civilian brought into the Resistance to advise on the network of provincial and planetary government systems speaks naïvely to Neaira about a “majestic Grün Confederation” he proposed to Onur to replace the Imperium after the coup succeeds. Rumor has it, or so the man tells her himself, that he has Onur’s ear; that his confederal idea is racing to the finish line on the inside track of all Resistance thinking. That’s why Lasalle Five invites him to come home with her, to find out more about his brave new Thousand Worlds.
“It will be a grand federation of autonomous planets, of all worlds great and small,” he gushes to her, “with full authority to decide their own local affairs in their own true interest.”
“How will it be defended?” she asks, sitting beside him on a red ottoman, one hand resting lightly on his leg but not quite in his lap, the other one stroking his bald pate. She’s leaning in to him, breathing in kittenish little pants so that her deep cleavage heaves up-and-down and presses outward just where his eyes come to rest on her magnificent, golden breasts.
“Why, by an all volunteer force, organized separately by each planet. Once we make peace with the Calmari, we’ll no longer need great armies and navies. It will be a new Golden Age!”
She kisses him chastely and says “Goodnight” quickly after he tells her that. She decides that he has nothing real or realistic to contribute to the coup plot. She makes excuses not to see him as he pesters her over the next two weeks. Her timing is eerily prescient. Major Winter doesn’t know that the fool went home that night with Neaira, but he worries that he is a habitual blurter who was brought too deeply into the Resistance, and far too fast. Field Marshal Onur comes to the same conclusion around the same time. When the man’s calls stop, Neaira makes a discreet inquiry and learns that he was killed in a terrible hover accident in the inner barrios, where he must have gone to locate a cathouse. She knows how rare his accident is, given control by traffic bots. ‘Better chance of being hit by ball lightning. Onur is more ruthless than I thought. Good.’
***
It’s hard for Calmari intelligence chiefs back on Kars and Caspia to credit that there’s an organized Resistance inside the Grün Imperium. Even less that there are networks of plotters, complex webs of deceit and insurrection, inside the capital itself. Let alone at the very top of the military, in the High Command that has access to Pyotr inside the Waldstätte! Lasalle Five’s reports are so
restricted only the inner War Cabinet sees them. It’s not enough. The politicians say they need confirmation inside certainty. They’re not getting that from other agents.
An undercover has access to Rikugun Onworld HQ on Novaya Bator. It’s one of the centers of the second generation Resistance, spurred by disgust over an unusually harsh occupation governor who persecutes the small community of Old Believers there, one of the last in Orion. The agent misses all of that, but in his defense he was never asked. He reports to SRG on Kars: “The plotters nearly all come from the Grün military elite, from the High Caste and best Old Families. They're not interested in revolution. Their goal is to stop one.”
A more skeptical and blunt CIS agent on Tohoku sends a tight laser dispatch to MoD on Caspia: “They're all murderers and war criminals,” he advises. “We can’t trust them to make any change that matters. And they all support the war.” His words might carry more weight if he did his job properly. It has been four years since the war started and he still hasn’t discovered the big lie that began on his assigned world. He doesn’t know that Takeshi Watanabe set up Sendai Garrison to take the fall for the Bad Camberg ruse, by stealing its warehoused Third Orion War uniforms to dress up and thereby hide his mercs.
Does it matter? It does, if you’re an ordinary Rikugun trooper from Tohoku. Especially if you run into angry Krevans in battle. Any KRA unit hearing that Tohoku troops are facing them across the black cares. Or if it sees them wearing their hated, trademark, out-of-style, forest green utes from the last Orion war to scour the Thousand Worlds. Then the Krevans shout “war criminals!” or “take no prisoners!” as they jump into your gun pit. They mean it, too.
“We surrender! Don’t shoot!”
“Drop your weapons!”
“Get over here, you bastards.”
“Captain! Look, they’re Tohoku.”
“They started this fucking war!”
“Whadda we do, capt’n?”
“Shoot ‘em all.”
Klack! klack! klack! klack! klack! klack!
