Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  He’s triggered by the pattern he detects in the bohr haze. He knows that it says someone on Kestino is a very clever spider indeed, sitting at the center of a huge orb web connected to many lesser webs, linked by silvery threads of virtually undetectable secret communications. But like any cobweb, once seen it’s easily broken. It’s a good thing for the Resistance that Hans Schuler is no longer loyal to Rikugun or Pyotr, or working for counterintelligence or the Kempeitai secret police. Because he’s exactly right. He found it. He sees Major Oscar Winter in the white noise. He knows Field Marshal Fidan Onur’s great secret. If he was a Loyalist, he’d expose this whole raft of coms networks that is the Resistance. ‘I have to talk to him. I have to tell Onur about God’s Plan for the Cosmos. I have to tell him to Make Ready for Paradise Morning.’

  Fragile.

  Secret.

  Aimless.

  Adrift.

  Focused.

  Enthused.

  Enlightened.

  He has made a heroic voyage from boyhood into manhood, from carefree youth to worried citizenship, from madness into metaphysics, curling back to madness but with God in tow. Now is his anointed hour. Now, he will act with Cosmic purpose.

  ‘Morning has broken on a New Day.’ He sings it as he rises, a Hymn to All Creation. He knows his god has chosen him out of all the hundreds of billions. He knows that it’s time to act. He knows what he must do. Hans Schulen takes a medical leave and heads to Kestino “to see a specialist.” He gets there on a cargo hauler in a return convoy, limping back from Amasia with one-third ship losses. He doesn’t bring his dogs. He makes an exception for his visit to Field Marshal Fidan Onur, reflecting that they’re nearly as large as the Little General. They look with baleful longing as he leaves them behind on Amasia, sensing that they’ll never see him again. Not knowing what is to become of them. He’s not worried about them at all. He’s going to save the Cosmos for them.

  ***

  Arriving in Novaya Uda, he heads into the Great General Staff building and seeks direct entry to Fidan Onur’s office, saying that he carries a hand deliver only message from his general in Xiamen on Lemuria to the GGS Chief of Staff. He faked the letter before he left. Or rather, he faked the outer shell of a coded scroll. The inside is totally blank. He stands with the office door closed behind him, a bright, beaming smile creasing his broad face, an empty scroll in his right hand. He’s not armed. He’s smiling almost wildly as Onur looks up, puzzled.

  “Yes? You have a message for me?”

  Hans blurts out what he needs to say with the swift bluntness of youth and madness, a brash missionary zeal Onur has only ever seen in the faces of fanatic postulants and acolytes of Maximilian Kahn. “I’m going to assassinate Pyotr! I need your help, Field Marshal Onur.”

  “My heavens, colonel. What are you talking about? How dare you burst in here and propose treason to my face? Shall I call my guards, or shoot you down myself?” Onur makes a show of drawing his pistol, but hesitates. Hans Schulen would not be the first agent provocateur Rikugun MI or Takeshi Watanabe sent his way, to test his loyalty to the war and Pyotr’s regime. But there’s something very different about this one. A kind of glowing honesty.

  “Why would you do that? I’m going to kill Pyotr for you!”

  “For me? Are you mad?”

  “Why, I don’t think so. Quite the contrary. I see things so very clearly now!”

  “What things?” Onur is tense as a cat on a hot carbyne roof. He still has his hand on his holster, but he doesn’t raise the flap.

  “The emperor must die if the Imperium is to live. With Pyotr gone it will thrive and revive. Then it will be safe for them.”

  ‘What an odd duck!’ Onur removes his hand from his holster and eases back in his chair. “Is there anything else you want to say to me?”

  “Yes. All dog eaters must die! Filthy murderers!”

  Onur thinks Hans is cursing, that by ‘dog cookers’ he means cads and regime criminals. He doesn’t. He means Daurans. He means literal dog eaters. He knows that starving troops at the Dauran Gate on north Lemuria ate the last suicide dogs when the program was cancelled. It seems that several trained to attack DRA armtraks ran under those instead of ACU tanks. Onur gambles. “You had best sit down and tell me what it is you want.”

  “I came to say, don’t worry about activating your coup first. Wait until I kill him, then you can start the ball rolling toward the candlepins. Innovate in the chaos his death will bring. Since you alone will know it’s coming, you can take best advantage and move quickly.” After two more blunt and direct approaches, and two more weak deflections, Onur drops the pretense that he has no idea what Hans is talking about. He has no other working plan, and the war goes evermore badly. He’s prepared to listen even to this madman, really listen.

  Besides, it’s hard to deny when the young man trembling with excitement in front of him has just described, down to the last detail, the whole Resistance coms network that he and Winter built up over three years. It’s listen, or shoot Hans and denounce him as a traitor. “We tried meticulous planning and we failed. Maybe it’s time to give chaos a chance. But we mustn’t discuss this here. Even my study may not be safe from Pyotr’s ears. Meet me in an hour, over at the ROC.”

  ***

  “I’ll take him out, field marshal. I guarantee it. Then you can do some open field running and carry the mercury ball over the line.” They’re sitting at a plain wood table in a backroom. Onur hates sports metaphors, so he ignores this one. Hans’ constant canine references and apparent fixation with dogs interests him more, as he’s a dog lover himself. But he also pushes aside the dog metaphors.

  “How will you do it? His palace security is much tighter now than before the war, ever since two drunken idiots tried to walk through his front door with a grenade in their pocket. Tighter also since we failed to take him out on parade day. We’ve looked into his new security assets and protocols. I can’t see a way through. Major Winter can’t see a way either, so that means there is none.”

  “I won’t kill him there.”

  “Then where? He hardly ever leaves the palace, not since that bomb killed so many of The Admitted.”

  “I’ll do it when he travels to the recovered Lost Children, as he announced he’ll do on the fifth anniversary of the Krevan Outrage.”

  “You mean Bad Camberg? OK, counting the Krevan War as starting nearly a year earlier than the war with the Alliance, that means both anniversaries are upcoming this year that just turned, Year Four of the Liberation War?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting. We should have thought of that ourselves.”

  “He’ll be more vulnerable when he moves offworld.”

  “Again, interesting. But to which world will he go, colonel? And when?”

  “His chief of security signaled to three planetary governors, at core secret level, that he’ll visit either Aral or Genève or Acis.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I read it in the neb clouds, the same way I found you.”

  “More and more interesting. Go on, son.”

  “I also know the dates Pyotr’s people gave the governors. They correspond to the anniversaries of the fall of those planets to our Liberation Armies. Genève was first to fall. Aral and then Acis fell in the same week, four days apart.”

  “You can’t set up on all three without drawing too much suspicion. So, there’s at best a one-in-three chance you can pull this off. How will you choose?”

  “He’ll go to Aral. I’ll be there waiting for him. With your help, I’ll kill him at the anniversary speech and land distribution ceremony in Yalto.”

  “How do you know that he’ll choose Aral?”

  “The other two are planted cover stories. He’ll never go to either.”

  “Why are you so sure?” Onur restrains from asking if the gods have spoken to Hans, to tell him the place and date where he’ll encounter destiny. He’s more than half afraid that the answer will be yes,
and he doesn’t want to hear that. He wants to believe this strange, sudden chance can work. So he says nothing.

  “Pyotr is a coward. The radiation levels from Kaigun nuking parts of Acis are still too high. He won’t risk it.”

  “Yes, I believe that must be right. And Genève? No nukes were used there.”

  “They haven’t fixed the only Genève elevator yet, even after the Kempeitai executed the first three Liberation Governors for their failure. Pyotr will not take a shuttle lander to the surface. He’s too vain, and too fat to handle the Gs.”

  ‘This man appears mad to me, and yet his analysis is lucid. Besides, where we failed to move fleets and armies, one man unafraid to die might just succeed. What is there to lose?’ “Why will you attempt this thing? And why now?”

  “Sir, the crimes we’re carrying out will sully our reputation for generations. Not to speak of the unspeakable Daurans! I can no longer live with so much sin on my conscience. I know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and how to do it. I just need a little help, from you and from God. Him I am sure about. But I needed to come here to talk to you, face-to-face.”

  Onur knows that so far he has failed, that the Resistance has failed. That he can’t convince enough senior officers to join an assassination and coup. That although many agree in principle, or at least say the war is being run badly, they raise practical objections, cite their loyalty oaths, say one should not betray one’s star nation in the midst of a great war for its survival. They say that if they agree to kill Pyotr and remove SAC from any influence over war policy, the fronts might collapse on dozens of worlds. They say that civil war might break out if the coup is not airtight and complete. They say maybe Pyotr can win, and that they prefer to ride the tiger with him. They’ll not act. Or at least, most won’t.

  “Alright, proceed. Get the travel and planetary landing authorization you need from Major Oscar Winter. I’ll make contingency coup plans here, in the event your assassination attempt on Aral succeeds.”

  Hans stands up, salutes, then turns sharply and strides out the door of the drab ROC, to go do bright red murder on a far off world. Onur thinks that he’s going to fail, that he won’t be able to kill Pyotr. But also that this is a very brave, if also quite mad, dead man who salutes him.

  The soft spoken Little General returns to his study and starts to organize military resistance cells. He issues orders to reposition units commanded by his most trusted men, moving them to bases nearer to Kestino from where they can fly in putsch troops on tight notice. The list is short, men and ships insufficient to the task. But he and Winter agree, it’s their best chance in three years.

  “Do it! Send out the orders, get all our available forces ready and in attack position.”

  “Yes sir. Every asset that can reach us in time will be in strike position three days before the anniversary of the fall of Aral. That’s ten days from today.”

  “Will it be enough, major?”

  “Only if the good colonel succeeds, sir.”

  “Agreed. If Pyotr dies, we have a chance. If not, we die.”

  “He won’t insist you accompany him, sir? You were in command at the surrender.”

  “He won’t want me under the limes with him, not on that stage. No, I’ll be left behind. I’ll be here at GGS, running the coup plan with you.”

  ***

  Hans travels on special orders signed by Oscar Winter. He arrives at Yalto a week before Pyotr’s escort fleet pulls in. He goes straight to Admiral Hussein Adamu, head of the local Resistance cell. Onur gave him the contact, but Hans already knew about the admiral from watching coms traffic back on Amasia. He procures a superior sniper rifle from Adamu and without adieu takes position in a Life Temple steeple, with a clear view of the parade square where Pyotr will speak on the anniversary of the hurried flight of the War Government into permanent exile. He settles in to wait.

  “The wasp is in position.” Adamu sends the double encrypted, tumbler coded signal to Onur. It floats down to Kestino inside the message cloud where Hans Schulen saw the shape of the Resistance and the Face of God.

  Adamu is a calm, outwardly unimpressive man of less-than-average height and slight build. Over the years, his seeming physical inadequacy endeared him to Pyotr, who pushed him ahead of more senior officers. It was the short thing again. Tallness irks Pyotr. He also rose on native talent. Adamu excelled as a light cruiser squadron leader at the Genève Obliteration, and again a few months later in near orbit combat during an Exodus run by an ad hoc flotilla called Alpha. Nine small warships under Captain Magda Aklyan broke past the orbital patrol led by the heavy cruiser KG Magni, and raced for the outer system. Adamu abandoned the chase to the Zerstörer escort so that he could take KG Dagr scudding along the Genèven atmosphere in a tight rescue mission, grappling the spinning wreck of light cruiser Loki. He saved hundreds of men, and the hulk of the warship.

  Dagr was transferred out-of-system with other capital ships after the Toruń City shields came down and Genève was overrun by Rikugun. Sent to reinforce the warfleet at Aral then under Onur’s overall command, Adamu was in the middle of the final assault and hard resisted dropship landings. Next he fought in the running gunfight Kaigun calls Yalto Exodus. He nearly died from severe burns when a near miss plasma blossom took out half his Bridge, leaving Dagr a listing ruin. He nearly died during planetside recovery, too, in a confiscated hospital in the smoking ruins of Yalto. Pyotr decorated him, promoted him to admiral, and appointed him Aral planetary governor. He stayed there ever since, in part to try to ameliorate the worst aspects of the occupation, tempering roughneck Rikugun behavior toward civilians. He doesn’t always succeed.

  He was told that burns and stiff scars precluded a return to active command for at least a year. Three years later, he still has massive scarring that covers half his back and neck. He’s very high on the list for cosmetic repairs but keeps letting common, and commoner, soldier wounded slip ahead of him. “What does it matter if I’m First Caste and Old Family? I sit behind a land desk planetside these days. And I’m not in any pain. They’ll get to me in time. Let the young private go first.”

  He dresses every day in spotless whites, but leaves off as much Kaigun gold braid as he can get away with. He never wears the gaudy Order of Andromeda Pyotr sent him, along with a personally signed commendation scroll. Ever since his wounding, he wears very old fashioned, silver wire spectacles that give him a scholarly, even owl-like appearance. They befit his antiquarian tastes, values and views. He looks like a schoolmaster to younger Resistance officers who gather around him to listen and learn. A few also seek fatherly advice. Some fear to speak truth to their real fathers because they don’t want to bring wrath down upon their families. Others fear to do so because they’re sure their hard fathers would inform on them to the Kempeitai, without a second thought given to their torment and execution, or to their mourning mothers’ and sisters’ lamentations.

  Adamu’s cell did not begin as a cabal of plotters. It started as a social network, bringing together the best and brightest young officers from Old Families. Now, all are idealistic critics of the regime. Alienated from Loyalists in the officer corps, they find in Adamu’s nascent organization a sense of belonging to a higher cause and better society. Each time they return to Aral system, for their shore leave or on a courier or other mission, they head straight for his quarters and huddle together, sharing secrets in the dark.

  They hate and oppose the war.

  It stains their honor as officers

  It pricks their consciences as men.

  It provokes their sense of moral duty.

  It teaches that decency resides in betrayal.

  It says they can no longer serve Pyotr.

  It will make them murderers and martyrs.

  They’re furious that not just SAC but Rikugun troops carry out massacres and other atrocities on occupied worlds. It started with killing prisoners of war, but hate and crime is spreading everywhere inside the military, to mistreatmen
t of civilian women, of children and the old; anyone deemed a ‘useless eater.’ They see the war corrupting all they value in their traditional officer code of honor, in family upbringings that taught them noblesse oblige, in the truth of Imperium justice they once genuinely believed they served in Kaigun or Rikugun.

  No one outside his cell doubts Adamu’s loyalty. He is a lifelong monarchist, a loyal officer severely wounded in dedicated service to the emperor. At one time, he was loyal to Pyotr. Before the Krevan War he met one of Onur’s men, who approached him to feel out his political views. Asked if he would bring his light cruiser squadron into active conspiracy, order his ships to back a coup, he bellowed: “How dare you suggest it to me! Turn against my sovereign? Break my oath? Never! Get out, before I report you to the Kempeitai as a traitor!” He went before his officers and said: “Whatever whispers you hear, I need you to stand foursquare by Pyotr, our Emperor. Do your duty to the Imperium, to your ships and crews. The ideals of Kaigun are one with Pyotr Shaka III. They are ideals of honor and duty, of courage, preparation, commitment and sacrifice. We officers of Kaigun have a duty to the noble heritage of the empire. We must help Pyotr help the Imperium to restore the dignity and glory of its past.”