by Kali Altsoba
But he did not stop. Pyotr made a vile league with Jahandar the Dread, foulest man to walk the Thousand Worlds. Billions are dead. Farfolk languish and suffer under the miscreant rule of two foul emperors. Hundreds of millions crowd in consolidation camps built on our side of the black on dozens of worlds. Our name as a people is sullied and stained by atrocity. It must stop!
With blood on his hands, reaching out to bloodstained Jahandar, our leader walked the path of madness, leaving behind a trail of tears, grief, agony, and pitiless death. He claimed a phony military genius that promised swift victory, but led us into a stagnant war of awful and endless attrition. He brings privation to our worlds and devastation to our fleets and armies. The brave sacrifices of our men, and now of our young women, too, are being squandered. It must stop!
We, senior officers of the High Command and armies and fleets serving on the field of honor, reject Pyotr Shaka as our ruler. We, the Provisional Military Government, acting in your behalf and in your good name, declare Pyotr Shaka outlaw and dethroned. He is the past. Do not obey him. It must stop!
Long live the Grün Imperium! Long live the brave and honorable men and women of noble Rikugun and courageous Kaigun! Long live liberty and justice on all Grün worlds. Long live a restored peace in the Thousand Worlds. Arise, join with us, reclaim your honor as a people. Reclaim your future in Orion.
Fidan Onur, Field Marshal
Chief of the Great General Staff
Combined Forces, Rikugun and Kaigun
Generalissimo, Provisional Military Government
***
After Oscar Winter leaves his inner study Field Marshal Fidan Onur starts to pray, silently. In a way he hasn’t done in decades. On his knees, face in his hands. With desperation bordering on despair. ‘My gods, I ask for your grace.’
‘You ask us to bless your plots of murder and war among the stars?’
‘Yes. I ask the undeserved favor of the gods in this great moral endeavor, not for myself, it does not matter if I live, but in the matter of the coup. I need your help to redeem the Imperium. I can’t do it alone.’
‘You come to us? You have no faith in men, or yourself, Fidan Onur?’
‘I have not. I lost it at Aral. I lost it in a thousand crimes since then.’
‘Your crimes?’
‘Mine, yes. And all the others.’
‘You know that we cannot absolve you. Absolution is a lie.’
‘I know it. I have always known it. That’s why I went to Oscar Winter for it, who has no power to grant me absolution. It’s why I never asked you.’
‘Then what is it you want from us?’
‘I do not ask for absolution of my past, but for grace in the future.’
‘Grace is a cheap trick we used to play. It will not bring you salvation.’
‘But I thought … I was taught that…’
‘There is no grace. All the old gods are dead. We are dead.’
‘To whom do I speak, if that is so?’
‘We are the Hollow Gods you made. We have no power to intervene. Men and women must act to decide their own fate. Only you may effect the salvation of the Imperium, not by your dead faith but in your living acts.’
‘There is no redeemer, there is only redemption?’
‘If you wish to avoid depravity, get off your knees and make your coup. If you win, you can tell the worlds that we favored you. You’ll be believed by the foolish majority. Make a new lie, and sheep will bleat. That will be good for both of us.’
Onur removes his hands from his face and stands up. He looks more grim. He looks determined. He looks alone, abandoned, worried. Yet also defiant.
***
The next time Oscar Winter arrives in Onur’s office to brief him, he hesitates after he finishes the daily reports, one on the war effort, the other on the coup. He stands pensively, then finally speaks when Onur looks querical.
“Sir, if I may ask? If Pyotr falls, do you think our peoples will rise?”
“I have to believe that they will, or I have been a fool to wear this uniform in their defense all my life. As my father and his father did before me, and my two sons wear it now on Amasia.”
“The peoples will rise, sir. I know they will.”
“Perhaps. I hope you're right, but we can’t count on it.”
“Grünen are a good and fair people.” Winter insists, as much to convince himself as to persuade Onur of what both men suspect: that after three years of brutal war against the Alliance, the evidence suggests it isn’t true at all.
“They may be, major. But only men in uniform acting in the dark of night can give them the chance to show it on the morrow. Plain folk will not decide the outcome of our rising. Only force majeure of an armed group, imposing its will, can do that now. In our system and these troubled times, at this midnight hour, all power and redemption flows down the barrels of our guns.”
“So, it is come to this? We rebel because we want to stop the war, to stop the killing. And yet, we must do more killing toward that goal?”
“We will kill to make peace. They force us to kill them. Therein lies all the moral difference.”
“Some days, it’s hard to see.”
“I confess it. But if we can’t see our way to do it, who will stop this war?”
“Sir, forgive me for asking. But what are your orders if you’re taken before we hear a code word back from Admiral Adamu? Takeshi Watanabe is asking difficult questions. You know that he suspects you, and hence surely me as well. He has his best spies watching us here in GGS.”
“I have long known it. Major, if he comes to arrest me, or if other gray men come in the quiet of the night, you must act alone. I authorize it. I deputize you. If I’m taken, send my communiqué immediately.”
“Start the coup without you?”
“Yes. Do what you can. If they take me, they’ll come for you as well. You must act fast. We can’t lose you and the networks, as well as me. Don’t hesitate. Send the coup orders the moment armed men enter this compound.”
“I’ll carry the code transmitter on my person at all times.”
“Good. Use it to send my last dispatch down all the spokes of our Resistance wheel at the same time. Get the armor rolling and our best troops in front of the palace and into the streets, before they block them off. Bring in reinforcements as you need them, using transport hovers from the Air Cav base at the foot of Black Rock volcano. That’s less than ten klics away.”
“We have enough men to overwhelm SAC Main HQ, if we catch and take them by surprise. If not, there will be heavy fighting along the lakeshore.”
“They’re a major target, but securing control of the palace and securing or killing Pyotr remains the first order of the day.”
“What will the officer corps do sir? On the whole, I mean.”
“Some will join us, but many others will fight hard to put us down.”
“And the troops? What will the rankers do?”
“They’ll follow their officers, on both sides of the barricades.”
“So, you believe there’ll be extensive fighting?”
“Yes. It’s inescapable.”
“It’s what we always feared.”
“We must be ready for heavy bloodshed.”
“We could be starting a civil war, field marshal. In the middle of a far wider, farfolk war. Win or lose, there will be many who call us traitor.”
“I know it, but even that’s better than defeat and desolation of who we are as a people. If saving our honor demands the blood of innocents, among our troops and in our cities, so be it. They shall not be the first innocents to die in Pyotr’s war. Nor I fear, shall they be the last.”
“The faster we strike, sir, the quicker we can win through and seize power in the city, the fewer innocents will be caught in the crossfire.”
“Agreed. Speed and surprise are everything, but there’s one other thing, major. It’s even more important.”
“What, sir?”
&nbs
p; “The honor of the military.”
“Which we shall save by bringing down Pyotr!”
“Yes, but it matters how we do it. That’s why I have a special order for you. Once we hear from Adamu, wait three hours, but no more than that. Give our Resistance a good head start, but then release my communiqué to all Rikugun and Kaigun military units, wherever they’re stationed.”
“But sir, we’ll alert our enemies if I do that!”
“Yes. But it must be done, or even our success will mean nothing.”
“Are you sure, sir? You really mean for me to do it?”
“Yes. We shall alert our enemies, but we may also signal to friends that we don’t yet know we have out there, in the fleets and barracks. We’ll need every possible ally in this high moment.”
“We’ve far fewer friends than enemies in uniform, I think.”
“Maybe. But in the end, those in uniform will decide this question, no matter what we do or when. Besides, this is the only way to discover their true loyalty, to force their hand at long last. It’s up to the armed forces to choose the kind of people we’re going to be, out here among the stars.”
“I don’t trust the officer corps, sir. Not in any branch.”
“Nor do I. Yet they have a right to decide, since they’ll die on both sides of the decision. I’m obliged to offer them a choice. They may yet surprise us all.”
“I doubt it, sir, but I’ll send the delayed communiqué as you order. First to the members of our Resistance, then to the armed forces as a whole.”
Fidan Onur slips into familiar speech, addressing Winter by his given name for the first time, ever: “You know, Oscar, even if our coup fails we still must do this, coûte que coûte. We must act, cost whatever it may, to ourselves, to the war effort, to the Imperium. The point is no longer any practical outcome. It’s important that we succeed, but it’s not the most important thing.”
“What else could be, sir?”
“To prove to the Thousand Worlds, and to all future history, that we in the Resistance have staked our all and put our lives on the line to stop this canker we allowed to grow for too long.”
“You mean, field marshal,” he can’t bring himself to call his venerable boss by his first name, “that even a failed coup will have meaning, despite not ending the regime or stopping the war?”
“I do. You know that we’re going to lose the war. It’s only a matter of time and how many billions must die before the end. The Alliance is too strong to be defeated, and is girding to win. The decisive factor, therefore, is not political success alone but even more to make a moral stand. History must remember that the best of our people acted to stop all this, at the cost of their lives. We must water the rose tree of moral redemption with our own bright, red blood.”
“I never considered that, sir, but I see it, yes I do. We must try to put an end to all the crimes committed in our names and for our people. Even if we fail, it must be recorded that we tried.”
Both men know that Pyotr’s death will release officers, as well as common soldiers and sailors, from their loyalty oath to his person. But they don’t know where that loyalty will migrate next. It’s a helluva gamble, rolling the iron dice of mutiny in the middle of an immense war. Yet there they go, cast up into the air. Now they’re falling, numbers rolling over and over. Tumbling, tumbling…
Sniper
Colonel Hans Schulen shifts uncomfortably in his sniper blind atop the Life Temple roof, below the steeple. He watches patrols of security troops rousting civilians in access streets below. They’re being moved away from the square, readying it for Imperator Pyotr and a great day of Imperium wide celebration of martial virility and empire. He sees women and children beaten by officers with swagger sticks, and with troopers’ carbyne maser butts. He sees old men who can’t hurry pushed to the ground by young men in too much of one. He watches stamping columns practicing a parade march in the emptied square. He doesn’t see these green clad soldiers as comrades or countrymen anymore, as he once did. He doesn’t see the harried farfolk civilians as his enemies. He sees everyone as victims of a Cosmic Injustice that he is specially chosen to fix.
“Thou shalt kill!”
‘I will, my Lord.’
‘Thy Will Be Done!’
‘On All the Earths,’
‘Under All the Heavens,’
“As it was in the Beginning,
so it is Manifest once again.
For I am become Death,
Savior of All the Worlds.”
Two months ago, he warned colleagues and superiors that the war could not be won with harsh occupation tactics. Not by forced relocations and shootings, not by their combat boots stomping down on the human face of farfolk worlds.
“We’re sowing hatred that we’ll harvest one day as retribution. We’ll reap it in the form of our own dead children and burned homeworlds. This is not God’s Plan for the Universe. You should stop.” He was told to shut up and follow orders, to just get on with forced civilian relocations on Amasia. So he went to see his general in Main HQ in Xiamen, to tell him that brute occupation would only garner hatred, reduce cooperation by civilians on the smallest of matters, encourage more active armed resistance. He wanted it to stop for the good of the Imperium and the Cosmos. And dogs.
“These crimes can’t be allowed to continue. They’ll come back to bite us. A beaten dog will finally turn on the man holding the stick, and tear him apart.” He thought about his hounds being beaten, as he dared speak criticism right to the face of his commanding general. You don’t do that in Rikugun in wartime and expect to live. Fortunately for Hans Schulen, the general was also his uncle.
“Crimes? If you were not my brother’s son, if I had not seen you emerge red and squealing into the light on Glarus, I would have you whipped like a dog or a dāsa slave for that calumny! Get out of my headquarters!” He left his uncle raging to his staff. Hans was ignored, passed over, snickered at behind his back by other officers, then fatefully sent north to inspect the supply issue around the Dauran Gate. His uncle the general wanted him out of his sight and out of his hearing for a few days, lest he shoot his own nephew in anger.
Up there, Hans saw that conditions were even worse. Daurans used the most brutal interrogation methods he ever saw or even heard of: no one survived their questioning. POW camps were closer to starvation camps, where Alliance died by hundreds upon thousands each and every week. Intense hatred for everyone on the other side of the black was almost palpable, reaching across with vicious morning barrages, active seeker mines, and really stupid nightly bombings. He saw that DRA morale was sinking, while desertion and suicide rates climbed. Always, General Royko’s and Röhm Krump’s answer was yet more exemplary punishment and brutal executions by the Shishi. Hans took it all in.
He reported back to his general a week later. He said the north was seeing a spiral of deterioration around the Dauran Gate that must one day open the flank of Rikugun to an enemy breakthrough, split open the Lemuria front into military disaster and lead to ultimate collapse. He didn’t report about the suicide dogs. That’s between him and Pyotr, him and God, him and the elite sniper rifle lying between his elbows on a Life Temple rooftop in Yalto on Aral. He shifts it into his hands. Its warm wooden stock rests against his cheek as he sights the target podium for the thousandth time. He recalls the last thing he told his bewildered and befuddled and enraged uncle, when he magleved to Xiamen on the Thalassa coast to see him one last time. It didn’t go any better than the first time.
“You generals haven’t achieved anything, except to bog us down in endless war,” he told his bristling uncle. “It’s time for you to head to the Life Temples. It’s time for younger men to lead.”
“You think you can lead my army, boy?”
“I have no need of an army, for all the Legions of God are with me. It’s the war, it’s Rikugun and its officer corps that are godless and doomed.”
“You’re a madman son. You clearly need medical help. Be
cause of that and the fact that you’re my idiot nephew, I’ll ignore your insubordination. Instead of a firing squad, I’m ordering you to report for medical examination.”
Hans didn’t know when to stop. “If generals won’t get involved in politics, if you won’t do what must be done to turn this mayhem off, then my dear uncle, it’s time for colonels to step up. If the colonels fail, too, it will be time for the majors and captains. Every rank, every man, now has a responsibility to act.”
“Are you talking about mutiny, nephew? That I can’t overlook, or forgive!”
“No uncle, not mutiny. I walk with God, but I act alone.”
“Act to do what?”
“God says that the time is come for me to save the worlds.”
That’s when his uncle and general put him back on medical leave and gave him the name of a trauma specialist on Kestino. “She does good work with head cases like you. Go back to Glarus first. See your wife and new child. Then get yourself to hospital in Novaya Uda and get fixed. That’s an order. Dismissed.”
***
Hans left his mournful hounds in the quiet Veranda sector on Lemuria as he took passage on a cargo ship. He had official medical leave papers now, so he no longer needed his stowaway plan. He flashed the scroll and got a lift on a bulk munitions ship, all the way to Glarus. He regretted leaving his dogs behind when he saw how much room the captain gave him, but was glad to be left alone by the merchant marine crew. Berthing on a warship would have exposed him to far too many intrusive queries by much more suspicious officers.
After three awkward days back home on Glarus he left for Kestino. Again, on a fat, empty ammo ship he boarded using his uncle’s signed scroll granting him medical leave and passage rights. That’s how he met Field Marshal Onur and Major Winter in Novaya Uda, with his deeply Loyalist and royally pissed off uncle’s unwitting aid. Onur gave him Admiral Adamu’s name and a letter of transit to Aral that couldn’t be challenged, along with a private berth on a fast courier where he could remain out of sight and away from questions. They didn’t trust him not to blurt. They wanted him in Adamu’s care in Yalto, fast.
