by Kali Altsoba
OK, slow it down to grave, pausing after every stop: “We are the assailants in this war ... We descended onto the United Planets and Calmari systems with hostile standards, acting and moving more boldly and bravely than our foes ... We fight with greater confidence and courage, with the heightened bravery that assailants always bring against those who are only defensive ... We reduced the so called United Planets that usurped a dozen Lost Children in the last war … We reduced the Calmar Union, most cruel and haughty power of all nations in Orion, an evil power that considers everything its own and at its own disposal.”
Boldly now! With brass and thunder: “We shall not stop until that power is overthrown! Calmari must be curtailed, thrown back, tamed and whipped, made to lie whimpering at our feet. We will overthrow a malevolence that thought it could regulate by its ‘golden treaty’ those with whom we are allowed to have war, and those with whom we are told we must make peace. Down with that arrogant power, which circumscribed us, shut us behind boundaries of marked off nebulae and vacuum gaps, saying we must not pass them for fear of causing a new war. Yet, never adhering to those same boundaries it appointed to us.”
“‘Pass not the Iberus Nebula into Krevo!’ we were too brashly told. ‘Claim nothing beyond the Saguntum Anomaly that guards the flanks of the Helvetic stars. You must not move a step in any direction! Stay on the worlds we leave you. We’ve written it down. Look and see! Here it is in platinum words. Sign!’ So they told our forefathers, and called it Peace. It was an iron chain and weight around our neck, plated in fool’s gold words to trick the weary and the weak.”
Quickly, make it fast and lively! Vivace! Don’t let them catch thoughts or even breath. Don’t let them remember how this war got started, or think on what it is becoming. “Pahhh! I told them that I don’t fear war! That you don’t fear war! That no subject of the Imperium fears war! We are the star nation that invented war, that thrives on war, that wins at war! And so I spat upon their treaties, on their words, and on their graves! I, Pyotr Shaka, tore the treacherous Golden Peace of Orion from grasping Calmari hands. I made it a rolled scroll to beat down their arrogance! Then I flung it into the gutter where it belongs!”
“Next, I sent my fleets and legions, I sent my sons, my children, to cross into disputed space and assert ancient claims. It is only necessary for you to continue to be brave to win victory and avoid death. You will go from here to conquer yet more worlds. If you should meet death in battle as you advance into glory, how much better a fate than to meet it in retreat or in your bed?” Fight! Fight!
Pyotr panders next to the Old Families gathered behind him. “Did not the Jade Eye, my ancestor and the founder of my dynasty and our nation, along with your forefathers, take the road to conquest in the Foundation War? Did not your own great grandfathers, and their great, great grandfathers, conquer new worlds in the First and Second Orion Wars?” A smirk creases his fat cheek. “Did not your fathers ready you for this? Now is your time, your day, your hour!” That one’s for abject youth wearing green utes standing behind black walls on a dozen worlds, not just for dress ranks looking up in adoration from the square below. The memex cameras swivel to show a sea of loyalty stamp and cheer to hear him speak in green ermine, sending them to their deaths in presto tempo.
“Is it not shameful that a people accustomed to be conquered, a little people ignorant of war, a small and unimportant people without arrows in their quivers, without war in their coward hearts, still battles against you? We must cast down the criminals who ambush our convoys and skybases, as we’ve cast down their worlds and stand with our boots upon their necks.” It’s the closest he has ever come to acknowledging the damage that Krevan resolve makes, that raiders of White Sails fleet and its butcher-and-bolt raids are doing to the war effort.
“Is it not to their forever shame that Kars and Caspia, perjured and perverted as they are, should dare to show their pocked and double turned, Janus faces to you, my brave soldiers and peoples?” He realizes as he says it that it’s a mistake. He just reminded everyone that he, Pyotr Shaka, not the Alliance he proclaims is the enemy of peace and decency, is in league with the greatest mass murderer in all the histories of all the Thousand Worlds. Plague ridden Jahandar, Tyrant of the Hermit Empire, is his ally. It’s still not a popular policy in the Imperium.
He recovers by making it personal for billions: “It’s amazing to me that we still must face in battle those evil men who, by their horrible crimes, beheaded your relations and bombarded your homeworlds in Year One of this war. Those barbarians who killed my kinsman, serving loyally at the fronts. We must see to it that their own heads don’t remain any longer on their shoulders.” Loud and largo: “Raise your standards, my brave men! Set neither measure nor limit to your merited rage. May the lightning of your glory be seen and the thunder of your onset be heard all across Orion. You, the avengers of noble blood spilled by the crimes of the Alliance. You, defenders of our just and historic cause.”
Now he turns cynically to how this will be heard by Brethren and his other allies of the moment, in Purity. And by the most backward and superstitious of his people, who move from the Black Faith to Purity and back as easily as they shift from wheat to corn. Say it sotto voce. “It’s not enough to conquer other men and worlds. We must dedicate all we do to a higher purpose. Let us today pledge together that the hells of Alliance worlds, that all their daemon legions and dark, satanic leaders shall fall bloody upon our swords. That we’ll invade Hell itself if needs be, and conquer the devil himself, with whom we wrestle daily. That we’ll cast him down and bind him with hands behind his back, leave him a shameful spectacle to the better angels of our justice and our far greater magnanimity, so that we may start anew and more Purely in Orion.”
***
Hans Schuler has heard enough. He can’t permit such infamous blasphemy to continue, let alone to go out into the ether of Orion, carried anon to all the Thousand Worlds. He eases into a basic 4 X 4 tactical breathing technique to calm his natural adrenal rush and his mindless fight-or-fight response, bridging back to an optimal sniper’s condition. He frames Pyotr’s uncovered head in the blue crosshairs of his gold liquid scope. He gently yet firmly pulls pressure on the trigger, releasing a single sound bullet. It sings down the barrel and out into the cold, damp, morning air. He’s an excellent marksman. He knows he just hit the target as God wants him to. Hallelujah!
As the round leaves his long gun and races toward Pyotr’s left temple, Hans lets out a long, slow breath. Then he cries out in sudden shock and surprise, calls out to his God. Too late. Three rounds from automatic countersniper bots arrive at his suddenly revealed and unshielded position. Lasers and kinetics rip through his flimsy camo net to tear apart his face and rend his unarmored chest. ‘My God, my God! I’ve done all that you asked of me, all that you guided me to this place to do! Why have you fallen silent in my hour of greatest need? Are you there, my God? Nina, where is my bliss? Where are my hounds? My God?’
Range-to-target is so close the sound bullet doesn’t need to take more than basic evasives to avoid two dozen anti-sniper defenses that leap up to try to save Pyotr. They're all a microsecond too late. Except for one, a tight laser beam shooting up from the base of the podium as a compact of sound flies past. The hot green light makes glancing contact with the colorless sound packet, just enough to ever-so-slightly push it off course.
But not enough. Death sound tumbles slightly downward from the laser hit taken at one tube end as it slides past and strikes Pyotr. It impacts with the left side of his head, two-thirds the way up, just below the flush temple aiming point it was trying to hit. It pushes into hat and hair, carrying bits of both through a neat hole it makes while passing protective bone, leaving behind a circle rimmed with abraded skin. It punches through one of eight cranial plates that encase Pyotr’s brain, sending shrapnel flying into his interior skull.
Sound swells to fill his head, tears apart synapses and higher functions, ends control of his body, which st
arts to crumple to the stage floor inside enveloping folds of green ermine robe. Even before his guideless body starts to fall straight down, expanding sound finishes its fatal excavation work. Connective tissue and fibrous membranes split open as the wave rips into shock absorber cerebrospinal fluid, splays and gouges out crenelated gray matter. Follow on waves make a cacophony of what was Pyotr’s mind, now just formless chemistry. The waves reverse the entry pattern, bursting out the other side of his skull. Only the exit hole is not small, neat and round. Half the right side of Pyotr’s head sprays across the stage. Broken bits of skull, clumps of brain and bright blood splatters and stains well dressed matrons from the Old Families. Pyotr lands heavily with a sick thud! thunk! twitches twice, then lies still. Crimson slowly pools under the green.
“What’s happening?”
“They’ve killed Pyotr Shaka!”
“They’ve assassinated the emperor!”
“Arrrrahhhh! Arrrrahhhh!”
Royal Canaries crouch low and too late, taking defensive stances all around their fallen master. They already know that they’ll likely pay with their lives for this failure. The square below the dais breaks into pandemonium. Some on the bloody stage start to run for the back exit, and are shot down by terrified guards, desperate to be seen doing something. Screams, cries, shouts and shots ring out all around. No one knows what to do.
Except one man. Admiral Adamu bends low over Pyotr’s corpse, feeling for a pulse with one hand. With the other, tucked discretely inside his uniform pocket, he pushes a tiny plunger into a code transmitter that sends a relay signal winging to GGS in Novaya Uda, where Onur and Winter wait to hear it and start the coup that will end the Fourth Orion War before the Imperium is invaded and ruined.
‘Pyotr is dead.’
‘Send out the orders.’
‘Long live the Imperium!’
Coup
“He did it, sir! He actually did it! He killed Pyotr!” Oscar Winter shouts it. And why not? The vid is bohring across the Imperium and conquered worlds, and beyond to the Thousand Worlds. It emboldens local Resistance networks even before Onur’s coup order arrives. And it shakes the confidence of Loyalist forces everywhere. The whole Imperium is stunned. Well, not all at once. Vids arrive in each system by bohr relay, staggered in the down system lightspeed runs by how far out the receiving LP is from the host star.
“Calm yourself, major. The race is on to see whose troops get into the field the fastest, ours or those controlled by Pyotr’s lieutenants. We must act calmly in these next vital hours. Half a day, no more, and worlds will turn over. Hold nothing back. Move on the Waldstätte. Send my communiqué. Activate all our nets and circles. Do it now, major. There’s not a bohr second to lose.”
“No, sir. Not a second.”
“Send troops into the city and my orders to the stars. Speed is everything!”
“With Pyotr gone, should we redraft your communiqué, sir? It doesn’t say he’s dead. It says that he’s alive and that we intend to arrest him.”
“You’re right. I should have amended the text, had an alternate prepared. Make the needed changes, but hurry. In the interim, images of Pyotr dead will speak to our purpose … Alright, is it ready?”
“A moment more … yes, it’s ready.”
“Send it! We must strike while maximum confusion reigns, while the shock of watching Pyotr’s fall into mortality still paralyzes Loyalists. We must take control before the regime rallies around a new leader. It is good that Pyotr left no male heir, only his idiot brother.”
Winter taps a code card he has carried in his pocket ever since Hans Schuller left Kestino. “It’s done. GGS troops will secure the Waldstätte compound. Our men will enter the city center within the next five minutes. It’s starting, sir.”
Onur’s words wing up from the huge transmitters of the GGS coms tower, to bounce as tight laser beams off three relay satellites and reach separate LPs within 90 minutes, then they leap out of the system to the stars. The message is coded for now, so that only officers and a few top civil leaders with Resistance deciphers will be able to read it. When they do they’ll race into action. Every wasted minute now counts in piles of dead men and fatal, altered futures.
“The communiqué is tearing down the spokes of our great wheel, sir. But we have no control from this point over any offworld movements or fighting. Even from the nearest system, it will take 90 minutes for the first report to drive at light speed from the outer relay LP to our ground receiver. And that doesn’t include varied times to down system the message from an LP on the other end.”
“Understood. We’re cutoff from offworld news for at least the next three hours. But so is everyone else in the city. Let’s concentrate on what’s happening here, in the capital and across Kestino.”
“We have a strong defense force inside the GGS compound, sir. Our men are moving through all major buildings systematically, arresting and disarming any Loyalist officers, securing defense points.”
“Excellent. And beyond? In the city?”
“It’s chaos, sir. Fighting has broken out. People are panicking.”
“What about our troops? Are they in assault position yet?”
“It’s a full, four dimensional assault sir, as we planned it. Four columns of heavy infantry and two uparmored armtrak regiments are moving on the palace. Progress is slow, because so many civilians are running in all directions. Bird guards are shooting indiscriminately into the crowds from behind the Jade Gate. But we have the Waldstätte ringed by our angles of approach. Commandos are in all the traffic tunnels and sewers, sealing off subterranean escape routes and proceeding underneath the Jade Square. The assault will come from below and all sides at once, as soon as we’re in position.”
“What of the key secondary target?”
“Four more armored and infantry columns are moving on SAC Main HQ, surrounding it. Again, we are moving into the underground dimension as well.”
“And the fourth dimension?”
“We control the sky over the city, for now. But that won’t last long, sir.”
“How are our coms?”
“As priority, we’re securing every bohr relay and transmitter in government buildings. They’re the most powerful. Once they’re secure, we’ll move against private transmitters in the corporate HQs on Lakeside Drive. We took down the milneb from here at GGS. We control it, sir. Washi have no external coms.”
“Good. What about common media outlets?”
“Kestino memex is offline, as per your orders.”
“Turn it back on and issue a declaration of Martial Law, in the name of the Provisional Military Government. Run it on a loop. Let’s get people out of the streets, out of any crossfire. And out of our way.”
Resistance units in long columns head into central Novaya Uda, encircling the main government quarters with armtraks and pounding holdout pockets with mobile artillery. Then ranks of infantry advance, with leveled and actively spitting masers. Already, return fire is heavy. And it seems to be increasing. Thousands of Palast Wache guards are fighting back from behind carbyne barricades. Snipers are in all buildings surrounded the Jade Square. They have to be hunted down and taken out one-by-one. And that draws off a lot of infantry, delaying the assault.
The scene in the streets of Novaya Uda is repeated on a dozen worlds, but on a time delay that stretches for hours, depending on how long it takes the Pyotr assassination vid to bohr relay from Aral, and for Onur’s action order to catch up from the Main HQ broadcast tower on Kestino. In each place, however, fighting is in real time. Troops of clashing loyalties take up positions across the Imperium and in occupied territories. They advance to, or stand waiting behind, barricades of overturned private vehicles and torn apart buildings and cobble streets. Eyeing each other in confusion, men call out across instant no-man’s-lands that spring up between suddenly hostile forces. Unsure what to do, both sides wait tensely for orders from different higher ups on a very far off world.
On a
third of Imperium worlds, the takeover is peaceful but incomplete and precarious. On another third, weak Resistance forces are quickly overwhelmed by far more numerous Loyalists, who respond with rage that anyone could be trying a coup in the wake of Pyotr’s murder. Elsewhere, fighting breaks out right away and is more even, seesawing back-and-forth in a search for dominance. Resistance demands to surrender are received by Loyalist commanders with combinations of disdain, disbelief, and gritty defiance. Loyalist demands to surrender meet hails of maser fire and last stands behind defensive barricades. Military and political confusion is rampant. Civil war is breaking out across the Imperium, yet the sides and the causes aren’t clear to anyone who’s fighting.
“What’s happening? Why the clarion?”
“I’ve no idea, colonel. But get your men behind barricades.”
“We’re fifty bohrs from the nearest enemy world. Is this a commando raid?”
“No, there are no reports of any ships or landings.”
“Who are we fighting, then?”
“I don’t know, but protect this HQ.”
“Protect it from who?”
“I don’t know! All I know is someone killed the Emperor.”
“Two columns of armtraks are reported closing fast, sirs.”
“IFF readout, now!”
“It reads friendly. They’re from the 752nd Armored. They’re ours, they’re Rikugun, sirs.”
“Why are they off base? They have no authorization to be in the city.”
“Wait! Hoods are down, general! They’re coming in hard, in combat mode and at high speed!”
“Challenge them at the barricades.”
“They’re not stopping!”
