Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  “Yes sir. The local people don’t know yet, either. It was a tight, offworld only, vertical beam. We’re still jamming all horizontal broadcasts, here in the city and across Kestino’s desert flats.”

  “There’s no time to lose. Double the main assault on the palace. Pull troops from the SAC perimeter attack if you must. It’s all or nothing now. Pyotr dies in the next three hours, or the Resistance does.”

  It’s too late to stop what Hans Schuler and Fidan Onur have put in motion. The iron dice are tumbling, deciding the fate of world after world. When they stop rolling, for which side will they come up sixes? No one knows. But odds are shifting, away from Onur and the Resistance, back toward Pyotr’s massive armed forces gathering in volcanic wrath and with mass murder in mind. Winter scrambles to maximize the attack on the Waldstätte. He opens a private channel to the ground force commander in the city center, whose troops ring the palace.

  “General of the Guard, this is Command One. Are you receiving?”

  “Yes. Go ahead, GGS HQ.”

  “General, the field marshal orders that you make the assault on the palace now. Go all in, general. Pull attackers from wherever you can. We’ll provide skycraft support, as best we can. The assault on SAC HQ must wait. Throw everything you have at the Waldstätte.”

  “Understood, Command One. We saw the lion vid here, in the command HQ. Our men don’t yet know about it. It explains the heavy defense.”

  “Redouble the assault on the palace. Kill Pyotr, or we’re done. Command One, over.”

  The coup is met by hard counterforce across Novaya Uda, leading to hours of heavy fighting. Most is concentrated in a hundred city blocks containing the Waldstätte, RIK Main HQ, and the GGS compound. Three hours in and tens of thousands of dead wet the streets, intermingled in Rikugun green and SAC gray, all blotched in red. Around the palace perimeter, bright colored Canaries lie in unmoving, crumpled piles, puffy yellow breasts soaked in crimson.

  Troops fan out as each side brings skycraft in from bases near and far. They strafe and bomb with precise hits that bring down smaller buildings whole, or gouge chunks from tower blocks and lift crater holes from streets. Jabos screech overhead, shooting ground targets and each other. Pyotr has a more pilots and machines, drawing from skybases across Kestino. Hypersonic squadrons shriek down from orbital platforms once Takeshi gets coms online. Onur’s weaker, slower skycraft are quickly cleared off and blown away. Now his ground forces come under all out air and ground attack at the same time. The end is certain.

  Onur gets a Loyalist skybase commander on a landline. He tries to persuade him to call off the strikes he’s directing against the Great General Staff HQ. His order is refused. The man is from Kestino, and always resented that the Chief of Staff is a short offworlder from Lucerne. “You don’t give orders anymore, you treacherous little shit! Not to me, not to my pilots or machines. Surrender immediately, or I’ll blow apart the GGS complex with you inside.”

  “Who do you think you are, colonel? Stuff your skycraft up your arse! How dare you attack your supreme commander and GGS HQ? The highest military authority doesn’t surrender to a pikey colonel born of a lowborn whore!”

  “Fuck you, Onur! Pyotr is the high commander here. Not some offworld, traitor dwarf!”

  Onur stands stiffly for five minutes after the colonel hangs up on him. Then he walks over to the tall, transparent armor window of his office to stare silently at the bowl rim of volcanoes that surround the city. Just as his enfeebled forces will soon be surrounded and destroyed by magma fire coming from below.

  ***

  It only seems to be touch-and-go for the first five hours, with bird guards hard pressed to hold back Onur’s heavily reinforced regiments of big armor and SOF ground troops. Then 3,000 Special Action Commandos strike hard into the Resistance flank, attacking out of ultrasecret tunnels under their HQ. The rebel regiments reel back sixty city blocks, which turn to ruin and rubble under Jabo attacks. Artillery flies in all directions, with short range mortars and howitzers shooting virtually straight up, so that shells come nearly straight down to land no more than one or two blocks over. They take out entire residence towers and half blocks at a time. Civilian casualties are immense.

  By the seventh hour, Onur’s regiments are outnumbered and outgunned by Washi battalions and regular Rikugun pouring into the city. Three full Rikugun divisions fly in from camps in the salt flats. Some of Onur’s men hesitate and stop shooting when Takeshi overrides coms to pipe in the lion vid. They emerge from close cover, lay down their weapons and raise up their arms. But not everyone on Pyotr’s side is as clever as Takeshi Watanabe, inducing surrender with an image instead of storm assaults. One angry division commander pushes him physically aside. “No quarter! You heard Pyotr Shaka, kill all the traitors! Keep shooting! No prisoners! Pyotr’s Pet is not in command here!” His men fire on the surrendering troops, cutting a quarter of them down as they come out with arms high. Until they stop coming, or run back inside the GGS compound to continue the fight.

  “You moron!” It’s all Takeshi says as he pulls his pistol and shoots the general dead, then shoots his second-in-command just to be safe, and to reinforce his main point. Loyalist fire peters out, then stops. “Accept any surrenders, you fools! We’ll execute them all afterward.”

  It’s too late. Survivors move back behind broken buildings or underground, resuming an all out fight that’s now for their lives and not for any larger cause. Both sides know it’s over and how it must end, in mass murder committed by one side and mass dying suffered by the other. And so, the battle breaks down into little mortal combats of scattered groups of desperate men, killers and the killed.

  Takeshi wants Onur and Winter captured. He tells the dead general’s highly attentive third-in-command: “We need the names locked in their heads, to roll up all the traitors. Take them alive.”

  Pyotr countermands him. He orders the GGS complex bombed, shelled and stormed. “Wreck it all if you must, but kill everyone inside that HQ. Everyone! Then bring that filthy dwarf’s head to me.”

  Takeshi thinks: ‘The fool! His vanity is his greatest weakness, but his rage is a close second. He indulges the worst qualities of his parents, the impulsivity of Tennō Karl Frederick and the blood fury of Queen Mary Oetkert. There’s no saving this man, after I save him today. The time is drawing closer. Soon, he will have to go.’

  ***

  In the tenth hour, Loyalist troops charge the broken rebel lines and massacre everyone behind the barricades. They shoot down the last strays and wounded, then race past dead and dying men to reach the compound gates. Follow on troops finish the massacre as the leaders reach the gate. The first men to arrive blast-melt ultrasteel doors with a thermobaric mine, then rush inside the multi building complex. The last officers and men loyal to the Little General stand and die on the other side of a red hot, glowing steel gate.

  More die inside, as each building falls in turn. Fighting is hall to hall, staircase to staircase, room to room. Sounds of shots ring out as kill squads move through rubble and break into the last locked rooms, to finish wounded. From far off, shots sound like trucks backfiring as they move through barrios making fatal deliveries. A company of SAC commandos tears into the main HQ. Each man knows that if he’s the one who fetches Onur’s head to the Waldstätte, Pyotr will set him up for life. And for the lives of his children, and his children’s children. They begin a systematic room search for the traitor, the singularity of betrayal at the center of a supermassive black hole of treason.

  Mercs are in on it too, Naujock’s men dressed in black. Both groups flit from room to room, blackbird style, working their way up to the highest floors in parallel, each racing the other to glory and riches. One group mounts stairs in front of the building, the other runs up a rear staircase. Men in gray take no prisoners along the way, cleaving to Pyotr’s lethal order. Those in black are under Takeshi’s command. They take five officers alive, for interrogation. Then they murder all the rest. A thi
rd group, a heavy squad of Kempeitai, clears out the basement of the Main HQ, shooting anyone with a dark green GGS staff stripe running up his trouser leg who doesn’t shout “All hail Pyotr!” when challenged to declare his true loyalty. Prisoners are beaten bloody before they’re shot.

  Oscar Winter enters the destruct command just before he exits his office to run up the last flight of stairs ahead of arriving Loyalist killers. He turns on the top step and fires his pistol into a murderous looking corporal leading five black clad pursuers, sheering off his face. Before he can fire again he’s crumpled in two by a maser blast that takes off the lower half of his left leg. He’s left to bleed out as the pursuit sprints right past him, led by a big master sergeant with a crooked nose and mashed in face. More mercs burst up the stairs, ignoring Oscar Winter’s death agonies, running straight to Fidan Onur’s outer office. Naujock is the first to arrive at the outermost reception. He kicks in the door and shoots down a young lieutenant aide-de-camp.

  One floor down there’s a deep, muffled explosion. The situation room, its deployment screens and operations screens detailing action on over a hundred worlds, is consumed by sudden white phosphorus fire. Secret coup plans, orders of battle, lists of Resistance conspirators compiled over three years are turning into smoke and vapor as Major Winter finally exhales his ghost. So are fifty SAC commandos, trapped and screaming as they burn down to the bone from a timed pyrophoric explosion. By then the man who killed them, Oscar Winter, is dead.

  ***

  As soon as Fidan Onur sees the lion vid he knows all is lost, that not enough top brass will rally to the Resistance cause, knowing that Pyotr lives. That their damn officer oaths and Old Family views and traditionalist values will keep them loyal to a terrible man who’s destroying the Imperium, and using them to do it. Or it’s fear. Fear of Pyotr’s vengeance plays a role, too.

  Onur stays with his guards to the end, returning loyalty to loyalty to the last pair at his outer door, a young lieutenant and a master-sergeant. But when he hears commandos running up the last brace of stairs and Oscar Winter cry out, he moves deeper inside. He needs to kill himself. “Give me half-a-minute more, if you can,” he asks the sergeant.

  “You got it, sir.” The sergeant shoots cover fire into the hallway, over the head of the now dying lieutenant who’s slumping slowly down the wall, leaving a broad red gash glinting against gray military paint.

  Onur takes his own life not from cowardice or despair at failure, or fear of torture. He does it from hope for his nation, that the Imperium may yet reclaim morality and honor some future day. ‘Maybe a few good men will survive this tragedy and try again in a more propitious hour. For that to happen, I mustn’t be taken alive. I mustn’t be made to give up the names of the Resistance.’

  He orders an ‘All surrender.’

  He takes his pistol from its holster.

  He pulls a small, silver trigger.

  He slumps down in his chair.

  He’s only a very little man,

  whose last act is a noble death.

  As the brute Albert Naujock breaks into the room, the Little General Fidan Onur is sitting behind his desk. His eyes are open but glazed, head unmoving, a smoking modular pistol in his hand is set to hard kinetic round. A hole in his right temple leaks blood and gray fluid onto his collar, thence down to golden shoulder boards that set off his dark green field marshal’s uniform. It’s over.

  Naujock thinks he looks far too small.

  He can’t believe this is a field marshal.

  He can’t believe this is the man behind the coup.

  He stands looking at the little dead man, sneering.

  Then he cuts off Fidan Onur’s head with a laser.

  Naujock is an ugly man inside and out, a fly’s drinking trough scar across his face and his soul. He grunts as he drops Onur’s head into a wastebasket, tucked under his left arm. He’ll bring the trophy to the palace to lay at Pyotr’s feet, within the hour. Then he’ll report in to his true master and patron, Takeshi Watanabe. Yet, even so dull a man as Naujock understands that everything is now in motion, and that the Imperium and all Orion will never be the same.

  Friends

  A curfew is declared in Novaya Uda. Isolated cries and shots ring out in back streets and echo along smoking barricades where wounded or unconscious Resisters are dragged from under the rubble to be revived with adrenalin, so they can be awake to know it when they’re summarily shot. Ordinary folk rush to get indoors before the declared curfew hour, which is brutally enforced. They cram and crush into a last few public transports or private hovers. They run wild and mad through back streets to get home. They try to duck and hide in a partly ruined building as troops tramp! tramp! past. Not everyone makes it inside in time.

  Novaya Uda’s mercury ball stadium is already filled with prisoners, jammed on the pitch and in the stands and below them, inside changing rooms and even cleaning closets. They’re profiled, sorted, separated. Most are family of officers and troops from smashed units, identified and rounded up across the generations to be collectively punished for what their menfolk did. Some are spared death, shuttled onto transports and whisked out of the city to consolidation camps set up in the Atacama desert to the north, or in frigid sub-Antarctic camps in the far distant south. Others are taken to the pitch and shot, bodies stacked like cordwood next to portable military crematoria that SAC brings in from its HQ. Already, ash and smoke from prisoner cremations rise on high over the stadium, falling back later onto rooftops and into the streets. There, the black intermingles with yellow dust and a slight scent of sulfur from the volcanic air that always taints the capital.

  As soon as the lion vid arrives in the warfleets it’s piped by Loyalist officers through ship’s coms and to every ship in each flotilla, then onward to convoys and floating battle stations and to over a thousand defended LPs. Loyalist crews countermutiny, taking back warships that declared for the Resistance, throwing the captains and first officers into their own brigs. Whole fleets choose for Pyotr, turning broadside guns on a few last ships that won’t surrender. Burned flotsam and wreckage stains a half dozen skies. Then summary executions start. Men are spaced out airlocks or steam catapulted down torpedo tubes. On one ship, captured Resisters are forced into a fusion drive antechamber and incinerated. On another, they’re taken to Weapons Storage and exposed to slow, lethal rads.

  The mutinies all fail because Pyotr lives, but that’s not all. Onur and his fellow plotters relied too much on too careful plans. What they needed was wildness, innovation, a swifter response to changing circumstance, a more ruthless drive and will to seize and hold power by any means. Takeshi makes careful mental notes about what not to do next time a coup is tried. He’s always making notes, about all possibilities and all sides. He likes to keep his options open. Later that night he composes a haiku about the victory over dead putschists. He pitches it to Pyotr at supper, making him laugh so hard he chokes on a bit of whitefish.

  ‘Beneath Kestino,

  scuppers running brightly red.

  Dead men feed the mice.’

  At Pyotr’s feet, still inside the wet wastebasket Naujock gave to Takeshi, Fidan Onur’s dead eyes look up from his severed head. Takeshi thinks the scene is too ghoulish, but Pyotr won’t relent. He keeps the head with him for two weeks.

  ***

  Adamu kills himself, but not before recording a confession thanking his chief of security and five other senior staff officers as coconspirators. All are in fact Loyalist, strictly Pyotr men. Adamu knows that all are until now outside the reach of law or justice for atrocities and war crimes. It’s a neat trick, killing one’s worst enemies from the grave, eliminating one small set of war criminals inside his own command by having even worse criminals on Kestino arrest and execute them. His security chief was doomed to be killed for failing to protect the clone when everyone thought it was Pyotr who was on Aral. The other four men he names are a nice, posthumous get for Adamu and the Resistance.

  On Aci
s, a cowardly Provo governor tries to switch sides at the last minute, saying: “I had no idea whatsoever this was going to happen.” He discovers that Pyotr and his supporters don’t appreciate men who try to play both ends against the middle. He’s gagged and summarily shot. So is every officer on his staff.

  On Tohoku, the ringleader is an older general who says as he surrenders his ceremonial katana to his captors: “The honor of the Imperial Army is in your hands. Do not soil it.” When Pyotr hears of it he orders the man beaten to death with the pommel of his own sword, which is then used to sever his head. It’s sent in a box to Kestino to join a growing mound in the desert.

  Manmō is a traditional military world, so the fact that the Provo government found support there comes as shock to MI counterintelligence. After all, it’s the homeworld of the 3rd Royal Artillery Division. One of the oldest in Rikugun, it earned its honorific in the Second Orion War. It’s also home of the crew of KGN Magni, lost in low orbit over Genève back in the Krevan War. Hence it’s the host world of the widespread “cult of the bell” centered on the battered and scorched Magni Gloriosa that serves as a key “symbol of strength and loyalty.” It hangs from a crossover marble yoke on artificial Memorial Island on Genève, in the crater lake locals call “Lake Constance” in memory of their dead general. The bell cult is a very popular propaganda motif in Pyotr’s holy war. As its host world, Manmō should not be lending any support to military traitors.

  On Lugo, victim of an ‘Auld Alliance nudger attack in the Third Orion War and homeworld of a famed ‘Badger Division’ of asteroid miners, a surrendering Resistance colonel holds out his hand to his captor, an old friend from military school days, years before the war began. His gesture is spurned. His hands are tied and he’s led away. Later, he’s handed over to SAC for interrogation. Innocent as well as guilty men on the wrong side of the revolt start to die across a hundred worlds. The purge goes on for a month.