Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  “Yes. We’re so deep into it, only continuing the war can keep the Imperium from falling apart. The central worlds fear losing the outer provinces, which they exploit. The outlying worlds resent defending corruption and incompetence at the center, but fear an aroused enemy far more. The military fears civil war in its own ranks while a farfolk war is underway, and will back me for as long as their war continues. They know we have no use for them otherwise. They will fight to keep wearing those shiny uniforms and braid. Do you understand any of this, gunsō?”

  “Ya suh, boss.” But he doesn’t really. Not that it matters. Not that he cares. Naujock actually is that remarkably, utterly shallow. He’s standing right at the epicenter of the greatest storm in Orion in a thousand years and he doesn’t care to raise a finger to feel where it blows or how or why. ‘Fuk alla dawk. Ids a helluva fukin’ wide, wile id lasts! Dads awl dad madduhs.’ Still, it’s the boss talking, so Naujock has to sound interested. He must pretend, although he suspects this boss sees through him whenever he fakes it. He’s not wrong. “An afda awl dad?”

  Takeshi is aroused to self-love, so he reveals to Naujock his nihilistic vision. That a year from now he’ll be the only man who can unite the Imperium and keep it in the war, or get it out. That he’ll rule as absolute tyrant over a regime that systematically destroys the best of the Old while preventing the New from coming into being. Why? Because he can. Because he’s that much better at everything than anyone else. Because before he’s done, everyone left in the Imperium will turn to him and beg him to rule over them. Because tens of billions who live in terror already will look to him, a new Leviathan, to save them from their own worst nature and from the wreckage of the Old Regime he’ll make. In abject and primal fear, they’ll turn to and acclaim him. Lowborn but supremely talented Takeshi Watanabe will be greeted as a godsend.

  “Maybe even as a god...”

  “Hmmm, wad cums afda duh fall, boss?”

  Takeshi startles. ‘An unconscious allusion. He can’t have meant to imply what he just did. I know this coarse and vulgar man. He’s not religious, and he’s too ignorant to have read that.’

  “After me, you mean? After I pass from Orion’s mortal coil, all will return to how it was before. Life will resume the same ancient and corrupt patterns of rule by thieves and rogues that has brought about the people’s rage and fuels my rise to power in the first place.”

  Naujock doesn’t get it. None of it. ‘Wads the fukin’ poynd, den?’ But he’s along for the ride, whatever happens next or in the end. He spits a blue stream. Phissshh! But there’s no clang! He misses the spittoon.

  ***

  Corrupted by untrammeled power, Pyotr has forgotten that even a despot rules only if he keeps the Mandate of the Stars, the silent consent of a majority of High Caste families and, in a dimmer way, that of the undercastes and lower orders. In his vanity, he has broken the implied social contract that undergirds the regime, that upholds equilibrium in the Imperium. He has pushed everything out of balance. He must go. The military wants it. Old Families want it. The cowls want it. Anyone who matters in the Imperium wants it. Takeshi will give them Pyotr dead, give them what they want. Then he’ll take away everything they have.

  It starts, but it doesn’t end, on the junglar campus of Pusan Technical University on Daegu. A handful of students in the Philosophy and History Department plaster buildings with anonymous anti-war leaflets. They think that’s daring and fun, so they organize an open air demonstration for the next day. Student leaders ask two thousand of the most privileged kids in the Imperium to march to the central quad for an anti-war rally, where they’ll dance and chant slogans. It will be even more fun than the postering, taking part in the first public protest against Pyotr’s War! To some of the guys, listening to some of the girls talk about how moral and important the rally will be, it looks like a great opportunity to get laid.

  Others expect to be taken seriously because they’re all privileged sperm, all going to preset places in life after graduation. Not like lower caste kids from the barrios drafted into Rikugun. They expect to be treated in the usual way, as pampered brats from High Caste families who are never arrested by local cops, aren’t drafted into military service, and will never have to work hard a day in their lives if they don’t choose to or want to. They’re at the top of the Natural Order. They’re elite. They feel important, because everyone says they are. They expect to enjoy a fine day of outdoor fun, then go back to class to bask in professorial approval, feeling warm and safe and happy that their parents are real upset.

  “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! War monger Pyotr’s gotta go!”

  “El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido.”

  “Hey! Ho! PSO, how many more kids gotta go?”

  “1-2-3-4! We don’t want your fucking war!”

  “No pasaran, pasaremos! No pasaran, pasaremos!”

  “Hey! Ho! PSO, fuck your war! I won’t go!”

  “Up! Up! the KRA! No more kids gonna die today!”

  “El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido.”

  Pyotr thinks he understands the cultural moment. He thinks mercy will be misunderstood as weakness by the High Castes. He believes he must crush this budding children’s crusade before it grows into a real opposition movement. So he gives the kill order, personally, sending it by bohr relay to the commander of Kolno Barracks the night before the protest is scheduled to take place. Maybe all those leaflets announcing the time and place and purpose, and denouncing him by name, were not such a good idea after all? Maybe the elite kids finally crossed a bridge too far? Takeshi provokes him to do it. “I know this campus. I know these people, and what their parents and uncles think. Softness can’t be tolerated. If you don’t want defiance to spread, protesters who chant disrespect to your name must all die before the passing of a second night on Daegu.”

  The colonel in command at Kolno Barracks, just outside Pusan City, is told to take Week Ten cohorts into the town, to occupy the campus and restore order, to arrest all student protesters. He’s also ordered by Pyotr, on Takeshi’s advice, to make sure that it’s faculty and fellow students who try and condemn the protestors and do the killing. Publicly and bloodily. It comes as a surprise to the protesters that inside a planetary rotation they’re denounced, rounded up, brutally beaten into mascara streaked confessions, tried by a kangaroo court of professors and student peers, tied to posts and shot to death in the campus quad.

  It’s an atrocity too far. Unrest spreads even before Takeshi leaks a recording onto the social memexes of Pyotr personally giving the kill order, then turning back to finish his mockfish and buttered rice. The vid breaks the back of regime political support among the Old Families. It breaks the social contract between ruler and ruled. It’s the final straw for outraged parents and extended relative networks. Families of the 2,000 dead students move to open revolt, but so too families of 10,000 surviving students who were forced to murder their friends.

  They go into the streets. In city after city, on world after world. Even families of the Week Ten cohorts from Kolno, proud-to-serve undercaste kids with no chance to ever get into Pusan University. Their parents balk at children being ordered to murder other children. They don’t know that happens on Rikugun occupied worlds every day, so they also head out to the streets. In Pusan City, they’re joined by the Week Ten cohort kids, who bring their masers with them. Millions are out, protesting the killings then raging in public for the first time in their lives about everything they ever hated about the regime, and the Imperium and most of all, their own cribbed and dishonest lives.

  Pyotr is bewildered.

  It looks organized, and it is.

  It’s Takeshi’s invisible hand.

  He moves it over Pusan campus.

  He draws destiny with his finger.

  He means to bring Pyotr down.

  Officers at Kolno Barracks are the first to respond to messages from their homeworlds. They arrest the commander and summarily execute him. Now all ten weeks of cad
et cohorts, led by near-to-graduation youths forced to oversee the student executions, assault the worst instructors and take over the Doughnut and then the base. A sniper course instructor who’s especially cruel is hanged upside down, and gutted like a carp. Within an hour, the Gate House statue of Pyotr that straddles the entrance is blown apart. The collapse starts from its oversize stone ankles. The holo image flickers and fails as the power source in the base under his feet explodes. The toppling is broadcast in the clear over the Daegu memex and leaches into the Rikugun and Kaigun milnebs, from whence it races across the Imperium. Deep below the Waldstätte, Takeshi seizes the moment. He sends out a coded signal to start the coup: “Agonistes.”

  ***

  This coup is organized by Takeshi Watanabe, not Fidan Onur. That means troops move into action like clockwork, surrounding the Waldstätte, shutting down all air and orbital traffic, imposing martial law on Novaya Uda and all other cities on Kestino. The putschists confine all other troops to barracks and declare a warship no-go-zone throughout Kestino system. It’s tight. It works. There’s no one to organize a Waldstätte Palast defense in Pyotr’s behalf. Except for killing a few dozen bird guards new to the outer perimeter patrol, who have the misfortune to be on duty at the wrong time in the wrong place, the action in the capital is almost bloodless and soon over. It’s almost unnecessary to take control of the whole city or surround the palace since core plotters are all inside the Waldstätte already, and the Palast Wache is under Takeshi’s command.

  “Move! Clear the hallways and inner sanctum. Arrest Pyotr! Gag and bind him. Bring him to me. Bring him to the Jade Throne Room. Turn off all cameras until I give the order to roll the recording.”

  Takeshi gives the commander of the Royal Canaries the private code that unlocks the elevator that leads ten stories underground, below the Throne Room to Pyotr’s stone bubble chambers. He doesn’t head there himself. He stays waiting patiently above. He has a complex choreography of death to arrange. ‘What’s the old saying? ‘The play’s the thing, scripted to lead to murder of this king.’ Well, close enough for Pyotr. Let the lime lights dim so we may watch in contented darkness as the low overthrows the high. I have waited and worked long for this.’

  Pyotr resists, but is dragged by his underarms into the Jade Court. His dirty, blue ermine robe swings opens to reveal his round belly and nakedness. He’s forced to his knees by two rough bird guards, both long in another man’s secret pay. They’re pleased in the moment to tower over the short, humiliated fatman. Conspirators gather around, as if to pay respects to their emperor. Takeshi stands to the fore. Just behind him is Maximilian Kahn. A half ring of Royal Canaries separates these men from all the others. Behind and around the bird guard ring is a larger company of mercs headed by Naujock, a wicked looking black diamond dirk already out in his hand. He’s twisting it in back-and-forth in air, unconscious that he’s doing it. Five paces behind stands panting Chiyoko, hunched and ugly, her face a mask of contorted hatred as her eyes dart from Pyotr to Kahn to Takeshi and back again. At her side is tall Neaira, a goddess vision with raven hair and piercing green eyes that bore right through men. Her smooth, long legs are half naked, softly whispering satin promises as they rise to the mount of pleasure.

  A small gap away from the main group are the big hats of GGS and all their aides-de-camp. Beside them, men of the General Curia from SAC HQ stand in a black uniformed bunch. Gathered in a half moon at the rear wall, facing the Jade Throne, are heads of Old Families and their fathers and sons in dress green uniforms, Rikugun and Kaigun alike. A few New Families are here also, in uniforms of the Order of the Black Eagle. They look frightened, wearing special uniforms laden with gold-and-silver braid with lace cuffs peeking out from silk sleeves. Beside them, in a compact group, stand the last Guild Masters still free and alive.

  Pyotr is panting heavily, coated in glistening sweat from the struggle in his chambers and in the elevator that stops just below the Throne Room, disgorging into a small antechamber and changing room. And from resisting being dragged across the cold green tiles in front of the Jade Throne, to stand before what he knows is a decided jury that wants him dead.

  “Unbind and ungag him!”

  “Is that wise, sir?”

  “Whatever else he is, this is Pyotr Shaka Oetkert III. He reigned over these worlds by right of descent from the Jade Eye himself. He has the right to stand at the end, unbound to meet his death and to say whatever words he has left.”

  Pyotr spits the gag even as they loosen it from behind, then wrings his hands to restore feeling and circulation. Smirking bird guards had him bound painfully tightly, beyond what was needed.

  “General Watanabe, what are you doing?”

  “What must be done.”

  “This is violence against your sovereign!”

  “You are no sovereign. You are deposed.”

  “You have no power to depose me! You treacherous rat! Guards, arrest this foul man.” Not one Royal Canary moves, but Naujock shades a half step closer to Takeshi, who stands smiling at the absurd, almost pitiable figure Pyotr cuts in his last panting minute of life. Pyotr pulls out the degen he took from his mother’s body the night his father and littlest brother died. He lunges at the nearest bird guard, a master sergeant standing next to him, one of the two who dragged him across the jade tiles. He runs the highly polished, nickel-iron blade through the surprised man’s arm, opening it from elbow to wrist. It stains his blue ermine robe with sudden spurts of ruby red. The sergeant howls in pain.

  Four bird guards seize Pyotr, holding him upright in place. Knowing he’s about to die, he muffles his head in his robe top and sucks in his belly, trying but failing to close the ermine over his exposed groin so that he might fall more decently, with the lower part of his body covered. Takeshi revokes what he told his fellow plotters. In this moment he needs it to be his hand that strikes the first blow, though he’s sure not to make the thrust a killing hit. That one he will leave to Maximilian Kahn. But to strike the ruler first affirms that he leads the putsch.

  “Naujock, bring me Shaka Zulu’s iklwa.”

  “Bwing ‘is whad?”

  “You dolt! Back there, the leaf blade spear hanging above the throne. Yes, the short one, not the assegai. The short one! It’s hanging beside his knobkerrie and nguni. No, don’t even ask. Yeah, I mean the club and tall rawhide shield.”

  Takeshi takes a two-handed grip, his right hand lower, where the wooden shaft meets the long, wide leaf blade. He strides straight to where Pyotr is held by the four guards, spreadeagled standing up. He thrusts the wide iklwa hard and deep into his big, overhanging belly. He hears an ick-leh-wah sound as he pulls it out. Pyotr groans, but he looks Takeshi directly in the eye as the short spear stabs in-and-out, again.

  It’s Maximilian Kahn’s turn. He scuttles over to Pyotr, who’s sagging but held upright by four bright yellow captors. Kahn picks up the holy degen from the tile where it clattered as it fell from Pyotr’s fist, draws his arm back high and stabs him with it. Over and over and over.

  He doesn’t use green silk.

  Takeshi told him not to.

  Kahn always obeys his god.

  Even when he blasphemes.

  He said it in a whisper as Pyotr was dragged into the Jade Court, leaning in to the old man in a too secretive way that made Chiyoko startle, then stare daggers of suspicion at them both. “Use the degen, the one stolen from your Order by the Dowager. He deserves no better. You may spill this Tennō’s blood because he’s illegitimate, not true. He does not warrant silk deference. You must kill him the way I say, to prepare the way for the coming of the Arahitogami.”

  Pyotr utters no word as he is being stabbed. After the sixth wound is made, piercing above his heart to glance in deeper off a rib, he finally lets out a soft, involuntary groan. Then he speaks, with little red pantings of breath in between. “Feeble old man! You can’t even finish me. How will you run my empire?”

  “Together, for we have finished you, Pyotr
the Last,” Takeshi taunts the dying emperor. “Know as you expire that no seed of yours will sit on the throne. In that, too, you have failed. Release him!”

  The guards let him fall. Pyotr lies naked in a bloodstained crumple of blue ermine. A tin of snuff rolls out of an inner pocket and rattles and rolls a meter away on the green tile, then stops silent. He exhales his last words: “Mother, I have lost it all! Monks! Monks! Monks!”

  As he watches black lifeblood pool around Pyotr, slicking cold green in front of the Jade Throne, Takeshi composes a quick haiku in his mind:

  ‘Pyotr’s life taken

  not by silk cord, but iron.

  Vulcan forged the blade.’

  He breaks his word to the coup plotters and to Maximilian Kahn a second time. He steals the thunder of the succession from the Devil’s Disciple by being the first to name Pyotr’s heir. “The emperor is dead. Long live the emperor! Master Kahn. It is your right. Proclaim the new Tennō. Proclaim the reign of Emperor Friedrich Oetkert Shaka XII. Let his reign begin.”

  Kahn flinches for a moment, confused. When he recovers he performs the ritual of the Jade Succession over Pyotr’s body and before the gathered powers of the Old Order. He proclaims the succession to an idiot, in front of the officer corps, heads of the Old Families, heads of the New Families and Guild Masters, and silent, wrathful men of the General Curia. They look daggers at reassertion of Broderbund legitimacy that they thought was buried in the Jade Tomb along with the Red Dowager. The old religious ceremony, a passage rite of the Black Faith, is broadcast out to the stars. It thrills half the population of the Imperium but frightens all the rest. Then the purge begins. Raw, red and ruthless.

  The last of The Admitted, those few survivors of the cathouse bombing, are the first to feel blades of retribution. One by one they fall, in a quick sequence long planned by Takeshi and completed over half-a-day by Naujock’s mercs. Each murder of an Admitted is staged inside a cathouse or other compromised locale. Each leaves a saggy corpse posed in some embarrassing way, shamed later over the memex. Each death accelerates the timetable of the next. It’s the start of a reign of terror, an all out struggle for unbridled power that Pyotr never attempted though often contemplated. Takeshi is unleashed on the Imperium.