Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  There’s little resistance: a few protest legal rights or ancient family dignity, but are clubbed into silence. One man, the bravest, proudest, and most foolish, protests too long. He’s killed on the spot, stabbed like Caesar in the Senate by a dozen Thrush blades. The rest comply. Then they’re led outside to waiting holding pens, a flock of white sheep heading to slaughter. As Ravens and Thrushes drag the old men out, SAC arrives. Curia leaders are not content to let Takeshi’s guards murder the Old Order without doing a little stabbing of their own. The old men go quietly, knowing that slow torments await any dissenter who’s removed to a cell below the Waldstätte, or under the HQ of the sleek young men in gray lined up outside the hall. Silence and meek compliance doesn’t save the senators. They stand, sit or lie or squat on green flagstones that serve as the floor for iron barred pens set up in the open, in the Jade Square right in front of the Waldstätte.

  No claim to rank or privilege avails with their guards. Nor begging, pleading, or offers of immense bribes. Nor calls for petitions or court challenges or crying High Caste women already wearing all black in anticipation of what’s coming. It only takes a day and an hour for Takeshi’s swift coup within a coup to be approved and made quasi legal, voted into a second emergency law by his paid off People’s Delegates in the Majlis al-Umma. The outcastes of the Council of the Nation are delighted to partake in the coming judicial murder of all members of the abolished upper house, the short lived Jirga. Those who aren’t, he’ll make compliant in other ways. There are lots of prison cells in the city that gape open, waiting on his word.

  The next day, a show trial and execution of a thousand old men begins. Several accusers come freshly blooded from inner city streets, pulled from looting and murderous mobs that Takeshi sent to ransack residence towers to silence families of the senators caged in the public square. Majlis delegates look on, stamping and whistling, hurling catcalls and truly vulgar insults at prisoners who were, until a day before, social and cultural superiors. Takeshi is releasing pent up class hatred kept under pressure in a deep magma chamber for many centuries. Until today. The tephra erupts.

  “They're all guilty!”

  “We want them found guilty!”

  “Why wait? Hang them now!”

  “Guilty! The bastards are guilty!”

  ‘Guilty.’ No other word carries so much fear in the Imperium’s dominions, but almost never does it apply to men like these. Punishment is meted out to the poor and powerless, not to heads of Old Families or first sons who rape or beat dāsa without conscience or consequence. Now a charge of ‘guilty’ carries terror to all classes in an empire being remade by a rabid revolution led by one man.

  A thousand elders from the disbanded Meshrano Jirga stand or kneel, scared and mute before a howling, lower caste and outcaste mob. They are all bowed and fearful of the 10,000 jeering delegates of the emboldened Majlis, gathered to take their measure and their lives. Takeshi pulls everyone into crime, again like a mafia boss insisting that each of his hit men share in a murder by shooting the corpse.

  Erected in haste overnight, a green presidential dais looms in front of rising rows of 10,000 People’s Delegate seats, forming a “Judges Grandstand.” Right-center is a long gallows tree, with rows of white hemp ropes hanging in waiting loops. Left-center is a five-neck-per-drop guillotine, over which hangs a single, glinting steel blade that must weigh two tons. Judgment of the old men in the pens is foreordained by the execution shade the gallows throws. And the morning sun glinting off the hoisted blade.

  Two million gather to watch and cheer the exhibition of revolutionary justice. They know that the verdict is certain. They’re impatient for the act. The only real decision that remains is the method of execution for each man: slow or fast? In case any People’s Judge falters in the judgement, around the grandstand are silent rows of bright Canaries, Ravens, and Bloody Thrushes to ensure complicity. Much farther back, 2,000 Special Action Commandos stand stiff in pristine dress uniforms. The long gray ranks have stub masers shouldered but ready. There are no pale green Rikugun troops here or even paler dressed Kaigun marines. Takeshi doesn’t trust even the tamed shell of the traditional officer corps to stand by and do nothing while he kills 1,000 of their fathers and grandfathers.

  Unbeknownst to anyone in the Jade Square, farther out in the surrounding city whole divisions of Shaka Army men are taking up position, fully armed. Takeshi controlled the shanghaied iklwa troops even while Pyotr lived, seeding a parallel army with handpicked officers and rougher sorts of veteran NCOs. It’s still called the ‘Shaka Army’ and nominally serves Tennō Friedrich, but before this red day is done everyone will know that their dread President commands his own army.

  Takeshi mounts the podium at midday. He’s an hour late, deliberately building tension, like a rock star. He waits more long minutes in full view of the pressing, sweating, chanting and singing crowd. It’s more like a holiday celebration below him than what it really is: a show trial that will make the masses participants in his revolution, give them just a red taste on the lips of the power that comes with murder. He will shift their mood from joy to a blood fury of excitement within the Jade Square, turning plain folk into a massive lynch mob he will play like a harp.

  Behind him, but set off to the side, stands a vision of seductive womanliness. Neaira is dressed in all red. Her hair is pulled back from her perfect face. Her jade eyes look cold in the morning light, with no pity in them. Around her slender neck is a lace-and-diamonds choker. Her shoulders are bare, squared to her erect pose that thrusts full breasts out just so, allowing a light breeze to catch the silk of a strapless dress that hangs off her neck and drape it gently across firm nipples. The top half of her breasts are out, rising and falling with each calm breath. The gown splits at the waist. Her navel shows while the red connects behind, just above the gentle curve of her buttocks. It’s sliced in front, so that hints of her extraordinary legs flash on either side of the red veil that every man who sees her longs to lift.

  Bloodlust is high among the judges, and for many of the billions watching on Kestino’s memex and milneb. Later, a hundred billion will watch ‘live’ on bohr delayed transmissions that reach far off systems, retransmitting on local memexes across the whole Imperium and far beyond. Takeshi is emerging from all shadows. Everyone across the Thousand Worlds will know his name, his terrible image, his lethal intentions, and his supreme will. He stands erect before the multitudes with arms outstretched like a rising god, in the full glare of his cruelty and power.

  At last, he moves to hush the mob. As it quiets, he slowly straightens his left arm along his side, pointing with his right. He guides everyone’s eyes down to the crowded prisoner pens in the sun drenched, and shimmering hot, Jade Square below. They’re full of fear and old man finality. “Today, the peoples get justice too long delayed. Today, the peoples get justice too long denied. Denied to your suffering, trespassed families. Today, the Lower finally shall judge the Higher.”

  “Hurrah! Hurrah!” A rolling thunder of two million voices. Wafting hate and the smell of murder on the morning’s air. The smell of vengeance, and scared old man piss and shit lining the jade tiles below an open air cage.

  Takeshi remembers the ancient warning cruel monks on Fates taught him, although they never really understood it. It echoes in his mind as he launches a new Terror into the Imperium. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’

  “I am the people’s servant. It is you the people who gather to bear witness to the New Justice, to the dawn of the first day of Year One of the New Order. You, the people’s representatives in the Majlis will judge and sentence these vain men, these terrible old men who say they are your social and moral superiors and that they are outside judgment.”

  “Booo! Hissss
!”

  “Are they superior to you?”

  “No! No!” Led by 10,000 Majlis reps, two million voices scream as if one. A few delegates in the Judges Grandstand look nervously at the horde gathered before them, salivating over murders to come. They wonder where this will stop.

  “Will you let these evil men take you back to the old ways, to olden days of terrible abuse of you and your families, when they stole the sweat of your brow?”

  “Never! Never!”

  “Will you let them escape justice, after fifteen centuries of unpunished High Caste crimes, after so many murders and rapes and despoliations?”

  “No! Never!”

  “What should we do with them?”

  “They must die! Kill them!”

  “Should we show mercy and let them go?”

  “No mercy! Kill them all!”

  Takeshi’s angry odor of copper and nitric acid wafts over the mob, reaching also the Judges Grandstand. The effect on the 10,000 Majlis delegates is electric. Like priests awaiting the burning of a heretic, or of a saint, they lead the chanting mob below as it replies with ritual assents to his prodding provocations.

  “These men stand accused of treason…”

  “Traitors!”

  “…they stand accused of corrupting the young…”

  “Sophists!”

  “…and denying the rightful gods.”

  “Sinners!”

  “They supported the Thirty Generals who almost lost the war.”

  “Traitors! Frauds!”

  “They killed your sons with their corruption!”

  “Murderers! Thieves!”

  “They hid military failures from you.”

  “Liars! Cowards!”

  “They concealed our losses. When your sons and fathers retook our Lost Children worlds from the invading Alliance they stole the gains that belonged to the dead, that belonged to you and to your families!”

  “Corrupt! Criminals!”

  “What should be done with these men?”

  “Kill them! Kill them!”

  “Very well. But first, you must judge them.”

  “Judge them! Judge them!”

  “Let the trials begin.”

  Testimony is short, the defendants not allowed to speak. Foreordained to reach a mass guilty verdict, it’s over in half-a-day. The accused are condemned 100 at a time, under a clear blue sky. Then white haired old men are roughly pulled from holding pens. They cry and plead like dāsa or peasants. A third are hanged before the start of a blood orange sunset. The rest are swiftly guillotined. The machine does merciful work quickly. Too quickly to satisfy the bloodlust of many in the crowd. Two million gathered to watch take more pleasure in the 300 old men who are hanged slowly, in groups of fifty. They twitch, jerk and struggle for a minute or more. Some hang straight down inside burlap sacks pulled over their heads and tightly tied around arms and waists. Others kick feebly outward as they choke. A collective cheer rises as the last old man finally stills and stops.

  “Let ‘im twist, the old bastard!” The hatred in it is so intense the lone cry is heard even above the roaring crowd. All around the proud shouter the applause is briefly thicker. He shouts it again, thinking to double his wit.

  Takeshi points to the last burlap cocoon as it stops moving. “He’ll order and rule, whip and exploit, beat and bully the great unasked masses nevermore.”

  “Hurrah! Hurrah!”

  “You have made a start!”

  “More, hang more of them.”

  “We are done here, for today.”

  “Kill them! Hang all the High Caste!”

  “Patience. Justice will be yours, sure and swift. But be patient. Go home.”

  After the executions, to educate everyone in the New Order of things, Takeshi directs that the last hanged men should be left dangling from the long gibbet. He orders the severed heads, white haired or bald as may be, mounted on rows of tall assegai taken from the Shaka Armory. Each bobbed shaft is jammed into a wood block at the base; each long spear has an old head impaled on it, as if Shaka Zulu himself ordered it. For three days burlap corpses sway in summer winds under the gallows. On the other side, hundreds of impaled heads don’t move at all, except a little when jackdaws fly down to peck out the eyes.

  A wounded man on med leave from Amasia thinks the bagged and swaying old men look like sleepy fruit bats, with heads carefully tucked inside folded over wings, hanging upside down from scraggly arms of a baobab he saw in the distance while fighting Alliance just north of The Sandbox, in the sahel region. He doesn’t think anything about the spiked heads. He has seen lots of RIK deserters executed that way, left on the near edge of the black to discourage all the others.

  It’s on all the memex channels for days. It’s even on the official milneb and servneb. Not just the executions, played in an endless loop, but a live broadcast in the top right corner of every screen, direct from the emptied Jade Square execution grounds. There’s something else onscreen for three sun bleached days and artfully illuminated nights. An endless, looping scroll rolling underneath the images of the gallows tree and long rows of plucked and planted Old Family heads. It reads: Lower Judges Higher. Everyone knows what it means. After three days and nights of cruel exhibition of Takeshi’s supreme will and the killing venom of new men in the Majlis, everyone understands. No one but those lame of mind misses or mistakes the message. Everyone knows the coup d’état that killed Pyotr is become a Revolution. And they know who’s really in charge, and that he was all along.

  ***

  The legal basis for Takeshi’s dictatorship is in place. What remains is to finish off his coup partners, then to justify his permanent absolutism with the sanction of one of two religions that compete for his attention and support, Purity and the Black Faith. Or he can destroy them both. As he gathers himself for the kill, each “one true faith” wants him to slaughter everyone who believes in the other one. He’s not sure that he has too, since he has already set them at each other’s throats. ‘They make it all so very easy, the fools.’

  Ten months after Pyotr’s death, Sakura-kai is exterminated, Washi guards are loyal to Takeshi and he controls the Shaka Army as an exclusive, private force. Old Families are dead or tamed, scared silent. Guilds are broken and a movement for social revolution and worker rights is preempted and suppressed. The military has been decapitated by SAC and the Brethren, which only uplifted his second tier loyalists to top command and planetary governorships. Neither the gray men nor the cowled men understood that the military is the main pillar of the Imperium: you can chip at the capital of the column but the pedestal remains solid and forever. Preemptive killings he goaded them into left the officer corps seething with rage toward both the grays and the cowls. The military wants blood revenge.

  Takeshi has a more terrifying plan to eliminate the Brethren, secretly already underway with Neaira’s help. He has implemented the first phase of the Mistletoe Project, although it’s not clear if she gave him the black vial with or without the prior approval of her uncle, Prime Minister George Briand. Now he turns to the traditional officer corps to destroy SAC, which is badly damaged and distracted by its “war of monks and mice.” It’s what he calls it whenever talking to Naujock, who laughs reliably every time. Takeshi knows that mutual hated between SAC and Brethren predates the blood purge by the Dowager. He knows the military despises both, wants both destroyed, and all traces of both removed not just from its fleets and armies but from the Jade Court and indeed the whole Imperium. He tells Naujock: “It’s almost too easy to turn all the old hates back on, all at once.”

  Fighting surges on Imperium homeworlds, as SAC brings troops back from occupied Alliance worlds by unescorted shuttle. They don’t always make it back, since Takeshi betrays them to Kahn and some are met by Broderbund phantoms he secretly provides the cowls. Then they’re met in battle by dāsa disembarking from troopships that fly in from Terra Deus and Fates, and other distant bastions where cowls have clone vats wo
rking overtime. From orbit, the white clone fields look like immense old style cemeteries, the kind where headstones chip and names fade barely outside a single lifespan of memory. Larger scale cloning is done deep underground, in breeding facilities that drop 100 or 200 stories below the surface. Shallow steel clone vats lie flat and forever, stacked side-by-side in endless rows like trays of bread dough in an industrial bakery.

  Casualties in the war of monks and mice reach tens of thousands in pitched ground fights and more frequent ship-to-ship and shuttle actions in low orbit. Two flotilla scale brawls are fought above Glarus and Zug, before Kaigun intervenes and stops all fighting above the atmosphere. No one interferes with heavy ground fighting or missile launches and skycraft dogfights. Combat comes to Kestino as well. SAC is too well protected in its main HQ, so fighting moves from the barrios of Novaya Uda onto the salt flats and well beyond, to the broad valleys between active volcanoes. Fighting wrecks parts of four worker cities on the other side of the world. This is no mere blood feud. The war between SAC and Brethren is an all out civil war. A no holds barred fight of brutality, massacre and extermination.

  Thousands of troops on each side are dying every day, falling in a hundred different firefights on a dozen different worlds. The combat becomes so extensive Takeshi must reassure even his handpicked big hats in Rikugun and Kaigun that it won’t affect the war against the Alliance. “In fact, I think you should stop them fighting inside operations areas in the occupation zones, as Kaigun did over the homeworlds Glarus and Zug. The war is far more important than this unseemly power squabble behind the lines. Let them fight it out here, but not where they might interfere with your vital operations.”

  “You propose we intercede to stop all fighting on occupied worlds, while you let this ‘war of monks and mice’ as you call it run its course on the homeworlds? You are even more devious than you look, President Watanabe.”

  ‘More than you can imagine in your darkest nightmares, my general. And you are my general, bought and paid for years ago.’ “Yes, and more. I propose that your intercession in the name of our security should be lethal in as many cases as possible. This is the hour to cull the rogue herds. Be ruthless in how you proceed.”