by Kali Altsoba
Wheels within wheels.
Murders inside massacres.
Genocides start to foam.
Handpicked men in traditional military uniform have been waiting for months in violently vacated command positions, eager to repay critical patronage that got them there. They will let his enemies kill each other off inside the Imperium, but act harshly to repress SAC and the Brethren on occupied worlds. GGS declares formal neutrality in the war between SAC and Brethren, but announces that the regular military will “disarm fighting factions outside our prewar borders.” That’s the official phrase: ‘disarm.’ The one posted on the milneb and memex, to placate civilians from SAC families watching on all the homeworlds, and the last holdouts of the Black Faith worried about the cowls. Racing along Kaigun and Rikugun bohr relay coms are the real orders. All military units are told to launch a brutal and immediate double purge. “Gray or Green, show no mercy. Take no prisoners.” Looks like neither mice nor monks are going to win their civil war.
Takeshi holds back Maximilian Kahn by giving him select bits of intelligence and assurance that he may soon proclaim the Dawn of the New Age, a blessed return of godhead and godliness to the chosen, redeemer worlds of the Imperium that God has prepared for 1,500 years to rise to this moment. “Soon, Master Kahn. The hour is written in the stars.” Only Takeshi knows what’s happening inside the Ordensstaadt. Only he knows that whatever the military outcome of the ‘war of mice and monks’ may be, the Broderbund is doomed. Cowls will die in immense numbers by his secret hand and plan. Alright, only Takeshi knows and one other. What? Oh, you’re right. Not just Neaira! Her uncle might know as well. He may have given the OK to use one of the two vials from the Mistletoe Project. Come to think of it, there may be a fourth person in the know. Another astonishingly beautiful, ruthless woman: Dr. Chan Wèi, owner of Argos Weapons Labs and the most talented bioweapons researcher in Orion. Yes, she might know about it, too.
No one who would stop Takeshi can catch their breath or see his larger plan. They’re standing still compared to him. He is always in motion. He is dervish to their stillness. He seems to defy nature by his perpetual, unpredictable movement. And now he’s too powerful for any one man to bring him down; too fast to target with a slow forming conspiracy; too lethal inside a dervish whirl of black knives to see or strike without risking death. Too many of his enemies are waiting for someone braver to intervene. Meanwhile, the colored anoura knife storm keeps moving and whirling, cutting him loose from the last restraints on power.
***
Next to fall, a month after Takeshi humbles the Old Families in the name of the peoples, are promises of broader rule and the 10,000 People’s Delegates in the Majlis. Men he made complicit in extraconstitutional hangings and beheadings, a fact that ensures their inevitable elimination. But first he rounds up hundreds of thousands of their supporters inside Novaya Uda, then millions across the outer systems. He wants to smash the traditional Guilds before he takes on the Majlis. Over four days and nights, his local police assault and arrest Guild Masters. On the memex, he blames them for wartime inflation and worsening shortages caused by price gouging in the markets, saying their agitation forces up prices that then outstrip any rise in wages. He bans traditional Guilds by presidential decree, although no such power exists in the office or in the constitution. Then he compels unwilling workers into a mandatory Imperium Great Guild he alone controls.
His outright lawlessness fits the culture, but this assault on the social classes that look to the Majlis for real change forces the hand of the minority of honest delegates he was not able to buy. They call a vote to stop this reckless, dangerous man, who is clearly on a fast path to an unprecedented personal dictatorship over all. The honest few, the naïve reformers who believed in him and the Majlis, can’t raise close to a majority against Takeshi. He already bought half the delegates and now he intimidates most others. When the roll is called a “vote of no confidence in the Assembly President” suffers a thundering defeat. Takeshi is not satisfied.
Regiments of Washi bird guards move inside the chamber. They march right onto the Majlis debating floor, arresting and beating any People’s Delegate who resists or protests. But these aren’t old men from soft, noble houses who did not fight back when he took down the Jirga. They’re guildsmen and workers. Some are outcastes who had to scramble and fight for scraps all their lives. They fight back against his avians. Knives are drawn. Blood is shed inside the Majlis.
The Speaker rises to protest the illegal actions of the Washi. He says: “We are promised elections and a new way ahead for all subjects.” He says: “Our sons and daughters are sacrificing for this nation and empire.” He’s going to make a moral claim on the state, when someone cuts off the mic. Takeshi is escorted by yellow, black, and red bird guards. He strides past the suddenly speechless Speaker, who’s assaulted then hustled away, sputtering in muffled outrage. He walks with steady gait directly up to the Speaker’s Podium, whirls neatly on one heel and stops. He’s getting comfortable in silent displays of raw power, made in front of billions.
He’s wearing a silver cape over an all black uniform filigreed with fine silvery lines. It’s neither Rikugun nor Kaigun nor SAC. No one knows quite what it is. It’s unique, that’s what! It’s another sign that Takeshi Watanabe is coming into his own in open displays of power. He speaks with a firm and steady cadence. “I stand here as your President, representative of all peoples of all the worlds of the Imperium. I say to you as your chosen spokesman that all nascent political parties, all secret societies, all dark conspiracies and would be groups of putschists, all the disbanded and morally discredited Workers Guilds and Old Family secret cabals, are declared enemies of the state and of the peoples, my peoples.”
“As your Leader, I’ll not allow these evil minorities to act as usurpers of the peoples’ will, which I embody by express declaration of that will. I’ll not allow factions to break our unity as we make war against an unholy Alliance to preserve and expand our sacred homelands. I say, therefore, to those gathered in this theater of the factions, this mockery of a united folk, this willful barrier to our victory in war, that this wild experiment, this Majlis, is over. You are dismissed. No one needs you anymore. The brilliant stars of the Imperium are ascendant. Yours fall away. Your death bells are already tolling. The Imperium shall be great again, but not by you. Go! Leave this place by your own will, or you shall leave it in chains.”
Genocide
Kahn has acclaimed Friedrich the rightful emperor and thinks he controls the Jade Throne, as his Broderbund ancestors did for fifteen centuries. He’s worried by military losses, but it’s more important to him that he truly believes in Takeshi Watanabe. He’s confident that this preordained man, the Prophesy Incarnate, will ascend as Supreme Being, a long awaited Redeemer: the Arahitogami. He is fed just enough tactical information, allowed to locate and kill enough Curia officers and commandos, ambush enough SAC units, that he thinks he has a chance to win the civil war. He tells Brethren desperate over casualties and far more mysterious losses in the Ordensstaadt: “Our brotherhood shall rise anew, in greater strength! We’ll carve out a hundred million commanderies for the sons we’ll make with our mother-wives. We shall rule a born again, Holy Empire. It’s coming, it’s coming! Hail the one true Arahitogami. He is here with us! We walk with God!”
Too bad, for deluded Maximilian Kahn.
Too bad, for the last of the Brethren.
After fifteen hundred years in power, it’s over.
After six thousand years of prophesy, their time is up.
And not one hooded fucker ever sees it coming!
The tide comes in all a once. It’s a late, surge tide, full of swirling disaster. Kahn’s monks die in ever greater numbers, and not just at the hands of mobs, the police state, or even SAC hit squads and action battalions. A quiet plague is taking them out, world after world. It spreads into hidden cells where they remain covert and unannounced, biding time, training dāsa slave armies fo
r a surprise dropship landing on the dry salt lakebed outside Novaya Uda, to overrun SAC HQ itself.
The strange casualties in the Ordensstaadt and on Black Ships and in forward bases mount. Kahn is now deeply worried, but it’s ever harder for him to speak to Takeshi, who pleads work and obligation and security, and preoccupation with juggling the factions at the Jade Court. He does it all, he tells Kahn, to clear the way to his inevitable ascension as the Arahitogami.
He’ll not meet.
He’ll not say why.
He sends a last, message.
“I’ll be with you soon, Master Kahn. We can read the charts together and talk of the future then. Patience, patience. The time of my divine revelation is nigh. It will not be long now.” The old fool never suspects that he’s already doomed, that his cowls will soon be dying by millions. Unstoppably dying. He doesn’t know that there’s no reversing the gene plague now.
It’s traveling down the space lanes like water on spokes of a wheel, reaching from the Ordensstaadt to wherever cowled men are found. It flies silently in air systems on Black Ships, creeps into ducts in spartan barracks on garrison worlds, exhales into evermore victims with dying breaths of other cowls. It’s inexorable, inescapable, inevitable. It’s the White Death. It’s coming for Maximillian Kahn.
***
“Heresy always triumphs in the end.” Takeshi laughs out loud as he says it to Naujock in the secret, muffled room they always meet in, a stone bubble even deeper under the Waldstätte Palast than Pyotr’s was. Less comfortable than the fat emperor’s chambers. More spartan. Even more secure, with antechambers full of silent monitors that watch the rooms and city above.
“Whaddaya mean, boss?”
“After 6,000 years the Black Faith ends in the White Death! And at my hand, which their absurd prophesies told them was the Hand of God.”
“Ah gid duh monks losin duh wah ta duh mice, bud wads duh ‘whyd ded’?”
It got the name back when the first colonists on Cretin contracted it. It was deep in the soil. Usually, an alien bacterium or virus was so specific to its local ecosystem it couldn’t cross over the species barrier to adapt to human or Old Earth plant or animal cells brought down to the surface in DNA arks, cloned and seeded by AI terraformer bots. But this one made the jump right away. It thrived on blood proteins. And it adapted, fast. In pneumonic guise, it formed pussy white buboes on the skin, caused severe chest pain and heavy sweats, and filled lungs with blood and fluid until they drowned. When a victim coughed, airborne pathogens were released that infected everyone nearby. Then the cycle repeated. Not one original colonist survived the White Death.
“Remember that covert mission I sent you on two months ago, on a phantom? You went to three terraformed moons deep inside the Ordensstaadt, right?”
“Yah, shuh boss. Ah wemembah.”
“Before you left, I gave you compact warheads in a coded case. You delivered them to the captain, with orders to fit them to drop charges in the underside bay.”
“Yah, shuh. We dwopped dem in duh cwowds on all twee ah duh moons. So whad? Whads dey gots tuh do with duh monks? Whad wus dey, awnyways?”
“Alien plague bombs.”
Albert Naujock is stunned. His guttural Yalto accent grows stronger with each corrupt syllable. But it’s not just his accent that twists his speech. It’s not even his broken nose, lips and face. It’s his sudden anger. “Fuk me! Ah wus caw’yin jerm bombs onda a fukin’ fandom? How cum yu nevah dol me?”
“You didn’t need to know.”
Naujock’s smashed nose makes him a heavy mouth breather at the best of times, limiting air intake and speech even when he’s perfectly calm. He’s sure not calm now. He’s fighting mad. Murderously mad. “Yu cwazy muddafukah!”
“Calm down.”
“Fuk yu, jin’ral!”
“Careful gunsō.”
Naujock knows he’s already gone too far, but he’s not thinking straight. He’s scared shitless. He has seen what plague does, wrecking the ethnic enclave where he was born nearly five decades ago. Seen it ravage his own family as a boy. It was plague that pushed him out into the hard streets of Yalto, at age ten.
Takeshi knows his history. He knows what Naujock is thinking. “It’s not the same thing at all. That was a local pathogen you saw as a kid, specific to Aral. It lay dormant in an isolated swamp for centuries. It was nowhere near as virulent as the White Death.” Well, that last bit sure doesn’t help calm Naujock, even if he’s not quite sure what ‘virulent’ means. He looks like he’s about to lose it.
Takeshi realizes he erred. He tries to course correct with dark humor and faux comradery, citing their shared Bad Camberg mission. “It’s not the first time you carried ‘special packages’ for me on a mission. Well done, by the way, eliminating the captain and crew so quietly and soon after you got back.”
“Dis is difwent! Id’s duh fukin’ playguh!” He’s never been so boldly defiant before. Never spoken to Takeshi like this. It’s a marker of how truly shocked and terrified he is. It’s primal. He can’t control it. He’s thinking about his knife.
“Relax. It’s not the same thing you saw as a boy. You can’t possibly contract this form. All humanity was inoculated 1,800 years ago, when this alien virus was encountered in primitive conditions by AI terrabots transforming primeval Cretan. That means even your primeval ancestors got dosed with antivirals.”
“Fuk yu! Dads nod funnee!”
“Do you really think, gunsō, that if I exposed you to a highly communicable strain of an alien virus, exposed you to the White Death, I would let you approach me? Or sit across from me, in this closed little room?”
“Uh, I dunno. Maybe … fuk you!”
“It can’t kill you or me. If it could, half the Imperium would be dead.”
“Soze how cum ids killin’ duh monks?” He’s calmer, but panting hard, tight beads of sweat forming on his jagged face, with its fly’s drinking trough scar. Then his anger bursts out again. His hand hovers over his knife sheath.
“Spid id duh fuk oud, jin’ral!”
Now it’s Takeshi’s turn to flash red anger. He exudes a lethal, metallic-electric odor that Naujock picks up right away. It frightens him almost as much as clear boyhood memories of the plague. “Calm down That’s an order. You will obey!” The point is made. As good as he is with a knife, Naujock knows that Takeshi is five times better at killing. Still, he manages a last defiance.
“Ah will, whan yu del me whad duh fuk yu did da me!”
“You’re in no danger. It’s a gene specific weapon, modified from the original pestilence. You delivered a unique, targeted variation to the Ordensstaadt. From there, it’s spreading along secret Broderbund military transport and reinforcement routes to wherever Brethren gather or are to be found.”
“Whad duh fuk does dad mean?”
“I repeat: it’s a refined, genetically targeted weapon. The disease can only be triggered if you have a precise set of genes. In this case, you must share a specific maternal heredity. However, if you have a common mother in your family history, you’re done for. Do you know who your mother was, genetically speaking, that is? No? Well I do! She did not have the targeted DNA.”
Naujock doesn’t think to ask how the general knows more about his mother’s genes than he does. He barely knew his mother, back in the scurvy, ethnic Grün ghetto in Yalto. He never knew his father, either. Except he overheard once that dear old dad was one of his mother’s regular tricks. Used to beat her, too.
“This is a highly modified strain, 1,000 times more virulent than the one that killed the colonists on Cretan. I call it Bénédictine. Quite clever, don’t you think? No? Nothing? Well, if you knew anything about the history of liqueurs, you would appreciate how truly funny that is.”
Naujock is still pissed that Takeshi made him carry the gene bombs without telling him what they were. But he’s somewhat reassured, so he says only: “I thod dad duh monks had no mudders? I thod dey wus awl cwones?”
�
��Don’t be a damned fool! Of course they have mothers. Nagas slave mothers. The point is, almost all Brethren are descended from an inbred set of 500 original, maternal sleepers. That makes gene targeting easy. They’re all literally brothers, descended from nagas mother-wives the first Brethren on Terra Deus implanted with stolen zygotes stored in freezer banks on the Deus ex Machina.”
“Ex whad?”
“I see you have forgotten your grade school history. Why am I not surprised? Deus ex Machina was the GDM colony ship that left illegally, breaking about fifty religious and bio and colonization laws on the way out of the system.”
“Oh yah, ah wemembah. Weal slow, two.”
“Yes. It’s good to see an Imperium education still counts for something.”
“Ah lak duh owd sduff.” He’s starting to calm down.
“Do you remember that it diverted and disappeared, along with 3,500 religious fanatics calling themselves Sword Brothers, who later founded the Ordensstaadt? Well, also on board were 500 female sleepers screened for high fertility, the so called ‘Five Hundred Eves’ that the White Death bombs now trace and target.”
“So, duh bugs kill all dere mudders?”
“Gods man, sometimes I don’t know why I bother trying to explain anything to you. No! The plague is a selective agent. It infests only those with the right maternal genetic markers, with linear descent from one of the 500 mitochondrial Eves. The fools have kept cloning from the same mitochondrial base ever since, for some obscure theological reason that even Maximillian Kahn has forgotten.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Alright, one last time, and just for you, real slow. The virus triggers and kills anyone who ‘the bugs,’ as you put it, detect is a descendant of the first mother-wives, the 500 nagas impregnated when the first Brethren landed on Terra Deus. They did it to jump start the population, and build the first interstellar army. Since then, they cleaved to the same DNA for each clone generation that followed the founding of the Ordensstaadt. That means we have them! We have them all!”
