Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  “Awl ah dem?”

  “Every single one, or close to it. White Death targets everyone with a trace of Broderbund matriarchal DNA. A tiny percentage, less than 1%, are Immunes for unknown reasons. Kahn may be one of those, but the odds are against it.”

  “Oh … oh shite! Dads gud!”

  “I’m so glad you approve. Because when its work is done, there won’t be more than 1% of the Brethren left. Cleaning up the remnants is a job for you and your mercs. I want not even one left alive. You’ll start very soon.”

  “Weh d’yu gid id, boss?”

  “At last, you ask an interesting question! The answer will surprise you.”

  “Yah? Wanna bed? Fahv hun’wed cwedids!” He feels emboldened. Having just escaped death in his own mind, he’s lightheaded. Even a tad giddy. Besides, the boss just told him about a job that means his mercs will be busy for months, killing the last wandering monk survivors. ‘Ah’ll be wollin’ in cwedids!’

  “You have nothing I want, or care to win. So I’ll tell you for nothing. The virus came to me from Argos Research Labs. That’s a top secret Alliance facility.”

  “Awl’i’yans? Youse kiddin’ me, wide? Were id weally cum fwom?”

  “I told you: Argos. Well, alright. It came to me via Argos. A top bioresearcher there, Dr. Chen Wèi, isolated a series of alien genes in stored microbes collected from preterraformed planetary records and ancient exploration biobanks. She has figured out how to target bomb populations of moderns that share genetic markers, following the mitochondrial line. It’s normally not that useful, since the gene pool of Orion is so diverse and dispersed. That’s what drives the Purity fools half mad!”

  “Saw’wy, boss. Ken ya ‘splain dad agin’?”

  “She weaponized alien DNA found by ancient explorers on a preterraformed planet. It’s a variant of the original plague virus from neighboring Cretan. It must have migrated on a meteorite eons before we ever reached the stars. It’s almost as impressive that she traced the 500 Ordensstaadt Eves down to modern times. No way she had any samples from Terra Deus. The Alliance must have gathered DNA from captured dāsa troops, from the cowls who commanded them. The only way they could have done that is on those ‘butcher-and-bolt raids they made. I wondered why they targeted certain of our rear area worlds. Now we know.”

  “I dunno, jin’ral. Shuh, I ‘spose. Souns’ gud.”

  “She might have found the original zygote records. Maybe stored on DNA, in the old Colonial Office memory banks? They used genetic material for data storage back then. Buried whole vaults of the stuff. Now she’s working off alien strains from a unique Dead Zone sample.”

  “Ev’n ah no dads nod poss’ble. Dads wy dey calls id duh dead zone.” Naujock thinks he said something quite clever. It gives him a sense of relief, and a flush of pride. Usually, when he has to think so hard and fast in these conversations with the boss, he gets real angry inside, feeling like he’s back in school being made fun of. And he gets a bad migraine.

  “Very good. Except it’s not entirely dead after all, it seems. Something very strange was found there by Alliance researchers. Something so secret none of our agents are close to finding out what. Something none of our own secret research missions were able to locate. But that’s a tale not yet written, perhaps to be told another day. Or maybe only whispered late at night.”

  “Hokay. Well, wanna cel’brate killin’ aw duh monks, boss? Wanna dwink?” He looks across the small table, hopefully. There’s a golden decanter on it, three-quarters full. He has been thinking about it for most of the past half hour, and all through his own anger and Takeshi’s speech.

  “Why, I believe I’ll take you up on that offer, gunsō. It’s the very best Baku scotch. Pour us each a double.”

  ***

  Maximilian Kahn’s war with SAC was more fair when he had greater numbers than the elite Special Action Commando. But devastations of the Ordensstaadt by the plague and Takeshi’s supply of advanced weapons to the General Curia tip the balance. Now that the White Death is moved offworld, carried at bohr speed to dāsa HQs and military colonies, the Broderbund is dying and losing everywhere. There aren’t enough Brethren left to control all the slave regiments. Rebellions break out on the surfaces of contested worlds, mutinies incapacitate fleets of Black Ships, troopships rebel and the last, sick cowls onboard are killed. At last, SAC gets the word from Takeshi. It swoops in to slaughter the last cowls still standing.

  It’s all over.

  Kahn flees Kestino.

  He won’t get far.

  Terra Deus has fallen.

  It’s assaulted and quickly overrun by a SAC invasion fleet, intent on finishing the genocide. Hard men in gray level all cities with nukes, then fall to the surface in dropships and radiation gear. They move into the countryside, looking for the last labs and infirmaries. All wounded Brethren they find are slaughtered. Tens of thousands of teenage novices and twenty-something postulants are lined up and masered against a nighttime backdrop of glowing ruins. Clone babies are ripped out of incubators and their skulls and brains dashed on the ground. Nagas mothers are put to death, along with their squealing infants and toddlers.

  The ships move across to Fates next, and the whole process repeats. The cities smoke, dāsa male slaves and all nagas mother-wives burn, along with libraries and nurseries and fields. Fire reaches deep under ground, sterilizing the soil, reversing 1,800 years of AI terraforming. There’s no need to nuke the three moons where Naujock first seeded White Death in the clouds. Everyone there is already dead. All other Ordensstaadt worlds are reduced to smoldering, lifeless hulks. All the old gods of the Nile and Euphrates and Tigris, of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, all the niflung, little gods of the mist and great gods of Valhalla, all the messiahs, hidden imams, Brahman and Arahitogami, all once-and-future kings are dead..

  ***

  Three weeks after the ‘Devastation of the Ordensstaadt,’ Takeshi and Naujock meet in the muffled stone room to take stock of the genocide,. It’s one of their periodic face-to-face check ins. Some things have to be said and done looking in the other man’s eyes. If that’s true of murder, how much more so in genocide?

  “Ya playd dad one booo’di’full’li, boss! Deys all dead, duh monks! Ha!”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Ah seen hun’dweds an dosands ah monk bawdies in duh sweets an’ allays ah alla duh citees. Deys all covawhed in whyd puzz balls! Deys stackin’ dem high in duh bawios, and buhnin’ dem in the pawks!”

  “Yes, but the Immunes are running, heading offworld in sealed ships. Here’s a list of unauthorized small craft and their bohr jumps. Send half the Ravens and all Robins to help your merc companies track them down. Leave the rest of the Washi Corps here, including all Canaries. Hunt these men ruthlessly. I want every man whose name is on this list dead inside a fortnight.”

  “Shuh t’ing, boss.”

  “Kill them all! Every man on that list and anyone you find with them, except Maximilian Kahn. Him, I want alive. You bring him to me in an iron cage.”

  “Yah, yah, boss. Duh boys will ged wide on it.”

  “No fuck ups, gunsō. I want you to go after Kahn, personally.”

  “Yas, jin’ral.”

  “He’s running. He’s terrified and even more, he’s bewildered that he has been abandoned by the prophesy, that he is given over to his enemies by his god. Well, as his fucking god, I want him brought to Kestino before the White Death can get him. It seems he’s one of the 1% of Immunes, but take no chances. Seal him up.”

  “Shuh boss.”

  “I can tell you where he is.”

  “Wheh, boss?”

  “On Fates. Hiding in his secret room underneath the burned out Uruk Library. It’s camoed, but you can locate it from orbit. Here are the coordinates. Take him alive, you hear! Seal him in a biocage inside your ship. I don’t want to take any chance that the plague gets to him first. He has to die another way.”

  “Ya said id ahwedy.”

  “
Well I’m telling you again! I have a special death planned for the Devil’s Disciple. He must not be allowed to kill himself or die from the gene plague.”

  “Whad yu gonna do?” Naujock leans forward in sudden, keen interest.

  “Never mind. All you need to know is that it’s a promise I made several years ago to an unusual person. I intend to keep my word. Are you clear on what to do?”

  “Yas, boss. Yu wand Max Kan bwod bak awive.”

  “Before the White Death gets to him! Take my personal ship, the Drake. It’s parked at Pyotr’s old yacht berth on the city central elevator. Get going.”

  ***

  SAC Main HQ in Novaya Uda leaves an enormous crater when it blows apart. Black smoke, white superconcrete dust, brown bits of cobbled street and red mist and bone from 4,000 Special Action Commandos rises a thousand meters into the sky above the city. The whole General Curia is gone. The plasma mine was laid in one of the ultrasecret, deepest tunnels that ran below the HQ and allowed the commandos to hit Onur’s troops in the flank during the failed coup in Year Four. Takeshi knew about the tunnel as a trusted member of the Sakura-kai, and from his post coup study of the Little General’s tactical errors. Cherry Blossoms were the first of the Old Order factions to be destroyed on his path to power. Then came the ‘big hat’ military, Old Families, the Guilds, and the Brethren. SAC is the last to go. It leaves with a lot more bang and style than the others combined. Takeshi unleashes the military, telling them it’s finally time to eliminate SAC leaders and the whole gray officer corps that dared to kill so many Rikugun and Kaigun six months prior. He concedes to the officer corps only a request to spare most of the NCOs and rankers in Special Action Commando field divisions.

  “Rikugun is having trouble filling in its ranks, now that its Year Five of the war. Casualties are heavy. It’s conscript SAC’s low and no rank troopers or call up the next youth cohort from the homeworlds, well before its due date.”

  “We’re talking several million men, yes?”

  “Seven million, give or take a few hundred thousand. We need every man we can get, up at the fighting fronts.”

  “You want all former SAC men in the ranks transferred into Rikugun?”

  “Not all. We’ll do some ideological vetting, of course. Kill the truly radical, the fanatics. The rest can fight. We’ll send most to Amasia. MI says that General Jan Wysocki is almost ready to release the big Alliance offensive there. And after all, what Purity man can object to fighting for what he believes is the ur world?

  “Yes, alright. Gray men can switch to green, and go out to die at the black.”

  “Thank you, President Watanabe.”

  “As for the rest, the officers, wipe them all out, commanders.”

  “Everyone? We we’re thinking along the same lines. It’s good to agree.”

  “Everyone who wore the gray, above the rank of master sergeant, must die. I mean across the entire Imperium, and I mean now. Finish what you started in the Occupied Zone and on the annexed worlds, on the Lost Children.”

  Kaigun captains arrest every man wearing gray on every warship, and space them. Rikugun is somewhat more selective. SAC officers are summarily shot but no one goes after the rank-and-filers, except for those who shout Purity slogans or try to defend the doomed officers. They’re disarmed, stripped of gray uniforms, their eagle standards broken while they watch. Their units are broken up and every second man is sent to a different RIK division. They’re redistributed and dispersed across more than 2,000 divisions engaged in active fighting on seventeen worlds. Nearly half still end up on Amasia, where the biggest fight of the war burns on.

  It goes smoothly because Rikugun and Kaigun officers approve of the blood revenge, but also because many RIK divisions and Kaigun warships are already under Takeshi’s indirect control. His loyalists have been promoted to command in the aftermath of two purges, the first by Pyotr after the Onur coup attempt and the second by SAC and the Broderbund at Takeshi’s secret urging, eight months ago. Now he takes out a final list of names and gives the purge order himself. For a third time, he culls the officer corps in a blood purge and doesn’t even get his hands wet. He is absolute dictator of the Imperium. There’s only one or two loose ends left. Impatiently, now that he’s so close, he waits for them to come to him, like a spider sits at the center of an orb web, or a viper rests on the thickest branch.

  ***

  Naujock finds Maximilian Kahn whimpering in hiding, right where Takeshi said he would be: in a secret room where he took young boys and girls to rape at night, after he finished daytime divinations in the Great Uruk Library carved into the rock deep beneath the surface of Fates. Takeshi was summoned there many times. He has never forgotten or forgiven. Naujock stuns Kahn, then binds him hand and foot. He throws him into a steel animal cage he brought from the Kestino Zoo. He over sprays the bars, sealing him inside a permeable, transparent biofilm keyed to block the gene virus. A bot hovertow floats the cube to the hold of his ship. He’s glad to leave Fates behind, shrouded in fatal radiation from nuclear and plasma bombs that gives it brilliant new auroras. Naujock is back at the Kestino elevator in four days, roundtrip. Another hour and he’s at the Jade Gate, heading inside to the Throne Room with a cubed and distraught Kahn in a bot tow cage.

  ***

  Chiyoko stands beside Neaira, waiting with Takeshi as Naujock lugs the cube into the Jade Court. The huge room is entirely empty except for the four of them, and Maximilian Kahn. Not even one bird guard is present, though hundreds are right outside, within easy hailing distance. Debased and humiliated, Master Kahn stares out from inside silver steel bars at Takeshi. Is this the Apostate God, a false Arahitogami? Is he the Doom of the Broderbund a handful of minor prophesies hinted at, only to be rejected and suppressed? Fear and despair compete across his face. Then he sees Chiyoko, a vision of absolute hate, and all color leaves him.

  “Remove the barrier,” Takeshi orders. “Let him out, but leave him bound.”

  Naujock sprays a dissolvent on the cube from a small pack on his hip, then steps forward and unlocks the cage with a hard click! A strong odor of urine and feces wafts into the Throne Room. The barrier has not worked 100%. Kahn’s face is swelling with the first small, pussy white buboes of White Death. He’s having trouble breathing and feels severe chest pain. His brow runs with heavy sweat. An hour ago, he coughed up his first handful of blood and fluid. He’s not immune.

  “Well, Master Kahn. It is finally come to this.”

  “My Lord, Divine One, Arahitogami. I am your loyal servant. Why are you doing this to me? Please, I beg you.” Is it irony, mockery, self-pity, or all three?

  “Beg me? There’s no point at all in that.”

  “Then why bring me here in a cage?”

  “To tell you to your face that everything you have ever believed in was a lie. To bring you to your just reward, before the vengeful god of your aspirations and Black Faith. To tell you that you’re going to die, then to watch you do it.”

  “I see now that you are the foretold False God! I renounce you!”

  “Why, I’m deeply hurt, Master Kahn!”

  “We misread the stars, to think they spoke to us of so vile a creature as you. We committed Error. The true Arahitogami is yet to come!”

  “You won’t be here to greet him when he arrives.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I am ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “To die, to be murdered by a false god. To be a holy martyr for my faith, for the blessed Black Faith. Kill me, and be done with it. Oh false one!”

  “Oh no, Master Kahn. You don’t get off so lightly. You will not go to your grave thinking that you are a holy martyr to the One True Faith. That’s all over, forever. The Ordensstaadt, the Black Faith, the Broderbund, your future messiah, all those millennia of grubbing in the superstitions that you found below the ruins. All of it. It no longer exists. Your past, present, and future are turned to dust.”

  “You lie! I was on Fates two da
ys ago! As long as worlds of the Ordensstaadt survive, the Black Faith will survive and one day we shall Correct Error.”

  “You mean you were hiding like a hermit crab under Fate’s surface, klics deep. Too deep to hear the atomic pounding or the last screams of the last clone child and the last mother-wife as they burned above you. I assure you, it’s totally gone.”

  “What is gone?!”

  “All of it! The holy script of the Corpus Hermeticum is burned. The artifacts your ridiculous Order gathered and guarded for millennia are destroyed, vaporized along with your last postulants and novices and the final dāsa and nagas. There’s nothing left of the Black Faith, not anywhere. It’s all and forever gone. I did that.”

  “Lies!”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No! Why would I listen to the false words of the False God?”

  “Hmmm, a good point. You probably should not. That’s why I have something for you to see, instead. Will you look on it, and believe the evidence of your eyes?”

  “Look at what? What new lie is this?”

  “Neaira, please show him.” A lithe vision steps forward, toward the stooping, wizened old man. A crimson, shoulderless gown top plunges in a ‘V’ to her hips, revealing half of each breast as it points even lower, toward the Mount of Heaven. The extraordinary gown falls in folds of red silk over her narrow waist, to the jade tile floor. Long, arousing, perfectly shaped legs are revealed to the inner thigh by a slit that parts and closes like the Sea of Reeds as she walks. High heeled black shoes arch her back, thrusting her pelvis forward ever so slightly. Kahn pulls back from her instinctively, thinking that he’ll be fouled by a woman’s touch before he dies. And not just any woman. A she devil in red. He wants no woman despoiling his martyrdom. He intends to fold in on it, like a collapsing star.

  “No worries! For both our sakes, I shan’t touch you.”