by Kali Altsoba
He stops recoiling. He stands stiffly. He looks down to what she holds before him: some kind of vid scroll she unravels with a quick snap of her right wrist.
“Look close, you ridiculous old man.” She touches or think commands ‘play.’ He can’t tell which. Against his will, his face is drawn down to watch the screen.
Vista after vista rolls past his eyes. Each is filled with pustule covered cowls; with mercury ball stadia in twenty or more cities, each stacked with dead novices and postulants and twisted monkish bodies. Then come broken seals and smashed caverns of the Holy Archives and Great Libraries of the Order, stopping with his own: the Great Uruk Library built deep underground on Fates. Next are slagged, semi molten surfaces of Ordensstaadt moons, then Fates and Terra Deus seen from low orbit. There are dull red patches where cities stood and hundreds of millions of cowls and their bastard sons walked, with mother-wives and dāsa slaves behind. Finally, he sees brilliant auroras of polar radiation glowing in the nightside view.
“You are not a martyr,” Takeshi corrects.
“What is all this? I don’t understand.”
“There is nothing for you to be martyred to. All of it is gone.” Neaira replays the montage, holding the screen to Kahn’s face. Again he watches Fates and Terra Deus burn, then glow. The truth at last creases his visage with pain. He wails out an inhuman cry of mortal pain but also soul despair. It hangs on the event horizon of a black hole of hopelessness. “Ahhhh! This cannot be!”
“Your faith died before you. It’s gone. The prophesies were false. How do we know? Because the Brethren are gone. Your life’s work failed. It meant nothing!”
Maximilian Kahn looks at Takeshi in total despair at his lost faith’s bleakness. Then he cries out, wailing in spiritual angst at the desolation of his faith, the death of prophesy and the divine. “Ahhhh! My God! My God!”
“Yes?”
“Ahhhh! Ahhhh!” Kahn wails incoherently, his cries echoing into the empty soundlessness of the Jade Throne Room, into the silence of Orion and Creation.
“I have but one question, Master Kahn, before you die. I am curious about one thing. Here at the end, given your brilliance and after so many decades of devotion and your study of the Eternal, might you have anything interesting to say before you enter your long, dark night? Anything, after so many years of useless blather?”
“My gods, why am I forsaken? How can this be? It can’t be true that all the prophesies were wrong! It cannot be that the Black Faith was false? Ahhhhhhhh!”
“So, it appears that you do not have anything worth saying. In that case, I’m done here.” Takeshi turns half around, looking for someone. “Chiyoko?”
Chiyoko was brought from prison to share this moment. She has been looking toward it for three years, ever since Takeshi made secret contact with her on her island prison. He made her three promises in return for information on Maximilian Kahn’s divinations and communications with the High Council. The first was that he would remove Pyotr from the Jade Throne and that his sibling would sit there in his place. She assumed that he meant her. He kept his word when he let Kahn raise up the idiot Friedrich. He did it cruelly, too, with her present.
Yet here she is, no more than a sharp blade’s thrust from Maximillian Kahn, the man she hates more than she loves herself. That’s the second promise Takeshi made: that she will be the one to kill the Devil’s Disciple. Even inside her ever vaulting Oetkert ambition, it was the price hatred demanded in return for helping Takeshi bring down and murder her brother. She’s panting heavily as she takes three steps forward, to stand in front of Kahn and beside golden Takeshi and raven Neaira. She looks directly into Takeshi’s face. He’s having difficulty holding back his own rage, his own hatred for this enfeebled and wailing old man before them.
“I made you a promise.” He hands her the Red Dowager’s degen, taken from Pyotr’s corpse. She takes it in her right hand. He and Neaira step back two paces, to let her work. Kahn looks in bewilderment at the holy blade as Chiyoko raises it to level with his face, showing him the instrument of his death and her revenge. Their eyes lock. His filled with an old man’s bleakness, hers with a wronged and barren woman’s hate and loathing. She suddenly darts forward, but not to stab him. She reaches out her left hand, which holds a pair of hidden plyers. She thrusts them into his mouth, grabs and pulls forward his devil’s tongue.
She slashes it off with the degen. She throws the soft, pink muscle into the darkness of the room. It lands at the foot of the Jade Throne with a fleshy plop, slithers a wet meter or so across cold green tile, twitches and stops. She leans in to whisper to Kahn, pausing so he can hear her over the sound of his own choking, over his smacking and sucking and spitting out mouthfuls of dark blood. Then instead of a whisper she screams into his face.
“You dared defile me, an Oetkert daughter! You dared lick me intimately with your vile tongue! Try it now! Try it now!”
Kahn falls to his knees, a frail thing in human form, hacking and spitting dark blood at the door of mortality. He looks every one of his many years. But there’s no pity in the room. “I scorn you, scurvy letch! You lump of foul deformity!”
She stabs him over and over with the degen, twisting it hard right each time she thrusts it in, hard left as she pulls it out. Maximilian Kahn slumps to the green tiles, tongueless and unable to call out for mercy to his murderer or to his Apostate God. He dies as she promised herself he would, inside a silent scream. Chiyoko turns to face Takeshi. The bloodsoaked degen is in her hand. Her prison smock is drenched red from her heaving breasts to waist and upper thighs. It wetly clings.
Naujock points his maser at her chest: “Dwop id!” She does.
Neaira hands something to Takeshi, a green vial. He taps a little pixie dust into his palm, then blows it gently into Chiyoko’s face. She blinks, and coughs. “Now, to fulfil my third promise. Gunsō Naujock, take her to see her brother Friedrich.”
“I’m free”…hack, hack…“to go?” Chiyoko asks through a coughing spasm. Naujock takes her by the elbow and guides her away from the Jade Throne.
***
“How long will it take to spread to them all, to every Oetkert-Shaka?” Takeshi asks Neaira when they’re alone in the silent green room. The lighting is so dim you can’t see the corners, but they both know that no one lurks there or listens.
“It’s much faster than the White Death, but harder to predict its course since Oetkert-Shaka descendants don’t cluster in segregated barracks and are spread out over far more worlds. Unlike the cowls were, at their end. You’ll have a better idea once she visits her brother. We’ll monitor how long it takes to spread to him.”
“How much is a lethal dose?”
“Well, the dust you blew into her face was probably enough to kill them all.”
“That good? Alright, this is how we’ll proceed. I’ll put one grain of gene virus in each of 10,000 vials and send them out with Naujock’s men to reach and infect all the Oetkerts and Shakas named in the Book of Births.”
“That will work. It will spread naturally inside extended family groups from those first contacts. They should all be dead within a year.”
“How many?”
“Hard to say. CIS and SRG estimate that there are up to 300,000 or slightly more members of the royal lines. But when it’s done, Orion will finally be rid of all Oetkerts and Shakas. That will force a new politics on the Imperium.”
“It doesn’t mean that the war ends right away. Too much blood was spilled to simply call a halt to the fighting. Anyone who tries will be lynched by the families of the dead, who will demand the Imperium keep fighting to justify their sacrifice.”
“I think that’s true. It must go on until your side is totally exhausted, and can resist us no longer.”
“As long as that? You underestimate my peoples.”
“Your peoples? Is that what you’re calling them now?”
“An expression only. It means nothing.”
“Are you sure it wasn�
��t a slip of the tongue?”
“My dear Neaira, what’s the matter. Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course not! Stop playing silly beggars. What are you planning?”
“Why, to congratulate your PM on his decisiveness. He should be pleased at how the Mistletoe Project worked. So completely, and so swiftly, too.”
“He will be. Yet, what this all really means depends on what you do next.”
“Well, my dear,” Takeshi says, taking her proffered hand by the fingertips as if escorting her into a Grand Coronation Ball, “in that case, let’s you and I go forth and make a little revolution.”
“You mean it? It’s not another of your tricks?”
“Not at all. I wouldn’t want to disappoint your uncle, the prime minister.”
“I’ll take you to meet him, inside the Palette Nebula.”
“Very good. I’m very much looking forward to it. And of course…”
“Of course, what?”
“Even more, I look forward to meeting The Envoy. He will be there as well?”
“He, or it, I never know which pronoun to use, never leaves uncle’s side.”
“Intriguing.”
“We should leave immediately.”
“My dear, dear Neaira. My great white whale, the Devil’s Disciple, is dead on my harpoon at last. All my enemies are dead or have submitted. Let me savor the moment. I am sure that The Envoy has the patience to wait for me a little longer. After all, it has come to the Orion spur all the way from the Perseus spiral arm.”
The Story Continues In
Revolution
Volume VIII
The Orion War
