by Kali Altsoba
“We must make ready, you must be ready, if Pyotr and the Higher Castes seek to displace popular unrest into a Fourth Orion War. If the center of their internal balance doesn’t hold, great evil will be loosed upon our sleeping worlds. And by us in due time and amplified many fold by rage and vengeance, back onto theirs.”
“The players are complex and partly obscure to us. There are Purity fanatics in Special Action Commando, the quasi-military secret police force that’s a power behind the Jade Throne. There are rumors of a revival of the Broderbund, pushed out in the Red Purge and slaughter of millions of Brethren by Dowager Empress Mary Oetkert, who broke their 1,400 year grip on royal power and succession. Yet their old commanderies are repaired, every crack patched and reinforced in the old walls of fear and superstition. Is the Broderbund returning to power under Pyotr?”
“Pyotr’s purpose may not be clear even to himself. Unfettered from the Dowager and the traditional elites, does he have more war in him? Or will he balk at crossing beyond Krevo’s near frontier, at releasing The Wolf into further systems of the Thousand Worlds, into our systems?”
“Do not forget Daura. Dressed up as a civilization, it’s a dungeon state wearing rags of primitivism head-to-toe. It’s vastness is dark to us, sealed since the Grim Revolution brought Jahandar to power a century ago, the bloodiest tyrant in all our thousand histories. His rule is so absolute intelligence officers say that even yesterday’s weather can be changed by his decree.”
“Discard what you think you know of Jahandar the Dread. He’s worse than nightmares you whispered to frighten your little brother at bedtime. He crushes even a suspicion of threat with as much gore and terror as his perverse imagination and Shishi cohorts can conceive. He’s isolated from any influence beyond his own brooding lusts and poisoned memories. Fear him.”
“This is no cartoon tyrant. He rules nearly 300 worlds and 945 billion ‘souls,’ as the old Dauran emperors called their trodden subjects. ‘Dead souls’ we call those living in Jahandar’s shadow. Pray for them one last time, to whatever useless god or gods or faith in science or fain hope for chance or fate or destiny you believe in. Then stop praying and start preparing for war.”
Again, the Old Believers are shocked and shaken. Castro’s on a roll. He’s managed to offend nearly everyone in the hall wearing cadet gray. ‘I’m not done scaring them yet.’
“Billions perished to establish Jahandar’s absolutism. Millions die yearly to sustain it. It’s his nature and his sport to increase the number of dead even in peace. What might he do in war?”
“He has never ventured over the borders of the old Dauran Empire that he destroyed from within nine decades ago, but from our perspective merely renamed. He seems content to deal death solely on his own harried and prisoner worlds. And so, the rest of Orion has learned to live with a seeming void where a third of its Thousand Worlds suffer unspeakable terrors, alone in utter darkness. Only it’s not a void. It’s a vast empire, the most populous in the spiral arm. It’s a powerful star state that in three prior Orion Wars once stood beside us, once stood against us, and once stood apart.”
“What will Jahandar do? He is a riddle to us, shrouded in mystery, wrapped within an enigma and dropped down an oubliette. Mortality must chase his madness with night terrors in his stretched and final years, loom over his fathomless insecure vanity. We think this is so, yet Daura is dark to us. We watch its borders but we cannot peer over or into them.”
“No agent of ours, no Neutral either, goes into the sealed Hermit Empire. Of those who tried none returned to us. This has been true so long that we are grown used to it, and our leaders now act as though Daura is outside Orion, lost to us in a long nightmare under fearful Jahandar. They think it is best to leave the dread tyrant undisturbed in his dark hermit’s cavern, pulling wings off bats trapped inside with him. They hope that he also ignores us.”
“The last agent reported a half-century ago. Before she went dark she told of massacres of entire rebel cities and devastations of whole planets, and of rumors of the growing madness of Jahandar even then. Today we are lost in a wilderness of mirrors and terrified to break the glass.”
It’s the best Castro can do, to frighten children into young adulthood. It’s nowhere good enough. ‘Too damn abstract. I wish we had more detail to tell them, but we don’t.’
“The rich worlds of our Union are the envy of the two sprawling eastern empires. We’re well-armed and well led by long blue ranks of those who sat here in gray decades before you. We uphold a democratic culture but we’re not pacifists. We will fight to hold what we have. Yet, three centuries of peace perhaps teach us too many wrong lessons. We’re too complacent in our material superiority. Foolhardy to believe trade and the Triple Treaties keep the peace. Reckless in forgetting that we must be ready to threaten, and that we must do, vast and terrible violence.”
“Jahandar is silent. Let him remain so. Pyotr is making the most noise. His diplomats buy our politicians and secretly fund street dissent. Grün attachés carry out military reconnaissance. His agents sponsor local terrorism to roil our border worlds. Ethnic antagonism is rising along with the Purity movement all along the Grün frontiers, with other Neutrals and with this Union.”
“As the main losers of the last war, Grünen teach and nurse strong and bitter memories. They lust to regain dozens of worlds surrendered by treaty, part of the swap of shattered Neutral and border systems that enabled negotiations. Pyotr calls these worlds his Verloren Kinder, ‘Lost Children.’ It’s clever, for no one is so aroused as a parent who thinks someone confines an unwilling child.”
“Yet even now few outside Krevo want to believe that the wider Grün threat is real. What sane person champions war in this enlightened era of moral advance? Ours is the Shōwa Age. We’ve all outgrown war’s atavistic impulses. It’s been nearly 300 years ... So we all say.”
“Policy is not a military matter. We will train you as thinking officers, to make war so hard and well that you never have to because the threat of you deters Grünen and Daurans. You are the best hope for peace in our time. This is your true duty and chosen calling. I admire you for it. You’ll train as terrible warriors, hoping for peace until you’re called away to war. This is the honorable purpose that we’ll hold you to, over the next three years. Nothing more or less.”
“Cadets, all rise! Attention!”
Castro accepts their standing salute, spins on his polished heel and walks down the steps, off the platform and out the hall. His perfect creases knife the air over the grassy commons.
“Exit by row and column, from the rear. Dismissed!”
The cadets feel older than an hour ago as they file out after him. They sense everything is changing. They’re right. A sordid and careful crime on an airless moonlet no one heard of before started the Krevan War. Now they must think on Castro’s warning of their own careful crimes to come. It weighs on them as heavily as the fetid air of their first morning on Barda.
Leclerc
Major-General Gaspard François Marie LeClerc of the Army of the Calmar Union is a year into his appointment as Director of Armaments. He’s a large man, broad of shoulder and fit. Built like a bull and with the personality to match. Except that his round brown eyes look both gentle and tired, underneath bushy gray eyebrows very much in need of a weeding.
He’s had hardly a day’s rest since he took the job, just six months before the Imperium invaded Krevo. LeClerc reluctantly agreed to leave his field command because he thought war was coming. He took the new post only upon urging by his closest and oldest friends, classmates from the Academy when they were all high-spirited lads still wearing gray cadet uniforms.
‘Now my old friend Juan Castro is Commandant of the Academy and Gaétan Maçon is a full admiral and head of the JSC. Who ever thought we wannabe j-birds would come so far?’
In the end it wasn’t his friends who talked him into taking the job. It was Minister Georges Briand, robust politician and unofficial leader of a
noisy “War Hawks” faction in the Lok Sabha, the great House of the Union of Worlds sited in Barda. Maçon introduced them, over the best scotch and through blue-white clouds of heavily scented tobacco constantly puffing out of Briand like an old-fashioned steam train tooting around some provincial Town’s Fair Days.
Briand is famous for his scented clouds. He never stops smoking. He once said to a pinched prude who objected to his smoking in her presence: “With the ancient triumph of science over cancer, ma’am, pipe tobacco returned to its rightful place as one of the very greatest pleasures in life. Along with a dram of good scotch after a solid meal and even ordinary sex. As long as it’s with another smoker.”
He didn’t care that he lost her vote and those of all other tobacco haters. “I’d rather have the smokers. Even if I lose, with them I’ll have more fun.”
Briand wasn’t yet a member of the inner cabinet when he first met LeClerc. That didn’t happen until the news of Bad Camberg broke into every GovNeb. Even so, he was already a key voice both inside the government opposing its do-nothing policy, and outside it pushing the same agenda with an evermore uneasy and worried public. He and LeClerc developed familiarity, but only over time. It came naturally to Briand. It was at first feigned by the more reserved LeClerc.
Briand thought the moment to recruit had arrived but nearly ruined his pitch with a flat civilian indifference to military ego: “Any general can manage a field command. We need you looking at the bigger view.” He said it during their first meeting, months before the Krevan crisis spun into war. LeClerc disagreed with this civilian impertinence, grunting noncommittedly. ‘I’d like to see you command an army. Only a civilian could say … Any general, indeed!’
Briand looks like an old-fashioned squire fussing over his family’s country estate, or a tweedy sort of professor from a quaintly cloistered discipline like literature or chemistry, subjects where pretty much everything has been written and said that’s worth saying, so that smoking and drinking the best scotch is clearly the wisest thing a person of refinement and intellect should do.
Yet he’s neither a squire nor a scholar by temperament. He’s a man of direct speech and buzz-saw action. His constant smoking and drinking are more likely self-therapy, the only frantic things that keep him still and functioning at any given moment. LeClerc saw that in their first-ever minute.
‘He pretends to be in perfect and affable control of himself, sitting back in that huge mockleather chair. But he’s tense and coiled as a desert viper ready to fling himself open-jawed on an unwary jackrabbit. And I’m today’s rabbit.’
It took time to gain the gruff general’s trust, for Briand stumbled right out of the gate by flattering a man incapable of being flattered, then calling on personality and connections over argument: “We need trustworthy people like you in key administrative posts. Smart military leaders who will make proposals like a Roman, sine ira et studio, without anger or fondness.”
“You’ve been spending time in Juan Castro’s company. I can tell.”
“Indeed I have. And your friends Juan Castro and Gaétan Maçon both strongly agree with me that you’re the only man for this job. General, we need your intelligent, cold eye cast onto readiness and weapons procurement.”
Still, Briand’s plea and argument worked. LeClerc committed to the job at just their third meeting. He was then cleared to see Core Secret classified reports on the Grün military build-up. They truly scared him, and General Gaspard François Marie LeClerc does not frighten easily.
***
“Georges, how can this be? How can they have done this in secret from us for so long? It’s like we’ve all been asleep, except for our enemies.”
“Ah Gaspard, it’s an old tale indeed, too often told. Those who love peace do nothing while those who want war gather strength and plot aggression and destruction in secret.”
Briand says it puffing constantly on a small wood pipe, three fingers of Baku scotch on hand in a fine Jos crystal goblet. He always smells of best scotch and perfumed pipe tobaccos, the fine-cut and mild Kars green varieties, not coarse and rough-cut (and illegal) Sachi blues.
“What can we do?”
“We may have to fight the Imperium before this crisis is over, but our first battle must be for the hearts and minds of our own people. The prime minister is deeply sincere, a genuine man of peace who’s not yet persuaded that the threat is real. Our job is to educate him that vanity and veneration of Pyotr Shaka and Purity are corroding reason and reasonableness in the Imperium.”
“Gods above! The man still needs to learn that simple truth at his stage in life?”
“As I say, he prides himself above all on being a man of modesty and peace.”
“This is ideology as suicide! It’s stupidity on stilts! He must have seen these reports. Doesn’t the PM understand that if this gets out and he does nothing it’ll set off a true crisis, here inside the Calmar Union? They’ll burn down the Lok Sabha, with him inside giving speeches!”
LeClerc comes from old Huguenot rebel stock, meaning his family has been in the war business, or at least the military business, for twice a hundred generations. His peculiar cultural inheritance and keen interest in traditions of dissent and rebellion makes him innately suspicious of imperial power and of all monarchies like the Imperium. Briand has been told this by Castro.
“He knows, but he suffers from a kind of pathological altruism that makes him lurch away from conflict. He thinks that when it comes to war doing nothing is how you do something, indeed the only just and proper thing. He’s a good man, Gaspard François Marie. A deep thinker, too, about human affairs. In his own small way. It’s just that this time he’s profoundly and fatally wrong about the most important things. As you can see, our enemies are real and coming over.”
“Damn his goodness! War is what happens while good people are making other plans. We must raise many new divisions and make hard decisions, not play at philosophy. Or politics or diplomacy. The time for words is past. We need to ready for war. It’s coming. I can feel it.”
“One can also make war with the right words, in the right places and times. But yes, we must make real and deep changes. Fortunately, we still have time to prepare for the worst.”
“What’s that, Georges? Total destruction? This morning when I rose and read the intel ‘overnights,’ not even the Core Secret report you just showed me, just the ‘overnights,’ I actually looked out to see if a mushroom cloud from a nudger strike was already rising over Barda.”
“He’s still the prime minister, Gaspard. He’s far from a hasty man and he can’t be forced. He must be persuaded to act if we hope to survive.”
“The time for persuasion is past. Perhaps the military should act on it own, to save the Union?” It’s an angry outburst, not a serious feeler. LeClerc would never support a coup. But Briand decides to pretend it is a feeler, though he winks as he laces LeClerc with faux umbrage.
“You bâtard! What of our democracy and long tradition of civilian primacy? Must we discard all that because of the failed optimism of your jaded youth? Will you march an old man’s anger in the street, lead divisions of young to storm the Lok Sabha? I’ll stand in the arch way!”
“Godsdamn it Georges, cut it out. You know I’m not a politician. I didn’t mean it. I would never … ”
“Relax, Gaspard. I agree that we’re only in an interregnum between catastrophes and that urgent acts are required. But not that. Besides, when war comes our folk will abandon all but the forms of our ideals and demand brutal policy from us. Or demand new brutes to lead them.”
“Aye, they’ll insist we make a Leviathan of them to fight all the others, then hang us after if we do it, saying we robbed them of their consent and natural freedoms.”
“When one wolf howls the moon all others in his pack howl, too, running in mad circles.”
“I fear you’re right, Georges. I hope you’re wrong. In sinful times like these reason and reasonableness are too often the more extre
me position.”
“Then the job of the reasonable, our job, is to push harder in the other direction. You and I shall make a rampart against the mob’s howl for red days and redder sins! ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. Gods help me.’”
“Stop quoting Juan Castro’s damn history lessons! Besides, most everyone is venal not mortal in their sinning. Some are truly evil, you know who I mean. But most folk are so ordinary they lack real imagination in their vices.”
“They are, until the times shift and call for the extraordinary. Then, to use your theology, even plain folk can do the greatest evil. Far more rarely, a few may rise to do the greater good.”
“The harder problem isn’t theology. It’s politics. No one’s really in control, anywhere.”
“Agreed. We follow an illusion of law and restraint when it’s all a muddle barely above anarchy. Even the mighty fear the fall of night, for they too can be killed while they sleep. Now, who was it said that? Some ancient philosopher I’ll wager. But enough damn college!”
