Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Jahandar never forgives her. Yet, he keeps a holo image of Tanya near, perched on his hand-carved Toruń oak desk as he works on purges and policy, vengeance and vendetta. On his walnut night table he keeps Tanya’s two old snow globes. They glow faintly inside his massive bedchamber, where slept emperors before Soso stood over the last of the line with a humming blue sachi, beheaded royal children and grandchildren piled all around his bloody feet.

  If Jahandar loves any one thing it’s the cruel, twisted schoolboy lurking within. He coos praise to Soso for his intellect and vision, imitating Old Ritual monks who taught a brutal boy to appreciate great and ancient stories and classic verses. Never seeing past a clever lad’s concealed shields to a hardened will and lethal purpose residing unrequited underneath. Or to the madness.

  Jahandar the Dread, the myth and man and ogre Tanya Ramos called “dear Soso,” her first and only lover, sits at night on the edge of a four-poster where dead emperors and empresses coupled and cuckolded for centuries. He rocks himself like a lost child, sobbing in self-pity and berating holo-Tanya out loud with curses and low moans.

  “Why did you betray me, Tatiana? Oh, my little Tanya. How could you leave poor Soso? Who told you to leave me? I’ll have them chopped, all who poisoned you against me!” He picks up the smaller snow globe, the one with the deer in the snow of the Blue Mountains. Does he remember Tanya or Soso?

  He shakes it, feebly. Most of the snow in the old-fashioned globe stays settled, clinging to the rim of the cottage. The little doe looks undisturbed by the shaking. “Everyone leaves, everyone betrays Soso in the end. Even you, bitch-cow. Why did you do it, oh why? My dear, sweet Tatiana. I hate you, my love.”

  He speaks loudly into empty air, like he’s narrating a Blue Mountain myth from boyhood, a tale of hard bandits with softened hearts. “This creature cracked my heart of Sachi stone. Now she’s dead and with her go my last warm feelings for Humanity.”

  Even a liar sometimes speaks truth to himself.

  ***

  In the old days he was coiled and visibly lethal. Now, anyone who wished could strike him down. No one does, of course. He’s armored in their fear. Adamantine in terror. In a sense, he is a hermit, isolated beyond all the worlds. It’s been 50 years since he left Nalchik’s surface. Twenty since he left the secure confines of the Caesarium Selo. He hasn’t walked or hovered the cobbled streets of Old Astrana in all that time, as he did before he imprisoned Tanya, who would go there with him, beaming pride in her Soso. His last time in the city Tanya was already two years dead. He went with his daughter Vashti. It was her 15th birthday and she made him go.

  The grand districts were built many centuries before the Grim Revolution. Their quaint, human-scale neighborhoods and sprawling bazaars are privately beloved and treasured because they still reveal ancient Dauran character and values. Still show taste and presence despite nine decades of malign neglect by crude Jahandar. Survive despite the grimy cultural contempt that the terrible victor shows toward everything ever built by the butchered losers of the old regime.

  Survive, but only barely. They shadow under drear additions of drab, monochrome towers that erupt in trunk-like prototaxites from nearby New City. They rise hundreds of stories in a repugnant, fungus forest built by a coarse and uncultured Tyrant. The fawning JarNeb calls his artistic vision “Brutal Realism” and declares it “a genius meld of form, function and ideal futurism.” Astrana’s gloomy residents shudder in the shade of his morbid gigantism..

  Vashti left her rainbow eyes fixed on red all day, to celebrate reaching the age of Dauran majority and raise her courage to ask the question. She was full of joy and hope and ignorance of who her father was, and what he could do even to her.

  So she asked him if she could meet alone with a certain boy. That night he penned her in her mother’s empty cottage while his Shishi gutted the first boy she dared to like, slaughtering his whole family after that. Vashti cried and pleaded for days but he wouldn’t let her out.

  Twenty years later, she’s in the cottage prison still.

  Royko

  Jahandar stands rooted in ruin. Leaning on the edge of the great redwood table to support his aching leg. He’s wizened, weak and naked inside his akhalukhi. Yet no one dares say that it’s frayed, dirty-gray, and food-stained. It’s been decades since he dressed or washed properly, since he cared at all. Thirty years since five-year old Vashti wrinkled her nose and said, “Papa, you stink!” Then she pointed to a dark stain on his left breast. “And you need to wash this suit!”

  He never cares again about outward show after he locks “my little rainbow” Vashti away, and there’s no one to tell him to wash his filthy clothes and stinking body or trim horrid yellow-black nails. More often now, he admits to himself that his physical decline is advancing. It’s why he’s obsessed with Blue Onis and their concealment of immortality.

  “Foreign shits!”

  He can’t ever admit that he’s in mental slippage. No one else can know, either. No one. “Shishi, my health is the greatest state secret in all Daura. Follow my doctor home. I saw treason in his eyes when he examined me today. Kill him there, and all his family. He must have talked to them, and he mustn’t ever talk. Then find me another doctor. One who’s not a traitor. Hurry!”

  His appetite is for vengeance, no matter how small a remembered slight to his insecure narcissism. “Assassin, there was a boy who moved away from Sachi when Soso lived there with his wife. He offended her in the market. Find him, whatever world he’s on. I want his tongue.”

  His intellect is keen and prodigious, yet he’s baffled at chafing his projects always meet, wearing to nothing with friction against the rough cloth of human nature that abrades all plans. “Why is production failing in warship turrets? Your factories are full of traitors. Purge them!”

  Frustration with the recalcitrance and base stupidity of Daurans, who just can’t make his projects for their betterment work, becomes ever hotter rage. And rage always leads him back to murder. In the end and at his core, Jahandar is a stone killer corrupted absolutely by absolutism, corroded within from too long exercise of unrestrained power over hundreds of billions of lives.

  Searching for hidden enemies and treason where even his secret police tell him none exist, he finds not one or two or ten plotters but millions of traitors, whole families and towns and regions made up only of traitors. “Black Robes! On your bikes and hovers! Sniff them out, my dogs! Sweep them away with your sachis and brooms! Slaughter them all!”

  Then he purges the traitorous Shishi leaders who failed him, who hid from him the hordes of traitors he knew and then proved were there. “So, commander you also were plotting against me, against poor Soso. Shishi, bring your laser. Chop this traitor down. Shishi, you are promoted in his place. Find his family. Bleed them into your scuppers. They’re all traitors too.”

  Over nine decades of unrestrained power and barely restrained madness, Jahandar turned the Dauran Commons into a vast panopticon, a circular prison of inward-facing cells impossible for anyone to escape. Jahandar’s systems look inward only, to Dauran worlds only, watching and informing and betraying each other lest one of the other inward-looking stars accuses them first.

  Not one among the generals and admirals of the Dauran Revolutionary Army and the Dauran Revolutionary Navy standing at the starmap will act against him. They could so easily do it, too. Encircling him like senators around Caesar. Yet none dare to pull a blade and strike him down. Not when they know that every other man in the half-circle is a viper, too, and that only Jahandar’s threatened wrath keeps them from turning on each other, to sink in poison fangs and tear flesh from bone. Not with his ever loyal Shishi so near and lethal and vicious in their sadism.

  Jahandar’s method is terror backed by torture, ending in mass murder. It starts in a simple suspicion to end in a tsunami of death flooding whole worlds. He kills on the slightest whim, or on a mere fantasy of opposition. He never snuffs out just the accused. He kills whole circles of
siblings, parents, spouses, children, grandchildren, cousins and friends. No one knows when the awful Black Robes will kick in their door, not for something they did or said, but for a reckless comment by a distant relative or friend or stranger who gave up their name under torment.

  Every prisoner accuses a hundred more conspirators, inventing them out of their agony, calling out names of relatives and friends or fellow workers. Any name will do. All of Daura, its hundreds of billions, trembles under his whim and capricious will. His closest servants in the Selo live in cloaked terror of a demented sense of humor, of poison soup and Shishi blades and his sheer delight in sadism. The nearer to Jahandar the greater the fear. He is menace incarnate.

  He’s a brilliant comet plunging through Daura’s history, destroyer of lives and worlds. Yet in the wasting years of his discontent not even deaths of tens of millions slake his thirst to dominate, humiliate and butcher. A rage he doesn’t understand but always indulges demands ever more revenge, torment, blood and cruel death. Daura is too small to contain him anymore. ‘Only war with those foreign shits will give me that, and more.’ He bites his lip in anticipation, tastes blood and iron in his desiccated mouth, then remembers what a Tikbuli monk taught him.

  Not even in sleep does Jahandar escape Soso. Nor can the terrible boy flee from the bent horror he will become. Each inhabits, haunts and stalks the other. Now in advancing dotage and decline they twist all kinds of misremembered words, moving back and forth between Jahandar and Soso, the great Tyrant and a brutal mountain boy. The boy was taught by Old Ritual monks a century ago, and was a prized student of literature. The same monks the corrupt old man had killed. Now, standing before the great starmap, they mix again, merge into a miasma of ego rage.

  ‘I must become King John. My breath will “kindle the dead coal of wars and raise up fires too huge to be blown out.” The first time he read that ancient text Soso admired what he thought was the poet’s secret lust for war, thinking that he saw what all the scholars missed.

  He’s too proud of his schoolboy insight, for Jahandar misrecalls and muddles up verses as he gloats into the starmap. ‘The future can’t veil its face from me. I’m the meteor of war! I shall light the skies of the Thousand Worlds on fire with my falling. Look up and wonder at my incandescence!’

  ***

  “Come my generals. Stand beside me, admirals. Yes Krump, time to unleash the night dogs. Play trumpets to my great purpose! A hollow whistling in the leaves foretells the tempest I shall raise. Send my legions out to wreak farfolk treasons! There are worlds to conquer, enough for all of you. And great secrets to win. Come, follow me to war. Let us discuss your duty and the day.”

  The uniforms around Jahandar stand motionless in a rare moment of clarity from their leader. In contrast to the Tyrant in his faux-modest akhalukhi, they’re sleek generals in creased DRA dark browns or very pretty admirals in brilliant DRN whites, trimmed in gold braid. The naval ornaments stand out above all the others, especially Shishi master Röhm Krump’s hooded cloak and wide belt, both modeled on Jahandar's boy gang fashion.

  Top generals and admirals of the Great General Staff saw the map for the first time a year ago, when they were summoned to the Caesarium Selo and ordered to make ready for war. No one but Jahandar saw the starmap reveal such detail before today. Not even the two dozen map-makers of the great holo have seen all that it displays. Frightened and shuttered clerks entered the coded data into its laser projector banks in total isolation from each other, then were replaced in the usual Dauran fashion: first a hard death, then total erasure under the “law of oblivion.”

  General Chima Azikiwe is black as midnight. The effect is amplified by his arresting all-black eyes, which have no border between pupil and iris. The lack of color make’s them impossible to read. He’s young, brilliant, ambitious. He’s also intently soaking in every detail of the starmap he can commit to a prodigious memory. Azikiwe knows he’s a superior talent. How else could he rise to such high rank in the Dauran Revolutionary Army by age 36?

  This is his first time in The Study and he’s drawn to the starmap like a silk moth to a flame, reaching it close enough to touch after several minutes of slow maneuvers. He extends a slender finger and runs it softly along the grown-diamond rim of the redwood table, thrilling to the cold. While Jahandar was silently brooding, Azikiwe peered into every system and sector, absorbing everything he saw into an imprintable memory. Now that the Tyrant is animate he continues to drink in information kept secret from Daurans and all Orion for over nine decades.

  The starmap is also ready for war. It reveals a thousand hidden military facilities and the distribution of all of Jahandar’s vast military assets and production lines and targets. Armies and fleets already cluster in fat brown lumps all along the western frontier, poised to cross over into Neutral and Calmari space and systems. Another, narrower strip of brown symbology rests along the southern border, where Dauran stars touch the double-green line of the vastness and might of the Grün Imperium. Fleets and armies show as brightened highlights inside 200 border systems.

  Azikiwe has already mentally photographed whole sections of the holo projection’s revelations, as if he mapped them himself. ‘My gods, I had no idea we had this many ships and armies and forward bases! This is where the wealth of our people has been poured, cast and hammered this past decade. This is why our worlds are so bleak, our cities grim and spare, our countrysides dark against the starry nights. Not all that the great Tyrant claims is a lie after all. Daura is strong. Very strong. Tonight, I must tell Vashti everything I see here.’

  He’ll talk about the starmap with his lover, if the hidden tunnel under the bower of her white cottage on the edge of the Selo courtyard is clear. For now, his mind fixes positions of spaceyards and bases, while others stand silent in the umbra of the terrible Tyrant, trying not to draw his eye or ire. Then he’s done. The starmap is locked in his mind and 3D memory. The most valuable information in all Daura. It’s an error Jahandar will live to regret and rage over, letting his secrets slip out into the worlds through the all-black eyes of Chima Azikiwe.

  He turns to assess the other uniforms standing around Jahandar, near but not too near, far but not too far. He’s less than impressed by what he sees. ‘They’re like little moons orbiting too close in, fearing to be torn into rings by the immense gravity of the monster who holds them.’

  Now he absorbs information and impressions about the men who will run the Tyrant’s war, as easily as he drank in the starmap. He notes every drop of perspired fear under one DRA general’s cap, a furtive look of lethal ambition on a cold DRN admiral’s face. They stand with the Transcendent Leader, too much aware of his dark star proximity to realize the extraordinary opportunity handed to them by the starmap revelations. While they all jockey for tiny increments of position against each other, no one wants to be the man standing right beside Jahandar. Every one has a secret shuttle and escape route ready, in case he turns on them in a murderous moment. Even though they know that if they run, their extended families will be minced into non-persons and wiped from memory. Or worse, taken as slaves to a Drapchi prison moon. Most would rather that their families died bloody than had to live under the whips of Krump’s cruelest men.

  One admiral standing rigid in tight dress whites spent his career before today in the outer provinces, happily forgotten and far from the Tyrant’s attention. He was shocked and terrified to be ordered to report to DRN HQ in Astrana a week ago. When he arrived he was told to replace a fallen and once powerful predecessor, now either dead or languishing somewhere in the Drapchi prison moons archipelago. He’s been trembling head-to-toe ever since he entered The Study. He can’t find enough self-control to conceal his longing to be any place but in this vast room at this moment, too near the author of all his daymares and nightmares. It could prove a fatal weakness should the pocked despot turn to see the horror showing on the stiff admiral’s face, or smell the little yellow squirt of fear just now running down the inside of h
is right trouser-leg.

  “Is this is the best Daura has? Are these the elite of all our hundreds of worlds? They’re scared down into their bowels. All except that cold, fish-eyed, lardy Royko and Jahandar’s mass gravedigger, that klick-klacking sadist Krump.”

  Azikiwe enjoys a good, old-fashioned curse. The kind you really have to work on and work up to. He’s been practicing very old ones with Vashti, each laughing and vying to outdo the other in archaism.

  ‘The others are all too vain or stupid to see what’s right before them, in this astonishing holo. There are many outstanding mediocrities here. Vashti’s right. Her father surrounds himself with a few men of real ability and power, but most are dullards who lack wit or talent.’

  He shows nothing on his unreadable and stoic face as he inwardly sneers at the yellow-dribbling, backworld admiral. ‘Fen-sucked and onion-eyed coward ... moldy rogue.’