by Kali Altsoba
He is indeed contemptible, feeding off the corrupt system Jahandar upholds but pissing his pants leg in the presence of its self-proclaimed god and prophet, and Tyrant for the Ages.
Chima Azikiwe wants to be nowhere but here in this unique moment, absorbing the immense starmap and reading the strengths and weaknesses of his enemies. Also watching Jahandar intimately, so that he might plot his demise. He’ll do so speaking in fine whispers ‘till dawn, lying naked and contented after thrusting deep inside wet and willing Vashti.
“How are the preparations for Operation Bloodhound,” Jahandar speaks to everyone at once and no one in particular. The ensuing silence is nearly unbearable as each man —there are no women in higher Dauran ranks— looks over to the next, hoping he’ll answer the Tyrant first. Most avoid Jahandar’s assessing gaze, looking down to the steel tips of their real-leather boots.
Jahandar lets the threat of his silence hang over them unnaturally long, before at last granting release. “General Royko, Chief of my Great General Staff.” It’s as if he sneers the title. “Are my armies ready? Are my fleets mobilized? What do you foresee? Speak!”
Oily and adipose General Mikva Royko is engrossed in himself, as he always is. He and Krump are within the inner circle, but too young to be survivors of the original Nalchik gang that helped Soso kill all the Party’s leaders one-by-one, to later emerge from a chrysalis of murder to become Jahandar. There are no survivors from that time, when Soso betrayed and slaughtered the founders of the Grim Revolution then moved Tanya into the Selo and the bed of dead emperors.
Azikiwe looks appraisingly at porcine Royko. He’s an immense yet hollow succulent. Gorged with fat and water, he’s pouring out of his DRA browns over the rim of the redwood table. Azikiwe recalls a line Vasti read to him, from the oldest book he ever knew or saw, one of her father’s from his schooldays on Sachi. ‘Sanguine fool. Huge hill of flesh. You disgust me.’
She saw it in her father’s bedroom when she was a little girl and asked him for it. It was wrapped in red real-leather binding. It was so old it had to be physically held and pages turned. It fascinated her, a thing so out-of-place yet so important to her father. He gave it to her, much to his own and her surprise. It was covered in dust and mold and hadn’t been cracked open in years, maybe decades. Vashti and Azikiwe laughed when they read it aloud together, to think Jahandar so treasured it. They begin to understand why, as their own plots and plans for murder unfold.
Mikva Royko is an impressively fat man. Of middling height and nearly as wide, he has a proud shock of thick black hair that he slicks back over his head right down to his collar, using copious amounts of clear oil. His skin is as shiny as fish scales, his cold fish eyes completing the image. His dark brown DRA uniform is stuffed, not creased, wherever great folds of flesh push it outward. He looks to be almost drowning in his own lard. He smells always of eels and oils, of oozing fat and heavy bathing salts he uses to conceal his stank even from himself. They never do the trick, so he’s always scouring far-off provincial markets for stronger soaps and bath salts.
Royko is used to high command, to life-and-death diktats about the fates and fortunes of millions of military slaves and subordinates; to watching executions by his guards while he eats his favorite meal of real-meat steak and yams, swilled down with copious samogon. He’s a full-blooded, “red-meat Dauran,” which means that he thinks about death all the time and not at all.
He clears his throat before replying to the Transcendent Leader, a choice that causes all five of his chins to jiggle and wag like a bowl of translucent fruit preserve. Röhm Krump fails to suppress a girly giggle at “Weeble,” as Royko is called by everyone, but only behind his back.
Krump is astonishingly thin and angular. Insect-like, he watches everyone for fatal weaknesses. ‘Did he let that little laugh slip out on purpose?’ Azikiwe wonders. Krump doesn’t choke it off or hide it from Royko, whose face registers an undulation of notice.
Azikiwe wonders how Jahandar’s top lieutenants really get along. ‘Royko is an immense and disgusting blimp, but he’s not stupid. Smart and tough enough to be Jahandar’s top general. Smart enough to orchestrate his war.’
Mocking, cruel humor is a staple of pharaoh’s court. Fearless, brash Azikiwe has seen even Jahandar make vulgar schoolboy jests when in his cups. Once the Tyrant pranked fat Royko by slipping a raw tomato onto his chair, curling into enfeebled laughter at his red-assed and red-faced embarrassment. ‘The higher the man the lower the wit. That includes almighty Jahandar.’
There’s nothing useful to a plotter like Azikiwe in a coarse boy’s pranks, but there are worlds of possibilities in an old man’s vanity. Jahandar is a volatile mix of backwoods crudity and cruel imperial pride. Somewhere in there he and Vashti will find a moment and a way.
“Real good progress, Vozhd.” Royko deliberately uses Soso’s old, Dead Souls gang handle. It’s a small trick to call him “Boss,” one that the dictator easily recognizes. It pleases him nonetheless, especially deployed by a fawning subordinate in full DRA dress uniform. Very full. It reminds him of the prettified Dambatta police Soso used to buy and humiliate, or kill on whim.
“In two weeks we begin our strategic assault on The Balcony, our opening move against the 15 frontier systems of the Calmari shits that jut into our space. But we also hit the far eastern systems of Krevo, to secure rear lines of supply and communication of our main advance into the blue stars of the north. We have little to fear from either shit navy, KRN or NCU,” Royko boasts.
Jahandar’s sneering rebuttal subtly threatens. “You’re brashly confident about my navy Royko, for a fat general who never once stepped inside the airlock of any of my warships.” It’s a rich criticism coming from a man who hasn’t left Astrana let alone Nalchik in decades.
“That’s true, Vozhd. But I know the Kaigun smashed the KRN in the opening battles. The Krevan ships that are left have no idea we’re coming, into what’s now their dumb vacated rear.”
“What of the Calmaris? Those blue foreign shits have many war fleets!”
“Ya, those swine are many more than the Krevans. But the blue pigs are moving most of their ships to their Imperium border, far south from where we’ll strike them into their fucking Balcony. They don’t know we’re coming, either. Thanks to your genius plan, Vozhd.”
Jahandar ignores the fawning. It’s so commonplace in all his conversations he seldom notices anymore, which forces his worst sycophants to try ever harder. Royko does it because he naturally slips flattery into speech like it’s punctuation, the same way teenage boys use profanity.
“What about planetside fighting, Royko? What of my armies? Are they ready?”
“Ya boss. Neither the Krevans nor Calmaris have major ground forces in their eastern systems, along our borders. Krevans moved what few armies and loose divisions they have left from their far eastern worlds, those marked as Dauran territory-to-be in your brilliant partition agreement with the Grün Tennō. They’re shifting everything to cover that pig Pyotr’s invasion routes, reinforcing their worlds already under attack on their broken southern frontier.”
“Again, what about the shitty Blue Oni’s? They’ll have armies in our path in the west.”
‘Blue Oni’ is an old folk term and pejorative for Calmari, meaning “small demons who live outside Dauran space.” It seeped into the memexes and popular memory over a millennium of xenophobia. It survives on hundreds of Dauran worlds even though no Blue Oni, or farfolk of any color whatever, has been seen in local space in all of Jahandar’s stretched time of paranoia and radical isolation. The idea lives on inside terrifying folktales of Dauran children kidnapped and served raw to magic werewolves, or hunted down and eaten alive by wraith-like Blue Onis.
“Ya, they will. Big armies, but weak. Local garrisons without heavies in support, or just a few. And very few skycraft, though what they have is dangerous.”
“We’ll shoot them down! Shitty blue skycraft.” It’s like he’s twelve years-old, not
163. To assume, boast and brag, not analyze. Millions of lives are at stake, and it’s like he’s twelve.
“Ya boss, come behind their systems and fuck ‘em right up the ass.” Royko decides to pretend he’s twelve as well. Who ever wants to argue with a petulant twelve year-old?
It’s true. ACU generals are looking south, along with NCU admirals. South to Pyotr’s build-up along the common frontier, where he can’t hide invasion preparations anymore.
“Not from all the blue shit spies. Their generals are also getting reports of Pyotr’s coming attack from Grün traitors.”
Royko is cunning enough to know that paranoid Jahandar will always believe something is more true if the quoted source is a traitor, so he made that bit up. There are ethnic Calmari on some Grün frontier worlds, as there are ethnic Grünen across Union frontiers. Most settlers on both sides are at least passively loyal to their farfolk hosts. Where treason runs in the south it’s flowing all one way: some ethnic Grünen were lured into the Purity movement and are betraying their long-time Calmari friends and adoptive homeworlds to the ugly, restless power on Kestino.
“So, there are little green traitors working against Pyotr. Good, good Royko.”
“Ya, boss. But they have no spies inside our star space. Your defenses are too great.”
“Maybe so, maybe not. But worse than spies, there are traitors everywhere. Anyone can betray.” As he says it he looks slow daggers of distrust around the half-circle of his commanders.
“Not in the DRA, boss. We killed them all two years ago, remember? You gave the order and I did it for you. You were right: we found over two million traitors wearing DRA brown.”
“There are always more … ”
“Sure boss. But the blue army shits don’t know we’re coming. No more than the blue shit navy does. All the shit Onis are looking south, to Pyotr’s systems and the Krevan War. They’re not ready for us or war up north. Vozhd, they aren’t even fully mobilized inside The Balcony!”
“Why not? We’re mobilized all around it. Is this a trick? I see a big foreign shit trap! Are you trying to lead my armies into their trap?”
Royko ignores the casual accusation of treachery, potentially lethal as always. One does not survive at the top with Jahandar for so long without learning when the threat is real and when it’s just the crudely violent way Jahandar always speaks. Like he’s fucking twelve years-old!
No one understands it. They just accept it as who Jahandar is and has always been. They don’t know that when he speaks to them like that he is just a boy of twelve. Cruel, whimpering, sneering, snarling, lethal, but only twelve. The admirals and generals of the vast Dauran empire don’t realize that they’re standing before the great starmap planning to launch the most terrible war in the history of Orion with a 12-year old boy. With Soso in command, as well as Jahandar.
“They’re not ready up there because Pyotr threatens to impale their southern border systems like he’s already stuck his stupid fucking assegai deep into Krevo’s guts.”
“I have done this! I did it!” Soso-Jahandar crows.
“Ya boss. Because you have not yet attacked his build-up is drawing all their fleets south as you predicted. That’s clearing the way for us to strike hard and clean in the north. Small blue armies will be up there still when we arrive, but just weak planetary garrisons with reduced naval support in every fucking system!”
“Do my special probes confirm this?”
Three months ago Jahandar reluctantly allowed 150 older phantoms to move outside his borders, to probe in stealth into Calmari space. They’re ancient craft, all pre-Grim Revolution. He doesn’t ever want any Daurans beyond his control or reach, but if he will make war he must bend the old rules. Jahandar and Soso agree on that. So he let them fly over the border, inviolate for half a century. Soso showed him how. He advised Jahandar to round up extended families of all phantom crews and officers, to keep them as blood hostages pending return of the phantoms.
Only Royko was told about the phantom probes, and only because Jahandar used the DRA and not Shishi to round up and detain all the crew families. He’s starting to have doubts about the reliability of his Shishi, under too long-entrenched Director Röhm Krump. Who better than Jahandar to know how dangerous it is to have a man of real talent in charge of secret police?
“They’re moving their forward forces around. Ya boss, it’s true. But always southward. No blue ships are moving north. They haven’t even called up all youth cohorts or alerted all the frontier worlds. They only reinforce systems directly across from the Imperium or behind Krevo, where the Kaigun is active. Our probes all say the blue shits are asleep across from us, boss.”
“The probers better be right, or there’ll be chopping and wailing when they get back.”
“It’s all confirmed, boss. Multiple phantom reports from dozens of systems. Everything they have is moving south. The northern third of Orion is wide fucking open.”
“Why leave their defenses inside The Balcony so thin? Are you lying to me?” Jahandar looks sudden ice-spikes at Royko, who isn’t shaken to his bowels as most men would be by the Tyrant’s sudden turn and accusation. Azikiwe notes Royko’s steady gaze and genuine courage.
“No boss, never. We think the Calmari will just let the Krevan systems fall to Pyotr. Why else would they sit back while he eats all those Neutral worlds? Look over here, boss.” He points out a dark blue double line a parsec back from the Calmari-Krevan border. “They’re reinforcing behind what will become their new Imperium border when Krevo falls. But no forward move.”
“That makes sense because they’re cowards! All the Blue Onis are filthy cowards. And traitors! Disloyal to the Neutrals they promised to defend in perpetuity, in that fucking Great Peace.” Like all natural and inevitable betrayers, Jahandar despises traitors above all others and delights in pointing out their treachery. Treason confirms his view of the nature of the Universe.
“Ya boss, filthy unchin-snouted cowards! Everywhere else, the Calmari sit and wait as if the Long Peace still rules Orion. We’re ready for war, Vozhd. They aren’t. I checked all probe reports personally.”
He says it as if it’s not the job of the Chief of Staff. “There’ll be little ground resistance when we attack the easternmost Krevan system of Krakoya, and not much more when we hit the Calmaris at Nunavut and Portus Cale. We expect total surprise in all three systems.”
“How many blue shits will we kill?” Jahandar says ‘kill’ without emotion or emphasis. To him, killing is as necessary and natural as breathing. This war will be a stroll in mountain air.
“Nunavut’s an ice-world, with a small local garrison. It’s never had any naval defenses. Not even a single floating squadron. Portus Cale is reducing its big garrison and flotilla. There was a big blue navy squadron and army there a month ago, but they transferred south to reinforce task forces heading south to deter Pyotr’s legions. Trying to scare Pyotr, they are.” Royko laughs loudly. It’s a brave or foolish thing to do, without permission. Did the Tyrant notice?
Jahandar’s too absorbed by the coming battles, succumbing to the allure of war, seduced by the scale of promised violence. “So, we’ll kill ‘em all. And the yellow shits on Krakoya? Will they give us any trouble Royko? Are the Krevans emptying their border systems too?”
“Ya, boss. Big time. They moved all assets west, to join the fight against the Rikugun at Aral. That’s almost over now. They have tens of thousands of little ships shuttling their people offworld. Their ice-moons are gone and they’ve lost most of the system belt now, too. Aral will fall to the Kaigun and Rikugun soon enough.”
“Fuck that green and greedy foreign shit, Pyotr.”
“Fuck him, yes. And the Calmari will do it, rape his ass when he attacks them. But that leaves Krakoya I and II wide open for us. We expect minimal opposition to our landings there.”
Krump’s eyes gleam as he interjects. “After our troops sweep the last old guard men and women of the garrison aside, my blood hou
nds will hunt and kill every last runner and holdout.”
Azikiwe would be appalled if he were surprised by the genocidal threat, but he’s not surprised. It’s what the Shishi do all over the Dauran Commons. He expects them to act even worse in foreign systems, once the war starts.
Royko seizes control back from his rival Krump. “We’ll overrun the Krevan planets fast, then move to strike fat Calmari worlds, all those under-defended systems inside The Balcony.”
“It’s just as I planned,” Jahandar says. Although it’s not. His admirals and generals have worked on this plan for a year, after he first brought his top commanders into the starmap room.
He orders: “Strike while blue rats and yellow pigs are busy in the muck fighting Grünen.”
He boasts: “I have waited since Pyotr impaled five Krevan worlds on his primitive spear. Waited wisely while my bigger enemies gather to move against each other in Orion’s south.”
He shifts his weight back to his short right leg, to give the longer left one a rest. He’s coiled and squat, artfully balanced against his crooked imbalance. He boasts some more: “Pyotr is unhappy with my delays and changes I make to our agreement, as I wish. Ha! Let him stew!”
