by Kali Altsoba
“Brilliant and wise, Vozhd.”
There are murmurs of sycophantic agreement from all the assembled brass. Azikiwe advisedly joins in the praise, knowing Shishi watch. Otherwise, his black jewel eyes hide his darker truth. They can’t be read by anyone. It’s why he re-engineered them in monochrome, so that black pupils inside black corneas conceal his darkest thoughts of conspiracy and murder.
Jahandar slips away from them awhile, speaking to Soso, only out loud in a harsh, raspy whisper. “They don’t see my threat, Soso. None of the foreign shits sees my clever trap. Oderint dum metuant. Yes, yes, the monks were right, you clever boy! Let all the foreign shits hate me so long as they also fear me.” He returns attention to Royko, saying much louder: “Show me more.”
“We expect weak resistance everywhere when we send in our first wave. We’ll hit five systems by surprise here, here, there, here and there.” Royko indicates five stars, each of which enlarges to show planets as he points. Three are closer than the Grün invasion arrow, just over the eastern edge of the beige Krevan bulge which brushes against the brown-haze border of the Dauran frontier. Two mark up on the starmap in Calmari pale-blue, Nunavut and Portus Cale.
“Ya, good Royko. Now, what’s my navy doing to ready for invasion?” Jahandar whirls to ask it, looking right into the artificial, scallion-green eyes of his top admiral. The man is dressed impeccably in a brilliant white DRN uniform with gold and brown trimmings. Azikiwe makes a mental note that this one doesn’t piss the inside of his immaculate leg. Like the new boy did.
***
Admiral Fedor Aleksandr’s uniform is spotless, an almost painful white. It’s unchanged in style and power and grandeur since the time of the old Dauran Imperial Navy. As the senior service, Jahandar permits the renamed Dauran Revolutionary Navy this silent salute to its pre-revolutionary traditions. Such trivia doesn’t matter, not when he holds all the reins of real power. For once, he appreciates the spur to performance that comes with allowing small, symbolic perks that predate the Grim Revolution: e-medals, e-ribbons, wide-peaked hats and imperial uniforms.
“DRN’s cooperating fully, Vozhd.” Aleksandr cues off Royko’s verbal trick as he returns Jahandar’s piercing gaze, his green artificial eyes holding a unbroken stare because they don’t need lubrication or tears or to blink. He adds both to their program only when he wants to seem more natural in normal conversations. Today, he turned off his usual blink-rate, not wishing to miss even a micro-second of this rare direct engagement with the Tyrant. He also understands that not blinking will subconsciously impress Jahandar as a mark of his hard character. For the Tyrant cleaves to all the old superstitions, picked up as a boy in the Blue Mountains on Sachi.
“The run-in by our new assault ships from the LPs will take place under close escort. General Royko’s transports will have battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, and plenty of light escorts with them when they reach down to the Krevan and Calmari worlds. We’ll make sure your troops land, boss. There’ll be no problem there. After that, it’s up to your generals.”
Aleksandr doesn’t mind generals as a rule, but he doesn’t think much of Royko. He told an aide-de-camp who asked him why. “You can see vanity peep and pour through each part of him. It oozes ahead just like his fat, always getting to where he’s going before he does.” The aide didn’t really understand why vanity was a disqualifier in Royko. After all, it seemed a perquisite to flag rank in every admiral he ever met or served. He thought it oozed out of Aleksandr, too.
“So, you agree that the Krevans and the Calmari shits have moved all their ships south?”
“Not all, Vozhd. The KRN, yes, but not the NCU. The Calmari have the largest and most powerful fleet in all Orion, with many, many flotillas in deep reserve across their inner systems, stretching even to the edge of The Gap in front of far-off Perseus.”
“But ya, ya.” He cuts out full vowels and finished consonants with a calculated drop into vulgar Nalchik-speak he doesn’t really carry off, since it doesn’t come to him naturally and he hardly knows even servants who come from so low a class. “We don’t see so many blue shits in the first assaults.” The imitative vulgarity is tactical, too.
“How many?”
“Hard to say, but be assured,” his speech resumes its more natural High Dauran patterns but keeps the limited flattery, “that because of your sound and detailed plan, and what must seem on Kars the more imminent threat to their precious Union from Pyotr’s gathering legions, they’re moving assets south.”
“What about Portus Cale and Minotaur? You said that’s a key location inside The Balcony and that we’ll hit it first? What will the blue shits do there?”
“They left a small flotilla at Portus Cale to defend the minor shipyards there. Truly, they don’t expect us to attack. The flotilla poses no threat. They’ve nothing bigger than four heavy cruisers. They have a short squadron of frigates and destroyers at Minotaur, along with a flock of small auxiliaries. Our main worry is the Portus Cale yard batteries. They’re a strong, white plasma defense.”
“You will take it, yes? Then when we have their guns, we can have white plasma cannon, too.” Jahandar thinks, like a twelve-year old: ‘You promised Soso he could have new guns!’
“Yes. But our second and third invasion waves into Calmari space will meet stronger resistance from their reserve fleets, and we’ll no longer have the benefit of surprise. But that’s not a problem with out first-wave assaults.”
“We’ll chop their reserves, too, when they come to take back their worlds from us.”
“Ya boss. ‘One chop at a time,’ as you always say.” Again, Aleksandr resorts to imitative coarseness that doesn’t fit. Feigning, to protect himself from Jahandar’s class envy, which goes deep and all the way back to Soso’s growing up a slum boy in Dambatta on Sachi. This time he hits a little closer to the mark.
“Yes, we’ll chop and chop. Now tell, me what of the shitty Krevans?”
“The KRN’s nearly gone. It only had a few capital ships to start with, and most of those engaged a big Kaigun fleet in the asteroid belt and around the three ice-moons of Aral. Survivors fell back to Katowice and Skadi or ran to Calmari sanctuary. The rest are cosmic flotsam. We’ll blast a path for the DRA through any small ships left that interfere with landings at Krakoya.”
Jahandar nods. It’s a good report. Yet he can’t help himself. He must threaten even so. It’s all he knows about leadership, going back to his criminal gang days with the Dead Souls.. He knows what Aleksandr just did, switching speech patterns but not well. Now it’s Jahandar’s turn to switch back to High Dauran tones from his usual vulgarity. He spent decades hiding his ability so that everyone underestimated his intellect. He tries to be subtle but he can’t do it
“Make certain that you are right. Admiral Fedor Aleksandr. Deliver to me Portus Cale and the other first-wave systems or Shishi hatchets will ensure that the pretty white uniforms you navy officer types love to wear will be soaked in red on every Bridge on every ship.” He can no longer control himself. Soso is in there still, and he must always threaten blood and murder. ‘I am Soso. I win!’
Even for Jahandar, the boy-gangster threat is a little over the top. So Aleksandr and the other admirals present relax a little. Except for the rookie at all this from the provinces, who pissed his leg. He’s still terrified by everything he sees and hears. To the others, it’s well known that the more elaborate a threat made by Jahandar the less likely it is he’ll carry it out. As with all killers, it’s the quick and silent strike made without a warning rattle that’s most to be feared.
Krump
Röhm Krump is standing erect at the edge of the redwood oval absorbing information with only half his dexterous mind, watching Jahandar’s interactions with the other half. He’s supremely intelligent and capable, which is why his lethal perversions are so truly terrifying.
He’s rubbing his hands together unconsciously, a gesture that enhances his inhuman, stick-insect impersonation. Chima Az
ikiwe has never seen him before today. He finds him so physically repellant he takes an involuntary half step back. ‘It’s true what they say. He looks exactly like a praying mantis about to seize an unwary fly.’
It was Jahandar who first said Krump “smelled like a fucking mantis.” Everyone laughed our loud, to please the Tyrant and praise his endless wit. But as they laughed each kept one eye on Krump, knowing he would remember. Some thought about the jibe later and realized they had no idea what a mantis smells like, or if it smells at all. Except to exude odor of its recently eaten prey. So it is with Krump. His odor changes with every killing, each wing-plucked human fly he ends slowly yet forever in his purpose-built torture cells, beneath his private chambers. Azikiwe sees it all right away. He decides to tell Vashti tonight that Krump smells of torment and flies.
He’s all angles and bone with little flesh and yellow insect eyes, dead to any expression except when they light with sadism. Then they flash the cruelty of the millennia, across all the thousand histories of Orion. Or is it even longer? Is mass murder the inevitable end-product of human evolution? Are we no more than mantises praying as we wait for prey? Is cruelty built into the hierarchy of devouring Nature bred in ancient salt seas, from the moment the first single-celled ancestor of choanoflagellates chose predation over photosynthesis to survive and thrive?
Maybe. But this is still a special kind of murderer. Krump isn’t moved by the necessary ferocity of the predator who must hunt to live. His bloodlust is novae beyond base predation of the shark or jackal or wolf. Despite his insect appearance, despite his odd look, Krump is fully human. Red wet and cruel without any need. He kills simply because he can. Because he loves it.
He betrayed and assassinated his way to the pinnacle of his chosen profession in the terror police. Second only to Jahandar, he inspires cold fear across Dauran worlds. He’s brilliant and well-educated, and a fine conversationalist on topics from art to xenology. In private settings he can be funny and suave. He’s also a brutal sadist who plots and thrills to killing above all else.
He keeps in his pocket a pair of smooth, dead eyeballs. They’re smaller than pool balls, dry and hard as marble. He reached in and pulled them out of his predecessor’s face. Just before he let the last Director of SHISH die, wailing for a morsel of mercy he never showed his own victims. He had them lacquered, kiln dried and polished. They’re exquisite. Blue-on-blue inside bulbous white, with thin red filaments threading behind perpetually terror-stricken pupils.
When not rubbing his hands together or wielding a sachi blade, Krump fondles the pair of hard eyeballs with his left hand thrust deep in his black robe pocket. He klacks! them whenever he speaks, his right hand gesticulating wildly. It’s a way of underlining words his long right arm and thin fingers draw in air. He’s totally unaware of the habit or that it adds to his insect menace.
Krump is urbane, sophisticated and lethal. He pairs the absurd and the rational like a cloistered priest. He’s crafty, shrewd, penetratingly direct in conversation, chillingly cruel in interrogation cellars. He overwhelms with torrents of words, niagaras of verbiage plunging over listeners, drowning them in whirlpools and undertows and whirling eddies of lies. Once he sees them grow exhausted, he strikes. He may be the most brilliant man in Daura, if not all Orion.
His appearance and mannerisms are anything but those of a murderer of millions, a sadist who takes cruelty to such exquisite depths he proudly thinks of himself as a high artist of pain, a toreador of torment. He’s relaxed and impeccably polite to guests and victims, serving camomile tea or cappuccino while looking men straight in the eye and smiling, all the while knowing that in the next ten minutes he will chop them into hog food. He oozes charm, like Mephistopheles.
“Vozhd, my Black Robes will sniff out and sweep clean any resistance to liberation of these foreign shit worlds.” Krump always quotes Jahandar’s coarse profanities back to him. It’s like using the old title “Boss.” It flatters by paying homage to the autocrat’s gang days on Sachi.
Klack, klack! Is it Krump’s pocket eyeballs or Jahandar’s cloven feet? It’s the eyeballs.
“I have 200,000 hounds primed to hunt.” He means the night dogs, most vicious of all terror specialists in SHISH. They race narrow city streets of Dauran worlds on two-man gyro-bikes, or over the countryside in six-man hovers. Splattering murder everywhere.
“I’ll cleanse your first wave worlds of filth, ready them for absorption into the Empire.” Suddenly, General-Commander Röhm Krump blanches. The head of SHISH and second-most powerful man in all Daura, who fears no man save one, shows a flicker of fear across his face.
Klack! Klack! He quickly corrects. “Umm, I mean, of course, the Dauran Commons.”
A pregnant silence falls over the group, which stops moving or speaking, waiting to see if teetering Krump will fall over so very small a thing. He would not be the first. Jahandar controls the dangerous moment with a deeper, longer silence that has a distinct menace all its own.
“Sorry boss.” Krump pre-empts.
Sometimes even Jahandar makes the error, breaking his own capital law by lapsing into pre-Revolutionary language, using “Great Dauran Empire” instead of “Revolutionary Dauran Commons,” or “Caesarium Selo” in place of the “People’s House of the Revolution.”
Still, he’ll remember Krump’s usefully fatal slip, committed in his presence. File it away in the deep, unforgiving bureaus of his torture-chamber mind. ‘What did he say? My hounds, My Shishi? The dirty little shit has been chief of my secret police for seven years. I never kept one so long before. Why have I left him in that place?’ With a start Jahandar suddenly worries that he forgot to kill Krump before today. Hadn’t he meant to?
Röhm Krump has headed SHISH since he volunteered to murder his blind predecessor by chopping the man into pieces with his own sachi in an execution yard, where blood flowed out of gouged eye sockets and handless wrists to drain into custom-built scuppers. The assassination completed another sudden purge of the purgers that suited Jahandar’s need, churning leadership while keeping rank-and-file Shishi and all Daurans in perpetual tension and paralyzing flux.
‘He has a brain, not like these other useful idiots. Maybe too clever? Does Krump think he can replace me, reave my Shishi for himself, use my own night dogs to chop me in my sleep? Yes, I must kill him. Everyone betrays me, always. But not now, not yet. Not until my war is done. I’ll need his bloody-minded zeal ‘till then. When the time is right, Soso, I’ll use his sly slip to take him down, expose his treason. Chop him up, yes, yes, Soso, chop him! But in our own good time.’
He’s actually pleased by what he heard this morning from his senior military advisors, and just as confident of swift victory over Krevo and the Calmar Union as are they. He even manages to looked satisfied, smiling with devious purpose to his assembled Great General Staff. He’s confident that the Dual Powers alliance, Daura and the Imperium, will swiftly triumph.
He turns to his assembled commanders to drench them in his will, soak them in his power and person. “My decision is unalterable. I shall attack at the most favorable and earliest moment. Breaching the Peace of Orion and the neutrality of Krevo and the Helvetics and Three Kingdoms is of no importance. No one will question our legality or moral right after we win!”
“ Za Jahandar! The admirals and generals all make the obligatory response.
Jahandar plays the role. There’s always been a great deal of political thespian in him, though he would never admit to it. “The hour is here. My time is come, my will be done, in Daura and across the heavens. My enemies think time works for them. I am outside time, above it. We will strike hard and mercilessly, chopping all enemies down before they can rearm, before they build the fleets and armies they need to hold off mighty Daura. Time is of no consequence.”
“ Za Jahandar!”
“I must tell you in all modesty that I’m essential. If asked for one word to describe my own person it is irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor any civ
ilian could replace me. I am the one, The Jahandar. Behind me stands the Dauran people and the nine hundred histories of our worlds. I shall stand or fall in this struggle. My revolution shall stand or fall. I shan’t survive the defeat of my people. There’ll be no capitulation to outside powers and no revolution from within. I will shrink from nothing and I will annihilate everyone who opposes me. I shall annihilate all my shit enemies. Wars are always ended only by annihilation. No negotiations, never. None!”
“ Za Jahandar!”
A warped grin lurks beneath his heavy mustache and plastered-over plague holes. It badly shakes several who see it, as the masque macabre slips for just a moment, to reveal another, far more hideous one underneath. He hid the ogre as Soso, but it bleeds to the surface of Jahandar.
They’re all brutes. Scions of the most brutal and murderous regime in all the histories. Only brute killers get to stand this close to Jahandar, within his corrupt circle, earn the privilege to grovel at his unclean and hobbled feet. Whether any of them are gifted brutes remains to be seen. ‘War requires different talents than terror. We shall see, Soso. We’ll soon test them all.’
