Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  “Be careful,” he admonishes them, “not to disrupt my greater plans by engaging Kaigun warships or Rikugun ground forces in those systems that I agreed to share with our new ‘ally,’ Pyotr.” He stiffens, calibrating the shrilly tones and theater-of-the-absurd of what he’ll say next.

  “My forces shall fall upon the farfolk worlds 20 days from now. We shall destroy them, wipe the last United Planets from the pages of Time, humiliate the arrogant Blue Onis! Then ... well, then we shall see. All Hail the Grim Revolution! All Hail the Great Dauran People!”

  It’s been decades since he bothered to personally lead the old chant, which goes back to Year One of the New Dauran Era. The year his retroactive prophets proclaimed he changed the history of the Universe. The year he became Jahandar, bemusing poor, simple-hearted Tanya.

  “Hail Daura. Hail Jahandar! Transcendent Leader. Infallible Guide.” The formulaic reply is automatic. It’s repeated at all state events and twice nightly on the JarNeb. Some use it as a greeting to display their sharper loyalty to his person. Yet, even the cynics and brutes in the map room feel some genuine enthusiasm. They serve only Jahandar, but they’re proud Daurans too.

  They complete three rounds of ritualized praise of the autocrat and their once-and-future executioner. Then a bevy of brass hats hurries past the stone-faced Black Robes standing astride the immense doors of The Study. They scurry, scuttle, or waddle out of the Caesarium Selo and off to do urgent war work. They go to DRA, DRN, and SHISH HQs, or leave on bohr command-shuttles to fleets and armies already gathering in concealed jump-off areas along the frontiers.

  They must ready navies old and disused in peace. Herd armies of Dead Soul krasnos off to war. Use brute force to break in the houses of two peaceful but more modern neighboring star-states. The smaller one is already wounded and bleeding, on its knees, fighting desperately to keep Pyotr’s green-eyed Wolf from snarling through its broken front door. Now comes Daura kicking in the undefended back door, to rape and murder Krevo’s last innocent, daughter worlds.

  What of the other? All of Jahandar’s men agree that poor and backward Daura will shock the too complacent leaders of the Calmar Union, shake that empire out of its smugness, force the withheld respect for Daura that all Daurans crave and demand. They all want to rip worlds from dead blue hands. They believe it. They want it, and not only to please Jahandar. This is Daura going to war. A vast, backward, perpetually humiliated and beaten-down empire. But an empire.

  None have been over the frontiers, a journey forbidden to all Daurans. They do not know their enemy. They do know who they serve, and they know what they’re doing. They know that Jahandar’s pact with Pyotr is a betrayal that will bring down the whole edifice of peace in Orion. They’re eager to do their part in launching a terrible war. No apologies. No excuses. No mercy.

  “You’re my own right-hand,” Jahandar lies to his longest-serving chief of secret police, as Krump leaves to join Admiral Fedor Aleksandr’s invasion fleet headed for Krakoya. Already the old Tyrant is plotting Krump’s execution and a mass purge of Shishi, once his war is won.

  “Hear that? Hurry, hurry Krump. War is coming!”

  “I hear. I hear the terrible trumpets and the beating drums. I hear war calling in Orion.”

  “Jahandar’s war. Daura’s war. Not filthy Pyotr’s and the Imperium’s. That green fool doesn’t know what he’s put in motion. You and I will finish this war, then we’ll finish Pyotr.”

  “Ya ya, Vozhd. Your loyal Shishi will chop down any farfolk shits who resist.”

  “Drove my krasnos to war and battle. No mercy for the weak. Eliminate all the weak ones! Daura cannot be weak.”

  “Shishi will chop any coward or malingerer in Royko’s army. Daura will advance!”

  “You are the most loyal of Daurans, Krump. A true man of the people. Daura is grateful. Jahandar will be generous. You will stand beside him and he will talk of your loyalty in front of all Daura. Go now, Krump. Go with Jahandar’s army to Krakoya and to war!”

  “I go there to do the gods’ work and yours, which are the same thing.”

  “Yes, yes. The prophesy! This is holy work you do. Go, my loyal Krump.”

  Krump is no fool. He knows what Jahandar is thinking, sees the lie in his dead yellow eyes. He knows Jahandar just promised to make him the centerpiece of a new show trial, that he’ll blame any setbacks in the war on Shishi, then purge their leaders. Still he leaves. Still he serves. There’s so much work to be done. Jahandar wants him bloody but he needs him, for now.

  ‘Yet the time is coming, perhaps soon boss, when that’s no longer true. Then we shall see who is faster to draw the sachi. Me or a babbling, decayed Tyrant. One chop at a time ‘till then.’

  ***

  Soso never returned to Sachi to kill his father as he wanted. The man slipped out of his reach before he could, dead in a Dambatta gutter from too much hooch dripped from a mountain still. He never saw his mother again. Never visited his old babu or answered her messages. She finally passed after a painful illness, in dire rural poverty he might have averted with a nod. One maternal uncle who chastised him as a boy was met by Black Robes and never seen again. His father’s brothers he left alone, recalling how they thumped the drunk from time to time and how one beat up the drug-addled incompetent doctor who wrecked his leg and insulted Soso’s honor.

  Jahandar sent his uncles rich gifts once, in a pale effort to reconnect somehow. Then he ordered them brought to Astrana, to stay with him in the Caesarium Selo. They boozed and ate and rutted like the country ruffians they were, but in sordid and imperial splendor. Mountain men, they were uninterested in the great urban trophy now owned by their older brother’s son.

  Maybe he was looking for a semblance of family life he never had as a boy and ruined as a man, as a terrible husband and worse father? They got madly drunk and shared weepy nostalgia for “the old days in the mountains.” The flood of emotion shocked Soso-Jahandar and surprised his hard-as-mountain-rock uncles. The mood passed, though not the hollow need. He let them go home to the Blue Mountains to live in peace, or as peacefully as any Abrek tribesman ever lived. No one knew why, Soso-Jahandar least of all. He had already moved beyond reason or reasons.

  That was before Jahandar took his sons from Tanya. As each reached age ten he shipped them out to cadet academies. When they turned sixteen he insisted they enlist. His middle child, Mahvash, despised everything about the DRN but stayed in the senior service where he at least had some sort of life on his own. Kurshid, the eldest, took to DRA barracks life and played on his father’s name to rise to the rank of Infantry General at age 24, on the cusp of the coming war. He’s brutishly willing to punish and murder his father’s enemies. He has no questions or mercy.

  Jahandar’s youngest, vivacious Vashti Ramos, was the only one allowed to stay with him in the Selo palace after she turned ten and he ripped her from Tanya’s arms. He told her Tanya abandoned them both to go back to Sachi. He never revealed that her mother’s open, extended arms were a stone’s throw away, locked in a white prison cottage growing poison. He never told her about the betrayal by suicide. Vashti believed for five years that her father loved her mother, who was somehow flawed to leave her children and him. She was touched to see Tanya’s snow globe on the night table beside his bed. Then everything changed, inevitably and forever.

  On her 15th birthday, while walking happily with her father in Old Astrana, Vashti raised courage: “Papa, there’s a sweet boy I’d like see, Papa. Please say that I can?”

  “Who? And where did you meet this boy?”

  “At one of your big, stuffy dinners where all the guests get drunk but no one ever laughs!”

  He was the teenage son of a high Dauran official. Jahandar had him gutted that night, his head later spiked on the wall of his father’s manor house on Planet Tampere. Shishi slaughtered the entire offending family according to the “law of guilty blood.”

  He told Vashti that night that he did murder for her sake. That he was a
good father. That many a harder man would have made her watch the execution.

  “Papa, no! You can’t! You didn’t!”

  “It’s done. I did it for you, a child who knows no better.”

  “Papa, you’re an ogre! A monster!”

  “Shishi! Take this slut away!”

  “Mama, why did you never tell me? Mama, save me!”

  Vashti was imprisoned in the same little house Jahandar built to hold her mother. She cried herself to sleep for months through every color of her changing rainbow eyes. Afterward, when she pleaded and promised to behave as he wanted, she was allowed to see her father in the palace for one hour once each week. His guards and spies kept watch on her prison cottage at all times. He thought that was what good fathers do, confine wayward, sinful daughters. There was more of the old Blue Mountains and Abrek morality still in him than he knew or could admit.

  Time passes slowly on all Dauran worlds, where nothing changes under aging Jahandar. More slowly for Vashti during 20 years in the cottage prison, always alone except for one hour each week she’s allowed into the Selo to visit the man she hates. She’s thirty-five now, ten years older than the age simple Tanya was when she came to Nalchik with Soso. She knows the truth of her mother’s death and has no illusions about her father. He’s aging badly. That pleases her.

  Jahandar doesn’t know Vashti’s secrets. He’s unaware that for the first two years of her imprisonment she worked with a simple kitchen laser to bore a tight tunnel beneath the cottage, until she broke into the Selo cellars. She climbed out and fell into a pit full of dry old bones, the forgotten system of imperial oubliettes that ran like worm holes through the Selo’s rotten wood.

  She chambered over the bones, rearranging them to cover her tunnel access. She explored every niche and cranny of the Selo over two decades of confinement, avoiding patrols and Shishi guards, making thousands of illicit, barefoot journeys. She started taking more chances, secretly thrilled by danger in freedom. The other thing that kept hope alive and Vashti sane was plotting revenge on the Horror for all Ages that she must call “Papa” when she attends him once a week.

  Nor does Jahandar know that every night for the past year Vashti waits inside her hidden tunnel passage to let in a handsome ebony lover with all-black eyes. He climbs over the bones, into her cottage and into her bed. General Chima Azikiwe is taking an awful, deadly risk bedding the Tyrant’s daughter, but it thrills him to do it. More, he thinks he’s in love with Vashti Ramos.

  She believes it, too, ever since the night Azikiwe caught her sneaking barefoot and half-naked through the inner sanctum of the Selo underground. Her virgin’s curves and hairy diadem showed beneath her thin shift, arousing him to passion. His black-jewel eyes bored into her flesh, making her quiver then and ever after whenever he’s near. His first touch melted all resistance.

  He was commander of the palace guard then, patrolling the Tyrant’s sealed quarters. He caught barefoot Vashti just outside. He took her back in secret, through the narrow tunnel, hiding her transgression to save her bit of freedom from a mad, vengeful father. Then he turned to leave.

  She slipped out of her shift before he knew it and stood before him naked, all wet and ready below, taut and trembling with years of unrequited lust. He was her first and only lover from that night, when they reddened the wood table in her kitchen, then the hard floor, and after that wetted all her sheets. When he got back to his barracks room he smelled of old oak, fish and onions, and an older virgin's blood.

  He goes back through the tunnel as often as he can, sometimes spending whole nights. He does it more often than is safe or wise. It’s not just the secret and exciting sex. They conspire after, talking and plotting of little except her escape and her father’s murder. Its unclear on some nights which arouses the entwined lovers more, passionate coitus or their maturing conspiracy.

  ***

  Jahandar the Dread rules the largest polity in the history of Orion. His proclaimed name means “Possessor of All the Worlds.” He’s the most absolute despot in all the histories of all the Thousand Worlds. And it’s not enough for poor, crooked Soso or for bent, corrupted Jahandar.

  ‘What is this hollow in my gut, like I’ve been stabbed? Who’ll betray me next? Everyone betrays in the end, Soso. You know it! They all trick me, they leave me. What can poor Soso do?’

  What he’s always done. Reach out, smite, strike down all who think they’re better than him. Who opposed, mocked and laughed behind his back at the “Poison Dwarf” and vulgar gang leader, at the brute secret Party man and functionary who stole their police and state away. They underestimated a toad-boy with a pockmarked-face and odd gimp, missed his brilliant if perverse intellect, overlooked a true dead soul with a corpse smell yet feral and yellow cat-eyes. Until his eyes changed color, flashing a red rage of his jealousy and vengeance as he murdered them all.

  There are more worlds for Jahandar to rule, rich planets and whole clusters of systems beyond his grasp. After nine decades he’s malcontent with death-dealing in a poor, backward empire. He wants all the Thousand Worlds. He’s learned too much from phantoms, courier spies and the Green Ships arriving yearly from smug Kestino. He wants more systems to reshape to his supreme will, better worlds with hundreds of billions more dead souls to remake and recycle.

  ‘I must have all the worlds denied me by petty little shits like Krevo, by the greedy Tennō and smugly mocking Blue Onis. I want their secrets, too. Yes, that one above all others. I must have their immortality. I’ll creep over their garden walls, into their golden homes and worlds, and take it for Soso. I’ll chop all foreign shit enemies and take everything they every were, are or will be. I’m strong. I’m right. I am The Jahandar. If you would stop me you must knife me first.’

  A brooding emperor-in-all-but-name glowering over a vast but broken empire. Always looking backward into umbrage and decline, never forward into broad uplands of progress. Here it is, laid out before him in a starmap in laser-light and redwood shadows. Right here in his vast and now empty Study. And he’s alone, as always. Without old teachers to praise him, without his babu or Tatiana or Vashti. Absent even his coarse and drunken uncles from the Blue Mountains.

  He slips easily from murder into war. ‘You kill one man with a knife, Soso, and they call you murderer. Kill tens of millions in battle and they’ll call you a great statesman. So let us make murder in uniform! For killing on a grand scale needs a more spacious name or men can’t say the lie out loud. Call it glory, call it war, and they’ll worship you as a lord and living god.’

  Jahandar will whip up hate on hundreds of worlds, drive billions of uncomprehending Daurans into brutish savagery and aggression. For when the blast of war is blown from the top tower of the Caesarium Selo he’ll wage a fight of merciless rage. He’ll straighten a stooped old man’s body hidden beneath a soiled akhalukhi. He’ll order a hundred million youths to battle. Conscripts and penal suiciders will advance in his name, calling out Za Jahandar! a horde of Shishi killers droving them from behind. Daura is going to war. Ready or not. Willingly or not.

  He says it out loud, unconscious that he does so. “Any among you who slip, my children, any who fail to make war in Jahandar’s name without pity for my enemies will receive less than none from me. No mercy, no pity, no quarter!” It’s the ancient Dauran way in war, only more so.

  Standing crookedly in perpetual pain from his misgrown leg at the great table in the empty map room, a boundless emptiness and engorging lust return to Jahandar. It always does whenever he’s truly alone, slipping back in time into Soso. His wizened spirit rages for revenge for never forgotten small grudges. ‘They shall have war, Soso, and pay for their presumption.’

  Something else. He hears more shrilly the ever-pursuing footsteps of his own mortality, closing on him from behind. Feel’s the arched yoke of Time weigh on his scabrous neck and Death’s boney fingers tighten a little more around his throat. He clutches spotted hands to the collar of his seamless cloak, weakly fendin
g off the tightening grip. ‘I must hurry, I must hurry.’

  He shrieks suddenly into the hollow chamber. A dry yowl of terrible, consuming pain leaps unbound and unformed from his desiccated throat. He shouts not in a monarch’s voice, but like a wounded bird of prey brought low by a surprise fletching that interrupts its prideful flight.

  Inchoate vowels screech around the empty ballroom. He breathes deep, then yowls again. This time the awful sound takes fateful shape in ancient verses learned and misremembered out of time, heard from lips of old men he later had killed: “Cry havoc! Oh war! Thou son of Hell!”

  His screech echoes before expiring into nothingness within his emptied soul. As also it echoes within the cavernous chamber, wailing over a domed starmap of the Thousand Worlds of Orion, but trapped in smallness nonetheless. Having cleared the brazen throat of war, he slumps into himself, muttering: “Poor Soso. Don’t fret. Jahandar will chop them all for poor Soso.”

  Outside, two Black Robe guards hear his strange cry. They begin to stir.