by Kali Altsoba
There are fewer than 1,000 high-secure cubicles in all the worlds of the Calmar Union. If you have one it means you’re a person of influence, possibly a Very Important Person. That’s why you use your secrets room as often and as publicly as you can, so you can be seen doing it. Especially if, like Sanjay, you don’t really need it to review overnights and standard reports. It’s why he ordered his outer office walls changed over to transparent-armor glass, on the excuse that as director he needed to see out when he really wants everyone to look in.
The holo image quivers above his smoothed out roll-up, atop a small table-desk of exquisite natural and artisanal beauty. The wood is polished Toruń teak, over 700 years old. A true classic, balancing on three handsome, carved legs shaped like climbing vines. Over its warm woody hues, the shimmering holo-image seems utterly sterile. Out-of-place and time.
‘She’s well-trained. No one could locate her origin world from that voice.’ He feels an unexpected rush and pulse of sudden warmth between his legs as he listens. ‘I’m sure she can modulate it half-a-hundred different ways. Someone did a wonderful mentoring job!’ Sanjay wonders what color her eyes are, then how he might fall into them if they met. It’s not something he usually does, have fantasies. He’s too fastidious. Mrs. Pradip would certainly disapprove.
The holo shifts to an overview of a vast megalopolis while Sanjay slips lower in his chair, glancing into the hall to be sure no one sees his hand slip inside his blue kurta. He sets the all-glass walls to cloud. ‘She must have eyes of jade, to move easily among the Kestino elite.’
She’s talking about bombardment defenses. That doesn’t interest him. Everyone knows that there’s no tactically effective means to take out a defended planet with a diverted asteroid, that there are a half-dozen means to deflect “nudgers” shot from the outer system. ‘And Krishna knows, the NCU keeps looking.’ It’s distracting him, the thought of huge battle fleets cascading down steady-stream kinetic bombardments to flatten cities like Novaya Uda or Barda.
Sanjay knows that nudgers are back in navalist thinking, but not that research is underway on Argos on a “life weapon” to change the old calculus, the nudger standoff dating to the last Orion War and devastation of Setubal and Lugo. He looks at the bristly Lowestoft skyline and winces at the idea Calmari and Grünen might bombard each other’s planets. ‘Surely it won’t come to that?’
La Salle Five relates how Novaya Uda is carved by four feeder rivers and tributaries into dozens of servile-class enclaves. Many would be good-sized cities by themselves on any other world. “The diversity of the capital belies a clear genetist turn in Pyotr’s practice and perhaps his ideology, as measured both in open memex broadcasts and our covert sources.”
There it is. An almost casual confirmation that the Tennō and High Court embrace the strange belief called “biopolitical science” or Purity. From what Sanjay understands of it, and what the best Calmari scientific and cultural experts tell CIS, it’s pseudo-genetic gibberish. A blend of scientism and mysticism. Not science at all. Not genetics, merely a corrupt genetism.
To Sanjay and most of his colleagues in CIS and the MoD, Purity reeks of superstition. It’s a radical secular faith rising madly to overcome reason with a false appeal to science. But he’s good enough at what he does to understand that for a political analyst, scientific fatuity and core stupidity of truly bad ideas doesn’t matter in the end. What weighs in the affairs of Orion is their power to move minds, masses, and events. What matters is that billions of Grünen are true believers in the new false god, that genetist ideology now drives Imperium policy.
‘It’s a terrible portent for us all that a doctrine so illogical and dull exercises so powerful an influence over so many, and may yet lead all Orion into a new and dark Kali Age.’ He may be a martinet without any real talent past brewing tea, who willfully blocks each effort by Maçon and LeClerc and Briand to prepare the Union for war, but he’s not wrong about that.
La Salle Five is talking more orotund prose about Kestino. He tunes out the information to concentrate solely on her voice. His groin warms and stirs again. He’s not risen so soon or so often in years. Certainly not with Mrs. Pradip. He’s a little ashamed but much more excited as he again slips his hand down his loose kurta. He can’t help the feeling of warm pleasure when he hears that voice. She could be describing the slow mixing of dry cement and it would arouse him.
“Novaya Uda is heavily garrisoned. RIK barracks are sited just outside a hardened ring-wall that protects residence towers of the highest orders and the mostly black-skinned elite. Old commanderies are here, built centuries ago by the Broderbund atop artificial islands on Lake Isis and around the Dead Sea. They’re being rebuilt, reinforced as well in many cases. It’s not clear why, or how this relates to Oetkert-Broderbund relations.”
“The city fills a bowl-shaped plain rimmed by three chains of distant, mostly dormant volcanoes.” He glances out his big metallic-glass bay window, surveying Lowestoft-on-Stamos laid out toward and over the horizon, bristling with buildings. Its shimmering, leaping hairbrush of towers contrasts with the flat sprawling sameness of Novaya Uda filling out his holo screen.
“The relationship of the Brethren to SAC and of both those rivals to the Tennō are not understood by CIS. However, if the Broderbund is reviving, as we suspect, opportunities may present for CIS to exploit residue of the blood feud between the Brethren and SAC.” Sanjay recalls that feud erupted into civil war and a great purge four decades ago, under the Dowager.
“The Imperium is in crisis. It couples a segregated elite with no interest in economic or scientific progress with subjugated service classes that don’t understand growth and can be easily manipulated by demagogues who promise credit handouts or social revolution via Purity.”
Now she’s droning on about the bad architecture of Pyotr’s rebuilt Waldstätte Palast. It’s an odd digression, strangely angry for an agent field report, almost personal. He glances at her CIS profile. ‘Aha, she trained as an archeologist and farfolk linguist.’ It’s a flaw in her perfect armor, to deviate into cultural commentary and indulge her own preference for the ancient over the new like this. He ignores it. He’s not really listening to what she says anyway.
Sanjay drifts away under his kurta, into a daydream covert mission with LaSalle Five somewhere in the eastern systems. He wins her admiration as they explore a set of ancient ruins dating to the First Orion War, gains her kama favor among broken pillars and headless statuary. She strips naked and invites him into her, lying atop a slab of sun-drenched marble, spreading her long legs and cooing to him like a morning dove. They entwine, bathed in orange-and-yellow light and heat. He’s inside her, thrusting into warmth and wetness, again and again. He climaxes with a giggle-grunt under his blue kurta, rolling off her satisfied and sweating body in his mind.
Forgive him. It harms no one. Not like when fickle gods rut on Mount Olympus or in Valhalla, or lustful and reckless men of power start wars with a tickle or shudder in the loins no more than this. Feathered rape of Leda led to the sack of Troy, to Agamemnon dead and Ulysses lost and exiled on wine-dark and star-crossed seas. Antony brought rapine and ravages to Rome and Egypt only because he had to lie between Cleopatra’s legs. Yu Fong led the Red Horde into battle and slaughter at Mars III not truly for the honor or security of the United Red Colonies but because Min Wu rejected him, twice. And the Jade Eye himself, Karl Ferdinand Oetkert, terrible founder of his Royal House and Grün Imperium, felled walls and trampled a billion conquered dāsa to death on the Foundation Worlds of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, not just to erect the Ordensstaadt atop their bones but to win the favor and the bed of Nobantu Shaka.
Unlike those vain or dreadful men, if Pradip lets slip the leash holding back hounds of war it will not be from malice or ambition. Like most in Orion, he hides in a clouded cubicle comforting himself as best he knows how, fearing a crisis spinning out of control and loathe to admit he really is so small a thing in the Universe as all the rest
of us. He knows only that for the first time in his career what he says and does actually matters. And that he has nothing to say.
‘I should make a note for the prime minister...’ He sees the first orange-red rays of sunset color the sky high over Lowestoft. ‘I’m late! Mrs. Pradip will be upset! The tea will be cold.’ He stands, smooths his kurta flat, and hurries out the door.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
***
The next day, a white eagle glides past the metallic-glass window of Sanjay’s office. It catches a corner of his eye, distracting him. His mind drifts from the issue of the day, of every day these days. He slurps the last of a fine cup of very hot tea. His teacup desperately hopes to be useful and warms itself to get ready again, without being asked. ‘Might I indulge another cup?’
“Your analysis and policy recommendations are most promptly required,” a top cabinet secretary told Sanjay urgently just over two weeks ago. “Prime Minister Hoare expects your best analytical insight and most careful and precise thinking on this pressing topic, Mr. Pradip.”
“That’s exactly why I must not be rushed,” he replied, and gets away with it as he always does. After 29 years of service, including the last seven as head of CIS Political Intelligence, he can’t be pushed or harried or rushed. Crisis or not, the prime minister and his government must wait on advice from Sanjay Pradip.
Everyone is also waiting to see what the newly declared “Supreme Warlord” on Kestino will do next. That’s what Pyotr Shaka III is called these days on monitored Grün memexes. It worries people in CIS, especially junior analysts without Sanjay’s years of sober and seasoned experience to calm them.
Pyotr is ten years younger than Sanjay Pradip, at just 55. But already he has 20 years on the Jade Throne. He mounted it when his mother, Dowager Empress Mary Oetkert, passed unexpectedly. A natural death, or was she killed? CIS doesn’t know what happened on that day.
Sanjay doesn’t think the Tennō is reckless or a danger to Orion’s peace. To the contrary: ‘We should be so lucky to have a great leader like a Pyotr, a man of authority, capable of taking decisive action. A man who knows how to get things done. Not like the weak, milky teas who lead us. Excepting the PM, of course.’ He can never say that out loud. He thinks it often nonetheless.
Most analysts are closer to Sanjay Pradip than to LaSalle Five. They’re conservative and cautious to a fault, the paramount traits of intelligence officers who rise in peacetime to positions in senior management then are asked for crisis advice by hasty governments that don’t like bad news. No analyst in the Combine, as CIS Political Division is called inside MoD, ever sticks his or her neck out. Not just because Sanjay is their boss and avuncular model. Peacetime analysts almost always say prudently wise-sounding things that they’re sure everyone else around them is thinking, while waiting for real time events to unfold so that they can sagely confirm them as “what I expected all along.” There are exceptions, but they’re rare. These days, they’re also working around their boss in secret, going over his head, reporting directly to Admiral Maçon.
Every analyst in CIS is waiting for the last Krevan world to fall. As fall it must, and soon. The politicians are also acting as cautiously as an ingénue at a bacchanalia. “Who wants to die for Krevo?” A minister demanded it during Open Question Time in the Lok Sabha, when news of the invasion broke six months ago, echoing loud calls for isolation from the war both inside and outside the Great House on Kars. For Sanjay that was a happy time of enlightened policy.
A few mummers of dissent came from the noisy “Briand cabal,” as Robert Hoare in private calls backbench and Party followers of his rival and popular Defense Minister, Georges Briand. Others call them “dogwoods” or “blue smokers” in reference to the odor of clouds of rich scented smoke that always engulf their leader as he puffs non-stop on a small wooden pipe.
‘Who wants to die for Krevo, indeed.’ Sanjay thinks it was one of the best questions ever asked in the Lok Sabha, not knowing that Takeshi Watanabe cynically asked Pyotr Shaka the same question about Calmari before he set out to execute the Bad Camberg false flag op that let Pyotr launch his war against Krevo. It’s not the same these days. More are swinging around to the dogwood view. The military is restless. It wants firmer action from the PM.
‘The invasion of Krevo must not be allowed to stumble all Orion into war,’ Sanjay thinks. ‘It will, only if our War Hawks get their way with expanded budgets and deployments.’
Sanjay’s more worried than he admits. In his most honest moments his worry slips into faith. ‘Are we in the Dvapara Yuga, the Age of Disintegration? Is this the fall into Kali Yuga, the Iron Age of War and Death of All Youth? Kala must never rule! We mustn’t allow Death’s dice to roll the snake’s eyes of war.’
What to do? Few among the contented tens of billions of the Calmar Union want to kill or die for anyone or anything, not farfolk Krevans about whom they know and care little. Yet it worries Sanjay that more MPs and a growing portion of the public now speak as if ready to ask fellow citizens to die for something. Some vaguely noble, hopeless cause to tickle their soul. For Krevo after all? Or worse, for the age-old and pernicious Calmari ideal of “universal freedom”?
‘Freedom is a dullard’s slogan, not a policy. A rhetorical addiction of our politicians and bored populations. They crave it like robusto. They ingest it, and it flushes them with grand illusions of vitality and crusading moral energy. Until, like robusto, it kills them early, young and stupidly.’
An amorphous and dangerous opinion, in Sanjay’s view, is building in favor of limited military action to rebuke, if not yet repel, Pyotr’s invasion forces. Something to aid the desperate Krevans who fight on even now. Not war, but a demonstration of Calmari power and resolve.
For a year he objected to limited military aid sent to Aral, shipments of missile parts and replacement tubes for the great plasma-cannon used in planetary defenses. He managed to limit supplies to Krevan ships forced to run a blockade line. Even so, shipments proved impossible to stop. Sanjay tried again, but the KRA was an old customer that paid for the standard replacement order many months before fighting started, long before the Bad Camberg incident broke Orion.
Not all the ships made it. A carefully careless chat over an insecure coms system here and there, and Grün spies saw to it that the Krevan transports were intercepted. Still, there was true danger in permitting any Krevan ships to leave at all, he thought. There’s real potential to expand a local Krevan affair into an Orion-wide crisis over Grün-Calmari relations. There’s talk in the Lok Sabha of sending more arms shipments to Krevo, and not just defensive weapons this time.
‘Madness! If we ship arms and Grünen respond as they must, our people will want to retaliate in turn. That’s how we find ourselves stumbling into a war no one really wants.’
Escalation and error are the real threats, in his view. A spiraling, runaway crisis where no one controls emotions or events. At least his government is making its desire for peace known in public and over thousands of private channels to all top contacts inside the governing Grün elite. The message is clear. Calmari regret and deplore the unprovoked invasion of Krevo, but if wider war between the Imperium and the Union can be avoided then it surely must be, by any means.
Sanjay is comforted to know that the tubes are the last arms shipment the PM agreed to allow to leave Calmari space. He achieved that much during months of building crisis, with his sage and persistent advice to Robert Hoare to avoid any confrontation or escalation. He thinks the PM can hold off the baying hounds of war in the Lok Sabha. Barring an unforeseen event.
‘The Krevans are on their own, whatever secret assurances we gave before the war about fighting as allies. We’ve already missed that deadline, thank Shiva, and thanks to the great worldly wisdom of the prime minister.’
Sanjay is traditional in prayers and devotions, ritualistic and devout in a small way. Mostly he calls down affirmation of his secular judgements and acts, pursuing a soft karma o
f sound policy and politics. Whenever he slips, however, he goes all the way into gut-clenching doubt about the classical Veda division of Time. ‘Are we at the end of the Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth, the Winning Age of Peace, Order and Virtue? Or in the Treta Yuga, in the Interregnum?’
From the start he strenuously advised against engagement. He opposed a secret alliance with Krevo when some proposed it a year ago, in what he viewed as a vain effort to deter the Imperium. “How can an alliance with the United Planets deter anything Kestino might do, if we keep it a secret as you propose?” His question was far more pointed than usual, outside his normal professional demeanor and habit. “Better no alliance than a secret one,” he harrumphed.
Sanjay worried when a pact was urged nevertheless by the War Hawks in government and on the memex. In the end, Combine opposition persuaded the prime minister and most of the Joint Cabinet to oppose a Krevan alliance: the politicians wanted all along to avoid confrontation at almost any cost. Still, secret verbal assurances of direct military aid were given to Aral by the prime minister himself, a clandestine offer that shocked Sanjay when he learned of it.
