Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Sanjay was drawn away from LaSalle Five’s report on Kestino by his need to prep a brief for the PM. Then the week-break intervened. He’s been working very hard, coming in early each day. He deserved a full weekend of rest, even if he had to spend all of it with Mrs. Pradip.

  He’s done the hard work, reporting to the PM on Pyotr’s will and intentions, setting up backchannel coms that only a Director of CIS Political Intelligence has. Today he’ll assess the Grün military build-up. Assess and report honestly. That’s his plan, anyway. His mind keeps wandering back to his verbal advice on Imperium intentions. ‘Did I get it right? Can I be sure?’

  Even Sanjay must admit that the long quiescent Green Empire is truly stirring. Roiling, bubbling, perhaps reaching an uncontrolled boil. Yet Pyotr’s thinking stays closed to outside reading.

  ‘Why did he really attack Krevo? Is it his mind alone that must be deciphered? Who’s in charge? Is it Pyotr or SAC? Are the Rikugun and Kaigun acting together? What’s the true role and purpose of the Purity movement? What’s the despicable Broderbund up to, with its hidden and poison secrets?’

  Is the rumint that Sanjay is hearing from his informers true, that the Tennō is an actual convert to the “biopolitical” ideology that captured SAC some 20 years ago? ‘I don’t believe it. He’s too educated to swallow the crude thesis of “biopolitical Purity.” He must be playing an old parlor game, stringing the fanatics along, readying to deal with them in his own time and with his usual decisiveness. He’s a great leader, a man of action. Of that there’s no doubt.’

  He has to believe it. To believe the rumint instead, to believe other signals coming out of the Imperium, means all else he believes is wrong and that war is coming to the Calmar Union. Even if Pyotr stops now his armies and fleets have already disturbed old habits of restraint that kept the Long Peace in place. The Third Orion War took 3.7 billion lives, only to end feebly in a stalemate confirmed in cosmetic territorial changes, mostly at the expense of buffer Neutrals that no longer exist. Then the balance of force among the three main powers was codified to fool the publics, locked in solemnity and embossed in platinum letters that suggested permanence. All the big powers lied, combining their lies to their own peoples in the shared lie of the Peace of Orion.

  ‘What if it’s only an armistice for 300 years? How do the Great Powers put the Great Spiral Egg back together if one is truly determined to smash him apart? I can’t take back what I told the prime minister. Or can I? What if I’m wrong? The cost to my position! Oh, poor Mrs. Pradip! No, surely I was, I am, right? Pyotr is no fool and only a fool would take war over our borders next. His ambition must be limited to Krevo. It must be! This is not the end time.’

  Images again rise up from a scroll he smooths over the petite Toruń-teak table on which rests his finely decorated teacup and saucer. Hot vapor rises from the fresh-brewed tea warming the insides of the happy little teacup.

  Sanjay prefers to form his own judgements based on the raw data, not to rely on some junior analyst report, no matter how sultry her voice is, no matter how arousing… Not that Mrs. Pradip isn’t a fine and handsome woman, full-figured too. It’s just that she’s a little too precise and conservative in bed.

  OK, there’s just something about the agent’s voice that gets to him. So Sanjay sips a delicate green tea with a hint of mint, one of his favorites for early mornings, and settles in to listen to a sonorous report that goes down on him as smoothly as the piping hot tea. Wait! No! He didn’t think that. I didn’t mean that. I kinda got lost in the sound of her… I mean, I made a typo. Yeah, that’s it. My, my. You really do have a filthy mind, don’t you? All I meant was, he’s barely listening to what she’s saying because, as the true professional that he is, he stops the holo playback to indulge more private thoughts. No! Not that kind!

  Seriously, take a cold shower already! Really? You want to watch? Well, I never! Maybe you should go off by yourself and read something else for a while. Something naughty, no doubt! ‘Cause this next bit’s not about that sort of thing at all. No, it isn’t!

  Sanjay’s gaze wanders with his mind as he looks out over Lowestoft. About 10 klics away, on the far side of the slow Stamos River, the first rows of over 6,000 skytowers glint in reflected morning light. Most are residential urban farms, holistic structures that make the city densely green and connected to the ground. Each is a mini-biopower station, with self-contained food supply and export capacity to street markets or other towers. Each hosts tens of thousands of stolid federal families living under an artificial canopy, inside leafy green.

  Sleek maglevs run up and down the interior walls, maximizing crop growth in outside sunlight. Stubby compartments pivot to horizontal as they rise, like cars on a ferris wheel. They deliver chittering flocks of bureaucrats to the city by day and return them to their nests at night. At the base of every tower is an open-air marketplace, linked to all the others in a broad river of bustling commerce. It’s a night refuge for the young and bored and sexually longing, and for the illicit robusto trade that thrives even here. Especially here, among the bored children of the elite.

  Surpluses are bought and sold by tower co-ops. Agents from specialty farmscrapers trade in everything from orchard produce to fresh milk and hydroponics, grown in filtered rain-water that’s pumped back up and around the growing platforms and into dedicated agro-floors under transparent glass and vaulted ceilings. There are pastures and orchards, parks and wilding floors with lynx and fox. The air in the farmscrapers fill with scents of flowers and grain, buzz with beneficent insects and bats and birds. Living in larger cities is a burden, but farmscrapers, parkscrapers, and the vast majority of towered buildings somewhere-in-between make it tolerable to pleasant.

  The towers proceed over the horizon in regular parallels, as if they’re trees in a huge orchard seeded by some ancient Leviathan. The titan’s garden continues over the soft, hazy-curve of the globe, easily visible from Sanjay’s high office window. At the farthest distance from his eye, it morphs into what looks to him like a man’s hairbrush. All bristles and no handle.

  Many risers are as tall or taller than the MoD six, straining into the western sky. But only a few poke up to reach the vain height of 300 stories or more. There’s no structural limit to altitude. Metallic-glass, nano-carbon fiber, and superhydrophobic ultraconcrete ensure that. No legal limit, either. If a builder wants to do it, he can make a tower whose top is vacuum sealed where it breaches Caspia’s atmosphere to reach the rim of space. After all, solid state elevators replaced fiber-ribbon God’s Lifts on most wealthier worlds over a millennium ago.

  And yet the towers are more limited. Why?

  The upper limits are social, not legal or structural. Most people simple object to working, and especially to living, much above about 200 stories.

  “Can’t see the damned ground!”

  “It’s always raining that high up!”

  “Over 1,000 stories up and I’ll see stars all day. Who wants to see stars all the time?”

  “I miss the green up there. Give me an ordinary flat on the 200th floor any day!”

  These are common complaints. Since the hyperloop and its many local branches means ground distance is no longer a barrier to ultrafast commuting, thousands of shorter towers are built instead. This mollifies the gray-shelled hordes of quietly discontented bureaucrats who scuttle to home and work and back again like files of monochrome crabs. All alike and all alone.

  Perhaps the tower limits are really psychological, a vestigial memory of our arboreal past? Some pinched anthrosociologist said limiting building heights that otherwise might literally scrape the top of the sky comes from a lingering, primeval desire to hide in the leafy canopy. She also said we all have a basic need to feel connected to the forest floor, like macaques. Sanjay saw the interview. He thinks anthrosociology is all stuff and nonsense. ‘Like macaques, indeed!’

  He restarts the holo with a flick of his tongue. A basic dot-channel, eye-implant would be best and fastest,
but CIS doesn’t allow implanted dots for obvious security reasons. It’s too easy to capture or compromise codes nesting in an employee brain. Only speech and tongue control is permitted at Sanjay’s level, and above.

  The holo shows a rotating view of Kestino, its image overlain with bright red symbology that locates all significant population centers on two brown-green continents. As a third, smaller continent rotates into view it reveals as mostly tan open desert. Several orange targeting circles hover over it nonetheless: SAC labor camps, clustered symbol boxes say, dense with political and societal prisoners and with dāsa slaves. The usual gray punishment stuff on Grün worlds.

  A vibrating purple rectangle on a solitary, isolated complex zooms out when he flicks his tongue at it. The AI reads: “Unidentified training site. Former prison. Confirmation pending.” The odd thing is that there’s no clarity to the image, however intently he peers or instructs the holo to refocus. Whatever its function, the base is well-camouflaged. Only Lasalle Five’s work caused this bit of rippled sand to stand out or be marked off at all. He asks for verbal details.

  “Not traditional cloak camo. Not metamaterial camo. Not bent light at the nano-level. Possibly a trapped-rainbow. Technically feasible. Gold filter micro-lens array. Expensive.”

  He prefers Lasalle Five’s dulcet voice to the staccato AI. He sticks his tongue out at a symbol for her tek note. “Rainbow camo at this scale is extreme, expensive even for SAC. We don’t cloak anything that big with trapped rainbows. We just bend light around buildings and bases we want to hide using ordinary, reactive materials. That means something real important is, or was, hidden here until a few months ago. Investigating.”

  Sanjay doesn’t know ‘tek stuff’ much beyond what any non-engineer knows, but he understands simple explanations. ‘Whatever is or was down there they really want to keep it secret.’ He marks what is in fact the hidden Bad Camberg training base with a top-level CIS priority command: Further inquiry ordered. Unnecessary, since the field agent is proceeding. But it helps him feel like he did something. Rather like a professor grading a paper “resubmit.”

  The scroll holo shifts into split-screen images, which surprises him. ‘How in the name of Lord Krishna did she get these shots? The gods bless her for it!’ Respect for her field-craft grows as he realizes the images come from brilliant use of the Imperium’s own assets to penetrate its secrets.

  Somehow, she placed ultra-passive recorder dots on skycabs riding one of Kestino’s three elevators, without triggering security systems that must be among the tightest in Orion. ‘Best double-check our own lift security.’ He makes a note to obtain a detailed report on how the agent did it, then to check all elevators for Grün recorder-dots capable of escaping standard scans.

  As the central holo-image reveals more of the largest continent he sees the anchor of one of the three old-fashioned elevators. Caspia has two of the more modern ones, anchored in ultra-concrete towers whose spires reach into low orbits. “God’s Lifts” is the popular name for them. Sanjay doesn’t use the quasi-religious term, but even he rides to his favorite high-orbit vacation spot once per year. With Mrs. Pradip plump and proud at his side, telling him to draw their bath. After, he smells of mango-oil and rigid, precision sex. No delights from the Kāmasūtra, just pure missionary stuff. ‘Worth it though. What a view!’

  Neither modern elevator on Caspia is quite so high or large as the massive, older lifts on Kestino. The technology used is ancient, older even than interstellar travel but still essential to it. Elevators eliminate the need for shuttles or booster-assisted ships, reducing environmental and crash danger from single launches and decreasing payload-per-lift-cost overall. They make low-gravity orbital manufacturing, interplanetary and inter-system trade possible and cheap. They’re one of the oldest, most successful teks used in all the Thousand Worlds.

  The Kestino elevator comprises a standard ground footing several klics broad and about 25 klics high. The base type is commonplace on settled planets and moons. That’s why he recognizes it. This one is surrounded by hundreds of square klics of warehouses, manufacturing and assembly plants, and heavy-cargo monorails that angle up from a thick web of ground transportation to reach varying access levels on the keystone tower. This one is unusual only in scale, not in its commercial, industrial, and military configuration.

  Unseeable at this range are 18 tracks of nanotube carbon-fiber ribbons. The farthest rises 1,750 klics from the surface. All connect to the ground-side port, then to hundreds of platform disks that perturb the elevator trunk like wild mushrooms on the side of a rotting Toruń oak. The lower disks, up to 20 klics from the surface, are reached directly by maglev trains that climb the outer tower or move unseen up interior tubes. Thousands of skycabs ride the metallic hydrogen ribbons between higher platforms, at lower speeds at first but reaching well over 2,000 klics-per-hour outside the atmosphere. It’s a smooth climb for passengers or cargo. And these are old lifts.

  The studding of platforms and attendant space docks hosts massive manufacturing plants, large luxury hotels, science labs, commercial research facilities, and cloaked military hubs. The latter mainly cluster at the extreme terminus, heavily defended by crystal masers, low-orbit fighter platforms and silos. The holo identifies military assets in a dizzying cascade of flashing symbology and text. The whole complex then connects to a ceiling anchor made of an irregular rock moved 1,800 years earlier from the system’s unusually thin and resource-poor asteroid belt. The tethered rock is counterbalance, keeping cables and center mass of the apparatus locked in geostationary orbit. It’s an immense bola that never lets go, but motionless relative to the base.

  What intrigues Sanjay isn’t the spectacular view that includes a silvery reflection of a second elevator rising over the distant curve of the horizon. It’s the flowing sidebars showing bases and camps spotting the surface. Hundreds of IDs scroll the sides of the projection, far more than should exist even on this huge, critically important capital world. He’s astonished by the sheer number of Rikugun, Kaigun, and SAC bases. By how many open or camoed sites Lasalle Five counts out one after another: “Possible barracks, local infantry. Armtrak field park, investigating. Raptor and Jabo park, confirmed. Artillery range…”

  A massive buildup is underway, far beyond what Pyotr needs for his invasion of the United Planets. Sanjay checks the time-file stamp. These troops and aircraft and vehicles were still parked or in training as of two-weeks ago. ‘Pyotr has committed only a fraction of his forces to Krevo. The stories of Grün overstretch and logistics failures are all false, probably plants!’

  This is one of 297 settled planets and moons in the Imperium, albeit the single most populous and important. CIS Senior Analyst Sanjay Pradip nearly drops his precious teacup as he realizes the scale of Pyotr’s military build-up and how advanced it already is. He recovers only with great effort, carefully placing the scared teacup back in a decorative saucer on his teak table. He leans back in his chair, confidence gone. ‘Sala kutta! What are the dog-eaters up to?’

  ***

  More days have passed and Sanjay’s great moment is approaching. He’s pacing in his office, pondering what he considers LaSalle Five’s wilder speculations on covert opportunities on Kestino, principally a quick and bloody strike to kill Pyotr, decapitate SAC, and end the war before it even starts. Does he dare pass the idea along to the prime minister and the Joint Cabinet?

  “Summary report. Goals: preempt and eliminate war party on Kestino; force negotiations by replacement regime. Method: knockout attack, one-time basis. Alternative: CIS agents-provocateurs raise dissent, foment riots and civil disobedience in Novaya Uda and megacity slums, promote overthrow from within. Back-up: NCU close-in kinetic bombardment, precision targeting.”

  “No!” Sanjay says it out loud, to himself. “She can’t be seriously proposing a NCU naval bombardment of the Imperium’s capital city, not even as a fallback option! What next, nudgers?”

  “Target list: SAC HQ, home of General Curia
; Imperium Seminary, training center for Purity politruks; Waldstätte Palast, imperial residence, command center, Eagle Corps or Washi Guards. Do nots: no infrastructure bombardment; no ground assault. Expected results: high casualties, CIS agents and special forces. Cross border retaliation: naval and possible ground attacks. Internal instability of Imperium. Peace party will quickly form citing interest in internal control. Expect no interference from Daurans. Expect all Neutrals will approve in private, may condemn in public. End report. Agent code: Lasalle Five. Confirmation: echo two-seven bravo.”

  Sanjay rolls up the holo and walks out of his cubicle. He takes a short, elegant hand-carved Toruń briar pipe from a stand of five and fills it with aromatic Kars tobacco. It’s his one concession to the rival capital, famous for naturally-scented green leaf. He makes sure the carco-filter is in place, re-enters the security alcove and leans back to think over important things.