Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Part of him admires LaSalle Five’s powerful initiative, another part recoils from her call for violent solutions to the Union’s pressing political and diplomatic problem. It’s been 30 days since he said “I mustn’t be pushed.” Even he can’t delay any longer. It’s time to recommend.

  The PM waits on his wise counsel. The Joint Cabinet waits. He draws a second puff from the finely inlaid pipe. It rises over his head in a useless, wispy and lazy cloud. Sanjay Pradip is going to Kars to brief the Cabinets. This is his moment, here and now, deciding what he’ll say.

  ‘Can I be as bold as her? She’s in the field under deep cover, her life at risk daily. Yet she offers to take on more risk, run the black ops in the barrios and slums. Of course, I could have done that, too, had I chosen a different path to serve, joined the ‘Obscure Service’ to do covert work. My path is harder, to serve in loyal silence here on Caspia. There’s boldness and risk in my position, too. Oh my, yes, yes. Great risk. How daring of me!’

  He feels a little hungry.

  ‘It will be the pinnacle of my career to solve this crisis short of war. I will be hailed as a visionary, a peacemaker. Called into the cabinets by a grateful prime minister. Yes, yes! It will be the pinnacle of my career to solve this crisis short of war. I will be hailed as a visionary, a peacemaker. Called into the twin cabinets by a moved and grateful prime minister. Yes, yes!’

  ‘Still … it would be a career-killer to be wrong. It would wreck my reputation and Mrs. Pradip’s social standing.’

  He’s definitely peckish. He spies a perfect peach Mrs. Pradip laid in for his late-day snack, to tide him over until he returns to her regular curry table later tonight.

  ‘Penetrate SAC HQ and assassinate the inner circle? Is that even possible? Yes, she said there’s a way in, from a delivery road connecting to the Avenue of Triumph, the grand parade route parting SAC HQ and the Waldstätte Palast from the rest of the city. It could hobble the regime! Cripple it! Eliminate their war faction, change the Jade Court! Timing will be crucial.’

  ‘Wait, did she really say we should do it, or only say it’s possible? I think she said ... No! She’s careful and sly, like any good field agent. That’s why she detailed entry possibilities to key buildings but stopped short of saying we should penetrate them. She’s shrewd to wriggle off the hook, pass on the obvious but most risky conclusion up the chain of command. Pass it on to me.’

  Assassination isn’t a game civil servants play at every day, not even the Director of CIS with nearly 30 years on the job. Disinformation and subversion are more familiar, better options. A war of words well short of violence and far short of war. They’re Sanjay’s kind of weapon, ready for the joust.

  Even better, disinfo ops can be ordered right away, and that will give the appearance of decisive action that the prime minister craves, but without using force or risking detection or negative feedback.

  ‘I shall recommend a campaign of covert subversion.’ Then he has a chilling thought. ‘RSU must be thinking the same, and doing the same here. I’d best get counter-intel on that.’

  He makes another of his infamous little notes, then returns to gloating. ‘It will serve them right when their people rise in rebellion. “A lot better than starting a war,” I’ll tell the PM. Yes, that’s what I’ll recommend, info ops and regime change.’

  Or will he? He raises his pipe to take another puff. He pauses in mid-gesture.

  ‘I should add assassination to the list as well, though present it as far too high-risk to be taken seriously. A very bad second choice to frame and promote the reasonableness of the first. Just what they always want to hear, that there’s a far worse choice that they never made. They can cite it later, to show their wisdom to the clots who vote them in or out. I’ll make the PM and Joint Cabinet think that they’re doing the choosing, but choose what I want them to. I need one more item for the list. It’s always best to give the pols three choices.’

  If his long career taught him anything it’s that politicians dislike binary choices. Four is always too many, forcing them to really think. Two is pressure-filled and runs against decision-makers’ instinct to fuzz-up every issue. Three is optimum. Everyone likes lists of three, the rule of three, where the last choice is so unsatisfying it conceals that the decision was always binary.

  ‘A covert raid on Kestino, a royal kidnapping or some such thing. That’ll do it. Less than a direct attack on the Pyotr regime and old guard by assassination, more than a subversion. Still far too violent for the cabinet. Just a variant on assassination, really. Good, that’s my three.’

  Sanjay really does feel peckish. He’s almost done with this report and task anyway, and his tummy knows it. Time to wrap things up, file his report in quadruplicate, then head home to a fine supper with Mrs. Pradip. He finishes dictating his memo and reaches for the peach.

  Suddenly, startling himself and the AI monitoring his glass-walled office, he slams down his pipe, cracking its briar bowl on the teak desk, scattering glowing Kars green tobacco and chips of ancient Toruń tree trunk across the desk and floor. The happy little teacup flies into the air then comes cracking! down on wood, shattering into bemused little pieces at its sudden end.

  ‘Why, I’ve had an epiphany!’

  At least, he thinks that’s what it is, this odd and unexpected flash and sense of certain insight. He’s heard other people call it that whenever they have one. His doubt is forgivable. It’s his first, ever.

  ‘Gods damn it! I’ll do it! I will! I, Sanjay Pradip, will step out boldly from a lifetime of brilliant caution to make worlds-changing recommendations to the politicians. I alone can and shall save us from this war, save all Orion from Shiva’s wrath and Kali’s wrack and ruin!’

  His broken pipe’s forgotten, its spilled Kars tobacco burning a small hole in his teak desk from which blue wood-smoke is rising, and another in the carpet. The AI Fire-Stop knows a burning floor is different from tobacco smoke, but worries that Sanjay is sealed in a sound-proof alcove, alarm blaring outside. Someone’s peering in but sees nothing through clouded armor glass. Then the auto fire-doors come crashing down to seal his security alcove off entirely.

  ‘I’ll use my backdoor channel, go directly to the PM. I’ll propose more resources for Agent Lasalle. She’s probably my protégé after all, judging from her perfect performance. I was wrong about Kars University. She may have graduated from there but she’s recovered, she has a future here in MoD on Caspia written all over her. We might even ... well, never mind that now.’

  The AI assesses his danger, but knows better than to initiate a conversation with an agent of his rank. It tries a long-range squirt of retardant at the carpet hole, but misses. It sends a little bot to sit on it instead. The bot does the job. The desk is hardwood and no longer burning. The AI relaxes. It turns off the outside alarm and starts to clean the air. It’s used to smokers.

  ‘I’ll ask for ... no! I shall demand, that covert CIS special forces be inserted on Kestino, that provocateur cells be activated, tell the PM that I have a field agent in place who can reach right into SAC HQ and gut the Tennō of his war council and leadership cadres with one lethal blow. I’ll advise him that this is the sure way to avert war, behead the enemy of its warlord, leaving no trace of intervention behind. “What if the blow misses?” he’ll protest. I’ll say “Why war is coming anyway. We all know it. Admit it, sir. At least we shall choose the fateful hour.”’

  Sanjay Pradip’s great moment is here at last, the defining minute of his lifetime. He’s in the perfect position to act. He can alter history, fix the fates of billions with the right word in just the right ear at just the right time. Then his precious moment passes as quickly as it arrives.

  ‘Wait, what if the PM thinks that’s too provocative? It could be, maybe. Yes, yes, it is. I shall be dismissed, disgraced, ignored. The cabinet will turn on me, Briand will roast me alive. What if I just insert these ideas in my files? Deep inside, under secure protocols? Good to have options, in the
files. Just in case there’s an official review later. There always is concerning such things. Who said what to whom and why? That sort of thing. Best to have plans, in the files.’

  Fortune wobbles, pushing gales of purposeful randomness no one can stop, drifting one way and the other but always heading straight toward its mark. Historians will look back later, if any survive the Fourth Orion War, to find the origins of the crisis and who to blame. They’ll map out chains of “deep causal links,” assert confident “connections,” proclaim an “inevitable outcome” instead of a billion might-have-beens. When in truth hundreds of billions of lives and whole worlds are buffeted willy-nilly by gusts of chance and little choices, fallen leaves tossed and strewn every-which-way by the blustery winds of hate, fear, hope and war. By human decision and indecision in roughly equal measure.

  ‘It’s a dangerous game, sticking one’s neck out to be ‘chopped’ like a Dauran peasant. Why should I take such a risk? I must think this through again, very carefully, while there’s time. “There will be time to murder and create ... Time yet for a hundred indecisions, and a hundred visions and revisions.” Who said that? Was it me? No matter. No rush. I’ll tell them what they want, what they think they need to hear. Then wait some more. There’ll be time, there’ll be time.’

  Time’s Arrow races on, arcing away from Sanjay’s fateful moment to some other’s. Its fletchings quiver in the hurricane wind sweeping ahead from a hundred million, trillion choices, made by the small as well as the great. By fighters who refuse to quit, others who throw down arms in despair. By ordinary folk who meekly agree to serve when called to take up arms. By the powerful few who force the many into uniform and send them to war. By students and farmers, strong sons, weeping mothers, too-proud fathers. By spies, diplomats and politicians, workers and industrialists. By hosts of petty bureaucrats like peckish Sanjay Pradip. By chauvinists and GovNeb editors, and by teachers and other corruptors of the young scattered over a thousand worlds across Orion.

  Sanjay feels much better with his choice made, as his unexpected and quite frightening bout with courage passes. Emboldened by caution, he looks to pour a second cup of tea, just in time to see his fine shattered teacup give up the struggle to stay warm and surrender its little china ghost to the cold Universe.

  He shrugs, then he turns to eat the fresh, perfect peach that Mrs. Pradip kindly packed that morning. He raises the fruit to his open mouth, readying to take a bite. He hesitates again. His moment of greatness flickering in history’s rear-view wilderness of mirrors.

  ‘Will I, after tea and perfect slices,

  face my moment, overcome my crisis?

  Do I dare rise to fight the Universe?

  It’s Kali! Coming with her hearse!

  I measure out my life in UST and china cups.

  with little spoons and sliced up lime,

  and Mrs. Pradip’s curried supper time.’

  He’s not sure he remembers the verse rightly, or quite how Mrs. Pradip wriggled her very ample form inside a schoolboy’s poorly learned lesson. Still, it seems to fit his moment. He dares at last. He bites into the warm, ripe peach. Sweet juice escapes his small, careful mouth to trickle over his chin. ‘It’s a pity about the old teacup. I’ll have to bring another from the set at home.’

  Outside the MoD tower window a too-high swallow carried upward on a thermal riser struggles with a sudden sideways gust. Higher up, a white eagle watches the faltering progress and beating wings down below. Its wings spread wide. Talons stretch. It dives...

  Virgiliu

  “The more consequential the information the higher the doubt.” It’s an old saying, one of Sanjay Pradip’s favorites. He often cites it to Mrs. Pradip. Other intelligence officers quote it too, across the CIS Combine high up the sixth MoD tower in Lowestoft-on-Stamos, back on Caspia.

  Its rival civilian intelligence agency, Le Service Général du Renseignement, is located worlds away and even higher in the clouds, atop the Tour de Sécurité in Barda on Kars. SGR has its own oft-quoted caution: “Perfect confidence keeps close company with failure.”

  Senior CIS and SGR officers are gathered in the SGR tower to brief the Joint Cabinet about the unfolding grand strategy of Pyotr Shaka III. They would serve themselves and their great Union to remember their own wise cautions. Yet they won’t. The fall of great men that comes with pride is different from the mediocre majority, from us, in one respect. It’s much farther down from the top.

  It’s a glorious, orange morning rising over Barda on Kars, host city of the Lok Sabha, the Great Lower House of the Peoples. Tropical air is heavy with hot, fresh rain and thick plant perfumes from three-foot magnolia blossoms hanging from colonnades. The 60-meter tall trees line all the main boulevards of what the locals call “Lotus City.”

  Wide parks are vibrant with intense orange-reds of giant sophronitis, and titan arum flowers so naturally large they’re hardly re-engineered at all. Except for a touch of deeper color and rims of bioluminescence that show splendidly at night. If you’re not familiar with Barda’s heavily perfumed streets, combined with thick humidity, it can make you feel faint or even retch. If you’re born to the city no other place seems alive at all. No other throbs with living pulsation, or always smells like a secret promise of sweaty midnight sex.

  Not that Sanjay Pradip cares about local vegetation or what he considers “typical Kars floral ostentation.” He much prefers Lowestoft’s stuffy high-tower sameness and always crisp, dry air to Barda’s faintly rotten odor of sour onion and wilting fruits. He hardly even notices the titan arum overhead as he dodges chatty tourists on the short walk from his hotel, worrying the whole way that so much humidity will wilt his suit and form wet patches in the underarms of his best shirt. He’s more than a little upset that he’s in Barda at all, and he just got more bad news.

  Sanjay’s eyes are common brown, small and too close-set. When he squints with distaste as he does now they make him look pinched, like a primary school teacher who’s suspicious of a scrawled parent’s note in his hand. Even Robert Hoare thinks so, and he looks like the principal.

  His face is deep in little notes. He pays no attention to glorious, steamy views while riding the swift-and-silent, external maglev high above vegetable and carbon fiber canopies, to the 240th story atop the Tour de Sécurité. That’s where he’s going to brief the Joint Cabinet in an ultra secure room, well away from prying local media or the peering eye of the sleepless memex.

  He arrived from Lowestoft-on-Stamos three weeks ago. He hardly ever leaves his home city, let alone his homeworld. He’s never been away from Mrs. Pradip this long before, not in 32 years of devoted marriage. He thinks he misses her, but he’s out of routine so he’s not quite sure. He doesn’t handle uncertainty well. Or surprises. Or decisions. Or conflict.

  His instructions from the prime minister are to liaise closely with his counterpart in SGR, the great man himself, Director Virgiliu Nicolescu. Sanjay is to “coordinate all CIS current intel with SGR intel on all issues relevant to the Imperium.” Bad enough that meant leaving for Barda, but he’s been here far too long: there are lots of CIS and SGR files on the Imperium to sort, catalogue, disagree over, and return to the database with a note saying they were read.

  Sanjay’s more than a little distressed because he learned just an hour ago that the prime minister wants him to stay in Barda “for the duration of the diplomatic crisis.” He doesn’t cope well with disruption of his smallest routines, so he’s out of sorts. Things are even worse, as he messaged his faithful wife by secure CIS relay, which he really isn’t supposed to use for such things, “because I haven’t had a decent cup of tea since arriving in this fetid city.” Mrs. Pradip knows her dear husband must be very upset to miss his tea, and to use a word like ‘fetid.’

  He steps into the ultra secure Briefing Room to find an embedded holo nameplate in a long walnut oval that indicates his seat. Its another irritant in an already irksome morning, for now Sanjay must sit directly across from the one
person in the Universe who most upsets his composure, causes him the greatest aggravation, utterly disrupts his clear thinking with interruptions and odd questions and snorts of acid disagreement. And smokes. Minister of Defense Georges Briand.

  Sanjay keeps his too-narrow eyes on his rolled-up vid-scroll as others enter and take their seats. He’s perturbed by their seemingly endless idle chatter and glad-handing, and the fact that even in here it’s still a touch humid and smells like an arboretum. He consoles himself with private wit.

  ‘Politicians! They’re like puffer fish, inflated with pride and prejudice. Do they never stop puffing to please everyone, even amongst themselves where they know they’re all frauds?’

  Sanjay has the proud soul of a career bureaucrat, who understands that authenticity is hard to fake. Not least because he fakes it every single day in order to flatter the most recent incompetent newly elected by “the folks,” as old and new ministers play musical chairs every election cycle.

  He waits patiently through the usual pleasantries as Prime Minister Robert Hoare makes the necessary introductions and filler-talk, then through five production and readiness reports and a vague diplomatic summary by a deputy minister. Finally, it’s his turn. Or will be after the first break.