Alliance: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  His will must be done over all worlds he conquers. By the same brutal methods used in every kowtowing Dauran village and town. He sends not just secret armies and navies crashing over the old frontiers, but alongside them his horde of slavering Shishi curs in terror-packs like nothing any Neutral or Krevan or Calmari knows or ever saw in worst nightmares. Shishi bay at the borders of the Hermit Empire, snarling to cross over and run wild. Now they’re loose, off the leash and hunting, red in tooth and claw, black robes whirling and snapping in the winds of war.

  It’s a risk, for the Shishi almost escaped Soso’s control once. At the start of the Grim Revolution he let them build a barracks-like HQ tall above an obscure workers district on the edge of Astrana called “The Drapchi.” The fellow sadists that he put in charge built their first torture fortress there, with sound-proof dungeons to carry out silent, screaming executions. With private torture chambers and custom-built blood drains. Its quadrangular towers looked straight down onto a closed execution yard used for larger groups, where long scuppers carried away blood from ritualized, mass choppings. Feared and fearsome, Drapchi became the model that lent its name to the later ‘Drapchi archipelago’ of strung-out, secret Shishi prisons and labor moons.

  In those days, Shishi actually carried short brooms and mounted severed dogs’ heads on hoods of their hovers and bikes. Soso made them. He told them the symbols said they would sweep away the filth of his enemies and be his blood hounds, sniffing out all dissent. That dark heritage is recalled in the modern Shishi flash, a snarling lion-dog head, an ancient Shisa that squats over a stubby, stylized whisk. It’s the symbol of his ‘Black Terror’ among all Daurans.

  After the Party was purged, Soso turned them loose on the Old Ritualists, supporters of the old ways and regime who kept faith in the semi-divinity of the extinguished Imperial Family. They denounced him in secret as a murderer, usurper and blasphemer. They said they waited for the return of the Rightful Heir, a hidden emperor, a royal child said to have escaped his slaughter who would stand over Jahandar’s grave when the rightful monarchy was restored. He denounced them as fanatics, mocking their claims to be The Elect, an elite chosen by the gods to dwell on eight predestined worlds founded by the GDM colony ships Idaho, Kashi, Liaotung, Novgorod, Odessa, Rio, Shanghai and Vatsa.

  Just by existing, Old Ritualists reminded Daurans that before him there was a different way, a better way than Soso, who ascended to blasphemous divinity as ‘The Jahandar’ then suppressed all memory of any gods or justice or even history before him. They denied his nihilist cult and rejected his sordid ways. They were too sincere to be left alone.

  Black Robes rode across the benighted Foundation Worlds, smashing colonies of Old Ritualists and droving hundreds of millions into the Drapchi archipelago, a black pearl-string of prison moons ruled without records or mercy or appeal. It grew vast with rising Shishi power, until it held several billion condemned Dead Souls. Nowhere is there equality like on the prison and labor moons, where all are sentenced for life. They’re the most equal places in all Orion.

  For Soso’s first seven years in the Caesarium Selo, his Shishi rampaged. Their most exemplary punishments came on Tula and Dorpat. When Tula’s leaders naïvely held out for a legitimate succession to a murdered emperor, ninety million were butchered by 100,000 frantic Shishi, hacked with sachis and slashed with flammards. Or locked in blockaded cities to starve until only fat corpse rats and mad feral cats were left. Then the cities burned, fired by wild bands of fanatic night dogs with oil and torches, chopping any Tulan who ran out of hiding in a cellar or maglev station now on fire. On Dorpat they sacked and burned 20 cities to terrorize all worlds of the Old Empire into submission. A chopping rate of 300,000 Dorpati per day lasted more than 100 days. They only stopped when all Daura begged them, and formally submitted to Jahandar.

  The violence and Black Terror that Shishi brought to Dauran systems in the first years of Soso’s rule was so extreme it threatened to break down basic order. Even he realized they had to be saddled, remembering a lesson that the Temple Seminary monks in Tikbuli taught him. ‘The blood‑dimmed tide is loosed ... Things fall apart … Mere anarchy is loosed upon the worlds.’ The master terrorist found ambitious new men to murder his murderers. It was a ferocious purge.

  Shishi had become a state within a state, an empire within his own, the Grim Revolution challenging his new prophesy and Revelation. So Jahandar turned on them, butchered all leaders, shuttered their HQ in Astrana, banished all Black Robes to their own Drapchi prisons. Allowed only a few to live, and only on cold moons in dimmed light far from him. He killed all the killers until the last Shishi bowed before him, groveled under his total control once more. “Pruning the pruners” was how he put it with a gardener’s laugh, his shears all notched from chipping bone.

  Prune them he did, keeping all surviving Black Robes confined on the Drapchi moons waiting for the next mission or purge. Killers-on-ice. After that, only hand-picked praetorians were allowed near him on Astrana. After that, his terror troops were also governed as he ruled all Daurans, separated from any law or mercy or natural justice. And yet, when Jahandar called them forth again, his night curs leaped like beaten dogs to a cruel master still holding the knout he beat them with. They rose off the dim-lit moons to go do murder at his bidding.

  To harden his power in amber, to encase the fossils of Party, Empire, and wild Shishi, he brought 50,000 of the worst Abreks to Astrana. He told them to purge the purgers and rewarded them beyond any Blue Mountain bandit dream. They killed the second-generation leaders whom Jahandar hand-picked to kill the first, the ones who made the Grim Revolution with him while he was young in power and still called Soso. At an immense show trial staged for and shown on the JarNeb, terrified civilians and lickspittle Shishi competed in coerced denunciations. Beaten rank-and-filers shifted blame for the slaughter from Jahandar and themselves to top Shishi men alone.

  “We were only following orders from Drapchi HQ.”

  “It was a few extremists in the leadership. They disobeyed the Boss! They gave us those foul, illegal orders to burn Tula’s cities and the people. We had to do it!”

  “We didn’t want to do it! It was the thugs and butchers in Drapchi HQ. They made us make a pyre of Dorpat’s cities. Jahandar stopped it once he learned of it. Gods bless him.”

  “No, it wasn’t me!” SHISH’s second Director was hauled before a Revolutionary Court of Justice. He stood with ten deputies in an iron cage. “Jahandar gave us the order. He said...”

  “Silence! How dare you lie about Jahandar! How dare you lie to a Court of the Peoples!” The new Abrek judge screamed and frothed, overflowing with venom and vehemence. “Jahandar is merciful. He stopped your filthy crimes. You’ll pay for your foul murders and your slander. You’ll be taken from this place and chopped with your own sachi. But first, you must confess!”

  More torture by master tormentors, this time of their old boss. They elicited his sworn confession. “I subject myself to the most severe criticism, strongly condemning myself. Grave and inexcusable was my behavior towards our Transcendent Leader, Jahandar. I am the sole guilty party, one hundred percent. I ordered liquidation of the Tula regime, I deviated from the correct policy-line framed by Jahandar. I ordered the measures on Dorpat. I alone...”

  Afterward, the lying witnesses were killed by Abreks, hiding Jahandar’s lies in murder. Then the Abreks slipped into the boots and lives of the Black Robes they killed, into their beds and inside their wives. Thus did Jahandar continue a permanent Black Terror. By the time the Drapchi scuppers dried out from a river of purge blood, Jahandar cut Shishi numbers by nine-tenths. All who were left feared him or loved him without question. Most often, they did both.

  The old Shishi went quietly into the drains. Afterward he kept their numbers low with unpredictable purges of the ranks and turnover-by-execution or secret poisonings of Directors. SHISH HQ was banished from Nalchik, exiled to rule over the dead and the condemned on the prison moons. Abr
eks who dressed in dead men’s black robes took over as his guards in Astrana.

  Rough, brutal and uneducated, Soso’s mountain gangsters are the true secret elite of his terror state. A closed circle of killers sustaining a vast murder-bureaucracy. Overseers of whole worlds covered with detention camps and prison cities, with no one allowed to leave any Dauran homeworld until now, when the first armies, 100 million krasnos, leave to kill and die in his war.

  Abreks are bound to Jahandar personally and by a culture of crude bandit honor. They serve him so loyally and well he only has to murder a few top mountain men, from time to time.

  Jahandar learned it all from Soso, stumbling onto a model of gang rule over the whole of Daura that works. Mass terror leavened by periodic purges and show trials stirs a constant chaos in which ordinary Daurans turn to Astrana to save them from fear and farfolk. Only he knows when the next terror wave will wash over their dreary lives and worlds. Only he is in control.

  The Black Terror centralizes all power in his hands while a cult of semi-divinity elevates him in the daily thoughts of Daurans everywhere. It’s most intense for anyone living on Nalchik who must walk under his ever-watching visage carved into the face of a looming moon. Yet even Jahandar’s decadent despotism is not unimpeded, not quite absolute. Not as divine as he would like. Even slaves must be given a little freedom or they’ll rebel. As a gangster, he knows that too.

  He needs Daurans to act from genuine motivation, to lubricate his terror system with a simulacrum of choice, an illusion of free will. Or else it must seize up. He gets most obedience by constant turnover at the top, yet shrewdly gives generous rewards to those promoted into dead men’s boots. As on Sachi in his Dead Soul gang days, so now across Daura, terror and loot bond his followers. Careerists in the military and government are tied to his person and his survival as the source of all their patronage, all poverty or privilege, all pleasure or torment. All life and fate.

  His mad governing genius is to keep all those nearest to him in constant agitation and all of society in permanent turmoil. In the place of any normal sensibility or community he inserts a raw statism and cult of his personality. Instead of traditional religious impulses he substitutes an idolatry of his person and power. Atop the natural love of home and place he lays out unnatural and abstract patriotism, verging on a martyr’s cult of death, as dying youth cry out Za Jahandar!

  In the last two years it’s gotten worse as Jahandar girds Daurans for war in the only way he knows, with fear and coercion. Martial training is elevated over more peasant and pleasant pastimes. Demonstrations of intolerance and violent vengeance are celebrated as virtues, displacing natural springs of neighborliness and family that Soso never knew. He knows only a vital burning hate that fills every thought and feeling since before he can remember. It’s a true misery to be Soso-Jahandar. Any normal man would have killed himself decades ago.

  He doesn’t understand his hate so much as service it. He venerates his flaws, which are the vices of cities over the virtues of the countryside, of quick violence over slow and peaceful intercourse, of excessive amour propre over love of family and community. He falls early into secular worship of a deified state and far more of himself, raising both above local deism and the usual harmless superstitions and folk beliefs of daily life. Just as he raises his own lunar profile over Nalchik. A deficient and cruel boy called Soso, a withered man who’s revered as Jahandar the Dread, both make war to bring the terror of his name and cult of personality to all Orion.

  “I am Soso. I am The Jahandar. I will be the God of War!” The mad Tyrant but speaks it, and hundreds of billions of Daurans surge with him into murder, mayhem and the black pit.

  ***

  On Nunavut it’s over militarily by the end of Z+2. After massing out-of-range of the Iqaluit garrison’s big guns, 300,000 Browncoats marched uphill upon the break of a cold orange dawn to overcome entrenched works of the local garrison. Other towns were undefended. The hovers simply landed krasnos and Shishi and started deportation of all the locals.

  “Last Stand of the Gardes” will be commemorated in patriotic songs and GovNeb recreations broadcast across the reeling Calmar Union. Within three months there’s a rumor about an opera-ballet that will open soon on Kars, then tour the provinces. Caspia propagandists get ahold of it. They order the name changed from ‘Tragedy on Nunavut’ to ‘Honor on the Ice.’

  Shishi executions, round-ups, and mass deportations of tens of millions of harmless Inuit to Drapchi prisons and labor moons begin immediately. It always starts with a hard three knocks, then a door kicked-open in the middle of the night. No time is given to answer the knocks or to gather clothes, or a small ivory-carving, or some other little memento of a lifetime of hard labor and raising kids among seals and wolves, bears and arctic cold. Everything is left behind, and later smashed to bits by careless krasnos picking through the abandoned rubble of emptied Inuit towns and forfeit lives. Half-full larders are gaped-open by drunks heading back to barracks with stolen sleighs and troikas loaded with salted fish, seal steaks, and big slabs of frozen blubber.

  Abandoned meat lockers are visited by curious white bears who sniff cautiously around once feared but now empty Inuit houses. They leave gnawed silver salmon heads and clumps of bloody seal fur behind when they retreat to the ice, still puzzled by good fortune but stomachs full. With larders emptied by the polars, chopping stumps are clawed to shreds by too-late, angry grizzlies. On bark-stripped trunks of black-pine rubbing trees, great Kodiaks buff their backs and shoulders in angry compensation, leaving thick strands of gold‑tipped fur hanging when they go.

  Here and there scavenging wolves chew on a drunk krasno who freezes to death among all the blubber and fish, forgotten and left inside a larder by careless friends who fail to notice he’s missing until roster-call next day. The wolves find the bodies in pantries and on meat-locker floors. They steal bites and tears of chilling flesh from exposed bellies, then from dead faces with open yet clouded eyes, pupils less-than-black and whites turning ash-gray. Smaller brown and black bears, snow fox, coyotes and coywolves, and other arctic scavengers eat their fill during a season of abandonment, over a hard winter beginning with a blood Wolf Moon unlike any in all the Inuit centuries spent in ice-huts or lying with harpoons on Nunavut’s jagged, blue floes.

  ***

  General Kurshid and his favorite traveling concubine spend only two nights in the old Gardes HQ outside burned Iqaluit, before deciding to leave Nunavut. They were shocked to learn the Gardes commander was a local schoolteacher, and that he didn’t have a great mansion. So they moved into the only really big house on Nunavut, the State House. The old governor had a small set of rooms in there. He doesn’t need them anymore. He’s frozen down a hole in the ice

  “What a shithole! And no samogon here, just this Calmari swill. What a shit planet!”

  He smashes a decanter of the governor’s finest Baku scotch against the wall and into crystal bits. So much for the spoils of war. All the best things in Orion are spread before him and all are lost on this soiled and sordid barbarian.

  The boor would rather drink throat-raw grain alcohol, cheap Dauran field-samogon, over the finest Baku scotch. Which as everyone in Orion knows, is the nectar of the gods! They forgot it when they abandoned our little spur to resettle in the more majestic Perseus spiral arm. Or so says the Baku Scotch Distiller’s Association, only half-jokingly, in all its better memex pitches.

  “It’s too fucking cold here,” his naked concubine whinges, burrowing deeper into a pile of a dozen white furs spread over a modest four-poster bed in the governor’s suite. She pulls the topmost bearskin up, covering her overlarge, heavy and floundering breasts. She’s not as young or firm as she was and fears that he’ll notice. She’s a little surprised he brought her here at all.

  A roaring gas fire heats the rooms so well that fat Kurshid sits naked and sweating in a fur-lined chair, a platter of sweetmeats balancing recklessly on his roundel gut, his thick genitals hangi
ng limp and soft between sweat-and-semen soaked thighs. “Yeah, too fucking cold!”

  Kurshid has a week before he leads another assault in Royko’s ‘Grand Design.’ He’ll be damned if he spends that time on a “foreign shithole ice-planet.” He decides to head back to his summer retreat on Achinsk, leaving on a cruiser with five destroyer-escorts flying alongside. “I’m an important man. I must be protected from enemy attacks and from Blue Oni assassins.”

  Achinsk is a tropical world with vacation facilities reserved for the regime elite, for top DRA and DRN officers, Shishi commanders, senior bureaucrats and other apparatchiki. It’s the kind of dreary, moldy, broken-down place that only crude Daurans ignorant of the commonplace luxuries available in all the western systems could ever love or think lavish or luxurious or nice.

  Browncoats stay on Nunavut, tending to wounded, burning their dead. They distill deep vats of samogon from liberated grain imported by Inuit before the winter and the war. They think their part in the fighting is done, that’s it’s been a splendid little war. A few hours of blood and fear, for sure. But followed by more to eat and drink than ever before in their short and spartan lives. And there are so many odd and pretty things for them to puzzle over and to break. After they transship to north Amasia six months later, to apply their arctic skills in the hard and pivotal fight developing on the supercontinent Lemuria, they’ll come to know horrors of a real ice-war.