Mobilization

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  Following his successful pincer attack, Yang retracted his previous remarks. He suspended his plans for escape, determined to wage battle against the next wave of the enemy. Not only because there was a high chance of being attacked from the rear, but also because, putting together several pieces of intel, they knew that Admiral Helmut Lennenkamp was spearheading the reinforcement division. Anxious about leaving things to Steinmetz alone, Reinhard had wasted no time in sending backup. Lennenkamp had planned on being there in due time, never imagining that Yang would fell an enemy twice his size in a matter of hours. Lennenkamp would have to be equally swift.

  “Mister Lennen, is it?” Yang muttered to himself, abbreviating the surname as he often did for his own convenience.

  For a mere few seconds, he put a hand to his chin in deep thought before snapping his fingers—a sound that only he could hear, and even then only faintly. If not for the faith of those working under him, his commands would’ve been difficult to grasp and accept.

  “Fire three volleys just before the enemy gets within range. After that, we’ll retreat to the Raighar star system. But we’ll do so slowly and systematically.”

  Even within the Yang fleet, no one understood the significance of this order, but no one questioned it either. After cutting through the infinite darkness with three aimless shots, they began their escape as if cornered by the advancing imperial forces. At first, the latter took the bait and upped their speed, but then Commander Lennenkamp suddenly ordered his men to fall back, and this they did begrudgingly.

  That’s when Yang, his eyes locked on the screen, ordered a full counterattack.

  His timing was exquisite. Lennenkamp’s retreat had given momentum to the enemy’s attack. Flashes of light mowed down both the darkness and the imperial fleet in one go, lighting up screens and retinas alike with their explosions. Seeing the wall of light approaching his flagship, Lennenkamp lost the will to fight and retreated after all. At 1300 hours, after half of its forces had been driven away, the imperial fleet pulled itself back together, at which point Yang made his getaway in earnest.

  “I wonder why the enemy retreated midattack. Had they kept going, they probably would’ve won,” said Julian to the dark-haired young marshal on Hyperion’s bridge. Even to Julian, it was a mystery.

  Lennenkamp, Yang explained, had been enticed by the Yang fleet in the battle over Iserlohn Fortress and had dealt him a hard blow. If Yang had learned anything from this exchange, it was that Lennenkamp would likely take any opportunity given to him as a trap and take precautions accordingly. If the alliance’s retreat seemed deliberate, then no doubt Lennenkamp would be wary to give chase. Any simple commander hell-bent on revenge would’ve done the opposite. Yang had made clever use of this psychology.

  “Yet again, many tens of thousands of widows and orphans will despise me for what I’ve done today. It’s a little too heavy for me to bear it all. You only have to fall into hell once …”

  Despite having made quick work of two imperial fleets in a single day, thick clouds gathered about Yang’s expression.

  “If the admiral is going to hell, then I’m coming with you. At least you’d never be lonely,” offered Julian, speaking from the heart.

  Yang’s expression softened.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, laughing bitterly. “I was planning on sending you to heaven so that you could fish me up from hell. I want you to do as much good in this universe as you can.”

  Julian said he would try his best, even as he leapt with pride on the inside over Yang’s victory. Julian had learned the psychology of both his strategies and tactics. It was precisely because both Steinmetz and Lennenkamp were not incompetent leaders that they fell into the psychological traps that Yang laid for them. Julian made a mental note that opponents of a certain degree of strength could also be the most predictable.

  “In Yang’s fleet, even a dozen lifetimes aren’t enough when you battle two fleets in one day.”

  In the fighter pilots’ waiting room of Hyperion, “Ace” Olivier Poplin, who’d risen to the rank of commander, was griping as usual. His friend Ivan Konev rebuked him.

  “In your case, you’d need a dozen women for each of those lifetimes, so it’s tough either way.”

  “That’s not entirely true. For each of my lives, it’s a dozen women who’d need me,” Poplin said.

  “Well, whenever you do die, those women will just move on to other men with their own virtues.”

  Having put his friend at a loss for an answer, Ivan Konev gave a sedate yawn.

  III

  The success of Yang Wen-li’s back-to-back attacks against the Steinmetz and Lennenkamp fleets was a sharp blow to Reinhard’s self-importance. Despite their prominence, the two admirals had been led around by the nose. His rage was incomparably greater than when his transport ships had been destroyed.

  With his ice-blue gaze, Reinhard harshly admonished the two admirals kneeling before him. He refused to allow them to regroup their fleets and forbade them any further stake in the battlespace. Their comrades were even more relieved than they were to have gotten off so easily.

  “I hope you’ve learned well from this. There are opponents whose level you cannot measure up to. Think hard about why I gave you your current positions, and start from square one.”

  Reinhard meant to reassign Lennenkamp as commander of Iserlohn Fortress and put Lutz in his place, but he was opposed by his private secretary, Hildegard von Mariendorf. Her reasons were threefold. First, if Steinmetz stayed behind while Lennenkamp was reassigned, the one being reassigned would think it unfair. Second, he’d already purged Rear Admiral Sombart, punishing him as an example to others, and doing so again in this case would harm overall morale. Third, everyone was sure to make light of the Iserlohn Fortress commander’s duties. Reinhard saw the soundness in Hilda’s argument and stopped his tirade against Steinmetz and Lennenkamp. Taking them both off the front line this late in the game would severely dampen their military strength. He could only accede to Hilda’s better judgment.

  Reinhard’s ice-blue eyes seemingly emitted a piercing light, reflecting the storm raging inside him. He would need an entire day to calm that storm.

  With their dreary interior design and furniture, the high-ranking officers’ lodgings were already in place on Urvashi. For the first time in months, von Reuentahl and Mittermeier felt the touch of real earth beneath their feet and enjoyed a conversation over wine. After reminiscing about various battles, the topic inevitably turned to the crafty enemy general whose threat they were currently facing.

  “His tactics are nothing short of magnificent. But I can’t imagine that even Yang Wen-li would attempt to compensate for strategic shortcomings by racking up tactical victories. He must have something else up his sleeve.”

  Von Reuentahl looked at his friend’s face, but his mismatched eyes were filled with doubt.

  “What is it? Have you hit upon something?”

  “Well …”

  Mittermeier crossed his arms.

  “Just say it, only to me.”

  The air in the room felt thick as mud, as it also had when they were struggling as low-ranking officers on the front lines. It was that very thickness that prompted Mittermeier to hesitate.

  “It’s something that Duke von Lohengramm said. Namely, that for the alliance to overcome its strategic disadvantage, they would have to kill him—that is, Duke von Lohengramm—in the battlespace. Their victory can come at no other price.”

  “Ah …”

  In the glow of those mismatched eyes, there was the slightest flicker. Something about it made his friend uneasy.

  “So, while it appears Yang Wen-li is insistent on a tactical-level victory, you’re saying this is all a ruse to bring Duke von Lohengramm out into the open so he can battle him head-on.”

  “It all makes sense, if you think about it.”

&n
bsp; “That it does.”

  Von Reuentahl nodded while Mittermeier poured wine into their glasses.

  “If Duke von Lohengramm should fall, we lose our leader, the object of our loyalty. The question then becomes, ‘For whom do we fight?’ It’s everything our enemy could hope for.”

  “The matter of who would succeed him has yet to be settled.”

  “Whoever does succeed him, he’ll never have absolute rule on par with Duke von Lohengramm.” Mittermeier’s tone, like the flicker in his friend’s eyes, was complex. He knew that von Reuentahl’s abundant reasoning power came with its own irrational baggage. It wasn’t just the philandering, which gave an impression of underlying recklessness, but also that, when they worked together as men of ambition in troubled times, a scent of exceeding danger wafted about him. He was probably the only one who knew this, or so Mittermeier thought, but von Reuentahl wanted to take care of himself. He didn’t think he should be wasting his talents drilling useless holes in level ground.

  Whether he knew his friend’s innermost feelings or not, von Reuentahl looked at the empty wine bottle longingly.

  “Is that all we have? I could go for another.”

  “Sadly, since our supply ships were destroyed, our suppliers have been less generous. We can’t have only high-ranking officers enjoying themselves.”

  “Running out of wine and beer is one thing, but if our meat and bread rations fall short, it’ll affect our soldiers’ morale. No starving soldiers have ever won a war.”

  “Either way, we’ll need to fight before we get to that point.”

  This meant that Reinhard would be forced to face Yang Wen-li head-on after all. Until now, he’d built up an advantageous position, and while he was hoping to be within hailing distance of the alliance’s capital, an instrumental duet between impatience and uneasiness was resounding in corners of the empire’s most veteran brains.

  It was during this interim that imperial forces rolled out their third victim. Once again, Admiral August Samuel Wahlen would be ground to defeat by the Yang fleet.

  Wahlen was of a staunchly different opinion about an empire spending its days idly waiting for the next supply shipment. He came to Reinhard with an operational plan of his own.

  “According to information gathered on Phezzan, the alliance has eighty-four supply bases in its territory, and material stockyards besides. Seeing as our supply convoy was attacked, I say we take an eye for an eye—attack their supply bases and pillage whatever we can.”

  Reinhard agreed with this plan not for the sake of some small greed but because he was no closer to making a final decision, and Wahlen’s plan at least showed initiative. He needed more time, and in any event, he couldn’t squander an opportunity to elevate the morale of his men with the prospect of more supplies.

  On the other hand, since the empire’s stronghold was on the planet Urvashi, assuming he was observing them, Yang would know with a fair degree of certainty whether they were on the move. To that end, the Yang fleet had disappeared somewhere not far from Heinessen, leaving Reinhard at a loss as to where he should focus his surveillance. This handicap put even the empire’s most competent generals at a considerable disadvantage.

  As the Wahlen fleet set out to attack the alliance’s supply base in the Tassili Stellar Region, their passage was blocked by the Yang fleet from the direction of Tassili. Again, Yang made a show of his appearance and would’ve been disappointed if it had been ignored.

  Seeing as the transport ships were never built for combat, it only made sense to position them in the center of the fleet to protect them from attack. Yet Yang had placed the supply containers in front, while the warships followed like servants attending their queen. The formation had no way of retaliating against a frontal attack. In Wahlen’s mind, such careless inattention to basic protocol meant they were looking to pick a fight.

  When the imperial forces assumed their tightest concave formation and rushed forward, the alliance stopped them in their tracks. What followed was a disgraceful spectacle. If the alliance forces were to engage, their own containers would get in their way. If they spread out in battle array, they’d be too thin to oppose a concave formation. Their feigned confusion brought out the first shot from the imperial forces, at which point Yang’s fleet fled as gallantly as it could. Although intentional in every respect, it seemed so genuine that Yang’s chief of staff, Vice Admiral Murai, couldn’t help but comment on it.

  “Our fleet has gotten pretty good at faking retreat.”

  The Wahlen fleet pursued the alliance forces, dispelling the disgrace of their comrades Steinmetz and Lennenkamp in the process, but the commander refrained from continuing their attack, ordering his ships instead to seize the cargo as planned. Wahlen wasn’t one to let belligerence get the better of him. Because the transport ships were long gone, more than eight hundred containers, precious cargo and all, fell into the hands of the imperial forces without incident. The alliance’s ungainly goose had surrendered them its freshly laid golden eggs.

  But when Wahlen’s fleet absorbed the large cluster of containers into its center and started back, singing a victory song like the Vikings of yore, the alliance forces reappeared, hot on their heels.

  “Retreat while continuing to protect the containers,” ordered Wahlen.

  He positioned his ship at the tail end of the fleet, leaving the head of the formation responsible for counterattack. Their coordinated formation and firepower made the alliance forces falter, and for a moment the alliance started to fall back in seeming confusion. They held their distance and kept timidly on their tail.

  “They just don’t know when to give up. I suppose it’s only natural, seeing as we’ve taken their precious cargo …”

  Whereupon countless beams of light shot out from the spherical containers. There was no escaping being fired upon at such close range and density. One of the destroyers was obliterated, while a cruiser and two more destroyers suffered massive damage. It was enough to plunge the imperial forces into chaos.

  “They’ve hidden troops inside the containers! So that’s their little game, knowing we needed the supplies?”

  Wahlen clicked his tongue, ordering his men to give up on transporting the containers and to instead exterminate the unruly parasites that had infiltrated their bowels. A container, twined in threads of energy beams converging from eight directions, exploded in a momentary convulsion. The first of many.

  A ball of white-hot light blanketed the imperial soldiers’ field of vision as a chain of explosions ensued and giant clusters of fiery jewels appeared at their centers. The price of one of those jewels was the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers.

  Each container had been outfitted with a rudimentary automatic firing system and payloads of liquid helium. And when their energy beams converged with the containers, the imperial forces triggered giant, deadly explosions by their own hand. The turbulence of heat and light tore them apart from within. The ship navigators went white-knuckled at their control panels trying to avoid collisions with their fleet mates, but their efforts were rewarded with a fierce attack as the alliance charged them at full force.

  The Wahlen fleet had brought about mayhem in both form and spirit, and was completely beaten into submission by the gunfire of Yang’s sudden assault. Tens of thousands of energy flails whipped down on the imperial forces, who screamed and writhed in pain. Each burst of light was like a spray of blood jetting out from the imperial forces’ wounds. Wahlen’s ships, crew and all, blood and metal, vaporized, looking something like a chain of miniature suns.

  “Human beings have their own value,” said Vice Admiral von Schönkopf by way of criticizing his commander’s strategy on the bridge of Yang’s flagship Hyperion.

  Julian Mintz was staring at the violent dance of light and shadow without a word. Yang had figured that the imperial forces would place the containers in their midst, surround
ing them with their ships, and had gone so far as to install the self-firing mechanisms to increase his chances of trapping Wahlen.

  Despite wanting unilateral destruction, Yang couldn’t bring himself to join hands with his cheering subordinates in optimism.

  “Duke von Lohengramm’s anger and pride will have reached a critical mass by now. He doesn’t have the resources to sustain a drawn-out conflict. Any day now, he’ll come at us with everything he’s got, and with perhaps even fiercer determination and even grander tactics than anything we’ve seen.”

  All eyes were on Yang, who noticed that he’d just spoken aloud words he’d meant to keep to himself. It wasn’t easy trying to prevent the wall around his heart from cracking.

  IV

  The latest blow to the imperial forces was the most serious yet. Rounding up every survivor he could, Wahlen returned alive, but as he knelt before the young imperial marshal and apologized for his thoughtless loss, Reinhard summarized his coldhearted anger in one word:

  “Enough.”

  Reinhard then stormed out of the room. The admirals left behind dropped their shoulders, their expressions of relief reflected in each other’s eyes.

  “Even someone as tactically sound as Wahlen was deceived,” they groaned.

  “No, it’s precisely because he’s so skilled that he was deceived. The same goes for Steinmetz and Lennenkamp on that point.”

  They weren’t just making excuses. A more hotheaded man would’ve forgotten the containers altogether and gone after the enemy. In which case, he would certainly not have fallen for Yang’s tricks. Wahlen had tripped himself up by his own reasoning. And yet, Wahlen’s loss didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t reaped at least one stalk of wheat. Just as they were about to be stampeded from all sides, he’d regrouped his fleet, all the while tracking the Yang fleet’s postbattle behaviors, thereby confirming that the Yang fleet, which had emerged from Tassili, had disappeared in the direction of the Lofoten Stellar Region.