Endurance

by Yoshiki Tanaka

Merkatz’s humble attitude had made a positive impression on all three.

  At that time, the imperial forces’ walküren corps was maintaining the empire’s advantage in the battle, although their dominance of the space above the fortress was a far cry from complete. The alliance forces’ spartanian units had proven surprisingly stubborn. In particular, the tactics employed by ace pilot Olivier Poplin’s six companies were so sophisticated that the term “diabolical” seemed to fit them. Poplin thought of himself as a natural at space combat—which was absolutely true—but knowing that not just anyone could become a genius like himself, he had drilled group-based tactics into his subordinates, wherein three fighters functioned as a single unit. That meant the sort of tactics where, for example, one fighter might lure an enemy walküre into pursuing it so the remaining two could attack it from behind. Walküren pilots took a lot of pride in their profession, and this kind of tactic made them feel like crying foul. However, the results Poplin’s companies got in battle were outstanding, and Poplin himself regularly and daringly downed many enemy fighters in one-on-one engagements himself.

  That said, the imperial forces still appeared to have an overwhelming advantage. When Müller briefly returned to Gaiesburg to give a report, Kempf said cheerfully: “Eventually, they’ll have to change the name of this place to the ‘Gaiesburg Corridor.’ Who knows—they might even end up calling it the ‘Kempf-Müller Corridor.’”

  The angle of Müller’s eyebrows tilted ever so slightly at that. The Karl Gustav Kempf he knew was a sensible and respectable warrior—not the sort of man to casually employ that sort of bombast, even in jest. To the eyes of the young vice commander, however, Kempf appeared not so much excited as uncharacteristically flippant and lacking in self-restraint. Marshal Reinhard von Lohengramm would never allow a subordinate to be honored in that way, the late Siegfried Kircheis notwithstanding.

  When he returned to his flagship, Müller decided to make some alterations to his plan. He had been waiting for the walküren units to gain complete spatial superiority within the fortress’s gravitational field, but since it looked like that was going to be more trouble than expected, he decided to seal the gates of the main port and render it impossible for the alliance’s fleet to launch. It should be possible to achieve an effective tactical outcome, he judged, by making the bold move of crashing six unmanned destroyers into the port. This wasn’t something he had just thought up on the fly; this was something he had been thinking about for some time now—a strategy he had hoped to avoid using if at all possible due to the long period of time that the port facilities would be out of commission following the recapture of Iserlohn.

  However, just as Müller finished lining up those six destroyers, Iserlohn’s main cannon began belching out tongues of cosmic flame in rapid succession. The aiming was not precise; those blades of unfathomable energy grazed a few cruisers and destroyers, annihilating them, but accomplished nothing more. This did, however, force Müller to break up his tight formation and scatter the fleet for the time being. Afterward he reassembled his formation in a region of space that the main cannon wasn’t facing, but during that brief interval, Alliance Armed Forces vessels had come pouring out of the main port’s gate.

  It had been a very near thing. If the mobilization had come any later, Müller would have succeeded in sealing the main port of Iserlohn Fortress. Trapped inside the spaceport, the alliance fleet would have been rendered powerless. If that had happened, Iserlohn Fortress itself would have lost more than half its functionality, been reduced to a mere cannon emplacement in space, and suffered a precipitous drop in the value of its existence.

  Young Müller stamped on the floor in frustration. Knowing that this would only set back their ultimate victory by a few days helped him recover his composure; their overall advantage had hardly been lost. He tried to intercept the attacking alliance fleet right away. However, the alliance fleet—the infamous Yang fleet, no less—which could have only come out in order to fight, changed direction to avoid Müller’s sharp thrust and began moving rapidly along the curvature of Iserlohn’s spherical surface. Müller, anticipating where that curve would take them, didn’t make the mistake of pursuing the enemy from behind. Instead, he circled around from the opposite direction, planning to appear in front of the enemy and hit their vanguard formation first. However, a cunning trap had been laid. Müller’s fleet had to pass right in front of Iserlon’s undamaged battery of antispacecraft turrets in order to do so.

  When Müller realized that, he hastily ordered a withdrawal—or rather, he tried to. By the time he was about to give the order, the alliance forces, with stunning speed and orderliness, had already gone on the offense and were effectively cutting off his escape route from behind.

  The imperial forces had been caught in a pincer movement between Iserlohn’s antispacecraft cannon fire and the Iserlohn Patrol Fleet under Merkatz’s command. With beams and with missiles, the patrol fleet, which up to that point had had neither time nor place in the battle, now unleashed all its pent-up vengefulness and aggression, pummeling the imperial forces at will. The imperial forces were caught in a vast net of energy woven of death and destruction. Robbed of their mobility—to say nothing of their means of fighting back—the imperial warships were snared left and right on those blazing strands, unleashing richly colored plumes of flame as they blew apart. Ships that had been smashed and rent asunder burst into fireballs—they glittered like phosphorescent beads, as if to adorn the netting.

  The sight could be seen all the way from Gaiesburg. Since firing their main cannon at the alliance forces would vaporize their own force as well, there was nothing Gaiesburg’s gunners could do.

  “What does Müller think he’s doing over there!” Kempf shouted angrily. “This is what happens if you hesitate when there’s a decision to be made.”

  But a decision point was bearing down on him as well: whether or not to mobilize the eight thousand vessels that remained under his own command and send them out to save Müller.

  “I can’t just stand by and watch while they’re slaughtered. Eichendorff! Patricken! Go out and rescue that snot-nosed kid for me.”

  His two subordinates were surprised at his coarse way of putting it. Still, if they didn’t put the order into action right away, their commanding officer’s ire would no doubt shift from Müller to themselves. The two admirals headed off to the fortress’s main port to take command of their divisions. Along the way, they couldn’t help whispering in the elevator. “The commander sure seemed upset …;” “Winning here would be an unparalleled achievement, but if he fails, demotion will be the least of his worries—he could even end up getting shuffled off to some do-nothing job.” “If it came to that, catching up with Mittermeier and von Reuentahl would be hopeless …;”

  Exposed to a concentrated assault, the imperial fleet had taken serious damage, but even as it was writhing about in agony, it was through Neidhart Müller’s wise command and leadership that it avoided collapsing completely. His flagship raced all across the battlespace, aiding subordinates that were in difficult fights, shoring up ranks that were on the verge of breaking, getting vessels with weak defenses to the back of the formation, tightening perimeter defenses, and waiting for the reinforcements he was certain would soon arrive. When he learned that Eichendorff and Patricken were on the way, he threw the last of his offensive capabilities at a single point and broke through the encirclement.

  Merkatz, too, knew when it was time to pull back, and so, avoiding a pointless battle against these new enemies, the fleet returned to the fortress in an orderly fashion. The objective had been sufficiently met.

  Julian also returned to port. In this battle, he had shot down three walküren and proven that the kills he had scored his first time in battle had not just been some sort of fluke.

  V

  From April 14 to 15, the Imperial Navy’s attacks would be successful for about 90 percent of each period o
f combat, only to end in failure after a sudden change of fortune. For Karl Gustav Kempf, this was maddening, and he started taking out his pent-up indignation on his incompetent—he believed—vice commander.

  “You’ve fought courageously. The problem is, that’s all you’ve done. What have you got to show for it?”

  Kempf’s remarks cut Müller to the quick. Although he had reflected on his mistakes as well, he was understandably put off when he was told to move back to the rear. It simply was not possible for a man who had been evaluated highly by Reinhard and received the rank of full admiral in his twenties to be entirely free of pride and self-confidence.

  Biting back his indignation, he had led the fleet under his command back to the rear of the formation. He was not a man of narrow mind, but in this case, he couldn’t help wondering if Kempf might be aiming to keep all the glory for himself.

  That was when one of the military doctors came to him bearing a report:

  “One of the prisoners has told us something very unusual.”

  “What is it?”

  “He said that Commander Yang Wen-li is actually absent from Iserlohn Fortress …;”

  Bending his upper body slightly backward, Neidhart Müller stared at the doctor. “Really?” he said. It was unclear whether he was asking about the report itself or its content, and that alone was a testament to just how surprised he was.

  The doctor calmly replied, “I don’t know how credible the claim itself may be, but it’s a fact that the prisoner, delirious with fever and on the point of death, let that slip. He’s dead now, so there’s no way to confirm what he said.”

  “But is such a thing even possible?” Müller said in a low voice. “Could that bogeyman not even be in the fortress?”

  At that, an even younger officer, Lieutenant Commander Drewenz, asked his senior officer, “Is Yang Wen-li really such a frightening opponent?”

  After a moment of silence, Müller responded with a question of his own: “Could you capture that fortress without spilling a single drop of your own men’s blood? And by using a method not a single person aboard was able to see coming?”

  “No,” Drewenz said, after thinking about it for a moment. “That would not be possible.”

  “Well then, Yang Wen-li is someone to be feared. An outstanding enemy commander should be paid due respect, should he not? There’s no shame in that.”

  After he had enlightened the lieutenant commander, Müller again sank into thought. Was it possible that the commander of Iserlohn—a fortress among fortresses—could be away from his post? And at an uncertain time when the imperial military might launch an all-out offensive at any moment? For Müller—and for any soldier with an ounce of responsibility and common sense—that was not an easy thing to believe.

  He recalled the visual memory of one of the ships he had seen himself when the alliance fleet had emerged from Iserlohn.

  Based on its shape, that battleship had been Hyperion—a vessel known these last two years as Yang Wen-li’s flagship. Didn’t the fact that it came out to fight mean that Yang was present on Iserlohn? Or had that been a trick to camouflage his absence? Was it also possible that this was a complex strategy designed to make them think he was absent and lure them into a reckless assault? In any case, Yang Wen-li was a man who had captured Iserlohn without spilling a single drop of his men’s blood. It had been such a shock for Müller two years ago, when he had first heard the report. At that time, the infinite diversity of military strategy had really been brought home to him.

  Could he truly believe the words of a dying prisoner? Maybe the doctor had been mistaken. Maybe his consciousness hadn’t been clouded by high fever. Wasn’t it just as possible that he had been trying to throw the imperial military into confusion with his dying words?

  It was even quite plausible that he had done so on Yang’s instruction.

  Müller shook his head slightly. Honestly, though, if he’s here, he’s here; if he isn’t, he isn’t. Even so, just look at all the trouble he causes, whether he’s here or not. I can see why they call him ‘Yang the magician.’

  If Yang Wen-li had been able to hear what Niedhart Müller was thinking about him, he would have almost certainly shrugged his shoulders and said, “Please, don’t overestimate me. I’m just a regular guy, big on thrift and low on ambition, dreaming of life as a pensioner. If my own people thought as much of me as my enemies do, I wouldn’t have courts of inquiry breathing down my neck.”

  For Müller’s part, no matter how cautiously he behaved, it never felt like he was being careful enough. Müller was anxious for his own sake, to say nothing of whatever clever scheme Yang might be hatching. Am I on the verge of running amok based on unreliable intel? he wondered. More than anything, he wished that soldier hadn’t died. When it came to captives taken in space, there were usually two kinds: those who were taken when a whole ship surrendered and those who were injured during hand-to-hand combat inside a fortress. In this battle, however, the captives they had taken were extremely few. Moreover, nearly all of them were seriously injured and at present unconscious, so there was no way to confirm what the dead man had said.

  They had only been able to interrogate one of them, and his words had only left Müller more confused:

  “Admiral Yang ordered Rear Admiral von Schönkopf to say that he isn’t there …;”

  Even so, Niedhart Müller at last made up his mind and gave orders:

  “Cast a recon and security net over the whole corridor. We will await Yang Wen-li’s return and take him prisoner. If we can do that, not only Iserlohn, but the Alliance Armed Forces as a whole will crumble, and ultimate victory will be back within our reach.”

  On his orders, three thousand vessels positioned themselves within the corridor. Straining their enemy-detection capabilities to their utmost limits, they filled the whole region with trap upon trap. As they were out to catch Yang Wen-li, a lot of thought went into their positioning.

  However, there was one individual whom this decision angered. Commander in Chief Kempf demanded to know why a repositioning of forces was under way without his having given any such order.

  Müller had no choice but to try to convince him.

  “Last year, Siegfried Kircheis traveled to Iserlohn for a prisoner exchange, and he told me something about Yang Wen-li when he returned—‘When I saw the man in person, he looked nothing like a fearless, ferocious warrior. And that right there is probably where his true fearsomeness lies.’”

  “And?”

  Kempf both looked and sounded displeased, but this was no time for Müller to be giving ground.

  “One of the prisoners from Iserlohn said with his dying breath that Yang is not inside the fortress. I don’t know why that should be, but it stands to reason that he would have headed straight back toward Iserlohn the minute he learned it had been attacked. If we can intercept him on the way and succeed in catching him, it will be a fatal blow for the Alliance Armed Forces.”

  After hearing him out, Kempf spat back, “We don’t know what kind of unusual tactics Yang is going to use—weren’t you the one who said that? The Free Planets Alliance has no strategic base more vital than Iserlohn. Why would its commander be away from his post? His plan, clearly, is to make us think he’s not there so we’ll spread out our forces. Return your ships to their original positions at once. It is vitally important that we have them here in reserve.”

  As there was nothing more he could do, Müller backed down, although that didn’t mean he was convinced. His wish was to capture that grandest of prizes himself, even if that meant ignoring his CO’s orders; still, he felt an uncertainty that was only natural and consulted with his advisor, Commodore Orlau. Orlau’s reply went something like this:

  “Your Excellency is the vice commander, not the commander in chief. Instead of insisting on your own way, you should follow the policy of the commander in chief.”


  Müller’s silence was worth ten thousand words of eloquent speech in expressing just how difficult it was for him to abandon his plan to capture Yang Wen-li. Even so, he at last let out a little sigh and heeded his advisor’s cautioning.

  “You’re right. A vice commander should follow the wishes of the commander in chief. Understood—I’ll toss my ego to the winds. I’ll rescind my previous orders.”

  Just like Yang, Müller was neither omniscient nor all-powerful, and capable though he may have been, there were limits to his insight and predictive abilities.

  In this way, all of the traps that for a time had been set to capture Yang Wen-li were removed from his path.

  Ultimately, Müller had made the right guess but the wrong decision. In times to come, the empire’s historians would criticize him for that, saying that if von Reuentahl or Mittermeier had been in his position, they would have seen their original intentions through to the end and succeeded in capturing Yang. In response, Mittermeier had this to say: “That’s nothing but speculation after the fact. If I had been in Müller’s shoes, I couldn’t have done anything more than he did.”

  In any case, the combat ground on afterward, with neither side gaining a decisive edge, and in this state of near-deadlock, time passed in the corridor until April was nearly over. It was almost time for Yang Wen-li to be “getting back home.”

  VI

  As Yang Wen-li’s subordinates were just beginning to wage their desperate struggle on Iserlohn, Rupert Kesselring, assistant to the landesherr in the Phezzan Dominion, was handling an enraged visitor with the bearing of a seasoned matador.

  “Please, Commissioner. There’s no need to get so upset.”

  The young man’s hint of a smile, in this instance, was like a red flag being waved at the older man, Commissioner Henlow, and it was driving up his blood pressure.

  “That’s easy for you to say, Kesselring, but as for me, I can’t just stand here and calmly accept this. Following your recommendation, we summoned Yang back from Iserlohn and subjected him to an official inquiry. But then what happened? A massive imperial fleet crossed the border, taking advantage of his absence. Isn’t that just amazing, splendid timing? I would really love to hear a detailed explanation regarding this intel!”