“It isn’t working!”
“No response!”
“Control is not possible!”
Their cries resounded against one another. Numerous transmissions had been broadcast from the rapidly closing Yang Fleet. One of them that Iserlohn’s computers picked up was a string of words no operator could have considered a normal transmission—“For health and beauty, have a cup of tea after every meal”—and in that instant, all defensive systems immediately went down.
Vice Admiral Wöhler, entrusted by Lutz with the vital mission of defending the fortress, could feel something akin to a toothache shooting through his mental circuitry. The sense of victory he had felt up until a moment ago had been purged from his body, replaced by the oppressive weight of a nightmare presaging doom.
“Break off computer control and switch over to manual! Fire Thor’s Hammer at all costs!” The orders caught in his throat, and wouldn’t easily leave his mouth.
Despair transformed into sound, and leapt from the operator’s mouth.
“It’s no good, Commander! It’s impossible!”
Understanding and terror invaded Vice Admiral Wöhler’s right and left lungs, and finding it increasingly hard to breathe, he sat there frozen in the command seat.
That keyword for disabling the fortress defenses had been the seed of Yang Wen-li’s magic trick—one he had planted one year ago, when he had fled from the fortress. Even so, what an absurd pass phrase! For his part, Yang felt he had worked very hard to come up with an utterance that carried no risk of being used in Iserlohn’s official transmissions during the next few years—although not even he could have put up a strong argument for it in terms of stylishness and taste.
Clearly, there had to be another phrase to unlock the systems, but as a practical problem, discovering it was an impossibility.
When the Imperial Navy had recovered Iserlohn, a large number of ultra-low-frequency bombs had been discovered. It had been believed that the fleeing Free Planets’ forces had tried and failed to detonate the fortress. However, when he thought about it now, that had actually been an exceedingly clever feint, designed to divert the Imperial Navy’s eyes from the real trap.
“The enemy is about to storm the port!”
“Close the gates! Don’t let them inside!”
Although the order was given, the reply was not hard to guess. When he heard the operator’s cry that the gates couldn’t he closed, Wöhler stood up from the command seat, and gave the order to prepare for hand-to-hand combat. The air inside the fortress vibrated with the sound of alarms.
Up until this point, it had looked as though things would unfold overwhelmingly to the advantage of the Yang fleet. But as Lutz, who had ordered a rapid turnaround, had said to encourage his crew, they were now on just about equal footing.
It was calculated that from the time Lutz’s fleet reversed course, more than five hours would pass before they could flood into Iserlohn. Unless through hand-to-hand combat the enemy could seize control of the fortress’s defense systems and activate Thor’s Hammer in that time, there would be no victory for the Yang Fleet. Moreover, in terms of troop strength, the garrison defending the fortress had far greater numbers. Even with the fortress defense systems paralyzed, they could still defend Iserlohn, deck by deck.
The Imperial Navy forces would be fine as long as they could hold out until their allies arrived, but the Yang Fleet had to secure a total victory before that happened. The goddess of victory was still fretting over whom to bestow her kiss of blessing on.
“Same as always, we’ve just gotta do it.”
However, as Olivier Poplin put it so casually, this kind of difficulty was nothing unusual for the Yang Fleet. During the coup d’état of the Military Congress for the Rescue of the Republic, during repeated offensive and defensive battles inside the Iserlohn Corridor, and in the battle at Vermillion, the Yang Fleet had been locking horns regularly with powerful enemies under what were essentially isolated and friendless conditions. Compared to these precedents, the situation that they had been dropped into this time wasn’t so dire.
IV
A blistering assault greeted the Yang Fleet as it stormed the port facilities inside the fortress. Under normal circumstances, charged particle cannons mounted at the gate would have been able to unleash slaughter and destruction at will, but the defensive systems linked to the tactical computers were without exception deep in hibernation. Equipment notwithstanding, the combatants had to travel back to the Stone Age for their tactics. The gaseous explosive known as Seffl particles had been released, so already the use of firearms was no longer possible.
Olivier Poplin, who had opened a boarding hatch and stormed outside, was already leaning forward when he dropped to the floor and rolled once. A bolt made of ultrahard steel, fired from an imperial soldier’s crossbow, had shot through the space that his head had occupied an instant before, striking the hull of the ship and ricocheting off it with an unmelodic ring. With an imprudent whistle, Poplin looked ahead, and saw imperial troops charging toward him, tomahawks and combat knives reflecting the illumination.
That was how the “barbarians’ bloody battle” began. Outside the fortress, a fleet of battleships on the cutting edge of mechanized civilization was hurtling in a straight line back toward its home port, but inside its thick walls, time had run backward until the days before gunpowder had been made practical, and there a clash of bodies and blades and blunt instruments unfolded.
Metals and nonmetals slammed into one another, and the stench of spraying blood surpassed the ability of the port facilities’ air-purification filters. Silver-gray armored suits changed from colorless to colorful every instant, as their surfaces were painted over. Julian, wedged between Olivier Poplin on the left and Louis Machungo on the right, was able to fight only facing forward. He had swatted down bolts fired from enemy crossbows, and taken a third in his helmet. The slash with which he repaid it was fierce, but ‘ultimately, a crack in his armored suit seems to have been the most I could do with a tomahawk,’ he would later reflect.
“Aw, I really hate this.” It was the voice of Poplin, who’d been swinging his tomahawk next to him.
“What is it you hate, Commander?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? Between Earth and here, I’ve gotten used to fighting with my feet on the ground! What else could be that awful?”
A vicious slash came toward him, but instead of simply blocking, he pushed it back, drove a fatal flash of metal into his enemy, and jumped backward. All the while, he was dodging the crossbow bolts that came flying, and moving quickly to trade blows with his next opponent. Even if he couldn’t mass-produce casualties on the level of von Schönkopf, his dexterous, ruthless actions made Poplin a target for imperial hatred. One soldier broke through the line where the two sides were fighting, and tried to circle around on Poplin from behind, but Kasper Rinz came running toward him, and with one flash of his tomahawk laid the soldier low beneath a mist of blood.
“The Rosen Ritter!”
Before they could even hear the cry, a shudder ran through the imperial soldiers. Their reputation for valor was known to everyone in uniform, both friend and foe. Shaken, the imperial soldiers fell back a few paces, though no one could have denounced them as cowards for doing so. This was, however, sufficient to give renewed energy to the Yang Fleet’s combatants. In combat, fame and exaggerated reputations had to be used to the fullest. During the silence, von Schönkopf gave orders, and the space that had been opened by one side’s retreat was instantly filled by the advance of the other. While the imperial line didn’t exactly crumble, it was falling back, slowly but surely, like the short hand on a clock.
At 2320, Poplin, Julian, and Machungo’s squads stormed Block AS-28, and occupied auxiliary control room #4.
The imperial forces displayed no particular dismay at this development. After all, it wasn’t the central
control room that had been occupied, nor were their defenses in danger of imminent collapse. However, the Yang Fleet’s true objective had been to take control of this room. Expecting that the central control room would be incredibly difficult to break into, Yang had earlier established a link to the tactical computer in this room, which was off of the route leading from the port facilities to the central command room. Poplin threw aside his bloodstained combat knife, leapt to the console, and inserted the main key.
“Thor’s Hammer, unlocked!”
With his eyes turned toward Poplin, Julian stretched his supple fingers toward the console, and typed a string of keywords into the channel: one cup of russian tea. not with jam, not with marmalade; with honey.
Poplin’s sweat-smeared, blood-fouled face cracked up with laughter. Just like the first one, it was a passphrase utterly divorced from the tension and excitement of the military.
At 2325, on the bridge of a flagship hurtling through the darkness of space, Senior Admiral Lutz let out a groan of defeat.
“It’s no good. Retreat!”
He had realized that he wouldn’t make it there in time. He knew that the fortress’s capabilities had fallen into the enemy’s hands. On one point of the giant, glistening silver sphere, a speck of light had welled up that was too bright to look at straight on.
“All ships, turn about! Withdraw out of Thor’s Hammer’s firing range!”
On-screen, the white light that filled the barrel of Thor’s Hammer was still increasing in both luminosity and radius. Feeling a cold sweat and a hot sweat on his back at the same time, Lutz ordered his ranks to scatter even more. The fortress was already stolen; but even thrown into the depths of defeat, he still had a responsibility to limit the damage to the smallest amount possible.
The world was buried in white light. In expectation of what was coming, every ship was dampening the photoflux of their screens. Even so, the torrent of white light was more powerful still. Even as it burned into the retinas of the Imperial Navy’s soldiers and officers, it froze their hearts as well.
In the less-than-five-second interval during which its 924,000,000-megawatt energy beam had been fully discharged, Lutz’s fleet had forever lost a tenth of its force strength, and another tenth had taken damage. Ships that had taken the hit directly had been vaporized with all their crew, ships positioned along the beam’s fringe had exploded, and ships on the outer edge of its circumference had had fires break out inside, their crews gripped with panic as they desperately scrambled to douse the flames.
“Battleship Luitpold, contact lost!”
“Battleship Trittenheim, not responding…”
As the pants and screams and whispers played their chaotic symphony, Kornelias Lutz was standing motionless, blanched all the way to his fingertips.
Thor’s Hammer had crushed not only the morale of Lutz’s fleet, but also that of the imperial forces inside Iserlohn Fortress. Cracks had formed in psychological suits of armor that had endured four hours of attrition and bloodshed, and by the time a new and unstoppable blow was struck, their will to resist had already evaporated.
Von Schönkopf and the others occupied each floor almost entirely without bloodshed. The enemy was so dispirited that for every meter the Yang Fleet’s forces advanced, the imperial forces fell back two. Before anyone was consciously aware of it, the calendar page had turned, and on January 14, at 0045, the imperial forces’ commander, Vice Admiral Wöhler, at last asked leave to abandon the fortress.
“I ask that my subordinates be allowed to leave safely. If that request is not granted, we shall resist with hand-to-hand combat until the last soldier falls, and will not hesitate to self-destruct the fortress with ourselves aboard.”
Julian had no issues with that demand, but negotiating technique, Captain Bagdash informed him, precluded giving an immediate answer. Julian promised to wait fifteen minutes before responding.
It was safe to say that combat had already wound down by that point. They knew that the curtain would fall after another fifteen minutes, so there was no further need for killing and hurting one another. Both sides sheathed their weapons, and simply stared at one another across a river of spilled blood.
Seven minutes later, Julian sent a reply saying he would accept those conditions. He sent it because he could not bear to look straight on at the moaning wounded in mires of blood. If he let another eight minutes go by, they might not still be alive. Julian found it in himself to ignore the look on Bagdash’s face, which seemed to say, You’re soft.
I can test my endurance some other time, he thought.
At 0059, the body of Vice Admiral Wöhler was discovered in his office, shot through the head by his own blaster. He was sitting in his chair, face down on his desk, but the sight of a repeatedly folded bed sheet, placed with care to keep his blood from staining the desk, bore witness to the character of the man who had died. For someone with such a strict and dutiful nature, there was probably no choice other than death after failing in his mission. Julian took off his black beret and silently paid his respects to the deceased. Respect for one’s enemies was something he had learned from Yang time and time again.
Lutz’s eyes still wouldn’t budge from the image of Iserlohn Fortress displayed on the main screen of his flagship.
“Excellency, please, take a rest,” Lieutenant Commander Gutensohn, his aide, said, knowing it was futile.
As he had expected, Lutz simply stood there unmoving before the screen, not answering, enduring the sense of defeat that was weighing on him.
Trains of defeated soldiers, together numbering ten times the size of the occupying force, were filing toward the port from every quarter of the fortress. Blood-tinged bandages naturally stood out, but those who bore psychological wounds seemed to vastly outnumber those with physical ones, and faces that appeared incredulous at the very notion of defeat were forming rolling waves of exhaustion.
“This really is the proverbial ‘devilish plan with godly planning.’ ”
Looking down from afar at the ranks of the defeated, Bernhard von Schneider’s eardrums caught that low murmur from Merkatz. Never mind the courageous fighting of von Schönkopf and others; what words could he use to describe the brilliant strategy of Yang Wen-li, who had managed to conduct it flawlessly from across time and space? Von Schneider could understand what Merkatz, who had only preexisting adjectives to rely on, must be thinking.
He had believed the man was more than just a gifted battlefield tactician, but when it came to the skill and efficiency on display just now in the retaking of Iserlohn, he felt Yang was simply astounding. Even while insisting that fighting large numbers with small numbers was tactically unorthodox, he used that unorthodoxy to extremes, and did so perfectly. Just imagine what he could do if he were only given the time and the forces!
In January of SE 800, Yang Wen-li and his subordinates succeeded in returning to Iserlohn Fortress. One year had passed since they had reluctantly abandoned it.
V
“Iserlohn Fortress is in the hands of our forces.”
When that report arrived from Merkatz, along with the news that there had been no deaths among the leadership, joyful displays of fireworks had been fired off all across the planet of El Facil, and the ceremony that was held in its central sports arena was attended by a hundred thousand people wearing a hundred thousand smiles.
“This marks the first victory of our revolutionary administration. Once again, Marshal Yang Wen-li has worked a miracle. And yet this is still just a small first step—a single frame in a film stretching out toward the infinite future…”
Yang Wen-li was sitting in a guest of honor seat, discontentedly listening as the independent government’s VIPs gave speeches that were unrefined compared to those of Job Trünicht. Though necessity had forced his hand this time, Yang still had the feeling he’d resorted too much to stopgap tactics and tricks, and didn�
�t feel much like boasting.
Still, though he hated this kind of thing with a passion, no advertising would also mean no political effect. In order to get the Phezzanese to invest, and in order to get human resources from the former Free Planets to gather here, the victory, and the victor, had to be advertised. Out of obligation, Yang attended the Victory Memorial Rally, but afterwards he avoided people and sequestered himself in his quarters—displaying an attitude that would become a seed for criticism in future generations.
“Since this operation had from the start been conceived in expectation of its political effect, its success, obviously, was a thing to be shouted from the rooftops. The fact that he hated that and locked himself up in his quarters proves that Yang Wen-li was a man of narrow abilities, and one not fully committed to his cause.”
In fact, while Yang Wen-li was a shaper of history whose accomplishments in war none could rival, he had mostly himself to blame for the rather mean-spirited evaluations that were made of him. In any case, it is a fact that he was “not fully committed to his cause.”
Yang took his first step into the nostalgic central control room of Iserlohn Fortress, and a pleasant wind passed through all five of his senses. On January 22, Yang arrived on Iserlohn from El Facil, and was able to regain the place that could fulfill his longings for home. Or as Walter von Schönkopf put it: “It’s just because there are no politicians here—that’s what lets him relax.”
Ultimately, Yang couldn’t help feeling like he just wasn’t cut out for life on the ground. He would turn thirty-three this year, and most of his life so far had surely been spent not on the surface of any planet, but in spaceships and man-made heavenly bodies. Also, it was a fact that his life and his lifestyle had been cultivated and woven in these spaces.
It was a shame about the late Helmut Lennenkamp. He’d been an important vassal of a dynasty that had conquered half the galaxy, and as such, had had no small amount of pride. Although he had doubtless ordained weightless space as the place where he should die, he had had to die a miserable death on the ground. It was an impudent thing to ask, but Yang himself also wanted to end his life in space if he could…
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 7 Page 15
