Desolation

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  Taking the long view, perhaps, Merkatz had never spoken of the wife and children he had left behind in imperial territory. He went about his duties without comment, holding a position somewhere between chief of staff and inspector of the fleet. He still wore his imperial uniform, but not even the fastidious Murai had ever complained about that.

  “I don’t think that the imperial uniform would have suited the late Marshal Bucock,” had been Yang’s comment on the matter. “And, in the same way…” His unspoken meaning had been clear to all.

  Given the floor, Merkatz spoke with his usual quiet composure.

  “If we can turn Fahrenheit and Wittenfeld’s fleets alone into independent targets, we may be able to close some of the distance in terms of military strength. I think it’s worth trying.”

  Von Schönkopf’s suspicious look may have indicated concern that the grave and dignified Merkatz was finally succumbing to the irresponsible ways of the Yang Fleet. Of course, von Schönkopf was one of the most prominent upholders of those bad habits, even if he felt himself above them.

  Merkatz, perhaps the only innocent among the fleet’s admiralty, continued to speak.

  “If we charge at them just as we send that message, they won’t simply take evasive action and retreat. Neither of them can help striking back when attacked. It’s in their nature, much deeper than mere personality. If we eliminate them first and then wait for Reinhard to arrive with his main force later, we may score a preemptive psychological victory against the proud kaiser.”

  “Hear, hear,” Attenborough muttered fervently.

  Yang remained silent, turning his beret over in his hands.

  “We’re talking about the Black Lancers here,” said Murai, with characteristic caution. “When we toss out the chum, we might get our arm bitten off.” Warning his comrades of what the reaction might be if they failed was one of his roles in the Yang Fleet. It seemed to Julian that von Schönkopf and Attenborough did not recognize how valuable this was, even if Yang did.

  “It still seems like a dirty trick to me,” murmured Yang, but Frederica and Julian saw the sparks of ingenuity flying from the flint behind his dark eyes. Yang turned to face the veteran overseer, fully present again.

  “Admiral Merkatz, would you mind if I borrowed your name for a while?”

  A plan had risen at the back of his mind—a plan that, if publicized, would give him a worse reputation for charlatanism than ever.

  V

  The groans weren’t particularly loud or unsettling. If Yang hadn’t noticed the slight lack of color in Julian’s demeanor that afternoon, leaving an afterimage that still flickered somewhere in his memory circuits, his hearing might not have picked it up at all. It helped, of course, that aboard a battleship even high-ranking officers were assigned tiny cabins with thin walls.

  Yang had been Julian’s guardian since SE 794. Alex Caselnes, a man so devilish it seemed he must be hiding a tail, had conspired to put them together. On their first meeting, Julian had barely reached Yang’s shoulder. He had been just a boy, with flaxen hair and wise eyes, but his diminutive frame belied a number of virtues Yang lacked—not least diligence and a passion for order.

  Yang got out of bed and pulled a dressing gown on over his pajamas. Frederica was either sleeping or, in pretending to, silently signaling her assent to her husband’s nocturnal excursion.

  Scratching his head with one hand, Yang pushed open the door with the other and stepped out of the bedroom. “Evening,” he said.

  Julian looked up and realized that he had been overheard. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “I’ve had a long day. It was a reminder of how green I still am. I was just blowing off some steam.” Which is another sign of immaturity, he thought with embarrassment.

  Yang rubbed his chin. His mild eyes regarded the boy with interest. “I wouldn’t call you green,” he said. “Yellow, maybe.”

  The man praised as a master tactician, a wizard even, apparently meant this attempt at humor to be comforting.

  Seeing that Julian was struggling to reply, Yang pulled a bottle of brandy and two glasses from the sideboard built into the wall and held them up for inspection. “How about a drink?” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Julian. “But are you sure you won’t get in trouble sneaking out of bed like that?”

  Rather than answering directly, Yang poured two glasses of the amber liquor with what was, for him, an unusual degree of care.

  “Admiral Caselnes once grumbled to me that he’d never know the pleasure of drinking with a son, you know,” he said. “Serves him right for being so hard on his men all those years, mind you.”

  With these far-from-virtuous remarks, Yang touched his glass to Julian’s. Julian tipped his glass back, feeling the brandy’s strong scent extend its sharp tendrils into him, and then went into a coughing fit.

  “Becoming an adult is about learning how much you can drink,” said Yang. Julian was coughing too much to argue.

  The conversation they had that night, sitting together on the bed and speaking until dawn, was one Julian never forgot. Yang had little to impart about matters of the heart. These could only be learned by experience, although some people spent their whole lives escaping enlightenment in that regard. In any case, as Caselnes might have said, taking advice from Yang about the female mind was about as wise as taking on the entire Imperial Navy single-handedly.

  Of course, what Yang was actually planning to do—was already doing—was very nearly as outrageous.

  If Kaiser Reinhard had been a brutal, inhuman conqueror who reveled in pointless bloodshed and pillage, it would have been easy to resist him. So far, however, Reinhard had proved to be one of the finest dictators in history, magnanimous and wise even as he brought the galaxy to heel. He showed his enemies no mercy, but did not harm civilians, and a certain level of social order was even now being established in the territories occupied by his forces.

  Yang and his allies were facing the ultimate contradiction. If autocracy was affirmed and accepted by a majority of the people, fighting for popular sovereignty would actually make them the enemies of that majority. Yang’s campaign would amount to a rejection of the people’s happiness and the popular will.

  “We do not want sovereignty or even the franchise,” the argument would be. “The kaiser is ruling justly, so why not give him free rein? A political system is just a means of realizing the happiness of the people. With that achieved, why not shrug it off the same way you would a heavy, stifling suit?”

  Could Yang argue against that? The question worried him. Too many people in the past had justified bloody acts in the present with fear of what the future might bring.

  “To guard against the possibility that a wicked dictator might one day take control, we must take arms against our enlightened ruler today, for only by defeating him can we ensure the survival of democratic republican governance based on the separation of powers.”

  The paradox was laughable. If the institution of democracy could only be protected by toppling virtuous rulers, that made democracy itself an enemy of good governance.

  Yang hoped to establish a seedbed of democracy where they could lie low during periods of enlightened rule but spring into action when despotism loomed. It was looking increasingly likely, however, that the people themselves would reject this plan as unnecessary. He thought back on the many solivision programs cranked out in the days of the former alliance. “If there was such a thing as absolute good and evil in this world, Julian,” he said, “life would be a lot easier.”

  VI

  In mid-April of that year, on the alliance’s former capital Planet Heinessen, a minor incident took place, amounting to less than a grain of sand in the vast, slow-turning gears of history.

  Whitcher Hill, about two hundred kilometers south of Heinessenpolis, was home to a large psychiatric hospital. One night, a fire broke out the
re, killing approximately ten patients. The reason that the number could not be calculated precisely was a certain mismatch between the patients confirmed alive and those found dead. The patient in room 809 of the special wing—one Andrew Fork—could not be found by any of the hospital staff, alive or dead.

  The name “Andrew Fork” was already old and stagnant water in the well of popular memory. Four years prior, in SE 796, the alliance army had been defeated so thoroughly at Amritsar that they were almost destroyed entirely. Fork had been the strategist responsible. After an episode of hysterical conversion disorder, he had been reassigned to the reserves. The following year, in 797, he had attempted to assassinate the man who was at the time director of Joint Operational Headquarters, Admiral Cubresly, and the possibilities for his life were closed up within thick hospital walls.

  No one man could be entirely blamed for the Free Planets Alliance’s military crumbling like a wall made of baking powder. But nor could it be denied that Fork was part of the ill-fated combination of factors leading to that catastrophe. He had made commodore at just twenty-six years old, rising even faster than the famed Yang Wen-li, and his fall, when it came, had been just as dramatic in both speed and scale.

  The hospital fire itself could not be concealed, but Fork’s disappearance was buried in the official statistic “Dead or missing: 11.” The planet was occupied territory now, and holes had opened in its governance. The lower-ranking bureaucrats in the alliance feared being reprimanded and punished for their incompetence by the Imperial Navy. They swept the matter under the rug, and everything was fine—or should have been. They were more than used to this approach from the days of the former High Commissioner Lennenkamp.

  A lone ship traversed the void of space. In one of its cabins, a group sat in a circle around a thin, pinched man just past thirty. If Julian Mintz or Olivier Poplin had been granted a clairvoyant vision of the room, they would no doubt have had to reorganize their visual memories. The man was Archbishop de Villiers, secretary-general of the Church of Terra.

  By rights, de Villiers should have been buried under billions of tons of earth and stone, with nothing to do but wait for discovery as a fossil in the distant future. But despite the destruction of the main Terraist temple by Admiral Wahlen of the Imperial Navy, the church’s innermost circles had survived, along with, unsurprisingly, their loathing of their enemies.

  One of the subordinates around de Villiers spoke, eyes filled with oil and fire.

  “Our recent history is one of repeated error, but this time, by the grace of God, it seems that all went well.”

  Another subordinate nodded. “We must not allow peace between the kaiser and Yang Wen-li. Their armies must battle each other to the last man. The success of this mission is imperative.”

  Archbishop de Villiers raised his hand. The gesture seemed partly intended to restrain the fervor of his minions and partly to do the reverse and fan the flames higher. Although not omniscient, he was able to foresee, more or less accurately, the end point of Yang Wen-li’s political leanings. The mutual destruction of both sides, the Church of Terra’s preferred result, seemed unlikely. If the church were to avoid being routed utterly, they would have to push the combatants over the edge themselves. Fortunately, they had just the tool for the job. It had been three years since they had last used it, but a few sweet whispers should be enough to remove the rust and grime.

  “It is you, Commodore Fork, who will be the true savior of democratic republican governance. Yang Wen-li seeks compromise with the dictator Reinhard von Lohengramm. He would make peace with a tyrant in exchange for a secure position and special privileges within imperial hegemony. Yang Wen-li must die. He is the vilest turncoat, eager to betray the principles of democracy itself. Commodore Fork, by rights you should have been a full admiral by now, the entire alliance fleet under your command, preparing for a decisive battle that could split the galaxy in two. We will prepare everything you need. Kill Yang Wen-li, save democracy, and regain your rightful position.”

  A fanatic needs not the truth as it is, but a fantasy painted to suit his tastes. Simply allow him to believe what he wanted to in the first place, and bending him to your will is a simple matter. Within the fragile realm of Fork’s psychology burned a feverish longing to be the hero who saved democracy. His vivid hatred for Yang Wen-li, the man who had usurped his place as that hero, was essentially no different from the hatred of the anti-Terran forces nursed by the Church of Terra’s leaders since before the Space Era. This the conspiracy’s architect knew well.

  De Villiers laughed at a volume just barely audible, sending out waves of malice directed both at those who were present and those who were not.

  “Let me add one thing, although I expect none of you to remember it. Since antiquity, the victims of assassination have always been those who left their mark on history for other reasons. Assassins, however, are remembered for that act alone.”

  If not for his vainglorious tone, de Villiers’ words would have been deeply moving. What he said was correct both as a matter of fact and on a deeper level.

  “Andrew Fork will go down in history as the monster who killed Yang Wen-li. But even this is better than being forgotten. Call it an act of charity bestowed upon a fool who seeks glory but lacks the ability to achieve it.”

  De Villiers waved his black-robed subordinates away and, in a dark mood, mentally reviewed what he had told them. He did not feel as if he had prophesied his own future, exactly, but some intangible hook had caught in the folds of the sensitivity he armored with ambition.

  Shaking his head, he focused his thoughts—corroded by worldly desire rather than fanaticism—on another man. A man who could either pave the way for de Villiers or bore deep holes in that road to hinder him. A man with a hairless head, watchful eyes, and a muscular body: Adrian Rubinsky, former ruler of Phezzan.

  The apostate must not be granted a single molecule of oxygen. The loathing and sense of impending crisis de Villiers felt at the thought of the man, psychologically kin to himself, continued to fester.

  I

  THE BATTLE BETWEEN Reinhard von Lohengramm and Yang Wen-li was in a sense epic, and made the easily remembered year of SE 800 one of the most tragic in human history. Humanity had endured countless battles since adopting the Space Era calendar, just as they had beforehand. Battles between law and the lawless. Between tyrants and liberators. Between privileged classes and unprivileged classes. Even between the forces of autocracy and of republicanism. But in no previous year had such an imbalance of external conditions coexisted with such evenly matched internal factors…

  First, let us consider those external conditions. On one side was an empire of unprecedented scale, ruling most of the galaxy; on the other, a band of fugitive mercenaries. It was a clash between a dinosaur and a sparrow. Even to argue over the outcome was pointless.

  But in terms of internal factors, it was a battle between two men who were spiritual twins. The only strategist whose field of vision was as broad and far-reaching as Reinhard von Lohengramm’s, whose imagination was as rich, whose grasp of military and civilian organization was as sure, was Yang Wen-li himself. The only tactician whose powers of observation were as sharp as Yang Wen-li’s, who had the same ability to see situations as they were and respond as they shifted, and who inspired the same loyalty in his men was Reinhard von Lohengramm. The invincible and the undefeated were closing for the final battle…

  They also shared a common antipathy toward the Goldenbaum Dynasty, which had ruled humanity for five centuries after its founding by Rudolf the Great. Both Reinhard and Yang despised its system of aristocracy, rejecting the nobility’s monopolization of wealth and unjust legal advantages. Both men dreamed of a revolution to overturn the noxious “Goldenbaumian social system” which held humanity in chains and affronted its dignity. Both men were in perfect agreement with the view that government’s purpose was to abolish injustice and
increase the degree of freedom around individual choice. Was there another pair alive at that moment who shared such deep mutual respect and appreciation? And yet, the two men were forced to make their respective cases with bloodshed…

  What compelled them to wage war on each other was a single difference in values. Was a just society best realized by concentrating authority or dispersing it? To argue that question, the greatest military minds of contemporary human society clashed, leaving a trail of blood spilled by millions of soldiers both within and without Iserlohn Corridor. Was there truly no way this tragedy could have been avoided?

  —J. J. Pisadore, The Heroic History

  On the first of May in SE 800—year 2 of the New Imperial Calendar—the Imperial Navy welcomed Kaiser Reinhard to the vanguard. Their invasion of Iserlohn Corridor could now begin. It would be the first time in history that an imperial fleet had sought to capture Iserlohn Fortress from the former alliance side of the corridor.

  At this time, the leadership of the Revolutionary Government of El Facil was fleeing into the depths of the corridor. The planet of El Facil itself surrendered. This was proof that Yang Wen-li and his allies hoped to drag the Imperial Navy deeper into the corridor. As Countess Hildegard von Mariendorf put it, Yang was prioritizing the establishment of his strategic position.

  “So Yang Wen-li, too, has his mind set on battle,” murmured the young kaiser to himself. Hilda watched the blood rush to his porcelain cheeks, feeling both admiration and unease.

  There were those within the imperial government who quietly but publicly criticized Reinhard’s expedition as a misuse of military resources. Minister of Domestic Affairs Franz von Mariendorf had, not without some circumspection, communicated his opinion to the kaiser as well.

  “Using the entire Galactic Imperial Navy to crush Yang Wen-li—under Your Majesty’s personal command, no less—is like exterminating a rat with cannonry. I confess my ignorance of military affairs, but surely if we simply blockaded Iserlohn Corridor from both ends, those inside would be forced to surrender eventually. To force a resolution by hastening into battle seems quite unnecessary. I beseech Your Majesty to consider the wisdom of returning to the capital.”