Desolation

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  Pain had become the sole, narrow passageway connecting Yang’s field of consciousness to reality. I might really die here, he thought. Faces came to him: His wife, his ward, his men. These images made him angry at the situation he found himself in. He was disgusted by his own carelessness, getting into trouble like this so far from any of them. Bracing himself against the wall with one hand, he began hobbling down the corridor. Almost as if, by doing so, he could break down the wall of distance that separated him from them.

  Strange, Yang thought ruefully with the tiniest sliver of his consciousness. You’d think losing this much blood would make you lighter. Why do I feel so heavy? It was as if malevolent, invisible arms had wrapped themselves around his entire body, not just his shins, and were trying to pull him down.

  Once ivory white, his slacks were now a crimson that grew darker by the second at the hands of some unseen dyer. The scarf wrapped around his wound had lost all capacity to stanch the hemorrhaging and now served only as a conduit for blood.

  Yang had a moment of confusion as his perspective dipped. He had collapsed to his knees. Following an unsuccessful attempt to rise to his feet again, he leaned back lightly against the wall and sat where he was. Not my finest hour, he thought, but no longer had the strength even to move. The pool of blood around him grew. Miracle Yang becomes Yang the Bloody, he thought. Even thinking was immensely tiring for him now.

  His fingers would not move. His vocal cords were failing. So when he spoke—

  “Sorry, Frederica. Sorry, Julian. Sorry, everybody…”

  —no one heard it but Yang himself. At least, that was what he himself believed.

  Yang closed his eyes. It was his last action in this world. In one corner of the consciousness that now fell down a colorless well, twilight turning to lacquer black, he heard a familiar voice calling his name.

  At 0255 on June 1, 800 SE, time stopped for Yang Wen-li. He was thirty-three years old.

  I

  0305, JUNE 1.

  A shock unlike any Julian Mintz had experienced before tangled itself around his legs like an unseen rope.

  Stopping in his tracks, he touched his blood-smeared tomahawk lightly on the ground and looked around as he forced order upon his agitated breathing and field of vision. The shock had been real. But he could not immediately understand why he had felt it. Foreboding swelled in his throat with nauseous pressure.

  The corridor before him was empty. Another dim corridor extended off to the left, and it was—not. Someone was there. Not standing. Not prepared for any sort of fight. Whoever it was seemed to be sitting down, leaning against the wall. On the floor a small object gleamed dully. It was a blaster, abandoned at the corridor’s entrance. It looked like an imperial sidearm. The figure in the corridor had one knee raised and the other leg stretched flat. Slumped forward, the figure’s face was hidden by a beret and the bangs that fell forward from under it. The black slick on the floor was silent testimony to how much blood the figure had lost.

  “Marshal Yang…?”

  Even as Julian spoke, praying to be contradicted, part of his brain was already screaming.

  “Marshal…”

  Julian’s knees suddenly began to shake. His body had grasped the situation before his reason and was reacting accordingly. He stepped into the corridor. He did not want to, did not want to face what he knew awaited him there, but he advanced anyway. Forced on by an unwanted sense of duty, he took three steps forward—four—then lost his balance and fell to one knee, bracing himself against the floor with one hand. He was already on the banks of the lake of blood. From his slightly higher vantage point, Julian gazed at the face of the corpse. It could have just been asleep, exhausted.

  Hands shaking, Julian removed his helmet. His unruly flaxen hair stuck to his brow, now slick with both cold and hot sweat. His heart, his voice were as disarrayed as his hair, bound by no order.

  “Forgive me. Forgive me. I failed. Just when you needed me most of all, I failed you…”

  Julian did not notice the warmth that still lingered in the blood that stained his knee. What had he promised Yang four years ago—that he’d always protect him? He had been so confident. This was the reality. Julian had failed. He was a worthless, useless liar! Not only had he failed to protect Yang, he had not even been with his guardian as he drew his final breath.

  Disgust coursed through Julian’s nervous system, flooding his senses with the stink of reality again. Glancing back over his shoulder, Julian saw them. Five or six men in imperial military uniforms, approaching from behind.

  It took less than a hundredth of an instant for the crimson current to electrify through Julian’s every nerve and artery.

  The men in imperial uniforms were confronted by a being of pure hatred and animosity, baleful energy in the shape of a man. At that moment, Julian was the most dangerous creature in the galaxy.

  A charge, a leap, a swung blade, all at once. In a flash of Julian’s tomahawk, one of the intruders’ skulls was split in two. He collapsed, spattering the corridor with fresh blood and full-throated screaming. A second flash flew in the opposite direction and shattered the clavicle and ribs of another victim. Before this second man hit the floor, blood was gushing from the newly smashed nose of a third.

  Hate and confusion filled the shouts echoing off the walls around Julian. The enemy’s tomahawks could not even strike his shadow. Had von Schönkopf witnessed the scene, he would no doubt have praised Julian’s brutality but criticized his lack of calm. Julian whirled his tomahawk where his boiling passions led, charging forward and painting the floor with a fresh layer of blood.

  “Sublieutenant! Sublieutenant Mintz!”

  The newly made revenant felt two arms thicker than his own legs wrap themselves around him from behind. Julian was no match for Machungo’s brawn, but the larger man still had to strain his every fiber to subdue this active volcano of aggression.

  “Please calm down, sir!”

  “Let me go!”

  Julian whipped his head around. Blood that was not his own flew off his hair and spattered Machungo’s dark face.

  “Let me go!”

  He kicked at the air with both legs, sending arcs of blood through the corridor like broken necklaces of red jasper.

  “Let me go! I’ll kill them all! It’s no more than they deserve!”

  “They’re all dead already, sir,” Machungo said, perspiration in his voice. “More importantly, what about Marshal Yang? You can’t just leave his remains on the floor here.”

  In half an instant, the storm ended. Julian stopped struggling and turned to look at Machungo. Reason—or something like it—had returned to his eyes. He unclenched his fists and his tomahawk dropped to the blood-slick floor, protesting against the rough treatment with a sticky noise.

  Machungo opened his arms and let Julian go. Unsteady on his feet as an infant walking for the first time, Julian approached Yang’s corpse again and dropped to one knee. Far in the distance, he heard a weak voice addressing the dead man.

  “Commander, let’s go back to Iserlohn. That’s our home—the home we all share. Let’s go home…”

  Seeing the young man wait for a reply that would never come, the black giant went wordlessly into action. With reverent care, he gathered Yang’s lifeless form in his arms. Julian was pulled to his feet too, as if by an unseen rope, and realized that he had begun walking alongside Machungo.

  Marshal Yang was gone.

  Unparalleled master of the arts of war, unrepentant hater of war itself, he had gone to a place where he need never fight again.

  Julian’s consciousness retreated through the corridors of memory. Scenes from more than 2,600 days flickered across his mind in a stream of images. He had a memory of Yang for every brain cell, and he had expected to keep accumulating more. To think that that process would be interrupted like this!

 
For the first time, liquefied fury and despair burst through the gates of his tear ducts. He wept wildly as a child. Machungo looked at him in consternation and muttered something to himself. “I guess at times like this, whoever cries first wins,” it sounded like, but Julian was neither watching nor listening. All he was aware of at that moment was the heat of the tears that fell on his hands.

  To live is to watch others die. Yang Wen-li had said so himself. The fact that war and terrorism cause the senseless deaths of good people is the main reason they must be opposed—he had said that too. He always spoke truly. But however true the words he left behind, what good were they when the man himself was dead?

  Words…Not only had Julian failed to witness Yang’s final moments, he had not heard his last words either. Not even a message to pass on to his wife. Regret and self-loathing came forth in a new wave of tears.

  At around this time, von Schönkopf discovered his subordinate and apprentice Blumhardt in the Gun Room.

  The young man was sprawled on the floor, surrounded by the corpses of seven or eight men in imperial uniforms. The scene was a testament to how bravely Blumhardt had made his final stand. Slipping more than once in the blood on the floor, von Schönkopf approached and knelt beside him. He took off Blumhardt’s helmet and shook him by one blood-streaked shoulder. The young officer, now in his final moments, opened his eyes a crack and gathered all his strength to whisper.

  “Is Marshal Yang all right?”

  Von Schönkopf could not reply right away.

  “He’s not good at staying on task. I hope he got away.”

  “Julian went after him. He’s fine. He’ll be here before you know it.”

  “Good. If he hadn’t survived…this would have been no fun at all.” He trailed off, and von Schönkopf heard two shallow, sharp exhalations. Commander Reiner Blumhardt, leader of the Rosen Ritter, had breathed his last, fifteen minutes after the commander he had fought to protect.

  Von Schönkopf cleared his expression and rose to his feet, but particles of sorrow remained lodged in his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and then lowered his gaze again to see someone approaching. Once he determined it was not an enemy but a known friend, the relief in his voice was apparent.

  “Julian. Was he all right? I searched these men. They’re not Imperial Navy—”

  Walter von Schönkopf stopped speaking amid a suddenly rising haze of misfortune. The inside of his mouth became a desert, and the fearless former commander of the Rosen Ritter spoke in a cracked voice as if vomiting up lumps of clay.

  “Stop it,” he said. “This isn’t drama school. I’m not interested in rehearsing a tragedy with you.”

  He closed his mouth, turned his seething eyes on Julian, and sighed with his shoulders. This was his ritual for accepting reality. Without a word—from him, or from Julian—von Schönkopf saluted Yang where he lay in Machungo’s arms. Julian saw von Schönkopf’s hand tremble slightly only twice.

  This done, von Schönkopf showed Julian a scrap of cloth. It had been found in Baron von Kümmel’s residence a year before by Kaiser Reinhard’s soldiers. Embroidered letters leapt into Julian’s field of vision: “The Holy Land, in Our Hands.”

  “The Church of Terra!”

  Julian reeled with vertigo. The hatred he had been aiming directly at the Imperial Navy could not be redirected instantly. He thought he had used up all his emotions, and was disgusted to find himself surprised once again.

  “But why should Terraists assassinate Marshal Yang? Because we infiltrated Earth and searched their base? If so…”

  “The inquiry can come later,” said von Schönkopf with an eerie, ominous calm. “We know who did this, and that’s enough for now. I’m going to deliver them all to the crematorium, along with even the ground they walk on.”

  Von Schönkopf turned to his subordinates.

  “Haul two or three of the survivors onto Ulysses. I’ll interrogate them at my leisure. There’ll be plenty of free time on the way back to Iserlohn.”

  Soul was unconscious and severely wounded, but alive. This was the only ray of light amid the mass of bad news. Julian was fond of Soul, and expected to learn a lot about the incident from him once he regained consciousness. Although Soul himself would not find this a pleasant experience.

  “Are we ready to go?” asked Machungo. Von Schönkopf and Julian nodded together.

  Both inside and outside Leda II, the killing was still ongoing. Von Schönkopf’s men had vast advantages in fighting ability and discipline, but every enemy they encountered fought to the death. Just like the imperial troops who had stormed Terraist headquarters, von Schönkopf’s men felt not fear but an uncanny nausea as they forced bloodshed on the enemy and pushed them back skirmish by skirmish.

  At 0330, von Schönkopf ordered all troops to withdraw.

  “No more wasting time on those ghouls,” he said. “We don’t want the Imperial Navy to find us and complicate things. All living boarders, evacuate now.”

  The order was promptly obeyed, with the survivors of the boarding party ending their battles and returning to Ulysses. The remains of Yang, Patrichev, and Blumhardt were carried on board as well. Later, the rescue team would be criticized for leaving the bodies of Dr. Romsky and the other revolutionary government officials behind.

  II

  Many were those who mourned the shocking death of Yang Wen-li. Most of them had fought under his command or even by his side. But among the historians of later generations, some offered severe criticisms of his legacy.

  One of the sharpest read:

  “What sort of man was Yang Wen-li, in the end? He denounced war, but advanced his personal fortunes by waging it. When his state fell, he declared and led a new war to split the human race in two, then failed at this also, leaving nothing but the seeds of discord and carnage to those who came after. Had Yang never existed, the tumultuous period from the end of the eighth century SE to the early years of the ninth would have deprived far fewer unwilling victims of their lives. We must not give him more credit than he deserves. Yang was not a disappointed idealist or a failed revolutionary; he was nothing but a warmonger paying lip service to the notion of a higher duty. Brush aside the garish adornment of military romanticism, and what remains of his record? We are forced to say: nothing. In neither life nor death did the man bring happiness to humanity.”

  Some historians offered a more measured assessment:

  “If the second meeting of Kaiser Reinhard and Yang Wen-li had taken place, what would its legacy to history have been? Peaceful coexistence between the titanic empire and the tiny republic, or a final, uncompromising war? Whatever we may suspect, the talks did not in fact take place, snuffing out the hopes of both the living and the dead. Yang Wen-li died at the worst possible time. Not of his own choosing, of course; the death was forced on him by a conspiracy, so we can hardly criticize him for it. No, the greatest sin was committed by the reactionary terrorists, whose unconstructive fervor and obsession led them to terminate those historical possibilities. Their act was like a sneer directed at Yang’s insistence that terrorism cannot change the course of history: at the very least, it changed the course of his life.”

  Other chroniclers took a different tack:

  “Moral good and political good are not the same. Yang Wen-li’s choices and actions from SE 797 to 800 were, perhaps, good in the former sense, but not in the latter. The age, the circumstances demanded a more forceful leader than would be needed in peacetime, and even there none other than Yang had the ability or popular support to perform that role, though he continued to deny this. Whatever personal satisfaction he may have derived from this piety, it ended with the democratic state that was the Free Planets Alliance losing one of its most important pillars of support, and collapsing as a result. Of course, in Yang’s historical philosophy, the alliance had already lost both its life and its reason to ex
ist as a state; presumably he saw no reason to ensure the survival of its name alone if the cost was acceptance of military dictatorship. Furthermore, he himself hoped to cede his key place in history to another.”

  Was that “another” Julian Mintz, Yang’s ward?

  “If Julian went to work for the kaiser, he could be a marshal one day,” was how Yang used to praise the boy’s potential, but given what he believed and where he stood this praise seemed doubly thoughtless. Still, two things were clear from Yang’s words: he recognized the capacities of both of the individuals he named, and he did not see Julian’s talent as superior to the kaiser’s. Of course, Yang did not think of himself as more capable than Reinhard either.

  “Even I know I’m not equipped for this,” he once told Julian with a shrug. He was far from the only one fascinated by Kaiser Reinhard, but he was surely the most deeply conscious of Reinhard’s position in history. What was more, he seemed to view his own position opposite the kaiser with a hint of pessimism.

  Yang had an instinctive dislike of those who held the reins of power in his own state, as well as those who dwelled in neighboring domains. It was not surprising that his relations with such people were not friendly. He did not welcome their visits, and feigned illness or absence on many occasions to evade meetings with them. This was not out of any particular belief or principle; psychologically speaking, he was on the same level as a child refusing to eat his vegetables.

  So overflowing with ideas and strategies on the battlefield that others called him superhuman, Yang knew virtually nothing of interpersonal relations. When he had overused the illness gambit and conversation with an unwanted guest looked unavoidable, Julian had sometimes played the role of invalid instead. After the crisis was averted, Yang would express his gratitude by tucking a ten-dinar note into his ward’s pocket, or leaving a box of chocolates on his nightstand. Indeed, he always tried to show care for his subordinates, however clumsily; he was a kind and magnanimous man by nature, but more reserved around his superiors and particularly those who made their homes near the seat of political power.