As Lang’s successes mounted, a woman watching them coldly turned to Adrian Rubinsky. “Surely you don’t trust this man Lang?” she asked.
“How unlike you to ask a question like that, Dominique,” said Rubinsky. There was no doubt that he expected to be repaid for the goodwill he had expended on Lang, but not even a hint of a smile showed on his face. “He’s a nobody. Show him a looking glass that magnifies his reflection, and he is delighted. I simply directed him to the mirror he craved.”
Unlike the stone-faced Rubinsky, the woman never stopped smiling, eyes and lips dripping with seemingly endless malice.
“And what does that make you? Didn’t you make this nobody kill Boltec? I’m sure it must have been galling to see your former subordinate become Mr. Acting Secretary-General and strut around like the kaiser’s most loyal retainer, but how can you relax with a drink after having an innocent man killed?”
Rubinsky put down his glass. The look in his eyes changed restlessly, but the rest of his face was entirely calm.
“You really don’t see it? Or are you just pretending not to?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Fine,” Rubinsky said after a brief pause. “Let me explain.”
If she already understood, there was no reason not to tell her; and even if she didn’t, there was still no harm in telling her.
“Boltec is nothing but a means to an end, and that end was having Lang kill an innocent man. With his own hands, Lang has tied the noose that will hang him.”
“So if he tries to escape from your yoke, you can reveal the truth about Boltec to the kaiser, say, or the minister of military affairs?”
Rubinsky tilted his glass by way of reply. Casting a final glance at him, Dominique Saint-Pierre left the room, followed half a moment later by shadow and derision.
Dominique walked down a corridor and descended a staircase to another room deep within the building. After a cursory knock, she opened the door and light cut a rectangle from the gloom within. A young woman inside raised her head, but as soon as she met Dominique’s gaze she looked away again, squeezing the baby in her arms more tightly.
“How are you feeling?” asked Dominique.
The woman declined to reply. Not out of fear, but pride. Still holding her baby, she looked back at Dominique, an afterimage of stubborn awareness of her station in life visible in her eyes.
“Marshal Oskar von Reuentahl will be arrested for treason before long,” said Dominique. Rubinsky and Lang might not have what it takes to lead great armies and crush the enemy on the battlefield, but they are certainly capable of stabbing those who can in the back.”
When the silence had flapped once around the room, a faint voice escaped the woman’s lips. Exactly what I am wanted, it sounded like.
“But isn’t he the father of that child you’re holding?”
The woman said nothing.
“What have you named it, anyway?”
Once more, Dominique’s question was met with a hostile silence. But it took more than that to upset the mistress of Adrian Rubinsky.
“There are so many types of people in the world,” said Dominique. “Some couples want children but never conceive them. Some parents are killed by the children they do have. I suppose there is also room for children whose fathers are killed by their mothers.”
The baby gurgled and waved its limbs.
“Do let me know if you need anything,” said Dominique. “There’s no point in letting the child die before you can even teach it to hate its father.”
She turned to leave, and then the other woman spoke clearly for the first time. She wanted milk, she said, and clothing. She added a few more items to the list.
Dominique nodded generously. “All right. And I suppose we’d better find you a nurse as well.”
Leaving mother and child in their room, Dominique looked back in on Rubinsky and saw him on the sofa, head in hands.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Another of your turns?”
“My head hurts. It feels like a dinosaur’s battering the inside of my skull with its tail. Pass me those pills.”
Dominique regarded her lover with an observer’s eye as she handed him the bottle. Watching him swallow the pills, one meaty hand still pressed to his forehead, she reached out to pat him lightly on the back.
“The gaps between these episodes of yours are getting shorter and shorter,” she said, coldly but correctly. “You must take better care of yourself. You’d look quite the fool if you took over the galaxy through plot and intrigue only to be brought down by a collapsing inner world. Why don’t you see a doctor?”
“Doctors are useless.”
“Oh? Well, it’s your body—none of my concern. And I do agree that doctors would be no help here. If anything, you need a sorcerer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I thought you knew already? Half of your problem is from a curse laid on you by the Church of Terra’s grand bishop or whatever he calls himself, and the other half is from the vengeful spirit of your son Rupert Kesselring. No doctor can save you now.”
This painful blow wounded his nerves, but Rubinsky showed no sign of it in his expression. Perhaps the pills had begun to exert their temporary power to heal, for the tension that bound his body like a thorny chain began to relax. He heaved a lengthy sigh.
“Vengeful spirits aside, you may be right about the curse. The archbishop seemed capable of that much.”
“Oh, nonsense! If that man really had such powers, Kaiser Reinhard would be long dead. And yet he lives, in the fragrant flower of…”
Dominique trailed off in the middle of her sarcastic tirade. She had heard the recent whispered rumors that the kaiser was plagued by fever and often confined to bed. More than fifteen centuries since humanity’s triumph over cancer, the human mind’s vestigial reptilian tail was still vulnerable to being pulled into the swamp of superstition. Dominique shook her head in irritation and left the room. She had to order the milk for Elfriede’s child, as well as the other items on her list. Apparently the mass of elementary particles that made up her character included a few electrons not of only one color.
III
On July 2 in SE 800—year 2 of the New Imperial Calendar—an imperial edict formally declared Planet Phezzan to be the new capital of the Galactic Empire and required the entire cabinet to relocate to Phezzan before the year was out. Senior Admiral Ulrich Kessler, commander of capital defenses and commissioner of military police, was also to move his headquarters to the new capital, leaving Odin’s defense to Senior Admiral Ernest Mecklinger, rear supreme commander of the Imperial Navy.
From the minister of domestic affairs to the lowest-ranking bureaucrats and their families, over a million souls in all would make the journey of several thousand light-years. Countess Hildegard von Mariendorf, senior advisor to Reinhard at imperial headquarters, would see her father for the first time in a year. For Mittermeier’s wife, Evangeline, traveling to her husband’s new posting would be the first long journey she had ever experienced.
Amid the preparations for the move, Hilda found herself unable to maintain indifference to one question: the question of Reinhard’s elder sister, Annerose von Grünewald, lover of the former emperor.
To the historians of later ages, the beautiful Annerose’s influence on the formation of Reinhard’s character was less academic theory than accepted wisdom, but at the time it had been nearly three years since she had gone into seclusion in her mountain villa in Freuden on the planet Odin. In all that time, brother and sister—likely the most beautiful pair of siblings in the galaxy—had not seen each other once. In losing that which should not have been lost, Reinhard had allowed past to be severed from present; the brilliance of that long-ago spring light, the melodies of those summer winds, were now far beyond his reach.
“Will Your
Majesty be inviting the Gräfin von Grünewald to the new capital?” asked Hilda, knowing full well that she was overstepping her remit as chief advisor.
Reinhard’s eyebrows moved slightly, as they always did when his hopes were disappointed or he was challenged on some sentiment he had yet to fully process.
“That, Fräulein von Mariendorf, has no connection with military affairs,” he said. “Pray direct that remarkable intelligence of yours to the task of galactic conquest rather than palace trivialities.”
This curt dismissal, however, was followed by a more personal reflection, as if Reinhard wanted his innermost thoughts to be heard. “Kircheis’s grave is on Odin. To move my capital and headquarters to a location more convenient for me falls within my prerogative, but to do as I please with another’s place of eternal rest is not.”
Realizing that Reinhard was indirectly revealing the reason he would not invite his sister to Phezzan, Hilda remained silent. She had known the question would only make things awkward for her, and brooded, as usual, over her inability to rationally explain the emotions that had driven her to ask it anyway.
“I shall return to Odin one day,” Reinhard continued, “but when that day will come is not yet within my power to discern. So many things remain to be put in order first.”
Hilda did not, of course, ask what these were.
Reinhard stood on the banks of recollection, gazing down at the waters of the past. The clock’s hands reversed direction, and night and day alternated with increasing speed until finally the former won out, and a scene from the past appeared before the kaiser’s eyes.
“Annerose! It’s dark! It’s dark!”
He was a small child—four years old? five?—waking one night to smothering darkness and crying out desperately for help. He pressed the switch of the lamp by his bedside again and again, but no light came to drive the dark away. Later he would learn that their power had been cut off because his father had not paid the bill. “Protector of the Imperial Household!” A fine standard of living for a noble!
Hearing her brother’s screams, Annerose came running from the next room. Later Reinhard would wonder how she could have been so fleet of foot through the pitch-blackness in her nightgown. But when he called, she always came.
“Reinhard, Reinhard, it’s all right. I’m sorry I left you alone.”
“It’s dark, Annerose!”
“It is dark, but I can see your golden hair so clearly! How beautifully it shines!”
“That gold lights up the darkness, Reinhard. You must be the light yourself, for then nothing will frighten you, nothing will hurt you, no matter how dark it is. Become the light, Reinhard…”
With melancholy mien, Reinhard raised his fair hand to sweep back the cascade of golden locks that had fallen onto his brow. As a child, when he wanted his sister, he only had to call and she would come. Indeed, on the day she’d stopped coming to him, had she not been in need of his assistance for the first time?
And had he not been powerless to help her?
He knew that he owed her an infinite debt.
As the busy days continued, a piece of information both surprising and unpleasant made its way to Reinhard: Job Trünicht had petitioned the kaiser for entry into government service.
As chairman of both the Defense Committee and the High Council for the former Free Planets Alliance, Trünicht bore grave and inescapable responsibility for his fatherland’s demise. He had fled to the imperial capital of Odin pleading the danger he faced from radical elements of the former alliance seeking revenge, but at forty-five years of age, he had still been young for a politician, and soon turned his personal and financial resources to the task of seeking, or rather hunting down, a position within the government.
The news sparked a flicker of displeasure in Reinhard’s expression, like the sight of something unclean. After a few moments of silence, however, he bared his white teeth in a malicious grin and nodded, almost as if in recollection.
“If Trünicht so badly craves a government post, I shall grant him one. Von Reuentahl was asking for assistance from an administrator familiar with conditions in the former alliance, I believe?”
The surprise on Hilda’s face quickly changed to exasperation.
“Your Majesty, surely you do not…”
“High counselor to the governorate of the Neue Land—the perfect post for Trünicht, is it not? If the citizens of the former alliance should happen to make him the target of their rock flinging, well, that also would be welcomed by von Reuentahl.”
“Your Majesty, I see no need for this. Surely assigning him to oversee the development of some far-flung world would be sufficient.”
Reinhard laughed and waved his graceful hand.
The offer was clearly outrageous, but Trünicht—despite having claimed refuge in the imperial capital for his own safety—accepted it the following day.
“He accepted?”
His own responsibility for this outcome notwithstanding, Reinhard could not help feeling deeply displeased by it. He had assumed that Trünicht would never accept such a position, and intended to bar the former alliance leader permanently from public service on the basis of that refusal. Clearly, he had misjudged Trünicht’s sense of shame in both qualitative and quantitative terms.
“How dare he show his face among the very people he betrayed? The man’s gall could power my largest warship’s main cannon!”
“It was Your Majesty’s decision,” said Hilda tartly. Reinhard made a noise of irritation.
If he had denied Trünicht’s request outright, that would have been the end of it. If Trünicht had declined the post, the result would have been eloquent proof of Reinhard’s convictions, if acquired in a somewhat mean-spirited way. But Trünicht’s acceptance of the offer made Reinhard’s gambit nothing but a simple, childish mistake. The kaiser had made many personnel choices since appointing the late Helmut Lennenkamp high commissioner on Heinessen, but this was the first he had felt dissatisfied with.
Naturally, the military had their own opinions on the appointment.
“Trünicht is taking up an official position in the Neue Land governorate, you say?” said Mittermeier. “Von Reuentahl won’t be happy about that!”
He found the matter grimly amusing at first, recognizing what the kaiser had intended to do. But his amusement faded as he began to suspect that, however brazen-faced Trünicht might be, he must be concealing something that he expected would make such a position tenable.
At times like these, Mittermeier was wont to confide not in the young and forthright Bayerlein but rather Büro, rich in the wisdom and experience of years. Büro was also old friends with von Reuentahl’s chief of staff, Bergengrün, meaning that he took personal interest in the matter.
The idea that Trünicht might be conspiring with von Oberstein to bring down von Reuentahl seemed to Büro rather a leap, but it was too grave a question to dismiss with a laugh.
“I do realize that it betrays my own prejudice to see von Oberstein’s shadow behind every event in the galaxy, but still,” said Mittermeier, his voice almost a lament as he ran an agitated hand through his honey-colored hair. He was thirty-two this year, and looked even younger. Usually, he did not meddle in matters he considered improper for military personnel to be involved with, but he could not be sanguine where his friends were concerned. Büro promised that he would privately warn Bergengrün to be careful, and with this Mittermeier had to be satisfied.
On July 31, a message was delivered to the office used by Minister of Military Affairs Paul von Oberstein. The bearer was Commodore Anton Ferner.
Marshal von Oberstein read the letter alone in his chambers. His face always remained expressionless regardless of the grave concerns that weighed on his mind, and this was no exception. After reading the message, he made sure to completely incinerate it.
Ferner came back into th
e office on other business and, after receiving his orders, suddenly retrieved from memory a matter from some days previous.
“By the way, Minister, I hear that Job Trünicht will be returning to the fatherland he abandoned in grand style—as high counselor to its governorate.”
“And this surprises you?” von Oberstein said.
“I never expected His Majesty to actually follow through on the idea. Trünicht himself must be utterly without shame to accept such a posting, but I wonder if there is not also someone pulling his strings.”
Von Oberstein did not respond directly. “Phezzan will soon become the official capital of the Galactic Empire,” he said. “The center of the galaxy in every way.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Even an ordinary citizen cleans a new house before moving in. Do you not think it best to cleanse not only Phezzan but the empire’s entire territory for the sake of His Majesty?”
This was quite loquacious for von Oberstein. He was not usually the type to explain things to his subordinates until they accepted his point of view.
“I see. You mean to smoke out the Black Fox and the other bogeymen who have gone to ground. With Trünicht as your tool…”
Ferner was sincerely moved. He knew that his superior the minister of military affairs was a man of no private interests, and felt great respect for von Oberstein’s diligence in advancing the goals of the state and the emperor himself. In that respect, von Oberstein was an unimpeachable public servant.
But von Oberstein’s ideas for stabilizing imperial rule always revolved around the elimination of harmful elements. Ferner wondered how long it would be before the imperial leadership began to resist such purges.
Even a pillar riddled with termites might still be the only thing keeping the house up. Once he eliminates everyone who poses the slightest danger, what will be left? The minister of military affairs might find himself trapped under a pillar toppled by his own hand.
But Ferner had no intention of sharing these thoughts with von Oberstein. This may have been because the minister of military affairs had clearly already anticipated such objections, and was proceeding with his plans anyway.
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