Assassin

by Kali Altsoba

  Or that’s what Takeshi believes. Has he really seduced this extraordinary farfolk agent? He discovered her secret when his spies brought him information on Onur’s network of Resisters, in particular a blurting future planner she took home one pale night. He believed in universal disarmament of all Orion, and just wouldn’t shut up about the role he was going to play in forging a new Grün Confederation. Looking into details of an unusual traffic accident in the barrios, Takeshi saw Neaira’s shadow inside the police and intelligence reports, looking over the shoulder of the unsuspecting Resistance and looking back out for him. Then he saw her gaze at him, longingly and seemingly lovestruck, across a bed of black silk sheets. Who was it lured whom? He’s not sure. Neither is she.

  But he remembers as clear as a mountain brook the night six months later that she whispered a terrible secret to him. All about the Dead Zone and what she said Alliance scientists found there. About how he and she could together use the secret to secure absolute power over the Imperium, even in all Orion.

  Or is she playing at seduction,

  hiding within a double game,

  wrapped inside a third betrayal?

  She hits the thrusters, all out bendix.

  She must get back to Kestino quickly.

  She’s expected by Pyotr tonight.

  in his bubble rock bedroom.

  Dogs

  Colonel Hans Schulen, Rikugun Military Intelligence, is tall, lean, and basically decent. He has traditional views typical of a man of his class and social privilege. And since he’s possessed of only a modicum of personal initiative and little moral imagination, he never questioned them before the war. After it started he worked diligently in MI, until he was wounded on Glarus. He had a real talent for sniffing out electronic conspiracies, for seeing hidden messages that got past others in counterintelligence. But that was before he was severely hurt, way back during Year One. Now he potters around listening to the memex all day, thinking he detects hidden intercepts and coms traffic that isn’t really there.

  Hans had doubts about Pyotr and his drive for war beginning with the Bad Camberg jumped up crisis. But then so did most of the Old Families whose sons and daughters he grew up among, future leaders of Glarus high society. In the end, when war came anyway, they concluded that the Imperium cause was just and that the ‘Lost Children’ must be recovered. They said to each other that they had to chip in and do their bit by serving in the officer corps, as they always had in the Reserve. Then the High Castes sent their children, slaves and serfs off to war. Hans went along. He did his duty like all other ‘first sons’ of Glarus. Just for being from a prominent local family, MI made him a colonel right off.

  Serving in the Glarus Homeworld Guard, he wasn’t in the shooting war. Not at first. He played at soldier, proud of a shiny green uniform but hardly knowing what to do or why, glad that he didn’t even have to deploy off his homeworld. In that, he was like other grasshoppers, as veteran officers call fresh recruits in clean green uniforms. It’s a barely more polite moniker than the one the enemy uses: ‘locusts.’ Hans worked hard to learn the military trades, but excelled at only one: marksmanship. He discovered a real talent for target shooting, then honed his skill at hitting very small targets at a distance with uncanny repetition and truly deadly accuracy. Until he was the best shot in the Glarus Guards.

  Like everyone else, he listened to bold memex talk of far off battles on the other side of the Imperium frontier. He thrilled to all the early victories over the United Planets and grew more excited over the first invasion wave sent into the Calmar Union and central Neutrals. Then the damn Alliance counterattacked along twin axes of advance, straight into Imperium space, with dropships falling onto the farside of Glarus, sitting exposed just six bohrs across the frontier. He saw his first action that day, then his second. He was wounded during his third.

  Most of the year that followed is hazy to his memory, split between recovery and his great spiritual awakening. He has been told he was captured when his position was overrun by ‘Enthusiastics’ from ACU 7th Assault. He didn’t have to surrender. Didn’t have to make a decision to do it. Doesn’t recall it because he was unconscious, hovering near death. He wasn’t told that an ACU robobear found him, saved his life as he lay inert and dying, bleeding out into darkening sand in the aftermath of a ferocious firefight. He had a real bad head wound and was gut shot, hit twice by an attack bot, an armadillo, when his unit got rolled over and cut apart by a charging battalion of angry Enthusiastics.

  Robobear found him propped against a spiny, opuntia cactus. He was nearly done for, half his guts extruded into his wet lap, one leg bent in a direction it was never meant to go. It didn’t care that Hans wore Rikugun green instead of Calmari blue, only that he was bleeding dull red. Inside a hard minute he was cocooned in a Trauma Pod, suspended beside three badly wounded ACU. He was treated by Alliance Cybermedical Corps in a hospital behind the 7th’s main positions. He never met Susannah Page or learned that she was wounded by a sniper bot from the next RIK division over, two days after he was. Never knew that the same quirky Pod that lifted her to safety on an offworld hospital ship carted him back, kept him alive while the surgeons cut deeply into his brain.

  He was still suspended when Gross Imperium dropships landed to overwhelm the Enthusiastics, capture the enemy’s field hospital and liberate him and many thousands of Rikugun prisoner wounded. He had a lot of time to think, lying on a rear area medical cot for half-a-year after that. Then more time back home with his wife, Nina, and their two-year old son. For eighteen months he was home on medical leave, his slow motion recovery running right through Years Two and Three of the Liberation War, as the bitter Fourth Orion War is called by loyalists on Glarus. It’s hard to believe, but the calendar and seasons have moved past the start of Year Four. He hardly feels he has been to war. He feels incomplete somehow, even though everyone around tells him: “Hans, please stop worrying about it. You’ve done your bit. Time to let others do theirs.”

  He’s living on his parent’s immense estate, allowed month after month to convalesce as befits the first son of a First Caste and venerable Old Family. He’s recovering slowly in safety, half a world away from the battlefield where he fell to the armadillo shooter. The estate is in the lucky hemisphere that was untouched by bombardment or the ground battles that marked Rikugun’s counteroffensive. Outside his window, where as a boy he gazed with longing at the stars, he sees barracks dāsa tending to horses and sheep as they always have. Each morning, he listens to the dawn chorus of endless birdsong. Each day, his heart leaps with joy to see his two hounds barking at squirrels and romping in perfect, pampered freedom. It’s all so very far from war.

  A few weeks ago he realized, for the first time, that he really hates war. Not just because he left half his stomach in a desert on Glarus. He hates the war on a much deeper level than he ever thought it possible to hate anything. He hates it as a spiritual threat to the Proper Unfolding of the Cosmos. Despite the hate, he feels more joyous with passing days. He doesn’t understand why each morning he awakes he’s happier than the one before. Nina is so pleased, at first, to see him recovering well. Though lately she’s growing worried about his near constant state of bliss and his newfound talk of God.

  “It’s not normal,” she whispers to his parents.

  “Oh, he’ll be fine. Wait ‘till they reduce his meds.”

  “I don’t think it’s his meds. He’s changed somehow, because of the war.”

  “He has never been religious, Nina. The reverse, actually. A natural sceptic.”

  “I know, I remember. But he was always a little odd, even before…”

  “Don’t you worry. You just take care of our grandson. I’m sure Hans will get over it when they stop his brain meds. This new god of his only lives inside a pill bottle, I’m sure of it.”

  They stop his meds, and he’s not fine. He’s ever more joyous, more carefree, nicer and more polite. Happy to see everyone, even dāsa slaves. Even the she
ep and cows. And especially his two dogs. He spends most of every day with them. It’s not normal to be this damn happy! Hans has no idea that he suffered a series of micro strokes during recovery from brain and stomach surgery. Somehow, his doctors missed them altogether. Maybe because they were so very small and left him feeling better, not worse? He never goes back to have further tests because the main effect of the little strokes is, unbeknownst to him, elevation of serotonin to astonishing levels that leave him in a state of delusional healthfulness. And far more, with a deep sense of spiritual bliss. At least that’s what it feels like: religious ecstasy. Walking in the presence of God.

  Then it takes a different turn, ever inward and away from all externalities. Except for his dogs. His family watches with deep worry as he pulls back inside himself, unaware that he’s doing it. His hounds sense it, too. They stop running in happy outdoor circles and come inside to sit with him all day, lying on the floor on either side of the big armchair he never leaves, just smiling. His parents are classical musicians. They play the cello and piano for him as he sits lost in far off thoughts about far better days, past and future. He talks to the dogs, and since he once made a real effort to learn Hound, he understands most of what they say back. They’re worried about him, too.

  No, seriously. I know that he’s High Caste. I know that, other than the elite women who talk to too precious poodles and pocket dogs, few High Caste learn animal languages that were deciphered many centuries ago. Hans did. Loves to bark and wuffle to the hounds. Speaks a little Orca, too. Learned it just for the helluva it. Though he doesn’t get to use that pitch tone language much. He never bothered to learn sheep or goat. Those species bore him. But he likes talking to his two dogs about today’s weather and all the cool smells they meet in their long walks around the estate. And that time they truly, really, actually, very nearly caught a squirrel. Otherwise, the only thing that pulls him outside himself over many months is watching the worsening war news. He sits before the memex and milneb all day, every day. He broods on how the independence of each system is eroding and disappearing under the pressure of a general war.

  As he recovers strength he’s invigorated by unrepressed joyfulness. He starts to study ancient aristocratic philosophy, and even older monarchist mysticism. Books of a kind that were hated and hounded underground as heresy a millennia ago, by the Black Faith of powerful Brethren who used to rule from behind the Jade Throne. He thinks about class and caste, economics and dynasty, decency and despotism. He thinks hard for the first time ever in his life about abstract principles of justice, about how to reform imperial courts and end dāsa slavery that he sees outside his bedroom window. He struggles to rise through a mental and spiritual fog of a lifetime of moral indifference into the broad, brilliantly lit uplands of the rediscovered idealism of his boyhood. He doesn’t know that his favorite books, filled with tales about the Jade Eye and his Table of Favorites and the grand nobility and mission of the Imperium, were packaged lies. He’s not actually all that bright. About average. So he took it all in and believed.

  It crests in a climactic epiphany, so exhilarating he leaps out of his padded chair and paces the room for three days and nights without stopping. He lets the dogs in, then locks the door. He refuses to see a family doctor whom worried Nina and his dull parents bring to the house. His insights keep coming, one after another, the whole hardening into a personal philosophy that embraces an ideal single community, united not by force or fear or favor but by highest culture. He calls it the “Celestial Imperium,” and comes to believe that it’s real and true, and above all, that it’s achievable in this Age. In it, there’ll be no High Caste or lowborn, no estates worked by dāsa slaves, no war or inequality or injustice. Hans Schulen looks inside himself and sees God grinning right back. That frees him from his stilted class upbringing and any loyalty to Pyotr, or trammels and trappings of imperial tradition. It also makes him an extremely dangerous man.

  Overnight, he rebounds. He opens the door to let the dogs out and his wife in. She brings the doctor and his parents, too. The diagnosis is that he has had a terrible brain fever but that it has broken, and he should make a full recovery. He behaves less strangely, more like his old self. Only his closest friends and family notice subtle changes. His colleagues in Glarus MI, where he returns to active service, remember that he was always more than a little odd and so too much discount the changes they see in him. After all, before the war, before his severe wounding and recovery, he was already locally famous for idiosyncrasies. Such as standing stiff at attention at his wedding altar in a first class suit of tailored civilian clothes but with his bright green, and spiked, Glarus Homeworld Guard dress parade helmet perched imperiously atop his head.

  “What on all the earths are you doing, darling?” his Nina asked, incredulous at his appearance beside her at the front of the wedding hall, over a thousand guests staring and more than half sniggering.

  “To be married is another way to be on duty, my love,” he answered. He refused to take it off, even though she begged him and started to cry.

  “Rector, proceed!” He gave the order like he was talking to a subaltern. The wedding went ahead, hat and all. He wore it right through the reception, and back home. Nina stamped her foot and pushed him away when he tried to climb into bed still wearing it. So he finally took it off. He’s much odder now, after his faux recovery. Although he doesn’t realize it, Hans is pulling away from everyone, into a hidden world of heroic fantasy and fantastic outcomes. He’s not yet ready to act, content inside his delusions. But all it will take is a spark to ignite his tinder, and Orion will change.

  ***

  Two months after he returns to Glarus MI he has another micro stroke. This one forces an abrupt shift in personality. This one is final, irreparable. Not least because he has no idea that he needs repair. He’s not unhappy. To the contrary. His sense of bliss deepens, until he’s disconnected from anything objective and everyone real outside his inner self. He thinks he’s moving into the Cosmos and the Cosmos is entering him, that he’s “embracing universalism of the life force, merging with pantheistic consciousness.” In fact, Hans Schulen is turning into a mad misanthrope. He fancies himself a true romantic hero in service to godly universal ideals, to the mission of the Table of Favorites. But that only separates him from the normal and the now. He spends all his time with his hounds, when he’s not target shooting with his Rikugun issue sniper rifle. It relaxes him.

  He hardly speaks to his wife or parents anymore. He prefers the company of his greyhounds. The way Lemuel Gulliver preferred to spend his time in his stables conversing with his horses, rather than in the drear company of his wife and yahoo children. He brings the dogs with him everywhere he goes. He can’t bring himself to like any man who doesn’t like his dogs. He knows they feel the same about him: they told him so. When the medics finally declare him fit for offworld duty he packs a few odd things, pecks his wife’s cheek, shakes his father’s hand, kisses his mother’s brow, and heads back to his field unit. It’s activated as a full combat division and fighting for a third year, now on Amasia. He has a headquarters staff appointment scroll tucked into his breast pocket, a secret agenda entirely his own (and God’s) and his two beloved greyhounds bounding and yipping at his side, then growling protection on the shuttle.

  Over the next few months, down on Amasia, Hans sees a lot of filthy war. He sees massacres of villages, casual mistreatment of prisoners, executions of civilians, and bloody battlefields. He meets brutal policies of occupation and resource and female and labor exploitation. He sees beatings in forced labor camps and witnesses three gang rapes by Rikugun in uniform, in broad daylight in one of the coastal city’s streets. No one but him even turns to look where the screams come from. He sees a rising toll everywhere on everyone exacted by the competing naval blockades and counterblockades, by starvation and wanton destruction and rampant nihilism. He sees mass casualties pile up in the near rear areas and on the milneb, reads reports of bombardme
nts of scores of cities on a hundred worlds across the warring Orion spur. Sees cratered fields, hears missiles fly, counts hundreds of bodies shipped to the rear by maglev each day as they pass through his daily commuter station. The arithmetic boggles.

  Intellectually, he laments it all. Emotionally, it leaves him hollow. It’s not until he realizes that the war is deciding the fate and increasing the suffering of dogs, and not just people, that this miserable misanthrope with a god complex turns hard against Pyotr Shaka and the war, and knows he must kill him. He whispers his secret concerns and plan only to his greyhounds. They try to talk him out of it at first, enticing him to go outside and play instead. But he persists, arguing back-and-forth until he knows he has their full support. It’s the story he tells them about the dogs up north that seals the case. They’re angry about it.

  ***

  On an HQ liaison inspection tour around the Dauran Gate in far northern Lemuria, Hans Schulen learns that General Mikva Royko and the Daurans are experimenting with suicide dogs. They strap bombs under the dogs and contact detonator wires erect over their collars, then send them sniffing across the black to run down a ramp deep into an enemy bunker or dugout or under an armtrak. Royko even used his own black bitch. Hans also heard the Daurans eat dogs. He’s livid to know that beast men are his allies, that the war has allied him with evil men who commit such atrocities against Cosmic consciousness. That’s when he decides to kill Pyotr, and dedicates every ounce of moral energy he has to do it.

  But how? Assigned as MI aide-de-camp at Glarus First Army Headquarters, he sees plenty of top secret traffic whirling back and forth, day into night into day. He watches for patterns in the haze, in the message clouds. He has an eye for that like no one else at HQ, so they let him sit there all day, reading traffic. He’s intrigued by a stream of broken messages hidden inside the daily logistics logs, and watches intensely for three weeks. No one else notices any oddity in the intercepts or cares when he points one out. In a state of heightened alertness and preternatural mental acuity, he fixates on the traffic, focuses and clarifies, looks to find an island of order in the streaming flow of seeming chaos. After the third week he has a lightening strike insight into the meaning of the stream. He double checks. He traces the messages through a labyrinth of disguise and deception, discovering their source at the center of a communications net at the Great General Staff in Novaya Uda. Someone there is sitting at the hub of an immense orb web, watching as prey touch and tremble the outermost circles of its tense, inescapable filaments. Waiting for what?