by Kali Altsoba
Chiyoko is shunted aside in sputtering futility as he plays the true puppet master to a dimwitted emperor sitting on the Jade Throne, grinning stupidly and drooling. She howls in rage as she’s taken away. She leaves Kahn standing over a dead brother, a vision half complete. Yet she’s still alive. She knows that while Takeshi kept his word to kill her brother, he broke his secret promise to sit her on the throne. Or did he? She realizes too late that he promised to seat “Pyotr’s sibling in his place.” She never thought that he meant her other brother. Takeshi owes her one other unkept promise, that she will be the one whose hand kills Maximillian Kahn. She’ll cling to that hope as she’s led to a Waldstätte cell. What choice does she have? What choice has she ever really had? This is the Imperium. Women don’t have choices. Not even women of blood royale.
***
From behind the stage, out of the limelight, away from now rolling cameras, over the following month Takeshi watches his allies of the moment move. Each is mortal enemy of the other. Each wants to seize control across the homeworlds and in conquered systems. He waits, a silent and deadly mamba, sire to a secret arboreal hatchery of other deadly serpents that he’ll soon release to hunt down his enemies. He satisfied Kahn for now, letting him proclaim Pyotr’s dimwit brother Friedrich as the true heir and Tennō. He knows that Brethren are eager to break out of exile, to retake old commanderies on more worlds where they were driven off by the Dowager decades ago. He encourages Kahn to let them to do it, to come out of hiding where he can kill them more easily. Meanwhile, he holds the Special Action Commandos at bay. He cautions the General Curia and Sakura-kai that it’s not yet time to shift from revolt to revolution. He shows them secret Broderbund plans shared by Kahn, plans to retake whole worlds for the Brethren, and hold them from commanderies. Then he stands aside, as the gray men move to eliminate recklessly cocky and newly aggressive monks.
Heads of the Old Families see him as a guarantor of their privileges. They say that he’s a barrier to a seizure of power by SAC, their main competitor for control of dāsa breeding. They also see him as a dam holding back the Brethren, another major competitor for control of the lower orders. Headmen of Old Families agree that he’s their best chance to take down their enemies on either flank. He plays at modesty. He’s even properly deferential in their secret talks. They say that they’re deeply committed to the war, but they're committed only to themselves, their huge estates and noble titles. They want clandestine talks to end the war before it turns inward, leading to social revolution. There are two portentous revolutions to stop, he warns them, triggering native conservatism and loathing of social disruption. “Your sons in the military are our only hope to stop both SAC and the cowls.” The snakes are out of the nest, hunting down his enemies.
Radical is set against radical.
Two revolutions are put on pause.
Headmen wait, trusting to his bond.
He says he’ll protect their Old Order,
but he’s already planning ruin and chaos.
The military is passive, exactly as Takeshi promised SAC and Maximilian Kahn they would be post coup. Leading admirals and generals, uniformed edge of the oligarchy and Old Families, think they have a unique deal with the man some sneeringly still call “Pyotr’s Pet” behind his back. They think they control him. They tell him to secure the strategic rear by taking homeworlds away from SAC, the Brethren, dead Pyotr and inept Friedrich. All they ask in return is that, unlike interfering Pyotr, he leave the professional military free to run the war the way it should be run, by whom it should be run. Top military want nothing to interfere with their conduct of the war. They prove yet again that they don’t understand the war that they're fighting, or the politics of war at all. Bastion of the Old Order, the generals and admirals see him as a bulwark against radical SAC activists, rivals to their authority over the troops. So they stand down or stand aside as Takeshi maneuvers pieces on the 4D chessboard of politics. They’re confident that they control him, and can use him to brake the pace of unwanted change. The fools!
***
Takeshi has learned much from years as Pyotr’s confident, but almost as much from studying Jahandar’s rise and rule, from uncovering the true history of the Grim Revolution in Daura, and how Jahandar seized total power silently, bit by bit.
“Especially two great truths,” he tells Naujock in private chambers.
“Was dey, boss?”
“First, when you join a regicide you must quickly kill the men with whom you just conspired to kill the king. And second, no one mourns a murdered murderer.”
“Ha! Gud wons, boss.” He’s not really sure what Takeshi means. Naujock just really likes the word ‘murder.’ He says it openly and often, with no hint of shame in the thought or deed. OK, yeah. He doesn’t say “murder.” He says “muhdah.”
“Yes, I thought you’d like that, gunsō.”
“Soze, ah shud gid ma nyv weady?”
“Not yet. Patience, my man. There’ll be time enough for that, and lots of work for your mercs. But for now, just relax. Have another fucking drink.”
***
Will to power is primary, but one needs the right instrument to turn a crucial moment to one’s ends. Takeshi chooses his portfolio in the new regime wisely. His rivals on either wing of the Compact do not. Abjuring the mantle of leader of the coup, he humbly asks his fellow conspirators for a single portfolio: Interior Minister. They’re happy to give it to him. They expected him to demand much more. Then they turn to arguing with each other over who gets the Praetorship, the nominal position of second-in-command to Emperor Friedrich XII.
As Interior Minister, Takeshi controls the rump of the Kempeitai, the purged royalist secret police that served the Oetkert-Shaka dynasty for centuries. He also controls local police on over 200 Imperium worlds. He has no authority on any occupied planets, which remain under military rule and administration; but he has allies who do. The secret police give him access to hidden assets of the Jade Throne and files on everyone who is anyone in the empire. The regular police give him more: bullies and bullwhips on every street corner in each town and city, in all cantons on every world in the old Imperium. As his regular police act on tipoffs from his secret police, roundups and deportations to consolidation camps on far off moons begin. Soon, no one who is anyone will be safe.
Pyotr is dead, bled out on green marble.
The Jade Throne is cold and vacant.
Except it has a drooling fool straddling it.
The viper strikes. He makes his move.
Haiku
Takeshi is near the power he has aspired to since leaving Fates as a boy, and he takes advantage. On his first day as Minister he orders preventive arrests and detention of tens of thousands of civilian administrators and local politicians: planetary governors, city mayors, directors of water utility boards and mines, and war production operations. He even detains a few professors. He arrests far more captains of industry and culls the top tier of the Imperial civil service. He arrests anyone who speaks out against his faux partners and his incompatible policies: support for Purity, yet return of the Broderbund to public life. It’s all done with enthusiastic agreement from eager ideologues on both his flanks, in the Broderbund and SAC, and against a backdrop of indifferent acquiescence of Old Families and the traditional military. All four factions have their eyes on other prizes. None see what he’s really doing, how far up the pole he climbs. The fools, the bloody fools!
As he removes key opponents he appoints his own people in their place. He has lists inside lists, that he pulls out of a floor safe. He compiled them over ten years, since he first met Pyotr, and ostensibly in his behalf. Always, his own plans lie hidden beneath the surface script. He arrests and appoints in the same action, at the same time, clearing out enemies even as he installs cronies who know that their careers and family fortunes depend solely on his whim and will. In public, they say they serve the state. In secret, they fawn before only him. Speaking in private to a constantly
nodding but mostly uncomprehending Albert Naujock, he calls this massive reshaping of the Imperium state on world after world, “getting them in line.” In line for what, he doesn’t reveal to the hitman. Naujock couldn’t follow his logic in any case.
Takeshi assures top military leaders that he knows little of strategy and abjures playing any role in it; that he’ll be content to leave the war in their capable hands. But he warns them that not all colleagues in Rikugun and Kaigun can be trusted, that there are younger men who covet their braid or their battalions, their ships and governorships, or newly gained estates and ancient family sinecures. He gives them a list of names, mid-level officers of capability whom he knows despise him and want him dead. High Command hands them over, bound and silenced. They're secretly tried in unbound Honor Courts set up under Pyotr and still controlled by Takeshi. The deal with the brass is that the bodies of their dead junior colleagues must disappear without mention or trace. Everyone starts making murder lists.
Top commanders who abet this first killing wave are second rate, but of course they don’t know that about themselves. They tolerate lowborn Takeshi, convinced that a single, seemingly isolated, man is not a threat to their talents or positions. And so, supposed traitors whose names he gives them for arrest are condemned in secret courts he controls. And so, the arrogant asses in the High Command relax their guard, while below rise new men loyal to Takeshi. Not to the new emperor, not to the Imperium, not to them. One stars and two stars, lots of colonels and promotable majors, ease into deserted higher ranks and command chairs at the second or third level, vacated by purged superiors. Then they lie still, waiting. They’re Takeshi’s serpent children, hatched by a hydra. In time, they’ll act on his orders to arrest or kill the highest ranking military putschists. They’ll shed their false skins and swell into their proper places at the top of his system. One enemy and obstacle to supreme power down. Three to go. The bloody fools!
***
Headmen of Old Families pay little attention to military affairs. Their sole interest is to keep their estates and dāsa, and all their privileges. They thought war would do it, so they backed Pyotr for five years of military buildup and five more of war, dating to the start of the Krevan War. Now they want a return to peace, if that’s what’s needed to keep them in their rightful place. What does it matter how many hundreds of millions of the lower orders died in Pyotr’s war? What does it matter that their deaths, their mothers and fathers, will be betrayed by a peace that returns all to the status quo ante bellum? They are who they are and where they are, on top of the worlds. To everything there is a season, for every Old Family, there is an appointed high place in the Natural Order. They say over lingering evening meals, in marriage negotiations, or on a sport hunt on one of their huge country estates, that it doesn’t matter who sits on the Jade Throne as long as traditional society stays intact. They don’t understand how much war has changed this calculation, or that Takeshi has their demise already planned out. Or that most of them shall willingly and eagerly help him do it.
Neither of his other partners in the cabal will descend to manage day-to-day and too grubby internal state affairs. They have their eyes on more lofty prizes. Plotters in the Broderbund are thinking of the millenarian future they’re about to usher in when they proclaim his godhead to all Orion. SAC and the Sakura-kai are focused on taking control of the war away from the officer corps, to get ahold of Amasia with one all out offensive drive and begin Purification.
They only care that he doesn’t demand the center in a precarious partnership, which each party is planning to dissolve with assassinations and acid in the face. They think that they’ll surround him with themselves, and are just as overconfident as the brash brass in Rikugun and Kaigun that they can contain, constrict, and control him, now that his patron Pyotr Shaka is dead. All believe he’s playing right into their hands. The fools, the damn fools!
They need him.
They rely on him.
They fear him.
They don’t trust him.
They don’t like him.
Above all other things,
they underestimate him.
***
He’s a step ahead, as they misread and misunderstand his tactics. Mobs shout up approval from the tiles of the Jade Square that lies below a stiff balcony that juts from the front of the Waldstätte Palast. Full of ego and too eager for power, his coconspirators stand up and wave back, not understanding that it’s better not to be out front in a tyrannicide. They don’t see that murder always leaves a stain. That the murder of a sovereign, however unloved, is a crime that disqualifies any man seen to be the agent of regicide. They soak in the adulation, thinking that it will last forever. Takeshi stands aside, watching the crowds, waiting, plotting.
When the cheering stops he softly hints, without quite saying, that he regrets weakening the monarchy. He tells the generals that Grünen must come together under Emperor Friedrich and their leadership, to prosecute the war. He tells Old Families he supports no changes in social policy. He asks Maximilian Kahn to order the Brethren to be patient, that as the Prophesy Incarnate he’ll know and say when the perfect moment comes to elevate him to godhead, in an orgy of blood and prayer. He warns SAC’s leaders and the harder Purity ideologues in Sakura-kai to sharpen their best knives, that all clone cowls must die before the genetic revolution and Amasia can be secured and Purification may begin.
Mutual hated among all four factions is so great, and his position so clearly isolated, he’s insulated from discovery of his serial betrayals. The only hint that he’s moving against them all is a faint odor that’s with him all the time now, of copper and nitric acid. He learned much from years at Pyotr’s side discussing Jahandar, but more by studying an emperor’s slow rebellion against the wisdom of his mother, the Dowager. Mary Oetkert understood what her son did not, or at least never accepted for himself. She knew that balance by division of others in the Imperium is the only way for a single family, or for one man, to rule an inherently and inevitably unstable empire. Almost as if he’s now playing the murdered mother against the murderer son, he waits for fellow plotters to divide as they must. He watches for them to make hasty mistakes he knows they will.
Vain, ideological men.
Dazzled, theocratic men.
Narrow, conservative men.
Arrogant, Old Family men.
All of them, soon to be dead men.
Takeshi’s agents in the police and the streets ensure rumors spread among ordinary folk, that the push for Pyotr’s murder came from Maximilian Kahn. It’s easy to sell, since Brethren killed Oetkerts for 1,500 years and Kahn boasts daily to his followers of his role in Pyotr’s death. Then there’s the vid of Kahn stabbing Pyotr again and again, made when Takeshi signaled Naujock to turn the cameras back on after he impaled Pyotr on Shaka Zulu’s iklwa. Broadcast over the memex, the sight of a wizened high priest of the Black Faith murdering an emperor inside the Jade Court, and doing it with brutal glee in his face, doing it by savage stabbing and not with holy green silk cords, sends chills of memory across the stars. Billions fear an old scourge has returned, and turn to Takeshi to save them. No one outside the doomed Brethren know that they think he is Arahitogami, or that Maximilian Kahn killed Pyotr to vacate the throne for him.
The High Council is enthralled with him, while lesser Brethren are too eager to reclaim and resettle old commanderies. They’re too concerned with enforcing unsustainable claims that date to before the Red Purge by Queen Mary Oetkert Yet they’re too few on the ground to make this premature move.. They fall back into old ways that can’t be sustained in wartime. They pull lashes from beneath their robes, whipping and expelling squatters from their old commanderies. Then then call on Fates and Terra Deus to send dāsa to repopulate slave holdings, and to clone more mother-wives to fill their beds and give the Order tens of millions more bastard sons to hold its offworld claims by force of arms, if necessary. Other cowls are dazzled by fanatic belief in prophesy. They th
ink that they’re preparing for the Arahitogami and a New Era of Broderbund Sacred Rule. After Pyotr died, ordinary Brethren were told by Kahn and the High Council, “he’s coming soon.”
SAC’s Curia is too busy settling scores with the military elite, which is too busy defending itself while it waits for Takeshi to give the word that the moment is nigh to wipe out the gray men. Brethren and SAC are watching each other. Old Families argue over how to divvy up huge estates on the conquered worlds. Not enough eyes follow Takeshi’s movements, or see that his hand pulls every string.
***
“Monks and mice,” he teases his sole, uncomprehending confidant, Gunsō Naujock. “You’ve dealt with both groups. What do you think of them?”
“Ah hades bode ah dem.”
“They’ll act exactly as I predict.”
“Gud! Bud wy dad twu?”
“They can’t help themselves.”
They're meeting in a secure room ten stories below the Jade Court. Takeshi had it built while Pyotr still lived, to ensure sealed communications, he said. And fair enough: it was the room that made possible broadcast of the lion vid that stopped Fidan Onur’s coup d’état. He’s made a few comfort adjustments since. Like adding a big brass spittoon to accommodate his vulgar but frequent visitor.
“It’s the patient nature of cowls to misread what they think is a god’s word, to imagine that celestial destiny is revealed in the mystic maps they made of the indifferent movement of the stars over millennia.”
“Huh?” Phissshh, clang!
“They see this fulcrum moment as the divinely anointed hour, the crux and holy instant in godly spacetime they’ve long prayed for and prophesied, waited for and longed for over six millennia.”