by Kali Altsoba
Genèvens see it differently. They tell their children and grandchildren that the day will come when they’ll tear down the Arch and beat the brass of the Magni Gloriosa into a simple scoop. That they’ll use the bucket to dig a mass grave in which to bury every Grün soldier and apparatchik who dares to stay on Genève. In the meantime, in private they call the water-filled crater that hosts Memorial Arch Island by a secret name: “Lake Constance.” They teach their children its double meaning. Already, they’ve sealed the terrible, lost “Battle of the Berm” inside a hard amber of hate and folk-memory, hung on a silver chain of hope forged at The Gauntlet.
For a select few Grünen, the Arch is a reminder of the hubris of admirals, emperors, and the corrupt Oetkert clan and system. Some here from the Imperium elite see the bell as a ringing rebuke to naval fogeyism in the Kaigun, to prewar nepotism by the regime, to corruptions at the top leading to a needless loss of Magni and several other warships. At least the disaster led Pyotr to order formal executions of three ship’s captains and one admiral, who was also a royal cousin.
Among the sceptics is a perfectly attired, supremely fit SAC officer. At the mention of loyalty to Purity, a quicksilver look of utter contempt flickers over his face. The obtuse governor doesn’t see it. Nor would he understand if he did. Takeshi Watanabe has returned to Genève to personally represent the Imperator, the only Admitted present. The rest stay at Court, wrapped around Pyotr’s power like an anaconda around a struggling ram. Or maybe a poisonous, multi-headed hydra, rival heads spying on the Tennō while plotting how to strike at him or each other.
Takeshi’s bathed in furtive, envious glances and hard stares as heavy as the Southland rain. He sits unblinking, squarely upright in the place of prime importance right behind the dais. He wears a shiny SAC general’s uniform, all-black but just as snug as his discarded colonel’s grays. He’s extremely young to be a taishō, barely across the threshold of mature Youthspan. More remarkably, and cause of all the envy, he’s the youngest ever appointee to the General Curia. Glowing on his collar is a unique service ribbon pinned there by Pyotr himself.
The other Admitted at High Court marvel that Takeshi dines with Pyotr alone, and is so intimate it’s rumored that the Tennō even kicks off his high-heels under the table and let’s his guard and mask fall in other unheard of ways. Is Takeshi highest of all Admitted? “How can that be? He’s so young! He’s a nobody, not from one of the great families that run the chaebols.”
Grünen in the next closed circle, just beyond the innermost circle of The Admitted, know only that this menacing young man was promoted to general and Personal and Special Imperial Envoy at the insistence of Pyotr. It’s rumored that they’re lovers, that Takeshi knows Pyotr’s bed. Or said with less respect after two glasses of Baku scotch or velvet Kestino gin, that he crawls on his knees under the Tennō’s blue ermine robe to pay lip service to his liege with his silver mouth and gilded tongue. How else explain his sudden rise than attribute it to Pyotr’s own?
It’s been eight months since he sent Gunsō Naujock to stir up Orion by planting corpses in the disturbed fairy regolith of the Bad Camberg moonlet. Six months since RIK landing craft scudded down to Southland and four other Krevan homeworlds. Five since he supervised Purity kill runs, overseeing quick work by Shōsa Gomez and fifty other death squads roaming the rear areas of Northland. Four since he was recalled to Kestino, pleased to leaving be “this horseshit world” but unsure what awaited him in Pyotr’s capital and Court.
A lot has changed since Takeshi last scraped Genèven blood and brains and dirt off his high black jackboots. He’s famous these days, across the whole Imperium. His face appears in GovNeb broadcasts that fawn over the High Court, and in reports about the genius of SAC High Command and Pyotr Shaka III. He’s watched now, too, by intelligence services of all the small neutrals and in the Calmar Union. In leading war news he’s seen though never heard, a lurking eminence noir of unknown purpose or motive but real if secret power. Everyone recognizes him but no one knows who he is or what he does. Least of all can they fathom how he rose so fast to so preeminent a place beside Pyotr at so young an age, and without old family ties. How he rose to wield lethal power even over them. It’s not fair. It’s not right. But it is the ancient Grün way.
Well, someone knows how, but he’s back on Kestino. He, too, has the ear of the Tennō, though no one could ever suspect him of being Pyotr’s secret lover. That’s how they accuse and explain lean, seductive, coppery Takeshi. Not this man. He’s old, bent, thin to a fault. A wizened bachelor monk of the despised and exiled Broderbund. A centenarian and scholar-priest, bastard son of a nagas slave woman, a ‘nagas-putra’ in the contempt of the old tongue and Black Faith of the Brotherhood. As are his sons. As are all Brethren. Slave-owners and slave-sons all at once, masters to their own bonded mothers far back to the first stolen zygotes and cloned generations.
He knows more about Watanabe than the Tennō does, far more than even Takeshi knows about himself. He’s not saying anything. Not yet. Confirmations must be made. There are more texts to decipher, more ancient maps to decode, more tests of the doctrine and the star charts to run and interpret. There are murders to plot and coups to set in motion before the Universe can turn over as it must. Before Takeshi Watanabe mounts the Jade Throne and the Broderbund reaps the bounty of millennia of loyalty to the Black Faith. It’s a godly plan that Maximilian Kahn holds in his skin-creased and boney hands, yet still encoded with unbreakable mysteries. It holds within a revelation just discovered in ancient scriptures that will shake Pyotr from his Jade Throne, topple the three-tiered elites of Kestino, then race to convert all Orion with holy war. “All hail Watanabe!”
Not even the highest authorities in the Curia or the Rikugun may investigate anything Takeshi does, ever consider prosecuting or harming this chosen one. His life is forever changed, and on his whim alone lives can change forever. He has immunity from everyone for everything. Except that he can be executed for anything by the one man whom he must please at all times. It’s a lethal tight-rope made of razor wire. One false step and he’ll fall, and be sliced in two.
Until then, a word or command from the new Special Envoy carries the same authority as if spoken by the Tennō himself. Including orders of summary arrest and execution of anyone not protected by the highest social position, yet foolish enough to displease the Tennō’s man. Sitting taciturn and unrevealing, he draws all eyes to his brooding presence. In the crowd, and across the military nebs and civilian memexes that later rebroadcast the ceremony. He knows it. He oozes potency and unpredictable lethality from every pore. To those nearest where he sits, pure menace is scented on the salty Southland air by a bitter nitric odor of acidic anger and metallic ambition.
The governor finishes at last and Takeshi rises. He’s far too important to linger on this backward, shit-covered, scorched world. This third-rate agro-planet, where he completed just barely enough military service to satisfy Pyotr, his nominal superiors in SAC, and himself.
Fifty minutes of suffocating boredom listening to the prating Liberation Governor and to Purity speakers, and public politics and public opinion are satisfied. A show of sanctioned sentiment about heroism and sacrifice is ready for the GovNeb. Now, he’ll go back to the Jade Court to do important things.
General Takeshi Watanabe makes the last, necessary if perfunctory farewells, then boards a sleek black private flyer to return to Toruń, thence to leave from the spaceyard to orbit and on to Kestino. He heads back to the maelstrom of High Court politics and military strategy, in the pampered Imperium style and privilege to which he’s fast becoming accustomed.
‘Pyotr has grand strategic plans beyond the Krevan worlds that have already fallen, and those beleaguered ones that are about to. I, too, have larger and deeper plans, though they’re not the same as his.’
So do many others who plot and scheme and wager on the iron dice of war and destiny tumbling across and down the wispy star systems of Orion: the Broderbund
in bitter exile in the Ordensstaat; the Special Action Commando elite and their Purity allies on Kestino and across the Imperium; grand theorists and worried politicians throughout the last Neutrals and in the Calmar Union; rising and ambitious youth at High Court who watch Takeshi furtively, thinking that they might replace him in Pyotr’s favor or in the royal bed; oldsters among The Admitted who lament that war comes too late in the arc of their lives to take full advantage, for their sons or chaebol.
Even mad, decrepit Jahandar stoops before an immense star map brooding on war. He's been traveling toward this vicious and appointed hour all his long and twisted life. He yearns to grasp the rare moment, use its sharp edge to stab all his enemies, to change the course of history and of all Orion in his own image. He will bend or break the Thousand Worlds to his iron will. He will wail with war, scream pitiless rage against the coming darkness of his due time.
The Wolf’s long red howl will be heard over all Orion soon. Already he’s loping toward the last free Krevan systems, calling to his brothers to gather in strength of the pack and join him in the kill. Look! Over there! He sinks warm, wetted fangs into the red throat of another world.
Castro
It’s late afternoon of a typically muggy tropical day in Barda on Kars, capital city of one of the twin capital worlds of the resplendent Calmar Union. Barda assaults the nose with its wild natural odors and dank, junglar mustiness. It’s air is thick with sickly-sweet plant perfumes and fainter whiffs of vegetative rot. Other than a clearing around the Military Academy, and the tops of just the tallest towers peaking out of a deep green valley bowl like young grass shoots, one would never suspect a city resided here. Let alone a metropolis sprawling along the valley floor and up its sides, stretching into an orange dawn.
Unmoving as a rock island in the midst of a spreading sargasso sea, the stern frontage of Kars Academy unconsciously reassures a bustle of millions of hurrying, sweating, self-absorbed civilians. Many hold brightly colored parasols high up against the beating orange sun overhead.
In the cool, almost chill main auditorium, Colonel Juan Castro strides briskly toward a set of nine steps leading up to a white, rounded dais at the end of a stubby walkway that projects into the Great Hall packed with frosh cadets waiting to hear the famous curmudgeon of Kars.
He’s in his fifth decade as professor-cum-artillery-instructor, pounding ancient tactics into officer cadets then leading them out to firing pits to pound plasma at a range of distant hills. As he crossed the quad to reach the Hall, he thought: ‘Those hills are more squat, shorter and flatter than when I sat for my first lecture as a frosh, 56 years ago today.’ Decapitated peaks are hazy with humidity, but shorn of jungle cover by the low-charge practice shells shot at them by his students and for generations before that. They look for all the worlds like a row of angry bald men glaring back at the small boys who torment them with pea shooters, then run away.
He feels every one of his nearly sixty years on Kars. On some days more than others. ‘I’m definitely middle-aged,’ he thinks, ruefully. ‘Maybe two decades of useful service is all I have left before the Army looks to retire me, even from teaching. But that’s only if we keep the peace. Things are about to get sparky for men of my profession, and for this next generation.’
He reaches the dais with minimum effort, taking the nine steps with three bold up-strides. He surveys the new class of cadets, not yet hushing their excited whispering about him. In his 20th year leading the top military school in the Union he fits the job just as his trim athletic build fits his taut Calmar Army uniform. Perfectly.
Otherwise, his career has been unspectacular, as is normal in a peacetime military. He rose slowly at the usual crawl, paying close attention to detail and duty and discipline until he made Academy Commandant. That’s all he ever really wanted. ‘I could give a fig for a general’s star or off-Kars command. It’s just endless rounds of drill and dreary oversight of listless troops on a bored frontier planet, surrounded by dullards and provincials who invite you over for tea.’
Unlike some, he certainly never hoped for war to fast-track his military career. He prefers his craggy war studies and artifacts, his woody professor’s chambers and time spent with some of the brightest students the Calmar Union can send him. For the ACU picks its cadets from 868.3 billion citizens on 217 member worlds. He has never been disappointed by cadet quality.
The sky hue of his tunic is trimmed only at the wrists by double-white stripes. On either side of his hard collar are diamond colonel’s insignia. A rectangle e-ribbon resides over his left breast. It’s for service, not combat: his army has been at peace for 300 years. All his creases are rigidly edged. His trousers look as sharp as a commando’s blade as he slices across campus, cutting through the strongest winds without once “losing his starch.” There’s an open wager entering its 41st year about how his tailor holds the knife cut. It’s a handsome sum, stuffed in a spent plasma shell in the Faculty Lounge. Rumor is there are three more shell casings in storage.
Except for the ribbon and creases his look is spartan. Understated to the point of being boastfully severe, in contrast to the rest of the gaudily attired faculty. Other officers sport gold or silver bars, oak or anchor or moon clusters atop varying combinations of blue-and-white ACU tunics and trousers. There’s Army here of course, but also Navy, Home Defense, Military Police, Intelligence, and guest lecturers in bright colored uniforms from a half dozen Neutral star states.
Some faculty are civis, to judge by sloppy dress and slumped and self-indulgent postures. They look quite shopworn, as careless in rumpled attire as in their raggedy thinking. Three are so ridiculously unkempt they seem to be wearing civilian status in a military academy as a uniform all their own, competing to live down to a stained cliché of personal indiscipline and indifference to sartorial or military convention. In fact, they’re not so busy with or absorbed by the “life of the mind” to care less than others about appearances. They really are sloppy and lazy, and clichéd.
Stretching away from the dais is a sea of cadet gray. Three thousand youths holding soft kepis stiffly in their laps, hands folded uniformly atop in the required Assembly Hall pose. On each cap is a gleaming metallic device, a small silver shield embossed with a deep blue fleur-de-lis, crowned with a scroll representing the constitution that forms the Calmar Union. Otherwise, everything they wear is slate gray right down to their underclothes, coat buttons and shoes. It’s impossible to stand out in this sea of gray puffins, which is precisely the point. Though here and there some pretty and coquettish young thing lets a blond or raven curl escape military discipline and fall over her brow, or tease down the taut back curve of a lean and carefully exposed neck.
Completing the contrast between Castro’s manner and theirs, his high status and their current lowliness, is his close-cropped and bristly hair. It’s as brilliantly white as north Amasian snow. Below his ample nose rests a huge, non-regulation indulgence of a military moustache. It’s his one affectation. His ‘stache is a wonder to smooth-faced boys and girls of 14 or 15 summers, fidgety frosh attending first assembly. Some barely sprout body hair, let alone such a magnificent anachronism. A bushy, stiffly-waxed trophy of manliness older than any four of them combined.
It comes straight from some forgotten, millennia-old image of frontier defense of the Militargrenze or Khyber Pass. From old war tales he likes to tell in history classes to explain to youths born into generations of perpetual peace that once there was something he describes as “warrior virtues” necessary to “close combat.” And what he most oddly calls “the joy of battle.”
Castro passes a flat hand over and down his face, smoothing the ‘stache in place. Then he starts a well-trodden first lecture with a warning he’s given dozens of times before. “All you hear today is highly classified, even if you already know it. If you discuss these matters with anybody except your assigned faculty adviser it will be considered a courts martial offense.”
It’s an old training trick, used
to catch and expel right at the start any foolish youth who can’t keep the simplest secret, who blurts it out to a wrong because forbidden teacher. With hard punishment of a few frosh, the ACU will impress all the others. Castro lays down the trap with the same words as always. Still, a few faculty notice there’s a new undertone of real foreboding.
His gunsight blue eyes look down at smooth faces that look up to him alone. Every one of the stiffening cadets feels his intense gaze as if caught in the lighthouse beam that cuts through the humid morning fog shrouding Barda Bay behind him. But one pretty youth in a front row so reminds him of his granddaughter he almost chokes on a gush of fast emotion rising in his throat.
His silence smothers them with authority and fear of vastly superior station, daring the bravest to free a mocking grin or a snigger, or chance drifting from his words. No one does. No one dares. This is no mere schoolmaster. He’s the scariest man they’ve ever seen. Even those in the back think they can smell the strong starch of his unforgiving creases and high standards.
“Nearly 21 centuries have passed since the first settlers from Old Earth spread gossamer light sails to catch boost assists from Sol-orbit pulsers, heading off to worlds terraformed by AI-bots along the sweeping curve of the Orion arm.” He knows they all know the founding story of Orion well enough, yet he doesn’t hurry. ‘First get them feeling comfortable, then hit them with harder truths.’ It’s his style. He’s famous for it among faculty in a hundred military academies.