Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Permission to the Green Ship is a tradition dating to the old emperors, a mutual snub by the eastern monarchies and empires of the republican Calmar Union. It was restored after the last war when Daura and the Calmar Union both fought against the Imperium, but separately and not as allies. Once Jahandar sealed off Daura the Green Ship was his only window on hundreds of farfolk systems beyond his ken or reach. For long decades they didn’t interest him or draw him outward, since they were “foreign shit” worlds. That’s about to change. For degenerate, jealous Jahandar stands with his generals at a starmap revealing Daura’s secret might and plans for war.

  ***

  Ancient imperial frontiers show on the starmap as a brown haze connecting all Daura’s border systems and claims to the west, where farfolk states are marked by different hazy halos. To the east, his frontier is not bounded. It reaches to the other side of the Orion spur, stopping where space blackens from a paucity of stars between the far side of the Orion spiral arm and the distant, gassy beginning of the long flank of the almost entirely unexplored Sagittarius arm.

  There are a few colonies out there, but they’re dark to Jahandar and the rest of Humanity. They were founded by the most fanatic of the original colonists. Light sail ‘sleepers were caught by faster ships that left decades or centuries later. Awakened in mid-journey, some refused to settle for less than their own worlds. They took fusion boosters for their ships, then soared off on new and secret vectors across the Sagittarius gap. No one knows where chance and fragile ships took them. Indifferent to Orion’s peoples, affairs and wars, they’re lost to all of us and to history.

  The star-thick south of Orion is profligate with settled star systems. They speckle the dusky nothingness to the very edge of the redwood table. There are no Dauran worlds or claimed systems there, yet Jahandar gazes southward. Does he dwell gloomily or greedily on the double-green border marking the end of his beaten down systems and the start of Grün Imperium space?

  “Foreign shits!”

  He says it aloud, though he thinks it only to himself. His retinue daren’t move. They’re waiting to hear a command so they may grovel in praise and agreement. They’ve seen him like this many times, moving in and out of awareness of the room. Though more often lately. Only a fool relaxes, for Jahandar can turn in a moment, glistening with sudden cunning, with insight and malice. Anyone caught unaware can end in an instant, by his wish or whim or misunderstanding.

  He ponders: ‘How far does Soso’s light go? He must fulfil his foretold destiny as The Jahandar, Possessor of All the Worlds! Soso needs more time!’

  Boyhood memories come creeping back into his waking mind more often these days, pouncing on him unexpectedly like a black mountain cat leaping from a low-limbed tree. Old images and bits of half-remembered literature needle his consciousness, rust his iron will, flush him with fresh waves of a fantastic paranoia. He moves between boy and man, between Soso the brutal youth gang leader and Jahandar, master of over 900 worlds and the bloodiest Tyrant of all.

  He’s drifting between myth and memory. He briefly touches reality’s shore with a paddle assist from one of Soso’s schoolboy lessons, an almost pathetically and pitiably human effort to live past death: ‘Will I be forever in ’flowing cups freshly rememb’red?’ If he goes to war as he plans, he surely will be. But will it be as a conqueror or the last Tyrant, who ended Daura itself?

  He shouts out loud, back in the present as Jahandar: “Phaah! I curse at Time and all its crumbling works! I despise all history and ruins! I defy past, present, and future. I write my own epic and it is the possession and the ending of worlds! I am the Jahandar!”

  He no longer recalls the murdered scholars he forced to retroactively foretell a fabricated destiny as all-worlds conqueror. He remembers only his defiant boast as he loomed over a Party leader who said a monster like him would be stopped by history, which had a destiny all its own: “Destiny is horseshit! I write my own. Now I write yours.” Down came his sizzling blue blade.

  There’s something else, deep at the bottom of his memory as Soso, five years old and sitting at a rough-hewn kitchen table in his mother’s cottage on Sachi. His babu believed that no one suffered like Daurans and everywhere else was better. Revolution was coming, and already the official lies were failing, especially the one that said farfolk lived in terrible poverty, unlike blessed Dauran worlds isolated by wise emperors to prevent the awful contagion spreading. She held Soso fixed that day with a strange tale about fabulously wealthy farfolk who lived forever.

  It’s stuff and nonsense, of course. With more nonsense stuffed inside for good measure. Yet his babu believed it with all her faith and being, and that made him believe it too, at age five. For nothing convinces a child of the truth of a lie like the sincerity of an adult, who believed it as a child themselves and so pass it on in wonderment. It’s the mainstay of all religion, nationalism, and ideology, the sincere lie repeated over generations until it’s accepted and venerated on faith.

  “They live forever, Soso, them rich ‘Blue Onis,’ them they call the ‘Immortals.’ Live in big houses made of gold, with gardens just for flowers they got so much food. All rimmed by silver birches.”

  “Forever, babu? They really live forever?”

  “Yes, yes! Forever and ever. They got big fish ponds wit’ fat sturgeons swimming round an’ you can reach in and grab ‘em by hand an’ have one for your supper.” On Sachi and across Daura, families like Soso’s still hunted and fished and ate live meat. It was mockmeat that was rare.

  “Every day? They eat every day?”

  “Fat fish every day! An’ fish eggs an’ eyes kept in tall jars with lids.”

  “Tell me more about the big gold houses, babu.”

  “They don’t have no mountain quakes to shake the gold houses down, an’ they’re gold, so they real strong, too. There’s lotsa rich food to eat, like pies an’ curries, spicy an’ hot. An’ huge mockmeat slabs hangin’ in every cellar, an’ hangin’ deer that’s curin’ an’ braces of coneys an’ partridges. Not purple an’ blue cabbage soup an’ black beans like we eat in poor Dambatta.”

  “I want to be a Blue Oni!”

  “They got fountains of crystal clear samogon, Soso, cool or spiced as you like it! You just bring your flask an’ fill it up an’ bring it home to papa.”

  “Truly? Papa wouldn’t hit you then.”

  “Soso!”

  “‘Cause he’d be asleep all the time. Ha!”

  “An’ we could play our games while he snores, my sweet.”

  “Are the houses really gold? The windows too? Tell me more!” So she did. Then he went to bed to dream of creeping up to a big gold house with a curved knife in his rope belt, climbing through a jeweled window to cut the throat of the immortal Blue Oni sleeping in a big gold bed. Soso sat down in his dream and ate wondrous food off silver plates he later took home to babu.

  Jahandar no longer believes his mother’s fantastic stories. Not about the gold houses or flying islands where ordinary folk holiday on warm ocean worlds. Or that everyone in western star systems gets free suspensor and is allowed to live to 130, or even to 150 or more. Unlike in Daura, where only the extraordinarily rich and powerful may stretch out their lives with drugs and transplants of printed parts. Not like poor Soso with his badly grown femur, twisted leg and hobbled life that his babu couldn’t afford to replace and his drunk papa didn’t give a damn about.

  Such a universe of possibility is beyond his ken or ability to conceive. ‘She was just an old fool, now forty years dead. Farfolk in golden houses. Ha! Shit-brick houses more likely!’ He knows that isn’t true, either. Yet only vaguely, as he senses the diseased miasma of his true lies.

  He can’t shake one hoary tale his mother told him. He thinks it might be true that farfolk have secret medicines to stretch life far beyond the 163 years he’s consumed so far, already far past normal Final Age. He gets extra suspensor treatments others do not and expects to reach 200, but already and too soon he feels
thinned. He defies a millennium of Dauran Empire law that even elite lives must end at 130, no exceptions. It was an edict ruthlessly enforced by the old regime, even against the Imperial Family. Its more harshly enforced now, with the usual means of tortures and public execution by Shishi chopping the “criminal extender,” then murdering his or her entire innocent family. It happens less often these days since there’s almost no suspensor anywhere in the Dauran Commons. Lifespans are already getting shorter, reverting to the natural.

  Jahandar takes Dauran suspensor and uses printed parts and organs to extend his life, of course. ‘I’m too important to my people to die.’ Yet he leaves his stunted, foreshortened leg as it is, to self-honor his tough boyhood as leader of the Dead Souls gang back in Dambatta. The pain keeps him more alert and vital, he thinks. The truth is, his weak short leg is too much a part of everything he’s become to repair it now. Besides, he doesn’t trust any of his doctors.

  But something’s wrong. Jahandar feels too ‘stretched,’ too close to the other side. ‘Can foreign shits extend life to 500 or 1,000 years? Do the Blue Onis live forever? Was my old babu right about their Immortals? I must know. I’ll chop them down and take all their secrets!’

  No one will tell him, but Dauran suspensor isn’t as good as “foreign shit” medicine. Its dilute and archaic formulas barely get elite lives to 130. He suspects this, but his psychoses take him leaping always straight to thoughts of conspiracy and belief in poisons in his soup.

  ‘Why have my doctors not given me immortality? They say I’m strong, Soso. They’re lying! Why do they keep the great secret from me? They want Soso to die! That’s it! Jahandar must pull and poke them, find what they hide under lies. I’ll rip immortality from their chopped hands!’ That’s just how fast and easily a hundred physicians will die in Astrana tonight.

  Stretched.

  Confused.

  Enraged.

  Lethal.

  From drones sent to scout foreign border systems, and from bribed captains of the Green Ships, he now knows something of the immensity of the rival empire to the south and the larger rival to the west. It galls him, gnaws at his cosmic vanity. ‘How are these rich worlds still denied to me?’ He asks again the old, tormenting question that has slow-burned inside him like a lump of Sachi turf fire for a decade, since his febrile mind first stirred to the possibility of making war.

  He demands of the starmap: “How many worlds has Pyotr now? How many billions?” The answer comes back in a synthetic female voice. ‘There are currently 703.7 billion Grünen living on 243 Imperium worlds, all in south Orion. Since the Krevan War began the Imperium added seven more systems with 14 worlds from the United Planets, or 16 billion new subjects.’

  As he broods, his commanders wait in strangled silence for him to tamp down the green-eyed monster climbing out his throat, choking off his reason. He gurgles and sputters and spits and mutters. He consoles himself with his favorite advice, which he taught himself decades ago on Sachi. ‘One leg, Soso, one chop at a time. Pyotr’s turn will come, in time.’

  Suddenly he speaks: “These Krevan systems Pyotr has stolen should have been my worlds, those 16 billion my souls. How dare he? I can’t wait 10 or 20 years more. I must have war now. Jahandar will fight. Daurans will fight!”

  “Does that mean we’re going to war with the Grün Imperium?”

  The sound of a voice other than his own in his starmap room jolts Jahandar. After nine decades alone in The Study, the alien voice explodes into the dark and cavernous air. Then he recognizes the voice. It’s General-Commander Röhm Krump, head of his SHISH terror police.

  Krump is thin as a vine. He’s standing in dim light slowly rubbing his hands over each other. It makes him look eerily like a praying mantis, not moving from the spot because it waits for the perfect moment to strike. His abruptly vanishing chin conceals ruthlessness behind an illusion of weakness. A thin mustache is barely there, perching on his lip like a young caterpillar leaning over the edge of a leaf. It looks uncertain if it will stay or creep out to fall into the gaping mouth and crunching mandibles that wait below.

  The sharpness of his narrow face and colorless lips is offset by a high-pitched giggle, which he seems unable to control. It escapes him unnaturally, yet with the easy embarrassment of a little girl at her first party.

  He’s one of the innermost circle, with his own power of life and death over hundreds of millions slaving on Drapchi prison moons. He dares to speak unspoken to, for he’s mistaken the boss’s escaped thoughts for intended speech, forgetting in his thrall of the starmap that the boss holds parallel conversations with himself and that sometimes words cross over and confusedly spill out. Krump better be careful. If Jahandar is embarrassed by the discovery he’ll surely lash out in spiteful rage.

  “No,” is all Jahandar means to reply but he forgets again and blurts out loud: “I’ll probe the stars with swords. Where my steel finds mush, I’ll push a sleek and clever blade snick snick into my enemies and twist, and stab and twist it again and again. In their guts I’ll find my glory.”

  ***

  No one behind Jahandar knows his intentions. Or that he’s had secret contact with Pyotr Shaka for ten years, a fact that will astonish Daurans and Grünen alike once it’s revealed outside the inner sancta of the Caesarium Selo and Waldstätte Palast. Like the gods, tyrants are never alien to each other. Yet the news will shock all their worlds, and far beyond. Orion will tremble.

  Jahandar was careful that only silent agents carried out the ultra secret talks, slipping them aboard Green Ships to carry conspiracies between the tyrant courts. After they returned to Nalchik on the next Green Ship and reported to him here in the starmap room, the couriers were all killed. Struck down at his feet by Shishi guards. Who were killed in their turn, so they could never repeat what they heard or saw of Jahandar’s plotting. After ten years of secret talks and even more secret military build-up, the first phase of the conspiracy is in motion in Krevo. Yet only a rarified handful beyond the two despots in Astrana and Novaya Uda know what’s coming.

  A year ago, for the first time, Jahandar brought his admirals and generals here to cluster before his starmap and learn of his plans for war. He had to bring them into his secret, to plan for today and what’s coming. There’ll be no hiding what happens next, even though he hates that he needs all of them to do it. Murder he can achieve alone. War is not a solitary act.

  Pyotr was almost as careful, going around official diplomatic officers to use hand-picked captains of the Green Ships as secret personal envoys. The first nine were handsomely paid then retired into gilded silence. The last one was a problem, as emerged in Pyotr’s private chambers.

  “I want 10,000 times my annual captain’s pay and elevation to a minor title, and with it a country estate on my homeworld of Tohoku. Or else.”

  “Or else what, good captain?”

  He swallowed hard, but carried through with his threat to the Tennō’s plans. “Or else I’ll tell what I know to my Kaigun superiors and also to the Rikugun High Command. And to SAC.”

  Pyotr restrained from reaching inside his blue ermine robe. He very much wanted to stab the impudent fool with his hidden degen, the holy Black Blade given to his ancestors by the High Council of the Broderbund centuries ago and carried by every Oetkert emperor and empress ever since. Instead, he promised the captain everything.

  That night, he handed a warrant to Takeshi Watanabe. He did it casually, reaching over a nice mockfish halibut to pass over the parchment. Takeshi arranged the kidnapping. He told his toad Albert Naujock to truss the captain as one of the “special packages” to be delivered to Bad Camberg. It was his mercenary gunsō who carried out the secret op that started the Krevan War.

  He added: “Leave him there with the others, only minus his face. We don’t want him recognized by his family or the Green Ship crew when you make the military neb broadcast.” It was a risky move that perfectly fit Takeshi’s dark sense of humor. Albert Naujock liked it, too. Pyotr
was less amused when he learned of it later, but his war was properly started so he forgave.

  ***

  Jahandar’s eyes move over the south-center of the map, settling on an orange haze of nearly 1,000 suns. It’s the Helvetic Association, 18 billion souls spread over 27 smallish worlds along the Imperium border. Underpopulated but technically advanced and well-armed and defended. Their orb is similar to a purple amoeba-haze. The Three or ‘Iron’ Kingdoms is a constitutional union of three modest royal houses and 40 billion people on 34 inhabited worlds.

  He doesn’t linger over these middling Neutrals, dismissing their weakness. ‘Mere mice, of no importance except as food for cats. One enemy, one chop. That’s how to move, until all Soso’s enemies are chopped to bits. I will fulfil prophesy. I will be Possessor of All the Worlds.’