Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  For now, no one pays him the slightest attention. The PM has stepped out of the room for a reason he explains to no one. Most of the others are drinking dark coffees while smoking steel pipes or draw sticks. Some are already snacking on sweetmeats laid out on a side table, smacking noisily on baklava or sticky-sweet rasgulla and bright orange jalebi pretzels. ‘Where’s the PM?’

  Sanjay smells the sharp spices and fruity desserts, even through the thick blue cloud of perfumed, nutmeg smoke rising over Briand’s head. It circles the Briefing Room before coming back and down on top of Sanjay, making him sneeze. Its almost as if the Defense Minister has a tiny private jetstream he can direct around the room at will to becloud and irritate his opponents.

  A stern four-star, the Director of Armaments Major-General Gaspard LeClerc, sits erect between Georges Briand and Admiral Gaétan Maçon, Chief of Staff of the JCS. LeClerc is here as principal advisor on military budgets, research and procurement. Sanjay knows him only by reputation, as an infamous hard-ass no one quite likes, except Briand. ‘Peas in a pod, those two.’

  Admiral Maçon has been spying on his own civilian head of political intel at the Hornet’s Nest for the better part of a year. “It’s always necessary and often far more useful to spy on your own top spies,” the Blue Hammer told Leclerc a few months back, before his old friend left for Argos. He had a sparkle in his clear blue eyes like sunlight glinting off a tropical lagoon. “It’s the best way to find out what your closest enemies are really thinking.”

  Sanjay ostentatiously smooths his vidscroll into a perfect rectangle and sighs quietly, waiting to speak. He looks around the room, meaningfully. Still nothing. No one pays him any attention as all eyes shift to the prime minister, just returned and looking unusually pleased with himself.

  ‘Where was he? Why does he look so smug?’

  No one notices except Briand, who looks at and through Sanjay. He coughs, not so quietly, to win the regard of the assembly. He coughs again, then a third time, quite loudly. Still nothing but chatter and cakes and smoke that makes him sneeze. Then a single, highly-provoking gesture from Briand gets the Very Important Personages to quiet, sit down and look to Sanjay.

  He begins his brief with a crisply professional summation of “just the facts.” He always thinks his little notes and personal interpretations represent hard facts. He never imagines that political and strategic facts are invariably shaped by presumptions and biases of the intelligence officers who sort and choose them. It’s a basic error, but not why Sanjay stumbles so badly.

  He’s reiterating bland official assurances about Grün intentions that even CIS Combine no longer believes, not given the huge military build-up known to be underway on Kestino and across at least a hundred Imperium worlds. Briand’s drill-bore stare unsettles him, pricks at his vanity and poise and prose, until he makes a grave, nervous mistake. He pronounces an opinion.

  “Recent incursions by Kaigun warships into our space have taken place in hot pursuit of Krevan refugee ships.” He pointedly declines to use the term Exodus. “Incursions have increased in the last three months, but it is my strong view that they are tolerable errors for which individual ship commanders have always apologized. Under these circumstances, CIS recommends...”

  He’s stopped by an impatient gesture from LeClerc, now out-of-the-policy-closet as an open member of the War Hawks faction. Sanjay sniffs a sudden and odd whiff of burnt and bitter almond as he turns to face the general.

  “If I may be permitted to fin...”

  LeClerc rudely interrupts. “If what you say is true why does CIS also report 16 incidents in the past month where no Exodus ships were near, yet Kaigun warships crossed the border into our sovereign space?”

  “Kaigun liaison to MoD says these were simple navigation errors. At CIS, we think… ”

  “Navigation errors? Sixteen of them in a month? I had no idea that Kaigun daisas are so incompetent. Admiral Maçon, are they?”

  “By no means, general.”

  “Can you explain to our prim civilian friend why they’re crossing the borders, admiral?

  “Mr. Pradip, I don’t believe you ever wore the uniform, no? So let me explain. These are probes of our frontier systems, scouting missions in fact.”

  “That is not what we… ”

  “Surely it’s clear even to civilians in the Hornet’s Nest that the Kaigun is sending them over the border to provoke a military response, to get our patrols and escorts to chase in order to assess system readiness and perimeter defenses.”

  “Well, I just don’t know… ”

  Sanjay is not a military man and is flustered by the question. He braced for a direct and frontal assault from Briand but is outflanked by LeClerc and Maçon. He’s not used to crisis-briefs or to such blunt you-are-on-the-spot-now questions, let alone a tough grilling by a gruff ACU general playing the part of a prosecutor demanding facts and clear-and-concise testimony. Then rejecting his facts out of hand, and not even letting him finish! It’s really quite upsetting.

  Sanjay’s smoothly successful career has spanned decades of peace. He spent it making private presentations to senior politicians about matters that seemed vital to him and them at the time, only to fade away later into dusty nothings. It’s been a fine career to fit a cautious man who fences with words, and builds fences from words. He prefers to work behind sealed doors, in secure rooms filled with like-minded people. He prefers backchannels where a raised eyebrow and whispered counsel over hot tea carries weight and impresses, leading to drinks and honors.

  Yet here he is sitting in the Briefing Room with the Joint Cabinet and heads of military and intelligence organs of the Calmar Union staring at him, parsing his every word. In the midst of the gravest interstellar crisis since the end of the Third Orion War three centuries ago. He’s in real danger of finding his prideful life and solid career about to disappear as an afterimage on a failing vidscroll, so fatally damaged it must be rolled up and discarded. Pointless and forgotten.

  He doesn’t know it yet, and can’t imagine that his minute has already come and gone. That he missed the key moment of his life, thinking about tea and biscuits. That he’s already moving in the rearview mirror of what truly matters in Orion. How can that be so, when he’s right here in this important room with all these Very Important Personages listening to him? But it is so.

  “We can’t confirm the exact nature of the phantom incursions. We’re still investigating all border incidents and assessing the field reports. I have personally read two dozen.” He thinks this should impress LeClerc. After all, he’s been coming in to work early, and he’s here on stinky Kars, is he not?

  “I anticipate that we’ll have a complete judgment ready for the Joint Cabinet in a week. Or maybe two. These things take time if one wishes them done right.”

  LeClerc glares hard at Sanjay from beneath an impressive set of thick gray eyebrows not properly trimmed or even brushed in over ten years. They’re so bushy they meet in the middle when he frowns, forming a defensive ridge above his nose. Juan Castro once said of LeClerc’s famous eyebrows, “they look like a stone-gray rampart erected by your Huguenot ancestors of yore, where they stand firing steel crossbows into futility and the French.”

  “A week is a long time in politics,” LeClerc says gruffly. “And it’s a helluva lot longer in war.”

  “We’re not at war, general. Surely no one around this table hopes that we will be at war in a week or a month or a year.” It’s the prime minister, interjecting in defense of his secret and backchannel source inside MoD, simultaneously taking a swipe at the War Hawks in the room.

  Buoyed by the PM's unexpected intervention and thinking that he’s finding his footing and professional composure, Sanjay adds: “Confidentially, I can tell the Joint Cabinet that CIS believes these are all examples of excessive zeal by single ships’ captains. The fact that each time the offending phantom ended up near one of our bases is, well … circumstantial, at best.”

  “Excessive ze
al? Circumstantial?” LeClerc is incredulous.

  “Yes, general. Not a definitive pattern, at least not one of aggression. Not a pattern we in the intelligence community deem statistically meaningful.”

  LeClerc thinks: ‘This jumped-up little man lives in an irony-free zone!’ He looks a dagger at the prime minister and two at Sanjay. “You know, some circumstantial evidence is definitive. Like when you find a trout in the milk, as an old proverb puts it on my homeworld, Jocasta.”

  “Or a phantom lurking inside one’s star port net.” It’s Admiral Maçon, coming to the assistance of his friend and co-conspirator in the War Hawks.

  Sanjay is quite disturbed by the image of an unexplained fish appearing on his breakfast table, in his warm milk. But not dissuaded. “Yes, circumstantial. And also understandable… “

  “Understandable?!”

  “… given the high emotion of their war with Krevo.” His heart is pounding, but he has no choice: he must plough through his prepared notes. “We at CIS don’t believe any one incursion represents official policy of the Imperium. Together, these overzealous incidents pose no systematic threat to our border security, let alone to our territorial integrity or sovereignty.”

  Even he knows he just lost the round, and maybe the fight. What he doesn’t know is that Maçon receives reports directly from Pradip’s own CIS agents, who vehemently disagree with their flaccid director and are routinely going over his head as well as behind his back. Contorting yes, but moving key information past his blocking actions and up the key chain of command.

  LeClerc knows. He doesn’t look pleased, but holds his piece. He’s had experience with petty career types like Sanjay. Besides, he achieved his greater aim. The whole Joint Cabinet now knows what was highly classified until a few minutes ago, that Kaigun warships are routinely violating Calmari space and scouting over the frontiers. They’re not just crossing to hot-chase escaping Exodus ships as CIS, SGR and the PM all told the cabinet. The lie is exposed.

  ‘Let the Joint Cabinet deal with it. Even if the prime minister and his backchannel toady in CIS won’t.’ LeClerc also knows about Sanjay’s behind-the-scenes moves with the PM, though not all of them. Not the most important. Not the one that will soon rock the room.

  Sanjay slumps down in his deep mockleather chair, losing himself in stuffy umbrage at being interrupted and grilled and questioned like he’s some rookie agent. He flies to thoughts of sipping a steaming cup of oolong tea, harrumphing silently. ‘You’d think one could get a decent cup on a tropical planet famous for growing the stuff, but no.’ It’s hard, leading from behind.

  Most people brush right past the unprepossessing Sanjay Pradip in a crowd. Not so the immensely famous Director of SGR Political Intelligence, Virgiliu Nicolescu, who steps in to finish the brief with but a curt nod to Sanjay. Everyone notices him, clears out of his way or stops to gape. For he’s the most famous person on Kars. Even beyond Kars, he’s the most famous personage across all the Calmari worlds, except for the prime minister himself and a few airy but swiftly forgotten celebrities of the current hour who strut and preen on the memexes for a day or month or a year.

  Even there Virgiliu competes for notice as a master of huff-puffery. His more-than-ample visage mouths soft, solacing slogans every night on the memexes, sounding words out with big round vowels from collagen-enhanced and dyed-blue lips. His nightly presence provides the public assurance about the crisis with the Grün Imperium. His doe-like, soft round eyes, one colored red and other blue according to the latest high-fashion, say to one-and-all without his even speaking: ‘Relax. The matter is in good hands. You needn’t worry when a great talent such as I am on the job.’

  What he actually says is: “This latest crisis will pass, as have all the others I have dealt with over my long career. Negotiations are underway. I am not at liberty to discuss, of course.” He says that ordinary folks shouldn’t worry, and to “just go about your lives.” That Very Important Personages are working on “a solution that will bring peace for our time to all Orion. So continue your daily business, then go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

  He calms and consoles, mollifies and assures, lies and fools and dulls doubts. It’s exactly what the Joint Cabinet wants. Or most of it, or it seemed to until today. This morning something is different. A restlessness is in the air and Briefing Room. And something else, also on the air.

  It’s flowers, and not a scent wafting in from the streets and canopy of Barda. It’s coming from Virgiliu, who always smells of the sweetest perfumes. Oddly for such a very fat man, the Director gives off a gentle, almost clean and floral scent. Well he should. He pays a great deal of attention to his perfume collection, and pays a very great deal for it. It’s a mark of pride that he always smells different. He likes to surprise, wearing a new scent each day, forcing subordinates to play a guessing game about its content and origin. His exquisite collection of haute parfumerie isn’t all exactly legal: even banned or blockaded, he buys it from across the Thousand Worlds.

  Well, not from Daura. Those systems have been closed to the luxury trades for decades. With one exception. In his collection he has a single, small bottle of the rarest perfume in Orion, a simple rosewater, one of only three known survivors of the disaster at Setubal. Otherwise, little glass bottles arrive by special couriers from everywhere else, colored robin’s egg blue or rosette or violent green, in canary yellow and turquoise. Even orchid black. He keeps them all in a large walk-in closet, rack-upon-rack of thousands of expensive scents from every mountainside or glen or tropical glade where flowers are hand-picked and crushed, then glassed and shipped offworld.

  For decades Virgiliu has breathed in secret information and exhaled wise counsel and aplomb from inside a cloud of rosewater or cucumber or tangerine or crushed edelweiss or white poppy. He’s counted on by everyone who counts to know all the relevant facts, which facts are relevant, and why and when and how. What he doesn’t know is deemed unimportant, by himself and most others. All on his own, he’s a good part of the total mass of vanity in the Thousand Worlds.

  The Director’s every error over a 60-year career is quickly forgiven and forgotten. He’s consulted by all politicians and statesmen before they consider making Urgent and Very Important Speeches. He’s cited as the ultimate authority on security matters by Very Informed Commentators, who merely read other people’s notes into the memex. He’s quoted at top parties and galleria by Very Successful People, for whom borrowing someone else’s opinion is always easier and safer than lending out their own, especially on rare occasions when they actually have one. Such wide respect and fame is a remarkable accomplishment for a supposedly secret spymaster.

  Juan Castro, who has a rare talent for summing up any personality with an archaic phrase or quotation or image, such as warrior LeClerc’s ancestral rampart eyebrows, once said of Virgiliu Nicolescu that “he wears his fame like a river. How did the poet put it? Oh yes: ‘bearing up things that are light and swollen, drowning things more weighty and solid.’ That’s our Virgiliu.”

  A supremely composed and utterly secure presence, he’s a political and intellectual titan and hero to Very Great Personages sitting in the Joint Cabinet and board rooms of the twin capitals. Especially the prime minister, ever since they met as graduate students at Government University on Caspia.

  “You know, he was mistaken once or twice in the past,” a worried Chancellor of the Exchequer whispered cautiously but urgently to the PM just before the Joint Cabinet convened.

  “Yes, but in the best possible way,” was the quixotic comfort she got back from Robert Hoare. “Besides,” she was quickly assured, “he comes from precisely the right sort of family. He’s one of us, you know. Excellent stock. Top drawer parents and exactly the right education.”

  It has always been thus. Virgiliu eased a path among chattering and political classes with the natural grace of a first-rate personality, sublimely unaware that he was a middling talent who charmed and impressed fellow mediocritie
s. He got away with it because his career was spent in the thick, forgiving atmosphere of peacetime politics. Now he’s flying higher, maybe into war. Engaging more vital matters than any time in his career. With the air under his wings thinning to nothingness at these altitudes, he has a long way to fall.

  During the past year of secret and open diplomatic wrangling with the Imperium Ambassador, Virgiliu has affirmed the PM’s abiding confidence in peace and in conciliation of the Tennō at almost any price. His political stock is soaring in this crisis, evermore so as war seems more likely. There’s even backdoor chatter that he’ll be Robert Hoare’s hand-picked successor as the next PM. Yes, OK, he’s the one who started the rumor. But it’s being spread by his many allies in government and at the very best parties hosted by Very Impressive Celebrities from all across high society.

  When the crisis deepened with the Krevan War, each day Virgiliu brought forth fresh news from the day before about what would not happen tomorrow. His equanimeous career, his hauteur and commendations, are stolid comfort to anyone worried about the durability of the Long Peace. Even now he reassures that the Calmar Union is unassailable and that the Peace of Orion is an unchallengeable interstellar reality, “part of the natural order of the spiral arm.”