Death in battle. Suicide. Flight. Surrender.
Out of these four, which should they choose?
Those who decided on either of the first two had the least to worry about. They were all preparing in their individual ways for courageous but futile deaths. It was those who had decided to choose life who were launching out into great seas of doubt.
“Even if we announce our surrender,” someone said, “will the golden brat—will Marquis von Lohengramm—accept it? We’re in completely uncharted waters now.”
“You’re right,” said another. “It’s doubtful he will if we go to him empty-handed. But if we bring him a gift …”
“A gift?”
“I mean von Braunschweig’s head.”
The speakers fell silent, and their eyes darted all around. Their guilty consciences naturally had them half-expecting to find guards listening nearby.
Already, the suicides were beginning. The first were the elderly aristocrats and those who had already lost their sons in this civil war. Some of them simply gave up on everything and drank poison, while others did as the ancient Romans and slit their wrists while spewing hatred and epithets against Reinhard.
With each new suicide, the survivors’ feeling of being in free fall intensified.
Duke von Braunschweig was drowning in liquor. Though he had no way of knowing it, this was remarkably similar to how Marquis von Littenheim had spent his final day. Duke von Braunschweig had stirred up his fighting spirit, however, shouting that he would kill “that upstart golden brat and make a goblet from his skull.” Sensible people frowned worriedly and grew all the more pessimistic about where this all was headed.
It was the young aristocrats, Baron Flegel chief among them, who had still not given up on fighting their way out of this. In particular, one segment of this group remained outrageously optimistic.
“All we need to do is fight one battle and take the golden brat’s head,” Flegel argued. “Do that, and we change history—and at the same time make amends for all our past defeats. We have to take the battle to them one last time. There’s no other way.”
With these words, Baron Flegel persuaded Duke von Braunschweig over drinks, then set about having their remaining vessels repaired and readied for a decisive charge that would breathe new life into the aristocracy.
When Reinhard saw the first of the secured messages delivered to him on his flagship, the young imperial marshal smiled just a little.
“Oh? A letter from Fräulein von Mariendorf?”
Hilda—Hildegard von Mariendorf. Reinhard recalled with pleasure the sparkle of her eyes, rich with intellect and life. After placing the chip in the player, he was addressed by the crisp, clear image of Count von Mariendorf’s daughter.
Hilda’s letter, or most of it anyway, concerned the activity or lack thereof of various pro-Reinhard nobles and bureaucrats on Odin. It was not unlike a report document in that regard. What caught Reinhard’s attention, however, was the part where she spoke of Duke Lichtenlade, the acting imperial prime minister.
“His Excellency is conducting a review of the government as a whole right now. At the same time, he’s been very busy running back and forth between aristocrats in the capital. It would appear he has some grand scheme in mind.”
There was a hint of sarcasm to Hilda’s words—to the tilt of her smile—and there was also something deadly serious there as well. She was sending Reinhard a warning.
“That old fox,” Reinhard muttered. “It sounds like he’s getting ready to stab me in the back.”
Reinhard smiled coldly as the face of that seventy-six-year-old elder statesman appeared in the back of his mind: the harsh gaze, the sharply pointed nose, the hair like new-fallen snow. Reinhard had readied plans of his own for the scheming minister, though now those might need to be accelerated. The old man had both the emperor and the imperial seal under his thumb. A scrap of paper was all he would need to legally rob Reinhard of his position.
Reinhard shuffled through the rest of his letters, ignoring the second through the sixth and at last selecting the seventh. It was from his sister Annerose.
After asking about his health and offering words of concern and admonition, Annerose ended her letter in this way:
“Please don’t ever forget what’s most important for you. Sometimes you might think it’s a bother, but it’s much better to recognize and appreciate something while you still have it than live with regrets when it’s gone. Talk everything over with Sieg, and listen to what he tells you. Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m looking forward to your coming home. Auf wiedersehen.”
Lost in thought, Reinhard touched his finely shaped chin with supple fingers. He played the chip a second time.
Was it just his imagination, or had a shade of gloom crept into his sweet sister’s lovely face? Even so, in the state he was in, Reinhard felt more irritated than appreciative at being told to consult Siegfried Kircheis about everything. Does she think he makes better decisions than I do? Unbidden, the slaughter on Westerland flashed through his mind, further souring Reinhard’s mood. Maybe Kircheis does make better choices. But it wasn’t like I did that because I wanted to. There was sufficient reason. Ever since Westerland, Duke von Braunschweig had completely lost the hearts of the people. And with all the uprisings and troop defections taking place in the wake of the massacre, the war was now shaping up to end much sooner than initial projections. If you totaled all the numbers, wasn’t this a boon to the citizenry at large? Kircheis was too narrowly focused on ideals that didn’t work in the real world; it was making him slip into a kind of formulaic moralism.
One other thing was bothering Reinhard, though—nowhere in that message had Annerose said anything along the lines of “give my best to Sieg.” Did that mean she had sent a separate letter to Kircheis? If so, what had she said to him? Reinhard wanted to know, but given his strangely awkward feelings about Kircheis right now, he just couldn’t broach the matter.
Reinhard could criticize Kircheis until he was blue in the face, but let von Oberstein try it, and Reinhard would take up for his redheaded friend every time.
“Even if the whole universe turned against me, Kircheis would stand by my side. He always has. And that’s why I’ve always rewarded him. What’s wrong with that?”
To Reinhard’s heated words, the chief of staff replied coolly, “Your Excellency, by no means am I suggesting you purge or exile Admiral Kircheis. I’m simply offering a word of caution—that you should treat him the same as you do von Reuentahl, Mittermeier, and the others. Treat him as a subordinate. The organization does not need a number two. Such a person is sure to prove harmful—the competent in his own way, and the fool in his. There should not be anyone who can function as a substitute for the men’s loyalty to the number one.”
“I understand,” Reinhard spat back. “That’s enough. Stop badgering me about this.” What irritated Reinhard the most was that von Oberstein’s argument, as a piece of logic, was sound. Be that as it may, why did that man’s words, in spite of their correctness, fail so thoroughly to make an impression?
Mittermeier had come to von Reuentahl’s cabin, and the two of them were enjoying a game of poker. A pot of coffee had been set out on the table in preparation for the long war ahead.
“I get the feeling something isn’t right between Marquis von Lohengramm and Kircheis,” said Mittermeier, at which there appeared a bright gleam in von Reuentahl’s mismatched eyes. “You don’t think that story is—”
“It’s still a rumor,” said von Reuentahl, “at least for now.”
“Even if it is, that’s a dangerous thing to have circulating.”
“Extremely dangerous. I wonder if there’s anything we can do about it.”
“It’s a delicate problem. If there’s nothing to it, it could be the work of some enemy trying to discredit His Excellency. But if it does check out, that
’s when things get incredibly rough. Either way, we’re not going to be able to stay out of this one.”
“That said,” von Reuentahl responded, “if we act rashly, we could end up turning a little brush fire into a raging inferno.”
The two of them looked at their cards. Both discarded three apiece, then drew. Next to speak was von Reuentahl.
“This has been bothering me for some time now, but our chief of staff seems worried about Marquis von Lohengramm being so close to Kircheis—in his personal as well as public life. It’s that idea of his that a number two is harmful. Theoretically, he has a point, but …”
“Von Oberstein?” There was little affection in Mittermeier’s voice. “He’s a clever man. I’ll give him that. But he’s got a bad habit of stirring up trouble when there wasn’t any before. Things have gone well so far, so why force a change just because something doesn’t fit a theory? Especially when it’s human relationships we’re talking about.”
Mittermeier looked at his cards, and the tense line of his mouth softened.
“Four jacks. Looks like tomorrow’s wine is on you.”
“I’ve got four of a kind myself,” the heterochromiac replied with a mean little smile. “Three queens and a joker. Too bad, Mister Gale Wolf.”
“Crap,” Mittermeier said, tossing his cards down on the table. Just then, an alarm began to sound. An enemy sortie had just launched from Gaiesburg Fortress.
Young extremist nobles, led by Baron Flegel, had convinced Duke von Braunschweig to attempt this half-cocked sortie.
This didn’t mean, however, that all of the aristocracy’s allied forces were participating. Merkatz followed his orders without comment, but one influential figure, Admiral Adalbert Fahrenheit, refused to go out at all.
“What’s the point of a sortie now?” Fahrenheit shot back at von Braunschweig, anger and scorn brimming in his light-aqua eyes. “We should be using the fortress to our advantage—forcing the enemy to spill as much of their own blood as possible, while we dig in for a long fight and wait for the situation to change. All this sortie is going to accomplish is to make us lose sooner.”
He didn’t stop there, either. All at once, Fahrenheit unleashed a laundry list of complaints that had been building up for quite some time.
“First of all, Duke von Braunschweig, you and I are comrades in arms—not master and servant. The status of our births may be different, but we are both of us court vassals of the Galactic Empire, and we have both fought to protect the Goldenbaum Dynasty from Marquis von Lohengramm. That should be the objective that binds us together. As a specialist in military affairs, I’ve given you this warning to help you avoid the worst possible outcome. And yet still you take that imperious tone and force your will on all of us. What is it that you’ve misunderstood?”
Duke von Braunschweig turned white with fury at Fahrenheit’s biting criticism. At no time in his life before now had he ever let such insolence pass unanswered. When anger had taken hold of him in the past, a common reaction of his had been to throw wine bottles or glasses from the dinner table at his servants. His mass murder of Westerland’s inhabitants had, in fact, been an extension of that very tendency.
Now as the attack was looming, however, von Braunschwieg could feel it in his skin that his support was peeling away. Above all else, he was no longer certain of victory. The duke took a ragged breath, and then, as if mocking his own weak-kneed hesitation, he left Fahrenheit with the words, “I’ve no use for cowards.”
He went and ordered the sortie, ignoring Fahrenheit’s advice.
III
The nobles’ fleet emerged from the fortress, lay down a blistering volley of cannon fire, then charged forward, the noses of their vessels lined up in a row. They were trying to overwhelm the enemy through sheer force.
Reinhard countered with three ranks of gunships equipped with high-output, high-caliber beam cannons, which launched continuous volleys at the oncoming enemy vessels.
The aristocrat forces had no lack of fighting spirit. They launched persistent attacks in waves, pulling back each time they took damage, reforming their ranks, then charging ahead once again. As the number of these assaults and ensuing failures mounted, as the nobles’ backs were driven up against the wall—that fighting spirit seemed somehow even admirable.
At last, Reinhard instructed a swarm of high-speed cruisers he had been holding in reserve to launch a counterattack at maximum battle speed.
His timing was impeccable. Six times, waves of confederated forces had surged forward, only to break on an unyielding shore and drain back out once again. Physical and mental exhaustion had begun to set in on their crews.
Worse still for the aristocrats, the cruisers had been placed under the command of Senior Admiral Siegfried Kircheis.
Reinhard had given his redheaded friend the most important role in this battle. Ordinarily, he would have given the order directly, but with his tangle of emotions still unresolved, he had relayed it through von Oberstein this time.
At the mere mention of Kircheis’s name, soldiers in the aristocrats’ forces became unable to hide their horror. Such was the terror that the young, undefeated admiral was already beginning to strike in the hearts of his enemies.
“You’ve nothing to fear from that redheaded whelp! This is the perfect chance to avenge Marquis von Littenheim!”
But try though the commanders did to raise morale with such cries, it amounted to nothing more than empty bravado. The high-speed cruisers that Kircheis commanded ripped into the nobles’ forces with overwhelming speed and ferocity, and then Mittermeier, von Reuentahl, Kempf, and Wittenfeld joined the fray as well. Reinhard’s fleet had gone on all-out offense, building rapidly on the advantage won by Kircheis and securing victory almost instantly.
A transmission arrived for von Reuentahl as he was pursuing the fleeing enemy ships. It was from Baron Flegel, one of the enemy commanders. When the baron appeared on-screen, he admitted his defeat but at the same time brought his ship about and issued a challenge to von Reuentahl, requesting a one-on-one duel to the death between their respective battleships.
Von Reuentahl coolly replied, “Don’t be absurd. Bark and growl all you like, but we have nothing to gain by fighting defeated enemy remnants on equal footing.”
He cut the transmission and continued his advance, flying right past the battleship from which Flegel’s gauntlet had been thrown.
After von Reuentahl, Fritz Josef Wittenfeld—leader of the Schwarz Lanzenreiter regiment—was next to appear in front of Baron Flegel. Contrary to his aggressive reputation, though, not even Wittenfeld would respond to Flegel’s insane challenge. The victor had been decided already, and fighting on with enemies already resigned to death would, at this stage, be nothing more than a useless waste of soldiers’ lives.
“That’s enough,” said Captain Schumacher, one of Flegel’s staff officers. “Please stop this.”
Schumacher could hardly bear to watch as his commander ranted madly at the screen. “No one is going to duel with you,” Schumacher said. “It would be meaningless to them. More importantly, we should be grateful to still be alive. We can escape now to some other place and start making plans for our comeback.”
“Silence!” said Baron Flegel, swatting aside his subordinate’s counsel. “What do you mean, ‘grateful to still be alive’? I have no fear of death. There’s nothing for us now but to fight to the last man and die beautiful deaths, as nobles of the empire have throughout our glorious history.”
“Beautiful deaths?” Schumacher laughed, but his smile was bittersweet. “If that’s what you have to say, I can see why we lost. All that does is put a pretty face on your own failures and let you wallow in some kind of tragic-heroic fantasy.”
“W-what did you say … ?!”
“Enough, already. If it’s a beautiful death you want, go right ahead and die one yourself, but leave us o
ut of it. Why should we go along with this and throw away our lives over your self-centered fantasy?”
“Insolent dog!” the baron cried. He tried to draw his blaster but clumsily dropped it to the floor. He scrambled to pick it up, then took aim at his staff officer’s chest.
Before he could fire, however, Baron Flegel’s body was pierced by energy beams fired from multiple sidearms.
His uniform riddled with holes, the baron took three, then four wobbling steps. His wide-open eyes seemed to gaze not on his subordinates but on lost days of glory that would never come again. When he tumbled to the floor, several of those there saw his lips moving, but not one of them could catch his final whisper: “Hail to the empire.” Captain Schumacher knelt down beside him and closed the baron’s eyelids with his hand. The soldiers who had just fragged their commanding officer gathered around him.
“Sir, what will you do now?”
The soldiers trusted in the clearheaded staff officer.
“It’s probably too late for me to join Marquis von Lohengramm’s camp. I’ll go hide out in the Phezzan Land Dominion for a while. Then I’ll think about what to do next.”
“Can we come with you?”
“I certainly don’t mind. But if there’s anyone who doesn’t want to, please let me know. You’re all free to do as you wish, whether it’s allying yourselves with Marquis von Lohengramm or going back to your homeworlds.”
At last, the battleship that was once the property of Baron Flegel departed the battlefield under a new commander, and its battle-worn, battle-scarred hulk disappeared into the depths of space.
On another vessel, a different drama had unfolded. A junior officer had looked on with a cold, hard expression as his ship’s captain had argued for self-destruction and mass suicide. Without a word, he had drawn his blaster and blown the captain’s head off.
“That’s treason!” the first officer had shouted—just moments before being shot to death himself, his hand still on his sidearm. He collapsed atop the captain’s corpse. By that time, crisscrossing flashes of scintillating gunfire were already being exchanged throughout the vessel. The crew had split into two factions—officers and ordinary soldiers—and open battle had broken out between them.
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