Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 6

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  “Any destitution suffered by the colony planets can be due only to their own incompetence and nothing else. To insist that Earth is to blame is the very definition of a slave mentality, one that shows a lack of independence and ambition.”

  Sentiments such as these were sparks that sent wildfires of indignation blazing across the colonized planets. Earth’s monopoly had forced the colonies into adopting monocultures by buying out their crops well below actual value and pushing those producing them to the brink of starvation. As a result of these and other injustices, interactions with Earth went cold.

  According to historian Ivan Sharma, “At that time, Earth lacked resources, just as its inhabitants lacked imagination. There’s no question the latter fueled their present deterioration.”

  Earth’s lack of imagination was manifested in its stubborn allegiance to elitist dogma. The powerful only grew to the heights they did because they were so deeply invested in notions of ancestral wealth and military strength that to even think of questioning either was to risk undermining the very foundation of terrestrial power. Earth plundered its colonies, and via their abundance fortified its own military prowess. The people of the colonies had, in effect, supported the very soldiers who surveilled and oppressed them.

  By the year 2682 AD, the colonies had reached a breaking point. Joining together, they made the following demands. First, Earth was to slash her overgrown military. Second, the number of representatives elected to the Pan-Human Congress was to be redistributed to reflect the actual proportions of interplanetary populations. Third, Earthly capitalism was to cease its interference in the economic affairs of her colonies. To those making the demands, these were natural, if modest, hopes. But to those of whom they were being made, they were difficult to fulfill. Either way, what right did they have to make such demands in the first place? Those barbarians of the frontier barely knew their place, yet they dared make demands of the suzerain superstate of Earth as if they were equals?!

  The honeymoon was over. Earth stopped paying its dues to the Pan-Human Congress, but not without attempting to strike a deal.

  Historian Ivan Sharma looks through a glass darkly at this turn of events:

  “At this historical juncture, Earth’s moral slump was deeper than it had ever been. The people of Earth were determined to guarantee her manifest rights, even if that guarantee flew in the face of justice. But how were they ever going to exercise said rights as a first step toward advancement and progress?”

  Contrary to Sharma’s speculative outlook on the past, the people of whom he writes no longer cared about advancement and progress. And so, Earth resorted to conspiracy and brute military force to suppress the discontent of her colonies. The Sirius star system government went on the offensive, taking it upon itself to spearhead a nascent anti-Earth faction.

  Earth began spreading disinformation, claiming that Sirius was criticizing her at every possible opportunity. This was not because Sirius sought equality, but because it aspired to rule over all humanity in Earth’s place. From the point of view of Sirius, Earth was to be universally feared, as its policies had eroded every last hope of amiable relations with her colonies. Not every colony planet had cause to blame Earth so brazenly. Their discontent was not, some said, connected at all to Earth’s ruin, but to the possibility that every colony might have to forfeit its own freedom and future in subservience to a maniacal Sirius. Sirius had now become a common enemy to both Earth and the other colonies. Its very existence was a danger to all. Before anyone knew better, Sirius had amassed incredible national power and armaments, and had even put a spy network in place to protect its clandestine interests. Before long, the slogan “Watch out for Sirius!” was on everyone’s lips.

  When confronted with these developments, the leaders of Sirius laughed away any such accusations of tyranny. Other colony leaders laughed with them, if only defensively, in sincerest hopes that Earth had merely been spreading rumors for the purpose of affirming hegemony.

  Thus, Sirius became officially recognized by Earth as an enemy nation. They were a controllable enemy, a miserable villain that could only yield and beg for mercy if Earth chose to display her true power. But even as Earth was propagandizing Sirius’s threat and might on the universal main stage, an unforeseen development was brewing behind the scenes.

  Many good citizens began to believe that Sirius’s power and intentions surpassed those of Earth. All other autonomous nations, including Sirius, followed suit.

  At first, and with malicious delight, Earth had magnified a false image of Sirius, only to watch as the mirage took on three-dimensional form as a fearful reality in people’s minds. The colonies were in awe of Sirius’s apparent power and convinced themselves that all would end well if push came to shove with Earth. There were also those who held to more cynical views, as famously exemplified by a journalist named Marenzio:

  “Last night, a local road was flooded when a major underground water line broke. We have every reason to believe that a spy from Sirius was behind the incident. This morning, a man was arrested for a series of arsons in F Block. Authorities suspect he may have been brainwashed by that same spy into committing these crimes. Make no mistake about it: Sirius’s devilish scheming can be traced back to all those ships that have gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and even Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit. Alas, Sirius, thou wilt loom over history as a universal evil.”

  Not surprisingly, this emblematic piece of hyperbole incurred the anger and hatred of security agencies across the board. Because they couldn’t very well punish its author openly for simply expressing his opinion, they instead threatened his boss and had him demoted to an undisclosed location on the frontier, where he was never heard from again.

  Meanwhile, Earth’s plot to paint Sirius as the enemy of her own propaganda brought about a most ironic consequence when several colony planets, harboring animosity toward Earth, began cozying up to Sirius in hopes of being on the winning side. Indeed, Earth had made them believe that casting their lot with Sirius was the only way to shore up their defenses against Earth’s despotism.

  The situation quickly deteriorated for Earth as one colony after another joined forces with Sirius. And even as Earth’s government was fretting over the backfiring of its seemingly foolproof plan, Sirius spearheaded a vigorous anti-Earth campaign in response to mounting pressures. In 2689 AD, fearing Sirius’s precipitous military expansion, Earth decided to teach her most self-sufficient colony a harsh lesson in provocation.

  Sirius gathered every colonial garrison at its disposal to carry out joint military exercises, promising heavy artillery provisions. Seeing that these activities were being mounted on such a grand scale, Earth’s military forces used this as a pretext to launch a preemptive strike. Their blitzkrieg tactics were a resounding success. Sirius’s homeworld, the sixth planet of Londrina in the Sirius Starzone, was overtaken by the so-called Global Forces. All colonial populations involved, beginning with that of Sirius, fled into space, leaving the surfaces of their planets in ruins.

  Despite having saved their planet from annihilation, discipline and morale among Earth’s troops had degenerated to an abominable level. Local headquarters took to crunching the enormous numbers involved in cleanup. On the one hand, the amount of confiscated materials was underreported, while the remainder went into the roomy pockets of Earth’s highest-ranking officers. On the other hand, enemy casualties were drastically exaggerated. The actual number of those killed in action, who totaled 600,000, had been inflated to 1,500,000. In order to make that number seem more plausible, not only did Space Force massacre innocent civilians by the thousands, but they also quietly carried out the barbaric act of dismembering corpses to make it seem as if those body parts belonged to a greater number of war dead. Space Force officials also underreported the number of casualties among their own so that officers could embezzle those salaries that would ha
ve gone to the dead had they still been alive.

  The climax of this hideous farce took place at a military tribunal held in February of the following year, 2690, in the Earth capital of Brisbane. There, a journalist who’d risked his life on the battlefield to report from the front lines was indicted for bringing to light the atrocity of Earth’s civilian massacre. Flying in the face of his hard-won information, only military officers took the witness stand. No one from the side of the victims was brought in to testify. The perpetrators, of course, denied their complicity in the matter. They waxed patriotic about having fought so bravely for the honor of their motherland and fellow countrymen, only to have their motives questioned while they were still licking their wounds. How unconscionable it was, they said through forced tears, that some ignorant journalist should ride in on his moral high horse and seek to defame them as a publicity stunt. The court exonerated the defendants and slapped a judgment of libel on their accuser, barring him from practicing military-related journalism at any point in the future. The victors, riding on the shoulders of their comrades-in-arms, marched down the capital city’s central avenue, chorusing war songs at the top of their lungs. As the verses of “Under the Banner of Justice,” “Guardians of Peace,” “My Life for Honor,” and “The Hero’s Triumphal Return” rose from their lips, their supremacy felt more secure than ever.

  All of which only further whetted the appetite of Earth’s military forces. No matter the cruelty, they distorted the truth under a delusion that they could get away with anything. With no accountability to show for their actions, they saw it as a disadvantage not to commit crimes for personal gain. Slaughtering civilians en masse, raping women, destroying cities, and looting came far more naturally, and more easily, than the challenge of battling a worthy foe. From this sinful turn, they stood only to gain. The military had gone from a group of soldiers to a band of thieves, and their hearts burned with romantic idealism for the next battlefield.

  That is, until the Raglan City Incident.

  While remnants of defeated colonial armies had fled into Raglan City, weapons and all, of greater importance to Global Forces was that Raglan, as the center of production and distribution for the planet Londrina’s abundant natural resources, had amassed great wealth from both above- and belowground. Global Forces mobilized its infantry, using fifteen mechanized field divisions to make a wall of troops around the city’s perimeter. In addition, they readied four aerial assault units and six urban warfare units to storm the city. The first wave of attack was planned for May 9 but was postponed twice—the first time because Raglan’s mayor, Massaryk, had overextended himself in his negotiations to avoid war, and the second time because within Global Forces, a certain Vice Admiral Clérambault, second in command at the Command Headquarters Strategic Division, had repeatedly downplayed tactical plans on the part of local forces toward preventing acts of barbarism. His efforts came to naught, however, when, on the night of May 14, ten units stormed the streets of Raglan City from land and air.

  The invasion did not go at all as planned. Under siege by a massive force and gripped by panic, some of the remnant soldiers in Raglan City, thinking they might neutralize an attack by giving themselves up to Global Forces, scrambled to organize vigilante squads and began hunting down insurgents. But the hunted had their own agenda, and because they had weapons, they would not simply allow themselves to be flushed out. Shoot-outs erupted across the city, and at 8:20 p.m., soldiers watched from the perimeter as the Western Block’s liquid hydrogen tanks went up in flames. They took this as their cue to launch an offensive in what would come to be known as the “Blood Night.”

  Their orders were harsh, to be sure:

  “Anyone bearing arms will be shot on sight. No questions asked. Anyone suspected of bearing arms, and those who appear to be resisting, escaping, or hiding, will be punished accordingly.”

  By giving its troops free license to kill, the military had effectively openly condoned indiscriminate killing.

  Those who stormed the city were hungry for the slaughter and destruction they’d been authorized to carry out, feverishly raping and pillaging wherever they could. Such actions were not officially sanctioned but were quietly tolerated nevertheless. Paintings and jewels were stolen from the city’s museums, and rare books were kicked into the flames by soldiers who understood nothing of their inestimable worth.

  The city’s Northern Block was home to its diamond refinery, as well as processing plants for gold, platinum, and other precious minerals. Naturally, it, too, became a target of attack by the overzealous Global Forces, whose second air assault and fifth land units accidentally killed some of their own in their zeal for destruction. Fatalities amounted to approximately 1,500 on both sides, but an investigation conducted on the following day revealed that the stomachs of over sixty bodies had been cut open, presumably to seize the raw diamonds they’d swallowed. Among the civilian casualties, such victims numbered a hundredfold those of the troops. Old men had their jaws cut open with military knives and their gold teeth pulled out, and women taken by force had their ears cut off for their valuable earrings and their fingers cut off for their rings.

  The Blood Night lasted ten hours. In that time, nearly one million inhabitants of Raglan City were killed by Global Forces, while damages from destruction and plunder totaled fifteen billion units of common currency. Local headquarters kept a substantial portion of stolen goods for themselves and informed their home base on Earth that, after a fierce battle, enemy forces had been eliminated and the city successfully occupied.

  In his grief, Clérambault grabbed a pen and vented his anger in his diary over failing to prevent his comrades’ barbarism:

  Nothing in human society is so egregious as an army without shame or self-restraint. And the force I serve in has become exactly that.

  Back at command headquarters in the capital, military leaders chatting idly before their comm screens with whisky glasses in hand sobered up at the loathsome voice of a veteran admiral named Hazlitt.

  “You all look pretty pleased for a bunch of men who’ve just sent other people’s cities up in flames. Does that thought excite you? Does it bring you joy? I guarantee you that, ten years from now, our capital will face the same fate. Mark my words. Should we not at least be prepared for that eventuality?”

  But those who criticized their allies’ misdeeds were forever in the minority. Two such dissenters were met with derision and retired from active duty.

  A Rear Admiral Weber, who worked as chief press secretary, made the following initial statement:

  “I can say with confidence that no single instance of massacre or pillaging was carried out in Raglan City. Those who claim as much should be branded as rebels whose only goal is to fabricate history and thus wound the honor of Global Forces.”

  Three days later, the military changed its tune:

  “After careful internal examination, we have determined that massacres and pillaging did in fact occur, albeit on a much smaller scale than originally reported. Casualties were, at most, twenty thousand. Furthermore, the perpetrators of these heinous acts were not Global Forces, but anti-Earth guerilla extremists hidden in the city. They pinned their own crimes on Global Forces in an attempt to incite anti-Earth sentiments. You can be sure these heinous crimes will be met with suitable punishment.”

  Military spokesmen never divulged the reasoning or investigative processes by which they’d arrived at such a quick about-face regarding their position on the Raglan City skirmish. Actions, they continued to stress, were more important than words. It was their responsibility to brutally punish these armed insurgents who’d destroyed the lives of civilians, and public order along with them. Carrying out said duty to its fullest, they claimed, would require them to conduct another search-and-destroy operation in Raglan City.

  What on the surface seemed a swift act of recompense in reality allowed Global Forces to go back for those mater
ial goods they’d failed to pillage the first time around, eliminate any lingering eyewitnesses who might compromise the credibility of their story, and thoroughly suppress anti-Earth efforts. But Global Forces, as Clérambault had predicted, lost control of themselves and went on a rampage. If their fourth objective was to seed fear toward the anti-Earth faction and dampen enthusiasm for the resistance, it never worked. If anything, they courted further hatred and hostility. Their little “cleanup” operation cost another 350,000 lives.

  Even their cruel hands of oppression, however, let a few small grains of sand fall unseen through their fingers, much to the regret of the Global Government and the delight of the colonies. These grains, it turned out, were the first of what would grow into a mountain of historic proportions.

  A twenty-five-year-old solivision journalist named Kahle Palmgren was beaten unconscious with laser rifles and left for dead when he refused a material inspection by the military. When he came to, he discovered that he’d been thrown atop a pile of corpses. Seeing that the mound had been doused with rocket fuel and set ablaze, he managed to escape through the thick cloud of smoke before the fire could add him to its victims.

  There was also Winslow Kenneth Townsend, a twenty-three-year-old accountant for a metallic radium mine and labor union secretary, who was watching the army marching by from his apartment window when he was shot at from below by a drunken soldier. The gun’s ray beamed straight into the forehead of his mother, who was standing next to him. He was utterly ignored when he pressed charges against military authorities, who responded by accusing him in turn of killing his mother himself. Knowing it was futile to take the case any further, he fled into the mines, shaking off pursuit until he’d gone completely off the radar.

  Then there was Joliot Francoeur, a twenty-year-old student of herbal medicine at the institutional affiliate of a medical school, who with his two thousand–page medicinal reference guide split open the head of an Earth soldier for raping his girlfriend. This left him no choice but to slip into the underground sewers as a fugitive. Only after his successful escape did he come to learn that his girlfriend had killed herself.