And finally, there was nineteen-year-old Chao Yui-lun, who had interest in neither politics nor revolution, and who’d been studying composition at a music conservatory. After losing his brother and sister-in-law, who’d raised him in place of his parents, to the random gunfire of safety corps officers, he grabbed his three-year-old nephew and fled the burning city of Raglan.
These four survivors went on to great renown. Unlike them, most others who vowed to take revenge against Global Forces as they watched their streets go up in flames died trying and ended their lives in obscurity. For this fateful quartet, resistance was more than a matter of principle. It was the means to survive.
“Raglan City has burned to the ground,” went the official report, “leaving behind massive carbonized ruins, 1.5 million dead, 2.5 million injured, 4.5 million prisoners of war, and four avengers.”
“Avengers” wasn’t the most accurate way of putting it, for what motivated Palmgren, Townsend, Francoeur, and Chao wasn’t merely a desire to oust Global Forces from their easy chair of authority and glory fourteen years later, but to see the phantoms of the razed city rise soundlessly from the depths of their ideals and ideology, overtaking the ones who’d killed them like thieves in the night.
The four of them first gathered on Proserpina, fifth planet of the Proxima central star zone. The date was February 28, 2691 AD. It was the first time they’d come to know each other by name, although it was possible they’d crossed paths at the anti-Earth faction’s base of operations without being formally introduced.
The subsequent division of roles among the four was a prime example of the right people being in the right place at the right time. Palmgren drew on his own ideals and worldview to unify anti-Earth factions and raise awareness among the public. These actions, combined with his natural leadership and rallying power, earned him status as the poster child for the anti-Earth movement. Using his keen sense of finance and administrative capacities, Townsend laid an ambitious economic foundation for what came to be known as the United Anti-Earth Front, thus engendering giant leaps forward in the potential of undeveloped colonies to boost domestic production on their own terms. Moreover, he successfully capitalized on his acumen in these matters to power an efficient distribution system. Francoeur, as supreme commander of a combative anti-Earth organization known as the Black Flag Force, mobilized a disorderly mob into a highly trained revolutionary faction, which he reorganized, regimented, led, and commanded. At the time, the Earth’s governmental army boasted three superlative admirals in its ranks, along with an overwhelming abundance of material resources, so initially Francoeur failed to subdue them on more than one occasion. But in the tide-turning Battle of Vega, he succeeded in dividing the Earth fleet, winning all eighty-four engagements after unlocking the secret to their legendary invincibility. Meanwhile, Chao Yui-lun oversaw intel, strategy, and espionage. In his normal life, he’d been a reserved young man who wouldn’t dare cheat so much as a bakery out of incorrect change, but when it came to toppling the Earth’s governmental hegemony he granted no quarter. To ensure their leadership within the United Anti-Earth Front, they accused the indecisive old regime of being Earth spies and banished them at the outset, thus opening several black holes within factions on both sides and reducing the number of potential combatants by half.
The aforementioned admirals—Collins, Schattorf, and Vinetti—were extraordinarily rare tacticians who possessed both experience and theoretical know-how, but refused to cooperate and severed contact with one another during the Battle of Vega. Each lost to Francoeur’s crushing tactics. It was Chao who took advantage of the dissonance borne between the admirals by this setback. His plan was devilish enough to have earned him a certificate of commendation from Mephistopheles himself. First, he forced Vinetti into a coup d’état, had Collins killed, and made the truth known to Schattorf, who had Vinetti captured and killed. He then pinned it all on Schattorf and incited Vinetti’s former subordinates to kill Schattorf in revolt. After being riddled with dozens of bullets, Schattorf lived long enough to let one word escape his lips:
“Fools…”
And so, in 2703 AD, Earth, effectively cut off from its own food supplies, raw industrial materials, and energy sources, commenced a last-ditch attack. Earth’s army, magnificent only in terms of equipment, was led by second-rate admirals devoid of talent and collaborative spirit. They were crushed repeatedly under Francoeur’s tactical boot, especially in the Second Battle of Vega, in which an Earth fleet sixty thousand strong suffered shameful defeat by the Black Flag Force’s mere eight thousand ships. By the following year, 2704 AD, Earth’s army had lost control of the solar system. Using the asteroid belt as a last defense, Earth kept up its nearly futile resistance until it abandoned even the formality of protecting its own people, commandeering citizens’ provisions and repurposing them for munitions use.
Within the Black Flag Force, which had been deployed as far as Jupiter, opinions were split between Commander Francoeur and Chao’s political committee. Whereas Francoeur insisted on full-scale attack, Chao was all for a war of attrition. The only options left for Global Forces were to surrender or starve to death. Assuming they were too stubborn to surrender, Earth’s surface would be reduced to a graveyard soon enough.
A compromise was reached, and Earth got the worst of it. The Black Flag Force cut off all supply channels to Earth, and after two months of siege commenced an all-out attack.
The tragedy at Raglan City was reenacted on a scale many times over.
In the wake of this unilateral slaughter, Global Forces representatives, along with over sixty thousand high military officials, were executed en masse as war criminals. Following this, Sirius’s—that is to say, the Raglan Group’s—sovereignty was established. The Earth’s power and authority had turned to ashes in an all-consuming conflagration, and the four who’d unified an angry mob of anti-Earth forces would surely be the ones to replace them. But the “Age of Sirius” would amount to nothing more than a flash in the pan.
Two years after the Sirius War, in 2706 AD, Palmgren, the living embodiment of revolution and liberation, died suddenly at the age of forty-one. A touch of cold had been exacerbated by inclement weather when he’d attended a cornerstone laying for an emancipatory war museum on a rainy day. Immediately after the ceremony, the cold had quickly escalated into acute pneumonia, which had kept him bedridden until his death.
“If I die now,” he said to his trusted doctor, “this new system we’ve created will come apart at the seams. If only death would give me five more years…”
Not three months after his passing, opposition between Prime Minister Townsend and Defense Minister Francoeur on the matter of Sirius’s victory came to a head.
Francoeur was upset that Townsend hadn’t dismantled the so-called Big Sisters, corporate giants funded by the Earth’s former regime, choosing instead to absorb them into the new economy.
Francoeur was a realist on the battlefield, demonstrating superb flexibility in planning and implementation, but stuck to his conceptual principles when it came to politics and the economy. When he suggested they tear down the power of the transplanetary capital of the Big Sisters, Townsend curtly refused. He couldn’t afford to lose that privilege, without which his power meant little to him.
At first, Chao Yui-lun looked on as if at deep-sea fish from far above sea level. When he saw with his own eyes the degradation of Earth’s system of authority into cruelty, one could say his own part to play was finished. He’d already been withdrawing from the political front lines, and this was the last push he needed to divorce himself completely from their downward spirals. Once the new system was in place, he was offered the dual seats of vice prime minister and internal secretary, but he refused the positions and the authority that came with them on grounds of personal principle, returning instead to his recovering hometown of Raglan to fulfill his lifelong dream of opening a music conservatory. Working as
board chairman, dean, and administrator, he found renewed contentment in teaching organ music and songs to a generation of children who, more than ever, needed the hope that only the arts could provide. As far as he was concerned, he’d finally recovered from both the fever of revolution and the epidemic of politics, and had gone back to who he used to be. Who he’d always been meant to be.
The children were very attached to him. No one among them would ever imagine that their beloved, kindhearted dean would, in two or three years, be deceived by a cruel and bitter opponent, and be either assassinated or driven to suicide, thereby bringing about the ruin of Earth’s governmental authority. The young dean’s pockets were always filled with chocolates and candies for the children, much to the chagrin of mothers worried about cavities. A sign, perhaps, of his naïveté when it came to securing the future of those he cared for most.
With Chao no longer claiming affiliation, the dispute between Townsend and Francoeur reached a tipping point. At first, Francoeur had tried to legally acquire the highest authority. When he realized it was impossible to sway the influence of a man like Townsend, rooted as he was in bureaucratic and economic soil, Francoeur decided to resort to a coup d’état. Townsend avoided disaster by a matter of seconds, as an officer once dismissed for disobeying Francoeur’s orders exposed the former tactician’s plan. The consequences of this dismissal played out one morning in Francoeur’s bedroom, when a Public Safety Bureau member kicked in the door and shot Francoeur dead just as he was reaching for his visiphone to order the coup.
Meanwhile, the Black Flag Force became a faithful watchdog of the Townsend regime and was reorganized under a stern policy of purging and oppression. Among the so-called Ten Admirals under Francoeur’s command, one had already died of natural causes, six had been executed, and another had died in jail. This left him with only two reliable men under his charge.
Townsend had emerged as the victor in this battle of authority. Like the man he’d overthrown, he believed in his own righteousness, which made them more alike than he cared to admit. Since whatever modicum of clout the Global Government possessed had already fallen by the wayside, from now on it would be necessary to rebuild resolution and order out of chaos and, for the sake of societal development and equilibrium in citizens’ lives, to erase Francoeur from history like the dogmatic revolutionary he was. With Francoeur gone, Townsend had no doubt that a new society would be built in strict accordance with his plans and abilities.
The one remaining obstacle, it seemed to Townsend, was Chao Yui-lun. While on the surface Chao seemed more than satisfied teaching songs to children at his music conservatory, who knew whether he was secretly cultivating a desire for his power, like he’d done when his balls were up against the Global Forces’ wall. Would he scoff at Townsend’s strategy and attempt to bring him down? Was he, in fact, capable of something more ruthless than anyone could imagine?
Hardly a week after Francoeur’s death, eight armed investigators from the Ministry of Justice’s Public Safety Bureau were dispatched to Raglan City. An arrest warrant presented to Chao accused him of being responsible for the death of revolutionaries who’d been purged for once opposing the Raglan Group and its hegemony. After silently reading the warrant and mentally confirming its untruth, Chao turned to his nephew, now grown up and helping with his uncle’s work while pursuing his studies.
“To me,” said Chao to his nephew, who advised him to escape, “strategy is an art form, but to Townsend it’s business. It was only a matter of time before I lost to him. There’s no one to blame. This is simply what fate has in store for us.”
He signed the payment ledger for the cost of the organ he’d recently purchased and handed it to his nephew. Twenty minutes later, a Public Safety Bureau worker who’d been awaiting orders in the adjacent room entered the dean’s office, only to discover that Chao was unconscious from a knockout drug. Another twenty minutes passed, and the untimely death of the revolution’s “elder statesman” was confirmed. One of the pupils had witnessed a sketchy-looking man exiting the dean’s room clutching a wet handkerchief. When he told his parents back home, they went pale and kept silent, exhorting him to do the same, for the sake of their family’s safety.
After thwarting Earth’s tyranny on the planet Proserpina and vowing to emancipate the colonies, the Raglan Group was utterly annihilated in the following year, 2707. The eminently powerful Winslow Kenneth Townsend, prime minister of Sirius and Pan-Human Congress chairman, got into a car to attend the anniversary of his victory against Earth, but when he was warned of a bomb planted on-site, he turned back toward his official residence, only to be killed by a microwave bomb en route.
This was one month after Chao’s nephew Feng escaped the Public Safety Bureau’s surveillance as a supposed criminal ringleader. Feng was never apprehended. Whether he’d gone on a crime spree or had been killed by an associate, no one could say for sure. In any event, he was never heard from again.
Neither was the bureau’s investigation thorough enough to say for sure. The moment Townsend’s body was blown to pieces, so too was the new world order that he’d strong-armed into place. Any bureaucratic loyalty toward Townsend had lost its cohesive power, left to percolate out of sight like all the blood that had been spilled to uphold that power in the first place. The Black Flag Force, for its part, had atrophied in the face of Francoeur’s tragic death and the political purge that followed. These events had triggered an explosion of pent-up energy, splintering the group in a mess of bloody infighting to the point of total irreconcilability.
Had Palmgren lived just ten more years, the Space Era (SE) might have begun nine decades earlier. As the cards fell, however, it would take almost a century and the efforts of countless individuals before a “universal order, sans Earth” could be rebuilt after being demolished halfway through its construction when, in the year 2801 AD, the Galactic Federation of States established its capital on Theoria, second planet of the Aldebaran system.
Throughout the eight centuries that followed, humanity—with all its developments and setbacks, times of peace and times of war, tyranny and resistance, submission and independence, progress and regression—averted its gaze from Earth. Along with losing her political and military authority, this lone planet had lost any reason for its existence, and had no value worth noticing. For all the valiant (and not-so-valiant) efforts of her citizens, Earth had become nothing more than flotsam on a forgotten sea.
But a few stayed behind on this forgotten mother planet to keep her memory alive, hoping to touch the torch of their Earthly zeal to the unlit candles of the future…
I
TWELVE YEARS HAD PASSED—he’d been but a young man—since he’d witnessed a coronation. At the time, he had been just another student at the Imperial Military Elementary School, where he’d matriculated under the name Reinhard von Müsel. Standing against the wall of the grand reception hall, roughly ninety meters away, he had barely been able to make out the face of the one being enthroned. It would take him four thousand days to collapse that distance to zero.
“For every second that blond brat continues to breathe, he sucks up one ton of blood. Like a vampire, he’s never satisfied.”
Such were the sentiments of those who hated him. He’d come to accept even the severest criticisms with graceful silence. Exaggerated as they were, such negative comments were founded in certain truths. While throwing his weight around amid the horrors of war, Reinhard had lost many allies, consigning a hundred times as many enemies to oblivion along the way.
His subjects raised their arms and voices high.
“Long live Emperor Reinhard!”
“Long live the new Galactic Empire!”
It was June 22 of SE 799, IC 490, and year one of the New Imperial Calendar. Just one minute prior, he’d received a golden crown upon his golden hair to become the founding emperor of the Lohengramm Dynasty.
A twenty-three-year
-old monarch. His ascendency to the throne was through no means of providence. He had gained the position and all the authority that went with it thanks to his own ingenious power. Nearly five centuries ago, Goldenbaum Dynasty founder Rudolf the Great’s descendants, who had usurped the Galactic Federation of States and claimed the throne, were driven from it after their long and senseless monopoly on power. And it had taken thirty-eight generations, or 490 years, for usurpation to be repaid with usurpation. None before Reinhard had been able to change history in this manner. It was as if the stars had required perfect alignment to bring about his genius.
Reinhard stood up from his throne and met the jubilation of his many subjects with a simple raise of his hand. His uncannily natural gestures seemed to follow a melody of refinement that only he could hear. But while his elegance, along with his comparable talents in politics and war, was unsurpassed in his time, it was the impression of those ice-blue eyes as they scanned the crowd that those present would remember most. Even those among his subjects less prone to flights of imagination held those eyes in their regard as jewels of purest blue, forged in ultrahot flames and then frozen, ready to smite all of creation should even one lick of the unimaginable power therein breach its containment.
First to be reflected in those eyes were his highest-ranking imperial military officers in the front row. All of them were clad for the occasion in their finest dress, uniforms of black trimmed in silver; they were young men not unlike the emperor, men in the prime of their lives, notorious soldiers who’d valiantly aided the ascendancy of their young lord.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 6 Page 3