Sunset

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  Was Julian simply naive? Perhaps he was. But he had no desire to accept the harshness of von Oberstein’s approach.

  Julian’s thinking may at this time have been heading in a rather dangerous direction. Rather than musing on morality, he should have been searching for ways to fight von Oberstein by political means.

  Then, on April 10, a message arrived at Iserlohn.

  It was a formal communique from the Galactic Empire’s minister of military affairs, Marshal Paul von Oberstein. If Iserlohn desired the release of the five thousand and more political prisoners being held on Heinessen, the message said, they should send representatives of both the Iserlohn Republic and the Revolutionary Army to meet with the empire on-planet.

  I

  The tension that accompanied our excitement was sometimes mixed with trace amounts of terror or optimism. Our psychological state was perhaps like that of a troupe of actors when the curtain is set to rise on their premiere performance. We knew the stage to be a cruel one. Those who left it could never return, and the playwright and director were nowhere to be seen, making no attempt to answer the questions of the players. And yet our incorrigible state of mind unendingly invited us to ascend the stage. One thing was certain: we had made no friendship with pessimism. In the end, we supported democratic republicanism of our own free will. Her unadorned face was lovely, we thought; with a wash and some makeup, she would be a breathtaking beauty. After all, for the past fifty years, she had had nothing but worthless men by her side, fixated solely on her faults…

  —Dusty Attenborough, A History of the Revolutionary War

  VON OBERSTEIN’S FORMAL ORDER that Iserlohn’s leaders present themselves was met with anger and derision by the staff officers of Iserlohn. However, flat refusal was impossible. They would have to obey, or at least give the appearance of doing so.

  When Frederica Greenhill Yang’s staff urged her to stay behind, she said, with a slight smile, “I appreciate your kindness, but to be excused because I am a woman is not what I wish. I was made the leader of the Iserlohn Republic, and Minister von Oberstein will not be satisfied unless I go to Heinessen myself.”

  There were no further arguments. What Frederica said was correct, and those present were more than familiar with her implacable firmness once she had made up her mind.

  Caselnes brought up a different problem.

  “We all know what happened when Yang Wen-li did this. What if you are attacked by terrorists on the way to Heinessen or Phezzan, Julian?”

  “I think we’re within our rights to demand an imperial escort this time,” Julian said. “We’ll communicate that request to Heinessen once we’re out of the corridor.”

  Attenborough raised his eyebrows.

  “An imperial escort? You’re going to put our fate in the hands of von Oberstein?”

  “Not everyone in the empire is a von Oberstein-brand product,” said Julian wryly. Attenborough had a momentary vision of the entire imperial military with photographs of von Oberstein’s face pasted over their own, and clutched at his stomach with one hand.

  “Yes, we might be able to trust Müller,” von Schönkopf said, correctly inferring Julian’s meaning. “I’m sure they won’t like us availing ourselves of their aid, but it’s better than grasping at straws.”

  With that, he poured himself another whiskey. He had a knack for committing what amounted to indiscretions with such refinement that none could object to them. It was a special talent possessed by this thirty-seven-year-old former member of the imperial military.

  “Admirals and above are all we need for this one,” von Schönkopf added. “You field officers can stay home to watch the fort.”

  Olivier Poplin, Kasper Rinz, Soon Soul, and the other officers below admiral rank immediately raised their voices in protest.

  “I don’t agree with that. This is the perfect chance to realize our ‘Die, Kaiser!’ battle cry. We want tickets to this show too.”

  “I may not be an admiral in rank, but I certainly qualify in terms of talent and popularity. Even if that wasn’t the case, I don’t want to see a new separation between admirals and field officers created at this late stage.”

  There was a 50 percent chance that those who went to Heinessen would not return alive. Immediate arrest and execution might await them. Even so, the field officers insisted on their right to go. Von Schönkopf watched with some amusement this expression of the “incorrigible state of mind” that Attenborough would later describe.

  “You can’t have everything your way,” he said. “Some of the admirals will be staying too. Admiral Caselnes, for example.”

  Caselnes would be needed to command and manage the troops left behind at Iserlohn. Even if they surrendered to the empire without a fight, someone had to be responsible for executing that surrender in an orderly fashion. Furthermore, everyone had a tacit understanding that Caselnes was a family man.

  “This is a party for bachelors only,” von Schönkopf said. “We can’t allow married men to get involved.” He chuckled and raised his whiskey glass to eye level as he glanced around for any objections to Caselnes’ assignment. There were none.

  “Majority rules,” he said. “By the most democratic means available, you have been selected to remain behind. Congratulations.”

  Caselnes started to protest, but then fell silent. He understood what made him valuable to the republic and, as the oldest member of the group, he had a responsibility to set an example by obeying its decisions.

  A youth for whom no example needed to be set broke the silence with visible alarm. “There’s two things I never want people to say about me: ‘Olivier Poplin hit on an ugly woman’ and ‘Olivier Poplin ran from danger.’ I’d never live either down, and that means I’m going too.”

  A very Poplin way to put it, thought Julian.

  Danger, thy name is Poplin, thought Attenborough.

  He could have just quietly come along, but he had to open his mouth and show everybody how immature he is, thought von Schönkopf.

  As for Admiral Wiliabard Joachim Merkatz, at Julian’s request, he stayed on Iserlohn as a fleet commander.

  Dividing Iserlohn’s leadership between those who would go and those who would remain was a necessary precaution. If the entire leadership was eliminated in one stroke, the flame of republican governance would be snuffed out as well. It was Dusty Attenborough who explained this to the others slated to remain, with only Poplin remaining unconvinced. On reflection, the only people Julian had been friendly with longer than Attenborough were Yang and Caselnes.

  Julian sometimes thought back on his first encounter with Attenborough. It was his first summer as a member of Yang’s household, and his new guardian took a week off for a vacation in the Heinessen highlands. Carrying a picnic basket prepared by the lady that ran their guesthouse, the two of them had strolled into the green hills, where the early summer breeze seemed to come laden with grains of pure light. With the approach of noon, Yang had sat down at the base of a great tree and opened a book. As Julian remembered it, the book had been the memoirs of Admiral Rosas, respected aide to Marshal Bruce Ashby. As his guardian had immersed himself in his reading, Julian had spread out a blanket. He had just begun arranging the sandwiches and roast chicken for lunch when he saw a young man climbing the hill toward them with a jacket slung over his left shoulder. This had been his first glimpse of Dusty Attenborough. Attenborough was supposed to have come on vacation with them, but some urgent matter or other had forced him to delay his departure by one day.

  After they had all exchanged pleasantries, Attenborough had gotten down to business.

  “They’ve made me a lieutenant commander this time,” he had said.

  “Congratulations are in order, then,” Yang had replied.

  “Are they, I wonder? With you a captain and me a lieutenant commander, it seems to me like the Alliance Navy is heading str
aight to hell—on a unicycle, at full speed.” Attenborough had sat down beside Julian, snagged a piece of roast chicken without so much as a pretense of hesitation, and began to munch. “To be honest, Captain Yang, I thought Lappe would be promoted even faster than you. But now here I am at the same rank as him. It’s a strange feeling.”

  “If Jean Robert hadn’t been sidelined by illness, he’d be an admiral by now,” Yang had said. “How is he doing?”

  “Miss Edwards said that all he needs now is time.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  Yang’s reply had come after a split-second’s hesitation. Julian understood what that meant now, but at the time he had been unable to imagine or deduce its import.

  Julian shook his head and looked at the group gathered in the conference room. In the future, he did not want to reminisce about them. He wanted to reminisce with them. It was bad enough that Yang, Bucock, and so many others now existed only in memory.

  All people, all things must eventually stand motionless in the gloom of the past. Perhaps it was a turning point in history that Julian sensed, like a feeling a change in the temperature or wind direction through the skin. Up until now, he had been wearing the coat named Yang Wen-li, and it had protected him from sudden and intense changes. It had been a magical coat—one that could also teach him about the historical, political, or military circumstances that surrounded him. But that coat was now lost forever, leaving Julian at the mercy of the roaring wind and searing sun. What was more, it was now up to Julian to become a coat for others.

  II

  With complication and confusion stumbling about the galaxy like competitors in a three-legged race, was anyone living at that historic moment able to fully grasp their situation, accurately assess their circumstances, and see ahead to the future?

  Both Julian and Attenborough later mused that Yang Wen-li might have been that person, had he lived. However convincing this assertion may be, however, it is merely a hypothesis. As a matter of fact, the individual who came closest to seeing everything—who judged the situation more correctly than any other—was probably Imperial Marshal Paul von Oberstein, the minister of military affairs. Since von Oberstein had absolutely no interest in disclosing what he knew, however, even high-ranking admirals like Wahlen and Müller were excluded from the center of his information-gathering network.

  Following the near-complete unification of the galaxy under the Lohengramm Dynasty, only three entities worthy of being called Reinhard’s enemies remained: the Iserlohn Republic, the remnants of the Church of Terra, and those loyal to Adrian Rubinsky, the last landesherr of Phezzan. Von Oberstein appears to have assigned himself the task of eradicating all three of these to ensure the stability of the empire.

  Von Oberstein, it seems, found it difficult to call even Reinhard von Lohengramm, greatest conqueror in history, a perfectly ideal ruler. It is believed that he hoped to instruct and shape the younger kaiser into that ideal. It was because Reinhard intuited this that he joked to Hilda about being overthrown by his minister of military affairs.

  Despite what the future held, Reinhard was in good health at that point, and had already ordered von Oberstein not to mistreat the “political prisoners.”

  But before any action could be taken, yet another calamity unfolded.

  Late at night on April 16, a full-scale riot broke out at Ragpur Prison, home to more than five thousand political prisoners. Lives were lost by the score to firearms, explosives, arson, and structural collapse. By the time order was restored, 1,048 of Ragpur’s prisoners were dead, 3,109 seriously injured, and 317 uninjured and still on premises. The rest had either fled or disappeared. Of the soldiers who had been standing guard at the prison, 148 were dead and 907 seriously injured. And this gruesome main course was soon followed by a series of horrible desserts.

  First, Commodore Ferner, who as chief secretary of the Ministry of Military Affairs had rushed to the scene to take command, was mistakenly shot through the left side of his chest by a guard, receiving a wound which would take fifty days to heal in full. Meanwhile, in central Heinessenpolis, reports circulated that Black Lancers were running amok, so that when Halberstadt led the Lancers’ ground forces out to suppress the disturbance, they were intercepted by the military police and halted in their tracks. The impasse soon boiled over into a physical clash as the enraged Black Lancers tried to force their way past.

  Ferner’s sound judgment and quick thinking prevented this standoff from deteriorating into a free-for-all. In the end, the military police and the Black Lancers made their way to Ragpur Prison together, where they set about quelling the riot.

  Given the position the imperial military was in at the time, the decision was inevitably made to use deadly force when necessary to prevent prisoners escaping. But, as often happens with mixed forces, the pressure was heightened by those seeking to avoid criticism from allies, and many deaths were the result. Ferner’s own injury could be called a byproduct of the same phenomenon. Had he remained in control of the operation, order would have surely been restored more effectively. For one thing, his injury prevented him from ordering the medics he had standing by into action, and they spent three hours waiting helplessly outside the prison. This led to hundreds of deaths and entirely avoidable bloodshed.

  When April 17 dawned, disorder still reigned, with fires and explosions blooming across the city as if in sympathy for the rioters. Black smoke rose even from the residential districts, which teetered on the brink of anarchy at one point. Wahlen was sent to put down this disturbance, and he successfully prevented panic from spreading throughout the citizenry.

  During this operation, someone actually attempted to eliminate Wahlen himself, but fortunately he escaped serious injury. It seemed that his would-be assassin was using a heat-seeking gun, but the shot had gone wild, drawn off course by the greater heat of the flames from a small explosion near his armored landcar.

  Minor incidents and anecdotes like this were swept away by the bloody tide, and by 0940 the imperial military had fully quelled the rioters.

  Even during this disturbance, Wittenfeld’s house arrest had remained in effect, leaving him unable to take any action whatsoever. Von Oberstein had ordered that forces be stationed at key points in the city to prevent the unrest from spreading, but he had left the execution of this order to Müller while he calmly took his breakfast.

  The riot’s unfortunate casualties included many who had once held high positions and commanded great respect in the former Free Planets Alliance government and military. This was only to be expected, since such figures had made up the bulk of Ragpur Prison’s population, but it was nevertheless sobering to learn that Vice Admiral Paetta, commander of the alliance’s First Fleet, and President Oliveira of Central Autonomous Governance University had been erased from the rolls of the living forever. What was more, during the riot, many of the dead had been left where they had fallen, to be ravaged by fires or explosions—or worse, as discovered by one imperial soldier who saw a wild dog running past with a human arm in its mouth. Unsettlingly, some bodies were said to have been found with gold and silver teeth missing, presumably pried from their jaws by unscrupulous and opportunistic soldiers.

  Marshal Sidney Sitolet, who had been imprisoned in Ragpur since the Nguyen Kim Hua Plaza Incident of the previous year, was pushed into a ditch by a gang of fleeing prisoners. The fall left him with a fractured left ankle, but being forced to sit in the ditch and await rescue would ultimately be what kept him alive.

  Vice Admiral Murai, former trusted staff officer of Yang Wen-li, avoided the violence and gunfire and walked toward the prison’s rear gates. His steadfast refusal to panic and race about blindly was testament to his commitment to order and discipline, but he was blown off his feet by a fierce blast, discovered unconscious on the ground, and taken to the hospital.

  Given how many of the prisoners had once held high positions in society,
their average age was also high, making it seem unlikely that the riot had broken out spontaneously. The inevitable conclusion was that it had been purposefully instigated by some unknown conspirators. Indeed, how the armaments needed to launch such a riot had been brought into the prison in the first place remained an unanswered question.

  Virtually every senior officer in the imperial military had the same suspicion: that this was the work of the Church of Terra.

  During this period, the Church of Terra was always the first suspicion of the empire’s admirals whenever they encountered or were informed of some misfortune. Nor did they see this as a prejudice in need of correction, since such suspicions were more often than not correct in the case of the more severe misfortunes. Common criminals, both alone and in gangs, would often borrow the church’s name as cover for their crimes. Of course, this impertinent misrepresentation often cost them dearly. More than a few petty criminals met sad fates they would have otherwise avoided—being shot, or dying in prison—simply because they claimed to be Terraists. Still, they had no one to blame but themselves.

  Once events began progressing toward the restoration of order, von Oberstein rapidly seized control of the situation, but it was Müller who realized that another important problem had emerged. If news of the tragedy at Ragpur Prison reached Iserlohn in a distorted form, it might invite the misunderstanding that the imperial military had begun mass executions of political prisoners. This could undo all the kaiser’s efforts to dilute the venom in von Oberstein’s plans and facilitate an honorable discussion.

  But did that mean that the riots were indeed the work of the Church of Terra, intended to prevent any trust being established between the Galactic Empire and the Iserlohn Republic? Müller went to the hospital and examined the list of patients with some connection to Iserlohn Fortress specifically. He found Murai’s name there, but Murai had yet to regain consciousness, and could not therefore serve as emissary to repair relations with Iserlohn. When chaos gave way to order, von Oberstein sent troops under the ministry’s direct control to manage and monitor the hospital, cutting short without debate Müller’s attempt to overstep the bounds of his authority.