This left seven men in the parlor together. Outside the windows were the rumblings of thunder and blue-white flashes of lightning. The parlor itself was decorated in a uniform palette of brown tones, but after each flash of lightning it sank into a world devoid of life and color.
It was not the first time these men had felt themselves to be on the cusp of history, but never had they felt so mired in heavy, bitter psychological mud.
“The conqueror who subjugated the entire galaxy, bound to the planet’s surface and shut up in his sickroom,” said Kessler quietly. “It is almost too heartrending to bear.”
They had accompanied Reinhard von Lohengramm on his journey of conquest across the sea of stars. They had smashed the Coalition of Lords, crushed the Free Planets Alliance, seen the galaxy itself at their feet. They had been all but invincible, but now, before the curse that was variable fulminant collagen disease, they were utterly powerless. Bravery, loyalty, strategic prowess—none of it could save the kaiser they loved and respected. When they had been outwitted by Yang Wen-li, their sense of defeat had been leavened with admiration. Now there was only defeat, like a loathsome pest that ate away at their spirit.
“What are those doctors doing? Worthless leeches! If they mean to stand by with their arms folded and ignore his suffering, they will pay dearly!”
Wittenfeld was the first to erupt, as all his colleagues had predicted. But this evening, he met with immediate opposition.
“Control yourself!” Wahlen snarled, his stoic reserve finally pushed beyond the limits of endurance. “I’m sick of your temper making trouble for the rest of us! There are sedatives you can take to control your mood swings!”
“What did you just say?!”
Having nowhere else to direct his raging emotions, Wittenfeld turned them toward his colleague. Wahlen was about to respond in kind when von Eisenach snatched a bottle of mineral water from the table and upended it over both of them. Water dripping from their hair onto their shoulders, they stared at him in shock. Their taciturn assailant stared back. When a low voice finally spoke, it came from the man who outranked them all: Marshal Mittermeier.
“His Majesty is enduring suffering both mental and physical. Surely the seven of us together can bear this much—unless we wish to hear him bemoaning what pathetic subjects he has.”
At this time, Reinhard was making some final requests of Kaiserin Hilda. One of these was to grant all six surviving senior admirals the rank of imperial marshal—but only after Reinhard’s death, and in Hilda’s own name as regent.
Wolfgang Mittermeier, Neidhart Müller, Fritz Josef Wittenfeld, Ernest Mecklinger, August Samuel Wahlen, Ernst von Eisenach, and Ulrich Kessler. These seven men would be known to history as the Seven Marshals of Löwenbrunn. “An honor earned simply by being lucky enough to survive,” as some quipped, but the fact that they had survived an age of such vast, intense upheaval despite spending most of their time on its battlefields was proof enough that they were not ordinary men.
As Wolfgang Mittermeier was already a marshal, he was to receive the title of Prime Imperial Marshal. It was a suitable title for the greatest treasure of the Imperial Navy, but had Mittermeier been informed of this at that moment, he would have been in no mood to rejoice.
At 1830, a maid came and asked Mittermeier to come with her. The assembled admirals felt frost descend on the walls of their stomachs, and rose from their couches to silently watch the Gale Wolf leave the room. But Mittermeier had not been called for the reason they feared. Kaiserin Hilda, who met him in Reinhard’s sickroom, had a request for him.
“I’m sorry to make this request during the storm, Marshal Mittermeier,” she said, “but please bring your wife and child here.”
“Are you sure, Your Majesty? My family, intruding at a time like this?”
“The kaiser wishes it. Please hurry.”
This left Mittermeier no choice but to obey. He leapt into a landcar and raced through the lead-colored rain and transparent winds toward his home.
At around the same time, an imperial envoy arrived at the Bernkastel Hotel: Vice Admiral von Streit, in a large landcar. Rather than placing a visiphone call, Hilda had sent him there as a mark of respect to the empire’s guests.
“The kaiser wishes to see you,” von Streit said. “I apologize for asking this during such dreadful weather, but please come with me.”
Julian and his three companions exchanged glances. Julian’s throat felt suddenly constricted, but he finally forced some words out of it.
“Is his condition grave?”
“Please hurry.”
At this indirect response, Julian and the others prepared to depart.
Marshal Yang, as your representative, I am about to witness the death of the greatest individual of this era. If you are there in the next world, please watch with me, through my eyes. Thus spoke Julian in his heart to Yang, partly because he did not feel he could retain his composure without Yang’s help. Poplin and Attenborough, too, changed into their uniforms in silence, with none of their usual irreverence.
Amid the wind and rain, Julian and the others finally arrived at the provisional palace. Entering the main hall, they caught sight of a beautiful golden-haired woman walking by in an upstairs corridor. This, von Streit confirmed, was the kaiser’s sister Annerose.
So that is the Archduchess von Grünewald! Julian felt an almost dreamlike sentiment pass through him. He was not familiar with every aspect of Reinhard’s life, but he had heard that it was Annerose who had made it possible for Reinhard’s star to shine so brightly. In a sense, she was the creator of today’s history. He could not feign disinterest.
Annerose, of course, did not even notice Julian staring from below. Entering Reinhard’s sickroom, she bowed to her sister and sat in the chair at her brother’s bedside. As if in response, he opened his eyes and looked up at her.
“Dearest sister. I was dreaming…”
A soft light drifted in his ice-blue eyes. It was a light Annerose had never seen before. At that moment, she realized that her brother was truly going to die. His battles had always been driven by the desire to fill the insatiable void in his heart, ever since he was ten and first became aware of what it meant to fight. He had fought to seize power, and he had continued to fight once it was his. Whether through some subtle change somewhere along the way, or because this had always been his true nature, it seemed now that Reinhard had made fighting itself the goal of his life.
“The kaiser is warlike by nature.” “Reinhard der Löwenartig Kaiser” (“Reinhard the Lion Emperor”). These were alternate expressions of his pride, and more than suitable for the man who had blazed like a comet in history. But now he had finally been consumed by that flame. The mildness in him now was like warmth from the white ash that remained after body and soul had burned away. Lingering heat, soon to cool and vanish. A flash of light before the return to darkness.
“Do you wish to dream more, Reinhard?”
“No, I have had enough of dreams. More than enough of dreams that no one has dreamed before…”
Reinhard’s face was far too mild. Annerose felt her breast freeze up, heard the spiderweb cracks spreading out across it. The awful clarity of those sounds spread through her every nerve. When her brother’s vigor and intensity had softened, he would die. A sword had no reason to be anything but a sword. To her brother, satisfaction was the same thing as death. Someone or something had shaped his vital energies that way.
“Thank you for everything, dear sister,” Reinhard said, but Annerose did not wish to hear words of gratitude. She wanted him to forget the sister who had retreated from the world at so tender an age—to spread his wings and fly once more across the sea of stars. After Siegfried’s death, that had been her only wish—the slender crystal thread that tethered her to this world.
“This pendant…”
Reinhard’s fair hand,
noticeably gaunt, reached out toward her. The silver pendant he placed in her palm illuminated the two with a translucent gleam.
“I have no more need of it. I give it to you. And…I also return Siegfried to you. I am sorry for borrowing him for so long.”
Before Annerose could reply, Reinhard closed his eyes. He had lapsed back into a coma.
The storm grew stronger, and at 1900 the road outside the provisional palace was flooded. An urgent report arrived through the wind and rain. The liquid hydrogen tanks outside the city had been detonated, and evidence had been found on corpses at the scene connecting them to the Church of Terra. The Imperial Navy, holding its breath with the kaiser at death’s door, could not help but be shaken.
When the report reached Ulrich Kessler, commissioner of military police and commander of capital defenses, he scolded his reeling subordinates.
“Pull yourselves together. Setting fires and explosions as decoys is standard operating procedure for the Church of Terra. Their true target is the imperial family. Focus solely on guarding the provisional palace!”
The Terraist organization on Phezzan had been eliminated. Kessler had confidence on this score. With a bow to the other admirals, he left the parlor to stand in the entrance hall, using it as a command center to direct the military police on the scene. His diligence was praiseworthy, but it cannot be denied that he partly sought to escape into his duties. For all his resoluteness of character, he could not bear to simply sit and wait for the kaiser to expire.
Mittermeier had not yet returned from his home, and the five men remaining in the parlor—Müller, Wittenfeld, Mecklinger, von Eisenach, and Wahlen—were so fretful and anxious they felt as if their veins might rupture. At 1950, von Oberstein returned from the ministry. The end was near, but there was still one act to be played.
III
Between von Oberstein and the “Five Marshals” (excluding the absent Mittermeier and Kessler) an awful mood flickered on the brink of ignition. Von Oberstein had just told them that the final remnants of the Church of Terra would soon attack the provisional palace, determined to end the kaiser’s life.
It was Mecklinger who expressed the first doubt. Why, he demanded, would the Terraists commit such an outrage? They had only to wait: the situation would change without any need for their violent methods.
Von Oberstein’s reply was lucid to the point of cruelty.
“Because I drew them here,” he said.
“You did?”
“I allowed them to think that the kaiser’s condition was improving, and that as soon as His Majesty was well again, he would destroy their sacred Terra itself. In order to prevent this, they have taken drastic action.”
The air in the room was frozen so cold that it actually seemed to burn.
“Do you mean to say that you used His Majesty as bait?!” Mecklinger cried. “I appreciate that your options were few, but that is not how a loyal subject behaves!”
Von Oberstein icily brushed off this denunciation. “The kaiser’s passing is inevitable,” he said. “But the Lohengramm Dynasty will continue. I’ve merely enlisted His Majesty’s cooperation in eliminating the Terraist fanatics for the sake of the dynasty’s future.”
Wittenfeld unconsciously balled his right hand into a fist and took half a step forward. Blood frothed in both his eyes. But just before their disastrous clash on Heinessen was reproduced on a grander scale, Müller spoke—though he, too, was struggling grimly to keep himself under control.
“Our first task is to obliterate the Terraists. If our leadership is divided, we play directly into their wretched hands. Let us work together under the direction of Admiral Kessler.”
And so from 2000 to 2200, as the summer storm raged, the provisional palace waged the gravest of battles against enemies both within and without its walls. This battle was carried out in near silence, to avoid disturbing the kaiser on the third floor. The storm had rendered the mechanical security systems useless, so Kessler’s subordinates crawled through the wind and rain and mud searching for intruders. They shot the first one dead at 2015.
Julian and the others were waiting in a room in the west wing of the ground floor, but they could not pretend that the matter did not concern them.
“Perhaps we ought to thank the Terraists. Shared hatred of their church has led the Galactic Empire and democracy to discover a new road to coexistence…”
Julian was, of course, speaking ironically. His true feelings were quite different. The Terraists had assassinated Yang Wen-li, making them—and their leader in particular—his sworn enemy. In order to offer some assistance to the Imperial Navy, Julian, Attenborough, and Poplin stepped into the corridor, leaving Karin in the room.
“Fighting…the Church of Terra…on Phezzan…to protect…the kaiser,” said Poplin. “You know that game where you cut up several different sentences and rearrange the fragments? That’s what this reminds me of. Even just fifty days ago, I never would have imagined that one day I’d be in a place like this doing what we’re about to do. One thing about life—it never gets boring.”
Julian agreed with Poplin’s musings, but his interest was quickly drawn in a different direction. Dusty Attenborough had spotted a man dressed in black crumpled in a corner of the corridor. It seemed the man had managed to run there after being shot, before expiring from his wounds. A blaster glinted dully in his damp, muddy, bloody hand.
“I’ll just borrow that,” said Attenborough. “We won’t get anywhere without a weapon.”
As Attenborough took the blaster from the dead man’s hand, the lights in the corridor went out. At once, the three of them instinctively flattened themselves against the wall. Elsewhere in the palace, beams of light flashed and footsteps pounded. Their eyes were just growing accustomed to the dark when a man who was clearly not from the Imperial Navy appeared in front of them. A beam of light erupted from the blaster in Attenborough’s hand, piercing the man through the chest. He collapsed onto the floor.
This was not, perhaps, so much because Attenborough was a crack shot as because the Terraist had run into the blaster bolt. In any case, another intruder had been felled, and Julian’s party gained another weapon.
At this point, the lights came back on—perhaps the emergency generator had been activated. As the wind howled and lightning rumbled, imperial troops continued their desperate battle with the Terraists both inside and outside the provisional palace’s walls.
The sound of a small explosion assailed Julian’s eardrums. He gave it little thought, but it was a blast that would have historical repercussions. It was from a primitive explosive device that had detonated in a room on the second floor overlooking the inner garden, and a flying piece of shrapnel had torn von Oberstein open from his stomach to his chest.
It was 2025.
After the explosion, the Terraists moved around to the west wing of the building and tried to escape into the night, looking like shadow puppets against the flickering lightning. A thin beam of light seared horizontally through the darkness and falling rain, and one of the Terraists fell, arms spread wide. The other men tried to change direction, splashing flecks of mud.
“Where do you think you’re going, Terraists?”
Blaster fire concentrated on the source of that youthful voice. A pillar on a terrace screamed as fragments of marble flew and glass shattered.
Julian rolled across that terrace once, twice, and then pulled the trigger twice the instant he stopped moving. Bolts erupted from his blaster, and two more Terraists collapsed with low groans. They rolled across the ground, sending mud and blood flying, then twitched slightly before falling still.
The third and last man spun on the spot and tried to run, but Attenborough stepped out in front of him. The man changed direction again, but ran into Poplin, whose eyes gleamed with even greater menace than Julian’s. The darkness and the rain formed a double curtain, enclosi
ng them in another world.
“Before I kill you, answer me one thing,” Julian said, stepping off the terrace. He was immediately soaked from head to toe by the rain, which streamed down on him. “Where is the Grand Bishop?”
“The Grand Bishop?” the man muttered.
This was not the reaction Julian had expected. A sincere believer should have shown awe and respect at the mere mention of the title, but what came from this man was only a bitter chuckle, as if he was laughing at everyone and everything—even himself.
“The Grand Bishop is lying right over there,” the man said, pointing at one of his dead companions. Poplin used the tip of his boot to roll the body unceremoniously onto its back. After a sharp look at the uncanny, aged face that was revealed, Poplin wordlessly crouched and peeled back a skillfully made mask of soft rubber. Another face was revealed in the dim light, belonging to a slightly built, even gaunt, but surprisingly young man.
“This is the Grand Bishop, you say?”
“He certainly thought he was. He was an imbecile, a kind of memorizing machine.”
“What are you talking about?!”
“The real Grand Bishop lies crushed beneath a gigantic sheet of rock on Terra. Give it a million years, and he might be dug up as a fossil.”
The man’s mocking tone showed no sign of faltering. Their encounter did not in fact last very long, but a kind of impulse to void his psychological bowels kept him talking. He told them many things: that the death of the Grand Bishop had been kept secret from the church’s believers, and that the imbecile had tried to take his place. That the twenty who had infiltrated the temporary palace, including himself, were all that remained of the Church of Terra. It all came out, like water from a pipe whose cap had been lost.
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