Above the golden gleam of the handsome young kaiser’s hair, a lion of that selfsame color was roaring voicelessly. The three imperial marshals saluted in unison before their new banner and kaiser. Each man’s eyes harbored his own deep feelings and expectations. As Reinhard returned their salutes, a thin haze of irritation directed at himself clouded his expression.
Lieutenant Commander Emil von Reckendorf, aide-de-camp to Imperial Marshal von Reuentahl, was standing by outside the meeting room awaiting his senior officer’s decisions on two or three clerical matters at Imperial Joint HQ. When the imperial council was adjourned and the young, heterochromatic marshal emerged from the meeting room, he exchanged a simple farewell with his friend of the honey-hued hair, then set off down the hotel’s hallway. As he was walking, subordinates handed him documents, and he issued instructions while perusing their contents. The aide-de-camp followed the imperial marshal with his eyes, feeling that something was a little off in his lucid, yet somewhat mechanical tone of voice. There was no way he could have seen through him, though, to plumb the depths of von Reuentahl’s inner heart.
Please, kaiser, don’t give me an opening to rise up against you. It’s you whom I’ve chosen to steer the rudder of history—you whom I’ve put forward for that task. I follow your banner with pride. Don’t ever make me regret it. You must always walk ahead of me, lighting the way. But how can a light like yours burn if fueled by passivity and stability?
That unparalleled spirit of yours, that capacity for action, that’s where your true worth lies…
III
Hildegard von Mariendorf, chief secretary to the kaiser, had naturally followed Reinhard when he’d moved his headquarters to Phezzan. Hilda’s father, Count Franz von Mariendorf, was minister of domestic affairs, and had stayed behind on Planet Odin, long the location of the imperial capital. There he was busy attending to affairs of state. The kaiser and his chief cabinet minister were separated by a distance of several thousand light-years, and no matter how much use they made of FTL comm channels, it was hard to expect the nation’s business to run smoothly. However, this unorthodox system was a temporary arrangement, and soon enough, the minister of domestic affairs would follow the kaiser to Phezzan. The opposite was impossible. Odin’s days as the crux of the empire were already over, never to come again.
Hilda was assisting Reinhard with the processing of government business, while at the same time advancing an analysis of the rapidly—sometimes drastically—changing situation. Thanks to Lennenkamp’s going off the rails and the resulting chaos in the Free Planets’ government, Yang Wen-li was now on his own, naturally complicating the political and military factors that made up the present situation. They mustn’t grow complacent, and dismiss his forces like some bothersome swarm of flies. After all, though the Lohengramm Dynasty and the Free Planets Alliance might both be great rivers, each had started from a single drop of water.
There were many forces at work within the galaxy. Listing them, Hilda wrote down the following:
A: Neue Reich (Lohengramm Dynasty)
B: Present government of the Free Planets Alliance
C: Yang Wen-li’s autonomous forces
D: Former Phezzan forces
E: Old Galactic Empire (Goldenbaum Dynasty holdouts)
F: El Facil (has declared independence)
G: Holdouts from the Church of Terra
Was it fair to say she was being a little too suspicious here? Hilda threw a glance at a small mirror on the table, closed one eye, and looked at her face, besieged as it was by frown-inducing worries. The expression made the face of the short-haired, boyishly attractive daughter of a count look all the more boyish.
Hilda shrugged her shoulders, stretched her arms high up over her head, and took a deep breath. Every once in a while, even her energetic brain cells needed a rest.
When she thought about it, political conditions long ago were more cut-and-dried. About half a century ago, police and detectives from both the empire and the Free Planets Alliance had cooperated to expose a drug syndicate smuggling thyoxin. Political acrobatics like that were possible if the leaders on both sides could just agree. Although even back then, that kind of coordinated investigation was never attempted a second time. These days, it seemed like each and every cell in the divided human family was trying to preach at its fellows about what was right, all of them brandishing dictionaries tailor-made to their positions.
And the camp with which Hilda was affiliated had surely had a dictionary thicker than any other. Reinhard himself, though, had been too proud to submit gracefully to those gilt-edged pages in the hands of the Boyar nobles. Who was there, in the camps opposing Reinhard now, who could say that that old Reinhard no longer existed?
Hilda once again turned her eyes toward the various forces labeled A through G. Viewed from this perspective, she could see that each of them had large or small weaknesses. D and G had lost their home bases, and possessed no known military forces. B and E suffered from a lack of talented people. F was as powerless as a newborn. And in A and C, everything depended on the personal abilities of their leaders. If the leader of either side were lost, their organizations would crumble. Hilda couldn’t help but shudder at the thought of what would have happened if Reinhard, leaving no successor, had died at Yang’s hands at Vermillion the previous April.
The enemy meriting the most caution would be an amalgam of B, C, D, and F—a union, in other words, of malcontent elements from the Free Planets Alliance and Phezzan, built around a core of confidence in Yang Wen-li. Were such a combination of military might and economic power to react chemically, it could create the conditions for a faint, poisonous smoke to fell an enormous dragon. Surely not even Yang himself believed he could bring down Reinhard with just his small military force. If that was what he was thinking, there would be no need to fear him. That would mean he was nothing more than a sick man, afflicted by the mental illness of heroic narcissism.
Supposing he did bring down the kaiser…Would Yang Wen-li have any prospects afterward?
That question was coiling around and around in Hilda’s mind. Of course, there was no way her gaze could penetrate all the universe’s phenomena, but she had guessed that Yang’s flight had not been premeditated; it was better described as an emergency evacuation. She could see that by looking at his conduct during the Vermillion War. As far as he was concerned, the orders of a government elected by the people must have been naturally akin to divine oracles.
There was something very interesting about this man, this Yang Wen-li. In Hilda’s view, his abilities were rather spectacularly out of sync with his disposition. While possessed of talents extremely well suited to dispassionate, realistic problem-solving, he personally seemed to despise those abilities. Hilda could picture the man staring at himself in glum dissatisfaction, even though he had become the most important man in his nation at a very young age.
Immediately following the Vermillion War, Yang had been invited to meet with Reinhard on board his beloved warship, Brünhild. Based on what Hilda had heard from a few crewmen, including Commodore Günter Kissling, chief of Reinhard’s personal guard, he’d looked nothing at all like a man whose résumé was buried in innumerable wartime achievements. The impression Kissling had gotten had not been of a marshal or commander, but of merely a slender, up-and-coming scholar. And yet, Yang had apparently seemed completely undaunted while visiting an enemy warship all alone. That ambiguous point was likely where the true worth of the man named Yang lay.
If that slightly peculiar aspect of Yang Wen-li’s character were to cease to exist, then the military power of the Free Planets Alliance and the economic might of Phezzan would lose the catalyst through which they could combine. On the other hand, if that happened, each of the other smaller forces would try to squirm away in whichever direction they saw fit, which would perhaps necessitate squelching them individually. That in itself was bound to be a lo
t of trouble.
Even Kaiser Reinhard, with his exceedingly clear intellect, had seemed unable these past few weeks to make a clear-cut decision on how to deal with the situation.
“Be that as it may, I wonder what His Majesty is thinking?”
Hilda harbored not half a gram of doubt regarding the young kaiser’s talents. Still, one thing did concern her: the threads of Reinhard’s psyche were made of tough, highly advanced steel, but intertwined with delicate silver strings. The former were always at work on the battlefield, lending credence to the myth of Reinhard’s invincibility, and the same had been true even in the halls of governance. However, was it not the silver threads that wove together to compose the psychological norms of this youth who was on the verge of completing a conquest of a size unknown to history? The flames that burned inside Reinhard were brilliant in their intensity, yet was it not the brightest flame that burned out most quickly? That concern was casting a shadow over the heart of the count’s bright daughter.
IV
Kaiser Reinhard’s move to Phezzan turned out to be an enthralling stimulant for the technocrats of the Neue Reich. Bruno von Silberberg, a young man doubling as minister of industry and chief secretary of capital construction, was living in a run-down building not far from the imperial headquarters, carrying out difficult assignments day and night. His only time off had been a week’s worth of sick leave.
The minister of industry’s vice minister, Gluck, a middle-aged bureaucrat-turned-politician, should have been suitably competent, yet despite his best efforts, the office work had fallen behind during von Silberberg’s sick leave. When the recuperated minister of industry had returned and dealt with the delinquent matters in practically no time, the vice minister had lost his self-confidence and submitted his resignation to the kaiser.
The vice minister had been bracing himself for an angry rebuke, but the handsome young kaiser had instead given him an unexpected smile.
“The responsibilities of a vice minister are secondary to those of a minister. If your talents surpassed those of von Silberberg, I would have installed you, not him, as minister. You’re a modest man who knows his limitations. That’s good enough for me.”
Per the kaiser’s wishes, Gluck had stayed on as vice minister to the minister of industry. Reinhard didn’t come out and say so, but it was not his intent to perpetuate the Ministry of Public Works’ gigantic organization and vast powers. Once the structure of the state and the framework of society were stabilized, he planned to privatize the departments doing on-site work and shrink the organization. During the establishment and expansion phases, an outstanding talent like von Silberberg was indispensable, but during the periods of downsizing and stabilization, it was the steadfastness of Gluck that was preferable. The kaiser saw that if he used Gluck as a plumb line of sorts, and shaved away the parts that were beyond his ability to manage, what remained would be an organization of appropriate scale and authority.
While mistakes—such as the installment of Senior Admiral Lennenkamp as chief commissioner to the Free Planets Alliance—could indeed be found among Reinhard’s appointments, they were vastly outnumbered by successes rooted in his magnanimity and discerning eye. As for von Silberberg, whom even the kaiser recognized as a rare talent, he was devoting a portion of his vast energies to hashing out a plan to transform Planet Phezzan into the center of all the universe.
As the Lohengramm Dynasty’s first minister of industry—or rather, the first in humanity’s spacefaring history—he already stood to have his name remembered by future generations. That being the case, he figured, why not really make it stand out, with decorations of lavish gold and crimson? He wanted to make it so that his name would never be forgotten so long as Planet Phezzan existed.
The Phezzanese people, on the other hand, were unable to feel at ease. Thus far, the empire had merely occupied their ancestral planet, but now that they had been swallowed, they were also being digested. “The next stop for us’ll be the chamber pot,” some were saying, showing just how deep their sense of defeat ran by trying—and failing—to twist it into a crass joke. By taking fullest advantage of their astrographical position between the empire and the Free Planets Alliance, and utilizing their wealth and every trick in Machiavelli’s book, they had striven to become the de facto rulers of all the universe, but now all of that had vanished like foam on the seashore.
“The wisdom of the civilized, undone by the strong arm of the barbarian,” some opined, but in the end, this was nothing more than the self-pity that followed on the heels of a forced admission of defeat. In any case, they had been unable to guess that the other side would resort to brute strength.
“Whether I look to the right or look to the left, all I see are ugly mugs of imperials.”
“Still, it’s hard to believe how much has changed in less than one year.”
As regretful and indignant looks were traded among the Phezzanese, the silver and black uniforms of the imperial military increased by the day, until it seemed as though half the atmosphere were being consumed in service of their breathing.
The greater part of the Phezzanese people had no reason to be supportive of Kaiser Reinhard, yet they couldn’t seem to help developing a grudging admiration for the sheer grandeur of his plotting, and the speed with which he made decisions and took action. It was true, of course, that a number of impurities were mixed in with those feelings. To curse Reinhard as an incompetent would be to shove themselves into a mire of disgrace for having been outmaneuvered by said incompetent. Economic might that was supposed to have been overwhelming had lain idle in the face of military force, and intelligence that they were supposed to have monopolized had been stolen by the hands of the imperial military without affording Phezzan any benefit whatsoever. It was the clever, scheming people of Phezzan who had been living complacently in the greenhouse of a conservative worldview, not knowing how fragile its glass walls were until that golden-haired youth had come along and shattered them.
In any case, there was no room for doubt that Kaiser Reinhard was in the process of creating history. At the same time, the people of Phezzan could not stave off concern over what kind of role they would be given to play on the magnificent stage of the history now being created.
There were also those who imposed upon themselves positive perspectives and actions. The strong point of the Phezzanese had always been their ability to extract the maximum profit from whatever political circumstances were laid before them. Even in the old days, Phezzan had never been some paradise of universal equality—small and midsize merchants had been left weeping by wealthy tycoons’ high-handed abuse of vested rights, and families had been brought to ruin by defeat in the competition for sales. For people such as these, the violent change of the times that Reinhard’s conquest brought about was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for what might be called a consolation match.
And so, seeking the conqueror’s favor, they scrambled to procure supplies needed by the military, to construct housing for soldiers, and to provide information regarding the economy, transportation, geography, and mood of the citizenry. The younger generation in particular harbored an accelerating rebelliousness toward Phezzan’s elders, as well as support on an emotional level for their young conqueror, and the imperial government made a deliberate point of treating young Phezzanese well, as they began roller-skating down the road toward coexistence.
V
It was the first of November when an even more massive upheaval shook the ground under the people’s feet.
That day, the funeral of the late senior admiral Helmut Lennenkamp was conducted in secret. Marshal von Oberstein, minister of military affairs, was named chair of the funerary committee, and although Kaiser Reinhard and many high-ranking government and military officials were in attendance, it could have been called a modest affair considering the rank of the deceased. The imperial government had not yet received a decision from the kai
ser regarding whether or not to publicize the deaths of high-ranking officials, and furthermore, unlike the case of Admiral Kempf in recent years, the deceased’s cause of death this time was a dishonorable one—suicide by hanging—so even the admirals in attendance found it difficult to find much meat in his death to feed their fighting spirits.
Sandy-haired, sandy-eyed Neidhart Müller leaned over and whispered to Mittermeier, seated next to him, “So, Admiral Lennenkamp won’t be promoted to imperial marshal?”
“Well, he didn’t die in battle, so…”
“He did die in the line of duty. Despite that, he gets no promotion?”
Wordlessly, Mittermeier nodded. As Müller had said, Lennenkamp had indeed perished in the line of duty, but his death had been brought about by guilt rather than achievement. It was likely because he had deviated from his original mission that the new order, based on the Baalat Treaty, was about to be robbed of the time it needed to build itself up and develop. Temporary though it would have been, peace had been on the verge of arriving in this age, and Lennenkamp inevitably received at least part of the blame for grabbing it by the ankles and dragging it back down into the depths.
Just before the funeral, a rear admiral who had been attached to Lennenkamp’s fleet approached Mittermeier with a heartfelt request. “I served under His Excellency, Admiral Lennenkamp, for five years. While it’s true he was a little set in his ways, he was a good senior officer. Could I ask you, please, to request that His Majesty launch a retaliatory strike on his behalf?”
Mittermeier sympathized with the rear admiral’s request. Still, if he had stated his opinion clearly, he would have said that both Lennenkamp and those around him would have been fortunate if he had never been promoted beyond rear or vice admiral. Human beings had a thing called capacity, which was different for everyone in both size and shape. An able fleet commander did not necessarily make an excellent commissioner. Misjudging him had indeed been the kaiser’s mistake, but at the same time Mittermeier could not deny that the plunge in Lennenkamp’s stock had been all his own doing. Naturally, acting against the kaiser’s wishes and marring the authority of his new dynasty had not been considered small crimes either.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 7 Page 3