Jahandar: The Orion War Read online

  Jahandar

  Volume III

  The Orion War

  by

  Kali Altsoba

  ©

  Kali Altsoba

  (2017)

  About the Author

  Kali Altsoba is the pen name used in future war fiction by a military historian who teaches at a major research university in the United States. He has published award-winning books on world military history and 20th century military history.

  Contents

  Arch

  Castro

  Leclerc

  Argos

  Adélaïde

  Murder

  Revolution

  Starmap

  Royko

  Krump

  Sanjay

  Arrow

  Virgiliu

  Briand

  Beguiled

  Betrayed

  “Even a fool learns something

  once it hits him.”

  Homer

  The Iliad

  Arch

  It’s been three months since the liberty of Genèvens expired in flame and fury at the berm, the day the Exodus ships hot-jumped a singularity at the shadowed, lee side of an orange-blue, cold gas giant. Since Jan and Zofia fled on different ships headed for separate destinations, unknown to themselves or each other. Since a black-booted Rikugun shōshō compelled locals to bulldoze and discard the bodies of hundreds of thousands of KRA dead into unmarked lime pits, five klics out there in the runty-treed ash zone that’s still off-limits to all civilians.

  Then the new military governor stood where General Amiya Constance gave her ‘death and defiance’ speech. He saw gray-clad Special Action Commandos strut the lead of a triumphal military parade of armtraks and artillery, hover troops in APCs, regular leg infantry in green caterpillar rows, smirking death squads in all-black needle-nose transports. A million pairs of boots pounding in unison on the ancient timbers of the Grand Boulevard vibrated up the wooden canyon walls. Silent crowds ordered to line the way from the Berm Gate to Governance Square and Old Towne Hall wept as they remembered a smaller parade just two weeks before the fall.

  Today a war memorial is being formally dedicated to all Grünen who died in the ground campaign to liberate Genève, one of the Imperium’s designated “Lost Children” worlds. As well as those lost in battered Kaigun warships that fell through smoky skies to gouge raw craters in the face of Southland. Or spilled into space somewhere along Alpha’s gauntlet run to the outer L2. Today, he’ll give a speech before dignitaries from as far away as Kestino itself. He’s oddly nervous, dressing and redressing, fussing over every sartorial detail. This will be on the GovNeb.

  The most important dignitaries to arrive will be late, of course. They’re still coming down in short-orbit shuttles as he reviews his speech before leaving for the memorial Arch. They have to shuttle down, since work hasn’t even begun to restore the old elevator wrecked by a Zerstörer attack at the start of the invasion. He can’t get the authorities on Kestino to agree to finance the Genève elevator rebuild. He must find all credits he needs for infrastructure from local sources.

  “Bellum se ipse alet. War must pay for itself.” The new War Production Minister barked at him in a sealed briefing during a Royal Inspection Tour. He was a thin, restless type, wearing a SAC uniform that looked three sizes too large on his bony frame.

  “But without an elevator I don’t have lift capacity to get even reduced production off the surface into orbiting cargo ships.” It’s a downward spiral. No lift no exports, no exports no taxes, no taxes no money to rebuild essential infrastructure.

  “The Rikugun did a lot of damage down here. Over half the forests on Northland are ash and ruin, and the forced labor camps on Southland are not as efficient as we hoped. There’s been sabotage, too, fires in the lumber yards...”

  The answer seared his pride. He replays it in his head just before leaving for the Arch ceremony. “Do you think that we spent Grün lives and treasure to capture these backward Krevan worlds only to pour imperial funds into them? Are you insane or just half-witted?”

  He protested with a wet splutter of outraged spittle and prideful umbrage, both at the interruption and the insult. “I assure you that I’m neither! Pyotr Shaka III himself...”

  “Silence! Or I shall report that you’re not up to the job of Liberation Governor. Do you think Pyotr cares who oversees his recovered children? You mistake your place and role. I ask again: are you capable of governing Genève as necessary?”

  It’s the same old Grün way: power and insult and threat, like excrement, all flow in one direction. Down a rigid hierarchy of high caste and royal favor that brooks no insubordination or excuse for failure. The governor’s retreat is as rapid as his jumped-up heart rate. “Yes minister! Apologies, sir. I’m ready for the great task Pyotr has set me. I serve at his pleasure, and yours.”

  “Indeed you do. See that the tithe is paid and the economy of this wretched and backward world is integrated with our wartime needs. Or neither I nor Pyotr Shaka will be pleased.”

  The governor promised to find the funds and send the required Imperium “tenth-of-all” to Kestino at each due tithing date. “I’ll do it even if I have to squeeze Genève until its pips squeak” he boasted later, from fear and damaged pride. Now he regrets that moment of weakness. There’s no way to make the next tithe to Kestino or repair battle-damage and infrastructure rebuilds. Not with the whole planetary economy smoldering to a stump like the dead methuselahs all around Toruń. ‘There’s no tourism. Not with a new war crisis building with the Calmari, angry over our annexations of the conquered Krevan worlds. Damn their sanctions and total travel ban!’

  With the lift knocked out and occupied Genève under strict embargo, tourists stay away even as funds from bulk lumber and handcraft exports plummet. In fact, the whole economy is crashing. Crops are unharvested, forests burned, too many suspect civilians are in the governor’s special detention camps. There, a sickening dull crack-thump! of a kendo stick smacking down onto prisoners’ skulls competes with barking of guard dogs and boasts of gloating, drunk, off-duty Rikugun men in the local pubs as the most common sounds heard on the new Genève.

  ‘Not even our own Grün tourists will come here now, except for a few ships of zealots who wish to visit one of the recovered Lost Children. Damned pilgrims spend like the puritans they are: not at all. How can I expand the tourist trades with fires still burning in the Old Forests? Or stories on the memexes about our stolen liners from before the war? Ghastly, awful Krevans, to treat our best people like that!’

  For the moment he has a ceremonial task that needs his attention. He’ll depart by stubby helo from the roof of his fine wood tower, thirty stories above renamed “Pyotr Square.” His suite has an unmatched, panoramic view of the city that he’s slowly growing to appreciate. He tucks the scroll into his pocket and leaves to dedicate the new memorial at the Magni crash site.

  As his helo banks over the city the governor looks down into a gutted ruin of one of the oldest buildings in Toruń. It’s a hole in the center of an otherwise intact city where once stood Old Towne Hall. It took military-grade incendiaries to burn though the fire-retardant of buildings marked for total removal, but after several tries engineers managed the destruction he ordered. Every major cultural site held precious by Krevans is gone, to be replaced by the higher symbols and culture of the occupiers. He smiles at the pleasing sight of a stack of massive granite blocks. They’ll form the base of a huge ultrasteel statue of “Pyotr the Liberator.” He’ll stand tall over what’s still just an open pit far below. ‘At least the statue build is on time. Pyotr will be pleased.’

  The city and all Genève reeks of burning wood. Even with the big
fires put out by winter rain and orange retardant dropped by adapted Jabos, a thousand years of windfall smolders deep inside the old growth forests. Ancient trees with bases dozens of meters in girth slow-burn from the outside in, or inside out, moaning in slow agony for many months. His experts tell him some will slow burn for at least five years, with the oldest redwood giants taking a decade or more. The smell of hot sap and burnt green-and-living wood is everywhere, mixed with choking ash.

  Scorched planking is being replaced where fighting pitted it around crossroads barriers the Rikugun took down with massive violence, against mostly last-stand and teenage defenders. Unknown to the new governor, local workers make sure to use thickly knotted wood so that RIK troops can’t parade crisply as they so like to do, at least not without stumbling a bit. It’s a silent, knobbled protest. A small way for Toruńites to remember what was done and who was lost.

  As the helo rises ever higher the governor is unhappy to see black smokers irregularly spotting the far horizon. ‘Arsonists and bandits in the woods. More lost lumber! Savages!’ His intelligence chief says the leader of the resistance is a woman, but his chauvinism won’t permit him to believe it. He suppresses all contrary suggestions in reports to Kestino. ‘It’s one thing to lose woodland resources to guerrillas, quite another to be humiliated by a damn woman!’

  He flies over a removed section of berm where construction of officer housing and RIK barracks is expanding Toruń for the first time in 400 years. ‘The Rikugun are building, but they only take. Nothing is added to my economy by the brass, their bases, or their damned barracks.’

  It didn’t have to be this way. In a third of Orion, outside the rigid Grün Imperium and totally closed Dauran Commons, real poverty is eliminated by smoothing the worst effects of economic cycles of supply and demand. Not everyone in the free trading systems prospers or lives equally well. Natural talent is not evenly distributed, so an aristocracy of merit always overtakes legislated equality over time. But the vast majority live materially content lives, with time to focus their natural envy on truer unattainables such as superior wit or beauty. But that’s manageable. Especially the beauty part, given that once luxury medicine is commonly available.

  The governor knows little of that. His experience and mandate is a traditional command economy. Indeed, he was born into and only knows a slave system of have-elites and have-not multitudes, of take all and leave and give nothing. He works for an Inca overlord, erecting treasure houses of stolen wealth in service to a man and regime claiming divine right after centuries of hereditary rule sustained by murder and secular plots and plunder. He has no imagination and only mediocre talent. He’s one of the gray men, an apparatchik who doesn’t threaten the closed system of the chaebol, the great family-centered hereditary conglomerates that control all major economic activity within the Imperium. He’s an underboss serving other underbosses who serve Pyotr, a master thief who’s entitled “Grand Tennō” but might be better called capo di tutti capi.

  The governor lands at a skybase 30 klics outside the city. Freshly ripped from a fire-shaved landscape, it abuts one of the blocked Old Forest Roads. A pyramid of tangled wreckage is plainly visible, piled 1,500 meters high and four times as wide around. Sunlight glints off shiny bits embedded in craggy ruins like raw diamonds in mine slag. Only they’re not diamonds.

  There are four more mounds just like it along the spoked roads leading away from Toruń that unite only to pass under the old Berm Gate, now guarded by RIK who let no civilian pass in or out of the city except to do forced military labor. All five artificial hills are comprised of burned and broken metal, shapeless little things, and melted people. Parallel to the closed Old Forest Roads are five fresh-cut black ribbons: military roads slashing through the ashland.

  From the RIK skybase the governor flies at mach-3 across the strait between Genève’s only continents. Soon he’s standing in a cold, sea-borne rain in front of an honor guard and a Kestino GovNeb crew. Around him is lower Southland. A spartan landscape, its treeless barrens and shortgrass meadows sustain only vast flocks of sheep. They’re slow-grazing on the last winter grass outside the new labor camps, filled with endless rows of dull barracks and confined lives. The sheep will grow thick and hot with wool, with no one to shear them after winter ends.

  Behind him in a hasty reviewing stand sit more than 2,000 Rikugun, Kaigun, and SAC officers, and dignitaries from martial law and occupation governments of six more annexed Krevan worlds. Fifty thousand RIK stand at rigid attention on either side of a Memorial Arch that he’s come to dedicate with full pomp and military honors, though he never served for even a day. Their uniforms are clean. Full dress, bright green, crisp and light as fresh lettuce. Or perhaps a descended swarm of locusts. Senior officers are decked in gold-and-silver braid with jeweled clusters. Clear-diamond ceremonial dirks are visible in transparent hangers attached to their hips.

  When the governor speaks at such public moments he reveals the backwater, second-rate functionary that he is. As always, he mistakes polite official applause for genuine enthusiasm as he gives an eminently forgettable, clichéd and cheek-bite inducing talk. He starts by recalling “a brave Kaigun-daisa and the courageous crew of a great cruiser lost in pursuit of Purity and glory for the Imperium. We who gather here today to honor their glorious memory can never...”

  ‘Gods save us, must I bite and bleed the other cheek to stay awake through this pabulum! I’d give half of Pyotr’s wealth for a hard pinch or a stiff drink right now!’ And variations on that theme and thought in at least half the grandstand listeners. The others, however, lap up the cliché praise of common Grünen who serve, dead soldiers and sailors of the non-citizen classes whom these dignitaries and top officers would never be seen with in public or let their daughters marry. Even the slave master sometimes feels it’s proper to give his slaves their due. Then back to work.

  The memorial is an austere monument framing a 1.5 meter brass bell, the one identifiable piece of the heavy cruiser KG Magni that satellite and ground searches found, other than cracked carbyne plate-armor fragments tracked to skidding meteor strewnfields over a third of Southland. The bell was used in commissioning rites and other onboard rituals. It’s sans crown and clapper now, but otherwise recognizable as what it was. It’s been formally renamed Magni Gloriosa.

  That it survived is explained by the heavy armor around the Bridge and Afterdeck that protected it inside a puddle of smooth metals during descent and in the impact melt. It’s a simple, mere physical fact. That doesn’t stop Imperium propagandists from encouraging superstition and mysticism about the “Miracle of the Bell.” Distant Manmō was homeworld to the incinerated crew. There, secret Purity funds and political support back a swelling, quasi-religious “Cult of the Bell.” A few of its first “green pilgrims” are already here, dressed in long cloaks like Broderbund monks. They bend low in weeping prayer, or stand with heads back to wail into the sheeting rain like keening banshees. They all hold little sanctus or sacring bells in front of their green robes, each miniature marked from bead line to shoulder with scorch marks exactly imitating those that score Magni’s bell.

  The battered and scorched Magni Gloriosa, “symbol of Imperium strength and loyalty,” hangs from a crossover marble yoke on Memorial Arch Island. The crushed stone islet was built at fever’s pace by forced laborers in the center of a Southland lake newly created by the plunging carcass of the broken cruiser. The molten ruin is gone now, the lake landscaped in memoriam.

  The stone for the islet and the Arch came from the quarry in Toruń. A covered alcove of ashes inside the quarry was moved by workers to a far back corner. Then they covered the ash mound with partly cut or broken bits of marble slab left over from the hurried Arch quarrying. Grün overseers thought the locals were oddly careful with the piled ashes. After all, ash covers half of Northland. As the effort took little time and posed no clear threat, they let them do it. A handmade sign hung over one end of the quarry before the city fell was smashed by d
runken RIK on the first day of the occupation. So no sign now points to or remembers the hidden ashes of old heroes. Yet all Toruń knows they rest inside the quarry. Everyone except the indurate occupiers.

  Memorial Arch commemorates over 3,100 sons, brothers and fathers who sailed to war on Magni, but not one of the illicit women who died in flaming air in an alien sky. It remembers 1,500 more men who perished on broke-back Loki, which did not crash but is being scrapped at a very old shipyard at Huertgen, a Grün forest world. Action by Alpha delivered 200 more Kaigun names from the crew of Baldr, along with hundreds from several Zerstörer crews lost during the Exodus run or to mines laid at two outermost LPs by fleeing Alpha and Beta ships. The rest are names of those lost during the highly successful Genève Obliteration operation, plus three light cruisers and more patrol Zerstörers hammered by Toruń Shipyard guns before Alpha bolted.

  At the very bottom of the list are the shamed crews of nine old Köln class frigates wiped out to a man by Émile Fontaine and Magda Aklyan at the Genèven inner moons. It speaks of them, too, as “Heroes of Honor and Purity.” Every single one was a Purity man. Or so says the governor, droning on under a gray-skied, soaking downpour. Most in the crowd nod solemnly. It might be a touching moment, except that it’s not true. No more than half believed in Purity.