Assassin Read online

  Assassin

  Volume VII

  The Orion War

  by

  Kali Altsoba

  SECOND EDITION

  ©

  Kali Altsoba

  (2019)

  About the Author

  Kali Altsoba is the pen name used to publish future military fiction by the award winning military historian, Cathal J. Nolan. He is the author of multivolume works of international and military history. He received the top international award for military history in 2018, the Gilder Lehrman Prize, for his acclaimed The Allure of Battle (Oxford UP). His histories have been feature reviewed in academic and military journals, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The National. He has delivered public lectures in Argentina, Britain, Canada, Israel, and all across the United States. Recent venues include the Chautauqua Institute, the National World War II Museum, the New York Historical Society, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (Ft. Leavenworth), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Kabul, Afghanistan), National Intelligence University Alumni, World Affairs Forum, and the Center for Military and Diplomatic History in Washington D.C.. He has interviewed on CBS Radio, Fox Radio, Radio Free Europe, Newstalk (Ireland), BBC Mundo, PBS and C-Span. He consults on military historical issues to the PBS series NOVA. He is featured on camera in the 2018 NOVA documentary on Dunkirk.

  Author’s Note (First Edition)

  Some events in this series derive from real world acts of war, including war crimes and atrocities adapted from After Action reports, combat memoirs and eyewitness accounts. They come from widely varied armies, times and cultures, in dozens of wars across many centuries. The result is often grim and not for the fainthearted, cruel and pitiless, but true to the wide human experience of war waged over time. As dark as the tale becomes, as savage as some characters and combat depictions are, I hope my effort to root this series in a deeply human experience of the high politics of empire and the brutality of war will be rewarding to some readers.

  Author’s Note (Second Edition)

  This book is reorganized, rewritten, and expanded. Seven new chapters are added, along with character and situational development in all other chapters. The story develops earlier themes in the series, adds plot twists and enhanced character arcs that continue in follow on books. Combat depictions may echo real events drawn from veteran experience, but are all reset within a complex weave of character development and future war that is reshaping the history of the Thousand Worlds of Orion yet to come. There are numerous literary references woven into names, plot twists, characters, and dialogue. Some are explicit. Many are left implicit, as a kind of cultural “easter egg” for curious readers to discover and explore.

  Contents

  Queen

  Regent

  Balance

  Chalice

  Cowls

  Kahn

  Chiyoko

  Purity

  Whiff

  Viper

  Onur

  Games

  Parade

  Bomb

  Wheel

  Neaira

  Dogs

  Grace

  Sniper

  Coup

  Friends

  Shōji

  Murder

  Haiku

  Betrayal

  Genocide

  “Think him as a serpent’s egg, which hatch’d,

  would as his kind grow mischievous,

  and kill him in the shell.”

  William Shakespeare

  Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene I

  Queen

  Pyotr remembers that algid night as if was last night. Yet, it was over 40 years ago. He slips back in his thoughts and dreams whenever something small triggers a memory of his mother, the Dowager Regent. It might be a hint of perfume on a woman in the Jade Court, or the scent of vanilla at a banquet, the sound of rustling silk, or a snatch of birdsong in the courtyard. He can’t recall what triggered him tonight. There are so many things it might have been.

  Tossing in his sleep decades later, he sees it all over again, feels terror grip just like it did back then. Pitch as tar, cold as rock ice. Lonely as every other night of his solitary life, so filled with people but not friends, so overflowing with lovers yet bereft of love. He goes back to the night Hashâshīn came for him, standard bearer and genetic carrier of two imperial lines. They wanted to end him, Pyotr Shaka Mobuto Oetkert III, 10 year-old heir to the Jade Throne.

  He’s back there, now awake and full of fear. He’s listening to hear them in the hall, knowing they’re here, wondering if this is the night they make it all the way in. They creep into the inner sanctum of the Waldstätte Palast where the Imperial Family sleeps, each in a separate, guarded bedchamber. Pyotr is alone, huddling and crying in the cold and dark, surrounded by shadow threats in a much too big room that might sleep ten more boys with space to spare. He's lying in a plush four poster bed. He’s hugging his favorite toy, a stuffed blue ermine bear. He startled awake ten minutes ago, after earlier crying himself to sleep as he always does, weeping for an absent father and any attention or sign of affection from a cold, aloof, distant mother. All around the bed, a prince’s jade paneled room is shelved with reminders of heritage and dynastic duty. The only giveaway that a child sleeps here are the rare and priceless toys lining high shelves that reach the ceiling, some worth more than the annual income of a fair sized offworld city.

  Royal biographers will look back on these early, lonely years and write how they shaped the man and ruler, the warlord and tyrant, that Pyotr becomes. But there’s really no connection. The child is not always father of the man. Gulags and purges, invasions and occupations to come do not follow from his lack of breastfeeding or maternal love, or too little paternal time well spent. It was this night that left him changed forever. This was the night his childhood ended.

  Across the city in a backstreet cathouse, a second team of Hashâshīn, sky high on God and extreme robusto that quickens the senses, is already at work. Two stand silent watch while three strangle Pyotr’s father, Karl Joseph Shaka XIV, with green silk cords. He’s naked, flailing, flopping and kicking in a cheap metal bed, looking and sounding like a caught carp panting its last breaths at the bottom of a ribbed rowboat. A dying woman lies bleeding on the floor. She’s an ordinary sex worker in the wrong place at the wrong time, and truly with the wrong man this night. Outside the door are the emperor’s four guards, still warm but slumped against the blood smeared hallway with slit throats. Their weapons are not drawn. Surprise lingers in their dulling eyes. Tonight, the Brethren solve all their Oetkert problems. Tonight they’ll show the reigning family yet again who it is who really rules the Grün Imperium. Tonight, though they don’t want this or know it yet, they’ll set the Thousand Worlds of Orion on the path to fire and the Fourth Orion War. And they’ll write their own doom.

  Pyotr doesn’t hear the five Hashâshīn creep silently through the marbled halls of the Waldstätte Palast, on the eastern shore of Lake Isis in Novaya Uda on Kestino. Masked from detection by biofilters and light and sound and motion disruptors, they’re searching for the nubian princeling and his two lighter skinned siblings, his simpleminded baby brother Friedrich, and his brilliantly precocious sister Chiyoko. They’ll know they have the royal children when they reach the inner sanctum, and confirm it in their jade, Oetkert eyes. When they kill them, they’ll stare into those sea green eyes to see life and color drain away.

  The five assassins slide down the hall, silent and stealthy. They are without conscience, here to kill the elder son of a libertine father and distant, imperious mother. Here tonight because it is the darkest of nights, moonless and still. Here because Hashâshīn have come to kill Oetkerts for 1,500 years. Here to choose which royal should die and who will live to rule the Imperium. Or r
ather, who will reign over it. For it is the Brethren of the Order, the Broderbund der Ritter who rule, and have for centuries from the shadows behind the crown and throne. The Order clings to very old ways. That’s why its High Council sent five men in green robes to creep along the stone walls of the Waldstätte, one with a holy black blade in hand, to slice open the throat of an Oetkert mother they no longer need and to murder her royal brat, Chiyoko, according to ordained privileges and duties and with the proper means and rituals. It’s why the first team uses green silk cords to strangle Karl Joseph, and the second will use them to kill his son Pyotr.

  Hashâshīn senses are intensely edged, raised to preternatural acuity by doses of pure robusto so strong they’ll ‘flame out’ in just months, rather than years. That doesn’t matter. Only the Will of God and holy kill mission matter. The five in the city and five more in the Waldstätte Palast care to stay alive only until they bring sure death to the Imperator and his son. They are keen and skilled killers who carry only diamond knives and silent lasers to dispatch any Palast guards they may meet. Fourteen ‘Royal Canaries’ are tumbled along the stealth route already, throats slit ear-to-ear or heads holed by slicing light. Already, crimson pools are soaking into fabulous handwoven rugs, spreading over green marble inlays. Four guards in the city and fourteen more in the palace are the first to die in the Revolt of the Ritter that will shake the Imperium to its foundations, then all Orion.

  A sharp snick! of a blade sliding across a royal throat will change history and the future. Hashâshīn use special knives for the carving. Not the sleek diamond blades they use on the bird guards, but a fabled degen: rougher edged, iron-nickel daggers given to the Brethren by God. Or stolen from him, from another point of view. A degen is a short, black throat cutter with jag toothed edges, forged from “Holy Iron” from the most famous of meteorites to fall anywhere in the Thousand Worlds. Degen are so venerated that by themselves they can incite Brethren to violence. That’s why their leaders keep them always sealed, for use on special missions only, as the sole weapon the old rituals and abiding superstitions allow Hashâshīn to use to draw sacred blood royale from a gaping, Oetkert-Shaka neck.

  The meteorite was once called al-Hajaru al-Aswad. The Black Stone was hurled by God straight out of Heaven, landing in Eden as a guide to prayer for Adam and Eve. To the heavens it returned millennia later, by the crime of mad, misogynist Brethren who then made of it instruments of holy death. They stole it in a flurry of bloody mayhem the day the founders of the Ordensstaadt burned away from the cradle world in the colony ship Deus ex Machina. It was not the only stolen, forbidden thing that foulest of ships carried to the stars. Its fridge banks were full of forbidden zygotes, slave seedlings awaiting planting in an awful race of clone mother-wives the Brethren have kept in bondage ever since.

  A fast shuttle waited with engines warm while an assault team attacked and blew down the walls of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, toppling its walls and high white minarets on top of tens of thousands of peaceful, circling pilgrims. Entering the chaos with purpose, they tore al-Hajaru al-Aswad from its silver frame in the Ka’aba. The raid achieved total surprise, the extreme violence against massed civilians did the rest. In the terror and panic, the attackers rocket heloed with the stolen Black Stone to a heavily camoed shuttle that launched straight up from a Yemeni desert. An astonished and outraged world watched as it rendezvoused with Deus ex Machina, which burned out of orbit and headed to the nearest Old Earth bohr zone with the universally loathed Broderbund der Ritter onboard, along with the Black Stone, stolen zygotes, and eternal malevolence in its hold.

  Uninspected, unauthorized, and unholy, the colony ship raced out-of-system before anyone could stop it. When it deep camoed and went silent, as it strained past the oort cloud, the Broderbund and the Black Stone disappeared into the future. It was a crime that announced a new force for evil would be part of all futures in Orion, right before the dawn of a Thousand Worlds aborning.

  Now, over 1,500 years later, five stealthy, green cloaked men approach Pyotr’s boyhood room with silken ropes and Mary and Chiyoko’s chambers with a forged and polished bit of the Black Stone. They’ll send a death signal back to Rudkhan Castle in the Alborz Mountains of Terra Deus, in the Ordensstaadt, announcing that the deed is done, proclaiming the Tennō and his heir are dead. Then the killers will guard dimwitted Prince Friedrich with their blades and lives. They’ll call in a thousand more Brethren waiting in the city, ordered to hold the Waldstätte Palast against all comers. They’ll kill without mercy, and die with no one to mourn them or regret their passing. For they are the Hashâshīn, the Holy Death.

  Karl Joseph is gasping his last on a barrio bed, and the cowl masters want his Queen, Mary Oetkert, removed from politics and her eldest boy Prince Pyotr dead. The minor prince is the uncrowned emperor of the Imperium. If only for a few minutes before he, too, dies by an assassin’s hand. Three Hashâshīn will enter the royal bedchambers, muffle mouths, then slice open exposed throats of pregnant Queen Mary Oetkert and her gentle daughter, Pyotr’s sister Chiyoko. They’ll use the iron-nickel holy degen to do it. Not so sleeping and dull witted Friedrich. The High Council has other plans for him. Not so cowering, terrified Pyotr. He must die a ritual death. It’s an ancient taboo to draw even a drop of a Tennō’s blood. Hashâshīn are fiercely obedient to the ancient, mystical laws. Together with Karl Ferdinand I, founder of the dynasty and Imperium, Brethren wrote those laws. Prince Pyotr cannot be shot or knifed in his bed. They must strangle him with silken cords, just as his father had to die naked and airless.

  ***

  For all its books of prophesy and daily divinations, the Broderbund never foresaw the swift and lethal rise of a terrible rival, the gray legions of the Special Action Commando. Instincts and training of modern Brethren eroded over too many centuries of unchallenged power, until their prophets and diviners of the masterless class and the Jade Court became degenerate and unwary. When Karl Joseph Shaka married Mary Oetkert, already the Brethren’s guard was down, clarion warnings of rising danger obscured by too much comfort. Their grip on Holy Assassin blades was slipping, and with it their hold on the Jade Throne. Even now, the High Council of the Brethren doesn’t truly comprehend the changes fermenting below the surface of all Imperium politics. It missed the moral revolution that seized imaginations of the governing elites and the masses in the same moment. It never saw the Purity movement coming, didn’t take it seriously, misunderstood how deeply it took hold in SAC, key subdivision of the military. Then watched it scuttle like a Green Widow spider into the Jade Court and park itself right beneath the throne. It bit and infected Pyotr’s father. It squats behind the jade seat still, full of venom and threat and ambition.

  Despite the contempt of the Queen for the hard men in gray uniforms, SAC is a serious rival to the Brethren, a real threat to displace the Broderbund from dominant political influence it has enjoyed for 1,500 years, since the founding. All cowls hate the gray men of the General Curia and more so the Sakura-kai, the Cherry Blossom Society. For unlike the more conservative Curia, that secret sect of young officers is fanatically devoted to the biopolitical ideology called Purity. Brethren despise the very idea of Purity, which would seize control of evolution and history from God’s rightful hands, meaning theirs. It’s sacrilege. They’ll not let such heresy control the throne and with it, the instrument of God’s purpose in Orion: the sacred Imperium they have designed to do God’s work through war.

  When the High Council sees the danger from SAC and realizes that it can’t be stopped or removed any other way, they set out to do what their Order has done since the founding bargain of the Imperium: they decide to change out the current emperor and seat a new, more pliable man on the Jade Throne. It must be a man: the Order despise all women and even enslave their own clone mother-wives. Mary Oetkert must die with her husband. And their firstborn son, too. They’ll kill Karl Joseph and his eldest son Pyotr, clearing a path to succession by a halfwit brother. They’ll murder Mary
to eliminate her future influence over dull minded Friedrich. The old fools! They don’t consider what must happen if they miss!

  ***

  The five Hashâshīn split at a forked corridor leading into the main sleeping area. Two move directly toward Pyotr’s room, three turn a long corner that leads to Queen Mary’s bedchamber and Chiyoko’s. Suddenly, the three stop cold. Blocking the way is a half company of maser troops wearing bright, even gaudy yellow. They stand five ranks wide to span the hall, ten files deep to take frontal casualties yet prevail. They’re alert, elite, lethal. They’re the Household Guard, or Palast Wache, the most elite regiment of the whole Washi or Eagle Corps that protects the Imperial Family inside the capital, Novaya Uda. These famed “bird guards” of the Jade Court used to wear all black, along with eagle feather helmets and beak masks. Karl Joseph shifted them into bright yellow to brighten his Court, and almost certainly also to humble them. He was playful that way. Mary loved him, but disapproved of the prank. She thought it unbecoming.

  Now they’re known as the “Royal Canaries.” Pyotr gave them the name when he turned four. He squealed with delight the first time he saw them, ceremonially dressed head-to-toe in yellow and standing guard at his birthday party inside the green tiled and green walled ballroom of the Jade Court. After he mounts the throne he’ll insist that “My Royal Canaries” must be very short men, none taller than him. It’s an absurd vanity that might cost him his life one day.

  There’s no hesitation. Hashâshīn shoot quick hand lasers and take down six guards, then rush the second rank to engage hand-to-hand with knives. But it’s not enough to be the best there is at killing when you’re outnumbered 15:1 and the other guys are not quite, but very nearly, as good as you are. A second passes, then a host of masers fire at once. All three Hashâshīn collapse into rumpled piles of scorched green robes and stinking, smoking, cooked and crumpled human flesh.