Assassin Read online

  “Now you are playing master to my student, general. Why not just tell me?”

  “Because you are my student today, and time presses on us both, I shall tell you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Kahn is of two minds, two competing motives.”

  “Do you ever speak directly?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Just this once general, put it in plain Standard, please. No more metaphors and paradoxes.”

  “Fine. His devotion is divided. Kahn fucks the impure world while he awaits arrival of a pure god. He lays in ascetic conspiracies while lying under silk sheets and between Chiyoko’s legs.”

  “More clear, but I still don’t understand his motive.”

  “His sinfulness is disguised even to himself as heroic selflessness. Can you tell me what that means, an an intelligence analyst I mean? By the way, this is now a test.”

  “It means that his lust masquerades as holiness, but not even he knows it.”

  “Very good. So you must not ask what drives him, as you did when we began. You must ask, what will make him act one way or another in a given moment.”

  “You have some idea?”

  “People often act in contradiction to how they see themselves, without intending to do the things they do. The weak believe the torment they feel over internal conflict is a valuable thing, yet let priests and politicians exploit it. The strong seek to overcome it on their own, to bring their will and wants into an unbent purpose. To line them up, like iron filings under a magnet.”

  “And you’re saying that Kahn is one of the strong?”

  “The strongest. He’s homo ferox more than homo sanctus or homo sapiens.”

  “Well, if you’ll pardon me, sir, aren’t we all? Our ancestors would not have built the Imperium otherwise. We’re an empire, which means we are among the most successful of history’s predators.”

  “We are also pragmatists, colonel.”

  “Because pragmatism lasts longer, and is a lot safer than idealism.”

  “Indeed, colonel. Anything more you think you know about him now?” “Kahn doesn’t play by our secular rules. He doesn’t understand that the only law that’s true and truly matters in this bloody business of the ancient game of thrones and empires is lex talionis.”

  “The interview is over. Welcome to Kestino, colonel. You’ll be assigned to the Broderbund desk, specially tasked to monitor Maximilian Kahn. Report for duty first light, tomorrow.”

  Whiff

  “The Big Whiff.” That’s what the senior analysts call it inside the Political Intelligence Division of MoD in Lowestoft-on-Stamos on Caspia. High in SRG headquarters in Barda on Kars, they call it the “Coup that Wasn’t.” Whenever prewar types get together to commiserate on their aborted careers, on isolated moons or mining asteroids where they’ve been reassigned to logistics, it’s the “Big Boss Fuck up.” They’ll rant for hours on end about bad bosses and their own scapegoating. And how everyone but them is to blame for not stopping the Fourth Orion War before it ever got started, in the last springs of peacetime.

  It was a colossal failure. Not to have asked about it. Not to have encouraged more of it. Not to have supported Agent Lasalle Five when she said it was going to happen, then doing nothing to help her push it along as it was happening. She put her life on the line to get information back to her handlers in MoD on Caspia and SRG on Kars. She put all her contacts and her whole network at risk. And nobody did shite. Then the would be putschists in Rikugun and Kaigun paid the ultimate price. There are some who think that changed Lasalle Five. That after her people did nothing with the info and the war started anyway she turned dark, became more pessimistic about hope for real change from any future coup.

  It happened right before the stars began to go out in Orion, one after another. A failed revolt by elements of the Grün military that Alliance intelligence didn’t detect or support. Back when the young of a Thousand Worlds did not yet die by tens of millions each year. Die for vanity’s sake. Die due to incompetence and elite arrogance. Die in magma pools of fear and hate erupting everywhere at once, pulling in the peoples. Perish in fires of war on a hundred burning fronts or locked in ice and free floating along a thousand erupted space lanes. Die only to be replaced by the next call up of cohort reserves turning seventeen or twenty.

  It started in flashes of blood and treason that ended in sobbing confessions that evoked no mercy in the dark. It saw hidden honorable death and defiance that was never recorded. It led to bloody teeth spat onto the floor of a torture cell beneath brooding SAC HQ in Novaya Uda, or screaming in thumbscrews and worse medieval machines brought from Fates and Terra Deus: Broderbund devices dating to the Foundation Wars and the cruelty of the Jade Eye. Going all the way back to darkest days of cowl depravity and sadistic punishments of dāsa military slaves and interrogations of farfolk prisoners of war.

  Going back even before that, to Torquemada and the Heretics Fork. To the Judas Cradle. To the Rack and Spanish Donkey and Wheel of Toulouse. Back to the Brazen Bull. Back to all the cruel ingenuities and devices dug out of the past and used to propagate the Black Faith and defend the aggressions of the Jade Eye and Imperium. With so much at stake, they tried everything and the tiniest thing led to fatal errors and regrets lived for a lifetime afterward. Usually a very short lifetime, just until the firing squad assembled or the guillotine blade fell onto a mutinous general’s exposed neck, or the Royal Hangman’s noose tightened around a squirming and kicking admiral’s throat. Pyotr’s vengeance was vivid red, and deep. Maybe not as red or wide as the Regent’s, but still…

  Wise, white haired talking heads still say it on the memexes to affirmatively nodding publics. Repeating it bitterly even today, years into the Fourth Orion War. They say that the government and prewar intel chiefs, and the top military brass of the Calmar Union, are all to blame for missing a spectacular chance to avoid this war before it started. The last chance. Not one of diplomacy, as then Prime Minister Robert Hoare tried and failed. Not by deterrence, as his Defense Minister Georges Briand failed to persuade the PM and colleagues to try. By hard, covert action to support Pyotr’s opponents inside his rebellious military.

  After, top level civil service cleansings began with Director Sanjay Pradip in MoD on Caspia and Director Virgiliu Nicolescu at SRG on Kars. The purge didn’t stop until the careers of old supporters and apologists and midlevel bootlickers were over, twenty or thirty or fifty years of prewar service ended by tumbling down garbage chutes of MoD and SRG multiplex towers, disappearing into vapor inside some Organic Waste Disposal Unit. Yeah, not at all like what would have happened to them in the Imperium or Daura. They got to live, if you can really call busting your hump on a third rate supply moon in the 9th Quadrant living. Or worse, being sent to the black on Amasia.

  All those who survived the purges know that complicit politicians and an unforgiving public are utter hypocrites, but also mostly right. Sure, they all wanted to stay out of the war and said to the top bosses “don’t do anything to provoke Pyotr!” (No one was even thinking about Jahandar or the Hermit Empire, back then). But it’s the job of top civilian and military intelligence officers to do what must be done, cowardly pols and ignorant or craven public opinion be godsdamned. The lucky ones who kept their jobs on the twin capital worlds say it, too, whenever they get real drunk or stoned. When sober, they know they were in charge back then, during the greatest cluster fuck and failure in the history of Calmari intelligence services. They know that they have the blood of innocent billions all over their hands. It’s why the most honest of them are such heavy drinkers.

  ***

  “Biggest missed chance in the history of the Thousand Worlds.” Georges Briand curses about it in private nearly four years later, looking out the secure window of the PM’s office high above the garden canopy of Barda on Kars. “And the last chance for peace there was. We blew it. It’s unforgivable.”

  “How did it happen, sir? Do we know? Do we k
now why so many reports of the Dual Powers buildup were ignored, never passed on to Cabinet?” It’s a senior ministerial aide asking. He wasn’t there, not in position with the PMO before the war, so he can ask knowing he won’t be blamed.

  “They thought it was merely rumors, the esteemed heads of both our civilian intel services, those idiots! Sanjay Pradip and Virgiliu Nicolescu, the Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber of prewar intelligence. They thought the ‘Golden Peace’ was forever. They ignored our best field agent’s reports. Damn them!”

  “Information flew in like a wren, through a high, open window of the MoD Hornet’s Nest on Lowestoft-on-Stamos,” chirps Admiral Gaétan Maçon. “It sat on the director’s desk, warbling to him about coups and plots, conspiracies and war. Then the fool let that little bird fly right back out again.” He’s far more poetic in speech than the PM, let alone General Gaspard Leclerc. To a real fault, actually. Even his friends will admit that. So he piles on the avian metaphor. “Then they stood looking out, as a swift kestrel swooped from above and tore that wren apart in an eruption of feathers, bone and blood.”

  Leclerc snorts. “Enough with the godsdamn birds, Gaétan! What does it matter now? Leave it to the scholars to sort and write about decades after we’re all dead. Right now, my friends, can we all get back to fighting this godsdamn war? It’s not going so well, you know.”

  “You’re right, Gaspard. Let’s get to it. How are the new artillery prototypes working out on Amasia? Have they been field tested there yet? Let’s hear the latest Argos Labs report. Closed session on that one, of course. Principals only. Dr. Chan Wèi will lead the briefing.”

  ***

  Across the broad Imperium, before the Krevan War begins and the Fourth Orion War is launched into the Thousand Worlds, a few brave men decide that they must act to stop the coming calamity. They believe honor and duty require that they betray Pyotr, and maybe murder him, if he won’t see reason and stop his drive to a Great War they don’t think the Imperium can win. They know they must purge the war mad loyalists who surround him in the Sakura-kai. They want to restore the old, conservative social order on the homeworlds, and sustain and save the Peace of Orion with farfolk empires. Not because they are men of peace, but because they fear Pyotr will lead them into a war too far.

  Pushed by an accelerating interstellar crisis with the United Planets, with Pyotr Shaka and Takeshi forcing the pace to war with Krevo in secret, at last the plotters decide to act. They meet in Novaya Uda just shy of a month before the start of what Grünen propaganda will later call “The Krevan Outrage,” a false flag attack on a Grün moonlet of Bad Camberg that will launch the Krevan War. A fake fight that dresses the stage for the Fourth Orion War a year later.

  The Bad Camberg provocation is cooked up in secret by Pyotr and Takeshi. It’s so off-the-books and well planned, it’s unstoppable. But maybe not the war it leads to. The air is thick with rumors that war is just weeks away, as transports and escorts move to position at the Krevan border. There is an outside chance to stop it. And yet, so close to the fulcrum moment, so close to counting, and the only thing one of four rogue generals meeting in secret comes up with is a blunt force attack on the Jade Gate and the grounds of the Waldstätte Palast by a short company of armtraks! Unsupported by infantry or his own coconspirators!

  “I’ll do this tomorrow, if you give me infantry support. Hell, I’ll do it alone!” The old man is adamant, his white brows knitting over a creased face that looks close to Final Age. Too close. He has been retired for thirty years.

  “What do you propose, General Bazaine?”

  “I’ll get heavy weapons past the Washi guards and into the palace grounds,” says the gruff, old man to a much younger yet more cautious and active duty General Felipe Sanchez.

  “That won’t suffice.”

  “It will if I do it! An armtrak blast is the surest way to take out that whippersnapper Pyotr.”

  “Will you simply drive a tank through the Jade Gate, then descend into his hidden chambers?”

  “Exactly so! I’ll lead an armtrak company right up the marble stairs, crash the Jade Gate, and drive into the palace. I’ll crush his Royal Canaries under my ultrasteel treads.”

  “Do you know where his chambers are, general? He has completely rebuilt the Waldstätte since your day. It’s not even the same building you knew under the Dowager. Pyotr’s location at any given hour inside the fortified maze he built over the ruins of the old palace is one of the best kept secrets in the city!”

  “It doesn’t matter. You bring infantry regiments behind my armtraks, you march them down and find his chambers. Then arrest the trembling coward!”

  “General, even if you get the armor in position in the square, how can you get it through the Jade Gate? The bird guards posted there have the firepower to stop armtraks on their own, while the Gate is dense with a meter of depleted uranium beneath the adamant. It’s unbreakable.”

  “Nothing is unbreakable.”

  “Not if you have enough time to apply the needed energy or explosive blast, but you won’t.”

  “Will you support my armored attack or not?”

  “No. It’s reckless. It will only get my men killed. It will get us all killed, as Washi troops arrive from all across the city and nearby bases and rally to defend Pyotr and the regime that pays and pampers them.”

  The third general to speak in the conspirator’s meeting is not all that bright, either. “Why don’t we just shoot him?”

  “What?”

  “Our side arms are supposed to be unloaded when we attend Pyotr at Court, but I’m sure I can get a packed gun past his dull witted Canaries.”

  “You will just walk up to Pyotr, pull out your modular pistol, set it to kinetic, and shoot him?”

  “Yes, General Sanchez. Why not?”

  “Because Pyotr is surrounded by sophisticated weapons detection systems and elite bodyguards, who are not dumb witted pretty boys. They will cut you down before the handle lifts from your holster or you push the arming button. I know that his Royal Canaries are unusually small men and they look truly ridiculous in gaudy yellow, but they’re very good at what they do.”

  “Pahhh! What’s that, fluff up their own feathers?”

  “No. Kill Pyotr’s enemies. You gravely underestimate them. If auto lasers don’t slice you in half as you reach for your sidearm holster, his Canaries will cut you down before you pull it. Or worse, they’ll take you alive.”

  “Besides,” a fourth general pipes in, “we know that he wears a fully armored suit under that stinking blue ermine robe he never takes off anymore.” He’s in special forces, although there’s nothing really special about him. “At least, he wears one whenever he’s out of his damn chambers, strutting across the Throne Room like one of his garden peacocks. Gods, how that man prances in public!”

  “If he’s wearing body armor as you say, I’ll shoot him in the head.”

  “You would never get a shot off,” insists the SOF general. “You’ll be the dead man, before what’s left of your head hits the green tiles.”

  “Or worse. As I said,” warns General Sanchez. “you’ll be taken prisoner. Then you’ll talk.”

  “What? Never! I will never surrender! And I will never talk!”

  “If you’re caught alive, my brave but foolhardy friend,” Sanchez warns, “you’ll give up all our names before the sun sets behind the palace on your last day on Kestino.”

  “How dare you!? Take it back, or I’ll demand satisfaction!”

  “Tranquillo! Any one of us would talk if we’re taken and tortured. You know that it’s true. There’s no resisting the infernal machines Pyotr was given last year by that most evil of cowls, Maximilian Kahn. He keeps them sharp and ready in the dungeons beneath the palace floors.”

  General Bazaine has heard enough. “Cowards! I’ll do this myself. You’ll not be involved.”

  “It won’t work, and you’ll blow all our covers.”

  “Stay in your barracks, childr
en! Let one of the Dowager’s generals rid us of her son, of this scourge of a boy emperor!”

  “Pyotr is a boy no longer, old man. He has been on the Jade Throne for 20 years! And no, sir! You will not act without us! You’ll wait for this leadership group to decide. You’ll follow orders, and wait until we can coordinate all our forces and make a coup that works.”

  “Sanchez is right. You’ll wait. We’ll all wait, until there’s a better chance.”

  The vote is three-to-one. The old general stomps away, swinging a black-and-silver swagger stick. The Regent gave it to him the day he retired.

  He leaves the active duty commanders alone, worried and complaining. “Do you think he’ll try, on his own?”

  “No, I don’t. He only pretends to decisiveness. In his entire career under the Dowager, he never heard a shot fired in anger. None of the old cohort did.”

  “Because as Queen and then as Regent, Mary Oetkert was always dedicated to keeping the Golden Peace with farfolk. Unlike her reckless son.”

  “So, General Sanchez. We agree to do nothing? We’ll take no action to stop Pyotr starting his war?”

  “We will act, but not just yet. Be in touch. I’ll make contact with the larger Resistance that we’ve all heard rumors about. They may have better intelligence than us, and the troops to reinforce the first attack that we need to succeed.”

  “Alright, Sanchez. We agree to wait for you to contact us, when you say the time is right. Then we move to take out this warmonger, this mad conspirer with cowls and Purists!” It’s an open secret that Pyotr has truk these days with both SAC and the Broderbund. But if the plotters knew then that he was also secretly conspiring with Jahandar, they would have been dumbstruck. And whatever the odds, to stop that vile alliance with the oldest and worst enemy of the Imperium they would have set all doubt aside and supported a dead Dowager’s old general when he makes his move to kill Pyotr. Instead, he goes ahead on his own.

  ***

  The retired armtrak general has no standing command, but he’s not used to following brusque orders from his juniors. So the next morning he puts down his coffee and puts on his old uniform. Then he stomps over to the armor park he used to command, thinking his force of personality and his emeritus rank is enough. He’s counting on loyalty from a former unit that was never really his. What little is left evaporates in front of him, now that the decisive hour is come.