Assassin Read online

  Eighty-six years later the pioneers glided down in a big landing chamber to the surface of a world barely terraformed to survival levels by AI terrabots. Out of the bowels of Deus ex Machina squeezed 3,500 fanatically devout ritter. They stepped onto a stark new-found-land. They were come to make a ‘New Genesis,’ conceived as a perfect moral order to be built in isolation from the rest of corrupt and decadent Humanity. They called their brave new world Terra Deus: ‘God’s Land.’ The fuckers.

  There was no way to stop them. Not even the New Meccans could find them, and they left early to track and run the kaffir down and recover the Black Stone. After a few decades even they finally gave up the hunt and settled on their own partly terraformed world, a barren waste of sand and endless sky that almost felt like home but never quite. New Meccans have not forgotten the awful crime committed that day on Old Earth at the Grand Mosque. Nor have they buried hatred for the kafir Broderbund or the Imperium the Brethren helped found.

  Terra Deus wasn’t supposed to be ready for settlement for another century. It was harsh and primitive when the Brethren landed, but they worked it hard. They defied all Sol system colony laws, strict codes passed before the first ark ship was built, before the GDM drive was even invented, let alone the quantum drive that sprinkle settled the Thousand Worlds of Orion. Anyway, secular rules don’t bind the godly. On Terra Deus, holy pioneers unfroze 500 mother-wives on the first day, implanting inside them the first of thousands of stolen zygotes illegally brought on the colony ship. When the rightful colonists finally left the cradle world the Brethren had been on Terra Deus for over a century. They had the largest, best armed population of any colony anywhere in Orion. It was too late to stop them and too dangerous to challenge for ownership. There were still open planets available in what became the Thousand Worlds. So the displaced colony ship went north instead, and founded Portus Cale.

  Thus began the vile cycle of Broderbund mother-wives, women forced to bear generation after generation of bastard sons conceived in incest. It gave the Brethren an immense running start in planetary population base compared to every other settled world to come. It also meant human beings would once again be bred into bondage, beyond the reach of unenforceable “universal laws” left parsecs behind, as Brethren made more nagas girls and women to fill their beds and to be house slaves. They also bred males they call sclavus di terra: sterile, genetically stupefied dāsa, forced to hoe and till harsh virgin fields in a barely terraformed world, then on other worlds. They worked in deep mines, or tied to benches in starter factories the first mines supplied with rich ores and minerals.

  That is how the two worst afflictions in human history, enslaved women and enslaved labor, migrated to the stars in the cramped crib of the third scourge: absolute faith in private revelation of God’s purposes. On Terra Deus, as on a dozen conquered Ordensstaadt worlds that followed its example, these horrors reunited with all the other vices and hypocrisies born on and borne from Old Earth. Would the old scourges have traveled with us to the stars even without the Brethren? Probably. But the bastards never even gave us a chance to try afresh. They didn’t bring the serpent to the stars hidden and coiled in their cargo holds. They were the serpent, infesting and corrupting all our New Edens.

  ***

  Ritter or ‘Sword Brothers’ are fully initiated Brethren who complete the final “Solemn Profession of Faith.” Before they get there, the first postulants train for frocking as if they’re warrior monks, apprentices out of some ancient Himalayan tale or killers in a Hashshashīn eerie high on God and mysticism. Not all of the novices and postulants make it to ritter status. Many apply, but few are chosen by God. Or so says the High Council that does the choosing. By rule, all Brethren must be born on an Ordensstaadt world, bred of a mother-wife descended from one of the original 500 Eves. Genetically, all Sword Brothers are literally brothers.

  There are three classes of Brethren: ritter, sergeants, and priests. ‘Ritter’ or ‘Knight Brother’ is used by outsiders about all three classes, although that’s not strictly accurate. Sergeants are least numerous. They police the order, carrying out punishment decreed by the High Council. All Hashâshīn rank as sergeants. Priests teach the Black Faith to postulants and a lesser form to outsiders. They keep the deepest secrets of the libraries and vaults on Fates and Terra Deus to themselves. A High Council rules over all three classes, controlled by the innermost circle of priests. It meets on Terra Deus and is the sole guardian of doctrine, a rigid coda which nevertheless can change overnight with fresh declarations of some new revelation that ‘scholars’ of the Order discover in the Corpus Hermeticum.

  Novitiates sleep even today on hewn rock; on punishingly hard shelves in spartan mountain barracks, meant to test their spirit by mortifying the flesh. They’re permitted only one possession besides their green sackcloth gown: an ultrasteel dagger or short sword. This facsimile represents the real and most rare black blades or the degen used by top assassins, the elite sergeant class they call Hashâshīn. Each true degen is forged from ‘Sacred Iron’ smelted from al-Hajar al-Aswada, the Black Stone iron-nickel meteorite the Sword Brothers ripped from the walls of Mecca as they left Old Earth in a blaze of sacrilege. But even a facsimile degen of the kind all ritter carry can be used as needed. Including to bleed or behead apostates whose contact with temptations of outside worlds leads them to drift from the “One True, Revealed and Prophesied, Black Faith.”

  Degen are medium blades with pommels and crossguards. A true, black not silver, degen is alone considered to be a ‘Holy Blade.’ Its extraterrestrial metal is imbued with layers of mystic superstition, beyond even the esteem in which the original metal was held for millennia. When not on a sanctioned mission of death, all true degen are kept in the hagios hagion, the Holy of All Holies on Terra Deus. It’s an impenetrable vault five klics below the surface, carved in the bedrock. The knives wait there with sacred texts and dead scrolls until a kill is ordained by God, as told to the High Council. All reside there still, except the missing degen that Hashâshīn lost to Mary Oetkert, who carried it until the day she died, when Pyotr claimed it. No amount of pleading by Maximilian Kahn has persuaded him to return it to the Broderbund. They hate him for keeping it.

  All Brethren practice self flagellation, extreme fasting, and other medieval devotions rooted in self purification rituals dating back to their founding. The most devout wear coarse ceramics against raw flesh, to further mortify the body and amplify the spirit. Using old tongues in secret rites, the severest ascetics call themselves Vratyas or “The Ones Who Have Taken Vows.” Vratyas are governed by self denial and mind altering drugs. They live in a wild fever, like Rudra, Vedic Master of Poisons, walking the isolated margin of the civilized worlds they spurn and that loathe them in return. Their priests imbibe soma and secret poisons then step onto the surface of Terra Deus to ‘see with the spiritual eye’ God’s own verses ‘written in fiery letters in the sky.’ They believe priests of the Order can penetrate to the deep truth of sacred graphene scrolls of the ancient, hidden Corpus Hermeticum. They spend lifetimes in the buried vaults, trying.

  Ruthless asceticism of the Founders was strangely paired with promiscuous breeding and prodigious cloning that made Terra Deus populous and strong, sooner than any other colony. But when the devout asked God to come to live in the vile dystopia they had made for him, he declined. Rising strength then made the disappointed and angry Brethren evermore restless with lack of purpose. Their occupation and expansion on Terra Deus complete, and the nearby sister world of Fates also fully developed, a steep decline in zeal set in among the bastard sons of the first generations of fanatic pioneers. They had gone out to the stars and built Paradise, only to find it empty of spiritual fulfillment and rejected by their god as insufficient to his purpose. Just in time, a “New Revelation” was announced by the High Council that reinvigorated the Order’s divine mission.

  “It was found deep in our most sacred scrolls and mystic books.”

  “What does it s
ay, Brother?”

  “It says we must go forth from God’s Land to carry his revelation to all the Thousand Worlds.”

  “We must leave Fates and Terra Deus?”

  “Not leave, expand. The new revelation says we must force all men to be free. They will submit to the truth of the Black Faith, or perish. We must make Orion holy. All worlds must adopt our faith and ways.”

  “Glory to God! It’s Holy War!”

  “Yes! We will make jihad, we will crusade until all the Thousand Worlds bow in service to God and the Broderbund der Ritter, which is the same thing.”

  “Our motto shall be: ‘Whoever Fights the Order Fights God Himself!’”

  “What say you, Sword Brothers?”

  “War! War! War!”

  So it was Brethren brought war to the stars. So it was that they abandoned radical isolationism and set out to conquer neighboring colonies. So it was that they launched the Expansion Wars. God may or may not have been alongside Sword Brothers as they launched the first interstellar conflict, an unholy jihad bringing blood and death to hundreds of millions. Inspired or not, they brought the fourth and most terrible scourge of human invention to the stars as they set out to conquer new worlds for God and themselves. They built fortresses they called commanderies as they advanced over continents, locking their conquests down by permanent armed occupation. They built new clone vats to breed more slaves and ruled their nagas estates from high ground forts, spreading immense fazendas of slavery across all neighboring worlds of the Ordensstaadt.

  An infamous oath all Brethren still take professes their willingness to “kill millions for the Black Faith” and to “sacrifice myself for any Sword Brother.” At first, other colonists thought the bonding oath bleak and exaggerated, but not meant seriously. They quickly learned that it was, as millions died. It was a hard lesson, that the Brethren were exporting war to the Thousand Worlds along with hideous medieval tortures, forced labor, sex and birth slavery. The nearest, most reachable colonies were weakly populated. No one else was thinking about war or had planetary defenses of any kind. They were too busy trying to make new worlds. They were overrun easily and quickly. They startled with disbelief to see ships of war arriving in orbit, then building sized dropships falling out of what an hour before was a peaceful azure or green or orange or red hued sky.

  Dāsa regiments arrived in the first interstellar ships made for fighting, later famous as the first Black Ships. They were crude, which mattered far less than the fact they were the first warships beyond Sol system. Even back there, only light speed models had fought over biodome inner colonies and outer gas giant moons, but never ventured beyond the heliosphere. These were the first bohr ships to arrive in uninvited skies, full of unholy marines and malice. Colonists were forced to kneel before the Order's high priests, or die where they stood in brave defiance. Bodies were left in public squares, seated in the lotus position with their own severed heads held in their laps. It was done as a warning to all others against any resistance to Broderbund rule and “The One True Faith,” the Black Faith as it quickly became known across Orion.

  As colonies farther from the fast expanding Ordensstaadt scrambled to build warships and ground defenses to ready for what was coming, wicked Brethren moved dozens of small asteroids into attack positions. Then they displaced ‘nudgers’ to fly close past settled worlds, sending them starward on near miss elliptical dives. That was enough by itself to convince most colonies to submit. Everyone could deflect away stray asteroids, of course, but no world had an answer to so many ‘nudgers’ plunging inward, protected from deflection by racing warships, or which just came hurtling into the inner systems in flocks. They only hit one world with a ‘nudger,’ obliterating it to make the point that the Broderbund wielded the heavenly power of Zeus himself. Most targeted planets that still resisted were bombarded with small kinetics only, from close orbit. After all, why wreck a perfectly good world with atomics or a big rock?

  God wouldn’t want that.

  He loves his scattered children.

  He’s merciful, to those who obey.

  He spares any and all, who surrender.

  His wrath is terrible, for those who resist.

  God is become Death,

  Destroyer of Worlds.

  Brethren would land on a coveted colony and release a pale cyborg horse, claiming for God all territory over which it galloped and ‘grazed’ during a local year. They never said its movement was random. Instead, they claimed it was “harnessed and reined to the Will of God.” Ritter generals herded the tireless galloper where they wanted, over rivers and mountains and continents. Under seas then back up, down long coastlines. An armed horde followed, along with nagas slave women and dāsa workers in tow. The unholy host built and manned small forts as they passed, the first of tens of thousands of brute commanderies.

  If local settlers killed the cyborg to block its claim, Brethren responded with total genocide. Sometimes they did it anyway, preferring to start with a fresh planet reseeded with mother-wife bastard offspring and submissive male slaves. In the wastelands they made they set up more fazendas, and stone and ultrasteel commanderies. Always from the highest ground, they ruled over culled and castrated, dumb and docile human herds. They were a godsdamn plague.

  Brethren kept a tight discipline of “Sacred Silence” onboard their warships and in siege camps, partly as spiritual devotion but also as early training for an assassin’s role. That special skill developed over time, as they were forced to intervene more subtly in affairs of better defended colonies that they could no longer always conquer by main force of arms. The best of these cruel Hashâshīn gathered at Rudkhan Castle in the Alborz Mountains of Terra Deus.

  Isolationism died hard, especially on conquered worlds already populated when they fell to dāsa regiments and ritter generals. Fortified moons were used as prime military bases, capable of threatening heavy bombardment of subject but still restless worlds. But these places, too, grew crowded over time. So Brethren migrated dāsa and built armored commanderies on the surfaces below. They were pulled down from orbit, pulled out of the heavens and forced to walk among the corrupt and less devout. Their fortresses stood in solitude and detached security atop jagged mountains, or on artificial islands anchored far out on a broad ocean, or rose as ultrasteel domes above undulating and endlessly duned deserts. Always they were as far from corrupt cities as they could get. Yet, Brethren also coveted and roamed the cities at night, seeking forbidden pleasures of the flesh. Afterward, they went back to their commanderies and lashed themselves bloody in penitence.

  Their battle cry ‘God is With Us!’ rang over two dozen ill defended worlds before the First Ritter Crusade was halted. Then the fight got harder, as all colonies in Orion girded for war and the first interplanetary alliances began to form. Like a supernova shock wave compressing gassy nebula to stimulate star production, Broderbund aggression provoked multiplanet confederations and thus planted the first seeds of war states that would grow into the great star empires to come. Hardly anyone these days knows it or says it, but this was the true origin of the vast star empires that still today contest for dominance in Orion.

  ***

  Violence reshaped all interstellar polities, establishing a balance of war and power up-and-down the Orion spiral arm. Each colonized planet or habitable moon was forced to arm to defend itself, then to unite with others in alliances both forced and free. Instead of a thousand glittering, independent worlds, star nations and then empires formed either to further aggression or defend against it. In the end, it didn’t matter what your motive was: empire was proven yet again to be the natural, inevitable response we make to disorder, chaos and war. Empire was shown to be not war’s cause, but its solution. At least a partial one.

  Within a century, the momentum of the first jihad began to fade. The spirit of crusading always does as the first generation, always the most fervent, starts to die off and more comfortable sons and grandsons stand inside armor instead. St
ill, there was enough martial spirit left inside the Black Faith for Brethren to try again, during the Second Ritter Crusade and the Coalition Wars it sparked. Those ended with ritter as frustrated holy warriors, a half aborted movement of gruesome ghazi who welcomed war but no longer wanted martyrdom. Willing killers for an unlovely and unloved god, but stymied in their hateful ambition. It looked like the Broderbund’s moment had come and gone, leaving only an ugly gash across the history of the Thousand Worlds of Orion.

  To civilized peoples, the Ordensstaadt stood for everything vile and violent, cruel and impure, for the old evils that always existed on the claimed edge of the intersection of human and divine. After a century of war, it was finally contained. It was over, or so everyone thought, with a tenth of the Thousand Worlds fallen to the Black Faith. Then the High Council received a secret ambassador from young Karl Ferdinand Oetkert of the three Waldstätte worlds, and Orion changed again. A new alliance of Ordensstaadt zealotry and Waldstätte military technology restarted the wars. With Karl I’s advanced aid, wild eyed Brethren emerged from containment to fight once more from their Black Ships and with blacker poisons, leading merciless dāsa armies in berserker attacks.

  Alongside the Oetkert legions, Broderbund intervention was decisive in the Waldstätte Civil War. Karl Ferdinand called the foul ritter forth and won the heavily populated and industrialized core Grün worlds of Schwyz, Unterwalden and Uri. Then the bund overran three dozen more worlds, and eighty more after that, before the Foundation Wars were done. The price to the dynast was acceptance of the Black Faith and flying the Black Eagle over his armies, as the new symbol of what was henceforth called the Imperium. Karl Ferdinand I, ‘Father of Oetkerts,’ bent the knee. In return, he gave the most abhorrent doctrine in Orion warrant as the ‘One True Faith’ tolerated on over a hundred Imperium worlds. He did it having cynically discarded and repressed all the other ones. “The Waldstätte is worth a black mass,” he said in private. “Cuius regio eius religio,” he shouted in public to his peoples and his armies: “Whosoever controls a territory decides its religion.”