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  “I can’t believe that. The report must be mistaken.”

  Fleet Admiral Steinhof, supreme commander at Imperial Military Command Headquarters, gave a hoarse groan, and after verifying the facts, retreated into a fortress of silence.

  Even Emperor Friedrich IV, known for having little interest in or energy for affairs of state, had through Minister of the Palace Interior Neuköln demanded an explanation from Marquis Lichtenlade, the minister of state.

  “The empire’s territory must be sacred and inviolate to all external foes, and so in fact, it has ever been. Nevertheless, for our lack of foresight in having allowed such circumstances to trouble Your Majesty’s heart, the shame we feel today knows no bounds.”

  Word reached the Lohengramm admiralität that the marquis had thus fearfully given answer.

  “Something’s wrong with that line of reasoning, Kircheis,” Reinhard said to his trusted aide in his office. “Not an inch of imperial territory must be invaded by external foes, he says. But since when are the rebels an equal, external power? It’s because he doesn’t see things for what they are that he utters contradictions like that.”

  Reinhard, having opened his admiralität and secured under his command half the ships of the Imperial Space Armada, was struggling daily with personnel arrangements.

  In the recruiting of young officers, preference was as a fundamental policy being given to low-ranking aristocrats and those of common birth. The average age of frontline commanders had plummeted. Energetic, youthful officers such as Wolfgang Mittermeier, Oskar von Reuentahl, Karl Gustav Kempf, and Fritz Josef Wittenfeld were now newly minted admirals, and the admiralität had come alive with youthful energy and spirit.

  Reinhard, however, had for these past few days been unable to shake a feeling of dissatisfaction. He had assembled frontline commanders who had courage and tactical skill to spare but had been unable to find people to fill his staff positions.

  Reinhard expected little of highborn staff officers who had been honor students in officers’ school. He knew all too well that military skills were not something nurtured in the classroom. While natural-born soldiers were sometimes brilliant in their school days—as Reinhard himself had been—the opposite was never true.

  He couldn’t put Kircheis on staff. Reinhard needed him to function as his representative and at times take command of some of the fleets. When they were together, he would have Kircheis looking at the big picture, making decisions with him. That was the duty one’s most trusted aide should perform.

  Just a few days ago, Reinhard had dispatched Kircheis in place of himself to the Kastropf system on the occasion of the uprising there. This he had done to let Kircheis mark up some achievements of his own and make it clear to everyone that he was the Reinhard Corps’s vice commander.

  Reinhard had put in a request with Marquis Lichtenlade, minister of state, for orders from the emperor to be handed down to Kircheis.

  At first, Marquis Lichtenlade had not looked favorably on this idea. However, the marquis had a parliamentary aide named Waitz who had offered this opinion: “Why not let him? Rear Admiral Kircheis is the very closest of Count von Lohengramm’s close aides. If he should succeed in quelling Kastropf’s rebellion, rewarding him—and putting him in your debt—may turn out to be profitable down the road. And if he fails, the blame will lie with Count von Lohengramm for recommending him. All you’ll need do is again order the count to go subdue them, and if his subordinate has failed once already, he won’t be able to go around boasting of it when the matter is settled.”

  “Hmm. That does make sense.”

  Accepting this reasoning, the marquis had set about the procedure by which the order to subdue Kastropf would be handed down from the emperor to Kircheis. Reinhard sent a gift of money to Waitz privately; the marquis never knew that Reinhard had asked Waitz to advise him as he had.

  In this manner, Kircheis received his orders from the emperor directly. This meant that he was going places as a soldier of the empire. In Reinhard’s admiralität, he leapt ahead of equivalently ranked colleagues, and it was recognized openly that he was now in the number two position. Naturally, this was nothing but a formality. In order to make it real, Kircheis needed some real military achievements.

  It was in this way that the uprising in the Kastropf system had come about:

  Earlier that year, the life of Duke Eugen von Kastropf had come to an unexpected end due to an accident aboard his private spacecraft.

  As an aristocrat, he had held the right of taxation over his private domain and as a matter of course had boasted the power that came of plenteous wealth; also, as one of the chief vassals at court, he had served as minister of finance for roughly fifteen years. During his tenure, he had used the authority of that post to amass personal wealth, and had from time to time even been embroiled in shameful bribery scandals. When it came to the crimes of the aristocracy, however, the law’s netting was of a terribly frayed weave. When things had reached the point at which even those holes were too small for Duke von Kastropf to slip through, he had nonetheless continued to avoid the hands of punishment through skillful application of his wealth and power.

  Count Ruge, minister of the judiciary at the time, had sardonically described his abuses as “splendid hocus-pocus,” from which it may be inferred that even in the eyes of highborn nobles like himself, the man had gone too far. As he was a pillar of the imperial government, they found it inconvenient that he would not follow the rules for public officials a little more closely. Public dissatisfaction with one chief vassal could easily grow into a distrust of the system as a whole.

  Now, this duke of Kastropf had died. For the empire’s Ministries of Finance and the Judiciary, this was what could be called a welcome opportunity. “Best to go right ahead and flog the deceased,” was the general consensus. This was imperative in order to show the population that even the great noble families could not avoid the rule of law and also to rein in all the other innumerable little Kastropfs that existed within the aristocracy, thereby demonstrating the law of the empire and the strength of its public administration. Naturally, the public funds that Count von Kastropf had made his own and the bribes he had accepted amounted to a vast sum, and if that could be paid into the national treasury, the suffering of public coffers strained by military expenditures could, for a time at least, be eased.

  Although there were some among the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance who spoke of taxing the aristocracy, that would mean changing a national policy in place since the days of Rudolf the Great and might also invite insurrections or a palace coup. If Duke von Kastropf were the sole target, however, there would be little opposition from the aristocracy.

  Investigators from the Ministry of Public Finance were dispatched to Kastropf. And that was where the trouble began.

  Duke von Kastropf had a son by the name of Maximilian, who, pending the emperor’s approval via the minister of state, was to inherit the title and property of his late father. Due to present circumstances, however, the minister of state, Marquis Lichtenlade, had elected to postpone the succession process and only recognize inheritance of the estate after the Ministry of Public Finance had concluded its investigation and deducted the portion that the prior duke, Eugen von Kastropf, had wrongly obtained.

  Maximilian opposed this. The child of a chief vassal and high-ranking aristocrat, this self-centered young man, long pampered in wealth and privilege, lacked his late father’s political skills, even in the negative sense of the word. He quite literally set his hunting dogs loose on the investigators from the Ministry of Public Finance and then expelled them from his territory. These hunting dogs were “hornheads,” which through DNA processing had come to have conical horns on their heads—they were savage beasts and symbolic of the violent side of aristocratic authority.

  This unimaginative young man had no idea that his actions had been a slap across the cheek of
an imperial government that placed great importance on prestige and the appearance of dignity. The slapped party, however, was not about to quietly tolerate that insult.

  When a second team of investigators was also illegally expelled, Minister of Finance Viscount Gerlach sent a request to the Minister of State that Maximilian be summoned to court.

  Upon receipt of that harshly worded summons, Maximilian realized for the first time that his actions were being viewed as problematic. Lacking balanced judgment, he was then overcome by extreme terror. He was certain that if he traveled to Hauptplanet Odin, he would never see his home again.

  In the family of Duke von Kastropf, he of course had many relatives and in-laws, and concerned about the situation, they interposed themselves and tried to mediate a solution. This, however, only exacerbated Maximilian’s suspicions.

  When one of his relatives, Count Franz von Mariendorf—a man known for his mild and unassuming nature—went to try to reason with him, Maximilian had him thrown into prison, and all hope for a peaceful resolution faded. Maximilian, having taken complete leave of his senses, began assembling a private army that consisted mainly of duchy security forces. That was when the imperial government decided to send a force to put down his insurrection.

  This fleet, commanded by Admiral Schmude, departed Odin at about the same time that the militaries of the empire and alliance were clashing in the Astarte Stellar Region. Schmude’s force was handily defeated.

  Maximilian, failure though he was at responsible adulthood, still possessed a modicum of purely military talent, and the force sent against him had taken their opponent too lightly, engaging Maximilian in battle with little in the way of a strategy. While these were among the factors that had brought about defeat, the bottom line was that the force sent to restore order had been attacked just as it was landing, and Admiral Schmude had died in battle.

  The second force sent to Kastropf had failed as well, and Maximilian, now getting carried away with himself, had proceeded to annex neighboring Mariendorf County and made plans to carve out a semi-independent fiefdom for himself in one corner of the empire. Although Franz, the head of Mariendorf’s ruling family, had been incarcerated by Maximilian, his family security forces put up a sustained fight against Maximilian’s invading army and appealed to Odin for aid.

  That was where matters stood when Kircheis was ordered to go and quell the rebellion. It took him ten days to tame an uprising that had gone on for half a year.

  First, Kircheis made a show of heading to the aid of Mariendorf County, and then he turned sharply and made for the Kastropf Duchy instead. A shocked Maximilian, not about to stand by and be robbed of his home base, broke his siege of Mariendorf County and rushed back toward Kastropf Duchy with all of his forces. With that, Kircheis had first rescued Mariendorf County from the danger it had been facing. Moreover, his making for the Kastropf Duchy had itself been nothing more than a diversionary tactic.

  Maximilian, frantic over the threat to his main stronghold, was negligent in protecting his rear. Kircheis, having hidden his fleet in a treacherous region of an asteroid belt, let them go past, then launched a sudden assault on their undefended back side, delivering a devastating blow.

  Maximilian withdrew from the field of battle, only to be murdered at the hands of subordinates hoping to lighten their own punishments. His remaining forces then surrendered.

  Thus the Kastropf rebellion came to a swift ending. Though it was said to have taken ten days to quell, six of those days had been needed for the journey from Odin, and it had taken two to deal with the aftermath on Kastropf, so in fact only two days had been spent in actual combat.

  The tactical ability Kircheis had displayed in this insurrection was extraordinary. Reinhard was satisfied, the admirals of his admiralität nodded their heads in approval, and the highborn nobles were astounded. It was one thing for Reinhard alone to possess such dazzling talent, but for his right-hand man to be similarly gifted was a bitter pill for them to swallow.

  A military achievement, however, was still a military achievement. Kircheis was promoted to vice admiral and awarded a glittering, gold-colored zeitwing—a medal shaped like a two-headed eagle. In the capacity of acting imperial prime minister, Marquis Lichtenlade, minister of state, bestowed on Kircheis both the title and the medal, and praised his accomplishments, encouraging him to be grateful for His Imperial Highness’s favor and to seek even greater devotion to His Majesty.

  Kircheis knew all about what had happened behind the scenes, so to him, the sucking up to which Waitz had egged on Marquis Lichtenlade was merely absurd, though of course he let nothing of such feelings come to the surface.

  Nevertheless, Kircheis was thinking, You’re asking the impossible, telling me to devote myself to the emperor. Had it not been Emperor Friedrich IV himself who had kidnapped the object of his true devotion from before his very eyes and even now kept her all to himself? It wasn’t the empire, the imperial household, or the emperor that Kircheis was fighting for.

  Sigfried Kircheis, this tall redheaded youth, was quite popular with the women of the palace, from the daughters of dukes up above to the page girls running errands down below. He was completely unaware of this himself, though, and would have only found it a bother had he realized.

  It was while Reinhard and Kircheis were in this way securing their respective footholds that there appeared before them Captain von Oberstein with his half-silvered hair.

  II

  I want staff officers! Lately, this desire of Reinhard’s was growing stronger by the day.

  But the sort of staff officers he was looking for were not necessarily specialists in military affairs. For that, Reinhard himself and Kircheis would suffice. Rather, he was looking for people with a strong aptitude for political maneuvering and plotting. Reinhard could foresee those sorts of struggles against the nobles at court—conspiracies and battles of wits, to put it bluntly—becoming ever more frequent from this point forward. Kircheis was unsuited to be Reinhard’s confidant in such matters. This was not a problem of intellect; it was a problem of character and thought processes.

  Reinhard checked his mental name card of the man who had just left his blaster with the guard and stepped unarmed into his office. There was nothing about him written on it that said he should view the man favorably.

  “Captain von Oberstein, is it? What business might you have with me?”

  “First, I would like you to clear the room,” the uninvited guest requested, his attitude bordering on arrogance.

  “There are only the three of us here.”

  “True, Vice Admiral Kircheis is here as well. Which is why I’m asking you to clear the room.”

  Both men stared at the visitor—Kircheis silently and Reinhard with a sharp gleam in his eye.

  “Speaking with Vice Admiral Kircheis is the same as speaking with me. Did you not know that?”

  “I am aware of that, sir.”

  “So you have something to talk about that you absolutely don’t want him to hear. But when I tell him afterward, the end result will be the same.”

  “Your Excellency is of course free to do that. The labors of a conqueror, however, are not achieved without talented people of all different types. I believe one should tell A what A needs to hear, give B duties suited to B, and so on …”

  Kircheis glanced toward Reinhard, and reservedly said, “Your Excellency, perhaps it might be best if I waited in the next room …”

  Reinhard nodded with a pensive expression. Kircheis took his leave, and von Oberstein finally delved into what he had come to talk about.

  “To be honest, Your Excellency, I am in a bit of a awkward position at present. I believe you’re aware, but—”

  “You’re the deserter from Iserlohn. It’s only natural that you be censured. This, despite word that Admiral von Seeckt died so heroically.”

  Reinhard’s answer was
cold. Von Oberstein, however, showed no sign of having been moved by it.

  “To legions of commanding officers, I am a despicable deserter and nothing more. However, Excellency, I do have my own side of the story. I’d like you to hear it.”

  “You’ve come to the wrong person. Make your case to the military tribunal, not to me.”

  Von Oberstein, the sole survivor of the Iserlohn Fleet’s flagship, was facing a maximum sentence for a single count of having lived. He had failed to perform his duty to assist his commanding officer and keep him from committing errors, and furthermore had sought only his own safety—these were the grounds for the impeachment and the icy stares, though there was also the fact that the circumstances required the scapegoating of some suitable individual present at Iserlohn’s fall.

  Upon hearing Reinhard’s indifferent reply, von Oberstein unexpectedly touched his hand to his right eye. When he finally lowered that hand, a small, eerie hollow had appeared in one part of his face. The man with the half-silvered hair held a small object out to the young marshal—a tiny, almost spherical crystal resting in the palm of his right hand.

  “Look at this, please, Your Excellency.”

  Reinhard looked but said nothing.

  “You’ll probably have heard from Vice Admiral Kircheis, but both my eyes are bionic like this one. If I had been born during the reign of Rudolf the Great, I would have been killed as a baby in accordance with the Genetic Inferiority Elimination Act.”

  After fitting his detached bionic eye back into its socket, the gleam in von Oberstein’s gaze was directed at Reinhard head-on, seeming to bore right into the admiral’s own line of sight. “Do you understand?” he said. “I hate them all. Rudolf the Great, his descendants, everything they’ve brought forth … the Goldenbaum Dynasty, the Galactic Empire itself.”

  “Those are bold words.”