Stratagem Read online

  Since the time of founder Leopold Raap, this system had never been used. In the event Adrian Rubinsky granted the Imperial Navy passage through the Phezzan Corridor, resistance would rage. Assuming this became a reality, Rubinsky would become the first landesherr in history to be impeached from the throne. To Boltec, this was inconceivable. Irrespective of how it was represented in the official records, Rubinsky’s ascent to landesherr was the design of the Church of Terra’s Grand Bishop. Any announcements of candidacy, speeches, voting, and counting of ballots constituted an epic performance for the public audience at large.

  Boltec cocked a half smile. Those merchants holding fast to their liberty and independence—who thought themselves so shrewd, pragmatic, and clever—were easy targets. For a moment, he was jealous of those simpleminded idealists who, by the efforts they’d expended to amass their great fortunes, believed themselves to be of the highest rank in the universal pecking order.

  If Rubinsky was overthrown, Boltec’s status and security as his confidant would be unsustainable. Until now, as the landesherr’s foremost advisor, he hadn’t so much as heard the footsteps of a potential rival. But Rupert Kesselring, who after Boltec’s transfer had taken over his position as aide, had, with the perspicacity of someone twice his age, quickly consolidated his power of influence within the autonomous government. Were Rubinsky and Boltec to be ousted, that greenhorn would take the seat of highest authority with all his nonchalance, although without endorsement of the Grand Bishop—a figure who 99.9 percent of Phezzan’s citizens didn’t know was their true ruler—this would never happen.

  Although Rupert Kesselring had aimed for the seat of highest authority, so long as that old stagehand turned his stale face away, his ambition would end in an unfinished dream too big for him to contain.

  At this point in his thinking, Boltec’s heart rate spiked. When it came to guaranteeing absolute authority over Phezzan, that old stagehand’s support was crucial. So was it not better to do the opposite? Even with the Grand Bishop’s endorsement, he—that is, Nicolas Boltec—would meet the requirements for becoming Grand Bishop himself. Was that such an arrogant wish? Not even Adrian Rubinsky was born to be Grand Bishop, his seat on the council of elders nothing more than a token position. Maybe it was time Nicolas Boltec joined forces with Reinhard von Lohengramm in ruling the universe.

  Today had been a succession of failures. They’d been placed in check by that golden brat, although it seemed easy enough to overturn the game board. That didn’t mean they were going to grant passage through the Phezzan Corridor, but it could serve them in future negotiations. And they still had their trump card. Because that clever golden brat didn’t know of the existence of a mysterious old man who had spread his black wings into every corner of the cosmos. He was a strong enough weapon, one whose position would be strengthened by any circumstance, violent or not.

  Boltec knew they had to proceed as originally planned. Aborting the mission was not an option. Doubts over their ability to carry out that mission had incurred Rubinsky’s displeasure. They would need to turn their losses into gains, and if anyone could do it, it was Nicolas Boltec.

  The commissioner pulled himself together. He put the secretary, who’d been eyeing Boltec with caution, at ease with a confident smile. They would proceed as planned with the emperor’s abduction. He had champagne brought out in anticipation of their victory.

  II

  The rain drew a veil across the imperial capital. Staring at the droplets creeping down his window, Leopold Schumacher thought to himself how unseasonable this year’s weather had been. Normally the streets of Odin would be filled with sunshine and greenery, its commoners rejoicing in the abundance of nature to placate their dissatisfactions.

  “Captain, aren’t you going to eat?”

  The table was decked with wine and food, and Count Alfred von Lansberg was speaking from behind the captain, lustfully eyeing every dish. Without waiting for an answer, he poured himself a tall glass of dark beer and downed it in a gulp.

  Its full-bodied flavor was just as he’d remembered, unrivaled by anything in Phezzan. Alfred was certainly not lacking in naive patriotism. Schumacher looked over his shoulder in silence. Despite knowing the beer was brewed in a factory funded by Phezzan, he saw no need to spoil the young count’s mood. Even the hotel they were staying in was Phezzan funded and Phezzan managed, and he almost wondered, rather cynically, whether the very air they breathed might not soon bear Phezzan’s trademark.

  What the hell was he doing here anyway? A cloud of self-deprecation cleared from his head.

  Schumacher couldn’t help but notice how the behavior of officials at the spaceport had changed for the better. Whereas before they trifled with their power and authority, bowing to those of higher status while oppressing common citizens and blatantly demanding bribes from all comers, now they attended to their duties with courtesy and diligence. The regulation of law and order proved that Duke von Lohengramm’s reform had taken root in at least one section of the social system. He’d emerged from exile to lay the foundation of reform and regulation.

  The young Count Alfred von Lansberg, for his part, was intoxicated with the sweet heroism of rescuing the emperor. Count Jochen von Remscheid, popularly called “Leader of the Loyalists,” had encouraged him with promises of a high position in the government-in-exile and a piece of the territory the government would one day claim.

  “The reward is trivial. It’s the actions that count,” affirmed Alfred.

  It was a sound argument. Schumacher had also been promised the rank of commodore, but that was the least of his concerns. Alfred still believed in the righteousness of his own actions; Schumacher, not so much. The Galactic Empire had fallen into ruin—a bare shadow of the mighty Goldenbaum Dynasty. Reinhard von Lohengramm’s rise to power had been decided with the demise of Lippstadt’s noble coalition. The establishment of a government-in-exile went against the grain of history. Behind the tenaciously chivalrous Count von Lansberg and the reactionary dreamer Count von Remscheid, it was the Phezzan party realists who’d written their script, while the true scenario had been invisibly annotated between the lines.

  Left to his own devices, Schumacher would never have participated in something so futile as reversing the planet’s rotation. He’d given in to coercion not only to save his own skin, but also because to oppose the plan would have jeopardized the new lifestyle of his defector subordinates. Nevertheless, Schumacher’s heart was ill at ease. Once this matter was settled, he vowed to put a sizable dent in Phezzan’s profits. More than revenge, this time it was not wanting to be forced by similar mechanisms to go against Phezzan’s wishes that drove him to act.

  Something else troubled Schumacher. Despite never being much of an optimist, that single drop of pessimism that had been added to a large, brimming glass was enough to ruin the delicate equilibrium of its surface tension, and all the wine might come spilling out at any moment. It was wholly connected to his pride as a military campaigner. Supposedly, Schumacher would simply be able to snatch the young emperor right out from beneath Duke von Lohengramm’s nose and set up a government-in-exile within the Free Planets Alliance. In the future, he would overthrow von Lohengramm and make his triumphal return to the imperial capital of Odin. Schumacher was shocked to hear of this plan from the landesherr’s aide, Rupert Kesselring. It had seemed little more than a reckless pipe dream at the time. But as the idea grew on him, and despite his reservations, Schumacher came to see the words and deeds of Commissioner Boltec, stationed in the imperial residence, as nothing more than evasive maneuvers. He couldn’t abide Boltec being tasked with general management of this place.

  Schumacher imagined the worst-case scenario: Phezzan investigating the abduction of the emperor or, on the other hand, spoon-feeding that information to Lohengramm in order to make them his scapegoats for something in return. Either that, or…

  There wasn’t enough informat
ion to determine whether his hunch was correct. Schumacher detected an unpleasant bitterness in the dark beer flowing down his throat. He didn’t enjoy being manipulated by others—even in service of a lofty goal, to say nothing of a far less obvious one.

  III

  Once everything was in place, Schumacher and Alfred went over their plans for invading Neue Sans Souci.

  Neue Sans Souci’s blueprints weren’t publicly available, and even with Phezzan’s organizational assistance, they were hard to come by. An effective authoritarian political system was one that kept its citizens in the dark, which meant that preventative measures against terrorism were a must.

  The magnificent palace was divided into quadrants. The East Garden was the nucleus of the administration, a place where royal audiences and meetings were held. The South Garden was the official residence of the imperial family. The West Garden, also called the “Rear Palace,” was home to the many beautiful ladies of the court. And the North Garden was a hunting ground of vast fields and forests, where deer and foxes were released to be hunted for sport. There were many other buildings and gardens of uncertain affiliation, totaling sixty-six square kilometers. The water fountains numbered two thousand, the total length of marble corridors was four hundred kilometers, and the gazebos totaled 752. An absurd number of extravagances besides spoke of the palace’s sheer scale. Reinhard’s sister Annerose had once set up a mansion in the northern section of the West Garden.

  “Security at Neue Sans Souci is surprisingly minimal.”

  As an aristocrat, Alfred von Lansberg had passed through the palace gate on many occasions. It had always been customary within the empire to employ flesh-and-blood human beings instead of machines. Although this practice did not date back as far as Rudolf the Great in his prime, in the past imperial guards were placed at twenty-step intervals in the gardens and corridors. In the last of Friedrich III’s six so-called Crimson Years of reign, conspiracy, assassination, and terrorism were rampant, while the establishment of the North Garden Dragoon Brigade and the West Garden Infantry Brigade incited rebellion among the guards.

  Although Friedrich III’s successor, Maximilian Josef II, put an end to what were essentially imperial private armies in the North and West Gardens, this time there was a danger of them uniting to overthrow the new emperor in competition for inheritance of the throne. Empress and former maidservant Sieglinde started carrying a gun for her husband’s protection. One couldn’t anticipate every eventuality, however, and the emperor was poisoned. He survived but was left half-blind by the attempt. Although Josef II had all the qualities of a benevolent ruler, without the cooperation of the morally upright Chief Justice Münzer, Empress Sieglinde’s devoted counselor, who had regulated national politics as prime minister, he probably would have been taken out by other means. Though afflicted by his damaged eyes, Maximilian Josef defended against internal dissolution of the empire and laid fresh cornerstones, earning him the title of “Great Rebuilder.” Looking at the big picture a century and a half later, the same one who’d rebuilt the empire had also set in motion an interminable war with the alliance.

  Following this incident, sentiments leaned heavily toward automation, but even with high turnover, the presence of soldiers in the palace never dwindled.

  Reinhard von Lohengramm had made huge cuts in palace expenses, completely shuttering the West and North Gardens, along with half of the buildings in the East and South. All political duties, save the occasional constitutional function, were planned and approved through the prime minister’s office. The number of vanity parties and garden functions had also plummeted, and the once-sleepless palace lost its splendor and looked more like a ghost town with each passing day.

  “I’ll guide us through Neue Sans Souci once we’re inside. It may be closed off, but it’s not like it’s been rebuilt, only abandoned,” said Alfred.

  He guaranteed that nearly every door, corridor, and gate would be usable. Furthermore, he said in a hushed tone, the grand palace was filled with hidden rooms and passageways—so many, in fact, that Lohengramm couldn’t possibly be aware of all of them—of which they could make effective use.

  This information wasn’t new to Schumacher, who had thought it to be nothing more than a rumor. Generations of emperors, fearing assassination and revolt, had built small rooms fortified with double-reinforced walls for refuge or escape, dug underground tunnels, and turned Neue Sans Souci into a labyrinth with access points concealed in bushes of the garden.

  Many of these passages had been used, each time spawning a comedy and a tragedy apiece. When Emperor Wilhelm II’s second son, Archduke Albert, was fifteen years old, he had gone exploring in the underground maze accompanied by the emperor’s aide-de-camp. Even now, a century later, his body had yet to be found. It was said that Wilhelm II’s favorite mistress, Dorothea, had planned the whole thing. Having given birth to Albert by the emperor who loved her, she became the target of Empress Konstanze’s violent hatred. And so, when the empress fell ill and was confined to her sickbed, Dorothea, fearing that her son would be harmed by the empress, entrusted him to the care of a young officer, who smuggled the boy through the underground passageways to the Free Planets Alliance, where he lived out his life in peaceful exile. Another theory had it that Empress Konstanze was behind it all, and that she’d somehow lured Albert underground, where he was left to die.

  Generally known to be true was that, immediately after Archduke Albert disappeared in the depths along with his aide-de-camp, Wilhelm II died of natural causes, and that the day after the empress’s own son took the throne as Cornelius II, Dorothea died from apparent poisoning. An inexplicable fever caused Empress Konstanze to die insane just one month later. It was more than enough to arouse people’s curiosity and suspicion. From these two apocrypha, a pair of sequels had arisen, as some aristocrats claimed to have seen a mature Albert aboard a Phezzanese passenger boat, while certain military personnel said they heard the voice of the accursed boy while investigating the underground labyrinth some ten years later.

  This was, of course, the tragedy. Comic relief came two decades later. Cornelius II became gravely ill without having produced an heir, and the aristocrats were running around frantically, wondering if anyone would succeed him. To that end, a man appeared who was said to be the spitting likeness of a mature Archduke Albert. Everything about him led much of the aristocracy to believe him. Cornelius II, who all these years had suspected his mother of criminal acts, summoned his “little brother” to his deathbed for a tearful meeting. The aristocracy expected him to become the new emperor Albert I, and the nobles vied to be the first to lick his boots.

  When Albert, as this man was known, was offered a grand aristocrat’s summer villa free of charge, he thanked them for their favor and generously arranged for his future position and territory. His popularity was all the greater, until catastrophe struck. His Highness Prince Albert, first in line to succeed the emperor, absconded with imperial jewelry worth fifty million reichsmark and, taking an innocent young maid with him, fled the imperial capital of Odin. In his wake, he left a throng of dumbfounded nobles, along with a dozen young women with shattered dreams of one day becoming empress as bearer of his son. Half of those young women bore his shameful illegitimate children, and several nobles named Albert went so far as to change their names so as not to be associated with the conniving impostor. Among the general populace, the aristocracy became the butt of ridicule.

  Some had wondered whether this man wasn’t the real Albert after all. But because the audacious impostor had disappeared without a trace, the truth would never be known.

  Whether poetic and prosaic, in the five centuries that had transpired since the reign of Rudolf the Great, the rafters of Neue Sans Souci had come to be hung with all manner of legends. Alfred von Lansberg said as much to Schumacher.

  A helpless “poet of action,” thought Schumacher, but Alfred didn’t have a malicious bone in his body
, so there was no reason to harbor any ill will toward him. He used to think he was incapable of feeling contempt toward others. Unlike Alfred, Schumacher wasn’t willing to wager his life for something he didn’t believe in. Or maybe he was just reading too much into things.

  Eying Alfred, Schumacher felt inclined to aim for success, if only to please him. Besides, far more intriguing was the prospect of pulling one over on that golden brat, once and for all.

  IV

  Meanwhile, the golden brat himself, targeted as the emperor’s “cruel captor,” had summoned his own staff officer to discuss countermeasures.

  If secretary-general Paul von Oberstein, the Imperial Space Armada’s chief of staff, was surprised to hear talk from Reinhard of a conspiracy between Phezzan and the remaining high nobles to abduct the emperor, he didn’t look it. He had never been one to display his emotions to begin with. With the optical computer built into his artificial eyes, he regarded the young lord seriously and nodded.

  “That’s typical of the Black Fox of Phezzan. They’re responsible for the script and production, pulling all the strings from behind the scenes.”

  “If he should appear onstage, he’ll be picked off from the orchestra pit. This would put others at risk.”

  “So what will you do? Do you plan on accepting Phezzan’s offer and allowing them to abduct the emperor?”

  A cold smile came to the elegant imperial marshal’s lips. “Yes, I think it’ll be fun to let them try.”

  “Shall we relax the palace’s defenses? To make it easier for them.”

  “No need,” responded Reinhard bluntly. “It’s not that well fortified to begin with. There exists a man who could occupy Iserlohn Fortress without bloodshed, so why would I cooperate with someone who can’t even manage to abduct one emperor?”