Sunset Read online

  As Julian Mintz would later write:

  One reason the Lohengramm Dynasty’s military was so strong was the belief that the enemies of the kaiser as an individual, the enemies of the state, and the enemies of the people were all one and the same. For them, Kaiser von Lohengramm was a liberator.

  As a result, it is no exaggeration to say that the Galactic Imperial Navy of the years around SE 800 was the private military of Kaiser Reinhard von Lohengramm himself. Its troops were unfailingly loyal not to the state but to the kaiser himself.

  It may seem erroneous to describe Reinhard as a liberator. But, if one takes the Goldenbaum Dynasty as the point of comparison, it was by no means untrue. Even if the soldiers of the Imperial Navy had been given the right to vote for their supreme commander, they would have thrown their support overwhelmingly behind Reinhard anyway. He was an autocratic ruler and a bellicose one, but the support he received from the public presents a unique case embodying one facet of democratic governance…

  As Julian pondered how such an enemy might be fought, two stalwart allies arrived, one following the other, in Iserlohn’s central command room. The first was Commander Olivier Poplin, the “Eternal Ace.” He was followed shortly afterward by Vice Admiral Dusty Attenborough, who clapped Poplin on the back with suspicious good cheer.

  “What are you grinning about?” said Poplin. “It’s giving me the creeps.”

  “You’re turning thirty this year, right?” replied a gleeful Attenborough. “Welcome to the club!”

  The sunlight that usually danced in Poplin’s green eyes took on an ironic gleam. “Until my birthday comes, I’ll remain a youthful twentysomething, thank you very much,” he said.

  “When is your birthday?”

  “On the thirty-sixth of Tredecember.”

  “That’s not even a good lie! Just look at you, flailing uselessly against the inevitable!”

  Julian couldn’t hold his laughter in any longer. Who would have guessed from their conversation that these two held the ranks they did in a real military force? Even in the Alliance Navy, the so-called “force of freedom,” men of such ability and irreverence could have never found their way into the kind of central roles that these two occupied. Only in Iserlohn Fortress had they been able to express the full extent of their genius and individuality. The ability to draw this out of his subordinates was the true measure of a leader. Did Julian meet that standard?

  By the time Attenborough and Poplin realized it, Julian had vanished.

  “Where’d he go? If he wanted to think, he could have done it here.”

  “Probably afraid we’d rub off on him.”

  “One of us, at least.”

  Katerose “Karin” von Kreutzer had finished her simulations for the day and strolled into the leafy park with an alkaline drink in hand. On the way, she met a group of young female soldiers her age who said they were off to meet some young officers and go dancing. Men outnumbered women in Iserlohn’s demographics, so young women had plenty of latitude to evaluate and select their partners carefully—not that Iserlohn’s most valiant warriors, like Walter von Schönkopf and Poplin, lacked opportunities to admire multiple blossoms in Iserlohn’s orchard.

  “Why don’t you come with us, Karin? There are plenty of men with their eye on you. Whatever your type, you’re bound to find someone.”

  But before Karin could answer, another of the young women laughed and said, “It’s no good inviting her. She only likes flaxen-haired boys who can pull off the deep, brooding look.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Sorry to waste your time, Karin!”

  The young women laughed merrily, waving off Karin’s indignant insistence that they had it all wrong, and departed like a flock of colorful birds. Left alone, Karin adjusted her black beret, shook her tea-colored hair, then stalked off in the opposite direction like a lone avian flying willfully into the north wind. As expected, a flaxen-haired boy was sitting on the Yang Wen-li bench in one corner of the park, pulling off the deep, brooding look. He was so lost in thought that it took him two and a half seconds to even notice Karin arriving and standing there beside him.

  “Can I sit here?” she asked finally.

  “Of course.”

  Julian brushed off the bench with his hand. Karin sat down decisively and folded her legs, then turned her indigo eyes on the youthful commander.

  “Brooding over something again?”

  “Well, I have big responsibilities. I just can’t seem to get my thoughts in order.”

  “Julian, when we accepted you as our commander, we all made our decision. We decided to follow your judgment all the way. Those who didn’t want to do that left—remember? So if you want to live up to our expectations, the only thing you can do is make your decisions without worrying what we might think.”

  As usual, Karin’s tone was as forceful as her words, but there was a freshness to the way she spoke, like an early summer breeze, that was not unpleasant to him. It never had been.

  Julian felt as if he were at the fulcrum of a balance with living up to his responsibilities at one end and being crushed by them at the other. The weight of a hair on either side could have upset the equilibrium, and now a strand of tea-colored hair was drifting down on the former side. He had always thought of the matter in terms of what he had to do, but Karin had reframed it from the perspective of what he was allowed to do. Although she was probably not aware of it herself, this would prove a turning point in his thinking.

  II

  There was a growing push toward war with Iserlohn in the upper echelons of the Galactic Empire, and as if in response, enthusiasm was rising within Iserlohn Fortress for a decisive battle with their imperial foes. The fortress’s inhabitants seemed to be longing to declare their hibernation over. Even the cautious Alex Caselnes pointed out that, with the Galactic Empire still struggling with disruptions to its economy and supply routes, Iserlohn could become the proverbial straw that breaks the Empire’s back.

  “But isn’t Kaiser Reinhard at least governing more benevolently than the rulers of the Goldenbaum Dynasty?”

  “The foundation of benevolent governance, Julian, is making sure the people have enough to eat.”

  Caselnes’s arguments were lucid and correct, as befitted a man who had reached the highest ranks of the military bureaucracy in the former alliance. As Julian had no reply to offer, Caselnes continued:

  “What good is a modicum of political freedom if you’re starving to death? The kaiser’s economic bureaucrats must be terrified that these troubles will propagate into the empire’s homeland.”

  Caselnes was entirely correct. If these disturbances were the fruit of some vast conspiracy rather than a series of unfortunate coincidences, even the kaiser’s indomitable battlefield prowess would not be sufficient to bring matters under control.

  “Do you think that the former powers of Phezzan are behind it all?” asked Julian.

  Caselnes nodded. “Very possibly.”

  Julian frowned. This only raised more questions. “If it is a Phezzanese conspiracy, why now? And why this?” Born alongside this uncertainty was its inevitable twin, unease. Even in its heyday, Phezzan could never have mustered military force to rival that of the Galactic Empire. A guerilla war in the economic realm was, in that sense, not illogical.

  However, if the current disturbances were the work of those who had once wielded power on Phezzan, why had they not made their move during Operation Ragnarök, before Reinhard had become kaiser at all? If they had cut off his lines of supply, transport, and information during the campaign, the empire would not have been able to sustain a long-range expedition, however mighty its military. And that, in turn, could have preserved Phezzan’s independence.

  Could it be that Phezzan itself was not the most important thing for Phezzan? Could benefiting the Church of Terra have been their primary goal all along? Or was it
simply that their conspiratorial preparations had not been completed until now?

  In his mind’s eye, Julian saw the form of his guardian and teacher—a black-haired young man pouring a thin stream of brandy into his Shillong tea with a smile.

  “Conspiracy alone can’t move history, Julian. There are always conspiracies, but they don’t always succeed.”

  Those were the words Yang Wen-li had spoken, after breathing deeply of the scent rising from his teacup.

  “With Kaiser Reinhard at the helm, bloodshed that should appear tragic seems glorious instead.”

  Yang had described Reinhard in these terms more than once, usually with a sigh.

  “It’s the beauty of a flame. It burns others, then consumes itself. A dangerous thing, I think. But flames this bright appear only rarely in history.”

  Reminiscences of Yang were always a light in the darkness for Julian’s thinking. He was inexperienced and young, not yet twenty years of age; he was able to act as standard-bearer for the anti-imperial forces, even if only formally, due solely to the fact that he held aloft a candlestick bearing Yang’s name. No one was more deeply aware of this than Julian himself.

  Self-reflection, self-control: these were the qualities that had set Yang apart, and Julian had naturally inherited them too. Taken to extremes, of course, self-reflection could become timidity, self-control stagnation, and this was something else for those around Julian to worry about.

  “Since we are the ones who actually run this republic, don’t you think we ought to offer a little encouragement to our young leader?”

  With an impish grin, Poplin posed this question to—who else?—Dusty Attenborough.

  Attenborough liked to call himself a “militant extremist radical,” but he appeared to be in an uncharacteristically cautious mood today. “Those people on Heinessen are really making trouble for us,” he said. “If they force us to attack and it ends in our defeat, democracy itself might be among the losses.”

  “That’s not what I expected to hear from Vice Admiral Attenborough, the man who loves fighting even more than he loves women.”

  “I don’t like fighting to lose,” Attenborough said frankly. He was a radical, but not an unhinged one. “And neither do you, as I recall. Especially not in battles that smell of perfume.”

  “It’s difficult to say when I’ve ever actually lost one.”

  “You know, commander, the quality of your boasting seems to be slipping these days.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You do have a gift for speaking nonsense, even without running a high fever.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Attenborough opened his mouth to object, but then closed it again, grinning as wickedly as Poplin had before. “I can’t tell you how envious I am,” he said. “No matter how high my fever gets, my thinking can never escape the twin pedestals of conscience and shame.”

  “With age comes wisdom,” said Poplin, leaving Attenborough with no retort.

  Two days passed with Julian still unable to make his decision. The unrest in the former alliance territories now seemed to be accelerating in the direction exactly opposite from resolution.

  “Iserlohn has already received more than ten requests for assistance from the former alliance territories,” said Captain Bagdash, Iserlohn Fortress’s intelligence officer. “Half of them are cries for help. In short, their message is, ‘Don’t abandon us.’ ”

  There was a hint of irony in Bagdash’s voice. He was another man whose current situation had come from a string of peculiar choices. He had infiltrated Iserlohn Fortress during the attempted military coup of SE 797 with the intention of murdering Yang Wen-li. But when Yang’s life was threatened by the machinations of the alliance’s government, Bagdash had joined forces with von Schönkopf and Attenborough. Even after Yang’s death, he had remained on Iserlohn, taking responsibility for gathering and analyzing information. He had made himself as essential to the republic as Boris Konev, the free trader originally from Phezzan.

  Attenborough made an irritated sound. “I don’t know what they expect us to do for them. We have our own strategic conditions and priorities to worry about.”

  “Except that right now a single glass of water would do them more good than a hundred strategic theories.”

  Bagdash’s report took Julian and his staff officers by surprise. The winds of rumor, it seemed, had been scattering the pollen of suspicion and mistrust in regard to the Iserlohn Republic’s government, blowing it across some of the republicans who remained in the former alliance territories. As proof of their suspicion, these republicans offered the fact that, during the Reuentahl Revolt of the previous year, the Iserlohn Republic had not only failed to join the armed rebellion against the empire, but also permitted the Mecklinger fleet passage through the corridor and enjoyed a temporary state of amity with the imperial forces. These facts had become a seedbed for mistrust. Perhaps the Iserlohn Republic sought peace and survival only for itself. Perhaps it intended to use noninterference and coexistence as excuses to sit back and watch the anti-imperial movement in the former alliance territories fail.

  “Even if that were true, could you blame us?”

  Poplin was happy to say such things, but for Julian this was not a problem that could simply be pushed aside. Though conscious of his own lack of boldness in decision-making, he had no choice but to think long and hard on it.

  If military force existed in order to achieve political goals, was now the time to use that force? Should they seek a tactical victory over the empire at this point, partly as a way to secure the trust and boost the morale of the republican agitators in the former alliance territories? If they avoided combat here, would democracy perish even if Iserlohn survived? If they opened hostilities against the empire, would they ever have another opportunity for rational negotiations? On the other hand, if they sought reconciliation with the imperial forces, was there still even room for that?

  All these thoughts were tangled together in Julian’s mind, but an underground stream must bubble to the surface somewhere. After silent contemplation, Julian finally made his decision. They had to make it clear, somehow, that Iserlohn’s military would fight to protect democracy.

  “Let’s take the fight to the empire,” Julian said.

  “Excellent,” said Walter von Schönkopf. “We’d been waiting for something to change, and now that change has come. Working to widen that change even further is a fine strategy.”

  Poplin clapped and laughed. “The time has come, then,” he said. “Fruit, war, women—they all ripen eventually.”

  Julian smiled faintly. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about the Kaiser’s character,” he said. “And I’ve come to a conclusion.”

  “That he has a taste for warfare?”

  “That’s it. This is just my thinking, and it may not be the only right answer. But it’s what settled my mind on going to war with the empire.”

  Julian was a portrait of flaxen-haired sincerity. To accept the sacrifices that war would require and pursue their goals regardless, or to give up before it came to that, and compromise with reality—bend the knee to it, even—in order to avoid the effort necessary to improve their own lot? Which approach to life would win them the respect of others?

  It seemed to Julian that Kaiser Reinhard’s values were one standard by which to answer that question, at least. In essence, they boiled down to one commandment: If something is valuable to you, protect it with your life or seize it by whatever means necessary. This sort of thinking might be the ultimate reason why human society was still plagued by bloodshed. But what had the kaiser’s twenty-five years been, right from the very first step, if not a life of battle and victory? If Reinhard showed respect for democratic republican governance, was that not because his greatest adversary Yang Wen-li had died to protect it? If Julian and the others could not
show similar conviction, not only would they earn the kaiser’s contempt, they would also lose all hope of ever negotiating on equal footing with him. When Julian arrived at this conclusion, his decision all but made itself.

  Discussion moved on to the next problem: finding a path to a tactical victory.

  “There is one possibility,” Julian said. “We lure the Wahlen fleet to Iserlohn Fortress.”

  This was not his idea alone. He had extracted and refined it from the voluminous memoirs left by Yang Wen-li.

  “All right, commander,” Dusty Attenborough said. “May we hear more?”

  He settled back in his seat, and the other staff officers followed suit.

  III

  The disruption in the former alliance territories, renamed the Neue Land by the empire, seemed to worsen by the hour. Distribution of military supplies was a first-aid measure at best. The civilian administration that had inherited authority from von Reuentahl’s governorate cast about for solutions, but the blockages in the supply networks showed no signs of improvement. Some distribution bases were overloaded beyond capacity, so that supplies were left to rot outside the warehouses; elsewhere, fleets of supply ships roamed in search of anything that might fill their empty holds.

  And then a report arrived on the desk of Senior Admiral August Samuel Wahlen: “Disquieting signs around Iserlohn Fortress.”

  Wahlen was not especially surprised by this. Iserlohn had always been a “cluster of disquiet and danger”—had it slumbered always in peace, what value would its existence have had in historical terms? It was against the threat of Iserlohn that Wahlen and his fleet had been stationed in the former alliance territories after von Reuentahl’s death.

  However, if the report was not surprising, it was certainly unpleasant. Quelling the ongoing riots and uprisings in the alliance territories was more than enough to keep him occupied, both physically and mentally. Military force would not be sufficient to deal with the Iserlohn Republic—more or less the sole official enemy of the empire—and he worried about the safety of his fleet’s rear.