Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 7 Read online

  “Von Reuentahl, I don’t know what she meant by saying such a thing, but that woman is bad news for you.”

  “And? What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Give her some money and send her away. That’s the only thing you can do.”

  Von Reuentahl did a double take, and looked at his friend with a slightly surprised expression. “That’s not the sort of advice I’m used to hearing from you.”

  “I don’t care how you do it—just find an exit and get yourself out of this. All I see is you crawling deeper and deeper into this maze.”

  “I’m sure it looks that way to you.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “No. To be honest, I’d be lying if I said that the same thing has never crossed my mind. It’s just…”

  At that moment, von Reuentahl’s piercing blue left eye and deep black right eye seemed to dim to the same color. Presently, von Reuentahl forced a smile and slapped his friend on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, Mittermeier. I’m from a family of warriors. When I die, it will be by the sword. I won’t be destroyed by a woman.”

  By the time Mittermeier found his way out of memory lane, the heterochromatic marshal was straightening his posture and rising to his feet.

  The Gale Wolf hurried to do likewise. Kaiser Reinhard had entered the room.

  VI

  Reinhard was in a foul mood. Ever since Lennenkamp’s kidnapping at the hands of Yang Wen-li’s faction, he had been paralyzed by indecision. The golden-haired young man was unaccustomed to this state, to say the least.

  Now, with the cause of Lennenkamp’s unexpected death made clear, should he seek redress by striking the Free Planets Alliance? Or leave the matter to the passage of time for a while, as he had briefly proposed to do earlier, and simply await the enemy’s slide into confusion and self-destruction?

  It was hardly any wonder that the Three Imperial Chiefs found the kaiser’s recent contemplativeness difficult to accept. The kaiser himself was having trouble accepting his own passivity. What had made him like this was a mental state of self-admonition against high-handedly exercising his nigh-unlimited authority. His youthful sense of aesthetics recoiled at the idea of bringing military force to bear against a defeated enemy a scant four or five months after the signing of the Baalat Treaty.

  What blew that feeling away was an impassioned speech from Wittenfeld. Asked his opinion by the kaiser, Wittenfeld made the same argument to his young lord that he had just made to Mittermeier. At first the kaiser hadn’t seemed terribly moved by it; he clearly considered it all too obvious that Wittenfeld would advocate for more militarism. It was his next words, however, that summed up the situation for him.

  “Your Excellency, the reason you’ve been able to boast of invincibility thus far lies in the fact that you’ve acted to move history. Are you going to fold your arms now, of all times, and wait for history to move you?”

  The effect that that line had on the golden-haired young man was surprising indeed. He looked like a sculpture that had had life breathed into it.

  “Well spoken, Wittenfeld.”

  As the kaiser rose from his sofa, his ice-blue eyes gleamed, filled with a bitter light. Stellar coronas were dancing wildly in those eyes. He had not been moved by Wittenfeld. He had rediscovered what he himself had been looking for.

  “I’ve been overthinking this,” he said. “The unification of space is the greatest and highest justification. Yet here I’ve been, putting various pretexts that scarcely merit consideration ahead of that.”

  Amid a stillness so complete that the very air seemed to have crystallized, the kaiser’s voice stirred rhythmical waves.

  “Admiral Wittenfeld!”

  “Aye!”

  “Here are your orders. As swiftly as possible, take the Schwarz Lanzenreiter fleet and depart for alliance space. Rendezvous with Admiral Steinmetz on Planet Urvashi, and maintain security there until my main force arrives.”

  “Aye!”

  Under his orange hair, the fierce young commander’s face flushed red. Everything he had wished for had just been granted. As Reinhard gave the order, he also turned his ice-blue eyes toward his chief secretary, who had accompanied him.

  “Fräulein von Mariendorf, I will shortly make public the death of Admiral Lennenkamp, and announce a mobilization seeking redress from the government of the Free Planets Alliance. See to it that a draft speech is on my desk by week’s end.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  Overpowered by Reinhard’s spirit, not even Hilda was able to caution or dissuade him. In her eyes, too, the kaiser seemed to shine blindingly bright.

  “Be that as it may, Your Majesty will lack a permanent dwelling until your palace is completed,” said Wittenfeld.

  Reinhard, who had started for the door, stopped and turned around, his luxurious mane of golden hair stirring the air. Then, the graceful lips of the young king and conqueror shot back the words which future historians would never fail to reproduce when assaying to write Reinhard’s biography.

  “I need no palace,” he said. “The royal palace of the Galactic Empire is wherever I am. For now, my throne shall be ensconced on the battleship Brünhild.”

  A thrill of exultation that was almost a shudder went shooting through the admirals’ central nervous systems. That was the kind of spirit which revealed their praiseworthy kaiser’s true self. The kaiser did not reside in palaces; he was a man of the battlefield.

  Reinhard’s spirit aside, however, a central hub for politics, military affairs, and intelligence gathering was indispensable for a vast interstellar empire, and there had been no change in Reinhard’s plan to give it one in the form of Phezzan. With Minister of Industry von Silberberg as its head, Imperial Capital Construction Headquarters was becoming ever more lively in its activities, and plans were moving forward for the kaiser’s new castle residence—tentatively named Löwenbrunnen, or Lion Fountain. As is widely known, however, construction on this palace did not begin during Reinhard’s reign.

  Reinhard’s elegant figure disappeared behind the door, and the admirals, saluting as he departed, went their separate ways. Each of them could feel their blood temperature rising.

  November 10.

  On the bridge of Königstiger, flagship of the Schwarz Lanzenreiter fleet, Senior Admiral Fritz Josef Wittenfeld stared at the main screen, arms crossed. His line of sight was directed at Phezzan, already on its way to becoming merely the brightest of the many stars there displayed. Although it was a hurried departure, what had been demanded of him had been more a hasty one.

  Admiral Halberstadt, the fleet’s vice commander; Admiral Gräbner, the chief of staff; and Commodore Dirksen, a senior aide, made up his staff. With strong and courageous expressions on their faces, they stood arrayed around their commander. Moving his gaze across each of their faces, the fierce leader of the Schwarz Lanzenreiter invincibly declared, “Well then, shall we head for Heinessen, and our victory toasts?”

  The extravagant colors of the Goldenlöwe blazed from the wall of the bridge. Beneath its new banner, the military forces of a new dynasty commenced their first greedy voyage of conquest. One hundred forty-one days had passed since the golden crown had come to rest on Reinhard von Lohengramm’s golden-haired head.

  I

  AS THE RULER and armed forces of the Lohengramm Dynasty were going into action to bring history and the universe to heel before the brilliant Goldenlöwe banner, another group of spaceships was wandering the eternal night, with no flag of its own to raise at all.

  In times to come, this would often be called the “Yang Independent Fleet,” but the man to whom that name referred simply called it the “Irregulars,” and his subordinates called it “Yang’s Irregulars.” Be that as it may, the fleet needed some kind of official name for itself, and its would-be pensioner, driven unwillingly from his cozy greenho
use into the cold, cruel world, had solicited naming suggestions from the crew members themselves. His tacked-on rationale for this was that it would encourage a sense of solidarity and self-awareness among fleet personnel, but in fact, the primary motivating factor had been that coming up with a name himself was a pain in the neck.

  The measure was, indeed, effective. While some certainly participated because they had nothing better to do, there is little doubt that it bore fruit in terms of creating a shared awareness of “our fleet.” From a brigade’s worth of respondents’ submissions, Yang selected the least self-consciously eccentric.

  One famous leader in the fleet, temporarily away from the main force at the time, would later lament that had he only been present to suggest it, “Studly Olivier Poplin and His Male Supporting Cast” would have surely been the chosen nomenclature—although he lacked even one sympathizer for this claim. In any case, Yang Wen-li did not let them pin any ridiculously overwrought names on their fleet.

  Yang was aware that the acid phrase “wandering private navy” had gained currency among those who opposed him. If one ignored everything that had happened thus far and focused only on the present, that evaluation had some surface truth to it. Even with Yang Wen-li as its commander, Wiliabard Joachim Merkatz assisting him, and Walter von Schönkopf, Alex Caselnes, and Dusty Attenborough as staff officers, it still existed entirely divorced from its nation’s official sanction. These five officers could likely organize and lead a force on the scale of five million personnel, but in reality, their fleet numbered somewhere above six hundred vessels, with personnel numbering only about sixteen thousand.

  They had no political cover and no supply bases. Now that the festive mood from their reunion with Merkatz at Dayan Khan’s abandoned base had cooled somewhat, the Irregulars’ leadership had to think long and hard about their direction going forward.

  Only Dusty Attenborough, running a hand through a tangled head of wooly, iron-gray hair, was moving toward action, rather than thought, first. In appearance, he looked more like some activist student revolutionary than a navy admiral. Yang had always rated his old underclassman from Officers’ Academy highly in terms of his skills as tactician and commander, but now freed from the shackles of the FPA military, Attenborough had, to a surprising degree, shown himself to be a man of action as well as organizational skill, surprising others with his hard work and energy as he applied himself to tasks such as reorganizing the fleet, preparing tactical battle plans, and training soldiers. Yang’s indolence only made his vitality more apparent.

  “How about this, Marshal? We recapture Iserlohn, create a liberation zone extending from the corridor region all the way to El Facil, and then respond to the empire’s offensive.”

  Dusty Attenborough’s proposal actually did sound like something a student revolutionary would say. This was evident from his use of terms like “liberation zone.” Yang, for his part, felt like puffing a smoky cloud of sarcasm back in his face. You don’t have a problem in the world, do you? he thought. But he had also discerned strategic value in his old underclassman’s proposal.

  “If retaking Iserlohn was all we did,” Yang said, “we’d just end up being isolated in the middle of the corridor. But if we could secure El Facil as a beachhead, and from there build connections with Tiamat, Astarte, and other nearby systems to establish corridors of liberated space, that might make it easier to respond to whatever changes may come down the line. Still, this isn’t the time for that yet.”

  Yang believed that. Furthermore, thinking ahead in terms of political as opposed to military strategy, he felt it was probably best to go ahead and start setting the stage for a future political settlement. By recognizing the hegemony of Reinhard von Lohengramm and the Neue Reich, and restoring Iserlohn Fortress to him, it might be possible to get El Facil all but freed in exchange, naming it a “free city of the empire” or some similar euphemism, and preserving the faint lamplight of republican democracy. In order to extract such a concession from Kaiser Reinhard, though, a commensurate price would have to be paid.

  At present, Yang was giving no thought whatsoever to the possibility of Reinhard reneging on his word. That young man, whose comely visage was like a portrait made with paints infused with the Muse’s breath, might conquer, might invade, might purge, and might avenge, but he seemed incapable of breaking a promise once it was made. The one time Yang had met him, he had felt that from the other man’s very presence.

  So in other words, various things work out better if he does us the favor of staying alive. Yang was the very man who had driven Reinhard to the brink of defeat in the Vermillion War a scant year and a half ago, yet sometimes he still had such thoughts. From the beginning, Yang had never harbored any animus toward Reinhard as a person.

  The man known as Yang Wen-li was an organism composed of innumerable contradictions. While detesting the military, he had risen to the rank of marshal; while avoiding battle, he had stacked victory on top of victory; while doubting the significance of his state’s continued existence, his contributions to that state had been many; while ignoring the virtue of diligence, he had accumulated incomparable achievements. For that reason, some argue that he had no guiding philosophy—that what did flow consistently through his psyche might perhaps have been the heartfelt wish to be a mere understudy in the great play of history, and a desire to hand off the lead role and find his seat among the spectators as soon as some greater individual took the stage.

  Scribbled in an unfinished historical treatise that Yang abandoned writing was the following: “All the universe is a stage, and history a farce with no author.” As he was merely restating a very old proverb, it was not the fruit of any particularly creative thought process. Still, it was useful for understanding at least part of where his viewpoint was coming from.

  If Yang had been born in the same generation as Ahle Heinessen, founding father of the Free Planets Alliance, his life would have probably been simpler and his choices more clear-cut. Most likely, he would have offered his complete, unconditional loyalty to Heinessen and his ideas, and on the military side of things, worked in a limited advisory capacity, staying one step behind the leader, and supporting him from the background.

  Some historians have pointed out Yang’s psychological tendency to prefer the role of number two to that of number one. They claim, for example, that when Yang extended his utmost courtesy to his elderly senior, Commander in Chief Alexandor Bucock, he was not doing so based on simple feelings of affection and respect, but out of a deep-seated wish to rise no higher than the number two position.

  Those who argue that the strongest lineup for the Free Planets Alliance Armed Forces would have been Bucock as commander in chief and Yang as general chief of staff—and lament the fact that this was ultimately not to be—base their views on such opinions.

  Naturally, Yang himself never made any clear answer to these claims. What is certainly factual, though, is that during the span of his own life, Yang was ultimately unable to find any individual worthy of his political allegiance. Whether this was a blessing or a curse was likely unclear even to Yang.

  II

  Immediately following his and his subordinates’ escape from the murderous hands of their government, Yang rendezvoused with Merkatz, and learned that the government of the El Facil system had declared independence from the Free Planets Alliance. Attenborough’s “liberation strategy” had of course been devised based on this information.

  Walter von Schönkopf also encouraged him along similar lines. Yang’s impression, though, was more of him waving around a red flag to egg him on. “Go to El Facil right away,” von Schönkopf said. “The people over there are passionate, but they don’t have any political or military strategy. They’d probably be glad to have you as their top leader.”

  Even amid such circumstances, though, Yang held to his refusal to become supreme leader of the anti-empire movement.

  “Th
e top leader has to be a civilian. There’s no such thing as a democracy or a republic ruled by soldiers. I can’t be the leader of this.”

  “You’re being too stubborn,” von Schönkopf persisted. He and the word “discretion” had fallen out of touch years ago. “You’re not a soldier anymore. You’re without rank, an out-of-work civilian whose government won’t pay out your pension, let alone a salary. What’s holding you back?”

  “Nothing’s holding me back,” Yang said, and although it sounded like he was just being argumentative for the sake of it, he had more than one reason for not rushing over to El Facil. What he wanted to say was that things just weren’t that easy.

  “Marshal, have you ever thought about where it is that you lag behind Kaiser Reinhard?”

  “It’s our difference in talent.”

  “No, it isn’t,” von Schönkopf averred. “It’s your difference in spirit.”

  Yang fell into a gloomy silence at von Schönkopf’s words, one hand still on the black beret he was wearing. It was his way of admitting that he couldn’t deny the truth in von Schönkopf’s assertion.

  “If fate were to try and sashay past Kaiser Reinhard without batting an eye at him, he’d grab ’er by the collar and force her to follow him. For better or worse, that’s what he’s good at. You, on the other hand…”

  Contrary to Yang’s expectations, von Schönkopf left off criticizing him further, as an expression that defied easy description appeared on his handsome, gentlemanly face. “I think there is something you’re after. What are you hoping for, Marshal? At our current stage?”

  After a brief hesitation, Yang answered in a small voice: “There’s only one thing I’m hoping for. That Chairman Lebello will do a good job smoothing over my absence.”

  Since escaping from the Free Planets’ capital of Heinessen, Yang had been groping his way through a labyrinth of thought and strategy, and had needed a lot of breaks along the way.