The Price of Desire (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 1) Page 33

  And what about your grandmother? Are you truly prepared to make war against her people—against your own?

  They’re not my people. She’s Bronte, and so am I.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Allegiance was about more than race; Kisten had believed it then, and he believed it now. One belonged to the people one chose, and a great many Charonites had chosen to join the Alliance, not because they had to but because they believed in all it stood for. Of the hundreds of thousands of local troops in the Charon II Army, most were loyal. And if the only problem had been opium, crisis might have been averted.

  But the Emperor—and, later, the Emperor’s son, Karan—made another and even more costly mistake by allowing certain factions to persuade him into adopting a program of religious reform.

  Needless to say, the program was not a success.

  On the Home Worlds, liberal-minded types decried what they saw as a high-handed attempt to meddle with their idealized picture of “nature’s gentleman.” If the savages wanted their gods, so what? But these objections were mostly desultory; the empire was, after all, civilizing these people and largely for their own good. Besides, surely the teaching of a religion that emphasized the right to life, the protection of women from harm, the right to justice and various other—hitherto unknown—concepts couldn’t be a bad thing?

  Ironically, what the Charonites viewed as their particular subjection was in fact an empire-wide problem. The True Faith had never been the only faith, even on Brontes—and certainly not on Braxis; Braxi culture was ancient, long predating even the arrival of the colonists from the Union. For generations, the nominally theocratic Alliance turned a blind eye to the fact of other religions; so long as practitioners worshipped quietly, in the privacy of their own homes, all was well. But as Karan’s power grew, slowly that began to change. Under his regime, tolerance devolved into brutal suppression.

  Even Kisten’s father, the Chancellor, could only do so much to halt the tide. The best he could do was mitigate the worst of Karan’s policies, and even then at tremendous political cost. His lifelong friend and political ally, Julian Tavish, was disgraced with the discovery that his family worshipped the old gods and only the fact that his senate seat was hereditary kept him from being expelled. He kept his seat, but he lost a great deal of support among those determined to curry favor with Karan.

  Shortly thereafter, Karan made apostasy a capital offense.

  All of this happened when Kisten and Keshav were children. Their father had just turned twenty-eight the year they were born, and when scandal broke around his friend Rajesh was in his early forties; still a young man and one of the youngest chancellors to serve the empire.

  Most Bronte accepted the situation stoically. Those who worshipped the old gods continued to do so, if with a bit more caution than before. But the Charonite religion required the wearing of a certain headdress, a far more difficult thing to disguise than a mere difference in belief. And as Karan continued to promote his twin agendas of drug trafficking and forcible conversion, too many of those in power opened their purses and turned a blind eye. Decrepit, hidebound senators and grasping civil servants were all too willing to believe what was convenient—that the Charon II Company’s board of trustees was justified in denying even the possibility of conflict. Meanwhile, missionaries clashed with would-be converts and resentment grew.

  The Chancellor warned the senate, time and time again, that in the sky of Charon II, as serene as it would appear, a small cloud may yet arise—as a cloud can arise in any sky. At first no bigger than a man’s hand, it can grow larger and larger until it explodes into a tempest. He was ignored. Behind him, Karan looked on in mulish silence.

  By the time Kisten was discussing his future with Master Nagarjuna, several years later, others besides the Chancellor had seen the cloud. And while Alliance revenues grew and the success of what had fondly—by some—been dubbed Karan Company was touted in every chamber of power from Chau Cera to Dharavi, resentment crystallized into hatred and many natives began to wonder why, exactly, they’d allowed themselves to be so easily cowed.

  The Rebel Coalition, ever ready to make itself part of any conflict, was waiting in the wings with promises of military aid and fiery speeches about nationalism. Kisten had no respect for the rebels; not because they were rebels, but because they were liars. They had no interest in the Charonites’ welfare, only in appropriating the planet’s resources for themselves.

  War was on the horizon that night in Master Nagarjuna’s office, but even then it might have been averted but for two things: a natural disaster and the snap decision of a luckless governor.

  During Kisten’s first year at the academy, a severe drought decimated Charon II’s main inhabited continent. All four inhabited continents were affected to varying degrees. There had been a shortfall in crops the year before, worrisome but nothing catastrophic. And then came the worst weather in recorded history: torrential rains rivaling those of the Flood pounded the parched earth for week after week, month after month. Swami and cleric alike prayed. Mudslides leveled entire villages; flash floods drowned both men and livestock.

  Civil servants, promoted far beyond their abilities, panicked. Reports of sickness and starvation were ignored or, in one memorable case, hidden. A political agent wrote, from his post in the north, that a few bags of grain would do more to restore peace than any measures that either the Premier or our own government could take. His pleas for grain were ignored by men who, later, when the reprisals began, claimed never to have received them.

  At the same time, a major source of discontentment for the Charonites had always been the fact that Alliance missionaries were exempt from much of the local law. And then, amidst the slow creep of starvation, something happened to justify every worst fear this favoritism had ever provoked: the chief commissioner of Dharavi captured a little boy and inexplicably had him executed. In trying to piece things together after the fact, it was discovered that the edict banning the Charonites’ ritual headdress had come down earlier that day. Something like a turban, it was incompatible with the newly redesigned uniforms being issued to both native and non-native soldiers alike.

  The native soldiers were told to remove their turbans. They declined the order, politely. A little boy, a street urchin who’d been adopted as some sort of bearer by one of the men, made his own displeasure with the order known by reciting a popular rhyme about the chief commissioner—to the man’s face. He then kicked the man solidly in the shin. Kisten had, at the time, rather admired the child’s bravery and been appalled when he was charged with, of all the ridiculous things, treason. He knew, without a doubt, that even Karan would have put a stop to that had he been given the opportunity. But even in their modern age, interplanetary communications were not instantaneous and by the time word arrived on Brontes the child had been summarily executed and the governor, a man so ravaged by senility that his bearers had to help him find the bathroom, had supported the chief commissioner.

  Whether he’d even really understood the nature of the situation was, to Kisten, a serious question.

  But it was too late.

  The day beautiful little Zoharin turned five and Kisten sat down to the last exam of his second year at the academy, a ragtag group of mutineers led by rebel insurgents slaughtered almost three thousand men, women and children. The village of Rangsit had been established as a community of Charonite converts to the True Faith. An abandoned temple had been granted to them by the local government and they refurbished it to suit their new beliefs.

  The soldiers, according to one survivor, gathered the villagers in Rangsit’s small square on the pretext of distributing food. They aimed for the legs and stomach, so the “collaborators” would die slowly. Others they locked inside the temple, which they then lit on fire. Those who tried to escape—mainly children small enough to fit through the windows—were met with laser fire. A number of men, women and even children were also raped.

  Kisten had emerged from
his exam to discover that the Alliance had declared war on both Charon II and the Rebel Coalition. He’d watched with the other cadets as his father, via satellite, detailed the gruesome massacre. And within the year, he was fighting in that same war.

  FIFTY-SIX

  The government that had ruled Charon II for a thousand years prior to the advent of the Alliance was crumbling. Government officials turned on each other, accusing each other of treason, and the Premier was assassinated. Some native regiments stayed loyal, others mutinied. Rebel forces appeared and disappeared with the disturbing quietude of bats.

  Kisten, now Lieutenant Mara Sant, had first been stationed aboard the Predator-class starship Defiant. He’d been running an errand when he experienced the first true disaster of his life, an irony that had never escaped him. He’d had two best friends, apart from his brother. And, really, Keshav hadn’t counted; Keshav wasn’t truly, to Kisten, a separate individual. But Utpal and Jivaj were special. Utpal, forever cursed with the fact that his name meant water lily, had followed Kisten to the academy from Ceridou and Jivaj he’d met on arrival. The three of them did everything together, and when Utpal had been assigned to the Defiant Kisten had been ecstatic. He’d been full of grand dreams about fighting side by side, finding glory—and, of course, regaling pretty girls with their gallant exploits.

  Even the fact that one or both of them might die, while acknowledged, inspired no fear. It didn’t seem real. And certainly neither of them had expected to die the morning Commander Dhevi had tasked them with flying one of the Defiant’s shuttles over to the Solent, the lead ship in the sector, to collect an important guest. Admiral Lahar had such sensitive information to impart that he had to do it in person. Kisten and Utpal had joked en route about embarking on glorious new careers as babysitters. Less than five hours later, Utpal was dead.

  Rebel forces had captured another ship in the fleet and, using knowledge of fleet protocol extracted under torture, employed a—successful—ruse. The Frigate-class Solent was ripped in half. Kisten was awarded a commendation for his role in evacuating the remaining crew, but 1,200 men perished. The first 500 were killed instantly, sucked into space through a massive hull breach. Utpal, fed up with waiting on the admiral’s ease, had gone in search of coffee and promised to return in fifteen minutes. Ten minutes later, the galley took a direct hit. Kisten had never quite gotten over his decision not to search for his friend; Utpal was almost certainly dead—couldn’t possibly be alive—but over a thousand men were still alive, men with families who, leaderless, were running around like frightened sheep.

  Kisten had stepped in for the missing officers—most of whom, he’d learned later, had also been in the galley and, along with another luckless lieutenant and the very same master chief who’d later helped him rescue Amal Nibodh, saved almost eight hundred of them.

  The fact that he’d never seen Utpal’s body still haunted his dreams. He’d written the letter to Utpal’s family, himself. And then he’d been promoted to the Callisto, where he’d eventually become first officer. He would have liked to credit his skill at command, but sometimes promotion had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with being the last man standing. Kisten had been alive, uninjured, and not obviously incompetent—in the eyes of the navy, more than enough to qualify him for lieutenant commander. That he was, by that point, more than slightly insane was irrelevant. He’d retaken the Callisto after she was boarded by rebels, saving the ship and, more importantly, the intelligence she carried. If he had some slight trouble relating to other people, well, that didn’t impair his usefulness.

  The Callisto had, unbeknownst to her commander, been home to a contingent of rebel sympathizers for some time. Kisten had had his suspicions, but when he’d shared them with Commander Hansin he’d gotten a dressing-down about showing confidence in his men. The same men who’d, later, overpowered the ensign minding the shuttle bay and admitted the enemy. Later, they’d ejected Commander Hansin with the garbage. After Kisten retook the ship, leading the small group of men who’d remained loyal, he’d been awarded the second of his many rings.

  Karan’s statement to the senate that the war was going poorly for both sides was such an understatement as to be irrelevant. Close to ten million civilians had died, and twice that many soldiers. The Alliance hadn’t suffered such catastrophic losses since the Great War. But this, it became apparent, was the excuse the Rebel Coalition had been waiting for. What had started out as a conflict over uniforms had become a full-scale revolt. Sheer size would, Kisten thought, ensure an Alliance victory—but at what cost? The rebels had no real plan for what to do after the empire was overthrown, nor did they seem to think they needed one. The empire is bad represented motivation, reasoning, and conclusion.

  Eventually, the rebels would agree with the Alliance that an Alliance victory was probable; at which point, they’d switched from fighting on behalf of the Charonites to robbing them blind behind their backs. Taking advantage of the Charonites’ blind zeal and lack of tactical sophistication, it had been easy enough to do. And the Alliance had won, but not for several more years—during which time millions more died, civilian and soldier alike, innumerable atrocities were committed and Kisten was captured and held as an enemy spy.

  That was when he’d lost Jivaj.

  Kisten had read somewhere that just about anyone could slip into madness, given the right circumstances. All it took to trigger the process was a special kind of blow to one’s self-perception. False cues had been the phrase, he remembered: a man is losing his hearing, for example, but for whatever reason doesn’t realize this fact. He walks into a room full of people talking at normal volume only, to him, they’re whispering.

  He asks them, why are you whispering? They reply, we’re not. Yes you are, he insists. You’re my friends; why are you lying to me? We’re not, they assure him—and yet, isn’t there the slightest hint of condescension in their collective tone? Wait—are his so-called “friends” laughing at him? He begins to have paranoid delusions.

  The condescension the man notices, in that scenario, is real: his mates think he’s lost it—a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. A famous Bronte wit had once remarked that madness was having erroneous perceptions and reasoning correctly from them. Kisten wondered, during the war, if believing himself a monster made a man become one. As the list of atrocities grew, he concluded that the perpetrators had gotten so lost in the supposed ideals of their new group that they’d lost their anchor. Normative concepts like right and wrong ceased to have any meaning; right was what their leaders said was right.

  These were, for the most part, decent men. Family men, men who played polo and went partridge hunting and made love to their consorts. Farmers, machinists, a handful of soldiers, they underwent some sort of sea change that transformed them into the kind of monster that Kisten honestly hadn’t known existed.

  Calling themselves the Society of the Righteous, they believed that a strict regimen of martial arts training, diet and prayer would transform them from mere mortals into Spirit Swords. They’d be able to perform extraordinary feats, then, such as flying or becoming invisible to their enemies. Many of them were addicted to opium. While nominally part of the rebel army, they followed no orders but their own.

  And while the Rebel Coalition fought the Alliance, the Charon II Army fought the Alliance, and the local government fought each other, the Society of the Righteous fought civilians—on both sides. Anyone suspected of being from the Home Worlds, and anyone suspected of helping them. Their self-stated mission was to “purify” the planet of foreign influences.

  The Imperial War Crimes Tribunal estimated later that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and grandmothers. Many of the rapes occurred as part of a systematic process; Spirit Swords went door-to-door, looking for young girls. Less attractive girls were killed immediately afterwards, often through mutilation. It was, Kisten thought, the kindest fate. The others were kept as slaves. Young children were cut open to a
llow the Spirit Swords to rape them.

  A Braxi surgeon who’d refused to flee, choosing instead to stay behind and care for the wounded, estimated that there were at least a thousand cases of rape a night in the capital alone. Men were shot trying to defend their consorts, children were shot trying to defend their mothers. No distinction was made between the so-called “Black Devils” and the Charonites.

  One private wrote home to his father that at least 100,000 men had to have been killed in Dharavi, including soldiers—on both sides—who’d laid down their arms. It’s beyond belief, he’d written. The bayoneted corpses of seven street cleaners are lying in the sun beneath the wall. They’re attracting flies, now, but anyone who tries to collect them for burial is shot. The Society boys—isn’t that a laugh?—claim that by accepting the job in the first place they’d become collaborators. Collaborators! For wanting clean streets! Would these people rather that we all drown in filth? Last night, two girls were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. They bayoneted one little boy—the younger of the two girls was his sister. They bayoneted him five times, twice in the stomach, but I think he’ll live. I carried him to the hospital, myself. I could see inside his stomach. I want to come home.

  The cantonments were all under siege. All foreigners were ordered to depart the planet immediately, but they feared to leave the safety of what fortifications they had for fear they’d be slaughtered. The Dharavi cantonment, in particular, was in a great deal of trouble. Sympathetic Charonites had been smuggling them food, but they were running out of water.