This post is the first of what I hope and expect will be another long-running, regular feature of the blog; excerpts from the story of an as of yet unnamed imperial planetary governor and officer in the imperial navy, as he prosecutes wars that need not be fought.





I started writing from basically what is the middle of the story, and I haven't been very good about writing it in order, for the most part, so apologies for any disorientation. Just enjoy the ride for now and we'll worry about organizing this in a coherent fashion later on.





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There had been a moment then when the City suddenly became small and familiar; it was the realization that the way it seemed so large to him when I was a child and a young man was just a function of how small I had been. It was never a quality intrinsic to the City, its strangeness, its toward grotesque disdain—stifled enmity, even—directed toward me. It didn’t give a shit. And once I recognized that, I felt freedom for the very first time in my life. I could disappear into crowds at a sai kavarnia, guzzling mutton and coffee in a vain attempt to fight off one of my weeks-long headaches I got from working under those white lights. They reminded me, in retrospect, of the lights we used on the middle-tech worlds of the Prim to illuminate the sets and the actors as they committed their scenes to the pictfilms; their embeckonments to young people to give their lives over to the causes their fatherlands had ordained.

And the ability to appear, as I so desired, to conjure up my wealth as a bidden servant or my father’s station or my education or my breeding. My class, my culture.

I wondered then how the people of the City saw him differently than the people of the Prim saw me now that I was returned, if at all.

“Sir? Are you unwell?” Lieutenant Manka asked me.

“Hnn? No—you talk too fast, Manka ; I was merely still considering the first thin you said. Go back there!” I bitched at him.

The Poor Boy. I knew he didn’t like me, but his breeding had him so beholden to the idol of duty, he would never admit it. The Poor Boy. He would never let himself admit he hated me.

“Stop,” I said. “Right there!”

“Sir?” Manka asked, suddenly worried as I yanked at the handle to the door.

“Stop the fucking limousine!”

The brakes engaged and I was out before it was safe to extend n appendage outside of the vehicle, the way kids do. The way soldiers do. The way anyone who really believes in a universe that allows for heroes does.

The shot went off first, I swear to all of the saints, it really did. That’s the way time felt to me then. I was opening the door on instant, and, the next, I was standing over the arbiter’s body, , with my sidearm in my hand and that familiar sting in my wrist that told me I’d fired it, trying to remember what happened in between.

I caught just a glimpse of them in the alley before the limousine moved on. The arbiter—some young fuck from somewhere else, no doubt—pushing an old local to his knees. I could read the moments before in their relative stances; the old man was trying to get to his feet for a while, but the arbiter wasn’t letting him. Like a boy picking the legs off of a spider.

Then I arrived, grabbed the arbiter by the belt and the collar, flinged him into the brick wall. Then it was the next moment; there was blood on the brick where the arbiter had been standing, turning to face me, surprised. The thunderous belch of the shot reverberated off the walls, filling the space like a physical force.

“Get out of here,” I barked at the old man. He scrambled to his feet and departed, nearly slipping to his knees on the dust under his old robes.

“ Manka !,” I shouted over my shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” Manka said from the mouth of the alley where the old man frantically pushed him aside as he fled onto the street.

“Clean this up,” I commanded as I passed him on my way back to the limousine.

“At once, sir,” Manka affirmed.

Poor boy.





I woke up to the cool comfort of darkness fallen on a hot day. Somewhere between the dusklit streets of the City’s outskirts and the black outlines of the grapevines against the purple gloaming, I had fallen asleep.

Sleep. When I was younger, it was a quiet empty space between days. Now it was a blank—a void, not even a moment long.

The limousine careered leisurely over the hill and the Estate crashed into view ahead of us, blazing like a diamond on fire under the unrelenting phoslamps.

It was built for defense—thick, heavy walls, small windows, crenellations, surrounded by a trench, placed up on top of a hill. It was low, squat and wide. If it ever came under attack, hitting it with anything less than a macrocannon shell would be like punching a slab of rock with your barehand.

The heavy ferrosteel gate shuddered to life, grinding open with its antique, high-pitched scraping sound. The driver of the limousine waited until the doors stopped and the amber “ready” light came on to accelerate again. None of the guards or the staff would be greeting me with any ceremony at this hour, and that was fine.

The gate closed again behind us, its dull grey sheen falling over the empty black night without, twilit by phoslamps. The limousine coasted in a wide crescent to the bottom of the staircase at the grand entrance. A pair of custodes awaited me and opened the doors of the limousine when it came to a stop, greeting me with the sign of the Aquila as I emerged. I ascended the staircase without addressing them further.

The custodes at the top of the stairs opened the heavy door for me and I entered within. The atrium was unlit but for the stark stripes of phoslamp pouring in from the tall, narrow windows.

“Your cloak, sir?” one of the custodes asked, hands outstretched and ready to receive the garment from me.

“No,” I refused him. “I’ll wear it to my quarters. It’s cold in here.”

“Yes, sir,” the custos said, relaxing his hands. “That is how the domina prefers it.”

“Hnn,” I nodded and began walking down the hall, blinded by every other moment in one eye by the intermittent ribbons of phoslamp steaming in from outside. The custos followed me a pace behind.

When we reached the venerary, I stopped.

“Ah, yes,” the custso said approvingly. “The domina has had this installed. She says that the household is quite improved by its presence.”

It was an unwelcome sight. That cult statue of that crusader-saint. I knew it as a tool of war, designed to make martyrs of the common man.

“Remove it,” I told the custo.

“I cannot, sir,” the custos told me. “That is the domina’s decision to make.”

“She will make it in the morning,” I said. “Just be ready to accommodate her when she does.”

A moment passed before the custos responded.

“Yes, sir,” he said. I started on my way again.

“Are you hungry from your journey? I can have a dinner sent to your quarters, sir,” the custos asked after me. I had put some distance between us and he had to raise his voice to ensure that I heard him.

“No,” I shouted back to him over my shoulder as I descended deeper into the halls of the Estate. “Just drink.”





I woke up again in daylight on the couch.

A copper cup, half-empty of raenka was surrounded by silent, blinking data slates. Someone had entered the chamber while I slept and draped a blanket over me. It took me a moment to realize what had woken me.

The domina grew tired of rapping at the door to my quarters and let herself in. I was still righting myself into a sitting position when she arrived at the threshold to my bedchamber.

“I didn’t want to intrude on you before you had a chance to make yourself modest,” she said. “Donning your parade dress strikes me as excessive, though.”

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. I’d simply fallen asleep in the outfit I was wearing the day before, boots and all.

“Good morning, Aristeia,” I bid her. I had made Aristeia, my wife’s sister, the domina of my household upon my wife’s death. That was decades before the campaign took me away for 10 standard solar years. In my absence, she was alone responsible for the wellbeing of my household.

“I see some things have changed while I’ve been away.”

“Yes. And I understand that you mean to make more of them,” she said pointedly. I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.

“No? The statue in the venerary?”

“Hnn… yes,” I said, remembering then the midnight missive I’d left with that pitiful custo. “We are a well-bred house. We have status. I have rank. We do not serve, we lead.”

I felt the froth of rage coalescing in the corners of my mouth. I wiped it away and to hide my shame, I turned abruptly around and kicked the cup of raenka across the chamber. The loud seconds that followed it felt like hours as drops of liquor splattered across the expensive grey tiles and the trophied carpets, once hung in the dusky halls of faraway worlds’ palaces and bazaars. I drew several short breaths, then a few more and then a few more, until I was able to draw one long breath, then another and another and another, until I could just fucking breathe.

“Now look what you made me do.”

“I’ll call for the subdomina and have the spill cleaned up at once,” the domina said.

“You’ll do no such thing,” I barked. “I spilled the cup; I will clean the mess.”

“He was just like you,” she said. I heard the scurry of the help in the shadows along the gallery at the solar end of the dining chamber beyond the threshold.

“What do you mean?” I looked up at her. A pair of doves roosted in the bosom of the coved ceiling several stories above cooed and fluttered about. I glanced up at them and wondered about something for a moment before I shook it off. Buried it deep down. Under heavy, grey wet sand. In a chest. A big, green, rusty chest wrapped up in chains.

“Was?” I asked and lowered my gaze to her.

“I didn’t mean to suggest that he had died,” she said. She was genuinely worried. “Far from it, brother,” she smiled for the first time. “He will live forever in grace, as a martyr.”

My mouth floded then with a vile taste and my breath caught in my breast.

“You mean to tell me that he has gone off to campaign with that fanatical cult?”

“They call it a crusade,” She said wistfully. “Don’t you remember how proud he was in the messages we sent you, of his father gone offworld to fight?”

“No,” I shook my head. “No; all that I did, I did to make sure that he would never have to go out there.”

Were we so desperate now, that the very tactics I deployed against the foolish, backwards, calcitrant people of the Prim were being deployed on us? Whatever we lorded over, I realized, those who lorded over us lorded over tenfold as much. We were not anyone to them but a tool, a quota to fill.

A virtue venerated the extreme is a vice, and people are much more willing to die for their vices. For what vice was my son being punished? For mine? I wondered. Then I remembered graduating to the strike squad and watching my father’s face as we assembled in our parade dress on the quarter at the academy. At the time, I thought he was overcome, moved; too old, too proud, too stubborn to show any emotion until it finally whelmed up and overtook him.

“Aren’t you proud?” she asked at last, leaning in.

“No,” I said and turned away from her.

“Martyrs of the common man,” I said to myself. “Is that what I campaigned for? That my son could die a common man?”

“He follows the path of a saint who will lead him to the light by which we all are made extraordinary.”

“No,” I said. “He follows the path of the fool, willed to war by the beating of drums.”

“Oh, of course,” she tittered. “You know scripture when it suits your point.”

I cut her a glare and her smirk withered.

“Will that be all, master-brother-sir?” she asked, hiding amongst the gestures she made while she adjusted her collar a look of utter hate for me.

“Just see to it that statue is removed,” I said, trying to return my voice to a reasonable volume.

“At what cost?” she asked.

“Mind your crowns about it,” I said and tossed myself onto the couch.