Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
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Part #298: Xaos Soludus
“There have been protests in Zanzibar today following the announcement of the results of the ASN’s inquiry into the awarding of next year’s WorldFest to Nouvelle Albi in Pérousie. Despite the claims of the Swahililand Government, the Multinational Board found no evidence of the alleged corruption on the part of the IWFC’s judges, and confirmed that the two bids had been fairly assessed on their own merits. A spokeswoman for Swahililand declared her country’s intention to launch an appeal, and made further allegations about disproportionate, quote, ‘European and settler-colonial domination’ of the composition of the the ASN’s inquiry board. The ASN has yet to issue a counter-statement, but it seems likely that this controversy will continue to run...”
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From – “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (1956)—
Nikolai Pavlovich Yengalychev was not a man whom most would have singled out as he would break Russia in two and shatter the Company’s unity forever. He is worthy of biographic study for the choices he made, choices which have been widely condemned in both the Russian and Lithuanian press, yet which many have defended. Those defenders do not include the man himself, who merely stated that he did what he had to do for the sake of his men, and to let history judge his actions.
The circumstances surrounding Nikolai’s ascension to his family’s hereditary princedom are quite unlikely in themselves. Nikolai was the grandson of Pyotr Mikhailovich Yengalychev, who was in turn the third son of Dmitri Ivanovich Yengalychev, grandson of Semyon Isvanevich Yengalychev, who had been made a prince by Peter the Great in 1723.[1] To add further complication, this was not the first time a branch of the Yengalychev family had been ennobled, with two separate such events stretching back to the 1500s. The Yengalychevs claimed Mordovian ancestry, but were usually classed under ‘Tatar nobles’ by Russian heralds, who considered them to have insufficient proof of title to be counted with the Russian nobility.[2] Nonetheless, Semyon Isvanevich’s branch built a significant noble family in the 1700s and 1800s. Pyotr Mikhailovich, born in 1799, was nonetheless too far down the birth order to benefit much from the family’s nascent privilege, and decided to seek his fortune by joining the new RLPC. He worked his way up and was a successful lieutenant to Ulrich Münchhausen; his son Pavel worked under Peter Molnár and fought under Prince Pozharsky in the Californian front of the Great American War.[3]
All of this was reflective of the culture in the RLPC at the time to judge a man on his work rather than his ancestry; though Pavel Petrovich was a noble, he was also half-Yapontsi. His mother had been what later records described as a ‘heathen princess’, a daughter of the Daimyo of Odavara, Okubu Tadayoshi.[4] He was fortunate in that his features only subtly broadcast this provenance, and that the RLPC was an organisation full of non-Yapontsi people such as Kalmyks and Kirghiz with similar such features. For over time, as Petrograd began to assert more direct control, the RLPC shifted from an organisation that looked aside, or even encouraged, such mixed marriages, to one which viewed them with suspicion and discriminated against their progeny.[5] The most dramatic shift came with the Hanran Rebellion in 1878, after which time Nikolai diplomatically chose to move his family to the Company’s domains in North America and raise his young son in Baranovsk. Nikolai grew up having to officially deny the existence of his own mother if he wanted to have a career. It was, perhaps, scarcely surprising that these formative years did not endear him to the distant Tsars.
Though Nikolai was, perhaps, already destined to rise to a senior figure in the Company (whose distinct existence from direct Russian government control was growing increasingly fragile) his life was further turned upside-down in 1900. The ‘Peace Flu’, spread by the movements of soldiers in the final stages of the Pandoric War, swept the world. Though it paled into comparison compared to the plague of a generation later,[6] the Peace Flu nonetheless impacted history considerably with over a million deaths. Among those deaths were the remaining survivors of the Yengalychevs descended from Pyotr Mikhailovich’s older brothers, which had already been depleted by deaths in the steppe wars of the 1860s-1880s. This meant that Nikolai, distant scion of a family whose other branches had focused on inviegling themselves with society in Moscow and Petrograd, had now inherited the princedom. As Nikolai had already served in a military capacity as a soldier in the Pandoric War, fighting in the bitter trenches of Noochaland, that was enough for Tsarevich Paul (even then largely calling the shots while his father yet lived) to decide that this Yengalychev could be an adequate substitute for the others. As a man who had grown up and fought in Russian America, he seemed the ideal choice to lead Russia’s armies there resisting the Americans at the outbreak of the war of the Black Twenties. Paul never actually met Yengalychev, and it is clear that this assessment was, as so often with the man, based on him creating a picture in his head and getting violent when reality refused to match it (as in the case of Héloïse Mercier). In hindsight, this exposes the failures of the Russian autocratic form of government at the time, as this proved to be a bad mistake.
Prince Yengalychev would indeed, as Paul had surmised, fight hard to defend what he viewed as his homeland – Russian America, not Russia proper. That was fine, so long as that priority aligned with the broader Russian cause. Yet, just as Admiral Chambord was finding for the French in Pérousie, that was not guaranteed. The bitterness of the Black Twenties’ struggle, and the prioritisation of other fronts, meant that Paul effectively ended up calling on Yengalychev and his men to fight to the death to buy more time for the stalemate of the trenches elsewhere to be decided in Russia’s favour. It was not an attractive proposition to begin with, but the plague made it worse. Yengalychev knew well, from the circumstances of his own elevation to the nobility, how much damage a pandemic could do. The Tsar’s orders were already leading to suffering for the common people of Russian America, as Yengalychev’s armies fought to the bitter end in trenches around the fortifications of Tretyakovsk. It was clear from American naval superiority that Noochaland was living on borrowed time, and reinforcement supplies from Siberia were growing fewer and farther between.
In January 1924, after sending out unofficial peace feelers to General Dawson for a while, Yengalychev surrendered his armies, citing the need to prevent the spread of the plague as a reason. This led to him being blasted in the Russian press as a traitor, and the assets of his family being seized – something which meant little to the prince, who had never felt any inclination to travel to the Old World to visit the Moscow town-house he had inherited. Unfortunately, and contrary to his own intentions, Yengalychev being presented as a Judas meant that Paul could not invoke the plague as a reason to seek peace in Poland, meaning that the nightmarish Oder Pocket trench warfare dragged on longer than it had to.[7]
For the next two years or so, a strange kind of atmosphere reigned in the cold north. The Americans had de facto occupied Russian America under General George Chandler Welch (redeeming himself as an administrator after his military failures), yet were reluctant to move beyond their strongpoints due to fear of the plague. The same factor led the Fouracre and Gilmore ministries to shift more and more American soldiers up to those lands, beyond the incompatible Rexoc railway network, to avoid them spreading the plague further in the American heartlands. While the plague still spread, this decision did undoubtedly slow it down and buy more time for Birline to control it in American cities. The problem was in justifying this to the families of those American soldiers, which – together with desperate bribes from the French – led Gilmore to decide to invade Old World Russia from Alyeska.
Throughout this time, Yengalychev was kept under house arrest in the inland, mountainous city of Shevembsk [Kelowna], with General Welch initially fearing that the Tsar would try to rescue him and/or kidnap him to put on trial if he was placed in a coastal city like Baranovsk. This failed to materialise, of course. Yengalychev went on to have a number of meetings with Welch and build a working relationship, using his expertise on Russian America to aid Welch’s administration. It helped that the two men despised General Dawson for different reasons; Dawson had replaced Welch and, in Welch’s eyes, taken credit for his own work, while Yengalychev hated how Dawson had strung him along during surrender negotiations and gotten men unnecessarily killed. Bringing the conversation back to Dawson’s failings as a human being would usually smooth over any disagreements between the two. While Welch fancied himself an able courtier in Fredericksburg, the need for Yengalychev to conceal his ancestry all his life made him no mean manipulator himself.
Over the months, Yengalychev persuaded Welch that the latter was wasting resources by putting his men under guard in camps, as well as making both POWs and guards more vulnerable to plague as a result. Where did he expect his men to flee to? Furthermore, almost all of them were either local-born or who had left everything behind in Old World Russia, come to seek their fortunes. Almost none of his men had had family ties in the Old World, and most of them had been veteran regulars who had been killed in the opening months of the war at spearhead points. Indeed, this factor had played a role in Yengalychev’s decision to surrender, as he had not wanted the Tsar to take revenge on any of his men’s families. Why not make use of Yengalychev’s men, who had no loyalty to the man America was still fighting?
Welch was eventually convinced, and Yengalychev’s disarmed men were soon working to rebuild damaged houses and railway tracks around Tretyakovsk, treating its sewers to control the plague. Then they were doing it in other settlements, eventually even on the coast. They would be trusted to drive trains, then mobile waggons.[8] Throughout this time, Yengalychev kept pushing, because Yengalychev had a plan. He feared, however, that the Americans would never be desperate enough to go for it. In this, he was wrong.
The first disaster came in October 1925, when General Zhdanovich managed to repulse General Bissell’s men in their siege of Savelyevsk. Yengalychev had been providing Welch with more guarded commentary on the Americans’ attempt to invade Kamchatka and the Company holdings. His advice, as later analysed, was usually accurate but incomplete, intended to direct Welch along a particular way of thinking. Yengalychev had primed Welch by saying that the only way the Americans stood a chance was if they managed to take Savelyevsk and Okhotsk, then push down into the Amur watershed to winter there. Otherwise, the army would be too isolated, on a long supply line while facing the Russian and Company forces in the winter, conditions they excelled at fighting in. Welch was all too ready to accept this, given his own experiences trying to fight Yengalychev’s men in the winter of 1922. It also helped that the Americans in Asia were under the overall command of Dawson, with Bissell as the point man, and Welch was all too willing to believe an analysis that would lead to a humiliating failure for his rival.
Yengalychev now painted a picture of the Americans being pushed back and forced to flee back over the Bering Strait to North America – leaving behind all their modern equipment for the Russians to pick over, if they were lucky, at a bare minimum. More probably, many POWs would be taken and left to rot in Siberian work camps. It was inevitable, he assured Welch. Welch remained sceptical, somewhat aware he was being manipulated, but the passing months seemed to support Yengalychev’s claims. The Operation Covenanter attack on Yapon did nothing to dent the supplies coming to Zhdanovich’s army. Yengalychev hid his fury at the attack on the RLPC and the Yapontsi workers he half-sympathised with, and instead merely said that the Americans had successfully managed to convince the dissatisfied Company that they now needed to fight all the harder for the Tsar to escape such a fate. As Yengalychev had warned, Bissell’s orderly retreat came dangerously close to a rout over the winter months of 1925/6 as Zhdanovich pursued. In February 1926 Bissell managed to rally around Penzhina Bay near the old Russian fort of Aklansk, originally built to subdue the local Koryak people (who now mostly upheld their oaths to the Company and made Kleinkrieger attacks on the American supply lines). However, it was clear he and his army was living on borrowed time.
In the meantime, Yengalychev had continued to outline his suggestions to Welch. Yengalychev’s men, and other local volunteers, would not take up arms to fight against their Russian brothers loyal to the Tsar; however, they were willing to keep on driving the waggons and piloting the boats they had been entrusted with. Bissell and Dawson lacked the logistical capabilities to rapidly evacuate their armies, but with the help of these men, Welch could do it for them – and become the hero. Furthermore, every young American who didn’t need to drive a waggon could instead take up a rifle and help defend it. But, I hear you cry (Yengalychev said) how can you trust my men – to what do they owe their allegiance? They are loyal to me, but they have not sworn an oath to me. Give them something they can pledge their fealty to; give them their own country.
Yengalychev did not attempt to claim the whole of Russian America, of course. The Shemeretvsk Outpost north of California was long since reconquered, the Americans had no intention of handing back any part of Noochaland, and so on. But, Yengalychev argued persuasively, Welch had seen in Fredericksburg the problems that arose when America tried to annex a large number of foreigners and give them full voting rights. Nouvelle-Orléans remained a culturally alien exclave of Westernesse whose electorate caused endless headaches, both in the Continental Parliament at Fredericksburg and the Confederal assembly at St Lewis.[9] Did the government really want to try to incorporate one and a half million Russians and let them elect MCPs – or risk the outcry and unrest from denying them voting rights?[10] Would the governments of Drakesland or Panimaha really appreciate being ‘awarded’ these new souls? It was a meal they could so easily choke on. Instead, why not draw a line around the major population centres of Russian America and spin it off as a vassal state, as the Empire had done with New Ireland? A state which would certainly be dependent on the Empire, would allow the Empire to build railways through it and station troops there, but not one which would elect representatives to any Imperial bodies.
Welch found this proposal increasingly attractive. Of course, he did not have the power to decide such a thing. But, as the news from Kamchatka grew worse and worse, he did begin putting into place the plans Yengalychev had advocated for his men to drive vehicles and multiply the logistical capability he had to transport Bissell and Dawson’s troops home. Welch warned Yengalychev that all he could commit to in return would be to arrange an audience between Yengalychev and a representative of His Imperial Majesty’s Government, in order to put his case. Yengalychev accepted this as the best he was likely to get.
Welch’s court contacts included members of the restless ‘Overripe’ faction of the Liberal Party caucus in the Continental Parliament, not least its leader, Anthony Washborough. Washborough had become a partisan defender of Welch in return for Welch providing him with a secret source of military intelligence outside the usual channels, which allowed Washborough to score points in Parliament by ‘predicting’ victories or defeats before they were officially admitted. Now, Welch sent a vaguely-phrased, encoded Lectelgram to Washborough describing Yengalychev’s proposals and calling for a meeting.
History turns on decisions. Washborough, trying to make sense of Welch’s parenthetical language, had to choose whether it was worth his while leaving the hotbed of court intrigue in Fredericksburg to investigate this proposal. On February 11th 1926, with news of Bissell’s latest reversals, he decided Bissell was doomed, and Welch’s veiled comment about a way to pull the fat out of the fire was worth his time. He secretly boarded a series of trains that brought him all the way up to the town of Bannockburn in Drakesland.[11] He used a pass claiming to be an agent extraordinary of Parliament, while his fellow Overripes helped conceal his journey by claiming that he was ill with the plague and in quarantine in his house in Fredericksburg. At the same time, Welch and a disguised Yengalychev travelled down via the Rexoc network, then shifted to the American-gauge railways so they could join Washborough in the town.
The irony of it all was that Washborough, who was new to the discussion and had not been gradually worn down as Welch had by Yengalychev over the months, might well have rejected the idea out of hand – had he arrived a day earlier. As it was, their first meeting was interrupted by Photel news of the Societist attacks on the American fleets...
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From: “History of the Twentieth Century” edited by K. D. Saunders (2001)—
When depicting the tragi-comedy of errors that is the War of 1926, it is common to depict the incompetent Imperial response to the Societist attack as though the first Celatores openly landed on Carolina’s fair soil mere hours after the sinking of the fleets of Admirals Wycroft and Daniels. In order to truly understand just how much the Imperials undermined their own response to landfall on Carolina, one must first tackle this misconception. Operatio Rubikon was launched on the night of February 18th/19th; the first open landings (as opposed to infiltrations like Markus Garzius’) did not occur until March 14th. During the intervening time, the Societists were exploiting their temporary naval and aero domination of the West Indies archipelago, filling every civilian cargo ship they could find with Celatores, support teams and equipment and shipping them across the Caribbean Sea to western Cuba.
Throughout this period, the Republic of Jamaica, theoretically an American ally, tensed for a coming invasion that never materialised. Through informal channels, the Societists informed the Jamaicans that providing none of their small fleet of warships crossed an exclusion zone with a radius of 200 talcodii from Zon11Urb26, they would not be attacked. After the Jamaican government’s civil servants had pored over some books and worked out that this meant 240 miles from Kingston, the Jamaican Navy avoided confronting the seemingly-invincible Societist hiveship flotillas with their small forces of dentists and cruiser-frigates. However, with few illusions about what the Societists might try if they thought they could get away with it, and keen to maintain ties with what might turn out to be the victorious side the Jamaicans did later quietly allow American ironsharks to resupply in their bases.
For now, however, flailing Fredericksburg had yet to recognise the Societist vulnerability to ironshark attacks and lack of experience with combatting them. In time, this would lead to the much-storied (and filmed) Operation Kappa, named for the capital of Arkensor Province in Westernesse.[12] Kappa had a foundational myth of holding out for months as a frontier fort while being besieged by local Osajee Indians, being resupplied by convoys of embattled supply waggons manned by heroes. This was typical of the often rather too-meaningful code names employed by the Empire’s military at this time, whose significance could potentially be worked out (and often were) by the Societists’ cryptographers. In this case, Operation Kappa similarly involved using flotillas of ironsharks packed with supplies to secretly resupply the isolated American troops still fighting on in the former French Guiana. The operation has been compared to Tsar Paul’s steerable resupply of General Privalov’s embattled forces in the Pendzhab; similarly, it was a grandiloquent propaganda gesture which achieved nothing in the long run, as there was no way the ironsharks could possibly carry enough materiel to keep General Goodwin’s men fighting for long. If those ironsharks had instead been deployed against the Societist convoys – but by the point Kappa was launched, those questions were already being asked in hindsight.
The IIC possessed a number of agents in Cuba, who correctly reported the arrival of Celatores and materiel into Xagua [Cienfuegos] and other western ports, western Cuba now being firmly under Societist control. However, the Societists successfully deceived their opponents (as they would term them) by seemingly sending all such troops eastwards to attack the remaining Cuban government and warlord forces in eastern Cuba. Instead, only a small portion eventually made it there, and then they stood on the defensive on the Alexander Line. Others peeled off, using the country’s railway network to head to Havana and other ports on the north coast. More Societist transport ships, with more of an emphasis on military craft, were heading there to await them; stripped of their Caribbean fleets and with what aerocraft they had focused on the defensive, the Americans missed this movement. Few could have imagined that the Societists were planning to merely use Cuba as a stepping stone to their real prize. Even fewer might have guessed how, on the way, they were training their Celatores on Cuba’s railways, which had been built to the same gauge as Carolina’s and still used some of the same rolling stock…
Yet this is not entirely true, because America was not completely blind; rather, her blindness was in part wilful. Her supposed weakness is often overstated by defensive Imperial histories. Just because a large Imperial army was trapped in an icy corner of Asia with General Zhdanovich breathing down their next, just because plague control made President Gilmore reluctant to shift soldiers from reserve battalions and training forts across the vast nation, does not mean that the Imperials lacked resources. They simply chose to use them in a foolish manner, and blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Gilmore himself – and, perhaps, those who failed to dissuade him.
Gilmore never truly understood the stakes of the War of 1926. Even after the Societists’ successes in Operatio Rubikon, he failed to truly take them seriously as an enemy. Some argue that, like many others, he saw the Combine as merely the UPSA with a new coat of paint; others dismiss this claim, but instead simply suggest that he failed to recognise the scope of the Combine’s ambitions. He was convinced that the point of attacking the fleets and blocking the Nicaragua Canal was to temporarily neutralise the Empire while the Societists ate up Cuba, and perhaps also Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. In fairness, this may well have been Alfarus’ original plan, as some have suggested. However, if so, the very fact that the Societists were emboldened into going further cannot have failed to be influenced by Gilmore’s response.
Following the fleet attacks of February 18th/19th, Societist Celatores crossed the border between what had once been the Panamá province of the Kingdom of New Granada, and the Costa Rica province of the Kingdom of Guatemala. This border had been an object of suspicion from the Americans, Guatemalans and the rest of the Philadelphia System bloc for some time, with many Societist Agendes and other ne’er-do-wells crossing it amid the Refugiados fleeing Societist rule. As such, the border was now significantly fortified, and the Celatores were soon bogged down in jungle fighting across a geographically restricted battlefield. It was reminiscent of a hotter version of the hellish Oder pocket in Europe, not rendered any more pleasant by the Societists also throwing around the ‘Scientific Weapon’ with gay abandon. Societist land-based celagii harrassed the Guatemalan forces and their allies.
Gilmore saw the basis of the Societists’ plan not only as a need to neutralise the Nicaragua Canal (correct) but also to protect the Pablo Sanchez Canal in Panama (which they would consider desirable but not necessary). By controlling the only passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, and dominating the waters around Cape Horn, the Societists could shift forces back and forth while the Americans were forced to manage with two entirely separated fleets. Under other circumstances, it might have been a valid analysis, but the Societists had already quietly transferred all the naval forces they required to the Caribbean. As such, Gilmore wasted vast Imperial resources on Operation Revenge – which George Spencer-Churchill sarcastically described as ‘with such cryptic terminology, how can the enemy possibly predict our actions’ – a massive aero attack on the Pablo Sanchez Canal. This was primarily enacted by American drome forces in Nicaragua (supported by smaller Guatemalan and Mexican aero flotillas) but HIMS Cygnia and Admiral Crittenden’s fleet were also brought in to assist from the Pacific sea side. The Societists’ own limited ironshark competence was put on display as HIMS Ohio successfully dodged several of even the enhanced steelteeth that were now deployed by the Celatores. In addition to the Buzzard bombers damaging several of the inland locks, Ohio’s 12-inch shells silenced the Societist defensive batteries near Zon11Urb28 (Panama City) and then inflicted serious damage on the first Pacific lock. The Americans then withdrew as a small force of Societist celagii counter-attacked, having achieved their objectives.
Pedrus Dominikus had hoped that the Rubikon attacks would block the Nicaragua Canal for months; they achieved only six weeks, but conversely Revenge would neutralise the Pablo Sanchez Canal for most of a year, and force the Societists to repair it at great expensive. But, as Spencer-Churchill later observed, never had a military operation so wildly successful on paper achieved so little in reality. The Societists’ plans had not relied on the use of the canal. Furthermore, Ohio’s spectacular success only lent fuel to the arguments of the conservative admirals who claimed that lineships were still the ultimate weapon of war, and that the sinkings achieved by the Societist hiveships had been a fluke. Revenge was, fundamentally, a misstep.
It did not have to be that way, as the military analyst Major Benjamin Liddell observed. The Societists had stripped their Pacific coast forces of many ships in order to build up the fleets in the Caribbean, and now could not transfer those ships back. If Gilmore had ordered Crittenden to press his advance further down, to vanquish the small Societist dentist and cruiser-frigate forces and then bombard the coastal cities once named Buenaventura, Manta, perhaps even Trujillo or Lima – it still would not have interfered with Alfarus’ plans, but it might well have endangered his popularity and sense of invincibility from the people of the South American continent. At the very least, it would have created more problems, created a distraction.
Instead, Revenge only distracted the Americans. It was, admittedly, only bad luck that the Buzzards left their aeroports (and the deck of the Cygnia) mere hours before the first Celatores feinted at the Spirit Glades and Tampa Bay before finally landing at Pensacola. It was merely a tragic coincidence that the IIC and military communications had all their attention directed to reporting on the distant, bold attack on the Pablo Sanchez Canal, a hand on which Gilmore had gambled all his chips. Had Revenge, or the Societists’ Operatio Libramendum for that matter, been launched a day earlier or later, if the two had not coincided…if Gilmore had not focused, Passeridic-like, on his distant forces in a way Alfarus had not, delegating to Dominikus…
If, if, if. At the end of the day, perhaps it would not have made a difference. The history of Carolina is a history of tragedy, and it was about to enter its final act.
[1] Of these, only Semyon Isvanevich is a historical character; the others were all born significantly past the POD of this timeline.
[2] The Mordovians or Mordvins are an ethnic group related to the Finns, who mostly live around the city of Saransk on the Volga basin. The Russians’ classification of them as Tatars is based on the idea that they were culturally ‘Tatarised’ during the rule of the Golden Horde in the 1200s-1500s, although the situation may be more complex than that; a key division within the Mordovians is between the Erzyans, who are sometimes claimed to have fled and resisted the Golden Horde, and the Moksha, who accepted Golden Horde rule.
[3] See Part #195 in Volume IV.
[4] As usual, Japanese names in TTL are reflective of Russian transliteration; in OTL the domain (Han) would be called Odawara in English. What this sketch doesn’t mention is that the area was devastated by a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the early 1700s and was still economically recovering years later. So, with the protection of the Shogunate falling apart at this time and Odawara unable to defend itself effectively, the Daimyo would probably be one of the most desperate among the Japanese nobles to gain Russian favour by marrying off his daughter. (In OTL, the last Daimyo surrendered Odawara to the Meiji Restoration without a fight (despite initially opposing it) for similar reasons; his name, coincidentally, was also Tadayoshi, the second of that name to rule).
[5] This reflects a similar OTL shift in the British East India Company (for example).
[6] And was much milder than the OTL Spanish Flu, being more comparable to the OTL 1889 ‘Russian Flu’ pandemic – but which nonetheless killed a number of historically significant people among its estimated one million deaths, such as Prince Albert Victor, heir presumptive to the British throne. Others, like Robert Mercier in TTL, recovered but their health was persistently weakened; an OTL example is Alfonso XIII of Spain, who was survived both the Russian Flu and the Spanish Flu but who suffered nerve damage as a result.
[7] This author is writing in 1950s Lithuania, so his publisher is keen to blame the Tsar’s decision on this, even though this is a relatively sympathetic painting of Yengalychev.
[8] ‘(Mobile) Waggon’ is the generic term usually used in TTL where we would say ‘lorry’ (UK) or ‘truck’ (US). In this era they will mostly still be coal/steam powered rather than using Mitchell engines.
[9] While this could be charitably read as commentary on Nouvelle-Orléans having its own distinct political parties and making it hard to form a stable majority government at St Lewis, it is more likely simply reflecting the fact that white, Protestant, English-speaking Americans were uncomfortable with the existence of black, Catholic, French-speaking MCPs in their Parliament.
[10] This is quite the contrast to OTL Russian America, whose Russian population never exceeded a few hundred – but, of course, also never expanded to more livable territories beyond Alaska. Note that calling them ‘Russians’ reflects their status as Russian subjects, rather than their ethnicity – among the Great Russians there are many Lithuanians, Yapontsi, Coreans, Nivkhs, Chukchis, etc. etc. Some of the local North American natives have also become Russian subjects, while others retain a quasi-independent status.
[11] OTL Pocatello, Idaho. In OTL the county is named Bannock, based on a transliteration of the name of a local native tribe; the TTL name is a double reference to this and the historical Battle of Bannockburn (as the TTL town was founded by Scottish settlers).
[12] OTL Jonesboro, AR.
“There have been protests in Zanzibar today following the announcement of the results of the ASN’s inquiry into the awarding of next year’s WorldFest to Nouvelle Albi in Pérousie. Despite the claims of the Swahililand Government, the Multinational Board found no evidence of the alleged corruption on the part of the IWFC’s judges, and confirmed that the two bids had been fairly assessed on their own merits. A spokeswoman for Swahililand declared her country’s intention to launch an appeal, and made further allegations about disproportionate, quote, ‘European and settler-colonial domination’ of the composition of the the ASN’s inquiry board. The ASN has yet to issue a counter-statement, but it seems likely that this controversy will continue to run...”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 06/07/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 06/07/2020
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From – “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (1956)—
Nikolai Pavlovich Yengalychev was not a man whom most would have singled out as he would break Russia in two and shatter the Company’s unity forever. He is worthy of biographic study for the choices he made, choices which have been widely condemned in both the Russian and Lithuanian press, yet which many have defended. Those defenders do not include the man himself, who merely stated that he did what he had to do for the sake of his men, and to let history judge his actions.
The circumstances surrounding Nikolai’s ascension to his family’s hereditary princedom are quite unlikely in themselves. Nikolai was the grandson of Pyotr Mikhailovich Yengalychev, who was in turn the third son of Dmitri Ivanovich Yengalychev, grandson of Semyon Isvanevich Yengalychev, who had been made a prince by Peter the Great in 1723.[1] To add further complication, this was not the first time a branch of the Yengalychev family had been ennobled, with two separate such events stretching back to the 1500s. The Yengalychevs claimed Mordovian ancestry, but were usually classed under ‘Tatar nobles’ by Russian heralds, who considered them to have insufficient proof of title to be counted with the Russian nobility.[2] Nonetheless, Semyon Isvanevich’s branch built a significant noble family in the 1700s and 1800s. Pyotr Mikhailovich, born in 1799, was nonetheless too far down the birth order to benefit much from the family’s nascent privilege, and decided to seek his fortune by joining the new RLPC. He worked his way up and was a successful lieutenant to Ulrich Münchhausen; his son Pavel worked under Peter Molnár and fought under Prince Pozharsky in the Californian front of the Great American War.[3]
All of this was reflective of the culture in the RLPC at the time to judge a man on his work rather than his ancestry; though Pavel Petrovich was a noble, he was also half-Yapontsi. His mother had been what later records described as a ‘heathen princess’, a daughter of the Daimyo of Odavara, Okubu Tadayoshi.[4] He was fortunate in that his features only subtly broadcast this provenance, and that the RLPC was an organisation full of non-Yapontsi people such as Kalmyks and Kirghiz with similar such features. For over time, as Petrograd began to assert more direct control, the RLPC shifted from an organisation that looked aside, or even encouraged, such mixed marriages, to one which viewed them with suspicion and discriminated against their progeny.[5] The most dramatic shift came with the Hanran Rebellion in 1878, after which time Nikolai diplomatically chose to move his family to the Company’s domains in North America and raise his young son in Baranovsk. Nikolai grew up having to officially deny the existence of his own mother if he wanted to have a career. It was, perhaps, scarcely surprising that these formative years did not endear him to the distant Tsars.
Though Nikolai was, perhaps, already destined to rise to a senior figure in the Company (whose distinct existence from direct Russian government control was growing increasingly fragile) his life was further turned upside-down in 1900. The ‘Peace Flu’, spread by the movements of soldiers in the final stages of the Pandoric War, swept the world. Though it paled into comparison compared to the plague of a generation later,[6] the Peace Flu nonetheless impacted history considerably with over a million deaths. Among those deaths were the remaining survivors of the Yengalychevs descended from Pyotr Mikhailovich’s older brothers, which had already been depleted by deaths in the steppe wars of the 1860s-1880s. This meant that Nikolai, distant scion of a family whose other branches had focused on inviegling themselves with society in Moscow and Petrograd, had now inherited the princedom. As Nikolai had already served in a military capacity as a soldier in the Pandoric War, fighting in the bitter trenches of Noochaland, that was enough for Tsarevich Paul (even then largely calling the shots while his father yet lived) to decide that this Yengalychev could be an adequate substitute for the others. As a man who had grown up and fought in Russian America, he seemed the ideal choice to lead Russia’s armies there resisting the Americans at the outbreak of the war of the Black Twenties. Paul never actually met Yengalychev, and it is clear that this assessment was, as so often with the man, based on him creating a picture in his head and getting violent when reality refused to match it (as in the case of Héloïse Mercier). In hindsight, this exposes the failures of the Russian autocratic form of government at the time, as this proved to be a bad mistake.
Prince Yengalychev would indeed, as Paul had surmised, fight hard to defend what he viewed as his homeland – Russian America, not Russia proper. That was fine, so long as that priority aligned with the broader Russian cause. Yet, just as Admiral Chambord was finding for the French in Pérousie, that was not guaranteed. The bitterness of the Black Twenties’ struggle, and the prioritisation of other fronts, meant that Paul effectively ended up calling on Yengalychev and his men to fight to the death to buy more time for the stalemate of the trenches elsewhere to be decided in Russia’s favour. It was not an attractive proposition to begin with, but the plague made it worse. Yengalychev knew well, from the circumstances of his own elevation to the nobility, how much damage a pandemic could do. The Tsar’s orders were already leading to suffering for the common people of Russian America, as Yengalychev’s armies fought to the bitter end in trenches around the fortifications of Tretyakovsk. It was clear from American naval superiority that Noochaland was living on borrowed time, and reinforcement supplies from Siberia were growing fewer and farther between.
In January 1924, after sending out unofficial peace feelers to General Dawson for a while, Yengalychev surrendered his armies, citing the need to prevent the spread of the plague as a reason. This led to him being blasted in the Russian press as a traitor, and the assets of his family being seized – something which meant little to the prince, who had never felt any inclination to travel to the Old World to visit the Moscow town-house he had inherited. Unfortunately, and contrary to his own intentions, Yengalychev being presented as a Judas meant that Paul could not invoke the plague as a reason to seek peace in Poland, meaning that the nightmarish Oder Pocket trench warfare dragged on longer than it had to.[7]
For the next two years or so, a strange kind of atmosphere reigned in the cold north. The Americans had de facto occupied Russian America under General George Chandler Welch (redeeming himself as an administrator after his military failures), yet were reluctant to move beyond their strongpoints due to fear of the plague. The same factor led the Fouracre and Gilmore ministries to shift more and more American soldiers up to those lands, beyond the incompatible Rexoc railway network, to avoid them spreading the plague further in the American heartlands. While the plague still spread, this decision did undoubtedly slow it down and buy more time for Birline to control it in American cities. The problem was in justifying this to the families of those American soldiers, which – together with desperate bribes from the French – led Gilmore to decide to invade Old World Russia from Alyeska.
Throughout this time, Yengalychev was kept under house arrest in the inland, mountainous city of Shevembsk [Kelowna], with General Welch initially fearing that the Tsar would try to rescue him and/or kidnap him to put on trial if he was placed in a coastal city like Baranovsk. This failed to materialise, of course. Yengalychev went on to have a number of meetings with Welch and build a working relationship, using his expertise on Russian America to aid Welch’s administration. It helped that the two men despised General Dawson for different reasons; Dawson had replaced Welch and, in Welch’s eyes, taken credit for his own work, while Yengalychev hated how Dawson had strung him along during surrender negotiations and gotten men unnecessarily killed. Bringing the conversation back to Dawson’s failings as a human being would usually smooth over any disagreements between the two. While Welch fancied himself an able courtier in Fredericksburg, the need for Yengalychev to conceal his ancestry all his life made him no mean manipulator himself.
Over the months, Yengalychev persuaded Welch that the latter was wasting resources by putting his men under guard in camps, as well as making both POWs and guards more vulnerable to plague as a result. Where did he expect his men to flee to? Furthermore, almost all of them were either local-born or who had left everything behind in Old World Russia, come to seek their fortunes. Almost none of his men had had family ties in the Old World, and most of them had been veteran regulars who had been killed in the opening months of the war at spearhead points. Indeed, this factor had played a role in Yengalychev’s decision to surrender, as he had not wanted the Tsar to take revenge on any of his men’s families. Why not make use of Yengalychev’s men, who had no loyalty to the man America was still fighting?
Welch was eventually convinced, and Yengalychev’s disarmed men were soon working to rebuild damaged houses and railway tracks around Tretyakovsk, treating its sewers to control the plague. Then they were doing it in other settlements, eventually even on the coast. They would be trusted to drive trains, then mobile waggons.[8] Throughout this time, Yengalychev kept pushing, because Yengalychev had a plan. He feared, however, that the Americans would never be desperate enough to go for it. In this, he was wrong.
The first disaster came in October 1925, when General Zhdanovich managed to repulse General Bissell’s men in their siege of Savelyevsk. Yengalychev had been providing Welch with more guarded commentary on the Americans’ attempt to invade Kamchatka and the Company holdings. His advice, as later analysed, was usually accurate but incomplete, intended to direct Welch along a particular way of thinking. Yengalychev had primed Welch by saying that the only way the Americans stood a chance was if they managed to take Savelyevsk and Okhotsk, then push down into the Amur watershed to winter there. Otherwise, the army would be too isolated, on a long supply line while facing the Russian and Company forces in the winter, conditions they excelled at fighting in. Welch was all too ready to accept this, given his own experiences trying to fight Yengalychev’s men in the winter of 1922. It also helped that the Americans in Asia were under the overall command of Dawson, with Bissell as the point man, and Welch was all too willing to believe an analysis that would lead to a humiliating failure for his rival.
Yengalychev now painted a picture of the Americans being pushed back and forced to flee back over the Bering Strait to North America – leaving behind all their modern equipment for the Russians to pick over, if they were lucky, at a bare minimum. More probably, many POWs would be taken and left to rot in Siberian work camps. It was inevitable, he assured Welch. Welch remained sceptical, somewhat aware he was being manipulated, but the passing months seemed to support Yengalychev’s claims. The Operation Covenanter attack on Yapon did nothing to dent the supplies coming to Zhdanovich’s army. Yengalychev hid his fury at the attack on the RLPC and the Yapontsi workers he half-sympathised with, and instead merely said that the Americans had successfully managed to convince the dissatisfied Company that they now needed to fight all the harder for the Tsar to escape such a fate. As Yengalychev had warned, Bissell’s orderly retreat came dangerously close to a rout over the winter months of 1925/6 as Zhdanovich pursued. In February 1926 Bissell managed to rally around Penzhina Bay near the old Russian fort of Aklansk, originally built to subdue the local Koryak people (who now mostly upheld their oaths to the Company and made Kleinkrieger attacks on the American supply lines). However, it was clear he and his army was living on borrowed time.
In the meantime, Yengalychev had continued to outline his suggestions to Welch. Yengalychev’s men, and other local volunteers, would not take up arms to fight against their Russian brothers loyal to the Tsar; however, they were willing to keep on driving the waggons and piloting the boats they had been entrusted with. Bissell and Dawson lacked the logistical capabilities to rapidly evacuate their armies, but with the help of these men, Welch could do it for them – and become the hero. Furthermore, every young American who didn’t need to drive a waggon could instead take up a rifle and help defend it. But, I hear you cry (Yengalychev said) how can you trust my men – to what do they owe their allegiance? They are loyal to me, but they have not sworn an oath to me. Give them something they can pledge their fealty to; give them their own country.
Yengalychev did not attempt to claim the whole of Russian America, of course. The Shemeretvsk Outpost north of California was long since reconquered, the Americans had no intention of handing back any part of Noochaland, and so on. But, Yengalychev argued persuasively, Welch had seen in Fredericksburg the problems that arose when America tried to annex a large number of foreigners and give them full voting rights. Nouvelle-Orléans remained a culturally alien exclave of Westernesse whose electorate caused endless headaches, both in the Continental Parliament at Fredericksburg and the Confederal assembly at St Lewis.[9] Did the government really want to try to incorporate one and a half million Russians and let them elect MCPs – or risk the outcry and unrest from denying them voting rights?[10] Would the governments of Drakesland or Panimaha really appreciate being ‘awarded’ these new souls? It was a meal they could so easily choke on. Instead, why not draw a line around the major population centres of Russian America and spin it off as a vassal state, as the Empire had done with New Ireland? A state which would certainly be dependent on the Empire, would allow the Empire to build railways through it and station troops there, but not one which would elect representatives to any Imperial bodies.
Welch found this proposal increasingly attractive. Of course, he did not have the power to decide such a thing. But, as the news from Kamchatka grew worse and worse, he did begin putting into place the plans Yengalychev had advocated for his men to drive vehicles and multiply the logistical capability he had to transport Bissell and Dawson’s troops home. Welch warned Yengalychev that all he could commit to in return would be to arrange an audience between Yengalychev and a representative of His Imperial Majesty’s Government, in order to put his case. Yengalychev accepted this as the best he was likely to get.
Welch’s court contacts included members of the restless ‘Overripe’ faction of the Liberal Party caucus in the Continental Parliament, not least its leader, Anthony Washborough. Washborough had become a partisan defender of Welch in return for Welch providing him with a secret source of military intelligence outside the usual channels, which allowed Washborough to score points in Parliament by ‘predicting’ victories or defeats before they were officially admitted. Now, Welch sent a vaguely-phrased, encoded Lectelgram to Washborough describing Yengalychev’s proposals and calling for a meeting.
History turns on decisions. Washborough, trying to make sense of Welch’s parenthetical language, had to choose whether it was worth his while leaving the hotbed of court intrigue in Fredericksburg to investigate this proposal. On February 11th 1926, with news of Bissell’s latest reversals, he decided Bissell was doomed, and Welch’s veiled comment about a way to pull the fat out of the fire was worth his time. He secretly boarded a series of trains that brought him all the way up to the town of Bannockburn in Drakesland.[11] He used a pass claiming to be an agent extraordinary of Parliament, while his fellow Overripes helped conceal his journey by claiming that he was ill with the plague and in quarantine in his house in Fredericksburg. At the same time, Welch and a disguised Yengalychev travelled down via the Rexoc network, then shifted to the American-gauge railways so they could join Washborough in the town.
The irony of it all was that Washborough, who was new to the discussion and had not been gradually worn down as Welch had by Yengalychev over the months, might well have rejected the idea out of hand – had he arrived a day earlier. As it was, their first meeting was interrupted by Photel news of the Societist attacks on the American fleets...
*
From: “History of the Twentieth Century” edited by K. D. Saunders (2001)—
When depicting the tragi-comedy of errors that is the War of 1926, it is common to depict the incompetent Imperial response to the Societist attack as though the first Celatores openly landed on Carolina’s fair soil mere hours after the sinking of the fleets of Admirals Wycroft and Daniels. In order to truly understand just how much the Imperials undermined their own response to landfall on Carolina, one must first tackle this misconception. Operatio Rubikon was launched on the night of February 18th/19th; the first open landings (as opposed to infiltrations like Markus Garzius’) did not occur until March 14th. During the intervening time, the Societists were exploiting their temporary naval and aero domination of the West Indies archipelago, filling every civilian cargo ship they could find with Celatores, support teams and equipment and shipping them across the Caribbean Sea to western Cuba.
Throughout this period, the Republic of Jamaica, theoretically an American ally, tensed for a coming invasion that never materialised. Through informal channels, the Societists informed the Jamaicans that providing none of their small fleet of warships crossed an exclusion zone with a radius of 200 talcodii from Zon11Urb26, they would not be attacked. After the Jamaican government’s civil servants had pored over some books and worked out that this meant 240 miles from Kingston, the Jamaican Navy avoided confronting the seemingly-invincible Societist hiveship flotillas with their small forces of dentists and cruiser-frigates. However, with few illusions about what the Societists might try if they thought they could get away with it, and keen to maintain ties with what might turn out to be the victorious side the Jamaicans did later quietly allow American ironsharks to resupply in their bases.
For now, however, flailing Fredericksburg had yet to recognise the Societist vulnerability to ironshark attacks and lack of experience with combatting them. In time, this would lead to the much-storied (and filmed) Operation Kappa, named for the capital of Arkensor Province in Westernesse.[12] Kappa had a foundational myth of holding out for months as a frontier fort while being besieged by local Osajee Indians, being resupplied by convoys of embattled supply waggons manned by heroes. This was typical of the often rather too-meaningful code names employed by the Empire’s military at this time, whose significance could potentially be worked out (and often were) by the Societists’ cryptographers. In this case, Operation Kappa similarly involved using flotillas of ironsharks packed with supplies to secretly resupply the isolated American troops still fighting on in the former French Guiana. The operation has been compared to Tsar Paul’s steerable resupply of General Privalov’s embattled forces in the Pendzhab; similarly, it was a grandiloquent propaganda gesture which achieved nothing in the long run, as there was no way the ironsharks could possibly carry enough materiel to keep General Goodwin’s men fighting for long. If those ironsharks had instead been deployed against the Societist convoys – but by the point Kappa was launched, those questions were already being asked in hindsight.
The IIC possessed a number of agents in Cuba, who correctly reported the arrival of Celatores and materiel into Xagua [Cienfuegos] and other western ports, western Cuba now being firmly under Societist control. However, the Societists successfully deceived their opponents (as they would term them) by seemingly sending all such troops eastwards to attack the remaining Cuban government and warlord forces in eastern Cuba. Instead, only a small portion eventually made it there, and then they stood on the defensive on the Alexander Line. Others peeled off, using the country’s railway network to head to Havana and other ports on the north coast. More Societist transport ships, with more of an emphasis on military craft, were heading there to await them; stripped of their Caribbean fleets and with what aerocraft they had focused on the defensive, the Americans missed this movement. Few could have imagined that the Societists were planning to merely use Cuba as a stepping stone to their real prize. Even fewer might have guessed how, on the way, they were training their Celatores on Cuba’s railways, which had been built to the same gauge as Carolina’s and still used some of the same rolling stock…
Yet this is not entirely true, because America was not completely blind; rather, her blindness was in part wilful. Her supposed weakness is often overstated by defensive Imperial histories. Just because a large Imperial army was trapped in an icy corner of Asia with General Zhdanovich breathing down their next, just because plague control made President Gilmore reluctant to shift soldiers from reserve battalions and training forts across the vast nation, does not mean that the Imperials lacked resources. They simply chose to use them in a foolish manner, and blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Gilmore himself – and, perhaps, those who failed to dissuade him.
Gilmore never truly understood the stakes of the War of 1926. Even after the Societists’ successes in Operatio Rubikon, he failed to truly take them seriously as an enemy. Some argue that, like many others, he saw the Combine as merely the UPSA with a new coat of paint; others dismiss this claim, but instead simply suggest that he failed to recognise the scope of the Combine’s ambitions. He was convinced that the point of attacking the fleets and blocking the Nicaragua Canal was to temporarily neutralise the Empire while the Societists ate up Cuba, and perhaps also Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. In fairness, this may well have been Alfarus’ original plan, as some have suggested. However, if so, the very fact that the Societists were emboldened into going further cannot have failed to be influenced by Gilmore’s response.
Following the fleet attacks of February 18th/19th, Societist Celatores crossed the border between what had once been the Panamá province of the Kingdom of New Granada, and the Costa Rica province of the Kingdom of Guatemala. This border had been an object of suspicion from the Americans, Guatemalans and the rest of the Philadelphia System bloc for some time, with many Societist Agendes and other ne’er-do-wells crossing it amid the Refugiados fleeing Societist rule. As such, the border was now significantly fortified, and the Celatores were soon bogged down in jungle fighting across a geographically restricted battlefield. It was reminiscent of a hotter version of the hellish Oder pocket in Europe, not rendered any more pleasant by the Societists also throwing around the ‘Scientific Weapon’ with gay abandon. Societist land-based celagii harrassed the Guatemalan forces and their allies.
Gilmore saw the basis of the Societists’ plan not only as a need to neutralise the Nicaragua Canal (correct) but also to protect the Pablo Sanchez Canal in Panama (which they would consider desirable but not necessary). By controlling the only passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, and dominating the waters around Cape Horn, the Societists could shift forces back and forth while the Americans were forced to manage with two entirely separated fleets. Under other circumstances, it might have been a valid analysis, but the Societists had already quietly transferred all the naval forces they required to the Caribbean. As such, Gilmore wasted vast Imperial resources on Operation Revenge – which George Spencer-Churchill sarcastically described as ‘with such cryptic terminology, how can the enemy possibly predict our actions’ – a massive aero attack on the Pablo Sanchez Canal. This was primarily enacted by American drome forces in Nicaragua (supported by smaller Guatemalan and Mexican aero flotillas) but HIMS Cygnia and Admiral Crittenden’s fleet were also brought in to assist from the Pacific sea side. The Societists’ own limited ironshark competence was put on display as HIMS Ohio successfully dodged several of even the enhanced steelteeth that were now deployed by the Celatores. In addition to the Buzzard bombers damaging several of the inland locks, Ohio’s 12-inch shells silenced the Societist defensive batteries near Zon11Urb28 (Panama City) and then inflicted serious damage on the first Pacific lock. The Americans then withdrew as a small force of Societist celagii counter-attacked, having achieved their objectives.
Pedrus Dominikus had hoped that the Rubikon attacks would block the Nicaragua Canal for months; they achieved only six weeks, but conversely Revenge would neutralise the Pablo Sanchez Canal for most of a year, and force the Societists to repair it at great expensive. But, as Spencer-Churchill later observed, never had a military operation so wildly successful on paper achieved so little in reality. The Societists’ plans had not relied on the use of the canal. Furthermore, Ohio’s spectacular success only lent fuel to the arguments of the conservative admirals who claimed that lineships were still the ultimate weapon of war, and that the sinkings achieved by the Societist hiveships had been a fluke. Revenge was, fundamentally, a misstep.
It did not have to be that way, as the military analyst Major Benjamin Liddell observed. The Societists had stripped their Pacific coast forces of many ships in order to build up the fleets in the Caribbean, and now could not transfer those ships back. If Gilmore had ordered Crittenden to press his advance further down, to vanquish the small Societist dentist and cruiser-frigate forces and then bombard the coastal cities once named Buenaventura, Manta, perhaps even Trujillo or Lima – it still would not have interfered with Alfarus’ plans, but it might well have endangered his popularity and sense of invincibility from the people of the South American continent. At the very least, it would have created more problems, created a distraction.
Instead, Revenge only distracted the Americans. It was, admittedly, only bad luck that the Buzzards left their aeroports (and the deck of the Cygnia) mere hours before the first Celatores feinted at the Spirit Glades and Tampa Bay before finally landing at Pensacola. It was merely a tragic coincidence that the IIC and military communications had all their attention directed to reporting on the distant, bold attack on the Pablo Sanchez Canal, a hand on which Gilmore had gambled all his chips. Had Revenge, or the Societists’ Operatio Libramendum for that matter, been launched a day earlier or later, if the two had not coincided…if Gilmore had not focused, Passeridic-like, on his distant forces in a way Alfarus had not, delegating to Dominikus…
If, if, if. At the end of the day, perhaps it would not have made a difference. The history of Carolina is a history of tragedy, and it was about to enter its final act.
[1] Of these, only Semyon Isvanevich is a historical character; the others were all born significantly past the POD of this timeline.
[2] The Mordovians or Mordvins are an ethnic group related to the Finns, who mostly live around the city of Saransk on the Volga basin. The Russians’ classification of them as Tatars is based on the idea that they were culturally ‘Tatarised’ during the rule of the Golden Horde in the 1200s-1500s, although the situation may be more complex than that; a key division within the Mordovians is between the Erzyans, who are sometimes claimed to have fled and resisted the Golden Horde, and the Moksha, who accepted Golden Horde rule.
[3] See Part #195 in Volume IV.
[4] As usual, Japanese names in TTL are reflective of Russian transliteration; in OTL the domain (Han) would be called Odawara in English. What this sketch doesn’t mention is that the area was devastated by a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the early 1700s and was still economically recovering years later. So, with the protection of the Shogunate falling apart at this time and Odawara unable to defend itself effectively, the Daimyo would probably be one of the most desperate among the Japanese nobles to gain Russian favour by marrying off his daughter. (In OTL, the last Daimyo surrendered Odawara to the Meiji Restoration without a fight (despite initially opposing it) for similar reasons; his name, coincidentally, was also Tadayoshi, the second of that name to rule).
[5] This reflects a similar OTL shift in the British East India Company (for example).
[6] And was much milder than the OTL Spanish Flu, being more comparable to the OTL 1889 ‘Russian Flu’ pandemic – but which nonetheless killed a number of historically significant people among its estimated one million deaths, such as Prince Albert Victor, heir presumptive to the British throne. Others, like Robert Mercier in TTL, recovered but their health was persistently weakened; an OTL example is Alfonso XIII of Spain, who was survived both the Russian Flu and the Spanish Flu but who suffered nerve damage as a result.
[7] This author is writing in 1950s Lithuania, so his publisher is keen to blame the Tsar’s decision on this, even though this is a relatively sympathetic painting of Yengalychev.
[8] ‘(Mobile) Waggon’ is the generic term usually used in TTL where we would say ‘lorry’ (UK) or ‘truck’ (US). In this era they will mostly still be coal/steam powered rather than using Mitchell engines.
[9] While this could be charitably read as commentary on Nouvelle-Orléans having its own distinct political parties and making it hard to form a stable majority government at St Lewis, it is more likely simply reflecting the fact that white, Protestant, English-speaking Americans were uncomfortable with the existence of black, Catholic, French-speaking MCPs in their Parliament.
[10] This is quite the contrast to OTL Russian America, whose Russian population never exceeded a few hundred – but, of course, also never expanded to more livable territories beyond Alaska. Note that calling them ‘Russians’ reflects their status as Russian subjects, rather than their ethnicity – among the Great Russians there are many Lithuanians, Yapontsi, Coreans, Nivkhs, Chukchis, etc. etc. Some of the local North American natives have also become Russian subjects, while others retain a quasi-independent status.
[11] OTL Pocatello, Idaho. In OTL the county is named Bannock, based on a transliteration of the name of a local native tribe; the TTL name is a double reference to this and the historical Battle of Bannockburn (as the TTL town was founded by Scottish settlers).
[12] OTL Jonesboro, AR.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
I don't remember that thread specifically although I was there at the time. A lot of people have speculated about similar ideologies in the past - Ian himself did one brief sketch of a timeline with an ideology called 'Unionism' which was one of my inspirations.
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
So Zanguebar had its own equivalent of the Zanzibar revolution against the Perso-Omanis? Also does the former Combine with a mixture of peoples displaced from , well all over the former combine, count as settler colonial domination?
Also Vostok Russia becoming independent as Carolina is annexed into the combine is ironic
African countries which are unlikely to change their names:
Also Vostok Russia becoming independent as Carolina is annexed into the combine is ironic
African countries which are unlikely to change their names:
- Madagascar- Benyovsky not unifying the island and providing the Merina a template for unification means it will likely retain its colonial name
- Sofala - a well established exonym
- Gazaland - named after the Gaza empire, a native state that lasted until 1895 IOTL
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Grandmother, no?
So cool to see him finally showing up in the timeline contemporaneously instead of as a historian.
I'm sure they'll use it for
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
That also fits the trope of Francafrique without the large population or costly wars to keep it. Algeria itself is unlikely to be a nuclear testing ground ITTL
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
Is this a reference to the 2011 Tohoku earthquakes in Societist Yapon?
The Eternal State will likely be genocidal towards nomadic populations, as established by combine societist views of stateless/nomadic peoples as savages and the right of "higher" civilizations to kill lower ones, and the traditional ottoman irritation towards nomadic Bedouin/Tuareg raids. So we might see "The Last Bedouin" as a movie?
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Referring to the Indian Ocean earthquake that wrecked Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Co. in our timeline, as has been referenced before.
Also...not how I thought we were getting "East Russia"...but also, not disappointed.
So it looks like Russian America is going its own way, which seems like a better solution for all involved by allowing the ENA to say they expelled the Russian Empire from the continent without necessarily annexing any territories they didn't already claim. Would this new nation be a principality or kingdom under Yengalychev, or does he intend to take more of a background role? I'm also wondering whether this will mean that the Superior Republic regains its independence, since I think I remember reading an update which hinted at Superia being independent at some point in the future. Seems like it'd be an acceptable compromise for all parties.
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298.2
Thande
Donor
From: “Memoirs of the First Born: The Authorised and Annotated Edition with Commentary” by Markus Garzius, edited and annotated by Albert Whitley and Maria Aydenia (1987)—
I remember vividly my shock and excitement when Agende Rodriga finished with her code book and looked up at me, her face now pale enough to satisfy any of the local cretins with their skin-colour obsession. Usually so impressively cool and collected, she stumbled over her words as she explained it to me, me and the others in our small circle of confidantes within the local movement. It had swollen enormously thanks to our efforts, and we were naturally concerned about infiltration; control of information according to the tribal [cell] system seemed appropriate.
The code book, itself in code of course, was hugely intricate in order to extract such specific meaning from merely the words ‘twelve’ and ‘red’. As I understand it (there was no reason for Rodriga to explain it in detail), there were other variables such as what time of the year the Kapud had made his speech, the phase of the moon and so on, which allowed the message to be made more specific. I say specific, but in the end the message turned out to be shockingly general and universal. On the night of Unember [March] 14th, every single Agende, cadre and chapter member in the unliberated parts of Zones 4, 9, 11 and 13 were to enact whatever sabotage they could to undermine the Septens and their henchmen.
Surely there must have been more nuance to it than that which I was unaware of (I realised in hindsight) or else our brave men and women would have also sabotaged the railway lines we needed to capture intact, and so on. Nonetheless, I was shocked at the boldness of the move. Regardless of what the deviationist dribbling morons currently mismanaging Free Humanity may claim, never let it be said that I never doubted the Kapud’s judgement. At that time, I feared it was too high a price to pay. The Kapud was effectively sacrificing all we had on this continent for a moment of advantage. Even a spectacular victory over the Septens would leave us with no-one to direct true believers within the Zones they squatted on. Afterwards, we would no longer have eyes and ears among the Septens, and they could relax in the knowledge that we would have to rebuild our networks from scratch.
Yet, as always, I underestimated the Kapud’s genius. It was not until years later that I was able to watch from afar, with sad amusement, as the Septens tore themselves apart in what they referred to as the ‘Second Black Scare’. Politicians and others made remorseless claims of Sanchezista infiltration in all walks of their government; men and women who had barely heard of the Way lost their jobs and were discredited and ostracised in their community. All the while, none of them dreamed that the Septen-occupied lands were perhaps the most Sanchezista-free part of the globe, where anyone with a record going back more than a decade or so could not possibly be one of our infiltrators, as we had already sacrificed them all. Their own paranoia, the limitations of their petty nationalistically-blinded minds, would hurt the Septens more than our Agendes ever had.
But let us return to happier times. It was clear what the order signified; Celatores would be landing in North America at the same time. None of us were aware that the Septens were planning an attack of their own, simultaneously, on the Pablo Sanchez Canal. Some attribute the timing to the Kapud’s genius, and though I can understand that view, I believe it was a mere coincidence – accountable, of course, to Dyeus’ providence. It is always reassuring to be reminded that one is fighting on the noble side, even if the act of fighting itself will always be repugnant.
Speaking of which. Persephone and I had had a falling out, one which had driven not only her to tears, but me as well. Like other cadre members, she wanted to take up arms (smuggled in over the past few years) and fight to raise the black flag over this land. With the others, I could dismiss them as necessary casualties; like myself, a necessary evil to free this land from the tyranny of an inferior level of civilisation (and barely that, in this case) whose losses would be honoured but not mourned. But I loved Persephone, and I could not bare to think of her one day standing on the gallows beside me, ready to surrender her life for the inexorable crime-sin of murder – no matter how noble the cause. Also, it was still a matter of debate then whether Celatores should be permitted to have children, and if so, whether they should be raised by their families or in Garderista crèches. It was the never-ending argument about whether the urge to raise arms against fellow humans was nature or nurture. For now, the Kapud’s pragmatism had suppressed the argument, but I knew it would return. I could give up a child to the cause, reluctantly, but I did not want Persephone to face that decision.
She did not understand my reasoning, of course, and so those days in Unember were colder between us than the month itself, in this balmy town misnamed Pensacola.[13] I kept my face fixed when I saw her practicing with her old Caputo ’91 rifle, doubtless salvaged from some poor Firstslain casualty of the War of Ascension. Fortunately, though the old lies of that age had been expunged from the Liberated Zones, our ammunition was still compatible with it, and my own superior Pazifikador XVIII could use the same stock. I wished Perse and I were as intercompatible as our weapons were, back then.
To get back to Rodriga’s briefing. We had more specific instructions than most, it seemed; reading between the lines, Pensacola had been targeted as a major descent site. We did not guess, at that point, that it was the major beachhead target. Later, many have claimed it was my reports, and the intervention of good old Barredus, that led to Pensacola being selected. I have always dismissed such things as mere flattery. Regardless, we prepared our plans. Pensacola’s defences might be old and creaking and poorly maintained, but there was still a detachment of about a hundred Septen regulars here, a minority amid the Zone 11 auxiliaries scattered through the hinterland.[14] They possessed a fort and a small artillery park with a couple of rusting pieces and some better-maintained protcars, which they used for occasional patrols and parades to show off their strength. It was not much, but we knew that in today’s warfare, a small group of soldiers could hold off a much superior force if they were allowed to gain a defensive position. Our task, therefore, was to ensure they could not do so...
*
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—
Operatio Libramendum (meaning pendulum) was launched on March 14th 1926, even as Societist infiltrators wrought havoc across the Empire. This was intended both as a distraction to overwhelm Fredericksburg with reports (not helped by the simultaneous Operation Revenge) and a way to break up communications and transport, hampering American efforts to respond to the attack. In stereotyped depictions of the event in film, we usually picture wide-eyed Societist fanatics cutting Lectel cables or Civic Steam lines, blowing up railway tracks, throwing spirit bombs through the windows of armouries, and the like.
Less discussed nowadays, though it was a major target in the Second Black Scare and helped doom the Mentian Party as a distinct entity, was Societist infiltration of the trade union movement. Many strikes had been pre-prepared for the day, ostensibly protesting against factory conditions as the plague continued to spread through them. Conversely, other protests came from groups unwilling to further tolerate the plague quarantine rules that did exist. When the attacks began, the Societists spread a message that Alfarus’ rule meant that Liberated Humans had been able to tolerate quarantine rules in order to focus on saving lives until the plague could be tackled, whereas the Empire had enforced quarantine rules just so lives could be sacrificed elsewhere in war instead. The Celatores’ initial rapid success helped feed the propaganda image that Societist Amigos and Amigas were healthy, rested and easily sweeping aside the tired, plague-ridden, war-weakened Americans.
As planned, Societist forces initially attacked the Spirit Glades, landing some troops to largely make mischief and a noise, as the region was strategically unimportant and not well connected to the rest of East Florida. It was clear the Societists’ hopes were that they could still draw American armies southwards into Florida and trap them there. After the war, many American critics stated that this landing would have been impossible if the Faulkner Ministry had not cancelled the modernisation of the former Fort Blackbeard on the Dry Tortuga Islands, instead having it demolished. Of course, it remains debatable whether a fort designed primarily to combat now-obsolete piracy (despite its ironic name) could have stood up to a modern Meridian force, even one that lacked hiveships and relied on celagii flying from Cuba.[15] A few weeks later, an outrider for this small Societist jungle force would be witnessed by the American rocket pioneer Edith Harrison near Caloosa. Harrison’s experiments had not yet attracted government interest yet, but that was about to change.[16]
Possibly based on information from Markus Garzius, Lugallus Rivarius changed his plans and chose to commit only a single hiveship force (the Elam’s) to attacking Fort Insulza on Tampa Bay. The Americans fought back hard, using some of the dromes which Gilmore had had redeployed to East Florida, and the Societists had the worse of it. The Elam had to retreat with significant losses, eventually rejoining the rest of Flodus East after repairs and resupply in Cuba. If the American pilots had managed to sink the Elam then it might have been enough to tip the scales later. Yet at this time, even after the shock of Rubikon, there is evidence that the pilots were ignoring their orders and deliberately trying to target the accompanying Societist lineship Pharaoh with steelteeth. (The Pharaoh was substantially damaged and out of the war for a month, but did not sink). Perhaps it was simply a matter of prestige, though this remains controversial.[17] While the Elam force was engaging the American dromes, Celatores were landed significantly to the north in what was largely wasteland, being forced to go around the keys and sandbanks blocking off the coastline proper. This force was intended to attack Fort Insulza from the north, but suffered many problems due to the terrain and only succeeded in keeping the Americans’ attention. However, this was also true on a grander scale; the success of the Fort Insulza aeromen and the ongoing attempted siege continued to draw the attention of Fredericksburg in coming days, even as the major attack was breaking out of Pensacola.
Although only two feint attacks were planned, many American writings record three; the third was a mistake, with four Societist Llama flying artillery from the Lagash mistaking Maubela for Pensacola after flying off course – a common hazard in those days before Photrack.[18] Maubela was considerably better-defended than Pensacola for various reasons involving logistics and politics a decade before, and the Llamas were slaughtered. However, their sacrifice did (unintentionally) further draw American attention farther away from Pensacola, with feints now both to the east and the west of the real landing.
Aero forces from the Uruk, Memphis and Lagash (minus those four Llamas) combined to strike strategic targets around Pensacola as the Celatores went in. Lugallus Mardinus Kasdrus was in command of the primary ground force, and had prepared to give orders to bomb local railway lines in order to buy time to dig in and defend against American reinforcements as more troops arrived. However, he found that the situation was considerably more favourable than he had expected. Not only had the saboteurs done their job across the Empire and Fredericksburg was reeling, drowned in reports of exploding railway stations and blacked-out cities[19] from Drakesland to Hispaniola, but Markus Garzius had also been working the miracles his name is associated with...
*
From: “Memoirs of the First Born: The Authorised and Annotated Edition with Commentary” by Markus Garzius, edited and annotated by Albert Whitley and Maria Aydenia (1987)—
I wiped the blood from my hands and my rifle dispassionately with a handkerchief, and tried not to look at the initials in its corner. Persephone had given this to me, a few weeks and a hundred years ago. Somehow I could not quite bring myself to throw it on the ground, and I stuffed the bloodstained mass into my pocket to become a horrible clotted mess. It was a profound metaphor for the damage I had done to Perse’s life, I thought bleakly. Before I and my murderous heart had come into it, she had been...
No. I was being foolish. Perse was not only a canvas for me to air my own self-doubts and shame on. She had her own life, and before I had arrived, it had been a miserable one. Not only living in a primitive society where humans were judged for the colour of their skin, but in an unstable and uncertain one, where the rules of society could change from city neighbourhood to neighbourhood, shift overnight at the whims of occupiers. What I had realised, both from Perse and her fellow locals, was that the driving spirit of this land was apathy. They had been stuck in some state of purgatory since their last regime had been toppled and nothing had satisfactorily replaced it. Years later, someone called me a genius for this insight, but it was obvious, and I am sure Rodriga and her comrades had said the same in their messages. The people of this land would not fight to resist us. Nor would they fight for us, not unless we persuaded them we would be better than the Firstslain they still thought of us as. They would keep their heads down and hope the horrors of war did not touch them, a commendable enough impulse.
Thought clearly not simply because I had said so, the plans of the Kapud, Prokapud Dominikus and Lugallus Rivarius had taken this into account. I know that Lugallus Kasdrus was sceptical at first, which I can understand. He thought of this in terms of the War of Ascension, as having to take a beachhead at great cost and then create a cautious defensive line to prevent the opponent forces from throwing us back into the sea. And that probably would have been the case, if he’d been attacking some place that the Septens actually cared about. Here, the local ‘Carolinians’ would shrug and let us take over their railways and send our Celatores many talcodii afield. All we had to do was neutralise the small number of Septen defenders.
Which I needed to get back to. Reluctantly dismissing thoughts of Perse and her bloodied handkerchief, I shouldered my Pazifikador. Terzus Sutardus still had the sniper rifle with which I had taken the life of Oquendo – cruel necessity – and he was using it with far more skill than I had. Several more of my men instead used ametralladores, what the locals called ‘minicings’.[20] As we had learned fighting back in Zone 7, such a weapon could allow one man to take down many opponents, if he was skilled with it. Some of the more unsavoury ‘Neighbourly Society’ groups in the region also used them; Rodriga and her comrades had managed to bring a few of them over to our side, and now they fought alongside us.
With the death of the Septen sentry, the blood on Perse’s handkerchief now also pooling on his grey-green uniform bearing its lie of a flag in blue, red and gold on his shoulder, the next stage could commence. A few stars gleamed in the night sky above, though most were banished by the glow of the hissing luftlights on the streets. Only a handful of squares in Pensacola had bright vac-lamps of the sort I had become accustomed to in the urbs of Zone 1. That would change, I was sure, as we progressed their civilisation level, but in the meantime the flickering luftlights helped hide our movements.
Some bright murderer over in Zone 8 had figured out that one could potentially destroy a rather expensive opponent ansukurrus with a cheap and simple glass bottle of spirit with a burning rag in the neck. They called them Fireballs or Firefizzers, a pun on an intoxicating cocktails of the day, while others called them Devil Brews.[21] Our cadre members, unskilled with firearms, had prepared many so we could take out the Septens’ protcars. Yet we now found we could capture them intact, their guards having fled, and the only purpose for the Fireballs was for the spirit in them to be poured into the protcars’ tanks so they could be driven off. The Septens were reeling from the attack even more than we had hoped; though our celagii obviously did not bomb the city itself for fear of harming its people, merely flying low overhead had driven them into a panic. I realised anew that these men were far from the Septens’ best; those had all been sent to die in freezing trenches against Pablus Romanovius’ gang. These were the very dregs of their murderers, sent here to keep them away from others. Some were clearly drunk as we mowed them down, incensed we had interrupted their leisure. Perse had dropped enough hints that many of them saw the locals, especially those with darker skin, as their personal property, to be used for their own enjoyment on a whim. I am not a sufficiently good human to feel regret as my bullets tore them to shreds.
Out in the bay, I heard a distant explosion as one of the less-than-well-maintained forts guarding the entrance [OTL Fort Pickens] succumbed to a shell from one of our lineships. The other [OTL Fort McRee] was silent, so the men I had sent under Segundus Kalvus appeared to have done their work well. I wonder if the handful of Septens manning it had even woken from their sleep before they found their fortification in our hands. Now, nothing lay between the mouth of the bay and our legions landing here. Nothing, except the third fort, the one my men and I were now in the process of taking [OTL Fort Barrancas].
Surprise had been crucial; poorly maintained as it was, these walls could nonetheless have allowed a small Septen force to hold us off for crucial hours, allowing what heavy guns they had to fire on our troopships as they approached. We had to secure them first, and we had. Now it was time to fight our way through the facility before our opponents could rally. Speed; it was the same lesson Lugallus Rivarius would soon go on to teach the Septens. Like a bantamweight boxer repeatedly hitting a much larger opponent in the face; he could not strike a blow heavy enough to knock him out, but he could keep him off-balance until his heavier friend and ally – our reinforcements – could arrive. I smiled at that metaphor; I had been talking to Perse’s salt of the earth friend Beau too much, with his love of boxing. Then the reminder of Perse wiped the smile off my face. I shunted the thought aside once more and focused on my job.
It was a hard fight. Sutardus, whose skills lay in long-distance sniping, was wasted here and was lucky to escape with a minor wound that took him out of the fight. The opponents might have been complacent and caught off-guard, but they were wise enough to use stairwells and narrow corridors as pinch points against us as we sought to take over. I regret that, though it was not my intention, in practice we often ended up using bold and fanatical local cadres as human shields; they would attack frontally and draw the opponents’ attention while we tried to flank them through alternative routes. But they knew this fort far better than we did, and I lost too many friends in that fight. Still, while they were fighting us, they could not be doing anything against Lugallus Kadrus’ men as they landed. We had cut the Lectel lines and I was mostly certain we had managed to destroy the Photel mast by now; those commandeered protcars had been useful. But I could not afford to relax, to say that fine, we could just hole up these Septens until they were forced to surrender. We could not be sure of everything they had in their arsenal, both in terms of literal weapons or in tricks that might still let them alert their nationalistically blinded colleagues elsewhere.
So we pushed on, through that shadowy hell of concrete corridors lit only by flickering, hissing luftlights at best, aware that every door we opened could bring a hail of bullets from the other side, cutting short a precious human life in an instant. We persisted, for we had no choice. After a while, which seemed like years, it felt that our opponents’ morale suddenly collapsed. Perhaps their lookouts had seen signs of our ships and men arriving in the bay in great numbers, and the rumour had been passed down; I did not get to see that glorious sight myself.
It was tempting to cheer as our opponents finally broke and fled, but I knew I had to secure the primerus’ office. While sending my men to pursue the fleeing opponents, I took it on myself and headed off alone. Foolhardy, perhaps, but after all the loud bangs and richochets and blood, I needed time along with my thoughts.
Yet our local cadre friends, of course, had other ideas. I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye as I searched the shadowy, chaotic fort for the office, heading in random directions, ignoring orders. I knew they had been through a lot, and I did not query them. Occasionally I still heard distant gunshots, and after comparing them to my shaky mental map of the fort, I decided to head in the direction of one particular set.
I knew I was heading in the right direction when I saw, displayed on a wall behind glass, that lying rag of the Septens. The gold stars on the red cross were barely distinguishable in the dim, flickering synthetic twilight, but both stood out from the darker blue background even though the colours were shades of grey-brown. It was as though all the claimed vitality had been leached out of it. It was torn and ragged, too, with a plaque below stating in the debased dialect called English that the rag had been carried by Septen soldiers who had taken this town in the War of Ascension. I paused to reflexively spit on the rag, and it was only then that I realised my mouth was as dry as the grave. Fatigue threatened to hit my body like a wave, but I pushed through, as I had done so many times before in the conflict over in Zone 7. So long as this world was imperfect, so long as Celatores were needed, it was never time to rest.
The sounds of gunshots were growing more intermittent, but I still followed them, now more cautious, rifle in hand. I stepped over several corpses. Most, sadly, were in civilian garb with makeshift black armbands to indicate their allegiance: our poor brave cadres. Occasionally, they had taken one of their opponents with them, and a slovenly Septen lay in a pool of slowly clotting blood, black under the dim lights. As though to foreshadow that world beneath the black flag when no-one would have to shed blood ever again.
I finally entered the office as a cadre member I recognised – his local name was George – collapsed before me, a bullet in his brain. As he fell, it revealed a lone Septen brandishing a revolving pistol. My mind rapidly reconstructed the scene; before him on a desk was a second, discarded pistol, its drum evidently emptied of bullets in making some of the corpses I had seen. Also on the desk was a large metal bin that had been hastily filled with papers and cardboard files, a small container of flammable cleaning fluid, and a cigarette lighter. Evidently the Septen had been planning to destroy important documents before they could fall into our hands, but our cadres, Dyeus bless them, had at least managed to slow him down. With their lives, they had bought time for me to stop him.
Which I would have done, had my trusty Pazifikador not chosen this moment to jam. I looked down in shock, a movement that would probably have been comic under other circumstances. I had failed to sufficiently clean the blood with Perse’s handkerchief, the sort of rookie mistake that I would have yelled at a raw recruit for and put him on latrine duty. It showed how distracted the thought of her had made me. It was about to get me killed.
Reflexively, I immediately sought cover instead, only to find there was very little. I knocked over a small table as a bullet whined over my head, but it provided insufficient protection. “Don’t move!” the Septen cried in a voice made harsh by yelling many orders over the past hour; I suspected mine would sound much the same. He came closer and loomed over me, drawing a bead on my forehead but not firing. A half-gloating, half-terrified grin came over his face. He was a tough man, but running to fat, probably a victim of the same exploitative way of life that had literally and metaphorically corrupted Septen occupation forces across this region.
“Hands up!” As the flickering luftlights hissed to a moment of intensity and cast his face into sharp relief, I realised to my shock that I recognised him. I did not know his name, but his face was one of a few that had been burned into my memory. He was one of the passers-by who had scowled at me for kissing Perse in the street. He hadn’t been wearing his uniform then: why? Was he a spy? Or had he just preferred not to be recognisable when making use of the local drug dens or houses of ill repute?
I raised my hands to shoulder height only, letting my useless rifle swing limply from its strap. My only other weapon was a knife in my belt, and there was little chance of me being able to draw it while he trained that pistol on my head. His past handiwork, on the remains of our poor cadre members littering the floor around us, betrayed that no matter his other failings, he was clearly an excellent shot. “You are in command?” I asked in English, vaguely recognising his dimly-lit rank insignia as that of a major, as the Septens named it.
He laughed harshly. “Damn right I’m in command! Or I should be,” he added sourly. “Looks like you torchies have overrun the place while we were all in our beds with one arm around a whore and the other around a bottle.” Well, at least he realised it.
“Not ‘torchies’,” I corrected him mildly. “We are—”
“Oh yes, I know,” he said, waving the pistol slightly for emphasis without breaking his aim. To my surprise, he switched to broken Novalatina. “Societistas, followers of Sanchus. You should like these place, nobody have known which country it were since I were an boy.”
“You speak the true tongue,” I said, keeping my tone diplomatically neutral to avoid giving away what I thought of his proficiency.
“I speaks it. Always good to keeps your option open, naught?” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Let me speak you, your way look a lot sensibler since war breaks? Lots-thousands die in mud and disease, for what? Why continue?”
I was surprised. If he really had any level of sympathy with us... “Then why kill all these?” I asked, gesturing at the bodies around me. “Why not join us?”
“You did ask not before you attack,” he explained, leaning on his desk chair, though his gun hand remained firmly trained on me. “Maybe I considers it. Maybe not. You could take not risk, naught? I understands.” He laughed. “What if now I give thisses?” He gestured with his other hand at the documents. “You offers place for me? I know where secret gold reserve buried, too. Need not tell, ah, Lugallus?”
His reflexive appeal to corruption sickened me, but so long as I faced his weapon, I could not risk it. “Hand those over and I give you my word you will be treated with honour,” I said.
The Septen major shrugged, again not shifting his gun hand a fraction of a susius [fingerbreadth]. “Looks like I has not choose much, eh?”
Then everything happened too fast.
There was a noise at one of the doors. A figure, barely visible in the dim light, burst in. The silhouette was wielding a rifle. Instantly, casually, the Septen turned and fired at them. It was not a headshot – he wasn’t that good – but the figure let out a cry and collapsed a few feet away, momentum carrying him on. A rectangular object flew from his chest area, landing near my overturned table.
Reflexively, my eyes squinted in the dim light to read it. The luftlights flickered bright again and the words on the cover, picked out in gold against the black leather, shone to treacherous life:
I had seen this copy of Sanchez’s first great work before. I had seen her devouring it with the eagerness of a child who has just learned to read. I had told her off for carrying it around with her like a talisman, warning her of what might happen if the police or local enforcers found it on her person.
Slowly, with inexorable dread, my eyes leapt to the fallen figure. Face down, but her dark hand flung before her told the story. As did the scream she had let out, only to be cut horribly short.
Persephone.
“Damn n---------r b------h,” the major said dismissively in his own tongue, before switching back to Novalatina. “All right. We do be having deal?”
I stared at him for a long moment. It was probably just as well it was so dim, as otherwise he would probably have seen it in my eyes.
Without another word, I leapt to my feet, curling around one leg to kick Unity Through Society into the air and roughly in the direction of the major’s face. I had never been so grateful for all the Human Football I had played with the local children in Zone 7. The major let out a reflexive cry and shot, but his instincts betrayed him; his pistol tracked towards the moving object, his lower animal urges telling him that was the threat. And this man had a lot of lower animal urges, I sensed.
The distraction lasted only a moment, but it was enough to let me leap over the table, smack the pistol out of his hand with my left, and simultaneously use my right to pull my knife from my belt. A moment later, I was holding it to his throat as I bent him over backward against the desk. This man might be a crack shot, but he was clearly not in his element when it came to hand-to-hand. Fear showed in his eyes, yet amid the fear was confusion. “What...?” he managed.
“Offer me your gold,” I said in a low, dangerous voice, speaking English. “Offer me your secrets. Offer me everything you have.”
“It’s yours!” he squeezed out. Not the only thing, either; my leg, braced against his, suddenly felt warm and wet. If I could have been more disgusted than I already was.
“I want something else,” I said softly. “I want the precious human life back of that woman you just killed without a thought.”
He stared at me in genuine confusion for a moment. “What, you mean that n---?”
I cut him off, literally, as my blade drew a droplet of blood from his throat. Up close, his eyes were those of a pig. Appropriate.
“You said you would treat me with honour!” he squeaked.
“I keep that promise,” I said, half to myself. It was true, in a sense. Few would dispute the justice of what I was about to do. But not even the most deviationist of the lickspittle braindead morons claiming to represent Sanchezism nowadays would probably concede that it was acceptable for me to make him understand what was happening first, in the way I did. I do not care. I know I am not a good human.
Perhaps, and call me a deviationist myself if you wish, sometimes humanity needs those who are not good humans.
“My name is Markus Garzius,” I told him. “You killed my lover. Her name was Persephone Weeks. Now die, you bastard.”
I rammed the blade into his neck so hard it almost severed his spine.
The body slumped into pooling blood. I conscientiously shoved it off the desk lest the blood spatter the papers its former inhabitant had sought to destroy. We could probably have made more sense of them if he lived. A coward like that would be easy to intimidate into giving away secrets, even if he hadn’t hinted already he’d have done it. As a result, it would take the cryptographers time to understand them, and maybe miss opportunities that might get fellow Celatores killed.
It is easy to play such moral games. I did not care then, I do not care now. All I know is that what I did felt right.
Then, my world was turned upside down again.
I happened to look down at the copy of Unity Through Society where it had fallen. With sorrow, I picked it up. It was then that I noticed the hole. A bullet had penetrated it, leaving a larger exit hole. Surely the major hadn’t managed to hit it midair when I kicked it as a distraction? He wasn’t that good a shot?
Behind me, I heard a wheezing gasp. I spun, and saw that dark hand was moving, pushing ineffectually at the floor as its owner tried to raise herself up. Perse looked up at me with pained eyes. “Markus...?” she managed.
I barely remember the next few moments, as I helped her into a nearby chair, fussing over her and mumbling in a confused mix of Novalatina, English and even the local corrupt tongues I’d learned in Zones 7 and 19 over the years. At one point I wasn’t sure if I was kissing her or trying to resuscitate her. [Probable anachronism – editor’s note] “Perse! You’re – how –”
She grinned at me, despite the pain in her eyes. There was wet blood on her chest, but not much of it, and a strange extra strap around it that didn’t belong to her rifle. She pulled her shirt open, revealing a shallow wound. “I think,” she gasped, “broke my collarbone...but that’s all...”
Confusion reigned, until my mind finally made sense of that extra strap. “You...you were carrying around the Book with you?”
“Took the bullet,” she confirmed with a gasp. I realised her earlier scream had been cut short by the force of the impact winding her, nothing more. “Slowed it down...broke the strap...” Hence why the book had fallen at my feet.
I gazed down at the wounded copy of Sanchez’s genius insights, then at my wounded love. “Persephone...I thought you were...I thought we...”
Then the tears welled up. And, as the final bombardment of the remaining Septen positions by our fleet provided better background fireworks than any new year’s celebration could have, over the slain body of the foul divisions that had poisoned this land for so long, we kissed once more.
I never did learn the major's name.
Three days later, we were there in the crowd, Perse with her arm in a sling to protect her healing collarbone, to watch the speech. Today, not only the nationalistically blinded gang regimes but also the deviationists in power over the Liberated Zones foolishly claim that it was not the real Kapud who had come to speak, merely a double. As though I could be fooled by some imitation? I knew he had travelled here, probably via an ironshark in great secrecy, to show how important our breakthrough was.
I was already overcome with emotion, but then was shocked anew with everyone else when his voice boomed out like that of a god. I learned later that it was the first public demonstration of a new kind of electrical amplification that our scholars had worked on, far superior to the compressed-air variety we all knew. It brought the Kapud’s voice to not all those assembled in Seville Square – Celatores, local loyalists who could now openly assemble, and other locals uncertain of the future – but blasted it across most of the town.
The Kapud spoke in Novalatina, with a translation provided by an aide. It was strange to think that the way most of these locals heard the stirring speech would come from that anonymous assistant, not from the Kapud of Humanity, but such things illustrate just why a single language is needed.
“People of Zon4Urb38, be not afeared. For longer than any of you have been alive, you have been ruled by those who have lied to you.
They lied that it was necessary to travel here from Zon11Ins1 [Great Britain] because there was insufficient space or wealth there for you. There was; they merely did not wish to share it.
They lied that it was necessary for you to conquer the people who already lived here in Zone 4 and take their land, because there was insufficient for you to share and live together in harmony. There was; but that was too difficult for them. It was so much easier to slaughter thousands and built a colony on a legacy of blood.
They lied that it was necessary for those of darker skin to be stolen from Zone 10 and be brought here against their will, to work the fields from dawn till dusk, their very lives stolen from them as readily as if they were murdered. It was not; your rulers merely wished to make money, money that would never be shared with the rest of you, no matter your skin colour.
They lied that it was necessary for you to divide yourself from your neighbours, to create that lie called Carolina atop that lie called America, for the sake of maintaining that division within you. For what? What did it profit any of you, save those who owned the plantations, to keep some of you enslaved and others overseeing them? You know now that that work could have been done by machines.
They lied that it was necessary for you to fight and die to protect that lie, to sacrifice your children to the cause of a rag on a stick. To sell out to the Meridians, the Firstslain as we name them, and surrender your control to their companies just so you might maintain the division between you. And then, a few years later, the Firstslain changed their minds and eliminated the practice of slavery, as is right and good, for no man should be the property of another. And you learned that slavery was, indeed, not required for prosperity. But what of your sons who now lay mouldering in the grave for no reason other than to defend the lie that it was?
There are many in this world who believe the lie that they live in a nation, a land with its own language and its own flag and its own faith, things that mark their difference from other humans, things that divide them. But no-one, no-one in the world, has seen that falsehood demonstrated as thoroughly, as tragically, as you. The nation called Carolina was built only, solely, on maintaining a division among yourselves. Because you divided yourselves, you were weakened, exploited by others, turned into a laughingstock. All the pride you invested in those young men who had fought and died for you was shown to be hollow, when you saw that no cause is worth dying for, that any cause can vanish like a will-o’-the-wisp a mere handful of years later; while widows and mourning mothers grow old under the summer sun, no-one even remembers the reason why their husbands and sons ever took up arms.
But now the truth is here. I do not know how much you know of what outsiders call Sanchezism or Societism. Whatever you do, cast it aside. Know only that we stand against all division. All humans are humans, and all are of equal worth. Some are suited to different kinds of work than others, and our meritocratic tests will identify this. But all souls are created equal, all deserve family, home and security. All deserve to live in a world secure in the knowledge that war will never come to them, that their children will never be taken from them to fight under a lie of a flag that no-one will remember a century on.
For you, that world begins today. And, as I ask your Amigo Karderus and Amiga Ferrera to help me, I now hoist the last flag you will ever look upon. In time, perhaps, no flag will be needed at all. But so long as this world is divided, look upon the plain black field and the Threefold Eye, the eye that sees only so long as its three supporters are united, and know that this is the beginning of the end of history. For history is nothing more than a record of wars and battles; and in the future, there will be none left to depict.
Peace and prosperity begins now. Publazon Benestarum! For the public good!
As I applauded twice as hard to make up for Perse’s inability to, I shouted at her over the noise. “That should’ve been you up there! That Sally Smith, ‘Amiga Ferrera’ my trasserus, only joined us a month ago!” Like Perse, she was a dark-skinned woman, while her colleague was a light-skinned man.
“Ricky Carter’s not exactly a longstanding member either,” she said back, struggling to shout without hurting herself. “But they’re the asimcon-friendly ones, I guess.” And, indeed, the bangs of flashes going off, making the Kapud’s tense bodyguards jump as they reflexively feared bomb attacks, would immortalise the moment.
I kissed her. Reflexively, she shied back, glancing around fearfully; we were in a crowd, after all. Then it dawned on her what the laws now were, and she laughed. Then winced, as she hurt herself. “Ow...”
“That’s the last pain you’ll ever have, doing that,” I told her. “And the last fear. Come on. The Kapud may have finished, but we haven’t...”
[13] The average temperature in Pensacola in March is about 17 °C or 62 °F.
[14] I.e. Mexicans, Guatemalans, New Irish, etc. Garzius’ estimate of ‘a hundred’ only means frontline American regulars and not their support crews, and is probably an underestimate even taking that into account.
[15] Fort Blackbeard, built by the Meridians in TTL, is similar to OTL’s Fort Jefferson, which is the third largest fort in the United States but was never finished.
[16] See Part #288.
[17] The Japanese had this problem in the OTL attack on Pearl Harbor, in which pilots would go for unlikely hits on battleships (or what they thought were battleships) while ignoring less prestigious but more strategically important targets.
[18] Of course, in OTL this sort of thing happened regularly in World War II even after the invention of radar. The phrasing here reflects the fact that in TTL Photrack was invented and popularised in a period of relative peace, so no major wars were fought while it was in its embryonic stages for this to become clear.
[19] In the sense of a communications blackout from Lectel lines being cut and Photel masts being damaged; cities lit with vac-lamps (electric lights) powered from a central station are still the exception rather than the rule. Some Societists may well have sabotaged the luftlight supply network in some cities, but it wasn’t one of their more iconic moves.
[20] Submachine guns. The Novalatina term is the same as the OTL Spanish name for full-size machine guns (Spanish specifies submachine guns as ‘machine pistols’, a term sometimes used in English as well). This is parallel evolution, as the French and Spanish terms for machine guns derive from older pre-existing words for grapeshot cannons and volley guns.
[21] I.e. Molotov cocktails. Zone 8 includes the Polish Front in Europe; the original devisers of the weapon in TTL were Italian. Garzius is giving the local Carolinian/American name for them, but they have different names in different countries. The OTL name caught on because it was a specific black-humour reference by the Finns to Soviet propaganda, from Foreign Minister Molotov, claiming that bombing runs were actually humanitarian aid missions dropping food supplies to starving Finns. Soviet bombs became ‘Molotov bread-baskets’ and the Finns’ petrol bomb was dubbed the Molotov cocktail as ‘the drink to go with his food’. With no such memorable origin story in TTL, everyone has their own name for the weapon, whether a joking one to real cocktails like ‘Devil Brew’ or a straightforward one like ‘spirit bottle bomb’.
I remember vividly my shock and excitement when Agende Rodriga finished with her code book and looked up at me, her face now pale enough to satisfy any of the local cretins with their skin-colour obsession. Usually so impressively cool and collected, she stumbled over her words as she explained it to me, me and the others in our small circle of confidantes within the local movement. It had swollen enormously thanks to our efforts, and we were naturally concerned about infiltration; control of information according to the tribal [cell] system seemed appropriate.
The code book, itself in code of course, was hugely intricate in order to extract such specific meaning from merely the words ‘twelve’ and ‘red’. As I understand it (there was no reason for Rodriga to explain it in detail), there were other variables such as what time of the year the Kapud had made his speech, the phase of the moon and so on, which allowed the message to be made more specific. I say specific, but in the end the message turned out to be shockingly general and universal. On the night of Unember [March] 14th, every single Agende, cadre and chapter member in the unliberated parts of Zones 4, 9, 11 and 13 were to enact whatever sabotage they could to undermine the Septens and their henchmen.
Surely there must have been more nuance to it than that which I was unaware of (I realised in hindsight) or else our brave men and women would have also sabotaged the railway lines we needed to capture intact, and so on. Nonetheless, I was shocked at the boldness of the move. Regardless of what the deviationist dribbling morons currently mismanaging Free Humanity may claim, never let it be said that I never doubted the Kapud’s judgement. At that time, I feared it was too high a price to pay. The Kapud was effectively sacrificing all we had on this continent for a moment of advantage. Even a spectacular victory over the Septens would leave us with no-one to direct true believers within the Zones they squatted on. Afterwards, we would no longer have eyes and ears among the Septens, and they could relax in the knowledge that we would have to rebuild our networks from scratch.
Yet, as always, I underestimated the Kapud’s genius. It was not until years later that I was able to watch from afar, with sad amusement, as the Septens tore themselves apart in what they referred to as the ‘Second Black Scare’. Politicians and others made remorseless claims of Sanchezista infiltration in all walks of their government; men and women who had barely heard of the Way lost their jobs and were discredited and ostracised in their community. All the while, none of them dreamed that the Septen-occupied lands were perhaps the most Sanchezista-free part of the globe, where anyone with a record going back more than a decade or so could not possibly be one of our infiltrators, as we had already sacrificed them all. Their own paranoia, the limitations of their petty nationalistically-blinded minds, would hurt the Septens more than our Agendes ever had.
But let us return to happier times. It was clear what the order signified; Celatores would be landing in North America at the same time. None of us were aware that the Septens were planning an attack of their own, simultaneously, on the Pablo Sanchez Canal. Some attribute the timing to the Kapud’s genius, and though I can understand that view, I believe it was a mere coincidence – accountable, of course, to Dyeus’ providence. It is always reassuring to be reminded that one is fighting on the noble side, even if the act of fighting itself will always be repugnant.
Speaking of which. Persephone and I had had a falling out, one which had driven not only her to tears, but me as well. Like other cadre members, she wanted to take up arms (smuggled in over the past few years) and fight to raise the black flag over this land. With the others, I could dismiss them as necessary casualties; like myself, a necessary evil to free this land from the tyranny of an inferior level of civilisation (and barely that, in this case) whose losses would be honoured but not mourned. But I loved Persephone, and I could not bare to think of her one day standing on the gallows beside me, ready to surrender her life for the inexorable crime-sin of murder – no matter how noble the cause. Also, it was still a matter of debate then whether Celatores should be permitted to have children, and if so, whether they should be raised by their families or in Garderista crèches. It was the never-ending argument about whether the urge to raise arms against fellow humans was nature or nurture. For now, the Kapud’s pragmatism had suppressed the argument, but I knew it would return. I could give up a child to the cause, reluctantly, but I did not want Persephone to face that decision.
She did not understand my reasoning, of course, and so those days in Unember were colder between us than the month itself, in this balmy town misnamed Pensacola.[13] I kept my face fixed when I saw her practicing with her old Caputo ’91 rifle, doubtless salvaged from some poor Firstslain casualty of the War of Ascension. Fortunately, though the old lies of that age had been expunged from the Liberated Zones, our ammunition was still compatible with it, and my own superior Pazifikador XVIII could use the same stock. I wished Perse and I were as intercompatible as our weapons were, back then.
To get back to Rodriga’s briefing. We had more specific instructions than most, it seemed; reading between the lines, Pensacola had been targeted as a major descent site. We did not guess, at that point, that it was the major beachhead target. Later, many have claimed it was my reports, and the intervention of good old Barredus, that led to Pensacola being selected. I have always dismissed such things as mere flattery. Regardless, we prepared our plans. Pensacola’s defences might be old and creaking and poorly maintained, but there was still a detachment of about a hundred Septen regulars here, a minority amid the Zone 11 auxiliaries scattered through the hinterland.[14] They possessed a fort and a small artillery park with a couple of rusting pieces and some better-maintained protcars, which they used for occasional patrols and parades to show off their strength. It was not much, but we knew that in today’s warfare, a small group of soldiers could hold off a much superior force if they were allowed to gain a defensive position. Our task, therefore, was to ensure they could not do so...
*
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—
Operatio Libramendum (meaning pendulum) was launched on March 14th 1926, even as Societist infiltrators wrought havoc across the Empire. This was intended both as a distraction to overwhelm Fredericksburg with reports (not helped by the simultaneous Operation Revenge) and a way to break up communications and transport, hampering American efforts to respond to the attack. In stereotyped depictions of the event in film, we usually picture wide-eyed Societist fanatics cutting Lectel cables or Civic Steam lines, blowing up railway tracks, throwing spirit bombs through the windows of armouries, and the like.
Less discussed nowadays, though it was a major target in the Second Black Scare and helped doom the Mentian Party as a distinct entity, was Societist infiltration of the trade union movement. Many strikes had been pre-prepared for the day, ostensibly protesting against factory conditions as the plague continued to spread through them. Conversely, other protests came from groups unwilling to further tolerate the plague quarantine rules that did exist. When the attacks began, the Societists spread a message that Alfarus’ rule meant that Liberated Humans had been able to tolerate quarantine rules in order to focus on saving lives until the plague could be tackled, whereas the Empire had enforced quarantine rules just so lives could be sacrificed elsewhere in war instead. The Celatores’ initial rapid success helped feed the propaganda image that Societist Amigos and Amigas were healthy, rested and easily sweeping aside the tired, plague-ridden, war-weakened Americans.
As planned, Societist forces initially attacked the Spirit Glades, landing some troops to largely make mischief and a noise, as the region was strategically unimportant and not well connected to the rest of East Florida. It was clear the Societists’ hopes were that they could still draw American armies southwards into Florida and trap them there. After the war, many American critics stated that this landing would have been impossible if the Faulkner Ministry had not cancelled the modernisation of the former Fort Blackbeard on the Dry Tortuga Islands, instead having it demolished. Of course, it remains debatable whether a fort designed primarily to combat now-obsolete piracy (despite its ironic name) could have stood up to a modern Meridian force, even one that lacked hiveships and relied on celagii flying from Cuba.[15] A few weeks later, an outrider for this small Societist jungle force would be witnessed by the American rocket pioneer Edith Harrison near Caloosa. Harrison’s experiments had not yet attracted government interest yet, but that was about to change.[16]
Possibly based on information from Markus Garzius, Lugallus Rivarius changed his plans and chose to commit only a single hiveship force (the Elam’s) to attacking Fort Insulza on Tampa Bay. The Americans fought back hard, using some of the dromes which Gilmore had had redeployed to East Florida, and the Societists had the worse of it. The Elam had to retreat with significant losses, eventually rejoining the rest of Flodus East after repairs and resupply in Cuba. If the American pilots had managed to sink the Elam then it might have been enough to tip the scales later. Yet at this time, even after the shock of Rubikon, there is evidence that the pilots were ignoring their orders and deliberately trying to target the accompanying Societist lineship Pharaoh with steelteeth. (The Pharaoh was substantially damaged and out of the war for a month, but did not sink). Perhaps it was simply a matter of prestige, though this remains controversial.[17] While the Elam force was engaging the American dromes, Celatores were landed significantly to the north in what was largely wasteland, being forced to go around the keys and sandbanks blocking off the coastline proper. This force was intended to attack Fort Insulza from the north, but suffered many problems due to the terrain and only succeeded in keeping the Americans’ attention. However, this was also true on a grander scale; the success of the Fort Insulza aeromen and the ongoing attempted siege continued to draw the attention of Fredericksburg in coming days, even as the major attack was breaking out of Pensacola.
Although only two feint attacks were planned, many American writings record three; the third was a mistake, with four Societist Llama flying artillery from the Lagash mistaking Maubela for Pensacola after flying off course – a common hazard in those days before Photrack.[18] Maubela was considerably better-defended than Pensacola for various reasons involving logistics and politics a decade before, and the Llamas were slaughtered. However, their sacrifice did (unintentionally) further draw American attention farther away from Pensacola, with feints now both to the east and the west of the real landing.
Aero forces from the Uruk, Memphis and Lagash (minus those four Llamas) combined to strike strategic targets around Pensacola as the Celatores went in. Lugallus Mardinus Kasdrus was in command of the primary ground force, and had prepared to give orders to bomb local railway lines in order to buy time to dig in and defend against American reinforcements as more troops arrived. However, he found that the situation was considerably more favourable than he had expected. Not only had the saboteurs done their job across the Empire and Fredericksburg was reeling, drowned in reports of exploding railway stations and blacked-out cities[19] from Drakesland to Hispaniola, but Markus Garzius had also been working the miracles his name is associated with...
*
From: “Memoirs of the First Born: The Authorised and Annotated Edition with Commentary” by Markus Garzius, edited and annotated by Albert Whitley and Maria Aydenia (1987)—
I wiped the blood from my hands and my rifle dispassionately with a handkerchief, and tried not to look at the initials in its corner. Persephone had given this to me, a few weeks and a hundred years ago. Somehow I could not quite bring myself to throw it on the ground, and I stuffed the bloodstained mass into my pocket to become a horrible clotted mess. It was a profound metaphor for the damage I had done to Perse’s life, I thought bleakly. Before I and my murderous heart had come into it, she had been...
No. I was being foolish. Perse was not only a canvas for me to air my own self-doubts and shame on. She had her own life, and before I had arrived, it had been a miserable one. Not only living in a primitive society where humans were judged for the colour of their skin, but in an unstable and uncertain one, where the rules of society could change from city neighbourhood to neighbourhood, shift overnight at the whims of occupiers. What I had realised, both from Perse and her fellow locals, was that the driving spirit of this land was apathy. They had been stuck in some state of purgatory since their last regime had been toppled and nothing had satisfactorily replaced it. Years later, someone called me a genius for this insight, but it was obvious, and I am sure Rodriga and her comrades had said the same in their messages. The people of this land would not fight to resist us. Nor would they fight for us, not unless we persuaded them we would be better than the Firstslain they still thought of us as. They would keep their heads down and hope the horrors of war did not touch them, a commendable enough impulse.
Thought clearly not simply because I had said so, the plans of the Kapud, Prokapud Dominikus and Lugallus Rivarius had taken this into account. I know that Lugallus Kasdrus was sceptical at first, which I can understand. He thought of this in terms of the War of Ascension, as having to take a beachhead at great cost and then create a cautious defensive line to prevent the opponent forces from throwing us back into the sea. And that probably would have been the case, if he’d been attacking some place that the Septens actually cared about. Here, the local ‘Carolinians’ would shrug and let us take over their railways and send our Celatores many talcodii afield. All we had to do was neutralise the small number of Septen defenders.
Which I needed to get back to. Reluctantly dismissing thoughts of Perse and her bloodied handkerchief, I shouldered my Pazifikador. Terzus Sutardus still had the sniper rifle with which I had taken the life of Oquendo – cruel necessity – and he was using it with far more skill than I had. Several more of my men instead used ametralladores, what the locals called ‘minicings’.[20] As we had learned fighting back in Zone 7, such a weapon could allow one man to take down many opponents, if he was skilled with it. Some of the more unsavoury ‘Neighbourly Society’ groups in the region also used them; Rodriga and her comrades had managed to bring a few of them over to our side, and now they fought alongside us.
With the death of the Septen sentry, the blood on Perse’s handkerchief now also pooling on his grey-green uniform bearing its lie of a flag in blue, red and gold on his shoulder, the next stage could commence. A few stars gleamed in the night sky above, though most were banished by the glow of the hissing luftlights on the streets. Only a handful of squares in Pensacola had bright vac-lamps of the sort I had become accustomed to in the urbs of Zone 1. That would change, I was sure, as we progressed their civilisation level, but in the meantime the flickering luftlights helped hide our movements.
Some bright murderer over in Zone 8 had figured out that one could potentially destroy a rather expensive opponent ansukurrus with a cheap and simple glass bottle of spirit with a burning rag in the neck. They called them Fireballs or Firefizzers, a pun on an intoxicating cocktails of the day, while others called them Devil Brews.[21] Our cadre members, unskilled with firearms, had prepared many so we could take out the Septens’ protcars. Yet we now found we could capture them intact, their guards having fled, and the only purpose for the Fireballs was for the spirit in them to be poured into the protcars’ tanks so they could be driven off. The Septens were reeling from the attack even more than we had hoped; though our celagii obviously did not bomb the city itself for fear of harming its people, merely flying low overhead had driven them into a panic. I realised anew that these men were far from the Septens’ best; those had all been sent to die in freezing trenches against Pablus Romanovius’ gang. These were the very dregs of their murderers, sent here to keep them away from others. Some were clearly drunk as we mowed them down, incensed we had interrupted their leisure. Perse had dropped enough hints that many of them saw the locals, especially those with darker skin, as their personal property, to be used for their own enjoyment on a whim. I am not a sufficiently good human to feel regret as my bullets tore them to shreds.
Out in the bay, I heard a distant explosion as one of the less-than-well-maintained forts guarding the entrance [OTL Fort Pickens] succumbed to a shell from one of our lineships. The other [OTL Fort McRee] was silent, so the men I had sent under Segundus Kalvus appeared to have done their work well. I wonder if the handful of Septens manning it had even woken from their sleep before they found their fortification in our hands. Now, nothing lay between the mouth of the bay and our legions landing here. Nothing, except the third fort, the one my men and I were now in the process of taking [OTL Fort Barrancas].
Surprise had been crucial; poorly maintained as it was, these walls could nonetheless have allowed a small Septen force to hold us off for crucial hours, allowing what heavy guns they had to fire on our troopships as they approached. We had to secure them first, and we had. Now it was time to fight our way through the facility before our opponents could rally. Speed; it was the same lesson Lugallus Rivarius would soon go on to teach the Septens. Like a bantamweight boxer repeatedly hitting a much larger opponent in the face; he could not strike a blow heavy enough to knock him out, but he could keep him off-balance until his heavier friend and ally – our reinforcements – could arrive. I smiled at that metaphor; I had been talking to Perse’s salt of the earth friend Beau too much, with his love of boxing. Then the reminder of Perse wiped the smile off my face. I shunted the thought aside once more and focused on my job.
It was a hard fight. Sutardus, whose skills lay in long-distance sniping, was wasted here and was lucky to escape with a minor wound that took him out of the fight. The opponents might have been complacent and caught off-guard, but they were wise enough to use stairwells and narrow corridors as pinch points against us as we sought to take over. I regret that, though it was not my intention, in practice we often ended up using bold and fanatical local cadres as human shields; they would attack frontally and draw the opponents’ attention while we tried to flank them through alternative routes. But they knew this fort far better than we did, and I lost too many friends in that fight. Still, while they were fighting us, they could not be doing anything against Lugallus Kadrus’ men as they landed. We had cut the Lectel lines and I was mostly certain we had managed to destroy the Photel mast by now; those commandeered protcars had been useful. But I could not afford to relax, to say that fine, we could just hole up these Septens until they were forced to surrender. We could not be sure of everything they had in their arsenal, both in terms of literal weapons or in tricks that might still let them alert their nationalistically blinded colleagues elsewhere.
So we pushed on, through that shadowy hell of concrete corridors lit only by flickering, hissing luftlights at best, aware that every door we opened could bring a hail of bullets from the other side, cutting short a precious human life in an instant. We persisted, for we had no choice. After a while, which seemed like years, it felt that our opponents’ morale suddenly collapsed. Perhaps their lookouts had seen signs of our ships and men arriving in the bay in great numbers, and the rumour had been passed down; I did not get to see that glorious sight myself.
It was tempting to cheer as our opponents finally broke and fled, but I knew I had to secure the primerus’ office. While sending my men to pursue the fleeing opponents, I took it on myself and headed off alone. Foolhardy, perhaps, but after all the loud bangs and richochets and blood, I needed time along with my thoughts.
Yet our local cadre friends, of course, had other ideas. I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye as I searched the shadowy, chaotic fort for the office, heading in random directions, ignoring orders. I knew they had been through a lot, and I did not query them. Occasionally I still heard distant gunshots, and after comparing them to my shaky mental map of the fort, I decided to head in the direction of one particular set.
I knew I was heading in the right direction when I saw, displayed on a wall behind glass, that lying rag of the Septens. The gold stars on the red cross were barely distinguishable in the dim, flickering synthetic twilight, but both stood out from the darker blue background even though the colours were shades of grey-brown. It was as though all the claimed vitality had been leached out of it. It was torn and ragged, too, with a plaque below stating in the debased dialect called English that the rag had been carried by Septen soldiers who had taken this town in the War of Ascension. I paused to reflexively spit on the rag, and it was only then that I realised my mouth was as dry as the grave. Fatigue threatened to hit my body like a wave, but I pushed through, as I had done so many times before in the conflict over in Zone 7. So long as this world was imperfect, so long as Celatores were needed, it was never time to rest.
The sounds of gunshots were growing more intermittent, but I still followed them, now more cautious, rifle in hand. I stepped over several corpses. Most, sadly, were in civilian garb with makeshift black armbands to indicate their allegiance: our poor brave cadres. Occasionally, they had taken one of their opponents with them, and a slovenly Septen lay in a pool of slowly clotting blood, black under the dim lights. As though to foreshadow that world beneath the black flag when no-one would have to shed blood ever again.
I finally entered the office as a cadre member I recognised – his local name was George – collapsed before me, a bullet in his brain. As he fell, it revealed a lone Septen brandishing a revolving pistol. My mind rapidly reconstructed the scene; before him on a desk was a second, discarded pistol, its drum evidently emptied of bullets in making some of the corpses I had seen. Also on the desk was a large metal bin that had been hastily filled with papers and cardboard files, a small container of flammable cleaning fluid, and a cigarette lighter. Evidently the Septen had been planning to destroy important documents before they could fall into our hands, but our cadres, Dyeus bless them, had at least managed to slow him down. With their lives, they had bought time for me to stop him.
Which I would have done, had my trusty Pazifikador not chosen this moment to jam. I looked down in shock, a movement that would probably have been comic under other circumstances. I had failed to sufficiently clean the blood with Perse’s handkerchief, the sort of rookie mistake that I would have yelled at a raw recruit for and put him on latrine duty. It showed how distracted the thought of her had made me. It was about to get me killed.
Reflexively, I immediately sought cover instead, only to find there was very little. I knocked over a small table as a bullet whined over my head, but it provided insufficient protection. “Don’t move!” the Septen cried in a voice made harsh by yelling many orders over the past hour; I suspected mine would sound much the same. He came closer and loomed over me, drawing a bead on my forehead but not firing. A half-gloating, half-terrified grin came over his face. He was a tough man, but running to fat, probably a victim of the same exploitative way of life that had literally and metaphorically corrupted Septen occupation forces across this region.
“Hands up!” As the flickering luftlights hissed to a moment of intensity and cast his face into sharp relief, I realised to my shock that I recognised him. I did not know his name, but his face was one of a few that had been burned into my memory. He was one of the passers-by who had scowled at me for kissing Perse in the street. He hadn’t been wearing his uniform then: why? Was he a spy? Or had he just preferred not to be recognisable when making use of the local drug dens or houses of ill repute?
I raised my hands to shoulder height only, letting my useless rifle swing limply from its strap. My only other weapon was a knife in my belt, and there was little chance of me being able to draw it while he trained that pistol on my head. His past handiwork, on the remains of our poor cadre members littering the floor around us, betrayed that no matter his other failings, he was clearly an excellent shot. “You are in command?” I asked in English, vaguely recognising his dimly-lit rank insignia as that of a major, as the Septens named it.
He laughed harshly. “Damn right I’m in command! Or I should be,” he added sourly. “Looks like you torchies have overrun the place while we were all in our beds with one arm around a whore and the other around a bottle.” Well, at least he realised it.
“Not ‘torchies’,” I corrected him mildly. “We are—”
“Oh yes, I know,” he said, waving the pistol slightly for emphasis without breaking his aim. To my surprise, he switched to broken Novalatina. “Societistas, followers of Sanchus. You should like these place, nobody have known which country it were since I were an boy.”
“You speak the true tongue,” I said, keeping my tone diplomatically neutral to avoid giving away what I thought of his proficiency.
“I speaks it. Always good to keeps your option open, naught?” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Let me speak you, your way look a lot sensibler since war breaks? Lots-thousands die in mud and disease, for what? Why continue?”
I was surprised. If he really had any level of sympathy with us... “Then why kill all these?” I asked, gesturing at the bodies around me. “Why not join us?”
“You did ask not before you attack,” he explained, leaning on his desk chair, though his gun hand remained firmly trained on me. “Maybe I considers it. Maybe not. You could take not risk, naught? I understands.” He laughed. “What if now I give thisses?” He gestured with his other hand at the documents. “You offers place for me? I know where secret gold reserve buried, too. Need not tell, ah, Lugallus?”
His reflexive appeal to corruption sickened me, but so long as I faced his weapon, I could not risk it. “Hand those over and I give you my word you will be treated with honour,” I said.
The Septen major shrugged, again not shifting his gun hand a fraction of a susius [fingerbreadth]. “Looks like I has not choose much, eh?”
Then everything happened too fast.
There was a noise at one of the doors. A figure, barely visible in the dim light, burst in. The silhouette was wielding a rifle. Instantly, casually, the Septen turned and fired at them. It was not a headshot – he wasn’t that good – but the figure let out a cry and collapsed a few feet away, momentum carrying him on. A rectangular object flew from his chest area, landing near my overturned table.
Reflexively, my eyes squinted in the dim light to read it. The luftlights flickered bright again and the words on the cover, picked out in gold against the black leather, shone to treacherous life:
UNIDAS PER SOCIEDADIS
AUDORE PABLO SANCHEZ
AUDORE PABLO SANCHEZ
I had seen this copy of Sanchez’s first great work before. I had seen her devouring it with the eagerness of a child who has just learned to read. I had told her off for carrying it around with her like a talisman, warning her of what might happen if the police or local enforcers found it on her person.
Slowly, with inexorable dread, my eyes leapt to the fallen figure. Face down, but her dark hand flung before her told the story. As did the scream she had let out, only to be cut horribly short.
Persephone.
“Damn n---------r b------h,” the major said dismissively in his own tongue, before switching back to Novalatina. “All right. We do be having deal?”
I stared at him for a long moment. It was probably just as well it was so dim, as otherwise he would probably have seen it in my eyes.
Without another word, I leapt to my feet, curling around one leg to kick Unity Through Society into the air and roughly in the direction of the major’s face. I had never been so grateful for all the Human Football I had played with the local children in Zone 7. The major let out a reflexive cry and shot, but his instincts betrayed him; his pistol tracked towards the moving object, his lower animal urges telling him that was the threat. And this man had a lot of lower animal urges, I sensed.
The distraction lasted only a moment, but it was enough to let me leap over the table, smack the pistol out of his hand with my left, and simultaneously use my right to pull my knife from my belt. A moment later, I was holding it to his throat as I bent him over backward against the desk. This man might be a crack shot, but he was clearly not in his element when it came to hand-to-hand. Fear showed in his eyes, yet amid the fear was confusion. “What...?” he managed.
“Offer me your gold,” I said in a low, dangerous voice, speaking English. “Offer me your secrets. Offer me everything you have.”
“It’s yours!” he squeezed out. Not the only thing, either; my leg, braced against his, suddenly felt warm and wet. If I could have been more disgusted than I already was.
“I want something else,” I said softly. “I want the precious human life back of that woman you just killed without a thought.”
He stared at me in genuine confusion for a moment. “What, you mean that n---?”
I cut him off, literally, as my blade drew a droplet of blood from his throat. Up close, his eyes were those of a pig. Appropriate.
“You said you would treat me with honour!” he squeaked.
“I keep that promise,” I said, half to myself. It was true, in a sense. Few would dispute the justice of what I was about to do. But not even the most deviationist of the lickspittle braindead morons claiming to represent Sanchezism nowadays would probably concede that it was acceptable for me to make him understand what was happening first, in the way I did. I do not care. I know I am not a good human.
Perhaps, and call me a deviationist myself if you wish, sometimes humanity needs those who are not good humans.
“My name is Markus Garzius,” I told him. “You killed my lover. Her name was Persephone Weeks. Now die, you bastard.”
I rammed the blade into his neck so hard it almost severed his spine.
The body slumped into pooling blood. I conscientiously shoved it off the desk lest the blood spatter the papers its former inhabitant had sought to destroy. We could probably have made more sense of them if he lived. A coward like that would be easy to intimidate into giving away secrets, even if he hadn’t hinted already he’d have done it. As a result, it would take the cryptographers time to understand them, and maybe miss opportunities that might get fellow Celatores killed.
It is easy to play such moral games. I did not care then, I do not care now. All I know is that what I did felt right.
Then, my world was turned upside down again.
I happened to look down at the copy of Unity Through Society where it had fallen. With sorrow, I picked it up. It was then that I noticed the hole. A bullet had penetrated it, leaving a larger exit hole. Surely the major hadn’t managed to hit it midair when I kicked it as a distraction? He wasn’t that good a shot?
Behind me, I heard a wheezing gasp. I spun, and saw that dark hand was moving, pushing ineffectually at the floor as its owner tried to raise herself up. Perse looked up at me with pained eyes. “Markus...?” she managed.
I barely remember the next few moments, as I helped her into a nearby chair, fussing over her and mumbling in a confused mix of Novalatina, English and even the local corrupt tongues I’d learned in Zones 7 and 19 over the years. At one point I wasn’t sure if I was kissing her or trying to resuscitate her. [Probable anachronism – editor’s note] “Perse! You’re – how –”
She grinned at me, despite the pain in her eyes. There was wet blood on her chest, but not much of it, and a strange extra strap around it that didn’t belong to her rifle. She pulled her shirt open, revealing a shallow wound. “I think,” she gasped, “broke my collarbone...but that’s all...”
Confusion reigned, until my mind finally made sense of that extra strap. “You...you were carrying around the Book with you?”
“Took the bullet,” she confirmed with a gasp. I realised her earlier scream had been cut short by the force of the impact winding her, nothing more. “Slowed it down...broke the strap...” Hence why the book had fallen at my feet.
I gazed down at the wounded copy of Sanchez’s genius insights, then at my wounded love. “Persephone...I thought you were...I thought we...”
Then the tears welled up. And, as the final bombardment of the remaining Septen positions by our fleet provided better background fireworks than any new year’s celebration could have, over the slain body of the foul divisions that had poisoned this land for so long, we kissed once more.
I never did learn the major's name.
Three days later, we were there in the crowd, Perse with her arm in a sling to protect her healing collarbone, to watch the speech. Today, not only the nationalistically blinded gang regimes but also the deviationists in power over the Liberated Zones foolishly claim that it was not the real Kapud who had come to speak, merely a double. As though I could be fooled by some imitation? I knew he had travelled here, probably via an ironshark in great secrecy, to show how important our breakthrough was.
I was already overcome with emotion, but then was shocked anew with everyone else when his voice boomed out like that of a god. I learned later that it was the first public demonstration of a new kind of electrical amplification that our scholars had worked on, far superior to the compressed-air variety we all knew. It brought the Kapud’s voice to not all those assembled in Seville Square – Celatores, local loyalists who could now openly assemble, and other locals uncertain of the future – but blasted it across most of the town.
The Kapud spoke in Novalatina, with a translation provided by an aide. It was strange to think that the way most of these locals heard the stirring speech would come from that anonymous assistant, not from the Kapud of Humanity, but such things illustrate just why a single language is needed.
“People of Zon4Urb38, be not afeared. For longer than any of you have been alive, you have been ruled by those who have lied to you.
They lied that it was necessary to travel here from Zon11Ins1 [Great Britain] because there was insufficient space or wealth there for you. There was; they merely did not wish to share it.
They lied that it was necessary for you to conquer the people who already lived here in Zone 4 and take their land, because there was insufficient for you to share and live together in harmony. There was; but that was too difficult for them. It was so much easier to slaughter thousands and built a colony on a legacy of blood.
They lied that it was necessary for those of darker skin to be stolen from Zone 10 and be brought here against their will, to work the fields from dawn till dusk, their very lives stolen from them as readily as if they were murdered. It was not; your rulers merely wished to make money, money that would never be shared with the rest of you, no matter your skin colour.
They lied that it was necessary for you to divide yourself from your neighbours, to create that lie called Carolina atop that lie called America, for the sake of maintaining that division within you. For what? What did it profit any of you, save those who owned the plantations, to keep some of you enslaved and others overseeing them? You know now that that work could have been done by machines.
They lied that it was necessary for you to fight and die to protect that lie, to sacrifice your children to the cause of a rag on a stick. To sell out to the Meridians, the Firstslain as we name them, and surrender your control to their companies just so you might maintain the division between you. And then, a few years later, the Firstslain changed their minds and eliminated the practice of slavery, as is right and good, for no man should be the property of another. And you learned that slavery was, indeed, not required for prosperity. But what of your sons who now lay mouldering in the grave for no reason other than to defend the lie that it was?
There are many in this world who believe the lie that they live in a nation, a land with its own language and its own flag and its own faith, things that mark their difference from other humans, things that divide them. But no-one, no-one in the world, has seen that falsehood demonstrated as thoroughly, as tragically, as you. The nation called Carolina was built only, solely, on maintaining a division among yourselves. Because you divided yourselves, you were weakened, exploited by others, turned into a laughingstock. All the pride you invested in those young men who had fought and died for you was shown to be hollow, when you saw that no cause is worth dying for, that any cause can vanish like a will-o’-the-wisp a mere handful of years later; while widows and mourning mothers grow old under the summer sun, no-one even remembers the reason why their husbands and sons ever took up arms.
But now the truth is here. I do not know how much you know of what outsiders call Sanchezism or Societism. Whatever you do, cast it aside. Know only that we stand against all division. All humans are humans, and all are of equal worth. Some are suited to different kinds of work than others, and our meritocratic tests will identify this. But all souls are created equal, all deserve family, home and security. All deserve to live in a world secure in the knowledge that war will never come to them, that their children will never be taken from them to fight under a lie of a flag that no-one will remember a century on.
For you, that world begins today. And, as I ask your Amigo Karderus and Amiga Ferrera to help me, I now hoist the last flag you will ever look upon. In time, perhaps, no flag will be needed at all. But so long as this world is divided, look upon the plain black field and the Threefold Eye, the eye that sees only so long as its three supporters are united, and know that this is the beginning of the end of history. For history is nothing more than a record of wars and battles; and in the future, there will be none left to depict.
Peace and prosperity begins now. Publazon Benestarum! For the public good!
As I applauded twice as hard to make up for Perse’s inability to, I shouted at her over the noise. “That should’ve been you up there! That Sally Smith, ‘Amiga Ferrera’ my trasserus, only joined us a month ago!” Like Perse, she was a dark-skinned woman, while her colleague was a light-skinned man.
“Ricky Carter’s not exactly a longstanding member either,” she said back, struggling to shout without hurting herself. “But they’re the asimcon-friendly ones, I guess.” And, indeed, the bangs of flashes going off, making the Kapud’s tense bodyguards jump as they reflexively feared bomb attacks, would immortalise the moment.
I kissed her. Reflexively, she shied back, glancing around fearfully; we were in a crowd, after all. Then it dawned on her what the laws now were, and she laughed. Then winced, as she hurt herself. “Ow...”
“That’s the last pain you’ll ever have, doing that,” I told her. “And the last fear. Come on. The Kapud may have finished, but we haven’t...”
[13] The average temperature in Pensacola in March is about 17 °C or 62 °F.
[14] I.e. Mexicans, Guatemalans, New Irish, etc. Garzius’ estimate of ‘a hundred’ only means frontline American regulars and not their support crews, and is probably an underestimate even taking that into account.
[15] Fort Blackbeard, built by the Meridians in TTL, is similar to OTL’s Fort Jefferson, which is the third largest fort in the United States but was never finished.
[16] See Part #288.
[17] The Japanese had this problem in the OTL attack on Pearl Harbor, in which pilots would go for unlikely hits on battleships (or what they thought were battleships) while ignoring less prestigious but more strategically important targets.
[18] Of course, in OTL this sort of thing happened regularly in World War II even after the invention of radar. The phrasing here reflects the fact that in TTL Photrack was invented and popularised in a period of relative peace, so no major wars were fought while it was in its embryonic stages for this to become clear.
[19] In the sense of a communications blackout from Lectel lines being cut and Photel masts being damaged; cities lit with vac-lamps (electric lights) powered from a central station are still the exception rather than the rule. Some Societists may well have sabotaged the luftlight supply network in some cities, but it wasn’t one of their more iconic moves.
[20] Submachine guns. The Novalatina term is the same as the OTL Spanish name for full-size machine guns (Spanish specifies submachine guns as ‘machine pistols’, a term sometimes used in English as well). This is parallel evolution, as the French and Spanish terms for machine guns derive from older pre-existing words for grapeshot cannons and volley guns.
[21] I.e. Molotov cocktails. Zone 8 includes the Polish Front in Europe; the original devisers of the weapon in TTL were Italian. Garzius is giving the local Carolinian/American name for them, but they have different names in different countries. The OTL name caught on because it was a specific black-humour reference by the Finns to Soviet propaganda, from Foreign Minister Molotov, claiming that bombing runs were actually humanitarian aid missions dropping food supplies to starving Finns. Soviet bombs became ‘Molotov bread-baskets’ and the Finns’ petrol bomb was dubbed the Molotov cocktail as ‘the drink to go with his food’. With no such memorable origin story in TTL, everyone has their own name for the weapon, whether a joking one to real cocktails like ‘Devil Brew’ or a straightforward one like ‘spirit bottle bomb’.
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Kaiphranos
Donor
I would expect the Societists to preserve them, but interpret them in some way that fits their worldview.
Well, it sounds like Markus is going to be a casualty of the Combine's equivalent of destalinization, then.
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
And with the hints the Combine may allow the Celatores to have kids will provide fuel to the Biblioteka Mundial that they are antiHuman aristocratic militarists and order collective punishment on anyone ... associated with them, which is part of the reason Markus hates the Combine's current leadership
Also we haven't seen how Novalatina deals with verbs or sentences - it's been mostly nouns
With NovaLatina as the "True Tongue", will Martial Latin be considered a separate language or merely a 'debased form of the True Language'
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You know, that might be another point in favour of the thing we keep hearing about how the Grey Societists are the thing that winds up doing the most damage to the Combine in the end. Their existence belies the Combine's claims to be purely united, and the fact that NovaLatina and Martial Latin are vaguely-related dialects instead of one language only drives it in further
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
Or the fact that they were elected into power, providing an initially-popular or even populist societism.
That the Eternal state's language is non-latin will provide further rebuttal and its emphasis on Islam even more so.
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