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There were certain things that Captain Paul von Oberstein had learned to accept decades ago. A different man than he was might have listed them all in a row: a litany of indignations, large and small, that made up the course of his life. It was not that Oberstein did not nurture resentments, but it was not in his nature to complain.
His position in Iserlohn Fortress, as a staff officer beneath Admiral Seeckt in the fortress fleet, was likely one of the highest he could reach in his career. It was not a prestigious position; it had the tedium and danger of the front lines, combined with the lack of honor that came with true command. If he survived in this position for a few years, he might be rewarded with a post back in the capital, though a promotion to flag officer seemed doubtful, even if Seeckt decided to praise Oberstein on his way out the door.
The position had been given to him in order to get rid of him— he knew that much. It was the combination of his flawless service record, and the fact that his former superior in the Data Processing Unit had a personal grudge against Admiral Seeckt, being a distant relation of Admiral Stockhausen, who considered Seeckt his rival. He hadn’t explained this in as many words to Oberstein’s face, but Oberstein was nothing if not a man who knew how to listen.
It didn’t matter why he had been given an Iserlohn post, petty grudge or deserved promotion. He was almost optimistic about the position, despite its downsides. Iserlohn was, more than anywhere else in the Empire, the crossing-point. The door through which everyone of note passed. It was the closest he could get to real power, as an already older-than-average captain who would not receive another promotion in his career. It was a place where he might be able to find others who shared his goals, and begin— at last— to work towards them.
Coming in on the ship that brought him there, he made sure to find a true viewing window to look at the fortress from. Seeing it through the screens on the bridge of the ship, and any of the other external displays, only showed the muddy, flat, staticky image that their cameras picked up. For the other men seeing Iserlohn for the first time, this might have sufficed. Oberstein had learned quickly that most people were not cursed to perceive every pixel and luminescent dot on a computer screen as an individual flicker that struggled to resolve into coherency. He preferred to see things directly with the cameras of his cybernetic eyes.
In his vision, Iserlohn was less the mirrored bauble that others described it as, and more of a swirling haze. He could change the frequencies of light that his eyes saw, and this revealed to him more than what was visible to others. The round fortress was covered by a liquid metal shell, but the radiation present in space, and the movement of the liquid metal itself, caused the topmost part to slowly evaporate. Iserlohn’s own gravity, though it was far weaker than any planet’s, was enough to keep these evaporated metal particles in place. This haze of iron vapor surrounded the fortress like a mist, though ships plunged through it, completely unaware or uncaring. They left trails in their wakes, like waving a hand through swirling motes of dust falling through a sunbeam, or a heavy truck passing through thick fog.
For just a moment, he could understand why so many people described Iserlohn as beautiful. The illusion was broken the minute that he stepped inside.
Iserlohn was loud, and crowded, and had the smell of a million men crammed into it. Shower water was rationed. In places, the corridors were too narrow for people to walk two abreast, so there was an awkward shuffling of ranks when two men encountered each other in the hallways, the lower ranked man having to flatten himself to the wall to let the other through. Footsteps echoed; walls creaked. It was impossible to escape the sensation of being inside something manmade, and therefore fallible.
Even Oberstein could recognize the irony in his own thoughts: it was strange for him to prefer the illusion of the perfection of nature, when he himself had been born one of nature’s mistakes— completely blind. If he had been an animal, a dog or a bird, he would not have survived to adulthood. But he wouldn’t have been aware of that as an injustice: it simply would have been. It was man’s ability to understand perfection, and therefore seek it, that tended to disturb him. If Oberstein had been born a few generations earlier, when the edicts of Rudolph were still enforced with all their strength, he would have been killed as an infant, seeking to purify the human race of any genetic stain. But he had lived, which sometimes seemed only for the sake of being cognizant of that injustice.
Regardless, from the moment he stepped inside Iserlohn’s walls, he disliked the fortress. He didn’t let it show on his face when he first reported to Admiral Seeckt’s office, saluting crisply at the door.
“Captain von Oberstein reporting, sir,” he said.
Seeckt looked up at him, and his nose twitched in immediate displeasure, as though Oberstein smelled like something foul, rather than like the same metal tang of filtered air that the whole fortress carried. Seeckt was a tall man, broad shouldered and strong despite his obvious age. His hair was fully white. Even while Seeckt remained seated, and Oberstein stood before his desk, there was an obvious contrast in their physiques. Oberstein was willowy and not particularly tall. The streaks of grey that had formed in his lank hair were perhaps the only physical similarities between them. Seeckt, too, was at the end of his career, though he had made it quite nearly to the top of the ladder: his position as the head of Iserlohn’s fortress fleet was marred only by the fact that he shared the honor of defending Iserlohn with the other commander (of the fortress itself), Stockhausen.
“You’re the new staff officer.”
It wasn’t a question, but Oberstein had no choice but to reply anyway. “Yes, sir.”
Seeckt looked him over. “How long have you been a captain, Oberstein?”
This was a pointed dig at his age. Nevertheless, Oberstein did not let any emotion cross his face— the intended insult rolled past him, and he simply answered the question, looking at the respectful fixed point somewhere above Seeckt’s forehead. “Five years, sir. Were you not provided my service record?”
“I was. I looked at it.” There was an uncomfortably long stretch of silence as Seeckt stared at him some more. A different man’s skin would have crawled. Oberstein, however, could stand in silence for quite some time. “Most other people who remain at one rank for that long find their talents are of better use outside the fleet, and retire.”
“The fleet has many roles for experienced officers,” Oberstein said. “I hope that I may continue to be of use.”
Seeckt leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. Dispassionately, he said, “But I suppose you wouldn’t be having a family, would you?”
No, that option had been lost long ago. Sometimes, when he permitted himself to think about it, Oberstein wondered what he would have wanted had he been given a choice. He was rather repulsed by the idea, willful participation in the Empire’s system, but he wasn’t a stupid enough man to lie to himself. Had he not been born blind, and therefore with the need to see and understand the Empire for what it was, he might have been like any other man. There were a million people in this fortress, and how many of the rest of them were holding the same resentments in their hearts as Oberstein was? Very few, he feared. Those who had not already lost something vital still had far too much to lose, if they decided to oppose the status quo. It was far better, and easier, for them to blind themselves to it.
“No, sir. I am the last of the von Oberstein line.” He said it without any rancor in his voice, in the same dry tone as he said anything.
Seeckt dismissed him quickly after that.
This had been some time ago, and since then, Oberstein had settled into his post with adequate comfort, though it was to the discomfort of his new coworkers. His fellow staff officers ignored him as much as they were able, as if by associating with him, they would receive the taint of his weakness. The enlisted men— already tending towards a self-protective wariness around officers— made superstitious hand signs behind their backs when they saw the red flash of his mechanical eyes.
Although this treatment was familiar (indeed, it was almost comfortably safe: he was now a high enough rank that no one could lay a hand on him physically) it was an obstacle to his goals. He had thought to come to Iserlohn to find someone like-minded, but some fact about his nature preceded him when he walked into every room. Even if his mechanical eyes were seamless, as they were most times when their batteries were not running low, strangers found him offputting.
He had always tended towards quiet observation, but he sunk deeply into silence, speaking only when spoken to, and spending all his time listening for any signal or sign.
No such sign seemed to be forthcoming, from any direction. It didn’t help that he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. Anyone else in his position, who shared his thoughts, by necessity had to hide them, or risk tumbling down into the abyss. When he sat in the officers’ mess and listened to the conversations drift around him, he knew he wouldn’t hear anything of note. His one hope was to keep watch for someone else like him , in whatever way that meant: perhaps someone else sitting at a table alone. But the cliques of the officers in the fortress fleet were well established, and Oberstein didn’t see anyone worth pursuing.
At night, he lay in his narrow bed in the otherwise generous officers’ quarters. His eyes were out, soaking in a glass of saline on his bedside table, so the only thing he could do when laying in bed was listen to the fortress creak and moan around him. Some banging of metal, a loose flap in the air filtration system, could carry for kilometers in the echoing vents that snaked the fortress. The liquid metal moving like tides far above his head, its motion a necessary consequence of the pulsing of the gravity engine at the fortress’s center, gave a throbbing song to the fortress at large. This sound would have been sub-audible, except for the fact that certain objects had resonant frequencies in key with it, and ceaselessly rattled.
He thought about the fortress itself, its manmade veneer of perfection, and he thought about what it would take to destroy it.
Such an act of terrorism might be within the grasp of one well placed person, and as time passed, Oberstein found himself thinking about it more and more. It wasn’t that he had any love in his heart for the Alliance— if Iserlohn was somehow destroyed, there would be no stopping their fleets from sweeping through the corridor into the Imperial heartland— but it might be better than the status quo.
He wondered if everyone else who harbored thoughts of treason inside Iserlohn were thinking of ways to defect to the enemy, rather than ways to destroy everything touted as indestructible: a fortress, a dynasty. It would be easier, and, for any man who cared about the value of his own life, less suicidal.
This thought consumed him for some time, and in his off hours, he used the authorization granted to him as Seeckt’s staff officer to wander the depths of Iserlohn, and to investigate it for potential weaknesses.
There were areas in the fortress where it seemed like no one went. Away from the main hubs of the shipyards and bunks and cafeterias, there were the vast fields of soybeans and corn, tended almost entirely by robots, intended to keep the population of the fortress fed even during a siege. There were storerooms full of food, and spare parts for several fleets’ worth of ships, and vacuum sealed stacks of new bedding for the enlisted mens’ beds, arrayed on towering shelves that stretched far above Oberstein’s head.
The scope of the logistics at play fascinated him. It reinforced the sensation that every person inside the fortress, and indeed the Empire, was one further cog in a great machine, but it also compelled him to wonder which of the cogs were vital to the functioning of that machine. Which pieces could be destroyed by his own small hands?
He wandered through the dark storerooms, looking for nothing in particular, using his flashlight only to read the labels on crates. He didn’t bother to turn on the hard and buzzing overhead lights; his eyes could see perfectly well in the dark, though everything outside of his flashlight’s cone was cast in shades of iron-red.
In the dark down there, he could see rats scurry away from his flashlight beam. It was a pity they were afraid of him— although he disliked the sentimental feeling, he nevertheless was fond of animals. Finding them there down in the depths of Iserlohn, away from the manicured and false beauty of the pleasure garden on the upper levels, felt like a vindication, and like he had found the kindred spirits he was looking for, even if Iserlohn’s rodent population could do nothing to help him. In the black depths of the fortress, he and the rats, the rot and vermin in the Empire’s perfect heart, were perhaps the only things truly alive.
Some time later, when he lay awake at night listening to the fortress creak, he heard the scuttling of tiny feet inside his walls. He got out of bed, put his eyes back in their sockets, and pried open one of the wall panels, revealing a gap just small enough for an animal to get through. Whatever creature had been there was long gone, but he left the panel leaning against the opposite wall, and the next morning, saved a crust of bread from breakfast. He left it in the crack, where he could see it from his position laying in bed, and was rewarded with the sight of the rat emerging to eat the meager offering.
Oberstein never tried to befriend the rat in any way more than leaving it food. Once it knew that food would be there, it never varied its routine, and came to his room every night, and that was enough. He wasn’t sentimental enough to be stupid: it was an animal, and it had no ability to understand him or sympathize with him. All it could do was seek sustenance and safety, and run whenever Oberstein shifted in bed and made a noise that scared it. But he enjoyed watching it eat: the gleam of its eyes, its sleek fur, the way its bald tail twitched against the cold metal floor.
In the officers’ mess, when he overheard other men who lived in his hallway commiserating about Iserlohn’s rat problem, and their resolve to ask the maintenance staff to put out traps, Oberstein thought about vast stores of strychnine in the warehouses below, and what it would feel like to vaporize it in the air filtration systems, pumping it through the fortress like a poisonous, invisible blood.
That night, he lay in bed and watched the rat, his arm folded beneath his head. He had never spoken to the creature before— what would be the point? — and his voice felt strange and rusty from months of disuse. He could go days without speaking to anyone. “Don’t eat what they give you,” he said.
The rat stared at him with its beady eyes, holding one of the soup crackers he had left for it in both of its front paws as it sat on its haunches. There would be no saving the creature: it would eat what was set down in front of it, poison or no.
He might have tried to trap it, keep it there safe inside his cell, but there would have been no point, even if he was able to somehow. There were thousands— maybe even hundreds of thousands— like it in the fortress, and the maintenance crews were on a constant warpath of elimination. And what did one tiny crawling thing matter?
The rat came by for several more days, and then was gone, the chocolate cookie that Oberstein left in its pathway growing stale. He eventually replaced the panel on the wall, the dank draft that emerged from the crevice too much of a grim reminder— and an unsightly and uncomfortable annoyance besides that, he told himself. He was a creature inured to loneliness, had been his entire life, so it shouldn’t have mattered.
He focused on his work, though he didn’t bother to silence the chorus of thoughts that rattled through his mind whenever he was faced with some snide remark by Seeckt, or some whisper by his fellow officers that he was supposed to hear. His thoughts didn’t show on his face— another cold benefit of his unfeeling mechanical eyes.
At night, he dreamed about men choking to death on their dinners, and the rats emerging from the walls by the millions to devour them, then the walls of Iserlohn itself, then swarming out to swallow the stars, too. He tried not to let that dream out into his waking life, but it often occupied his idle hours.
Weeks later, when he was standing in the Iserlohn control room, waiting for Seeckt to be done discussing some aspect of recent deployments with Stockhousen, he heard their conversation turn, just momentarily, away from their mutually adversarial relationship, and towards a shared object of derision.
“Our fleet at Astarte is barely twenty thousand,” Stockhousen said, nodding at the map projected in front of them.
“We’ll see that blond brat humiliated this time,” Seeckt said.
“You don’t think he has a chance of winning? He might have some strange plan to overcome the enemy, like he had before.”
“He’s without his usual staff,” Seeckt sniffed. “A man can’t win a war alone, and certainly not without good staff officers.” This was not a pointed remark at Oberstein; Seeckt was not aware that he was standing in the back of the room, a sheaf of reports on recent training results in hand.
“He’ll look even better if he does win, then.”
“I thought you didn’t want to hear talk of winning.”
Stockhausen scowled and turned away, which made Seeckt turn towards the back of the room and notice Oberstein, who saluted and approached, bearing his paperwork. “Sir,” he said in his usual flat voice. “I’d like to discuss the recent—”
“Yes, yes,” Seeckt said, and waved him away. “Leave it on my desk. I’ll look it over.”
Behind Seeckt, Stockhausen let out a dark chuckle at Seeckt’s displeasure with Oberstein, which made Seeckt brush past Oberstein and march out of the room.
His superior’s rancor aside, the conversation had been illuminating— two of the Empire’s most respected soldiers were cheering for their own side to lose to the enemy, simply because they disliked the commander. Oberstein had heard of the man in charge of the fleet at Astarte, an admiral more than ten years his junior named Reinhard von Lohengramm. Although he was clearly talented, Oberstein had never had much reason to pay attention to him— his elder sister was Kaiser Friedrich’s current favorite, and so much, if not most, of the young Admiral Lohengramm’s success was due to her influence, and the influence of the Kaiser. It seemed unlikely that such a man, whose rise to power was through the Kaiser’s generosity, would be an ally to Oberstein in his desire to destroy the entire Goldenbaum line.
But perhaps there was a reason he was so detested.
Oberstein made a point of tracking down Lohengramm’s former subordinates, those who had been taken away from him prior to this deployment. They were stationed on Iserlohn, waiting for Lohengramm’s return. Although they had been there for months, Oberstein had not encountered them before now. Even among the officer class, Iserlohn was far too large to know every name and face.
He didn’t approach them the day he found them in one of the officers’ dining areas, one of the nicer ones. Lohengramm’s subordinates were several ranks above him, and he knew himself to be an offputting stranger, especially if he interrupted their dinner. Instead, he just took a table near to theirs and listened to their conversation, watching them out of the corner of his eye.
The two men were drinking wine, picking at a shared plate of cheese and crackers between them as they waited for their meal. One of them was short and blond, a stocky vice admiral, while the other, of the same rank, was tall and black-haired, with eyes of two different colors. They spoke in low enough tones that it caught Oberstein’s interest only further— these were men with something to hide.
“It’s been four months, separated from him ,” the dark-haired one— Oskar von Reuenthal— said. His voice, dropped low, held something unspoken. That unspoken thing couldn’t have been just the name, since postings were public information.
The other, Wolfgang Mittermeyer (a commoner, from the lack of ‘von’ in his name), replied in a tone that indicated he understood whatever Reuenthal was hinting at. “Don’t talk about the military’s personnel actions.” But even he couldn’t help but add, “Nobody else will be under him, either.”
“No, only the redhead has that privilege,” Reuenthal said, open jealousy in his voice. He rested his chin on his hand and gave Mittermeyer a searching look. “But can he survive without us?”
“Regardless, there’s nothing we can do to help him from here,” Mittermeyer said. He leaned forward, his hand slipping under the table, and Oberstein watched as his fingers came to rest delicately on Reuenthal’s knee. It was a motion so subtle that no one else would have noticed it unless they were watching. “It’s fine. He’ll win.”
Oberstein narrowed his eyes, and raised his own glass.
He understood now what Reinhard von Lohengramm might have to lose. If he survived the enmity of the upper fleet command, enough to win at Astarte, he might even be worth approaching.
As it turned out, Lohengramm did win at Astarte, handily defeating an Alliance fleet of forty thousand ships, twice the number under his own command. Although this should have been a cause for celebration— and it was, among many of the enlisted men who had no eye or care for court politics, and couldn’t even name the commanders on their side— it rankled Seeckt to no end.
When Lohengramm’s gleaming white flagship (a personal gift from the Kaiser) docked in Iserlohn’s shipyard briefly to pick up supplies for the journey back to Odin, the animosity of the upper fleet staff was such that Oberstein couldn’t even find a way to get close to him, let alone speak with him. All he saw was a glimpse as he stationed himself in the shipyard to watch Lohengramm depart.
Lohengramm stood for a moment at the bottom of the ramp of his flagship, speaking with the two vice admirals who had been separated from him during the battle. Although Oberstein was watching from above, in a window looking out over the shipyard, his eyes let him focus and magnify the scene, narrowing in on Lohengramm’s cold face, the movement of his lips. Although he was engaged in the conversation with his subordinates, focused eyes flicking back and forth between the two, and he even smiled when they saluted him and turned towards their own ships, it was clear that Lohengramm held himself apart from them, despite their obvious loyalty.
It was only when Lohengramm marched up the ramp, and greeted the man who stood at the top— the redhead whom Reuenthal had mentioned, and only a captain— that his cold countenance broke apart into something else. Although Oberstein could no longer see his face when he reached the top of the ramp, his whole posture changed, and when he idly reached up to tug a lock of the redhead’s curly hair, the other man smiled, his whole face crinkling up. They acted like they were the only two men in the world, as though the rest of the world couldn’t see them.
This shameless display, though it cemented Oberstein’s surety that Lohengramm had something to lose, and something he would consider worth fighting for, almost dissuaded him from approaching. Lohengramm seemed to be a careless type, and it was immediately clear that he played favorites with his subordinates. Even if he was talented, he would be a difficult man to work under, as favoritism bred factionalism: backstabbing and divided goals and loyalties.
But perhaps the two vice admirals Oberstein had observed were loyal enough for that to not matter. And he himself, should he become a member of Lohengramm’s cadre, was used to being the outcast— it wouldn’t matter to him if Lohengramm never graced him with a smile, or anything else. In fact, the idea faintly disgusted him. So long as they shared a goal, that would be enough.
Oberstein didn’t soon expect a chance to meet Lohengramm personally, since Lohengramm was based off of Odin, and he remained on Iserlohn, so he waited. Fortunately, a slight opportunity presented itself sooner than expected. As the Alliance had been soundly defeated at Astarte, it was judged a safe enough time for Seeckt to return to Odin for a combination of leave and business, wanting to speak in person with the top fleet command about various things. Oberstein, as one of his staff officers, traveled with him.
It had been a long time since he had been on Odin, months spent in the mechanical confines of Iserlohn. Although he tried not to let it affect him, he felt the sun warm his wan face like a man who had been imprisoned below ground, and he listened to the fluttering wings and coos of pigeons like music.
The Kaiser held an audience at his palace to deal with military matters, and Seeckt went along, bearing several grievances. Lohengramm was there, too. Oberstein saw him on the way in, accompanied by his redheaded captain. The audience was for flag officers only, so both Oberstein and the captain ended up waiting in an antechamber outside the audience hall, along with the rest of the banished support staff from Muckenburger’s offices, and anyone else who was coming to see the Kaiser.
This would be Oberstein’s only chance to get close to Lohengramm for quite some time, so he had no choice but to take it. He waited until after the ceremony in the other room had begun, strains of music drifting in through the walls, and all of the waiting staff had formed their cliques. The redhead— Oberstein had looked up his name, Siegfried Kircheis— was alone, leaning on a pillar with his eyes closed. Like his master, he seemed to be uninterested in the affairs of other people, or perhaps the hatred of his master made people unwilling to speak with him. Regardless, this made him easy to approach.
“Captain Siegfried Kircheis?” Oberstein said, walking up to him. They were the same rank, so some formalities could be dispensed with.
Kircheis opened his eyes, blinking, and stood straight from his lean on the pillar. He took in Oberstein in one glance: his nasally voice, the dangling way he held his arms, his greying hair, the rank stripes embroidered on his shoulders. Oberstein could feel this once-over, like a cool breeze that washed over him with the movement of Kircheis’s wide blue eyes. Whatever Kircheis saw, he didn’t seem to like. He was cautious when he responded. “I am, but who are you?”
“Captain Paul von Oberstein— pleased to make your acquaintance.” He gave a polite bow, and as he did, the warning lights in his eyes flashed red, as they did once every few minutes, reminding him that he would need to charge their batteries. He had worn this pair on purpose, although he had a different set that was in better condition and did not drain power so fast.
He had hoped that it would serve as a signal to the other man, an unspoken indication of the reason why Oberstein might be approaching him, but instead Kircheis was visibly surprised, flinching back.
“Pardon me,” Oberstein said, closing his eyes and touching his eyelids. “It seems my artificial eyes are in rather poor shape. I’m sorry I startled you. They allow me to live comfortably despite my blindness, but they have a short battery life.”
“Was it a war wound?” Kircheis asked.
“No, it was natural,” Oberstein said, feeling a strange comfort at the word. He continued. “If I had been born in Kaiser Rudolph’s time, I would have been disposed of under the Inferior Genes Exclusion Law.”
He wondered if Kircheis would have something to say to that, any acknowledgement at all, but the other man was merely uncomfortable.
Oberstein got to the point— somehow, despite his best efforts, he had gone through this wrong and left a poor impression already. There might be no way of fixing that. “You have a good commander. Sooner or later, I’d like to talk with you about that. Well—” He nodded and turned to go.
Kircheis called him back. “Which unit are you assigned to?”
“The Iserlohn Stationed Fleet, beneath Admiral Seeckt,” Oberstein said. “I think that I’d rather be blessed with an excellent commander like yours, if it’s possible.”
He looked back at Kircheis, waiting for a response, but Kircheis seemed to be a much more circumspect man than his superior, and said nothing.
“You’re a very cautious person,” Oberstein said. “But I’m not your enemy.”