The Battle of the Corridor, Part Two: Jericho

January 489 I.C., Odin

The journey to Iserlohn Fortress was one fraught with tension for several reasons.

Yang warned Braunschweig that Fleet Admiral Muckenburger knew that they were coming, so it would not be out of the question for him to send out the Iserlohn Fortress fleet in advance, to stop Braunschweig’s fleet before they even arrived in the corridor. Waiting to encounter an enemy ahead was never a pleasant feeling.

It was made worse by not knowing the status of events on Odin. If Littenheim had, by occupying the capital, gotten Lichtenlade to surrender, there would be other Imperial fleets chasing them from behind, too. Hunting them down on Littenheim’s orders.

It had only been the fact that Braunschweig had no ground troops in his current fleet— nothing he could use to mount any attack on an enemy on the ground— that had stopped him from chasing Littenheim all the way down to Odin. Braunschweig’s fleet needed to reunite with their own ground troops, many of whom were stationed on Cahokia, on the other side of the corridor.

Even if they didn’t encounter enemies en route, what lay ahead was not really pleasant to contemplate. Despite the confidence Braunschweig projected to his men, and their past successes with Geiersburg, everyone in the fleet had spent their entire career thinking of Iserlohn Fortress as an impenetrable wall. For some, the idea of being the ones to finally break it was exhilarating— but for others, the idea of losing their lives under the Thor Hammer filled them with despair.

Yang felt reasonably confident that he could take the fortress if all went to plan, but it seemed unlikely that everything would.

But even if he was having doubts about their ability to carry out the attack, it wasn’t a plan that could be changed, since they had no way of contacting their forces on Cahokia. So Yang tried not to think about it during the trip.

Unlike their time in the minefield, where he had spent as much of his waking hours as possible on the bridge, Yang tried to make himself invisible. Although he got the sense that Braunschweig’s men knew, in an abstract sense, that he had been the one to formulate the plan of attack, he wasn’t a confidence-inspiring figure, nor did he want to be one. Let Braunschweig take the initiative to talk about their assured success.

He slunk through the Berlin at odd hours, and no one seemed to miss him much. No one aside from Ansbach, who hunted him down one night while he was eating alone— a cold leftover dinner— in the officers’ mess. Yang was the only one in the room, a sole figure in the sea of clean white tablecloths with no place settings on them. He had his plate shoved idly to the side, and he picked at the wilted salad with his fork while he scrolled through his tablet with his left hand.

Yang looked up when the door opened, then looked back down at his dinner when Ansbach came in. Ansbach disappeared into the industrial kitchen without even saying hello, emerged a minute later with a hot mug of coffee, and sat down across from Yang.

He looked at Yang’s tablet. It was displaying text in the Alliance language— Yang was reading sections of Reinhard von Musel’s economics newsletter, the one that Muller had sent him. It was the distraction that Yang needed, being quite removed from his own current troubles. He had never gone back all the way to the beginning of Musel’s archive, and it was amusing to picture a boy hardly older than the one in Kircheis’s photo writing these treatises.

Ansbach skimmed the text with a displeased twitch of his lips. Yang assumed he couldn’t read it at all.

“What are you reading?” Ansbach asked.

“An essay on the effects of Phezzan’s financial-responsibility inheritance law on the structure of Alliance firms that do business in that territory,” Yang replied. He turned off the tablet and looked up at Ansbach. “But I assume that’s not what you’re here to talk to me about.”

“The Alliance?” he asked, stressing the foreign word, though Yang had delivered it in an accented enough Imperial tone that it fit naturally into his sentence. “It’s a close enough topic, anyway.”

Yang said nothing, but gave Ansbach a questioning look as he drank his tea.

“I’m here to warn you about what’s going to happen after we take Iserlohn.”

“Warn me? I was the one who wrote the plan.”

Ansbach didn’t appreciate Yang’s tone. His expression remained stony. “You may think that certain people are stupid, but that won’t save you from their paranoia.”

“And who among the illustrious Braunschweig clan are you accusing of stupidity, Ansbach?”

“I’m not in the mood, Leigh. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m afraid that I don’t.”

“I’ll put it bluntly, then: your plan to turn Iserlohn Fortress over to the rebels.”

Yang laughed. “You think I’ve been planning this since I was sixteen? You must think a lot more highly of me than I do of myself.”

Ansbach frowned, and drank his coffee.

“You can’t really think I’m about to do that,” Yang said. “You would have gotten rid of me a long time ago if you did. I don’t doubt you’re capable.” Ansbach was harmless now— Yang couldn’t help but twitch his lips in an almost-smile.

“You can’t tell me it’s not a little in the back of your mind. You’ve put yourself in the perfect position for it.”

“And Reuenthal tells me that I’ve put myself in the perfect position to kill everyone here and crown myself Kaiser. Everyone who wants me to be a traitor is going to have to get in line.”

Yang had bet that honesty would startle Ansbach enough to disarm him, and he was right. He opened his mouth like a fish for a moment, then closed it again.

“He’s right,” Ansbach said after a second.

“The last thing I want is to be the Kaiser. Besides— you’re in just as good of a position as I am. I could accuse you of scheming, too.”

This made Ansbach bark out a laugh. “No, I’m not.”

“But would that really matter to Baron Flegel, the paranoiac you’ve come to warn me about?”

Ansbach said nothing.

“I’m not planning to turn Iserlohn over to the rebels, if you need me to reassure you,” Yang said with some finality. “I don’t even want to use our last resort, of asking them to back us.”

“Why not? You’re a republican, aren’t you? Wouldn’t it get what you want?”

“Who did you hear that from?”

“Princess Amarie.”

“Maybe I am guilty of that,” Yang said. “But I’m other things, too.”

“Like a count? Has owning property gone to your head at last?”

On another day, Ansbach’s tone would have been far more cutting. Despite the harshness of his initial overtures, Ansbach had come to mildly antagonize Yang because he was as apprehensive about the invasion of Iserlohn as anyone else, rather than any malice or forethought. Yang was possibly the only person on board that Ansbach could talk to with any degree of freedom, and with whom the subject could be something other than the fast-approaching battle.

“No,” Yang said. “I don’t believe so.”

“Then what is the other thing that’s turned you away from republican ideals? Being a married man?” He looked pointedly at Yang’s wedding ring.

“I haven’t turned away,” Yang said. He leaned back in his seat, looked over Ansbach’s shoulder at the Braunschweig crest on the wall of the mess. “I trust you won’t go around telling everyone that I hope that this nation can become a democracy someday.”

“Anyone who looks at you is already sure you think that— or whatever they think about the rebels and their politics.”

“Maybe so,” Yang said. “Anyway, it is my hope, but I don’t think being invaded by the rebels is the best way to achieve it.”

“No? It’s probably the fastest.”

“Is it?” Yang shook his head. “Even if on paper every planet they conquered was given equal rights immediately, if everyone was made a citizen right then and there, I would think it would take quite some time— a hundred years, maybe— for that to actually be represented in their government. And in the meantime, every planet is a conquered territory, with all that entails.” He smiled, that wry, half-secretive but genuine smile. “If the Empire can come to democracy on her own terms, that would be better for everyone. I keep saying that I’m a servant to all the Empire’s people. It’s a shame that no one has ever once believed me, even if it’s the complete truth.”

“I don’t think you’re capable of telling the truth,” Ansbach said.

“Aren’t we having a truthful conversation right now?”

“What do you want to happen, once we get Iserlohn?”

“You know. If we can, make the government surrender. If not—” He let out a breath. “It was what I initially proposed to Braunschweig when he took me on, but that was a different time— like I said, I won’t suggest we make overtures to the rebels right away. First, we should try Odin for ourselves.”

“I’m glad you understand that making that suggestion would be suicide.”

“Someone might still need to, if we end up on the back foot with Odin.”

“If Lichtenlade surrenders to Littenheim, you mean.”

Yang nodded. “We can’t fight the entire Imperial government, and Braunschweig certainly won’t give up. But I hope that doesn’t happen— this war is already terrible. Inviting the rebels in would make it cost...” He trailed off. Millions more lives— soldiers on both sides, and civilians throughout the Empire.

“Is your calculus really just to minimize death?”

“What other calculus is there?” Yang shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Don’t tell me. I know there are others.”

Ansbach didn’t press— strange. “I seem to remember that was a class you failed.”

“Almost failed,” Yang said. “I’ve always just squeaked by.”

“I don’t know how you manage it.”

“I don’t know,” Yang said. “It would almost be easier if I had failed, really failed, somewhere along the way. I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“You’d be dead.”

Yang shrugged, though his eyes skirted away from Ansbach’s gaze— he knew that better than most others. “Yeah, probably.”

“Is that what keeps you from failing?”

Yang tried to smile, but it was maybe more of a grimace. “What do you think?”

Ansbach shook his head, drained his coffee, then stood. When he was putting his empty mug on the cart of dirty dishes in the corner, he spoke. “I believe you, unfortunately.”

“Believe me about what?”

“Who you’re working for.”

“Ah.”

“So don’t die,” Ansbach said.

Ansbach’s unintentional echoing of Oberstein’s sentiments made Yang uncomfortable. He tried to joke: “I didn’t know I could convince you to be a republican.”

“You won’t, My Lord,” Ansbach said with a scowl, which made Yang shake his head.

As they came closer to the Iserlohn corridor, the discussion about how they were going to begin the attack grew more and more serious. In order to signal to their other forces on Cahokia that they were ready to begin the two pronged battle, Yang’s forces would have to attack Iserlohn first, in a dramatic enough way to force them to send out their fleet, or use the Thor Hammer. Either of those two things would be visible to the watchers near Cahokia.

There was, of course, the chance that the outpost on Cahokia had already been destroyed. Muckenburger knew it was there, and knew what Yang planned to use it for. Yang had made a bet that Muckenburger also had no desire to waste lives, or make himself an enemy of Braunschweig when he didn’t need to— he would wait until they attacked Iserlohn.

It was a bet that relied on Muckenburger’s pride, as well. He had to believe that he could defend the fortress as it was, without a preemptive strike. That seemed to Yang like the type of man he was, but this civil war was so different from fighting the Alliance— the only kind of battle Muckenburger had lived for— that it was hard to know for sure.

Yang’s plan was to bombard Iserlohn from just outside the range of the Thor Hammer. They would send in missiles, hoping to disrupt the liquid metal shell of the fortress. The fortress’ floating gun turrets would be able to take care of it, at least initially— this was one of the lessons that Yang knew the fortress had learned after Admiral Sitolet in the Alliance had attacked— but the turrets could still be overwhelmed. Muckenburger would be forced to launch his fleet, and do it early, to stop them from becoming trapped beneath the liquid metal shell. If that was too disrupted, it would make it very difficult for the fleet to launch.

Since missiles were a finite resource, and Muckenburger could try to wait out the attack and hope that Yang ran out before Iserlohn was too damaged, Yang had stressed to Braunschweig that they should take as many missiles as they could physically load into their ships. They had, and in the belly of each vessel were hundreds of powerful bombs. Most were conventional high explosives, but they also brought the Braunschweig family’s personal cache of atomics. Yang hoped that those would not be necessary.

At the mouth of the corridor, they reduced their speed, hoping to avoid detection. If the Iserlohn fleet had not yet launched to meet them, which it seemed like they hadn’t, they wanted to remain undetected as long as possible, which meant slowing down to take a circuitous route through the corridor, avoiding the observation stations and communications outposts that littered the space.

It felt strangely easy, going up against the Imperial government, since they had maps of where everything in the corridor was. Muckenburger could have stationed additional watchers, but they didn’t meet any en route.

Yang was asleep, dozing off in a chair in the officer’s lounge with a book forgotten across his knees, when he was shaken awake by an urgent hand. He pried his eyes open and found himself staring into Hans von Vering’s face.

“I was told to get you,” Vering said, adopting an air of indifference as soon as Yang was conscious.

“Who?” Yang mumbled, trying to regain his senses. They weren’t anywhere near Iserlohn proper yet, so he hadn’t been expecting a summons.

“Commodore Ansbach.”

“Is there trouble?”

Vering narrowed his eyes and said nothing.

There had to be trouble. There were no alarms sounding, so they couldn’t be in battle, but anything Ansbach needed Yang for couldn’t be good.

Yang hauled himself out of his plush armchair with regret, and followed shufflingly after Vering.

It was the middle of the night, and though the bridge was fully occupied— this was war, no skeleton crew would suffice— it was eerily quiet, with just the soft beeping of computers and the sounds of men breathing in the dimness. The overhead display showed the field of stars outside, making it feel like Yang was walking through some metal-floored plain on an empty planet.

Ansbach sat in the central chair, but he stood up as soon as Yang came in. Ansbach seemed to never really sleep, these days. He took an hour in the tank bed once every shift, and called that good enough. These short rests were not enough to clear up the sallow look of his face, or the dark shadows of his eyes. Without speaking, he passed Yang a tablet.

The tablet displayed a readout from the communications station, which was monitoring for any broadcasts within the corridor. Thus far through their trip, things had been unnaturally silent— no communications between Iserlohn and Odin, or any chatter between the fortress and her fleet that might be on the Empire side of the corridor. But now, it seemed like they had picked up a message, coming from behind them.

It was a wide broadcast— and short, because of that— it repeated over and over as it swept across space, tossed into the wind. To do so, it was using a ship’s highest power transmitters— the ones used for emergency distress calls. The message wasn’t even long enough to be tagged with any identifying information: it was simply one word. It was a miracle that they had even picked up the signal at all, since it was coming from very far away.

All it said was WAIT.

“Is this for us?” Ansbach asked.

Yang looked at the crisp black text on the screen for a long minute, as though the four characters there could reveal some additional meaning. “Who else would it be for?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Someone.”

“It’s not for the fortress— if someone were transmitting to them, its location is known, so they’d be able to speak to them directly. I don’t know who else would be in the corridor.”

“I hope you’re not about to suggest we reply to find out,” Ansbach said.

“Of course not.” He handed back the tablet, then ran his hand through his hair. “But we should obey.”

Vering, who had been listening from a couple feet away, and was peering at the tablet in Ansbach’s hand, looked up, startled. “What? Weren’t you the one who was paranoid about traps before?”

“Yes,” Yang said. “I don’t think this is one, though.”

“How do you know?” Ansbach asked.

It was a gut feeling, more than anything else, but he couldn’t say that. He closed his eyes and tipped his face towards the sky-ceiling above, feeling the stretch in his throat as he spoke. “I thought something like this would happen,” Yang said.

“And what is ‘this’?” Vering asked.

“Reinforcements,” Yang said. “Coming through Phezzan, heading towards Cahokia.”

“You’re summoning ships out of thin air, now?” Vering asked. Ansbach gave him a glare, and he shut up.

“I think I know who it is, and how it happened.” Yang couldn’t keep the strain out of his voice— the mixing of relief that he would have an ally, and fear. There was a reason he had intentionally avoided asking his friends for help.

“Who?” Ansbach asked.

“Mittermeyer,” Yang said. Ansbach nodded, without comment, which surprised Yang. He continued. “This wouldn’t be happening unless the situation on Odin is desperate. We need to take Iserlohn quickly, in that case. We can’t let this turn into a siege.”

“Wasn’t that the plan?” Ansbach asked.

Yang took the tablet back, looked at the singular, enigmatic message again. “It was, but it’s not anymore.”

“If time is of the essence, how long are we supposed to wait?”

“Until we get another signal,” Yang said. “I’m sure we’ll see it soon enough.”

“And until then?”

“We wait,” Yang said. “We hide in the corridor.”

“You explain this to Admiral Merkatz,” Ansbach said. “If he takes your word for it, then I’ll present it to the duke.”

“Alright,” Yang said. He could already see exactly what was happening— Mittermeyer’s fleet of ships racing across space. He could paint that picture for Merkatz.

“Lieutenant Commander Vering—” Ansbach said, clearing his expression to something totally blank. “You— you know how navigation charts work, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Vering said, affronted.

“Go find a place for us to hide in the corridor, if we’re going to wait.”

All three of them understood that this was a request to dismiss Vering, without saying as much.

“Duke Braunschweig will be happy to hear you’re giving me so much responsibility, sir,” Vering said with a scowl. He narrowed his eyes at the two of them, but left the command dais, watching over his shoulder as Ansbach sat back down in the command chair and activated the silence barrier. Yang stood at his shoulder, and Ansbach didn’t look at him, instead staring out at the stars on the screen ahead.

“Did you plan this, Leigh?”

“Plan? No,” Yang said. “I explicitly planned to not have this happen. If I wanted Mittermeyer to participate, I would have had him meet us at Odin.”

“But you’re not surprised.”

“Two of the most talented and willing men I know are being intentionally sidelined in this war, to deprive me of allies,” Yang said. “No, I’m not surprised that they decided to take the initiative.”

“Two?”

“Reuenthal.”

“Is he coming as well?”

“I don’t know how he could,” Yang said. “Mittermeyer has ships— he was assigned to be the commander of a shipbuilding facility. Reuenthal is still on Odin, with no way to get off, as far as I know. But I’m sure he’s the one coordinating this.”

“I see.”

“You didn’t need to get rid of Vering to ask me that,” Yang pointed out.

“Mittermeyer has no reason to be loyal to the duke.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“But he’s loyal to you.”

Yang was silent for a second. “I already told you, I’m not trying to take the crown for myself. I thought you believed me.”

“Me believing you when you say that is not the problem,” Ansbach said.

“Of the things the duke suspects me of, I don’t think that kind of treason is one of them.”

“I believe you,” Ansbach continued, as though Yang hadn’t said anything. “Your friends, on the other hand—”

Yang thought about the look on Mittermeyer’s face when Reuenthal had placed the crown of leaves on his head. Shock-wide eyes, cheeks shiny and flushed with alcohol and something else. It was for the best that Ansbach wasn’t looking at him at the moment.

“Mittermeyer isn’t a man with that kind of ambition,” Yang said.

“So he’s just here out of friendship.”

“Yes— that’s the reason.”

They waited.

Yang assured everyone that they would see a sign, and soon. He felt a little too much like a prophet making his pleas to Merkatz and the duke. But he was sure of what was going on. If they began their attack on Iserlohn without waiting for the signal that Mittermeyer’s forces were in place, they would end up in an uncoordinated, and therefore lost, battle.

They sat in the darkness of the corridor, in interstellar space light-hours away from the fortress, with all their listening arrays and telescopes turned towards Iserlohn. There was no way to get closer without risking detection, so they had to accept the several hour information delay.

When the sign came, Yang was on the bridge. He wasn’t the first to see it, though the image of Iserlohn was projected in odd radio-signal false-color on the forward screen of the bridge. The telescope operator noticed it first, and shouted, “Sir! The Thor Hammer!”

Yang didn’t have time to feel vindication. If that emotion passed through his consciousness, it was quickly drowned out by the sinking feeling of battle approaching.

Braunschweig stood from his command chair and immediately gave the order for the fleet to move. Yang wasn’t paying much attention to that— the sound of Braunschweig’s voice occupied a tiny corner of his awareness. His eyes were fixed on the display in front of them. The telescope operator had seen the ripples beneath the skin of Iserlohn’s perfect liquid metal shell, signaling the movement of the Thor Hammer, but it took merely seconds after that for the beam to lance out into space, heading towards an enemy that they couldn’t see on their scopes.

The beam itself was only visible when it hit something, but the space around Iserlohn was cluttered with the microscopic— atomic— debris of past battles, and those absorbed some infinitesimal fraction of the Thor Hammer’s energy, and glowed like the sun in their instruments’ views.

It was a little concerning to Yang that Muckenburger had chosen to use the Thor Hammer rather than deploying the Iserlohn Fortress Fleet against the attackers on the other side. It might not matter, but it did mean that Muckenburger was holding the fleet in reserve, presumably waiting for Yang to make his appearance.

Yang didn’t know what forces Mittermeyer had brought with him, but the force on Cahokia had always been a way to split Iserlohn’s attention. It consisted of just enough ships and resources to form a viable threat if nothing was done about it, but Braunschweig’s main fleet was intended to be greater. The real strength of the Cahokia fleet was in ground troops, which would need to enter Iserlohn and take it from the inside, if there wasn’t a surrender.

As their fleet accelerated to faster than light speeds, they lost sight of what was happening at Iserlohn. The screens above displayed their position relative to the fortress, and nothing else. It felt like they were crawling forward, but they would be within the Thor Hammer’s range in less than half an hour.

Whenever anyone opened the door to the bridge, the air was flooded with the wailing alarms that summoned everyone to their stations. The atmosphere was chaotic: people performing last minute checks on their weapons controls and yelling out fleet positioning instructions to transmit to their other ships as soon as they dropped back down to sub-light speeds.

Although Merkatz, in his own ship ahead, was to be the true commander of the battle, within minutes, Braunschweig had his usual cadre gathered around him. Flegel was at his right hand, Ansbach right behind him, and Vering lingered at edge of the command dais, always not sure where he was supposed to be. Yang, who had been leaning against the back wall and looking up at what was going on, walked over.

“We won’t go into the Thor Hammer’s range,” Yang said to Vering, quietly. “At least not until—”

“Did I ask?” Vering snapped.

Yang shrugged, then stepped forward to join Braunschweig. Despite his verbal annoyance, Vering stayed on Yang’s heels.

“How long will it take for Muckenburger to deploy his fleet?” Braunschweig was asking Ansbach. Ansbach glanced at Yang when he arrived, so Yang offered an answer.

“I think he’ll do it as soon as he sees us,” Yang said. “He’s clearly holding it back for us to arrive.”

“Will we still use our bombardment strategy?”

“We’ll start that way,” Yang said. “We have to make the first move— sitting outside the Thor Hammer’s range without firing a shot would just lead to our allies exhausting themselves for no reason.”

“Merkatz is plenty of a match for the fortress fleet,” Braunschweig declared. This was likely true. Since Muckenburger himself was on Iserlohn, and the command structure of the fortress had been rearranged prior to the civil war to root out any potentially dangerous elements, the commander of the fleet was a less experienced man than Muckenburger himself, who Yang expected would remain within the fortress.

Still, Braunschweig’s confidence had the opposite of the intended effect in Yang. He felt strangely helpless, perhaps even moreso than he had felt when they had fought outside of Odin. He had written the plan, had gone over it extensively with Merkatz, but it was entirely out of his control now. He would stay at Braunschweig’s side and advise, but he felt the limits of his usefulness quite keenly. To plan the attack, he had leaned on the feeling of playing his old games with Reuenthal and Mittermeyer, but now he felt far less like a player, and more like a puppet, lurching across a stage.

They dropped out of faster than light travel a hairsbreadth out of the Thor Hammer’s effective range. With the fortress’s giant laser occupied with keeping the attack on the other side of the corridor at bay, they could advance in relative safety, but not too close.

When their instruments could take stock of the scene, they discovered it was far more chaotic than they had expected. Their radios were suddenly awash in communications, most of them using the new garbled encryption that Iserlohn Fortress had employed, but some that made it through were able to be deciphered— the ships on the opposite side of Iserlohn were broadcasting in an Alliance cipher which had been cracked prior to the outbreak of the civil war. The Alliance had not yet realized that their communications in that particular mode had been compromised, and so the radio chatter of Spartinian pilots barking out their kills was clear as day.

“Did we come in early?” Ansbach asked. For the first time, Yang heard a touch of real fear in the crisp edge of his voice.

“No,” Yang said. “Listen to what they’re saying—” He realized belatedly that only he spoke the Alliance language.

There was a moment of silence between everyone standing at the command dais as the radio operator honed in to one of the clearest signals, though even that was garbled with static.

“Fucking new strategy— don’t see the fucking point. Corner us in here? Augh.” The pilot’s open mic captured the hup-hup-hup of him forcing his breath into his lungs as he executed a too-tight turn in his dogfighter. “Foxtrot— on your six. I hate this, man. Feels unnatural to sortie out behind our fleet.”

“What are they saying?” Braunschweig demanded, looking at Yang, narrowing his eyes. The other Spartinian pilot on the channel responded as Braunschweig talked over him, but then the transmission faded into static as the pilots moved where their instruments could no longer pick up the conversation.

Yang gesticulated, trying to illustrate the situation as he saw it. “They’ve lured an All— a rebel patrol fleet in there,” he said. “The rebels haven’t realized what’s going on, yet— that the Imperial fleet they’re seeing is at cross purposes with the fortress. Our allies are trying to push them towards the fortress, but it’s a bit of a standstill, it looks like. They have their Spartinians out to protect their backs so that the main fleet can turn around before they’re forced into Iserlohn’s range.”

“Is that... good?” Vering asked.

Yang ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll trust that they know what they’re doing on the other side,” Yang said. “Our fleet on Cahokia is a match for a little corridor patrol fleet, certainly. I’m sure at first it was just a way to keep the fortress from seeing what was really happening— distract them with the threat of a rebel attack— but they must know now what’s going on, since we can see it.”

“Does this change anything about our plans?” Braunschweig asked.

“No,” Yang said. “I think as soon as Mittermeyer sees that we’ve arrived, he’ll let the rebels retreat. There’s no sense in wasting lives fighting them, now that they’ve served their purposes of keeping the Thor Hammer occupied while we approach. The rebels don’t want to attack Iserlohn— they’ll retreat as soon as they see an opportunity. It would have been nice if the fleet had been lured out and away from the fortress— I’m sure that was the goal— but Muckenburger is too conservative for that.”

Braunschweig stopped listening to Yang long before Yang stopped talking. He gave his orders— for the bombardment of the fortress to begin. Already, Merkatz had spread out their line of ships, preparing their barrage.

The first wave of missiles went out, a coordinated push. Since the missiles had so far to travel— the entire effective range of the Thor Hammer— the floating gun turrets of Iserlohn would have plenty of time to shoot them down one by one. But there was always the chance that some of them would make it, and the more that were sent out together, the harder the gun turrets would have to work to get them all. The second wave followed not long after.

Despite the launch of the missiles, the Iserlohn Fortress fleet didn’t emerge immediately. The fortress continued to fire the Thor Hammer in the direction of the Alliance fleet behind it, Mittermeyer continuing to try to press the Alliance ships towards the fortress.

The first of their missiles came within range of the fortress’s floating gun turrets. They fired rapidly, changing targets as quickly as they could, and before the missiles could approach Iserlohn, most of them were destroyed. Only a few made it, and they exploded near-harmlessly against the gleaming surface, causing barely a ripple.

This had been expected, of course. Already, another wave of missiles was approaching, and another behind that. Each time, more and more of the explosions took place on the surface of Iserlohn itself.

These preliminary blows were making Braunschweig impatient.

“Why aren’t they sending out the fleet?” he asked.

“He’s baiting us into approaching, sir,” Yang said. He illustrated with his hands. “If he makes us think that the Thor Hammer is occupied, we might be tempted to creep in towards the fortress, and get in too deep to escape in time, when he turns it around.”

Braunschweig’s lip curled— it was clear he was already thinking of ordering their fleet to go further in.

Yang couldn’t stop talking. “A worse plan would be like this— if we had enough forces on either side to be able to sacrifice them, we could just walk in. Advance on this side, bait out the blow, our forces on the other side come that much closer, just running forward as soon as the fortress looks away and taking the hit—”

“We don’t have that kind of manpower,” Ansbach said, cutting in before Braunschweig could get any ideas.

“Of course not,” Yang said. “We can’t go forward yet. We need the fleet to come out, like we planned.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They have to,” Yang said. “If we destroy the fortress’s shell with missiles, we’d be able to destroy the Thor Hammer itself— and then walk right up to the fortress. Muckenburger knows that. As soon as we’ve done enough damage to the floating turrets, he’ll have to launch the fleet. We just have to be patient.”

Patience was not one of Braunschweig’s virtues. He paced back and forth, watching the action in front of them. The surface of Iserlohn shimmered, like a pond disrupted by rain, as their missiles struck home again and again. After each wave, they took out several more of the floating turrets, making each further launch of missiles more effective.

They had stopped picking up radio signals from the Alliance forces on the other side of the corridor. This was because of communications jamming from Iserlohn itself— someone had realized that the last thing they wanted was for the two halves of Braunschweig’s forces to be able to communicate and coordinate their attack. It left Yang blind to what was happening over there, except for the very regular firings of the Thor Hammer. He expected that Mittermeyer had let the Alliance fleet retreat by now, and was dancing back and forth just outside of the Thor Hammer’s range and sending small contingents of his fleet forward, or missiles or other bombardments that were small enough that they wouldn’t be tempting targets for the giant laser itself.

When the plan had originally come to Yang, so many months ago that it now felt like a different lifetime, he had been sitting at his desk in his old boarding house, looking out at the garden. A hawk had been swooped by a whole host of sparrows, each one tiny in comparison to the large black bird, but they dived and pecked and harried it until it gathered enough speed to escape. At the time, Yang couldn’t help but root for the victim, and was glad to see it get away. If it hadn’t been fast enough, it would have fallen to the ground and been picked apart— no matter how large and wicked its claws and beak were, they couldn’t be in ten places at once.

Now, Iserlohn Fortress was completely immobile, and Yang had plenty of sparrows at his disposal.

The surface of the fortress rippled again. But this time, it wasn’t from their missile strikes. Ships emerged: the Iserlohn Fortress Fleet, coming out to fight at last. To not waste ammunition, Merkatz immediately ordered the bombardment with missiles to stop. They began firing at the oncoming fleet with their main guns. This wouldn’t have much effect until the two fleets were much closer. Merkatz allowed the Imperial fleet to advance much more quickly than they moved forward— still wary of the Thor Hammer even with the promise of the enemy fleet as a shield.

Merkatz advanced their fleet, moving into the Thor Hammer’s range. As they crossed the invisible demarcation of safety, Yang glanced over at Vering, who was studying the map on the large display, pale but not looking like he was about to run.

“We’re using the fleet to buy us space,” Yang said. “Muckenburger doesn’t want to fire on his own men. We can push them back towards the fortress and get closer that way.”

But even as he said this, Yang felt suddenly unsure. He had made this plan by studying Muckenburger’s battle record, and remembering the fateful meeting where he had been dragged in front of the fleet high command at gunpoint, to explain how Iserlohn had almost fallen, once. The commander of Iserlohn at the time had fired on his own men to stop the Alliance. Yang thought Muckenburger wouldn’t do the same.

Muckenburger was a career soldier, a conservative one, not known for snap decisions or grudges that overwhelmed reason. Yang’s impression, during their last conversation, had been that he was well aware of the fortress’s weaknesses, and knew that it could fall, but he would stretch the battle out. Any siege of Iserlohn was winnable— the question was how much Yang was willing to pay. Muckenburger was betting that there was some cost that was too high, and that he could force Yang to pay it quickly, without weakening the fortress.

Merkatz concentrated his fire from their fleet on the foremost portion of the advancing Iserlohn fleet. Under normal circumstances, the oncoming fleet would have slightly shifted their posture, tried to return fire enough to prevent any one area of their line from becoming too weak, but the Imperial fleet was slow to respond. Even as the tip of their line visibly frayed, it took far too long for the command to be issued to change their firing pattern or reorganize their front line. This could have been the result of a truly inexperienced commander being sent out, but Yang didn’t think so.

The sweat on Yang’s back turned to ice. “Sir,” he said to Braunschweig. “Order Merkatz to send out Valkyries ahead of us,” he said.

“Why?”

“A hunch,” Yang said. “We shouldn’t get too close. Pull back. Bait them out of the Thor Hammer’s range.”

“What’s your hunch?” Ansbach asked. Every second that they stood discussing it was another fraction of the way closer to the fortress, the more devastating a blow from the Thor Hammer would be.

“I don’t think those ships have anyone in them,” Yang said. “I think we’re being lured in. If they’re unmanned, the Valkyries will be able to pick them off— they won’t have their own Valkyries to launch— no pilots.”

“And if you’re wrong, we won’t have a Valkyrie contingent left,” Braunschweig said.

“Just hold here, then—” Yang said. “Let them get closer. See how they react.”

Braunschweig thought about it for a second, then gave the order, though it was in a grudging tone. The Iserlohn fleet continued its advance.

Over their radios, Yang could hear Merkatz begin to test the advancing fleet, giving orders to switch up their own fleet movement to see how the ghost ships would react. He was a masterful commander, and had picked up the nuances of the situation immediately: if they did not let anyone in the fortress know that they were aware that the ships were unmanned, they had an advantage of knowledge. What they could do with that advantage, Yang hadn’t yet determined. But Merkatz moved the fleet in such a way that the testing wasn’t obvious— these were standard fleet maneuvers, pushing one side of the line forwards, trying to poke at the enemy flank, rushing and baiting. To an observer, it would look like Merkatz testing the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy in a normal way before they started really pressing the line forward.

It became clearer and clearer that the ships were inhumanly sluggish. They didn’t react to changes in Merkatz’s posture in any complicated ways, and the way they moved as a fleet was mechanically coordinated. In a normal fleet advance, each individual ship would have the ability to choose its own targets, and move to a better position to fire. Here, the fleet moved as one solid mass, leaving many of its ships at dead angles to the targets they might want to hit. They fired anyway, but their guns blasted off into the emptiness of space, missing the Braunschweig fleet completely.

It was enough to convince Braunschweig. Unfortunately, it meant that their plan to approach Iserlohn using the fleet as a shield was dead.

Merkatz continued to push the fake fleet around. There was only so much time he could waste with this maneuver before Iserlohn figured out that they knew the trick— they would have to change their plans soon.

Yang closed his eyes, not looking at the faux battle taking place outside. Behind him, he could hear Braunschweig speaking in an annoyed, low voice to Ansbach, asking him if Merkatz should simply destroy the ships ahead of them. If Yang didn’t think of a way to use the information to their advantage quickly, they would lose it.

Ghost ships. It was annoying that the ghost ships could see what they were doing. They couldn’t simply make ghost ships of their own to sacrifice to the Thor Hammer— the empty ships had cameras trained on them, and would see any evacuation happening. ‘

They were being controlled by people in the fortress— there certainly hadn’t been enough time for the ships to be given any kind of mechanical autonomy in this situation. That was why they moved so slowly and clumsily, because humans in the fortress had to control the ghost fleet as one block.

That was the real advantage Yang had. They couldn’t react very fast.

The plan was settling into Yang’s brain. He didn’t like it, but it was the only thing he could think of that might work. It was all a question of timing.

Ansbach noticed when Yang finally opened his eyes and looked over at Braunschweig.

“Do you have an idea?” Ansbach asked. Braunschweig, with narrowed eyes, turned to look at him.

“Yes,” Yang said. “I do.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a question of timing.” And then he explained, the pieces clicking firmly into place as he spoke.

Although it clearly burned Braunschweig, the Berlin had to remain outside of the Thor Hammer’s range. This plan was far too dangerous for Braunschweig himself to lead the charge. They pulled back, along with about a third of the fleet, and lingered outside of Iserlohn’s striking distance, watching the battle from afar.

Ahead of them, with the other two-thirds of the fleet, Merkatz began pushing the ghost ships back into Iserlohn’s controlled space. As expected, it was very easy to push them back. They continued to fight, just to keep up the pretense, but it was the goal of the ghost ships to lure Merkatz as close to the fortress as possible. They played along, inching forward.

Inside the middle section of those ships, all of their crews were preparing to evacuate. They couldn’t create their own ghost ships, but they could do the next best thing.

The difficulty, as Yang had told Braunschweig, was that the timing had to be clockwork perfect. That was difficult.

An escape pod traveled at a known speed. The beam width of the Thor Hammer at various distances from the fortress was also a known quantity. It was relatively simple math, on paper.

Yang watched the action as it played out. They had lost radio contact with Merkatz and his section of the fleet as soon as they had gotten any distance away— the ghost ships were employing severe radio jamming— but they could still see it all on their telescopes.

The ships had started pushing forward at a perfectly timed moment, such that they would hit a point in space where the Thor Hammer’s beam width was exactly the distance that the escape pods could travel in ten minutes, which was exactly the time between Iserlohn’s very regular firings of the Thor Hammer on the other side. It wasn’t as close to the fortress as Yang would have preferred, but that also meant that Iserlohn was unlikely to fire on them early, which would have killed everyone.

The Thor Hammer fired another warning shot at Mittermeyer’s fleet on the other side of the fortress. At exactly that moment, Merkatz gave the command to move his fleet in the way Yang had described.

Merkatz’s fleet took on a spindle formation and abruptly accelerated. There were deceptively few ships that stood between them and the fortress, and it was easy to break through their line. Merkatz had been slowly picking a central hole in the ghost fleet the entire time it was being pushed back, and it had been spread thinly to begin with, making it look bigger than it really was.

As soon as Merkatz’s fleet broke through, the fleet split into different sections. Two peeled off on either side, trying to keep the perfect distance between themselves and the fortress, while the central column charged ahead.

The escape pods that had flown out from the central column of ships were too small to see on their telescopes, but Yang knew they were headed out. With any luck, they were too small for Iserlohn to detect, too.

Behind them, the ghost fleet struggled to turn around, but they were irrelevant.

With ships charging at Iserlohn, there was no choice but to use the Thor Hammer.

Even if Muckenburger knew that the central column of ships was now equally ghost-like to his own fleet, it still needed to be dealt with before he could attack the wings of the fleet. Some of the Braunschweig family atomics were armed and on board the rushing ships: if they reached the surface of Iserlohn, the fortress would be breached.

The Thor Hammer began to move, the surface of the fortress rippling as it swung into a new position, turning to point towards Merkatz’s charge.

Now that it was facing towards them, Yang shuddered. The central eye of it glowed a menacing yellow as it regained its strength to fire again.

Yang couldn’t tell what was happening on the other side of Iserlohn, but he suspected two things: Mittermeyer would be trying to take advantage of this opening as much as he could, and Muckenburger would be sending out what remained of the Iserlohn Fleet to stop him.

He couldn’t stop himself from thinking about that, picturing it in vivid detail, even as the battle continued in front of him. Mittermeyer surely had the situation well in hand, Yang told himself. Despite feeling frustrated at himself for thinking about Mittermeyer alone, rather than the thousands of men in danger on this side of the fortress, it was where his mind stayed.

The giant laser fired, arcing out across space and melting both ghost fleets into indistinguishable slag. This did manage to shock Yang’s thoughts away from Mittermeyer, and he held his breath as the beam’s glow faded to embers, hoping that all the escape pods had made it out of the path.

Now that the Thor Hammer was exposed on the side of the fortress, it displaced many of the floating gun turrets that had previously been fending off the worst of the missile strikes. The final element of Yang’s timing plan went into play. The two remaining wings of the Braunschweig fleet continued to approach Iserlohn from either side, spiraling in. Ahead of them, they sent out a wave of their fastest missiles.

With the Thor Hammer still recharging, the floating turrets displaced, and the fleet occupied on the other side of the fortress with Mittermeyer, the missiles struck home.

Many of them impacted the area around the Thor Hammer’s great eye. A glittering wave of the liquid metal shell swelled around its raised edges, rippling in towards the lip of the eye, then out again in a wave around the fortress. They traveled at the wave propagation speed of the liquid metal. Although these waves were as tall and wide as a destroyer, they still appeared tiny and slow as they crawled across Iserlohn’s surface. Yang followed them with his eyes on the magnified view of Iserlohn overhead, involuntarily focusing on something else as the last wave of missiles struck true home— the exposed center of the Thor Hammer.

It was still glowing, recharging for its next strike— it was already painfully bright to look at on the telescope view, an overexposed pure camera white in the center. It was nearly ready to fire again, which made the impacts of the missiles that much more deadly. All that energy had to go somewhere, and since it couldn’t be sent out, it remained to boil the fortress itself.

The explosions of the missiles striking the center of the Thor Hammer were even brighter. They briefly washed out the entire view, and when the cameras adjusted their light-sensitivity to get the view in focus, they were left with a scene of slowly unfolding destruction.

The central column that made up the Thor Hammer’s firing chamber began to collapse in on itself. It glowed an odd shade of fire blue: the liquid metal waves crashed over the hole in the fortress’s side, then caught fire as they fell. The complicated molecule that formed the liquid metal shell broke apart into its raw components, oxygen and iron and some other elements Yang couldn’t remember or name. It melted into parts of Iserlohn’s structure, further widening the gyre, spreading the exothermic reaction outwards.

The opening grew wider as more and more of the liquid metal was pulled inside, looking like a gaping wound, or a giant maw swallowing the fortress from inside out. It would stabilize when someone within the fortress turned off the gravity engine, but that would take some time.

For now, Braunschweig ordered his section of the fleet forward, towards the fortress. Yang didn’t hear him. Their cameras trained on the popped soap bubble kept it the same size on the large screen overhead, only sharpening in detail as they grew closer, revealing the gory extent of the damage.

There were a million people in Iserlohn, Yang knew. The damage he had conspired to do would kill an untold number of them. He still didn’t know what had become of the soldiers who had escaped the ships that charged the fortress— if the timing had been right, if they had escaped the Thor Hammer’s fury. He didn’t know how Mittermeyer was faring on the other side of the corridor.

Behind Yang, Braunschweig and Flegel were celebrating their victory. It was a victory— as clean of a victory over Iserlohn fortress as Yang could picture. The Alliance would have killed an untold number of people to accomplish what Yang had done. This would likely win the civil war for Braunschweig.

Yang should have felt pleased. But looking at the hole in Iserlohn’s side, he felt only an echo of that yawning horror within himself.