The Phoenix and the Firefly
I watched the signing of the armistice through a gunsight. The day was too beautiful for what we bore witness to; the sky a crisp blue, without a hint of haze or cloud. I was overlooking the Imperial Steps leading up to the governor's palace. I remember looking upwards repeatedly as I set up the gun carriage, hoping to see a smudge on the horizon; wishing for an anvil cloud to appear and drench the proceedings, for thunder and lightning. For the wrath of God.
It stayed clear: perfect, blue, and sunny.
I placed my weapon into its carriage, hooking it up to a generator that would have produced enough energy to reduce a fighter craft to vapour. I plugged in the targeting pad and optics, sitting down next to it and putting it through the regular checks. Worked perfectly. Everything worked perfectly.
Below me were six thousand more soldiers, three thousand on each side of the Imperial Boulevard. They formed a neat path up the Steps, gleaming the black and gold of the Imperial Guard, and standing at attention with the stillness only androids can accomplish. I was one of the other four thousand soldiers setting up in the buildings on either side of the Boulevard, armed with the marksman and antiaircraft weapons.
The entire ten thousand of the Imperial Guard Legion, taken hundreds of light years away from the Capital for the signing of this armistice. Because the only way the Yagoshans were willing to sign at all was if the Empress herself did.
The Empress was at the top of the Steps, surrounded and decorated with all the Imperial circumstance afforded to the First Servant of the Servants of God. She wore a burgundy silk dress, the skirt requiring a handmaid to carry and weighted with gold. Her face was painted the white of purity, her eyes and lashes the black of night. She was fifteen.
The war began a year prior, with the assassination of her parents during a military parade. Nobody appreciated the terrible threat the Yagoshans represented until a single craft penetrated to the heart of the empire undetected, and plunged itself from orbit in a suicide attack.
She was coronated on the spot. At fourteen years old, with tears streaming down her face, staring at the wreckage of the ship that killed her parents, she became the Empress of the Annater Thalassocracy, Beloved of the Empire and God, First Servant of the Servants of God, and Master Admiral of the Navy. With the entire weight of those titles in her voice she issued her first edict: Punish Them.
After only a year of fighting the might of the Imperial Navy was shattered against Yagoshan technological superiority. Billions died screaming as their warships broke apart in orbit above Personis Three, Viktas Prime, and Kissinger Prime. The war had turned into a grueling meatgrinder gauntlet to reduce those three Yagoshan garden worlds to cinders. Hundreds of thousands of battleships, cruisers, and frigates were destroyed in each engagement.
The Yagoshans never communicated with us. Their carbon black spindle ships picked away at us with half-a-kilometre long coilguns, weaving in and out of range. The admirals called it being needled to death, which seems like such an effete term after having seen a single direct hit split a battleship in two, or pierce the entire length of a vessel, stem to stern.
When the Flagship of the Punitive Fleet was destroyed over Kissinger Prime what little momentum the Imperial Navy had was gone, and fell into full retreat. That was less than a month ago. It could have been a rout. Billions dead, three worlds turned to glass, and not so much as a hint of having slowed the Yagoshan warmachine. When they requested an armistice it was such a shock that at first most thought it was a hoax. But the Yagoshans let our fleet retreat unscathed, and continued to broadcast their request.
The Empress, in a sign of either wisdom or weakness depending on who you ask, accepted immediately. The armistice was to be signed by the Empress on Hawkins Prime, the closest habitable planet to the Yagoshan-Annater astral border. The Yagoshans replied saying they would send their First.
The First was thought to be a myth. A legendary figure: the creator and first of the Yagoshans, a creature that gave them their genocidal ideology, who honed their terrorist strategies, and directed their chaotic war fleets. But she was real, and her signature was the only one that would carry any weight amongst in the anarchist territories the Yagoshans called their own.
The pronouncement of a Yagoshan carrier in orbit felt like a resistor failing. Every one of the wires in every one of the soldiers present was humming with nervous energy. I don't know how my comrades beneath me continued to stand at attention. Every bit of military training started to unravel in me, leaving a frayed void of nerves. We were all expecting it to have been a ruse: a plan to destroy our Empress, and with her the last of our pride and military. We were all expecting face Hell. But no rain of fire came.
We were told a lone craft left the carrier and entered the atmosphere. We weren't going to get bombed from orbit but things could still go horribly wrong. We were expecting it to. I think we were all secretly hoping it would. To justify our nerves. To justify the war.
The distinctive sound of a Yagoshan engine in the distance broke the last willpower of those standing at attention, as they all craned their heads to look for the source. A Yagoshan Spider transport appeared on the horizon, flying low. Matte black against the clear sky, it was not the smudge I had been hoping to see. I trained my gun on it, watching it through digital optics. It was unarmed, its eight robotic "legs" held on tightly to what might be mistaken for a simple cargo container. It blasted us with warm air flying over, and setting down at the edge of the soldiers. Ten thousand guns were trained on that aircraft.
All you could hear was the Yagoshan engine's echo through the evacuated streets of the city. When even the echo faded, the front hatch fell open. I could hear the crack of the pavement, even up on the roof. The Empire held its breath.
A Yagoshan woman stepped out furtively. She was clad head to toe in their infamously durable black carbon skinsuits, reinforced further with plate inserts on her chest, shins, thighs, and face. Strapped across her eyes were the heavy optics their soldiers wore, with the red lenses that saw everything. She was unarmed. A bodyguard making sure we were good to our word. She looked around - I was sure she saw everyone one of us in the windows and on the roofs - and turned towards the troop transport. She took a lot of the tension out of the situation somehow. She affirmed that the Yagoshans were afraid of us too. The Empire exhaled.
Then she stepped out. She seemed to drain the colour around her, leaving everything black and white for a few lingering seconds. She had the skin of a fallen angel - immaculately pale - and the fine, snow-white hair that barely reached her shoulders, matched. She annihilated any sense of fear, any sense of equality and solidarity between us. She was cold, measured, primordial hatred. This was the First.
She breathed upwards, not outwards - gaining height with each breath she took. She moved toe-heel as she strode to stand beside her bodyguard, making machine-precision look clunky, and looked around, just as her bodyguard had, seeing every single one of us with her albino red eyes. I met her gaze through the optics of my gun, and despite having a weapon that could erase her being, she made me feel powerless. Her features were tailor made with a razor blade: neat, sharp, clinical.
The Imperial Retinue began carrying a small table down the steps towards the Yagoshans. On it was the armistice treaty. They presented it to the First, and set an Imperial signing pen down beside it. The ink itself carried the weight of the Empress' voice. The First signed it carefully, providing us with a name to her title, and writing it out in four evenly spaced characters.
"M I L K."
Milk. The name seems like a cruel joke. A light name, a trivial name. The synthetic stuff people drink. The First, the murderer of billions. Believed to be the Devil herself. Milk. A travesty of a name.
The chief retainer for the Empress moved to take the table back up the Empress and the First grabbed his wrist and twisted it away from the table. Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. The First just pointed up towards the Empress.
She has to sign it here was the clear message being sent. The First was not going to accept bureaucratic trappings. It was just going to be Empress Josephine, the Beloved of the Empire and God and Milk, the First - the atheist, the anarchist, the demon.
At first the Empress hesitated, then she dismissed her handmaid and summoned the Prefect of the Imperial Guard to her side, and whispered something to him. Then they both moved down the stairs together. You could hear each step the Prefect's metal feet made on the marble steps. It sounded like a death knell.
When they reached the table, the Prefect stood behind the Empress, weapon drawn. The First, unfazed, reached out, spinning the armistice treaty around with the tips of her fingers, and then placing the pen on top of it. Then she stood there, still save for her breathing, glaring down at our Empress. The Empress picked up the pen and then shuddered.
It was a miracle that prevented the entire Imperial Guard firing. We expected some treachery, some poison on the pen, or nerve gas, or a small needle gun to the heart. We watched, horrified, because the truth was worse. Josephine, Empress of the Annater Thalassocracy, Beloved of the Empire and God, First Servant of the Servants of God, and Master Admiral of the Navy, was crying.
At first she held it back, weeping as she signed the treaty, but then a single, small sob escaped her lips. It resounded in the street like a thunderclap. It was crushing. I would have given up my place in Paradise if only I could have dried those tears, if only I could have been at her side, being brave for her. It was our job - our sacred charge - to protect the Empress from harm. And here we were, watching her cry in front of our enemy; an enemy who simply stared. An enemy we were powerless to stop.
Without a word, Milk turned on her heel and strode back into the troop transport with her bodyguard, leaving the Empress with the signed armistice and her tears. As the transport sealed and began to lift off, the Empress collapsed into the arms of the Prefect, sobbing. He held her, looking around to the rest of us - the Imperial Guard. The failures.
The terms of the armistice were white peace. There was no blame, no reparations, no territory changing hands. And yet, there was no question - we had been defeated. What pride, what sense of worth we had left, had been shattered against Milk. The war had left us battered and our navy humbled. But the armistice crushed us.
The Empress has her detractors. There are those who think she showed an unforgivable weakness to the Yagoshans. That the Empress had humbled us, even when we were on equal terms. But I know the reality of it. The entire Imperial Guard knows the reality of it. Josephine stared into the eyes of the Devil herself. And while meeting that gaze, signed a deal with her.