Dawn (5 page)

The twenty-nine-year-old Yang, with his black hair, black eyes, and medium height and build, gave more the impression of an easygoing scholar than that of a soldier. At least that’s the impression one might describe if pressed. Most people who looked at him saw nothing more than a very quiet-natured young man. Most couldn’t believe their ears when they heard his rank.

“Commodore Yang, reporting as ordered, sir.”

The fleet commander, Vice Admiral Paetta, turned his unfriendly eyes on the young officer saluting him. He was a middle-aged man with stern, forbidding features that made it impossible to imagine him in any line of work but the military.

Observing Yang again, he simply said, “I’ve looked over the tactical plan you submitted,” though what he wanted to say was,
How in the world can a sissy-looking kid like you be only two ranks below me?! “
It was a fairly interesting idea,” he continued. “But too cautious. And I wonder if it wasn’t just a bit too passive.”

“You don’t say,” Yang answered. He said it in a very quiet tone of voice, but on reflection, it might have seemed a pretty rude thing to say to a commanding officer. Vice Admiral Paetta hadn’t noticed it, though.

“As you yourself noted,” he continued, “it would be pretty hard to lose with this strategy. But there’s no point in simply not losing. We’ve gotta win. We’re closing in on the enemy from three directions. And on top of that, we’ve got twice their numbers. All the conditions are lined up for a big win, so why are you thinking up ways to avoid losing?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not like they’re surrounded already.”

This time Paetta did notice. His eyebrows drew together in irritation, making a splendid vertical crease in the midst of his forehead.

Yang was as relaxed as ever.

Nine years ago, when he had graduated from the National Defense Force Officers’ Academy, Yang had been an unremarkable, newly minted ensign. He had graduated 1,909th in his class of 4,840. But now, he could certainly not be called an unremarkable commodore. He was one of only sixteen officers in the entire alliance who had reached admiralty while still in their twenties.

It was impossible that Vice Admiral Paetta was unaware of the young commodore’s service record. In nine years, Yang had participated in over a hundred combat operations. And even though he hadn’t often been in large-scale battles involving thousands of vessels like this one, he hadn’t been just some kid playing with firecrackers, either. Above all else, he had been the shining hero of the so-called El Facil Evacuation.

Though he was young, he was the hero of a historic battle, and yet Vice Admiral Paetta didn’t get that impression from him at all. Still, when the officers’ salaries were calculated in the rear service at headquarters, it was clear that he was being well paid in accordance with his record.

“At any rate, this tactical plan is rejected.”

Paetta held the papers out to Yang, then added unnecessarily, “Let me also just say, this is nothing personal.”

“It’s because I dote on my money,” he would say to friends who asked him the secret of his success. “It goes out into the world and makes its fortune, and then it comes back home like a faithful child. Bronze coins turn into silver ones. Silver ones turn into gold. It all depends on their upbringing!”

As he himself seemed to think that this was a sharp-witted joke, he went around telling it every chance he got, eventually acquiring the nickname “The Financial-Parenting Expert.” It would be difficult to claim that this title was always spoken with affectionate intent, but Yang Tai-long himself was apparently quite happy with it.

In addition, Yang Tai-long was a collector of antique art. His residence was piled high with stacks of paintings, sculptures, and ceramics from the days when the AD calendar was still in use. Before he came to occupy an office and command a fleet of interstellar commerce vessels, he was always busy at home admiring and polishing his antiques.

After this hobby had metastasized, there were rumors that he had even chosen an antique as his spouse. For after divorcing his first wife—who had had a penchant for wasting money—he had married another woman of considerable beauty, who was, however, the widow of a certain soldier. Then his son, Yang Wen-li, had been born.

Yang Tai-long had been in his study at home when he received the news that it was a boy. His hands had paused for a moment in their polishing of an old vase, and he had muttered, “Huh. So when I’m gone, all these works of art will be his.”

Then his hands had resumed their polishing.

When Yang Wen-li was five years old, his mother died. The cause was acute heart disease, and since she had always been healthy up until that point, her sudden death understandably came as a shock to Yang Tai-long. He dropped a bronze lion ornament to the floor but then unexpectedly picked it back up and incensed his wife’s entire family by uttering these words:

“Thank goodness I wasn’t polishing something breakable …”

Yang Tai-long had now lost two wives—one to divorce and one to death—and he had no wish to marry again. He assigned a maid to take care of his son, but when the maid was on break or when the boy became difficult to manage, Yang Tai-long would set him down beside himself, and together they would polish a vase or something.

When the relatives of his late wife came to visit and found father and son wordlessly polishing vases in the study, they were horrified, and in the end the assertion emerged that the child should be rescued from living with such an irresponsible father. When they had cornered the father and asked him which was more important to him—his son or his antiques—he had replied:

“Well, the art required a lot of capital, you know …”

But on the other hand, I got my son for free
, being the implication.

The entire family, driven into a rage by these words, was preparing to take the matter of the boy’s custody to court, but Yang Tai-long guessed what they were up to, and carrying the boy with him, boarded an interstellar trading ship and disappeared from the capital of Heinessen. The family, realizing how absurd it would be to allege that a father had kidnapped his own son, shrugged their collective shoulders and did nothing beyond tracking where in the starry sky the spaceship had gone. “Oh well,” they said. “The fact that he took the boy with him must mean he at least has a beating heart.”

In this way, Yang Wen-li came to spend the greater part of his first sixteen years inside the hulls of starships.

In the beginning, the young Yang Wen-li would become ill and run fevers every time he experienced warp, but eventually he got used to it and was able to calmly accept his circumstances. Once he had generally satisfied his interest in engineering, he turned his attention in another direction: history.

The boy watched videos, read e-copies of old books, and loved listening to reminiscences about the past, but in particular, he held a deep interest in “the most wicked usurper in all of history,” Rudolf.

Because Yang Wen-li was in the Free Planets Alliance, Rudolf was naturally made out to be the very incarnation of evil, but in listening to what people said about him, the boy had begun to have his doubts. If Rudolf had really been such a villain, he wondered, then why had people supported him and given him power?

“Because he was dishonest to his marrow. He had the people fooled.”

“Why were the people fooled?”

“Because Rudolf was an evil man, y’see.”

These answers didn’t quite satisfy the boy, but his father’s view differed somewhat from those of the others he talked to. He answered his son’s inquiry in this way:

“Because the people wanted to have it easy.”

“Have it easy?”

“Exactly. They didn’t want to solve their own problems by their own effort. They were all waiting for some saint or superman to show up from somewhere and shoulder all their troubles by himself. And that’s what Rudolf took advantage of. Listen. I want you to remember this: it’s the ones who empower a dictator who deserve most of the blame. But the ones who don’t support him actively—who watch it happening without saying anything—they’re just as much to blame. But listen, don’t you think you should turn your interests in a more profitable direction than this kind of stuff?”

“More profitable?”

“Like money or artwork. Art for the soul, money for the pocket.”

Despite comments such as these, Yang Tai-long never forced his business or his hobbies on his son, and Yang Wen-li became more and more absorbed in history.

A few days before his son’s sixteenth birthday, Yang Tai-long died. It was the result of an accident involving his ship’s nuclear-fusion furnace. Yang Wen-li had decided to take the entrance examination for Heinnessen Memorial University’s history department, having only just recently gotten his father’s approval.

“Ah, why not?” he had said. “It’s not like there’s never been anyone to make money at history.”

With those words, the father had given his son his blessing to walk the path that he loved.

“Don’t ever despise money, though. If you’ve got it, you can get by without bowing your head to people you don’t like, and you don’t have to compromise your principles just to get along in life, either. But just like politicians, it’s best if we manage it well and not just do as we please with it.”

At the end of his forty-eight years, Yang Tai-long left behind his son, his company, and his huge collection of artwork.

After Yang Wen-li had finished with his father’s funeral, he was kept busy with mundane matters such as inheritance and taxes. And then he discovered the terrible truth: the works of art that his father had so passionately collected prior to his death were, almost without exception, counterfeit.

From the Etrurian vases to the rococo-style portraits to the bronze horses from imperial Han China, everything was “worth less than a single dinar,” as the government’s public appraiser told him by way of an expressionless underling.

And that wasn’t all. Prior to his death, his father had mortgaged his ownership of the company in order to cover his debts. In the end, Yang was left out in the cold with nothing but a mountain of junk.

But just as he had done when he was a child, Yang accepted the situation with a wry smile, mingled with a sigh. He did think it was rather odd that his wheeler-dealer of a father should lack an eye for value only when it came to his beloved works of art. If—just if—he had been knowingly collecting forgeries, Yang felt like that would have been just like his father. As for his father’s company, Yang had never had any desire to take over the business anyway, so he didn’t mind losing it one bit.

At any rate, there was an even bigger problem. He didn’t have enough money left on hand to afford the cost of going to the top-tier university he was supposed to be attending soon.

Because of the chronic state of war with the Galactic Empire, hugely expensive military appropriations were putting a strain on the national budget, and funding for education in the humanities—which had no direct military applications—kept getting cut. It was hard to get a scholarship.

It seemed as if there would be no school anywhere where one could study history for free … and yet there was one.

And the National Defense Force Officers’ Academy, with its Department of Military History, was it.

Just before the deadline, Yang sent off his application, and although his entrance exam results placed him far indeed from the head of the class, he somehow managed a passing score.

Almost all of the mountain of junk he had inherited from his father he threw away—though he did put some of it into storage—and he moved into the officer’s school dormitory quite literally empty-handed.

His motives being what they were, there was no way Yang was going to be a top-level student. He diligently studied his military history—and all the wide range of nonmilitary history that made up its background—but he skimped as much as possible on his other subjects.

Particularly in the areas of weapons training, flight class, and mechanical engineering—the boring subjects—he was perfectly happy getting grades that hovered just above failing.

If he did fail, though, there was the danger of being expelled, and even if he weren’t expelled, the makeup tests would take up precious time. The point being that as long as he didn’t fail, it was okay. His goal was not to be the director of Joint Operational Headquarters, the secretary of the space srmada, or the superintendent general of staff. He wanted to be a researcher at the Military History Collation Office. He had practically no interest at all in advancement as a soldier.

His grades in Military History were outstanding, and combined with his nap-of-the-earth marks in all the practical subjects, produced a total that was the very picture of “average.” However, Yang’s marks in Strategic Tactical Simulations weren’t bad at all. Grades in this class were determined by having the students face off against one another in VR simulations. The instructors were shocked one day when the class’s top student—a boy named Wideborn, who was touted as the most brilliant student the school had seen in the last decade—was soundly defeated by Yang Wen-li.

Yang focused all of his forces on one point, cut his opponent’s supply lines, and then switched over to a purely defensive posture. Wideborn, using a variety of tactics, penetrated deep into Yang’s ranks, but when his supplies ran out, he had no choice but to retreat. Both the computer’s judgment and the instructor’s scoring awarded the victory to Yang.

Wideborn, whose pride had been wounded, was furious. “I’d have won if he’d played it straight and fought me head-on. I mean, all he did was keep running back and forth to get away, right?”