For Rudolf, the gene decided everything, and to prevent the collapse of his belief system, Magdalena had had to die. It simply could not be that Emperor Rudolf had a genetic makeup that produced retardation. The fault had to lie completely with Magdalena.
After the death of Rudolf, the imperial crown of the Galactic Empire came to rest upon the head of Sigismund, eldest son of Rudolf’s eldest daughter, Katharina. And so at the age of twenty-five, with the assistance of his father Joachim, Lord of Neue-Staufen, this young emperor came to rule the galaxy.
With the death of Rudolf I, republican rebellions erupted in every quarter. It was believed that with the loss of Rudolf’s leadership and fierce personality, the empire would soon crumble; however, that kind of thinking was too optimistic. The aristocrats, military leaders, and bureaucrats that Rudolf had been nourishing at his side for the past forty years made up a troika far stronger than the republicans’ hopeful estimation.
These forces were led by Lord Joachim of Neue-Staufen, who was both the emperor’s father and prime minister. Displaying the composed, cool leadership that might be expected of a man chosen by Rudolf as groom for his daughter, Joachim crushed the weaker forces of insurrection as though they were eggshells beneath his heel.
More than five hundred million who had participated in the uprisings were killed, and of their families more than ten billion had their citizenship revoked and were thrown into serfdom. “In the suppression of opposing forces, be unsparing,” said the imperial regulations, and they were followed to the letter.
The forces of republicanism were once again made to endure a long winter.
In the face of such powerful dictators, it was thought that this harsh winter would stretch on forever. After Joachim’s death, Sigismund ruled directly. And after his death, Sigismund was succeeded by his eldest son Richard, who was in turn succeeded by his own eldest, Ottfried. The highest position of authority passed only to the descendants of Rudolf, and it looked as if heredity was the only thing that could determine the transition of power.
However, deep beneath the thick ice, a watery convection current was silently moving.
In IC 164, the republicans of the Altair system—who had been denounced as a rebel clan, reduced to slave status, and set to hard labor—succeeded in escaping, using a spaceship they had constructed themselves.
Their plan was not like the ones that their forebears had been carefully refining for generations. The number of such plans that had been proposed was equal to the number that had ended in failure. The grave markers of republicans had only increased, and in place of elegies, only the cruel laughter of the Bureau for the Maintenance of Public Order resounded among the graveyards. It was a cycle that had repeated itself endlessly. Yet finally, there was success. And from conception to execution, it had only taken three standard months.
It had literally begun as child’s play. A child of two slaves who were mining molybdenum and antimony in the cruel cold of Altair 7 had dodged out of the sight of his overseers and was playing at carving small boats from the ice, which he then floated out onto the water. A young man named Ahle Heinessen had been watching him absently, and this image reverberated in the back of his mind like a divine revelation. Wasn’t this lonely planet, after all, a bottomless storehouse of shipbuilding materials?
On the seventh planet, the overall amount of water was not so great; it abounded more in natural dry ice than in frozen water. Heinessen chose a gargantuan mass of dry ice that was entirely buried in a certain valley. Its dimensions were 122 kilometers in length, forty kilometers in width, and thirty kilometers in height. After hollowing out the center, he made a propulsion area and a living area, and soon it began to look like it could fly. The most difficult part of the plan was the question of how to get materials to actually build a spaceship. It was no good trying to obtain materials illegally, for if the Bureau for the Maintenance of Public Order got wind of it, they would simply arrest and slaughter everyone involved.
However, this world also had natural resources that would not draw the bureau’s attention. In the absolute zero cold of outer space, there was no fear of dry ice sublimating into gas. If they could just isolate the heat that would be generated by the propulsion and living areas, a considerably long-term flight would be possible. During that time, they could search asteroids and uninhabited planets for the materials needed to build an interstellar spaceship. There was no need to keep flying in the same ship in which they had departed.
And so their glittering white spaceship of dry ice was christened the Ion Fazegas, named after the boy who had made that toy boat out of ice. Four hundred thousand men and women entered that vessel and escaped from the Altair system. This was the first step on a journey that historians would later dub the Long March of 10,000 Light-Years.
After shaking off the ruthless pursuit of the Galactic Empire’s military, they hid themselves beneath the surface of a nameless planet and there constructed eighty interstellar spacecraft. Then they set out into the inner core of the galaxy. Here the escapees faced an immensity brimming with deadly giant stars, dwarfs, and variables. Here the ill will of the Creator crashed down on their heads time and time again.
In the midst of this journey of hardship, they lost their leader Heinessen to an accident. His dear friend Kim Hua Nguyen took over as leader. By the time this man grew old and his eyesight faded, they at last passed out of the dangerous regions and found their future in a stable cluster of main sequence stars. More than half a century had passed since they had left Altair.
To the stars of their new world they gave the names of the gods of ancient Phoenicia: Baalat, Astarte, Melqart, Hadad, and others. They made their base on the fourth planet from Baalat, to which they gave the name of their fallen leader Heinessen, that his deeds might be forever honored.
The conclusion of the Long March of 10,000 Light-Years occurred in IC 218, but these people—who had escaped the yoke of the dictatorship—chose to abolish the imperial calendar and revive the SE calendar instead. In this, they prided themselves that it was they who were the rightful heirs of the Galactic Federation. Rudolf and his ilk were nothing more than contemptible traitors to democratic rule.
In this manner, the establishment of the Free Planets Alliance was solemnly declared. It took place in SE 527. The first generation of its citizens numbered around 160,000. More than half of their comrades had perished during the Long March.
It was far too small a number to truly say that humanity had been divided, but the founders of the Free Planets Alliance possessed incomparable diligence and passion, and by their power, material fulfillment was rapidly attained. Childbearing was encouraged, and the population grew. A national establishment was put in order, and the agricultural and industrial production capacity steadily increased.
It was as if the golden age of the Galactic Federation had returned.
Then, in SE 640, the forces of the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets encountered one another for the first time in the form of a clash between battleships of both sides.
From the standpoint of the Free Planets, such an encounter was a possibility for which they had long been preparing themselves. To the imperial side, however, it came like a bolt from the blue, and so victory in the battle went to the Free Planets. However, just before a direct hit from a neutron-beam cannon turned the imperial warship into a fireball of destruction, an emergency communiqué leapt away toward the capital of the empire.
Imperial bureaucrats there extracted old records from computer archives and learned that more than a century before, there had been an incident involving slaves escaping from Altair. So they had not died out in space after all; they lived and even prospered! A force was assembled to put down this insurrection. Great battleships were dispatched to the stronghold of those rebels.
And there those warships were utterly defeated.
There are many reasons why the imperial military was so soundly beaten despite its superior numbers. For one thing, the long-distance campaign caused physical and mental exhaustion to set in on the empire’s soldiers and officers. For another, the issue of resupply was taken too lightly. In addition, the imperial military knew too little about the area in which they were fighting. They also underestimated both the enemy’s strength and will to fight. Their strategy was careless. The Free Planets’ military had capable commanders. Et cetera, et cetera.