Chapter Text
Oskar von Reuenthal waited outside the admiral’s office on the Brunhilde, his body ramrod-straight and patient. His face was settled into its accustomed lines of perfect stoicism and composure. The only thing that belied his emotional state were a few papers in his right hand, crumpled from his grip.
Eventually, the door opened, and a harried-looking commander stormed out, glaring at Reuenthal before marching off down the corridor. He didn’t fully close the door behind him, and Reuenthal hovered on the threshold. There was a quiet conversation happening in the office, and he could catch a few snatches of it.
“What a waste of my time.” The admiral—the notes of disdain in his voice were clear. “Do I have another meeting now?”
The person who responded spoke more softly, but Reuenthal thought he heard his own name being said.
“Ah, him,” the admiral said, now sounding thoughtful, even—if he dared hope—pleased. “Let’s see what he has for me. Call him in.”
The panel on the wall beeped, and the guard nodded impassively at him. Reuenthal pushed the door open and entered. The office was not large, with a pair of couches, a desk, and a window, richly decorated with gilded detailing and faux-wood paneling in the classic Imperial style. Two aides were standing by the door, watching the inhabitants of the room. A tall man with dense curls of stunningly red hair—Reuenthal recognized him as Captain Siegfried Kircheis, the admiral’s second-in-command—perched on the edge of the desk, looking at the man who was gazing out the window at the sea of stars beyond. Admiral Reinhard von Müsel.
Reuenthal crossed the room and saluted before the admiral. Müsel turned, and smiled, almost affectionately, at him. Reuenthal heard the aides mutter something behind him, and he smiled to himself.
“Rear Admiral von Reuenthal,” Müsel said. “Your visit is most welcome. May I offer you some tea? Kircheis and I were about to sit down, and we would appreciate your joining us.”
“Gladly, Your Excellency.” Reuenthal dipped his head respectfully, and Müsel nodded at one of the aides, who slipped to the sideboard and poured three cups of tea. As Reuenthal accepted his, he continued, “First, I must admit that I did not request this audience merely for the pleasure of having tea with you both, although I am honored by your invitation. There are… certain matters about our business on Ultima Thule I would like to discuss.” He shot a glance at the aides—the pair had the snobbish look of Odin bureaucrats. As little as he cared about the opinions of the landed nobility, Reuenthal knew that, in this case, there was far more at risk than his own reputation. “Privately, if possible.”
Müsel nodded and waved a hand at the aides. Reuenthal turned to watch them shut the door behind them. When he looked back at his two superiors, Kircheis hadn’t moved a muscle. The admiral was still staring at him intently, his lips pressed together, as if daring Reuenthal to comment on the other man’s presence. Reuenthal said nothing, hoping that would at least raise him incrementally in the admiral’s estimation. The two gave each other another look, and then Müsel sat down on one of the couches, Kircheis beside him. Reuenthal followed their lead and sat opposite the two, trying to surreptitiously smooth out the papers he’d brought with him in his lap.
“As you asked of me, I have gathered a few documents pertaining to the situation which we might find necessary.” Reuenthal took a sip of his tea—he would have preferred coffee, but it was a rich, earthy red herbal blend, and quite good regardless—and handed the admiral two of the three printouts. “The first one is Mittermeyer’s original incident report, and the second is his arrest record.”
Kircheis leaned over Müsel’s shoulder to read. Reuenthal didn’t fail to notice how close his cheek came to the admiral’s mane of golden hair. Their faces darkened as the admiral flipped through the papers. Only a few weeks ago, it had become public that during the territorial skirmishes following the Sixth Battle of Iserlohn, as the Alliance fleets made a few last-ditch attempts to protect their settlements closest to the mouth of the corridor, several officers in then-Commodore Wolfgang Mittermeyer’s fleet had disobeyed his orders not to harm the civilian populace, and he had punished them severely, as was his right. This should have raised few eyebrows with the admiralty, if not for the fact that Mittermeyer was from a commoner’s family, and a few of the subordinates who he had ordered executed were part of powerful noble families, including a man who was related to Prince Braunschweig, the Kaiser’s son-in-law. The fact that Mittermeyer, like Reuenthal, had been promoted to Rear Admiral for his conduct in the battle upon his return to Odin held no weight with the High Admirals once Braunschweig had raised a fuss, and he had been removed from his command and thrown in the military prison at Ultima Thule.
“What a mockery of justice,” Müsel sneered as he finished. “These nobles have lived so long in privilege that the moment they are held accountable for anything, they lose their minds and lash out at those who hold them to the same standard that they hold the rest of us.” He momentarily re-composed himself and shuffled the pages back into their original order.
“I assume that last paper is a personal letter,” Kircheis said, straightening up. There was pity and tenderness in his large blue eyes.
Reuenthal nodded, and looked down at the scrawled writing. Mittermeyer hated typing his letters, he knew, and he could picture him hunched over a tablet, frantically scribbling out this letter, this heartbreakingly desperate plea for Reuenthal’s help. He couldn’t look at the page for long without his stomach wrenching with sorrow and rage, and he tried to nonchalantly stare out the window. The stars impassively slid past as the ship sailed on its steady course. He could feel the familiar throb of the engines through the soles of his boots, and the distant near-imperceptible hum of the stardrive as it dug into the fabric of space to propel them forward, towards Ultima Thule, towards Mittermeyer. He took several deep breaths. Müsel and Kircheis didn’t ask to see the letter.
“It is our duty to fight against the injustices of the Goldenbaum nobility whenever possible, but I must point out that this may be more challenging than we expect. There is a chance that I will not be able to help you—I may be ordered not to interfere,” the admiral said, not unkindly. “What would you do then, Reuenthal?”
“I would get him out myself. Whatever it takes,” Reuenthal said, low, still not looking at them. He felt wild at the thought.
“So he is that close of a friend.”
“He is. If I may be so bold, he is to me what he—” He turned away from the window and nodded at Kircheis. “—is to you.”
They both exchanged another glance. Kircheis reached over and put his hand on Müsel’s knee. Reuenthal felt something hot rise in his chest. It was jealousy, he realized after a moment of taking stock of the feeling—jealousy that they could be so outward with their affections. No matter how obvious their relationship seemed (and, gods, it was obvious to anyone with eyes), no one dared criticize them. Whether that was Müsel’s position, or his sister’s influence, or sheer force of personality, Reuenthal couldn’t say, but he wanted to have it. To stand on the bridge of a ship, to go everywhere, with Mittermeyer at his side and no authorities above them that could judge or separate them—he wanted it with a fervor that surprised him.
“I see,” said the admiral. His pale eyes looked distant as he sipped at his tea. “Thank you for bringing these to me, Reuenthal. I am sure they will be useful when we reach Ultima Thule—five days, right, Kircheis?” The redheaded man nodded. Müsel stood, and Reuenthal quickly followed suit. “Keep looking for whatever information you can find about the arrest. Kircheis and I will search as well. I can only hope that our efforts will be rewarded.”
Reuenthal bowed deeply. “I do as well, Your Excellency. I am indebted to you for this.”
Kircheis gave him a last, warm smile, and the admiral went to sit back behind his desk. Reuenthal took this as a dismissal, and saluted the two one last time and stepped out of the office. He tried not to walk too fast as he headed for his guest quarters, but Mittermeyer’s letter was being crushed in his hand. Don’t worry, Wolf. I’m coming. And I have the greatest power in the Empire at my back.
Wolfgang Mittermeyer had only a few things sustaining him in prison, but they were powerful things that fed an unquenchable internal fire. The first was working out.
At some point in the military prison’s history, some unexpected budgetary windfall had resulted in the building of a relatively well-stocked gym. It was nowhere near as lavish as some of the ones he’d frequented on Odin, but it had a good selection of stationary exercise machines and weights (chained to the wall against inmates potentially using them as weapons). Of course, he had no way to practice his hand-to-hand combat skills apart from starting fights with other prisoners, and he had no intention of doing that if he could help it. Mittermeyer had a long-standing philosophy of avoiding drawing attention to himself in tricky situations, which he was abiding to now. Although access to the gym was often arbitrarily restricted by the guards, he spent as much time as he could there. He would distract himself with long hours on the spin bikes or treadmills or rowing machines, wearing a VR headset when they were available (rarely), until he grew too tired to think or feel, and then would drag himself back to his cell to collapse on his bunk. He tried to avoid doing this too often, since it felt unsustainable, but it was hard to pull himself away from exercising when there was nothing else to do.
The second thing sustaining him was his rage against the nobility and military command for imprisoning him. Most people in the prison on Ultima Thule were enlisted soldiers, arrested for battlefield crimes that didn’t warrant execution but were unsightly enough to merit punishment. There were, however, a few dozen officers, and they recognized Mittermeyer for one of their own quickly. At first, he welcomed their attempts to reach out to him. But when they sat down with him at mealtime to regale him with stories of their embezzlements and petty treacheries, he soon realized he disdained them as much as the thieves and rapists among the inmates. Eventually, he had to flatly tell them that he had executed one of his subordinates for war crimes—crimes which, he was quick to point out, were not much greater than those of the officers around him. They left him alone after that.
The third and final thing was a letter that he had printed out and, for a while, taped to the wall above his bunk. It was Reuenthal’s response to the frantic letter he’d written before being shipped off to Ultima Thule. He read it every night, trying to soak in his lover’s presence through his tight, restrained handwriting.
Dear Mittermeyer,
I would like to say that I cannot believe this has happened to you, but that would be a lie. The corruption and prejudice of some of our exalted superiors knows no bounds. Obviously, I trust your account of the situation, and I hope I am not the first to say that you were completely justified to act as you did.
Luckily, there may be a way out for you yet. I know we have discussed Admiral Reinhard von Müsel before, and I have come to the conclusion that he is likely to be sympathetic to your plight. He may be able to pull some strings to get this overturned. I am currently working on getting myself an introduction—so far a challenging process, as nearly everyone with any clout in the Admiralty considers him an irritating brat. Most of this, I’m sure, is just the usual resentment of their Excellencies towards genuine talent, compounded by his extreme youth and family connections. In any case, I won’t let their jealousy be an obstacle, and will obtain Admiral Müsel’s aid if I have to knock on his door in the dead of night to get it. Ultima Thule is only a week away for a single ship, and by the end of the month I will be there to personally drag you out of that hell-hole.
In other news, Bittenfeld is currently also on leave on Odin, and is his usual overeager self. I’ve managed to rope him into practicing with me, with the dual goals of keeping in shape and maybe instilling some more tactical sense into him, but so far I have only achieved the former. Here I must admit that my motivations for helping you are somewhat selfish—you are too good of a sparring partner to let languish in a military prison.
There are many, many more interesting things that I would like to tell you about, but they must wait until we see each other in person. If I recall, it was your turn to provide the wine for dinner, and I do hope that you make a better choice than you did last time.
Yours,
Oskar von Reuenthal
The casual optimism of Reuenthal’s letter broke him sometimes—how could he talk so confidently about their next choice of wine?—but it started to seep into Mittermeyer’s thinking nonetheless. He ticked off the days in his head, imagining his ship coming closer and closer to Ultima Thule.
At first, he kept the letter on display near his bed, being lucky enough to not have a cellmate. But the guards could see it too, and one night, as he was looking at it again, he heard them stop in their patrol down the hallway and bang on the wall.
“Hey, pretty-boy Admiral. What’s that you’re reading?” The sneered insult, weak though it was, stung Mittermeyer, and he resolutely tried to ignore it. “Letter from your wife?”
“Nah, I got a look at it when mail security checked it. Apparently it’s from his friend, some other admiral. He promises to pull some strings and get him out.”
The first guard laughed. It was an ugly noise. “Oh, of course he does. Hey, you know what’s going to happen, you little cocksucker?” His voice got louder, as if he was leaning up close to the bars. “Your ‘friend’ is going to pretty quickly realize that you’ve been buried deep, and it will be far easier for him to just forget about you and leave you rotting in here.” When Mittermeyer didn’t react outwardly, the guard made a disappointed sound in his throat and stepped back. “What a fucking sissy.”
At that, Mittermeyer flinched, and could no longer restrain himself from leaping up and lunging towards the bars. He wasn’t sure what he meant to do, but was quickly stopped by the jarring buzz of the electric field around them and fell back. The guards only snickered and walked on, leaving him panting and twitching with rage and pain on the floor of his cell. After that, he was sure to keep the letter hidden under his mattress, and only brought it out occasionally.
So the weeks passed, and Mittermeyer grew increasingly impatient and despondent by turns. He started to worry that maybe the guard had been right, that Reuenthal had left him. It was an irrational fear, he was sure, but he couldn’t keep the possibility out of his thoughts as the days went on with no word from the outside. There was a sort of all-consuming blackness at the very edges of his mind, and he flung himself more and more into exercising to stave it off. Failing that, he devoured the mediocre contents of the prison library, or paced the length of his cell until his legs wore out. He had less and less tolerance for the insults of the guards and other inmates, and with his shortening fuse he couldn’t pull himself away from real physical confrontations.
It was after about a month had passed since his arrest that Mittermeyer’s fraying routine changed. The free period after what passed for dinner had just begun, and he was waiting alone outside the gym for the guards to open it. Their expressions were suspicious, and Mittermeyer was mentally sizing them up in case they decided he had provoked them, but any tension was immediately deflated by the appearance of one of the warden’s aides. The man, a rail-thin officer with a gaunt face and colorless hair, glanced at Mittermeyer, and then told the guards, “This one needs to come with me. Commander Orff’s orders.”
The guards shrugged. “You’re free to take him,” said the most outspoken, the man who’d called him a sissy once.
“He needs to be accompanied by at least one guard when leaving the main complex. Are you all too stupid to know your own regulations?” the aide said, ignoring Mittermeyer, who felt like the floor was dropping out beneath him, but very slowly.
“We’re supposed to be unlocking the gym,” another guard said sulkily. “There needs to be at least three of us there to supervise it. If anyone went with you, we’d have to wait to get someone else here to open it up.”
“I don’t care. Commander Orff wants him transferred now.”
The hierarchy of the prison, though often violent, was inflexible—the commander and his aides were solidly above the regular guards, and the inmates were dehumanized by both alike. After a few minutes of grumbling, the guards cast out one of their number to go with the aide. Mittermeyer’s head was swimming as he was prodded through hallways he hadn’t set foot in since his arrest. He told himself to be realistic; surely Orff was calling for him as a result of the fight he’d been in last night that had landed another prisoner in the infirmary. He couldn’t let himself hope. At some point, they reached a checkpoint of a sort, and he was handcuffed before they proceeded. Mittermeyer tried to keep track of where he was being herded, but the walls and doors seem to be miles distant and he couldn’t focus on anything. His blood was pulsing loudly in his ears. Both of the options he sensed before him were overwhelming—either he was about to undergo some kind of torture, even execution, or Reuenthal had made good on his promise.
They came to a bleak, empty corridor, doors set in regular intervals along each side. The aide pointed to one, seemingly at random, and he was marched up to it. The guard opened it and stepped back. An even smaller and danker cell than the one he’d just left yawned before him, and his heart sank.
“You’re to wait here,” the aide told him, and ungently pushed him by the shoulder towards the open door.
Mittermeyer resisted. Anger and despair together made him bold. “Wait here? Can I ask until when? Or why?”
“The commander did not deign to inform me.” The aide pushed him again, harder, and, unable to balance himself with his wrists still cuffed, he stumbled across the threshold. The door slammed behind him as soon as he was inside. Mittermeyer heard the beep and heavy click of the lock before he could turn around.
The only illumination in the cell was a tiny sliver of a window, high on the far wall. The sun had already set, and it only cast a faint acidic shine into the room from the distant electric lights outside, but it was enough for Mittermeyer to find his way to the low cot and sit down, slowly. He felt as if his limbs were weighted down with lead.
Oskar, I hope you get here soon. He rested his head against the cold concrete wall. Thunder crackled somewhere, far-off and outside. Raindrops began to tap against the window, first slow, then escalating into an incessant drumming. He would not sleep that night.