Ambition

Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Vol.2: Ambition
GINGA EIYU DENSETSU Vol.2
© 1983 by Yoshiki TANAKA
Cover Illustration © 2007 Yukinobu Hoshino.
All rights reserved.

Cover and interior design by Fawn Lau

No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

HAIKASORU
Published by VIZ Media, LLC
P.O. Box 77010
San Francisco, CA 94107

www.haikasoru.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tanaka, Yoshiki, 1952– author. | Huddleston, Daniel, translator.
Title: Legend of the galactic heroes / written by Yoshiki Tanaka ; translated by Daniel Huddleston.

Title: Legend of the galactic heroes / written by Yoshiki Tanaka ; translated
by Daniel Huddleston.

Other titles: Ginga eiyu densetsu

Description: San Francisco : Haikasoru, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2015044444 | ISBN 9781421584942 (v. 1 : paperback) |
ISBN 9781421584959 (v. 2 : paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction. | War stories. | BISAC: FICTION / Science
Fiction / Space Opera. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Military. | FICTION /
Science Fiction / Adventure.

Classification: LCC PL862.A5343 G5513 2016 | DDC 895.63 /5—dc23

LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044444

Printed in the U.S.A.
First Printing, July 2016

Haikasoru eBook edition

ISBN: 978-1-4215-9147-6

*Titles and ranks correspond to each character’s status at the end of
Dawn
or their first appearance in
Ambition
.

Major Characters

Chapter 1:

Before the Storm

Chapter 2:

Ignition Point

Chapter 3:

The Yang Fleet Mobilizes

Chapter 4:

Bloodshed in Space

Chapter 7:

A Victory for Whom?

Chapter 8:

The Golden Bough Falls

Chapter 9:

Farewell, Distant Days

About the Author

A hundred billion stars gleamed
with a hundred billion lights. Those lights were weak, however, and the greater part of space’s infinite expanse was dominated by obsidian darkness.

A night with no end. An infinite void. Coldness to beggar the imagination. The universe did not reject the human race. It simply ignored humanity altogether. The universe was vast, though to humans there never seemed to be enough room. This was because space only had meaning to humans within the range that they could perceive and act in it.

Humans divided the universe up prosaically—into regions inhabitable and uninhabitable, into regions navigable and unnavigable. And those most hapless of humans—professional soldiers—divided all the stars and all of space into regions controlled by the enemy and controlled by allies, regions to be seized and to be defended, and regions where battle was easy and where it was difficult.

None of these divisions had names originally. To distinguish recognizable zones, minuscule humans spoke of them in symbols of their own devising.

There was a region of space called the Iserlohn Corridor—a long and narrow tunnel of safety running through an unnavigable stretch of galactic space. Through its interior there flew a solitary battleship. Under the light of a G0 star, its streamlined hull would probably have gleamed silverfish gray, and the inscription of its name,
Ulysses,
would have stood out in vivid clarity.

Ulysses.
This ship, named for that hero of ancient legend, belonged to the Iserlohn Patrol Fleet of the Free Planets Alliance.

Six months prior,
Ulysses
had been a part of the Alliance Navy’s Eighth Fleet. That fleet had fought in the battle of the Amritsar Stellar Region—the largest-scale military clash in human history—where over 90 percent of its ships and personnel had been lost forever. With this defeat had come the dissolution of the fleet itself. Its scant survivors had been shuffled off to other fleets and bases.

Ulysses, hero of many a battle, had faced many life-or-death struggles and lived to tell the tale. The ship itself was such a hero. Its crew as well.

That said, the name of the battleship
Ulysses
was not so much an object of respect now as it was fodder for benign joking.

In the Battle of Amritsar, the damage taken by
Ulysses
had been light. All that had been destroyed was the bacterial wastewater treatment system, but that had resulted in the crew having to fight while ankle deep in regurgitated sewage.

Awaiting
Ulysses
upon its return was a most undesirable descriptor—“the battleship with the broken toilets.”

Lieutenant Commander Nilson, the ship’s captain, and his first officer, Sublieutenant Eda, had reeked to high heaven by the time they reached Iserlohn, and those who greeted them, saying “Good work” and the like, had done so in tones hardly suited to their sentiments. Still, in the face of a numbingly miserable defeat in which 70 percent of the thirty million deployed had been lost, perhaps people needed
Ulysses
—whether as the start of a conversation or the butt of a joke—in order to keep themselves from becoming mentally unhinged. Cold comfort though that might be for the crew, even assuming it were true.

At present,
Ulysses
was away from Iserlohn Fortress on patrol duty. These patrol missions had long served as training for the crew, but beyond this region of space—brimming with variable stars, red giants, and irregular gravitational fields—there waited a human danger even more vast. The territory of the Free Planets Alliance extended only so far as the region surrounding Iserlohn; beyond lay the vast spread of the Galactic Empire’s frontier. In times past, this region had on many occasions been witness to large-scale combat, and from time to time, fragments of spaceships destroyed centuries ago were still discovered here.

Captain Nilson’s hulking frame rose up from the command seat. An operator had reported the sighting of an unidentified spacecraft.
Ulysses
’s enemy detection system, like those of the other ships, consisted of radar, mass-detection sensors, energy-measuring devices, swarms of advance-surveillance satellites, and more—and all of them were responding. What they had detected was not a fleet but a single vessel.

“There aren’t any friendlies in this sector now, are there?”

“No, sir. At present, not a single friendly vessel in this sector.”

“Then process of elimination tells us it’s an enemy. All hands, alert level one!”

Alarms rang out, and the adrenaline levels of 140 crew members began to skyrocket. Voices shot back and forth from every department—
Distance thirty-three light-seconds … Rail cannons condition green … Heat cannons ready … Viewscreen photoflux adjustments completed
—and the captain, in a strikingly resonant voice, ordered that a transmission be sent giving the mutually understandable signal:

“Halt your vessel. If you fail to comply, we will attack.”

It was five minutes later that a reply came back to the tense, sweating crew. The communications officer who received it cocked his head in bewilderment as he handed his tablet to the captain. Written there was the following:

We’ve no desire to exchange blows. We seek negotiations and humbly entreat you to honor this request.

“Negotiations?” Captain Nilson murmured, as if seeking confirmation from himself. First officer Eda crossed his arms.

“It’s been a while since the last one, but I wonder if we might have ourselves a
visitor
.”

By which he meant “a defector.”

“In any case, the detailed examination comes later. Don’t stand down from battle stations yet. Tell them to stop engines and link up their comm screen.”

Captain Nilson took off his uniform beret, all black save for its white five-pointed star mark, and used it to fan his face. It would be best if a mutual slaughter could be avoided. After all, even if he won, his ship wouldn’t come away without casualties. He stared at the enemy vessel that had floated into sight on one of his viewscreens. It was not so different in appearance from
Ulysses
, and Captain Nilson wondered:
Are the people in there also waiting on pins and needles, sweating just like we are?

Iserlohn was an artificial planet positioned on the border between the territories of the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance, revolving around the star Artena. Located in the very center of the Iserlohn Corridor, it was impossible to launch a military incursion into either side’s territory without first passing it. Constructed by the empire and stolen by the alliance, this artificial world was sixty kilometers in diameter. If its interior were cut into thin slices, it could be divided into several thousand floors. On its surface was a multilayered armor of ultrahardened steel, crystalline fiber, and superceramic, all treated with beam-resistant mirror coating. To secure the fortress, four layers of this armor were piled one atop the other.

It was equipped for every function that a strategic base required: offense, defense, resupply, R & R, maintenance, medical, communications, space traffic control, intelligence gathering. Its spaceport could berth twenty thousand vessels, and its repair shops could service four hundred simultaneously. Its hospitals had two hundred thousand beds. Its arsenals could manufacture 7,500 fusion missiles per hour.

The combined number of soldiers in the fortress and its patrol fleet rose to a total of two million, and an additional three million civilians were living inside it as well. The greater part of that number were family members of soldiers, though it also included those to whom the military had delegated the operation of lifestyle- and entertainment-related facilities. Among these were a number of establishments employing only women.

Although Iserlohn was a military fortress, it was also a huge city that boasted a population of five million. Among the galaxy’s inhabited worlds, not a few had populations that were smaller. Its societal infrastructure was also well-appointed. Schools it had had from the beginning, and in addition it was furnished with theaters, concert halls, a fifteen-floor sports center, maternity clinics, day cares, self-contained reservoir and drainage systems, hydrogen reactors doubling as freshwater recycling plants, vast botanical gardens that functioned as part of the oxygen supply system and as places for “forest therapy,” and hydroponics ranches that were primarily sources of vegetable protein and vitamins.

Serving as commander of both fortress and patrol fleet was the man ultimately responsible for this gargantuan city in space, the leader of its fighting forces, Free Planets Alliance Navy Admiral Yang Wen-li.

It was hard for most people to imagine Yang Wen-li as one of the top VIPs in the FPA military. First of all, he didn’t look like a military man, not even when in uniform.

He was not some thoughtful-looking old gentleman with perfect posture. Nor was he some huge muscle-bound giant. Neither did he have the appearance of a coolheaded genius or a pasty-faced young nobleman.

He was thirty years old, though he looked two or three years younger than he was. His hair and eyes were black, his height and build average, and while he wasn’t exactly
not
handsome, his looks certainly did not bespeak the value of the rare talent he possessed.

What was extraordinary about him was not what was outside his skull, but what was inside it. Last year, in SE 796, he had held a complete monopoly on the military successes of the Free Planets Alliance. He had stolen from the empire’s hands the fortress Iserlohn, whose impregnability had been renowned in song, and done so without spilling a single drop of his troops’ blood. In the Astarte and Amritsar Stellar Regions, the Alliance Armed Forces had suffered crushing defeats at the hands of the Imperial Navy Admiral Reinhard von Lohengramm, yet in both cases it had been Yang’s calm and ingenious operational command that had rescued his compatriots from complete obliteration.

Had he not been there, the Free Planets Alliance’s annals of war would have needed only one word to describe SE 796—
defeat
. That fact was admitted by all. It was for that reason that Yang had been promoted from commodore to full admiral in less than one year. The young admiral, however, had hardly been moved to tears by this exceptional advancement. For although he was a master of warfare whose like was nowhere else to be found, Yang himself had discovered nothing of value in the thing called war.

More than once he had dreamed of retiring from the military to become a civilian of no special note, but he as yet had been unable to do so.

That day, he was enjoying a game of 3-D chess in his private quarters.

“Check!” shouted Julian Mintz.

Yang, scratching his black head of hair, conceded defeat. For some reason, it didn’t look like he was ever going to be called a great admiral when it came to chess. “Oh well. So this makes seventeen straight losses?” He sighed, but there was neither frustration nor petulance in it.

“Eighteen,” corrected Julian, flashing a smile. Still right in the middle of boyhood, he was only half as old as Yang. With his dark-brown eyes and flaxen hair that had subtle, natural waves, all agreed he was a handsome young man.

Three years ago, Julian had been sent to live with Yang thanks to the application of what was called Travers’s Law, by which children of soldiers killed in action could be raised in the homes of other soldiers. He was a top student at school, the boys’ top scorer for the year in the sport of flyball, and since receiving a status equivalent to lance corporal as a civilian employee of the military, had displayed an outstanding knack for sharpshooting. While it was all just a little embarrassing for his guardian Yang, it was also a source of pride.

“Julian’s one flaw,” Alex Caselnes—Yang’s sharp-tongued upperclassman from Officers’ Academy—had once opined, “is that he worships the ground you walk on, Yang. Honestly, that’s just terrible taste. If not for that, I’d gladly give him my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

The thirty-six year-old Caselnes had two daughters, actually, the elder of whom was seven.