EMPIRE: Resistance

by Richard F. Weyand

  “When you were in your twenties, Claire? Really?” Burke asked.

  Diener chuckled, remembering some past indiscretion or antic, no doubt, and Claire elbowed him.

  “Perhaps,” was all she would say.

  Diener laughed aloud, and Claire blushed.

  There had to be a terrific story behind all that, Burke decided. One she was unlikely to ever hear.

  “Well, you did a nice job bringing the crown to the dais, Claire, and Jimmy and I appreciate it.”

  “I was happy to do it, Gail. I actually enjoyed it, once Jimmy got me breathing again.”

  Gail winced then, and Claire was concerned.

  “Gail, are you OK?”

  “Just a twinge of a headache there, for a moment. Not surprising, with everything going on.”

  Moody came up then, with some news.

  “The instantaneous polls are in from the newsfeeds,” he said. “The coronation was a big hit. You’ve taken a huge push in your polling numbers. Much more than normal for a coronation. So I would say your plans worked out, Gail.”

  “Jimmy’s plan, but I’ll take it. That’s good news. It gives us more options going forward.”

  The small party continued to nosh on hors d'oeuvres and chat until dinner was announced. It was mid-afternoon, but no one had had any lunch.

  Staff always outdid their normal high standards for the after-coronation dinner. They started with a creamy clam chowder, with oyster crackers, followed up with a Caesar salad. The entree was marinated tournedos of beef with a mushroom gravy and pan fried slices of new potatoes, with a blanched medley of vegetables. Dessert was a twofer, a peach cobbler lightly drizzled with honey and a splendidly sinful tray of small finger desserts, including little cheesecakes, chocolates, and baklava.

  They didn’t talk shop over dinner. There was plenty of time to begin more serious business tomorrow.

  As everyone got up from the table, Burke grabbed suddenly at the edge of the table. She tottered, like she was about to fall, then straightened up.

  “Gail, are you OK?” Burke asked.

  “Yes, Jimmy. I just had this momentary vertigo–“

  Burke collapsed.

  Ardmore caught her as she fell and ran for the doors. The Guardsmen standing by threw the doors open in front of him and he pushed through them and went running down the hallway, Burke across his arms. He was transmitting in VR the whole way.

  Ardmore to elevators:

  Emergency call.

  Ardmore to Imperial Residence medical suite:

  Medical emergency incoming.

  Ardmore to Hargreaves:

  Lock down the Palace. Secure all the food.

  Ardmore hadn’t let the Imperial Guardsmen on the elevator lobby doors know he was coming, and he turned and hit the center of the doors with his back. The doors exploded open and he ran for the elevators. A car was there, Imperial Guard standing by, and he ran in and took it down one floor.

  The medical clinic was next to the elevators, and a nurse had the doors open. Ardmore ran in and lay Burke on the table. The emergency team was suited up and standing by.

  “Sudden collapse after dinner,” Ardmore said. “Check for poison or tampering of some kind.”

  One of the nurses cut Burke’s clothing off of her while the doctor waited for the first diagnostic results from the table.

  Dr. Henry Jordan Clay had been one of the Imperial physicians for fifteen years, and head of the group for the last five. He always put himself on call for the big events, like today’s coronation. He had just been about to end his shift when he got the medical emergency alert from Ardmore.

  When Ardmore brought Burke in, she was completely unresponsive. She had a heartbeat – though a bit irregular – and was breathing shallowly. As the diagnostic results started coming in, though, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. Her whole body was trying to shut down, but it couldn’t. It was like something was running round inside her body turning off the lights, but all the switches were spring-loaded to ‘on.’

  That triggered a memory. Twelve years ago, the Empress Julia had died suddenly at the age of eighty-three. One of those things that happened, people had said. But Clay had had his doubts. It was like her whole body had shut off at once. He had done some research, and had his own theory about what had happened, but he wasn’t in charge. Once he had been put in charge, however, he had taken steps.

  Clay walked over to a side cabinet and pulled out a box of injector ampoules. He started injecting Burke, tossing the ampoule, loading another one, injecting again. Legs, arms, buttocks, chest, neck. Again and again he injected her, then watched the diagnostic screen in VR and waited.

  Ardmore fretted in the corner. He knew better than to interrupt or ask what was going on, even though it killed him to just sit there. Assassination was always a threat for the powerful. How the hell had they pulled this off? And if she died, what would he do?

  One thing for sure. Whether Burke lived or died, there was going to be hell to pay.

  After an anxious fifteen minutes, Burke took a big lungful of air and came to, coughing.

  “What the hell happened? Where am I?” she asked.

  “You’re in the Imperial Residence clinic, Milady,” Clay answered. “As for what happened, your nanites tried to kill you.”

  “My nanites tried to.... Wait. How is that even possible?”

  “The premium nanite package got orders to kill you, from somewhere. They tried, but you also had the basic nanite package. They kept trying to save you.”

  Ardmore, hearing this, sent another message in VR:

  Ardmore to Hargreaves:

  There is an illegal transmitter in the Palace. Find it. Room by room with metal detectors if that’s what it takes.

  “So what did you do?” Burke asked.

  “I had a nanite search-and-destroy package here. It went after all the other nanites in your system and killed them. It is going to self-destruct on a timetable, and then you won’t have any nanites at all in your system.”

  Burke got a pensive look for a moment.

  “I have no VR.”

  “No VR, no health maintenance, no contraceptives, no nothing. No nanites at all. I’m sorry, Milady. We’ll have to start over on getting those set up again.”

  “And it was the premium package that tried to kill me?”

  “Yes, Milady.”

  “How did you happen to have the search-and-destroy package available?”

  “That’s a long story, Milady. Not long after I started working at the clinic here, the Empress collapsed and died. It was like her whole body shut down at once. I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t in a position to act on them. Once I became head of the clinic here, though, I found and stocked the search-and-destroy package.”

  “And the Empress died? Augustus VI’s wife?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. She was eighty-three. You survived the attack because you’re only twenty-nine, because you had the basic nanite package still in place, and because His Majesty got you here so quickly.”

  Burke looked over to Ardmore.

  “My hero,” she said.

  Ardmore shrugged.

  “When you collapsed, I caught you,” he said. “I just ran here with you.”

  “And alerted us he was on the way, so we were ready when you got here, Milady.”

  “You carried me the whole way, while running?”

  Ardmore shrugged his massive shoulders again.

  “You’re not heavy.”

  Clay considered the muscled, 6’2” Imperial Marine lying naked on his diagnostics table. Well, compared to Ardmore she wasn’t heavy.

  Burke turned back to Clay.

  “How long ago was that? That the Empress died?”

  “Twelve years or so, Milady.”

  Burke looked to Ardmore and raised an eyebrow.

  “From Jonah’s notes,” Ardmore said, “she was pushing what reforms he was trying. Someone must have decided to shut her up to stop the reform
s without the potential of an Imperial assassination investigation.”

  “Yes, but that means this shit goes back a long ways, Jimmy. And how do you tell which dose gets used where? You wanna bet all the premium nanites are built to take external orders?”

  “That’s a hell of a control on the rich and powerful,” Ardmore said.

  “It also means the nanite companies are in this up to their necks.”

  “Well, we warned them. Now they’re going to learn they should have listened.”

  Ardmore sent another quick message in VR.

  Ardmore to Pitney:

  I want a complete list of the CEOs and Directors of Research of the companies that make the premium health maintenance nanites. Going back twenty years. Ask Becker.

  “What are you going to do, Jimmy?”

  “The thing about an historian, Gail, is most of the people we study have been dead a long time. A few years one way or the other hardly matters. They thought taking you out would be a smart move, that you were the more dangerous of the two of us. They miscalculated.”

  “Is that the smart thing, though, Jimmy?”

  “Yes. When there was an attempt on Trajan the Great, he executed a hundred and eleven of the wealthiest and most powerful businessmen in the former Democracy of Planets, including both the ringleaders and those who went along with them. People need to understand the Throne is not to be trifled with.”

  “’When you strike at a king, you must kill him.’”

  “Emerson was right, Gail. And he still is. The democratic revolutionaries in Baden-Baden in 1848 didn’t understand that, and they paid for it. The Russian Bolsheviks by 1918 had learned the lesson.”

  “Sire,” Clay said. “You’re a potential target, too. Should I use the search-and-destroy nanites on you as well?”

  “No,” Ardmore said. “One of us needs VR capability. Once Milady Empress has hers back, then you can dose me.”

  “What do we do in the meantime, Sire? We need to have someone standing by in case they try for you.”

  Ardmore looked to Burke. She shrugged.

  “A doctor in the Residence upstairs with the package, ready to go. How about that?” Ardmore asked Clay.

  “That will work, Sire. One of us is always here anyway. We can just maintain station upstairs for a while. I can rig a small alarm device for you to wear on your wrist.”

  Thomas Pitney, the head of the Department, the Throne’s private intelligence service, called Franz Becker, the head of the Stauss-Becker family. The Stauss-Becker family had been Throne loyalists for three and a half centuries.

  Pitney put in a call to Becker under the pseudonym by which Becker knew him – Jonas Whidley – and with an avatar from Section Six’s library.

  “Good morning, Mr. Whidley. How can I help you today?”

  “Good morning, Mr. Becker. My superior requires a list of the CEOs and Directors of Research for all the companies that make the premium health maintenance nanites, going back twenty years. He thought you might be the person to ask.”

  “I think I could come up with such a list pretty quickly, given our previous work on the subject, Mr. Whidley. Let me put that together and send it on to you.”

  “That would be much appreciated, Mr. Becker. I’m sure my superior will be grateful for your assistance. Good day.”

  Whidley cut the connection and Becker sent the request on to Elizabeth Schoenhorst, the head of his best financial consulting group.

  Becker then started looking into liquidating his holdings in companies that manufactured the premium health maintenance nanites. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but when the Throne showed an interest like that, it was clear change was coming, and the markets’ initial reaction to change of any kind was almost uniformly bad.

  Pitney received the list from Becker the next day, Saturday. It was labeled ‘Companies currently manufacturing premium health maintenance nanites, and their Chief Executive Officers and Directors of Research for the past twenty years.’

  Pitney sent the list on to Ardmore. Ardmore called him into a VR meeting in the Emperor’s office within the hour.

  “Your Majesty,” Pitney said, standing before the Emperor’s desk.

  Ardmore slid an Imperial death warrant across the desk.

  “They tried to kill the Empress, Mr. Pitney. With adulterated nanites.”

  Whitney’s brows shot up and his eyes widened.

  “Kill them all.”

  Ardmore cut the connection.

  Recovery

  They kept Burke under observation in the clinic Friday night and through Saturday. She had blood in her urine, one sign of the huge civil war between nanites that had been waged in her body. She was generally weak, and lost her dinner about an hour after she came out of it. Her digestion had been interrupted, and the body’s solution to that was to empty the whole system, from the center out both ends, and start over. Her urine remained cloudy for two days as her body shed the debris of all the nanites it had built up over the years.

  Ardmore stayed with her in the clinic that first night, sleeping in an armchair Housekeeping brought in for him. He had come so close to losing her, he didn’t want to leave her side. When she had nightmares that first night, he moved the chair right up against her bedside so he could hold her hand. She hugged his arm and fell back asleep.

  Saturday night, Burke was released to the bedroom in the Imperial Apartment. The doctors set up a watch station in the hallway right outside the doors.

  In bed that night, they clung to each other.

  “No lovemaking, Jimmy. I don’t have any contraception right now, and without the nanites I have no clue where in my cycle I am. I wasn’t paying attention. But we can’t start a little one until I’ve recovered. It’s not fair to the baby.”

  “I know. I just want to hold you. Gail, I came so close to losing you. I– I’m just sort of– I don’t know. I’m just sort of overwrought at the moment.”

  “I know, I know. Hold me, Baby. Don’t ever let me go.”

  The next day, Sunday, would normally be brunch with the Co-Consul, Paul Diener, and his wife Clair on the Co-Consul’s side of the top floor of the Imperial Palace. To accommodate Burke – and not have to move the medical watch team – they met instead on the Emperor’s and Empress’s side of the floor. Burke was wearing a comfy fleece lounger top and pants.

  “Thanks for coming,” Burke said. “Sorry for being dressed down.”

  “Nonsense, dear,” Claire said. “Are you sure you’re OK to be up and about?”

  “They tell me it’s OK. I feel good, if still a little wrung out. And I don’t have any VR.”

  “How long is that going to be, Gail?”

  “About a week. They have to wait for the search-and-destroy nanites to time out and self-destruct.”

  They all helped themselves to food from the buffet set up on the sideboard. Breakfast was mostly quiet, because the rules were explicit – No talking business during the meal – and there wasn’t anything else to talk about.

  When they all sat back with their coffee, the staff dismissed, the real discussion got under way.

  “So let me get this straight,” Diener said. “The premium nanites have a backdoor that allows someone to get in to them and tell them to kill their host?”

  “Yes,” Ardmore said. “And all the nanite companies know about it. There’s no way they haven’t reverse-engineered each others’ stuff enough to know that. Actually, they probably all shared it, so no matter what premium package you have, they have control over you.”

  “My God,” Diener said. “So someone is using this, behind the scenes, to get rid of people who are inconvenient for one reason or another?”

  “Yes,” Ardmore said. “I started a deep search on Imperial records and was quickly overwhelmed. I drew in the Zoo to help out. They’re looking for everyone who had premium nanites and who died suddenly below age ninety-five. You know, no warning, no onset of frailty a month or two before death. Someone just u
p and dies. That should tell us a lot.”

  “I’ll say. Because then you can see who they were being trouble for, who benefitted from them being suddenly gone. Who do you suspect, Jimmy? The sector governors?”

  “No. The people behind them,” Ardmore said. “The moneyed interests. Some people with a lot of money are unscrupulous. That may be how they got the money, or it may be the heir to some large estate was just a bad guy. But I expect it to be some big-money outfit. Or a group of them. That’s what it has been in the past.”

  “So now what happens?”

  Ardmore looked to Claire, then back to Diener.

  “I gave the orders yesterday to clean some house with the nanite companies. People need to know this is not OK, and will result in a serious case of dead.”

  Burke raised an eyebrow at that. It was clear Ardmore had been busy yesterday when she was more or less out of it.

  “How many, Jimmy?” she asked.

  “Fifteen hundred and some,” Ardmore answered.

  “That many?” Diener asked.

  Ardmore shrugged.

  “I’m an historian. In a hundred years, they’re all dead anyway. The question is, What survives? The Empire? The Law? An open society? Those are the questions I’m concerned with. I’m prepared to be completely ruthless in achieving the legitimate goals of the Throne.”

  Diener nodded. Burke looked at Ardmore with fresh eyes for several seconds, then nodded.

  “They miscalculated,” Burke said. “You said that Friday, Jimmy, but I don’t think I fully realized how much so until now.”

  Ardmore simply nodded.

  “The Imperial Guard locked down the Palace complex and searched every room over the last two days,” Diener said.

  “Yes,” Ardmore said. “Something like this can’t be done from another VR. When you and I message each other, it goes through the Palace system, and the system won’t pass on anything that doesn’t fit its parameters. So there had to be a transmitter somewhere close by. I surmised that within the hour Friday, and had the Guard go looking for it. They actually found it pretty quickly, but they wanted to make sure there weren’t two of them.”