EMPIRE: Resistance

by Richard F. Weyand

  “And they found the operator?” Diener asked.

  “Yes. He was executed after questioning. Lina Schneider is tracking all that down.”

  “Where’s the transmitter, Jimmy?” Burke asked.

  “The Guard sent it to the Imperial Marines Combat Training Center for testing. They’re going to come up with a detection mechanism, and install one in the Palace so we know if they make another attempt.”

  “Do you expect another attempt, Jimmy?” Diener asked.

  “It’s happened before,” Ardmore said. “The Empress Julia died suddenly at the age of eighty-three. She was pushing Jonah to make reforms.”

  “My God,” Claire said. “That was twelve years ago.”

  “That’s right, Claire,” Burke said. “Someone has been deciding who lives and who dies for a long time now.”

  “But everyone with the premium nanites is at risk, then,” Diener said.

  “Yes, Paul, including you and Claire if you have the premium nanites,” Burke said. “We’re going to have to flush you two as well, and switch you to the basic nanites for a while. Until we get this all cleaned up.”

  “And you as well, Jimmy,” Claire said.

  “Oh, yes. We’re going to wait until Gail is back up in VR before we do it. One of us needs to be able to rule, and we need VR to do that.”

  “What if there’s an attack on you in the meantime, though?” Claire asked.

  “That’s why there’s a doctor standing by on this floor now, and why I wear this detector bracelet. Speaking of which, I should have them put one of these on both of you as well.”

  Ardmore sent a VR message to the medical clinic.

  “So they have an antidote or something?” Claire asked.

  “Yes. They just start the flush immediately rather than waiting. That’s what they did for Gail. And we were lucky with that. Dr. Clay suspected something with the Empress Julia, and, when he became head of the clinic, he got the search-and-destroy nanites to flush them out.”

  “Do we trust those, Jimmy?” Diener asked.

  “Different manufacturer, Paul. Not part of this whole mess. At least, we don’t think so.”

  “So the wealthy and powerful paid extra to have nanites other wealthy and powerful people could use to kill them,” Claire said, shaking her head.

  “More than a little irony there,” Burke said.

  She turned to Ardmore.

  “So how are we going to handle all this with the press, Jimmy?”

  Ardmore turned to Diener and nodded.

  “At Jimmy’s suggestion,” Diener said, “I gave Mr. Armitage an extra two weeks’ paid vacation. Maybe even three.”

  “So the press office is closed during all this?” Burke asked, looking back and forth between them.

  “Of course,” Ardmore said. “There was the big push up to the coronation, and now he’s taking a vacation. Ho-hum. Nothing to see here.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, you’re evil,” Burke said, laughing. “It’ll drive them nuts, not knowing what happened.”

  “Or even if anything happened at all,” Diener said.

  “Paul, we should keep a special eye out for anyone who pushes hard to find out what’s going on,” Ardmore said. “Their handlers and bosses are the ones who expected something to happen.”

  “We’re on that, Jimmy. Also, there’s a friend of the Throne we probably ought to warn.”

  “Good point, Paul. I’ll take care of it.”

  Franz Becker was at his weekend house in the country when he got the Sunday morning meeting request from the Emperor. While he was not dressed for business on Sunday, his avatar was. He took the meeting immediately, and found himself standing in front of the desk in the simulation of the Emperor’s office in the Imperial Palace on Center, over a thousand light-years away.

  “Your Majesty,” Becker said, bowing his head.

  “Be seated, Mr. Becker.”

  Becker sat in a guest chair in front of the desk.

  “Mr. Becker, a situation has come to my attention that may affect you and your family, so this meeting is my warning to you. Parties unknown attempted to kill the Empress after the coronation on Friday. This is not yet public knowledge.”

  “I understand, Sire. Is Her Majesty all right?”

  “She’s currently recuperating, Mr. Becker. The mechanism was previously unknown. Her premium nanites were given instructions through a backdoor in their programming to kill her. We believe all the premium nanites used in the Empire have such a backdoor. Obviously, this represents a risk to you and your family as well.”

  “It certainly does, Sire.”

  “Her Majesty was partially protected by her prior basic nanite package, Mr. Becker. The basic nanites tried to keep her alive while the premium nanites were trying to kill her. It provided enough delay for her to get the ultimate treatment, which was a set of search-and-destroy nanites to clear all the nanites from her system. She’ll have to start over.”

  Becker shook his head.

  “I’m glad Her Majesty survived, Sire. What a terrible thing.”

  “This is all very confidential, Mr. Becker. I tell you so you may protect yourself and your family. I would suggest a basic nanites package in addition to what you have, to give you time to respond, and to stock the search-and-destroy nanites as the ultimate treatment. I’ll leave that up to you.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  Ardmore cut the connection.

  Released from the call, Becker sat back in his armchair in the study of the country house outside Heidelberg on Hesse and considered.

  There had been rumors for years, but they had always been dismissed as conspiracy theories. Murphy’s Law. How someone just up and died, before the normal age of death between ninety-five and a hundred. Those things happen, that’s all.

  Except, maybe not? How many of those premature deaths were manipulated? Were, in fact, murders? And who benefitted?

  Becker shook his head. The Stausses had always enjoyed the game. The actual money involved had long since stopped being important to their lifestyle. After you had a certain amount, it was just a way of keeping score. But this? This was cheating.

  Becker made two more calls that afternoon. One was to his physician, to have the whole family injected with the basic suite of nanites, and to lay in a stockpile of the search-and-destroy nanites.

  The other was to Elizabeth Schoenhorst. What deaths in the last ten or twenty years were suspicious, in the sense the person up and died with little warning before age ninety-five? And, in each case, who benefitted?

  He had no doubt the Emperor was doing the same investigation on his end. And the Emperor’s investigations group had more access to Imperial records. Becker had his own advantages, though. And he didn’t have to identify all the players.

  But if he could identify some of them, there was money to be made. They had tried to kill the Empress, and, if Becker read this Emperor correctly, that was going to create some, er, turnover among the galaxy’s richest families.

  Investigations

  The Emperor had called Olivia Darden, the leader of the Zoo, into his office on Saturday morning. She was in the Palace, in an apartment in the Imperial Residence, but it was Saturday, and he was still in the clinic with Burke. He had called Darden to a VR meeting in channel 22, the simulation of his office.

  “There is a trap door in the premium health maintenance nanites package that allows someone with the right equipment to hack someone’s nanites and order them to kill their host. I believe there is a conspiracy by some group that has been using this hack for at least twenty years to their advantage by killing a small number of people for profit or power. They tried to kill the Empress yesterday.

  “That’s all I know. Find them.”

  Darden called an emergency meeting in channel 591, the lecture room simulation the Zoo used for big meetings. It could expand to hold as many people as logged into it. Zoo animals, as they now called themselves, logged into the simulation from all
over Imperial City and beyond, some people being out of the city for the weekend.

  This was the sort of problem the Zoo existed to solve, but problems of this magnitude seldom came along. When they did, the animals were all over it. They would work on it until they solved it, no matter how long it took, with little regard for sleep or meals.

  Darden repeated the Emperor’s words exactly, then told the Zoo, “That’s all we know. Go get ‘em.”

  In seconds, Darden was alone in channel 591.

  It was a big problem. Over thirty trillion people died in the Empire every year. Go back twenty years, and you had six hundred trillion death records. Cause of death and other items on the death record were not consistent across the Empire’s more than half a million planets.

  One group in the Zoo had coalesced around Matthew Houseman. They sat at one of the bigger tables in the cacophony that was channel 700 this morning.

  “So how do we sift out a few hundred or thousand murders from half a quadrillion death records?” Houseman asked.

  “Wait, Matt. That’s not the real problem,” Denise Coutard said. “We were asked to find the perpetrators, not every instance of a murder. We should concentrate on the murders we can isolate and be sure of, then do a benefit analysis. Who profited?”

  “I think that’s right,” Wang Minwei said.

  Wang was short and thin, and seemed to vibrate when he was on a problem. The team had asked him to modify his avatar so the constant drumming of his fingers didn’t drive them all nuts. He still did it, but now it didn’t make any noise.

  “The initial issue, however, is even getting all the data into a common format,” he continued.

  “Harry’s probably already on that. Can someone check?”

  Wang disappeared, to another part of the cafeteria simulation that was channel 700, and was back in seconds.

  “Yes, Harry’s on it,” he said.

  “OK. Given that, then, what do we filter on?” Houseman asked.

  “I think we ought to start with a histogram of age at death,” Lois Costas said.

  “What are you thinking, Lois?” Houseman asked.

  “Well, I expect we get a big, broad hump in the seventies and into the early eighties, then a sharp hump in the late nineties. Those are the ages at natural death with the two kinds of nanites. But if someone dies suddenly between eighty-five and ninety....”

  “I see where you’re going,” Coutard said. “If they made it past eighty-five, they probably have the premium nanites, but if they didn’t make it to ninety-five, that could be an indicator.”

  “Can we filter on cause of death as well?” Rick Pender asked. “Anything wishy-washy, like natural causes or unknown. I mean, if it’s a groundcar accident or they drowned or something, we want to filter those out.”

  “That’s good, too,” Wang said. “But we’re ignoring motive. I wonder if we can fold probate records into it. Someone wealthier, who controls some corporation or investment fund or something. Let me check with Harry again.”

  Wang disappeared again, then popped back into his place at the table. The others were used to it by this point. It was as if even a simulation couldn’t nail the hyperactive Wang down.

  “He’s going to try to fold in something along those lines. It’s going to take a while for his data extraction to run, though. Maybe we can borrow the Imperial Navy’s big computation engine.”

  Wang disappeared again, and several people laughed. Houseman just smiled and shook his head. In seconds, Wang was back.

  “Olivia’s going to ask, and coordinate with Harry,” he said.

  “All right,” Houseman said. “So let’s start building a multi-stage query, with the biggest filter first, then save intermediate extractions for filter tweaking later. What’s first?”

  “Age, I think, the way we’re looking at it,” Coutard said. “That sheds a lot of data right off.”

  “Then histogram that?” Houseman asked.

  “No. Cause of death filter next,” Lucia Martelli said. “Accidental deaths will fuzz up the histogram.”

  “OK. Let’s get started on those.”

  Across the Zoo, a dozen different teams were building their strategies for solving the problem. Was it wasted effort to have so many teams acting independently? Perhaps. But it definitely was effective. The teams were wildly competitive. And having different teams, using different methods, come to the same answer – which is what usually happened – gave confidence in the results.

  Come Sunday night, the Zoo was still in full swing. They were almost thirty-six hours into it, as a matter of fact. It wouldn’t be much longer and Olivia Darden would have to order people to stand down for a while. Six hours to eat and sleep and eat again were probably best. But they had their teeth into the problem now, and they didn’t want to let go.

  They were closing on solutions.

  There were almost six hundred companies manufacturing the premium health maintenance nanites, which gave Thomas Pitney a total of – how many? – fifteen hundred and twenty-four targets, including executives who had retired or moved on.

  The first thing he did was map them, in terms of which planets they were on. He saw with some relief they were generally on planets on which the Department already had a presence. Primarily sector and provincial capitals, with the occasional large commercial planet that was not a capital.

  The next thing to do was compare that map to a map of those agents who were, let’s say, used to that sort of work. Experienced with it. Hmm. He would have to move some assets around. And some of the targets might best be serviced with other assets.

  Together with his assistants, Pitney started working on a plan. Simultaneously, or nearly so, was clearly the best bet. Perhaps within a single day, or maybe two.

  Pitney issued travel orders, relocating assets. He also queried the Co-Consul as to the availability of other Imperial assets, such as Imperial Marine, Imperial Navy, and Imperial Police assets.

  By midweek after Friday’s coronation and assassination attempt, the plan was coming together. It would be a mix of methods. Department operatives, military assets, police assets. The biggest challenge was knowing which military and police assets could be trusted, which weren’t compromised in some way.

  In many cases, that would be a judgment call.

  Lina Schneider and her Investigations Office were working the issue from the other end. They had the identity of the operative inside the Imperial Palace who had secreted the transmitter into the Palace and hacked into Burke’s nanites. Her deputy, Stan Nowak, had also participated in the operative’s questioning. The empty husk that had been John Steiner had been executed at the end of that questioning, but they had his VR ID and his answers to the questions.

  Schneider looked at the investigation map taking shape in the viewing room. Steiner, a supervisor in building maintenance, had been popular, a friendly guy with an easy demeanor. That he was involved had been a shock to everyone. But his admissions while interrogated under drugs were damning. He had been a perfect deep-cover plant.

  The other investigation map underway was huge. The fifteen hundred and twenty-four current and former CEOs and research directors of the premium health maintenance nanite manufacturers. There was connectivity all over the place. They belonged to the same professional organizations. Most lived on a small subset of the Empire’s planets, the ones with a substantial health industry presence. They attended the same conferences, usually in VR.

  It was the unexpected thread they were looking for, without knowing what it would be. What was it that bound these people together, and which constituted the mechanism by which they were paid for their collaboration or silence?

  Wait a minute. This wasn’t a horizontal coordination. At this point it was simply a money-laundering operation. The backdoor in the nanites existed, and had to be kept in place, and had to be kept secret. But there was no coordination anymore. All there was were payments to those keeping things in place and keeping their mouths shut.r />
  So what were these people’s net worth, and where was the money coming from? Those were the only questions on the table.

  Schneider faded all the connections to grey, and highlighted the net worth from known accounts. Most of them looked completely normal. No large payments here. That didn’t make sense, either.

  Schneider focused on the retired executives, and looked up their retirement addresses. Looking at some of those locations, they were some pretty upscale houses, no doubt about it. Estates was more like it. She took one at random and looked up the title of the property. It was titled in someone else’s name.

  Schneider looked up that name, and the person had no background, no birth record, no school record, but they did have bank accounts and brokerage accounts. She pulled those up and swore under her breath. Big whopping accounts at that. Those were the accounts that bought the house and maintained it. Paid the staff. Paid the utilities. Supplied the groceries.

  So they were using aliases, eh? Follow the amounts paid into those accounts. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Payments for services rendered. From whom? She sent that off to investigators to follow.

  Now, how to track down the aliases for these other guys? The ones who hadn’t changed their address of record. There had to be a way.

  It was afternoon Sunday of a three-day weekend. Maybe they had gone to the estate for the weekend and hadn’t headed back to town yet. Schneider scanned the VR system records for the last login for each of the active employees. She found their rough locations, then had the system nail them down.

  Now find the owner of record for each house, attach that alias to that executive. Look at the alias, look at its bank accounts and brokerage accounts.

  OK, let’s have investigators track down the payment streams into those accounts as well. She sent those aliases on to the investigators as well, together with the obvious question.