EMPIRE: Resistance

by Richard F. Weyand

  Where is the money coming from?

  Karl Weibel was being very conciliatory.

  “We’re just not sure, Your Highness. I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we find out anything. Hopefully everything went according to plan. He is one of our best men, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Paul Bowdoin said. “It’s just very frustrating not to hear anything. How can we not know?”

  “Just let things play out, Your Highness. There are other things we can do as well. You know that. Just hold tight, and I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything.”

  “All right. Be certain you do, Mr. Weibel. I am not pleased at the moment with how things are going.”

  “I understand, Your Highness.”

  Bowdoin, the thirteenth great-grandson of Anne Bowdoin, the hereditary queen of Phalia who had surrendered her claim to the throne to annex to Sintar, cut the channel.

  Karl Weibel found himself back in his office simulation. He was actually on Sondheim, the Sondheim Province capital, in Earth Sector. Weibel was heir to the financial and commercial empire that had been much diminished by the stock market meltdown that had followed his twelfth great-grandfather’s execution by the Emperor Trajan in 10 GE, more than three hundred and fifty years before. They had rebuilt the family’s fortune over time, though it was still nowhere near what his ancestors had been able to accomplish in the corrupt environment of the former Democracy of Planets.

  Waiting in the VR simulation of his office was his partner and second, Arthur Kunstler, a descendant of another of the targets in Trajan’s long-ago purge of the Democracy of Planets’ plutocracy. He had been watching Weibel’s meeting with Bowdoin in the management channel, where neither participant could see him.

  “I worry about that guy,” Kunstler said.

  “I know. He’ll be OK for the time being,” Weibel said.

  “And long term?”

  Weibel gave Kunstler a long look.

  “Nothing’s changed. None of our plans. He’s needed right now. He holds their erstwhile aristocracy together, and they have organizations on all Phalia’s major planets. When he outlives his usefulness, we’ll deal with him.”

  “He thinks he has nanites without a backdoor.”

  “Life can be full of unpleasant surprises,” Weibel said.

  “What about the Empress?”

  “We just don’t know. Let me ask you. If we have been successful, and the Empress has died, what is the Palace’s likely response?”

  “To clam up and not say anything, while they try to figure out what’s going on,” Kunstler said.

  “And if we have not been successful? What is the Palace’s likely response?”

  “To clam up and not say anything, while they try to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Exactly,” Weibel said. “So we just have to wait. It wouldn’t be smart at this point to push too hard to find out, no matter which way things went.”

  “OK. I see that. Waiting is hard, though.”

  “After three hundred and fifty years, I can wait a little longer.”

  “And we’re not going to take a market position on this?” Kunstler asked.

  “No. That’s the mistake our ancestors made. It was a big signal something was going on. We’re just some businessmen, going about our business. Ho-hum. Nothing to see here.”

  Weibel looked off into the distance, seeing some other place, some other time.

  “For a thousand years, our families ruled the Democracy of Planets. They were in control for more than six hundred years before the Sintaran Empire rose out of the carnage of the Fifty Years War. Yes, it’s been a long wait to restore that control. But we are almost ready now, and the delay of a few days doesn’t matter.”

  Reports

  It was a cobbled-together meeting Wednesday morning. Olivia Darden and Lina Schneider stood by in the investigation viewing room in VR to brief the Emperor. Ardmore attended in VR, as did Paul Diener and General Hargreaves. Thomas Pitney was on the management channel, so he could see the reports without anyone else seeing him.

  Burke watched a projection of the meeting onto the wall of the private living room in the Imperial Apartment. The Imperial Guard had been dismissed and audio monitoring suspended for the meeting. She had a microphone as well, and could send audio into the meeting.

  “All right, Ms. Schneider, Ms. Darden. You may begin.”

  “Yes, Sire. We’ve decided I should probably go first,” Darden said.

  “That’s fine, Ms. Darden.”

  “Thank you, Sire. What you can see here is our filtering process. We started with six hundred trillion death records. Of those, we extracted just about ten trillion that occurred between eighty-five and ninety-five years of age. There’s a slump there because it is after the normal age of death for the basic nanites, and before the normal age of death for the premium nanites.

  “We threw out more than half of those because they were accidental deaths of some sort. We then selected the records for just those in some position of power. People who were not yet retired and had either some government position or some financial position, such as the head of a family controlling large investments.

  “That came down to a relatively small number. Most of the people in this age group are long retired. It was still billions of people, but it was not trillions.

  “Next we scanned obits and announcements. We were looking to separate the people who died with the notation ‘after a short illness’ or of known causes from those who died suddenly. There are a number of people who survive into this age group even with the basic nanites, and some with premium nanites who die earlier than the norm. They’re the tails on their respective distribution curves.

  “We knew we didn’t have to find every murder, we just had to have some high-likelihood murders to analyze for motives. And the numbers here are still large, with a much smaller number of murders. We were looking for needles in what was still a very large haystack. So we threw out anything with any indication it might not be a murder.

  “When we finally came down to the smallest sample we could manage, we still had millions of potential murders on our hands. We sorted them for influence and net worth, and looked just at the top two thousand or so.

  “So we’re still looking for needles in a haystack, but we hoped we would see a pattern. Some person or group of people – probably big-money people – who stood to benefit financially from the deaths of some of these people. There’s big money behind something like this, so we looked for the financial benefit. And we didn’t find it.

  “What we did find is the most likely murders were slanted towards Throne loyalists and people who were working to hold the Empire together, including the Empress Julia. That is, there was a slant in our data toward killing off people who were actively on the side of the Empire, working to increase the power of the Throne, rather than, say, working to increase the power of the sector governors.

  “And that’s all we found. Nothing we can trace. Our conclusion at this point is there is some big money out there actively working to bring down the Empire, by killing off a small number of key people at critical times.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t find more, Sire, but that’s what we have so far. I finally shut down channel 700 for twelve hours and told everyone to go eat and sleep for a while. They had pretty much worked straight through on this since Saturday.”

  “I understand, Ms. Darden. It looks like tremendous work to me. It’s always difficult to tease out a small, very specific sample from very large numbers of records. And we do know something after all. This is a political battle, not merely some financial cheat of some kind.”

  “Yes, Sire. From what we see, I believe that is correct. It also means there is a great deal of discipline involved here. There was no use of this murder mechanism to generate financial benefit. From what we can tell at this stage, it’s purely a political play.”

  “That’s a good point, Ms. Darden.”

  “Thank you
, Sire. One other note. The distribution of these suspected murders over time is flat. There is no indication this started in the last twenty years. This is a long-term play. To win over time by continually weakening the other side – a bit here, a bit there – over a long period.”

  “Another good point. Very well, Ms. Darden. Thank you. Ms. Schneider?”

  “Yes, Sire. Rather than focus on motive, as the new ideas group did, we focused on the money. Who was paying for all this? One of those areas of investigation was the operative who transmitted the signal.

  “One of the things we got from the interrogation is he was being paid through stock transfers into a brokerage account that was under an alias. Shares of public companies would occasionally appear in this brokerage account. These were shares in large companies, interstellar holding companies and the like.

  “When we try to track the shares, we find they were legitimately purchased directly from the company under the alias name and transferred into the account. But when we try to track the funds used to purchase the shares, we come up empty-handed. Either there is no retrievable record of the source of the payment, or the source of the payment is a disbursal company that has no retrievable record of the source of the payment.”

  Burke’s voice came from the general direction of an empty chair.

  “They aren’t required to keep accessible records of those kinds of transfers, Ms. Schneider?”

  “No, Milady. We looked into that, and there was a broad accounting deregulation put in place by the Emperor a hundred years ago.”

  “That would be Augustus II then, Ms. Schneider?” Ardmore asked.

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Very well, Ms. Schneider. Carry on.”

  “Yes, Sire. We next looked at the money being paid to the fifteen hundred and twenty-four executives of the premium health maintenance nanite manufacturers. At first, we couldn’t find anything at all. No outside sources of income.

  “But, given the use of an alias to pay the operative, we looked at the estates where the retired executives were living. They were purchased and titled under aliases as well. Using those names, we tracked down large brokerage and bank accounts. Some of the same actions, with the transfer of shares. Also some large money transfers.

  “We looked at those money transfers, and they were coming from Imperial accounts. Payments for services.”

  “From Imperial accounts, Ms. Schneider?”

  “Yes, Sire. Paid out of Imperial coffers. Now, normally those things would be easy to track down. However, there’s a trick to it. Payments to corporations and such for services normally include a receivables account number. When the Empire pays a vendor, they make the payment to whatever the receivables account is. The payment to the vendor is recorded, but the receivables account isn’t recorded.”

  “Let me guess, Ms. Schneider. That process was also changed a hundred years ago.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “So this is a multi-generational effort to destabilize the Empire, Ms. Schneider,” Burke said.

  “Apparently so, Milady. We discovered the aliases that were holding titles to these estates for the retired executives on Sunday afternoon. On the chance the still-active executives were visiting their country estates for the three-day weekend, we tracked them down in VR and got aliases for about two-thirds of the currently active executives as well, based on the properties where they were spending the weekend.”

  “Are we sure those are aliases, Ms. Schneider? That they weren’t simply visiting wealthy friends for the weekend?” Ardmore asked.

  “Yes, Sire. No birth record, no employment record, no educational record.”

  “Opening accounts in an alias like that isn’t caught by the auditing or whatever, Ms. Schneider?” Burke asked.

  “No, Milady. Such checks were dropped in the accounting deregulation a hundred years ago. One more thing. The operative was recruited to this organization or effort – whatever you want to call it – in high school. He’s been on the Palace staff over twenty years. And his control? Another alias. No trackable record.”

  “All right. Thank you, Ms. Schneider.”

  Ardmore cut the connection and was back in channel 22, the simulation of his office. Hargreaves was not there, having logged into the investigation viewing room on his own, but Diener and Pitney were still with him, as was Burke, viewing on the wall of the private living room in the Imperial Residence. Pitney was not in the management channel in this connection, so his avatar was in one of the guest chairs. There was a third guest chair in the office simulation, so Burke’s voice had an apparent point of origin.

  “Well, this is a hell of a mess, Sire,” Diener said. “Now what do we do?”

  “One thing we can do is look at those accounting changes a hundred years ago. What other trap doors for chicanery did they open? Oversight can look into that for us. That’s where a lot of the accountants are, Mr. Diener.”

  “I’ll take care of that, Sire,” Diener said.

  “And who pushed the changes, Sire?” Burke asked. “Who was behind it? It doesn’t sound like something the Emperor would have done on his own.”

  “That’s a good point, Milady,” Ardmore said. “You and I can look into that in the Emperor’s personal records. See if he recorded who was pushing it.”

  “I think we also need to delay the executions of the executives, Sire.”

  “Really, Milady? Why?” Ardmore asked.

  “Basic strategy. Get your own forces under cover before launching an attack. If we execute them now, that’s a big signal to whomever we’re on to the nanites game. If we do it, I predict a whole bunch of Throne loyalists will drop dead within days. They’re only holding back to keep us from figuring it out. But, if they know we figured it out....”

  “That’s a good point, Sire,” Diener said.

  Ardmore turned to Pitney.

  “Mr. Pitney, you haven’t begun your operations yet, have you?”

  “No, Sire. I was getting prepared, and would have asked you for a final go-ahead.”

  “All right. Let’s hold off, Mr. Pitney.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “It might be good to grab one and interrogate him, Sire,” Burke said. “Make it look like a kidnapping. Send a ransom note or whatever. Then interrogate him with drugs, get whatever we can out of him, and dump the body somewhere it’ll be found.”

  “Kidnapping gone wrong, Milady?” Diener asked.

  “Mr. Pitney?” Ardmore asked.

  “We can do that, Sire. Law enforcement sees that sort of thing once in a while. We can make it look good. Do we want a CEO or a research guy?”

  “That’s a good question, Mr. Pitney,” Ardmore said. “Which will provide the better interrogation? What questions do we most want answered?”

  “Who’s in charge of the conspiracy?” Diener asked.

  “Either is unlikely to know that, Mr. Diener,” Ardmore said. “How did he get recruited? Are there premium nanites without the backdoor? Who has those? How hard would it be to close the backdoor in the premium nanites going forward?”

  “I suspect there are no premium nanites without the backdoor,” Burke said.

  “Really, Milady?” Diener asked. “Even for their own people?”

  “Of course. You need to be able to get rid of people within your own conspiracy once in a while. And if there were some without the backdoor, and we got a list of them, that would be an org chart of the conspiracy.”

  “That makes sense, Milady,” Ardmore said. “But we should ask the question anyway. So it sounds like one of the research types to me. They would know if any without the backdoor existed, and how hard it would be to close if not. Maybe it can even be done with a second injection of something. Something that reprograms the ones that are there.”

  “Now that the ringleaders may have, Sire,” Burke said. “Because there would be no record of it. It would be under the table.”

  “Another option might be to turn the tables, Milady,” Ardmore
said. “Can we reverse-engineer that transmitter? Build them ourselves and go after their people?”

  “Oh, that’s sneaky,” Burke said. “I like it, Sire. Especially after we have our own people out of danger. Is that possible?”

  “It’s actually standard hardware, Sire,” Diener said. “It’s the message sequence that’s special. And we have that now.”

  “Excellent, Mr. Diener. You have your interrogation questions, Mr. Pitney?” Ardmore asked.

  “Yes, Sire. Someone from one of the big companies, I would think. The smaller company guys may not know those answers. Also somebody from one of the bigger planets. Maybe a planet with a history of some high-profile kidnappings.”

  Ardmore nodded.

  “Whatever seems best to you, Mr. Pitney. What else do we need to do, everybody?”

  “Protect our own, I think, Sire,” Burke said. “Warn the Throne loyalists to flush their nanites and go back to the basic package.”

  “If word gets back to the conspirators, they’ll likely kill a bunch of people before they can flush them, Milady.”

  “Start with the most loyal first, Sire. The Consul and his wife. The Palace staff, starting with the heads of the Offices. The loyal sector governors. The loyal provincial governors. Then warn the rest after we’ve taken care of them.”

  “Even our problem children, Milady? Von Hesse and his bunch?” Ardmore asked.

  “Yes, Sire,” Burke said. “Some of them may not be a part of this at all. Or not know they’re a part of it, anyway. And if we warn them, then they owe us one. Maybe we can make some inroads there.”

  “All right, Milady. That sounds like a plan. Everybody clear on what we’re doing?” Ardmore asked.

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Very well. That is all for now.”

  Ardmore cut the channel.

  When Ardmore dropped out of VR, he was in the private living room in the Imperial Apartment with Burke. He wasn’t actually going down to the office until he had his nanites flushed, because he needed to stay near the medical station set up in the hallway.