EMPIRE: Resistance

by Richard F. Weyand

“Another good idea,” Ardmore said. “I hope if you have any more, you’ll get in touch, Mr. Becker.”

  “Yes, Sire. Of course.”

  “We have a bit of information for you as well, Mr. Becker. We have determined the special command by which the premium nanites are able to be directed to kill their host is not present in the basic nanites package.”

  “How did you determine that, Sire?”

  “We took one of the research directors of one of the big nanite companies into custody – our mutual friends essentially kidnapped him – and interviewed him on this and other topics.”

  “Do you think he told them the truth, Sire?”

  “Yes,” Ardmore said. “He was extorted into maintaining the secret, Mr. Becker.”

  “They murdered one of his teenage daughter’s friends to prove they could get at his family, Mr. Becker,” Burke said.

  That shocked Becker, but he realized it should not have. They were playing for keeps, as were the Emperor and Empress. This was going to get messy before it was over, he was sure. Time and past time to review and update his own security procedures.

  “Trust me, Mr. Becker,” Ardmore said. “He wants them as badly as we do.”

  “Are you going to announce there’s no hack into the basic nanites, Sire?”

  “We’ve been debating it, Mr. Becker. If we’re wrong, and a hack exists he doesn’t know about, it would hurt our credibility a lot, but if we don’t announce it, people may unnecessarily flush their basic nanite package. Do you have thoughts on it?”

  “Yes, Sire. Announce that the Palace has tentatively concluded there is no hack into the basic nanites package. In any case, there’s no need – right now, at least – to flush the package.”

  Ardmore nodded.

  “That’s about where we had gotten to, Mr. Becker,” Burke said, “but it’s nice to hear it as advice from you as well.”

  “I think that’s it for this time, Mr. Becker, unless you have something else,” Ardmore said.

  “No, Sire.”

  “Very well.”

  Ardmore cut the connection.

  “He came in over the camera and projector rig, He must have flushed his nanites,” Burke said after Becker was gone.

  “Yes. I expect all his family and senior people have. They’re clearly a target, given the family’s long-term and very public pro-Throne position.”

  Burke nodded.

  “It’s becoming clear to me we need to shift gears in our thinking, Jimmy.”

  “In what way?”

  Burkes shifted on the sofa to face him more directly.

  “With the attack on us and Jonathan five years back, we traced that to Nekrasov and Shubin pretty quickly, and dealt with them. But this is different.”

  “Yes, this is a much longer-term plan against the Throne.”

  “Yes, and I think it takes a longer-term plan from us as well. At least a longer-term strategy to fight it. This isn’t something where we uncover the bad guys, deal with them, and then we’re done. We don’t even know who the bad guys are. Every layer we penetrate, it’s just more victims.”

  Burke nodded.

  “So you like Mr. Becker’s plan of collecting the data, like the bank accounts and the descendants, and then monitoring this thing. See how much we can find out before we make any moves against it.”

  “Yes, Jimmy, I do. I think they made a major mistake striking against us. They tipped their hand. Now let’s see how much we can learn before we do anything. We need to find this snake’s head so we can cut it off.”

  That evening Ardmore spent a quiet evening searching through the records and notes of the Emperors Augustus I and II. He was looking for who had encouraged Augustus I to leave the Throne to his son, and who had encouraged Augustus II to install the accounting ‘reforms’ that had left the financial system open to abuses that enabled illegal activities.

  Burke was doing the same using the projector. It was much slower going, but it was also a different view of the material.

  A Longer-Range Plan

  Sunday morning was Sunday brunch with the Co-Consul, Paul Diener, and his wife Claire. They had brunch, once again, in the dining room on Burke and Ardmore’s side of the floor, so as to be close to the doctor’s station in the hallway.

  “C’mon in,” Burke waved at them in the hallway.

  “Hi, Gail. Jimmy,” Diener said.

  “How are you doing, Gail?” Claire asked. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m doing fine. I was weak the first couple days, but now I’m just frustrated, because the new nanites haven’t kicked in yet.”

  “So no VR,” Claire said.

  “And no birth control. Abstinence is not my style.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Jimmy,” Diener said and laughed.

  They went on in to breakfast. There was no talking shop until after the meal, especially, these days, with staff present. The conversation was on accommodating the lack of VR until her nanites kicked in, in another three or four days.

  “Then it’s my turn,” Ardmore said. “What about you two?”

  “Well, I never upgraded to the premium nanites, Jimmy.”

  “What?” Burke asked. “You’ve been Co-Consul for seven years, Paul.”

  “I know. And I always meant to do it, but I’ve just been so busy.”

  “What about you, Claire?” Burke asked.

  “I flushed early in the week and got VR nanites yesterday. No contraceptive nanites needed for me. Based on what Paul says, I should probably drop into the clinic and get the basic health nanites tomorrow.”

  “We can go together. I’m going in tomorrow for the same thing,” Burke said.

  “Then once her VR kicks in, I flush nanites,” Ardmore said. “In the meantime, I stay close to the doctors. I don’t really expect anyone to pick me up and run me to the clinic.”

  They finished the meal. Coffee was poured and the staff dismissed. Burke ordered audio monitoring stopped.

  “I saw the interview with Dr. Scharansky. Thank you for copying me on your note.”

  That was the note to Thomas Pitney, Ardmore and Burke knew, but Claire was not in the need to know loop for the Department.

  “No problem,” Ardmore said. “We also talked to Franz Becker yesterday.”

  Ardmore brought Diener up to speed on the conversation with Becker, including Becker’s recommendations for monitoring the bank accounts rather than impounding them.

  “I think he’s right on watching the accounts and seeing what we can learn,” Diener said. “Might be a lot quieter now, though, as I can’t imagine they’ll continue paying off the nanites people.”

  “Couldn’t be helped,” Ardmore said. “We had to warn people.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t complaining, Jimmy,” Diener said. “I think you had to. We could have taken horrific losses.”

  “You know,” Burke said. “They might continue paying the nanites people, if they think they can corrupt the new premium nanites.”

  “New premium nanites?” Diener asked.

  “I told the nanite manufacturers’ people they were going to be providing premium nanites to everyone in the Empire, and set the price. If they think we’re going to take corrupted nanites, they better think twice.”

  “We should probably make sure they’ve figured that out,” Ardmore said.

  “Let me take care of it,” Diener said. “I’ll just send them a note asking how the need to provide an uncorrupted premium nanite package will impact their delivery schedule.”

  “But are our conspirators going to try to corrupt the new package?” Burke asked.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Ardmore said. “That’s the sort of trick that only works once.”

  “I’ll make sure my note mentions that, if the new premium nanites are corrupted, they will be held liable for damages by the Throne,” Diener said.

  “That should do it,” Burke said. “I think I left them in little doubt as to how angry I was with them last time.”

/>   “I’d heard that,” Diener said, chuckling.

  “Given that, I think you’re right, Paul,” Ardmore said. “Those accounts should be a lot quieter. I wonder what we’ll see.”

  “Actually, without the clutter of the payments to the nanites people, it might be easier to see the transactions that correspond to the relationships we don’t know about,” Diener said.

  Claire had been watching this conversation with growing bewilderment.

  “Wait,” she said. “I don’t understand any of this. You can’t track payments that have been made already?”

  “No,” Ardmore said. “The source of payments is no longer recorded.”

  “Since when?” Claire asked. “Who made that change?”

  “About a hundred years,” Ardmore answered. “Augustus II made the changes. It was called accounting reform.”

  “Who put him up to that? That doesn’t sound like a change an Emperor would think of by himself, Jimmy.”

  “We’ve been trying to figure that out,” Burke said. “We’ve been looking through the personal notes of the Emperor trying to see if he recorded who was pushing it.”

  “And also who pushed Augustus I to leave the Throne to his seventy-five-year-old son, rather than pick the best available young candidate,” Ardmore said.

  “And?” Claire asked.

  “It was a lot of different people,” Ardmore said. “In both cases. I can’t make heads or tails out of it yet, in terms of whether it was orchestrated or not.”

  “Same here,” Burke said.

  “What were you hoping to find?” Claire asked.

  “Some clues as to what organization was behind the changes. What group of people. Some kind of links between them. Who the leader was.”

  “What if there is no organization?” Claire asked. “No leader. It’s just a bunch of different people or groups who all want the same thing. The decline of the Empire.”

  “That’s a disturbing thought,” Burke said. “We talked about that before, Jimmy. What if all the anti-Empire forces joined together. That’s worse somehow. What if they’re not one organization, but all the disparate anti-Empire forces pulling in the same direction without any organization.”

  Diener grunted.

  “Not necessarily, Gail,” he said. “If they’re separate groups, they don’t react like a single organism.”

  “So?” Burke asked.

  “Can we set them against one another? Get them mistrusting one another?”

  “There might actually be a possibility there,” Ardmore said. “That’s actually happened before. In history.”

  “What are you thinking, Jimmy?” Burke asked.

  But Ardmore was lost in his thoughts. It was a long time before he answered her.

  “Huh? What? Oh, I’ll have to think about it some more. See if we can pull it off. It’s an interesting option, though.”

  Burke nodded. The historian sometimes took days to come up with the end result of some insight. It just had to simmer long enough.

  “What’s clear, though, is we need a longer-term strategy than ‘find the bad guys and beat them,’” Burke said. “I don’t think that will work here. If we try that, I don’t think we ever get to the bottom of it.”

  “So we watch the alias accounts,” Diener said. “And we look for descendants in unexpected locations. What else?”

  “We start planning a return to more rigorous accounting and recording requirements, to make this sort of activity impossible,” Ardmore said. “Basically just reverse everything done since Augustus the Great died.”

  “But we don’t put that in place until we get a better view of what’s going on,” Burke said.

  Ardmore nodded.

  “OK. That gives me a better roadmap,” Diener said.

  Oleg Scharansky, too, was making long-term plans. It was clear the alias accounts would be found and were going to go away. It was also clear the Empire was not going to give everyone premium nanites that had an undocumented command for killing the host. What was needed was a new premium nanites package that was clean. The first company that had that together would dominate the market, at least in the early stages. They’d be able to ship them to the Empire as fast as they could manufacture them.

  Scharansky started planning what the new nanite package would look like, and how he would parcel out the work to be done within his staff. He started estimating the work and the timeframe to having a deliverable package.

  One breakthrough in Scharansky’s thinking was they could implement the premium nanite package as just the additional pieces required to modify the basic package into a premium package. That would reduce the timeframe required to put the package together and leverage the manufacturing capacity of the basic package already in place. It would also make it easier and cheaper to upgrade the vast majority of people in the population who already had the basic package.

  Scharansky also started planning on how he would transfer the money in the alias account into his own possession. If the Empire knew the account was there, it shouldn’t be a big surprise to them he would use it.

  By the time Monday rolled around, Scharansky had things pretty well in hand. First thing to do Monday morning: call a staff meeting and get people hopping on the new premium nanites package.

  On Monday, the Imperial Press Office issued a press release.

  PRESS RELEASE

  – For Immediate Release –

  IMPERIAL PALACE – The Imperial Palace has investigated the basic health maintenance nanites package and has as yet found no evidence the basic health nanites package has been hacked. There is no need to flush the basic health nanites package at this time.

  Also on Monday, Burke and Claire went down to the clinic one floor down from their apartments to get the basic health maintenance nanites. Dr. Henry Clay was in this morning.

  “Good morning, Milady. How are you feeling today?”

  “Excellent, Dr. Clay. I felt beat up and hung over those first couple days, as you know, but I’m feeling great now. And I started working out again on Saturday.”

  “Excellent, Milady. And good morning to you, too, Ms. Diener.”

  “Hello, Doctor. We’re both here to get the basic health nanites installed, now we know they’re safe.”

  Clay turned to Burke.

  “I saw the press release this morning, Milady. Are we really sure they’re safe?”

  “As sure as we can be, I think, Dr. Clay. The research director of one of the big companies was negotiating the suspension of a death sentence with his cooperation. He said they’re clean. And he also knew if he lied, well, what can be suspended can be unsuspended.”

  “Which company, Milady?”

  Burke hesitated. She didn’t want Scharansky exposed, even within her own staff.

  “Let me rephrase that, Milady. Is there a company whose product you would be most comfortable using?”

  “Yes, Dr. Clay. NanoHealth.”

  “That one I think we have, Milady. Let me check.”

  Clay left the room to go back into his stores to look, and came back with two ampoules.

  “We’ve got them, Milady.”

  “Are they still good, Dr. Clay? From your stores and all?”

  “Absolutely, Milady. We rotate stock continuously. And I’ve checked the date. We’re good.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Clay. Just checking.”

  “Understood, Milady.”

  Clay injected both Burke and Claire with the NanoHealth basic nanites package.

  “You should both start seeing some options showing up in your VR in about a week.”

  “We need to have our VR show up first, but we’ll keep an eye out for it, Dr. Clay.”

  “Yes, Milady. If you don’t see some options showing up in ten days, you need to come back and see me. Otherwise you’re good to go.”

  First Results

  When she came in Monday morning, Lina Schneider logged into the viewing room. She looked at the investigation map with something
like despair. It showed every account for which they had found the accountholder had no background in other databases. The display software scaled the entries down to fit it all in until it looked like a gigantic cloud of gnats. There were billions of them. Hundreds of billions. Needle in a haystack didn’t begin to capture it. How would they ever sort the wheat from the chaff?

  Maybe she could find some structure to it.

  “Group them by sectors and provinces,” Schneider told the display.

  That was curious. Over ninety percent of all the alias accounts were in two sectors. What was with that? What was it with those two sectors?

  It took her ten minutes to figure it out. Those two sectors had income taxes. They were old Sintaran Empire sectors, too. They should know better. The rich were always good at avoiding income taxes. They had enough income to make the effort worthwhile. Here it looked like they used alias accounts to hide much of their income from the taxman. Most of those accounts would probably be closed in the next several weeks, after the tax caps kicked in and income taxes were illegal.

  “Display everything other than the Pritani and Provence Sectors.”

  That was more like it. Maybe tens of millions of accounts were left, and the numbers tapered off quickly when you sorted by the account balance. There weren’t many with more than a hundred-million-credit balance. Hundreds of thousands, maybe.

  That was actually a number one could deal with.

  “Tag displayed accounts and initiate deposit and withdrawal tracking and logging.”

  The new ideas group, too, had a viewing room. Their map was part of what they called their bulletin board. It was actually pages and pages of information you could flip through, but each page was three-dimensional.

  Olivia Darden flipped through pages, seeing what the groups were doing. Harry Tyler had extracted and normalized the birth records from the original hundred-plus planets on which the one hundred and twenty-eight initial targets lived. That was some nice work. He had added planets as descendants were found who moved from their birth planet.