EMPIRE: Resistance

by Richard F. Weyand

  “But now we were on to them. I surmised there must be a transmitter – because the nanites, after all, are only actuators, and can’t do higher-level processing on their own – and the reconstituted Imperial Guard found it. We interrogated the assassin before we executed him. He didn’t know much, but he gave us a number of clues.

  “We started mapping the entire tree of descendants of those hundred and eleven executed in 10 GE. We also started finding every alias account in the Imperial Bank and tracking their transactions.

  “We had the Department kidnap one of the nanite manufacturers’ directors of research and interrogate him on his involvement. We found out he had been extorted and coerced, and was actually on our side. He laid out the entire technology for us, and gave us more insight into the payments system.

  “We also announced to the entire Empire the existence of the murder nanites, and everybody started flushing nanites. This was a major blow to the DP plutocrats, who now lacked a simple and unsuspected way to murder people who were in the way of their plans.

  “Then they killed Paul Bowdoin. We think the DP plutocrats pulled back from their plans a bit when the assassination attempt on Gail failed and we announced the murder nanites. Bowdoin was known to be a hothead with a big mouth. He may have said something he shouldn’t have to the DP plutocrats. Maybe he threatened to tell us what he knew. And apparently he hadn’t flushed his nanites, despite our warning. Perhaps he thought he was safe from his own allies. In any case, they killed him.

  “A Department agent on Phalia heard the police call about the death on the radio, notified the head of the Department, who talked to me. I saw the potential of it being a nanite murder right away, and spoke to the sector director of the Imperial Police. They got there at the same time as the city police, including with a bunch of patrolmen and a forensic team. They got there so fast, they caught the assassin before he could get away. He was killed trying to escape, but they got his VR ID. Rather, his VR IDs, because he had multiple VR IDs.”

  “Multiple VR IDs?” Becker asked.

  “Yes. We have a special package for the Imperial Police and some select few others. It allows better aliases for agents working undercover. But it was a key clue for us. We started looking at the family trees of the DP plutocrats looking for people who had been in the Imperial Police. We expanded that to include those who had been in the Imperial Marines, Imperial Navy, and on the Imperial Palace staff.

  “We also told the sector governors and the heirs of the former royals about the multiple VR IDs and the nanite-murder transmitter we found on Phalia, and they went looking for them. Every single one of them found someone on their staff with multiple VR IDs and a nanite-murder transmitter.”

  “That’s– interesting,” Becker said.

  “Yes. Every single one of them died – either tried shooting it out with the house guard, tried to run, or suicided – except one. He got hit with a tranquilizer dart, and when he came out of it he was already under the effect of the interrogation drugs. We got the whole story.

  “He was the second cousin once removed of Nikos Mantzaris. As a matter of fact, from the VR IDs that have been provided to us – which is pretty much all of them, even from the anti-Throne factions of the sector governors and royal heirs – every single one of these embedded potential assassins is a member of one of the DP plutocrat families.”

  “That is also interesting. And it brings up a potential opportunity,” Becker said.

  “How so, Franz?” Burke asked.

  “I know Manfred von Hesse. Not really well – we’re not friends, per se – but I know him well enough. My city house is about a mile from the governor’s residence. We go to each other’s parties, see each other at events. We’ve spoken privately a number of times. Von Hesse isn’t an ideologue by any measure. He’s a pragmatic, practical politician. He enjoys being sector governor, and, by all accounts, he’s good at it. He enjoys being good at it, for that matter. Finding out his fellow travelers – perhaps allies – had embedded on his staff the means to kill him at any time will not sit well with him.”

  “You think there’s an opportunity to flip a faction?” Diener asked.

  “Perhaps. The plutocrats really screwed up with von Hesse. You just don’t do that to him. It will be clear to him now they are not aiming for a status quo ante, in which the DP is reconstituted and von Hesse can have Baden Sector. They’re going for the whole thing – the whole Empire – and von Hesse is just a means to an end. He will not like the sound of that at all, and he could bring his whole crew along. The reason they follow him is because he’s usually right. The right package might flip the whole bunch of them.”

  “What kind of package?” Burke asked.

  “Mostly personal, I think. One, that they won’t be removed for cause by the Throne for past actions. Probably an Imperial Pardon for whatever shenanigans went on in the past. The example of Piotr Shubin is still pretty recent in their minds.”

  “If they came over – truly came over – those would be acceptable,” Burke said.

  “There’s a couple more things,” Becker said. “They’re not going to want to tell you what they know. I suspect they know very little you don’t know on your own already at this point, so you don’t lose much. But if they promised to remain silent about something, they’re going to want to do that.”

  “Also acceptable, I would think,” Burke said.

  She looked at Ardmore, and he nodded.

  “The other thing is they’re not going to want it to be anything big and public. You know, like a press release or something. ‘Imperial Palace announces Imperial Pardon for sector governors; they promise to behave in future.’ It would be subtler. ‘Well, when the Throne has such able occupants, the sector governors need not be so assertive as a lesser ruler might require,’ or something like that. Leave that to von Hesse. He’s a master of political gibberish. But his policies will change, in terms of supporting the Throne more vocally instead of trying to subtly undermine it. That sort of thing.”

  “That’s the makings of a deal, Franz, from our point of view,” Burke said. “Not only would it give us more support, but it would deprive the real enemy of their support.”

  “I’ll see what I can arrange along those lines,” Becker said. “Perhaps set up a meeting where the ground has been laid. I’ll watch for the opportunity.”

  “Excellent,” Ardmore said.

  “I wonder if we can turn the royals faction, too, now,” Diener said. “They have to have had the same revelation in terms of their disposability to the plutocrats. Bowdoin was one of theirs, after all.”

  “Turning factions against each other is always good,” Burke said. “I’ll look into who is most likely to be approachable in that bunch.”

  “I had another question,” Becker said. “What’s become of the correlation between the Imperial Marines and Imperial Navy with the plutocrats?”

  “They’re still working on it,” Ardmore said. “We should be getting results soon.”

  “Good. Because I would think the plutocrats have to have a way to handle the military question. Without a plan, the fall of a throne is most likely to result in a junta. I’m just not sure what their plan is.”

  The Zoo

  Matthew Houseman’s group in the Zoo was working on the correlation of the plutocrats’ descendants with members of the Imperial Marines, Imperial Navy, and Imperial Palace staff.

  “What about correlating the tree against the Zoo?” Denise Coutard asked.

  “I think that comes out automatically,” Houseman said. “Aren’t we on the Imperial Palace staff listing?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Coutard said.

  What about the Imperial Guard?” Lois Costas asked. “They’re not on the Imperial Palace staff listing, nor in the Imperial Marines listing.”

  “OK, that’s a good one,” Houseman said. “Let’s include them.”

  “You know, if this is a conspiracy that’s been going on a long time, we might be able t
o discern more of a pattern if we include all the members of the tree, not just the current generation,” Rick Pender said. “How far back do our military records go? Can we do this correlation all the way back to 10 GE?”

  “Got it,” Wang Minwei said, and disappeared.

  Costas giggled.

  It was less than a minute before Wang reappeared. They had known it wouldn’t be long, and had simply waited.

  “Yes, we have all the records,” Wang said.

  “OK, so we should probably do that, too,” Houseman said. “We might see some pattern in the way they placed people, or tried to, anyway.”

  Houseman looked around the table.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “I’m wondering,” Costas said. “We also have all these alias accounts, right? What if some of the people in the military were operating under aliases? Shouldn’t we check the alias accounts.”

  “That’s a lot more work, I think,” Houseman said. “There’s a lot of alias accounts.”

  “It’s on the same order, though, right?” Pender asked. “We have hundreds of millions of descendants just in this generation.”

  “Let’s try it and see how far we get, but not until we do the descendants. Everybody OK with that?” Houseman asked.

  He got nods around the table.

  “All right. Let’s start building our queries.”

  It wasn’t that big of a processing job – not compared to some of them they had done, anyway – and the answers came back from the big Imperial Navy computation center pretty quickly.

  “How many?” Houseman asked.

  “Thousands. Between the Imperial Marines, Imperial Navy, and even the Imperial Guard, there are tens of thousands of them in the current generation,” Pender said. “Hundreds of thousands, when you go back up the tree.”

  “We’re going to have to pull the career records of these people, and find out where they are, how they got there, and what they did while they were there,” Houseman said.

  “Let’s start out by concentrating on the higher ranks for the hand work,” Houseman said. “In the meantime we can get the machine working on the alias accountholder names.”

  During this period, all the multiple VR IDs from the ninety-eight potential assassins came in from the Investigations Office. Those who hadn’t supplied them initially supplied them in response to an inquiry from the Imperial Investigations Office.

  “You know, I’ve been looking at these aliases the assassins used,” Lucia Martelli said. “Things like Hector Dimas and Viktor Zima. Same guy.”

  “I know why they do that,” Costas said. “That’s so if someone calls your name, you respond appropriately. Also, so if you do respond to your actual name, they’re close enough you have an excuse.”

  “Right. But can we teach the computer enough phonetics to be able to match up real people with alias accounts?” Martelli asked.

  “Probably not phonetics,” Pender said. “But if we characterize the names somehow, and then compare the characterizations, maybe use a sloppy compare....”

  “Isn’t that a huge compare, though?” Houseman asked. “You have to compare every name in one to every name in the other. That’s an m times n problem.”

  Computer people hated m times n problems. With a million of these and a million of those, it’s a trillion compares.

  “No, I think if we convert them into some kind of characterization, then sort them, we’re comparing sort against sort,” Pender said. “That should be a stepwise process down the lists.”

  “All right, Rick,” Houseman said. “Why don’t your guys work on that.”

  Pender, Martelli, Coutard, and Costas were actually team leads. They each had two or three other people who sat at the big table with them, but didn’t say much. Wang was his own thing.

  Pender nodded and he and his three crew disappeared from the big table, taking up a smaller table across the room.

  “OK, I shot my mouth off and now it’s an assignment,” Pender said. “How do we do this?”

  “Stupidly, I think,” Marie Dooley said. “That is, in a stupid simple way. Take Hector Dimas and Viktor Zima, for example. If we just take the vowel sounds, which is what is most important for rhyming or recognition, we have eh-oh ee-ah and i-oh ee-ah. Three out of four match. If we weight the last syllable of each name by two instead of one, which is probably about right, it’s a five of six match.”

  “Yeah, that would work,” Porter Hall said. “Then we scan the maybe-matches by hand.”

  “What if there’s a million of them?” Pender asked.

  “That’s still not many of them,” Murielle Decamps said. “Matt’s whole team could do it in a day if we had to.”

  “It’s probably worth it,” Hall said.

  “And we get the vowel sounds how?” Pender said.

  “I think we can run the names through a text-to-speech engine, and siphon off the intermediate calculation, then strip the vowel sounds from that,” Dooley said.

  “We have to keep the key back to the original name so we can match them back up again,” Hall said.

  “Well, yes. Of course.” Dooley said.

  “Just making sure we remember, Marie,” Hall said.

  “OK, let’s do that and see what we get,” Pender said.

  They had to load a different text-to-speech engine into the Imperial Navy’s computation center because the one the Imperial Navy was using didn’t allow intercepting the intermediate values, the phonemes. Then they queued up the descendants’ names and ran them through the text-to-speech engine, building one table. They created a new column for just the vowel sounds and stripped those out of the phonetic pronunciations.

  They did the same thing to the alias accountholder names. They then created a column in each table with the vowel sounds in reverse order, and sorted on that. That would give the last sound priority of consideration.

  “Have we got the compare engine ready?” Pender asked.

  “Yeah, Porter and I just finished,” Decamps said.

  “Let’s kick it off and then break for food and sleep,” Pender said. “I’m beat.”

  They had been at it for over twenty hours.

  Nine hours later, when Pender’s group met back up in the Zoo, the comparison was finally coming to a close.

  “That took a while,” Decamps said.

  “Well, we’re not the only people running big jobs over there,” Pender said. “So what have we got?”

  “It looks like about a hundred thousand matches,” Dooley said.

  “What about our prototype?” Pender asked. “Did it match up Hector Dimas and Viktor Zima?”

  “Sure did,” Dooley said. “It missed on Victoria Beaman, though.”

  “Yeah, that one’s a little further afield,” Hall said. “It looks like most of the others are in here, too. Not the further out ones.”

  “Well, if we get the majority, I think we’re doing good,” Pender said. “Someone else will refine it down the road. Or we will. Let’s join back up with Matt.”

  The rest of the group had taken their own break for food and sleep and returned not long before. Pender and his group popped back into their seats at the big table Houseman’s group always used.

  “Did you get anything?” Houseman asked.

  “Yeah, we think we have a hundred thousand potential matches,” Pender said. “Probably twenty percent are real. Someone has to look at them by hand now. How about you?”

  “We’re good,” Houseman said. “We sent off what we had on the general staff and the other upper officers before we broke. So we can all jump on this if you think it’s ready.”

  “Yeah, we’re ready,” Pender said. “The idea is to look at the names that are paired, and, for each real name from the descendants tree, see which look like the most likely aliases.”

  “OK,” Houseman said. “Push the pointer and let’s get going.”

  It only took the sixteen of them six hours to go through all hundred thousand matches, ma
rking for each descendant name their most likely aliases. Pender wrote up the header description and posted it on the Zoo’s discussion and results board.

  Ardmore and Burke were in the investigation viewing room. Lina Schneider and Olivia Darden had asked for the meeting.

  “Thank you for coming, Your Majesties,” Darden said.

  Ardmore nodded and waved a hand to her to continue.

  “We have been correlating the descendants names against the names of people in the Imperial Marines, Imperial Navy, and Imperial Palace staff at your request. We have also correlated the descendants names against the names of people in the Imperial Guard.”

  Darden turned to the display area, and the descendants tree lighted up with thousands of nodes highlighted, stretching back over the last three hundred years to within a few generations of the executions of 10 GE.

  “Most of these people have gone into areas like administration and logistics, that would put them on a path to assume leadership positions or positions as aides to high-ranking officers. In addition, not a few went into intelligence and communications, putting them in the pipelines of our most secure internal communications.

  “An additional correlation has been attempted and has resulted in some success. One group thought to see if they couldn’t run the descendants names against the alias account names, looking for similarities of the kind we see with Hector Dimas and Viktor Zima or Peter Hillier and Dieter Geller. They were able to computerize the task to come up with a hundred thousand or so possibles, which they then went through by hand.

  “The end result was almost twenty-five thousand likely matches. We don’t think we got them all, but a more sophisticated computer program is being worked on to see if we can’t ferret out some more.”