EMPIRE: Imperial Detective

by Stephanie Osborn

  Books in the EMPIRE Series

  by Richard F. Weyand:

  EMPIRE: Reformer

  EMPIRE: Usurper

  EMPIRE: Tyrant

  EMPIRE: Commander

  EMPIRE: Warlord

  EMPIRE: Conqueror

  by Stephanie Osborn:

  EMPIRE: Imperial Police

  EMPIRE: Imperial Detective

  EMPIRE: Imperial Inspector

  by Richard F. Weyand:

  EMPIRE: Intervention

  EMPIRE: Investigation

  EMPIRE: Succession

  Books in the Childers Universe

  by Richard F. Weyand:

  Childers

  Childers: Absurd Proposals

  Galactic Mail: Revolution

  A Charter For The Commonwealth

  Campbell: The Problem With Bliss

  by Stephanie Osborn:

  Campbell: The Sigurdsen Incident

  Other books by Stephanie Osborn

  The Division One Series:

  Alpha and Omega

  A Small Medium At Large

  A Very UnCONventional Christmas

  Tour de Force

  Trojan Horse

  Texas Rangers

  Definition and Alignment

  Phantoms

  Head Games

  Break, Break, Houston

  Tourist Trap

  Mega Moth

  Coming soon:

  Byegones

  Everywhere Signs

  Shake, Rattle and Roll

  Die Glocke

  Diplomatic Catfight

  Forming Terra

  Popular Science:

  INCOMING! The Chicxulub Impactor

  Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano

  Rock and Roll: The New Madrid Fault System

  The Weather Out There Is Frightful: Solar/Space Weather

  Sherlock, Sheilas, and the Seven-Percent Solution:

  Victorian Era Drugs

  A New American Space Plan, with Travis S. Taylor

  EMPIRE

  Imperial Detective

  by

  STEPHANIE OSBORN

  Copyright 2020 by Stephanie Osborn

  All Rights Reserved

  EMPIRE Universe and characters used with permission

  ISBN 978-1-7340758-3-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Credits

  Cover Art: James Lewis-Vines

  Back Cover Photo: Fritz Ling

  Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.

  Bloomington, Indiana, USA

  August 2020

  CONTENTS

  Associations

  Busted

  Mergers

  Rebuilding

  Problems

  Skulking

  Disaster

  Planning

  A Big Bada-Boom

  Reckoning

  A Decision

  Interrogation

  The Other Conspirators

  The Head of the Serpent

  New Beginnings

  Addition

  Subtraction

  Division

  The Jive

  One Up

  Upgrades

  Changes

  Multiplication

  And So It Begins

  Complications

  Author Notes

  Associations

  Newly-betrothed investigators Dominick Xavier Ashton and Callista Elena Ames had just arrived at her childhood home to spend the weekend with her parents, as Cally introduced her beloved to them. Alexandre Paul Ames and his wife Laura Elaine Devin Ames had been a bit surprised upon receiving word of their only daughter’s engagement, and even more surprised upon discovering that Nick was a detective for the Imperial Police.

  So when the pair arrived, Cally’s parents had a few questions.

  And more than a few declarations.

  By way of putting their joint foot down. In the front door of the house.

  “I’m sorry, Cally,” Alexandre Ames told his daughter, stern, blocking the door and refusing to let Nick even enter the house, “but I’m afraid we don’t approve of this relationship.”

  “No, not at all,” Laura confirmed. “This is not the man we would have chosen for you.”

  “No, and we’re hoping you’ll come to your senses soon,” Alexandre added. “We’ll back you on whatever you need to do to get rid of him. Just do it.”

  “Wha– But Mom! Dad!” Cally exclaimed. “Why in the name of the Empire not?! I love Nick!”

  “When you moved to Imperial City after graduation, we thought you chose the Imperial City Police Department to stay away from the corruption of the Imperial Police Headquarters,” Alexandre reminded her.

  “I did! What does that have to do with Nick?” Cally demanded, as a startled, off-put Nick stood behind her, trying not to gape, and wondering why his beloved’s parents disapproved of him without ever having met him before.

  “Is he or is he not a ‘detective’ in the Imperial Police Headquarters?” Alexandre said with disgust, quirking his fingers in the air to denote quotation marks around the title. But before either of them could respond, Cally’s mother interjected.

  “How in the name of all that is holy did you get involved with such a man, Cally?” Laura wondered, anxious and concerned. “Does he have something on you? Is he blackmailing you? Did he make something up on you in order to blackmail you? We’ll do whatever we need to do in order to get you out from under his influence. We swear to you, we will.”

  “How much do you want in payment to be rid of this façade?” Alexandre asked Nick. “We aren’t rich, by any means, but if you’re blackmailing her, we’ll pay you off to get you out of her life, for good.”

  “Oh,” Nick and Cally said simultaneously. “I get it now,” Nick added. “Let me expl–”

  “You be quiet, young man!” Laura snapped. “We’re talking to our daughter, not you. You have no right to even be here!”

  “Mother,” Cally said, in a threatening tone. “Let. Nick. Speak.”

  “Don’t talk to your mother in that tone, young lady,” Alexandre scolded.

  “I most certainly will, when the both of you have already reached a judgement without even hearing the facts of the case,” Cally declared, suddenly becoming Investigator Ames as they watched.

  “And what facts are there to hear, other than what we already know about IPD Headquarters?” Laura wondered, scornful.

  “How about the fact that Nick was working in the Imp City Police Department when we met?” Cally fired back. At that news, her parents literally, as well as metaphorically, rocked back on their heels.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Laura murmured, shocked and confused. “Do you mean to say that this is the nice young man you were telling us all about, the one who was teaching you to be a better investigator?”

  “The same,” Cally averred. “Why don’t you ease up a little, set aside your preconceived notions for a minute, and let him tell you his story?”

  Alexandre and Laura exchanged glances, then stepped away from the door arch, allowing the younger couple into the house.

  “All right,” Alexandre Ames said, grudging. “You get one chance, Ashton. The two of you, come in and sit down.” He pointed at the bags sitting on the front porch. “Cally, grab your things. Ashton, leave yours. If you explain well enough to suit us, we’ll come back for them.”

  “And it better be good,” Laura Ames averred, scowling.

  “Oh, it will be,” Cally said, matching her mother’s scowl.

  Nick sat on the sofa, Cally beside him, while her parents took the two armchairs, positioned across from the sofa in a kind of conversation circle. Cally took Nick’s
hand, as both parents folded their arms and waited, unsmiling, and without speaking. Cally squeezed his hand in hers; he drew a deep breath and commenced.

  “I grew up on the planet Flanders,” he explained, “and always had an interest in detective work. When I graduated from the Imperial Police Academy, rather than go back to Flanders, which is kind of a quiet place, I decided to accept an offer to come to the Imperial City and work at the IPD Headquarters…”

  “And what did your poor mother think of that?” Laura remarked, in a somewhat snarky and wholly reproving tone.

  “Mother,” Cally warned.

  “My parents died in a lightning-sparked house fire about a year before I graduated the Academy,” Nick said quietly. “I was pretty much on my own. I had an aunt and uncle, but they’d only just come back to Flanders from where Aunt Beatrice’s job had taken her, over in Sunda Sector, and I didn’t really know them very well yet.”

  “Oh,” Laura said, subdued.

  “Yes, ma’am, and I was probably way more naïve than was good for me, in a business like this,” Nick admitted. “Long story short, I had no idea IPD Headquarters was so corrupt – corrupt at all, really – until I got thrown into it head-first. There were a couple of people I knew who played it straight, but not many. After I got involved in a couple cases by being first on the scene, and royally pissed off the detective over me, my supervisor – who was one of the straight guys, like me – had to clear me out of there fast, or one of the ‘enforcers’ was gonna come down on me like twelve tons of brick landing square on my head. So he managed to get me transferred over to ICPD. I’m still not sure how it all worked, because as far as anybody at IPD HQ knew, I had been sent off-planet for some ‘training’ that would make me crooked like them.” He paused, then shrugged. “Then my supervisor got the hell out, himself, by applying for extra-early retirement.”

  “Wow,” Alexandre said, leaning forward. “Was he in danger, too?”

  “And what kind of danger?” Laura asked.

  “Danger of getting killed, ma’am, and yes, sir, he was,” Nick explained. “When they didn’t like something you did, they generally just eliminated you if you didn’t come around to their way of thinking pretty damn quick.”

  “And they kept trying, even after he was over at ICPD,” Cally interjected. “Though it took ‘em a while to realize he was there, and not off on another planet someplace, getting ‘trained.’ Which at least gave him a chance to get settled in, and a little more on-the-job training under his belt.”

  “Yeah, they did keep trying,” Nick agreed. “Because once I realized that ICPD wasn’t at all like that, I made the transfer permanent, rather than just a kinda ‘loaner’ situation, if you understand what I mean. And ICPD put me into Investigations, where I wanted to be, whereas IPD had kept me a basic beat cop, and so I started to learn and really do some good.”

  “And he moved up the ladder in the division,” Cally added. “Pretty fast.”

  “Yeah. But the IPD goons were still after me. They even shot me at one point. Square in the chest.” He rubbed his chest, where he could still remember the pain of the impact. “Fortunately, I was wearing body armor, or they’d have killed me outright, then and there – though I didn’t have shock plates in it, and damn, did it hurt. Hell, they even blew up my old apartment within hours of my moving into a new apartment. Killed the maintenance guy, who was there doing all the updates an’ stuff so they could lease it back out to a new tenant.” Nick shrugged. “Not that they cared. I felt awfully bad for his family, though. He had three kids.”

  Both of Cally’s parents gasped.

  “But why?” Laura wondered. “Why were they after you? Why did they stay after you? What did you do to anger them that badly?”

  “I don’t really know for sure. As nearly as I was ever able to figure,” Nick elaborated, then paused and backtracked. “Okay, lemme give you some history first, so you’ll understand. You know about the Imperial Council rebelling against the Throne and killing the last Empress a few months ago, right?”

  “Yes…” Alexandre said, and they both nodded. “She seemed a lovely woman, and a very capable Empress.”

  “It’s been all over the news,” Laura added.

  “Well, the reason Headquarters was so corrupt was ‘cause the jerks at IPD Headquarters were the Council’s right hands, and the ones who assassinated the Empress and the whole rest of the on-planet family of the new Emperor, for the Council,” Nick practically growled. “I think they were trying to usurp her authority, because I’m pretty sure what got ‘em really pissed at me was when I prevented the theft of something called the Empress’ Sigil. It was a signet ring with a special version of the Imperial emblem on it, given to the, I dunno, like a chamberlain or something for one of the early empresses from centuries ago, that showed he acted with her full authority, and in her name… and he could use it as a seal on documentation an’ stuff…”

  “It was way back before all of the nanites and VR and QE radio and all that stuff was invented,” Cally explained. “They had to use real old-fashioned means to communicate.”

  “So that early empress had issued a royal decree authorizing the Sigil, and none of the empresses since that time had ever revoked that, even though the thing was in a museum now,” Nick noted. “I expect it had been forgotten by the Palace staff, it was so long ago that it was used. And if I had to guess, I think somebody on the Imperial Council heard about it and wanted to get hold of it, to throw some serious wrenches into the works where Empress Ilithyia II and her policies were concerned…”

  “And you stopped them getting it,” Laura realized.

  “Yes, ma’am. Except the people in charge at Headquarters wanted it to be stolen, and probably were the very people who arranged the theft,” Nick said. “I didn’t know that, though, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to me if I had – theft is theft. So near as I can tell, when I recovered the thing for the museum within just a few minutes ‘cause I recognized the thief, people all the way up to the Council level got seriously, big-time mad at me.”

  “Damnation. No wonder they didn’t let it go,” Alexandre murmured. “You scotched a serious, long-term plan.”

  “Probably.” Nick suddenly scowled. “And damn glad of it, excuse my language.”

  Alexandre offered the younger man a wolfish grin, and Laura waved a dismissive hand.

  “Yeah, and once Nick realized what their ongoing mad was about, he told Detective Gorski,” Cally noted with a slight smirk, “and Gorski went to the Empress’ brother – the guy who’s Emperor now – and told him, and he got his sister to issue a revocation of authority on the thing. So now the Sigil is just a cool historical object, but it gives no power to the person in possession of it. And that put paid to any future attempts to steal the thing.”

  “That’s more like it,” Laura said in patent approval.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nick agreed. “Anyway, when it all started going down, I mean the rebellion against the Throne and all, I was working with the Imp City Police and the Imperial Guard to track down who was doing what, and who had assassinated one of the Empress’s staffers – who also was a close friend of the Empress, who I got to meet, and yeah, she was impressive. So after we nailed the assassin team, we took down their chief enforcer, who tried to resist arrest and fight back, and got himself killed for his efforts. Not that I minded,” Nick admitted, “because he was also the one that kept coming after me, or sending his underlings after me. But after that, Colonel Peterson decided–”

  “She’s my – our – boss, the head of the Investigations division,” Cally injected, as her parents nodded in recognition of the name. “Maia Peterson.”

  “…Peterson decided it might be good to get me out of reach for a little while,” Nick continued. “It’s really only been the headquarters of the IPD that was dishonest, because of the connections to the Council; for the most part, sector branches are pretty honest and by-the-book. So by that time, my old boss and my n
ew boss had gotten married – seems they’d known each other for years, but his position at IPD had kept ‘em apart, for obvious reasons – and they put their heads together and contacted a chum of theirs who runs the Catalonia Sector IPD, and I got ‘exported,’ if you will.” He laughed. “So I was en route there when the whole mess went down with the attack on the Palace, and Ilithyia’s death, and Trajan ascending to the Throne, and his retaliation on the Council and the IPD HQ…”

  “It was a huge mess within Imp City,” Cally averred. “But yeah, Nick was gone for all of that. He was in hyperspace and didn’t even find out about it until he’d reached Catalonia.”

  “Yeah, and the Catalonian IPD chief briefed me on it as soon as I got there. And then there was a related mess that went down on Catalonia,” Nick added. “The sector governor was fomenting discontent through the media, because she had delusions of grandeur and used the assassination and Trajan’s ascension to try to secede from the Sintaran Empire and become a tin-pot empress of sorts over the ‘Catalonian Empire.’ Only she got herself murdered in the aftermath, and…” He sighed. “I couldn’t come back to Sintar; I couldn’t even talk to Cally, because the Emperor said, ‘Fine. You don’t wanna play with us, you don’t get the benefits,’ and killed the VR and the QE radio and everything. So we had to just wait it out, there at Catalonian HQ.”

  “Whoa,” Alexandre muttered. “Damnation.”

  “Kinda like, yes, sir,” Nick replied. “Everything was pretty much dead in the water. A body doesn’t realize how much stuff we do through VR until the VR isn’t there.”

  “So when all that was finally over, and Nick – as the acting head of the whole Investigations division for Catalonia – solved the case of who killed the sector governor,” Cally said, raising her chin and beaming proudly, “we recalled him to Sintar, because his old boss – the one that married Colonel Peterson – had gotten tapped by the Emperor and the Consul to rebuild IPD Headquarters…”

  “That’d be Lee Carter, the new IPD chief, or whatever he’s called now,” Nick filled in. “I think he and Emperor Trajan… and maybe Consul Saaret… are still debating what to call him.”