EMPIRE: Imperial Detective

by Stephanie Osborn

  “Ohhh…” Ames whispered, wide-eyed with shock.

  “Not pretty,” Peterson agreed in a quiet voice. “Stefan told me about it.”

  “Did he tell you what my reaction was?” Ashton asked, flushing slightly in embarrassment.

  “No. If he was the only witness, that’s between you and him, hon,” Maia said gently. “I can imagine, though, because I know what mine would have been.”

  “Me too,” Cally said, subdued.

  “Make it three,” Lee added softly, then deliberately changed the subject to allow Nick to escape the memory. “But no, Nick, I don’t think we need anything quite that elaborate. Just a good, solid background check on all personnel should do it. And you’ve been arranging for that as we went. Oh, and we do have several official volunteers from the Imperial City department’s investigations division to help you out, in the ongoing efforts on same.” He glanced at Maia and Cally.

  “They call themselves, ‘The Team,’” Maia added. “I think you know ‘em all.”

  “Good,” Nick said in some relief. “Because I had no idea how I was gonna do it all myself.”

  “Not a problem, honey,” Cally said, leaning over and kissing his cheek. “I already told you, The Team has your back. We worked with you for how many years, there? ICPD Investigations isn’t gonna let you down. We’re part of one of the sections, and glad to have an honest IPD to work with – because we know you and Lee are gonna keep it straight.”

  “No shit,” Maia averred. “To alla that, right there. Frankly, Stefan, Gene, and myself are proud as hell of where you are now, Nick, because we feel like we trained you to be able to do the job.”

  “You did,” Nick confirmed. “Nobody in Investigations over at IPD did anything but tell me, basically, to siddown and shuddup.”

  “Or get your lights punched out,” Lee added.

  “No shit. And tried to make it a permanent lights-out,” Nick finished.

  They were all quiet for a moment.

  “Oh,” Carter said, sitting up straight. “Before I forget, Nick, this is yours.”

  He reached into a pocket and withdrew an IPD ‘pocket’ badge.

  “Here,” he said. “New little gadget.”

  “Gadget? It’s a pocket badge,” Ashton said, accepting the object. He studied it; it looked very much like the circular pin that went on his dress uniform – a laurel wreath with a throne in the middle of it, representative of the Throne of Sintar.

  Unlike the pin and like the standard pocket badges the ICPD investigators carried, it was all silver, with the throne and laurel depicted in bas relief. Beneath it, along the border of the circle, was a scroll with his surname and IPD designator. The latter was a short series of letters and numbers… but when Emperor Trajan had effectively hit reset on the IPD, Carter had decided to start over with the designators. So Ashton, being one of the first of the new IPD, had a designator that read AB0004I1. This code meant that he had been part of the original IPD – represented by A – but was now an integral part of the revamped department – represented by B. The first numeric sequence denoted the fourth police officer in the revamped system, and the I1 denoted the first member in the investigative division.

  “No. It’s a little bit more than a badge,” Carter explained. “It’s your bona fides as a legitimate IPD officer. Remember how the old IPD had their enforcers running around, who claimed to be actual officers, sometimes even detectives? People like Gorecki’s goons? And the powers that be gave ‘em badges, even after the jerks were officially thrown off the force?”

  “Yeah?”

  “See the slight little depression under the Throne emblem? Between it and your name?”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Put your index fingertip in that and hold it for a couple seconds.”

  Ashton obeyed, and within a second, the scroll on the badge, containing his name and IPD identification number, lit a soft green.

  “Nice,” Ashton decided, as Peterson and Ames oohed and aahed.

  “Yeah, it is,” Carter decreed. “And if somebody who isn’t a real cop tries to use it, as soon as they touch the bio-indicator, it lights up red. If the person wielding it is a legit cop, but not you, it lights up yellow. Look.” Carter put his fingertip into the depression, and the scroll lit a pale amber shade.

  “Cool!” Cally declared, enthused. “Maia, I want one ‘a those!”

  “HA! Well, sooner or later, it’ll filter to us, I guess,” Peterson decided.

  “I’ll try to help it be sooner,” Carter promised.

  “Nice. So you have it all covered,” Ashton said, nodding. “In an emergency, if a colleague doesn’t have a badge on ‘em, we can still identify ‘em as a colleague. I like it.”

  “So did Emperor Trajan,” Carter said with a grin.

  “Even better,” Peterson said, matching her husband’s grin.

  Problems

  “Did you hear about Peabody?” Captain Ted Bradly, chief over the Dispatch division, asked his companion – an old colleague and sometime assistant – over coffee in the break room at lunch.

  “What about him?” Lieutenant Bill Carr, responsible for the Evidence Archive, wondered. “He gonna run Investigations again?”

  “Not just no, but hell no,” Bradly noted with a snarl. “The new Chief busted him all the way down to sergeant investigator. They got some young, snot-nosed kid, fresh out with his detective badge, running Investigations, of all things. Talk about bass-ackwards, that’s it, all right.”

  “I don’t expect Peabody is happy about that.”

  “He’s not. I talked to him the other day. Says he has to earn it all back...from scratch.”

  “Damn.”

  “Never mind this cockamamie, damn-fool idea that they’re gonna get rid of military rank.”

  “Tell me about it! How the hell are ya supposed to tell who reports to who, if nobody’s got a damn rank? I’m not lettin’ go of my rank!”

  “Yeah. Me, either. This ain’t gonna work, Ted.”

  “No, it’s not. And it’s only a matter of time before the idiots runnin’ the department figure it out. Carter never made it past captain, so you know he hasn’t got a clue how to manage things. And now that damn crazy-ass idiot emperor has him tryin’ to run this shit.”

  “You suppose it’ll go the way it went before?”

  “Probably. I figure it’s just a matter of time, like I said. Meanwhile, I guess we wait it out.”

  Carr pondered for a bit.

  “Maybe not,” he said then. “Maybe we can, uh, ‘hurry it up’ a little bit, if you get me.”

  Bradly sat up straight.

  “What did you have in mind?” he wondered. Carr glanced around to make sure they weren’t being watched or overheard, then he leaned forward.

  “This is all coming from Carter. He schmoozed his way into the top position by sucking up to the new emperor, with the help of his ICPD bitch. But that new emperor don’t know jack-shit. We do. We know way the hell better than Carter the best way to run this department. So what if something...happened...to Carter?”

  “Mm,” Bradly hummed. “Interesting. They’d have to find somebody else with a reasonable rank and experience to stick in the slot.”

  “Right! Chances are, it’d be Peabody – which is only fair, after busting him down like that,” Carr noted. “But if he didn’t want the top job, there’s no reason why somebody else couldn’t slip into the position...like you, Captain.” He cocked his head. “After all, if they think Carter can…”

  “True, true...you make some really good points, there…” Bradly thought for a moment. “The biggest problem I see with that is, it’s hard to get to Carter these days. When he got the head slot, him and his ICPD bitch wife moved out to the ‘burbs and bought ‘em a nice, not-so-little house. Never mind the kid running Investigations and his wife – who is also an ICPD bitch, let me note – are out there all the time, as they all plan how this ‘new, improved’ excuse for a department is supposed to run.�
��

  “Yeah. ICPD has been a pain in our collective asses for years. We really need to look at getting rid of that whole damn place.”

  “But with Gorecki gone missing, and half his enforcers dead in the attack on the Palace, and the other half dead in the strike on the old Headquarters building, we got nobody to do it for us.”

  “So? We get together a group of us ‘oldies,’ and we do it ourselves.”

  “Ourselves? Are you crazy?”

  “Nope,” Carr said with a wicked grin. “Look. We got us a perfect opportunity to wipe out the top dog, his pup, and the bitches, all in one go, if we do something to the house during one of those little dinner parties they have.”

  “Yeah, but it has to be foolproof, and not at all obvious,” Bradly pointed out. “Otherwise, this emperor will not be forgiving. He’s already demonstrated that, in spades.”

  “No shit.”

  “And that was the whole point of having ‘enforcers.’ With them, if they screwed up badly enough, you just cut ‘em loose… or cut ‘em down. Otherwise, they did your work for you; if they got in trouble with anybody, you bailed ‘em out, and there weren’t any blatant connections to worry about. I mean, they knew, they just couldn’t prove it.”

  “True…”

  “Look. Why don’t you round up some of the other boys and girls who are ‘oldies’ like us, and see if anybody has any experience? Some of ‘em maybe worked in Gorecki’s group at one point or another. Make sure you pull in Peabody on it; he’ll probably appreciate the effort on his behalf. Oh, and see if you can find out where ol’ Gorecki got himself off to.”

  “Huh? Didn’t he bite it in the bombardment?”

  “Nah. He went AWOL a couple days before, and nobody knows where he went, or what happened.” Bradly scowled. “Some people are saying he cleared out to avoid the heat before the Empress could get popped. He may not even be on Sintar any more, the bastard.”

  “Oh. Huh. That’s a pretty shitty thing to do. I didn’t think he was the sort to do that. Shows how surprising some people can be, I guess. Okay, I’ll see what I can scrounge up on him.”

  In the end, Carr and Bradly were never able to find out what happened to Gorecki; the fact that Ashton’s team had had to gun him down in the street when he resisted arrest was a matter that Empress Ilithyia II had wanted kept under wraps – the fact that they had attempted to arrest him at all was to be kept under wraps, and Emperor Trajan had agreed with his sister on the matter – and thanks to the way it had been handled during the city’s off-hours, the IPD ‘elite’ had never managed to find out what happened to their chief enforcer. He simply disappeared one day; most – like Bradly – thought he’d skipped out to avoid trouble. The practice of cremating the remains of those executed – and, if unclaimed, placing them in a decidedly unhallowed location – meant there wasn’t even a body to find.

  But Carr had managed to round up around half a dozen other ‘oldies,’ not including himself, Bradly, and Peabody.

  So two nights later, they met in a relatively high-end bar several blocks away from the rented ‘New Headquarters’ building. They would have preferred their old hangout, the Fire Water Bar, not far off Imperial Park Boulevard South, but it was no longer in business – it had been raided by the ICPD not long after the attack on the Palace, and with the aid of the Imperial Marines, no less… though none of them understood why.

  So instead they met in another bar, farther west – the Cool Breeze Pub. Both it and the Fire Water Bar had been places where they were used to meeting their enforcers and mercenaries – thieves, assassins, and the like. Bradly hoped, by going to the Cool Breeze, they might see some of those same familiar faces, and bring them in to do most of the dirty work.

  Winston Peabody joined them.

  They didn’t encounter any of the desired familiar faces; almost all of those had, indeed, been eliminated in the Emperor’s attack on IPD Headquarters, one way and another.

  In the end, however, one of the ‘oldies’ had managed to find a couple of ‘enforcers’ who had been away on a camping and fishing trip together during the destruction of the original Headquarters building, and brought them along to the meeting, which occurred in a back room at the Cool Breeze Pub. As soon as they found out what the crooked cops wanted, they grinned.

  “That sure sounds good to me,” Pete Brandt remarked, smirking unpleasantly. “Me ‘an Joe here can handle it, can’t we, Joe?”

  “You bet, Pete,” Joe Hennig agreed, matching his smirk. “You got an address for ‘im? This Carter fella?”

  “Yeah; look in channel 1248,” Bradly said, pushing a small file through VR to the enforcers. “That’s where Carter lives now, with Colonel Peterson from the ICPD. It’s on the extreme west-southwestern outskirts of Imperial City.”

  “Right,” Brandt said. “We’ll scope it out and get a feel for their habits.”

  “How does he get inta work these days, do ya know?” Hennig wondered.

  “Drives, as far as I know,” Bradly said with a shrug. “Got ‘em one of those little box electrics that Imperial Transports makes. I’ve seen him pulling up in it a couple times.”

  “That sounds promising,” Hennig decided. “Ever been to the house?”

  “No. I, ah, don’t move in the same circles.”

  “Mm. Well, most o’ the suburban houses around this part o’ Sintar tend to use gas to run incidentals, like hot water heatin’ an’ such,” Hennig noted. “Me an’ Pete oughta be able to scope that out pretty quick, once we get out there. It ain’t a gated community, is it? If it is, it could give us troubles.”

  “That, I couldn’t tell you,” Bradly said. “It could be, I suppose, but from what I can see of Carter, I kinda doubt it. He isn’t the type. Too egalitarian.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Brandt said, holding up his hands. “Two-bit words, please. Them damn ten-credit words just make things complicated.”

  “He doesn’t believe in elitism,” Carr tried.

  “That’s...a little better,” Brandt decided. “What you’re tryin’ to say is, he don’t hold with fancy shit an’ lordin’ it over other people, right?”

  “Right,” Bradly confirmed. “Carter’s trying to flatten out the hierarchy, and he’s doing away with rank, and everything. It’ll ruin the department.”

  “Damn,” Brandt said, rocking back in shock. “That ain’t good for any of us. Here we manage to survive what that bastard emperor did, and now this guy’s cuttin’ down what’s left?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” George Holland, one of the other dirty cops, remarked. “We figure, if we can off him and his pet investigator, Ashton, along with their interfering ICPD wives, one of us – prob’ly Peabody, here – can step into the role and make the department what it used to be. Whether the damn emperor likes it or not.”

  “Then, if we’re smart,” Dave Seeger added, “we’ll see about taking out the ICPD. They’re nothing but trouble anyway, sucking up to the Palace an’ shit.”

  “I figure a bomb in the right place, over at their main precinct, oughta take care of them,” Matt Lowe pointed out. “That can wait until after Carter is outta the picture, though, I guess.”

  “But we have to be crafty, on all of it,” Bradly pointed out. “If the emperor figures out what happened to ‘em, we’re dead men.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hennig said with a wide grin; it was not a pleasant expression, for it showed two teeth missing, and most of the rest in various stages of negligence and decay; it was unclear whether he couldn’t afford dental work, or just didn’t bother. “Me an’ Pete are good.”

  “All right,” Bradly agreed. “You two go scout things out, and we’ll meet back here in...three days?”

  “Pay?” Brandt asked. “What are we gettin’ for this job?”

  “Your old job back,” Bradly responded. “More than likely, either Win Peabody over there,” he gestured to Peabody, who sat quiet, watching, “or me, are apt to end up in the driver’s seat when this is all ov
er. We’ll see to it, once we’re in charge.”

  “That sounds good t’ me,” Hennig concluded. “With rates set ‘cordin’ to the old rates once it’s done?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m in, then,” Hennig said. “Pete?”

  “I’m in, too.”

  “Looks like you gentlemen got yourselves some hired help.”

  The next morning, before he even left for work – while he was still eating breakfast – Ashton got an urgent ping from Peabody. Opening it, he saw the message:

  Detective Ashton,

  Meet me in channel 486 as soon as you can. It’s extremely important and very time-critical.

  W. Peabody

  “What’s wrong, honey?” Cally asked, as Nick paused in his consumption of his favorite breakfast meal – Cally’s crepes with powdered sugar and fresh strawberries and cream.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he said, laying down his fork. “I just got an urgent message from former Inspector Peabody, and he wants to meet me in VR pretty much immediately.”

  “Something’s wrong,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Go see what’s up. If I need to, I can make you more crepes.”

  “Gone,” he said, and dropped into channel 486.

  Peabody was pacing anxiously when Ashton appeared in the nondescript room.

  “There you are!” Peabody said, turning toward the younger man immediately.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” Ashton wondered. “I was in the middle of breakfast with my bride.”

  “Oh damn, I’m sorry to have interrupted, sir, but this is incredibly important,” Peabody said, apologetic. “Do you know how to reach Director Carter? Like, immediately?”

  “Sure. Do we need him in here, too?”

  “Yes,” Peabody said emphatically.

  “This sounds bad,” Ashton said, as he opened up another channel, composed a message, marked it ‘urgent,’ and sent it to Carter.