EMPIRE: Resurgence

by Richard F. Weyand

  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

  EMPIRE: Renewal

  EMPIRE: Resistance

  EMPIRE: Resurgence

  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

  EMPIRE

  Resurgence

  by

  RICHARD F. WEYAND

  Copyright 2020 by Richard F. Weyand

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-1-954903-00-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Credits

  Cover Art: Paola Giari and Luca Oleastri,

  www.rotwangstudio.com

  Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk

  Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.

  Bloomington, Indiana, USA

  March 2021

  CONTENTS

  Unlikely Friends

  Nightmares

  Too Quiet

  Endless Summer

  Free Trade

  Back in Imperial City

  Family

  Investigations Continue

  Waiting And Watching

  Mustering

  Setting Up Shop

  New Position

  Teamwork

  Digging Deeper

  The Cusp Nears

  Trigger

  Realization

  Convergence And Confrontation

  Sacrifice

  Reaction

  Leverage

  Sean’s Letter To His Grandmother

  Galway

  Imperial City

  Many Meetings

  Audience

  Museum

  Preparations

  Funeral

  Families Meeting

  Oath

  Imperial Guard

  Commandant

  Epilog

  From The Encyclopedia Hominum

  Afterword To The Renewal Trilogy

  Unlikely Friends

  Travis Geary and Sean Boyle had become friends at the Imperial Marine Academy. Both were history majors. Both were younger than their classmates. Both were excellent students. They shared several classes.

  The classes they didn’t share were the freshman leadership classes Geary was taking to make up for skipping freshman year at the Academy. He had come in as a sophomore, and he was ahead on his history sequences and the general education requirements for the degree, but he had missed the freshman leadership classes. Boyle had not, having attended the Academy the year before.

  Boyle was from the former Democracy of Planets, the Connacht Sector capital planet of Galway. Geary was from Mandrake, a provincial capital in the Lacomia Sector, one of the Sintaran Empire’s original sectors, adjacent to Estvia Sector. Boyle’s experience of the Empire was quite different than Geary’s, and they had long discussions about those differences in the evenings and on weekends.

  “I guess what I don’t understand, Travis, is your instinctive loyalty to the Throne. Sure, it’s the only game in town right now, but I guess I’m stuck in the old DP way of thinking a democracy would be better if anyone could figure out how to even do that with two and a half quadrillion people.”

  “Sean, you misunderstand me, I think. The Throne is successful because it is the government people want. The polls consistently show the favorability ratings of the Emperor and Empress as well above those of the former DP or any of the former governments in the volume of space that makes up the Empire. Even just the polls within the former DP. Democracies can get people into all sorts of trouble. People are too busy living their lives to research issues in depth, with the result that media and politicians can railroad people into all sorts of stupid things.”

  “Like what, Travis?”

  “Like the DP’s war with Sintar. Sean, there was no way the DP could prevail against Sintar. By the time the war was kicked off, even the DP’s own leaders knew that, but they couldn’t forestall it. It was what the people wanted. The people didn’t have the full information the leaders had, and the opposition party would have kicked the government out in elections if they had tried to avoid it. So they went ahead with it. And the plutocrats behind the government saw it as an opportunity to make money. Billions of people died. How much stupider a result could you want?”

  “But that’s not what happened, Travis.”

  “It’s not? Look again, Sean. You’re a good enough history researcher to go to primary sources and ferret it out. Let me give you something. This book is really well researched, and contains pointers to all the primary sources you need to look at.”

  Geary shoved Boyle a pointer.

  “’Power & Restraint, An In-Depth Retrospective on the Four Good Emperors,’” Boyle read aloud.

  “Yes. It’s the Emperor’s history of the first two hundred and forty years of the Empire. We haven’t gotten to it yet in classes. That’s senior year.”

  “Well, the Emperor is hardly going to write something critical of the Empire.”

  “You’re wrong, Sean,” Geary said. “He wasn’t the Emperor then, and he had no prospect of being the Emperor. He was a nobody when he wrote it. A history grad student at IUC. And he was very critical of the Empire at that time. But that doesn’t even matter. What I’m telling you to do is use it as a pointer to the primary sources. It’s really well footnoted. Don’t take anything he says for granted. Check it out.”

  “All right, Travis. I’ll look into it.”

  True to his word, Boyle did look into it, to the extent he could between classes and homework and exercises. Truth be told, an Academy underclassman didn’t have a lot of extra time. But he did track down the primary sources that were most at odds with his existing worldview.

  They left him troubled. Even primary sources out of the former Democracy of Planets, assiduously collected by Imperial forces after the war, backed up Travis’s argument. The DP’s leaders were more than dubious about their ability to prevail in a war with Sintar, but the people, misled by the media and the opposition party, pushed ahead. So did the plutocrats, the DP’s wealthiest families, who didn’t anticipate the outcome either, but instead saw the war as an opportunity for profiteering on a massive scale.

  The Emperor Trajan, by contrast, tried to avoid the war, tried to give the DP an out once the magnitude of the DP disaster had become apparent, tried to minimize the casualties on both sides. He had, in fact, supplied the DP’s own spacers while their government dithered, so they wouldn’t starve. He even ceded Imperial territory to the DP fleets when it was clear he could have wiped them out to the last man.

  This was all very much at odds with what Sean Boyle had been taught by his family. For Sean Boyle was actually Thomas Doolan, a deep-plant operative of the plutocratic families of the former DP.

  In fact, his maternal grandmother was Maire Kerrigan.

  Boyle recalled taking his leave of his grandmother on Galway before the beginning of his freshman year at the Academy. His parents and his siblings lived in a separate house on the family’
s estate fifty miles outside of Galway City, the capital of the planet of the same name. Boyle had gone up to the main house, a great stone pile on the hill, to say goodbye.

  He had found his grandmother in her office, the office from which she plotted the overthrow of the Empire and the restoration of the family to its historic rule. For he knew that was her purpose. It was the family’s great project, carried on over the last three centuries and more. Of course, they had ruled the Democracy of Planets – together with the other plutocratic families – for the prior millennium, so the time frames were necessarily long.

  “Ah, there you are,” Kerrigan said when Boyle came into her office. “Come to say goodbye to me?”

  “Yes, grandmother. My shuttle lifts in three hours.”

  “I won’t keep you then, but I must get a last hug from my grandson.”

  Kerrigan came around her desk to hug him, then held him at arm’s length.

  “My, what a handsome young man you’ve become. I’m so very proud of you.”

  “Thank you, grandmother.”

  He was her favorite, he knew. The eldest of his generation, and destined to be the leader of the family when his time came. After his mother’s stint in the job, of course. Perhaps thirty years from now or more. He would be long retired from the Imperial Marines by that time, and deep into the family’s business.

  “Very well, then. Scoot along so you don’t miss your shuttle. And study hard. Make us all proud.”

  “I will, grandmother.”

  “And don’t forget, your Uncle Ian is there as well, though also under cover, of course. If you need him, you should go to him for help.”

  Kerrigan meant her younger brother, Ian Walsh, Boyle’s great uncle.

  “I’ll remember, grandmother.”

  He bowed his head to her then, and left her to her scheming.

  Despite it being Boyle’s first interstellar flight, the transit from Galway through Annalia and on to Center had been uneventful. He traveled business class, and read and studied during the five-week-long trip, breaking up the boredom with daily stints in the gym. Interstellar travel took a long time between distant points and that was all there was to it.

  Imperial City had shocked Boyle. Galway was a sector capital, but it was nowhere near as developed as Imperial City. He should have expected that, he supposed, but there was something more to it. The Imperial Park West area had the unmistakable look of a place that had been allowed to deteriorate and then regentrified. A veneer of ‘new’ over the ancient epoxycrete buildings indicated the resurgence of the economy here in the Empire’s heart. The bustling city was clearly enjoying something of a renaissance.

  Similar things were happening on Galway, of course, though at a much reduced pace when compared to Imperial City. The aged Emperor Augustus VI had made many changes over the last six years, and they were rippling out across the vastness of the Empire.

  Still, Boyle had to wonder at how bustling, how happy, and how prosperous Imperial City was. This was not an oppressed people struggling under a tyrannical monarch, as his family would have it. Galway in his youth had been much more subdued, under the taxes, censorship, and other policies of the Connacht Sector Governor on Galway, a friend of his grandmother’s. Those policies had all disappeared within the last five years as the Emperor had reinstated the Law of Ilithyia II and done away with the worst abuses. Even now, though, Galway was nothing like this.

  He entered the Imperial Marine Academy, swore oath to the Throne, and embarked on his studies. His first year was hectic enough his concerns were shunted aside for the moment, even his wondering how he would square his oath to the Throne with his loyalty to his family if push came to shove.

  Or, rather, when.

  Boyle stayed in Imperial City during the summer break after his first year. It was ten weeks to Galway and back, with a twelve-week break. If he had merely won a scholarship to the sector academy – Imperial Marine Academy Galway – it would have been a different matter. Home would have been a few hours’ drive away. But the Imperial Marine Academy Center had been too good to pass up. It meant he could study history at the Imperial University of Center, the premier university in the Empire.

  Boyle took only one class that summer, spending much of his time enjoying both the city and the country, both the night life and long walks in the hills. He turned eighteen at the beginning of that wonderful summer, which made the night life of the city’s bars and clubs available to him.

  Boyle met and courted a girl – a young woman – Angelique, from Terre Autre Sector, that summer. The romance faded apace with the summer, though she had been kind at the end and left him with fond memories.

  The other thing that happened that memorable summer was the coronation. Emperor Augustus VI had died of old age in April of Boyle’s freshman year. He had been the Emperor for Boyle’s entire life, taking the Throne two years before Boyle was born. Boyle had watched the recordings of Augustus VI’s coronation as a child.

  Boyle watched in amazement as the Empire crowned not one ruler but two, not an old man but a young couple barely a decade older than himself. The Emperor had been a graduate student and received his degree in history, Boyle’s major, from the Imperial University of Center, where Boyle took his academic classes. The Empress had been an Imperial Marine officer, graduating from Imperial Marine Academy Moria, from the same military leadership curriculum Boyle was in on Center.

  Boyle felt like he knew these people, by their backgrounds, at least.

  Within days had come the news of the attempted nanite murder of the Empress Arsinoe. Boyle knew it had to have been the families. He had not known about the nanite murder mechanism, but it fit into some things he had overheard over the years.

  Boyle’s confusion grew, and then his sophomore year started. With the coming of the new school year, there also came Travis Geary. A fellow history student, but with a bone-deep loyalty to the Throne.

  It was Boyle’s exploration of that loyalty that led Geary to recommend the Emperor’s book to Boyle, and Boyle dug into it and its primary sources looking for answers.

  One book that the Emperor, then simply Dr. James Ardmore, referenced in the early portion of his history was the autobiography of Eugene Derwinsky. Already a precinct governor – the equivalent of an Imperial provincial governor – in the Democracy of Planets when the war broke out, he had been named Essen Sector Governor by the Emperor Trajan when the war was over.

  Having served at high levels in both systems, there were few people who were in a better position to point out the differences between the late Democracy of Planets and the early Galactic Empire. Derwinsky laid out the case for the Empire with brutal clarity. His sense of humor took the sting out of many of the revelations, though, and Boyle found himself laughing aloud at many of his stories.

  Derwinsky made the astounding – to Boyle, at least – claim in the book that being conquered and absorbed by the Sintaran Empire was the best thing that had ever happened to the people of the Democracy of Planets. Then, with tables and charts, he proceeded to prove it. Real per capita income. Infant mortality. Average educational attainment. Life expectancy. Malnutrition rates. Disease rates. Penetration of VR nanites.

  In measure after measure, the people of the DP were better off as part of the Empire than they had been under the ancien régime or any reasonable extrapolation of it. It wasn’t even close. And it had happened fast, within twenty years.

  In Derwinsky’s view, it had happened because of the motivations of its leaders, not the actual structure for selecting the leaders. Whether Emperor or elected politicians or puppet-master plutocrats, that didn’t matter to Derwinsky. Simply put, the Emperor had sworn to do the best he could for the people of the Empire, and he had meant it, while the politicians and plutocrats of the former DP had the aggrandizement of themselves as their primary motivation.

  The plutocrats and politicians, including Boyle’s family – and, by association, Boyle himself – stood indicted by Derwin
sky of high crimes against the people of the Democracy of Planets. They had kept the people in disease, in poverty, in thrall, to their own selfish ends.

  The war with Sintar was not the disease, it was a symptom.

  Skeptical, Boyle looked into Derwinsky. He was among the elites of the DP, having attended the best schools, being elected to office first as a councilman then mayor of a planetary capital, then planetary governor, and finally precinct governor under the old DP system. He was considered an outstanding precinct governor at the time. His inside knowledge of the DP certainly couldn’t be questioned.

  When the DP surrendered to Sintar, the Essen District governor, Derwinsky’s superior, had retired, and Derwinsky had been named to the Essen Sector governorship by Emperor Trajan. He had served the Emperor for forty years in that position, and was considered one of the best of the Empire’s sector governors. So his inside knowledge of the Empire couldn’t be questioned either.

  It was Derwinsky’s book that tore it for Boyle. His loyalties began shifting from his family and its project to the Empire. It was easy to do in the Imperial Marine Academy. Loyalty to the Throne here was something of a given.

  What it would mean when he got back to his family was a whole different thing, but that was in the future.

  At the end of the first term of Boyle’s sophomore year, the Empire cleaned house of many of the hidden operatives of the families buried in the Imperial armed forces. Colonel Noah Simpson was arrested in the middle of his last lecture in Logistics and Supply class. Boyle was sitting with Geary and his friend Nathan Benton when the scene played out.

  A captain and two beefy sergeants in MDUs with MP armbands entered the speaker’s well from the side door.

  “Colonel Simpson, you are under arrest,” the captain said. “Come with us, please.”

  “Class dismissed,” Simpson said to the astonished cadets, then followed the captain out the side door, the two sergeants following along.