EMPIRE: Resurgence

by Richard F. Weyand

  “I suppose. It just gives me an itch between my shoulder blades. Like I have a target on my back. I can’t believe they’ll let it drop here. Not when they didn’t for over three centuries.”

  “Do you think we should tighten security, Gail?”

  “No. Not without any additional signs of something going on. That’s the sort of thing that wears out your ability to maintain decent security. Running at heightened security over the long term turns heightened security into normal security, and then you have no heightened security to go to. But I do think we need to be watching for those extra signs something is imminent.”

  “That’s fair. We can let Tom and General Hargreaves know. I think we could also step things up in Investigations, too. Maybe even have the Zoo think up other ways to assess the data.”

  Gail was nodding.

  “That’s probably all worthwhile, Jimmy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s my Mommy instincts turning on. I just don’t like it.”

  “I trust your instincts, Gail. You’ve been right all along. I’ll start with Olivia Darden on Monday.”

  “I want to be there.”

  “Of course.”

  The Zoo was the Consulting Office’s new ideas group, hundreds of young idiot savants and polymaths who tackled the Empire’s toughest problems, the problems for which there was no known way to proceed. They always produced a bunch of ideas, many of which would prove unusable, but the review of their ideas could be done by others.

  They met in a simulation of a cafeteria, where they would hammer out issues in a chaos of informal meetings. That cafeteria simulation was on channel 700 of the Palace VR system, and, between the chaos and 700 looking so much like ZOO, it had been so named.

  “Ms. Darden, Your Majesty,” said Edward Moody, Personal Secretary to Their Majesties, as he waved Olivia Darden through the door from the outer office.

  “Come in, Ms. Darden,” Ardmore said. “Be seated.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  Darden sat in one of the guest chairs before the expensive but not elaborate desk in the Emperor’s office.

  Ardmore sent Burke a VR message, and she came in through the communicating door to her office. Darden shot to her feet.

  “Good morning, Your Majesty.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Darden. Be seated.”

  Burke sat down in the other guest chair. Darden then sat down. She wasn’t sure what the topic was, but it was not a small request, to have an in-person meeting with both rulers of the Empire.

  “Ms. Darden, we have a new assignment for the new ideas group. For the Zoo.”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  “We were wondering if there isn’t some more actionable information we can glean out of the data you have collected already about the group of plutocrat families in the old DP who oppose us. Who oppose the Empire, really.”

  “I see, Sire.”

  “My specific concern,” Burke said, “is that things are too quiet, Ms. Darden. When the enemy is quiet, I worry. I want to stay on offense. But we don’t know how to do that with what we have so far. We already hit them as hard as we could with what we have.”

  “I understand, Milady. Is this a short-term project, or a medium-term project?”

  Burke looked to Ardmore.

  “I would think it is a medium-term project, Ms. Darden. It might, for example, take some surveillance to turn up extra bits of information you need, that sort of thing. But we want a plan to harass and contain these people going forward, not simply hit them hard once and then stop.”

  “That’s good, Sire. I think we got what we can get on the short-term the last time. But let’s see if we haven’t missed something, and what other things we can come up with.”

  “Excellent. Keep us informed, Ms. Darden.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Dismissed, Ms. Darden.”

  Darden called the Zoo together in the virtual lecture hall of channel 591. The room kept growing to accommodate new arrivals until several hundred people filled tiered rows of seating in the hall.

  “I just came from a meeting with Their Majesties. We have a new assignment directly from the Throne,” Darden began.

  That got everybody’s interest. Assignments and requests came into the Zoo from all over the government, but the assignments from the Throne were always the most interesting.

  Darden explained what Their Majesties were looking for, and then put the challenge to the group.

  “We have all this data. We know this plutocrat group – some subset of this group – is actively working against the Throne. We don’t think we got them all on the last round. So what are we going to do about it?

  “We’re going to find them, that’s what we’re going to do. Go back through the data. Find anything we missed. Figure out what we still need, so we can start data collection on that, using Imperial warrants and surveillance if we have to.

  “Get after them, ladies and gentlemen. The Throne wants to go on the offensive, and we need to get that intel.

  “Dismissed.”

  Everyone was gone in seconds.

  Matthew Houseman’s group gathered at their usual table to start working the problem. It was really a table of group leaders, as they each had their own followers as well.

  “All right. The floor is open. Ideas, anyone?” Houseman asked.

  “One thing we didn’t do last time,” Rick Pender said, “was track the leaders of the families. You know, the surviving elder person in the line, look for who has the biggest holdings in the family’s stocks, that sort of thing. We were after operatives at the time, but if we’re going to do surveillance on the medium term, that would be over a limited number of people. We should probably start with them.”

  “That’s a good one,” Houseman said.

  “We need to make sure we consider the stocks everybody had before the Empire seized all that stuff,” Denise Coutard said. “The family leader may not be the biggest holder now, or the leadership could have changed. Two prospects there.”

  “Good. What else?” Houseman asked. “Lois, your awful quiet.”

  “Huh?” Lois Costas said. “Oh. I was just thinking we never made use of the negative data.”

  “Negative data?” Pender asked.

  “Yeah. Like, which families did we not catch anyone from?”

  “Maybe they weren’t involved,” Lucia Martelli said.

  “Or maybe their operatives were just better hidden,” Costas countered. “What if we just missed all their operatives? But there should be a way to tell.”

  “How would you go about it, Lois?” Houseman asked.

  “Well, if someone is being an operative somewhere, then he’s not being himself where you would expect him to be. Birth record, school record, but no death record. He just stopped existing under his original name. No death record, so he’s somewhere else, under some other name.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Pender said.

  “Thanks,” Costas said. “Now, we have all these aliases, and we have the people who disappeared. Maybe we can match them based on when one disappeared and the other appeared.”

  “That might work. If we have the alias name now, that is,” Martelli said.

  “What are you thinking, Luce?” Houseman asked.

  “What if one of these families was in deeper cover than that? No bank accounts in alias names. So we don’t have any alias names to match with. They could be anybody.”

  “Can we find their alias names – at least in the military and such, the sensitive spots – by looking for people without full backgrounds?” Pender asked.

  “Maybe not,” Martelli said. “Let’s say they got an alias when they were children. Their VR account was opened – at age four – in the alias name.”

  “Ooo, that’s a nasty thought,” Pender said. “Would they even do that, though?”

  “I don’t know why not,” Houseman said. “They’ve been at this three hundred and fifty years.”

  “The
n how the hell do we find them?” Pender asked.

  “We don’t,” Costas said. “We let them show us. If we’re going to do medium-term surveillance now, we watch the family leaders. We should be able to tell which families they are. We still have people who disappeared in childhood, right? But the family needs to communicate with them. If we can follow the communications path – maybe in a couple of steps – we should be able to track them down, right?”

  “I like where this is going,” Houseman said. “Let’s track down the heads of families, then let’s do some initial work to see if we have that situation. Families who didn’t have anybody found in Their Majesties’ purge – or not many, anyway – but who have children who more or less disappeared before they opened a VR account.”

  “I bet Harry’s already on the heads of families,” Wang Minwei said.

  Wang disappeared to another area of the cafeteria simulation on channel 700. He popped back in less than a minute.

  “Yeah, Harry’s working the heads of families already.”

  “All right, so we’re on to the families that didn’t have many found in the purge, looking for missing kids. Let’s work on that and see what we get.”

  As a first step, they set the computers to doing a ‘where is he’ query on the records of the last three generations of the plutocrat families in their descendants database, worked up in the previous investigation. This search was a very common one within the Empire’s databases, and the code for it had been optimized long ago, so it would run fast. There were a lot of records to run, though, so it would take a while.

  With that under way, Houseman’s group went back to lower priority problems.

  There were two four-foot by four-foot by four-foot crates on the floor in this corner of the warehouse.

  “It’s all ready?” Antonio Sciacca asked.

  “Yes, sir. We’re ready to ship,” the technician said.

  “The interlocks and all we discussed are in place?”

  “Yes, sir. Once it’s mounted on the stand, after an hour it sets itself. Taking it off the stand at that point will set off the device. There is an interlock on the cover of the detonator compartment. If the cover is removed, that will set off the device. The igniters are all monitored by the detonator. If someone goes into the weapon access panel and attempts to cut the leads to the igniters, that will set off the device.”

  “And it can be set off over QE radio as well, right?” Sciacca asked.

  “Yes. It’s a private QE link, not interconnected to the Imperial QE network, and cannot be defeated by them. It can only be set off from here.”

  “Excellent. You’ve been most helpful. Thank you.”

  Sciacca nodded to one of his bodyguards, standing behind the technician. The big man grabbed the technician’s head and, with a deft twist, broke his neck. The technician dropped dead to the floor.

  “Clean that up,” Sciacca said, nodding to the dead man, “then pack the crates for shipment.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Upon arrival on Annalia, in the Sciacca companies’ shared warehouse outside of the capital city of New Delorme, the container – in which the two crates were the only cargo, lashed down to the freight rails in the floor – had been set aside.

  “Hey, Fred. What’s going on?” the security guard asked.

  “Oh, hi, George. There’s a container got misread. Damn near got lost. I guess the numbers got scraped up or something.”

  Fred Grainger held aloft a pail he carried with some spray paint cans and stencils.

  “I’m gonna clean ‘em up before we ship it on.”

  “All right. Just let me know when you’re done.”

  “Will do, George.”

  Grainger went over to the crate. On both sides and both ends, he spray painted a new flat-black background over a 3 and a 0 on the container’s ID markings. While that dried, he went over to the master ID plate by the container’s doors. After looking around, he pulled a small battery-powered engraving tool out of the bottom of the pail. He changed a 3 to an 8 and a 0 to a 6. Both were easy in the font used on the plate.

  With the flat-black paint now dry, Grainger went back to the ID markings on both the ends and sides of the container and used the white spray can to paint an 8 and a 6 where the 3 and the 0 had been. He eyed his work critically. His overpaint was a good match to the original white letters on the flat-black rectangle of the ID markings. It was important to have the correct stencils and paint, and Grainger did.

  It was a common smuggling trick, and one Fred Grainger had done before. Not all of the Sciacca companies’ business was on the up and up. For that matter, it wasn’t the first time George Toler had made himself absent for Grainger’s little modifications either. He would get a performance bonus this month for his unswerving performance of his duties.

  But it also meant the container would not be traceable back to its actual point of origin if whatever was inside attracted the attention of Imperial authorities. Changing one number of the twenty-four number string wasn’t enough. The Imperial Police were on to the trick, and there were only two-hundred and sixteen possible alternates for a one-number shift. There were over forty-five thousand possible alternates for a two-number shift, though, and that was too many container IDs to check all the routing on.

  Once the stencils were dry enough, Fred Grainger packed up his materials into his pail and bid George Toler a good day on his way out.

  Endless Summer

  Travis Geary, Nathan Benton, and Sean Boyle all stayed on Center through the summer break. ‘Summer’ break was something of a misnomer, for two reasons.

  The first was that all planets in the Empire ran on the same calendar, but that didn’t mean they all had their summer season at the same time. They were all over the map. But schools had to be in synch or an interstellar university system wouldn’t work. So June 1st to August 31st was summer break from schools, everywhere in the Empire. If that was when it snowed in your location on your planet, so be it.

  The second is that Center had no axial tilt. Some planets, like Earth, had an axial tilt that produced marked seasons. Some planets had even more axial tilt than Earth, and the seasonality was even more pronounced, at least in the latitudes farther from the equator. But Center had a very small axial tilt, and Imperial City’s latitude at only fifteen degrees north negated even that small variation. The weather in Imperial City was mostly pleasant, most of the time.

  Which was fine with Geary, Benton, and Boyle. They spent much of that summer at the beach, a hundred and fifty miles north of Imperial City downtown. It was only an hour’s train ride away, and when the weather gave them several nice days in a row, they spent the nights simply sleeping on the beach. With all the schools on Center on the same schedule, they weren’t alone.

  All three had gotten into good physical shape at the Academy and were tanned and muscular. They usually wore Imperial Marines-issue swim shorts. They found that this was an attractant for some young women and a repellent for others, but it did push the ladies off dead-center, so it was overall a benefit to their social life. Geary and Benton learned to surf, getting lessons from Boyle, who had apparently led a pretty pampered life on Galway.

  The best part of the long beach was where the coastline made a sharp corner to the north, which gave glorious sunsets over the ocean, with the hills behind the beach delaying the dawn. There was a surf shop there where they rented boards, and they could paddle out across the incoming surf rather than into it.

  The three beach bums actually wore out their attraction to the beach, and, as the summer waned, they were looking forward to setting aside sun, sand, and surf and starting their junior year.

  The faculty and staff at the Imperial Marine Academy Center did not have the summer off, though they did take extended leaves during the summer. That’s when a lot of business got done that simply couldn’t be handled during the bustle of the school year.

  At the beginning of the summer, Lieutenant General Broderick Hanse
n called Colonel David Ryan to his office to talk about the colonel’s proposal to seriously remodel and refurbish the Imperial War Museum.

  The Imperial War Museum was in the building east of the Imperial Marine Academy Center, toward Imperial Park, and took up fifteen floors above the entrance floor on the arcade level. It had an impressive facade on the street level. The rest of the building was officer’s quarters, staff offices, and other support for the Academy. The museum was open to the public, through a separate set of elevators.

  The museum displayed thousands of military artifacts, weapons, video presentations, and other military and war-related materials from throughout the history of the Galactic Empire, the Sintaran Empire, and even the Kingdom of Sintar, going back a thousand years. It was arranged roughly by date, with a century of material on each floor early in that millennium, and fifty years per floor or less in the latter part of the millennium, the period of the Galactic Empire.

  “Reporting as ordered, Sir,” Colonel Ryan said.

  “At ease, Colonel. Have a seat,” General Hansen said.

  “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

  “Your proposal to refurbish the Imperial War Museum has finally made it through channels, Colonel. The committees have all passed on it, the budget people have passed on it, and it’s come to me for final sign-off. I wanted to talk to you a little about it first.”

  “Of course, Sir.”

  “From your proposal, Colonel, I take it your plan is to remove everything from the museum, refurbish the facility, refurbish, rework, and update all the displays off-site, then move everything back in.”

  “More or less, Sir. Some of the displayed materials are so large, I’m not even sure how they got them in there. They may have gone in through the side of the building. For those large items, we will move them all to one side of the floor they’re on, remodel the rest of the floor, then move them out onto the floor and remodel the part they were blocking. I’m not sure how else to do it.”