EMPIRE: Resurgence

by Richard F. Weyand

  Donahue, Odom, and Dickens piled into the big car and Odom pulled it out of the garage and headed to the Imperial War Museum.

  “Do you need us to drop you off and circle around so you have time to jimmy the door?” Donahue asked Dickens.

  “No, that won’t be necessary. Those Imperial Police permissions can be very useful.”

  Dickens raised his voice, directing it to Odom.

  “Pull right up to the dock doors, Mike.”

  “Got it,” Odom said.

  Odom pulled the car around to the back of the building that housed the Imperial War Museum on its first fifteen floors and into the pull-off for the docks. The dock door in front of him opened, and he eased the big car through and into the dock area. The dock door closed behind them.

  With a number of bays in front of them, Odom parked the car well off to the side. He got out of the car and rummaged in the trunk as Donahue and Dickens got out.

  “That’s a cool trick with the doors,” Donahue said.

  “Yes. One can’t use it all the time, lest one burn one’s assets, but, when in need–“

  Dickens shrugged.

  “You set?” Donahue asked Odom, who was closing the trunk.

  “Yeah. Just grabbing some shit we might need.”

  “All right. I think I know my way from here,” Donahue said, and led them off into the building.

  Ryan had gone out for a long walk. He walked past Imperial Mall, and saw the operations going on there, with Imperial Marine assault shuttles coming and the Marines deploying around the Palace and setting off in Imperial Police and Palace Guard vans.

  A trained eye told Ryan this was no exercise. There was a certain grimness of purpose, a certain edge in the voices of the NCOs, a certain nervousness in the voices of the troops. No, whatever this was, it was real, and he connected it with the Medusa message. Whether his own identity had been burned or not, it was definitely time to collect Tommy and get the hell out of town.

  He should be able to get into his apartment and out before they showed up, given they had no VR location for him with the personal VR suppressor he was wearing. He would normally be at breakfast already, then on his way to the office.

  Ryan went into one of the side entrances of the Imperial University of Center and down to the service level. He took the tunnel over to the building his apartment was in, which was the same building that housed the Imperial War Museum on its lower fifteen floors. He took the heavy car lift up to street level, emerging in the docks.

  Ryan saw the limo parked over to one side immediately. He looked around quickly, then walked over to the limo and felt the hood. Warm. They just got here.

  Slipping the pistol out of his pocket, Ryan headed into the museum. He skipped the escalators and the elevators as too noisy, and ghosted up the stairs.

  Stinson, Geary, Benton, and Boyle made their way into an exhibit hall and to the warhead display. At one point, Geary, looking around, had a sudden shock when he saw they were being watched by an Imperial Navy MP. It turned out to be a wax figure, but it gave him a hell of a start. There were similar figures around the floor, to give it the feel of a secure military installation.

  “Well, there it is,” Boyle said. “Now what do we do?”

  The warhead sat on a new, sturdier pedestal, and was freshly painted and stenciled. Otherwise it was much like it had been.

  “Let’s see if our conjecture is correct. Nate?”

  Benton walked forward and laid his hand on the device, toward the top.

  “It’s warm, Travis. It’s got a pit in it. Gotta assume it’s live.”

  “Now what do we do?” Geary said.

  “There’s an access panel to get at the detonator,” Benton said.

  “You have to assume it’s booby-trapped in a bunch of different ways,” Boyle said. “Just removing the access panel could set it off.”

  Geary was working through that when an unfamiliar voice cut through his thoughts.

  “What’s going on here, Brigade Commander?”

  Geary turned to see three men in their forties, dressed in suits.

  “Who are you?” Geary asked.

  “Imperial Police,” Donahue said.

  Well, close enough, Dickens thought.

  “We think this so-called decommissioned warhead may be live, Sir,” Geary said.

  Dickens looked to Odom, nodded. Odom walked over to the device and put his hand on it, then turned to Donahue and nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s hot. It’s got a pit, anyway. I’d figure it’s live.”

  “The problem is it’s probably booby-trapped, Sir,” Geary said. “We were trying to figure out what to do about it.”

  With all of them more or less facing the warhead, none of them saw Colonel Ryan coming up behind them, his pistol in his hand.

  “Don’t move, Mr. Donnelly,” Ryan said.

  Donahue turned his head slowly to see Ryan there with the pistol in a two-hand grip, trained on him.

  “That’s good,” Ryan said. “Nice and easy. Now let’s say you three gentlemen – one at a time now, and very, very slowly – put your guns on the counter there. You first, Mr. Donnelly.”

  Donnelly took his pistol out of its shoulder holster with two fingers and set it on the nearest display counter. This was not the time to try for Ryan. He would slip up eventually.

  “Excellent, Mr. Donnelly. Now your driver.”

  Donahue nodded to Odom, and he did the same thing.

  “Now this third fellow,” Ryan said, nodding to Dickens.

  “I am unarmed, sir. Crude devices. I don’t use them.”

  “Show me. Slowly.”

  Dickens opened his suit coat wide, lifted it to expose his waistband all the way around, and turned completely around once, slowly.

  “Interesting,” Ryan said.

  Ryan wasn’t sure what his great-nephew Tommy was doing here. Probably swept along in whatever was going on.

  “Tommy. Come over here and get out of my line of fire.”

  Donahue raised an eyebrow, but Geary nodded Boyle to go. Boyle walked around the back of the group then past and behind Ryan. He didn’t know what to do, and looked around at the displays around him. There! That mannequin of an Imperial Navy MP had a baton in his belt. That would do.

  Behind Ryan, Boyle sidled over to the MP mannequin and silently slid the baton out of the loop in the mannequin’s belt.

  “Unfortunate for you all to have stumbled on this,” Ryan said to the group. “My nephew and I need to leave now, but you’re all staying here.”

  Donahue tried not to look at Boyle. Go for the gun, son.

  Things then happened very fast. Ryan caught a flash in the corner of his eye. He didn’t have time to turn and look before the MP baton came down hard on the wrist of his gun hand. The gun was moved well off-line and down, then went off, hitting a display case to Ryan’s right of the group. The gun clattered to the floor. Dickens dropped to the floor, clearing everyone’s field of fire. Odom took three quick strides forward and popped Ryan on the jaw, and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Donahue retrieved his pistol from the counter and had everybody covered.

  Geary stood stunned. Not two seconds had passed, and the situation had completely changed. From Ryan in control, it had gone to Ryan down and the Imperial Police in control.

  “I got cable ties,” Odom said. “Where do we put him?”

  “There are jump seats along the wall in the hallway,” Stinson said.

  “Good enough.”

  Odom picked up Ryan like a rag doll and walked out through the door of the exhibit hall into the hallway. After holding the door for him, Stinson pulled down one of the jump seats along the wall and Odom unceremoniously dumped Ryan into it. He trussed up Ryan’s wrists and ankles, then cable-tied him to the chair. He also made sure Ryan was wearing a personal VR suppressor and it was still on.

  The group wandered out into the hallway to watch, Boyle in the lead. Ryan came to only a few minutes after he had been pop
ped, to see Boyle standing in front of him.

  “Tommy, why?” Ryan asked.

  Boyle was furious, and he let it all out at Ryan now.

  “Why? Why will I not let you kill fifty million people? Why will I not let trillions more die in the chaos that follows? For what? So your sister can try to rule the Empire? Are you shitting me? She has anxiety attacks before a goddamned board meeting. What the fuck is the matter with you? You were always supposed to be the smart one. You’re such a dumb shit. If you pull this off, you will go down as the most evil person in humanity’s long and sordid history. Not her. You. Her patsy.”

  Boyle spat on the floor in front of Ryan, who sat stunned.

  Donahue was sitting in a jump seat across the hall from Ryan. He had pulled a small folding wallet from an inside coat pocket and had unfolded it on his thigh. It contained half a dozen hypodermic syringes.

  “Would he know what booby traps are on the device?” Donahue asked Boyle.

  “He might,” Boyle said. “Might not. He’d know what he needed to know to accomplish what she wanted. Other than that, they kept him ignorant. Which apparently wasn’t that hard to do.”

  Ryan winced at the scorn and loathing in Boyle’s voice. Was this his future? To be the object of everyone’s scorn and loathing until someone killed him? Would he ultimately come to consider that a mercy?

  Ryan knew he was unlikely to survive the day in any case. Or even the hour. What was done was unlikely to be undone.

  Ryan looked across at Donahue and his syringes.

  “You don’t need your syringes, Mr. Donnelly. I’ll tell you what I know. I don’t think it will do you much good, however.”

  Donahue left the wallet of syringes open on his lap.

  “What interlocks and booby-traps are on the device?” he asked.

  “I know the access panel to the detonator compartment is booby-trapped. If the access panel is removed, the device will detonate. I know one of the bolts mounting the device to the stand is booby-trapped. Once it’s screwed in, if it’s removed, the device will detonate.”

  “So if one of the workmen had fumbled the bolt? Seems twitchy to me.”

  “The bolt had to be in place for eight hours for the interlock to activate,” Ryan said.

  “Ah.”

  “Once the bolt is in place, the device cannot be moved. If its positioning coordinates change, it will detonate.”

  “Latitude, longitude, and altitude?” Donahue asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It’s got a QE link. Unjammable. The guy at the other end of that link can set it off any time he wants.”

  “Oh, great. Anything else.”

  “That’s all I know, Mr. Donnelly.”

  “So what do we do now?” Geary asked.

  “I’m open to ideas,” Donahue said.

  Donahue looked around the group, but all were lost in thought. Except Odom. He shrugged.

  “I know how to deactivate it,” Odom said.

  “How, Mike?”

  “Blow it up.”

  “What?”

  “Not detonate it. Blow it up.”

  “Explain.”

  “Sure. There’s a detonator in there, right? Got a processor in it and all. All these safeguards and shit. If you try to go in there all nice and clean and disable it, that processor is going to figure out what you’re doing and detonate the device. But if you set off an explosion that takes out the detonator faster than it can figure it out, then there’s no more detonator, and so no big kaboom.”

  “So we blow up the detonator?”

  “Yeah. It’ll never know what hit it. That’s the secret. I had to do this shit before, inna Navy. Like I said. I hate nukes.”

  “What do we blow it up with?”

  Odom started pulling things out of his pockets.

  “That’s why I had to stop and get some shit outta the car on the way up. I got a few pounds of plastic and a remote detonator here.”

  “Excellent,” Donahue said.

  “Yeah, disarming the nuke ain’t the problem.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Everything in that fucker is either radioactive, or poisonous, or both. We blow it up, the N/B/C boys will be busy here for a year. Probably poison the whole building. Assuming we don’t set the building on fire and poison the whole neighborhood with toxic and radioactive smoke.”

  “Well, I guess that beats leveling Imperial City and killing fifty million people,” Donahue said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figure.”

  “Uh, Sir?” Stinson said.

  “Yes?” Donahue asked.

  “Phil Stinson, Sir. I’m a museum custodian. The exhibit halls can all be isolated. The main doors seal, and they’re double doors, like an airlock. The HVAC system has sealing dampers on all the ductwork into any exhibit hall. It’s part of the fire-suppression system. To cut off air to the fire and isolate the rest of the building. I can seal off this exhibit hall. I have access to those controls in VR.”

  “What else does the fire-suppression system have, Mr. Stinson?”

  “Well, it’s supposed to have a halon system, Sir, but it hasn’t been charged yet. That was to be done later this week.”

  “So there’s no sprinkler system?”

  “In a museum, Sir? One small fire would set off the sprinklers and water damage would wipe out the collection. There are a large number of extinguishers, however, as you may notice.”

  Stinson waved a hand up and down the hallway. Donahue could see six fire extinguishers just from where he was sitting.

  “Well, it is what it is, I guess. Let’s get started. Mr. Stinson, isolate this exhibit hall.”

  Sacrifice

  They all went back into the exhibit hall to where the warhead stood on its stand.

  “OK, we’re gonna need to tamp this with somethin’, or the explosion is mostly gonna bounce off the thing,” Odom said.

  “How about the nose cone off the missile there?” Benton asked.

  Odom looked over at the missile.

  “Yeah, that’d work. You got some tools around here?”

  “The service closet is around the corner,” Stinson said. “I’ll get the toolbox.”

  “We’re gonna need to weigh it down,” Odom said. “You got some buckets in there?”

  “Yes. I’ll get them,” Stinson said.

  Benton went along to help carry things.

  Odom was placing his plastic charges on the warhead. He knew how the detonator compartment was laid out, and he placed the charges for the most destructive effect on the detonator.

  Stinson and Benton returned with a toolbox and three empty buckets. All three had wire handles, and one of the buckets had side handles as well.

  “Perfect,” Odom said. “Now get that nosecone piece off.”

  Benton went to work on the fasteners on one side of the nosecone, and Stinson went to work on the other. Access to the warhead was sometimes required, and they were quarter-turn fasteners, so it didn’t take long.

  Odom placed the remote detonator on the warhead using the peel-and-stick adhesive on the back. He didn’t turn it on yet. He pushed the caps into the plastic, then plugged their leads into the detonator.

  “There we go,” Odom said, eyeing his work.

  “I’m glad you know this shit. I’d be lost,” Donahue said.

  “It’s easy stuff, but it helps if you done it a lot. OK, you got the nosecone?”

  They brought the nosecone over. Before he put it on, Odom reached out to the detonator.

  “OK. Hope this doesn’t go boom.”

  Odom turned on the detonator and nothing went boom. He placed the nosecone over the warhead, which it was shaped to, since the warhead was one of the type that missile carried. It didn’t go down all the way, because of the plastic charges and the detonator, but it covered most of the warhead.

  Odom then turned one bucket – the one with side handles – upside down over th
e top of the nosecone, on its point. The other two buckets he hung from the upside-down bucket using multiple cable ties from the side handle of the upside-down bucket to the wire handle of the hanging bucket on each side.

  “OK,” Odom said. “We need to fill these buckets up with heavy stuff. Metal anything. Just grab a bunch of stuff and fill ‘em up.”

  The group went around the displays, grabbing the heaviest items they could and filling the buckets. When the buckets were full, Odom eyed their handiwork.

  “OK,” he said. “That’s it, I think. Now we just go out in the hall and set it off.”

  “What if the nuke detonates?” Donahue asked.

  “Then I fucked up and Imperial City is gone. You’ll never know it, though. You’ll be gone before your brain can register the explosion.”

  “Comforting thought. I guess.”

  “I done this a bunch o’ times before. We would get fizzles, and this was less risky than trying to defuse them. ‘Course, we done it outside the ship with HARPERs, but it’s actually easier doin’ it by hand.”

  “You’re confident this will work?” Donahue asked.

  “Yeah. We’re good.”

  Donahue turned to Dickens.

  “Your vote?”

  Dickens looked surprised to be consulted, but nodded.

  “We have to do something, and I bow to Mike’s expertise on this.”

  “Brigade Commander?” Donahue asked Geary.

  Geary looked to Benton, the engineering student, and he nodded. Then Geary looked to Stinson, who nodded as well.

  “I’ve seen it done, though I’ve never done it myself,” Stinson said. “I’m good with it.”

  “So how do we know if it worked or not?”

  “Oh, we’ll know,” Odom said. “The detonator compartment and the detonator will be crushed beyond functioning. How we gonna verify that without coming back in, though?”

  “We can actually watch the explosion,” Stinson said. “The exhibit halls all have VR projection systems for docents to use, so they don’t spend all day on their feet.”

  “No shit?” Odom asked. “We can stand here and watch in VR? Oh, this’ll be some cool shit.”