EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6)

by Richard F. Weyand

  Otto Stauss was gleefully selling puts on anything the DP money men were buying them on. What the hell, he figured. Somebody had to take their money. It might as well be him. The ‘put money’ was flowing in. He was using it in turn to buy puts on the stocks controlled by the Auer Group and its investor circle, along with calls on the same stocks at prices well below market. The strike prices on those calls were low enough, the calls were inexpensive.

  “All right, Dieter. Now what’s going to happen is, they’re going to make their big play soon, whatever that is. And it’s going to fail. And then the shit’s going to hit the fan. So what we need to watch for is when that happens, because I think a lot of big DP interstellars are going to get very cheap all of a sudden.”

  “You expect their stocks to crash?”

  “Yes. If they’re plotting against this Emperor, they’re going to find out he has no sense of humor about such things. Perhaps fatally. When their stocks crash, we exercise all our puts, we exercise all our calls, and we use those profits and our credit line at the bank to buy up lots and lots of stuff on the cheap.”

  “And what if it doesn’t work? What if it all goes the other way?”

  “Then we shrug and say, ‘oh, shucks,’ and pay off the credit line with the income stream from the salvage operations. Maybe we don’t make any money from them for a decade or so. We’ll just have to find some way to live on the trillions of credits we already have and are making from the shipping and leasing businesses.”

  Stauss shrugged.

  “Not much downside there, Dieter.”

  “OK, Dad. Got it. But how will we know when?”

  “Oh, I don’t expect the signs to be subtle, Dieter.”

  Stauss thought back to his meetings with the Emperor and those cold, white-blue eyes.

  “Not subtle at all.”

  Gunther Auer was at work in his office on Gandon when he received a call from Erik Weibel, another wealthy DP businessman and investor and a member of Auer’s investor circle.

  “Good morning, Erik. How are you today?”

  “Good, good. Gunther, have you checked the options markets lately? Someone in Sintar is taking a counter-position to our anti-Sintar moves.”

  “Yes, I see it. I hope he has deep pockets, Erik, because he’s going to get taken to the cleaners.”

  “You seem so positive.”

  “I am positive, Erik, because we know something he doesn’t know. We know the astropolitical situation is about to change drastically. All he’s doing is sweetening our position. We’ll make even more money than we were going to.”

  “OK, Gunther. I just wanted to check.”

  “No problem, Erik. We’re fine.”

  Timothy Pierce was meeting with the Imperial Police detective who had taken him into his confidence. They were at a coffee shop in Imperial Park West, near the IUS campus.

  “Sorry, Mr. Pierce,” Detective Joseph Gardenia said. “I’d take you someplace nice for dinner, but you know how it is. I don’t have expense authorization for that. The IP is incredibly strict on expense reports.”

  “That’s alright, Detective. I understand.”

  “The reason I wanted to meet with you is to let you know things are coming to a head in my investigation. We think we know what’s going on. The Emperor is being manipulated by mind-control drugs. Very subtle. But it leaves him open to suggestion by those around him. We think we know who his control is, too, but of course I can’t tell you any of that.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty insidious.”

  “Yes, because everyone just follows the Emperor’s orders, just like regular, right? What they don’t know is those orders are being suggested by someone else. It’s a brilliant plan, and it was very hard to figure out. But I did it, and it looks like I’ll get my Inspector’s badge out of this one.”

  “Congratulations, Detective.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pierce. Now, the one last thing I need is to nail down when the drugs are being introduced. You can help me with that. We think they’re being introduced overnight, when the Emperor is in his apartment. We’re not sure exactly when. If we knew that, we would have better evidence of who the underlings are. You know, who’s doing the footwork.”

  “How can I help, Detective?”

  Gardenia pulled a small box out of his jacket pocket.

  “I have a drug sniffer here. It can pick up the drug they’re using, and it has a clock to record the times it senses the drugs. What I need you to do is to put this sensor in the main return plenum for the HVAC system in the Imperial Residence, and then pull it out a week later and give it back to me. That’s it.”

  Pierce looked at the device. The box was sealed in a plastic bag. Double-sealed, it looked like, with one sealed bag inside another. It was only two inches by four inches and an inch thick. It had air vents on the top, and a peel-off strip on an adhesive pad on the back for mounting it in the air duct.

  “Why is it sealed up like that, Detective?”

  “We don’t want it to start detecting now, Mr. Pierce. It would spoil the results. Don’t open the sealed bags until you have the HVAC system open and are ready to place the device in the return plenum. That’s very important. We don’t want to sample any air except that of the Imperial Residence. We have to prove it’s the Emperor that’s the target.”

  “I see. Well, that’s simple enough, Detective.”

  “You’ll be doing the Empire a great service, Mr. Pierce. We have to get to the bottom of who is doing this. It’s treason, and we must catch them.”

  Pierce was nodding.

  “The weekend will be the easiest, Detective. Friday night after work. That’s the slowest time, always.”

  “That will be fine, Mr. Pierce. Probably better, in fact.”

  “And can I see your Imperial Police ID again, Detective? Just to be sure.”

  “Of course, Mr. Pierce. It’s important to be careful.”

  Gardenia withdrew his ID from his pocket and set it on the table between them. Pierce looked at it carefully. Then Gardenia set his finger on the biometric sensor of the ID and a green light on the ID glowed softly.

  “Well, that’s ironclad. Sorry, Detective. I had to be sure.”

  “No problem at all, Mr. Pierce. I’m glad you checked.”

  The two men shook hands, and then Pierce picked up the sealed device from the table, put it in his jacket pocket, and left the coffee shop.

  Behind him, Daniel Kendig, a DP covert operative on Sintar, watched Pierce leave the coffee shop.

  That went well, I think.

  Counter-Intelligence

  Timothy Pierce walked out onto the mall level of Imperial Park West and turned toward the Imperial Palace.

  “Excellent, Mr. Pierce. Well done,” General Mercer said from the small VR inset in the top left of Pierce’s vision. “There’s a luggage shop about a hundred feet ahead of you. Stop in there. A man will be looking at a red suitcase. Give him the device.”

  Pierce continued to walk down the mall, then, as if on a whim, entered a luggage shop. He looked at a couple of items, working his way toward the back of the shop. About halfway back, a nondescript man in a nondescript business suit was looking at a piece of red luggage. Pierce took the device out of his pocket and gave it to him. The man took it without comment, without even looking at Pierce, and put it in his pocket. He continued to look at the red suitcase. Pierce finished his browse of the luggage shop and went back out onto the mall.

  “Excellent, Mr. Pierce. Proceed to the Imperial Research Building, and check in with the Imperial Guard in the basement, please.”

  The nondescript man finished looking at the red suitcase, having apparently decided against a purchase, and went out on the mall. He took an escalator to street level, where he took a seat on a bench and casually looked around as he watched everyone coming up the escalators for fifteen minutes. He then walked down the street and opened the cargo door of a van parked at the curb. There was a steel box on the cargo floor. The
man opened the box and placed the device in it, in the middle of the padding in the box, then closed the gasketed lid and latched it shut. He closed the cargo door and walked on. The driver of the cargo van, who never looked at him, pulled the van away from the curb and disappeared into traffic..

  At a shuttleport ten miles south of downtown, an Imperial Marines attack ship sat idling on the pad. A panel van pulled up on the pad next to the attack ship. The driver of the van withdrew a steel case from the side cargo door of the van and carried it over to the pilot of the attack ship, who stowed it on the ship. The driver of the van got back into the van and drove off. The pilot of the attack ship got back into his ship. Moments later, the attack ship took off straight up into the air, then angled its engines to horizontal and screamed off to the south.

  An Imperial Marines attack ship settled onto the pad at the Imperial Marine Combat Training Center four hundred miles south of the capital. A truck pulled up to the pad, and the pilot and the truck driver transferred a steel box from the attack ship to the box of the truck.

  The truck had hazardous materials placards on it, and on the door was stenciled “Biological/Chemical Weapons Analysis and Disposal.”

  The truck pulled off the pad and headed for the Biological/Chemical Weapons Lab.

  “All right, so what is it this time?” Seth Hersch asked. “Someone misplace their purse? A lost puppy, perhaps?”

  Kwan Shufen laughed. There had never been another case like the murder of Vasilisa Medved ten years before. Kwan and Hersch were still a team doing video analysis work, though. They now worked in the Investigations group in the Imperial Administration Building.

  Yes, there had never been another case like it. Until now.

  “Not this time, Seth. Espionage, counter-espionage, and treason.”

  “Really? Hot damn!”

  The camera feeds and recordings from Imperial Park West were directly accessible by the Palace now, unlike ten years ago. And this time they had advance warning. They were watching this one unfold in real-time.

  “All right, so there’s our guy,” Kwan said. “That’s Tim Pierce. Some guy in maintenance.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen him around. Who’s the other guy?”

  Kwan pulled up an image from the VR feed from Pierce’s meeting with ‘Detective Gardenia.’

  “OK, so let’s start a face matcher on him,” Hersch said.

  “Running.”

  The face match program reduced the human face to a set of ratios, half a dozen numbers the system could compare quickly, and compared those to billions of sets of such ratios taken from police mug shots, spaceport arrival queues, and other venues. One of the things it checked was the actual roster of the Imperial Police, as well as the Imperial Navy, Imperial Marines, and Imperial Guard.

  While that ran, they were monitoring the coffee shop. They saw Pierce leave the coffee shop and walk down the mall. Kwan put a tag on him so the system would keep track of him.

  “OK, so there goes our guy.”

  They continued to watch the coffee shop. Twenty minutes later, the ersatz detective left the shop and came out onto the mall. Kwan put a tag on him as well. They had the system view follow him.

  Gardenia took an escalator down to the commuter trains level, and got on a southbound local. The system picked him up again at the Imperial Park South station, and followed him up the escalator, out onto the mall level, and down the mall to a gift shop. He did not re-emerge until closing time.

  “OK, so what did we get?” Hersch asked.

  “Face match came up negative, but we tagged his account when he got on the train. Daniel Kendig. He owns the gift shop. Lives out in the burbs. Wife and three kids. Immigrant from the Democracy of Planets,” Kwan said.

  “Bingo.”

  “Seth, he immigrated fifteen years ago. No record. No prior arrests. Model citizen.”

  “Shit,” Hersch said. “Sleeper cell.”

  “All right,” Mori said. “We’ve got our guy. Pavel, tag his VR account.”

  “You got it, Sue,” Sokolov said.

  He put a tag on Daniel Kendig. Every mail he sent would be flagged, ten generations deep among his contacts.

  The bank investigations group had a simple request this afternoon. All bank records on one Daniel Kendig, from immigration fifteen years ago to present. Not a big deal. The examiner extracted all the records, transferred them into a file, marked it as ‘Protected Personal Information,’ and sent the file to the requester. The examiner went back to his major assignment.

  The steel box was placed in a fully enclosed, all-metal, sealed analysis chamber, where mechanical manipulators were used by an operator working in VR. The device was removed from the sealed box, and the sealed bags were sliced open one at a time. The device was extracted and left there to see what it would do.

  One hour later, alarms went off. The returning operator reviewed the video recording. One hour after being unsealed, the device had expelled a stream of vapor for over a minute. It had set off the bio-alarms immediately. The operator scanned the analysis results as they came up in VR.

  “Holy shit.”

  Daggert met with Dunham in Dunham’s office.

  “Yes, General Daggert. You have some preliminary results, I take it?”

  “Yes, Sire. One of our double-agents was recruited in the last year by someone claiming to be an Imperial Police detective. A fellow on the maintenance staff. HVAC technician. He came to us with it immediately, and we ran him like the others.

  “This fake detective said he was working on a plot against you, that you were being controlled by drugs. He asked our double-agent to emplace a device he called a drug sniffer in the HVAC system of the Imperial Residence, so they could find out when the drugs were being introduced. The Imperial Marines analyzed the device and found it contained enough nerve agent to kill everyone in Imperial Park. The Palace itself would have been so contaminated it would likely have to be sealed off for decades until the agent deteriorated on its own.”

  “They’re playing for keeps, then, General Daggert.”

  “Yes, Sire. In a big way. The analysis chamber they used at the Marines laboratory had to be flushed with acid, the acid incinerated, and the chamber heated to eight hundred degrees for several hours to be sure it was cleaned. They lost the whole suite of analysis equipment in the chamber.

  “Chemical analysis of the nerve toxin indicates it was likely manufactured in the Democracy of Planets by a company whose big shareholders include, among others, Gunther Auer, Erik Weibel, and others in their investor circle. The delivery device itself is a bathroom sanitizer spray device, the sort that spritzes a deodorizer for a split-second every fifteen minutes or so. It was modified to spray the entire contents in one long burst. Also manufactured in the DP, by another company largely owned by our suspects.

  “Even more troubling, the fake detective, Daniel Kendig, has proper Imperial Police ID, with biometric confirmation. He immigrated from the Democracy of Planets fifteen years ago and has been a model citizen since.”

  “Well, the Imperial Police ID is easy to explain, General Daggert. He probably made friends with somebody like Stanley Gorecki and got the ID years ago.”

  “That is our surmise, Sire. Daniel Kendig owns a gift shop in Imperial Park South, and Stanley Gorecki was known to be a fan of fine chocolates.

  “What’s really troubling is the presence of such a sleeper cell. They are notoriously hard to find. Kendig moved here from the Democracy of Planets in his late teens, finished his schooling to Imperial standards, opened this gift shop in a rented space, and has lived a quiet lawful life until now.”

  “How was he being paid, General Daggert?”

  “He received regular substantial dividends from stock holdings in the Democracy of Planets, Sire. Explained to immigration as an inheritance from his parents. He moved here as an orphan to start over.”

  “We should probably start searching bank and immigration records for immigrants from the Democracy
of Planets receiving such dividends from DP firms, General Daggert. I’m not sure how to go about that, or even if it’s possible.”

  “We’re doing that, Sire. We are also keeping track of Mr. Kendig’s mails. The network operations people have figured out how to track mail messages into and through the DP’s network. It will also flag and track any recipients, so they can follow the recipients’ mails. They’re quite proud of it.”

  “Is this the same group that beat Sector Governor Gallego’s unique treason, General Daggert?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “I’m not sure I ever properly commended them for their performance on that task, General Daggert. Perhaps they’ll give me a chance to repair that error now.”

  “I hope so, Sire. At the same time, we don’t think mail in VR is likely to be a main communication path for an espionage ring this entrenched unless they got sloppy over time. So we’re not quite sure where to go from here.”

  “We don’t even know whether this guy is a government agent or part of a private, corporate-financed organization, do we, General Daggert?”

  “No, Sire, but in the Democracy of Planets that may be something of a false distinction.”

  Daggert considered for a moment.

  “How would you have us proceed, Sire?”

  “Arrest him, interrogate him to determine his superiors, contacts, and methods of communication, using whatever drugs are necessary, and then execute him. Do it overnight so we have a chance to pick up his contacts before he’s missed.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  Rolling Up The Spy Ring

  Daniel Kendig closed up the gift shop for the night, locking the automatic door in VR as he exited. He turned around to test that the door was locked, and, as he did so, a man walking past hit him with a stun gun. He collapsed into the man’s arms.

  Another man was walking down the mall pushing an empty wheelchair. He stopped, and the first man lowered Kendig into the chair. They walked down the mall to an elevator, took it up to street level, and pushed the wheelchair onto a lift into a small unmarked van. They raised the wheelchair up into the van, climbed in behind it, and the van pulled away from the curb.