EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6)

by Richard F. Weyand

  It was an early morning meeting in the Emperor’s office.

  “What did we learn last night, General Daggert?”

  “I have the entire interview for you, Sire. It went on for quite a while,” Daggert said and sighed. “I’m really getting too old for this sort of thing.”

  “Yes, but that’s why you have delegates, General Daggert. You don’t need to be involved in every detail.”

  Daggert ran a hand through his thinning hair.

  “I suppose, Sire. When the threat against Your Majesty is this direct, however, I just find it hard to delegate such matters. In any case, we learned Mr. Kendig was a spy for the Democracy of Planets intelligence services. He was being run by a local handler, one Franz Gerber. Gerber’s cover is as a package delivery man, which is a great cover. He moves around a lot, can deliver items like our nerve toxin dispenser without questions, and is so mundane as to be unseen. Mr. Gerber will be picked up this morning.”

  “Did Kendig have any contacts other than Gerber, General Daggert?”

  “No, he was his only contact. Apparently the contacts changed once in a while. Gerber was Kendig’s fourth handler since arriving on Sintar fifteen years ago.”

  “Kendig was part of the DP intelligence service, General Daggert? They didn’t come apart with the destruction of Olympia?”

  “No, Sire. Apparently the intelligence services always accepted side jobs from the corporate interests, and made considerable side income from them as well. In the entrenched corruption of the DP, that was just business as usual. As long, of course, as you accepted side jobs from the right people. So when Olympia was destroyed, the corporate interests just picked up the portions of the intelligence services they were most interested in as their own little spy agency.”

  “I see. And we expect to learn more from Mr. Gerber, General Daggert?”

  “Yes, Sire. I am most interested in two aspects of what Mr. Gerber can tell us. One is who his other agents are here on Sintar. More important for our immediate needs is who his superior is, and how he communicates with him. As this was originally a government intelligence operation, I would expect something like the use of one-time pads and a dual access anonymous workspace in the VR system. They’re not going to be using anything less secure than that. They’re not just going to send mail or call each other in VR.”

  “That sounds correct to me, General Daggert, though it’s not my area of expertise. I did want to ask you, though, are the Imperial Police being of aid in all this?”

  “Yes, Sire. Their pick-up of Mr. Kendig was splendidly done. Quiet. Low-key. Professional. There are no issues of the sort we had to endure before Your Majesty so thoroughly cleaned up that organization nine years ago.”

  “Excellent, General Daggert. When Mr. Gerber is acquired, you have the same orders. Get what you can out of him, then execute him. The same for his other spies here on Sintar. Once we have rolled this ring up, then we need to continue on up the chain until we find out, for sure, who is giving the orders. The Throne cannot act capriciously or reflexively. I don’t need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to exercise my prerogatives of high justice, but I do need more than just a preponderance of the evidence.”

  “And then, Your Majesty?”

  “And then we will use the Imperial Guard’s reserves to roll them up as well. There is a carrier group in or on the way to every single planet of the DP and its satellites right now. That includes at least a full regiment of Marines, including attack ships and assault shuttles, in every system.”

  “Very good, Sire.”

  “In the meantime, General Daggert, you should get some sleep. The Imperial Police and your own delegates can handle the pickup and interrogation of Mr. Gerber. I will need your best counsel later on today, once Mr. Gerber’s interrogation is complete.”

  “Very well, Sire.”

  Frank Garb – whose original name was Franz Gerber – got out of the delivery truck in the alley carrying several packages, and went into the department store’s rear deliveries door. Once inside the door, he was hit with a stun gun by an Imperial Police plainclothes officer in the receiving area. Another Imperial Police officer in the uniform of the delivery company walked out the door, got into the delivery truck, and drove off.

  An ambulance pulled up at the deliveries door of the department store, and the attendants pulled the gurney out of the back of the ambulance and went into the deliveries door. They came out several minutes later with a patient on the gurney, put the gurney in the ambulance, and closed the doors behind them. The ambulance drove off.

  “Where’s Frank?” the receiving clerk at the engineering firm asked.

  “Called in sick. On my day off, no less. Oh, well. I can use the overtime,” the delivery man answered.

  “Yeah, a few extra credits never hurt.”

  Imperial Police Detective Rick Honda agreed and went back out to the delivery truck to continue Franz Gerber’s route.

  It was late afternoon when Dunham and Daggert met once again in the Emperor’s office.

  “What did we learn from Mr. Gerber, General Daggert?”

  “Quite a lot, Sire. First, that Mr. Gerber was running a total of twelve agents here in Imperial City. We are currently in the process of rounding them up. This is being made easier by the fact none of them knows any of the others, so we don’t have to do some sort of simultaneous roundup or anything like that.”

  “A dozen spies in Imperial City, General Daggert?”

  “Yes, Sire. Oh, that’s not unusual. We had several dozen spies of our own in Demos in the Democracy of Planets.”

  “On Olympia, General Daggert? Were they all killed in Operation Hammer Blow?”

  “Yes, Sire.” Daggert shrugged. “It’s a dangerous business.”

  “I see. Carry on, General Daggert.”

  “Yes, Sire. The second thing we learned was who his contact was. He had a contact on Carolina, the capital of the Carolina Sector, in the Democracy of Planets consulate there. Communications went from there into the DP by means unknown to him. Communications between him and his contact in Carolina was in fact by sharing the login to an anonymous workspace in the system, and using one-time pads.”

  “What were they using for a pad, General Daggert?”

  “The text of the third feature article in a weekly news digest published by one of the Sintar new services, Sire.”

  “OK, so completely innocuous and invisible, then. I mean, it’s not like they both had a copy of the same edition of War and Peace or something.”

  Daggert chuckled.

  “Yes, Sire. Although even that would be next to impossible to break. How would you know which page they were on? Or if they use every third letter, or every other line, or use the letters in reverse order?”

  Dunham nodded and Daggert went on.

  “As I said, we’re rolling up the spy ring here. What do you want to do about the Carolina contact? They’re in the DP consulate, so they have diplomatic immunity.”

  “Not so, General Daggert. The capital of the Democracy of Planets surrendered to Sintar, in the person of the senior remaining official in the capital. The DP government is defunct, and his diplomatic immunity has lapsed. Besides, were we to declare him persona non grata and deport him, where would we send him to? The Democracy of Planets, which is now occupied by Sintar.”

  “Actually, it’s a woman, Sire. What are your orders?”

  “Let’s see if we can’t trigger a communication from her, General Daggert. The options across an international border are limited. There were no anonymous workspaces across borders, for example. The diplomatic courier pouch is an option, but a slow one. Let’s dummy our way in to the communications stream and see if we can’t trigger a message from her to her bosses.”

  “Actually, the consulate probably has its own QE radio that’s part of the DP system, Sire.”

  “Which we control now, right, General Daggert? I mean, isn’t that under our network people now?”

  “A
ctually, I believe you’re right there, Sire. So we monitor that link for her communication. Then what do we do?”

  “Pick her up for interrogation, General Daggert. Any means necessary. The Imperial Police on Carolina can handle that. Then execute her.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  With the kids in bed, Dunham and Peters were both in the private living room of the Imperial Apartment. Peters brought up the spy ring.

  “I watched those interrogations today. Did you see them?”

  “No, I’m working on the district governors currently. Figuring out which ones I can keep in place. Did I miss anything?”

  “The interrogations were pretty brutal. Those drugs are nasty.”

  “I know, Amanda. I’ve watched the like before. The investigation into Vash Medved’s murder.”

  “At the same time, I find I have little sympathy for them,” Peters said. “Not patriots, working for their country. Mercenaries, in it for the money. And they would have killed us all with that thing.”

  “It would have killed everyone in the Imperial Palace. The controls on air quality are on air coming into the Imperial Residence, not on air going out. To the extent there’s any crossover, the Residence vents into the Palace.”

  Peters shuddered at the mental image.

  “So now we know who the control is, the consul’s personal secretary in the DP consulate in Carolina, Carol Urban. What do we do about her?” Peters asked.

  “Same thing. Pick her up, interrogate her, execute her.”

  “Is there an issue with diplomatic immunity, Bobby?”

  “No. If we were to declare her persona non grata, we would send her back to the DP, which is now under our occupation.”

  “I see. Is there going to be a problem getting her out of the consulate?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dunham said. “It’s DP sovereign territory, like all the rest of the DP. We let the guards surrender, we arrest everybody, then we release everybody except her.”

  “Oh, OK. That sounds simple when you put it that way. What are you going to do about the district governors?”

  “I haven’t decided. The DP has twenty districts, of about four thousand planets each. That’s about the same size as an Imperial sector, and with higher planetary populations, so I don’t think it makes any sense to re-subdivide them. Just change the name to ‘Such-and-such Sector.’ Like the Essen Sector instead of the Essen District.”

  “That makes sense, Bobby,” Peters said. “They already have all their internal reporting structures and the like. Why reorganize for the sake of reorganizing?”

  “Exactly. As for the district governors, I’m not sure. Some of them look pretty good, others are a little iffy, in terms of corruption and the like, and a couple look like trouble.”

  “I have a thought there. Just leave them all in place. If you remove them right off the bat, you have a fifth column that already has the reins of the district police and security forces and the ear of the people who elected them. Just leave them all in place, at least initially, but make sure they understand there’s to be no more hanky-panky.”

  “New landlord, same rent?” Dunham asked.

  “Yes, basically. There’s a lot of advantages for them. They never need to run for election again being the big one. Sure, there’s to be no corruption, but they’re all rich already. It’s just the new rules.”

  “And the advantages for me?”

  “Everything is already in place,” Peters said. “They already have staffs and have everything running more or less OK. You don’t have to deal with that turmoil among all the other things going on. And who would you pick to replace any of them with no experience of who the players are already?”

  “What about the troublemakers, Amanda? We’re looking at a couple of likely Gallego-style secession attempts.”

  “I think there’s a way to handle that, Bobby. Meet with them all as a group. Lay out the setup. Give them the option of retiring if they prefer, but immunity from prosecution for what went before, whichever path they take. Tell them they all have a week to think about it, and then you’ll meet with each of them privately to hear their decision and talk about the path forward.”

  “Give them a week to think about it?” Dunham asked.

  “Sure. And then during that week, roll up the plutocrats.”

  “Whoa. That will sort of put point to their consideration of their options, won’t it? If they know I have no hesitation to take some of the richest people in the galaxy out and shoot them, they’re unlikely to think they’ll be immune to the same consequences for misbehavior.”

  “Exactly. The bulk of them will modify their behavior and adapt to the new circumstances, even be very able sector governors. The least of them has four thousand planets and sixteen trillion or so people under their administration, and they didn’t get to where they are by being stupid. The rest you can deal with one at a time once we get on top of things a bit more.”

  “I like it, Amanda. I like it a lot. We’ll have to work on the timing, but that should be possible.”

  “OK, new assignment,” Stenis Dernier said.

  “Whatcha got, Stenis?” Sayuri Mori asked.

  “There’s likely a QE radio in the DP consulate on Carolina. At least, that’s what we do with our consulates. We have to find it, and isolate one user in that consulate. Then we want to see if we can get her to send a message.”

  “Should be easy, right?” Pavel Sokolov asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Dernier said. “Who says they label them? Just a random link to somewhere.”

  “Wouldn’t an unlabeled link be easy to find?” Mori asked.

  “How many consulates and embassies do they have?” Dernier asked.

  “Ouch,” Sokolov said. “So there’s a bunch of ‘em.”

  “Yup,” Dernier said. “Now what?”

  “OK, wait a minute,” Mori said. “If someone sends a message to the consul, the network itself has to know where to find him. We should be able to send a message to him and track it. I mean, we have administrative access to the DP network, right?”

  “Sure,” Dernier said. “The Navy comm guys patched one of our QE radios into their secondary NOC on Blaisdell, and they got the logins from an operator there. So we have full admin functions over the whole thing.”

  “OK, so we put a flag on the message, send it to the consul on Carolina – we know who that is, right? Because he has to have diplomatic credentials – then we monitor all the unmarked QE nodes to see which one it ends up at.”

  “That ought to work,” Sokolov said. “We’ll set it up.”

  “OK, everybody ready?” Sokolov asked.

  “Yep. Send it,” Mori said.

  “Sent,” Sokolov said.

  “And there it is,” Dernier said. “Nice.”

  “We got the link?” Sokolov asked.

  “Yeah. So what’s the next thing?” Dernier asked.

  “Isolating one user,” Mori said. “We need the account IDs.”

  “Problem is, she may not be active right now,” Sokolov said. “She could be laying low.”

  “Well, we have the ‘recent’ table,” Dernier said. “Process of elimination?”

  “Let’s try it,” Mori said.

  They set to the task, there in the network map of the NOC, with the consulate node – it’s tables and routes – laid out in front of them. It took a while, but eventually Mori declared victory.

  “OK, so we have three accounts we haven’t eliminated, and everybody else has at least one associated account.”

  “What is her job in the consulate?” Sokolov asked.

  “Secretary to the consul,” Mori said. “She’s also the spy control for DP spies on Sintar.”

  “They told you that?” Sokolov asked.

  “I told them more information made success more likely, so it was cough up or likely not get results.”

  “All right, then. One for her secretary job, one to talk to the spies with, and one to the bosses?
” Dernier asked.

  “That can’t be it,” Mori said. “Talking to the spies on Sintar would be over the Imperial network.”

  “Damn. Yeah, that’s right,” Dernier said.

  “What about the third one just being an account for personal business,” Sokolov said. “Most people in the consulate have two accounts. That would seem more likely.”

  “Actually, that does seem likely, doesn’t it?” Mori asked.

  “OK, then. Given that assumption, can we tell them apart?”

  “I think so,” Mori said. “Let’s try. Open that ‘recent’ table again.”

  Sokolov popped the ‘recent’ table up.

  “Well, this one is the account to her spy bosses,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?” Dernier asked.

  “Because there’s nothing in the ‘recent’ table. That can be flushed by user request, and she keeps it empty.”

  “Excellent,” Mori said. “OK, let’s tag all these for message flags.”

  Sokolov tagged the accounts.

  “OK. Done. Now what?”

  “Let’s see if we can get her to send something,” Mori said. “They gave me the method, and the message they want sent.”

  “What’s the message?” Dernier asked.

  “It’s coded, so I don’t know. It’s short, though.”

  “All right. And we put it in this anonymous workspace?” Sokolov asked.

  “Yes. Here’s the ID and password.”

  Carol Urban was expecting a message from Franz Gerber as to the status of the effort to implant the device in the Imperial Palace. She was checking the shared workspace on the Imperial network occasionally, looking for a new entry in the draft messages.

  Mid-morning, there was a new draft message. She looked at it and decoded it in VR using the article from this week’s news digest.