EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6)

by Richard F. Weyand

  He had alarms set all over the place. If any of his calls triggered. If any of his puts triggered. If any news came over the wires involving the Emperor, or any of the investors he was betting against, or any of the major companies that were themselves just the pawns in this very high-stakes game.

  As it turned out, most of his alarms went off at once.

  Linnae came into Auer’s office without knocking.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Auer. You have visitors.”

  They walked in right behind her. Five Imperial Marines, led by a Lieutenant Colonel who was wearing some sort of gold braid on his left shoulder.

  “Are you Gunther Auer?” the lieutenant colonel asked.

  “Yes. Colonel. I’m Gunther Auer.”

  “I have an Imperial Warrant in your name, Mr. Auer.”

  “What are the charges, Colonel?”

  “Conspiracy to mass-murder and conspiracy to murder the Emperor.”

  “Can I call my attorney, Colonel?”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Auer. It’s a death warrant.”

  With that, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Weber, Imperial Guard, drew his sidearm and shot Gunther Auer twice in the center of the chest and once in the head.

  The secretary screamed and fainted, falling to the floor.

  “Take DNA samples,” Lieutenant Colonel Weber said.

  Weber walked up to Auer’s desk. He took a folded piece of stiff paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and set it on Auer’s desk.

  “Consider yourself served, Mr. Auer.”

  Erik Weibel saw the Imperial Marines shuttle land on the front lawn of his low-rise suburban office building, and he decided he wouldn’t hang around to find out what they wanted. He went up to the shuttle hangar on the roof and started his shuttle. As he opened the hangar door and brought the commo suite up, he saw the Imperial no-fly warning. They had apparently banned flying in the airspace around his building.

  Weibel shrugged. They’d have to catch him first. He had selected one of the fastest single-seater shuttles available for his bug-out ride, and no lumbering Imperial Marine shuttle would be able to catch it.

  An Imperial Marines attack ship was another matter entirely, however, and the heat-seeking missile it fired was faster still.

  All across the Democracy of Planets, the conspirators were accosted in their offices, in their homes, in their beds, and the death warrants served. Usually it was by Imperial Guard officers on detached duty to the Imperial Marines. When one wasn’t available, Imperial Marine officers served.

  One might think they might have some compunction about shooting someone in cold blood, or in front of their spouse or employees, but all had been briefed on what the conspirators had planned, on what the Imperial Guard and Imperial Police had discovered on far Sintar. All were sworn to the Emperor, and they had no mercy at all for the people who had planned the mass murder of their Emperor, his family, his staff, and their fellow Imperial Guardsmen in the Imperial Palace.

  They were implacable, and they were thorough. When they faced armed resistance, they called in the attack ships and then searched the rubble for the DNA samples they needed. To make sure none of the conspirators got away, none escaped their net.

  In all, one hundred and eleven Imperial Warrants, death warrants all, were successfully served, all across the former Democracy of Planets. One was served on Carolina, at the consulate of the former Democracy of Planets, against spymaster Carol Urban.

  The Imperial Press Office issued a terse statement.

  “The Imperial Guard and Imperial Marines today carried out death warrants against one hundred and twelve individuals who conspired to murder the Emperor, his family, and staff. List follows.”

  Otto Stauss was reading the morning newsfeeds when his alarms started going off. He checked in VR and the one at the top of his priority list was an Imperial Press Office statement. He read it with tremendous satisfaction.

  “Damn. I knew it was a mistake to cross this Emperor. What the hell were they thinking?”

  He called Dieter, and Stauss and his son manned the war room they had set up in VR. The markets, especially the markets in the former Democracy of Planets, were in absolute chaos. In any normal market, trading would be stopped on the swings and volumes they were seeing, but such environments allowed the rich to make more money, and someone had been kind enough to shut off the trading stops for this week.

  Otto and Dieter waded into the chaos, exercising puts on crashing stocks, exercising calls when they hit bottom, buying stocks in name-brand DP interstellars at bargain basement prices, and doing it all on margin with ten-to-one leverage. They were arbitraging the chaos, and making a great deal of money doing it.

  Twenty-four hours later, when the round-the-clock markets had started to stabilize around new pricing levels and all the easy pickings were gone, Otto and Dieter Stauss called it quits. Worried that, in their fatigue, they might slip up, they said ‘Good enough.’

  “So how did we do?” Otto Stauss asked his son.

  “Near as I can tell, we made about two hundred and forty trillion credits.”

  “That’s a nice day’s work.”

  Gandon District Governor Seth Glick got an emergency mail from a fellow District Governor that just read, ‘Check the newsfeeds.’

  He did, and was shocked, then shocked again. One hundred and eleven of the most prominent businessmen of the Democracy of Planets, murdered – executed, he supposed – in their offices and homes, each under an Imperial Warrant for their execution. And Gunther Auer was among them, right here on Gandon.

  He read the top news stories. Most of them were speculation, as the press release from the Imperial Press Office had been terse to the point of lunacy. The Sintaran press was a bit better, pointing out that, under the Imperial system of high justice, no arrest, trial, appeal, or plea bargain was either possible or required. The Emperor could simply find you guilty, impose sentence, and carry the sentence out on his own say-so. Some past actions under this system were reviewed, and the general impression one got was such actions had been both rare and justified.

  One thing was clear, however. The Emperor was not kidding when he said he had no hesitation to impose the traditional penalty for capital crimes. This was a man who played a high-stakes game, and was not afraid to up the ante when it was required. Gunther Auer and his fellows had apparently been toying with a man who played for keeps. In any case, they had underestimated him badly.

  Glick reassessed what the Emperor had said on Tuesday in the light of recent developments. Auer had said Glick could wait to decide on the Emperor’s offer, because further events might make his decision more obvious. Auer had been right, as it turned out, if not in the manner he had thought.

  If Glick took everything the Emperor had said at face value, what would it mean to truly administer the district – sector now, he supposed – for the benefit of the common man? What policies would have to change? What new policies should be implemented?

  He was deeply into the consideration of policy changes and their likely outcomes before he realized he had already made his decision.

  On Thursday evening, with the kids in bed, Dunham and Peters were sitting out on the balcony of the private living room of the Imperial Residence. It was a clear night, just starting to get a little cool, finally, after the warm day. The sky was clear, and they could even see a few of the brightest stars despite the light pollution and light haze of the Imperial capital.

  “So our friend Otto Stauss had a very good day today,” Peters said.

  “Oh, really? What happened with him?”

  “Well, you know the conspirators were taking big market positions betting on a crash of Sintar stocks following the culmination of their plot. Mr. Stauss apparently decided to go whole hog in a contrary position, betting on you and the Empire against the plutocrats and the DP.”

  “That should have worked out pretty well for him.”

  “You might say that. He made more than two hundred
trillion credits. He’s now the richest human being alive.”

  “That much? How could it possibly be that much?” Dunham asked.

  “Mr. Stauss opened a ten-trillion-credit line with the Imperial Bank against the future income from the salvage operations and bought huge contrary call and put positions, in opposition to the conspirators. When the news broke yesterday, and it was clear his positions were going to make a lot of money, he went on a buying bender on DP interstellars, buying on margin at bargain basement prices. It was a wild twenty-four hours in the markets, and the big money on the DP side were sitting it out because the decision makers were mostly dead. Their calls and puts were in place, but it was their stop-loss safeties that kicked in, and Mr. Stauss ruthlessly went after them. When prices finally stabilized, Mr. Stauss ended up owning huge positions in these companies. He effectively transferred a large portion of the conspirators’ wealth to his own pocket. There will be books written about the moves he made in that crazy twenty-four hours.”

  “Well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow.”

  “You joke, but he did you several big favors. First, he warned us something was coming, because he could see them setting up their big play. I’m not sure we would have seen it without him.

  “Second, he arbitraged the chaos in the markets, which injected liquidity at a critical point and saved them from total meltdown. Auer and his cronies had the trading stops that would normally have kicked in disabled for the week, so they could clean up. It worked to Mr. Stauss’s advantage instead, but without him there would have been a total sell-off. That’s not good, and could have crippled the economy, especially in the former DP, for a decade or more.

  “And third, he now has controlling interest in a lot of the big DP interstellars that could have made integration of the DP into the Empire very difficult. That integration, I suspect, will now go along much more easily because the biggest shareholder in many of these companies will push integration along instead of working to impede it. He’s a big fan of yours.”

  “He should be. He’s made an awful lot of money.”

  “But he was wealthy before. In a very real way, he’s done more good for you than you have for him. By a lot, actually.”

  “Interesting. I never expected that much fallout.”

  “From executing the top hundred or so wealthiest businessmen in the DP? Really?” Peters asked.

  “I didn’t. They don’t actually do anything. Build anything.”

  Dunham shrugged, went on.

  “Short-sighted of me, I guess.”

  “I’ll say. And the way you did it didn’t help. Some of those were pretty brutal. I watched some of the recordings.”

  “If I was going to execute them anyway, doing it in such a way as to send the most powerful message was a free benefit.”

  “Oh, I think you sent a message loud and clear. For all that, I will always treasure the look on Mr. Auer’s face when he realized no attorneys were going to get him out of this one.”

  “When was that?” Dunham asked.

  “After Lieutenant Colonel Weber told him it was a death warrant, just before he shot him.”

  Dunham raised an eyebrow at the sound of satisfaction in her voice.

  “Hey, he was going to kill you, me, the children, and everybody in this building,” Peters said. “Instead, he’s dead, and I couldn’t be happier about it.”

  Otto Stauss took a nap during the middle of the day on Thursday. Late in the day he and Dieter went back into their VR war room for an hour to tidy up after the twenty-four hours of chaos. Consolidate some position here, grab a piece of low-hanging fruit there. He also paid off the line of credit at the bank. No sense paying interest on money he didn’t need at the moment, though it did seem strange to push a nine-trillion-credit payment to the bank.

  Stauss was now the largest shareholder in some of the former Democracy of Planets’ largest interstellar companies. Some of their board members and CEOs would have to be replaced, given they had been executed on Thursday, but a certain amount of management shake-up was probably a good thing. These companies had been getting a little complacent, not maintaining a competitive edge. Their new major shareholder would have been unlikely to allow that situation to continue anyway. Why, some of these companies had money laying around not doing anything. What was with that?

  Friday morning Stauss received a mail with an Imperial header. He accepted the meeting invitation, and entered VR to find himself once again in the simulation of the Emperor’s office on Sintar.

  “Your Majesty.”

  “Be seated, Mr. Stauss.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “You’ve been busy, Mr. Stauss.”

  “Yes, Sire. You have as well, I believe.”

  Dunham chuckled.

  “Indeed, Mr. Stauss. Your warning was correct and timely, in that we were able to discover the conspiracy, round up the conspirators’ henchmen here on Sintar, and track back up the chain to the conspirators themselves. And, while you made a great deal of money yesterday, you also saved the markets from melting down, by arbitraging the chaos. Finally, you are now in a position to ensure the big DP interstellars work to ease the integration of the DP into the Empire rather than fight it.

  “You saved the lives of me, my family, and thousands of others, you saved the economy from melting down, and you have made my job much easier going forward. I am in your debt, Mr. Stauss.”

  “I– I– I don’t know what to say, Your Majesty.”

  “Well, I do. Thank you, Mr. Stauss.”

  Stauss sat flabbergasted as the Emperor spread his hands and then bowed his head to him.

  “And here is a more tangible token of my gratitude, which will be delivered to your offices as shipping speeds permit.”

  The Emperor waved a hand, and a presentation case appeared on his desk, open to show a gold laurel wreath lapel pin and a larger gold laurel wreath on a ribbon for wearing it around one’s neck.

  “The Gratitude of the Throne, Mr. Stauss. It’s a mere trinket compared to the riches you’ve accumulated, but it is a symbol of my appreciation and gratitude.”

  “Oh, no, Your Majesty. It will be my prized possession, and an heirloom of my house for generations. Thank you.”

  Dunham stood, and so Stauss stood. Dunham reached across his desk and shook Stauss’s hand.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Stauss.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  Dunham bowed his head and cut the channel.

  Three other people received invitations to meet with the Emperor on Friday. Stenis Dernier, Sayuri Mori, and Pavel Sokolov entered the VR channel to find themselves sitting before a desk in a well-appointed office. When the Emperor appeared behind the desk, they shot to their feet.

  “Be seated.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  Dunham waited until they were seated.

  “Ms. Mori, Mr. Dernier, Mr. Sokolov, you may have noticed in the newsfeeds the successful conclusion of the investigation in which your assistance was so instrumental.”

  Mori answered for all three.

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “I am told you three were also instrumental in foiling the Catalonia Secession, by sustaining the Imperial Palace’s video feed and capturing Sector Governor Gallego’s coronation speech during the Imperial Coronation more than nine years ago. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Remarkable. I neglected to thank you properly for that effort. My only excuse is I was new to the job and did not yet know all the means at my disposal. You have given me the opportunity to correct that oversight.”

  The Emperor waved a hand, and a presentation case appeared on his desk, open to show a gold laurel wreath lapel pin and a larger gold laurel wreath on a ribbon for wearing it around one’s neck.

  “The Gratitude of the Throne. It is very rare, given only when someone’s actions on behalf of the Empire come to the personal attention of the Emperor, and those actions are so a
bove and beyond the ordinary as to deserve commendation. You three have in truth earned it twice, but it is a once-in-a-lifetime award.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  “The award also includes a substantial, tax-free monetary gift. I am pleased to award it to you all.”

  Dunham stood, and the three network operations admins stood. Dunham shook the hand of each in turn.

  “Congratulations, Ms. Mori. Congratulations, Mr. Dernier. Congratulations, Mr. Sokolov.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  Dunham bowed his head and cut the channel.

  When Sayuri Mori dropped out of VR back into her office, an officer of the Imperial Guard was waiting for her. He held out a black-velvet presentation case to her.

  “With the Emperor’s compliments, ma’am.”

  Building the Peace

  The Zoo was a buzz of activity this morning. It was even louder and more chaotic than normal. People’s voices were both louder and more stressed than normal in anticipation of the planned event this afternoon. The proposals for building the peace were complete. They had been run through the business review group and the new ideas review group and hammered into concrete, workable proposals.

  But the members of the Zoo, those who had come up with the ideas in the first place, would present them. That had been Milady Empress’s idea. And they would be presenting them to the Emperor, the Empress, and Consul Saaret.

  “Are we all ready, then?” Valery Markov asked.

  The auditorium simulation was sized for five hundred, and it was nearly full as the time for the presentation approached. The Zoo was here in its entirety, along with Lin Jiahao and his lieutenants. Everyone looked nervous but ready.

  “Please stand for the Emperor.”

  The Emperor, the Empress, and Consul Saaret appeared in the speaker’s well as everyone stood. They were all dressed in their normal office attire.