Tyrant

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Yes, Sire.”

  King Michael laughed.

  “They really screwed the pooch this time, Whitcombe. They really and truly did.”

  Including the flights up to the troopships, unloading and changing crews, and the troopships’ long turns to come back around for another pass on the planet, it took two days to get all His Majesty’s Imperial Marines off of Wollaston.

  “That’s it, Sir. We got them all out,” Rear Admiral Gunnar Karlsen said.

  “Any problems?” Vice Admiral James Doheny asked.

  “No, Sir. Two shuttles mixed up their landing locations and ended up with troops going to the wrong ship, but they figured that out on the way up and simply docked to the other ship to offload. Then they had to each go to their own ship for the crew change. That was about it.”

  “That was that one long pass they did?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A few injuries, Sir. You can’t move that many people without somebody tripping over his own two feet. They are Marines, after all. Minor injuries. Twisted ankle stuff.”

  “No hostile action at all?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Excellent. Good work. Send my congratulations out to all captains, then let’s release the troopships for the trip home.”

  “Yes, Sir. What about us? Are we headed home, too?”

  “No, our orders say to hang around here for a while. We’re going to do those exercises we were planning. We’re just going to do them here rather than around Guojuan.”

  “Very good, Sir.”

  On their next turn, the troopships staged their turns to string themselves out at twenty-minute intervals. They came back around for another pass on the planet, lining up on the Wollaston hypergate. One after the other, the big ships passed through the hypergate. It took ten hours for them all to depart Wollaston.

  As their troopship, the HMS Lake Baxter, approached the hypergate, Sergeant Flood and PFCs North and Schulte were playing cards. The speaker in the rec room sounded the five-minute hypergate warning.

  “Well, there we are,” Flood said. “Five more minutes to hyper, then four weeks and we’re home on Sintar.”

  “Damn. I just realized something,” North said.

  “What’s that?” Flood asked.

  “I’m gonna miss seein’ the coronation.”

  “You can watch the recording when we drop out of hyper,” Schulte said.

  “Yeah, but it ain’t the same.”

  “Would you rather be watchin’ it live back in the Shithole?” Flood asked.

  “Forget I said anything.”

  “Your Majesty,” Whitcombe said, “The Sintarans have completely withdrawn from Oryssia. We have had our engineers and demolitions people go over their base very carefully, and they find no evidence of it being booby-trapped. They just pulled out and left everything behind. Guns, ammo, supplies, even food in the freezers.”

  “Excellent, excellent,” King Michael VI said. “All right, Whitcombe. Tell our people to move into their base. Let’s harden it up. When they try to come back, we want to be ready for them.”

  “Certainly, Sire.

  “Oh, and make sure they only move heavy stuff in at night. No need to let them know just what sort of things we’ve managed to smuggle in.”

  “Yes, Sire, “ Whitcombe said. “Your Majesty, I still don’t understand. What did they hope to accomplish by pulling out?”

  “Their new Emperor thinks somehow his problems are going to go away if they pull out. But in reality, they’re just starting.”

  “All our troops are off Oryssia, Sire,” General Kraus said.

  “Excellent, General Kraus.”

  “Local forces, which we suspect to be Estvian regulars, have taken over the base, Sire. We have also picked up the infrared emissions of large vehicles moving into the base under cover of darkness. We don’t know what vehicles exactly, although we can make some guesses based on their heat signatures. If you know how fast something is moving, and how much diesel exhaust it is emitting, you can guess its mass pretty closely. Within twenty-five percent or so.”

  “What do we think they are, General Kraus?”

  “It looks like mobile artillery, Sire. Anti-aircraft guns. And even a few tanks.”

  “Do we know how many, General Kraus?”

  “About a hundred and fifty heavy vehicles so far, Sire.”

  “Amazing. All hidden in the city, eh?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Very well, General Kraus. Thank you for reporting in. Maintain surveillance on them.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “I’ve been seeing reports on Wollaston. I guess the Estvians moved a lot of their people into the Marine base,” Peters said.

  “That’s right. They’ve taken it over. They’ve also moved in a bunch of heavy equipment they’ve been collecting in Savanna, the capital city of Oryssia.”

  “So what are you going to do about Wollaston?”

  “Something you’re probably not going to like very much, Amanda. You may end up second guessing yourself about thinking me a nice guy.”

  “I don’t think so, Bobby.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have three hundred trillion people to worry about, Amanda. Right now there are over seven hundred insurgencies active along the edges of the Empire. All are being fed by outside entities like Estvia. All have stepped up in intensity since the Council Revolt, thinking Sintar in chaos.”

  “Well, we have been, at least a little bit, while we sorted out the government.”

  “Understood. And there is evidence these same outside entities are at work trying to foment more insurgencies on other planets. Hundreds more. We brought it on ourselves by not putting a stop to these things long ago, but the bureaucracy wanted these little wars for their arms manufacturer friends. And now the Empire itself is at risk as these things grow. I need to impress on everyone that this behavior will not be tolerated by my administration the way it has been in the past. It won’t be tolerated at all, in fact.”

  “But how do you do that, Bobby?”

  “You make an example of somebody.”

  He had been walking while he talked. He stopped now and looked at her.

  “A really big example.”

  Rehearsals

  “I don’t know about this, Bobby,” Peters said.

  “Know about what, Amanda? The coronation?” Dunham asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “I’m not so sure. We did a walk-through yesterday. There are stairs.”

  “So?”

  “Bobby, think about it. I’m a palace brat. When did I ever see stairs? I knew how to use the elevator in VR before I ever even saw a flight of stairs. And now I need to walk down the steps of the dais backwards?”

  Dunham just stared at her. Of course, when he thought about it, it was true, but the concept seemed so foreign. He hadn’t seen an elevator until he was on Sintar.

  “Now what do we do?” he asked.

  “I’ve started taking the fire escape down to the hairdresser and stuff on the floor below. I walk backwards down the stairs and forward up. It’s pretty comical at the moment, but I am getting better.”

  “Well, keep practicing. You still have a couple weeks.”

  As the day drew closer, Peters got better and better at navigating the stairs, but at dress rehearsal two days before the event, she found it impossible to do it in the official getup they dressed her in. All the foundation undergarments had her feeling trussed up like a stuffed boar, and then they added shoes with heels. She had never gotten used to heels, and had worn flats for her work in finance and, more recently, in the co-consul’s office.

  “This isn’t going to work. I’ll be right back.”

  She kicked off the shoes and carried them back into the dressing room off the anteroom to one side of the throne. She shucked out of the whit
e full-length empire dress and turned to her dressers.

  “All this crap has to come off. Lose it all.”

  They stripped off the slip and undergarments and hose until she stood naked once again, then, at her direction, they put the white dress back on her.

  “There. That’ll work.”

  “Uh, Ma’am, that dress is not entirely opaque. In the shaft of sunlight that bathes the dais at noon, you will tend to, um, show through a bit.”

  “I’m facing away from the crowd the whole time, though, right?”

  “For the part where you’re in the sunlight, yes, Ma’am.”

  “Fine. Perfect. Better that than all that crap.”

  “And for shoes, Ma’am?”

  “I’ll go barefoot. I’m steadier on my feet without shoes. Pin this hem up to make up for it.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  It took only ten minutes to get her all squared away. She went back out to where everyone – everyone except the Emperor, that is – waited. He would be in the final dress rehearsal tomorrow, once everyone else had their parts down.

  “Sorry, everyone,” Peters said. “We’re all straightened away now. Let’s try my part again.”

  This time she managed the stairs with no problems at all.

  The next day was final dress rehearsal, with the Emperor. Peters inspected herself in the mirror in the closet after her morning shower. So if she – how had the dresser put it? – showed through her dress a bit in the sunlight, how much would show? Her nipples were light, still, given she had never been pregnant, and she was pretty tanned from all the time naked on the pool deck. Not a problem there.

  She was a natural brunette, though, and some bits obviously didn’t match her skin tone. That could be quite a show in the sunlight. She reached for the razor.

  When she was done, she eyed her handiwork. There we are. Now at least everything matched, a toasty warm tan. There would be no tell-tale bits. She might simply be wearing nude-colored undergarments.

  When Peters stripped down in the dressing room off the anteroom of the Throne Room, the dresser eyed Peters up and down.

  “Very good, Ma’am,” she noted approvingly. “That will make things quite a bit less, um, risqué, I think.”

  The dress had been re-hemmed since yesterday, and was the perfect length for her to navigate the stairs without tripping.

  Once dressed, she went out to join everyone else gathering before the rehearsal. Dunham was there, resplendent in his Imperial Guard uniform, the Cross of Sintar prominent on his chest. Peters sidled up to him.

  “Hiya, hot stuff,” she whispered to him as she came up alongside him.

  Dunham chuckled. He slipped an arm around her waist and was surprised to get an armful of girl under a very thin covering. He slid his hand down to her hip, then back up.

  “Heavens. I really like this dress,” Dunham said.

  “Yes. I’ve asked if I can keep it afterwards. For play time.”

  “A very good idea. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “They had me all trussed up like a turkey underneath it, and between that and the heels, I couldn’t handle the stairs, so I lost all that crap. Now, no problem.”

  “Well, it’s certainly no problem for me.”

  He kissed the top of her head and she leaned against him.

  “All right, everyone. Places, please,” the director called out.

  The final dress rehearsal went off without a hitch.

  The Emperor and his consort weren’t the only people practicing their roles in the upcoming coronation. Hundreds of people had spent thousands of hours constructing not just one, but two, special-purpose network operations centers in VR. One was for the Sintaran Empire and one was for the Catalonia Sector.

  In the weeks leading up to the coronation, Pavel Sokolov and his team manned the Catalonia Sector NOC, launching red-team attacks against the Sintaran Empire NOC, manned by Sayuri Mori and her team. Stenis Dernier and his team also stood by, for the second phase of the operation, disabling the QE system, which Pavel Sokolov and his team would then defend against.

  All three teams were composed of the best experts the Empire had on network operations. The complexity of deploying and maintaining the Empire’s massive VR system and the QE radio links on which it rode had given them plenty of experience and insight into the system’s components and their interaction.

  Now, though, it wasn’t operations they were practicing for, it was cyber warfare.

  The QE network operations department heads – Jason Biggs, Debby Norton, Kiran Gupta, Erich Bosch, and the rest – as well as the VR network operations department heads – Carl Becker, Caroline Pritchard, Chouko Saito, Brendan O’Clery, and the rest – were observing in VR, but in management mode, without their avatars present. No one wanted to jiggle anybody’s elbows at this point.

  In the past, the more aggressive managers might have wanted to be at the controls, or at least to ensure it was one of their people who was in the command slot. They were always looking for the limelight and bucking for the next slot up. Now, though, they were content to let the most highly competent technical people, regardless of whose group they were in, actually run the system.

  “Deploy the bots,” Sayuri Mori said.

  “Bots deploying, ma’am.”

  Mori and her bridge crew were all immersed in the giant simulation display. They, like many other highly skilled VR operators, used truncated avatars – just their heads and arms, the only parts they needed to ‘play the game.’ They were also all skilled in full-globe visualization, and Mori had pulled her bridge in close to Catalonia without giving up her view of what lay behind her.

  She saw icons following the bots’ progress out into the Catalonia Sector, penetrating it to its farthest reaches, replicating themselves and leaving icons behind. They spurned the links out of the sector, but washed over the sector completely, occupying every node.

  “Bots all reporting operational, ma’am.”

  In his network control center, Pavel Sokolov had also forward-deployed his bridge. His view was from the other side of Catalonia, facing toward Sintar, but he and his crew were also able to see Catalonia Sector behind them. They were not able to see Mori’s bots deploying.

  “All right. Stand by to map the feed when it comes in.”

  “Initiate feed,” Mori said.

  “Feed initiating, Ma’am.”

  Mori saw the Sintar feed deploy, running to Catalonia as it did to all the sector capitals, branching to every provincial capital, and finally branching out to all the planets. There was a fine silver thread running along all the hierarchical links now.

  “Initiate backup feed,” Mori said.

  “Backup feed initiating, Ma’am.”

  Another, black, thread ran out from Sintar behind her, to Catalonia alone of the sector capitals, branched and branched again, until it, too, had reached all the planets of the Catalonia Sector.

  “Both feeds nominal at all planets, ma’am. Bots reporting in with good compares.”

  “And now we wait,” Mori said.

  “OK, there’s the feed, establishing itself.”

  Sokolov watched the red string run along the network, hitting nodes and then branching itself. He couldn’t see Mori’s backup feed, because it didn’t have an all-points broadcast address.

  “All right. Start the timer. Simulation rules say five minutes to set baseline performance. Then we’re going to start messing with them.”

  “Timer running, sir.”

  They sat and waited. Sokolov had a new trick up his sleeve this time. He wouldn’t cut and substitute the feed at Catalonia this time, which Mori had easily countered the last several games, but at the provincial capitals.

  “Deploy the bots.”

  “Bots deploying, sir.”

  Fifty icons raced out from Catalonia past him to his rear, to the provincial capitals, and he withdrew his bridge from Catalonia back behind the provincial capitals, where he could see his bots st
anding by as icons next to the provincial nodes.

  “Bots all reporting ready, sir.”

  “Timer expired. The game is on, sir.”

  “Initiate private feed.”

  “Private feed initiating, sir.”

  Another thread, this one green, spun down all fifty provincial capital links to the bots in the provincial nodes.

  “Bots all reporting private feed stable, sir.”

  “Swap the feed.”

  “Swapping feed, sir.”

  In a wave, the red feed from Sintar switched to green as the bots swapped in the private feed.

  “Bots are reporting that compares are negative, ma’am.”

  Mori saw the bots all report the bad feed.

  “Restore feeds, ma’am?”

  “No. Deploy the sniffers upstream from the provincial capitals. Find me the source of that private feed.”

  “Deploying provincial sniffers upstream, ma’am.”

  Mori saw icons of her sniffer program, deployed with the bots, run back up the links to Catalonia and start looking for the source of the bad feed.

  “Got it, Ma’am. It’s coming in from this node.”

  The Catalonia node in front of her magnified and turned into a nest of nodes, one of which was highlighted.

  “Freeze system status, isolate that node, and echo status.”

  “Freeze in place. Isolating. Isolation complete. Echoing.”

  “Now deploy bot killers and restore the feeds. And start the razzle-dazzle program on that isolated node.”

  “Switching feeds, ma’am. Razzle-dazzle initiated.”

  Mori saw the correct feed re-establish as her bots deployed bot killers to over-rule the Catalonia bots in the provincial capital nodes, and then switched the feed back to the official one.

  What Sokolov should see is his substitute feed continuing to run unobstructed throughout the sector, even while she made ineffectual attempts to over-ride his bots.

  “Oh, she’s trying, sir. I can see her trying to kill our bots, and they just keep replicating. She can’t get on top of it.”