Usurper

by Richard F. Weyand

  EMPIRE

  Usurper

  by

  RICHARD F. WEYAND

  Copyright 2019 by Richard F. Weyand

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-1-7321280-5-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Credits

  Cover Art: Aaron Griffin

  Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk

  Books by Richard F. Weyand:

  Books in the EMPIRE series:

  EMPIRE: Reformer

  EMPIRE: Usurper

  Books in the Childers Universe

  Childers

  Childers: Absurd Proposals

  Galactic Mail: Revolution

  A Charter For The Commonwealth

  Campbell: The Problem With Bliss

  Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.

  Bloomington, Indiana, USA

  February 2019

  CONTENTS

  Accession

  Transition

  Settling In

  Construction

  The Council

  Disaffected

  Shadow Councilor

  The Justice System

  Taking Stock

  Coronation

  Shadow Court

  Interviews

  New Building, New Hires

  Chief Justice

  Under Way, But Undercover

  The Perjury Case

  The Civil Rights Case

  The Bar Association of Sintar

  Imperial Subpoenas

  Collision Course

  First Blood

  Collecting the Evidence

  Analysis And Interrogation

  Fairfield

  DNA

  Results

  Interrogation and Execution

  More Interrogations

  Plans and Preparations

  A Hypothetical Question

  Whitmore and Gorecki

  Game Move

  Accession

  Deanna Dunham Garrity sat next to the body of Jiahui Song, the Empress Ilithyia I, twenty-sixth Empress of the Sintaran Empire. A tear slid down her cheek as she held the hand of the Empress, dead at seventy-two of a heart condition Dee had not known about. After several minutes, she stood and placed the Empress’s hand on her stomach, and arranged the other hand with it.

  She was gone so suddenly. All their plans, all their efforts, all their progress, seemed to go with her.

  Except.

  Just minutes before, the Empress had informed her that she had selected Dee as her heir. The heir to the Throne? The Empress of Sintar? At the age of twenty-seven?

  Dee sat back in the chair. She accessed the palace VR system, and found there a new top-level folder. Inside were other folders, the file system of the Empress, transferred to her when the Empress’s VR interface had informed the palace systems that their host had passed.

  As she had committed to Song on her deathbed, Dee accessed the list of people Song felt she could trust. Many familiar names. Claude Perrin, Song’s Personal Secretary. General Daggert, the head of the Imperial Guard. George Pullman, the top legal fixer of the Empress’s close personal staff, and his wife Anne, Perrin’s assistant. She found herself there, too, the Empress’s Personal Counsel, as well as Cindy – listed as Cynthia Newberry Dunham – Dee’s sister-in-law and the head of the Empress’s special group in charge of evaluating new ideas. Many other names, too, but not as many as she thought. This was all the people the Empress of a hundred and fifty thousand inhabited worlds, ruler of three hundred trillion human beings, trusted?

  Only one person on the Imperial Council was listed. Lord Saaret, with the notation, “He can be trusted to do what he thinks is best for the Empire. His thoughts on the matter do not necessarily agree with mine.”

  Dee stood up, smoothed her skirt, straightened her jacket. When the alert had gone out to the Imperial Guard at five o’clock this morning, she had dressed in her most serious business suit, a charcoal-grey outfit she called her court-and-funerals suit. Little had she known how appropriate it would be.

  She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue from the box on the nightstand. She looked at the two Imperial Guardsmen, standing at ease in the far corners of the room. Their impassivity was belied by the unshed tears in their eyes. As she watched, a single tear ran down the cheek of one of them.

  Lord Saaret was hurrying down the hallway in the Imperial Council building, adjacent to the Imperial Palace. It was about eight o’clock, and Pomeroy was just arriving for the business day.

  “Saaret, where are you hurrying off to?”

  “Her Majesty is ill. She is not expected to survive.”

  Pomeroy fell into step alongside him.

  “She dies without an heir. We have a chance to name her successor,” Pomeroy said.

  “That’s not how it works, Pomeroy.”

  “Then who will name her successor, Saaret? The Council has as much right to name her successor as anyone. More than anyone else, in fact. We can’t let the Throne slip away from us.”

  “The Throne does not belong to the Council. There is no such thing as it slipping away from us.”

  “Then who names the heir? Who is her successor?”

  “We shall see, Pomeroy. We shall see.”

  Down the elevator, on the people mover through the tunnel connecting the buildings, up the elevator to the Imperial Guard floor.

  “We attend Her Majesty. We were summoned,” Saaret said.

  He stretched the truth a bit there, as Pomeroy had not been summoned but he had tagged along.

  The duty sergeant did not contest him, though, and an escort of two Guardsmen showed them back into the elevator and set the elevator for the top floor of the two Imperial Residence floors, floors Saaret and Pomeroy could not access on their own.

  They were shown down the hallway to where a clutch of people were assembled outside the closed doors of the Empress’s bedroom. Saaret recognized Claude Perrin, General Daggert, and George Pullman. There were also several members of the Imperial Guard.

  “What is Her Majesty’s condition?” Saaret asked Perrin.

  “Her Majesty is in the final stages of congestive heart failure. Her Personal Counsel is with her now.”

  “Ms. Garrity?” Saaret asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We should see her,” Pomeroy said.

  “Her Majesty has not requested any other visitors.”

  “Even so,” Pomeroy insisted.

  Saaret put a restraining hand on Pomeroy’s arm, shook his head, and Pomeroy subsided.

  “Has she named an heir?” Saaret asked.

  “Yes,” Perrin answered, and handed Saaret a sheet of stiff paper with the Empress’s coat of arms on the top and her signature on the bottom. An Imperial Decree.

  “Her Majesty signed it in front of the three of us, as witnesses.”

  Saaret scanned the document. Deanna Dunham Garrity as heir? That was going to be interesting.

  Bobby and Sean watched the tableau in impassive silence. Having completed their assignment to escort Dee to the Empress’s bedroom, and not been dismissed, they had melted into unobtrusiveness along the walls of the hallway.

  Bobby got an emergency alert in VR, to all Guardsmen. The Empress had died. The new Empress was Deana Dunham Garrity.

  Bobby’s eyes shot to Sean, who looked back at him in shock.

  Dee walked out into the hallway outside the Empress’s bedroom door. Bobby and Sean were in the crowd there, as well as several other Imperial Guardsmen, Perrin, Pullman, Daggert, Saaret, and Pomeroy.

  “The Empress is dead,” she said flatly.

  “Long live the Empress!” Perrin, Pullman, and Daggert said and bowed their heads to her. Sean and Bobby looked lightning-struck. Saaret and Pomeroy said nothing.

&nb
sp; “She has not been confirmed by the Council,” Pomeroy said.

  Dee caught Saaret’s eye and held it. Without looking away from him, she began asking questions.

  “Mr. Pullman, under the law, when the Council confirms an Empress’s choice of successor, what is that person called?”

  “The Heir Apparent, Your Majesty.”

  “If the Empress’s choice of successor is not confirmed by the Council, Mr. Pullman, what is that person called?”

  “The Heir Presumptive, Ma’am.”

  “What is the rule of succession, Mr. Pullman?”

  “Absent an Heir Apparent, the Heir Presumptive accedes to the throne, Ma’am.”

  ”If there is a controversy, who decides the succession, Mr. Pullman?”

  “The Imperial Guard, Ma’am.”

  “General Daggert, has the Imperial Guard made a decision as to the succession in this case?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “And that decision, General Daggert?”

  “Deanna Dunham Garrity is the rightful successor, by the express statement to me of the Empress Ilithyia, before witnesses.”

  “Does the Imperial Guard stand ready to defend the integrity of the Throne, General Daggert?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Do your reserves stand ready, General Daggert?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Who are the Imperial Guard’s reserves, General Daggert?”

  “The Imperial Marines, Ma’am.”

  Through all of this, Dee’s eyes never wavered from Saaret’s. The Empress Ilithyia said he could be trusted to act in the best interests of the Empire as he saw them. How do you see them now, Lord Saaret?

  Saaret was held immobile by those impossibly blue eyes. Garrity had always been the silent partner in Saaret’s meetings with the Empress Ilithyia. He had been unsure of her fitness for the Throne. He saw the steel there now, though. This could work.

  Saaret bowed his head to Dee, spread his hands at his sides.

  “Long live the Empress,” Saaret said.

  Pomeroy continued to stand there without any recognition of her. She did not look at him, but kept her gaze on Saaret.

  “Mr. Pullman, is it against the law for a member of the Imperial Council to refuse the authority of the lawful Empress?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “What is the charge, Mr. Pullman?”

  “Treason, Ma’am.”

  “That is a capital charge, Mr. Pullman?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Dee’s head slowly turned to Pomeroy, like a gun turret in traverse. Pomeroy found himself the unwilling target of the blue muzzles of her eyes. Dee raised one eyebrow.

  “L-l-long live the Empress,” Pomeroy stammered.

  Dee considered him for two seconds more, then swiveled her head back to Saaret.

  “You are dismissed, Lord Saaret, Lord Pomeroy.”

  Saaret bowed and turned to go as Pomeroy continued to stand there. Saaret grabbed Pomeroy’s arm and turned him around and pulled him down the hallway with him. The Guardsmen who had escorted them followed along.

  “Lord Pomeroy is going to be trouble, Your Majesty,” Perrin said.

  “Keep an eye on him, General Daggert.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  After their Guardsmen escort got off the elevator on the Imperial Guard floor, Saaret lit into Pomeroy.

  “Pomeroy, you fucking idiot. Can’t you ever see which way the wind is blowing?”

  “Now is the time to push back, Saaret. This is the moment,” Pomeroy said.

  “Against the Imperial Guard? Against the Imperial Marines? At the risk of a charge of treason?” Saaret shook his head.

  “She wouldn’t dare.”

  “Why not? The Imperial Council does not select the heir to the Throne, the sitting Empress does. The Empress named her the heir to the Throne in front of Daggert, as straight an arrow as you will ever find. Perrin has an Imperial decree naming her the heir, signed in the Empress’s own hand. And her husband and her brother are both officers in the Imperial Guard. You were standing right next to them. Can’t you even read a fucking name tag, Pomeroy? Did you not notice that, standing to one side as Deanna Dunham Garrity became Empress, were Captain Dunham and Captain Garrity? If she had ordered them to shoot you for treason just now, they would have shot you without a qualm.”

  “But she’s not the Empress. She can’t be.”

  “Why? Because that’s not what you want? Pomeroy, the world does not exist to please you. She is the legitimate Empress, whether you like it or not, and she knows it. She graduated near the top of her class, in Imperial law, from the best law school in the Empire, at the age of twenty, and she has been the Empress’s right hand for almost a decade. Does none of that tell you anything? She knows her rights, she knows her powers, better than anyone. I’m certainly not going to stand in her way. And you aren’t going to stand in her way, either, or you’re going to end up dead.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “No, it’s the law. This is an Empire, Pomeroy, and she is the Empress. Whether you believe it or not, she is more important than you. While you may not be able to imagine the Empire going on without you, it can and it will if it comes to that. Because if you move against her, you’re going to end up on the scaffold, and I am not going with you.”

  “I can’t believe you are going to stand aside for this, this, this usurper.”

  By this point they were walking down the hallway in the Imperial Council building. Saaret stopped and turned to Pomeroy and shook his finger in his face.

  “Listen to me very carefully, Lord Pomeroy. You will not use that word, you will not express those sentiments, in my presence, ever again, or I will turn you in for treason myself. You’re upset because things didn’t go the way you wanted. I can understand that. But it’s time now to calm down and deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be. If you want to spend your time productively, you should be working on the reform of your department, because I predict that Imperial mandate will not be forgotten by the new Empress. And now I have productive things to do. The subject is closed. Good day, Lord Pomeroy.”

  Transition

  Dee went down to the Empress’s office – her office now – walking through the outer office that had been her workspace for almost ten years. It felt strange to walk through the door into the inner office without so much as a knock. When she got there, of course, Guardsmen were already at their posts in the corners.

  Dee sat down at the desk and buzzed for Perrin.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Be seated, Mr. Perrin.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Mr. Perrin, what happens now? How are arrangements made? For the funeral? For the coronation? For my living arrangements? Empress Ilithyia died so suddenly, I have had no time to study up on the process. How does all this work?”

  “Lord Biser will handle the funeral arrangements, Ma’am, and Lord Saaret will handle the coronation arrangements. We have advantages there, as they both handled those events sixteen years ago on the passing of Empress Adannaya.

  “As to the Empress’s apartment, which is the Imperial Guard’s preferred living arrangement, Housekeeping has requested several days to repair, refurbish, and refresh the apartment and its furnishings. This is normal, as they have not had the chance to do a full going over of it for sixteen years. The normal arrangement would be for Your Majesty to take up residence in the family apartment next door for several days to allow them that access.”

  “I heard a ‘but’ there, Mr. Perrin.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Your Majesty and Captain Garrity have lived in close proximity with Captain Dunham and Ms. Dunham for almost ten years. If you wish to continue that arrangement, then ultimately the Dunhams would take up residence in the family apartment. They could initially take up residence in the first guest apartment next door to the family apartment, and, once Housekeeping is completed, everyone would move
down one suite. Alternatively, the Dunhams could take up residence in the family apartment now, and Your Majesty and Captain Dunham could stay in the first guest apartment until Housekeeping is completed. The family apartment and the first guest apartment are identical. It is Your Majesty’s decision.”

  “Does the Imperial Guard have a preference, Mr. Perrin?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “Very well, Mr. Perrin. Ask Captain Garrity and the Dunhams to meet me in the family apartment in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “That is all for now, Mr. Perrin.”

  When Dee got to the family apartment, a Guardsman opened the door for her. There were two Guardsmen already on duty inside, standing at ease in the corners. Sean, Bobby, and Cindy were waiting for her, and they all stood when she entered.

  “Your Majesty,” Cindy said, and bowed her head.

  “Be seated, everybody. Please.”

  They all sat, and Dee flopped down on the couch next to Sean, put her arms around him, and held him to her. After a moment’s hesitation, he returned her hug. After a few moments, she kissed him, then sighed.

  “OK. Look, everybody, we have to figure out accommodations here. I’m not going to call everybody Captain Garrity, and Captain Dunham, and Ms. Dunham the rest of my life, and I sure as hell don’t want all of you calling me Your Majesty all the time. So what do we do? Cindy? You’ve got the best sense for this kind of thing.”

  “I think in the offices, in public, when there’s anyone present outside just us and the Guardsmen there –” Cindy indicated the Guardsmen in the corners “– it has to be Your Majesty and Ms. Dunham and Captain Garrity and all that. No familiarity that would be out of place for anyone else. I mean, if it were just me and you in your office downstairs, it would probably be OK to be familiar, but I wouldn’t want to be, for fear of slipping up when someone else was there. Up here, in the Empress’s residence, the rules are whatever you make them. Your Majesty.”