Usurper

by Richard F. Weyand

“Yes. One of my guys, the guy who set it up, says the shooter and his two spotters disappeared. Haven’t been seen in days. And there’s a rumor running around South End that somebody saw Imperial City PD pick him up.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “Well, we can’t confirm the rumor, and police records don’t show him in custody. Don’t even show he was arrested, for that matter.”

  “Are we getting excited about nothing, George? Guy goes off on vacation or something, and we get all excited.”

  “I don’t know, Larry. All three of them at once? I guess maybe they were all friends and went off together, but it doesn’t feel right.”

  “Did your lieutenant colonel and the other guys show up finally?”

  “No. What about your guy, Larry? Fairfax.”

  “Fairfield. No, he hasn’t shown up either. That makes what, George? Fifteen people missing now, all related to this incident. That is worrisome.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t find anything out, because Imperial City PD still has all the security camera recordings for Imperial Park West locked down.”

  “Maybe we ought to make preparations. Just in case. Get some people practicing with that new hardware you have.”

  “We need rockets for the shuttles, Larry. If we’re going to do anything big, we need rockets.”

  “Let me see what I can do, George. We sometimes pull a pallet out of a shipment for spot-checking. You know. Quality check. That sort of thing. Let me see if I can get one of those pulled and divert it to you.”

  “That’d be good. If there’s really something going on, we’re going to need them.”

  “Please, Your Majesty. Let us move you to safety. I beg you.”

  “No, General Daggert. The Empress of Sintar does not rule from hiding.”

  “But, Your Majesty, we can no longer protect you here.”

  Daggert seemed on the edge of tears. That he could not perform his solemn duty, that he found himself and the Imperial Guard unable to keep the Empress safe, was to him a dereliction of a sacred trust.

  “No, General Daggert. If they strike at me, they strike at me. That they will regret. But there are some things we need to put into place, whether they succeed with their first strike or not. I have therefore drawn up and executed some Imperial Decrees that I will give you for safekeeping.”

  Dee pulled a short stack of documents over from the side of her desk, and handed them one at a time to Daggert.

  “This first one is for the succession.”

  Daggert took it from her and, as he read it, he raised his eyebrows.

  “Is this legal, Your Majesty?”

  “Yes, General Daggert. It is not traditional, but it is legal.”

  “I see. Very well, Your Majesty.”

  “This one deals with the Council.”

  He took the second, and read it, nodding.

  “Sensible, Your Majesty.”

  “As does this one, General Daggert.”

  Daggert read this document, and got a look of grim satisfaction on his face. He did raise one eyebrow to her, though.

  “You hold Lord Saaret aside, Your Majesty? He is the Chairman of the Council.”

  “Yes, but he is not a part of this. Of that, I am sure. As for the rest, do you recall the saying, ‘Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man goes to prison?’”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “In this case, it is better a hundred innocent men die, than one guilty man get away. To preserve the Empire, to maintain the Throne, that is the choice I must make. The Throne must prevail.”

  “I understand, Your Majesty.”

  “There are some things we need to do to prepare, General Daggert. I have prepared a short list. Let’s discuss these items one at a time.”

  “Whatcha got there, Stash?” Steve Johnson asked as he walked up.

  Stanley Gorecki was standing by a large pallet that had been dropped off on the loading dock of one of the hangars on the shuttle base at Imperial Police Headquarters in the southern outskirts of Imperial City.

  “Some more play toys. Let’s get these inside. Go get the forklift.”

  “Sure, Stash.”

  Johnson went back into the hangar, then returned driving the forklift. He moved the crate of sixteen ATG-21 air-to-ground rockets into the building and set it down by the Imperial Police’s two armored combat shuttles.

  “General Kraus,” said General Martin Kraus, Commandant of Marines.

  “Hi, Marty. Brian Daggert here.”

  “Hi, Brian. What can I do for you?”

  “I need you to be working on some contingency plans for me, and I need to borrow your best demolitions outfit for a little while.”

  “No problem, Brian. Planning and demolitions both tend to get a bit rusty if you don’t use them regularly, and good, solid problems for them are rare right now. Whatcha got?”

  “All right. So what we need to do is practice aiming and firing sequences with these rockets. We need to know we can run these systems,” Stanley Gorecki said.

  “How we gonna test ‘em, Stash?” Mark Olestri asked. “We’re not gonna take ‘em out and shoot ‘em off, are we?”

  “No, we’re gonna test ‘em here in the hangar. We’re gonna go through the whole thing, and just not push the trigger at the end. But we don’t wanna be out blowin’ shit up, because there’s no way to hide that from the Navy up there in orbit, and then there’s all kinds of questions and shit, right?”

  “If somebody hits the trigger, though, it’s gonna make a hell of a mess, Stash.”

  “Well, then, we’ll have to be real careful. OK?”

  “One thing I don’t get, Stash,” Steve Johnson said. “If we’re not gonna fire ‘em off, why did we rack them up on the shuttles?”

  “’Cause half the targeting system is on the rockets, so you can’t actually practice usin’ the damn things unless they’re racked up.”

  “That seems stupid. There ought to at least be a dummy responder on the shuttle so you can practice.”

  “Well, there is. But it don’t have all the goodies of the new rockets, because it’s not the current version of the dummy responder. I couldn’t get a hold of that. So we practice with live rockets, just don’t push the stupid button, OK?”

  The shuttle crews – pilots and co-pilots/weapons officers – nodded as Gorecki looked back and forth among them.

  “Now these shuttles can carry four rockets each, and you can fire one, two, three, or four at once. I put a target drawing in front of each shuttle on the wall over there. Just four squares in a line. The idea is to go in there and go through the arming sequence, then target all four squares. All you gotta do is click in each square. The systems are set up to aim at the center of the target no matter where you click on it, unless you override that setting. Once you’ve done that and the system says ‘Targets Acquired,’ then we disarm them and we walk through it a couple more times. Then you swap jobs, so the pilots get the same practice. All right?”

  Nods all around.

  “OK, let’s saddle up.”

  A manager from Housekeeping met the construction crew at the loading dock of the Imperial Council building. A large box truck backed up to the dock, and a couple of transporters pulled up with it. A dozen construction workers got out of each transporter and assembled on the dock.

  The dock foreman came over.

  “Whatta we got?” he asked.

  “We’ve been having some settling problems in the Imperial Research building, and it’s a copy of this building, so we figured we’d get them both straightened out at once,” the Housekeeping rep said.

  “This building’s been here a while, though. How did we never notice?”

  “Oh, we only noticed in the other building because it has all the modern structural sensors in it. Probably same thing going on here, though. It isn’t really a problem unless there’s some kind of strain on the building. You know, heavy weather or someth
ing. But we do want to get it taken care of. We’ll be mounting sensors first, so we can see if we see the same thing over here. We’ll monitor those for a while, and then do the mitigation work.”

  “All right.”

  The dock foreman turned to the construction crew, which was unloading equipment cases, toolboxes, welding equipment, and various other tools and supplies from the box truck.

  “You guys need any help with your stuff?”

  “Nah, we got it,” their foreman answered.

  “OK. Well, let me know if you need anything.”

  “Will do. Thanks.”

  The construction crew moved on into the sub-basement of the building, the center of which was open storage space. Some set up their big gas-welding rigs around the basement for the later work to be done. The others were placing sensors on the exposed concrete columns of the buildings, black suitcase-sized boxes that they strapped to the columns with steel bands and cinched up.

  They worked several days on getting everything set up just right. Once all the ‘sensors’ were in place and turned on, and the welding rigs deployed, the Imperial Marine demolition teams got back into their transporters and left the Imperial Council building.

  Dee sat at her desk in her office in the Imperial Palace. She was almost ready to take Gorecki and Whitmore into custody. A few final things remained. One was the disposition of her computer files in the case of her death. The other was a letter – more correctly, a VR recording – to Bobby. She collected her thoughts, then she shut off the VR recording feed to the Imperial Guard and redirected it to a file in her system account.

  When she was ready to record, she looked up at the two Imperial Guardsmen in the far corners of her office.

  “Guardsmen.”

  They both came to attention.

  “Leave me. I will call you back when I am through.”

  The two Guardsmen nodded to her and left her office through the door to the hall.

  She imagined Bobby sitting across from her, and began talking to him.

  “Dear Bobby:

  “I am setting this recording to be delivered to you in the event of my death. I hope as I record this that you will never see it. That you are seeing it now, though, means I am gone. I am terribly sorry. I did what I did, acted the way I acted, for the good of the Empire. The Throne must prevail....”

  A Hypothetical Question

  “Galbraith?”

  “Yes, Pomeroy. What can I do for you?”

  “I have a hypothetical question for you, Galbraith. One for which, however, I think we should have an answer in hand against direst need.”

  “I’m listening, Pomeroy.”

  “The Empress is very young. She has likely as yet given little thought to naming an heir. My question is simple. Were the Empress to die without naming an heir, who then decides the succession?”

  “It’s never come up.”

  “I understand that. However, if this Empress – or any Empress, really – were to die without naming an heir, what would we do then? Shouldn’t there be a mechanism in place for that most-unwished-for scenario? To resolve the issue in law before it comes up in fact? I would argue that this is not a matter best left to be decided in haste or heat under the circumstances then appertaining, but rather to determine it with all due deliberation in advance.”

  “What would you suggest, Pomeroy?”

  “Have the High Court determine a mechanism. They would, in the pertinent case, be the highest-ranking legal body then available. Why not have them decide the issue now, rather than then?”

  “All right, Pomeroy. I’ll ask Floyd Gaffney about it and see what he says.

  “I can’t ask for more than that. But I do think it’s important.”

  “Floyd Gaffney.”

  “Hi, Floyd. Myron here.”

  “Oh, hi, Myron. What can I do for you today?”

  “I had a question, Floyd. If an Empress were to die without naming an heir, who decides the succession?”

  “I don’t know. It’s never come up.”

  “That was my thought as well. But is there any method under the law to at least figure out who it should be in advance, so it’s a decided issue should we ever get there? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one wants to be deciding at the time.”

  “Why did this come up all of a sudden?”

  “I think there’s just a concern that this Empress is so young, she may not be thinking in terms of a successor yet. She certainly hasn’t sent one to us for approval. But things do go wrong in the darnedest ways from time to time, mostly when you’re not prepared.”

  “She’s been on the throne four years, Myron.”

  “Yes, and there has been a concern from the start, but the longer it goes on without her sending us a successor for approval, the more pointed it becomes.

  “All right, Myron. Fair enough. We’ll take a look at it and get back to you.”

  “Thanks, Floyd.”

  It was the weekly meeting, and all the Imperial High Court justices were present.

  “Good morning, everybody,” Gaffney said. “I got something of a weird request from Lord Galbraith yesterday, and I thought we would kick it around this morning and see what we think about it.

  “His hypothetical question, as he calls it, is this. If an Empress were to die without naming an heir, then how would the succession be determined?”

  “What brings this up now, Floyd?” Maureen Cain asked.

  “My understanding is that they’re concerned that the Empress has still not sent them a successor for approval. They fear she may be suffering from the feeling of immortality common among the young. And he thinks it would be much better to determine this matter now instead of waiting for the event. Have it on record, whether for this Empress or another, were they to die before naming an heir.”

  “First, what are the alternatives?” Guan Ju-Li asked. “There are only a few. One is that the commander of the Imperial Guard picks the heir. Another is that the Imperial High Court picks the heir. And the third is that the Imperial Council picks the heir.”

  “Are those the only alternatives?” Oleg Popov asked.

  “I think so,” Guan said. “What other choices are there? The commander of the Imperial Guard already resolves the succession if the Empress has named an heir, and every other organ of government is subservient to one of the other two. So I think that’s the short list.”

  “I don’t think it should be the High Court,” Rosario Garcia said. “We’re too divorced from the overall administration of government. We only consider the issues that come before us. We are ill-prepared to choose the successor.”

  “I think I agree with that,” Gaffney said. “Were the issue to come up, I’m not sure how we would even begin to consider the matter.”

  “As to the other two, the Empresses have always picked their successors from among their familiars,” Paul Fairweather said. “And the Empresses hold their personal staff very close, in terms of their responsibilities. The commander of the Imperial Guard may be the only person who is well enough versed in palace operations to be able to make an intelligent choice.”

  “But does he have a broad enough view of the government?” Garcia asked. “That’s what I worry about.”

  “You would prefer the Council choose the heir, then?” Fairweather asked

  “In the case of the Empress naming no heir – and that’s the big caveat here – then I think I prefer the Council, yes,” Garcia said.

  “The Guard commander picking the Empress sounds too – praetorian, I guess is the word. Didn’t the Praetorian Guard select a number of the Roman emperors?” Cain asked.

  “Yes, and their choices were among the more unfortunate Emperors under which Rome suffered,” Guan said. “Their interests were too centered on Rome and the palace, and their choices showed it. They were bad for the Roman Empire as a whole. Usually the Roman emperors had a son, or adopted an heir. Those worked out much better.”

  “Which is eff
ectively the system we have here, except the Empress always ‘adopts’ the heir, I guess you could say,” Gaffney said. “So are we closing on a decision?”

  “I think it should be the Council,” Garcia said.

  “I as well,” Guan said.

  “I had forgotten about the Praetorian Guard example. I support the Council making the decision,” Fairweather said.

  Gaffney looked up and down the table, and got nods of assent from everyone present.

  “We’re unanimous? Heavens, I didn’t expect that. Can someone volunteer to write it up? Our advisory decision, that is.”

  “I’ll take it,” Guan said. “It shouldn’t take long. I’ll circulate the draft for comments.

  “All right,” Gaffney said. “On to the next topic, then.”

  “Lord Galbraith here.”

  “Hi, Myron. Floyd Gaffney.”

  “Yes, Floyd. What can I do for you?”

  “We have a decision for you on the succession question you raised the other day. An advisory decision.”

  “So soon?”

  “We came to a unanimous decision fairly quickly. There are limited options, after all.”

  “Yes, of course. So what is your decision, Floyd?”

  “In the specific case where the Empress has not named an heir to the commander of the Imperial Guard, the Imperial Council should choose the successor. We considered the commander of the Guard as well, but we are mindful of how poorly it worked out for Imperial Rome when the Praetorian Guard selected the emperor.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose that’s not unexpected. Are you going to be writing this up?”

  “Oh, yes. It should just be a few days. I’ll get a copy to you when we have it.”

  “All right, Floyd. Thanks so much. It’s not a pleasant prospect to consider, but better than to be caught by surprise, I think.”

  “Agreed, Myron. All right, then. We’ll be talking to you.”

  “Yes, Galbraith?”

  “Floyd Gaffney got back in touch on that succession question, Pomeroy.”

  “What’s their decision?”