The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  “You’re scaring me, boss.” Laughter came from along the lines of desks.

  “You could use a good scare, Hetto. Back to work, all of you.”

  The operators hushed immediately—and Hetto smiled and turned back to his terminal. Over two decades she’d watched his youthful brashness turn into jaded irascibility, but he still relished getting a rise out of her.

  Zaluna had never expected to command a room of any kind. The diminutive Sullustans—at just over a meter and a half, Zaluna was taller than most—were one of the least threatening peoples on Gorse, a world where folks did a lot of threatening. Long before she had been promoted to her superior position, Hetto had taken to walking her to and from her tough neighborhood. She appreciated the gesture, but in fact she faced danger gamely. Theft on Gorse was a constant, like the groundquakes that rocked the world. You might get knocked down now and again, but you simply had to get back up.

  It had started before the Empire, under the Republic: The Mynocks had been tasked with screening electronic communications and certain monitored public places for “conversations suspected to pose a threat to the lives of Republic citizens.” As the Clone Wars had dragged on, “the lives of Republic citizens” had evolved into “Republic security”—and under the Empire, that phrase had morphed into “public order.”

  No matter, Zaluna had thought. They’re just words. She’d never had a problem with listening to those of others for a good cause. The mining business attracted a lot of rowdies, yes, but worse things grew in darkness. It was smart for law enforcement authorities to use the latest tools to keep tabs on miscreants.

  And there was no shortage of things to listen for. During the Clone Wars, the Separatists had hatched many plots against the Republic; watching out for them was just common sense. Even the Republic’s supposed defenders, the Jedi, had turned traitors—if you believed the Emperor’s account. She wasn’t sure she did, but she was fairly certain that if there was a plot, then someone like Zaluna had probably first flagged it.

  Privacy? In her younger days, Zaluna had found it a silly concept. Either thoughts were in your head, or you let them out. The only distinction between a whisper and an intergalactic broadcast was technical. A listener with the means to hear had the absolute right to do so. Really, the obligation to do so—else the act of communicating was a futile one. Zaluna didn’t speak her mind nearly as often as Hetto, but when she had something to say, she definitely wanted people to listen.

  But times had changed. Under the Empire, words had become causes with greater effects. People she’d monitored had disappeared, although she’d never found out why. And the job had ceased to be as much fun.

  Skelly’s frozen image lingered there before her, his mouth stuck open mid-rant. It seemed a perfect pose—and she knew she’d see it again. Because Skelly, she knew, was red-stamped. Records digitally stamped with a red star indicated visits from Gorse’s mental health authority.

  “He gets any more stars, he can open up his own galaxy,” she said. She took a deep breath, relieved. Red-stamped people tended to stay in the medical system, rarely escalating to anything else. They were freer with words than most, rarely intending action. And Skelly had been fun to listen to in the past, at least. She unpaused the feed. “That’s that, then. I’ll close out the—”

  “Incoming message,” Hetto said, speaking abruptly. “The official channel.”

  That doesn’t happen every day, she thought. “Put it through!”

  A macabre form appeared holographically in the space before the brown-clad supervisor. His mechanical voice spoke precisely and clearly. “This is Count Vidian of the Galactic Empire, speaking to all surveillance stations under my authority. I am launching inspections of mining operations both on Cynda and at the processors on Gorse. All such locations are now under Security Condition One. No exceptions.”

  Zaluna gawked at the life-sized figure. “Excuse me. All the mining operations? Are you aware how many—”

  Count Vidian did not wait to hear her finish. The transmission ended.

  Hetto spoke first, as always. “What the hell?”

  “Yeah,” Zaluna said, under her breath. Then she let out a whistle. The mining trade employed tens of thousands of people.

  “Is he serious? Does he even know what he’s asking for?” Hetto threw up his hands. “Maybe we need to get a red stamp for that guy’s file. I swear, some of these Impies must be out of their minds! That, or—”

  “Hetto!” Zaluna snapped.

  Except for the low murmur of audio feeds coming from the monitors, the room fell silent. More quietly this time, she said, “We do what we’re told.”

  Zaluna traced her jowls with her fingertips as she tried to remember the last time Sec-Con One had been invoked. It hadn’t happened since the Emperor first drafted Transcept into Imperial service to deal with the Jedi crisis. It meant escalating every case under watch to the highest level—and Zaluna had a sense of what that meant.

  It was nothing good.

  Her eyes had returned to the live feed of Skelly on Cynda, the connection she had been about to close without action. “Bump him up, Hetto.”

  “But he’s a red-stamp.”

  “Which counts for nothing today.” The supervisor straightened. “Whatever his condition, Master Skelly’s mouth is going to earn him some time with our friends in white.”

  And good luck to him then, she thought.

  “COUNT VIDIAN, THIS IS AN HONOR,” gushed the tall cape-clad Neimoidian waiting at the bottom of the Imperial shuttle’s landing ramp. Despite the short notice, every firm working the moon had sent someone to the party meeting Cudgel, and the director’s big red eyes practically beamed with pride. “The Cyndan Mining Guild welcomes you,” he said, a wide, thick-lipped smile on his noseless green face. “I’m Director Palfa. We’ve all heard so much about—”

  “Spare me,” Vidian snapped, and half the listeners on the cavern floor took a step back, unnerved. “I have a schedule—and so do you. When you bother to keep it!”

  The director’s throat went dry. “O-of course.” The others averted their eyes, afraid to stare at the cyborg.

  Good, Vidian thought.

  In the waning days of the Republic, Vidian’s management texts had become pop-culture hits despite—no, because of—his reluctance to appear on the business HoloNets. He wasn’t shy or ashamed of his appearance; he just didn’t like wasting his time. But while the mystique added to his public reputation, in person his physical presence was a large part of his managerial success.

  The turnaround expert, he had written, is a germ invading the body corporate. It will be opposed. Whenever someone sought to make over an organization, entrenched bureaucrats always tried to intimidate him. But two could play that game, and Vidian had been winning for fifteen years.

  The legend of Denetrius Vidian had started five years before that, on what doctors expected would be his deathbed. But he’d survived, spending his bedridden time turning his meager bank balance into a fortune through electronic trading. In time, he purchased expensive, high-tech prosthetics, crafted to his own specifications. He did not look like other humans, but then humanity had abandoned him first, leaving him to rot in that hospice.

  So Vidian had optimized his physical features in keeping with his now-famous trinity of management philosophies: “Keep moving! Destroy barriers! See everything!” Simple rules, which he diligently applied at every opportunity.

  Including now, as the coterie made for the elevators. “The tour you ordered will cover some distance,” the director said. “Would your lordship like to rest first?”

  “No,” Vidian said, marching so quickly the others had trouble keeping up. He moved faster now than he ever had in his youth; physical age no longer mattered. Some joked that Vidian was half droid, but he knew the comparison was inapt. Droids shut down. Vidian had spent too many years lying around already. So he had compounded his successes by working 90 percent of every day. “Keep moving: With an
able body, the mind can achieve anything!”

  Leading Vidian from the elevator onto a lower floor, the director paused in his blather about Cynda’s wonders. “I’m sorry,” he said, presenting his comlink. “Would you like to call your vessel to report your arrival?”

  “I just did, while you were prattling in the elevator,” Vidian said.

  Palfa seemed puzzled. He hadn’t seen or heard Vidian do anything. The count had installed a variety of comlink receivers into his earpieces; by routing his artificial voice through them, he regularly placed calls without ever appearing to open his mouth. Vidian hated getting information from intermediaries, who often distorted things for their own reasons; his communication capabilities were just one more way of cutting out the middle. “Destroy barriers: Get information directly, whenever possible!”

  “This chamber leads to one of our mining levels,” the director said, gesturing to the workers hurrying around. “What you’re seeing is a typical day here—”

  “A lie,” Vidian said, continuing to walk. “I’m reading the live feed from your reports as I speak. You’ve doubled your pace, but will return to mediocrity when the Empire turns its eyes away. Be assured: I will see it does not.”

  A rumble came from the group of mining company representatives around them. But there was no point in their arguing. With a vocal command that made no external sound, Vidian cleared the daily production reports from his visual receptors.

  Years earlier, he’d realized how leaders, from floor managers to chief executives, were often blind to the basic circumstances around them. Vidian didn’t want to miss a detail. His optical implants not only gave him exceptional eyesight, but also eliminated the need for vid monitors by projecting external data feeds onto his own retinas. See everything: He who has the data has the upper hand!

  Vidian looked back at the group of worried mining officials. Many were out of breath from trying to keep up with him, including a Besalisk woman. There were several of the multi-armed humanoids working at Calcoraan Depot, his administrative hub: members of a reasonably industrious but otherwise unremarkable species. Before he gave her a second thought, freight elevators opened on either side of the chamber. Stormtroopers rushed from the cars.

  Right on time. Vidian pivoted and pointed to five different corridors leading from the chamber. Without a word in response, the squads split up and headed into the tunnels.

  Director Palfa was startled. “What’s going on?”

  “No more than I said.” Vidian’s tone was as casual as his meaning was ominous. “You are managers. We’re helping you manage.”

  —

  Hera wasn’t about to bring her ship into the Cyndan mining complex for an unauthorized landing. Joining the convoy, however, had gotten her close, and once out of sight of the Star Destroyer, she’d parked in orbit. Her ship’s small excursion vessel had taken her the rest of the way to a little maintenance outbuilding on the surface.

  She’d studied just enough about the mining trade to know what to pretend to be: a maintenance tech for bulk-loader droids. The rest she’d thought up on the spot.

  “This is the wrong entrance,” the guy inside the airlock had said.

  “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. It’s my first day, and I’m late!”

  “And where’s your badge?”

  “I forgot. Can you believe it? My first day!”

  The man had believed it, letting her pass with a smile that said he hoped she’d keep making wrong turns in the future. People of several different species found Hera appealing to look at, and she was happy to put that to use for a good cause.

  But as she walked carefully through the mining complex, she increasingly realized how difficult that cause had become. Gorse and Cynda produced a strategic material for the Empire, yes, but they were well away from the galactic center. And yet Hera spied one surveillance cam after another—including several that the workers clearly weren’t intended to see. If Coruscant-level security had made it out to the Rim worlds, that would make any action against the Empire all the more difficult.

  Another good reason to visit my friend on Gorse after this, she thought, darting lithely beneath the viewing arc of another secret cam. A rendezvous with any mystery informant was dangerous; she’d learned that quickly enough in her short career as an activist. But her contact had proven knowledge of Imperial surveillance capabilities, and she’d need that to get to the important stuff, later on.

  Finding out more about Count Vidian’s methods, though, she’d have to do through old-fashioned skulking. He was on Cynda now, she knew: She’d seen him once already from afar, passing through the caverns with a tour group. It was tough to get closer. The transparent crystal columns were pretty to look at but lousy cover.

  Darting through an isolated side passage, she thought she’d found a shortcut to get ahead of him. Instead, she found something else.

  “Halt!” A stormtrooper appeared at the end of the corridor, his blaster raised.

  Hera stopped in her tracks. “I’m sorry,” she said, putting her hand to her chest and exhaling. “You scared me!”

  “Who are you?”

  “I work here,” she said, approaching as if nothing was wrong. “I may be in the wrong place. It’s my first day.” She smiled.

  “Where’s your badge?”

  “I forgot.” Dark eyes looked down demurely, then back up. “Can you believe it? My first day!”

  The stormtrooper studied her for a moment—and then saw the blaster she was wearing. She moved before he did, delivering a high kick that knocked the blaster from the startled stormtrooper’s hands. Seeing his weapon clatter away, he lunged for it. She easily sidestepped him—and pivoted, leaping onto the armored man’s back. Losing purchase on the crystalline floor, he stumbled, her full weight driving his head into the side wall. His helmet cracked loudly against the surface, and he slumped motionless to the ground.

  “Sorry,” Hera whispered over the fallen trooper’s shoulder. “Charm doesn’t work on everyone.”

  “HURRY UP! HURRY UP!”

  Skelly looked back in annoyance as Tarlor Choh rushed about the cavern, egging workers on. A tall light-skinned fellow, Tarlor was Dalborg Mining’s imbecile for Zone Thirty-Nine—not to be confused with all the other imbeciles managing their firm’s efforts in this underground pocket. There were official imbeciles in all the other zones, too, Skelly knew—and not one of them had a whit of sense.

  All were currently in a tizzy. For hours, arriving workers had reported the Empire spurring them along, even circulating a tale of the Star Destroyer blowing up a freighter captain for slacking. Now word had come through Tarlor that the Emperor’s top efficiency expert, Count Vidian, would be inspecting.

  Skelly saw it as deliverance. The top government inspector—coming right to him? Well, not to him, of course, but this was close enough. And better still, it was Denetrius Vidian. A business mogul under the Republic, true, but perhaps the only one Skelly respected. Vidian fed on blundering corporations, profiting from fixing their mistakes. Vidian’s famous treatise, Forget the Old Way, was the only business holo Skelly owned.

  If Skelly could get his research to Vidian, the Empire would understand—and it surely had the power to stop what the mining companies were doing.

  Tarlor loomed over him. “Skelly, get those charges set!”

  Skelly simply sighed, then returned his attention to the crystal column he was kneeling beside. Having prepared a suspension of baradium bisulfate in putty, he began caking a ring of the pasty substance all around the stalagmite’s base.

  It was slow, painstaking work—and hard to do neatly when he was irritated at the universe and everyone in it. Kanan, of course: Skelly’s mouth still hurt from the man’s punch. Who did he think he was? Tarlor plagued him, too—along with all his managerial kind, especially since Dalborg had recently busted him down from explosives supervisor to lowly demolitions placement tech.

  And most of all, he hated his right hand, for being useless a
nd forcing him to do the finely detailed work with his left. He could just bear to look at the fake hand now; it had been curled into a claw most of the time since that terrible day back in the Clone Wars.

  The Clone Wars were yet another thing to be upset about. Everything about that conflict had been a lie. The Separatists had been this big enemy, and yet when the Empire was declared they’d melted away as if at the push of a button. The big corporations had staged the whole thing, Skelly was sure. Wars sold more ships, more weapons, and more medical devices. And in the Clone Wars, even the soldiers on both sides were manufactured goods.

  The Republic and the Confederacy had been partners in the same corrupt game. The Empire was probably just another iteration of all that, to Skelly’s thinking; no more or less immoral. To corporate oligarchs, political allegiances were just another change of clothes. This decade, central rule was in fashion. Something else would come along soon. The beast had to be fed, with lives and limbs on the battlefield and with the sweat and blood of the workers.

  The problem was that blowing things up was the only thing Skelly had ever been taught to do.

  He didn’t fault himself for that. He was the product of a system that built only to destroy, as he saw it. He’d learned from the best—and learned well. Everything always came down to that simple list, taught to him during his first day in military demolitions: Pair your ordnance with your initiator. Ignition leads to reaction leads to detonation. Whether applied to compounds of baradium or its tremendously more powerful isotope, baradium-357, those steps referred to a series of complex reactions that had the same simple result.

  Now forty, Skelly thought that list also applied to life. You started with a festering problem. Someone initiated a change. The system reacted to that pressure. And then, bang, you had your solution. It had always been his method. He’d been the one to initiate changes, whenever possible, starting back on the battlefield. It was why he’d volunteered for everything. Whenever battlements were too dangerous to storm, Skelly risked his life to burrow beneath, planting the explosives that made the decisive opening. He did that and more.