Books in the EMPIRE Series
by Richard F. Weyand:
EMPIRE: Reformer
EMPIRE: Usurper
EMPIRE: Tyrant
EMPIRE: Commander
EMPIRE: Warlord
EMPIRE: Conqueror
by Stephanie Osborn:
EMPIRE: Imperial Police
EMPIRE: Imperial Detective
EMPIRE: Imperial Inspector
by Richard F. Weyand:
EMPIRE: Intervention
EMPIRE: Investigation
EMPIRE: Succession
EMPIRE: Renewal
EMPIRE: Resistance
EMPIRE: Resurgence
Books in the Childers Universe
by Richard F. Weyand:
Childers
Childers: Absurd Proposals
Galactic Mail: Revolution
A Charter For The Commonwealth
Campbell: The Problem With Bliss
by Stephanie Osborn:
Campbell: The Sigurdsen Incident
EMPIRE
Renewal
by
RICHARD F. WEYAND
Copyright 2020 by Richard F. Weyand
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-1-7340758-8-5
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Credits
Cover Art: Rotwang Studio
Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk
Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
January 2021
CONTENTS
The Historian
The Emperor
The Historian And The Emperor
The Marine
The Marine And The Emperor
The Historian, The Marine, And The Emperor
The Historian, The Emperor, & Their Secrets
The Historian And The Marine
The Emperor And The Family
The Emperor In Command
The Co-Consul
The Historian And The Doctor
The Businessman
The Wizards And The Schools
The Six Top-Level Groups
The Students And The Sector Governors
The General And The Spies
The Great Hiring
The Switchover
The Investigation
The Department
The Fine Tuning
The Pushback
The Attack
The Counterattack
The Competition
The Military
The Passing Of An Age
The Nanites
The Transition
The Preparations
The Coronation
The Historian
In the tenth year of the reign of the Emperor Augustus V, in the fourth century of the Galactic Era, a boy was born into a lower-income family on the planet Lucerne in the Vandalia Sector of the Galactic Empire. He was a happy baby, the only boy among five children, and the couple’s youngest child.
His great-great-grandfather lived with them. Nampa, as the children called him, was eighty-six years old when James Ardmore was borne. As Ardmore grew, and Nampa got older, the old man would tell Ardmore stories of his youth. The stories he told of the Emperor Augustus I, Augustus the Great, were the ones Ardmore liked best.
“Tell me another one, please,” little Jimmy begged.
“Oh, that’s enough for now, young man. I think your mother is about to announce it’s your bedtime.”
“No. I don’t want to go to bed. I want another story.”
“Now listen, little one. If you don’t go to bed without complaints, your mother will tell me not to tell you stories anymore. Do you want that?”
Ardmore, his eyes wide, shook his head emphatically.
“Then you better go to bed when she says so, and not be trouble, or there’s going to be no more stories.”
The lady of the house, Mary Jane Ardmore, came into the first-floor study that was the old man’s bedroom.
“There you are. Come along, Jimmy. It’s time for bed.”
Ardmore was about to kick up a fuss when the old man’s hand caught him by the shoulder. He looked up at the old man, who winked back at him.
“All right, Mom. I’m coming.”
Mary Jane raised an eyebrow, but didn’t complain about her smallest charge’s unusual acquiescence, and the old man chuckled.
The stories the old man told Ardmore were of the first of the Augustan Emperors, Augustus the Great. Taking the Throne at age thirty-eight, he had ruled the Galactic Empire for fifty-nine years. He had died when the old man was nine years old, in 242 GE. When he died, he departed with tradition. Rather than select a young man as his heir, the best candidate he could find in the Empire’s vast population, he had left the Throne to his son, who became Augustus II. Each Emperor since had done the same, the new Emperor being in his mid-70s at the time of his coronation, each new Emperor ruling for a mere twenty to twenty-five years before dying in his late nineties. The old man had lived through the reigns of them all.
But the stories the boy liked best were the ones that were already history when the old man was born. Of the handsome young Emperors – Trajan the Great, Trajan II, Antoninus, and Augustus the Great – and their beautiful young Empresses, Amanda, Marie, Josephine, and Catherine. The stories of great times and great achievements, when the Emperor reigned supreme and brooked no challenges to Imperial authority.
The young Ardmore looked for materials in his school program about those first four Emperors of the Galactic Empire, but they were curiously missing. Instead there were boring summaries of the later Augustan Emperors, and glowing biographies of the Vandalia Sector Governors, all of whom had been plutocrats or their puppets.
Where had the early history of the Empire gone? Who had hidden it, and why?
When Jimmy Ardmore was twelve, his grandfather finally died at ninety-eight years old. His children had already passed on, in their seventies. When Ardmore asked the old man, toward the end, how he had lived so long, the old man told him something that outraged the child. During the reign of Augustus the Great, everyone in the Empire got the same nanites, nanites which protected them from all the major diseases and frailties of the human condition, and allowed humans to live out their full lifespan. The generations since did not, because those nanites were expensive, more expensive than the lesser nanites the current Empire would subsidize. The wealthy and the favored, however, got the expensive ones. So the old man had outlived his own children, dead in their seventies of diseases and frailties mankind had cured long ago.
Thus, at the age of twelve, Ardmore’s path was set. He would find out what had happened to the Empire. How it had fallen from its early promise. He studied everything on Imperial history he could find. It would be his life’s work.
He excelled in his studies, driven by his quest. He won a sector scholarship to the Imperial University of Vandalia for his undergraduate degree in history, and, at the age of twenty-one, was accepted for the doctorate in history at the Imperial University of Center.
At IUC, as a doctoral candidate in history, he had access to the complete archives of the history department.
He had hit the mother lode.
James Philip Ardmore, age twenty-five, was not an impressive physical specimen. Six inches shorter than median height, he was also six inches wider at the shoulders than median width. He was built like a fireplug, and was, from a lack of physical activity in his years of intense study, overweight. His complexion was very white – one might say pasty, or doughy – and his eyes were unexceptional unless talking about his subject, when they came alive. His hair was dirty blond, and, given the scholar’s rudimentary efforts at personal hygiene, the ‘dirty’ applied
more than it might otherwise. He was simply too driven to begrudge any more time to what someone else might consider a necessity.
He nevertheless had friends in the history department, and he was complaining to one of them over dinner in the cafeteria of the graduate-student section of the massive residence tower in downtown Imperial City.
“Bob, I can’t get approval for my doctoral thesis. I’ve tried half a dozen different formulations of the topic, and none of them were approved.”
“Sounds simple to me, Jimmy,” Bob Fullman said. “Pick something else.”
“But this is what I’ve spent my life working on. Can I just walk away from it? I don’t think so. It’s important.”
“Nobody said walk away, Jimmy. Do the doctoral thesis on something less, well, controversial, I guess.”
“But what about all my research, Bob? I have a ton of material. It was all I could do to try to condense it down into a manageable-length thesis paper.”
“So don’t condense it. Write the doctoral thesis on something else – something trivial, like most of them – then write a book. You can go long-format, and really lay out your entire discussion, without any compromises at all.”
Ardmore’s eyes widened, then narrowed.
“Yeah, that would work. But once I submit the thesis and get my doctorate, what do I do to support myself while I write the book? If I’m working, I won’t have the time to write it.”
“How long do you have left to submit your thesis paper? When’s your doctoral deadline?”
“A bit over three years.”
“So write the book now. Take three years on it. Knock off the thesis at the end and submit it. You’ve got three whole years of subsidy yet, why waste it?”
“Damn! That would work. Thanks, Bob. I couldn’t figure my way around this one.”
“You’re just too locked into your topic to have seen it, Jimmy. That’s a good thing, but it made you blind to the possibilities.”
So Ardmore set to work on a book-length presentation of what he had found out about the early Empire. How the early Emperors made it work, and what had changed since. What the Empire had been, and what it was now. He had thousands of sources, hundreds of points to make. The work grew, from one volume to two, then finally three. It took every bit of three years to capture all he had discovered in his years of study.
In his last two months, he worked up his doctoral thesis, submitted, and defended it. He received his PhD and added the initials to his byline on his three-volume magnum opus, ‘Power & Restraint: An In-Depth Retrospective On The Four Good Emperors.’
Ardmore didn’t seek a publisher per se. He sent it in to the self-publishing arm of the Imperial education system.
Imperial censors rejected it.
Then he got a summons from the Emperor Augustus VI.
The Emperor
Jonathan Drake – His Majesty the Emperor Augustus VI – was approaching ninety years old. He had risen to the Throne on the death of his father fourteen years before. He was the sixth in his line, the great-great-great-grandson of the Emperor Augustus I, Augustus the Great.
Drake sighed. Neither he nor any of his other forebears would be called ‘the Great,’ he knew. They just didn’t seem to have it in them. It saddened him a great deal. Not for himself so much. He had been the pampered great-great-grandson of the Emperor, then great-grandson, then grandson, then son, now Emperor. Pampered all the way along, actually.
He probably had a few years left, and he wasn’t sure what to do with them. For fourteen years, Drake had tried to stem the tide, and it wasn’t working. He wanted the best for the Empire – he truly did – but didn’t know how to bring it about. The two and a half quadrillion people currently composing humanity deserved his best, it seemed to him, if he could figure out what he could do to break what even he had to admit was a cycle of decline.
These issues weighed heavily on Drake as he approached his ninetieth birthday. But there was no solution in sight.
When a solution did present itself, he almost missed it.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” Edward Moody said.
“Good morning, Mr. Moody. Be seated,” Drake said to his Personal Secretary. “Ready with this morning’s items?”
“Yes, Sire. The first item is something I think you might have an interest in. You’ve mentioned your interest in reforms of some sort. We’ve talked about the possibilities over the years. I set a number of keyword filters on my information stream a while back. Well, something came across my desk that triggered a bunch of those keywords. Most of them in fact. It’s a book.”
“What sort of book, Mr. Moody?”
“A history book, Sire. The censors have halted publishing on it under the rules against criticizing the Throne, and that notice was in my stream. I read the Introduction, and it may be something you have an interest in.”
“What is it called, Mr. Moody?”
“’Power & Restraint: An In-Depth Retrospective On The Four Good Emperors.’ You see, Sire, by its title alone it could be considered a criticism of the Throne currently. But the introduction goes into much more detail. The book itself is in three volumes.”
“Heavens. A wordy sort, Mr. Moody.”
“Yes, Sire. The author just received his doctorate in history from the Imperial University of Center. He’s actually here in Imperial City.”
“Very well, Mr. Moody. Push me the book. I’ll take a look at it.”
“Yes, Sire. Moving on to other items....”
When Moody left, Drake, curious, opened the history book in VR and started out by reading the Introduction. He was completely sucked in. Here was the analysis he’d been looking for. What those early Emperors had done that had maintained the Empire at its high water mark for two hundred and forty years, before the last century of decline. The author was careful not to imply cause and effect to specific policies, but laid out the differences between their policies and subsequent policies with brutal clarity.
Much of this, despite a top-shelf education, were things Drake didn’t know. Some things he was shocked by. He spot-checked those, following footnotes to the citations and looking up the citations himself. Everything he checked was confirmed by contemporaneous primary sources. If anything, the author hedged his bets, refusing to overstate anything. He didn’t need to. The truth was amazing enough.
Drake checked the author’s bio, and searched him in Imperial sources. Not very prepossessing, surely. His academic achievement was very solid, however. Superlative, even. He had had an interest in the history of the early Empire from a young age.
Drake read, fascinated, through the day and late into the evening, even through dinner. The Empress had predeceased him a few years back, so there was no one to chide him for his inattention.
“Good morning, Your Majesty.”
“Good morning, Mr. Moody. Be seated.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Mr. Moody, I’ve been reading that book you sent me with much interest. I would like to meet with the author. He’s in Imperial City, you say?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Very well. Set up a meeting for tomorrow morning, Mr. Moody. Say ten o’clock. And make it a paid consultation. Be generous. He’s just coming off being a starving grad student and isn’t employed yet. Half up front.”
Moody raised his eyebrows but registered no dissent.
“Yes, Sire.”
“On to your other items then, Mr. Moody.”
“Yes, Sire.”
Ardmore looked at the mail message again.
To: James Philip Ardmore, PhD
From: Edward Moody, Personal Secretary to HM
Subject: Consultation Request
His Majesty the Emperor Augustus VI wishes to consult with you on the topics of your recent book. This is a paid consultation, for IC20,000, half in advance.
If acceptable, present yourself at any Imperial Palace entrance by 9:30 AM tomorrow.
Please advise either acceptance or any d
ifficulty in complying.
It had to be a fraud. Ardmore clicked on the From: address, and it was crypto-signed by the Emperor’s Personal Secretary, just like it said. He sent a hasty reply accepting the appointment, and ten thousand credits appeared in his bank account within half an hour. Then he called his friend Bob Fullman.
“Hi, Jimmy, what’s up?”
“Bob, the Emperor wants to see me about my book.”
“Say what?”
“That’s what I said. The Emperor wants to see me about my book.”
“You getting arrested, Jimmy?”
“I don’t think so, Bob. It’s a paid consultation. Twenty thousand credits. Half up front. I accepted and ten thousand credits just showed up in my bank account.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. And it’s tomorrow morning. Bob, what do I do now? I don’t even own a suit.”
“What are you doing for the rest of today?”
“Nothing.”
“OK, Jimmy. Meet me for lunch in the cafeteria, then we’re going out.”
“Where?”
“To a place I know.”
They were in the arcade in Imperial Park West, not far from the palace entrance, when Fullman steered Ardmore toward a storefront.
“Salon for Men? Is this where you go, Bob?”
Ardmore could believe it. Fullman was his opposite in personal maintenance.
“No. I can’t afford it. But you can.”
They went in, and the manager directed his query to the well-groomed Fullman.
“Yes, sir. May I help you?”
“Yes. My friend Mr. Ardmore here needs a full workup. Bath, hair, complexion, manicure, clothes, everything.”
The manager looked critically up and down the disheveled Ardmore, who tried not to squirm.
“Think of it as a challenge,” Fullman said.
The manager turned back to Fullman.
EMPIRE: Renewal Page 1
