EMPIRE: Renewal

by Richard F. Weyand

  It turned out the head of the Stauss family also knew about Section Six. Many Section Six operatives were provided cover identities and employment within Stauss Interstellar companies, with the direct intervention of the legendary Otto Stauss, then his sons, grandsons, and so on. It was a legacy passed down within the family.

  More to the point, the Stauss family had also kept the Section Six secret. It had not leaked in three hundred years, but that also meant they had not leaked it.

  So where was the Stauss family now?

  Ardmore tried simply searching Stauss among business listings. Nothing.

  OK, let’s try it from the other end. Look up Stauss Interstellar, and see where the company went from the other end. Ardmore knew Otto Stauss was the founder of the corporate titan. He left it to Dieter, who left it to Bernd, who left it to Karl. It went on for generations.

  Ardmore kept following the probate records. At one point, the sole Stauss heir was female, and she had taken her husband’s last name, Becker. Stauss Interstellar eventually was renamed as well. Or rather, it was reorganized, into Galactic Holdings. That was still around. Unlike Stauss Interstellar, which had been privately held, Galactic Holdings was a publicly traded company. A really big one.

  Who held most of the shares of Galactic Holdings?

  The Becker family.

  OK, so far, so good. Who was the scion of the Becker family? The leader, if you will? It looked like it was Franz Becker.

  Ardmore looked up everything he could on Franz Becker. He found interviews, pictures, videos. He looked through them, even sampling on the videos, letting the computer find one frame of each video sequence.

  It was so fleeting, such a small detail, he almost missed it. He ran that video sequence. It was a recording of Franz Becker answering a question from an interviewer. He was sitting behind the desk in his office. On the wall of the office behind him, off to one side in a display of pictures and memorabilia, there was a framed image of a gold laurel wreath. Ardmore zoomed in on it. It was a box frame, which had a gap between the front glass and the back surface. Hanging on a ribbon in that box frame was a medal representing a gold laurel wreath.

  It looked like the gold laurel wreath of the Throne and the Wreath, the symbol of the Sintaran Empire during the first part of the reign of Trajan the Great.

  Ardmore captured that image and ran a search on it. He added the terms medal or award. There it was. The Gratitude of the Throne, a rare award given only by the Emperor himself, for service to the Throne.

  How many of those existed? Over the centuries of the Sintaran Empire and the Galactic Empire, only a few hundred had been given out. None had been given out since the Four Good Emperors. Paul Gulliver received one, Ann Turley received one, Daniel Parnell received one, Jared Denny – Trajan’s tech wizard – received one. And Otto Stauss received one. No other had gone to anyone in the Stauss or Becker family.

  Ardmore went back to the video and looked at the award again, close up. The award still looked fresh and new, but it was gold and would not tarnish. The ribbon, though, was faded by ultraviolet light, and the wood of the box frame had darkened with age. Looking at it, Ardmore could well believe it was over three hundred years old.

  “Jonah, I need you to do me a favor,” Ardmore said at breakfast the next morning. As they all lived in the Imperial Residence now, Ardmore, Burke, and Drake took all their meals together.

  “Of course, Jimmy. What do you need?”

  “I think I found our business contact, Jonah, but only you can contact him.”

  “Why is that, Jimmy?”

  “Another mystery about Section Six is how they got operatives out all over the Empire without ever being suspected. Some guy comes onto the planet, sets up shop, and starts nosing around. He’s going to get made in seconds, right?”

  “Right, Jimmy,” Burke said.

  Drake nodded.

  “Well, I tripped over the answer. We know the names Turley and Gulliver and Ashton and the like come up again and again in reference to Section Six. But I was also getting a bunch of German-root given names. I couldn’t make heads or tails of them. So I searched on all of them at once, and filtered for prominence. And I came up with a family name to go with them. Stauss.”

  “The fellow you said was Trajan the Great’s ally in the business community,” Drake said.

  “Yes, but it was more than that, Jonah. It was Stauss Interstellar, Otto Stauss’s company, that provided the cover for those operatives. They were the new salesman for this Stauss company, or the new local manager for that Stauss company. They come on planet and start making contacts and it’s no big deal. That’s what business people do.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Burke said.

  “Yes, and Otto Stauss, then his son, his grandson, and so on, placed thousands of operatives, all over the Empire and beyond, because Stauss Interstellar was so big, it had offices or representatives in every niche and cranny of human space.”

  “So they knew about Section Six,” Drake said.

  “Yes, but they never leaked it. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it, Jimmy?” Burke asked.

  “Exactly. It never leaked, but they knew, so they never leaked it, either. Even after it went defunct.”

  “All right, Jimmy, so where are they now?”

  “Stauss’s fortune was handed down, eventually to a female heir. She took her husband’s surname, Becker.”

  “She took her husband’s surname, Jimmy?”

  “The people in Baden Sector often do, Gail. And the company got reorganized and renamed along the line, too. It’s now Galactic Holdings.”

  “That’s a really big outfit, Jimmy.”

  “The biggest, Jonah. And the Becker family still controls it. With me so far?”

  Burke and Drake nodded.

  “The head of the family is Franz Becker. I found a video snippet of him in his office. Look at this.”

  Ardmore pushed the frame to them, with an inset showing the box frame with the award much larger than it appeared in the picture.

  “That frame looks centuries old. The ribbon is faded. But that medal is called the Gratitude of the Throne. There were only ever a few hundred given out, by the Emperor himself, through the period of the Four Good Emperors. Otto Stauss received the Gratitude of the Throne in 10 GE, three hundred and thirty-six years ago. No one else in the Stauss or Becker families ever did.”

  “And Franz Becker still has it hanging on his office wall.”

  “Yes, Jonah. Handed down from generation to generation for three hundred years. So I need you to call him.”

  “What do you want me to say, Jimmy?”

  “Tell him we’re starting up Section Six again and see what he says.”

  “Oh! Because if one of us calls him, he’ll ask us what we’re talking about,” Burke said.

  “Exactly. They haven’t leaked the secret for over three hundred years. The question is, Did they hand down the knowledge of Section Six with the medal?”

  Drake nodded.

  “Makes sense, Jimmy. When should I call him?”

  “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon in Heidelberg right now, Jonah. Why not now?”

  “All right. You have his mail address for me, I assume?”

  “Yes.”

  Ardmore pushed it to him.

  “Channel 20 or 22, do you think, Jimmy?”

  “Channel 22, Jonah. The office.”

  “All right, let me send him a meeting invitation and see what happens.”

  Drake went into VR for a moment, and then was back.

  “If he accepts my invitation, I’ll leave the management channel open so you can observe, but not be seen. Here’s the code for this meeting.”

  Drake sent them both the code for the management channel.

  “Oh. There’s his answer. He’s accepted the meeting for right now, so off we go.”

  Drake entered the channel, a simulation of his office in the Imperial Palace, four floors below the dining
room of the Imperial Residence where they sat. Burke and Ardmore both entered the management channel, where they could observe the meeting without being seen by the participants.

  When Drake appeared behind his desk, a man in an expensive and well-tailored business suit was standing before one of the guest chairs. He was in his mid-sixties.

  “Your Majesty,” Becker said and bowed his head.

  “Be seated, Mr. Becker.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “I wanted to get in touch with you, Mr. Becker, to tell you we’re starting up Section Six again.”

  Becker nodded.

  “We had begun to wonder whether you would ever call, Sire. The last four generations. It’s been a long time.”

  “I understand, Mr. Becker. My four immediate predecessors were not up to the prior Imperial standard, shall we say. I am remedying the issue. In particular, the next Emperor will not be my son, who would then be in his seventies. I am going back to the pattern of the Four Good Emperors, beginning with Trajan the Great, and hand-selecting my Heir from the population at large.”

  “Indeed, Sire.”

  “Yes, Mr. Becker. That is confidential information, which I know I can trust you with. In terms of predicting the environment in which your businesses operate, though, I might recommend to you a book just published by my Court Historian, Dr. James Ardmore, called ‘Power & Restraint: An In-Depth Retrospective On The Four Good Emperors.’ If you read that, I think it will give you a very good idea of what the Throne is up to now.”

  “I will make a point of it. Thank you, Sire.”

  Drake nodded.

  “Back to the subject of my call, Mr. Becker. As I say, we are restarting Section Six, an Imperial asset which my immediate predecessors foolishly let slip away. It will now be called the Department. I will have the newly appointed head of this organization get in touch with you. I don’t know what alias or name he will be using. Is there a code word or phrase he might use in his initial communication with you as an identification of sorts?”

  “How about Phoenix, Your Majesty?”

  “Splendid, Mr. Becker. Phoenix it is. And let me take this opportunity to thank you, Mr. Becker, for your family’s longstanding loyalty to the Throne. Your family has served the Throne more honorably in many ways than my own.”

  “Thank you, Sire. I am honored.”

  Drake nodded.

  “That is all for now, Mr. Becker. Good day.”

  Becker bowed his head to the Emperor, who cut the channel.

  When Ardmore, Burke, and Drake dropped out of VR, they were back at the breakfast table in the Imperial dining room.

  “That was unbelievable,” Burke said. “’We were wondering when you’d call.’ Amazing.”

  “The Stauss family did a better job preserving the legacy of the Four Good Emperors than the Drake family did,” Drake said. “I’m embarrassed by that.”

  Ardmore nodded.

  “It was the family secret all these years, Jonah. There are precedents in history, where some noble family kept their own traditions alive during a string of bad rulers, then resurfaced later. Rome. China. England. So I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “Be that as it may, we’ve reestablished the connection between the Throne and the Stauss family. Good work, Jimmy. That will be a huge benefit to Mr. Pitney as he goes forward. I’ll let him know.”

  “So what’s next, Jimmy?” Burke asked.

  “The technical wizard. I’m starting to work on that. Hopefully I’ll make some progress there today.”

  Drake nodded.

  “All right, you two. I’m off to the office. Mr. Diener has some candidates for the six top-level groups he wants to discuss this morning.”

  After dropping out of his VR meeting with the Emperor, Franz Becker set an alarm on his inbound message queue to the word ‘Phoenix,’ then downloaded Dr. Ardmore’s book. He canceled the rest of his day’s appointments and started reading.

  Once he had finished the Introduction, he sent a copy to his son Kurt, with the notation ‘Highly Recommended. Ardmore is the Emperor’s Court Historian. I’m reading it now.’

  One thing sure. If this was the Emperor’s plan, it meant disruption of the current order was coming, and on a major scale. And there was one thing Franz Becker knew, just as his nth-great grandfather Otto Stauss had known:

  Disruption meant opportunity for the prepared.

  By this time, Thomas Pitney had read Ardmore’s book. He had also read all the Section Six materials Ardmore had turned up in the Emperor’s files, the personal files archive of the last twenty rulers in Imperial City.

  Now Ardmore was an historian, and a good one, but he was not an investigator. Ardmore knew how to dig through archives, how to follow bunny trails through the data, how to unearth the buried fragments of the past. What he didn’t know as well, however, was how to dig up things intentionally hidden, things which had been obscured by design. Pitney did, and he now had access to Imperial records most people only dreamed of.

  Pitney didn’t have access to the Emperor’s personal files, but Ardmore had done that work for him. He did have complete access to Imperial records, though. The sort of records anyone else would have to ask permission to see, assuming they knew they existed. Pitney searched and cross-referenced and tracked down unusual terms and data strings, and he found the most astounding thing.

  He found an Easter egg.

  In computer terms, an Easter egg is a hidden piece of data of some sort, planted there as a thing to be found if one was good enough. Pitney was good enough. He found a snippet of semi-random data here, a snippet there, a snippet the other place, that didn’t have any obvious relationship to the data structures they were buried in. They were buried in the Imperial Marines personnel record of Ann Turley, the Imperial Police personnel record of Nick Ashton, and the Imperial archives biography of Morena Prieto, Paul Gulliver’s analog in the Verano uprising that mirrored the Julian uprising, back in 53 GE.

  Looking at the three strings, they looked like they were encrypted. But where was the key? Or maybe one of them was the key, and the other two were the encrypted data when assembled in one order or the other. Or two were the key, when assembled in one order or the other, and the third was the encrypted data. Well, there were only so many combinations, and he tried them all. One of the combinations worked, and decrypted to a pointer, which itself included an encrypted key. He clicked on the pointer and gaped at the result.

  He had found the private personal archives of the heads of Section Six.

  The only thing Pitney could figure is that, as Section Six was defunded and disbanded by the Emperor Augustus II, as it was winding down, the then-head of Section Six decided to store the archives in a way that, with a determined search, they could be found. And they had lain there in a firewalled section of the Imperial archives, unnoticed and unavailable, for over a hundred years.

  Pitney found assignment messages, operative identities, operative reports, recordings of virtual meetings, avatars, VR simulations – billions of records, accumulated over more than two hundred and forty years of covert operations.

  There was one thing he needed right now, though.

  An avatar.

  Franz Becker was in his second day of reading Ardmore’s book when he got an alarm from his inbound message queue. There it was. The subject was ‘The Phoenix now available in a beautiful leather-bound edition.’ Becker opened the message, and it looked like a junk message shilling a book. If it hadn’t been for the word Phoenix in the subject line, his message filters would have dumped it. And there, in the message, was a pointer, presumably to buy the new book.

  Becker clicked the pointer and found himself in a VR simulation of a normal-looking executive office. Nothing out of the ordinary, but with nothing to place it, either. Behind the desk sat a rather nondescript man. A plain-looking person in a plain-looking suit.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Becker. My name is Jonas Whidley. I am the new head of the Departm
ent.”

  Franz Becker knew damn well the actual appearance and name of the person he was meeting with was nothing like what was being presented to him here, and he didn’t care. They were back in business, serving at the pleasure and for the benefit of the Emperor, the current occupant of the Throne to which his family was bound by history and custom.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Whidley.”

  “We’re just getting things restarted here after our little hiatus, Mr. Becker, so I have no current requests for you. I just wanted to make first contact with you so we were in touch.”

  “You really are starting it up again?”

  “Yes, Mr. Becker. To best serve the Throne. As before, all assignments will come to us directly from the Emperor. There are no surrogates or delegates who can direct us. No bureaucrats or underlings. Only the Emperor. And you are encouraged, as before, to check directly with the Emperor on anything that seems out of the ordinary. As your ancestor, Otto Stauss, did on more than one occasion. As did his heirs.”

  Becker nodded. Yes, that was what the legend said, what his instructions from his own father said. When in doubt, call the Emperor – whose private address he now had – and check.

  “I understand, Mr. Whidley.”

  “Good. I look forward to a long and productive relationship, Mr. Becker. Long live the Emperor.”

  “Long live the Emperor,” Becker repeated.

  Whidley cut the connection.

  The Wizards And The Schools

  Having been so successful with the search for a corporate partner, Ardmore turned his sights on the need for a technical wizard. He started his research with the most successful technical wizard of them all, Jared Denny, whose group had redesigned the Imperial Navy and changed the face of space warfare forever.

  Denny had come out of Extremadura Province of the Catalonia Sector, taken his degree in mechanical engineering on an Imperial scholarship, and then formed Sintar Specialty Services. They had bid on and won the high-level design contracts for the Imperial Navy’s new unmanned ship development, then went on to design a system for maintaining those ships under way, counter-defense systems for missiles, new missile launch mechanisms permitting mass missile launches, and on and on.