EMPIRE: Renewal

by Richard F. Weyand

  “You, Captain Burke?”

  “Yes, Sire. I shouldn’t give any order I’m not willing to carry out myself. If I am to be Empress, I should be able to carry out death warrants, not just issue them.”

  “I see, Captain Burke. Very well, General Hargreaves. We will proceed as Captain Burke suggests. I will give you death warrants for them all.”

  “Yes, Sire. Thank you, Sire.”

  In the basement of the Imperial Research Building, in a padded epoxycrete room of the Imperial Guard cell block there, the twenty-four captured spies were each gagged and bound hand and foot and tied to a chair. They were of different ages, both men and women. Each of them had a large number from one to twenty-four written on a piece of paper and pinned to their shirt. The chairs were arranged in a circle, so they could all see each other, sitting in order of their numbers.

  Through the door and into the center of the room walked Captain Burke, in MCU with the black fourragère and wearing a sidearm.

  “You have all been found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death by His Majesty, the Emperor Augustus VI. You have all refused what mercy may be granted for cooperating with the investigation into your crime. So be it.”

  Burke looked up at the ceiling.

  “Begin.”

  In the next room, a Guardsman pulled a number out of a jar.

  “Seven.”

  Burke pulled her sidearm out of its holster, turned until she faced number seven, a middle-aged man. His eyes were wide and darting about. She shot him three times across the center of the chest. He jerked with each shot, flopped a bit, and was still.

  “Next.”

  “Nineteen.”

  Burke turned to number nineteen, a pretty young woman, her eyes squeezed shut. Burke shot her three times across the center of the chest. Her head fell forward on her chest. Her bladder released at that point, and blood and urine dripped from her chair onto the floor.

  “Next.”

  And so it went. Six times a number called out, six times Burke turned and fired three times, six times a prisoner died. Some were messy. Some were quiet. Some struggled against their bonds and tried to scream past their gags. Some jerked their heads around crazily, looking for some escape. Some simply closed their eyes. The smells of urine and blood and gunpowder filled the room and mixed with the muffled sobbing of the survivors.

  After the sixth one, Burke reloaded and reholstered her sidearm and walked out of the room. She went into the bathroom down the hall and threw up.

  Burke took the basement slidewalk from the Imperial Research Building to the Imperial Palace and summoned an elevator. An empty car arrived and she rode it express to the top floor. One of the Imperial Guards on watch opened the door for her and she walked down the hallway. As she walked past Ardmore’s room, she stopped, then turned and knocked on his door.

  Ardmore opened his door to find Burke standing there. Her eyes were haunted and she smelled of gunpowder.

  “Gail, are you OK?” Ardmore asked.

  “I need you to hold me, Jimmy.”

  Ardmore took her in his arms and held her while she wept on his shoulder.

  “What the hell made you do that?” Ardmore asked.

  Burke took a deep breath and let it out slowly. They were sitting in the living room of Ardmore’s apartment. He was still holding her, and she had told him what she’d done.

  “It’s so easy, right? I read about it in your book. Trajan ordered one hundred and twelve people executed for treason. Imperial Guard went to their homes, their offices and just shot them. Later he ordered over fifty people executed in the Earth Sector Crisis. Trajan II did the same thing with the five sector governors who plotted against the proper succession. That is what it is to be a strong Emperor.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t do the executions themselves, Gail.”

  Burke shook her head.

  “That makes it too easy, Jimmy. ‘Off with their heads.’ No, that’s wrong. If I’m ever going to sign death warrants, I need to know what it is I’m doing. Think about it long and hard. Not just sign a piece of paper. So easy. No. I wanted to know what that means in practice. Not to be someone who can callously order someone put to death, but to be someone who knows what that really means. That it’s ugly, and it’s terrible, and yet, sometimes, it’s necessary.”

  Ardmore nodded and held her head to his shoulder while she cried again.

  “I wondered myself, when I wrote those passages. How heroic can it be to order someone executed when you know someone else will do the dirty work? But they must have known. None of them was a stranger to violence. Maybe it was heroic after all, knowing what they knew, and doing it anyway. I don’t know.”

  Burke nodded.

  “I had to know, Jimmy.”

  She pulled her head back and looked at him.

  “To be a good and just ruler, in my own heart, I had to know.”

  Ardmore looked at her and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Burke kissed him on the cheek.

  “I know,” she said.

  She took a deep breath, dabbed at her eyes.

  “I have to go, Jimmy. I need some time alone.”

  Ardmore nodded and let her go. She let herself out.

  It was very late, and Burke sat on the balcony, looking out at the statue of Ilithyia II. She had read everything there was to read about the Last Empress of Sintar. She had ordered and sat in on executions, Burke knew. Arguably worse ones. Execution by drugs during interrogation.

  It was a terrible thing, a terrible power, and terribly open to abuse, to be able to simply order a person put to death. No shield of judge or jury or process, but simply to order it on your own authority. An authority she would have.

  That’s when Burke realized. There would never be anyone who could understand her. Understand what it meant to possess and wield that kind of authority. Have to make those kinds of decisions. No one else could ever understand how easy it was, and how much it would cost her.

  Except one person.

  Burke got up and closed the window wall behind her in VR as she walked across the room. She was wearing a long flowing caftan, white and sheer. She didn’t bother to dress, but went out into the hallway, the night lights making her a ghost flowing through the dimness.

  She grabbed the doorknob, unlocked the door with her Imperial Guard override, and slipped inside.

  Ardmore woke to the realization he was not alone. Warmth against warmth, skin against skin, breath against breath.

  “Make love to me, Jimmy. Make wonderful love to me.”

  They were at breakfast the next morning when Drake came into the dining room.

  “Well, I must say you two look chipper this morning.”

  Drake turned to Burke.

  “I worried about you after that little escapade you pulled yesterday, young lady.”

  Burke nodded.

  “I had to know, Jonah. If I’m to wield that authority, I had to know.”

  Drake nodded.

  “I watched, the first time. Same reason. Well, I’m glad you don’t seem to be the worse for wear.”

  Drake sat at the table and gave the cook his breakfast order.

  “Oh. I got a message from General Hargreaves late yesterday. It seems every one of the survivors has decided they would be happy to tell us everything they know. So it did work. And that’s eighteen people we don’t have to execute.”

  General Hargreaves reviewed the video of the executions yesterday. He hadn’t had time to until now, as he and Colonel Leahy had been reviewing the questioning of the eighteen survivors and planning the next steps in the investigation.

  His mouth set and his eyes hardened as he watched Burke emotionlessly carry out the systematic killing of six human beings, all filled with terror as their number was called, and the grisly results. He followed her out the door in the surveillance recordings as she went down the hall and into the bathroom and was violently ill.r />
  His eyes softened, his mouth relaxed. It was an act, he realized. That emotionless exterior. Not callous at all, she had felt every one of those deaths in her very soul.

  She would be a great Empress.

  The Great Hiring

  Gladys King looked over her staffing plan again. Ardmore’s book, ‘Power & Restraint,’ told her how many people were in the Budgets group under each of the Four Good Emperors. It actually hadn’t changed much during that period. The bloat in the Imperial administration came later, after the reorganization in 244 GE, under the Emperor Augustus II. That’s when the top-level groups were disbanded and replaced with a hierarchical structure several layers deep.

  She had been assisted in getting her top-level people by the reports submitted by the other fifteen candidates for her position. She’d grabbed a couple right off for her top lieutenants. Some lower-level people came from that group, too.

  With them aboard, they all started talking about who else they knew, who was good, who would fit into the new setup. That resulted in a whole bunch of new hires.

  Without any separate assigned office space, everyone stayed in the offices they had for the moment, so all their meetings were in VR for the time being.

  Ultimately her group would have thousands of people in it. That would take a while, but they were on their way.

  Yuri Pestov had a bigger problem than Gladys King. A bunch of his people would have to come in from outside the current administrative structure. The new ideas group would be mostly outsiders, and he needed hundreds of them.

  At some level, the new ideas review group was worse. That group needed people young enough not to be turned off by fresh ideas, but experienced enough with the government to separate the possible from the impossible, or to see ways to retool unworkable ideas into workable ones while keeping the gist of the solution.

  Pestov pulled several people in who were good managers, known for hiring good people, and set them to work. They started hitting the ‘job wanted’ listings of the Imperial University of Center, looking for new grads and people in their twenties for the new ideas group. They grabbed the best people they could find. As they came aboard, it turned out they had people they could recommend as well, and it started to take off.

  Since a lot of people were coming in from outside, there was an issue of office space. His Majesty’s hacking away at the bloat, including the censorship groups, the curriculum management groups, and the scholarship management groups opened up some space, but those groups had not primarily been located in the Palace anyway. The Imperial Press Office had been, though, and a wave of office space became available.

  Of course, he was one of six people competing for that space.

  He went back to Ardmore’s book, trying to track down something he vaguely remembered from his first time through it. He couldn’t find it, so he finally called Ardmore himself to ask about it.

  “James Ardmore.”

  “Dr. Ardmore, Yuri Pestov here.”

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

  “We’re fighting an office-space crunch right now, and I seem to recall there was a mention in your book about the original new ideas group and they had the same problem at the beginning, but I can’t find it now. What can you tell me about that?”

  “Oh, yes. The new ideas group originally had no office space at all. They took over one of the cafeterias and everybody worked in there. It was so conducive to the way they worked that when office space became available, they implemented the cafeteria in VR so as not to lose the energy.”

  “They had a cafeteria in VR?”

  That didn’t make sense. You can’t eat in VR.

  “Yes, just as office and meeting space. The simulation is still available, believe it or not. Meet me in channel 700, and I’ll show you.”

  Pestov VRed into channel 700, and found himself in a cafeteria of the style of the first century before the Galactic Era, almost four hundred years before. Ardmore joined him.

  “They worked here?” Pestov asked.

  “Yes, for almost three hundred years. Even after office space became available. They sat in their offices and VRed into this simulation. They never updated the cafeteria to a newer style, even when the prototype was remodeled, but kept this version. It became sort of their trademark.”

  “Their trademark?”

  “Yes. The new ideas group was called the ZOO, because 700 looks like ZOO when written down. They were named after this simulation. This is where all the heavy lifting got done. In fact, this is where the whole idea of the six top-level groups was brought up and refined. And this is where the parameters of the Peace of Trajan were hammered out.”

  Pestov looked around the huge room, which probably seated three hundred at tables from small tables for two to big meeting tables for twelve.

  “It must have been a cacophony in here.”

  “Oh, from the descriptions I’ve read, it was. But the vibrancy and dynamism of the place was also amazing. And young people seemed to thrive in this setting.”

  “Amazing. So you think we should just restart the Zoo?”

  “Why mess with success? We have a formula we know works.”

  Pestov nodded.

  “Well, that solves my office space problem. People can just VR in from anywhere. From home for the time being.”

  “Absolutely. It’s the work that matters. And they did tremendous work here.”

  Pestov’s other problem was the new ideas review group. The best place to find people who knew how government worked but weren’t part of the problem was to look at the people who had left the government. He and his core group began VR interviews of people who had left the government. Their first question was normally, Why did you leave?

  They quickly developed a small catalog of the likely answers and the ones that signaled someone who would likely work out. A more in-depth interview followed. Those hired also had friends they could recommend, and they could help with the interview process. As they came on board, the hiring process started to pick up steam.

  Lina Schneider had her own set of problems staffing up the Investigations Office. Investigating anything was not a major occupation within the current bureaucracy. One didn’t go around turning over stones when you knew what you would find.

  She did pick up some people internally, mostly people who had been demoted or shoved aside for looking into things more aggressively than their supervisors had wanted. That wouldn’t do the trick, though. There just weren’t enough of them around.

  She talked it over with the Co-Consul, and Diener told her the Imperial Police were going to go through their own round of layoffs. Section Six through Section Ten of the current Imperial Police structure had been left without a job after the restoration of the Law of Ilithyia II made legal once more the things they had been organized to investigate.

  With that piece of information, Schneider went hunting through the Imperial Police for many of her new hires. She talked to a number of senior people, asking them who, other than themselves, would they hire for a new investigations team if they could have anybody they wanted. Most pointed to the same man, Stanley Nowak.

  Schneider talked to Nowak, who was going to be left without a job soon, and was impressed enough to hire him on the spot as her number two. He knew everybody worth having in the Imperial Police, and she filled out her ranks of senior investigators quickly.

  Those investigators began looking into the spies caught in the Palace, trying to follow the cash flows.

  Andrew Forrester, the head of the Troubleshooting Office, and Natacha Meknikov, the head of the Projects Office, had it a bit easier. There were people within the current administration who were known to be the go-to people to head up a tough project, or to turn around a failing organization. They started by hiring them, and then using their recommendations to fill out their ranks.

  Liam Aronson, the head of the Oversight Office, started out by skimming the Imperial auditing function within the Treasury
department. Much of the Oversight function was financial. He then pulled people from the Human Resources department’s internal ethics and disciplinary group. They had mostly been emasculated within the current administration, but there were some true believers there, and he snagged them. Using their recommendations, he began to fill out his department.

  One more senior manager was trying to hire as well. Thomas Pitney, the head of the Department, was looking for operatives. He looked at retired military counterintelligence people, people within the current Section Six through Section Ten of the Imperial Police, and corporate counterintelligence groups. He was very picky, as he needed agents who could operate alone, and be effective within very broad parameters.

  He picked a person here, a person there. He was in no hurry.

  His employment activity was interrupted by his retirement, and his and his wife’s relocation.

  As the hiring process progressed, bureaucrats in the current administration began putting in for replacement hires to fill in for the people the six Office heads had hired away. The Co-Consul refused to authorize any of those hires, though, and the complaints ratcheted higher.

  Three months into the hiring process, the Emperor addressed the six Office heads in a VR meeting, held in the simulation of a small presentation room. Diener was also there in the audience.

  “Be seated, everyone.”

  “I wanted to meet with you all to congratulate you on your progress in staffing out your Offices. It won’t be long now before we switch over to the new administration.

  “That being said, I wanted to caution you on something I’ve learned over a very long time in government. It isn’t the quality of the hiring you do that makes the difference, it’s the quality of your firing. You need to make sure you fire the right people, and do it quickly, as soon as you know who they are.

  “Not every hire you make is going to work out. There’s the fellow who’s never happy. There’s the fellow who immediately starts angling for higher position within the organization, usually by tearing down the people around him. And there’s the fellow who argues against every decision, trying to force the new administration in the direction of operating like the old.