EMPIRE: Renewal

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Now what do we do?” Karlsson asked.

  “For the moment, nothing, I think,” Smith said. “I’m not sure it even pays to continue the audiences. We know what he’s going to say.”

  “Well, I’m not meeting with that doddering old bastard again. I’ll tell you that right now,” Shubin said.

  “Piotr, you basically dared him to do something, and he did,” Smith said. “The Emperors have always been sensitive about the proper respect due their person.”

  “Fuck him,” Shubin said.

  “You might want to watch your references to His Majesty, Piotr,” Porter said.

  “He’s the one who did away with censorship,” Shubin said. “I can say anything I want.”

  “You also serve at his sufferance,” Porter said. “He can remove you anytime he likes.”

  “I’d like to see him try,” Shubin said.

  “Gentlemen, this is getting us nowhere,” von Hesse said. “The only question on the table is, What do we do now?”

  “I think we suspend or cancel the rest of the audiences,” Conway said. “They’re not doing any good, and could be doing harm.”

  “Seconded,” Karlsson said.

  “All right,” von Hesse said. “I agree with that. Anything else?”

  “I think we just sit back and do nothing for now,” Gaskin said. “He hasn’t touched any of the big things yet. Taxes, control of the military, the selection of sector governors.”

  “He hasn’t yet,” Shubin said.

  “Yes, Piotr,” Gaskin said. “That’s what I said. He hasn’t done any of those things yet.”

  “Are we all agreed, then?” von Hesse asked.

  There were nods and murmurs of assent all around, but not from Shubin.

  “Piotr?” von Hesse asked.

  “You can all do whatever you want. I will maintain my own counsel, thank you,” Shubin said and dropped from the meeting.

  “Oh, dear,” von Hesse said. “I’m afraid Piotr is going to do something rash.”

  “Should we warn the Emperor?” Karlsson asked.

  “Why?” von Hesse asked. “After all, he might be successful.”

  “That would be a pleasant outcome,” Gaskin said.

  “Just the same, I think I am going to prepare a disclaimer of any involvement and a condemnation of such actions,” von Hesse said.

  “A condemnation of what actions?” Smith asked.

  “Of whatever stupid actions Piotr is going to do,” von Hesse said.

  The Attack

  “The sector governors seem to have calmed down recently,” Drake said. “After they canceled the rest of the audiences – What? Two months ago now? – there hasn’t been a peep out of them.”

  “That worries me, actually, Jonah,” Burke said.

  “Really, Gail?” Ardmore asked.

  “Yes, Jimmy. When the enemy is quiet, that’s when you worry. What are they up to?”

  “I see,” Ardmore said.

  “I had the same thoughts,” Drake said. “General Hargreaves assures me they’re keeping an eye on our double agents to make sure they haven’t flipped. And any of them that had access to sensitive areas like this floor have been moved anyway. I don’t know. Maybe the sector governors just decided to lay low for a while.”

  “We still need to stay sharp, Jonah,” Burke said. “I don’t like it.”

  “We have override access to the elevator system, so it’s real simple. We go up to the top floor. This is the layout. There’s two guys here and two guys here. Now, they’re not expecting any trouble, so these first two guys are easy. Elevator door opens, bang-bang, they’re down. Right?

  “The second two guys are tougher. They’re through these doors, and they heard the first shots. So first two guys out of the elevator, you get these doors, fold them back all the way. They open toward you. Next two guys engage the guys down the hall. They got no cover, and the only weapons they have are sidearms. They’re Imperial Marines, they’re combat veterans, so they won’t back down, but they got precious little chance of giving us much trouble because of the setup. Got that bit?”

  Nods all around.

  “OK. Now, primary targets will be in this room. We know when they’ll be having breakfast. They’re same-same like clockwork on weekdays. So we send two guys down the hallway to take them out. Two more guys are their backup, ‘cause one of the targets is also former Imperial Marine, also combat veteran. She’s got nothing heavier than a sidearm, but, being in the room and having warning, she has more options. So take out the woman first.

  “The rest are holding the elevator in override. We take down the targets, withdraw back to the elevators, we got override to the basement, and we’re outta there. Any questions?”

  “No, looks good.”

  “All right.”

  One weakness in Palace security was Housekeeping. They were everywhere and nowhere. They had access to everything, yet most people didn’t see them. They were the next thing to invisible. Housekeeping also had more access to the elevator controls than they should have. They needed to be able to move carts around, express the elevator for some functions, but the controls were far too open to Housekeeping.

  A second weakness in Palace security was the loading dock. Shipments to and from the loading dock were made directly by the outside vendors, rather than being cross-loaded to Palace vehicles at some other location. In this case, a delivery truck came in before the day shift arrived. The night-shift attendant let them in, and showed the assassination team through the empty basement to one of the elevators. The night-shift attendant then locked that elevator down as ‘Under Maintenance.’

  That night-shift attendant hadn’t been found by Lina Schneider’s Investigations group. He was under a different paymaster from the ones who had been found, in a whole separate espionage network. Piotr Shubin was too paranoid to put all his espionage eggs in one basket, and only one of his ‘baskets’ had been found.

  It was not too unusual to have one of the elevators under maintenance at the beginning of the work day. The service people had clearly not gotten their work done in the time they had planned, and no one thought a thing about it.

  They had been in the elevator a half hour when there was a knock-knock on the elevator doors. The day shift had not come on yet, as the primaries ate breakfast early enough to be at their desks for the beginning of the work day.

  “All right. That’s the signal. Sixty seconds.”

  A minute later, the elevator controls lit up and the elevator got under way to the top floor. It stopped, there was a ‘ding’, and the doors opened.

  Ardmore, Drake and Burke were at breakfast when they heard rifle shots. To Burke’s trained ears, it sounded like two almost-simultaneous double-taps.

  “They’re on this floor,” Burke said.

  She jumped up and walked to a painting on the wall. It started to slide aside as she approached. The Imperial Guard alarm sounded in VR, triggered by the gunfire sounds picked up by Palace security sensors. The alarm gave location, but help could be two or three minutes away.

  Ardmore flipped the heavy table over on its side and shoved it up against the sideboard. The sideboard was a wood enclosure over metal refrigerators, freezers, and warming ovens. Ardmore turned to an astonished Drake, now sitting alone in his chair in the middle of the room.

  “Get behind the table, Jonah.”

  Drake got on the floor and crawled behind the table. Ardmore picked up his chair and walked over to one side of the double doors. He grabbed the chair by the top of its back, the seat sticking out to his left, toward the doors.

  Ardmore looked over toward Burke. Behind the painting was an arms cache. Burke pulled out an M55 over-and-under. It was an M23 Imperial Marine rifle, with an underslung M32 SGM (Self-propelled Guided Munition) launcher. Some procurement wag had decided thirty-two plus twenty-three equals fifty-five, and so the combo was named.

  There were enough M55s in there for a rifle squad.

  “Holy shi
t,” Ardmore muttered.

  On a shelf above the rifles were a dozen small camera drones. Four of them started up and moved out into the room as Ardmore watched.

  Burke logged into VR and was surveying the situation as she checked the weapon and stuffed magazines in the pockets of her MCU. Palace security systems could give her the physical location and status of every VR system in the Palace. She had long ago marked Ardmore and Drake with yellow and blue icons. Imperial Guard were all green icons. All other Palace personnel were black icons. Anybody who wasn’t one of the above was a bright red icon.

  There was more gunfire from the hallway. Burke could see the two Imperial Marines as flashing green icons in the elevator lobby – flashing meaning they were dead or dying – and watched as the two outside the dining room door went down. Two red icons moved down the hallway.

  “They’re coming down the hallway, Jimmy,” Burke said, loading a magazine into the SGM launcher.

  Burke moved to the other side of the doorway, and nodded at Ardmore. He nodded back and swung the chair to his right, getting into his backswing. The doors started to open out, and Burke sent him a VR signal, ‘NOW!’

  Two gunmen stepped into the doorway, but saw no one in the room. Just an overturned table and chairs, breakfast food and dishes strewn across the floor, and four drones hovering in the middle of the room. Then they got hit by a bus.

  Ardmore swung the heavy chair with everything he had, and the projecting seat and legs caught the intruders full across the torso and catapulted them out into the hallway. They landed in a jumble, tangled up with the chair, and tried to get their weapons up to bear, but Burke stepped out from the cover of the side wall and double-tapped them both in the head.

  Burke sent the camera drones out into the hallway and VRed into their feeds. Two more hostiles were starting down the hallway. Without exposing her body, she held the M55 out sideways in front of her, aimed down the hallway, and fired an SGM AP round.

  The initial charge expelled the rocket far enough from the launcher to keep the user from getting burned in rocket blast, then the rocket took over. The little rocket shot down the hallway, aiming for the point Burke had marked in the VR feed. It exploded between and in front of the oncoming assassins, shooting out a thousand razor sharp flechettes. The men screamed and went down.

  Burke leaned out around the corner of the wall, past the open door against the wall, and double-tapped both men on the ground twice for good measure. She marked a new target spot in VR and fired three more SGM AP rounds down the hallway and pulled back into the room. She changed the magazines of the rifle while she waited.

  These three rockets, one after the other, went down the hallway, through the double doors to the Emperor’s side of the floor, and into the elevator lobby. They exploded about a quarter of the way across the elevator lobby, showering everyone in the elevator lobby with flechettes.

  Burke stepped out past the edge of the doorway and opened fire. She could see where all the injured hostiles were in her Palace security display, behind the wall to the elevator lobby.

  Burke had changed from soft-nose expanders to tungsten-point penetrators with that magazine change, though, and she fired through the wall at the injured assassins. That was not an epoxycrete supporting wall, it was a standard construction interior wall. The wall and the folded-back doors behind it were not cover against such rounds, and she cut the hostiles down like the wall wasn’t even there.

  Burke sent an all-Guard message in VR: “Seal the Palace. No one gets out. Find out from security tapes who let them in.”

  Imperial Guard boiled out of the fire escapes and the other elevators, just under two minutes after the alarm sounded. They found eight dead assassins and Burke, standing in the middle of the hallway, her smoking M55 in her hand.

  “See to our injured first,” Burke called out. “The Emperor is fine.”

  Ardmore walked over to the overturned table and helped Drake to his feet. Drake looked out through the double doors into the hallway, where Burke stood with the weapon, smoking from both barrels.

  “Jimmy, I’ve got just one piece of advice for you. Never get her really mad.”

  Imperial Guard made VR scans of all the assassins and got five IDs from the eight bodies. These were given to Lina Schneider in Investigations.

  The Housekeeping spy who let them in did not get away. The Imperial Guard caught up with him fast enough he didn’t yet realize the plan had failed.

  The van with the getaway driver was still sitting at the dock. When accosted by the Imperial Guard, he set off a grenade in the cab of the van rather than be captured.

  Hargreaves briefed Drake on the progress of the investigation that afternoon. The briefing was done in VR, in channel 22, as Drake was not leaving his private apartment in the Imperial Residence until the status of things was better known. Two rifle squads of Imperial Marines armed with M55s lined the corridor to the Emperor’s private apartment, and metal field pillboxes had been deployed in the hallway so they had cover.

  Burke was also in the briefing.

  “We know how they got into the Imperial Palace, Your Majesty. We probably should have all deliveries to the Imperial Palace made to some other location, then bring them to the Imperial Palace with our own people. Right now, anyone can drive up to the basement loading dock.

  “The other big hole was the elevators, Sire. The Imperial Guard has override controls on the elevators. That’s always been the case. What I did not know is Housekeeping also had such control. They should have some additional control over the elevators to do their jobs, but that should have been a subset of full control. Apparently, at some point, someone gave them full override controls rather than configure a new intermediate set of permissions. That was a big hole.

  “We’re closing up both of those holes, Sire.

  “As for the attack itself, the biggest reasons it wasn’t successful are we seriously upgraded the Imperial Guard’s weapons caches on this floor, at Captain Burke’s suggestion, and Captain Burke herself was in a position to respond effectively.”

  Drake nodded.

  “What about the agent in Housekeeping?” Burke asked. “Was that one of your double agents who re-flipped?”

  “No, Captain. It was somebody we didn’t know about at all. He wasn’t a normal Palace staffer getting some money on the side to talk out of school. He appears to be a long-term plant. A true operative. I need to ask how you want to handle him, Sire.”

  Drake looked to Burke, and she nodded.

  “Drug whatever information you can out of him, General Hargreaves,” Drake said, “then execute him. Coordinate with Ms. Schneider on the questioning.”

  “Yes, Sire. Lina Schneider has also started an investigation map on everyone we have IDs on, and they’re scraping every database around.”

  “I think we should have them pay special attention to Sector Governor Shubin, Sire,” Burke said.

  Drake nodded.

  “He seems the most likely candidate, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Very well, General Hargreaves. Pass on my regards and condolences to your men over their losses today, and to the families as well, of course.”

  All four of the Guardsmen on watch in the Imperial Residence that morning had died.

  “Of course, Sire.”

  Drake cut the channel.

  Lina Schneider gave her report three days later. Drake, Burke, and Ardmore attended the meeting in the investigation map viewing room in VR.

  “Good morning, Your Majesty.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Schneider. Proceed.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  Schneider, standing, turned to the investigation map, pointing out features to Drake, Ardmore, and Burke, who were seated in the viewing area. Schneider highlighted entries in the map as she spoke.

  “As you can see here, we started with five attackers, plus the one fellow from Housekeeping, as well as the ID number on the delivery van itself, which had b
een rented from a local agency. Using those as a starting point, we were able to identify the other three attackers and the likely driver of the van, as you see here.

  “Going up the chain has been harder. We could not find direct payments to any of those involved. We branched out and started looking at family members, especially spouses. We found payment streams for which we had no other explanation, and followed them. Some of them led to another explanation, and I have greyed them out in this map.”

  “What other sort of explanation might there be, Ms. Schneider?” Burke asked.

  “One person receiving payments, for example, is the sister of one of the attackers, and is also the mistress of a businessman, Captain Burke. He gives her maintenance payments.”

  “I see. Sorry to interrupt, Ms. Schneider. Carry on.”

  Schneider nodded.

  “Of the other payment streams, they are coming through multiple intermediaries, but we did manage to track them down. And they all lead here. This man is Vladimir Nekrasov. All the payment streams originate from him. Nekrasov is a close associate of Piotr Shubin, and has been a highly paid aide and adviser to Shubin for decades.”

  “Highly paid enough to afford these payment streams and still be receiving payment for his own services, Ms. Schneider?” Drake asked.

  “Yes, Sire. As substantial as all these payment streams are – and I have more of those to show you – they leave a substantial amount of money for Nekrasov from what he is receiving from Shubin.”

  “So he’s not an adviser,” Burke said. “He amounts to an agency.”

  “In a sense, Captain Burke. Yes. Now, we also followed other payment streams from Nekrasov out, and we came up with this map.”

  The previous map faded to grey, and a much larger one sprang into highlight.

  “My God,” Burke said.

  “Yes, Captain Burke. Nekrasov is running what amounts to a spy agency of hundreds of operatives.”