EMPIRE: Intervention (EMPIRE SERIES Book 13)

by Richard F. Weyand

  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

  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

  Intervention

  by

  RICHARD F. WEYAND

  Copyright 2020 by Richard F. Weyand

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-1-7340758-5-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Credits

  Cover Art: James Lewis-Vines

  Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk

  Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.

  Bloomington, Indiana, USA

  October 2020

  CONTENTS

  Gulliver’s Travels

  Amanda’s Play

  Assignment to Julian

  Alexa

  Julian

  A Plan Comes Together

  The Resistance

  Simulation and Coordination

  Pieces In Motion

  In Transit

  Setting Up

  Training Day

  Going Active

  The Empire

  The Resistance Goes Active

  Advance

  Imperial Audience

  Mieland’s Decision

  The Verano Operation

  Immediate Aftermath

  Justice

  Food and Water, and a Move

  Personnel, Health, & Ordinance Disposal

  Reconciliation and Release

  Everywhere And Nowhere

  Under Way

  The Citizens And The Council

  Tractors and Seeds

  Ballistic Demolition

  The Campaign

  The Elections

  Interregnum

  Moving On

  Gulliver’s Travels

  Dick Holden, the CEO of Galactic Equipment Supply Corporation, was preparing his quarterly report to the holding company that owned GES, Stauss Interstellar Holdings.

  One section of his report detailed the increasing business GES was doing with the Western colonies, the independent planets the Emperor had chartered and funded to the galactic west of the rest of human-settled space. It was a small part of GES’s overall volume, but it represented a significant growth potential as more and more colony planets came on line.

  Much of that growth had come about because of the efforts of Paul Gulliver. Gulliver was an intelligence gatherer for GES, visiting colony planets and researching their needs for the agricultural and construction equipment that was GES’s bread-and-butter business. He had proved adept at characterizing the colonies’ needs, and projecting those needs into the future. Of course, he didn’t visit every colony – there were thousands of them by now – but his observations on colony planets at certain stages of their development had informed GES of the likely needs of other colonies at the same stage of development.

  Gulliver had not been a normal hire. He was not hired through normal HR channels. Instead, he had been recommended to Holden by Dieter Stauss himself, the CEO of Stauss Interstellar Holdings. Because of that, Holden guessed Gulliver was also an intelligence agent for his boss, keeping an eye on Holden and GES.

  Holden couldn’t know and didn’t guess that Paul Gulliver was actually an Imperial agent.

  Dieter Stauss was in his office in Heidelberg, the capital city of the planet Hesse, in the Baden Sector of the Empire. It had been Otto Stauss’s office until his death five years before, and it still felt strange to Dieter to be behind the desk in his father’s office, rather than in front of it.

  Otto Stauss had founded Stauss Interstellar Freight Services, and leveraged it into Stauss Interstellar Holdings, the largest corporation in the galaxy. Even so, Stauss Interstellar Holdings was still privately owned by the Stauss family and was a huge conglomeration of corporations and business interests sprawling across all of human space. Otto Stauss had run it all from here, from this very office, until he had died at the age of ninety-six. The Emperor Trajan and Empress Amanda had actually VRed into the funeral services, a singular and unprecedented honor for the man who had played such a huge role in the early part of Trajan’s reign.

  Now, fifty-one years since Trajan had ascended to the throne of the Sintaran Empire, and forty-one years since he had consolidated all of human space under his rule, the Emperor was himself eighty-four years old. He was clearly nearing the end of his reign, and what disruptions that would entail were unknown and unknowable.

  Just as in the early part of his reign, the Stauss family continued to support the Emperor, both publicly and very, very privately.

  “I was looking at the quarterly report from Dick Holden at Galactic Equipment Supply,” Bernd Stauss – Dieter Stauss’s son, assistant, and heir-apparent – told his father later that day. “They’re doing a good job of growing the colony business. Of course, it’s a small part of their overall business right now, but more colonies are being established every year, and the existing colonies are growing fast.”

  “And the Empire is funding them, so they have money to spend. Don’t forget that,” Dieter said.

  “Absolutely. Of course, that makes a big difference. Between that and their burgeoning growth, their need for construction and agricultural equipment is much higher per capita than other planets, despite them being so small currently. And this Paul Gulliver is making a big difference. He’s been great at projecting the colonies’ needs before they even know what they’ll be.”

  “Yes, Gulliver’s worked out well.”

  “Wasn’t he your recommendation to Holden?” Bernd asked. “Where do you find these guys, anyway? You’ve personally recommended dozens of hires to our subsidiaries over the years. Maybe hundreds.”

  “In the five years since Dad died? Perhaps a few hundred.” Dieter shrugged. “I know a lot of people. They recommend other people. Anyway, most of them work out pretty well.”

  What Dieter knew, and Bernd did not, was that all those recommendations came from one place, and those candidates all had one thing in common.

  They were all Imperial agents.

  Dieter remembered listening to his father’s final VR message to him, after his father had died. The revelation had been a shock. For over thirty years, his father had placed Imperial agents in Stauss Interstellar companies, in continuing support of Emperor Trajan and his goals. No doubt Bernd would be just as shocked when he viewed Dieter’s final VR message to him.

  Of course, a huge interstellar conglomerate like Stauss Interstellar was a perfect cover for thousands of Imperial agents spread out across human space. Whether it was an agent placed onto some specific planet, or a traveling agent like Paul Gulliver, employment with Stauss Interstellar or one of its companies was a cover that was hard to beat.

  For all that, most of them were very good at their cover assignments as well. They were some of Stauss Interstellar’s best employees.

&
nbsp; Paul Gulliver looked out the window of his rented offices on the second floor of the frame building in downtown Perryville, the capital city of Cander. The city of fifty thousand people was the bustling hub of the colony, through which all the commercial activity of the early-stage colony was routed.

  Of course, ‘Paul Gulliver’ was not his real name, though he had used the alias long enough it might as well be. He had selected Gulliver as his last name as a paean to a long-ago work of fiction. It had tweaked his sense of humor to select such a name for an itinerant agent, though the reference was obscure now, thousands of years after the work had been published. No one had ever called him on it.

  In any case, his work here on Cander was almost complete. Galactic Equipment Supply was sending out an office manager to take over the local office he had set up, and he would be moving on to another colony planet to set up a local office there. The locals he had hired to staff the office would all stay on under the new office manager. The steady outside income that came with a job for a Stauss Interstellar company was welcome on any colony planet.

  Gulliver had liked Cander. It was well run, as colony planets went. In his travels, he had found colony governments to be a mixed bag. Independent of the Empire by their charters, each colony had had to come up with its own form of government. None of them were truly atrocious – at least none he had visited yet – and Cander was better than most.

  There was one last thing to do before his replacement showed up on tomorrow’s inbound freighter. He set about writing his final report on Cander. This, though, was not a report to Galactic Equipment Supply.

  Ask anyone in the Imperial Police, and they would tell you the Imperial Police was organized into five sections: Planetary Affairs, Provincial Affairs, Sector Affairs, Imperial Affairs, and Imperial City, the capital of the Empire, located on the planet Center. There was no sixth section. Other than the agents themselves, only the Emperor, the Empress, the Co-Consul, and the CEO of Stauss International Holdings knew any different.

  Gulliver was preparing his final report about Cander for Section Six.

  Gerald Conner – Gerry to his friends – cast his line out across the lake. He was bobber fishing from the small runabout he maintained at his retirement home on Jora, a sleepy little planet in the Empire’s Monserrat Sector, which had been part of the Kingdom of Phalia before the Alliance/Sintar War forty-three years ago.

  Conner was retired as the vice president of corporate intelligence for Selantra, the medical supplies giant that was itself part of Stauss Interstellar Holdings. It had been a great cover, and he retired from it only when he was selected as the new head of Section Six to replace the legendary Nick Ashton.

  Like Ashton, Conner found fishing to be a great cover for heading Section Six. Long hours fishing out on the lake or relaxing in one of the Adirondack chairs on the porch of his lakefront home gave him plenty of time in VR for running the Emperor’s private intelligence network.

  It wouldn’t be too long and he would have to worry about who his own replacement would be. Of course, he had recorded an emergency replacement if he should come to an untimely end, but he was still looking for the perfect replacement, someone young enough to have a long run as head of Section Six, but with the savvy and experience to handle the job.

  Conner settled down into the seat of the runabout and logged into the Virtual Reality system using his neural implants and the planet’s Quantum Entanglement radio system. In VR, he sat behind his desk in Section Six headquarters, a completely virtual environment. The other members of Section Six present there were logged into the virtual headquarters from planets strewn across billions of cubic light-years of Imperial space.

  He opened his inbound mail queue and began reviewing the latest reports from Section Six agents assigned to the Empire’s potential hotspots.

  Robert Allen Dunham IV – His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Trajan – sat in his preferred spot, the end of the sofa in the living room of the Imperial Apartment, on the upper of the two Imperial Residence floors of the Imperial Palace.

  He was a large-boned, powerfully built man, shrunken somewhat now with age. His blond hair had long ago turned to white. He walked with a bit of a limp, a souvenir of the terrible wound to his leg while serving in the Imperial Marines on Wollaston during the Wollaston Insurgency. Even at eighty-four, though, his white-blue eyes retained their intensity.

  Amanda Peters – Dunham’s wife, the Empress Consort Amanda – also sat in her favorite spot, on one of the club chairs facing the sofa. At seventy-six, her brown hair had turned mostly grey, and she had done nothing to dye or color it. Always trim and fit, she had retained her figure into old age.

  The drapes and sheers were open, though the glass wall to the balcony was closed. It was a little chill this evening, and they were more sensitive to the cold than they had been when younger. The view down Palace Mall, out over Imperial Park, and of the sparkling towers of Imperial City beyond was still breathtaking.

  “Fifty years. Can you believe it?” Dunham asked.

  “The twins have been out of the house, off to college, for almost thirty years now, Bobby. Our grandchildren are in their twenties.”

  “And making little great-grandchildren at a breathtaking pace.”

  “Well, Samantha’s cheating. Dee tells me she’s carrying twins.”

  Dunham shook his head. Life seemed to move faster as they aged. It seemed like only yesterday that he and Peters had exchanged wedding vows on the exterior steps of the Throne Room of the Imperial Palace. Yet half a century had passed.

  “They’ll all be here Saturday for the party,” Dunham said.

  “Yes. I’m looking forward to it. We don’t often all get together anymore.”

  “There’s so many of them now. Dee and Rob, Sean and Jessica, Dee’s four and Sean’s six, four of the grandkids are married, and how many great-grandchildren now?”

  “Six, if you count Samantha’s two and Debby’s one on the way,” Peters said.

  “Twenty-four. Amazing. Just from us.”

  “It has been fifty years, Bobby. That’s a long time.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. And even longer on the throne.”

  Peters tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Are you thinking of retiring, Love?”

  “No, Amanda. I wouldn’t know what to do with my time otherwise anyway. Sitting around waiting to die holds no appeal.”

  “Good. I think keeping busy keeps one going. It doesn’t get any easier, but we’re both still in pretty good shape. For our age, I mean.”

  “And things are going well,” Dunham said. “With the Empire. All the reforms Dee started, and we pushed through, have been in place long enough now they’ve become the normal way of doing things. I no longer worry so much about things reverting to the status quo ante when I’m gone.”

  “Well, I should hope not. With all that’s been accomplished? Incorporating the Alliance and the Democracy of Planets into the Empire. Bringing all their citizens the benefits of universal VR, and universal contraception, and universal education. Getting to nearly one hundred percent of all human beings, everywhere, having VR implants. Raising the standard of living of their hundreds of trillions of people up to modern standards, and then getting even better from there. The economic and technological progress even within the original Sintaran Empire has been remarkable. It’s been a golden age for everyone. Going back to government corruption and crony capitalism would be insane.”

  “Yes, Amanda, I know that. But you know as well as I do the threat is always there. There is no end of people who think they’re better than the common man, smarter, and they therefore need to exert their control over lesser men. For their own good, of course.”

  “And to be well-compensated for it at the expense of their fellows, of course,” Peters said with sarcasm.

  “Well, of course. They deserve it. Just ask them.”

  Peters snorted.

  “And the tremendous progress we’
ve made in the last fifty years without their oh-so-benign control? With people deciding their own lives?”

  “Just think how much better it could have been if the right people were making all the decisions.”

  Peters rolled her eyes, and Bobby continued.

  “That’s how they think, Amanda. And they always will.”

  “So what do we do to keep them from getting control back, Bobby?”

  “Two things. One is the succession. Oh, I have someone named for the moment, in case something happens to me without warning, but I am worried about leaving the best person in place when I go. That’s still an open question. And the other is to keep an eye on things. Make sure some sector governor or some commercial interest isn’t conniving to assert control they shouldn’t have.”

  Peters looked up at the ceiling, then back down to Bobby.

  “Guard,” Bobby said.

  “Yes, Sire.” The voice came from the ceiling.

  “Suspend audio monitoring for one hour.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  Bobby turned to see the flashing red light go on, on the switch panel near the door. He signaled the Imperial Guardsmen in either rear corner of the room and they nodded and left. He turned back to Peters.

  “So what do you think of the latest reports from Section Six?” Peters asked.

  “As I read them, things are pretty quiet. Oh, I have a couple of sector governors who are feeling their oats a little bit, but they’re not way out of line. At least not yet.”

  Peters nodded.

  “And the western colonies?”

  “Well, there are a couple I worry about.”

  “You’re talking about Verano and Julian.”

  “Yes, among others. I’m not sure what we can do about them, though. They’re independent. I have very limited rights over them.”

  “But you’re funding them, Bobby. You don’t have to fund tyrants.”

  “According to their charters, I have to do just that, and without Imperial control.”