“Let her go, Travis. She just needs to come to terms with it.”
“What about you, Dad?”
“Travis, if you feel very strongly about something like this, when you’re young, you should act on it. Don’t spend your life regretting not following your heart’s path.”
“And when you’re older?”
“When you’re older, too, if you can. But you collect other obligations and burdens and duties as you age, and you have to fulfill those. That limits your choices later on.”
“I understand. Thanks, Dad.
“I’m very proud of you, Travis. Not everyone sees a duty and picks it up. Some don’t see it. Some see it and refuse it. It takes a special person to see it, accept it, and get on with it.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
David Geary nodded.
“You think someone is trying to bring down the Empire?” he asked.
“Yes. I read the Emperor’s book. He wrote it about seven, eight years ago. The story is the book was what attracted the Emperor Augustus VI’s attention to him in the first place. I know where they’re headed. The Emperor and Empress. I know what they’re going to do. So does anyone else who read his book. And someone, somewhere doesn’t like it much. That’s the only explanation for what’s going on.”
“And you think you can change it? Affect it somehow?”
“History is strange, Dad. Most of the time there is a huge momentum, an inevitability, to it. It moves along as it has been going. But once in a while, there comes a key point, a point where history hinges on some event. Some cusp. At that point, a single person – the right person – in the right place, at the right time, can change history. Set it off down a new path, for good or ill.”
“And you think you’re the right person, Travis?”
Travis Geary shrugged.
“I could be. The odds are high against it, but I could be. The question is, Will I be in the right place, at the right time? I think the right time is approaching. One of the hinges of history. Then the question is, Can I be in the right place? The only way I can see to be in the right place is to go into the Imperial Marines. Will that hinge of history come to me? Will it be mine to decide? I don’t know. But without going into the Imperial Marines, the answer is No.”
“And that’s why you’re going to switch the scholarship.”
“Yes. If I’m not the person in that place at that time, who will it be? What decision will they make? I can’t leave that up to chance.”
Travis Geary looked out the window, at the pretty backyard in the peaceful suburban neighborhood where he had grown up. A by-product of the distant Imperial government and the peace it had enforced for three centuries. He turned back to his father.
“It’s not even a choice at this point, Dad. Knowing what I know, seeing what I see, at this point it’s a duty. One I will not shirk.”
David Geary nodded.
“All right, Travis. I’ll support you. Your mother will be OK. I’ll talk to her.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Did you tell your parents?” Benton asked.
“Yeah.”
“What did they say?”
“Mom wasn’t happy,” Geary said. “Ran from the room crying.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. But Dad and I talked about it. He understands.”
“Well, I’m not sure I do,” Benton said, “But it’ll be fun. We’ll be in together.”
“Yeah, that’ll be fun. We won’t have the same academic classes, with you going for the degree in engineering, but we’ll have all the same Academy classes. Leadership and all that.”
“So when’re you going to do it?”
“I thought I would send them a message now,” Geary said. “I have the contact information for the scholarship program. You know, where they tell you to message us at this address if you have any questions.”
“You’re going to jump right on it, then.”
“Absolutely. I don’t know how short a notice they can have and still do it, and it’s getting close. We leave in a week.”
Cally Sounder worked for the Imperial scholarship program. She was working through her incoming message queue on Monday morning when she saw Travis Geary’s message. Transfer from IUC to the Imperial Marine Academy on Center? They had openings, she knew. It all depended on whether the candidate met the Imperial Marine Academy incoming requirements.
Of course, since he met IUC’s academic standards, that wouldn’t be an issue. She ran the file past the checker and he passed. She made the transfer, which triggered the system to send a notification, as well as the additional stipend amount that applied for an Academy student.
His message noted his neighbor had been influential in his decision. She queried the system, and it kicked back a message that the candidate’s neighbor was already accepted to the Imperial Marine Academy. She approved a bonus payment to the neighbor for the recruitment, and tagged them in the system as traveling together.
She moved on to the next message.
Travis Geary found the inbound message in his message queue when he woke up on Monday morning. Imperial City must be ahead of them currently.
Benton took Geary’s VR call.
“Yeah,” Benton said blearily.
“Hey, wake up, sleepyhead. You can’t sleep this late in the Imperial Marines. I certainly don’t want any of our fellow Marines to think I’m a sluggard for hanging around with you.”
“You heard?”
“Yeah,” Geary said. “I’m in.”
Benton had an alarm in his inbound message queue and he brought up the message during the call.
“Did you mention I was involved in recruiting you?” Benton asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because they gave me a two-thousand credit recruitment bonus.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that. I owe you a beer.”
Thinking It Through
Burke and Ardmore were at breakfast Saturday morning in the dining room of the Imperial Residence.
“Did you see the interview with Oleg Scharansky that came in last night?” Ardmore asked.
“No. I saw Pitney’s message, but I haven’t watched the interview yet,” Burke said.
“You need to watch it, and then we need to talk about it. Pitney needs some instruction from us.”
“All right. I’ll do it right after breakfast.”
“I’ll be up at the meadow.”
Burke walked around to the picnic table on the edge of the meadow. Ardmore was there with a pot of coffee and cups, sugar, and cream.
“Hi, there,” Burke said, walking up.
“Grab yourself a cup of coffee.”
“Thanks.”
Burke poured a cup of coffee and put a teaspoon of sugar in it. She had lost the taste for cream in coffee in the Imperial Marines. On deployment, sugar was easy, cream was hard.
“Did you watch the interview?” Ardmore asked.
“Yeah. This is crazy. We think we find the bad guys, and we dig a little deeper, and what we find is they’re victims, too.”
“Yes, which means my initial reflex to execute everyone involved isn’t the correct one. Imagine. Trading your honor for the life of your family. I mean, it’s one thing to put your own life on the line, but your family?”
“Jimmy, I want these guys. I want ‘em bad. This shouldn’t happen in the Empire. In our Empire. I want to get ‘em, and I want to know we got ‘em.”
Ardmore nodded.
“In the meantime,” he said, “we need to tell Mr. Pitney what to do with Dr. Scharansky.”
“I don’t think we can execute him. We’ll just victimize him again, in the name of a justice that has failed him once already.”
“So what do we do, Gail? We can’t just let him go home.”
“Why not, Jimmy? So he stayed at some friends in the city overnight, because he was spooked by the crowds at work.”
“And being inaccessible by VR overnig
ht?”
“VR suppressor. He was scared. He didn’t want to be trackable.”
“OK. That might work,” Ardmore said.
“Dr. Scharansky. Dr. Scharansky, wake up.”
“Huh? Wha’?”
“Wake up, Dr. Scharansky. It’s time to go home.”
“Home?”
“Yes, Dr. Scharansky,” Donahue said. “The Emperor himself has suspended your death sentence. We’ll drop you at home.”
They got in the groundcar, and Odom pulled it out of the barn. He got out to close up the barn behind them, then got back behind the wheel and headed into the city.
Donahue leaned over between the front seats to talk to Scharansky.
“Dr. Scharansky, your story is you were spooked by the crowds at NanoHealth’s headquarters, and you were afraid some of them might follow you home. You stayed in the city with friends overnight – maybe one of your engineers, say – and then, given that no one followed you there and there was no trouble, you came home this morning. Does that work for you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“And not a word to anyone, Dr. Scharansky. That death sentence has been suspended, but telling anyone else about this investigation would constitute treason against the Throne. These vipers – the ones who killed your daughter’s friend simply to make a point – are going to pay, but you have to help us out there. Our little camping trip is our secret.”
“I understand. Trust me. I want these people to pay. I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize your efforts.”
“Very good, Dr. Scharansky.”
They arrived at Scharansky’s house, an upscale affair in an expensive neighborhood. Odom got out and came around the groundcar to open the door for Scharansky. Before he got out of the groundcar, Scharansky laid a hand on Donahue’s shoulder.
“Thank you. For everything.”
“You’re very welcome, Dr. Scharansky.”
Scharansky got out of the groundcar with his briefcase from the night before and walked up the steps to his front entry, where a staff member opened the door for him. Odom closed the door, walked around, and got back behind the wheel. The armored limousine pulled away.
“So we let the guy go?” Odom asked.
“Yeah. We let the guy go,” Donahue said. “He’s not a criminal. He’s just another victim.”
“When do we get to the bad guys?”
“Soon, I hope. I want a piece of them.”
They had both worked out in the gym that morning, then had lunch. After lunch, Burke had swum her laps. Now they lay on the chaise together on the pool deck.
“Jimmy, I can’t get that interview off my mind. The Empire isn’t even safe for children? That just enrages me. And it makes me sad.”
“Yes, I know. But we have things in motion. There’s nothing to do at the moment.”
“Isn’t there? Why don’t we start planning what we’re going to do when the data comes in. I think we need to gather some other information.”
Franz Becker was sitting on the deck of his country house enjoying a lovely Saturday evening when he got a message alarm on a little wrist gadget his tech people had given him. He went into his office and checked the camera and projector rig he had set up there, and found a message with an Imperial header. He logged the system into the VR channel in the message and the projector showed him the private living room of the Imperial Apartment.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Becker,” Burke said. “Thank you for joining us.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.”
“Mr. Becker, we have inquiries ongoing in two major areas,” Ardmore said. “One is to find all the descendants of the royalty of the former Alliance nations and all the descendants of the ruling families of the former Democracy of Planets. The other is to find every bank account with significant resources for which the named accountholder is likely an alias.”
Becker nodded. Those had been his suggestions. The sheer amount of computer horsepower and access to records those efforts would take staggered him, but they were unlikely to be beyond the capabilities of the Imperial staff. The casual manner in which the Emperor discussed it, though, was wildly in contrast to the size of the effort required.
“I see, Sire.”
“The question then, Mr. Becker, is what do we do with that information. I have two specific questions to ask you in that regard, but feel free to offer additional insights, if you would.”
“Of course, Sire.”
“My first question, Mr. Becker, involves family matters within dynastic families like yours. Let’s say I have a person who is not the leader of the family, but a family member. He is not the leader of this conspiracy, or one of the leaders, but he is involved. He takes an assignment on another planet. Moves there, tries to infiltrate some organization or carry out some other long-term task.
“So here’s the question: Did those orders more likely come directly from some other family, or did they come down within his own family?”
“Generally speaking, Sire, they would come down within their own family. Now there are some exceptions. It’s sort of like a board of directors relationship to its president. I’m the head of the Stauss-Becker family because the rest of the family is happy with me being the head of it. I include people, I generally make smart decisions, they’re happy with me in the lead.
“None of them could displace me on their own, or even with a small group. Now, if the family as a whole was unhappy with me, they could ask me to step down and put someone else in, and together they have enough shares to enforce that. There can be a bunch of scheming around that sort of development, and a member of the minority might go off on his own if there’s that kind of turmoil in the family. That’s one exception.
“For us, normally no one would go haring off on a project of their own without at least talking to me about it. Get my advice, get my blessing, maybe even get family investment. The exception there is if, say, I already had a deal with another family, and a nephew or niece, say, was working with them under that deal, and they got instructions to go off on some assignment. But that’s also within the context of my approval.
“Does that answer your question, Sire?”
“Yes, Mr. Becker. I understand. Now my next question is about alias accounts. Are there legitimate reasons to have alias accounts in business?”
“There are a couple, Sire. One is as an escrow account, where the two parties to a contract don’t trust each other. One doesn’t trust he’ll get paid if he does the work, the other doesn’t trust the work will get done if he pays in advance. The payor might put the funds in an escrow account, and the payee would do the work. The trustee of the escrow account – who both sides have to trust going in – would then pay out the funds if the work was done to contract. But the trustee of the escrow account doesn’t want the funds in his own name, and it can’t be in the name of the payor or the payee, either. The trustee might use an alias account, particularly if the project was a secret from competitors, like a research or product design project.”
“Do you use them that way, Mr. Becker?”
“No, Milady. I don’t do business with people I don’t trust.”
“I see. Go on, Mr. Becker.”
“Yes, Milady. The other way people commonly use them is for corporate espionage. You have someone who is pretending to be an investor or reporter, say, but he actually works for you. He goes to some conference or something, and tries to get people talking about their new products or business plans. Your competitors. So he’s using an alias for his activities, and he’ll have accounts in that name so he can survive a surface look-see into his identity.”
“Do you use them that way, Mr. Becker?”
Becker considered. There were no Imperial Guardsmen in the living room he could see from this angle, but he wasn’t sure the conversation wasn’t being monitored or recorded outside of the very small circle of people who knew about Mr. Pitney’s activities.
“I do, Milady, particularly for certain, uh,
departments.”
Burke’s eyes flared for a moment, but she responded casually.
“I see, Mr. Becker. Yet those would be amounts appropriate to a person who is a normal businessman, not huge deposits, is that correct?”
“Yes, Milady. Salary, travel, expenses, savings – including retirement savings. Nothing that would amount to more than, at most, a few million credits, depending on the cover identity.”
“So you would expect most alias accounts have something to do with illegal activity, Mr. Becker?”
“Yes, Sire. Illegal activity of one kind or another. That may or may not have anything to do with this conspiracy, however.”
“Understood, Mr. Becker,” Ardmore said. “Once we have these accounts identified, we have several options for what to do about it. One is to impound them all, or lock them all, and starve the conspiracy of funds. Another is to change the accounting rules to make such accounts impossible going forward. I was wondering what suggestions you might have.”
“I’m not sure either of those is the best move, Sire, at least not as a first step. What might prove better in the long run is to tag these accounts in the computer first, and track all the transactions in those accounts into a log. Watch what money comes in, from where, what money goes out, to where, and construct a financial map of the enterprise. I think you could learn a tremendous amount from a map like that. You can always impound the funds later, even if they move somewhere else. And make such accounts impossible going forward at that time.”
“That’s a very good idea, Mr. Becker. Thank you for that.”
“Another thing is to track, when funds are disbursed to a legitimate enterprise for goods or services, for whose benefit are those goods or services purchased.”
“You’re thinking of the executives of the nanite companies paying their staff, buying groceries, buying estates, and the like.”
“Yes, Milady. That allows you to determine whose alias account it is, and that puts a name on all the incoming and outgoing funds for that account.”
EMPIRE: Resistance Page 10