“What the hell?” Benton asked Geary.
“Interesting times,” was all Geary would say.
“Is that all you have to say? ‘Interesting times?’” Benton asked.
Geary nodded.
“You don’t even seem surprised.” Benton said.
Geary turned to Benton.
“I’m not, actually. I’ve been expecting it, or something like it.”
Other officers and some students were also arrested, including Lachlan Norwood, Third Regimental Commander at the Academy, and therefore the commanding officer of the sophomore class. Travis Geary was selected as his replacement.
Boyle half expected to be arrested at any time, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure how, but he had escaped the net. He thought it might be because he had always had the alias Sean Boyle as far as the VR system went. He didn’t have two VR IDs. When he was four, and first received VR nanites, his mother had suggested he play a game, and give the system a different name, a pretend name, rather than his real name.
He had done so, and, as far as the Imperial VR system was concerned, the young man his family had christened as Thomas Doolan was and always had been Sean Boyle.
Boyle’s great uncle also escaped detection, and remained on the staff of the Imperial Marine Academy Center.
Nightmares
The Saturday after finals week, about ten days after the arrests were made, Boyle finally had a chance to tag up with Geary. It was clear at this point Boyle would not be arrested, and Geary finally had some spare time after the finals crunch and taking over as regimental commander of the sophomores.
They were in Geary’s apartment in the IUC residence hall, across the arcade from the Imperial Marine Academy. Benton was there, too. He went into his apartment and slid another armchair over, which, with a bit of shoving, barely fit through the communicating door between their apartments.
“How did your finals go?” Boyle asked.
“Good, I think,” Benton said. “I never really know until I get the grades back.”
Boyle turned to Geary and raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, mine were good,” Geary said. “How about you?”
“I’m only worried about Logistics and Supply,” Boyle said. “That clearly wasn’t Colonel Simpson’s exam. There was some material in the exam Simpson didn’t cover. So I appreciate your warning to study the previous exams.”
“Yeah, that was smart, Travis,” Benton said. “I would have been lost. It was crazy, him being arrested in the final lecture like that.”
“That reminds me,” Boyle said. “Travis, I meant to ask you. What did you mean when you said you had expected it when Simpson was arrested? Did you expect him to get arrested?”
“Simpson, in particular? No. I expected extraordinary events to occur, and still do, as the cusp approaches. You’re familiar with the cusp theory of history, right?”
“Of course. Events go along, institutions go along, populations go along, as they have been, until some seminal event that changes everything.”
“Right,” Geary said. “But it’s more than that. I think of it as history getting fragile – or more ductile, say – until it gets to a point where it can be nudged in a new direction. The momentum that’s pushing things along tapers off, until, at some point, even just one person can change the world. Set history off in a new direction.”
“So there’s certain points where that seminal event is more likely. Is that it?”
“Both more likely and more impactful. And I think we’re approaching one now.”
“Why do you think that, Travis?” Boyle asked.
“Because there’s so much change in the air already. The changes Augustus VI put in place the last six years before he died. The new Emperor and Empress. The attempt to strike at the Empress. The newfound loyalty to the Throne of the sector governors and the royal descendants of the former Alliance nations. Things are shifting about. The players are moving. That jars things out of long-set patterns. It makes things loose. And that’s when unexpected things happen.”
“Yet you expect it, right? Do you expect something in particular?”
“Yes,” Geary said, “but I hope I’m wrong.”
“What do you expect?”
“Someone will try to take down the Empire. Now’s the time it will happen, if it’s going to.”
Boyle was shocked. That was exactly his family’s goal. He said nothing, and hoped Geary and Benton read his shock as being to the concept of such a thing, and not to Geary’s prediction of it. Could his grandmother and her friends be so close to acting on their long-schemed plot?
“That’s a pretty tall order, though, isn’t it, Travis?” Benton asked.
“It’s not as hard as you might think, Nate,” Geary said. “Think of breaking a glass window pane. Hit it hard enough in the center, and, due to its internal stresses, it will shatter all the way to the edges. The Empire is similar. The centrifugal forces – the internal stresses – are higher during times of change. Once everything settles down, it will be harder.”
“But why would anyone try to bring down the Empire?” Benton asked. “It makes no sense.”
“It’s always power,” Geary said. “Power and money. They think they can take over the Empire, or some part of it, and rule it to their advantage. Of course, they can’t. I used to think it was some subset of sector governors. Now I don’t know. Some group of moneyed interests, perhaps.”
“They can’t rule it?” Boyle asked.
“Of course not, Sean. The glass window pane again. Once you break it, there are pieces everywhere. The Empire will spin apart into tiny pieces, and everyone will be squabbling to pick up a few. There’s no structure and no group in place that has any idea how to rule something as large as the Empire or the discipline and the power to hold it together. Once it’s broken, it will stay broken. And we descend into barbarism. A period that will make the Fifty Years War look like a kindergarten picnic. Until finally someone starts to accumulate enough pieces out of the wreckage to put some larger unit together again.”
“You sound so certain, Travis,” Benton said.
“Oh, I am certain, Nate. Someone’s playing with fire, and has no clue what they’re dealing with. This Emperor has been studying Imperial history since he was twelve years old. And the Empress swore oath to the Throne for the first time when she was sixteen. They spent six years in training with the prior Emperor.
“Where is there anyone who understands as well how to rule a large interstellar polity? There were people like that. In the Alliance nations. In the Democracy of Planets. Still not as large as the Empire, but they at least had some idea. They’re all gone. There’s no one anymore who has close to the experience they need. Just schemers and plotters, without a clue. Rats, scurrying in the shadows.
“And where’s the infrastructure? The Empire has fourteen trillion civilian employees. How do you rule without them? You don’t. Let’s say some commercial interest has a lot of employees. A hundred billion, say. Great, they’re only ninety-nine and a half percent short of what they need. There is a six-hundred-year-old institutional memory within the Empire of how to rule such an enterprise, and such exists nowhere else.
“No, they might succeed in breaking it, but they can never hold it. It will sweep them all up in the firestorm as well. It’s the prosperity of the Empire that even makes their scheming and plotting possible. Without it, they would be reduced to scrabbling for survival, with no time for such grand schemes.”
Boyle kept thinking about Geary’s points long after their conversation. He hated to admit it, but he couldn’t see a flaw in Geary’s argument. His grandmother had no experience running anything larger than the family business. That and her scheming. Of what use were those in ruling an Empire?
The family of plutocrats that ruled the DP for a thousand years had had their own internal training and apprenticeship. People came up through the family, learned the ropes, acquired or were granted more responsibility over tim
e.
There was none of that now. How could there be? There was just the enshrined goal, to bring down the Empire and restore the families. But those people who knew how to rule were a dozen and more generations in the past. Their knowledge and experience had been in the grave for centuries. And on-the-job training wouldn’t cut it. Civilization itself would come apart, and have to be reassembled. And the burden for that, he knew, would fall on the common man. War always did.
No, the families had not inherited that knowledge and experience. They had inherited only their ancestor’s bitterness over losing a war, a war they themselves had started in order to make more money. More than twenty billion people had died. And now the families schemed to bring about a collapse that would kill trillions more.
Boyle had nightmares that night.
“That’s the widget?” Maire Kerrigan asked.
“That’s the device, yes.” Antonio Sciacca said.
“Evil looking thing. And it’s been remanufactured?”
“Yes. It looks like a device from the Sintar-Alliance War, but the device internals are completely new.”
Kerrigan looked at the warhead sitting on the bench in a VR channel. She was not actually in the presence of the thing, nor was Sciacca.
“I thought all of that stuff was tightly controlled.”
“Oh, it is. It absolutely is. By the contractors. Which is to say, us. All the reporting was completely in order, just wrong.”
“And the yield?”
“Ten megatons. It’s a three-stage device, fission-fusion-fusion.”
“And you can get it to Center?”
“Yes. I can get it onto the planet, but I can’t get it into the city. It’s too easily detected by the sensors.”
Kerrigan waved a hand.
“I can manage that bit. Most of my people escaped the Emperor’s little round-up. I never much cared for that nonsense with the sound-alike aliases. Some of my people did, and they got rounded up. Most didn’t.”
Sciacca nodded. That was a bit of tactics that had apparently backfired on the families. That and their pay-as-you-go plan. Most of the Kerrigan operatives’ bonuses were accrued in spreadsheets and collected later. There had been few tracks for the Empire’s bloodhounds to sniff out.
“Tell me again why we don’t simply drop it on Imperial City and be done with it,” Kerrigan said.
“We’ve looked into it. The planet’s and the city’s approaches are too well defended. Odds of success are well under fifty-fifty. It might work, but is unlikely to. This has greater odds of success.”
“All right. You might as well get it headed in that direction. Let’s not get it on-planet until we’re ready, though. I have some things to arrange.”
“Of course, Maire. We can hold it nearby. One of my warehouses. It will only be a couple of dozen light-years from Center. A day’s spacing.”
“Excellent. Thanks for showing me, Antonio. Sometimes you just have to see something.”
“Of course, Maire.”
Maire Kerrigan thought about the device off and on throughout the day. Detonating it in the center of Imperial City would kill the Emperor and Empress, and gut the center of the Imperial bureaucracy. It would also kill about fifty million people – men, women, and children – but Kerrigan had few qualms about that. The Emperor Trajan had bombed the DP’s capital planet of Olympia in the war three hundred and fifty years ago, and had killed three and a half billion people. Surely turnabout was fair play, however long delayed.
The plan was for the families to then step into the power vacuum, to take up the reins of the Imperial bureaucracy and Imperial military in place. They had carefully recruited sector governors and provincial governors, as well as emplaced their own people in key spots within the Imperial military hierarchy, in the Imperial Navy, Imperial Marines, and Imperial Guard, and in the Imperial bureaucracy.
Of course, they had suffered their losses in the current round of Imperial reprisals for the attacks on the Empress and Paul Bowdoin, the heir to the throne of Phalia, which had been surrendered to the Emperor after the Sintar-Alliance War. They had lost the sector governors entirely, and they had taken the provincial governors with them. They had also suffered large losses in their placements within the military and the bureaucracy. Not all of them, but more than half.
Kerrigan sighed. She had told the other heads of family they had been playing too loose and fast with the banking system in order to channel funds to family members. Clearly, the Empire had used those alias accounts and transfers to track down many of their embedded personnel.
Kerrigan sent a couple of messages to her contacts on Center, then spent the afternoon going through the plan. Would it even work at this point? Let’s say the rest of the Empire went to hell. Came completely apart into squabbling sectors and provinces. Could the families at least hold the territory of the old DP with the staff and embedded personnel they had remaining? Or even most of it?
The plan was clearly going to take some tweaking. After working on it well into the evening, she still had her doubts. Should they press on regardless? Should they wait until they could rebuild their organization?
Or should they abandon their plans entirely?
Kerrigan went to bed with all of this on her mind. She had nightmares that night. In some of her nightmares, their plans to bring down the Empire didn’t work.
In others, they did.
On Center, in Imperial City, in the officers’ quarters of the Imperial Marine Academy Center, Colonel David Ryan received his older sister’s note. He was originally Ian Walsh, but he had not used his actual name publicly since he was a child. In particular, the Imperial VR system knew him only as David Ryan.
So they had been successful in obtaining a device and it was time to prepare for it. He could do that. He had his proposal all ready for submission.
The problem in getting a nuclear device into Imperial City was there were multiple systems in place to prevent it. These were located far outside the city, where the traffic density was less than it was within the city and its suburbs. Anything being brought into that detection radius would be automatically detected and stopped well away from the city. You couldn’t just put the device in a box truck and drive into the city with it.
The issue was that nuclear devices all contained specialized nuclear materials. You needed a fission bomb to start a fusion reaction, and fission bombs necessarily contained elements that emitted some hard radiation all the time. Those radiation signatures were easy to detect.
That would have made it impossible to get anything containing specialized nuclear materials into the city, if it were not for the fact some things that had to get into the city also emitted radiation. Some medical and industrial activities used various isotopes for legitimate purposes, so there was an inspection and admission process in place to bypass the detection system for those legitimate shipments.
And Ryan’s proposal provided a cover for a perfectly legitimate shipment of radioactive materials. It would take a while to get everything done and get the device in place, but Kerrigan had stressed there was no hurry.
Too Quiet
After the arrests at the Academy, it all quieted down for the second semester. Geary was initially very busy learning his new role as regimental commander for the sophomore class, and Boyle and Benton started hanging out together more often without him. As Geary got on top of his duties, he rejoined the others more often. By that point, Boyle and Benton had grown close, so the threesome was very comfortable with each other.
At the end of the semester, Geary, who had only had half a stint as regimental commander sophomore year, was named Second Regimental Commander for the upcoming year, so he would be the leader of the junior class as well.
It wasn’t nearly as long a trip to go home to Lacomia Sector for Geary and Benton as the trip to Connacht Sector was for Boyle, but all three decided to stay on Center for the summer.
James Ardmore – His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Ptolem
y I – lay back on the chaise and sighed. Gail Burke – Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Regnant Arsinoe – cuddled up to him and kissed his cheek.
“That was just what the Empress ordered,” she said.
“His Majesty is not complaining, either,” Ardmore said.
It was a bit chill on the pool deck this Saturday afternoon, and the sun felt good.
When Burke had turned off her contraceptive nanites, she had ovulated three weeks later. She was now almost four months pregnant, and her breasts had filled out. Given where she had started from, it was an embarrassment of riches. There were other changes, too. More subtle changes. She just seemed to glow, to be more like herself, somehow. Ardmore found the changes fascinating, not least of which that she seemed even more beautiful to him. He had not thought it possible.
“I’m glad I’m done being cold all the time,” Burke said. “It’s nice to get back in the pool. I just couldn’t handle it before.”
“Yeah. I missed our quiet times up here,” Ardmore said, holding her more tightly.
“Speaking of which, Jimmy, it’s too quiet,” Burke said.
Ardmore looked left and right on the pool deck.
“What?”
“Not here. In the Empire. It’s too quiet. It’s been almost six months since we took down the plutocrats’ money and spies, and there’s been nothing. No reaction. No pushback. No follow-up. Something’s up.”
“What, do you think?”
“I don’t know. But you remember when things got quiet before Shubin tried to kill Jonah? When the enemy is quiet, that’s when you worry.”
“I remember, Gail, and I understand. Maybe they just pulled back to lick their wounds a bit. We are keeping the pressure on. In Investigations With our friend Tom. We’re still picking up the occasional additional spy here and there.”
‘Our friend Tom’ was Thomas Pitney, the head of the Department, their private and super secret intelligence service. Even here, even alone, they didn’t talk about it. The rooftop gardens of the Imperial Palace were monitored by the Imperial Guard.
EMPIRE: Resurgence Page 2