With his tour complete, Geary was now returning to the Imperial Palace for a month’s leave ‘at home.’ His kids had one more month at home before they headed off to college, so he would have a solid month at home with them in residence before he and Maureen became empty-nesters.
He had a pang of homesickness as the Imperial Palace came into view. Was that normal, to identify feelings of home with the seat of power of the Galactic Empire? Whether it was strange or not, it was what it was. He had been in the Imperial Guard twenty-five years by this point, and the Palace had been home that whole time.
The Palace limousine pulled off Imperial Park East Boulevard into the ramp down into the tunnel to the Imperial Palace. They stopped in front of the Palace entrance, and the driver retrieved his bag from the trunk and opened the door for Geary to get out.
Geary took his bag from the driver and walked into the Imperial Palace, taking the slidewalk to the elevator bay. He took the elevator up to the Residence Wing, and walked down the hallway to the apartment they had had since Peggy was born and they needed the third bedroom. That was what? Seventeen years ago now? That must be so. The kids were born only nineteen months apart, and had always been very close. Sean had delayed going off to college until Peggy qualified, so they could go off to school together.
Geary opened the door of the apartment and walked in. The heavy drapes were closed, and it was early evening by now, so the apartment was dark. He clicked on the lights in VR and–
“Happy birthday!”
Maureen and Sean and Peggy and Nate and Marie and their kids Tony and Barb all shouted at once. Then Maureen and the kids were all over him, hugging him. Nate shook his hand, and he got a hug from Marie.
Geary got tears in his eyes.
It was home, after all.
Two weeks into his leave, Geary got a meeting request under an Imperial header. It was for a rare in-person meeting with the Emperor and Empress. Rarer still – unheard of, actually – it was for a meeting in the Imperial Gardens. Picnic lunch with the Emperor and Empress. Maureen was invited as well, and dress was specified as ‘picnic casual/MCU.’
Geary accepted, of course, and Saturday at noon found him leading Maureen down the hallway of the Imperial Residence to the escalator up to the roof. Geary was wearing MCU and the black fourragère, and Maureen was wearing a sun dress, it being a beautiful late-summer day. Guardsmen stationed at the doors from the elevator lobby and at the escalator came to attention and saluted as they passed. Geary acknowledged their salutes with a nod.
“I’ve never been up here,” Maureen whispered to him as they walked down the hallway.
“Almost no one has. They have to have somewhere they can be human, after all.”
“I’ve never even met them. And the first-name thing. Jimmy and Gail. Are you sure?”
“Absolutely sure,” Geary said.
“Have you ever called them Jimmy and Gail?”
“No. I’ve never been up here except when I was on duty, and the first-name rule doesn’t apply then.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’ll be fine, Maureen. Just relax.”
They got to the single escalator, and Geary pushed the button to start it going up. They rode up, then walked around the path toward the pool, where they saw Burke and Ardmore fussing with lunch on a picnic table on the pool deck. Burke was in MCU with the royal purple fourragère, and Ardmore wore a knit shirt over baggy shorts and sandals.
“Travis. Maureen. Over here,” Burke called, waving.
As they came up, Burke said, “Call me Gail. And I’d like you to meet my husband Jimmy.”
“Maureen. Travis. Good to see you,” Ardmore said. “Have a seat.”
They all sat around the picnic table, and Geary and Maureen were soon at ease. They had standard picnic fare, sandwiches and potato salad and a fruit punch and cookies. They chatted about nothing in particular during lunch.
After lunch, Ardmore had a confession to make.
“I’m afraid we have an ulterior motive today, Travis. We really need to talk to you about something, and, since you’re officially on leave, we didn’t want to call you in to the office.”
“You could have, though,” Geary said. “I wouldn’t have minded.”
“It would have been bad form,” Burke said around a cookie.
“General Redmond has expressed the desire to retire,” Ardmore said. “Completely understandable. He’s been in the position for fifteen years, and in the service for forty, but it leaves us without a Commandant of the Imperial Guard.”
Geary looked back and forth between them.
“We were wondering if you would accept the position of Commandant, Travis,” Burke said.
“That would also include your sixth star,” Ardmore said.
Geary opened his mouth, closed it. What did he really want?
“You don’t have to answer us today, Travis,” Burke said. “Think about it. You and Maureen talk about it. But we do need to know in the next few days.”
Geary nodded.
“I’ll think about it, Gail. I’m not sure what we really want to do. I have my twenty-five in. I could retire. We could move up to the coast or something. I’m just not sure.”
“Just let us know, Travis. When you decide,” Burke said. “Want another cookie?”
Geary and Maureen talked about it later.
“What about you, Maureen?”
“I grew up in the city, Travis, and we used to spend a month during the summer on the western shore. So I’m good either way. What do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure. Everybody always looks forward to retirement, but I don’t know what I would do with my time. Most people have some plan, don’t they? Or maybe it’s just to get away from a job they hate.”
“But you’ve always liked your job.”
Geary looked at her for several seconds, then nodded.
“That’s right. I guess I have.”
“So, stay on the job.”
“Is that OK with you Maureen?”
“What’s OK with me is that you’re happy, Travis.”
At the end of the month, Sean and Peggy headed off to college. Not so far, after all, as they had both gotten in to Imperial University Center in Imperial Park West. They could have commuted from the Imperial Palace, but Geary and Maureen both thought it was better they live on campus with the other students.
After the kids left, Geary came back from his one-month leave and reported in for his new assignment. He had a moment’s sense of the surreal as he saw the brass plaque on his office door.
Imperial General Travis Geary
Commandant, Imperial Guard
Epilog
In the lobby of the Imperial Marine Academy Center, in Imperial City, there is a bronze statue of a young man in uniform. He has a lieutenant’s collar tabs and Imperial Guard fourragère on his Academy cadet uniform, and wears the Combat Ribbon, the Galaxy Cross, and the Gratitude of the Throne. He stands next to a large fire extinguisher. The right foot of the statue is shiny, where cadets entering the building have touched it for luck for decades.
A duplicate of that statue stands almost two thousand light-years away, in the gardens of the Walsh family estate near Galway City, on Galway, Connacht Sector. It stands near a small stone pond where it is visible from the house. It was a gift from Her Majesty the Empress Regnant Arsinoe I to Maire Kerrigan, the renowned mater familias of the Walsh family in the middle of the fourth century of the Galactic Era.
On the tenth floor of the Imperial War Museum in Imperial City, in the Lt. Thomas Walsh Doolan Exhibit Hall, there is a bronze plaque set into the floor. It reads:
In Memory of
Lt. Thomas Walsh Doolan, IG
who died on this spot
on May 28, 356 GE.
By his selfless act
he saved the Empire.
The plaque is surrounded by six brass stanchions joined by velveted chains. Standing watch over the plaque is the wax figure of
a man in the Marine Dress Uniform of a Command Sergeant Major, with the fourragère of the Imperial Guard, and wearing atop his other decorations the Gratitude of the Throne. His name badge reads ‘STINSON’.
For over seventy years, at nine o’clock in the morning on the last Tuesday of May, two officers of the Imperial Guard made pilgrimage to this spot. With deployments to the Imperial Marines on remote planets, sometimes it was only one or the other who could make it, but they would always bring along a second Imperial Guard officer, so there were always two. They laid a wreath at this plaque every year.
After the last of the two passed in 432 GE, the annual honoring of the spot became an Imperial Guard tradition, and two senior officers of the Imperial Guard continue to decorate the commemorative plaque marking the spot where Thomas Walsh Doolan died, at nine o’clock in the morning on the last Tuesday of May, every year to the present day.
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From The Encyclopedia Hominum
Galactic Empire – also known simply as the Empire. Capital: Center (was Sintar, a variant of Slavic ‘cintar,’ meaning center). The Galactic Empire was the first political unit in history to unite all humanity under one central government. The foundation of the Empire is usually dated to the accession of the Emperor Trajan to the Throne of Sintar, though it would take ten years of war and annexation to unite all humanity under his rule....
Jonathan Drake – Reign name: Augustus VI. Drake was the sixth and last of the Augustan Emperors. Drake was also the last of the hereditary Emperors. Drake noted the decline of the Galactic Empire during his life, and recruited Court Historian James Philip Ardmore to help him restore the Empire to its former status. A key element of that was ending hereditary rule, which Drake did by naming Ardmore and Imperial Guard Captain Gail Anne Burke his successors. The eldest son of the Emperor Augustus V and the Empress Caroline, Drake acceded to the Throne on the death of his father in the year 333 GE....
James Philip Ardmore – Reign name: Ptolemy I. Ardmore was the first Ptolemaic Emperor, and, with Jonathan Drake (Emperor Augustus VI) and Gail Anne Burke (Empress Regnant Arsinoe I), reinstated the practices and policies of the Galactic Empire’s Golden Age, leading to the period known as the Second Golden Age. Ardmore was born on Lucerne, in the Vandalia sector, the youngest of five children....
Gail Anne Burke – Reign name: Arsinoe I. Also known as Arsinoe the Great. Empress Regnant with her husband, James Philip Ardmore (Emperor Ptolemy I). Burke was the first Empress Regnant on the Throne of the Galactic Empire, and the first Empress Regnant in Center since Empress Ilithyia II, on whom she consciously modeled herself. Burke, with Jonathan Drake (Emperor Augustus VI) and James Philip Ardmore (Emperor Ptolemy I), reinstated the practices and policies of the Galactic Empire’s Golden Age, leading to the period known as the Second Golden Age. Burke was the middle of three children, and the only girl, born on Moria in the Phalia Sector....
Paul Diener – Imperial administrator and Co-Consul late in the reign of the Emperor Augustus VI and well into the reign of the Emperor Ptolemy I and Empress Arsinoe I. Diener was elevated from deep within the bureaucracy to be the fourth member of the team that remade the Galactic Empire, leading to the Second Golden Age. The other members of that team – Emperor Augustus VI, Court Historian James Philip Ardmore, and Imperial Guard Captain Gail Anne Burke – relied on Diener’s administrative experience to carry out the Golden Age practices and policies they reinstated....
Franz Becker – Primary heir and custodian of the fortune originally amassed by the great tycoon Otto Stauss at the beginning of the Galactic Era and chairman of the board of Galactic Holdings. As all of his family before him, Becker was a Throne loyalist and supported the Throne through the reinstatement of historical policies and practices at the beginning of the Galactic Empire’s Second Golden Age. The extent of his support of the Throne only came out much later....
Maire Kerrigan – Head of the Walsh family, a plutocratic ruling family of the former Democracy of Planets, in the mid-fourth century of the Galactic Era. Kerrigan was one of the ringleaders behind the DP plutocratic families’ attempt to destroy Imperial City in 356 GE, known as the Imperial City Plot. Her grandson Thomas Doolan died defeating the plan, which caused a change of heart in the matriarch. Kerrigan was behind the rapprochement of the families with the Throne, aided by the Empress’s stark alternative....
Thomas Doolan – A member of the Walsh family, a plutocratic ruling family of the former Democracy of Planets, in the mid-fourth century of the Galactic Era. Doolan was a cadet at the Imperial Marine Academy Center when he became aware of the families' plan to destroy Imperial City. He was instrumental in defeating the Imperial City Plot, for which he posthumously received the Galaxy Cross, the Gratitude of the Throne, and invitation to the Imperial Guard. Doolan was born on Galway, in the Connacht Sector....
Travis Geary – A member of the Imperial Guard. Geary was instrumental in breaking up the Imperial City Plot while he was Brigade Commander of the Imperial Marine Academy Center, for which he received the Gratitude of the Throne and invitation to the Imperial Guard. Geary rose through the Imperial Guard to the rank of Imperial General, becoming the Commandant of the Imperial Guard at age forty-five, a position in which he served for nearly thirty years. Geary was born on Mandrake in the Lacomia Sector....
Afterword To The Renewal Trilogy
After writing the Reformer Trilogy, the Conqueror Trilogy, and the Succession Trilogy, I was left to consider whether there was another interesting major story arc in the EMPIRE series.
The main-sequence books all dealt with very big themes, at the very top of Imperial power: domestic affairs, in cleaning up the corruption-ridden Sintaran Empire; foreign affairs, in defending the Sintaran Empire against the envious DP plutocrats, ultimately resulting in Trajan ruling all of human space; and the problem of succession, ensuring Trajan’s era of good government would endure. The major players were the Emperors and Empresses, their courtiers and their military commanders.
I had tied up the story arc of Bobby Dunham and Amanda Peters with EMPIRE: Succession. From very early in EMPIRE: Reformer, when Bobby makes his first appearance as a fourteen-year-old, through his accession and reign, and finishing up with the funeral of Amanda Peters at age ninety-nine, the three-trilogy series covered a span of almost ninety years, with the Empire on track and its future bright. EMPIRE: Succession was a hard close to that overall story arc.
Was there another such story in EMPIRE? Another story at the very top of Imperial power? One that wasn’t simply a retread of one of the other trilogies?
I considered how the wheels could come off, how the Empire of EMPIRE: Succession could deteriorate. I didn’t want to write about it deteriorating – that would be depressing, both to write and to read – but what if it had deteriorated, and then it got back on track? How did all that come about?
I took, as before, the Roman Empire as a model. The Five Good Emperors of Rome – Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius – were not hereditary rulers. Nerva was selected by the Senate, and Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius were each hand-picked by the prior Emperor as his adopted son and successor. Marcus Aurelius broke the chain by leaving the throne to his biological son Commodus, who was a disaster. Rome never again had such good leadership as it did during the Five Good Emperors.
What if that happened to the Galactic Empire as well? Some Emperor left the Throne to his biological son, and hereditary rule became the norm. The Empire would surely deteriorate under hereditary rule. That’s a given. How would it get back on track? By reinstating the policies and practices of its Golden Age. For that, I needed both an historian, someone who could unearth what those policies and practices had been, and an Emperor, who saw what was happening and was determined to stop it despite the resistance of entrenched special interests, including his own family, who enjoyed their preferences.
Now there was a story I could tell.
&n
bsp; With that, I was off and writing. As always, I had no idea where the story would take me. One issue was that the historian, Jimmy Ardmore, had no military background. I solved that story issue with Gail Burke, an exceptional and strong woman, who could be co-ruler with Ardmore. It was inevitable they would fall in love.
With both characters, I went against the types I had run with before. Ardmore was a dumpling, pasty white and lumpy. No chiseled features, no tall, muscular military man. He was the consummate scholar instead.
With Burke, I took a different tack. The Empire is multi-ethnic, of course. The people who colonize space will self-select by capability and temperament, not ethnic background, and their descendants will run the gamut of human variety. While I don’t do a lot of character description, names are often a clue, and all the European and Asian ethnicities are represented.
As for racial composition, major characters throughout the EMPIRE series are Asian-descended – like the Empress Jiahui Song and Admiral Mah Muping – Hispanic-descended – like Gerardo de Navarro (Jared Denny) and Admiral Maria della Espinoza – and African-descended – like Cynthia Newberry and Seth Glick.
So with Burke, I gave her a strong element of African descent. I also made her beautiful, dangerously competent, and highly ethical. In a human space of over two quadrillion human beings, only the best will rise to the very top of the Empire. Besides, it’s fiction, and my powerful women can be beautiful if I want. Author’s license.
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