Tyrant

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Emperor?”

  “Yes. Emperor Trajan. Major Robert Allen Dunham, the Empress’s brother. He was her designated heir.”

  “Emperor. That’s different,” Whitmore said. “So what do we do now, Captain?”

  Mercer shrugged.

  “Go home. Go in to the office tomorrow. Go back to work.”

  Derek Beckham was led from his cell to a conference room. A box on the table contained his clothes and other personal items from when he was arrested. His clothing had been laundered and neatly folded.

  “You are being released, Mr. Beckham. You may dress in your own clothes and retrieve your personal items now. Someone will be in to talk to you in a few minutes.”

  Beckham stripped out of the prison coverall and re-dressed in his own clothes. He had recovered all his personal items when an Imperial Guard officer entered.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Beckham.”

  Beckham sat down.

  “I’m being released?”

  “Yes, Mr. Beckham. The Empress committed to you that you would be released if you answered our questions. While the Empress is gone, the Emperor will stand by her promise.”

  “Wait. What? What Emperor?”

  “The Empress was getting close to the people who ordered the murder of Vasilisa Medved, Mr. Beckham. Rather than be arrested for murder, they struck at the palace and killed her. The new Emperor is her brother, and he counter-attacked.”

  “Damn.”

  “So the Emperor will stand by the deal. As you recall, you are being released, and you have an Imperial Pardon for all your crimes except as accessory to the murder of Ms. Medved. For that crime, you have received the death sentence, but it has been suspended. As long as you are never again convicted of a felony, you have a clean record. If you are ever again convicted of a felony, the suspension of the death sentence will lapse, and you will be executed. It is my suggestion that you find a legitimate line of work, Mr. Beckham.”

  “That certainly makes sense to me.”

  “There is one further item, Mr. Beckham. The Emperor does not wish to put you out on the street with no means of support. You might return to crime out of necessity. And so His Majesty has given you a fifty-thousand-credit deposit into an account in your name at the Imperial Bank. He hopes you will use it to tide yourself over while you find a legitimate trade.”

  “What?”

  “His Majesty has given you fifty thousand credits, Mr. Beckham. To help you go straight.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s a nice person, Mr. Beckham. A nice person in a tough job. You lucked out.”

  Coming Up To Speed

  “My God! I was so worried about you,” Suzanne Saaret said when her husband, Geoffrey Saaret, got home that evening. She gave him a big hug, and held on like she couldn’t believe he was there and would never let him go. “When I saw the recording of the building coming down, and looked out at the wreckage, I thought there was no way anyone survived that.”

  “No one did, actually. I wasn’t in the building.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I should let you sit down. Come, tell me about it.”

  They went into the living room and sat in the big armchairs, facing out the windows to the view of the Imperial Palace and the Imperial Research building. The palace looked strange without the Imperial Council building.

  “You weren’t in the building?”

  “No. The Emperor called me to the palace before he imploded the Council building. I was with the Emperor when he blew it up, and it was a half-hour before I could get a message to you in the VR. Sorry, my dear.”

  “It’s OK now that you’re safe. I had a tough time there until I got your message, though. So you were actually with the Emperor? He called you out of the building first?”

  “Yes. The Emperor called me to the palace, and he and I were standing on the balcony looking at the building when he blew it up.”

  “It looked like it just collapsed.”

  “He set off a bomb inside it. It swelled upwards first, then just collapsed. It was awful to watch. I told those assholes on the Council that you do not trifle with the Throne. They ignored me and paid the price.”

  “Who? Pomeroy? Galbraith? Newsom?”

  “Yes, and Ralston and Falmouth and Austin and Ashbury – all of them. Dead at the Emperor’s hand. For treason. Because it was members of the Council who orchestrated the Empress’s assassination.”

  “Were all of them involved?”

  “No, but all of them had resisted the Throne’s efforts at reform for, what, twenty years now? They’re also the ones who elevated Pomeroy, Galbraith, and Newsom to the Council. They selected the hotheads to fight the Throne, and the Emperor wasn’t in the mood for sorting the wheat from the chaff. Except for me.”

  “Well, thank God for that. Why did he do it?”

  “He told me the two prior Empresses trusted me to act in the best interests of the Empire as I saw it. They didn’t always agree with my judgment, but they never doubted my heart, he said.”

  “That’s really nice, actually.”

  “Yes. And then he offered me a job.”

  “I saw that on the news. What’s a co-consul?”

  “It goes back to ancient Rome, on Earth, three thousand years ago. During the Republic, two co-consuls were elected every year to rule the Republic for that year. During the Empire, the Emperor was one consul, and his co-consul could either be a figurehead with no authority, or the right-hand man of the Emperor.”

  “So which is it for you?”

  “Right-hand man of the Emperor. He wants me to set up a new administrative structure for the Empire, reporting to him. No more Imperial Council. I’ll be the second most powerful man in the Empire.”

  “Which you arguably were before. There’s a strange kind of symmetry there.”

  “Yes. It’s also a brilliant move for him politically. With me as co-consul, it can’t be true that the Emperor was wrong in dispatching the Council, or I would have nothing to do with him. That I signed up as co-consul means I agree with him the Council was in the wrong.”

  “And do you?”

  “Oh, yes. I warned them. For years, I warned them. But they just kept getting more and more out of control. They forgot the one basic fact. It is loyalty to the Throne that holds the Empire together. The Empire can do just fine without the Council. It would disintegrate without the Throne.”

  “So how do you proceed from here?”

  “First, I think, is to take stock. I have had no visibility into the Emperor’s personal staff at all. I simply don’t know what resources are available.”

  “Wow. What a job. A new government, from scratch.”

  “Well, yes and no. All the departments and staff are still there, and the Throne is still there. We’re missing two or three layers of the bureaucracy at the top. That’s what I have to figure out. How to run the existing machine with a new set of controls. I don’t have to design a whole new machine.”

  “You two are high on the list of people Mr. Perrin tells me I need to talk to,” Saaret said. “Looking at your backgrounds, I find much in common – same schools, same degrees, both with litigation experience – so, given the amount of catch-up I have to do, I figured I would talk to you together. What do you two fellows do around here?”

  Finn and Pullman looked at each other, and Finn nodded to Pullman.

  “We were Her Majesty’s attorneys, Mr. Saaret,” Pullman said. “I brought Bob in when he expressed a desire to get in on the action here. Generally speaking, Bob has been handling the litigation issues, like the weapons systems subpoenas, and the High Court cases, because he has much more litigation experience. I have been handling the government legal issues. The question as to whether it was legal to name a male heir to the Throne, for instance, came to me. But it doesn’t much matter which of us you talk to, we’ll use the other as a resource.”

  “We’ve been friends for a very long
time, Mr. Saaret,” Finn said. “We were roommates in law school, and we stayed in touch. George first brought me in to palace business on the wrongful death case against the Empress for the deaths of those Marines on Wollaston.”

  “So that was an inside deal,” Saaret said.

  “Of course,” Pullman said. “Her Majesty – that would be Ilithyia I – wanted to uncover all the documentation on the problems with those weapons, and she used the discovery process to do it, rather than try to force the issue herself through the Council.”

  Saaret nodded. Lots of things were beginning to make a lot more sense.

  “When I came on board, the first thing I did was work on staffing up the Shadow Court,” Finn said. “That was the brainchild of Andy Forsythe, a brilliant young attorney you need to meet at some point. I recruited Bob Simms, and then Bob and I recruited the other ten judges for the Shadow Court.”

  “Andy Forsythe has been working with the new ideas group to rewrite Imperial Law,” Pullman said. “They want to get it down to a couple of volumes, written in English.”

  “The new ideas group?” Saaret asked.

  “Has nobody mentioned the new ideas group to you?” Pullman asked.

  Saaret shook his head.

  “No. What do they do?”

  “OK, this goes back – what? Fourteen or fifteen years. Since Deanna Dunham Garrity was first hired as Personal Assistant to Ilithyia I,” Pullman said. “The Empress asked Ms. Garrity to be thinking of ideas of how to run the government better. She was young, and coming at government with fresh eyes, and the Empress asked her to make notes any time she thought something like, ‘Why do we do this in this way, and not in that way?’ The first idea she had was to have a whole group of young people who did that, who just thought up new and better ways to do things, instead of just her.”

  “Except they’re not always better,” Finn said. “Some ideas are flat out impossible, even while others are brilliant. Rather than throttle those wild horses, there’s another, more seasoned group that analyzes the raw output from the new ideas group and comes up with solid proposals. Cindy Dunham was hired initially to run that new ideas review group, then four years ago she stepped up to run the whole process.”

  “And there’s also the business ideas group, which is composed of executives on loan from the private sector, who apply private-sector methods to government problems to come up with new ideas. That’s all part of the same organization. Those get fed into the new ideas review group as well,” Pullman said.

  “So there’s an entire infrastructure of people here for coming up with new ideas and working them up into proposals?” Saaret asked.

  “Yup,” Pullman said. He gestured with his thumb. “A whole building full of ‘em. Next door.”

  Saaret’s head spun. He had been dreading working up a new government structure to replace the Imperial Council by himself, and now he found he had a ready-made organization tuned to doing just that. Coming up with the ideas, injecting the best of private-sector methods, and analyzing the raw ideas to come up with concrete proposals. And they’d been in operation for well over a decade.

  Then again, the Empress had called her new building the Imperial Research building. What sort of research would the head of Imperial government be doing? Why, researching government itself, of course. A blind man should have seen it.

  “It’s obvious to me I need to talk to those people right off,” Saaret said. “Where should I start?”

  “The ringleader of the circus,” Pullman said. “Valery Markov. He’s the head of the new ideas group. They’re bound to be pretty shook up over there at the moment, though. Cindy Dunham was a major driving force – her energy and activity level was incredible – and Vash Medved was working the weapons acquisition process. They’re both dead now, in just a month, and that’s going to hurt. You’ll need a replacement for Cindy, heading up all three groups, and she’s going to be hard to replace. The same with Vash’s depth of knowledge of the existing acquisition process.”

  “Well, I guess the first thing to do is go talk to Mr. Markov,” Saaret said.

  “Oh, yeah. You definitely want to go over there. Ask him to show you the zoo.”

  “The zoo?”

  “Just ask him.”

  Saaret called to make an appointment to meet with Val Markov, but Markov said to drop by any time. When Saaret had a chance that afternoon, he went down to the palace sub-basement and over to the Imperial Research building on the slidewalks, then back up to Markov’s floor.

  “Come in, come in. You must be Mr. Saaret,” Markov said.

  “That’s right. Mr. Markov?”

  “Yes, yes, sit down, sit down. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I think I know a little bit about what your group does, but how does it work? I mean, how do you decide what to work on?”

  “Sometimes someone says, ‘You know, we could use a better way to do this or that,’ and sometimes it’s more like, ‘How would you do this or that new thing.’ Sometimes somebody just gets a notion to go off and look at something they don’t understand. So lots of ways.”

  “I see. So if I need new ideas about this or that problem, I do what?”

  “Just tell me. If you want to present the background to the whole group, you can do that as well.”

  “And then who works on it?”

  “Anybody who wants to. Whoever thinks they have some ideas, something to contribute.”

  “It sounds completely unstructured.”

  “Its structure is internally driven. People who have an interest in a problem will get together and start banging on it. I never know who it’s going to be. We have some people who are drawn to any new thing, any new project, and others who like to really sink their teeth into something and keep going on it until they’re satisfied.”

  “How many people are in the group?”

  “We really grew when we moved into this building. I’m not sure how many there are now. Two or three hundred.”

  “You don’t know how many people are in your own group?”

  “Do you really need to know, Mr. Saaret? We could research the question.”

  Markov said that with a twinkle in his eye, and Saaret suspected it was something of an in-joke.

  “Part of the issue is that reporting lines in Her Majesty’s personal staff – I guess it’s His Majesty now – are so fluid. For example, Andy Forsythe. I think he actually works for George Pullman, but he’s almost always over here. They have a big project under way.”

  “So I understand. Re-writing Imperial Law.”

  “Yes, that’s the one.

  “I was told I should ask you to show me the zoo.”

  Markov laughed.

  “Channel 700. When you write 700, it looks a lot like ZOO. You see?”

  “So the zoo is a VR channel?”

  “Yes. Before this building was built, we didn’t have enough office space. We all met in the cafeteria, and used the limited offices only for private meetings or study. When we moved into this building, with everyone having their own office, we didn’t want to lose that energy. Andy Forsythe suggested we generate a virtual cafeteria for everyone to hang out in, and that’s where the action is. Would you like to see it?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right. Go full-immersive on Channel 700.”

  Saaret selected Channel 700 in the palace VR, and found himself in a cafeteria that could seat about three hundred people. It looked similar to the cafeteria in the palace where he had had lunch earlier.

  There were dozens of tables, at most of which two or three or four people sat, engaged in discussions, some of which were pretty lively. Others sat at small tables by themselves, studying some document or other. The noise was similar to that in cafeterias anywhere.

  “Welcome to the zoo, Mr. Saaret,” Markov said.

  “How can those people be studying on their own, with all the noise of the other conversations going on around them?”

  “Young people
don’t process input the same way, Mr. Saaret. They like having their friends and co-workers around. They can’t concentrate sitting alone in their office. The silence eats at them.”

  Saaret shook his head. He certainly couldn’t concentrate here.

  “Is Andy Forsythe here?”

  Markov looked around the room.

  “Yes. That fellow over there with the white shirt and tie. Tall, thin, short blond hair.”

  Saaret looked where Markov indicated, and saw Forsythe in an animated conversation with three other people at a table for four.

  “Do you want me to call him over, Mr. Saaret?”

  “No. Don’t interrupt him. They look like they’re in the middle of something.”

  Saaret looked around, just trying to soak it all in.

  “This is amazing, Mr. Markov.”

  “They call it the zoo, Mr. Saaret, but it’s His Majesty’s think tank. You throw the problem in here, and you get ideas back. Lots of ideas – good, bad, and middling. Separating the wheat from the chaff? Well, that’s not our job.”

  “Let’s go back to your office, Mr. Markov.”

  “Of course.”

  Saaret dropped out of VR and was back in Markov’s quiet office. The silence was almost palpable after the chaos of the zoo.

  “I can’t get over how quiet it is here, given the noise level in the zoo.”

  “That’s because almost everyone on this end of this floor is in VR. They’re all physically sitting in their offices, but they are all VRed into the zoo.”

  “Amazing.”

  Saaret shook himself, considered his other goals here.

  “Another thing I have to talk to you about, Mr. Markov, is a replacement for Cindy Dunham. Someone has to head up the planning section. Is that something you want to be considered for?”

  “No. Not at all. That should almost certainly be Joe Lin. Lin Jiahao. He stepped up to head the analysis group four years ago when Cindy was promoted.”

  “But he’s been in that position only four years, and you’ve headed up the new ideas group for how long?”