“Fourteen years. Since the start. But that’s not how it works in His Majesty’s personal staff, Mr. Saaret. You find a niche, something you like doing, something you’re good at, and you do it. If there’s another need, and you’re the best fit, and you think you can help there, then you do that. But the planning job is much more up Joe’s alley than mine. He’s been running the new ideas review group that does all the analysis and the proposals. That‘s the true output of all this, and he owns that output now. I wouldn’t know how to do Cindy’s job, but he already does. You see? We’re stronger with him there, rather than with me.”
Saaret thought of all the scrambling and clawing for position and power there had been within the Imperial Council and its staff. This attitude was going to take some getting used to. He liked it, mind, but it was night and day from the Imperial Council and the administrative bureaucracy.
“That’s an amazing point of view, Mr. Markov.”
“Not really, Mr. Saaret. We are on His Majesty’s personal staff. We are at the center of Empire. There is no ‘up’ from here. Why, at any time in the last fourteen years, if I had a great idea, I could have requested a personal meeting with the Empress, gone in and said, ‘Your Majesty, I have this idea that could really work out,’ and she would likely have told me to go ahead and work on it and see where it led. Given me a staff. Whatever I needed. How does it get any better than that?”
Saaret nodded. He could see how compelling that was, even the possibility of it. The ability to make a difference, at the very center of power, and with it, direct access to the Throne.
“Very well, Mr. Markov. Thank you for the suggestion. I have one more item for you today. I have a job for your group.”
“Marvelous. What have you got?”
“While the Council and its immediate reports one or two levels deep are gone, The Emperor remains, as do all the various departments of government. What I need to know is, what structure goes between? Not the Imperial Council. We will not resurrect that entity, as we know where it leads. Where it has led, in fact, twice in the last three hundred years.
“Instead, we want to look into everything that has worked, and hasn’t, and how well, throughout history, whether in business or government, and come up with an administrative structure within which the Emperor can run the government.”
“What an excellent problem. Absolutely everyone is going to want to get in on this. You see, Mr. Saaret? What position could you possibly offer me – could anyone ever possibly offer me – better than the one I already have?”
Funeral and Reconstruction
The broken and burned bodies of Dee, Sean, and Cindy could not be embalmed, could not be dressed, could not be made up. They were laid out in their caskets with care as they were, and covered with a linen sheet from shoulders to knees. The linen cover for Dee’s body was edged in gold, and bore the Imperial Arms in gold at its center.
They lay in state side by side in the nave of the Throne Room all day the day after the revolt of the Council was decidedly ended by Dunham’s demolition of the Council building. Dee was in the center, before the Throne she died to protect, with her husband Sean to her right hand and her best friend Cindy to her left.
At the foot of the dais to the throne, a large picture stood on an easel – a portrait of the Empress after her coronation, taken in the gardens, the clouds of an incoming storm behind her.
The Imperial Guard stood watch over the caskets, which were surrounded by a velvet rope strung between brass poles.
All that day, long lines of mourners waited to slowly move up the nave and past the caskets. Even having waited in line so long to reach the caskets, some could not bear to look, while others looked and quickly turned away.
There was no doubt in their minds – there would never be any doubt in their minds – the Emperor’s actions against the Imperial Council and the Imperial Police had been justified. The obscenity of what had been done to their beautiful Empress stood in their minds as testimony to the guilt of the Imperial Council and Imperial Police to the ends of their lives.
Late that evening, the caskets were closed, and the Imperial Guard took up the caskets for the funeral procession down Palace Mall to the Imperial Mausoleum. A single drummer walked along in front, making one muted tap on his drum every several seconds, with all the off-watch Imperial Guard walking alongside the caskets.
Imperial Park had been opened to the public for the event, and the Palace Mall was thronged with people. They left a corridor for the passage of the coffins and the Guard.
When they reached the Imperial Mausoleum, it was opened for the first time in four years, and the caskets carried within and slid into their niches. On the foot of each casket, visible from the aisle of the mausoleum, was the burial plate, with the name and dates of each person interred. Having been laid to rest, the Guard retreated from the mausoleum and it was closed and locked, left to its dead once again.
Dunham watched from a lower balcony of the palace, the Imperial Mall being too dangerous for his personal presence. The public funeral was just that – for the public.
He cried himself to sleep for the third night in a row, in an on-call bedroom on the duty floor of the Imperial Guard.
Todd Whitmore was back in his office supervising the weapons acquisition process. About mid-morning, Fred Dunlop, the head of ship acquisition, stopped in to say hi.
“Hey, Freddy. Have a seat.”
“Thanks, Todd. Boy, times are strange, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, you might say that.”
“No boss. Nobody up there at all but the Emperor. Now what do we do?”
“Our jobs, I guess. What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s no direction from above. What does it mean to be doing our jobs?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to weigh all my actions going forward on what the Emperor would want, not what Wilkins or Gordon or Pomeroy might have wanted. They were the guys pocketing all the big money and telling us what to approve and what not to approve. All that shit is gone. So I’m going to do what I think the Emperor wants.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“You’re damn right it does. I had a little meeting with the Empress herself when I was taken into custody for questioning in the Medved murder investigation, and I’ll tell you this. If her brother is anything like her, he’s not someone you want to disappoint.”
“I think the wreckage of the Imperial Council building is proof enough of that.”
“That’s exactly right. So when the Emperor next goes around looking for troublemakers, I’m not going to be the one with my head sticking up, that’s for damned sure. Do right by him, do right by the Navy, and you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Dunham and Saaret were in the Emperor’s office when Harold Iverson joined them.
“Good morning, Mr. Iverson.”
“Good morning, Your Majesty.”
“Mr. Iverson, I should have asked you earlier. Are there any apartments in the Residence Wing open at the moment?”
“Yes, Sire. There is an opening currently.”
“Mr. Saaret, would you like to move into the palace? The Residence Wing is the two floors above this one, and everyone resident here eats breakfast and dinner in the same cafeteria they have lunch in, on the floor below us.”
“Actually, Sire, I have concerns about it. I already worry about eating in the cafeteria at lunch. You’ve given me authority second only to your own, and I worry my presence there would be an interference with what is, by every evidence I have seen, an incredibly smoothly running organization despite its largely ad hoc structure. I fear I might be a stifling presence, like yourself, though to a lesser extent.”
“I understand, Mr. Saaret.”
Dunham did understand. The level of authority he had given Saaret was high enough to have that effect. Then again, there were other solutions.
“Mr. Iverson, the entire top floor of the Imperial Residen
ce is going to have to be rebuilt, is that not correct?”
“Yes, Sire. Between the explosion, fire, smoke, and water damage, all the furnishings are so damaged as to make gutting the floor and rebuilding it easier than half-measures, which would be unsatisfactory in any case.”
“Very well. One entire end of that floor is guest apartments that have long been unused. I’m wondering if we can replicate the one end of the floor onto the other. Flip it over, so the other end of the floor also has a living room, dining room, master apartment, all that sort of thing. Then wall off both halves from the elevators into an elevator lobby. We would then have the Emperor’s half of the floor and the co-consul’s half. Is that possible, given you are rebuilding the top floor anyway?”
Iverson thought about it, then slowly nodded.
“Yes, Sire. That would be possible.”
“Mr. Saaret, what do you think? It would also solve your problem with lunch in the cafeteria. You would eat lunch in your own dining room.”
“A generous offer, Your Majesty. I will talk to Suzanne about it.”
“Excellent, Mr. Saaret. On to the next thing. What do we do with the mess next door?”
“We are going to need administrative space, Sire, whatever sort of structure gets put in place,” Saaret said. “Mr. Markov’s people are coming up with possible structures for the top levels of the bureaucracy, but, whatever they come up with, we’re going to need room.”
“So you would recommend rebuilding the Imperial Council building, Mr. Saaret?”
“Not exactly, Sire. We don’t need the fancy furnishings, the Council chambers, the huge offices, the private dining rooms. I was thinking more of building another copy of the Imperial Research building. Just flip the plans over and build it again.”
“Can we do that, Mr. Iverson?”
“Yes, Sire. The footprint is the same as the old building. We can even use some or most of the pilings, I think. The tunnel from the palace is intact, as is the people-mover tube and station. No new excavation or construction is required there. We have almost two hundred thousand tons of debris to remove, however. Call it five thousand truckloads. Even doing two hundred truckloads a day will take a month. That will slow us down, but there’s a lot of things that are done already. And of course, we already have the plans.”
“Time estimate?”
“It’s going to be on the order of a year, Sire. It may stretch a little bit, depending on how quickly the process of removing all the wreckage goes. You can only truck it and remove it so fast.”
“Understood, Mr. Iverson.”
Dunham looked back to Saaret and raised an eyebrow. Saaret nodded. Dunham turned back to Iverson.
“All right, Mr. Iverson. You may proceed with the construction of the Imperial Administration building.”
“Yes, Sire.”
They were sitting in the living room, looking out the picture windows across Imperial Park to the Imperial Palace.
“I have a proposal for you, my dear. Or rather, the Emperor does,” Saaret said.
“The Emperor? Heavens,” Suzanne said.
“He asked me today if we wanted to live in the palace.”
Suzanne looked out across Imperial Park, to the palace, gleaming in the dusk.
“There is a Residence Wing, isn’t there? I think you told me that. Apartments for close personal staff.”
“Yes, but the arrangement the Emperor proposed is another thing altogether. They need to completely gut and rebuild the top floor of the palace, the Imperial Residence. Much of it was comprised of guest apartments for family and the like. The Emperor has proposed dividing the top floor in half, and duplicating the Emperor’s own apartments on the other end of the floor. For the co-consul.”
“For you? The top floor of the palace?”
“Half of it. Yes. Private dining room, living room, guest apartments. And all the services that come along with it. Meals, cleaning, laundry service, hairdressers, manicurists. It goes on and on. There are disadvantages, too, of course.”
“Like what?”
“Any company we have to the palace has to be vetted by the Imperial Guard.”
“But we don’t entertain, Geoffrey. When I get together with my girlfriends, we go out. And after all day at the office, you most value being alone with your reading.”
“And you might run into the Emperor waiting for the elevator in the morning.”
“That would be something, wouldn’t it? I suppose it would be just another day at the palace, in that sense. ‘Good morning, Your Majesty.’ That’s it, right?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Well, I can certainly manage that. Why the top floor, though, Geoffrey, as opposed to a normal staff apartment?”
“Suzanne, that place is incredibly well run, mostly by not being run at all. Everybody knows what they’re up to, and they just do it. The Emperor today told the head of Housekeeping to build a new building, a copy of the Imperial Research building, on the site of the Imperial Council building. And he said, ‘Yes, Sire,’ and that’s it. He’s off to build a building. No oversight. No budget. In a year or so, he’ll come back and say the building’s done. It’s the damnedest thing.”
“How do they manage that?”
“Careful staff selection. Letting go of anybody who comes in and starts scrambling for power, or who can’t handle being self-directed. And an employee retention rate that approaches a hundred percent. It’s not a workplace, it’s a culture.”
“Wow.”
“Exactly. The problem with a staff apartment for me is that meals would be in the cafeteria with the other close staff.”
“Ah. I see the problem. I bet the Emperor doesn’t eat in the cafeteria, either.”
“That’s exactly right. My presence would be cold water on the camaraderie and informal structure that really runs the place. I mentioned that to the Emperor, he saw my point, and just said, ‘OK, well let’s just duplicate the Imperial apartments on the top floor.’ Extraordinary.”
“He sounds like a remarkable man.”
“He is. He definitely is. By the most unlikely and unfortunate chain of events, the Empire may have just stumbled into exactly the right ruler at exactly the right time. It certainly seems so, so far.”
“That would be wonderful. And living in the palace would certainly make things easier for you. I think we should do it, Geoffrey.”
“What about you, dear?”
“Oh, I think I can manage having all those services and not having to direct my own staff, dear.”
She laughed.
“In fact, it sounds great to me.”
When Housekeeping decided they were going to do something, they did it. Within twenty-four hours of the Emperor’s order, crews descended on the wreckage of the Imperial Council building. Over a dozen cranes began lifting the debris and loading it into trucks to be hauled away. As the pacing item for the construction of the new Imperial Administration building, they ran sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.
Workmen fell on the job of rebuilding the top floor of the Imperial Residence as well. The freight elevators ran non-stop taking debris down to the loading docks for disposal. To speed the process, debris was loaded into tubs, and forklifts on the top floor and in the sub-basement loaded and unloaded tubs from the freight elevators continuously throughout the day.
Saaret had let Iverson know he and Suzanne would be moving into the other half of the floor, and, as the construction phase got under way, workmen began framing in the elevator lobby and making the other changes necessary.
Commander In Chief
“All right, Mr. Saaret. What do we have this morning?”
“A couple of questions, Sire. While we don’t have a complete list yet, some people likely survived the implosion of the Imperial Council building simply by not being present that morning. The question is, What do we do about them? Do we take them into custody?”
“No, Mr. Saaret. The back of the opposition is broken, we d
on’t need to shoot the fingers off the corpse. I don’t want them in the new government, though. Let them retire on their Imperial pensions and leave them be.”
“And the bribery? The money they accrued from their corruption?”
“Let it go, Mr. Saaret. The future is in the other direction.”
“Very well, Sire.”
“The one exception is Henry Wilkins. He will not escape responsibility for the murder of Vash Medved. Have we found out where he disappeared to, Mr. Saaret?”
“No, Sire. Not yet. He’ll probably turn up eventually.”
“All right. What else, Mr. Saaret?”
“We should probably send out a notice to all the department heads telling them to carry on doing their jobs while we sort out the government, Sire.”
“Do we have a map or organization chart of who survived? Who the department heads are, Mr. Saaret?”
“Not yet, but we should soon, Sire.”
“Very well. Let’s take care of that when we can, Mr. Saaret.”
“Yes, Sire. The other item for today is the military. I think they should have a reporting structure, at least a temporary one, as soon as we can manage it. Not be left to their own devices. That seldom works out well.”
“The military will report directly to the Throne, Mr. Saaret, not through the civilian bureaucracy. That was always a mistake. I will take care of that.”
“Very well, Sire.”
“I had a question for you, Mr. Saaret. How are the sectors? Are we going to have any problems with the sector governors while we sort out the central government?”
“I’m not worried about the sector governments except for the Catalonia Sector, Sire. Sector Governor Renata Palomo de la Gallego is always trouble. The current crisis and the succession is likely to get her thinking along troublesome lines. The other twenty-nine sectors will be fine, for the time being, at least.”
“Why is she still a sector governor if she’s well-known for causing trouble, Mr. Saaret?”
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