EMPIRE: Renewal

by Richard F. Weyand

  “In the meantime, you don’t need a bunch of officious busybodies, backstabbers, and political hacks interfering with your ability to do your job, so I got them out of your way.

  “So carry on, everyone. Do your jobs. Do a good job for me, for the Empire, and for its people, who trust us to look out for their interests.”

  The Investigation

  The next week was one of musical chairs in the Imperial Palace. The six Offices once again established their territories, with Budgets, Oversight, and Projects in the Imperial Administration Building and Troubleshooting, Consulting, and Investigations in the Imperial Research Building. People who had been temporarily left in the offices they had in their prior positions, and had been located all over the Palace complex, were now grouped with their fellows in the respective functional areas.

  Housekeeping asked anyone who could move on their own to do so once they were told their new location was empty. Of course, they would help anyone who needed help, but if you didn’t need help, you didn’t need to wait for them to move you. They made moving boxes available in the elevator lobbies on every office floor of all three buildings. The hallways and elevators of the Palace complex were busy with people carrying boxes of their personal effects from one office to another.

  There was also a lot of empty space, but the Offices were not up to full staffing yet.

  Once the Investigations Office had consolidated in its new location and had its core staffing in place, it was time to begin the investigation into the spies the Imperial Guard had found in the Imperial Palace.

  After the word got out that six of the twenty-four original spies had been executed, another hundred and twenty-one people had turned themselves in to the Imperial Guard under an amnesty announced by General Hargreaves. They were now being used as double agents, sending back to their bosses only the information the Imperial Guard wanted their bosses to have, much of it false.

  Some of that information was how dangerous it was now to send any kind of internal information. Many of them got increased payments, which was fine by General Hargreaves. Their bosses were now paying more money for false information. There was also the psychological factor that a person tended to place a greater value on things for which one paid a higher price, so the false information would actually be more compelling than the previous true information.

  The investigators now had one hundred and thirty-nine separate investigations to do under that one project. They built an investigation map, and started skimming information from Imperial databases, including the VR system, the Imperial Bank, and the population database. It would have taken time even if they were at full staffing. As investigators came aboard, they were added to the project.

  Lina Schneider had unwittingly developed the methodology of her predecessors in Investigations. Perhaps it was just something about how compelling the investigation map was, or how senior investigators approached an investigation. Either way, she spent a lot of time in the viewing room in VR, watching as the map grew.

  Ardmore, Burke, and Drake were at breakfast in the Imperial Residence dining room.

  “I need you two to attend me this morning.”

  “Of course, Jonah. What’s up?” Ardmore asked.

  “Ms. Schneider is making progress on the investigation into the spies in the Imperial Palace. She wants to show me what they have so far.”

  “Sounds good,” Ardmore said.

  Burke nodded.

  After breakfast, they went into Drake’s private living room and got comfortable, then logged into the Investigations viewing room. An incredibly complicated investigations map sprawled across the speaker’s well.

  “Good morning, Your Majesty.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Schneider. I believe you know Captain Burke and Dr. Ardmore.”

  “Of course. Good morning.”

  Ardmore and Burke nodded.

  “Proceed, Ms. Schneider.”

  “Yes, Sire. The investigation map has become very complex, because it has led us down so many trails. We’ll talk more about that in a bit. Let’s stick for the moment to the primary investigation objective. Who’s running spies into the Imperial Palace? The answer is damn near everybody.”

  Schneider adjusted a control on the map, and most of the complexity faded to grey. The remaining colored portions were the primary payment paths to the Imperial Palace spies. Schneider pulled one of those into the foreground.

  “This is a typical example, Sire. We can track the money back almost all the way to Odessa Sector Governor Piotr Shubin. The actual payments were made by one of his long-time henchmen. If I group the spies in the Imperial Palace by which sector governor is associated with each, this is what I get.”

  The map twisted around, and the vertical payment trails from each spy at the bottom to their paymaster at the top grouped into about thirty different sector governors running from one to ten spies apiece in the Imperial Palace. A few stood alone off to the side.

  “Shubin is the most active, with no fewer than ten spies in the Imperial Palace, but most of these had three or four. We still have some we haven’t connected, over here on the side.

  “What gets interesting is when we follow payments from those paymasters down, to other potential spies in their network. We have a bunch more spies into the Imperial government, including into the Imperial Navy and Imperial Marines.”

  Schneider adjusted the controls, and the original payment streams turned black, and other payment trails down from the paymasters lit up in various colors.

  “The red and yellow links here are into Imperial Navy Headquarters and Imperial Marines Headquarters, Sire, both here on Center. The blue and green links are to Imperial Navy and Imperial Marine facilities within their own sectors, while the purple and orange links are to Imperial Navy and Imperial Marine facilities within someone else’s sector.”

  “My God,” Burke said under her breath.

  “Oh, it gets even better, Captain Burke.”

  Schneider adjusted the controls again, and the previously colored links also turned to black and another whole group of links jumped out in color. There were a lot of them.

  “These are the spies the sector governors have deployed to spy on each other, Sire.”

  “Ha! Even the rats don’t trust each other,” Drake said.

  Schneider chuckled.

  “Indeed, they don’t, Sire. It’s basically a free-for-all. We have seventy-nine different governments out there, and everyone is spying on everyone else, plus us. We, of course, are one of their main interests.”

  “And are we spying on them as well, Ms. Schneider?”

  “Yes, Sire. I’m not showing any of that here. That version of the investigation map is very closely held. The less spread around that information is, the better.”

  Drake nodded.

  “And are you looking for double agents there, Ms. Schneider? I can’t imagine we don’t have some of those working against us.”

  “Yes, Sire, we do. I wanted to ask you the best way to proceed there. The best thing to do may be to just leave them, and evaluate the information they provide from the point of view that the information is what their other boss wants us to think.”

  “That sounds solid, Ms. Schneider.”

  “There’s another thing I wanted to ask you about, Sire, in that general vein. Mr. Diener asks us from time to time to perform checks on specific individuals to make sure they aren’t spies for someone else – to check their bank records and such – and to report the results directly to him.”

  Diener had told Drake that Thomas Pitney was having people checked before approaching them to bring them into the Department.

  “I’m aware of the circumstances there, Ms. Schneider. That’s fine. It’s important you do a good job on those, but you needn’t trouble yourself about it otherwise. And there should be no records kept on those once you report results.”

  “Yes, Sire. That’s what Mr. Diener said as well, and we’re keeping no records on any of
those.”

  “Very good, Ms. Schneider. Anything else?”

  “Well, this is information only right now, Sire. What we should do about any of this is another thing entirely.”

  “I understand, Ms. Schneider. Start thinking about options there, and we’ll talk more when the updates to the investigation map slow down a bit.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  Drake cut the connection.

  “So what do you think of all that?” Drake asked Ardmore and Burke once they were back in his private living room.

  “It’s pretty unbelievable there are so many spies running around,” Ardmore said.

  “Actually, given the size of the Empire, I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. What? There were a few thousand in the investigation map? The actual number probably goes into the millions.”

  “Really?” Ardmore asked.

  He thought about it before continuing.

  “I guess you’re probably right. One forgets the size of the numbers involved. I mean, if there were just one spy on every planet, that’s half a million right there.”

  “The ones in the military are particularly disturbing,” Drake said. “According to military justice, they should be court-martialed and shot.”

  Drake raised an eyebrow to Burke.

  “But is that really justice, Jonah? I’ve given a lot of thought to this since I executed those six people a few months ago. If you allow something to go on without any hint of enforcement or repercussions, as the Empire has done for a hundred years, can you then just walk in one day and say, ‘All the punishments apply,’ and execute the offenders? Is that justice? Weren’t you, in your acceptance of the situation for so long, complicit?”

  “It’s not an easy issue, is it?”

  “No, Jonah. It’s not. Not at all.”

  “One option is to just leave it all be,” Drake said. “Not let people know that we know. Keep them out of sensitive positions, surely, but not give any indication to their spymasters we’ve busted their setup. If we do let them know we’ve busted their setup, they’ll continue to try, but they’ll change payment and communication methods. Then we would have spies who are harder to find.”

  “Another option is to tell everybody we know what they’re up to and to stop it, or we will execute them,” Burke said.

  Ardmore started to chuckle. Drake and Burke turned to him.

  “Another option is to have the Imperial Press Office issue a press release. ‘The Empire has broken an interstellar spy ring. List follows.’ Then publish the names of everyone, who they work for, and who they’re spying on.”

  “Oh my God!” Burke said, laughing. “We would have people killing people all over the place.”

  “That would really set the rats after each other, wouldn’t it?” Drake asked. “To find out your buddy and fellow sector governor had spies in your own staff. That may be something we want to do at some point, but I think that’s something we want to do tactically.”

  Ardmore and Burke both nodded.

  “It could be a great way to sow discord among them at an opportune moment,” Burke said.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Drake said. “Well, let’s all think about it and see what we come up with.”

  Several days later at lunch, Jonah asked them if they had had any ideas on handling the spy situation.

  “I think there is no one solution, Jonah,” Burke said. “I think it depends on the situation.”

  “How, exactly, Gail?” Drake asked.

  “Well, consider. We can’t get rid of all of them, or their bosses will know we’ve tweaked to their methods and they’ll change methods. Maybe we won’t be able to find those. But as long as they think they have active spies in an organization, they won’t feel like they need to place more. A spy represents costs and risks to them, so they won’t have more than they think they need. So maybe the best bet is leaving most of them be.

  “Now some of these people we can’t leave in place. Like spies in the Imperial Palace. If we can’t run them as double agents, we get them out of here. Fire them. That’s one group. A plain information spy, say in a department or in the military? Well, we need to keep them away from anything sensitive, but we can play them a bit, too. Run false information past them, realize anything they give us is likely to be tainted by their boss’s wishes. We can infer their boss’s wishes from that, and that’s information for us.

  “But I make an exception for operatives. An information spy is one thing, an operative is another. He might bring in a bomb or a weapon, commit an assassination, whatever. Those guys we need to find and execute.”

  “Ah. OK. I see the distinction,” Drake said.

  “There’s an embedded question there, Jonah,” Ardmore said. “Can Ms. Schneider’s group unearth which spies are the pure information spies and which ones are the operatives?”

  “I’m not sure, Jimmy. I’ll ask her to consider the question, though, and see if she and her staff can come up with an answer to that.”

  “And then as far as the sector governors spying on each other, well, that’s none of our business,” Burkes said. “But I think it might be really worthwhile, at some point of tactical benefit, to create dissension among them.”

  “You mean, like at the time they start pushing back on the Throne in a serious way,” Ardmore said.

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Jimmy. At some point of maximum benefit to us, we set them on each other.”

  Drake nodded.

  “All this seems right to me. We’ll see if we can’t carry on down this path, then. I’ll let you know what Ms. Schneider comes back with.”

  The Department

  Thomas Pitney was also staffing up, but he was of necessity taking it slowly. He knew who he wanted. Serious intelligence types. Not just investigators, they had to be people experienced with working under an alias, pretending to be something they weren’t, collecting information at the tip of the spear, and working alone without any backup.

  He also had to make sure they were loyal to the Throne.

  One further requirement was that some of them, at least, be capable of direct action. Most of Section Six’s activities, as he learned from the files, had been pure intelligence work, but not all. There were always those situations that required the right touch, the right direct action taken, at the right time, and without surfacing the organization.

  Thomas Pitney and his wife Jody Berman had left Imperial City after he had officially retired, after more than thirty years in the Imperial Police and then the Imperial administration. He was only in his mid fifties, but had graduated college early and had his thirty-five years in to qualify for full retirement.

  They had long had their eyes on the Mondari Alps, a mountainous region on her home planet of Biarritz, in the Lacomia sector. Her twin sister Jane lived here, with her husband, Fred Davies. He was a writer and, given the ability to live anywhere they wanted, they’d retired to ‘the Alps’ where the Bermans had spent vacations. Pitney and his wife bought a house near her sister, which both made Jody very happy and got them into the local village scene in record time.

  Pitney spent long hours out on the porch or in his study, working for the Department. His wife’s initial curiosity about his activities, and her desire for him to spend less time working, dissipated when the salary transfers started showing up from Galactic Holdings. He was making a lot of money.

  She contented herself with spending a lot of time with her sister, whose husband also spent long hours sequestered in his study writing his next novel, and the four of them occasionally got together for dinner in the village or an afternoon of cards.

  After the initial two weeks of being out of touch in hyperspace, Pitney set to the staffing problem with a vengeance. He reconnected with a lot of old contacts, working his way back into and around the community of people who did the sort of work one didn’t talk about much. He presented himself as looking for corporate counter-intel people for Galactic Holdings. If someone checked deepl
y enough, they would find out that ‘Anthony Gilley’ was indeed working for the CEO of Galactic Holdings.

  “Hey, Buck. Tony Gilley here.”

  Of course, in the face-to-face VR call, Buck Testa knew damn well it was Tom Pitney, but people like them often used different names, for different reasons.

  “Hey, Tony. Long time no see.”

  “Yeah, I sorta kinda retired except not really.”

  “Figures. What can I do for you, Tony?”

  “I’m looking for people, Buck. Our kind of people. Good ones. Long-term gig. No more or less dangerous than normal. Corporate gig, for Galactic Holdings, so no problems getting paid and shit. Oh, and they gotta be Empire types. Big bosses here are all rah-rah for the Emperor, which only makes sense, I guess, with them being so spread out all over. Anyway, somebody who thinks Joe Sector Governor is the shits won’t cut it. Any ideas?”

  “There’s a couple guys I know, Tony. Probably right up your alley. Let me give ‘em a call and see if they have an interest. If they do, I’ll put you in touch.”

  “Thanks, Buck. I appreciate it.”

  And so it went. Again and again. Pitney had made a lot of friends over the years, and he called them all. Some of his friends were interested, some sent him on to other contacts with their recommendation, some of those contacts knew other people.

  Every time he had a candidate he was interested in, he sent the name on to Paul Diener, the Co-Consul. The Co-Consul gave the names to Lina Schneider, and Investigations would scrape the Imperial databases for information on them. They were looking for ringers, people in the employ of one of the sector governors, people who weren’t what they presented themselves to be, at least in an objectionable way. People in this business often presented themselves as something else, it just depended on what, why, and for whom.

  Sign-ups were given very minimal information at first. They were working for a department of Galactic Holdings. They were sent to a Galactic Holdings location – initially all on sector capital planets – and were given a Galactic Holdings cover job.