Gulliver looked around the room at that.
“The room’s been swept, Mr. Gulliver,” Boardman put in.
Gulliver nodded.
“OK. Your cover is thin at the moment,” Gulliver said. “You’ll get made getting off the shuttle.”
“I know. We need to fix that before we go.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Gulliver said. “What do you think? Hydraulic engineering degree for Lyle would work. What about you?”
“History would work for me,” Kersey said.
“I’ll make you a retired college professor. Explains your residual air of authority. Planets? Some places you actually know something about.”
“Both originally from Preston, in the Essen sector of the former DP. We met there.”
And Ann Turley and Kyle Gordon had both been posted there, though at different times.
“Got it. Maybe a military academy type of high school for you, Mr. Boardman, to explain your posture. What about you, Ms. Kersey?”
“Finishing school, perhaps?”
“That works. Give me a couple days to get it set up, then download your backgrounds and study them on the way.”
Kersey and Boardman nodded.
Kersey considered. That Gulliver had access to changing the Empire’s records on its citizens spoke volumes about his connections. They at this point knew much more about him than he did about them. Time to redress the balance a bit.
“As for our real backgrounds, Mr. Gulliver, we are both recently retired from the Imperial Marines, and the solution to the problem on Julian is anticipated to be somewhat, er, kinetic. That is what we are gathering information for.”
Gulliver nodded. That was as expected, given their postures and the extraordinary additions to his sales catalog for Julian.
“Rank at separation?”
“Command Sergeant Major,” Boardman said.
Gulliver nodded, then looked to Kersey. She hesitated, then replied.
“Brigadier General.”
Gulliver raised an eyebrow at that. He looked to Boardman, and Boardman gave him a single sharp nod.
“I see. So you are anticipating needing a brigade-level force?”
“Given the size of the planet, yes, that’s what we expect. But the make-up of the force required, and its size, is still an open question.”
“Expensive.”
“I am given to understand that expense is not a concern. I’ve been instructed to err on the side of too big, actually.”
There was a knock on the door then, and Boardman pointed to the bathroom. Gulliver padded silently to the bathroom and went in, leaving the light off and the door ajar.
“Coming,” Boardman called.
Boardman let the room service waiter in and had him set table for two, with the side dishes and large salad between the entree plates.
“Great. Thanks,” Boardman said as he signed off on the tab.
The waiter nodded and left.
Rather than call to Gulliver, Boardman walked over to the bathroom door and said, “Coast is clear, Mr. Gulliver.”
Kersey took the large salad back to her armchair and Gulliver took the other seat at table, across from Boardman. They ate in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. When dinner was done, Gulliver and Boardman returned to their prior chairs.
“For my part,” Gulliver began, “I am also skilled in gathering intelligence, and, once on Julian, if there are things you need to find out and cannot cover yourselves, I can help there. With Galactic Equipment Supply, I will have different contacts and different activities that may help on some things.
“As a GES salesman, I am skilled at the ordering of equipment, arranging the shipping of the equipment ordered, transportation of support personnel, and forecasting their need for supplies and housing. All that sort of thing.”
“Excellent,” Kersey said.
Boardman nodded.
“Logistics. Logistics is good,” Boardman said.
They spoke for another two hours, including a discussion of what was new in Gulliver’s sales catalog, and the amounts of supplies, ammunition, and personnel required for each of the weapons systems available.
After Gulliver had gone, slipping out as quietly as he had come, Kersey and Boardman reviewed the evening’s events.
“Wow. What a great resource,” Boardman said.
“I’ll say. That guy can go anywhere. Nondescript. Low-key. He’s the next thing to invisible.”
“Yeah, you look up low-key in the dictionary, and his picture isn’t there. He’s more low-key than that.”
Kersey laughed.
“He’s a quick study, too. We didn’t have to tell him anything twice.”
“Yeah,” Boardman said. “I don’t know what outfit he’s with, but I know why they picked him. He’s easy to underestimate.”
“That, I think, is a mistake someone is likely to make only once.”
Boardman nodded.
“OK, so it’s your turn for the bed. I got the sofa tonight.”
When Gulliver got back to his room, he did a quick search on Imperial Marine records. There weren’t a lot of female brigadier generals, recently retired. He set the age range for fifty to fifty-five years old, and displayed head shots.
There she was. Ann Turley. He read her personnel record and let out a low whistle. The Groton Insurgency. Nicely done. Somebody had made a wise choice for this operation.
Gulliver would have to work on their covers, but they had already lost a lot of the military bearing they would have had in service. He had picked up on it because he was looking for it. And they had picked good aliases, similar enough to their real names they would respond naturally, different enough they wouldn’t respond to searches. More importantly, if someone called their real name and they responded, it would be excusable in light of the similarity.
He looked up Preston. Nice, heavily populated planet, like most of the former DP planets. He began to spin the back story of the pair’s covers. This military school, that finishing school, this university. Married on such-and-such a date.
It was late when he wrapped up, but he had all the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted before he sent the records change request off to Section Six.
Gulliver was in the freight section of the Alexa spaceport, waiting with returning crew members for a shuttle up to the ICV Ivan Bledsoe. The big freighter was bound for Julian and other colony planets to deliver supplies. Julian was first on its itinerary. It would only be seven days’ spacing to Julian.
He saw Boardman and Kersey arrive, Boardman dressed in a sport coat over slacks, a typical engineer’s attempt at business attire, with Kersey following behind, the dutiful wife traveling with her husband. Perfectly in cover.
Gulliver, dressed in a proper business suit as a corporate salesman, walked up to them when they settled in.
“You two don’t look like returning crew,” Gulliver said.
Boardman stood up.
“No, I’m going to Julian to do an engineering evaluation of their water control needs. For Hydraulix. Name’s Lyle Boardman. This here’s my wife, Fran Kersey.”
Kersey nodded to Gulliver without getting up. Gulliver reached out his hand to Boardman.
“Gulliver. Paul Gulliver. I’m a salesman for Galactic Equipment Supply. Another Stauss Interstellar company. Maybe we can work together. If you’re going to build a dam, you’ll need bulldozers. Bulldozers I got.”
Boardman pumped Gulliver’s hand enthusiastically.
“That’s great. Nothing worse than trying to work within the bounds of an inferior equipment base. Maybe we can do some planning on ship on the way there.”
“Works for me.”
It was all show, of course. But the lounge was full of ship’s crew, and if they took shore leave here, they would likely take shore leave on Julian as well. And gossip got around.
The Imperial Commercial Vessel Ivan Bledsoe lined up for the Alexa hypergate, accelerating at one gravity all the way.
Julian
It was the weekly cabinet meeting of the Julian planetary government. They met in the president’s palace – called merely the Executive Building – in the Government Center complex near downtown Monroe.
Julian Monroe had been the first leader of the colony. He had worked tirelessly to organize the colonists prior to shipping out from the Empire and to form the structure of the colony government on the trip out. In his seventies and in marginal health to begin with, he had been injured in an accident soon after landing, and, without modern medical facilities yet in place, he had died. The grateful colonists had named both the planet and its capital city after him. Since there was already a planet named Monroe, in the former Democracy of Planets, they had named the planet Julian, and its capital Monroe.
“We have to get this stupid opposition faction under control,” James Mieland, the president, said. “They’ve always been a small part of the population, and they’re having deleterious effects way beyond their numbers.”
“I’m afraid their numbers may be growing, sir,” said Hubert Land, his security minister.
“Nonsense. They’re the naive tools of corporate interests. Dupes. Nothing more. I got elected by the largest majority in the history of Julian, don’t forget.”
“They’re making an issue of the suspension of elections. This is the second five-year election that’s been suspended.”
“Of course, elections are suspended,” Mieland said. “I ran on a twenty-year plan to make Julian an equitable planet for all its citizens. You can’t have elections in the middle of a twenty-year plan. The pain is necessarily up-front, while the payoff comes later. We can’t abandon the plan in the middle. We’ve been all through this.”
“I understand, sir. I’m just saying they’re making it an issue. I’m afraid it may be having some sway over the rest of the populace.”
“Then we need to crack down on these troublemakers. We’re not going to let them derail us from our goals, shelve our push for true justice and equity, in the name of their corporate sponsors.”
Most of Mieland’s other ministers, central planners who were true believers in his program, were nodding their heads around the table.
“Yes, sir,” Land said. “I have plenty of manpower, but I’m going to need better tools to go after the opposition effectively.”
“I hate to deflect funds from our efforts on economic justice. Maybe we can get the Empire to provide us with the necessary equipment as part of their colony support program. I’m told we have a representative from Galactic Equipment Supply arriving on the next freighter, to assess our needs. Bring it up with him and see what he says.”
“Yes, sir. Although I’m not sure they’ll provide us with what we really need.”
“See what he says. Get me involved if you need to. Hopefully he’ll be reasonable.”
Paul Gulliver got off the shuttle at the Julian spaceport, such as it was. He looked toward the city, several miles distant. What he saw was depressing.
Gulliver had seen lots of colonies in his time traveling for GES, colonies at all levels of development. Julian was a first-wave colony, and was first settled almost forty years ago.
So why did it look like a thirty-year-old colony? It was like development had stopped ten years ago. Worse, since the population kept increasing, it had the population of a forty-year-old colony, but the infrastructure of a thirty-year-old one. Including housing. By this time, all the initial crude structures of a start-up colony should have been replaced. It looked instead like they had reverted to building more of them. Instead of high-rise buildings and tidy suburbs, Julian had slums. Miles and miles of them.
He sighed and headed to the terminal building, Boardman following, with Kersey bringing up the rear.
When they got to the shabby terminal building, there was one battered sedan for hire there. The legend ‘CAB’ was painted on the side with a sash brush. Of necessity, the three shared the car for the ride to the Capital Hotel, Julian’s premier hostelry.
The fare was triple what it would have been on Alexa.
When Gulliver got to his room, he checked out the local news feeds. He wanted to see the government news. He needn’t have worried. Most of the news was government polemic. At least he now knew what the problem was. The government had declared all ‘excessive’ profits to be the property of the state, and confiscated them. No wonder there was no capital investment. Why bother?
It also explained the dripping sink in his hotel room, with a rusty stain to the drain, the lack of hot water – it was tepid at best – and the hotel’s general tired air of having been ridden hard and put away wet. Also, the languid and defeated attitude of the hotel staff. Like it didn’t matter what they did, it would all turn to shit anyway.
One thing that was up-to-date, or more so, anyway. The surveillance equipment in the room wasn’t more than five years old, and they hadn’t bothered to hide it. More laziness, or did they just not care if he knew he was under surveillance?
Gulliver stripped for bed and clambered under the covers of the single bed. He curled up in a sleeping position, but instead logged into VR. He invoked a hook in the Imperial VR system that had been installed when the colony was first founded and ran a Section Six diagnostic. The local government had not managed to break into the VR system. He suspected that was more than a small irritation to them.
Sure that he was secure, he put in a call request to the accounts he had asked Section Six to set up for Boardman’s and Kersey’s aliases.
Boardman and Kersey had asked for a king room when they checked in, and the clerk had just given them a blank look. The room they got had two single beds.
They got to their room with their luggage – unassisted by any bellhop – and looked around.
“What a dump,” Kersey said, in character as the wife used to much fancier surroundings.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen worse. Construction sites and the like, You know.”
“But this is supposed to be the best hotel on the planet,” Kersey insisted.
Boardman shrugged.
“It is what it is.”
Kersey gave him the ‘you’ll pay for this later’ look all husbands knew.
“Anyway, I’m beat. I’m going to bed.”
While Boardman got ready for bed, Kersey hung her clothes on the bar that ran diagonally across one corner of the room, muttering while she worked. There was no closet.
When the call came in from Gulliver, Boardman and Kersey were both in bed, logged into VR and reading the news feeds. They accepted the call, and met in a plain room with several leather club chairs.
“I checked the VR with some special software. No changes to the Imperial communications package. It’s clean,” Gulliver said.
“So at least we can communicate clandestinely. I can’t believe how obvious the surveillance equipment is,” Boardman said, as if disgusted by the lack of professionalism.
“Beyond that, the whole place is ramshackle, and sloppily run,” Kersey said. “After even a rural Imperial planet, it’s something of a shock.”
“There’s been no capital investment,” Gulliver said. “The government confiscates what they call excessive profits, which appears to be any profits at all. There’s no inducement to invest.”
“Well, it shows,” Kersey said. “The only things built with any quality antedate the current administration, and it’s been going downhill since. On the way in, the most recent construction looked the shabbiest.”
Gulliver nodded. Boardman looked back and forth between them.
“So what’s our plan going forward?” Boardman asked.
“I had a message waiting for me from Hubert Land. He’s the security minister. He wants to meet with me to discuss his needs for equipment for the police and security forces.”
“Well, you can promise them anything, as long as it
doesn’t land before we drop the hammer on ‘em,” Boardman said. “For my part, Hydraulix sent word on ahead that I was coming, and some vice minister for infrastructure is meeting with me to discuss dam sites. Then I’ll go out and look at them. See if there’s anything promising. That work will be useful later in any case, and in the meantime it gives me a chance to take a look-see around at the countryside and the topography.”
“As for me, I’m going to take in the tourist sites, maybe do some shopping, and see what kind of gossip I can dig up,” Kersey said.
“All right,” Gulliver said. “Well, I guess we can all check back in with each other tomorrow and compare notes.”
Boardman and Kersey both nodded, and Gulliver killed the channel.
A government car came around in the morning to pick up Gulliver for his appointment with the security minister. It was an armored limousine, with a well-stocked bar – all Imperial imports, he noted – in the rear seat. From the thickness of the door and window when the driver let him in, the armor would stop high-powered rounds from an Imperial Marines crew-served automatic weapon.
There was also a serious looking man riding shotgun. He never moved from his seat, and had an array of monitors on the dash in front him, both in visual and infrared. Some of those looked like they were sighting screens for some type of weapon system.
They passed through the shabby downtown on their way to the Government Center. It didn’t look like Kersey would have much luck shopping here.
The Government Center was a walled compound several city blocks on a side. The limo driver slowly slalomed around staggered epoxycrete barriers as they approached the guard station at the entrance. They were waved through and passed into the compound under the watchful muzzles of gun emplacements on either side of the gate.
Once inside the compound, the quality of the architecture, the landscaping, and the general level of maintenance changed sharply from that outside. It didn’t approach the level of an Imperial planetary capital city, but, after the general air of decrepitude of the rest of the city, it was a startling contrast.
EMPIRE: Intervention (EMPIRE SERIES Book 13) Page 4