EMPIRE: Intervention (EMPIRE SERIES Book 13)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Not after we popped it with a few GDPs and blew off ordinance in the holes, it wasn’t.”

  “Wow,” Gulliver said. “So you’re opening up that part of the basin rather than have a shallows that’s a boating hazard, and building the dam with it.”

  “Yeah, and increasing the capacity of the basin at the same time. It’s a twofer. And we got another spot further up the valley we’re gonna chew up, too. It would be a shallow area on the inside of a corner coming around the bend in the lake. A boat catcher. We popped it with some GDPs yesterday.”

  “Well, this is really something. And it looks like the generating station and the water treatment plant are coming along, too.”

  “Yup,” Gordon said. “All that stuff showed up on the Montgomery a few days back, and they got the epoxycrete pads in place already. Starting to mount stuff now.”

  “I had a question. Something I don’t get.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, the generating plant generates electricity by the water coming downhill through the plant, right?” Gulliver asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “And you treat the water for drinking water – you make it potable – and send it in to the city, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “But the city is uphill from here. Don’t you spend all the electricity you get from the water going downhill pumping it back uphill again?”

  “No,” Gordon said. “The generating plant runs on the full average flow of the river there, right? The year-round average. The dam does the averaging for you.”

  “Right. I got that.”

  “But we don’t treat anywhere near that much water. Maybe five percent, if that. The city doesn’t use that much.”

  “But it will as it grows, right?” Gulliver asked.

  “Probably. But then there’ll be other sources of electricity. Other sources of water, too, probably.”

  “More infrastructure.”

  “More population, more infrastructure,” Gordon said. “Always. Either that or falling standard of living. You don’t want that.”

  “OK. I think I get it.”

  Gulliver shook his head.

  “This really is something.”

  The Campaign

  As the construction projects got under way, so did the election campaign for the President and the Council. Candidates started filing petitions to be on the ballot, and Turley found herself answering questions and setting policy more or less on the fly.

  There would be no primaries, but to win, one needed a majority of the vote, not just a plurality. If you got fifty-percent-plus-one, you won. If not, there would be a run-off election between the two top vote-getters.

  Most candidates identified themselves as either Liberty Party or Equality Party when filing their petitions, and those labels would appear next to their names on the ballot. Some candidates filed without a party affiliation as well, but not many.

  Neither party had yet filed petitions for the presidency. The number of petitions required was greater, for one thing, and Turley got the impression they were trying to narrow their candidates down within the party organization to limit the number of candidates running.

  Mark Chapman was Presidential Adviser. Turley needed people who knew Julian so she could ask them questions about how this or that had been in the past, what might work going forward, all that sort of thing. Chapman had been the leader of the resistance, which was the underground wing of the Liberty Party when the party was being actively suppressed by the government. In the name of equality, Turley supposed.

  As such, Chapman was a perfect candidate for president. And he had declined. Pointedly. Several times. Turley had prevailed on him to become Presidential Adviser because she needed him, but convincing him had been like pulling teeth.

  So she was surprised when he came into her office the week after her Wednesday night speech and confronted her. He walked up to her desk, without an appointment, and stood in front of her, hands on hips.

  “You tricked me.”

  “How so, Mr. Chapman?’

  “You knew if you made me a Presidential Adviser, and I was working with you in getting Julian back on its feet, that I’d get sucked in. That the party would want me to run, and even that I would want to run.

  “That’s not true. I didn’t know. I hoped maybe, I thought it was likely even, but I didn’t know.”

  He continued staring at her as he considered. He had expected her to deny it.

  “Please have a seat, Mr. Chapman.”

  Chapman continued standing, lost in his thoughts.

  “Mark! Sit down.”

  Chapman started, then sat in a guest chair and fumed.

  “I told you Julian needed you. It was true then, and I think it’s true now. No one else has the credibility, the leadership experience, and the moral character to do a good job of it. The government killed anyone else who did.”

  “Jarl Gunderson could do it.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s always worked for someone else, been secondary to someone else, who made the hard calls.”

  “What about you? You were under someone else’s command. You seem to be doing a good job.”

  “Yes, but I was the highest-ranking field commander in many situations. I didn’t have the option of checking with higher when decisions had to be made. I had a mission and I had to make the decisions required to carry it out. There was nobody there to hold my hand. Nobody I could go to for a decision when push came to shove.”

  Chapman considered. He seemed to be warming to the idea, if still reluctant.

  “I still don’t like that you tricked me.”

  “I will do what I have to do to accomplish the mission. My mission is not to be liked. My mission is to rescue Julian from tyranny, famine, and disease, and set it on a new course. I needed you. I used you. I’m sorry, but I would do it again. Will do it again, if it comes to that. If you run for president, and are elected, you will do what you have to do, too. That’s the nature of the job.”

  Chapman nodded slowly.

  “Yeah. That’s the way it was in the resistance, too. I had to make the hard calls. Use people to my best advantage. Sometimes they got hurt. Sometimes they died. It wasn’t my choice, but it was my decision.”

  “Exactly.”

  Chapman looked down at his hands, then back up at her.

  “Madam President– Ann. I’m sorry. You have enough pressure on you already, I didn’t need to make it worse. It just takes some getting used to, I guess.”

  “I understand. Now, go decide what you want to do without your anger steering your decision. You know how to make the hard calls, so go do it.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Thank you.”

  Chapman got up and left her office.

  Turley watched him go. Chapman was an interesting and complex man. More her age than Gulliver, too, for that matter. A natural leader, hardened with the right experiences.

  Oh, stop it, Ann Turley.

  She didn’t want to be First Lady of Julian any more than she wanted to be its President. This job was getting to her. And she wouldn’t see Paul Gulliver again until Sunday. God only knew where he was or what he was up to.

  Turley sighed and checked her calendar.

  OK. What’s next on the schedule?

  Mark Chapman did file petitions for president just a few days later. He had no trouble getting petition signatures once it was known he was running. The petitions were available in VR, and people could sign them in VR, the VR system recording their unique user identification. Chapman marked his affiliation in his petition as the Liberty Party.

  Clifford Rumson ran for president for the Equality Party. He filed petitions a bit after Chapman, but no other candidates filed for president. With each party having one of its strongest players on the ballot, any competitors were quickly dissuaded.

  The rhetoric got heated quickly when Rumson called Chapman a terrorist and attacked Turley as being a foreign despot. Chapman’s one-line retort wa
s an instant classic in VR:

  “Clifford Rumson, having moved to Julian as a young man and headed the Council during Mr. Mieland’s administration, has a lot of gall calling anyone a terrorist or a foreign despot.”

  The rhetoric went downhill from there.

  Rhetoric aside, hugely in the Liberty Party’s favor were the infrastructure projects going up outside of the city. The government posted aerial reconnaissance views of the projects every day. When the refinery was complete, the government switched from the refinery construction to the mechanized planting activity on the farms, and then to the crops as they broke ground and started growing.

  Rumson first maintained it was all doctored footage, and no such thing was happening. The surviving media, which had been catered to by the Mieland administration repeated his claims endlessly, and refused to perform the simple fact-finding it would take to drive out into the country and look.

  Postings by farmers and workers on the dam project gradually grew to overwhelm Rumson’s claims, at which point he switched arguments. If this was all true, he noted, why hadn’t these projects been done earlier? Why had the corporate interests denied Julian the benefit of these projects under the Mieland administration?

  Chapman was ready for this one, and posted a series of explanations about capital investment and its inverse relationship to confiscatory taxation of profits:

  “Why would anyone invest money in Julian if there were no profit to be made from it? Would you sink your savings into opening a store if you could only recoup your costs and make no money? Would the farmer plow his fields if his crop had to be sold at his cost and he made no money? Why then would a corporation act any differently?”

  The argument was compelling to many, but Rumson dialed up the rhetoric again, calling Chapman a shill for corporate interests. Chapman retorted that he was actually a shill for electricity, for clean water, and for meat protein in the Julian diet.

  “If you don’t want any of these things, and want your tax money spent on Secret Police instead, then vote for him. He’s the guy who brought you shortages in everything but surveillance and terror, and he stands ready to do it again.”

  And the political rhetoric spun for another cycle, but Chapman was more than holding his own.

  One Sunday night about six weeks before the elections, Gulliver did not come by at what had become the normal time in the evening. He did send Turley a note saying he would be very late, and she should go to bed and he would try to join her later. He finally arrived in the middle of the night, sneaking into her room and into bed with her.

  Later, when she got up to go to the bathroom, she saw him by the bathroom light as she headed back to the bed. He had black hair and a thin mustache, was swarthy, and had sharper, more distinctive features.

  “My God! I know it’s you, Mr. Gulliver. How could I not? That session would have been hard to fake. Few have your skills. But how? Why?”

  “I am engaged in a little side project, Madam President, and it is important I not be identified as one of your partisans. As for how, I know significant tricks I can play with modifying my body chemistry, facial appearance, and some other, more minor, things, like hair color.”

  “Does this side project have anything to do with the elections?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “I promised free and fair elections, Mr. Gulliver.”

  “And I am doing my damnedest to keep them that way, Ma’am. Against the interests of others, who are not.”

  “Oh. In that case, I understand. And I don’t want to know anything more about it.”

  “Which is the proper course, Madam President. It also means, however, I can only come to you well after dark, when the guards at the gate can’t tell the difference in my appearance, as striking as it may seem in the light.”

  “And at some point, does this project come to fruition, Mr. Gulliver?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. As a matter of fact, I will likely need to talk to you about it soon. Within weeks. In the meantime, I may or may not be able to make it by to see you.”

  “Then give me something to tide me over, Mr. Gulliver. Something to remember.”

  “I will try, Madam President.”

  Later, Gulliver got out of bed and dressed. Seeing by the light she had left on in the bathroom that Turley was watching him, he asked her the obvious question.

  “Was that sufficiently memorable, Madam President?”

  “God, yes. I’m completely wrecked.”

  She raised herself on one elbow with difficulty.

  “Be careful out there, Mr. Gulliver. Your loss would be a tragedy, in more ways than one.”

  He bent down to kiss her tenderly.

  “I will, Ma’am.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  Gulliver did not come around the next Sunday. Early in the evening, Turley got a one-word note from him. ‘Sorry.’

  The next weekend, on Saturday afternoon, with barely four weeks to the elections, Turley got a VR meeting request from Gulliver. She met with him in a small conference room with a table for four. His avatar was that of his normal appearance, not the disguise she had seen two weeks before.

  “Good afternoon, Madam President.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gulliver. Are you well and safe?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I was wondering. Could you invite Mark Chapman and Kyle Gordon to join us?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Gulliver.”

  Turley sent the VR meeting requests, and first Chapman then Gordon joined them around the table.

  “Madam President.”

  “Thank you for joining us, Mr. Chapman.”

  “Good afternoon, Madam President.”

  Gordon’s avatar was wearing civvies.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gordon.”

  Gordon turned to Gulliver.

  “You sure made yourself scarce the last few weeks, Paul. I keep expecting you to show up wanting to see our progress.”

  “Yes, well, something’s come up, and we need to decide what to do about it.”

  “It’s your meeting, Mr. Gulliver.”

  “In short, the Equality Party has offered me a great deal of money to assassinate Mr. Chapman.”

  “You?” Gordon asked.

  “Well, not exactly. They know me as Mario Scarpa.”

  Gulliver changed his avatar to his disguised version, held it for several seconds, then changed it back.

  “Which is to say, me.”

  “That’s how you look in person now?” Gordon asked.

  “Yes,” Turley answered. “I’ve seen him in this disguise. It’s very effective.”

  “I’m still trying to get over that they would try an assassination in the middle of an election,” Chapman said. “I mean, they tried to find and kill me for years, but this seems more personal.”

  “You turned them down, of course,” Gordon said.

  “Oh, no. I accepted the job,” Gulliver said.

  “What?” Chapman asked.

  “Of course,” Turley said. “If he had turned them down, they would just have hired someone else. And we wouldn’t know who he is.”

  “Just so, Madam President.”

  “They’re afraid they’re going to lose the election. When they’re afraid they’re going to lose, they turn to violence,” Chapman said.

  “So it appears,” Turley said.

  “It’s too bad we can’t prove it,” Gordon said.

  “Oh, but I can, Gordy,” Gulliver said. “I have the recordings of the meetings.”

  “Faked.”

  “Streamed in real-time, crypto-verified, to the Imperial Archive. Immutable. Even the Emperor can’t change them.”

  “Oh, my,” Turley said.

  “And there’s also the money. They paid me half up front. In Imperial credits. And we’ve tracked where the money came from.”

  Interesting trick, that, Turley thought.

  She and Gordon had known Gulliver was an agent of somebody other than Galactic Equipment Sup
ply, but tracking Imperial financial records was Imperial Guard or Imperial Police, both interesting choices. And only with the highest-level authorization. Gulliver’s use of ‘we’ was not lost on her.

  “And we’ve tracked the VR communications of my contacts, with specific regard to the time periods when they were in touch with me.”

  Another interesting trick.

  “Who all is involved?” Turley asked.

  “Rumson. Bertrand. Pretty much their entire upper echelons.”

  “My God,” Chapman said. “How stupid can you be, to involve that many people in something like this. We were smarter than that in the resistance.”

  “But, as the government, they didn’t have to be careful, Mr. Chapman. You did.”

  Chapman nodded.

  “True.”

  “I guess the question now is what do we do about it?” Turley said.

  “Arrest them all and shoot them for conspiracy to murder and treason,” Gordon said.

  “Arresting the opposition party during an election?” Turley asked. “That’s no good.”

  Gulliver nodded.

  “My thoughts exactly, Madam President. That’s why I don’t know what to do.”

  “But if you don’t do it, Mr. Gulliver, they will find someone else who will,” Turley said.

  They were silent for several minutes, each thinking it through. It was Chapman who broke the silence.

  “Well, I have an idea.”

  “Is it the same as mine, Mr. Chapman?” Turley asked.

  “Perhaps, Ma’am.”

  “I can’t see anything wrong with it, Mr. Chapman.”

  “I can’t either, Ma’am.”

  “With what?” Gordon asked.

  Turley turned to Gordon, and her eyes were twinkling.

  “Let Mr. Gulliver shoot him.”

  “What?”

  The Elections

  With two weeks to go until the elections, the rhetoric was getting even hotter, and dirty tricks appeared. Equality Party mouthpieces in both politics and the media accused Mark Chapman of every kind of moral failing from corporatist greed to pedophilia. Sympathetic victims came forward to tearfully recount their abuse at his hands, their long-time records of Equality Party activism and legal representation by Equality Party hacks being obscured by the Rumson-friendly media. It was up to Liberty Party activists to do the research and get the information out there on VR, and some Liberty Party partisans effectively became their own media outlets.