As an example of the traditional loyalty of the Navy: When Empress Stanley Five, her husband and four of their five children were assassinated in 2299 their youngest child, Prince Edward, escaped death only because he, then an ensign in the Navy, was being guarded as no other person had ever been guarded before. Fleet Admiral Simms - who ironically had performed the same service for Edward’s mother nine years earlier - declared martial law and, in the bloodiest purge in all recorded history, executed not only all those found guilty - including the late Empress’s brother and sister-in-law - but also their entire families for good measure. He then made himself regent and ruled with an iron hand for six years. Then, to the vast surprise of all (and the relief of many), he relinquished his regency on the day that Prince Edward came of age. it was he himself who crowned the young prince Emperor Stanley Six.
(Farnham, The Empire, Reel 2, slot 784.)
‘You’re positive she said “treason”?’ Yvette reiterated. They couldn’t afford any slipups at this stage of the game. ‘I couldn’t have missed a word like that, Evie.’
Both of them knew what the Duchess’s use ofhat word meant. The crime of treason was an act against either the Empire or the Emperor. Crimes against the lesser nobility were considered civil crimes, and tried accordingly. For Duchess Tanya to accuse ducos of treason meant that she considered herself to be of imperial rank. And, since there was no known Stanley blood in her heritage, there was only one place she could have gotten such a lineage - from Banion the Bastard.
‘We can’t hang her on the basis of that one word, you know.’
No,’ Jules admitted, ‘but it gives us the wedge we need. We now know where to look- and if we look hard enough we’ll find what we want. Nobody can cover their trail that completely.’
He paused. ‘Damn it, and I was just starting to like that girl, too. She was almost behaving herself.’
‘Save your sympathy,’ Yvette said coldly. ‘If she’s not executed outright for treason, she’ll certainly be banished to Gastonia for her complicity in the matter.’
‘I know, I know. Hand me her father’s file, will you?’ He took the reel Yvette handed him and fed it through the viewer. ‘Grand Duke Nicholas Otamar. Born a commoner in 2382, according to the birth certificate listed here; that would make him two years younger than Banion is supposed to be.’
‘Birth certificates can be forged,’ Yvette said distractedly. Her mind seemed to be on something else.
‘And something that long ago would be almost impossible to verify now,’ Jules agreed. ‘Usual school records and such. He gained his current title by marrying Grand Duchess Olga Ferensky in 2410. That’s kind of unusual, for a grand duchess to marry a commoner. Not impossible, of course, but it would certainly have helped him woo her if he could have shown her the Patent of Royalty his mother hid away for him ...’
‘That’s it!’ Yvette shouted suddenly, slapping her palm down hard on the table in front of her. Her action was so abrupt that Jules jumped involuntarily.
‘What’s what?’ he asked.
‘A piece just clicked into place. We get so used to calling nobility by title, first name and territory that we usually ignore the last name. Papa, for instance, is usually just called Duke Etienne of DesPlaines; the d’Alembert is understood. We’ve been calling this guy Grand Duke Nicholas of Twenty so long that we’ve totally missed the point of his last name!’
‘Otamar?’
‘Don’t you see? It’s an anagram of “Amorat”. Aimee Amorat, the Bastard’s mother.’
Jules now pounded his own fist on the table. ‘Eve, you’ve nailed him. He’s got to be our man.’ He turned the reel in the viewer to a picture of Grand Duke Nicholas and stared hard at the man’s face. ‘You know, now that we know his identity for a fact, you can see the Stanley lineage in his face. Long and angular, sort of squared-off chin behind that goatee of his, the same bushy eyebrows...’
‘We don’t know it for a fact, though,’ Yvette reminded him. ‘All we have is one wrong word from his daughter and a name that could be an anagram. If the Head is going to present this case to the Emperor, he’ll need a lot more substantial evidence he’ll need the Patent itself.’
‘And we’ll get it for him,’ Jules said with determination. ‘Now that we know who’s got it, it’s only a matter of time.’
Ducos deigned to accept six grand dukes and duchesses as personal clients - among them Grand Duke Nicholas and Grand Duchess Olga of Sector Twenty - but that was all he would take. Working from that position of intimacy, Jules tried to delve deeper into the private affairs of that twosome, but to no avail. Their public facades passed the closest scrutiny.
Yvette tried working from a slightly different direction. Since Nicholas and Olga maintained three estates on Earth, each with a large staff, the turnover of their personnel was quite high. At every opportunity, Yvette managed to wangle one of her family members into those households - in kitchens, garages, and anyplace else - in an effort to find the slightest traces of information. Little bits and pieces manifested themselves - strange cryptic messages arriving at odd hours, an unusual assortment of people visiting the Grand Duke, and so forth - but there was nothing to prove that Nicholas was indeed Banion, that Nicholas was planning an imminent revolt, or that Nicholas had possession of the all-important Patent of Royalty.
‘We’ve got to take this to the Head, Eve,’ Jul es said at last, after several more weeks of fruitless searching. ‘I hate to yell for help on our first really big job, but Nicholas is just too fat a cat for us to tackle on our own. If we make even the slightest goof, there’s more than a possibility that it’d be the Head’s head that would roll, not Nicholas’. We simply can’t take that risk by ourselves.’
Yvette nodded. ‘You’re right, I’m afraid. The Emperor himself sits in judgment at any trial of a grand duke, and he’d be a fair judge even in a matter l ike this. If we can’t conclusively prove Nicholas guilty of treason, the Emperor would let him go.’
They met the next day with the Head and laid the whole mess out before him as clearly and concisely as they could. As they spoke, they could see him aging ten years; and when they were done he sat silent and motionless, in intense concentration, for a full ten minutes. Neither d’Alembert spoke another word while he was so engrossed. In the hushed atmosphere they could almost hear the master strategist’s keen brain at work.
‘Nicholas,’ he whispered at last, as though to himself. ‘I can’t say I’m shocked, particularly; but even so, I’ve known the man for years. We weren’t especially close, but he was polite enough company at some awfully tedious state banquets.’
He laid his hands out flat, palms down, in front of him and looked up at his two top agents. ‘You’re both right, of course - we can’t move against him without the genuine Patent actually in our hands.’
Jules scowled. ‘That’s what I was afraid you’d sa y. And I’m sure that Patent must be in the solidest safe-deposit vault on Earth.’
‘It isn’t,’ the Head said flatly. ‘The Emperor can open any bank vault he pleases, with no reasons or excuses at all. Nicholas knows that. Besides, he wouldn’t want that Patent anywhere out of his immediate grasp, and who knows what could happen to it in some bank? So the Patent’s got to be in a vault as good as any on Earth, but probably one in the deepest subcellar of his Castle Englewood. I’d stake my head on that. In fact,’ he added, enjoying the irony, ‘I undoubtedly will.
‘Theoretically, the Emperor could open even a grand duke’s personal vaults, too, at whim. But the legal machinery grinding into action would tip our hand, and probably spur the Bastard into precipitate revolt. Nicholas’ army and navy are of unknown strength; once he got them mobilized, who knows which side would win? At the very least, we would face a bloody civil war that would claim billions of lives on hundreds of worlds, and the scars would be with us for generations.
‘No, gentleman and lady, we are all going to have to stake our heads on this gamble. No matter how daintily we pussyfoot it, there’s always the chance of our touching off the explosion. We might as well all go out in style.
‘Now, as to the ways and means. At the slightest hint of trouble, Nicholas would try to kill the Emperor and establish his claim, so we’ll have to get Bill out of the way. Edna is a safer target, since there’d be little gained by killing the Crown Princess while her father is still alive. What do you think of this?’ and they discussed details for two hours.
Three days later, the various news media announced that Emperor Stanley Ten had had a heart attack.
It wasn’t too serious as those things went, they hastened to point out, but a battery of medical specialists agreed unanimously that he had to have at least two months of carefree rest - preferably at his favorite summer place, Big Piney in the Rocky Mountains. Wherefore Crown Princess Edna was given the most unusual title of ‘Empress Pro Tem’ and her parents departed the Imperial Palace with no pomp or circumstance at all. They did not go to Big Piney, however, but to a specially selected island in the Pacific that was guarded by every defensive device known to the military science of the age. And, just coincidentally, a small but able fleet of battle cruisers hovered in synchronous orbit over that spot to guard against a concerted attack from space.
Meanwhile, to relieve the concern in the minds of the Empire’s subjects, Empress Pro Tem Edna announced a Grand Ball - a getting-acquainted party that, beginning with a full Grand Imperial Court, would last for three days. All thirty-six grand dukes and grand duchesses and their families were invited, as well as all the nobles of Earth above the rank of count and any visiting nobles from out in space. There was, of course, no chance that any of the invitees would turn down such an event, which promised to be the social climax of the decade.
With the cat away, the mice set out to very serious work indeed. Castle Englewood appeared from the outside to be deserted except for the servants who managed the estate. Jules and Yvette invaded the castle with a small army of both relatives and technical experts. The staff - some of whom were much more adept with weapons and fighting than they had any right to be - were overpowered without too much fuss. Fifty cat-footed, fully briefed d’Alembert wrestlers were quite sufficient to take care of even the many-times-too-numerous Castle Guard. Once the help was dispatched, the Service people had free run of the castle - theoretically.
Architects and engineers had brought along the detailed blueprints of the castle, as registered with the Imperial Building Commission but, as had been expected, the plans were found useless. Most of the actual details that mat tered had never been registered. So the Service’s best electronic wizards moved in, unlimbered their ultra sensitive detectors and explored walls, floors and ceilings. They traced cable after cable, wire after wire; and as they traced, they figured out what each system was and cut it. Section after section of the vast castle went dark and powerless as these experts went through, skirting the defenses and dismantling the traps.
Eventually, after more than three hours of grueling, mind numbing detail work, they found the Grand Duke’s personal elevator tube. Riding it down to the subbasement, they found the enormous scale model of the Empire with its various colored lights still twinkling. The sight was awesome, and it forged one more damning link in the chain, but it still was not enough. They had to find that Patent.
It had, of course, been obvious from the start that Castle Englewood was no ordinary grand ducal residence. The invaders from SOTS found it a fortress; a fortress that, except for the Head’s brilliant strategy of deception and the d’Alemberts’ ability to carry it out, would have been starkly impregnable. And, even so, the attack almost failed.
The castle had been searched from top to bottom, with every possible place of concealment pried open and examined. No trace had been found of that all-important document. Finally, after exploring all the other subterranean tunnels and computer banks, Jules and his company returned to a grimly thick steel wall that stood boldly at the end of one broad corridor. ‘How about this, Major?’ Jules asked.
The officer in charge of the military aspects of this raid examined the wall in minute detail. ‘It opens from somewhere, somehow,’ he said, pointing out an almost invisible crack where steel butted against steel. ‘A lot of effort has gone into disguising it, though, so it’d probably take us a week to find out where and how it opens. I think we cut all the external leads in, but I’d bet this section has its own independent power source.’
‘We’ll have to assume that, yes,’ Jules replied. ‘And automatic stunners - or worse, blasters. Gas maybe, or triggered bombs. But the Head gambled his life on a lot less than we know now, so bring up your shields and high-powers and burn the damned thing down.’
Fortunately, the corridor that led up to this blank wall was a very wide one, fifteen meters from side to side. Heavy armored shields were brought down to protect the assailants from automatic blaster beams.
Jules and Yvette and the team of d’Alembert weightlifters and wrestlers- led by their cousin Rick once more - all donned spacesuits to protect them from any gas that might be released. Then they brought into play the special heavy -duty blasters to cut through the wall that faced them.
Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the unbelievable fury of those beams ate through the twenty-centimeter thick plating in front of them. When the cutting was through, that heavy wall of metal fell inward onto a steel floor, producing a crash that rattled the teeth of the SOTS agents and shook the very bedrock upon which Castle Englewood was built.
The collapse of that wall revealed a brightly lit room behind it where, seated around a small table, was a squad of ten DesPlainian weightlifters - Grand Duke Nicholas’ last line of defense.
One glance was all the attackers had time for, though, because at the same instant that the wall fell everyone in the tunnel-guards and SOTS operatives alike-were yanked to the floor with a force the likes of which none of them bad ever experienced before.
‘Ultragrav!’ Jules gasped as the wind was knocked from his lungs when he hit the smooth floor. And indeed it was; the toppling of the wall had turned on the final protective device, a totally unexpected one.
The entire corridor was now experiencing an artificial gravitational field of some twenty-five gravities. Jules and Yvette, who felt quite comfortable at three gees and could get around without too much hindrance at six or seven, were pinned flat to the ground, helpless as babies. They could barely lift a forger to help themselves.
Imminent danger threatened. Their own shield, set up to protect them from blaster fire, now held them in deadly peril. It had not been meant to stand up under such extreme conditions, and was wobbling visibly. If it fell backwards onto them, the people it had been meant to protect would be smashed to a thin layer of ooze on the tunnel floor. ‘Shield!’ Jules gasped out in warning.
Rick had seen the danger, too. Unlike Jules and Yvette, he was a trained wrestler; the muscles in his body had been specially toughened to supernormal strength. Thus, while the ultragrav was crippling to him as well, he was at least able to move. With a feeble lurch, he pushed his body forward against the shield. That one slight push was all that was needed in a gravitational field as strong as this; the armor plating toppled forward with a bang that jolted everyone’s bones.
‘Nice,’ Yvette complimented him through gritted teeth. ‘Now, can you get those other guys before they get us?’
We’re working on it,’ Rick said hoarsely of his team, and they were.
If the situation had not been life-and-death it would actually have been comic to watch those hundred- and-fifty kilogram brawlers, each one muscled to put an Atlas to shame, exerting every iota of their tremendous strength to such puny results: first to get up onto their knees and then to lift, using all the strength of both arms, a two kilogram weapon up into some kind of firing position. Unfortunately, one of the Grand Duke’s guards a giant even for a DesPlainian weightlifter - made it before any of the d’Alemberts. His first blast went straight through the man on Jules’ left, who had managed to reach his knees.
The man screamed and collapsed very quickly.
The next blast hit Jules, who was still pinned flat, just below his left knee. He screamed with agony as a fist-sized chunk of skin was burned out of his calf, then passed out completely from the pain. The blood, being pulled out of the wound by a force many times stronger than normal, flowed copiously.
Yvette watched her brother’s injury-with horror, and reacted as quickly as she could under the circumstances. Within a field of twenty-five gees, the blood would be drained from even a small wound very rapidly unless something were done to stop it. Jules could literally bleed to death in a matter of seconds. Drawing strength from she knew not what reserve, she pulled herself around to face his leg.
There were two principal methods recommended in her first aid classes for stopping bleeding - applying direct pressure on the wound and elevating it to make it harder for the blood to flow out. The pressure method was out: it was impossible for her to lift her arm enough to bring it down on top of his leg. By scraping her arm along the ground, however, she was able to get it under her brother’s leg, thus lifting it a little off the ground. Even that little bit was enough to do the trick, though, for the twenty-five gee field was now working in her favor; it pulled the blood downward and reduced the outward flow to a mere trickle.
Because Jules was unconscious and Yvette was otherwise occupied, neither of them saw any more of the action for the next several minutes. If they had, however, they would have been very proud of their relatives. Only that one guard had been able to beat any of the d’Alemberts into action. Rick d’Alembert did not wait to get to his feet to fire his blaster; he shot from a prone position. Soon the air was filled with blaster beams as DesPlainians on both sides managed to squeeze off shots. In the ensuing awkward, slow-motion battle eighteen men died - ten of them being the Grand Duke’s last guards. Then, with the opposition gone, the d’Alemberts had o nly the gravity to contend with. Step by leaden step, Rick pulled his way along the wall into the guard’s room. His brain was foggy and his eyes were not focusing properly, but he did manage to find the ultragrav controls. The next instant, he had restored the tunnel to one Earth gravity - light by his standards, but he was thinking of Jules and two other wounded men.
The instant the ultragrav let up, Yvette gulped in a few deep breaths of air, then ripped the shirt off the dead man on the other side of her brother. She held that compress in place until the flow of blood had abated, then tied it on the burn with a bandage. The wound was a ghastly one, but she was sure that Jules would be able to recover from it.
Rick had fainted after his tremendous exertion in turning off the ultragrav, but fortunately his special strength was no longer needed. The regular army and Service agents could handle the job from this point. In the opposite wall, behind the ruins of the table where the guards had sat, was a large steel vault. The attackers made no attempt to unlock it; such niceties no longer counted at this stage of the game.
Demolition experts brought up their shields and sandbags and blew the face of the vault to bits. They removed the debris, ransacked the interior - and found a scroll rolled up on the topmost shelf.
Hearts in their throats and scarcely daring to breathe, the people who had done so much of the fighting up until now looked on while the handwriting and documentation experts had their turn at center stage. They scrutinized the parchment in minute detail and subjected it to every test they could manage on their portable equipment. ‘This is the genuine Patent,’ the chief examiner announced finally; and in the joyous clamor that followed even the dead were for the moment forgotten.
The rest of the operation went so smoothly as to be almost anticlimactic. At a single code word from the major in charge of the Castle Englewood invasion, the full regiment of Imperial Guards sealed the Imperial Palace tighter than a mailed list. The Navy assigned two dozen ships to fly in formation over Moscow and create an umbrella impervious to attack. A special team of couriers was dispatched from Castle Englewood to the Imperial Palace, carrying with it the notorious Patent. The instant that was delivered safely into the hands of the Empress Pro Tem, Fleet Admiral Armstrong himself led a company of space marines into the Grand Ballroom and broke up the party by placing Grand Duke Nicholas and his entire retinue under immediate arrest for treason.
The Grand Duke was taken at once to the Pacific Island to confront the Emperor himself. As Stanley Ten watched, his own personal physician administered the nitrobarb to his long-unrecognized half-brother. Then Zander von Wilmenhorst came forward to conduct the intensive questioning that the situation required. Slowly but surely, the full story emerged.
Banion had been placed in an orphanage by his mother when he was slightly over two years old, and had eventually been raised by a foster family that knew nothing of his royal ancestry. Aimee Amorat had kept the Patent hidden herself, and kept equally close tabs on her son as he grew and matured. Finally, when he was sixteen years old, she had come to him and told him the true story of his birth. He hadn’t believed her at first, but she had all the proof at hand to convince him - including the Patent, the most conclusive evidence of all. She told him that the Throne and the Empire were his for the taking if he wanted them badly enough; his heritage would depend on his own skill and cunning.
She left the Patent of Royalty with him and then vanished. Though he was to search every corner of the Empire for the next fifty years, there simply was no trace of her to be found. It was as if the Beast of Durward had been swallowed up by the Universe.
But the dream she had left with him had conquered his soul. By the time he was twenty years old, he had already formulated his first tentative plans for galactic domination. By age thirty he had built up a small but intensely loyal organization and was reaping enough profits to allow him to approach Grand Duchess Olga of Sector Twenty. Shrewd woman that she was, she saw the immense benefits to be gained by backing this pretender to the Throne.
T heir marriage accelerated tremendously the growth of his subversive organization until today, thirty-seven years later, it was undermining and sapping the strength of the entire Empire.
Under the Head’s expert probing, Banion revealed all the major hierarchical details of his traitorous organization. With those particulars to work from, the Emperor issued his orders and Fleet Admiral Armstrong carried them out. Since it is much faster in these matters to work from the top down than from the bottom up, full information - including the names of ninety-eight percent of the people involved in the organization - was obtained in less than a week, and the roundup of the miscreants began.
Nicholas and Olga Otamar were tried jointly before the High Court o£ justice, with Stanley Ten himself presiding as judge. They were found guilty by a unanimous vote of their peers and were summarily executed. The Dowager Duchess Tanya was also tried and found guilty of abetting treason. She was sentenced to death, but that sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on Gastonia and loss of all titles in exchange for her renewed vow of loyalty to the Crown. Other participants in the conspiracy received sentences ranging from death to several years in prison, depending on the degree of their involvement.
The vacancies in the various services that resulted from this housecleaning operation were many and terribly shocking, but the menace that had hung like a cloud over the Empire for sixty-seven years was at long last ended. And most importantly - at least to Jules and Yvette d’Alembert- the Service of the Empire was finally scoured clean of even the slightest taint of treason.