My Friend the Emperor Read online

  MY FRIEND THE EMPEROR

  By William Lee Gordon

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2015 William Luznicky

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Medsabi LLC

  Frisco, TX

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prelude

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Orbital Platform Perseus

  Chapter one

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Academy on Capital Planet Celcium

  Chapter two

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  A Rough Start

  Chapter three

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  My Eyes are Opened

  Chapter four

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  Moving On from Valys

  Chapter five

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Graduation

  Chapter six

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  A Secret Assignment

  Chapter seven

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Meeting the Captain

  Chapter eight

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  An Emergency Message

  Chapter nine

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Imperial Station 417

  Chapter ten

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  A New First Officer

  Chapter eleven

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  I’d Thought I Was the Only One

  Chapter twelve

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  The Captain’s New Lover

  Chapter thirteen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Crazy Candice

  Chapter fourteen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Ajax Delivers a Warning

  Chapter fifteen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Researching the Captain

  Chapter sixteen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Mount Sinai Massacre

  Chapter seventeen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Congratulations! It’s Twins!

  Chapter eighteen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Out of My League

  Chapter nineteen

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Mental Breakdown or Breakthrough?

  Chapter twenty

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Traded In for a Newer Model (or two)

  Chapter twenty-one

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Admiral’s Dinner Table

  Chapter twenty-two

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Chasing Consuelo

  Chapter twenty-three

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Grieving Son Returns Home

  Chapter twenty-four

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Politics of Empire

  Chapter twenty-five

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Formulating a Plan

  Chapter twenty-six

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  I thought You Were Gone Forever

  Chapter twenty-seven

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Rescued

  Chapter twenty-eight

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Returning to the C.E.S. Halcyon

  Chapter twenty-nine

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Beginning of the End

  Chapter thirty

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Going Hunting

  Chapter thirty-one

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  A Surprising Turn

  Chapter thirty-two

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Some Wisdom

  Chapter thirty-three

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Reflections on Empire

  Chapter thirty-four

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Civil War

  Chapter thirty-five

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Meri Acá

  Chapter thirty-six

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Paradigm Shift

  Chapter thirty-seven

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Running Away

  Chapter thirty-eight

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Decision Time

  Chapter thirty-nine

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Plan

  Chapter forty

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  Here We Go

  Chapter forty-one

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Traffic Control

  Chapter forty-two

  LEUTENANT MONICA STILES

  What Could Go Wrong?

  Chapter forty-three

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Lifting the Veil

  Epilogue

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Unexpected Opportunities

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dedication

  As always, this work is dedicated to the love of my life, my wife Consuelo. Without her support and understanding this book would not be possible.

  Without her love and inspiration the true joy of living would not be possible.

  Prelude

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Orbital Platform Perseus

  I yanked the dead body out of the seat.

  My team of seven was now down to just myself and two others. The smell of smoke and burnt electronics was heavy in the control room. I quickly set down at the console and tried to figure it out.

  How could I have gotten myself into this? How could I have let this happen? Was I really going to betray everything I’d always believed in?

  Just then one of the screens opened up to the image of Captain Acamar on his bridge. The scene behind him was chaotic; the bridge crew were shouting commands and running from station to station. He looked at me with those calm green eyes and said, “Well Ensign, what are you going to do?”

  That was the question wasn’t it? As my two protectors started firing back through the doorway, offering their lives to defend me on my mission, I realized I had very little time to make a decision. It was going to be now or never.

  “You’re not going to save the Empire, are you?” I asked.

  “No, not exactly. That’s not the plan,” the Captain said back at me.

  Did I have the right to change history? Did I have the right to end an empire that had lasted almost 500 years?

  As the attack outside the room intensified a gas canister rolled through the doorway and started spewing its fumes. I had already prepped the station in front of me by entering my codes; the only thing left was to tap the flashing icon.

  I rested my fingers on it as the room suddenly shook…

  Chapter one

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  The Academy on Capital Planet Celcium

  Two Standard Years Earlier

  “I hereby now officially declare you Citizens in the Celcium Empire Stellar Legions. Long live the Emperor!”

  “Long live the Emperor!” we shouted back at the Admiral.

  Of course we couldn’t really see the Admiral, or at least I couldn’t. I was so far back in the ranks that I could barely make out the Review Stand he was sp
eaking from.

  The multitude of media globes that hovered over the Parade Ground insured that we could hear him… and of course they also served to observe our reactions and insure that only loyal, respectful, and patriotic men and women graduated from The Academy in the first place.

  It had been unnerving at first, to be observed at every waking (and sleeping, eating, defecating, and lovemaking) moment for the last four years, but the logic of it made sense. The Empire had been expanding for centuries and the requirement for Citizens to man its legions kept growing exponentially. The loss of privacy was a small price to pay to protect the integrity of the Citizen’s Corps.

  There were thousands on the Parade Ground with me today, and there would be thousands more graduating every few days for the next thirty weeks. The continuous expansion of the Emperor’s domain constantly created new fronts to protect and new civil service positions to fill.

  The Empire had long ago given up on trying to differentiate between civilians and military. Now, if you wanted to be a Citizen of the Empire, you graduated The Academy and served in a military, civil service, or business legion. All Officers were Citizens and all Citizens were Officers.

  Being a Citizen or not was the distinction between being of the Empire or working for the Empire.

  Unsurprisingly, Citizenship was highly sought after. The competition was so stiff it was rumored that on some planets if you were selected to attend The Academy you could expect numerous assassination attempts from those hoping to take your place. The Academy itself officially denied this, but unofficially everyone accepted that it was just another culling of those unfit to serve.

  My planet wasn’t quite as mercurial, but still I’d had my own hurdles to jump.

  There are four ways you can gain admittance into The Academy:

  You could be mega rich and buy your way in.

  You could be a legacy (having a parent that was a Citizen).

  You could be appointed by the Imperial family (almost unheard of).

  Or, you could score high enough in the admittance exams (which meant you usually had to score in the top one-tenth of one-percent of your planet’s peers in academics and athletics).

  Only a certain number of positions are available to each planet each year. Thus, the competition.

  The truth is, unless you can qualify in at least two categories you probably aren’t going to get in.

  I’m pretty sure I’d made it in by the skin of my teeth.

  On my home planet, Lightspar, I’d had great marks in school so that wasn’t a problem, but my family certainly wasn’t rich - especially not that kind of rich. My ace in the hole was that I was a legacy. Sort of.

  My father had been a Citizen but had died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm when I was still very young – I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Normally none of that would have mattered but some time before then he had been disgraced and discharged from the Imperial Oversight Legion that liaised with Lightspar’s government.

  My mother had moved us halfway across the planet to shield us from that disgrace and spent the remainder of my father’s relative fortune on bribes and securing a new life for us. She had apparently found a way to prevent my father’s Citizenship itself from being revoked. I’m assuming it was either by a technicality or a bribe because we were certainly stripped of every benefit of Citizenship including our stipend; and without the income due Imperial Citizens and their families it had been tough for her.

  I say apparently because all of this was news to me. Up until about a year ago I’d had no idea my father had been a Citizen. But when it came time to fill out my academy application she’d had me type his name into the appropriate field and then proudly recited by memory a 24 digit identification passcode. She had then biometrically authorized the entry.

  She had wept during this entire process and I had mistakenly assumed it was because she was ashamed of my father.

  ΔΔΔ

  Academy life had been… demanding.

  I had assumed that most everybody would be as patriotic as I was. Not only was this not true, but it seemed to me that many of my classmates could have cared less about advancing the goals of the empire.

  For most of them this was just a ticket to Citizenship and all the power, prestige, and riches it entailed.

  When I was growing up I’d been enthralled by all kinds of stories about galactic conquest, the exploring of new planets, and discovering new life forms. The galaxy, or at least our spiral arm of it, was full of intelligent life – it just wasn’t alien life. Oh, we met plenty of new planets that were already settled, but they were settled by humans. They also tended to be uncultured, undisciplined, warlike, and desperately in need of our guidance.

  Some of those same stories had speculated wildly on the origins of the human race, but I found it hard to believe that we’d come from another galaxy or been bred by an ancient race as slaves or had evolved by accident on a single lost planet, or… Still, it had been kind of fun to fantasize about it.

  The main effect that all those stories had on me, however, was to give me the dream of what our great empire could accomplish.

  We brought organization that calmed the chaos, education that cultured the masses, and the law that kept the peace.

  Fortunately, all of the hundreds of new cultures discovered thus far had been technologically inferior, or at best our equal. The Celcium Empire was about bringing enlightenment, order, protection, and trade to as many disparate star systems as possible. To educate their masses, protect them from themselves, and show them a better way of life… these were the things our instructors constantly preached to us at The Academy. I was proud that our empire did this for the cultures we encountered - and I reveled in the thought of being a part of it.

  Choosing a career path in a business legion seemed boring and a military life held no fascination for me. That made my days at The Academy difficult, but I knew that once I graduated I could request assignment to a civil service legion. Since my papers showed me as a civil service legacy my appointment should be automatic – and I had plans.

  My ambitions were much higher than simply rising to a planetary governorship – I wanted to make Lightspar rich again! I would lead my world into the most prosperous economic expansion the Empire had ever seen. I was sure I could raise the economy of my planet much faster and much higher than what we were currently accomplishing, and I could visualize the Emperor himself publically honoring me for my success. I could then return home to the adoring and thankful inhabitants of my world.

  I know this all sounds incredibly naïve but I’d really put a lot of thought into it.

  You see, every planet had its own economy; every planet used its own currency. There were areas of the planetary and interplanetary economy that were incredibly inefficient and I was good at recognizing patterns like that. This meant the disparity between the value of those planetary currencies and the Imperial Denar was vast.

  I had learned just how vast the hard way… and it had almost cost me my position at The Academy.

  Chapter two

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  A Rough Start

  Four Standard Years before Graduation

  I, like everyone, knew that Citizens were rich but it was brought home to me personally my very first day at The Academy…

  I’d reached the end of the cafeteria buffet line when the screen at the payment kiosk started asking me a million questions about who I was, did I have funds deposited with The Academy, and what account was I using. When a red light and a single harsh tone startled me several students scattered about in the crowd of tables laughed out loud. That same screen was now busy pointing out that my student fund account didn’t have a sufficient balance to cover the cost of my lunch. This confused me terribly because my mom and I had scrimped and saved everything we could between the time I was accepted and when the ship arrived to take me away. I had realized it wouldn’t go very far on Celcium, but I’d had no idea just how bad
the exchange rate would actually be. According to the screen, all of my savings amounted to barely two denars. My meal cost three.

  I was dumbfounded.

  “Let me guess,” I heard an impatient female voice from behind me say. “You just got here and haven’t had your chip inserted yet.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. “When is that supposed to happen?”

  “Hasn’t your advisor told you?”

  “My advisor?”

  “You haven’t been assigned an advisor? Have you even checked in yet?”

  “Uhh… The other students on the ship told me to relax until somebody contacted me…”

  “Fracking newbs,” she muttered. “They’re just jacking with you. You’re supposed to go check in immediately upon arrival.”

  “Oh shrak,” I whispered. I was getting off to a great start.

  She wasn’t smiling so maybe she just felt sorry for me, but at any rate she stepped up to the kiosk and started tapping on the screen. A moment later a green light lit up and the screen messaged me to ‘Enjoy’.

  “There,” she said. “I’ve overpaid for your lunch so you’ll have a few extra denars credited to your account until you get implanted. As soon as lunch is over go find your counselor – if you don’t you might as well head back to the spaceport. They’ll ship your butt home faster than you can blink for breaking the rules.”