documentation to fool members of this conspiracy. They had thought it might take a
week or two for the conspirators to check out the sources and discover they were faked;
instead, it took only a day-and that slip nearly cost the d’Alemberts their lives. They
would not underestimate the opposition again; they’d find a method of getting to Gastonia
on their own, without the aid of SOTE.
There was only one way of being sent to Gastonia: commit treason and be sentenced for
it.
The situation was a little more complex than that, of course. The very worst traitors were
executed rather than sent into exile. That was the fate that awaited C and Lady A when
they were finally brought to justice. It was only the lesser traitors who were spared
execution and banished to the harsh world of Gastonia.
The practice of exiling people to Gastonia rather than killing every convicted traitor began
under the short, unhappy reign of Empress Stanley five, more commonly known as “Mad
Stephanie.” Whether she was any madder than some of the other Stanley rulers is a
matter of some dispute; her nickname derived from her fanatical knack for smelling
treason on every breeze and spotting traitors in every crowd. This obsession did have a
basis in fact; when she was thirty-six her younger brother Edmund made a power play
for the Throne, killing her father (then-Emperor Stanley Four) and very nearly killing her.
Only the supreme loyalty of the Navy-primarily in the person of Fleet Admiral
Simms-prevented the revolt’s success. After several weeks of turmoil, the rebels
admitted defeat, and Stephanie ascended to the Throne with a vengeance.
Prince Edmund and Grand Duke Gaspard of Sector Nineteen, the principal architects of
the revolution, were publicly tortured and executed. Seven hundred and twenty-eight
naval officers were court-martialed and shot. Stephanie combed the entire peerage; any
noble who could not prove a record of unimpeachable loyalty was apt to find himself
facing charges – of treason-and, since Stephanie’s will was the ultimate law, a trial was
but an automatic prelude to death.
When, after a year, Stephanie showed no signs of abating her purges, all the
Empire-including her closest advisors began to worry. At the rate she was going, there
would soon be none of the nobility left-and she was already beginning to accuse the
more influential commoners as well. To prevent a further bloodbath, the Imperial advisors
finally convinced their empress to banish the lesser offenders to the newly discovered
planet of Gastonia at the outermost limits of Sector Twenty. The death penalty, while still
the official punishment for treason, became reserved only for those who opposed their
sovereign on a grand scale. In Stephanie’s eyes, there were still plenty of those to go
around-but thousands of people escaped execution and were “merely” banished for life.
As Stephanie’s tyrannies grew more obsessive, the plots to depose her became very
real indeed. The Service of the Empire, founded by Stephanie’s grandmother Empress
Stanley Three, had its work cut out for it, becoming little more than a terrorist police
squad. Even SOTE could not keep the lid on all the revolutions, however, and
Stephanie-along with most of her family-was finally assassinated in 2.299, six long years
after the start of her bloody reign. Only her youngest son Edward survived, and became
Emperor Stanley Six. To his credit, he pardoned most of the prisoners who had been
unjustly exiled to Gastonia-but he kept the possibility of banishment open for future
cases, and so it had remained down to the present day.
Jules and Yvonne thus found themselves having to tread a fine line. They had to commit
treason; ordinary criminals were dealt with on a local level, and usually assigned to
planetary prisons. The treason they committed had to be serious enough to rank them
above the level of the common crook-but not so serious that they would die for it.
After a couple of long brainstorming sessions between them, the d’Alemberts decided
that they stood the best chance of being noticed on one of the younger pioneer worlds.
They took the names of Ernst and Florence Brecht. ostensibly raised in a backwoods
community on the very crowded planet Promontory. This identity was carefully selected;
since Promontory was so crowded, and since its backwoods area was so primitive, a
great many people existed without adequate documentation.
The fact that the Brechts had no birth certificates, no marriage license-indeed, no
records of any sort-would not be considered unusual.
Also, because of its overcrowded condition, Promontory was a focal point of the
Empire’s emigration drive. Whenever there were new planets opened, the: Empire
subsidized migration from the crowded worlds to the newer ones. The population of the
Empire kept moving and spreading; theoretically, there was no end in sight.
Thus it was that, one afternoon, Ernst and Florence Brecht showed up at the emigration
office in Tor, capital city of Promontory, and volunteered to emigrate to the new planet
Islandia. The recruiting officer was delighted with this young couple, in such fine physical
condition, and did not delve too deeply into their background. He had a quota to fill, and
this couple satisfied all the necessary conditions. Within three days, the Brechts were
aboard a spaceship bound for lslandia.
The planet Islandia was so named because more than ninety percent of its surface area
was covered by water. These vast oceans were dotted by thousands of small islands,
many of them still unexplored. The islands were a biologist’s paradise, since many
species of animals had evolved separately on each of the islands, making it an ideal
laboratory for testing theories of parallel evolution. In addition, the sea life was rich and
varied; most of the colonists’ food and materials came from the oceans.
All the inhabited islands so far were located in the equatorial regions, making Islandia a
tropical paradise. Life there was easy and relaxed. At present there were only about
fifteen thousand people on the planet-though as word of its delights spread through the
Empire there would undoubtedly be a large influx of tourists and settlers looking for the
good life.
Jules and Yvonne settled right in, and for the first two weeks they were model citizens.
Jules took a job as a dispatcher for a small fleet of fishing boats; Yvonne worked in a
factory that processed lecthit, a native sea plant similar to kelp. They rented a small,
modest apartment and kept very much to themselves. On a new colony like Islandia, that
was all they needed to establish their identities.
They spent all their waking time away from their jobs studying the structure of life on
Islandia, analyzing it with their expert eyes and calculating its weak points to a fine
degree.
Although the planet’s population was spread out over more than twenty islands, the
administration required to serve its fifteen thousand people was minimal and was
concentrated on Bantor, the largest inhabited island. The entire police force for all of
Islandia was a squad of thirty-six officers, only one-third of whom were on duty at any
one time-and of those on duty, only half remained at the central police station while the
rest patrolled around the islands in cruising air cars. The local SOTE office was merely a
formality, with only two agents assigned to it, keeping regular business hours rather than
around-the-clock protection.
“It’s a lucky thing this planet isn’t more valuable,” Vonnie commented, shaking her head in
wonderment. “A baby could take it over.”
“Isn’t it nice to know we’ll be performing a worthwhile service?” Jules agreed. “They’ll be
much more careful after we get finished with them.”
The first step of their plan was to obtain weapons. The local sporting goods shops
carried a wide assortment of stun-guns and stun-rifles for hunters. The settings on these
weapons available to the general public only went up as high as three–a half hour stun;
with the specialized training in weaponry that the d’Alemberts had received, however, it
was easy enough to modify the guns they bought to deliver a number four stun, sufficient
to knock a victim unconscious for two hours. They had the knowledge, had they wished,
to give their stunners a lethal capacity as well; but they specifically wanted to avoid killing
anyone during their little coup. The d’Alemberts had a great respect for innocent human
life, and didn’t want to kill anyone just to achieve their aims. Besides, committing a
murder during their crime could very well lead to execution rather than banishment to
Gastonia. A two-hour stun would serve their purposes well enough.
With their weapons properly modified and concealed, the d’Alemberts walked brazenly
into the local SOTE office late one afternoon. The building SOTE rented on Islandia was
small, consisting of a storefront reception area, two separate offices for the agents, and
a locked room at the back where emergency equipment was kept. Jules and Vonnie
looked around and saw, as they’d expected, that they were the only “customers” in the