Out of curiosity, Pias took a walk by the local office of the Service of the Empire. Because Newforest was an out-of-the-way planet where little ever happened, the SOTE office was barely more than a storefront staffed by a couple of low-level officials. Pias considered going in, but thought better of it when he saw the trio of police officers loitering nearby. They were watching the office and obviously prepared to take note of anyone trying to contact SOTE with complaints about the local regime. Pias had little doubt that calls to SOTE were also monitored, further discouraging local complaints. Still, such activities should not have silenced the SOTE operatives themselves; anyone with eyes could see what a reprehensible situation was occurring here. SOTE’s failure to do anything indicated a tremendous breakdown somewhere in the system.
Pias spent a week in Garridan, becoming more and more depressed at the dismal circumstances. He wandered, watched, listened, and spent a good deal of time mentally composing the blistering report he would write to the Head. But the report was still incomplete; there were still things he had to discover about Tas and the way the system operated.
The key to everything on Newforest seemed to be those little blue citizen’s cards. Through their use, a person could be tracked throughout the city and his movements monitored to a high degree of precision. Pias’s own trail had been innocent and random; the security forces would learn nothing by keeping track of where he went and what he did. But there was serious potential for abuse; with a system this tight, individual freedom became purely a rhetorical concept.
To make the system work would require an enormous degree of computer sophistication, a reliance on technology that Pias would have thought antithetical to the Newforest character. Somewhere there had to be a computer facility where this random information, compiled from all over the world, was assimilated and analyzed to look for troublemakers or signs of rebellion. There had been no major computer centers on Newforest when Pias had left it. Somehow, Tas had built one in the last few years to consolidate his tyrannical rule. Such a facility would have needed outside help to build – and Pias was almost afraid to speculate on where that help could have come from.
It didn’t take Pias long to find the center. There was only one place in Garridan that was both new enough and large enough to house such a mammoth facility: a sprawling, heavily guarded installation near the out skirts of town. The number of guards around it, and the fact that the outside was kept brightly lit around the clock, indicated its importance to Tas’s regime. It was so thoroughly watched that it became an irresistible target of Pias’s curiosity.
Many agents would simply have reported the buildings as suspicious and left it to an official Service team of experts to investigate the inside. But going through channels might give Tas time to cover up the true nature of his operation. Pias felt he had to go inside and take at least a preliminary look around. He was not a computer expert and was not sure he could spot something significant even if it was right in front of him, but comparing the place before and after an official SOTE investigation would at least show whether changes had been made.
The building was so well guarded that Pias knew he had no chance of making a surreptitious entrance. Only uniformed guards and people with special clearances were allowed in and out of the place. Pias would have to disguise himself as one or the other. After some brief thought, he decided to impersonate one of the brassies. A uniform, by its very nature, was made to be taken for granted. One person in uniform looked very much like another and unless his fingerprints or retinal pattern were checked, Pias could probably walk through many areas of the building unchallenged.
He haunted the area near the time of shift change and followed one of the guards who was near his own size as the man got off work. Pias tracked him patiently until the man passed a deserted alleyway where the SOTE agent promptly waylaid him. The man was no match for Pias’s Service training, and within minutes Pias found himself in possession of a uniform and a blaster – and a security badge that cleared him to pass through the gates of the computer complex. By taking this action he realized he was limiting himself. The guard’s absence would be noticed within a day, or thirty-six hours at most; Pias would have to be well away before then. Still, the chance to look around inside the complex seemed worth the risk.
He tied up his victim, donned the uniform, and strode purposefully back to the guarded installation. The guards at the front gate barely gave him a second glance as he casually flashed his security pass at them. In like manner Pias passed two other checkpoints before entering the front door of the building itself.
Inside, the structure was even bigger than it looked from the exterior. The planet’s heavy gravity dictated how tall a building could be above ground level, but there was no such limit on how deep into the earth it could extend. The complex was a tall one for Newforest, rising three stories above the ground. It sank at least twice that many below ground. The computer facility was a small city in itself, housing hundreds of workers who tended the machines and analyzed the data pouring in continuously from all parts of the planet.
Pias could not stand around and gawk, or it would destroy his cover; as a uniformed guard, he was supposed to be quite familiar with all this. With so many people in constant motion he wasn’t noticed as he walked briskly in a random direction, pretending he knew precisely where he was going. He kept his eyes open for clues about what was happening where, and no one stopped him or questioned his presence in this supposedly sacrosanct installation.
At last he saw a sign pointing the way to the administrative section, and decided that was where he would get some of the information he was seeking. As it was the night shift, most of the administrative personnel were gone, their offices and desks empty. Pias wandered through the aisles and past another security checkpoint until he came to the chief administrative officer’s room. The door was locked. Pias could spot no special alarm system; a short beam from his blaster burned out the mechanism and he entered the room unseen.
The desk top, with a computer scanner built into it, was barren of paper; apparently most of the work was stored in the computer itself with little need for print out. Still, Pias had never heard of any operation that didn’t use some hard copy, and he began searching the desk drawers.
A slight noise made him stop and reach for the blaster at his hip, but as he looked up, he realized the gesture was futile. Standing in the doorway to the room was his brother Tas, holding a blaster already pointed at his chest – and behind Tas was a small army of brassies, all similarly armed.
“Hello, Pias,” Tas said with all the false warmth of a fourth-rate undertaker. “Welcome home.”
But it was not his brother’s words, nor the blaster, that attracted most of Pias’s attention. Around Tas’s neck, almost hidden by his collar, was a thin silver chain from which dangled a single integrated circuit chip – the recognition symbol of the conspiracy that was out to overthrow the Empire. Pias’s worst fears were suddenly realized: Tas Bavol had sold his soul, and the entire planet of Newforest, to the Empire’s worst enemy.
CHAPTER 5 The Resurrection of Pias Bavol
“I wish I could say it was good to see you again,” Pias replied in even tones. As he spoke, his mind raced. Tas might not know that Pias was now an agent of SOTE, or that he’d had special training. For all he knew, Pias had returned at Beti’s request, to undermine Tas’s authority. As long as he thought that, there was a chance Pias could somehow talk his way out of the situation-but if Tas ever learned that he represented the Service, Pias was not likely to survive the revelation.
“Yes, you never liked me,” Tas sneered.
“I always treated you fairly.”
“Of course-big brother generously doling out the crumbs. I got tired of a steady diet of crumbs. I wanted the whole loaf, and now I’ve got it.”
“And are you happy now that you’ve got what you want, now that you’ve enslaved our whole planet?”
“You always were the romantic,” Tas said. “The truth is far less melodramatic than you make it seem. Newforest was a sleepy, backwater place with nothing to recommend it. I’m merely yanking it into the twenty-fifth century, preparing it for its proper place in galactic affairs. I’m making it strong, Pias. Naturally people are complaining, the same way your muscles complain when you exercise them, to build up your body. Change always hurts. The whole Empire is in for a change soon and a lot of people will be hurt – but the Empire will be a stronger place afterward.”