“And you stopped them getting it,” Laura realized.
“Yes, ma’am. Except the people in charge at Headquarters wanted it to be stolen, and probably were the very people who arranged the theft,” Nick said. “I didn’t know that, though, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to me if I had – theft is theft. So near as I can tell, when I recovered the thing for the museum within just a few minutes ‘cause I recognized the thief, people all the way up to the Council level got seriously, big-time mad at me.”
“Damnation. No wonder they didn’t let it go,” Alexandre murmured. “You scotched a serious, long-term plan.”
“Probably.” Nick suddenly scowled. “And damn glad of it, excuse my language.”
Alexandre offered the younger man a wolfish grin, and Laura waved a dismissive hand.
“Yeah, and once Nick realized what their ongoing mad was about, he told Detective Gorski,” Cally noted with a slight smirk, “and Gorski went to the Empress’ brother – the guy who’s Emperor now – and told him, and he got his sister to issue a revocation of authority on the thing. So now the Sigil is just a cool historical object, but it gives no power to the person in possession of it. And that put paid to any future attempts to steal the thing.”
“That’s more like it,” Laura said in patent approval.
“Yes, ma’am,” Nick agreed. “Anyway, when it all started going down, I mean the rebellion against the Throne and all, I was working with the Imp City Police and the Imperial Guard to track down who was doing what, and who had assassinated one of the Empress’s staffers – who also was a close friend of the Empress, who I got to meet, and yeah, she was impressive. So after we nailed the assassin team, we took down their chief enforcer, who tried to resist arrest and fight back, and got himself killed for his efforts. Not that I minded,” Nick admitted, “because he was also the one that kept coming after me, or sending his underlings after me. But after that, Colonel Peterson decided–”
“She’s my – our – boss, the head of the Investigations division,” Cally injected, as her parents nodded in recognition of the name. “Maia Peterson.”
“…Peterson decided it might be good to get me out of reach for a little while,” Nick continued. “It’s really only been the headquarters of the IPD that was dishonest, because of the connections to the Council; for the most part, sector branches are pretty honest and by-the-book. So by that time, my old boss and my new boss had gotten married – seems they’d known each other for years, but his position at IPD had kept ‘em apart, for obvious reasons – and they put their heads together and contacted a chum of theirs who runs the Catalonia Sector IPD, and I got ‘exported,’ if you will.” He laughed. “So I was en route there when the whole mess went down with the attack on the Palace, and Ilithyia’s death, and Trajan ascending to the Throne, and his retaliation on the Council and the IPD HQ…”
“It was a huge mess within Imp City,” Cally averred. “But yeah, Nick was gone for all of that. He was in hyperspace and didn’t even find out about it until he’d reached Catalonia.”
“Yeah, and the Catalonian IPD chief briefed me on it as soon as I got there. And then there was a related mess that went down on Catalonia,” Nick added. “The sector governor was fomenting discontent through the media, because she had delusions of grandeur and used the assassination and Trajan’s ascension to try to secede from the Sintaran Empire and become a tin-pot empress of sorts over the ‘Catalonian Empire.’ Only she got herself murdered in the aftermath, and…” He sighed. “I couldn’t come back to Sintar; I couldn’t even talk to Cally, because the Emperor said, ‘Fine. You don’t wanna play with us, you don’t get the benefits,’ and killed the VR and the QE radio and everything. So we had to just wait it out, there at Catalonian HQ.”
“Whoa,” Alexandre muttered. “Damnation.”
“Kinda like, yes, sir,” Nick replied. “Everything was pretty much dead in the water. A body doesn’t realize how much stuff we do through VR until the VR isn’t there.”
“So when all that was finally over, and Nick – as the acting head of the whole Investigations division for Catalonia – solved the case of who killed the sector governor,” Cally said, raising her chin and beaming proudly, “we recalled him to Sintar, because his old boss – the one that married Colonel Peterson – had gotten tapped by the Emperor and the Consul to rebuild IPD Headquarters…”
“That’d be Lee Carter, the new IPD chief, or whatever he’s called now,” Nick filled in. “I think he and Emperor Trajan… and maybe Consul Saaret… are still debating what to call him.”
“And Chief Carter – the guy who’s married to Maia Peterson, my boss, and who used to be Nick’s boss, the guy who got him outta the IPD and over to us – well, he wanted Nick there to help him rebuild the Investigations division, and do it right, this time,” Cally finished.
“So this Carter came out of his early retirement to do it?” Laura Ames wondered. “To take over the Imperial Police Headquarters and clean it up?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nick confirmed. “It’s really more of a rebuilding than a cleaning house, though; there’s not really a ‘house’ left, by the time Emperor Trajan finished with ‘em. There’s a few of the people
