Empire's Legacy

Chapter 29: Covert Operations

Amy let out a deep breath she hadn't even been aware she was holding and sank down into the chair her father had been sitting in. She stared across the hall at the warped glass, lost in thought, and didn't realize the door had opened until someone entered her field of vision, blocking out the light from the window.

"I'm sorry to disturb your thoughts, Ms. Brenner—"

She opened her mouth to correct him and then thought better of it.

"The Secretary has requested me to inform you that should you desire to remain in the Capitol, I am to escort you to your chambers in the Residence Wing."

Amy's brows lifted. "I wasn't aware I had chambers."

"There is a standing order, courtesy of the Secretary, for a suite of rooms to be kept in readiness should you ever require the use of them, Ms. Brenner."

"What a colossal waste of time and space," she said, pushing herself up out of the chair. "However, seeing as I'm here and could use some sleep, lead on."

The Guardsman gestured for her to exit the Hall ahead of him; he followed, securing the doors behind him. She trailed down the corridor after him, listening to the whisper of his stockinged feet between the echo of her own footsteps off the stone walls.

"Why is it that the Residence Wing is located within the Parliament Building?" she asked abruptly.

"I'm sure I couldn't say," the Guardsman said, opening a door for her. "I imagine that the statesmen and stateswomen prefer to be close to both their work and their families. And I suppose it's convenient to have residences for visiting dignitaries."

"Don't most families of members of state reside in the city or on estates outside of the Capitol?"

"I'm afraid I don't know, but if you'd like, I could find out for you."

"No, it's fine. Thank you."

"As you wish. Here we are." The Guardsman stopped in front of a pair of double doors, much smaller and less grand than those of the Hall of Tributaries, but imposing nevertheless.

"Well," Amy said as the doors swung open and the interior of the rooms was revealed, "my father has certainly never worked out my taste in décor."

The rooms were decorated in early Commission rococo style. She trailed her fingers over a carved pink rosette and glanced back at the Guardsman standing in the doorway.

"If these rooms are not to your liking, I can arrange for someone else," he said stiffly.

She shrugged. "I'm hardly moving in. It's fine."

"Will you require anything further, Ms. Brenner?"

"No, thank you. You can go."

He bowed. "Have a pleasant evening, ma'am."

Amy waited until the door was closed before moving to the middle of the room and taking stock of her surroundings. The rococo décor made spotting the eyes different. The corner eye was the most obvious; it was intended to be spotted, to encourage any residents to relax and not go looking for others. That there would be others, Amy was certain; firstly, because this was the Parliament Building, and secondly, because this was the suite apparently kept for her by her father. She would have had to have been a complete and utter fool to assume she wasn't being watched by someone.

It took her nearly an hour, but she was fairly confident she had worked out the location of every eye in the suite. The only reason it had taken so long was because there was no point in conducting an outright search, as that would have made it extremely obvious what she was doing. Instead, she had prowled about, exploring the rooms, opening cupboards, investigating the wardrobe—she had even rung for tea. Now, as she finished the last of the biscuits the cadet had brought her with the tea, she settled down for an apparent nap on the bed, having slid into a blind spot behind one of the eyes, and reconfigured the room's system to respond to her jury-rigged signal box, surreptitiously retrieved from her boot and tucked into her shirt. Half an hour later, the camera was playing a looped recording of her sleeping and she was shimmying up through an uncomfortably tight air duct, headed for Chancellor Naisbitt's council chambers.

It had been years since Amy had crawled through ducts as heavily alarmed as those of the Parliament Building, and she was surprised to see that more than half of the security system seemed to be down. It made her journey much quicker, as she didn't have to stop every few feet to disable air sensors and motion trips, but it also made her wary; as the dead center of the main hub of the capital city of the capital planet of the Commission, C-Prime's Parliament Building was usually swarming with alarms and security, seen and unseen. Although she wasn't entirely certain why they bothered tripping the air ducts in the first place; there were very few people who were capable, or stupid, enough to mount an infiltration of the Parliament Building, or indeed of any kind of ship or building, through ducts this narrow. That kind of close-quarters infiltration wasn't part of cadet training, nor was it part of advanced maneuvers, as far as she was aware. It was a different kind of maneuver than going through the maintenance tunnels from Cam's ship back onto Peleteth, which even the greenest cadet should have been able to do (though a green cadet might not have been able to deal with the shaft beginning to detach partway through); maintenance shafts were designed for the movement of people, not air. Air ducts, on the other hand, were tight and cramped, big enough for a person if absolutely necessary—someone did have to clean them on occasion—but hardly encouraged. The only reason Amy knew how to move through air ducts with any element of ease, much less disarm any level of security measures that happened was because of her father, who'd taught her and Cam the summer she was 16 and he was 12. That had been one of the hottest summers on record in the hill country of Idylla's northern hemisphere, and he'd had her and Cam crawling around inside the air ducts of the grounded Commission museum ship at the flight yard. At 12, Cam had already been almost too big to squeeze through the confines of the ducts. By the following summer, he'd been exempt from those kinds of exercises; she'd been jealous, although he'd been subjected to an alternative that, at the time, he claimed was equally unpleasant. That following summer, building on Amy's success with the museum ship's air ducts, her father had set up a very big, very intricate, very detailed course of air ducts with real sensors and alarms and trips—a course that Amy hadn't realized until much later was an exact duplicate of the ducts in the Parliament Building. She'd worked that one out the first time she'd come crawling up into these ducts, when she was 18 and had just been sacked from her duties waiting on Chancellor Naisbitt. Annoyed and anxious to learn the end of the negotiations she'd been listening in on as his server, she'd hacked into the classified files containing the blueprints for the governmental buildings in search of the air duct layout plans, carefully ignoring everything that was thanking her father for having taught her how to navigate them, and then discovered, to her surprise, that she was already familiar with the design.

And now she was back, again ignoring the feeling at the back of her brain that her father was to thank for having taught her how to successfully navigate these ducts in the first place. When she was a child, she'd never imagined she'd be crawling around air ducts at the age of 30. Not for the first time, she wished her hips were narrower—not because she had any particular objection to her physical appearance, but because she seemed to have developed a habit of ending up in narrow confines and having curves like the Hourglass Nebula didn't exactly help when trying to squeeze through tight spaces.

She inched along until she came to a T-junction and went right. Thirty feet along the shaft, she paused, resting on her forearms so her eyes were inches above an air vent. Carefully, she twitched open the slats on the vent and found herself looking straight down at Chancellor Naisbitt's desk. An outdated image of his son was perched on the corner; Dylan looked about 18 in the picture, although at a guess Amy would have said he was closer to 40 these days. Definitely older than she was, at any rate.

A balding head moved into view below the vent and stepped behind the desk—Naisbitt. He'd lost more of his hair since the last time she'd seen him. The impression wasn't the best from above, but she had always been startled by what a physically powerful man Naisbitt was. In his University days, he'd competed as a heavyweight boxer, and though he'd put on weight over the years during his time as a rising statesman and then as Chancellor, his tall frame carried the extra weight well. She'd always thought it an odd contrast between Naisbitt, with his imposing presence and charismatic personality, and her father, whose appearance was almost forgettable, considering that it was Seamus Brenner who was the quietly acknowledged power behind Rabb Naisbitt. Naisbitt was the face of the Commission, but Brenner operated the strings behind the curtain.