A treatise on The Imperial Eye.
The Lord High Imperial Inquisitor is Count Chamon Mazarin, a stunted but brilliant man who finds himself in charge of the great and powerful Imperial intelligence service. The Imperial Eye is currently a branch of the Empire in transition. The previous head of the Imperial Eye, Duchess Olestre Acata Xanthippes, has recently been deposed for authorizing an elaborate espionage plot on Count Ernesto Urrutia Castenda, accused of plotting treasonously with the Decados. She has been arrested by a trio of Questing Knights operating in cooperation with Count Chamon Mazarin, and is being held as a prisoner of the Emperor until her guilt is proven. Alexius’ supporters laud his efforts to instill honor in the Imperial Eye, while his detractors whisper that the arrest was merely a power play by Count Chamon, supported by his childhood friend Alexius in order to bring the Imperial Eye under his control.
Officially, the Eye is divided into three directorates. The Directorate of Reclamation retrieves artifacts, searches for lost worlds, and is in charge of determining if a resource must be brought under Imperial control. This Directorate has a mixed reputation among guilders, as it tends to confiscate many of their prized inventions, laboratories, finds or jumpkeys. On the other hand, it also tends to pay them off generously in Imperial contracts and promissary notes. The Directorate of Reclamation’s duties often overlap with those of the Questing Knights, who are also charged with recovering artifacts and vital resources that are the rightful property of the Emperor, but they rarely conflict, as both the Company of the Phoenix and the Directorate of Reclamations are so undermanned that they rarely run into each other. Still, there have been a few areas where both a Questing Knight and a Reclamationist has tried to claim an artifact in the name of the Emperor. In many cases, the Questing Knight graciously cedes the resource to the Imperial Eye, but when the Knight sees herself as honor-bound to acquire it personally, she is adamant and the Eye gives up, grumbling.
Reclamations teams range in size from two to ten and tend to be composed of freemen who are extremely technically skilled, and always include at least one noble. The Imperial Eye maintains its own training facilities, and so only rarely requires Reclamation agents to cooperate with the guilds. They are always extremely well-equipped and trained for many contingencies. They always have at least one powerful theurge among them to deal with occult threats from the artifacts that they seek as well as from any forces that oppose them along the way. Like Investigations teams, they are highly-mobile, usually travelling by skimmer whenever terrain permits. As with most representatives of the Empire, they tend to find themselves dealing with threats to the Empire that are outside their official purview simply because they find themselves there.
They have somewhat touchy relations with the Inquisition and the Kalinthi, although they try to cooperate with them as much as possible. The Directorate of Imperial Investigations, formerly directed by Count Chamon Mazarin, is charged with rooting out the enemies of the Empire and bringing them to justice. Officially, this Directorate only practices clandestine surveillance on commoners. The official policy used to also allow clandestine surveillance on alien and barbarian officials, but now any alien or barbarian noble has the same immunity from espionage (in theory, at least) as does a human noble. Officially, when a noble or churchman is suspected of treason or crimes against the Empire, a Magistrate Imperial and his retinue of officers will notify the suspect of his charges and interview him and any of his servants, staff, allies and associates. The proceedings are treated as a police investigation rather than espionage, and there is often much pageantry about the investigations, the ensuing trials and punishments. Magistrates Imperial report directly to the local office of the Directorate of Investigations, although they have the leeway to range quite freely. They travel singly or in pairs, but if they travel alone they usually have a significant retinue of freeman Investigative Officers who are highly trained in interrogation, detective work, security, and combat. The Magistrate Imperial tends to have an Interlocutor Badge, an Imperial Eye blazon which acts as a sophisticated lie detector on whoever lays their hand upon it and often generates a circle of silence which makes it almost impossible to eavesdrop on the conversation. He also carries a dueling weapon (sometimes a concealed wireblade), a dueling shield, synthsilk, a whisper pin, sophisticated bug detection equipment, night-vision goggles, a hierarchy or journal think machine, and a pistol of some sort- often a palm laser. His officers carry more specialized bug detection and security equipment (perimeter sentries, white noise generators, laser tripwires), night-vision equipment, pistols and swords, dueling shields, whisper pins, synthsilk, advanced cameras and various scanners, longer-range scrambled communicators to contact other officials in the Directorate of Investigations, and medical equipment, sometimes including truth serums and torture devices for use on commoners (though Alexius is attempting to phase these out). At least one member of the retinue is a skilled theurge, although sometimes a retinue includes a psychic instead or in addition. All members of the retinue have suicide pills to preserve Imperial secrets, and some have suicide bracelets or cyber-implants. The retinue is highly mobile, often ranging all over a planet, and they tend to travel in a sleek skimmer with many concealed weapons. Count Chamon Mazarin is attempting to increase the presence and visibility of Magistrates Imperial, recruiting many new Magistrates and keeping them busy. This is partly to make up for a decreased use of Operatives Imperial and partly to compensate for the remaining use of these Operatives. Since there are still some dishonorable operations that higher-ups in the Eye have been unable to root out, it’s important that the citizenry be more likely to encounter the Directorate of Investigations in an honorable capacity than in a dishonorable one. Clandestine operations are undertaken by Operatives Imperial. These shadowy freemen are spies through and through, and make no bones about it.
Theoretically, they are only authorized to spy upon lay commoners, and if they intend to spy on serfs of a lord, they must acquire the lord’s permission first (which they usually do by explaining the necessity of the espionage, promising modest rewards for cooperation and threatening investigation of the lord by Magistrates Imperial if he doesn’t comply). However, during the Regency the Operatives Imperial paid little heed to these dictates, and established many spy rings and teams of assassins that investigated priest, noble and commoner alike. These teams and spy rings have proven very hard to root out, as the cell system used by Operatives Imperial and the shadowy information available concerning funding and operations make it very hard for high-ranking officials to learn the precise structure of the personnel under them. There are few formal rankings amongst the Operatives Imperial. They organize in cells of anywhere from 3 to 15 Operatives. Each cell is linked to at least one other cell, and often only to one other cell. Standard practice is for each cell to only know one contact in the neighboring cell, reducing the possibility of discovery. To make things more difficult, the contacts are usually implanted with remote-control suicide devices, making it possible for a spymaster to instantly sever his connections with a compromised cell. Cells themselves tend to have the responsibility for training new members beyond the basic training all receive at the Imperial Eye Academy on Aldaia, and some spy camps run by Old Guard spymasters are downright frightening in their efficiency. Worse still, each cell has the discretionary ability to organize groups of outside operatives (known as affiliates), who are usually organized into cells themselves. These affiliates do much of the work of the Imperial Eye, and they almost never have any idea that they’re working for the Eye. The Eye tends to recruit affiliates under the flag of various other groups. Favorite false fronts are Third Republicans (especially members of Newtopia), Jakovian agents, individual Decados lords, Reeves, Scravers, Sathraists, psychic covens (to recruit psychics- valuable commodities amongst the spy communities), al-Malik spies, alien sympathizers and technosophists. These false fronts recruit sympathizers or mercenaries and carry out their day-to-day operations little realizing that among their leadership is a contact for the Imperial Eye. The Operatives organizing spy rings such as these have tended in the past to be stubborn men who care little for honor and whose loyalty lies less to high command and more to each other. These sub-networks of spies are truly powerful forces. The Sathraist Old Guard of the Regency exists unofficially at this level, made up of many Operatives who have contacts with other cells, each of which have powerful affiliate spy rings and many side projects such as spy camps, psychic training facilities, crime rings to fund operations, long-standing surveillance or blackmail arrangements, smuggling networks to acquire forbidden drugs or technologies, or any other manner of covert organizations.
Cells composed of Operatives Imperial tend to focus more on acquiring contacts than on conducting covert operations themselves. Most of their activities consist of acquiring and maintaining contacts through blackmail, false-front recruiting, and simple bribery, but they do delegate affiliates to surveillance tasks, as well as the occasional infiltration, covert intrusion, or assassination. Nonetheless, the Operative Imperial definitely have the capability to take on these roles themselves if situations arise that need to be handled skillfully. As spies, their best agents are on par with those from the Jakovian agency. Full-fledged Operatives Imperial have dueling shields, derringers or palm lasers, bug detectors, white noise generators, night vision goggles and scrambled whisper pins. They also have the ability to requisition concealable spyblades (extendible monowire swords not as powerful as full-fledged wireblades), static bugs, remote-control golem bugs, laser listening devices, long-range microphones and digital cameras, journal, hierarchy and facial scanner think machines, homing bugs, synthfaces, pheromones, all manner of drugs, gasses and poisons, ice-needle sniper rifles (able to silently deliver frozen slivers of poison under a target’s skin at long range), thieves’ keys, scrambler pads, all sorts of silent intrusion devices, various types of explosives for sabotage and assassination, and much more.
The Directorate of Imperial Intelligence has a strangely ill-defined role. Though technically in charge of oversight, analysis and coordination of the activities of the other two directorates, it is an unpopular and rather weak directorate, but Count Chamon Mazarin is working to combat that. In Regency times, it stayed a mere storehouse for information, a research and development division and a home for scheming spymasters and technosophists. Under Alexius, however, many of the old corrupt officials have been jettisoned and replaced with more loyal administrators, and it is beginning to exercise its official functions as the brain of the Imperial Eye. The Directorate of Intelligence has a complicated hierarchical structure of information sifters, analysts, and long-range planners all committed to processing and making use of the wealth of information pulled in by the Directorates of Reclamation and Investigations. All of the higher-ranking positions in the Directorate are open only to nobles.
It is the Directorate of Intelligence that determines how to deploy and fund Imperial Eye resources and it is the Directorate of Intelligence that prepares reports for the other branches of the Empire, from briefs on the threat posed by the Symbiots for the Imperial Legions, to reports on Ur ruins for the Imperial Archives, to analyses of the current political climate for the eyes of the Emperor’s Chancellor himself. The other primary function of the Directorate of Intelligence, besides managing the other two Directorates, is the research of technologies both new and old, both for the Imperial Eye and, occasionally, for the Empire itself. When the Reclamationists uncover alien or Second Republic artifacts, they bring them in the end to the laboratories of the Directorate of Intelligence to be analyzed and tested. The Directorate of Intelligence is increasingly coming into conflict with the newly-expanding Imperial Archives, which demand access to many of their classified reports and artifacts.
The Head of the Imperial Eye has all the authority of the Director of Intelligence as well as the ability to oversee the Imperial Eye itself. While the Directorate of Intelligence involves some administrative oversight over the other two directorates, the Head of the Imperial Eye is in charge of the Quaesitorae, the Magistrates granted almost unlimited powers to root out corruption within the Imperial Eye, including within the Directorate of Intelligence itself. In addition, the Head of the Imperial Eye is in charge of the Imperial Eye troops directly responsible for safeguarding Eye operations. These Imperial Eye legionnaires do not fall under the purview of the Imperial legions, but though they are excellent sentries, they do not constitute much of a fighting force in their own right.
Each Imperial Eye office hosts a contingent of agents from each Directorate. The Directorates of Reclamation and Investigations tend to send out teams to operate more or less autonomously from the office, while the Directorate of Intelligence tends to remain firmly based in the offices. The distribution of offices is not at all as regular or efficient as the distribution of revenue offices. There is at least one office, on every world, as well as one office attached to the Imperial Embassy on each world. Most planets have at least one office per major continent, but there are quite a few exceptions- Kish is the most notable. There are more extensive offices on Byzantium Secundus (home of the Imperial Eye headquarters- most of the Directorate of Intelligence is located here, but there is also a huge presence of agents from the Directorate of Investigations, who comb the planet for traitors), Stigmata (The Directorates of Investigations and Reclamation divide the responsibilities of providing intelligence support for the Stigmata Garrison), Nowhere (almost entirely members of the Directorate of Reclamations), Criticorum (The Directorate of Investigations is on the watch for traitors here as well), Severus (The Directorate of Investigations here keeps an eye on the Decados), Cadiz (All directorates have a strong presence here, ostensibly to keep an eye on the Vau. However, most of the Directorate of Investigations agents spend their time watching the Decados), Sutek (the Directorates of Reclamations and Investigations keep an eye on the ancient artifacts and possible Decados sympathizers here, respectively), Vera Cruz (the Directorate of Investigations watches both the Kurgans and the Hazat), and Leagueheim (mostly agents of the Directorate of Reclamations). The Imperial Eye is currently increasing its presence on Pandemonium and Leminkainen.