Deeper and Darker (Deep Dark Well Book 3)

by Doug Dandridge

  It would do well to not dismiss these people precipitously, he thought, studying the holo that showed an active and vibrant technical civilization. Shuttles rose from the atmosphere, or flew in with white hot heat shields. There were scores of ships in orbit, docked at large stations, or in their own individual orbits. Several of those vessels were large warships, like the one that had brought him here. They are just advanced enough to be dangerous, especially as there are no Galactic policemen anymore, ready to come in and stop their depredations. At least, not yet.

  The shuttle began to shake and shudder itself as it cleaved into the atmosphere. There was very little feel of acceleration, as, like most vessels of this tech period, its inertial compensators took care of that little distraction. What they had trouble with was smoothing out the random turbulence of a roiling atmosphere while plunging through it.

  The surface of the world appeared through the clouds, shown in perfect detail by the holo. The lights of cities shone across much of the land, while the lamps of fishing fleets and the glow of the stars on the water showed the general outlines of oceans. The shuttle dropped further, until it was flying a mere couple of thousand meters above the lighted surface. The tall buildings of a city rose into the sky on the horizon, and the shuttle started to bank to the right, heading for a well-lit flat area that had the look of a landing field.

  “Move,” said one of the guards as Watcher remained in his seat after touchdown, studying the view of the city on the holo. The push of a heavy stun rifle in his ribs convinced him it was time to move.

  The primary was beginning to rise as he was escorted out of the shuttle. The gas giant up above was glowing orange with the light that was both coming around the larger planet, and rising at the horizon of the moon. The black towers of the city were ominously absorbing what light hit their thin, pointed spires, the sign that they doubled as solar collectors. There was a station hanging in the sky over the city, too low to be in orbit, not moving, obviously sitting there on some kind of antigrav.

  “Into the car, you monster,” said one of the guards, motioning at one of the two aircars sitting on the tarmac.

  Watcher turned to see the Admiral and another officer getting into the second car, joining the driver that was already inside. Watcher was poked and prodded into the other car, the two armor Marines joining him, one sitting beside him, the other in the front seat, looking back with stunner leveled.

  The cars lifted and headed toward the center of the city, which was actually much further off that it had first appeared. They moved over twenty kilometers of suburbs, low buildings with a crisscross of streets occupied by heavy ground traffic. Billboards projecting large holos floated above the streets, flashing advertisements for various products. Or so it seemed.

  Watcher focused his eyes on one of the holos, which didn’t appear quite right to his sensitive vision. There was another holo beneath the first, undetectable to the vision of most, but still capable of having an effect. The swirling colors had a hypnotic effect, one that Watcher could easily fight, but which would be very powerful to lesser minds. He looked to another holo and saw the same effect. He noticed a low level hum that seemed to pervade everything, and focused his hearing on it. Damn them, he thought, as he recognized the message that was coming across under the hum. Respect your leaders. Your leaders have your best interests at heart. Obey your leaders. Obey all of their commands. It is for your own good.

  Bastards are continuously brainwashing their own people. But, do they ever break free, like when they’re in space. He looked at the Marine guards and thought that they must have some way of keeping up the programing. And I wonder if this is supposed to be affecting me, he thought, remembering the techniques they had tried to use on him when he was in his cell. To no effect, though they might have thought it had to have some based on their own experience.

  The cars were now over the center of the city, towering buildings to every side. Or at least towering to this tech level, thought Watcher, gauging the tallest tower to be about three kilometers in height. Downtown didn’t boast the mechanical traffic of the suburbs. Down below were a series of parked bordered walkways swarming with foot traffic, most of it heading in the same direction as the car. There were hundreds of flags flying from the poles in those parks, blood red, with a fist in an iron gauntlet holding a sword on each one. And the same advertising holos along the walls of the buildings, while the voice under hum pervaded everything.

  “We’re almost there,” said the driver to the Marine sitting next to him. The man grunted, but would not take his eyes off of Watcher.

  Watcher saw a large square ahead, what looked to be a kilometer square of grass and walkways, almost covered in people. He had a feeling they had come to get a look at him. On the far side of the square was a couple hundred meter tall ziggurat that looked like it had been transported from ancient Mesopotamia. Except it was made of the same black material as the skyscrapers in the city center. People were at the top of the structure, all of them looking at the approaching aircars. Waiting for us? thought Watcher, wondering what kind of a spectacle this was planned to be. The square was surrounded by tall flagpoles, each displaying the same flag.

  The car put down on the top of the ziggurat, in the one clear space set aside for that purpose. His guards hustled him out of the car, and pushed him to where the Admiral was standing, along with a group of naval officers he didn’t know. That they were high rankers was told by the cut of their uniforms, and the layers of medals on their breasts. Most seemed to be the peers of Jackson, some his superiors.

  On the other side of the area were gathered several hundred people in civilian clothes, if they could be called that. About half wore clothing similar to the people gathering in the square before the structure, but of a finer cut, and an emblem of the iron fist and sword that seemed to be the symbol of this Empire. And not a very reassuring one, he thought. The rest of people, who were predominantly men, wore what looked like a civilian clothing of a military cut. It was more their mannerisms than anything else that seemed to separate them from the true military.

  They’re almost like the Nazis, thought the superman, recalling some of the little bit of old Earth history he knew, and only because he found the whole idea of totalitarian governments fascinating. He next noticed something else equally fascinating. There are no women among the military people, with the exception of some very attractive but low ranking members that seem to be aides or stewards.

  He looked again at the civilians, and saw that the pattern was more or less repeated there. While there were some ladies, with few exceptions, they seemed to be hanging on the arms of one of the men or other. The exceptions were a couple of older women who appeared to be on their own, wearing the militarized civvies, from their confident expressions females used to wielding power.

  They’re like the Nazis in that respect as well, he thought, remembering that he had seen only a few women aboard the ship as well, and they had been dressed in a, less than military manner. But why would they make such use of half of their intellectual ability, thought Watcher. He knew of societies where women were thought to be inferior to men. And all had gone one of two ways. They had either gone down in defeat after a short period of expansion. Or they had wallowed in squalor for centuries, if not millennia. It hadn’t been so much that they had degraded their women, even while praising them to the heavens as wives and mothers. It was the overall rot of the systems that did such.

  A holo projector moved to the center of the platform, hovering twenty meters above. Watcher was sure that whatever was about to happen was happening now. An image formed in the holo, and the reaction of the crowd in the square was as immediate as it was telling. The murmuring of conversation stopped as every face turned toward the top of the ziggurat, and people stood at attention and raised their right fists into the air.

  “Hail,” they called. “Hail the Leader. Hail.”

  Holographic flags unfurled by the hundreds in midair, at the same
time the image of a dark haired, blue eyed man in uniform appeared on the holo projector. The people on the top of the ziggurat and snapped to attention, military and civilian alike, while their right fists thrust into the air.

  “Hail, Leader,” they shouted. “Hail the Emperor. All power to the Empire.”

  A platform was rising from the top of the ziggurat, the man on the holo standing in the center, flanked by a quartet of guards in black armor. His uniform included an armband with the fist and sword on a red field, as did the right arms of his guards. He walked to the front of the platform and raised his hands into the air, and the crowd started to roar the hails to truly deafening levels.

  “My people,” called the man’s amplified voice over the square. Everyone went silent in an instant. “My people. A great day is upon us. We have captured the monster who destroyed Galactic Civilization, the civilization it is now our mission to restore.” He raised his hands in the air, and the crowd roared again, then went completely silent as Watcher’s image appeared on the holo.

  The Marines moved him forward to the platform the Emperor was standing upon, where two of the people in black armor grabbed his arms and hustled him forward, to force him on his knees beside the Emperor.

  “And here is the blackguard, the Abomination that destroyed the Galaxy at peace. Who was responsible for the lives of countless trillions.” The Emperor dropped his hands, which must have been the signal for the people to let themselves be heard again. And the crowd roared, a frightening tidal wave of sound that washed over the square.

  Watcher’s ears could separate some of the voices from the cacophony. People cursing his name, yelling their ideas of fitting punishment. Or simply crying out in rage. But, it wasn’t me, he thought, cringing under the noise. Don’t you understand? It was Vengeance. The Emperor raised his hands once again, and the square went silent like nothing Watcher had ever heard of.

  “And he will face his punishment, my people,” called out the amplified voice. “The sentients of the Galaxy will get their revenge on this creature, this Abomination. He will suffer for his many crimes. He will suffer like no other creature has ever suffered. But only after a proper interrogation, and a proper trial.”

  And I bet it’s a fair one, thought Watcher with a slight smile.

  The speech went on for what seemed like hours, the Emperor tirelessly projecting his voice over the crowd. He introduced other people, various functionaries in his government who had some claim in tracking down Watcher, ending with the introduction of Admiral Carlos Jackson, who received a promotion and decoration at the hands of the Monarch. After that the Emperor continued to speak, and Watcher was sure the man wanted the last thing about this speech to be something the people would remember, about him.

  The man has a God complex, thought Watcher, paying attention to every word. And he has an entire planet playing his game. Or, should I say, many planets.

  Finally, after what seemed like an entire morning, the speech was over, and the platform the Emperor was standing on started to roll back, then lowered itself through the roof and into the structure. Two of the black armored guards held Watcher down with the strength of the powered suits. One dug his fingers into Watcher’s shoulder in a move intended to bring a cry of pain from the superman. Watcher looked up into the face of the sadistic guard without any expression. The man increased the pressure, until Watcher was sure his collar bone as about to break.

  “Please, Robert,” ordered the Emperor to the guard. “This, thing, is our guest. We must treat him as such.”

  “Yes, my Lord,” said the guard, bowing his head and releasing his grip on Watcher’s shoulder.

  The platform stopped moving a couple of floors down, and the Emperor stepped off, following two of his guards while the second pair dragged Watcher after. They walked down a hall with armored guards along the walls every ten meters. Right fists were raised in the air just before they passed, lowered right after they had. Everything seemed to be built in the oversized manner of a palace, wide hallways, high ceilings, huge double doors ahead with guards flanking.

  The doors swung open as they approached, while the four men standing there, two in armor, raised their fists into the air. Beyond was an ornately appointed office with a desk in the center, a beautiful redhead woman who reminded Watcher superficially of Pandora sitting behind it. She jumped to her feet and rendered the salute. Watcher noted that the subliminal noise that had seemed to follow him everywhere on this planet was reduced to almost nonexistence in this room.

  “I am not to be disturbed,” he told the secretary, heading for another door that opened at his approach.

  The guards followed him into the room, pushing Watcher into a chair that locked his hands and feet to it when he sat. The Emperor waved the guards away and went to a small bar that occupied one corner of the huge office. He returned with a drink and flowed into the chair across from Watcher.

  “You are augmented,” said Watcher, recognizing it in the way the man moved.

  “Oh,” said the smiling man, smacking his lips after taking a sip of his drink. “More than that. Much more.”

  “I heard you called the Immortal Emperor,” said Watcher, staring into the man’s ice cold eyes. “I thought that was impossible with humans.”

  “No more so than it was with yourself,” said the Emperor, his smile growing.

  “But, I was one of a kind,” said Watcher, noticing that the subliminals were off in this room. He raised an eyebrow at the other man.

  “No use listening to my own brainwashing,” said the man, answering the nonverbal question first. “Not that it has any effect on two such as ourselves.”

  “You were bioengineered?” Asked Watcher. “By the ancestors?”

  “Yes,” said the man with another smile. “You could almost say we are cousins. Not really brothers, since your model was already deemed a failure by the time they got around to me and my kin.”

  The Watcher raised his eyebrow again, and the man laughed.

  “They wanted your abilities, but had decided that they had given you too much in the way of, Intellectual abilities.”

  “I was meant to be a general,” said Watcher. “An Admiral. A military genius.”

  “And turned into a threat,” said the man. “One that should have been terminated.

  “But then you would not have been given this opportunity,” said Watcher with a smile of his own.

  “That is very true,” said the other man, nodding his head, then taking a sip of his drink. “I have much to thank you for.”

  “And you’ve been around for thousands of years?”

  “Not quite that long,” said the Emperor, again smiling. “In fact, I have not been currently active for more than five hundred years. Otherwise, I was in cryo, until I was discovered by the unfortunate system miners.”

  “So you haven’t run into the memory barrier yet,” said Watcher, nodding his head. “And why were the people who found you unfortunate?”

  “Because they became my slaves, as soon as they breathed the same air as myself.”

  Watcher became aware of the heavy scent of pheromones filling the air. Similar to his own, but somewhat, different. And with an obviously different purpose than his own. He had the sudden urge to bow down before the man, to kneel and offer his eternal obedience. Such were the effects of the pheromones on his biological systems. Fortunately for him, his mind trumped his biology in a manner like no other, and he shrugged away the effects of the biochemicals with a thought.

  “I didn’t really expect that to work on such as you,” said the Emperor, his smile turning into a slight frown. “I had hopes, but no real expectations. You are not as these weak minded fools who serve me. Unfortunate.”

  “Because now you will have to get the information from me in another way?” asked Watcher with a smile.

  “It is not pleasant, what the interrogators will do to you,” said the man, shaking his head. “Not pleasant, but you make it necessary. I wish it wer
e not so, but you leave me no choice.”

  Watcher was tempted to tell the man that it would do him no good to get the information, that the station was already under the control of others who would not give it to him. Unless he gets into the same room with any of them, he thought. But it would be to his advantage to not let this man know that. The longer he spent trying to break Watcher, the longer he would not be turning his attention to the station. And the longer he would believe that Watcher was actually important enough to keep alive. The situation looked hopeless, but Watcher had no quit in him. As long as he was alive, he had hope.

  “Take him to his quarters,” the Emperor said to the guards that reentered the office. The four men in black combat armor surrounded him before they unlocked his chair. “I’m almost tempted to try you in single combat. I am sure I could take you.”

  “Then why not try me?” asked Watcher, as the guards started to hustle him to the door.

  “Because I have nothing to win, and everything to lose,” said the Emperor after a short laugh. “Now please, enjoy our hospitality. And I will talk with you later, after we have adjusted your attitude.”

  Watcher was led away, down the corridor, again aware of the subliminal sounds in the air, as well as what he now recognized as pheromones similar to those of the Emperor, if much weaker. They took a lift that seemed to drop a kilometer straight down, and opened on another corridor, this one not ornate at all. In fact, the rough hewn block walls reminded him of pictures he had seen of old Earth dungeons, and he was sure they were intended to have that impression. The subliminal sounds were more intense here, as were the pheromones. He was led to a cell that had actual bars for a door. He was pushed into the cell, the door clanging shut behind him with finality.

  Watcher went to the uncomfortable looking bunk and took a seat, aware that the pheromones were even heavier within the room. They must have a high success rate with their prisoners, with such biological persuasion techniques, he thought.