Deeper and Darker (Deep Dark Well Book 3)

by Doug Dandridge

  So, why didn’t he just give them what they wanted? One reason was simply his well-developed survival instinct. He knew if he gave them what they wanted his days would suddenly be numbered. These people wanted to try and execute him for a crime that his present personality hadn’t committed. Though this body definitely bears partial responsibility, he thought with a twinge of guilt.

  Can’t keep thinking like that, was the next thought through his head. This, noise, they’re hitting me with, of all kinds, is affecting my thinking, whether I want to admit it or not. I’ve got to hang around long enough to take this asshole who’s running this operation out.

  So Watcher sat in the chair, ignoring the majority of the stimuli they were sending at him, while figuring out how he could escape his captivity, and strike back at the being who had ordered it.

  * * *

  “Any progress on the interrogation?” asked the Immortal Emperor Alphonso Kitticaris of his Chief Inquisitor.

  “None that I can see, my Lord Emperor,” said the man, kneeling on the floor in front of the Monarch’s throne, eyes averted to the floor. “We have tried every technique we know of, and nothing seems to affect him.”

  “And mapping his brain?”

  “We have mapped every neuron, my Lord. But with nothing to reference it too, we cannot give meaning to the configurations, or to the chemical signals within. It is just too, different, for comparison.”

  And it’s completely different to my own neural architecture, thought the Emperor. They actually simplified that structure with my own brain, after what they saw in his behavior. The Emperor glared at his Inquisitor for a moment, finally deciding it was not the man’s fault that Alphonso had received an imperfect processing unit as compared to Watcher. He wouldn’t have expected the man to break him, so why should he blame the man for not being able to break something even more advanced?

  “How long to do a complete neural transference?”

  “You’re talking a mind upload, my Lord?” asked the Inquisitor. “We have never attempted such with a mind like this. But a week. Maybe a month. We would have to be careful with this one, my Lord, since we will only get the one chance.”

  The Emperor stood up from his chair and walked across the room, standing before the armorplast window that looked out over the capital city. His capital, with the ever present globe of Odin looking down, always caused a rise to his spirit. But not enough, he thought. Never enough. He turned back and looked at his Chief Inquisitor.

  “Continue with the standard methods for one more week,” he told the man. “We will see where we are then, and I will make a decision about a transference.”

  The man nodded, then got to his feet and walked out of the chamber, leaving the Immortal Emperor alone with his own thoughts. Even if I don’t get that station, I will still build an empire that encompasses the Galaxy. There is nothing that can stop me from doing that. But it would be so much quicker if I had that technology under my control.

  And when I have what I want, Watcher will serve one final purpose, as the rallying point for trillions of sentients to fight under my banner.

  * * *

  “We’re ready, Admiral,” said Captain Aagney Behera, Nagara Krishnamurta’s Flag Captain.

  “Very well,” said the Suryan Supreme Naval Commander. “Let’s get this circus underway.” The Admiral turned to the other holo, which showed the face of Vice Admiral Paramita Borgoyary frowning out at him.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Admiral,” said the woman.

  Is this because you think this is a bad idea, or because you wish you could lead this mission? Krishnamurta looked at the side screens that showed the bridges of all the ships under his command. All he could get prepared in the given time period. And still the mightiest force any person from his kingdom had ever commanded. On those screens were the commanding officers of four five million ton cruisers and eight one million ton destroyers, representing more than nine times the firepower that Pandora Latham had taken with her.

  “You just hold down the fort, Paramita,” he said, waving a finger in the air. “And don’t you dare let Commodore Latham know we are coming. Because she is just as likely to forbid us from coming after us, he thought, realizing that she probably had the means to shut down any of the technology he was using. But once we show up, she won’t have much choice in the matter. Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

  “I’m not an idiot, Admiral,” said the woman, her frown growing. “I think she was ill advised to go off as she did. And I truly wish you good fortune on this mission.”

  “Thank you, Paramita. Just keep getting those ships ready while I’m gone. I think we’ve got quite the task ahead of us.” Krishnamurta switched his attention back to the bank of viewers linked to his other ship commanders. “Let’s get going. Ganesha will maintain position in the center of the formation. Your destroyers will form a shell around the cruiser, Commodore Karjee.” He already knows that, Nagana, thought the Admiral, shaking his head. You don’t have to tell them what they already know. We’ve got almost a two week voyage ahead of us.

  The Admiral kicked back in his seat and let his people do their jobs, as the twelve ships in his command started accelerating away from the black hole at eighteen hundred gravities. There was some noticeable hesitation among some of the bridge crew, something that the Admiral had expected of people who had less than a week to train on the ship simulators before being assigned to their stations. As long as they err toward the conservative, we’ll probably be fine, he thought. Which, based on the fact that all of these naval officers were used to controlling ships with much less in the way of technological abilities, was probably the direction they would err. I still would have liked to have more of a shakedown period, he thought. But he hadn’t been given that time.

  He dismissed that thought and focused on the positives. The crew had spent scores of hours each on the simulators, which didn’t include the hundred hours or so each had on the tech guides. With their interlink with the station computer, those hours translated into hundreds of simulations. And they would continue with that training on the way to the mission target. Enough to give them proficiency with the tech? He was guessing that he would find out.

  The Admiral looked at the tactical holo that showed the station behind, a huge ribbon built around the black hole it used to generate wormholes, of which his ships carried several each. He still marveled whenever the true scale of that enormous construct was thrown in his face. It was something his culture couldn’t dream of building, and from what he understood, the ancestors had built several of them, maybe as many as five. He looked out over the rest of the holo as he changed the zoom, bringing the entire Supersystem into focus.

  Did they really move stars and their planets into place? he thought. It didn’t seem possible to him, not based on what he knew about science and technology. But it also seemed impossible that this was a natural formation. Not with every star in the perfect place for all to have stable orbits, and for the planets circling them to be in well-ordered paths as well.

  “Time to hyper limit, three hours, thirty minutes,” said the Navigator, breaking the Admiral out of his fixation on the worlds surrounding him.

  “I’ll be in my day cabin,” he told the ship’s Captain over the com, looking at him as he stood on the ship’s bridge. “I want to be here when we translate, so don’t let me get too involved in my paperwork.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the smiling Captain, nodding. “We’ll get you up here in time for the fireworks.”

  Nagana smiled back, then headed out, knowing that the task ahead of him was not all that exciting, but still necessary.

  Chapter Seven

  Freedom is contagious. That's why despots fear it so much.

  Bill Owens

  Pandora Latham shook her head once again as she looked over the records they had pulled from the New Galactic Empire ship. It wasn’t that she couldn’t believe what she was looking at, even if she was having some
trouble digesting all the immense amount information that was in the records. Even with computer assistance, it was too much for a single mind to process, and she had split the duty with several of her officers, letting them wade into some other sections of the record in what little free time they had. Still, she wanted to know as much as she could herself.

  So everything was going well with them, she thought, looking at the map of the Empire as it expanded beyond its own star system. They rediscovered interstellar flight, sort of like what the Suryans had. They had found some other systems, raised those people up to their level of tech, and were generally a force for good in their small corner of the Galaxy, again like the Suryans. Until about five hundred years before, when they had found the frozen body of the man who was to become their Immortal Emperor.

  And somehow the son of a bitch took over. A Republic became first a Presidency for Life, then a Dictatorship, then an Empire. Reminds me of some things that happened on Earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Except for the speed, it was just like it. Someone who wasn’t even a part of their society slid right into the leadership role. Like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. Not even quite like that, since those monsters were actually part of a peripheral and allied culture to the one they came to rule.

  And once he had taken over, the technology increased by leaps and bounds, and with it the territorial expansion of the Empire. Where they had been lending a helping hand to their star neighbors, now they were coming as conquerors, using their military might to take control of world after world and dragging them into the Empire.

  How in the hell did he do it? she thought, looking at short vid of the Emperor standing up and giving a speech to an adoring crowd. The man ranted and raved for almost an hour, people looking at him with adoration on their faces. The man played on their emotions, building them up to a fever pitch while spouting platitudes about the superiority of human beings, how humans were the natural rulers of the Universe, how it was their divine destiny.

  At the end of that vid she still wondered how he was doing it. She really didn’t understand. The speech reminded her of some she had seen by Hitler, the black and white reels of the man standing up in front of a frothing crowd, black uniforms with symbols of hate on their sleeves.

  At least he wasn’t calling for the death of all aliens, she thought, looking at a still of the crowd, studying it and not finding one non-human face within it. But there sure don’t seem to be any aliens in the rally. She went through the portfolios of the rank and file of the one and only political party that ran the Empire, and was again struck by the absence of non-human faces. Next she looked at a listing of the planets of the Empire, and the constituent populations. There’s billions of non-humans, she thought, looking at the alien faces that flew over the holo. Scores of species. And not a one in a position of authority.

  She opened a folder that led to lists of major work projects for the Empire, and found that, while all of the executives of the projects were human, the workers were to a being non-humans. Slaves? she thought, shaking her head. She looked closer at some of the detailed reports and saw that some of the projects really used what she what have thought of as slaves. Like the Gulags of the old Soviet Union. Most of them used what looked like the same kind of setup that coal mines and factories used before the advent of unions in most of the civilized nations on old Earth. Or the lives of the regular citizens of the above mentioned Soviets. While having freedom of movement, somewhat, they lived in company housing, shopped in company stores, and lived or died with their employment to the company. They were free to leave at any time, and free to starve if they did.

  It was obvious that while they weren’t as deadly to non-humans as the Nation of Humanity, it was also obvious that they did not have the best of intentions towards them. There was no hope for the non-humans under the rule of the New Galactic Empire, unlike that of the empire of the ancestors.

  Is this all we’re going to be facing? she thought, turning off the holo and leaning back in her chair. Petty government after petty government, wanting to rule the Galaxy, for their own benefit, and only their own benefit. Some might be large and dangerous, like this New Galactic Empire. Some may be small and petty, like the medieval kingdom she had visited in the Supersystem. But all would be stones that must be removed from the soil of the Galaxy. A feeling of hopelessness came over her as she thought about those endless battles in the future. And if she couldn’t rescue Watcher, it might be something she would have to face alone.

  I’m just a country girl from Alabama, she thought. Sure, I got out of there, and into space. And I’ve gotten some high tech augmentation added to my poor little body. But I’m not a statesman, not a military genius. Not even a social worker. How in the hell am I going to get a handle on getting the Galaxy sorted out. She put her face in her hands, shaking her head as she thought about how impossible her task was. She needed Watcher for this. Not just to hold her when she was feeling like this, but also to teach her what to do when she ran into such a horror as the New Galactic Empire.

  But there are the Suryans, she thought, picturing Mandrake and Krishnamurta. Good people who are willing to stand up for their beliefs. There’s got to be more of them out there as well. People we need to find, and not all of them human, who we can bootstrap up to better tech. And not just to gain allies who can help us liberate and police the Galaxy. But to give them the hope that comes with living with good medicine and quality of life.

  So I’ll just have to get Watcher out of the crack he’s in, she thought, picturing his face in her mind. Then the both of us will have to rally the good people to take out the bad, and get this whole mess of a Galaxy organized on some kind of rational basis.

  “Ma’am,” came a call over the com. “We’re an hour out from exit point from hyper.”

  “Thanks, Dasha,” she replied, closing the comp she was using and getting up from her desk. “I’ll be up in a moment.” She had left those orders because she wanted to get a good look at the home system of the New Galactic Empire. A real eyeball look of the system of the enemy. Not just something that appeared on a computer recording, as accurate as those might be.

  Moments later she was in her chair on the flag bridge, looking at the main viewer that showed the dimension of hyper VI that they were now traveling in, having dropped down from VIII a light year out. Just featureless red, glowing with some kind of internal energy, deadly to any unprotected matter from normal space. The red was dotted with black dots, the gravity wells of stellar objects making their gravitic presence known in this dimension. There were some dusky blurs as well, nebulae. What it lacked was the bright pinpoints of light, the individual, the massive globules. Hyperspace was not beautiful to Pandi’s eyes. It was a cold place, devoid life and light.

  Ahead was the dark globe of their target, the gravity well of an F8 star, with the darker areas of large planets within it. And a blinking dot that showed their translation point into the system.

  Pandi switched a tactical view from above, showing the system and her command in reference to it. The star was in the center of the display, the planets arrayed around it. The gas giant the capital planet, Kallis, orbited around, Odin, was a blinking icon on the screen, sitting there among the miniature system of moons, three more of which were also life bearing and inhabited. And according to the records, all terraformed. All the other major system bodies were also on the view, as well as any ships that happened to be moving under their own power and putting out graviton emissions.

  The circles of translation barriers stretched around the system. Actually, there were two set of barriers. One, spaced from hyper I at a half light hour out from the star, to VII, almost a ten hours out, represented the ranges of the hyperdrive engines of the New Galactic Empire. Somewhat advanced from those of the ancestors at this level of expansion. The engines of her own craft were much finer tuned, and her hyper I was actually inside the orbit of Odin, though there was a secondary ring around the gas giant designating i
ts own barrier. And her ships were much harder to track as well, due to that superior tuning, as well as her grabber units having the ability to pull many of their own graviton emissions back into themselves, damping their own signal. They could still be tracked, especially when they were accelerating at a high rate. At the moment they were pulling no more than fifty gravities, and it was unlikely anything more than ten light minutes away would be able to pick them up.

  “Launching probes,” called out the Sensory Officer, as Niven and her sisters went into a coast. The small, ten kilogram probes moved away at twenty gravities, opening up some distance before they opened a hole in space and dropped into the normal Universe, immediately drinking in every form of energy their sensitive sensors could detect. Due to their small size, they were able to translate with a minimum of spatial disruption.

  The information began coming back over the wormhole links, showing a representation of the system from several light hours out. They fell inward, picking up more information by the second and filling in the blanks of their knowledge of it. More ships, stations, bases on moons and asteroids began to fill the plot, as they had been hours before, picked up by their heat signatures if not by visual. The number of contacts increased tenfold over what they had picked up through graviton emissions.

  “At least three hundred of what look to be warships,” called out the Sensor Officer.

  Pandi whistled. She had been expecting some concentration of military vessels, given that the Empire had over twenty thousand ships in service. She had expected most of them to be out of the capital system, what with the Empire being an expanding power. But I guess they need to keep the appearances of power here at home as well.