Deeper and Darker (Deep Dark Well Book 3)

by Doug Dandridge

  What she saw raised her rage to epic proportions. People being bullied by the police, uniformed and secret, while the rest of the people moved around like sheep, not paying attention to the state they lived in.

  The many clocks on the building faces struck the half hour, thirty minutes before the start of curfew. People looked up, some with panic on their faces, many more with a touch of anxiety. Some continued to move at the same speed, people who obviously lived close by, while others hurried to tram stations. The police ramped up their efforts to harass people, increasing the anxiety of those who still had a ways to go. And I bet being stopped by the police is not an excuse for being out after curfew. Unless you’re high enough up the food chain that you don’t have to pay attention to any of this shit.

  Pandi watched the advent of curfew as the hour struck. Everyone was off the street by that time, with the exception of the police that were there to enforce the rule. Pandi watched them for a few minutes more as they patrolled the streets like bulldogs guarding a junkyard. She shook her head in disgust and raised her form into the sky, getting herself oriented on her HUD and heading back toward the apartment.

  “Let me in,” she shouted as she banged on the door of the apartment, then waited for someone to come and open it. The window had been closed and locked with a mechanical device, and other than breaking through the glass that way was barred to her. So she came in through the main entrance, making sure that no one was watching when the door seemingly opened on its own.

  “Where the hell have you been?” asked Tony Garcia, pulling open the door, then looking confused when there was nothing there.

  “On a scouting mission,” Pandi said, pushing past him, then disengaging the stealth field. Jorge and Katherine were also in the room, anger and shock warring on their faces as they stared at the woman.

  “You were told to stay here through the day,” said Tony, eyes wide at the now revealed woman.

  “I don’t follow your orders, Tony,” said Pandi, walking past them and into the living room of Katherine’s apartment. “I am not a member of one of your damned cells. I’m here on a mission of the utmost importance to myself and the Galaxy. And there was no risk, as you can plainly see.”

  “I have to admit, your technology is impressive,” said Tony, watching as Pandi took a seat on the couch. “But that doesn’t guarantee that something wouldn’t happen to give you away. Or that you wouldn’t lead the authorities back to us.”

  “That was a risk I was willing to take,” said Pandi, glaring at the Opposition leader. “The only way I’m going to free Watcher is by getting the intelligence I need. And that’s the only way you’re ever going to get this asshole of an Emperor off your backs.”

  “We might be able to overthrow him ourselves,” said Jorge in a voice that didn’t sound very sure of itself.

  “From what I’ve seen so far, Jorge, you don’t have a chance in hell of overthrowing this government,” said Pandi, pointing her finger at the man. “How many people do you have in your organization? A hundred? A thousand? A couple of thousand? And how many did you have last year? Fewer? I would guess more, isn’t that right? You lose people every year, and the new recruits don’t make up for the loss do they?”

  “We have been losing members every year,” admitted Tony, nodding. “And there are fewer of the immune to recruit every year.”

  “So your movement is dying,” said Pandi, “by your own admission. So your best chance of overthrowing the government happened years before. And now, right now, this year, is the best chance you will ever have from now on, and it will decrease next year. So let me ask you this? How close are you to overthrowing this government, right now?”

  “We cannot overthrow the government,” said Jorge, bowing his head. “Our only chance is in killing the Emperor.”

  “And how much of a chance do you have of doing that? With all of the security he has around him, I would think it would take an army to take him down.”

  “We have no chance of, taking him down,” said Tony, frowning. “The best we can do is hold on, and hope something comes along to help.”

  “And Watcher is that something,” said Pandi with a smile. “He’s going to lead a crusade to free the Galaxy from people like your ruler.”

  “And you can’t do it yourself?” asked Jorge. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Oh, I could do it,” said Pandi, turning a fierce gaze on the man. “Sure enough I could. But Watcher is the one who has the plan, and I won’t move without him. Not while he’s still alive. And before you say anything else, he dies here, you all go to the end of the liberation line, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Your people would probably help us if we held you as a bargaining chip,” said Jorge, pointing a finger at Pandi.

  Before the man could blink Pandora was in his face, her left hand grabbing his throat and squeezing while lifting him into the air. “Holding me would be the problem, sweetie,” she said, turning him in the air and throwing him onto the couch. “Your whole cell is no match for me hand to hand. And if it came to a weapon’s fight, you would all be dead in an instant. So don’t start throwing around threats when you don’t really know what you’re dealing with.”

  Pandora looked at Tony, seeing the smirk on his face as he looked at Jorge. She had already gauged that the other man was the troublemaker of the organization, one that Tony would be glad to see reined in a little tighter. “I will be in the second bedroom for a while,” said Pandi, turning and walking away. “Do not disturb me unless it’s something of vital importance.”

  “We’ll let you sleep,” said Tony, looking over and making eye contact with Jorge.

  “Oh, I won’t be sleeping,” said Pandi, pulling the helmet off her head. “I’ve got some data to look over. I really don’t want to assault that courthouse. But unless I have another target to hit, it just might come down to that.”

  Pandi closed the door behind her and sat on the bed. An argument ensued in the living room, and her sensitive ears listened in on every word. But her mind was elsewhere, as she brought up the images recorded on her implant through her eyes, and the other data recorded by her helmet. She accepted the analysis from the shipboard computer, and the Marine analysts, and looked over the plan they were in the early stages of formulating. After looking at it for a couple of hours she gave her head a satisfied shake. The plan might work. Again, it might not. But either way, the people of the New Galactic Empire would be talking about the day the Confederation went to war with them for many years.

  Chapter Fourteen

  An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

  Charles de Montesquieu

  Admiral Emilio Tounces stared with some trepidation on the home system as his borrowed flagship came out of hyper. There was always the feeling of happiness at seeing home. And the fear that the Emperor would not be well disposed towards him after hearing the news. But first, he had another report to make.

  “We have made contact with Station Delta Four,” said the Com Officer, a man who the Admiral didn’t even know.

  Tounces nodded. Delta Four was one of the perimeter stations, one of eight built out near the barrier, and orders were to report in to the nearest one when coming out of hyper. Even though he outranked its commander, he was still nervous about sending in the report he had dictated about his failure to stop the enemy force from penetrating the Empire. Even though no one else could have done any better, he thought, pushing the transmit button on the arm of his command chair. It was superior tech. None of our ships could have handled them.

  But in the New Galactic Empire there was no excuse for failure. Officers and senior enlisted personnel were expected to follow their orders and succeed, or to die trying. And his surviving the encounter would be considered failure, despite his bringing vital information back to headquarters.

  The message that contained his reporting into the system was, of course, encrypted with codes that could be deciphered by the station. Bu
t the report that told of his encounter with the infernal woman that had destroyed most of his force was a different matter. It carried a top secret encryption that could only be deciphered by Naval Headquarters on the home world.

  Tounces waited for the message to get to the home world, about twenty light minutes away. Then the wait for them to look it over and make a response, and probably report it to the Emperor, another hour. And then the twenty minutes back. A face appeared on the holo, one he recognized as the Fleet Commander, Grand Admiral Esparanto, an old man that Tounces was sure was too superannuated to actually command anything.

  “Admiral Tounces,” said the old man, glaring out of the holo. “You have failed, and you know the price for failure.”

  Tounces wanted to answer back, to defend himself, but the old man was twenty minutes com time away, and any reply he made would only confuse the situation. So he forced himself to remain silent and hoped he would have time to defend himself later.

  “Still, the Emperor thinks you showed great courage in bringing this information to him, and not just sending a messenger to risk his displeasure. He understands the threat these people impose, and is willing to forgive this failure, this single instance. You and your ship are ordered to report to the home world, where you will be questioned and debriefed about her force and its capabilities.”

  Which they already have within the report, he thought, knowing there had to more to it than just a debriefing. More like an interrogation. And one I might not make it out of.

  But he really didn’t have much of a choice. He was here, in the system, in a warship that would now take him to the planet, no matter his wishes. He was certain that orders had been sent to the ship’s captain, who was currently in the CIC, and would not obey any commands he might now give.

  “We will see you at Naval Headquarters when you arrive,” said the Naval Commander, and the holo went blank, leaving Tounces alone with his own thoughts. Moments later the ship started to accelerate toward the gas giant on a least time profile.

  * * *

  “We have lots of movement, ma’am,” announced the Tactical Officer.

  Captain Dasha Mandrake looked up from the screen she was studying, almost thankful for the interruption. She had been working her way through a series of higher math problems that illustrated the use of hyperspace, a theory she still felt a little vague about. After all, up to a couple of months ago, she only had an understanding of the more primitive inertialess drive that Suryan ships used. And now she was commanding a ship she really didn’t understand, even if she did know the proper commands to give, and the crew the proper buttons to push.

  Which was one reason she spent so much time on the bridge and had been getting so little rest. If Pandora Latham had been aboard, she was sure that she would have been ordered to take rest. But if the Commodore wanted to play spy on the planet, then her Flag Captain would do what she wanted to aboard the Niven.

  “How many of them are involved in this movement?” she asked, standing up and walking to the holo, where red vector arrows were appearing with frightening rapidity.

  “It looks like every military ship in the system, ma’am,” said the Tactical Officer, pushing a panel that made every enemy vessel in the star system start to blink. Almost half the icons were vector arrows, while more were turning into that kind of marker every second.

  As she watched, hundreds of more arrows appeared on the holo, all showing tiny mass figures as compared to a warship.

  “It looks like every ship in the system is launching smaller craft,” said the Tactical Officer. “Like they’re planning to do a concentrated sweep and search.”

  “That’s exactly what they’re planning to do,” said Mandrake, her eyes narrowing as she watched the smaller craft begin to form up in squares that would sweep forward, covering the greatest amount of space while bringing their sensors within detection range of any known ships. And possibly their own.

  “Give the other ships the heads up,” ordered the Captain, pointing at the Com Officer. “Tell them to make sure they are not putting out any unnecessary energy emissions.

  “Engineer,” she said, linking into the shipboard com system. “Make damned sure that we aren’t putting out anything we have the capability of controlling.”

  Dasha sat back in her chair and looked at the holo. More small vessels were moving out into the space around the warships, some already starting their sweeps. So far there was no way to tell what the pattern was, though there was sure to be one. And if they got close enough to her ships, or ran into one, the game would be up, and they would have to fight their way out of the system.

  Dasha knew that her three ships had capabilities far beyond those of the people they were facing. Including stealth. The hulls were well insulated to the extreme, and nanotech made sure there were no large openings or seams that went past that insulation. The grabber units were powered down to station keeping, and most of their waste heat was being fed back into the ship through superconducting cables, and into the wormhole heatsink, like most of the thermal generation on the ship. The hull absorbed over ninety nine percent of sensor beams, leaving very little return, especially wide angle transmissions from distance. And the invisibility field made sure there was no image to detect, while the same absorptive features of the hull turned it into a black body that would not be visible to any but the closest scans, even if the field dropped completely.

  Still, there was some radiation going on. Neutrons, photons, and neutrinos were being released into space and moving outward in more or less a sphere. At a light hour away, they were pretty much indistinguishable from the background of space. At a half light hour there were four times as many of them per square kilometer, which still amounted to maybe one particle. It was only when ships got within a thousand kilometers that there was a noticeable difference between the point in space the vessel occupied and the background. And too often it was still too faint to be noticed as anything but a small anomaly. But if a ship with a good sensor suite got within a hundred kilometers of one of the vessels there was a chance they would notice something. At fifty there was four times the chance, and so on.

  Right now it looked like her two close in ships were still safe, sitting a ten thousand kilometers from the gas giant. The one sitting out beyond the hyper barrier was even more secure, as the fewer ships sweeping that area had a much larger area to cover. But if the people they were trying to hide from really thought there was something here, they were unlikely to quit anytime soon.

  “Get the Commodore on the com,” she told the Com Officer, then waited a moment until Pandora linked in. There was, of course, no visual, as she was communicating through her implant, the signal going to the nearby probe’s wormhole. But as soon as she was on the link the com let Mandrake know.

  “This is an alarming development, Commodore,” she told her commanding officer. “I think someone came into the system recently and told them about us.”

  “And I probably made a mistake letting that son of a bitch Tounces remain where he was,” said Pandi with a regretful tone. “I didn’t know what else to do, besides killing him when he and his people were more or less helpless. And now it’s going to bite us in the ass.”

  “Want do you want us to do, Commodore?” asked Mandrake, watching the holo as the now thousands of ships were moving across the system. She looked at another screen that showed the intensity of active sensors that were hitting the ship, nothing too dangerous to them yet, but a sign that this enemy was serious about finding them.

  “For the moment, stay put,” said Pandi. “Try to stay out of their pattern. If worse comes to worse, move out of the system beyond their search. After all, the wormhole will still connect me to you, no matter how far you’all move away.”

  “Any luck finding Watcher?”

  “Not so far,” said the woman after sighing. “We may have to take him from the courtroom. If that happens, I want you all back in close. Even though you don’t need to be for the wo
rmhole to connect us, I may want your weapons in a ground strike role. Or to take out their air support if they try to interfere.”

  “I hope you don’t get us involved in a bloodbath, Commodore,” said Dasha, imagining what their weapons might do to the large city their commander was operating in.

  “I’ll try to avoid that,” said Pandi. “I really don’t hold many of these people responsible, beyond their Emperor and his cabal. The rest are just brainwashed. But like good little automatons, they will do all they can to protect him, and get in our way. And I will not have anyone get in the way of getting Watcher free. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Just make sure the Marines are prepped, and the battle bots are all ready and able to fight, and I won’t have any problems with you or your people. And keep those ships safe. I don’t want anything happening to your people, and I will need something to get us away from this place when the time comes. Latham out.”

  Madrake sat there for a moment after the com died, wondering how much of this did she really want to get involved in, especially since they were talking about military action among a large civilian population. We all gave her our oaths, she thought, looking at a side holo that showed the blue globe of the moon against the orange backdrop of the gas giant. We swore to her, and through her, Watcher, to do what was needed to reestablish Galactic civilization. And Pandora doesn’t believe we can do it without Watcher. Who am I to say she is wrong, the greatest mind in the Galaxy. Surely that is an important enough resource to warrant the collateral damage it might cause to free him. And not just because she loves him.

  Mandrake sat there watching the holo for some hours, thinking about this whole situation she found herself in. Command had always been something she had dreamed of. Now, she wasn’t sure the ambiguities were worth the power. And the enemy ships continued to sweep, the closest first moving through the space near to the gas giant and its moons, then moving out to the next sphere when finished.