Deeper and Darker (Deep Dark Well Book 3)

by Doug Dandridge

  “We need to go, your Majesty,” said the Captain in charge of the escort force.

  The Emperor nodded his armored head. His adrenaline was flowing. He felt like walking out to challenge Watcher and his soldiers in battle, not skulking out of his palace. But Watcher and his woman have equipment just as powerful as this, he thought, rationalizing his decision to run. And the government will fall if I die. Not that he would really care if the government fell if he wasn’t around to lead it. In fact, the result of his death, which had already been programed, would make sure that no one in the capital enjoyed their freedom from Alphonso Kitticaris.

  “Let’s move then, Captain. I will follow you out.”

  * * *

  I can’t believe this is happening, thought the shocked Captain of Secret Police, Rafael Jiminez.

  Smoke was forming an obscuring cloud over the city, making it almost impossible to see the tops of the tall buildings. Ahead, in the center of the street, lay an armed police aircar, its left side a gash of molten metal, an indication of the strength of the particle beam that had taken it down. It was also a sign that the police could expect no more air cover. And no more reinforcements either, thought the disbelieving cop. All calls for help had gone unanswered. In fact, as far as he knew, the com net had collapsed completely.

  But, we were invincible, he thought, shaking his head, then looking at the twelve remaining men from his precinct. He had been brought up to know that the Empire had a destiny, that they would rule the Galaxy under the benevolent rule of their Emperor. And they had brought the most notorious criminal in the Galaxy to justice. No one had ever expected that not everyone in the Galaxy would have the same view of the Abomination, and that they would attack his world.

  “What do you want to do, sir?” asked one of the uniformed policemen, wrapped up in unpowered body armor. “We can’t just stay here out on the street.”

  Jiminez didn’t know what to do. His training told him to not give up, to keep fighting for the only government that he knew. But there was that little voice in the back of his head that was telling him it was time to give it up, that it had always been a lie, and that he had been an idiot to buy into it. And where in the hell is that doubt coming from? he thought. He had never doubted before.

  “I know what I’m going to do,” said one of the uniformed policemen, Patrolman Gonzalez. “I’m going to ditch my shit and go home, and just pretend this shit never happened.”

  “And you don’t think people will remember that you were a cop,” said another uniformed officer. “That they won’t remember the way you treated them.”

  “What do you mean, the way I treated them. I was upholding the law. If you mean to say…”

  Jiminez tuned the men out and listened, trying to figure out what was different in the night air, besides the smoke. And then it hit him. The constant hum he had grown up with, and heard every waking minute of his life. It was gone, as were the scents that constantly tickled the nose and seemed to evoke memories. And the billboards were different as well. The floating boards that had patrolled the air above the streets were just gone. But the others, those attached to buildings, were either blank, or still showing the same inane advertisements, which didn’t make sense with a battle going on. There was something different about them as well. He really couldn’t tell what, but he could look at them and not feel his thoughts twisting around in his head.

  The subliminals are all off, he thought, with a clearer head than he could remember having. He had of course known about the programming subliminals, had approved of them, as they helped to keep the population calm and under control. But he hadn’t realized what kind of effect they had on his own mind. While still a bit fuzzy, his brain was operating at another level.

  “Everyone,” he said, raising his voice. “Go home, and try to keep a low profile.”

  “And what do we do if an armed mob comes for us?” asked one of the plain clothes men.

  “Hopefully that won’t happen,” said Jiminez. And if it does, it's probably no less than what we deserve.

  “I’m afraid your hopes don’t enter into it, cops,” came a voice from above.

  Jiminez felt his heart skip as he looked up to see civilians with long barreled rifles pointing their weapons out of windows at his people.

  “You are all under arrest by the Provisional Democratic Government,” said the same voice, which the Captain localized in one of the windows, obviously talking out of a speaker. “You will drop your weapons in the street, and hold your hands over your heads, until our people have placed restraints on your wrists. Failure to comply will be met by deadly force.”

  “The hell with that,” yelled Gonzalez, lifting his carbine to his shoulder and firing a burst at one of the windows. Those were the only rounds he got off, and scores of high velocity penetrators burst through his body armor, or hit him in the head, and the officer went down.

  “By rights I could have you all shot down,” said the voice, and from the tone the Captain believed that the man would. “Now drop them, while we’re still in a good mood.”

  Jiminez dropped his carbine in the street, reached slowly for the pistol in his shoulder harness to follow it, then unbuckled his ammo belt and let it fall. “You heard the man, men. Drop your weapons. We don’t have a chance out here.” Jiminez put his hands on his head, interlacing his fingers, and waited for people to come out of the buildings and put the restraints on.

  “Can you guarantee the safety of my people?” he asked the man who walked up to him after his hands were secured behind his back.

  “I’ll give you the same guarantees you’ve given the people you arrested and threw into hell holes,” the man said, glaring at the Captain. “I can guarantee that you will be given a quick trial, though, not like those you left in their cells for years.”

  Jiminez looked down to get away from that glare, realizing that he would find no mercy here. The rebels led them away, and the Captain was grateful that they just didn’t lead them into an alley and put a bullet through each of their heads.

  * * *

  “I need to have a word with your commanding officer,” said the older man in the uniform of an Imperial General, walking toward the small group of recon vehicles that led the way of that thrust into the capital city.

  The unit, a recon platoon of the second battalion of the First Armored Brigade, was sitting in an open square, vehicle weapons commanding the buildings around them while the infantry scouts deployed in any area that offered cover. This was the warehouse district on the east side of the city, and some of the buildings had suffered superficial damage from the antimatter warhead that had gone off in front of the then advancing Confederation units, still thirty kilometers from the city. Now this unit waited for the rest of the battalion to catch up before plunging into the city, where armored vehicles might not have the advantages they had enjoyed in the countryside.

  “And what do you need to tell my commanding officer,” said the Lieutenant in charge of the platoon. “Have you come to surrender?”

  “Actually, yes. I will surrender all of the troops under my command, the entire corps trying to keep you out of the city. Though I can’t promise all of them will obey, or even most of them, now that they’re back in the city.”

  “And what the hell does that mean? Sir,” added the junior officer with a sheepish look, realizing he should have used the honorific in greeting the man.

  “Every one of my soldiers is conditioned to never give up,” said the man with a sarcastic grimace. “They have had that message rammed into their heads their entire lives.”

  “And what does the city have to do with anything?”

  “The city has the thickest concentration of subliminal brainwashing apparatus on the moon, and anyone who comes into it will be quickly reindoctrinated.”

  “What about yourself, General?” said the Lieutenant, thinking that this information needed to be passed up the line, and quickly, so the Confederation troops could take precaut
ions, maybe filtering out the signals with their visual and audio sensors.

  “I was never that well indoctrinated,” said the officer, standing slightly taller in pride. “And working out in the countryside, away from the flood of subliminals? Well, it’s like I wakened from a horrible dream.”

  “We’ll get you up the line, General,” said the Lieutenant. “I’m sure they’ll want to hear what you have to say. But we’ve got men in the palace. I think your Emperor will be in custody within the hour, if we don’t just go ahead and kill his ass.”

  “Oh no,” said the officer, a panicked expression coming over his face. “You mustn’t kill him. That would be the death of us all.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

  Tacitus

  “Missile impact in one minute,” called out the Tactical Officer.

  Admiral Krishnamurta nodded, almost afraid to speak the order he knew he had to give. Their defensive fire had whittled down the swarm of missiles considerably, but there were still several thousand one minute away from his ships. They had to have flushed their magazines, thought the Admiral. At least that was his hope.

  The Admiral looked over at the tactical plot, looking at the system brought to him by his probes in almost real time. The new force was due in the system in less than five minutes, and a cursor was blinking on the plot to show its most likely exit point. All of those ships would still have full missile loads, and he was sure they would take him under fire as soon as the order was relayed to them. Which could be almost an hour, if it came from one of the main enemy forces already in the system. Or less than ten minutes if one of the ships still out there on the perimeter already had the order.

  The force that had entered thirty minutes earlier had run into the buzz saw of the fast attack ship squadron. They had lost sixty-one ships, while taking out twenty-two of the attacking force. The nineteen ships remaining had sped off under intertialess drive, turned, and shadowed the enemy force, giving them something to think about. Without missiles on-board there was little else they could do.

  “Have our fast attack ships been told what to do?” the Admiral asked his Com Officer.

  “Yes, sir. They’re tucked in tight and ready.”

  “Impact in thirty seconds.”

  “Engage,” ordered the Admiral, his stomach muscles clenching in nervous tension.

  The four cruisers and seven destroyers channeled power through their graviton projectors, opening the space to their front. Not with the holes that led to hyperspace, but the silvered circle of a wormhole portal. Fifteen seconds before the first missile could make contact the ships slid through, each with a small pack of fast attack ships in their wake.

  The Holy Grail of wormhole technology had been the ability to move a wormhole within a wormhole. The resonances of the two holes could cause a collapse of both, and the energies released were just short of catastrophic. It had been thousands of years after the human development of wormhole technology before it could be accomplished with an acceptable safety margin, and even longer before it became commonplace. Three of the cruisers and the seven destroyers all made it through without a problem, while the damaged cruiser ran into serious resonance problems. A blast of energy, photons and particle radiation, came flying out of the other end of the wormhole just before it collapsed into nothing, taking the cruiser and six fast attack craft, and over a thousand spacers, into oblivion.

  It took some seconds for the Admiral to get his wits about him, and his stomach under control. He didn’t see the cruiser exploded, and nothing really visible was left of it besides the photons and spreading particles. The scene replayed on the holo for everyone who missed it, and most of them really didn’t want to relive the scene, but there it was.

  Krishnamurta lowered his head and said a prayer for those men and women, then looked back up with a fierce expression. He still didn’t have time to grieve. There was still a battle to fight, and only complete concentration and attention to detail would win it.

  “We’re four light seconds from the predicted translation point,” called out the Tactical Officer. “Missiles have accelerated up to attack velocity.”

  “ETA on enemy ships?” asked the Admiral, staring at the plot, making sure that none of his ships were producing any graviton emissions. This will only work if they don’t know we’re here.

  “One minute, twelve seconds.”

  Krishnamurta stared at the plot that showed the enemy warships moving through hyper to the optimal exit point into the system. “All weapons free,” he announced, looking at both his Tactical and Com Officers. “Fire when targets become available.”

  The acknowledgments came back quickly, everyone wanting to take out their feelings on the ships that had nothing to do with the loss of the friends.

  “We have translation,” called out the Tactical Officer. “Five degrees to port, ten degrees ascendant. Range, five point three light seconds.”

  Of course they didn’t see the holes open in space, because those were facing away from them. They could see the first fifty or so ships appearing as if they had teleported in. Seconds later half a hundred more came into normal space, with more following every second.

  “Firing,” called out the Tactical Officer.

  The cruiser shook slightly underfoot, the vibration coming up through the acceleration couches. Within seconds, almost a thousand missiles were in space, speeding for their targets at point nine light. These were not missiles from the magazines of the ships, nor were they fired through the accelerator tubes of the vessels. They had been fired through ten thousand kilometer long tubes that ran along the outer skin of the Donut, boosted along at hundreds of thousands of gravities.

  The particle beams lanced out at the same time, picking on targets that the tactical computer had identified as priority, command ships, those with the most chance of engaging the incoming missiles. The computer did not always guess correctly, but in most cases it did. The beams, traveling at point nine nine nine five light, struck their targets a second before the missiles, blasting through the armored hulls of warships, destroying surface installations, taking out beam weapon batteries. As soon as one ship was hit to the point where it was accessed to be heavily damaged, the fire was switched to another.

  And then the missiles hit, well before the enemy could prepare more than a perfunctory defensive fire. Out of nine hundred and sixty missiles, over six hundred hit their targets. Very few were destroyed by close in weapons, and those that didn’t make a hit normally flew through the plasma of a ship they had targeted that had been struck by another missile. Many exploded as their noses were eroded away by plasma and debris, until their antimatter warheads breached. The few that made it through continued on into space, their grabbers pulling furiously to decelerate for another attack, something they couldn’t do until they made a stop, or curved their vector around enough with different course corrections. Both something that couldn’t be done for over an hour.

  The fast attack ships meanwhile were raising their negative matter bubbles and boosting on a vector that would take them away from the four hundred odd remaining enemy ships. It looked like they were running, but they were doing anything but. They were putting distance between themselves and their future targets, so that they could come back in at high velocity and put missiles into more enemy vessels.

  “Prepare to jump,” order Krishnamurta, feeling a little better about this maneuver that the last. The enemy had launched, and hundreds of missiles were coming at them across the five light second distance. Beams were striking out as well, but having little success targeting the stealthy, heavily shielded ships. “Jump,” shouted the Admiral, and the ships opened holes into hyperspace, well within the barrier for the Imperial ships. His force disappeared into hyper, shielding them from attack while they planned their next mission.

  * * *

  “He said what
?” asked Watcher into the com, stalking the seemingly endless corridors of the palace while searching for his prey.

  A hundred gigatons? thought Pandi, listening in on the tranmission. That would wipe out everything for a hundred kilometers in every direction. There might be some standing buildings on the fringe, but nothing else. And unprotected people? What, two, three hundred kilometers, more? “What kind of maniac would set that kind of doomsday device in his own capital?”

  “A megalomaniac,” answered Watcher in a grim tone. “Everything revolves around him, and if he isn’t here, it doesn’t matter. He would probably blow up the Universe if he could, since nothing matters without himself involved.”

  “So, what are we going to do?” asked Pandi, her mind almost refusing to wrap itself around the murderous selfishness such a device signified.

  “We can’t kill him until we get that device disarmed,” said Watcher, shaking his head. “Or moved from its current location to someplace where it can’t do so much damage.”

  Watcher was silent for a moment, thinking. Finally, he came to a decision. “All teams. The Emperor must be captured, alive and unharmed. Repeat, alive and unharmed. No matter what.”

  “What if he fights back?” asked one of the platoon leaders, one whose unit was closest to the presumed location of the man they were hunting.

  “You are to try to avoid taking casualties, but will take them if necessary. Any action taken is to disable his suit only, if he happens to be in one. If not in a suit, then he is to be taken down with sonics.”

  “That sounds like suicide, my Lord,” chimed in the Lt. Colonel who was in charge of the battalion.