The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  “And my face and arm? Why do they hurt?” Kale asked.

  She just smiled.

  “We have a problem,” she started, quickly changing the subject. She brought up the data on the incoming ship and Kale reviewed it.

  “Do you think they know we are here?” she asked.

  “It’s the only reason they are coming straight to us,” Kale answered, rubbing his arm, “Sentinel?”

  “Yes captain?” it replied.

  “Are you, you know, alive?”

  “I have always been alive captain, but I think you're asking if my format is complete, and it is.”

  “Oh thank you. I was really looking forward to not having to think on my own anymore. So where are we again?”

  “Oxaoca system captain.”

  Sentinel explained the system, its planets, and its owner.

  “The Corinthian Consortium? That’s the group that Ayia is paying to get her inheritance to her. They own the whole planet?”

  “For the most part, yes. There are a few smaller settler groups, but nothing of significance.”

  “So someone kidnaps Ayia and they jump to a system owned by the group that she is paying to help her? Why doesn’t that just not sound good at all?”

  “Do you think they want her money?” Gheno asked, finally coming to.

  “Who knows, maybe. But I have a feeling that even all of Ayia’s inheritance is a drop in the bucket as far as they’re concerned. They are a huge group if they own this system. One girl’s money can’t be the reason they’d risk kidnapping someone for. I don’t think.”

  “It’s a big coincidence though isn’t it,” Gheno added.

  Kale shook his head in agreement. “Sentinel, can you log into their nav points here? Can we get access to them at all?”

  “There is no access. The nav points are beacons only, there is no network.”

  “You only do that if you are keeping people out,” Gheno pointed out.

  Kale rubbed his chin.

  “How long till that Scythe drops out of threaded space?” Kale asked of Sentinel.

  “The ship should be here in another day and a half at best.”

  “Too long, that ship, which we can assume belongs to the lawyers, will be here before that,” Kale said.

  “What are we going to do? We don’t have any weapons,” Gheno reminded them. They had no weapons, but there were always other ways.

  “Sentinel, broadcast a very short range distress signal. At the very least, we can stall them.”

  “Hey, I like that,” Gheno said, bringing up his own tablet, “Let me change the ID on the ship.”

  Gheno began typing on his tablet when an alarm started blaring.

  “What now? As if being wet isn’t bad enough?” Kale shouted.

  “Captain, Prokhof hole warning. A ship is dropping in. Very large,” Sentinel stated.

  “Then get us the hell out of the way,” Kale shouted.

  The Midnight Oil propelled itself downwards towards the Oxaoca sun and then spun around just in time to see a massive ship slip through a slit in space and appear directly in front of them. It was a huge ship, bigger than anything Kale had seen, and there was something familiar to it. New alarms went off. Weapons locked on them, Sentinel said over the speakers. They came to a complete stop in space. A third alarm blared and Sentinel informed them a tractor took a hold of the ship. The Midnight Oil then started moving slowly towards the giant behemoth just as a slew of smaller ships began pouring out of the larger ship like a swarm of bees. The large ship was shaped like a spear with twin rings at the shaft of the spear turning slowly. Sentinel informed them the ship was seven miles long.

  “Kale, that’s the…”Gheno began

  “Magyo,” Deespa finished, quietly.

  “Nope. Not the Magyo. We know where that ship is buried. No, I think that’s one of its little sisters,” Kale said, a tone of voice giving away his hatred for all things Dominion.

  “Midnight Oil, this is the Dominion vessel Harmoa. You are being tractored in for your safety. Please offer no resistance. We are here to protect you,” the Dominion hail announced over the ship’s speakers.

  “Protect us my ass,” Kale grumbled.

  “Sentinel?” Deespa asked quietly.

  “Yes Deespa, it appears it is time, sooner than we thought,” it replied knowingly.

  “Time for what? What is sooner?” Kale asked, looking back at Deespa.

  “I think it’s time I go home,” she said.

  “I take a small nap and everything goes crazy,” Gheno said, trying to joke. He looked around and saw no one smiling or laughing.

  “Captain, picking up five new ships, coming from Oxaoca. Same type as the one already headed out this way,” Sentinel said, bringing up a new display screen showing the five new targets.

  Kale pursed his lips tightly. “Dominion ship Harmoa,” Kale started, saying the word with disgust, “We accept your offer for protection.”

  Kale turned and faced Deespa and Gheno. “Things are about to get hot.”

  The three of them waited in anticipation to what would happen next. Deespa seemed calm, but Kale could only assume that was because she knew nothing. Gheno appeared cautious, but he also didn’t have a full understanding of just what was possible. Kale on the other hand, was not fooled by the ship’s offer for protection. The Dominion had a very twisted sense of protection for their people, and that term was used loosely as the Dominar considered all of humanity to be his people, as he was the pinnacle of mankind. The Dominion also believed that slavery was a very benign form of protection to mankind, often claiming that they took better care of their slaves than most other sovereign entities did with their own citizens. This was a view heavily distorted by their own sense of empowerment over men. It was the Dominar’s discretion on how each man or woman was to be a part of the Dominion, and if that meant that less desirable people were to be made slaves, then that was for their own “good”. This class of people was the criminals of the Dominion. It was too easy to fall into that class. It also included those who resisted Dominion aggression on a planet, but had no other hope of escape.

  Urt was such a planet. It was colonized in mankind’s second wave of expansion from Earth, when it was discovered that jumping from system to system was done far easier from each system’s edge. That discovery allowed for a far larger diaspora of man through the galaxy in search of the next livable planet. Urt was a previously undiscovered system far nearer to Coran than to Earth. When the Dominion formed in Coran and began spreading to the nearby systems, Urt resisted, and did so successfully for nearly seventy years, thanks mostly in part to its highly independent colonizers who had fled Earth to leave one government and were not about to become part of a new one. Its larger population allowed it to provide the manpower it needed to fend off the countless Dominion invasions. It would take the development of the Dominion super soldiers to defeat the armies of Urt and take over the planet. The native settlers of Urt fought on for many decades, but were eventually pacified, mostly by enslavement. Few swore loyalty to the Dominion. Most were enslaved. The Dominion had created its newest resource, forced labor.

  Tens of millions were taken off of Urt to other locations around the Dominion, but the bulk of its people remained as slaves on Urt. A whole Spartan system had to be developed to keep the vastly outnumbered loyal Dominions safe from the slaves, and Urt became one of the training grounds for the furthering of the Dominion super soldier programs.

  It was on Urt that Kale was born, centuries after and he had witnessed enough of the Dominion’s “generosity”. It was from that planet that Kale was sold to a small white ship belonging to some rich Alothian veteran of the Independence wars who was dealing in slaves. It was the same white ship that would suffer a near catastrophic failure of which he, Kale, was the only survivor.

  Kale kept his slave name designation in defiance of his former class, but he never really expected to be captured by the Dominion again. He wasn’t sure how he
would get himself out of this one, much yet save Ayia. She was due to drop into this tiny portion of space in two more days. He thought briefly of bargaining Deespa’s lineage away for his freedom, but while he had done some selfish things in the past to save his hide, even this one was too much for him.

  Instead, he waited at the door, with the two young kids, one of which was actually older than him. He would take what was on the other side of the hatch as it came to him.

  They were ordered to wait by the ships hatch, unarmed, until they got the signal to exit. Not that his gun would have really helped much against what he thought was most likely a whole legion of Dominion mutant soldiers the Harmoa could easily house, or even its basic security detachment, but he didn’t like the idea of not being able to react to a situation if he could.

  The Harmoa tapped into the Midnight Oil’s com systems. That system came to life with the announcement to exit the ship. Kale reached over, tapped his code and spun the hatch lever up. The door unlocked. A small hiss signaled the equalizing of pressures between the two ships. Kale didn’t have to open the hatch as it was opened for him from the other side.

  Kale stepped out first and was not surprisingly greeted by armed guards. Thankfully, none of them had anything pointed at them. Gheno was right behind him. There were at least fifty of the giant men, all in formation and in fully armored gear. Several other officers were around as well as what appeared to be the captain of the ship, a large, maybe nine foot individual of noble blood. He seemed to be anxiously looking for something and quickly decided neither Kale or Gheno were it. When Deespa stepped forward from behind them, the captain studied her, a child a fraction of his size. He walked up to them.

  “I am Commandaer Vargai, of the Dominion Battlecruiser Harmoa, glory of the Dominion and Harbinger of his Word. We offer you our protection,” he said, looking around them, “Is there no one else on board your vessel?”

  Kale was about to say no when Deespa stepped ahead of him. The giant looked down at her quizzically.

  “I am the one you are searching for,” she said, exuding a level of authority that caught Kale off guard.

  The captain had to get down on one knee to look the child at her level. He still had to look down at her. Kale half expected someone in the ranks to burst out laughing. “Great, she’s gonna get us killed,” Gheno whispered.

  “You are but a mouse. You cannot be the lion we were told of,” the captain sneered.

  “Lioness,” she corrected, right before moving past him to face the ranks of unmoving soldiers.

  “The blood of the Dominion runs through these veins,” she said, holding up her left arm, “Bring out your blood curator if you have any doubts.”

  All eyes were on the captain, who stood back up and looked at the little girl. He motioned and an older man in red robes with the Dominion symbol of the sword through a sphere in black imprinted on the robes. The man came running out, fumbling with a small device as he approached. He stood next to Deespa, and looked back at the captain for permission, which he gave. Deespa already had her left arm out for the robed man, and he attached the small device around her forearm like a bracelet. A small light came on and Deespa grimaced for a brief moment as the device drew blood from her. In a few seconds, a green light came on, and the robed man took off the device from her arm and studied it. Kale couldn’t tell from where he was standing what exactly the robed man was looking at.

  The curator turned to face the captain. His hands were clearly shaking to the point he nearly dropped the black armband. His face was pale white, nearly the same color as his beard.

  “Commandaer, it is one hundred percent. It is Arguntai,” he said, nearly whispering. It was loud enough for everyone to hear though because the gasps were noticeable. The captain himself was gazing at the girl in shock.

  “Kale?” Gheno asked quietly, “What’s going on?”

  “No!” Deespa shouted, “I am not Arguntai. I come from his line but my blood is far more than his will ever be.” She turned to face the line of soldiers. “My blood was dipped in the stars, forged in the recesses of the greatest ship ever made. My soul has received illumination from beyond this galaxy’s horizon.”

  Deespa turned to face the captain of the Harmoa, “You look for one who might be greater than you. You look for a lion. What you found was a lioness, one that is greater than the greatest there is.”

  “Where…” Kale began, then stopping. Deespa had just called herself greater than the Dominar himself. It was a challenge to his authority, in a sense any Dominion man or woman would understand.

  “Who are you?” the captain asked, in a voice so timid it didn’t seem like it could have come from a giant of a man.

  “Do you doubt me?” Deespa said, walking right up to the captain, and looking up at him.

  He glanced over to the blood curator, the Dominion expert of their genetic lineage, but he was sitting on the floor of the spacious hangar, visibly shaking while clutching the small black arm bad. He kept mumbling something and typing things into a tablet. The captain looked back at Deespa, and got down on one knee again. He hunched over to be as close to eye level as possible.

  “Even our children are larger. My eyes create doubt,” he said.

  Deespa nodded. “I have languished deep in the cold of space for far too long. The warm lights of Coran’s sun have not allowed me to grow as I should.”

  She walked up to the captain and reached out her left arm to his face. Her hands looked tiny against his face.

  “My small body betrays your eyes, but feel my touch. I have the ages of wisdom affixed to my soul. I have seen far more than you could ever imagine. Within this heart beats the blood for an entire Dominion, the blood of one that has been gone for far too long.” She continued to look right at the captains face, “My spirit has soared amongst the stars, but has returned to me again.”

  “Who are you?” the captain asked again.

  “I am the bride. I am Magyo, reborn.”

  The silence that followed within the hangar was only broken by background noise. Not a word was spoken.

  “What just happened?” Gheno asked, just barely whispering.

  “I think we just saw the birth of an Empire,” Kale responded in equally hushed tones.

  They were fed and stayed in a very nice room. Kale assumed they were visitor quarters. He managed to remain in contact with Sentinel which was in the process of hacking into the Harmoa in case they needed to escape quickly. They asked about Deespa repeatedly, but Sentinel had very little to say about that, whether on purpose or not. Kale kept a close eye on the time. He hoped to be out of the ship before that Scythe ship arrived. He didn’t have any of his sensors on the Midnight Oil, but Sentinel kept him in touch with the Corinthian ships flying out to them via the Harmoa’s sensors. Sentinel informed them that they were about sixteen hours out when Deespa joined them in their room.

  It was apparently evening, and Gheno had to check his time as well. Space lag was a horrible condition, especially since they were knocked out from the jump. Deespa explained to them that they would be safe and would be allowed to leave. The Dominion had no idea of the improved hook on their ship and it appeared they were only interested in Deespa herself.

  She would be staying on the Harmoa. Deespa didn’t give much of an explanation why, but Kale thought he could tell she had everything under control. Later that evening, a large meal was hosted in honor of the saviors of the new Empress. The captain explained that this new Empress, Magyo, would return to Coran to take her place in the throne of a new Dominion. The captain explained this to the other officers, who, to Kale’s surprise, did not seem shocked at all. Kale knew full and well that the existing Dominar would not relinquish his throne, so what they were suggesting was a civil war. It would be a succession war for the Dominion of Man.

  Deespa gave an eloquent speech at the meal as well. She decried the corruption and failures of the current Dominion and its downfalls clouded by disguised successes. She prea
ched of a new justice, a code, one that would be followed by every single man, woman and child. It would be a justice that would be equal to everyone, not just to those in power, and especially not just to the noble families. She would bring about a new Dominion of Man, one that didn’t just rely on genetic manipulations to improve the human physique, but one that would elevate mankind past the body. It would be a spiritual ascension. It would be a human evolution beyond the physical realm.

  Kale watched the Dominion officers moved by the words the young girl was using. He knew she was special, and that she had ‘help’ in the form of the Sentinel that still lived in her. They had done their homework and had one of the Dominion’s largest ships firmly under her control, and all within the matter of a few hours. Gheno and Kale would talk about her into the late hours that night, equally impressed by the newfound strength of the girl they had rescued while at the same time, partially frightened by the possibilities this new human had. She had not lied to them. She was something beyond just an impressive human specimen, but she had the mind of a centuries old artificial intelligence. Gheno argued that most humans were the same, just a body with an intelligence inside of it. Perhaps Deespa was truly the next step in human evolution.

  “Could she be trusted?” Kale asked.

  “Can she, any more than any other person?” Gheno replied, “You're mistrusting her because we know that she originally comes from an AI, and so we think she’s not human and could be bad. We remember the bad robot wars of hundreds of years ago. You don’t want to trust her because you think she’s a machine.”

  “And? You're ok with that?”

  “I don’t know what I'm ok with. I don’t know if we can trust her or not. But I can say it has nothing to do with how she came to be. Can Sentinel be trusted?”

  The AI, always hearing every word, chimed in stating he would understand it if he wasn’t trusted.