The Depths of War (Dark Seas Book 5)

by Damon Alan

  “Trey, get me all the Alliance files you can find on the Michael Stennis and the master of that vessel. Anyone who can take out one of our occupation squadrons with one starship either has a remarkable ship or remarkable ability. I’d like to know which.”

  Trey bowed and dashed for the door. He was a third generation servant of the Komi, and as such was completely reliable. There would be hardcopy documents on his desk in minutes.

  Seven ships. The smashed remains of five destroyers, and two cruisers that had simply vanished.

  What to make of that?

  The loss was small, as the Syndicate was expansive and powerful, but any test of the Komi stranglehold on power would displease Bannick’s father.

  Urdoxander Komi.

  The name made him cringe a little, even just thinking it. Bannick didn’t let emotions cloud his judgment, and his father respected him for that. But there was no love. Urdo’s children were simply a means to continue the Komi empire.

  And they all knew it. Their privileged lives depended on performance.

  Trey returned and gently laid the requested documents on his desk.

  Bannick dismissed him, and then opened the files. The Michael Stennis had served an inordinately long time in the Alliance. During a time when a ship could be expected to last a few years, the Stennis had lasted nearly fifty. A chain of competent commanders had led the vessel, keeping it mostly safe from the ravages of the Hive.

  Particularly interesting, however, was the ship’s last known commander. Captain Sarah Dayson. According to the final reports from Bannick’s missing and destroyed ships, she was calling herself an Admiral now. Her Alliance records reflected no such promotion.

  Perhaps she served another government, one that had rewarded her.

  He brought up a sound file again on his desk computer, the last series of radio transmissions from the squadron.

  “— ship just appeared on our sensors. Not sure how it got so close without being detected. We are moving to intercept and subdue.”

  The second was just as mysterious. “— disappeared from our sensors after threatening us and refusing our order of submission. The vessel claims to be the Michael Stennis, an Alliance capital ship according to our database. This Dayson person is seeking to speak to the Alliance High Command.” The speaker actually chuckled at that point, unprofessionalism that rankled Bannick. The transmission continued. “The admiral speaking to us, however, says she and the ship are Oasian. There is no record of an Oasian territory in our databases. The current location of the intruder is not known. We are scouring the area.”

  The third radio transmission made even less sense.

  “Small fighters have appeared, and are engaging the destroyers. I… none of us have any idea where they came from. They’re firing missiles.” The transmission paused. “The gunnery officers are complaining that the missiles are extremely small, like the craft that launched them. Ops is worried that defensive railgun fire will be marginally effective.”

  The next one infuriated him each time he heard it.

  “— is Captain Hozz. I am ordering the cruisers Kurig and Marchast Rising to stand down from battle. Our enemy is overwhelming, we stand no chance. Unless by some twist of fate we are released, this will be our last transmission. They have arrived, again, previously unseen, forty kilometers behind us.”

  Hozz was lucky he was missing. Because otherwise Bannick would have the man shot.

  How did one battlecruiser, with a handful of primitive fighters, wreak such havoc?

  Did the Oasians possess cloaking technology? Komi scientists, and every scientist to come before, said that cloaking a large ship was impossible. Had the Oasians found a way?

  Bannick clenched his fist in frustration. The news of an Alliance ship returning home to rout a squadron would not serve the Syndicate. Any mention of it would be banned from the holonet.

  He paced back and forth in front of the projectile proof glass, staring down below at the city. His regiments marched on the streets. The populace was quelled. There would be no revolt. But nor could they have hope that others would do what the Alliance previously had not.

  He stood for a long time, his eyes focused on nothing.

  The question was what to make of it all. The admiral who spoke to his squadron commander… Dayson. Her claim not to be Alliance… that was the significant detail of this encounter. Not Hozz’s surrender or the devastation of one meaningless squadron.

  Oasian? Who were they? If they were meddling in Komi affairs his father would respond harshly. With the meddlers and with Bannick.

  So Bannick needed to find their home worlds and deal with this. It would further cement his standing in Syndicate Hall.

  Maybe this Dayson defected to the Oasians, betraying the Alliance? Could she be bought?

  Too many questions. It irritated him. He punched a comm on his desk, activating the link to the person he trusted most, the woman who was also his lover. “It’s me. I need you to speak to the admiralty, I’m too upset. Until I give further orders to the contrary, I want the squadrons to run in double. Four cruisers, ten destroyers,” he snipped.

  “I’ll notify the admiralty, Lord Komi.”

  “Palia. After you’re done, you’re to come to my office. We need to discuss this matter further.”

  “I’ll move with haste,” she answered, her voice softening slightly.

  He hung up. A gesture that made him think. He’d done the hanging up. In as long as he could remember, not a single person had ever broken a conversation with him other than his family. The Komis were rude to each other all the time. Oneupmanship. But nobody else ever was. Palia had never turned away his advances, even when he’d first met her.

  Did she sleep with him for enjoyment or fear? He hoped it was enjoyment. Since meeting her he’d come to care about her quite more than was proper. She had become an adviser in a sense, although all of her best advice was dispensed in the nude.

  His crude male thought made him chuckle. But it was true. Usually, when they were together in private, she was unclothed.

  Her beauty always softened his ire, smoothed over any agitation he might feel.

  Thinking about her being with him against her will made him more tense.

  He pushed a different button on his desk, and a wall partition slid to the side. It revealed a small room with a comfortable bed and a small bar of exquisitely expensive liquors.

  Palia would be here shortly. They had things to discuss.

  Maybe today they’d lay skin to skin, speak of the issues at hand, and there would be no sex at all, to see how she responded.

  Chapter 14 - Intent

  24 Jand 15332

  For the last two days he’d been captive in a small town. These were the Oasians? Their technology didn’t seem to be anything special. In fact, what little he’d seen of the town seemed very functional and didn’t really display any culture at all, except for the primitives that seemed to occasionally walk about the city. The view from his jail, and as comfortable as it was it was his jail, was an apartment complex, a harbor, some sort of technical building, and the sea beyond.

  A couple of missile platforms could also be seen in the distance.

  One fellow even had an animal with him that he rode.

  Sailing ships sat in the harbor.

  Sails? Who used sails for anything but a pleasure craft?

  The death traps he’d seen were not pleasure craft, they were wooden vessels that hardly looked seaworthy at all. He’d protest if asked to board one, surely the Admiral’s people didn’t use such conveyance. They must belong to the barbarians he’d seen.

  Were those slaves? Did the Oasians practice slavery? No, they didn’t have the demeanor of owned beings. These barbarians were happy and confident.

  He’d studied the docked vessels, the ones with freight being loaded and unloaded. Animals, what looked like wood products, skins… and in return the town was loading what looked like ingots onto the ships along with a fe
w manufactured goods.

  What sort of world was this?

  Now something different was happening. Finally. He sat alone in a room, in a prefab building, near a small spaceport. There certainly didn’t seem to be anything special about the building or the airport. He’d watched a jetliner take off. A jet aircraft. He’d almost laughed.

  Two Alliance uniformed marines brought Adriat into the room, and sat him down in the chair next to Sten.

  “They’ve treated you well?” Sten asked.

  “More than we would have them,” Adriat replied. “Have you seen the pale ones walking around? Like ghosts.”

  “I have. I think those are the natives. The opposite of your situation on Shingald. They probably struggle to make enough vitamin D on this world, and need to capture every UV ray they can.”

  “They stare at me, the pale ones. It creeps me out,” Adriat said.

  Sten laughed. He liked his first officer, in fact it was their long term friendship that had emboldened him to surrender to enemies of the Komi. Maybe he’d found freedom for him and his friend at last.

  “What do we tell them?” Adriat asked. “That we’re traitors to our government?”

  “You probably just did, I suspect the room is bugged,” Sten answered. “Besides, it’s true. Speak to them with honesty. We are traitors. Tell them about the Komi, and how efficiency is all that matters with them. Tell our captors that you want to sit on their pretty beaches and paint sea shells if that’s the truth.”

  His XO smirked at that. “And you? What do you want?” Adriat asked.

  “I want my family to be safe from threat, I want my friends to be free.” Sten looked down at the table top. “I want to do my own will instead of the will of others for a change.”

  The door to the room slid open and Admiral Dayson strode in with one of the pale barbarians. They sat down on the opposite side of the table, and two marines took position at the door. The nearest one glared at both Komi officers as if he’d kill them if they twitched wrong.

  Hamden, his name tag read. Probably best avoid eye contact with that one.

  “Hello, Sten, Adriat,” the admiral said. “Welcome to New Korvand and our capital, Jerna City.”

  “Capital? I was expecting something more dramatic,” Sten said. “But greetings to you.”

  The admiral laughed at his comment. “We have a lot of explaining to do for you. But first to business. You didn’t put up much of a fight for this Komi Syndicate you work for.”

  “Worked for. If you return us to them, we’ll be executed. For the sake of our families I’m hoping they don’t know how little we fought before we surrendered,” Sten answered.

  The look on Admiral Dayson’s face told him that he was probably going to like her. She might be tough, but she didn’t use Komi methodologies.

  “Tell me about them,” she said.

  “Not much to tell. It’s a simple system. Control everyone, and if anyone gets out of line you destroy their lives and maybe their family as well. Torture happens, but usually it’s just a quick shot to the head,” Sten said. “Success in any field is based not only on competence, but on who is your friend in the powerful houses. To reach our ranks,” he gestured at himself and Adriat, “you need a house to sponsor you.”

  “That sounds dreadful,” Dayson responded. She glanced imperceptibly at her pale friend, who gave no indication that he noticed her look. Despite that, she clearly was satisfied with something she got from the man.

  “Who is this?” Sten asked. “I’ve noticed his people walking your streets. There are definitely two cultures here.”

  “This is Alarin Sur’batti,” she replied. “As you are not his friend, you’ll use his first and last names in conversation. It is the way things are done here.” She adjusted her dress jacket. “But we’re asking you about the Komi. What is their military like? How large are their forces? Are you willing to share the combat tactics a captain such as yourself would certainly know?”

  “I’ll share whatever you want. If I know it, and you ask, it’s yours. I sense you’re a better people than the Komi, but it’s my opinion you sure can’t be any worse. And if you’re as bad as they are, pitting you against them is doing everyone else a favor.”

  “Force size?” she asked again.

  “Generally a system like Mindari has a few hundred ships. Mostly light cruiser squadrons since the Hive quit attacking, but on the front lines there are often as many as four very heavy warships in the system. I have no idea how many ships are in the total force, but few people probably do.”

  She nodded at his answer. It was almost like she was judging his truthfulness and finding him satisfactory. But no mind scanner was in this room. And mind scanners required the same question to be asked several times to weed out any extraneous neural firing patterns.

  She didn’t delay in her questions. “Did the Komi fight the Hive?”

  “Until we didn’t. Even as we engaged the Hive on a small front, we expanded into other human systems. The Syndicate believes the only way to survive the scourge is to get large and powerful. Fast.”

  “That is a reasonable thought, but I don’t like their methods. What do you think made the Hive withdraw their attacking fleets.”

  “They met another species,” Sten answered.

  She looked apoplectic. Like he’d poked her in the liver. But then she glanced again at the pale man, who had no visible reaction. It’s like he was set in stone, which was very disconcerting.

  “You don’t believe me?” Sten asked. “It’s not a Komi thought. It’s an Alliance belief. The Komi recovered the intelligence from the databases they seized on Mindari.”

  “I believe you,” she replied. “At least in the sense that you think that is the answer. It’s likely propaganda from your superiors.”

  “You have a better explanation?” he asked.

  Her face said she didn’t. But she clearly was opposed to the concept of aliens. “I wish I did. But I’ll have to find out.”

  “With your cloaking device you can probably go to Mindari and free the Alliance military members being held there. They might know more about the Hive’s behavior.”

  His probe to see how she responded to his mention of a cloaking device didn’t reveal anything about it. Was that how she and the fighters appeared from nowhere?

  “There are prisoners? Where?” she demanded. She’d been interested and sometimes amused before. But now she was urgently serious about wanting to know what was in his mind.

  “When the Komi jumped into the system, the battle of Hamor was just finished. Scouts let the main fleets who were waiting out system know when the survivors docked at the orbital drydock. They straggled in with a fraction of the ships that had gone out. Even if the Alliance hadn’t left themselves completely defenseless by docking every single ship, they’d not have been able to stop the invasion. Mindari fell inside of a month, including the ground war. The crews from the fleets in drydock were taken to an island in the southern seas. A prison complex ran by the Alliance before Komi took it over.”

  She stared at him, speechless for a moment. “How many?” she finally asked.

  “Thousands. There were probably forty ships. They’re still in drydock being repaired. The thing at Hamor, it was the most brutal beating the Hive has dished out in some time, and some of the ships were so damaged it almost makes you want to believe in miracles that they survived.” Curiosity struck him. “Why does this matter to you?”

  She leaned in. “Because these are my comrades in arms the Komi have. I need to ask you a few things, and your answers are going to determine the rest of your life. Each of your crew will be asked the same thing. If you answer negatively, then you’ll be dropped off on a world either in Komi space or nearby to make your own way. If you answer yes, you’ll have a home here. But we will know if you’re lying.”

  “I believe you will,” Sten said. He pointed at the pale barbarian. “Somehow that man is telling you whether or not I am being truth
ful. Normally I’d wonder that you don’t have a brain scanner in this room, but I’ve seen your technology. Your drives and combat systems are superior to ours. Maybe your mind scanners are as well. Whatever the case, he operates it and tells you the details.”

  “Your suspicions are as close as I could expect you to come,” she said. “I’ll happily explain it all if your answer satisfies me and my truth detector.”

  “Ask away,” Sten urged.

  “Are you loyal to the Komi in any way?”

  “No.”

  “Adriat?”

  “No,” his XO answered. “And to expand on my captain’s earlier answer, the Komi are not evil purely to be evil. They are efficient. They are soulless. The individual has no meaning unless that person is in a powerful family. Eliminating dissent is like silencing noise in an engine. Nothing more.”

  “Noted,” the admiral answered, seemingly unphased by Adriat’s words. “Next question. Will you provide assistance to my military by any and all means you can?”

  “You’d include us?” Sten asked, a bit astounded. “Absolutely. I’m not afraid to die, but I am afraid to die a slave.”

  Adriat agreed as well.

  “Would you fight the Komi to the best of your ability? And do you feel your crew would do the same given the opportunity?”

  “Of course. There will be loyalists, the mindless type that would follow another off a cliff,” Sten answered. “There might even be a political plant or two, reporting on crew behavior to the Naval Directorate.” He knew his answers were honest. This day was going far better than he’d ever expected. “If you’re planning on hitting the Komi, and if the opportunity—”

  “We will attempt to recover your family,” Alarin Sur’batti said.

  Admiral Dayson glared at her companion. “Alarin! You don’t know what you’re committing us to. You don’t get to assign the fleet to action.”

  “I see in his mind what we’re committing ourselves to, and I will not stand by ever again while evil runs free. Adriat says the Komi are not evil, but he’s wrong. Their lack of goodness is in itself evil. Never again,” Alarin Sur’batti responded, his emotions running hot just under the surface.