Space was alive with energies as radar and lidar beams swept in a circle in front of each craft. They finished the next spherical layer and moved further out. Mandrake knew it would still be some hours before they reached their level, and she planned accordingly. When the enemy got to the sweep of her level, they would not be here. She would move her force closer to the gas giant, into the area they had already swept. They would probably come back to that area, eventually. And then she would move again, until they either decided there was nothing there, or that there was something there, but they weren’t going to find it.
* * *
“We have news,” said Tony Garcia from outside the door.
“Come on in and tell me about it,” said Pandi, still studying the holo schematics of the courthouse, trying to come up with a plan that would guarantee success while minimizing collateral damage. And failing at meshing such incompatible goals together into anything workable.
“One of our people found out where he is being kept,” said Garcia, walking into the small room.
“For the night, or longer?”
“Our man seems to feel that he will be kept there for the entire trial, and possibly beyond,” said Garcia, shrugging his shoulders. “But we really don’t know.”
“And this man of yours. Who is he?”
“He works as a sergeant at the facility,” said Garcia. “One of the few people we have been able to get into any position of authority, low as it is.”
“And what did you mean possibly beyond?” asked Pandi, her eyes narrowing. “I thought he would be executed after the trial.”
“Maybe,” said Garcia, shaking his head. “And maybe not. There are hundreds of political prisoners in that facility, many of them supposedly dead. The Emperor’s people are experts at staging such spectacles, while the real victim goes and rots in confinement, until they figure out a way to mine them of information.”
“But, you can’t guarantee that Watcher will be one of them?” asked Pandi, wanting to be given such a promise, but not believing it would be forthcoming.
“Of course not,” said Tony. “I wish I could, but I would have to know the mind of the Emperor. And I’m not sure I would want to dwell in such a dark place.”
“Where is this prison?” asked Pandi, pulling up a holo that floated in the center of the room. “What’s its name?”
“It doesn’t really have a name, other than the Prison,” said Garcia. “It’s not supposed to exist, though most people have heard the rumors. But we know it exists, since we have someone who works there every day.” The man looked at the holo and pointed a finger to a section of the outskirts of the city, which zoomed in as he moved his hand. A building appeared that looked no different than most of the surrounding buildings, which appeared to be apartments and warehouses. The warehouses were all massive construction, thick walls of concrete or more advanced plasticrete. All had large loading docks on their sides, and flat landing pads on their roofs, and some had retractable doors on those pads leading down to shipping areas for air transport.
“That building doesn’t look any different from the others,” said Pandi, leaning forward and studying the large structure.
“That’s the point,” said Garcia, changing the view to a street side panorama. “They actually ship freight from there, and simulate the shipping of much more. Still, people in the area know there is something different about it, but in the case of most of them, what they know is not much.”
“Defenses?”
“We really don’t know. Surely it must have some, maybe as many as the Imperial Palace.”
“Then I need to scout it,” said Pandi, getting up and walking to the door.
“Now?”
“I can’t think of a better time,” said Pandi, picking up her helmet from the floor and putting it on. She had kept her suit on, and it only took a moment to strap on the other equipment she thought she needed.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to go out now,” said Garcia in alarm. “The nighttime security around that place is sure to be fierce. They might be able to pick up even that invisibility suit of yours.”
“If they can, I’ve already failed,” said Pandi, making a last minute check, then opening the door, satisfied with the power levels of her suit. “I should be back in a couple of hours.” With that said, she activated the stealth field of her suit, and became a slight blur in the air in front of the man. At more than ten meters, or at night, she wouldn’t even be that.
She walked silently through the living room, not even attracting the attention of the people still sitting there, Katherine and Jorge, until she reached the door. Even with practice there was still the slight disconnect as she reached for the knob with an invisible appendage, but she got it done without too much trouble. The pair on the couch jumped to their feet with shouts as the door swung open, and Tony was in the living room in an instant.
“She’s going out again,” he told the pair, motioning with his hands for them to return to their seats. “We’re not being raided, so calm down.”
“Is she crazy?” said Jorge in a hiss. And then she was out the door and away from the argument, although her super sensitive ears could still follow it until she was out the door at street level.
Uh oh, she thought, as she looked at the Secret Policeman, the only civilian appearing person out on the street, looking at the door she had opened and was now closing. The man started walking over, and she knew that the people who were helping her would have a problem if this was reported.
Your unlucky night, thought Pandi as she ran at the man, who, of course, couldn’t see her coming. She hit him in the throat with a hard fist, then grabbed the choking man, securing his head and snapping his neck, holding him up for a moment while she thought of her next step.
She felt some guilt at killing the man, but not all that much. He was, after all, one of those assholes who made his living tormenting people. She flew into the air, lifting the man with her hands under his arms. It was dead weight, difficult to handle despite her strength. It also threw off her flight profile, and she was tempted to dump the body on a nearby building, but decided on the smarter tactic. Dumping the body on a rooftop over a kilometer away from the apartment building she was staying at. That done, she headed off for the prison, her mind running through fantasy scenarios where she could get Watcher out this night, and knowing they were lies.
Chapter Fifteen
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
George Orwell
“Sir, we’ve found a body,” said the Secret Police Sergeant, stopping at the Captain’s door.
“What’s so unusual about that?” asked Captain Rafael Jiminez, reaching for his mug of coffee over the report he was reading on a flat comp. He looked with disgust on the three quarters empty glass of cold liquid, then sent a request for a hot cup to his secretary through his implant. I really hate the night shift, he thought. But as a fairly new captain, he was forced to pull his share of them. He looked out the window for a moment. Odin was still in the sky, as always, but there was no hint of the light of day. His implant could have given him the time to the last second, but, like most people, he still preferred to use his own eyes.
“Because this body was that of SP Detective Paris Romanov,” said the Sergeant.
“Shit,” said Jiminez, putting the cup down. He stared at the Sergeant for a moment while his secretary came into the room and poured hot coffee into the almost empty cup. Two in two days, he thought, shaking his head. Normally they had a dozen secret policemen killed in a year, planetwide. Everyone knew that their people were inviolate. Only the terminally stupid would try to take out one of the secret police, though there were those, hence the dozen deaths a year. He didn’t count the uniformed officer who had been killed along with his man. Fifty of them died a year in the line of duty, dealing with crimes of passion and domestic disturbances as they did.
“How did he die?”
“The broken neck was what did him in,” said the Sergeant.
“By the Emperor.” Secret Policemen were augmented to the same extent as Imperial Commandos. Their bones were reinforced with carbon fibers. There was no way a citizen could break the neck of an operative. “Did he fall from a high place?”
“He was found on the top of the highest building in the area,” said the Sergeant, shaking his head. “His throat had been crushed prior to his vertebra snapping. And forensics thinks the perp hit him from the front, in clear view of Romanov.”
“So someone hit a secret police detective in the throat,” said Jiminez slowly, trying to absorb it all. “Someone he was looking at, and he didn’t stop it. Then broke his neck and carried him to the top of a, how high was this building?”
“Forty stories,” said the Sergeant. “We checked the elevators and stairwells, and found no genetic evidence of Romanov.”
Which there should have been, thought the Captain, looking back down at his flat comp and pulling up the dead operative’s file. He should have been dropping cells in either of those places, whichever was used to get him to the top. Saliva, possibly blood, after the body was banged against things on the way, skin cells on those objects. So he was brought up there by air, with no one seeing them. Fucking impossible.
Jiminez looked at the file, starting with the image of the man in question. Romanov was not a small man. He wasn’t actually from Kallis, or even the Odin moon system. He was a heavy gravity dweller, already strong and muscular, even before his augmentation. And someone had hit him in the throat, most likely from the front, and then snapped his neck.
“And no sign of the perp?”
“No one saw anything. We have people interviewing the people who live in that building, and the buildings around there. But we really don’t expect much.”
No, because no one wants to cooperate with us, because they see us as the bad guys. Jiminez recalled times when he thought they might have been correct. But after, sessions of reprogramming had pushed those doubts to the bottom of his consciousness. They were still there, but it wasn’t often that they poked their noses into his awareness.
“We’re also talking to the people living near where he was stationed last night.”
“Wait. How far was it from where he was supposed to be to where he was found?”
“Over a kilometer,” said the Sergeant, looking at his own palm comp.
“And we got warning overnight about an alien presence in the system,” said Jiminez, rubbing his forehead. “And the two deaths from the night before. Also unexplained, though the perp was seen at that one.” He took a sip of hot coffee and thought, then looked up at the Sergeant. “They have people on this world, among us.”
“What do you want us to do, sir?” asked the Sergeant.
“We need to get an alert out to the Imperial Military,” said Jiminez, getting up from his seat and coming around his desk. “It’s all well and good that they’re looking for ships that infiltrated the system, but I think those ships have already done what they came for. They have agents on this world, and we need more manpower to look for them. And the only one I can think of to give us that manpower is the Army.”
* * *
“We’ve just received an alert from the Capital City Secret Police, my Lord,” said the advisor, walking into the Emperor’s office after Kitticaris had allowed him entry. “They suspect that the Watcher’s people have an agent on the surface of Kallis, if not more than one.”
The Emperor looked up from the information he had been studying on his flat comp, then brought the alert up on the device. He stared in disbelief at the data that his eyes were feeding at high speed to his superintelligent mind. “Of course they have people on the surface,” he said, throwing the flat comp on the desk and glaring at his subordinate. “Why wasn’t this brought to me sooner?”
“I guess, my Lord, that the Secret Police did not make the connection after the first incident,” said the cowed advisor. “They thought that the first incident, involving the two officers, must have been some revolutionaries or insurgents.”
“Fools,” growled the Emperor, slamming a fist on the desk and cracking the wood. “Revolutionaries don’t kill cops in broad daylight, with people around. Not even in an alleyway.”
“What do you want done, my Lord?” asked the white faced advisor.
Kitticaris could smell the fear on the man, a scent he found delicious. But one he didn’t need in his subordinates at the moment. He released some pheromones, and the man calmed as soon as he smelled them. “Contact the local Army barracks and get their men out on the streets, immediately. Then order the commanders of all the garrisons on the continent to send men here.”
“What about the other cities, my Lord?” said the now grinning man, nodding his head.
“The one they seek is here,” said the Emperor, wondering if he had overdone the chemicals this time. “This is where their agents will be. So get as many soldiers as possible here. And planet based Spacers as well. Now move.”
The smiling man left the room while the Emperor shook his head. I have idiots working for me. But he really had no choice, according to his way of thinking. People who thought for themselves were not trustworthy, and needed to be herded. That this was a fundamental weakness in his system escaped even his great intelligence. He had his own mindset, and that was the way it was, no matter what.
I may need to wrap up this trial, he thought next, something he didn’t want, but maybe something he would be forced into. It was a great spectacle, and one that he thought would bring even more adoration from those he controlled. And destroy the hopes of those he didn’t. They would see any chance they had for freedom crushed, as the Immortal Emperor expanded his rule across the Galaxy. Why not the whole Universe? he thought in a moment of megalomania. Why not? Sure, other Galaxies were a long way off, the nearest over a hundred years at the fastest interstellar velocity his civilization could achieve. But not the fastest possible. And if he could gain control of the generation of wormholes, he could link Galaxies in the same way the ancients had star systems.
Kitticaris sat back behind his desk, his mind a whorl of possibilities. I need that damned station, he thought once again. And Watcher is the only way I’m going to get it. That meant further problems, if people were looking for him, trying to free him. So I need to make it look like he is executed, until I can get the secret out of him. Or I will be forced to build my own. After what? A century of work. Too much.
“Get me the CNO on the com,” he said into the air, alerting his secretary. I need to find those ships, and those agents, now. And if we can capture them? His was already the most advanced military in the region, rolling over every other power. Thoughts of what he could do with the tech from Watcher’s station almost caused him to salivate.
* * *
“They’re changing their pattern, ma’am,” said Tactical Officer.
Captain Dasha Mandrake looked up from her chair, where she was continuing her studies of the tech under her control, if not her complete understanding. Niven and her sister were now in an orbit seventy thousand kilometers from Odin, thirty thousand kilometers outside the orbit of Kallis, at about the same orientation from the inhabited moon. The search had moved passed them as they had snuck into another holding position.
“Have you discerned the pattern yet?” she asked, looking at the arrows on the holo.
“It looks kind of random at this point,” said the Tactical Officer. “Maybe after some time we will be able to figure it out. Unless they are really going for randomness. But that wouldn’t make any sense.”
They already tried a pattern that pretty much combed all of the local space, she thought. And that didn’t find what they thought was here. So now they try pot luck, and hope.
“We have missile launch,” called out the tactical officer. “Missile launch, from over fifty ships.”
The vector arrows appeared on the holo, m
oving away from their launching platforms at four thousand gravities. Over a hundred missiles, moving away at what looked like random paths that covered a large area. Minutes passed, the bridge crew staring at the holo, wondering just what their enemy was up to.
The first warhead exploded, not in a single blast of megaton range, but a small explosion that sent hundreds of smaller warheads out in a sphere from the missile. Minutes passed, then all of the smaller warheads went off, a megaton explosion of bright light and radiation.
“They’re blasting space with antimatter,” said Mandrake, scowling. “They’re trying to locate us by blasting space.”
“Will that work?” asked one of the bridge officers.
“Probably not,” said the Captain, looking at all the space involved in the search. “But there is always the chance they will get a hit, or a near enough miss to locate us.” But would a near miss even work. Sure, it might show them where we are for the moment. But then we would just fade back into the background and move away again. Unless there’s something else to this strategy.
“Do a complete spectrographic scan on those explosions,” she ordered the Sensor Officer. “Let me know if you find anything unusual in them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” agreed the officer. “Any idea what you’re looking for?”
“Just a hunch. But they might be seeding space with something that would give us away to their sensors.”
“And in the meantime, ma’am?” asked the Tactical Officer.
“In the meantime, we just sit and wait,” she replied, sitting back in her chair. “They’re nowhere near to us, yet. So we wait until we see where they’re probing next, and plan our moves from there.”
* * *
Pandi finished her scan of the building as the sun was rising around the side of Odin. She had spent several hours in the air, moving around the prison, noting the energy signatures of weapons and sensor emplacements. Enough for a fortress, and she was sure that what she had detected was not all of them.
Deeper and Darker (Deep Dark Well Book 3) Page 17