Deeper and Darker (Deep Dark Well Book 3)

by Doug Dandridge

  “And what woman is that?”

  “You know which woman, traitor,” said the Inquisitor, no longer playing his friend. “You tell the Emperor what he wants to know.”

  “One of the Immune,” said the Emperor in a voice that dripped with scorn. “The fortunate ones who cannot be programed by subliminals and chemicals.” The Emperor grabbed the front of Tony’s shirt and pulled him and his chair off the ground. “The ones I am trying to eliminate from the population of my Empire. I am damned tired of your sedition. We will be much stronger without you.”

  “Yes,” croaked Tony through his dry mouth. “A strong society of slaves. Until you eventually lose.”

  The Emperor smiled as he lowered Tony and his chair back to the floor. “Yes, the Immune. But not immune to me.”

  Suddenly Garcia’s nostrils were filled with a strong, sweet scent, like nothing he had ever smelled before. He realized in a moment that this was not strictly true, he had smelled a similar scent, one used all across the moon. It had never affected him or the other members of the resistance, at least not in any meaningful way. The common thought was that it was part of the chemical programming of the Empire, and something else they were immune to.

  But this was different. Sweeter, more enticing. Something he wanted more of. And it made him want to be helpful to the Emperor.

  No, he thought, fighting the compulsion. And losing, as it overwhelmed his senses, then his intellect. He is the one I will die for, was his next thought. There is nothing he can ask that I will not do.

  “Feeling better now?” asked the Emperor in the sweetest, most caring voice that Tony had ever heard.

  Tony simply nodded his head, a wide smile on his face.

  “Good. Then you can tell me about this woman, and anything she said that might be of interest.”

  * * *

  “We’re picking up a large force in hyper VII,” called out the Flag Sensor Officer.

  What now, thought Admiral Nagara Krishnamurta, looking at the holo that showed the vector arrows of the other force, moving in the same relative direction that they were, though slightly ahead.

  “Destination and ETA?” he asked, looking over at his Flag Navigation Officer. While he waited for a reply he looked over the force. It was made up of forty battleships and ninety-five smaller warships, what looked like more than a match for his small force, despite the disparity in tech. And this was the third force they had encountered in the last two days, though it was the largest, all headed for the home system of the New Galactic Empire.

  “The destination appears to be the Empire’s home system. ETA, two and a half days.”

  And we’ll be there in twenty-one hours, thought the Admiral, watching as his force of hyper VIII ships started overtaking the other force. At least they can’t do anything to stop us while we’re in VIII. Though they have to know we’re here, and what we are.

  “I want probes in that system an hour before we enter normal space,” ordered the Admiral, wondering what he was going to do if he got there and he was heavily outnumbered. He smiled a bit as he thought of the wormhole links aboard his ships, the ones that connected him to the Donut. Reinforcements waited on the other end of those holes, if he could deploy them in time.

  “What’s the status of the Commodore’s force,” was his next question.

  The Flag Com Officer queried the Donut over their own com link, and waited for the station to gather the status of Pandora Latham’s ships.

  “Avenger has been destroyed, sir,” said the Com Officer, her face a mask of anger, hiding her sorrow. She listened for a moment more. “Niven and Vengeance are hiding in the gas giant, Odin, that the moon Kallis orbits. Niven no longer has a connection to the Donut, but are able to communicate through Vengeance.”

  Which means the people on Niven can’t evacuate back to the Donut, thought the Admiral. That was not good, and the only reason they would be hiding in the clouds of a gas giant would be because there wasn’t a way out of the system for them.

  “Do they have Watcher?”

  Another moment’s hesitation. “He’s aboard Niven, along with Commodore Latham.”

  “Thank the Gods,” said the Admiral. And I’ll be the third ranking officer in the system when I enter, he thought. Watcher was, of course, the supreme commander of the Confederation, no matter what was said about him just being an advisor. He was the most brilliant being in the Galaxy, and he had saved Surya from a devastating war that was grinding her down to probable defeat. He was like a God to them, one of the ancient ones reborn, and would be their leader as long as he lived. Which, from what had been said, would be a long time, if he weren’t killed by something along the way.

  Krishnamurta did not believe in immortality for corporeal beings. Lack of aging did not mean freedom from harm, and given enough time, anything living would come to an end. But as long as Watcher was with them, he would be the guiding hand of whatever government finally took control of the Galaxy. There seemed to be a lot of people that wanted to control everything, and he didn’t trust them to look out for the welfare of all peoples, of all species. Watcher was a known quantity. The Admiral knew that the ancient man punished himself for the fall of Galactic civilization, and the trillions of deaths that had followed. He suffered from the guilt of what something else had done that had controlled his body at the time. The Admiral did not blame him in the least for that fall, nor did any of his people. It had been something else, an outside force, but Watcher would always blame himself. And would go to any lengths to see that such did not happen again. Not only that he would not be the cause, but that no one else would be either.

  And Pandora Latham was his second in command, and would be for as long she lived. The titular rank of Commodore notwithstanding, a rank she had accepted in protest, she was in all actuality the queen of their enterprise. And if she ordered the Admiral to take some action, he would, gladly, even if he tried to argue her out of it because he thought the course might not be the best. She was a survivor, that one. And he had a feeling that her cause would survive as well.

  “Send a message through to Vengeance,” he told his Com Officer. “Let them know we’re coming. Give an ETA. And ask for instructions.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

  I. F. Stone

  Niven cruised along one of the bands of gas that made up the striped form of Odin. The band was traveling like a jet stream at over a thousand kilometers an hour. The destroyer and her sister would be on the other side of the planet in a couple of days, and then?

  “We have the probe in position, ma’am,” said Niven’s Sensory Officer. “We’re getting a tactical feed from above the clouds, now.”

  The tactical holo came alive, replacing the one that had been showing them the system through one of Niven’s and two of Vengeance’s probes. Above the planet were the icons of over a hundred warships, arrayed in blockade fashion over the region they were under. A dozen of the vessels were large battleships. Those weren’t what worried her at the moment. The concern was the nine destroyers that were starting to probe downward into the clouds.

  “Why the hell did you have to give her that name?” asked Watcher, pointing to the icon of Vengeance on another holo, just twenty kilometers to the port of their ship.

  “What should I have called her?” asked Pandora, not taking her eyes off of another screen, this giving her a visual of the enemy ships above the clouds.

  “I don’t know. Retribution, Destruction, Death. You know, some of your other favorite words.”

  Pandi cursed under her breath. Ever since Watcher had left the medtank with a new set of implants, and had looked over the data on the operation, he had been on her about the collateral damage she had caused.

  “We were at war,” she told him. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Leave me where I was,” he had answered. “Organize a big enough force to beat t
heir fleet, you know, the guys we’re supposed to fight, and make them surrender.”

  “And you are important to our cause, you moron,” she had yelled back at him. “You are our leader, and I had no way of knowing that you would survive if I took my time to organize a, proper, rescue mission. And I have no reason to believe our cause would survive without you.”

  “I’m just one man.”

  “You’re a hell of a man, lover,” she had said with a smile. “And you’re so much more than one man. From what you said, that son of a bitch they have is almost your equal. So don’t you think we need our Superman to go against their Lex Luthor?”

  “Thank you,” he had finally said, and she thought the argument was over. Unfortunately, it now seemed like it wasn’t.

  “How is the new interface?” she asked him to change the subject.

  “Fine. Except for the lack of a quantum entangled interface, it works great.”

  “Then I’ll have to do the linking with the station computer for the both of us,” said Pandi with a smile.

  Watcher gave her a strange look when she said that.

  “I know,” she said, looking up from the viewer. “I’m the one who was totally against having that thing in my head. But I thought it necessary to pull this off. And the extra computing power sure has come in handy a time or two.”

  She looked back at the viewer, happy that she had gone with the entanglement option. Niven had lost her wormhole connection to the Donut during the run into the atmosphere, about the same time the enemy missiles had exploded behind her. No one in her engineering staff could tell her what happened. Even Watcher wasn’t sure, though he thought that maybe the distortions in space caused by the multi-gigaton explosions, and the high gravity field they were in had combined to rip the connection apart. That left the question of why the two remaining links were still intact. They stretched a far more limited distance, one to a probe about a light hour out, the other to the probe that was still on-board, maybe twenty meters at that time.

  Still, it meant that they weren’t going to be able to evacuate back to the Donut, as Watcher had planned when he had suggested that they head into the atmosphere of Odin. And, though they might be able evacuate to Vengeance through their connection with that ship, and through their wormhole connection, that for some reason was still functioning, it was still a risky proposition, due to both ends of the portal sitting within the high gravity field of the gas giant. Otherwise, there was no way to link the ships with a pressure tight connection. No way the shuttles could withstand as much pressure as they were under, and no way a battle armor suit could either.

  “How soon till they’ll be able to pick us up on their sensors?” she asked Satyapathy over the link to the main bridge.

  “We can’t pick up anything over a hundred kilometers away,” said the Tactical Officer. “I’m fairly confident that they can’t pick anything up until they’re within half that distance. Maybe a third.”

  Pandi noted on the tactical plot that the closest enemy ships were still over four hundred kilometers from their position. They were coming in over a large area, fourteen more destroyers entering as she watched. Lidar was completely useless in the hydrogen/helium soup of an atmosphere. Radar was just a little better, its efficiency dropping off quickly as the waves were absorbed in the gas. And for the same reason passive sensors were a complete non-starter. Graviton emissions weren’t much better. None of the ships involved on either side were running their grabbers at a very high rate. The Confederation ships were pulling four gravities, the same as the field of the planet, one five hundredth of her capacity. And any heat they were putting out was completely lost against the hot air rising up from the interface of liquid hydrogen sea and thick gas envelope.

  They were listening to everything, the standard procedure in this kind of environment. And hearing way too much, between the turbulence in the atmosphere and the crashing thunder of lightning strikes that were each more powerful than twenty thunderstorms worth on a terrestrial planet.

  So basically, we’re both blind men groping in the dark, she thought with a smile. That was totally to their advantage, since their part of the game was hiding from the other side in the atmosphere of a planet over a thousand times larger than anything inhabitable by humans.

  “I don’t like the way that one is dropping,” she said, pointing out one of the icons that was coming down on a course that would intersect theirs.

  “Are you sure they can’t take as much pressure as we can?” she asked Watcher.

  “Positive. But remember, they are not damaged to start out with. We could go down another seventy-five kilometers, maybe a hundred, if we were intact.”

  “So what do we do about them?”

  “I think we’ve got something that might just ruin their day, as you like to say,” said Watcher. “Tactical Officer. On my command….”

  * * *

  Captain Klaus Kinisey really did not like this, dropping his ship into the suffocating clouds of a gas giant, looking for an asteroid in a nebula. This was not what he had signed up for when he had joined the Imperial Navy from his native Warzawa, one of the earliest of the Imperial conquests, and one that had fully integrated into the Empire.

  Of course, his planet had also had to undergo the same kind of indoctrination as any other Imperial world. Which was not quite the same as that on the worlds of the home system for some reason. They were still very loyal. Not one of the crew aboard this ship would do anything but obey the orders that came down, at least symbolically, from their Emperor. But they were not quite as fanatic as those from the home system. Which meant they could think for themselves quite a bit more than those native to the home system. And Kinisey for one did not like what they were doing at the moment.

  “Hull pressure, six hundred standard atmospheres,” called out his Sensor Officer.

  “Anything on the sensors?”

  “Not in this crap,” said the other man, listening intently to all of the passive devices that were trying to pierce the noise and thermals of the hellish environment.

  And we can take six hundred and fifty atmospheres, thought the Captain. At least that’s what they tell us, though I’m pretty sure no one has taken this particular ship this deep into this particular planet. And, for some reason, that doesn’t make me too confident.

  “Take us down to six hundred and forty atmospheres.”

  “Are you sure, Captain?” asked the Helmsman. “That’s cutting it kind of close.”

  “You heard me, Helm. That’s well within our safety margin.” The Helmsman acknowledged and started them on their way. At least I can hope it is, thought the Captain. Of course, this turbulent atmosphere could have eddies within it that increased local pressure. The Captain was depending on the Sensory Officer to let him know immediately if they encountered such, so they could change altitude in a moment, hopefully before hull integrity failed.

  “Six hundred and twenty atmospheres,” called out the Sensory Officer. “And sir, I’m picking up graviton emissions from twenty kilometers down.”

  “Tactical. Target those emissions and fire.”

  “Aye, sir,” called back the Tactical Officer. “Lasers are useless, so I’ll try and hit them with particle beams.”

  The Captain nodded, the anxiety taking his voice away for the moment. That’s a million ton ship we’re trying to do battle with, and we mass a little over two hundred thousand. And, besides giving up the weight, they’re just a bit more advanced. I’d feel a whole lot better if we had company of our own.

  “Com, transmit our location back to the task force. Tag our opponent so they know where to look.”

  “I’m not able to get a transmission through that crap overhead, sir,” called back the Com Officer.

  “What about subspace?” he asked, talking about the system that transmitted signals through the other dimension at a dozen times the speed of light. Not really something designed for this situation, but…

  “Not in this
gravity well, sir,” said the Com Officer.

  “Particle beams are not penetrating the atmosphere,” called out the Tactical Officer. “We’re getting burn through of about five kilometers before the beams are totally dispersed.”

  “Target them with missiles, then,” yelled the Captain, following the track of the enemy ship that was moving slowly away.

  “Maximum velocity on the missiles will be about two kilometers per second,” said the Tactical Officer, looking back at his Captain and shrugging his shoulders.

  That’s pitiful, thought Kinisey. A missile travelling that slow was an easy target for any ship’s defensive systems. Of course, in this situation, the defending ship would not be able to hit it with beam weapons until it got within five kilometers, at least for particle beams. Lasers were not even a factor. He wasn’t even sure how well counter missiles would work. He only hoped they would be as degraded as the systems of the attacking birds.

  “How many, sir?” asked the Tactical Officer.

  “Give them a full spread. Ten missiles.”

  “Opening tubes,” said the Tactical Officer, a statement that was not normally given before firing on a warship. But in this case, opening the doors on the tubes was letting in six hundred atmospheres of hydrogen and helium. “Firing, now.”

  The ship shuddered slightly as it released the missiles through the tubes. It was much less than normal, as the tubes, which would normally eject the missiles over their fifty or more meter length at twenty thousand gravities, were powered down to minimum. Now, they were merely being moved slowly at a couple of gees through the tubes to outside, where their own grabber systems started to move them to the target.

  “How long until you can get another spread off?” called the Captain to the Tactical Officer.

  “A couple of minutes to evacuate the tubes of gas,” said the man. “Then the autoloaders can reload them and we’re back in business.”

  So we’ll know if we’ve got a hit before we have to fire again, he thought, looking at the plot that showed the missiles tracking unerringly onto the target.