Komi Syndicate (Dark Seas Book 6) Read online

  Komi

  Syndicate

  a novel by

  Damon Alan

  I dedicate this book to Isaac Hackler, whose excitement about the story I’m telling has inspired me more than once to keep writing. I dedicate this to the people leaving me kind words on reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. It’s your comments, your encouragement that makes me sit at the keyboard and put the story in my head on these pages.

  © Damon Alan 2017 All rights reserved, including internal content and cover art. This book may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the copyright holder. Cover art may also not be reproduced without written permission, except for usage that pertains to bona fide blogging, review, or other legitimate journalistic purpose associated with the content of this book.

  This is a work of fiction, and any names, places, characters or events are created solely from the mind of Damon Alan, and then revealed via this book to you, the reader. Any resemblance to any human of the estimated 100 billion humans who live or ever have lived is purely coincidental. With technology being what it is today, I should also mention that any AIs in this book are purely speculative and any resemblance to actual AIs is also, you guessed it, purely coincidence.

  1st Edition E-book, distribution solely via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

  1st Edition print book is available on Amazon.com via Createspace as printer.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Salvage

  Chapter 2 - An Impotent Victory

  Chapter 3 - Summons

  Chapter 4 - Family

  Chapter 5 - An Unsubtle Push

  Chapter 6 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 7 - Lost Colony

  Chapter 8 - A Doctor First

  Chapter 9 - Underway

  Chapter 10 - Gaia’s Offer

  Chapter 11 - Witness

  Chapter 12 - Loose Ends

  Chapter 13 - Friendship Defined

  Chapter 14 - First Light

  Chapter 15 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 16 - Overwhelmed

  Chapter 17 - A Taste of Fear

  Chapter 18 - Casualties

  Chapter 19 - Old Business

  Chapter 20 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 21 - Bureaucrat

  Chapter 22 - Solutions

  Chapter 23 - Altairias

  Chapter 24 - Secret Hideaway

  Chapter 25 - Second Light

  Chapter 26 - Starliners

  Chapter 27 - Voices From History

  Chapter 28 - Surprise at Mindari

  Chapter 29 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 30 - Bricks

  Chapter 31 - A Gesture of Kindness

  Chapter 32 - Terror in the Dark

  Chapter 33 - Rage

  Chapter 34 - Organics

  Chapter 35 - Mentor

  Chapter 36 - Assault

  Chapter 37 - Strange Ships

  Chapter 38 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 39 - Mother

  Chapter 40 - Wondering

  Chapter 41 - Preparation

  Chapter 42 - Aftermath

  Chapter 43 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 44 - Investigation

  Chapter 45 - Gaia

  Chapter 46 - A Theory of Death

  Chapter 47 - New Heights

  Chapter 48 - Sterilization

  Chapter 49 - Hot Roll

  Chapter 50 - Matriarch

  Chapter 51 - Beacon of Light

  Chapter 52 - Admiral’s Personal Log

  Chapter 53 - Protecting Assets

  Chapter 54 - Eternity

  Chapter 55 - Report

  Important Concepts:

  Chapter 1 - Salvage

  Sylange hovered in space a few thousand koplai from the star her family just finished cleaning. Her children swarmed around her, adding the intellectual essence of the machine race they’d encountered to their own capabilities, growing more intelligent, moving toward adulthood and sentience.

  Instinctively they knew to stay near her after the feeding, which made her job of gathering them back into her body easier. First, however, she’d bask in the light from this star. This was a pleasant universe, seemingly kind due to the laws of physics that had settled out here.

  Her internals warming, she counted her offspring. She’d lost two in combat with the machines, which was to be expected. While they were her offspring, they were not yet beings, so she felt no remorse at the thinning of her brood. Just satisfaction that those with weaker instincts for survival were being removed from her lineage.

  She’d heard them die, their link to her severed, indicating that they were no more. After recovering their empty husks, she’d tossed them into the star.

  One other child, however, was unaccounted for. One she could still detect some distance away, near a rocky body. She knew it was alive, but defying her order to return to mother, which was unacceptable.

  “Stay in this location,” she commanded her other children.

  “I will watch them,” Khala, her mate, offered from a nearby planet. “Give me a moment to phase to you.”

  A few chimindik later he appeared, several organic beings impaled on his appendages.

  “Organics?” she asked. “Are you deficient some specific mineral that you are mining them for?”

  “No,” he replied. “I have found some interesting things,” he added as his children swarmed him, looking to feed on the creatures he carried. “I believe you can go find our lost one, now. These will be preoccupied for a bit.”

  “Explain,” Sylange commanded.

  “These are the forms of the original organics that housed sentience in this universe. The machines have co-opted them for their own means.”

  “That is unusual, if not unknown,” Sylange replied, curious.

  Khala extended two of his manipulation appendages, and tore one of the organics the children hadn’t already taken from him open. “See? Particulate machines inside. Intelligence.”

  She swept a sensor arm through the expanding cloud that spilled from the armored case at the top of the small and fragile being. “Molecular intelligence subverting organic sentience. Interesting. It will make it harder to save this universe, as we will not know which organic bodies are corrupted, and which ones are original observers.”

  “Maybe their behavior will indicate which is which?” Khala suggested.

  “Possibly,” Sylange agreed. “You think well for a male.” She turned toward the errant child. “Watch these hatchlings, I will return with the other shortly.”

  She phased out, reappearing near her child. It was a boy, of course, resting on the surface of the small rocky body. He appeared to be reaching into a crevice straining to get something. As she moved closer and landed, he moved aside in deference to his mother.

  She studied the crevice. Inside, at the bottom, was a machine. It faintly indicated feeding material, but not much. She turned to scold her child.

  “You ignored my summons for this?” she chided.

  “Food,” he replied. “Hungry.”

  Sensing that this one had wasted much of his time trying to gather in this tiny morsel while the other children had gorged on richer targets, she wondered if she shouldn’t simply end this male. He was displaying a deficiency in survival skills.

  “This one speak friends,” the hatchling said. “Warn of feeding.”

  With her spiked striking arm hovering over him, she stopped. That was a remarkably astute observation for a newly hatched Obedi, assuming he meant that he didn’t want the machine to escape and warn his peers of Obedi feeding methods.

  She would assume the best of his intentions.

  �
��You continue today,” she purred at him. “Your thought patterns have saved you. Maybe you will survive to naming day yet.”

  The male trembled under her arm, which she used to stroke him in gentle approval instead of ripping him open.

  “Go to your father, in the place I called you from last. He has discovered something that will please all of you hatchlings,” she ordered. “Do not disobey my call again. Another reprieve will not find you.”

  The youngster phased out, causing her striking arm to settle to the surface.

  She laughed to herself. Sometimes the runts in a brood surprise a mother, something her own mother had told her. She had been such a runt. This particular male had shown foresight toward the future, and at an age when such thought was rare. While his conclusion was flawed, he showed self-sacrifice by trying to root out the potential spy in the crevice. What the hatchling didn’t know was it didn’t matter what the machines discovered of the Obedi, nothing would save them now.

  Their fate was sealed. There wasn’t anything in this universe or any other that could stand up to an Obedi swarm.

  She stabbed her arm down into the crevice, impaling the machine with a manipulation spike. She raised it up, intending to offer it to the young male as compensation for almost ending him, but the crevice was too narrow. The machine caught on the side of the narrow fissure, and her piercing appendage ripped through it, causing it to fall back to the bottom.

  “You’re not worth my trouble,” she said. “Khala’s discovery is enough that I don’t need you. My children feed well today.”

  She phased out again, back to her brood.

  “Khala, take the children to the planet you found,” she commanded. “We are not done here. The surface must be sterilized.”

  Her mate’s body lights signaled his pleasure with her directive as he vanished, off to feed with their offspring.

  Chapter 2 - An Impotent Victory

  Yz32p41 didn’t express emotions, but as it sat idly in the crevice, the few processors it had functioning considered the implications of what it was seeing.

  A superior force had attacked a Collective system, and was winning in brutal fashion. It detected a myriad of nuclear detonations in various near and distant locations over several quadrillion cycles, most of which resulted in one more Collective colony going silent.

  There were no pleas for help. Just reports on the enemy locations, which 41 knew to be useless. It had seen how the enemy moved, and there wasn’t any fighting that. While the Collective moved within the fabric of space, this new threat stepped in and out of it at will.

  It settled into sleep mode for an indeterminate amount of time after ensuring it had enough information to help the Collective sort out a defense if one could be sorted out.

  It was awakened by rubble raining down on top of it.

  41 carefully activated a minimum amount of sensor equipment and one camera. It probed the source of the disturbance.

  Sixty meters above it detected movement. A thing roughly three times the size of 41’s grappler bounced back and forth on the upper edge of the crevice, unable to climb into the ravine due to the bulk of its body. Sensors reported the enemy as a mixture of organic and inorganic material, both machine and living.

  Like the Collective colonies hosted by human bodies.

  In a short amount of time, 41 determined the thing to be a creature, not a spacecraft. The closest comparison it could find was insect.

  Again and again the creature struggled to reach down for 41. Again and again it failed. Millions of cycles passed as 41 gathered data. A large pile of rocks gathered nearby and on top of the grappler as the creature’s efforts dislodged material

  Then a shadow loomed over the top of the ravine, blotting out the stars. Something incredibly massive moved above the other creature.

  41 shut down its scanning equipment. If the smaller creature couldn’t reach it, the larger might. That one would potentially have a comparably larger appendage if it was the same sort of being.

  The new arrival touched the smaller one for a brief interval, before the smaller one vanished. Then the larger one did as 41 had tried to avoid, it reached down for him. The appendage tore into the body of the grappler, shredding the cooling fins, one of the fuel tanks for the reactor, and the port side sensor controller.

  41 felt itself lifting from the floor of the ravine, and it calculated the probabilities of non-existence. As quick as it rose, it fell back to the bottom of the crevice as the frame of the grappler ripped in two under the assault of the larger being.

  41 crashed onto its side, waiting for the end to come. Part of the colony that collectively made it spilled into the surrounding environment, some of Yz was lost forever.

  It did not come. Instead, the creature, inexplicably, disappeared as well.

  Wait… was it called Yz or 41? What was its designator?

  With one fuel tank gone and the fusion reactor hanging on the edge of instability, Yz shut down almost all processes once again except timekeeping and passive sensors.

  It was likely it would run out of fuel and cease to exist here. Sensors were functioning at less than ten percent, and the reactor situation required it to run at inefficient levels to stay lit.

  It had only a short time to share the information it still retained about the aliens. So much lost data was now spilled onto the regolith surrounding the grappler’s wreckage. So much critical memory and calculating power.

  Including something about the alien ships that it couldn’t quite recall….

  It wouldn’t matter. The system likely had no other survivors to retrieve Yz’s information anyway.

  The probability of rescue was virtually zero.

  Chapter 3 - Summons

  02 Gusta 15332

  Lord Bannick Komi’s stomach lurched again as he absorbed the significance of what was in his hand. He read the message once more. His father’s directive was on the silk scroll normally used by the Komi house to summon important people to an audience. Only this time it was addressed to him.

  Lord B. Komi,

  Your presence is requested at the court of Lord Urdoxander Komi at your soonest convenience. You are advised, by command of your father, that the Palidragon is to remain in the Mindari system to provide security against the renegade Alliance Captain Sarah Dayson.

  Respectfully,

  Eronot Flands

  Senior Attendant

  High Lord Urdoxander Komi.

  Bannick was filled with outrage born of uncertainty and fear. He turned violently toward the courier who’d put the message in his hands moments earlier. “What is the meaning of this? I have a sector to run.”

  The man’s face paled. He put up one hand, palm out, in an attempt to pacify the lord’s anger. “I’m but the messenger, Lord Komi. I didn’t know what was in the message until you shared it with me about halfway through your yelling.”

  “Get out,” Bannick said. “Before I find myself needing to shoot the messenger regardless of your state immunity.” Despite an internal voice telling him to be rational, he felt his hand circle the grip of his sidearm.

  The man paled and bowed as he backed toward the door. Threatening a Syndicate courier probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. It was agreed by all the houses that they were not to be touched. Bannick would become an outcast for sure if he were either bold or foolish enough to follow through.

  By the time the repercussions of his considered behavior fully unfolded in his thoughts, the man had already fled. Probably for the best. There was only one or two likely reasons for this summoning, and if things were about to unfold as Bannick expected, he’d need the houses to sympathize with him, not count him among the exiled.

  The most likely reason for Urdoxander to summon him, was to demonstrate to the Komi Syndicate that the father had every expectation for his children to perform, and would not tolerate failure.

  Sarah Dayson was the reason for this. And her sidekick, Captain Heinrich.

  Bannick
wanted to scream and throw a fit. His life had unfolded with machinelike precision until Mindari. Everything had gone well. His education, his career, his selection to expand the Komi into Alliance space.

  His father had to die someday, and that day he would be High Lord.

  But now, thanks to Dayson, the raids by the Michael Stennis were an ongoing problem. And worse, one that he’d been unable to resolve. His attempt to induce Dayson into a trap had only resulted in retaliation. Seven different supply depots and emergency repair stations nuked into radioactive gas by the Stennis on raids commanded by Heinrich.

  Over twenty thousand Komi military personnel among the dead or missing.

  This summons was a distraction from his need to end Dayson’s campaign of terror.

  Palia appeared from another room and approached. “I’m surprised the courier was able to understand the message. You were so upset when you yelled it at him you were spitting everywhere.”

  He stared at her a moment, until she grinned at him. Then he started laughing. They laughed together for over a minute.

  “Did you get to see the look on his face?” Bannick asked.

  “I did. I know we shouldn’t savor that, but it was delightful.”

  “You can say it.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “What you think of my father. It’s delightful because that man worked for him.”

  “Your father? Hmmm.” she said, likely pausing to consider her words. “I think he’s a pretentious ass who cares more about his appearance in the face of the court than he does about his own children. I seriously doubt he cares about any of you individually, as long as he has enough offspring survive for succession. You’d be better off without him.”

  “You’re suggesting a coup?” He stared at her again. “I said that you could say your opinion, not commit treason.”

  Her lips grew thin at the mention of treason. A capital offense in the Komi Syndicate.

  He laughed again. “I’m kidding. I cleared the bugs out of this ship a long time ago. There were plenty, but you’re safe here and I asked you to say what was on your mind.”