The Deep Dark Well

by Doug Dandridge

  Her ship sped away, along toward the next and final target, as she waited in nervous anticipation for the next event that must occur if they were to be successful. It seemed like forever, but the flares in the distance finally erupted, starting the process of nudging the station back into a stable orbit.

  Watcher's right, she thought. The computer still held out the hope that it would survive their attack. And it could not allow itself and the station that housed it to go to destruction in the black hole while hope remained.

  Time to plan for the next leg. This last one was easy. The next one would be anything but. And the ship would present a killable target if the computer located it this time.

  * * *

  There was a glimpse, thought the computer. A small picture of a moving object, accelerating along. It disappeared, then appeared again. Then disappeared. Her ship, if such it was, was damaged, and he could see through the small rupture in her hull, no longer protected by the absorbent skin.

  Not enough of a glimpse to guarantee a disabling shot. Not at the speed it was traveling, piling on more by the second. But that would come. If it were patient and waited, the ship would be at rest, and it would be able to get enough of a target lock to send her spinning out into space. Then whether she lived or died would be up to fate, otherwise known as probability, and the station computer could function with a cleanly programmed conscience.

  Chapter 21

  O, for an engine, to keep back all clocks,

  Or make the sun forget his motion!

  Ben Jonson (1573-1637)

  The wormhole mouth opened before the target area, homing in on the proper orientation to unleash its burst of radiation. Within a microsecond the mouth collapsed, the wormhole flashing out of existence before it could truly stabilize. Within moments another opened a little distance from the first, collapsing just as fast.

  “Damn,” said Watcher, and Pandi looked up from the display at the holo. “Stop the ship. Emergency boost.”

  Pandi ordered an immediate stop, still short of the assault zone.

  “What’s happening? Can’t you open a wormhole?”

  “No. He’s throwing point gravity wells into the wormholes before they can complete their opening, collapsing them. And I’ve already done the mass dump.”

  “Graviton beams?”

  “Yes,” said Watcher. “And I’ll bet he has instantaneous transmission lines all through the area.”

  “I guess it’s time for Plan B,” she said, getting up from her seat.

  “And what is Plan B?”

  “Entry at another point and fighting my way to the target area.”

  “And how do you intend to get out before it swallows you?”

  “Hadn’t thought that one out yet.”

  “I have a better idea,” said Watcher. “Attack from the specified zone, blasting through deep into the hull. Follow up with antimatter. Then attack inward through the wasted zone.”

  “You think that will take out all the defenses?”

  “Probably not,” he answered. “But it will reduce the odds against you.”

  “OK,” she agreed with a nod. “I’m going to suit up. If anything happens to me…”

  “I’ll flood the area with antimatter,” he said. “I won’t allow your sacrifice to go for naught. But be careful and keep your eyes open, and you’ll come back to me.”

  He doesn't sound so sincere at that last, she thought. But what was he expected to say? I think you’re going to die, which will make me very sad, but you must to accomplish my purposes. For after all, it was his salvation he was worried about. She could care less about Galactic civilization, and whether the peoples of the Galaxy took thousands of more years to climb back to the heights they once occupied.

  She added to the suit as he had shown her. This time she was less worried about maneuverability, and more worried about overall firepower. The plasma cannon mounted on the shoulders of the suit, linked into her eyes and the sensory systems of the armored vessel for her body. Portable rocket launchers in sheaths attached to the backpacks. A pouch of grenades on the belt. The box containing the special attached to the other side of the belt.

  She looked over her handiwork. Now the gorilla suit looked even more like a gorilla. She wouldn’t be able to carry all of that if the repellers went out. The repellers would just have to hold up.

  She shuffled back up to the bridge encased in a half ton of armor, weapons and environmental suit. The schematic of the ship came through her link, showing the explosive bolt system that would blow the view screen from the bridge for an emergency exit. The nanobots of the ship’s repair system could build a replacement facsimile on the trip back, if there was a trip back. Speed was more important now than any other factor. She had to fire and get in.

  * * *

  A heavy gauntleted finger hit the commit pad on the control board. The ship accelerated on emergency burst, building up and killing velocity in an instant, sliding into place. Another pad lit as she hit the commit, opening fire with the particle beam weapons. A flood of charged negative matter hit the superstrong material of the hull, disintegrating matter both positive and negative, blasting a large hole deep into the station. Hellfire rocked at the same time, as particle beams of more normal material opened up on her as well.

  Damn, thought Pandi, how has it located me so fast. She stabbed the next commit pad to light, switching the load of the particle beams to antimatter. The ship’s nose swayed back and forth, up and down, as the volatile material was sprayed into the interior of the station. White light flashed as the explosions ripped through the section.

  Hellfire shuddered from another hit, and Pandi cursed her luck. She had hoped to be able to totally fry the interior, all the way to the computer core. The plan had been for nothing to be in her way.

  Her gauntleted hand pushed pads on the control board, maneuvering the ship closer, as she continued the fire upon the station. Another punched pad ceased fire, and then blew the view screen. Vacuum sucked at the air within the bridge, pulling anything not strapped down into the space in front of the ship. Anything, including one woman in a half ton of assault unit.

  Then she was in space, the ship retreating behind her. Within moments the link between her and the ship was severed, and she rotated her suit around to see what had happened. Her eyes widened at the sight of Hellfire, spinning out of control toward the black hole among a cloud of debris. She watched several spins. The bow of the ship was intact, except for the missing view screen. But the stern was a total wreck, inertialess drive ball gone, the attaching boom a shredded mass of metal and crystal.

  No time to think of what she would do to get away. That worry can wait, she thought, as she turned the suit and boosted into the station. Maybe her knight in shining armor would have to ride his charger out and get her. If he had the time, and she gave him the opportunity.

  Small pieces of material struck her suit as she entered through the mass of debris that choked the interior. All hell's broken loose in here, she thought. She had to switch on active radar to avoid large pieces of debris, or even parts of still attached station. The suit maneuvered beautifully, responsive to her signals, accelerating and decelerating smoothly as it changed vectors to get around obstacles.

  Pandi cringed within the suit again and again as objects came out of nowhere to strike her. Thoughts that she might be under attack came to mind, to be quickly rejected as a piece of twisted metal bounce back into the maelstrom. She still worried that a particle might penetrate her suit, killing her before she could do what she had come to accomplish. The thought of drifting here forever struck her as ironic; to travel through time and space to become a derelict like the one she had found so many tens of millennium ago.

  The rational part of her mind realized that wasn’t going to happen, at least not as she was envisioning it. Already the masses of particles were beginning to fall toward the opening as they lost their own explosion provided momentum. They were acting under the pseudogr
avity of the spinning station, settling against the outer skin, or falling through the opening to be captured by the pull of the black hole.

  Her own drive kept her from following them on their paths. If she were killed the drive would eventually die from lack of power, and she would probably take a long fall into the black hole itself.

  Pandi boosted forward on her drive, and the debris began to clear ahead and give her a good view of the excavated chamber. Her ship had blown out a cavity of four or five kilometers in width, and at least ten kilometers in depth. It will have to take me most of the way to the computer core, she thought, though her radar found a solid wall of material ahead, with no obvious openings.

  Pandi checked her position as she moved ahead, readying her own weapons for the continuance of the assault. She sprayed the ceiling ahead from a distance; the beam spread enough to open a large hole. Perfectly she slid through the new opening as she decelerated. Indications were that the space ahead was enclosed.

  The suit came to rest in the hall. She had blasted half way through the next ceiling as well, and her thought was to continue through the way she was going. But first she set charges on the floor behind her. If she had to get out she would have to get out fast, and might not be able to maneuver like she had on the way in.

  Another blast and she was through the next ceiling, the air blowing out into the vacuum. She set more charges while she checked her position. The suit’s on-board computer system was keeping track of her position probably as well as any system could. But she missed the contact with Watcher, advising her along the way. With Hellfire gone there was no way to contact him at the moment, though if she knew him that might just change.

  Get moving, she thought. As she moved up into the large room she had entered she checked her inertial guidance system through the suit’s computer. Less than a hundred meters ahead, the edge of her target, where she could release the special and get out.

  “Pandora Latham,” said the voice of the station computer. “I know you are there.”

  “Great. I’m so happy you’re still paying attention to me.”

  “You do not have to do this, you know,” it said. “We can work together.”

  “Keep talking,” she said. “You might just convince me.”

  Something hit into her left arm, hard. Pain lanced through the assaulted body part. She could hear the sound of air hissing out as she thanked her luck that the impact was below a suit tourniquet. The pressure equalized. Her next thought was to get moving and not provide a shocked, standing target.

  The suit zoomed back as she pivoted and brought her weapon to bear. Her left arm refused to work, and she noted the fact, filing it away for future reference as she took care of the here and now. The here and now included a trio of robots, two firing away at her with small accelerator weapons, the third recharging the chamber of a heavier weapon. Armor piercer, she knew. She had been lucky it hit where it had, having to go through her arm and two sections of armor before being stopped by her side torso armor. But a straight on shot would surely take her out.

  The negative matter beam cut into the robot with the heavy, annihilating the center section of the weapon and blasting a slot through the robot as she moved the beam up. A couple of follow up shots, her aim off a little having to handle her weapon one handed, took out the other two.

  Have to keep my head about me. She tried to ignore the pain in her arm, realizing that the tourniquet seal would kill her arm after a while. But she had to worry about the rest of her.

  She blasted through the next ceiling and set her charges one handed, sweat pouring off of her forehead while she wished she could get to it and wipe it away. The suit environmental system was good, but this perspiration had nothing to do with heat, everything to do with agony. And she couldn’t afford the luxury of a suit-administered hypo. Her mind had to stay clear, and that was not the way to do it.

  * * *

  Watcher cursed to himself yet again as he tried to piggyback a signal through to Pandi. The last he had seen of her was a glimpse of her suit going into the station as the ship camera rotated to try and keep track, failing as the ship spun under it on its way to destruction. She had gotten in, but how far? And was she still on the assault, or the defensive, or neither?

  There was very little he could do to help her until she deployed the special, but not knowing was eating a hole in his heart. And the computer was still blocking all his attempts to access any of the resources of the station beyond the control of this center.

  Well, he thought, I could fire up the power system. That was still under his control. His mind centered on the system before him. He ordered the switching of the magnetic field to full power, turning the black hole again into an enormous electrical generator. The computer would know he was about to open another wormhole. He just had to hope that it didn’t guess where, or figure out how to stop it from doing its job.

  * * *

  Just ahead in this large chamber she could see the warning signs on the wall ahead. The detonator chamber, this one further in than the others, and supposedly evacuated of all of its antimatter. Her target area, as far as she was supposed to go. At this point she was just a delivery person, and the delivery only needed to be made for her to accomplish her mission.

  Doors swung open as those who wished to interrupt the delivery entered. Dozens of them, all of the smaller combat models, wicked looking rifles of unfamiliar design in their hands.

  “Stop, Pandora Latham,” said the station computer over its com link. “You will be allowed to go no further.”

  “You’re not able to kill me,” she said. “At least not directly.”

  “I do not need to kill you to stop you,” it said. “These robots are equipped with high powered gamma ray lasers. They will cut through your suit in less than a second.”

  “Killing me? You know your programming won’t allow that.”

  “Not killing you,” it said, “if I disable you by amputating your limbs. You will survive. In great agony, but you will survive. One day I may even allow you to receive a regrowth procedure. One day.”

  “And why haven’t you already done it?” she asked, hoping she knew the answer.

  “I would prefer to not damage you any more than necessary,” it answered, and she knew it was lying. It thought she was carrying some kind of powerful weapon on her that she would use to destroy it. And a stray shot might set it off. It was probably trying to initiate a thorough scan on her now, a project her suit would try to defeat as long as possible. And it was probably trying to puzzle out just what kind of weapon she was carrying.

  And it was secure in the knowledge that nothing she could carry in her suit would do the job. Even if she were made out of antimatter, the most powerful concentrated energy source known, she would not be able to defeat the armor ahead of her. But it had to think she had some kind of plan, though its machine lack of imagination was hindering its thought processes. And anything at all that puzzled it was to her advantage.

  “Looks like a standoff to me,” she said, thinking of how to open the package before it took her arms and legs off.

  “I am curious,” it said. “Just what have you with you that could blast through over sixty meters of superhard materials, and deliver a death blow to thousands of cubic kilometers of station?”

  “We don’t mean to destroy you,” she said as she looked over the robots that kept their weapons steadily on her. “That wouldn’t have served our purposes nearly as well as taking control of you. After all, you are still a perfectly functional device, if we could get rid of your personality.”

  “And how did you plan on taking control of me? Through an implanted program of some kind? I would be able to defeat any attempt at reprogramming.”

  “Then I guess you have nothing to worry about. Especially since I never made it into your processor in the first place.”

  “And how did you plan to reprogram me?”

  “With this small quantum computer in my belt pouch
.”

  “Another of those damned things,” it said, its intonation like a spit of the words. She had hoped it would hate the kind of computer that was to supersede it. Its pseudo-personality was very well developed, and very predictable.

  “Toss the thing on the floor,” it ordered. “I will order one of my robots to destroy it. Then you will accompany them to a holding area where we will begin your reeducation.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “The robots will take you to the holding area as a quadruple amputee, and the reeducation process will be much more painful.”

  Pandi nodded her head as she pulled the strap holding the pouch to her belt and released the package. Her good hand gripped it as she looked around, as if seeking an escape.

  “Nothing cute now,” it said. “Just toss the box onto the floor. I think we will then follow with anything else that can come off of the suit. No use taking chances that you might have another surprise on your person.”

  Pandi tossed the box on the floor gently, well away from her, as she waited for the computer’s next move.

  “Wormholes,” it said. She jerked slightly at the reference.

  “Your friend the Watcher was still trying to generate wormholes. I think he was still trying to attack my machinery with gamma radiation. Which of course would have been deadly for you. I guess you never know who your friends are.”

  “I guess I’ll have to be more careful in the future,” she said with a one armed shrug.

  “We will make sure of it,” said the computer, as one of the robots moved his weapon to cover the small box sitting on the middle of the floor. “I wonder if it will feel fear as it is destroyed.”

  The box vaporized as the invisible beam of radiation intersected it.

  “And so it dies,” said the computer. “That which was built to replace me.”

  The shimmering mirror shape grew swiftly from where the few solid remains of the box sat. Robots jerked their weapons toward it. They might have been firing away at it for all she knew, with the soundless, invisible destructive beams. If so they would do nothing to affect it.