The Deep Dark Well

by Doug Dandridge

  The crew, realized Lucille. They were helpless in combat mind link. They needed free action to be able to defend themselves. Terminate mind link, she ordered, forcibly ejecting all of the members of the crew. They would be groggy for a second. But they would soon be aware of the danger.

  * * *

  “What in the name of all the Gods just happened?” exclaimed Admiral G’narjanasan. The human ship had been right in the path of a trio of missiles fired from one of his battleships. Then it had not been there. It had been someplace else. An instantaneous translation of space. Quite impossible, he thought. And contrary to all the known laws of physics.

  “Maybe they did something to our sensory input,” said one of the junior officers on the bridge.

  “Or they transmitted the data to us,” said another. “Somehow they got it into our systems, like a virus.”

  “Impossible,” said the com officer. “There are too many filters between any uncleared transmissions and our data systems. That information would still be held up in quarantine while check after check was being run on it.”

  “Something happened,” said the admiral, his eye stalks swinging around the bridge to glare at the other officers three at a time. “Either that ship has some unknown capability, or some manner of making us think so. But I need to know what it is.”

  The nightmare of a ship that could instantly translate space ate at his imagination. It could appear right next to his flag, penetrating all of its defenses, to loose a volley of destruction before disappearing. Away from retaliation of any kind.

  “What’s that?” said the tactical officer, breaking through his thought.

  G’Narjanasan looked over at the screens depicting the space around his flagship. His hearts beat faster as the wrongness of what he saw penetrated into his system. The dozens of tentacles, made of something blacker than space, waving around his vessel. A glance at other video inputs showed that the objects were around every ship in the fleet. But nowhere were they more concentrated that around the human ship. Another trick of the human?

  “Open fire on those, things,” he ordered, realizing as he said it that he might have made a mistake. Particle beams and lasers had trouble making a lock. But the crew compensated on manual and they were soon visually aimed at the targets, flaring their beams of death and destruction into the total blackness of the objects. All of the tentacles went wild as some of their fellows were struck. Waving this way and that, though the beams seemed to be having very little effect on them.

  Then they were through the hull of the flagship and the screams of terrified crewmen rang over the com circuits.