To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well)

by Doug Dandridge

  “And what will that consist of?” asked Watcher with a smile.

  “Why sir,” said Pandi, a smile cracking on her face. “What do you think? Me fucking your brains out, of course.”

  “I have a lot of brains,” said Watcher with a laugh.

  “Then I have a lot of fucking to do, don’t I,” said Pandi, leading him along the path.

  * * *

  “You be careful out there,” said Watcher over the com link.

  “I think they’re the ones who need to be careful,” said Pandi with a grin as she ran down a last check of the vessel. Avenger was equipped with a score of wormholes, including a dedicated com link, and a passenger gate that led back to the Donut. The twenty thousand ton ship was capable of pulling two thousand gees constant acceleration, with a bit more for emergencies, and could pass light speed with her inertial bubble system. Pandora had thought of using one of the more advanced hyper systems, but had decided it wasn’t needed for an insystem mission like this.

  The vessel was as heavily armed as could be, equipped with two one hundred gigawatt lasers in ring mounts fore and aft, and a quartet of particle beams that were fed through wormholes from the station. The particles were actually accelerated in massive arrays on the station, then shot out of the apertures on the ship on command. She also carried sixteen of the high gee missiles, as well as strong plasma fields for defense. Though not their size and weight, she was the match for any single enemy battleship.

  “Don’t get too cocky,” said Watcher, wagging a finger. “They are still capable of taking that ship out, and you with it. I know having an escape hole might make you feel confident of taking on anything, but an antimatter explosion would move through that ship faster than you could make it to the wormhole.”

  “I’ll be careful, lover,” said Pandi with a smile. She knew what he said was true, but she was about to go on a campaign, a grand adventure, and she wasn’t about to let facts spoil the excitement she was feeling. And that’s my biggest problem, thought the rational part of her mind, the part she preferred to ignore. And Watcher knows it. He’s just very concerned about losing the woman he loves. So we’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

  “And remember,” said Watcher, finger still wagging, “that those combat robots may not be as formidable as you think. Their Marines outfought twenty times their number of them the last time they were on station. Sentient warriors can outthink robots most times.”

  “These are better models, lover,” said Pandi, pulling up the specs of the combat robots on her link. And they were much better. They hadn’t even attempted to copy the forms of sentients with these machines, making them instead eight limbed combat chassis that were the best combination of offensive and defensive platforms they could put together.

  “Don’t think that they are invincible,” cautioned Watcher. “Nothing is invincible. Especially hard headed women from Alabama.”

  “And how many Alabamians do you know?” said Pandi with a chuckle, at the same time ordering Avenger to leave her slip.

  “Just one,” said Watcher, a frown on his face. “And that is enough to make me cautious about the breed.”

  “I’ll check in regularly,” said Pandi, moving the one hundred and fifteen meter long ship back out of the slip on one engine.

  To either side were the seven hundred meter lengths of destroyers. They would have been the perfect ships for this mission, able to hold their own against the entire Nation fleet. Unfortunately, the ancestors had not been trusting enough to allow ships capable of doing serious damage to a planet’s biosphere to be run by a single sentient. In fact, it took at least twenty people to run one of the comparatively small warships, which originally operated with a crew of three hundred.

  The outer hatch opened behind Avenger, stopping its motion when it was more than large enough to allow the sixty meter width of the ship to pass. As soon as she was in space the thick hatch slid closed, securing the warships. I’m back in space, thought the woman in exultation. That had always been her dream, and back in the twenty-first century it had become a reality. But this reality was so much better. She would be given the chance to explore a good bit of the Galaxy in her expanded lifetime. To be able to put her boots on the soil of strange planets, with exotic suns in the sky. To talk with aliens and humans from completely different cultures. Her dream realized.

  Avenger pivoted in space, turning her front away from the station. While capable of max acceleration in any vector, no matter her orientation, to Pandi it just felt more natural to have the nose pointed where she wanted to go. She shuddered a moment as the blur in space that was the black hole came across her view. That thing almost ate me, she thought, recalling her trip around the hole, just outside the event horizon. She still lay awake at nights wondering about what it would have been like to have fallen in. Complete annihilation? Or would she have been subjectively falling for eternity, never actually reaching the hole, but constantly on the way. That would have been the most horrible way to go, a living Hell, worse than anything her father could have come up with from his so called holy book.

  “Accelerate on programmed course,” she ordered the ship as soon as it stopped traversing. Avenger engaged all three of the inertialess drives on command, the three globes on the stern pushing against the fabric of space. This close to the hole it was a strain to pull away, and the ship followed a parabolic orbit to gain distance from the gravity well and get further away from its attractive force. The Deep Dark Well, she thought of it. A well that once fallen into there was no return.

  The ship continued to move away from that distortion of space time, building velocity. At twice the distance from launch Avenger was only having to deal with one quarter the pull, at double the distance again one sixteenth, according to the square of the distance.

  Pandora watched her scanners the entire way out of the near gravity well of the Hole. She could see that the Nation ships were busy, moving into a formation, as if they were going somewhere. A check of the incoming vessels gave a high probability that they were going to come out of warp very near to the Surya base around Topaz IV. And that was where she figured the task force within the Supersystem would also head, so they could get there about the same time as their outsystem force, to catch the Kingdom task force in a nutcracker. And that was where she needed to be.

  Pandora set the ship to get her there just before the outsystem force. She was sure she would be a surprise that they wouldn’t find pleasant. Nav set, she lay back in her comfortable chair and willed her reticular activating system to put her to sleep, and her internal alarm to wake her up when they neared the operation area. She still felt fatigued from the night before, which brought a smile to her face. Watcher had been very aroused, and very much into it. It was funny how knowing a loved one was going into danger could affect the libido. She would have to remember that in the future.

  Chapter Four

  There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with. William Halsey

  Pandora felt totally rested when her internal alarm woke her. She quickly checked the readouts from the ship, satisfied that they were about where she had planned to be from the outset. She was just entering the Topaz System, moving in FTL but starting to decelerate. Avenger was one hour out from the gravity well limit, a limit that would give her problems if she penetrated it while still in FTL. Crossing that limit would disrupt the inertial bubble and dump her back into normal space, where faster that light travel was impossible. Inertia would flood the ship, and most likely she would come back into space as a spray of near light speed particles. Not a proposition the woman was looking forward too. But the ship was in the proper decel profile to come out of hyper well short of the limit, and decelerate down to point nine light before she entered the system proper. From there she would continue to decel into the system until she was at her attack profile of point seven light, and heading for her target.

  “Show me t
he disposition of the enemy,” she told the ship’s computer, and a holo screen switched the view from real space to a tactical representation. Just like from one of those old movies me and my boyfriends used to pretend to watch while we were groping, she thought with a smile. Except that she was actually paying attention to those old Space Wars movies, as they showed her dream in full CGI glory. And here she was.

  What the hell do I think I’m doing, she thought as she tracked the enemy ships on the holo. I’m not a damned naval officer. She thought about that for a moment as she watched the vector arrows of the first Nation of Humanity force move into the space of the G2 class star, heading toward the Kingdom of Surya force. But I guess I’m the best we have.

  She switched her attention to the second enemy force, moving from the opposite direction from the first and timed to reach the Surya base just minutes behind the first. Catching them in a nutcracker, and wiping them out before they have a chance. And they can’t even see them coming until they turn off that damned dangerous drive of theirs.

  The Nation ships actually destroyed the space in front of the ship, the space that photons had to traverse to deliver their information. And the photons disappeared with that space, rendering the ships invisible from the front. The Supersystem was filled with probes that reported back to the station by wormhole gates. Information that was transmitted to Avenger, giving her a glimpse at ships traveling effectively faster than light. Their drives also caused ripples of gravity waves that travelled through all the dimensions of Hyper that the more advanced Donut vessels used, allowing Pandora’s own sensors to track the ships by those distortions.

  And they surely can’t see me traveling hyperluminal, she thought with a smile. When she slowed down her light waves would again precede her ship. If she happened to be generating any. The ship’s stealth field absorbed light and did not retransmit it. And even ninety-nine point nine percent of her heat was sucked away by the wormhole heat sink. The first they would see of Avenger was when she closed to attack range, and probably only after she opened fire. Otherwise, even looking right at her with their sensors they were unlikely to see her.

  Pandora checked her weapons load, something that Watcher had insisted on her doing as often as possible before closing to firing range. She had of course balked at that, until he pointed that all the elite warriors of the ages were always making sure their weapons were ready, all the time. Because all it took was one misfire to kill a soldier. So we’ll just have to see that nothing like that happens to Daddy Carl’s little girl. And Carl Latham, her father, was long dust in the earth, not that she cared much for what the hyper religious bastard had thought then.

  Everything checked out, and she watched as her velocity dropped to below light and the range closed on the target. A few of the enemy ships shifted in formation, and she wondered for a moment if they might have spotted her. But after the initial shift there was no more motion other than straight at their target.

  Pandora thought about her strategy for another moment while the closing velocity and the distance dropped. The particle beam projectors gave her the option of four different loads, all corresponding to a separate wormhole portal to a different accelerator loop on the station. Charged particles were best for hitting targets with full force, as they didn’t lose velocity in a charge strip, which wasn’t required for them. The problem being that any kind of electromagnetic field could repel them, or at least spread them from a concentrated beam to a diffuse shower. Uncharged particles didn’t have that problem, and could hit with a hard kinetic impact, but still lost some velocity in the stripping process. Negative matter was a special use weapon. Negative matter simply made a like amount of matter disappear on contact. The matter and any effects it carried, including kinetic energy, just ceased to exist. Due to conservation of mass more of the impacted matter would disappear, but not all that much, as a little bit of mass was the equivalent of a lot of energy. Negative matter was really better when something needed to be breached without a lot of collateral damage. And of course antimatter had to carry a charge, or it was nothing. An uncharged anti-proton was a neutron. But antimatter was the ultimate particle beam, causing kinetic destruction followed by the effects of total conversion of its mass and an equivalent mass of matter to energy.

  Pandora set one of the particle beams for uncharged and one for antimatter, figuring that the uncharged beam might cause enough surface damage to mag field projector units to allow the antimatter through. And then she checked her missiles. Then she checked all the rest of her systems, and went over the weapons systems again. She was satisfied with all the charges, lasers and defensive fields, but forced herself to check them again anyway. And then she waited until the distance closed some more.

  Got to watch those space altering fields, she thought, watching the enemy vectors closely. Coming in front of a Nation ship would destroy her vessel. Come directly astern? She wasn’t sure what would happen, but she didn’t want to chance anything. So she set her approach and retreat vectors with care, then waited. Until the wait was over.

  The ship’s clock started a countdown at ten seconds, Pandora just an observer to things that were going to happen faster than even her reaction time could account for. At three seconds one of the enemy ships started to turn its vector a little, followed by another two a second later. They’ve seen me, she thought. Too late, she thought with a wolfish grin, as Avenger opened up with all weapons.

  The lasers from the front ring hit first, two beams on two targets. Both ships had electromag fields up, not strong enough, as they were not expecting an attack. The ships were still moving at several times the speed of light subjective, so the beams were fired well ahead and shot quickly along the hulls, the projectors swinging them along to increase the milliseconds of contact, ripping through metal and opening rooms to space. Particle beams hit a moment later, a quick burst of each on the two ships that were targeted. Uncharged particles hit the hulls, causing ripping damage. Followed by the antimatter beam which hit with explosive force.

  Avenger dropped a quartet of missiles at the same time she fired her beam weapons. The missiles took off at thirty thousand gravities accel, moving onto their separate targets, vessels further back in the formation that they could intersect at the times the hyperspatial ships got there. It was a difficult mathematical problem, and like most such it didn’t provide perfect answers. One came in too far to the front of one vessel and disappeared from current space-time. One missed to the stern of a ship and exploded, but the blast could not catch the ship. One entered the actual field containing a ship exploded overhead, sending a flood of heat and radiation into that vessel. The last missile hit its target dead center. The quarkium warhead blasted with hundreds of gigatons of power, and the ship was blown first to pieces, then to particles as its own antimatter breached containment. The space destroying drive died in that instant.

  “Eat shit, you xenophobe motherfuckers,” yelled Pandi over the grav wave com, following with her best rebel yell.

  And then she was past the enemy ships, her stern lasers and particle beams taking them under fire for the fraction of a millisecond that they were viable targets. She didn’t bother with any missiles, they just would have been decelerating to slow down from the imparted momentum of her ship, and would have been out of range by the time they had developed any vector toward the enemy warships. Pandora smirked as she looked into her viewer, watching the expanding mass of one enemy ship, and the dead in space hulks of two others. One of the two looked lifeless, while the other was a hive of activity as spacesuits and repair bots started to swarm over the surface.

  Not bad for a quick strike in what really isn’t a warship, she thought, ordering Avenger to begin braking and vector changes to bring her onto the second group, a maneuver which could take several hours. By that time the enemy ships would be in normal space, and she had no doubt they would find a message waiting for them that told of her existence. The next group would be waiting.

  “Cou
ld I convince you to preclude the second attack,” came the voice of Watcher over the com, a timber of anxiety coming through the words.

  “No way, lover,” said Pandora, grinning. “I’m having too much fun.”

  “You realize that you have just killed over a thousand intelligent beings.”

  You’re one to talk, thought Pandi, catching herself before she said something hurtful to Watcher. After all, it wasn’t really he who had destroyed Galactic civilization. It had only been his body under control of another mind. Then Pandi thought about the men she had killed, and that brought another smile to her face. I’m not always the nice girl, she thought, imagining the destruction of that ship her missile had hit. And times like these call for us bad girls.

  “I wish I could bring those bastards back to life so I could kill them again,” said Pandora through gritted teeth as she let the anger at those kind of people build within her. “Those xenophobic, misogynistic, genocidal son of bitches.”

  “You are not in the proper emotional state to go into combat,” said Watcher, his voice tone calming. “You need to be in a better frame of mind, and not controlled by your emotions.”

  “You know,” said Pandi, checking her tactical display to make sure nothing was about to bite her in the ass, “my uncle Clayton told me stories about being in the Marines during the Third Crusade. And I think he would disagree with your assessment of the utility of emotions during combat. He was a fighter pilot, and the Marines never believed in turning over air support roles to robots. He told me that a good old mad was just the thing to take into a fight.”

  “Interesting,” said Watcher, his voice so calm it felt almost hypnotic. “But I think he was wrong in this situation. Your brain is the only thing keeping you alive.”

  “You trying to hypnotize me,” said Pandi, her voice rising along with her anger. “If you want to talk rationally, then let’s talk. But none of that damned mesmerizing crap.”