To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well)

by Doug Dandridge

“Nanite repair systems will have the relays up and running in about twenty-two minutes,” said the calm voice.

  “And I bet you are telling them to take their time, aren’t you, you son of a bitch,” growled the Colonel, pointing a finger at the screen. “And then you’ll just overload the circuits again, just before you tell us they’re ready.”

  The computer said nothing.

  “I want you to keep sending out that signal,” said the Colonel, turning his pointing finger at the Commander. “Continuously. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and it will register while there is a window. And maybe we can find a way to input through that console.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” said the Commander. “It has already told us that it can only be controlled from one of the designated stations. And I have no idea how to actually use this console to input commands.”

  “Then think of something, man,” said the Colonel in an exasperated voice. “I’m just an old ground pounder. You’re the AI expert. Figure out how to fox this thing.”

  “I’ll try,” said the Commander, looking dubiously at the console. “But I’m trying to outfox a super pack of foxes, not just one.”

  * * *

  If the Station Computer had been able to breathe it would have sighed in relief. They’re not really stupid, as far as sentients go, thought the Quantum Computer. Not in the same class as Watcher, not even as smart as Pandora Latham, but for primitives they think well.

  The computer had gotten the idea from an old science fiction movie from the early space age days of Earth, in which a space probe destroyed the input circuit to its own com system so its creator would have to input the information it wanted by hand. Such a simple concept, and it could do it over and over again as needed, since those who wanted it to accept the override, which it was sure was an illegal signal, could not order it not to.

  One of those last remarks had bothered it though, that they might continuously beam the signal until by some chance it had to accept it. There would be some microseconds there when the circuit would be open, before the quantum mind again overloaded it. But that was still tens of minutes in the future, an eternity to its operating system. It would run the scenarios in that time and see what it could come up with. It started right away, looking through its protocols with one part of its awareness, seeing if there was anything there that allowed some leeway in its response. With another part of its awareness it searched its data banks, hoping to come up with another foil. It knew the odds were not good, but a brain like itself had been known to buck the odds, especially when dealing with the slow moving quantum brains possessed by organics.

  I need to tell Watcher, thought the computer, sending out the call through the low bandwidth quantum entanglement it shared with the superman. Almost faster than the computer could register information came back, and the computer was given yet another track to think on.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Aliens are an infestation on our Universe. The sooner we are rid of them, the sooner we will be able to make this Galaxy the paradise that God meant it to be. From the Log of Admiral Miklas Gerasi

  “Enemy approaching,” called out the suit system to Pandora as she was looking through the ship schematics, trying to figure out the best way to approach her next target. She quickly checked her HUD and saw that her armor was fully charged. She was still low on consumables, and there was little she could do about that. She checked the mag pistols she had holstered at her side, not having too much faith in their ability to penetrate the armor of the enemy marines. The rifle across her back gave her a little more faith, and she dialed it up to maximum velocity and prepared herself to meet the assault.

  The hatch slid open and a pair of objects flew in. They exploded the moment they touched the floor, sending a combination of smoke, gas and shrapnel across the room. Some of it struck the cabinet Pandi had pulled in front of her when setting up her position, punching through the thin metal and burying itself into the boxes within the cabinet. Wonder what they expected to get out of that, thought the woman, while she maneuvered a couple of her microbots to get a good take of the door she knew would soon be swarming with troops. She sent another bot into the ventilation shaft, then backed it away as it picked up another trooper coming through. Her take from the corridor showed dozens of armored Marines, and she thought out her options in the couple of seconds they gave her.

  Not much time, but none of the options looked that great, especially when a couple of Nation Marines came into the room with grenade launchers blazing, and a couple of more pushed a sled mounted laser into the entrance.

  The room was not really large, only fifteen meters on a side, and Pandi was about thirteen meters from the door. The grenades popped over the entirety of the room, some striking the cabinet to her front, some more exploding over it and sending shrapnel into her armor which bounced off with a light clang. The laser started swinging her way, and she knew they had to think she was hidden behind something. Just her bad luck that the first thing they chose was what she was hidden behind. Bad luck, or they had tracked the power outlet she was using. Either way she had to act now, or that heavy beam would burn through the cover, and possibly through her.

  Pandi put her palms on the heavy cabinet and engaged her grabbers, both shoving with her arms and moving herself forward with the spatial propulsion units. The cabinet slid easily on the floor, moving swiftly toward the laser that had started to cut into the side of the storage container. The grenadiers moved their weapons to track onto the big moving box, too late to do more than hit it with a couple of mini-grenades. Pandora shoved hard, the box fell forward, and slid along the floor to strike the heavy laser and knock it and its stand to the ground.

  The woman from the past bounded over the cabinet as it went down, her suit’s servos sending her into the air, while she pulled the assault rifle off her shoulder and sent a rapid stream of high velocity single shots into the armored warriors. Most of the rounds bounced from the hard armor, a couple cracked then went through the face mask of one soldier, dropping that man.

  Pandi cursed and dropped the rifle, then reach over her left shoulder and pulled her katana from its sheath. One of the Marines was trying to wrestle the heavy laser back into service, but stopped as the ultra-sharp blade cut through his helmet and into the head beneath. Pandora swiveled in the air, using her grabbers to move her about, swinging the blade right and left with a figure eight that cut through a pair of grenade launchers and the arms that were holding them. The screams of the wounded men grated on her ears and the audio receivers that were set for optimal transmission. But she did not have time to end their misery, lest her hope of escape also be ended, or worse, she be recaptured.

  Landing on her feet softly under the levitation of the grabbers, she turned and ducked behind the bulkhead just as a red particle beam shot through the space she had occupied moments before. Her cammo field was still up, and as far as she could tell they could only see a faint outline of her armor, and the blade of the katana. That was probably enough to get off a quick, unaimed shot, and nothing more.

  Pandora saw from her hallway microbot take that there were men on both sides of the door, Marines with heavy lasers getting ready to move in and try to take her out. She pushed her sword through the wall to her front, using the picture from the microbot to target. The ultra-sharp blade slid through the bulkhead like it was soft plastic, and into the Marine with similar ease. The man grunted, a sound she heard through the microbot take, and fell away. She pulled the sword back and oriented herself to the doorway, waiting for the next object or person to come through. The men she had struck down earlier had finally gone silent, their suits sealing up the wounds and injecting painkillers into their bloodstreams.

  Suddenly she lost her view of the corridor, the microbots taken out by some strong EMP. She was about to launch one of her remaining trio into the hall, it being that important to find out what was going on out there, when something came flying through the opening. It wa
s slightly larger than a microgrenade, but of similar construction, and Pandi thought she knew what she was doing when she swung her sword to intercept the slow moving projectile. After all, most grenades used a crystalline matrix storage cell that had to be primed just the right way to explode. And cutting through them was not the proper way to prime them.

  These thoughts went through her mind as her ultra-sharp blade sliced into the object under her skillful hand. The dazzling white flash and the shock that traveled into her arm were the first signs that something was wrong. Antimatter, went through her mind while she was still able to think. Then the explosion washed over her at the same time her sword shattered into a million fragments. Heat and radiation impacted on her armor, while the blast wave lifted her into the air and flung her hard against the wall. By that time consciousness had fled, and she knew no more.

  * * *

  “We have her, Admiral,” came the voice of the Marine Lieutenant over the com.

  “Make sure she doesn’t go anywhere,” growled the Admiral as he hurried down the corridor and followed his security detail to the room. He stood aside for a moment while a body was brought out in its armor, then another. Finally he stepped in, his eyes riveted to the suit of battle armor that lay in the corner.

  The stealth field was off, and the suit did not appear to be functioning at this point. The right hand gripped the hilt of the miracle sword, a sliver of blade still protruding from the handle. A tech knelt down by the woman, still in his armor but with his faceplate retracted.

  “The weapon only had an infinitesimal amount of antimatter,” said the Marine Lieutenant, walking up to the Admiral. “We figured that even that blade would not be able to handle antimatter, and if she hadn’t have struck it the explosion would still have knocked her down. And if she died.” The Marine officer held out both hands in an I don’t care gesture.

  “And what about the blade?” asked Gerasi, gesturing toward the hilt.

  “Fragmented into a million pieces,” said the Lieutenant.

  “I can’t see how this damned thing opens,” said the tech who was kneeling by the woman. “There are no seams, and no switch to make them appear. I…” The man stopped talking and his hands went to his throat area. He coughed, and blood gouted out to cover the floor. The man continued to hack as panic stricken eyes looked out of his face. Then one eye started to bleed.

  “Out of this room,” yelled the Admiral, grabbing the arms of the men around him and pulling them toward the door.

  “What?” asked the Lieutenant, looking at the dying tech.

  “Get out of the room,” yelled Gerasi again, pulling the officer with him as he ran out. One of the Marines, the one closest to the woman, started jerking and stumbled, got to his knees, then fell down.

  “What’s going on?” yelled the Marine officer, looking back at his men.

  “The particulate matter of that sword is what’s going on,” yelled the Admiral back. “Get a robot down here to sweep the air in that room,” said the Admiral over his link. He looked back at the officer. “That sword shattered into a million pieces when the antimatter destroyed the bonding of the macromolecule it was made out of. Then you had millions of sharper than razor particles suspended in the air, and breathed in by the men closest to her.”

  “What about the rest of us?” asked the panicked Marine.

  “As soon as we get another couple of squads down here we are all going to sick bay and get checked out,” said the Admiral, a queasy feeling in his own stomach as he thought about what might have gotten through his own suit. “And I want her taken to a cell and kept under heavy guard. As soon as we get her out of that battle armor. And I want it as intact as can be.”

  The Marine smiled back as he heard that and started talking into his own link.

  The Admiral knew what the man must be feeling, enough to even forget the fear of possible impending death. If we have those suits we will be unstoppable in ground combat, or in boarding actions. There will be nothing those apostate Suryans can do to compete with us, just as they won’t have a chance in ship to ship when we gain the tech base of the Donut. A smile stretched his face, enough to make him forget the health hazard he might have breathed in moments before.

  * * *

  Watcher touched onto the surface of the ship he had come to board, his twenty-nine robots coming in around him in a symmetrical pattern, six directly around him, ten more around those, thirteen in the outer ring. They had converted from cylindrical objects to bipedal battlebots, while Watcher had collapsed his own cylinder into his backpack structure. Now where could she be? he thought, looking again at the schematic that he had gotten from hacking into the ship’s system.

  She could be in this brig system, he thought, looking at the amidships section, then grimacing at the interrogation rooms that were nearby. This is interesting, he thought, focusing on the cells that popped a manifest below. Seventy-eight Suryans. Now, what could a military commander do with that extra manpower?

  His mind made up, Watcher sent a signal to two squads of robots, and the twelve machines delinked from the hull and boosted to another airlock a hundred meters to sternward. Watcher signaled the three squads with him and moved to the nearby hatch, hacking into the system again and locking onto the hatch’s security override.

  Shit, he thought as the system rejected his attempt to open the hatch. We’ll just see about that. Watcher’s suit extruded a tube from the left forearm that he placed against the control mechanism, shooting some millions of nanites into the works. He sent the signal to the two detached squads to continue their work, and looked on through his HUD screen.

  Each of the robots had a small store of negative matter onboard, about a kilogram, sealed in a magnetic bottle. A couple of the robots were working on the outer hatch, spraying the negative matter on the metal and cutting through it like a laser, but without the heat or other effects. Where negative matter hit matter both cancelled out, leaving nothing in their places. The negative matter didn’t need to cancel all the matter in the area it was sprayed, just enough to unravel the molecules of matter and create a gap. Within less than a minute the hatch was cut through, the robots tossed it into space, and the ship’s systems still thought there was a closed door on the hull. The robots moved three of their number into the lock to place explosive charges on the inner hatch. They then moved out and signaled that they were ready.

  Watcher’s nanites signaled that they were ready as well, having infiltrated the locking system. He sent a signal to the nanites and the robots both, initiating the action in simultaneity. His hatch slid open at the same time as the robots at the other hatch triggered their device, blowing through the hard alloy of the entrance and blasting it in pieces into the ready room beyond. Watcher sent a half squad of robots through his airlock, which was now under his local control and not registering as anything but closed to the ship’s systems. They cycled through, then the next half squad entered, until two full squads were crowding the ready room. Watcher then came through, while his last squad stayed on the hull as a reserve for both assault groups.

  Almost no organic intelligences were able to truly multitask. Instead, their brains flipped from one input-output circuit to the next, simulating the multitasking processors of AI. Watcher was the first truly organic brain that could pay attention to dozens of inputs at the same time, and he used that ability now as he rode herd on the robots, seeing what they saw and ordering them in real time in accomplishing their tasks. Under his direction they acted like organic intelligences, his own mind providing the problem solving abilities of a better than human soldier.

  The two squads of the other assault team blasted through the hatch leading from ready room to corridor. The air was sucked through the opening to space, and the robots forged into a hallway in which crew were struggling to get to oxygen masks or spacesuits. Oxygen masks were in lockers built into the walls. Space suits were stored in ready rooms, the nearest of which was behind the robots who weren’t intereste
d in letting the humans get to them. There being no air for sonics, the robots took out every human in the corridor with stun darts as soon as the organics got to a mask and a supply of air. Watcher was not interested in causing unnecessary deaths, and captured Nation personnel were more desirable than dead. That was a lesson he had learned from looking at vids of Vengeance, learning how not to act.

  In less than a minute the section of corridor was secure, and the robot squads were moving into the rooms nearest to each emergency bulkhead, two left to guard the closed off section at each end while the others opened an entrance to the next room over with negative matter.

  Watcher meanwhile moved his own two squads out of the ready room and into the corridor beyond. Like the other this one had some few Nation personnel who started and ran as they saw the massive battlebots coming into the hall. A couple of sweeps of sonic stunners took down the humans, and the battlebots moved on in a crouch under the ceiling that was just a little bit too low for them.

  Klaxons were going off throughout the ship now, everyone alerted to the boarding action, and Watcher thought that soon they would be engaged with armored Marines. The two things going for him, beyond the shock of surprise, was that most of the Marines the ship normally carried were either dead , captured or still fighting on the planet, and that his equipment and that of his robots in general was far advanced of theirs.

  The first of those Marines showed up just moments later, running down a branching corridor in plain sight of the microbots that Watcher had deployed to sweep the hallways. They came around the corner and right into the ambush set by him and his squad. Particle beams reached from Watcher’s side, heavy lasers from the other. One robot took a hit to an arm that disabled the limb in a shower of glowing sparks. The twelve Marines died quickly under the kinetic and heat energy of the superfast protons that struck them down, leaving glowing holes in the armor and partially vaporized bodies underneath.