To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well)

by Doug Dandridge

  [Move, now,] he sent to his other two squads on the other prong of the assault. Acknowledgement came back as those robots finished blasting through the walls, into the empty rooms beyond, and then to the doors, where in both actions they took Marines who waited by the bulkhead doors in the flanks. Those men died to a man, and the robots moved on to sweep further into the ship.

  Maybe I can take the whole ship, thought Watcher, dismissing the idea as soon as it came. He might just be able to do that, or he might stretch his resources too thin to accomplish his major task, that of rescuing his lover. He was sure that eventually the other ships would be sending reinforcements over here, even as they were taking fire from the planetary defense base his Suryans were manning. He checked his take from the robots outside and cursed, noting that the ships were moving, going back into low orbit and putting the planet between themselves and the base.

  At least those Suryans will be safe, he thought as he led one squad toward the brig, while his second squad moved along a parallel corridor and tried to tie up more of the enemy forces.

  * * *

  “We have a situation back here, sir,” came the voice of the Security Chief over the com while the Admiral sat in an examination seat and the doctor started the scan.

  The Admiral tapped into the ship’s system and saw exactly what kind of situation they had back there, cursing under his breath. “So what are you doing about it?”

  “We have all Marines on alert,” said the Security Chief, as if that covered all the bases.

  The Admiral checked the information link again, and saw that the ships were almost out of range of the surface base they had been unsuccessfully dueling with. The curve of the planet was protecting them from that base, unless it had missiles to reach around the horizon, and it had shown no indication of that so far.

  “Contact the other vessels,” said the Admiral. “Have them get some more Marines over here.” He shifted his attention and looked up at the doctor, who was studying a monitor with an intent expression.

  The doctor looked back at the Admiral and shook his head. “Nothing in your system.”

  “Are you sure we need more Marines, sir?” said the Security Chief. “Surely the hundred and fifty we still have on board will be enough.”

  “You just get them over here and let me determine if they’re needed,” said the Admiral, growling. “And get every damned Spaceman armored up and armed as well.” Idiot, thought the Admiral, linking into the situation and looking at it in his mind. Like a hundred and fifty Marines are going to stop the Abomination and his robots. He’ll go through them like shit through a goose.

  “You’re clear, sir,” reiterated the doc when the Admiral dropped from the circuit.

  “I’ll be on the bridge,” said the senior officer with a nod. “And I would get ready for a lot of casualties.”

  The ashen faced doctor nodded back and left the examining room in a run, while the Admiral headed out and toward the corridor, thinking of the disaster that the two residents of the station had already caused him. At least I have one of them under wraps, he thought, running for the lift. And maybe I can use her to get the other one.

  * * *

  Fleet Admiral Nagara Krishnamurta wondered whose side the Gods were on as he watched the last of the Nation warships dip below the horizon, and out of his firing arc.

  “That’s it, sir,” said Lt. Commander Dasha Mandrake, running a hand through her short, dark hair. “Not much we can do while the planet is between us and them.”

  “Keep an alert crew ready,” said the Admiral, looking at the taller woman who had become his right hand on the planet. “In case they come back, or some other assets come within range. Then come with me.”

  The officer nodded, told off some crew, then followed the Admiral from the control room. Mandrake was no longer in her battle armor, having shed it soon after she had a command crew assembled in the control room. The Admiral had to admit that she was a fine figure of a woman. Larger than he was used to, she would be considered a Valkyrie on his home world, though on hers she was closer to the norm. Growing up under heavy gravity had made her strong, and he wondered if she had ever considered a career in the Marines, where her heavy gravity muscles would have served her well.

  The Admiral walked into a room that contained scores of combat suits, next to another room that contained battlebots. The Admiral walked up to one of the suits, armor that looked like it might have been made for someone near his stature, and ran a hand down the metal forearm. “Amazing, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the other officer, putting her right hand on another suit. “Amazing tech, far beyond anything we have.”

  “But maybe not for long,” said the Admiral, looking over at the woman and smiling. “I want you to figure out how to use these suits. And then train our other people in their use.”

  “Are you sure that Watcher would want us doing that?” asked the officer, narrowing her eyes.

  “Watcher is not here,” said the Admiral, plinking a finger against the hard metal of the suit’s chest. “And besides, he showed us how to use that control room, and its tech is just as advanced as these.”

  “Very well,” said the Lt. Commander, looking around the room. “I have a feeling these will come in handy in the next couple of days.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said the Admiral, clapping the younger officer on the back. “I’m going to wander this complex a bit, and see what else I might be able to find that could come in handy.”

  The Admiral left the Lt. Commander standing there looking over the suits while he walked down the sloping corridor, moving deeper into the complex. He passed room after room of robots, then quarters for the station personnel who no longer existed. There were what looked like cafeterias and recreation rooms, and cross corridors that seemed to lead off into an infinity of perspective.

  And then he reached the wonder he had hoped would be here. A long room with the Tori Gates of the wormholes, scores of them beyond a thick door that was meant to close this room off from invasion. There were the skeletal remains of humans and aliens, over a hundred bodies, and the remains of the robots they had been battling. Remembering those rooms above he realized that these robots had come through the wormholes from elsewhere, and that the defenders had not been able to bring their own bots into action. Or had it been that those robots had somehow been deactivated?

  And Watcher was supposed to be alive at this time, thought the Admiral, an image of the tall, muscular superman in his mind. What part did he have in all of this? What is he hiding?

  He looked at the gates as he walked along the wall. There were forty-four of the things, but only eleven of them showed the mirrored surface of an active wormhole. Krishnamurta wondered where they led, and was tempted to actually jump into one to see what would happen, where it would lead. But that way led to death, most likely, coming into an unknown environment totally unprepared. But as soon as we have some people outfitted in that armor, he thought, his imagination bringing him to those unknown places. Then we will go exploring, and see what parts of the Galaxy this opens up for us.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It sometimes amazed me how Pandora Latham was constantly getting into trouble, as it constantly amazed me how she could extricate herself from trouble, usually to the extreme detriment of those who opposed her. I attributed it to having matured in a society where there were none of the safety systems that Imperial Humans depended upon. Memoirs of Watcher.

  Pandora woke from blackness, fully alert. She remembered the flash of the explosion and nothing else. She was in a room, standing upright in her battle armor. There were people moving at the far end of the room, gathering equipment that seemed vaguely familiar. She ran through a quick diagnostic of her suit and her person, and found that all was working. There was some surface damage to the suit, and there would be some gaps in the stealth field when it was activated, but nothing that would prevent her from engaging in combat.

&nbs
p; “Are you there?” came a familiar voice over the com link.

  “Good to hear your voice, lover,” said Pandora, the rush of emotion almost overcoming her. “And you came for little ole me?”

  “What else could I do, you insufferable woman,” said the voice of the superman. “For some obscure reason I have become very attached to you.”

  “And where are you now?”

  “I am fighting my way into the brig to rescue some Suryans,” said Watcher, and Pandi could now hear the sounds of combat in the background. “Then I will come for you, if what I can determine as your location is correct.”

  Pandora looked at the beacon that was superimposed over the schematic of the ship and grunted. She checked her own suit system and verified that he was on target. “But I think you better hurry,” she said, trying to move the arms and legs of her suit, and not shifting a centimeter. “I seem to be stuck, and people are coming toward me with bad intent.”

  “Is it your suit, or do they have your suit confined in some manner?”

  Pandi ran through the quick diagnostic again and found that everything was working, but that she was still unable to move. Then she noted that her arms and legs were held by bands at wrists/ankles, forelimbs and upper limbs, and that restraints were around her chest and neck as well. “The latter, I’m afraid,” said Pandi, watching as the men moved the laser cutting equipment toward her.

  “OK,” said Watcher. “That’s actually good news. Maybe we can figure out a way to get you out of there.”

  “So,” said one of the Nation Techs, a man with the tabs of a Lt. Commander on his collar. “She’s awake. You might as well come out of that lobster shell, woman, before we have to cut you out of it. You might not like the result of that, because I can’t guarantee we won’t cut off some parts of you as we go.”

  Pandora felt panic starting to overcome her as the man spoke. She was helpless again, and in the hands of the fanatics. And she knew those laser cutters would penetrate her armor, tough as it was, and as the man said, they might slice into her as well. She could grow back a limb, but would still be rendered helpless by the loss of a leg, and weakened by the absence of an arm.

  “Stay calm, Pandora,” said Watcher in her com. “Are your forearm laser units still in operation?”

  She forced herself to take a calming breath and checked those units. “They seem to be functional,” she said. “But what good are they going to do? They’re pointed the wrong way.”

  “Good. They rotate out in this manner,” he said, sending her a short vid of the laser nozzles shifting down and moving into a configuration that pointed them out from the forearm.

  “Who thought of that,” said Pandi, wondering at the paranoid mind that had built in what looked like an escape function from the improbable.

  “Why I did, of course,” said the superman with a laugh. “Sometimes, when you think they’re out to get you, they are.”

  Pandora sent the command to the suit, and the laser heads slid out of their forearm sheaths and rotated.

  “What the hell is going on,” yelled the tech who held the laser torch that was coming down to her right leg.

  Pandora brought the laser nozzles into play at that moment, slicing through both of the restraints that held her wrists. The lasers continued to rotate up and bit into the bands holding her forearms. Sparks flew from the metal bands and from the harder metal of her suit, catching some of the overflow from the beams.

  “Stop her,” yelled the officer in charge, and the tech brought the laser torch up and fired it into the laser unit on her left arm.

  The unit sparked and stopped working before it got to the upper band. The right arm unit continued up and cut partially through the upper limb band. Pandora sent a command to the unit to rotate back to weapon configuration, but the tech hit it with the laser cutter before she could finish the transformation.

  The tech swung the laser toward Pandora’s faceplate, a place she really didn’t want him to go. He activated the beam before the nozzle pointed at the target, intending to sweep it up and into the weakest part of the suit, even if it was not that much weaker compared to the rest of the armor. Pandora grabbed the man’s wrist with her right hand and squeezed, feeling bone crunch under her armored fingers. The man screamed in pain and attempted to switch the unit to his other hand, but the woman was much faster, releasing his wrist and grabbing the laser cutter head before he could aim it into her body. She clasped the unit tightly and punched the man in the head with it, sending him reeling away to stumble and fall with a broken nose and other possible facial damage.

  The officer screamed out for help, while turning on the other laser cutter and aiming it at Pandora. The beam missed the laser she was holding, his obvious target, and hit the arm of the suit, burning a centimeter into the hard armor. Pandora moved her own beam onto the Commander, cutting through uniform, flesh and bone. The man had time for one squawk of pain before his head was rolling off his body. That body folded in on itself, the right hand still gripping the laser cutter. The body twisted and the beam struck another Spaceman coming up to grab it, cutting across his stomach and releasing a cluster of entrails that splattered onto the floor.

  The Marine guards had been paralyzed for a moment, and afraid of hitting the spacemen who might get in the way. As the last man fell they raised their weapons and started to fire, just as Pandora engaged the suit’s electromagnetic fields.

  Mag rifle rounds sprang from her armor while she cut through the last of the bands on her left arm, then moved to her neck, followed by the waist. She cringed as some of the rounds hit her faceplate when she looked up. But the armored faceplate used light transmission on both sides of its structure to mimic plastic, unlike the Nation suits which actually used a hardened plastic. It may have been the weakest part of the armor, but that did not make it weak at all. Round after round bounced from the faceplate, and despite its strength Pandora knew she needed to do something about the Marines before she went for freeing her legs. Things had been known to happen, and she didn’t want one of those things to happen to her.

  Laser torches were not really made as weapons. They were made to cut through metal at short range. That said, there was no range limit to a beam of light. The beam from the torch spread out faster by design than a beam from a weapon, so that it would not propagate over long distances, and burn through things that the user didn’t want to burn through. The Marines were not out of the effective range of the beam, and it might as well have been a heavy laser that cut through the faceplate of the first target and sent him dropping to the floor. The second Marine fared no better. The third targeted the torch and knocked it apart with a trio of well-aimed shots, then walked toward Pandi, firing away.

  Shit, thought Pandora as the man moved to the other laser torch and swung the rifle around his shoulder. He’s going to burn through me if I don’t do something. As the Marine picked up the nozzle of the torch Pandi grabbed the heavy power unit of the inoperative one she held and raised it over her head. The Marine looked up, the activated torch in his hand, just in time for the power unit to strike him in the face and chest, knocking him back.

  Pandora popped both of the sets of close in fighting blades from her forearms, the twin trios of knives coming out of hidden recesses and deploying. She bent and placed the tips of a blade in each of her ankle restraints, sharp side out, and sliced through the metal bands that were no match for the ultra-hard blades. While not in the same class of the katana that she had lost, they were up to the task of taking out the restraints, and sliced easily through what to them was soft metal. She did the same to the calf restraints, and then moved up to her thighs.

  The heat coming through her helmet was the first indication that the Marine had gotten back to the laser and started firing, trying to take out her head and kill her as fast as possible. The armor had superconducting heat absorbers, which siphoned off some of the heat that made it through the electromagnetic field and the reflective surface of the suit. Bu
t it was still coming through, and Pandora could smell her hair scorching while the skin underneath burned. She knew that the helmet would soon be pierced, at which point she would have a hole burned into her brain, and it would all be over.

  Pandora straightened in a swift motion, her left forearm coming up to guard her head from the beam, which started to eat its way through that part of the suit. She screamed at the top of her lungs at the pain, pulling her legs and snapping the cut through bands that had been restraining them. She lunged forward, a couple of quick steps that covered the three meters between them, keeping her forearm in the way while she brought her right arm back. In range, she swung her right fist forward, the triple blades cutting through the laser, pulling her hand back, then forward again, thrusting through the chest of the Marine.

  The Marine grunted as the blade cut through what to him was hard armor, but to the tech of the Donut was nothing of the sort. It pushed through his skin and ribs, and he only had time for the one grunt before it skewered his heart. Pandora pulled the blade out and retracted both for the time being, pulling the mag rifle from over the Marine’s shoulder and grabbing a pair of hand grenades that were attached to his belt.

  “I’m free,” she called to Watcher, looking around the room and shooting him the image. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Find a place to hide and I’ll come for you,” said Watcher. “I’m almost through here. Just stay safe.”

  “Will do, lover,” she said, looking at a schematic and coming up with a plan. When the squad of Marines came into the chamber moments later she was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  She’s alive, thought Watcher, his emotions soaring. He reined himself back and talked to her on the com, making sure she knew what options to take. He was watching the feed from her suit as she fought herself free from captivity. His heart in his mouth as she battled the tech with the laser, then the Marines, in each case making the right move, and getting herself out of situations that would have killed most. He had marveled at the way a non-enhanced (well, at least not in his range) had reacted, and had taken out a room of people once she had been shown how.