To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well) (4 page)

“I cannot,” said the
comp in its chillingly human voice, just like that of a seductive woman.  “I am
hard programmed to not violate the Man in the Loop Accords.  There must be
human oversight within two light seconds response time for any robots operating
with the capability of offensive actions.”

“What about defense of
the station?” argued Pandi, trying to out reason the greatest intelligence ever
created.  “We could be ten light seconds response time….”

“The station has a web
of wormhole com systems integrated within its structure,” said the comp.  “The
same is not true within the Supersystem of worlds.  And a single wormhole
aperture is not sufficient, as it may close after the units are given a
command, in which case a counter-command cannot be given.”

“So we’re stuck there,”
said Watcher, glancing back at his partner.  “And we don’t have enough, between
the two of us, to man one of the cruisers in the docks, much less a destroyer.”

“Then we’ll just have
to rig up something I can control by myself,” said Pandora Latham, crossing her
arms over her chest.  “And as many robots as I can carry with me.”

“That’s too damned dangerous,”
said Watcher, jumping up from his seat and turning toward her, a finger pointed
her way.  “I can’t let you risk yourself that way.”

“And you can’t stop
me,” said Pandi, pouting her lips, then sticking her tongue out at her
superman.

“I…”

“Pandora Latham is
correct, Watcher,” said the comp, cutting off whatever he was about to say. 
“She has total access to this station and its resources, as per your command. 
Access that can now only be restricted at her request.  As a free being she
cannot be restricted unless it is shown that she is not of sound mind.  Which,
according to all scans, she is.”

“So there, Mr. I Am In
Control,” said Pandi, glaring at Watcher.  “Now you can help me get ready for a
spoiler mission, or you can get out of my way.  So which will it be?”

“I guess I had better
help you,” said Watcher with a resigned tone.  “So you don’t get yourself
killed.  But what about that reformation project you had planned for Sapphire
V?”

“Those primitives will
wait,” said Pandi, grabbing Watcher’s hand and pulling him toward the long
walkway from the room.  “Now let’s get crackin’.  And then we can have our
going away bash.”

“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 the
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.

“Could 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.”

“OK,” said the
superbeing, his own voice slightly agitated at being caught in a subterfuge. 
“Just talk.  Since you have about four hours before you’ll be ready to engage
the enemy again.  So let us go over some history of space warfare.  And just
maybe you will see the wisdom of my suggestions.”

“I’m all ears,” said
Pandi, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes.  “Enlighten me.”

*     *     *

“What in the hell was
that?” yelled Admiral Miklas Gerasi as the
Orca
bucked from hits from
particle beams.

“Eat shit, you
xenophobe motherfuckers,” came a voice over the grav wave receiver, following
by a high pitched warbling yell.

There were shocked
looking faces all over the large control room.  It was impossible to attack a
ship while it was in Alcubierre drive.  Wasn’t it?  But something sure had.  It
would take computer and targeting tech like they could only imagine to do what
had been done to them. 
And so we didn’t get the best the station had to
offer
, thought the Admiral, shaking his head and determining that the
Nation of Humanity needed that tech if they were to realize their plans of
Galactic conquest.  And of course they had used some kind of inertial bubble
drive to catch his force, with accel and decel that also weren’t to be
believed. 
How do they get rid of that heat?
thought Gerasi, looking
back at the main viewer. 
Wormholes?  That’s got to be it.