The Deep Dark Well

by Doug Dandridge

  * * *

  Pandi had traveled for over an hour before she ordered the car to stop at the next possible station. Of course that meant almost an hour of decel before it was possible to stop. The speed of the car was amazing. But the shortcomings of this mode of travel were enormous. Once the car had gotten up to a certain speed the passengers were trapped for the duration. No wonder the people of this station had preferred travel by the wormhole gates.

  Now she was coming to a stop, in a station whose murals showed it was a Hustedean section of the Donut. The door slid open quickly and silently, and she walked into the station. Murals of the creatures decorated the walls. Exotic plants sat in the planters. Seats were designed with holes for tails. She couldn’t wait to look over this area, to see what these people considered the normal accouterments of civilization.

  “Those look like desert shrubs,” she said, looking into one of the planters. The light overhead seemed kind of harsh and bright as well.

  “Hustedeans evolved as desert dwelling omnivores,” said the computer. “Day hunters. The plants and the ambient light are intended to make them feel at home within the confines of the station.”

  “I guess most intelligent species were hunters. At least that’s what the anthropologists and psychologists thought on Earth.”

  “All sentient species in this Galaxy sprung from hunter gatherer origins, with a single exception.”

  Hunter, thought Pandi. She had always thought hunting was a cruel sport. Now she thought it even more so, when she was the prey. That thought brought back to her mind her present situation.

  “There aren’t any of Vengeance’s robots around, are there?”

  “Vengeance has no robots under his control in this part of the station at this time,” answered the computer. “But you would do well to use caution in this area.”

  “Why this area?”

  “Station security elements in this area are a considerable threat,” answered the computer.

  “I thought you ran station security.”

  “Not all inhabitants of the station fully trusted the central control facility,” said the computer. “The Husted race was always suspicious of humans, and integrated their regions of habitation into their own security and control system. While I can access the data coming from this region, I have no control over the independent elements at work here.”

  “OK,” said Pandi with a huff, “I’ll watch myself.”

  “Hey,” she said as a thought came to her mind. “Maybe I can take charge of this area for myself. It would be nice to have my own turf, where I could retreat and hold off any of the other inhabitants that might have it out for me.”

  “I would advise against it,” said the computer. “I say again that I have no control over the security of this area of the station. I doubt that the security elements would let a human gain control of Hustedean habitations.”

  “Just point me to the control room and warn me if anything dangerous is near,” she ordered. “I’ll worry about what I can and cannot do.”

  Pandi took a lift up a level and walked through another of the large wormhole gate terminuses. About a third of the gates were still active at this terminus, many without barrier fields, and the adventurer in her wanted to jump into one at random and find out where it led. And end up choking out my life, she thought, on some methane or propane world. She had enough adventure right here and now for any person.

  The arrows on her helmet visor map pointed the way. She went through door after door, down one hall after another, until she wondered if the computer was playing a game with her. The scan room computer had said the map was downloaded into her helmet processor, and the station computer would have no control over it. But this was another region of the station, and there must have been an additional download sometime in the recent past.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “I urge extreme caution in this area,” said the computer. “The hallway ahead leads to the central control room for this region of the station, and there is bound to be security in the area.”

  Pandi tightened her grip on her rifle as she stepped into the indicated hallway. It seemed to stretch on forever, with numerous doors on each side. At the end of the hall it had said. But when did the hall end?

  “The endlessness of the hall is an illusion,” said the computer. “It is intended to make whoever is trying to find the control room become impatient and turn back.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked on me,” she said. She had walked all over Europe on vacation from college. Some of those hikes would have killed an infantryman.

  “There is a neural induction field ahead,” said the computer. “It would paralyze any chordate creature that entered its range.”

  “Any way I can turn it off? Maybe the EMP pistol?”

  “It is too heavily shielded for that weapon,” said the computer. “I am attempting to access the local computer system. This may take a few minutes.”

  Pandi waited, again not sure how much she could trust the station computer. It had treated her right so far. Or had it? How did she know it wasn’t leading her to do what it wanted her to do?

  “I was not able to turn the field off, but I did set it to fluctuate.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “When I give the signal to go, run as fast as you can through the hall ahead. Do not let any feelings of numbness stop you.”

  Feelings of numbness. That didn’t sound good.

  “Go,” said the computer, and Pandi didn’t wait to think. She took off in a sprint. Five steps into the run and it felt as if she had the worst head cold of her life. Her fingers and toes felt numb, and she couldn’t feel her feet hit the floor. But she kept her muscles moving, not allowing her momentum to die, for she knew she would be stuck in the web. To die of starvation or thirst? If there was no one here to come and get her, that was a definite possibility.

  Then she was through, her head clearing in an instant, her extremities tingling with renewed feeling. She kept going for a dozen strides, not wanting to stop too close.

  “OK. Is there anything else like that ahead?”

  “No,” said the computer. “Nothing like that. Nothing quite as harmless.”

  “You will be able to warn me of any dangers ahead?”

  “Of course not. I warned you about trying to get to the control center. The defenses are set so that no one can gain entrance without a struggle, even if they have the aid of the central station computer.”

  Great, she thought, shaking her head at her own stupidity. Of course she would still go forward. And not just for the reasons she had given the computer. The region control center would allow her to access a major computer system separate from the stations central processor and memory. Maybe then she could get some of the answers that the computer had denied her. Maybe then she could get to the bottom of the mystery of Watcher and Vengeance. And the mystery of the fall of civilization.

  When she saw the robots she thought they were Hustedeans come to life. The same squat shape, thick legged with stumpy balancing tail. Even the surfaces were the same color as the beings in the murals, sandy tan, to blend in with their desert homes. Since she had never seen a living member of their race she couldn’t tell from their movements. The glint of light on their polished surfaces gave it away.

  Pandi ducked, just as the first robot brought up a hand weapon and fired soundlessly. The crack sounded over her head, the passage of a particle traveling at supersonic speed. A projectile weapon, similar to her rifle, though she assumed not as powerful. But powerful enough to kill her if it hit her in a vital spot.

  A burst of minishapes over the torso of the first robot assured that she hit a vital place. The robot fell backwards and the other two robots brought their own weapons to bear, as Pandi tried to pull herself closer to the floor while returning fire. Something hit her suit, a hard hammer as the material went rigid. Not rigid enough, as the power of the pellet still abraded her skin through the clothing
. Another hit her helmet, a head ringing slap. At least they weren’t shapes such as she was firing, or they would have easily penetrated suit and helm, and she would be lying dead on the floor.

  Three quick bursts took care of the two gun wielding robots. They fell back into unmoving repose, pistols still gripped in their vise like hands.

  “That set off the alert system,” warned the computer. “The reaction force will be coming soon.”

  “How many? And how do I stop them?”

  “I have no idea how many,” said the computer. “Weapons will stop them for a time, but the only way to shut down the system is to take the control room, and then break its coded lock out.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said, running forward, sprinting down the hall. Yeah, she thought, that’s all I have to do. Break the code on an unknown computer system. How many possible codes? Billions? Trillions?

  Her brain went numb for a second, along with her extremities, but her speed carried her through before her body could collapse. Wonderful things, those neural induction fields.

  Two robots stepped into the hall to her front. She cursed as she realized what they were. Fractuals. She would have to destroy every part of them before they would stop trying to kill her. She flipped the selector switch quickly and fired a burst of microgrenades at range. The explosions annihilated the front ends of the robots, destroying their weapons before they could bring them to bear. A second burst took out another large section of movable cubes from both robots.

  Then she switched to full auto fire, ball ammunition. She remembered how her pistol rounds had been enough to take out individual cubes on the first of these she had encountered, and over half of her drum was loaded with the simple, high velocity pellets.

  The rifle bucked with Newton’s opposite reaction as she fired from the hip, on the run, walking the bullets like a hose of water over the bodies of the robots. The air to her front turned into a cloud of metallic particles as the rounds ate into the robots. She fired until the empty indicator lit, then switched to minishapes, as she slowed to assess her damage through the obscuring cloud that was settling to the floor. They’re toast, she thought, looking at the floor, littered by a half meter of fragments.

  Heat burned into her shoulder. She dropped quickly below the fire and hit the floor, scooting herself around to bring the robots to her rear under fire. Sneaky bastards, coming up behind her while she was busy. Luckily the suit provided enough protection to keep the millisecond of beam contact from burning through her, though she knew she would still have a bad burn on her left shoulder.

  The rifle bucked as she sent a stream of minishapes into the robots. As she blew the two that were in sight into immobile hulks, more of the machines came into view, running up the hall in the strange hopping gait of the creatures they imitated. They held pistols in their hands, and from the effect of the other pistol she was sure they were not stunners.

  The switch rotated easily under her thumb, as she set the rifle for single fire, microgrenades. The load indicator showed at least fifty rounds of the small but powerful warheads. She aimed carefully at the lead robot and squeezed the trigger, feeling the short recoil as the low velocity round left the rifle. As soon as the round was away she shifted aim and squeezed off another shot. She didn’t know how many of these things would come before they stopped, so it seemed a good idea to conserve ammunition.

  The first round struck, right on target to the head of the robot, driving it into a backward fall. The next three took head shots before she missed, the round striking the wall. Her next four took out robots, and she noticed that the bodies were falling nearly perfectly. The barricade was rising.

  She continued firing, one shot right on the heels of another, as she kept scoring hit after hit, with very little in the way of wasted rounds. The pile grew higher, until the robots following had the crawl over the pile ahead of them. Crawl over to be met with a grenade, adding to the height of the pile. A couple of robots tried to crawl through the remaining space. They were stopped in place, completed the obstruction of the hall.

  Take them a while to get through that. She checked her load. Only four left, so she shifted back to minishapes. Quickly placing a grenade on the floor, set to motion fuse, she got up and started to walk over the remains of the fractals. Until she saw movement in the pile. Cubes were still active and were seeking each other out, forming a new robot from the remains of the two. And there was a grenade to her back, set to arm in another five seconds.

  A second to back up a couple of feet, one to run forward, another to clear the pile in a leap. She landed heavily on the other side, falling into a roll to take up the impact. Time’s up. She kept motionless, waiting for the explosion, but nothing happened. She began to low crawl away from the pile of fractal remains, until she thought she had enough distance between herself and the motion sensitive grenades.

  Getting to her feet she took a quick glance back. The fractal was starting to grow out of the pile, moving too slowly and smoothly to set off the grenade. Until it configured and took a step. The pile of Hustedean robots was shifting as the many on the other side tried to push them out of the way. She hoped the fractal didn’t configure until the other robots made it through, so the grenade could take them all out. But she didn’t have time to wait and see.

  Pandi walked about twenty yards before taking off into a run, her ears straining to hear the sounds of the robots attacking the pile of their deceased compatriots. She could see the end of the hall now, no more than a couple of hundred yards ahead. She pulled in air through her lungs, trying to keep her breathing in a rhythm, but finding that she was losing the battle to fuel her muscles. She was staggering by the time she reached the door, her hand reaching for the pressure plate, this not being one that opened on approach, when the grenade went off.

  Pandi looked back as the door opened, seeing the rush of flame coming up the hall, the blast confined to the oncoming wall of fire. She ran through the door and hit the pressure plate on the other side. The door slammed into place. A second later it was shuddering under the assault of the explosion. But the blast had been too far away, and the door too strong, for there to be more than an unsuccessful assault on the opening.

  “What’s the melting point of this door?” she asked as she pulled the laser pistol from its shoulder holster.

  “Beyond the capacity of that weapon,” said the computer.

  “Can it withstand the blast of a grenade at close proximity?”

  “Yes.”

  Pandi hit the pressure plate again and tossed a grenade set on motion fuse a short way down the hall. In the distance it looked as if the barrier was still holding. But from this far away she couldn’t make out details. She closed the door behind her and looked around the room.

  “I thought it would be harder to get in here.”

  “This is not the control room,” said the computer.

  Pandi’s heart fell as she looked at the heavy door ahead of her, like the door of a bank vault. She was sure it would be harder to bypass than a mere vault door. A number pad and what looked like a modified pressure pad were set on the side of the vault.

  “I guess I’ll be safe if I can get past that, huh?” she mused, moving toward the door.

  “It would take heavy weaponry to get through the door without the proper code,” said the computer as Pandi put her hand on the pressure pad. Nothing happened. “The pad is a palm recognition unit. Only the living palm of one authorized to enter will open the door. The only way you will gain entry is through the input of the proper code on the keypad.”

  Pandi looked closely at the keypad. There were fifteen keys, in five rows of three. Each was marked with an unknown symbol. Not gonna be easy. How many different millions of combinations were there? And she didn’t even know how many there were in a sequence.

  “No way you can help me out with this thing?” she asked.

  “I can run probability programs on the keypad sequence,” said the
computer, “based on the personalities of the last programmers. But I am afraid it will not be an easy task, nor a speedy conclusion.”

  “Go ahead and try,” she agreed, pulling up one of the strange looking chairs. “I’m not getting any younger sitting here.”

  As she sat in the not uncomfortable chair she thought over her problem. If only she hadn’t gotten greedy, she wouldn’t have been here. Yeah, she could have hidden like a rat, at the mercy of the two brothers who alternated in running this station. Or she could try to get some juice of her own, some power, to gain her own bargaining chip. Or she could be killed, by robots following the orders of people long dead.

  And dammit, she needed to know what was going on here, so she could influence the events surrounding her. She would rather die standing up fighting than at the hands of a sadistic fiend, helpless to save herself. I showed him once, she thought with a smile, something he didn’t think she had in her. But he would be more careful next time, and her pain would be greater.

  “Try these keypad combinations,” said the computer.

  A representation of seven symbols appeared on her visor. It took her a moment to find all of the keys matching the symbols. She punched in the seven symbols in the order presented on the visor. Nothing.

  “This thing isn’t booby trapped or something, is it?”

  “If you mean will it set off an alarm or traps if the wrong symbols are punched in, that is an affirmative,” said the computer. “Though for safety's sake it will only be after a certain number of false entries.”

  “Any idea how many?”

  “That was up to the programmer,” said the computer.

  “Great,” said Pandi, punching in the next sequence that came up on her visor. Again nothing. Another sequence, another no go. But what could she do but keep trying?

  She had punched in over thirty sequences, wondering all the while what the programmer was like. What were his favorite things in life? What code would he have used, based on his life, that would have ensured he didn’t forget the code? But she had no idea what the symbols were. She could let the station computer enter her brain, to transfer the information she needed to read this language. But she didn’t trust it to have that kind of access to her mind.