The Deep Dark Well

by Doug Dandridge

  “Send a signal on tight beam to the other force,” ordered the admiral. “Hopefully they’ll get it when they come back to normal space.”

  “If the enemy doesn’t hit them first,” said the tactical officer, shaking his head.

  “We’ll just have to pray that doesn’t happen,” said the admiral, “and adjust our plans as if it will.”

  “And who in the hell was that on that ship?” asked the tactical officer, looking around the bridge. “The language sounded kind of familiar. And that yell at the end.”

  “Feeding it into the translator now,” said the com officer, working his board. “OK, wait a second.”

  “There is small particle debris behind us,” called out one of the sensor techs. The viewer switched to behind, where the tactical display showed a radar image of a cloud of fragments swiftly expanding.

  “We also have two ships motionless in space behind us,” called out another tech, and the viewer switched from first a ship sitting lifeless against the mass of stars in backdrop, to one that was a swarm of people and robots frantically making repairs.

  “I have a match on the language,” said the com tech, looking up from his board. “Colloquial English, circa 2100, old Earth.”

  “No wonder it sounded so familiar,” said the captain, nodding his head.

  Yes¸ thought Gerasi, nodding. English had been the language of the Old Empire, the one that had fallen several thousand years before. The Nation’s own language was based on it, though it had diverged quite a bit since the fall.

  “Computer thinks the speaker originated in the Southern United States, as that Empire was called.”

  “Amazing,” said the admiral, looking at a viewer that was showing a picture of the enemy ship on closest approach. “And that yell she let out.”

  “No references in the data banks,” said the com. “Frightening though, when coming from something streaking by at point nine five light. And I’m receiving a transmission from Manta. She suffered superficial damage to the ship, but major to her drive. They are expediting repairs.”

  “And what about the other ship?”

  “Skate, sir,” said the tech, looking at the viewer, which was back with a view of the ship dead in space. “Major damage and casualties, but her captain thinks he can get her moving again in a day or so.”

  A day or so, thought the admiral. “I’d hoped to be out of this area and back to the base in less time than that. So should I leave someone behind to protect her, or just take the crew off and scuttle?

  “Where do you think she came from?” asked the captain, interrupting the admiral’s train of thought.

  Valari Midas would not have interrupted my thoughts. The admiral shot a glare at the flag captain while remembering that a good command team was like a marriage. And he couldn’t see this one ending in any other manner than divorce.

  “She came from the Donut,” growled Gerasi at his subordinate, with a look that told the man his admiral thought him an idiot. “Where the hell else do you think she came from, with that kind of tech?”

  “Then maybe we should attack the station,” said the captain, squaring his shoulders and trying to look brave.

  Gerasi shook his head in disgust and turned away from the officer. He thought of the attack he had carried out on the huge station two years before. The thing was so large that he was sure he could do no critical damage to it. And it had weapons that could wipe out his fleet, if given a chance. He had barely been able to get in close and board using a ruse, to capture what he needed and go. Losing almost half his ships and over half his crew.

  “No,” he said, turning back to his flag captain. “We will not be attacking that thing while I am here. We will operate out here on the fridges.”

  “And if they send more ships?”

  “If they had them, or the crew to man them, I think we would have been swarmed under. Com,” he said, walking up behind the com tech. “Give Manta orders to stay with Skate. She is to escort her sister back to base when both are capable. Meanwhile,” he said, walking back to his chair, “get us underway and catch up to the fleet.”

  The helm looked back at the captain, waiting for the order to come through the chain of command.

  “You heard the man,” said the captain, plopping down in his own chair. “Engage the drive.”

  The helmsman nodded and turned back to his board. Ahead a hole of darkness grew as the drive swallowed up space before the photons riding on it could reach the ship. And behind a lesser darkness grew as Orca outran the pursuing photons.

  Excerpt from The Shadows of the Multiverse

  “The game is up, ma’am,” said Lt. Marokowski from his tactical station. “Narrow beam lidar has us painted.”

  Navarin had been at reduced acceleration for over twenty minutes. Only two gees, allowing the crew to leave their acceleration tubes and staff their normal battle stations. It was well and good to be able to maneuver the ship at maximum sustainable gee. But robots could only be trusted so far. And it gave captain and crew comfort to know that human beings could react to any damage to the ship. That human hands could work to correct any problem.

  “Any chance they didn’t get a return signal?” Lucille asked the officer.

  “No ma’am,” replied the Pole. “Signal will be attenuated. But they will know we are here.”

  “Full alert status,” she ordered. “Train all weapons on the closest target and fire on my command.”

  “Aye ma’am,” replied the tac officer, his fingers dancing along his boards.

  “All crew prepare for combat link,” ordered Lucille as she keyed the ship-wide intercom button on her command chair.

  Within the bulk of the vessel the crew mentally and physically prepared for battle. They were already fully armored, having gone from tubes to protective gear as soon as they were out. Now they made doubly sure magazine systems were clear and ready to operate, laser capacitors were fully charged, and particle accelerators were whirring their inmates around their circumferences.

  “Combat link,” she ordered as she surrendered her own consciousness to the group mind. The delicious feeling of melting of self, while at the same time self became all through meshing with the sensory and computational capacities of the ship, came upon her in a rush of pleasure. Like the most seductive and addictive drug ever developed by mankind. Which of course it was. The rush was compounded every time another consciousness joined the link, increasing the capacity of the group mind.

  Yes, she thought. She was the controlling link in the group mind, still retaining enough of her self to think semi-independently. We feel like a god, in our omnipotence and power. Our capacity for destruction. But some sense of reality still existed. She looked through the sensory apparatus of the group mind and saw the enemy vessels ahead, each with an equal or greater capacity for destruction than her own. Looking at her ship with their targeting computers. Locking on her ship with their weapons.

  Navarin was now operating as a unified entity, the crew members going about their tasks in the most efficient way possible. Some would sacrifice themselves during the battle without a thought of self-preservation, only thinking of preservation of the whole. Weapons were aimed at the weak points of the closest enemy vessels while the ship itself prepared for the worst that would come its way.

  Protective shielding up, ordered the group mind that was fifty-one percent the will of its captain. Nozzles on the outer skin of the ship released a cloud of charged metallic particles that were instantly grasped by the strong magnetic field the ship was now generating. Within microseconds the hull was surrounded by a whirling cloud of obscurants. On the hull itself armored shielding swung into place to cover hatchways and observation portals, while within the ship hatches closed, isolating sections of the vessels that they might survive a hit to somewhere else. Meanwhile the ship calculated firing solutions at a speed the enemy, with their less sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, could not match.

  The group mind looked
out at the array of enemy vessels their ship was falling toward. Big battle wagons toward the center of the formation, with an average separation of a million kilometers. A couple of battle-cruisers front and rear. While a heavy cruiser, a couple of light cruisers and some destroyers provided the screen a couple of million kilometers out from the battleships. The battleships would be able to give support to the outer screen. But four seconds would pass before they knew which ship had been hit, and another four seconds at light speed to respond. And that with their light speed weapons, the weakest they had. Even longer to make an effective response with particle beams or the even slower kinetic rounds or missiles.

  The closest of the alien vessels, a heavy cruiser, locked on with laser beams, the attenuated photons striking the skin of Navarin. The ship responded with an immediate alert that it was under attack. But the majority of the energy was absorbed by the obscuring cloud, which whisked superheated particles away to be replaced by new heat sinks, while the molten particles radiated their heat into space at the opposite side of the ship.

  Fire, ordered the group mind, and Navarin fired its own beams of coherent energy through the holes that opened before them in the shielding cloud. For some reason, maybe arrogance, the enemy heavy cruiser had not put up its own shield and the beams of energy struck true on their targets. One of the laser turrets of the enemy vessel flashed with brilliant light as invisible photons turned to heat. With a puff of streaming particles the laser turret was put out of action, while the enemy ship adjusted the reflectivity of its own skin so that the laser beam would not move on to wreak more destruction. But Navarin had already compensated for the maneuver, changing the frequencies of the outgoing laser beams, shifting from gamma to x-rays and tearing a huge rift in the hull of the alien vessel.

  Navarin was approaching bow forward to the side of the heavy cruiser, bringing its main weapons to bear, while the hapless target could not. It tried to swing its bow around, to target the human vessels with its main weapons, but started the maneuver too late and achieved too little.

  Fire, again ordered the group mind in control of the vessel, as thrusters aligned her nose to where the enemy vessel would be when the weapons reached her. Particle beams of antiprotons reached out, their flight time of three seconds allowing the enemy ship to know of its peril. Frantically it attempted to deploy its own particle screen, too late. The antimatter particle beam hit its hull and exploded through. Even the few ounces of material in the beam was enough to blast a gaping hole through the armored hull, releasing atmosphere and flooding the aft port section of the ship with gamma radiation.

  The human ship’s kinetic weapon fired next as it continued its approach to the doomed cruiser. Three rounds accelerated out in rapid succession, their own drives flaring as soon as they left the tube. Missiles flew from the cruiser on interception courses, attempting to take out the warheads before they could close for a kill. The kinetic warheads launched their own counter missiles in a duel of weapon against weapon. The night was illuminated by the painful flare of fusion warheads exploding, as counter missile hit missile and missile hit cylindrical warhead. But one of the warheads made it through, its evasive maneuvers moving it away from lasers and particle beams as it closed within a hundred meters of the enemy’s hull. A half-ton of antimatter detonated like a shaped charge, sending a flaring jet of superheated antiparticles into the cruiser, a death blow that annihilated her center section in a cloud of heated particles, debris and hard radiation.

  A trio of fusion warhead missiles impacted the dying cruiser bow and stern, taking out any intact systems and spinning the cruiser out of control, into the center of the enemy formation. And, observed the group mind of Navarin, obscuring the firing path of one of the massive battleships.

  An array of lasers and particle beams reached out from the enemy ships as Navarin passed fifty thousand kilometers over the twirling hulk of the dead heavy cruiser. The battle-cruiser bucked and twisted in a series of evasive maneuvers. But the distance now was not sufficient for total evasion, and the shield of particles quickly overheated, radiating as much heat inward as outward. With a quick release of the magnetic field the superheated particles were dumped into space as a new mass was ejected from the ship to take up positions within the field.

  More ominous were the multiple launches from all of the ships in the enemy fleet whose formation Navarin was penetrating. Missiles sped from tubes at significant fractions of the speed of light, accelerating on fusion overdrives toward the human vessel. Kinetic energy weapons spat large cylindrical warheads toward the human. Space was instantly full of destructive weapons systems, all with one objective in mind. To find and strike the enemy within their midst.

  Navarin’s group combat mind quickly calculated the odds as defensive weapons systems were locked onto the most lethal of the attackers. The odds were not good. At most a two percent chance that the battle-cruiser would survive the onslaught. Without fear, without regret, the group mind got on to business. Assigning priorities to the rest of the incoming weapons. Calculating firing times and trajectories. Looking into the near future to assess possible outcomes.

  Along the length of Navarin’s hull counter-missiles flared into space. Not needing the long acceleration tubes of offensive missiles since their own targets were accelerating toward them, their fusion drives only fired for a dozen or so seconds, pushing them at hundreds of gees and leaving only enough boost for last minute corrections. Other missiles left the forward tubes of the ship, pushed to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light by the long accelerators that provided their initial boost. Lasers and particle beams locked on and fired on those enemy weapons that were at closest approach.

  The targeted weapons were not completely helpless. Clouds of particles were released to interpose themselves between larger warheads and beam weapons. Decoys and smaller interceptor warheads were released to speed between incoming weapon and counter-missile. Jammers flooded space with interfering radiation, blinding the sensors of incoming missiles or confusing the targeting systems of the human battle-cruiser, rendering the incoming weapons invisible.

  Within seconds the first act of the play was over. Beams struck or missed. Hurtling objects collided with flashes of light and bursts of hard radiation. Five hundred gigaton warheads blotted the views of the battle from complete shipboard sensory systems, rendering all combatants blind for tens of seconds.

  Through it all, against all of the odds, Navarin came unscathed except for minor hull damage from the heavy sleet of particles filling the nearby space. The group mind calculated the odds of surviving the next volley, found them to be even worse than before, and looked for anything that might increase their chances. The legendary luck of their captain entered into the equation and the odds were suddenly adjusted upwards to a respectable ten percent.

  Within microseconds the group mind rejected those odds as the closer of the enemy ships let loose with a new volley of beams, missiles and kinetic warheads.

  * * *

  Lucille was still linked into the group mind when the impossible happened. One instant she was a center-less, selfless intellect. Just another processor and source of input into the super-mind that was the ship crew link. The next she felt her own self coming to the fore. Still in overall control of the group mind, making the major decisions that meant life and death to them all. But also separate; again an individual, compartmentalized, being. Something that had never been known to happen during the linking process. And then she felt the wrongness. A feeling of things not being right in the Universe around her. The feeling that had pulled her partially from the link. But for what purpose?

  They’re coming. The thought resounded through her mind. But it was not her thought. It came from another mind. A mind that was not part of the link. And there was only one such mind aboard ship.

  Siohban? It had to be the child. The resonance seemed familiar. One she had felt before. But suffused with a terror she had not felt the last time their minds had touche
d. Who is coming, child?

  The monsters are coming. They’re stepping across the dark places. They’re coming here.

  Lucille’s mind was pulled back to the here and now as she noticed the large warhead that had gotten through her ship’s defensive fire. Within seconds of striking a death blow to Navarin. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  No, she thought. I don’t believe this is happening. It can’t be the end.

  She didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before. The mass of metal that flew into the path of the warhead, striking it squarely on the side and sending it tumbling harmlessly into space. Lucky Lucille, she thought. More legends would grow from that fortunate intersection of object with object. But such things do happen. Don’t they?

  They felt you do that, said the thoughts of Siohban in her head. They know where we are, and they’re coming.

  What in the hell are you talking, or thinking about, child? Who is coming? And what did I do?

  A trio of missiles, their smaller warheads bearing the promise of crippling but not killing the capital ship, came through the defenses. Drives flared as they made their last second adjustments and accelerated into their target. Again the captain of Navarin looked on with a feeling of disbelief. The ship shuddered.

  That wasn’t a hit, thought Lucille. No warning klaxons. No damage reports. Something had moved the ship. But not the hundred-megaton warheads of a trio of missiles. She shifted her awareness to surrounding space and noted the trio of missiles coasting outward from her vantage, drives dead from lack of reaction mass. A quick calculation showed her that the ship was now a hundred kilometers from where it should be, though its vector through the system had not changed.

  They’re here, called out the frightened mind of the child. And they’re crazy with anger.

  And there they were, outside of the ship. A hundred tentacles of pitch black shadow that obscured the stars. A wrongness that made Lucille shudder. A wrongness of something existing in a space in which it was not meant to be. The tentacles whipped into action, penetrating the hull of the battle-cruiser, seeking the life cradled within the vessel.