To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well)

by Doug Dandridge

  “When do we strike?” asked the young Commander who was in charge of the humans, Yasha Kallistara.

  “When it is time to strike,” said Watcher, looking at the nervous officer with calm eyes. “And not a moment sooner.”

  “I wish you would give me a straight answer, sir,” said the young officer with a scowl.

  “And I wish I had one to give, young lady,” said Watcher, himself hoping that Pandora would get into position, and knowing that it would do no good if she were spotted and stopped before she could. “It all depends on my mate getting into position, and being ready to support us when we strike.”

  The young Commander stared at him for a moment, then shook her head. She looked back with a gleam in her eye. “You really love her, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” said Watcher, not having to ask what she was talking about. “She is the love of my life. Without her I would still be the lonely creature haunting that station. Or something even worse.”

  “I hope someday I have someone who would be willing to sacrifice all to come rescue me from danger,” said the woman.

  “I’m sure someday that person will enter your life, Commander,” said Watcher, checking his schematic and seeing that Pandora was almost where she needed to be. “And I hope by that time you will have no need of rescuing. Now get your people ready,” said the superman, sending the order to his robots to move into final position. “I think the show is about to start, as my mate would say.”

  With a signal the robots went to work, spraying a slight stream of negative matter along the planned breakout point, slicing into the hull metal and leaving just a thin layer to hold it together. Within a minute the robots had expended most of their negative matter, and had traced a two and a half meter high by three meter wide oval in the wall. Watcher sent the next order, and the robots arrayed themselves for the following phase and waited.

  * * *

  Pandora was ready to ‘get the show on the road’, but it seemed that the Marines of the Nation of Humanity had different ideas. She had been able to make it to within thirty meters of where she needed to be, the corridor that fronted the breakout point that Watcher had chosen.

  “We’re ready,” said Watcher over the com. She could hear the impatience in his voice despite his attempt to control it. Someone else would have heard pure calm, but she knew him better than anyone.

  “I’ve got some clowns between you and me, lover,” she said, looking at the take from the microbot. “A half dozen plug uglies I think are their reaction force.”

  “Then we need to wait,” said Watcher, enunciating each word.

  Pandora smiled. She knew he could read her as well. She wanted to get this thing going, for better or worse. “We can’t wait too long, lover, and you know it,” she finally said. “I got all kinds of movement out here, like more troops are moving into place. Soon we won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  “And I am picking up more shuttles as well,” said Watcher, after a sigh that told her he recognized the logic of her statement. “They will be delivering even more Marines.”

  “Then we need to move, and move now,” said Pandora, planning what she would do when she left the security of this hidey hole. “Here goes.”

  Pandora pulled a trio of grenades from her suit that she had picked up from the Nation Marines, armed them, then threw them around the corner into the corridor. One of the Marines saw the grenades and yelled something out. They started to move, but the grenades were on a short fuse, and went off before they could do too much. The two closest Marines caught the brunt of the blast and were blown off their feet. Their armor protected them from severe damage, but one lay still after he hit the ground, and the other staggered up with only one working leg. The other men were able to take the blast and keep their feet, and their wits.

  The woman from the past had never thought of herself as a hero, but she had sure acted that way since she had arrived in the future. Now she didn’t even think about her actions, or the risks that she ran. She just went with the flow and hoped for the best. Those were her thoughts as she erupted from around the corner with a mag rifle in each hand, stocks held under her arms. Each rifle was set to single shot, maximum velocity, armor piercing rounds.

  Pandora had always been a good shot, exceptional to tell the truth. She had come into the future with a pair of matched Gold Cup forty-fives, the pistols she had used to win many contests on Earth. And now that she was enhanced she was an even better shot, with a steadier hand, sharper eye, and exceptional targeting ability. The mag rifles were made to penetrate the armor of the men she faced. They were not intended to take on her level of armor, but three of the men had weapons that could, a pair of heavy lasers and an auto-grenade launcher. One man was down, and one man with a mag rifle was unsteady on his feet. She instantly prioritized her targets and attacked.

  The first two shots, one from each rifle, went unerringly into the faceplates of a laser gunner and the grenadier. Faceplates shattered inward, the high velocity rounds cracking, then breaking the hard plastic of the plate. Both men dropped their weapons as they began a fall to the ground. Pandora’s second pair of shots took out the rifleman, but a combination of firing too soon and the man moving made the shot at the second laser gunner miss. That gave him enough time to fire a shot that hit Pandora on the joint of her left shoulder. With a shower of sparks the shoulder froze in place, and Pandora yelped in pain as some of the heat of the heavy laser beam came through the suit. She brought the rifle over to point at the man’s face while the laser continued to burn into her suit. A shot through his faceplate and he dropped the laser and fell dead to the floor.

  Pandora cursed as she put a shot through the last rifleman, the one who seemed to be having trouble getting his suit to respond. She thought for a moment about shooting the man on the floor, then dismissed the thought as petty. He was out of the fight, and shooting him now was just plain murder, something she did not want to resort to. So she stepped over the body and headed for the next target area. She tried to move her left arm, but that limb of the suit was frozen, and she was sure that nothing short of a stay in an armory or workshop was going to make it functional again.

  “We’re burning through now,” said Watcher over the com. Then his voice took on a more urgent quality. “Your suit is damaged. I want you to abort and get out of here.”

  “No way, lover,” said Pandi, turning another corridor and opening fire with the grenade launcher she had picked up from the dead trooper behind her. “I’m the cavalry, and the cavalry never turns back just before the nick of time.”

  * * *

  Watcher grimaced as he looked at the damage readout from Pandi’s suit. He thought that any rational being would turn back, instead of bringing such a damaged piece of armor into combat, though he admitted he would have continued on if it had been he coming to her rescue.

  “Now,” he ordered his robots, and they all went to work, pumping out high energy laser beams and cutting the oval piece free from the bulkhead. In an instant it was done, and Watcher, along with a pair of his robots, slammed into the piece and ejected it into the corridor, knocking over two Nation Marines who hadn’t gotten out of the way in time. The rest of the Marines started firing at Watcher and his robots. Only a few were equipped with mag rifles, and their rounds bounced harmlessly from the armored superman and his heavy combat robots. Most of the others had beam weapons of some sort, and they could be deadly, and evidenced by one of the combat robots losing a hind limb as soon as it broke into the corridor.

  Watcher turned in that direction while three of his robots fired the other way. His particle beam cannon struck an enemy, tearing through the suit, killing the man inside. He moved his aim point as the next barrel rotated into place, and put out another killing shot. The robots kept up the barrage, along with some Suryans who had come out to lend their fire. He noted two of his robots dropping off the net and turned quickly in that direction, watching as the third robot was hit b
y a powerful particle beam and went down with a hole through its thorax. Watcher fired his own cannon, and shouted in dismay as the beam bounced from an electromag screen in front of the enemy gun that had to have been taken from some kind of vehicle mount. He started to adjust his own beam, to change the barrel settings so they would strip the charges off the particles as they left the weapon, hoping he could get some into the enemy weapon. Too late, he thought, as the ominous barrel swung in his direction, until it was pointed directly at his body.

  * * *

  “We have something coming out of, I don’t know what they’re coming out of,” said the panicked voice of the Sensor Officer, over an Oh shit by the Tactical Officer.

  Admiral Miklas Gerasi looked up from the repeater screen where he was keeping track of the battle in the amidships section of his vessel, and swore as well as he looked at the main viewer.

  Something was opening up the space out there, as big red dots began to form and expand. The Admiral could see that there was some other space on the other side, seeded with black points that looked like the negatives of stars. And things started to come through the openings, ships of a configuration he had never before seen. He remembered tales of the hyperspace used by the ancients, other dimensions that his people had still not learned to access. And here was evidence that someone else had rediscovered them. They were here, and he didn’t know their intentions.

  The first ship to come through its rip was slightly larger than his own, as were the next five. Then came four larger vessels, all about five times the mass of his ships. He thought they were the biggest vessels he had ever seen, almost two kilometers in length, with triangular grabber units bow, stern and amidships, and large boxy apparatus on dorsal and ventral surfaces. Then came the last two ships through their wide open rips in space, and the Admiral felt his mind stagger. They were easily three, maybe four kilometers in length, and a kilometer in width, and had to mass twenty million tons if anything.

  Two of the Nation warships fired on one of the smaller of the enemy ships, the escorts. Their lasers and particle beams did no damage, striking a strong field and reflecting off. The escorts fired on the two offending vessels with bright as sun beams that tore through the two Nation’s battleships like a laser through thin wood. Both vessels went up in a series of secondary explosions, leaving a spreading debris field where had existed million ton warships with crews of several thousand each, all gone.

  “Do not fire on my ships,” came a strangely accented voice over the com, while a face formed on the main viewer of a youngish looking man with blond hair and a square jaw. “We have no quarrel with your people, but I will not tolerate aggressive action toward my vessels.”

  “Who are you?” yelled Gerasi, fear and anger warring within him. “What do you want?”

  “We have come for the being known as Watcher,” said the man, whose face looked like that of a thirty year old, while his eyes looked much older.

  “We have him aboard my vessel,” said the Admiral. “He is my prisoner.”

  “We demand that the being known as Watcher be turned over to us,” said the man, smiling a smile that did not reach his eyes.

  “He is my prisoner,” said Gerasi, slamming a fist on his chair arm. “Not to be turned over to a bunch of newcomers.”

  The man nodded and looked at someone off screen, then said some words that Gerasi couldn’t understand. The screen switched to a view of one of Gerasi’s vessels, just before a trio of bright beams intersected on it, and it disappeared in an explosion of vapor and the bright flashes of secondaries. The face of the man reappeared on the screen.

  “Do we understand each other now, Admiral Gerasi?” asked the man with another cold smile.

  Gerasi nodded his head, not even wondering how the man knew his name. “I will give my full cooperation, as long as you don’t harm any more of my ships or crews.”

  “I do not think we will need to,” said the man. “And you will turn the Watcher over to us?”

  “He’s not really my prisoner,” said Gerasi with a frown. “He is aboard this ship,” said the Admiral, raising a hand when the other started to speak, cutting him off. “We are engaged with him and his forces at the moment, but I am sure that we will soon have him.”

  “Then I will send my people aboard to assist in his apprehension,” said the man, looking off screen again and yelling out some harsh syllables. “And I can expect your full cooperation?”

  “Of course you may, uh.”

  “Admiral Gunter Connor,” said the man, raising an eyebrow. “Of his Imperial Ship Strausserr.”

  “Imperial?”

  “We represent the New Galactic Empire,” said the man with another cold smile. “And I am here to arrest Watcher for crimes against the Galaxy, so that he may be tried and punished.” The other Admiral glared into the screen for a moment. “Justice will be done.”

  “We have some very large shuttles leaving one of those ships,” said the Tactical Officer, wiping his sweat covered face.

  “Do not fire on them,” said the Admiral. “No matter what they do, or where they go? Understood?” He looked over at the Com Officer. “Relay that order to the other ships. Immediately.”

  It was a sobering thought. The Admiral knew that the Donut was their technological superior. But now they knew that some of the fallen powers had risen faster than they had. Sobering indeed, and the Admiral wondered whose side God was on. And what would be the eventual fate of his civilization with such other powers in the Galaxy.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Never stand and take a charge... charge them too. Nathan Bedford Forrest

  Pandora flew around the corner as the image of what was there registered on her HUD, sent from the microbot. Two Marines lay behind her in the suits she had hit with microgrenades. The small explosive devices had been configured as armor piercers, and had ripped through the suits of the enemy while their mag rifle rounds bounced from hers. But she knew this thing was a different can of worms.

  Her eyes verified what the microbot had sent, that a heavy particle beam weapon had been deployed on tripod legs in the corridor. It was obviously too heavy to be carried by an individual trooper, and had probably started out mounted on an air or ground vehicle. Beside it were the large boxy apparatus of magnetic field generators, protecting the gun from fire from the front. The gun fired as she started to raise her grenade launcher. The enemy saw her and men with heavy lasers started to turn her way, while the gun elevated and traversed onto another target. She didn’t know what that target was, but was sure it was something she didn’t want destroyed.

  Pandi pulled the trigger and the launcher started to buck in her hands. The microgrenades, twenty millimeters wide and packing a level four crystalline matrix punch, were set for proximity fuse. They would detonate if they hit something, or on closest approach to something they missed. The launcher sent the small rounds through a magnetic rail at the rate of ten a second. Within two seconds of pulling the trigger twenty small explosions rippled around the large particle beam gun. Both gunners were hit and went down, and the barrel tracked up just before letting off a burst of particles into the ceiling. Pandi tracked the launcher onto the nearest of the laser gunners before he could get his weapon to bear, knocking him to the ground. The other laser gunner fired, his beam striking Pandora in the knee and crippling the leg of the suit by welding the joint. Pandi hit him in the chest with a stream of grenades, then shifted aim as she fell to the floor. The grenades hit the magnetic field generator to the right of the particle beam, knocking it out of action. Then she hit the floor and the launcher jarred out of her gauntleted hands.

  “Bitch,” yelled the one surviving Marine, raising his laser and coming toward her in a jog. He stopped above her and aimed his weapon at her head, while she tried to get her hand in the way. “That’s not going to help you. The Admiral ordered your dead, and I’m the one who’s going to do it.” The Marine kicked her arm away. She looked up at the barrel of the weapon
, thankful that at least it wasn’t going to hurt, much.

  * * *

  Watcher stared in disbelief as the barrel of the particle beam elevated upward just before releasing the blast of protons into the ceiling, burning a large hole through the thick hull metal. He yelled and fired a shot at the gun, his yell turning into a curse as the beam reflected away. He fired a second shot and cheered again as some of it got through. She did it, he thought, checking on Pandora and scowling as her status came up on the HUD.

  The superman rocketed forward on his grabbers and through the remaining magnetic field, which dropped as he hit it. He was over the particle beam and the magnetic field projectors in an instant. To his horror he saw that Pandora’s suit was on the floor, a Marine standing over her with a laser aimed at her helmet. Without hesitation Watcher aimed his weapon and fired, and the helmeted head of the Marine dissolved under the proton beam. The man fell to the side, his weapon clattering to the floor, and Watcher was instantly at Pandi’s side.

  “Are you OK?” he asked, putting a gauntleted hand on her armored shoulder. He retracted his faceplate and looked down on his mate.

  “I’ve been better,” she said, retracting her own faceplate so she could look at him face to face. “Nothing some time in a regeneration tank won’t fix.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I should have gotten here sooner, before those fanatics could do what they did to you.”

  “You got here in the nick of time,” she said, tears brimming in both eyes. “Just like the cavalry is supposed to. So give me a kiss, you big lug.”

  Watcher smiled and leaned over the woman, bringing his lips to her full mouth. It was almost like an electric shock when he made physical contact. It still amazed him that he could feel such toward another human. He had used machines to pleasure himself before she came, and technically they were much better at it than any mere human. But love, and the emotionality that went along with it, transcended the purely physical. He kissed her for what seemed like minutes, savoring the taste of her mouth, until a throat clearing from behind caught his attention.