To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well) (16 page)

The man gave her a sad
look, then touched the electrode back to her chest.  Snot flew from Pandora’s
nose again and she screamed, pushing all the air out of her lungs until there
was no more.  The Inquisitor removed the electrode and Pandi fell back to the
table as her muscles relaxed, her chest heaving as she tried to bring enough
air into her lungs.

“We can do this for
hours,” said the man, nodding to a subordinate who ran a wet cloth over her
forehead, then cleaned up the rest of her face.  “Why put yourself through
this, when you know we will get what we want at the end.”

“She seems to be
resistant to our drugs,” said the Inquisitor who was watching the computer
screen.  “I don’t know how that is possible.”

“Because her tech base
is so much more advanced than ours,” said the Chief, who then smiled at the
woman.  “Our drugs are probably primitive compared to what they have on that
station, and I think she has been conditioned to resist even them.”

The man looked over at
the table of instruments, his hand reaching out and touching, then grabbing,
another device that looked similar to the freezing unit.  “Maybe pain is not
the total answer,” said the man in a soft, almost caressing voice.  “You are a
beautiful woman, desirable, even to that Abomination you call a lover.  Perhaps
he will not desire you so much when you are a scarred, pitiful creature.”

The inquisitor flipped
on the device and pressed it to Pandora’s right breast, the one that had not
been scarred by the cold.  The smell of burning flesh reached her nostrils at
about the same time the pain came through the nerve damp that her nanites were
administering.  It was excruciating, though she knew not as bad as it would have
been without the nanites.  What was worse was watching the probe burn its way
into her tender flesh, deep into the breast.  The man moved the probe and
burned off her nipple, then pushed it back down.

“Bastard,” she yelled,
putting more pain into the yell than there really was, which was not really
such a stretch.

“Give us the code, or I
promise you that you will be a woman no man will ever desire.  Ever again.”

Liar
, she thought, knowing
she had to hold out at least a little while longer.  Knowing that once on the
station she could have all of the damage they were doing repaired.  That’s what
her rational mind was telling her.  Her emotional mind was crying over the
damage that was being done to her body.  It was telling her she was going to be
a hideous cripple for the rest of her life. 
Lair
, she thought again,
this time at her own mind. 
That’s what they want you to think.
  She
closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to clear the emotion laden thoughts
out, and only allow the rational to take hold.

A sharp pain in her
left hand forced her eyes open, and she stared in horror at her pinky finger,
held up in the pincers that had taken it off.  She took a shuddering breath,
fighting back the fear that was about to again overwhelm her.  And at that
moment the heat probe struck at her inner thighs, burning into the flesh just
below her privates, sending a wave of excruciating pain rolling up her nerves
before the nanites could initiate a block.  Pandora sputtered and ejected more
snot from her nose, clamping her jaws shut, then fading into blackness.

*     *     *

“She is very strong,
this one,” said the Chief Inquisitor over the com link.

“Take your time,” said
the Admiral, looking at the burned and bleeding form of the woman strapped to
the table.  “We don’t need the information this day, but we will need it.  And
don’t worry about what shape she is in at the end.  We are planning to just
space her body anyway.  Maybe that will cause the Abomination to make a mistake
out of anger.” 
Or attack us in a great rage and wipe us from the Universe
. 
It was a risk either way, but Gerasi was determined to strike at the
Abomination somehow.

Chapter Fifteen

Watcher was developed to be the ultimate
soldier.  But once it was discovered how frighteningly intelligent he was even
the military wanted nothing to do with him.  It is surprising how generals and
admirals have strong opinions about the intelligence of subordinates, and how a
brilliant underling is seen as a threat by the ruling class of the Military
Establishment.   Journal of the Watcher Project

Watcher stood on the
branch of the tree he had levitated up to, looking out over the broad river
valley to his front.  He had decided an hour earlier to take to the upper
canopies again, banking on the enemy not knowing where he was.  But now he had
this river ahead that at its narrowest was at least ten kilometers, a narrow he
would have to cross if he didn’t want to detour far out of his way.

The wind rustled
through the leaves of the tree, and the leaves turned to allow the wind to
carry away heat. 
Amazing ecology
, thought Watcher, looking at the
leaves that were actually exothermic sugar factories.  In an extra billion
years of evolution Maurid life had branched off much further on the
evolutionary scale than did Earth forms, and plants and animals were much more
closely related than they were in terrestrial ecologies.  Plants had fibrous
muscles, some more than others, while animals were able to gain some energy
from light.  Maybe not enough to survive, but enough to aid them in survival.

But of most interest to
Watcher was the shielding effect the jungle had on heat emitters.  Vehicles
under the canopy were invisible to infrared sensors in air or space, both
because the heat production of the plants, and the heat absorption/reflection
of the leaves.  But when he was over the cold water of the river things would
be different. 
Unless
, he thought, stepping from the branch and lowering
himself to his tank on his grabber units.

His audio pickups told
him something was moving through the air some distance away, toward that
river.  Watcher reversed course, back to his perch, his HUD zooming in on some
objects moving through the center of the valley.  He cursed as he recognized
the atmospheric fighters that had given him so much trouble five hundred
kilometers back.  Cursed while remembering that he had prepared for just this
eventuality.

Watcher hadn’t thought
of aircraft when he had planned this mission.  Spacecraft yes, and things
looking down from the orbitals.  But not old fashioned, well really high tech,
aircraft that could swoop low to attack or fly high to recon equally well.

Two of the craft flew
directly over the river, while each had a wing man over the jungle on either
side.  It made sense they would patrol this waterway, as this valley was
directly on his path from where they had spotted him previously, and where they
knew he wanted to go.  He had detoured a little north before progressing again
in this direction, but they would have taken that into account as a possible
course.

One of the fighters
banked to the right and straightened out in a path that would take it near his
position.  Watcher moved back into the foliage, making sure that his suit was
only radiating on the same strength and frequency as that of the surrounding
vegetation, at the same time radiating the excess heat back into the jungle. 
He zoomed in on the approaching fighter with his HUD, sprouting a smaller
screen that showed its path over the terrain in relation to his position.  It
was going to come close, but nowhere near an overflight.  It roared over the
jungle inland of Watcher, moving just a little over the speed of sound, and
passed.  Watcher switched his view to his orbital microsats and scanned the
area.

“Shit,” he cursed as
the number of aircraft registered on his sweep.  They were of course stealthed
to the best of their tech’s ability.  But not good enough to escape his when he
actually looked for them.  He counted about eighty aircraft within a two
hundred kilometer radius of his area along a two hundred degree arch.  From
that he estimated that the Nations must have deployed over two hundred
aircraft, which was probably an underestimate.  He didn’t see how or why they
had taken that many atmospheric craft with them on their ships, though he had
to admit each could carry a couple of squadrons stowed away without too much
trouble.  But they were liable to cause him trouble unless he did something
drastic.  With that thought he was back at his tank, contacting the bots that
had flown to him from the pyramid, getting them ready for the next phase of the
operation.

*     *     *

The small robot scanned
the skies as it used it scramjet propulsion to move through the air.  Its
sensors picked up the target it had been programmed to seek, and the robot
increased speed and changed course until it was coming up behind the Nation
fighter.  The robot was giving off very little heat with its advanced engines,
and its five centimeter length and stealth construction gave back no return to
the less advanced sensor tech of the enemy aircraft.

The robot maneuvered in
close and came to a soft landing on the skin of the aircraft, its legs bonding
with the alloy they sat upon.  A small laser bored into the hull, then a
proboscis extended into the hole.  With a jet of air the package was delivered,
and soon microbots were swarming through the inside of the aircraft, heading
for their targets, where they delivered their nanobot cargos.  The delivery
robot dissolved its attachments to the hull and fell off, dropping the
kilometers back to the ground.  Meanwhile the nanobots went to work, first
making more of their kind, then attacking the systems of the aircraft.

*     *     *

Watcher sat in his
tank, leaning out of the top hatch, while his suit HUD kept him apprised of
what was going on.  The river stretched ahead, his vehicles back from it fifty
meters into the foliage.  He could see a gleam of sunlight on water here and
there through the growth.  The timer on the HUD counted down, until it hit
zero, the moment the nanites were supposed to work their magic.

*     *     *

Senior Pilot Skyler
Kane looked out of his canopy on the red and orange tinted world below. 
It’s
beautiful
, he thought, a lush growth like nothing they had at home, where
population had just about overrun resources.  He had also seen some flying
creatures that seemed almost too big to take wing, then remembered that the
oxygen level out there was much higher than on his homeworld, again thanks to
all that vegetation.  He had been flying too fast for the flyers to do more
than get a quick look at him, and even if he had been going low and slow they
would have been insane to have tackled anything as big as his fighter.

The river glinted below
in the sunlight as he banked his fighter into a turn.  His eyes scanned the
length of the waterway at the same time as his sensors reported nothing
unusual.  He straightened the fighter out and cruised at three thousand meters
over the water, heading for his next checkpoint.

The flashing red lights
on his instrument panel were the first indication that something was wrong. 
The engines dying with a rattle was the next.  The pilot tried to call up his
onboard computer to get an idea of what the malfunction was, but the AI did not
respond to his queries. 

“What the fuck,” he
cried as the nose of the aircraft started to tilt down.  He pulled hard at his
stick, which had seemed to go dead in his hand. 
The fly by wire system must
be out
, he thought, struggling to pull the aircraft up and into a glide by
shear strength.  But no matter how hard he pulled, the stick would not come
back.  The nose of the aircraft soon pointed straight down, and the plane was
in a dive from which he would not be able pull her out of.

Normally the computer
would be yelling at him to pull up, but it was completely missing in action. 
The altimeter went through a thousand meters of distance at an alarming rate,
and Kane made a snap decision.  With the pull of a lever the canopy blew off. 
A second later the seat blew out of the aircraft, then separated from the
pilot.  A moment later the parachute opened and the pilot was swinging beneath
the shroud lines, the river below.  He pulled on the lines and started his move
away from the center of the water, aiming for the shallows.  That jungle was said
to be deadly, and he didn’t want his introduction to it to be a drop while
banging against the trunks of large trees.  He was also pretty sure that the
river would hold things he didn’t want to meet, but he liked his odds in the
shallows better than in the orange and red canopy below.

As he watched another
fighter slapped nose first into the river and disappeared from sight.  Kane
said a prayer to the God he worshipped as he saw that the canopy was still
intact on that aircraft, meaning the pilot had ridden it into the drink. 
Nothing surfaced, and Kane said another prayer, before turning his attention to
the water coming up below.

He splashed down into
that water, about twenty meters from the shore.  His suit kept him dry, but was
also trying to pull him under.  Kane hit the chute release and unburdened
himself of the waterlogged equipment, then hit the buoyancy control and
inflated his vest.  He looked toward the shore, making sure that his survival
pack was attached to his suit.  A bubbling noise caught his attention, and he
turned outward to see something big disturbing the water, the pattern moving
toward his position.  He turned and started toward the shore as fast as he
could swim.  It was not a race he would win.

*     *     *

“What the hell,” said
the tech in a loud voice.

Admiral Miklas Gerasi
turned to the sound of the voice, wondering what was going wrong this time. 
“What do you have, Ensign?” he asked, getting up from his chair and walking
with quick steps toward the officer’s station.

“We lost contact with
all of our aircraft over the large river valley,” said the young officer,
looking at the Admiral with bewildered eyes.  “Then they all started to drop
from the sky.”

“At the same time?”
asked the Admiral, his own eyes widening.

“As close to it as to
make no difference, sir,” said the officer, looking back at his screen and
pushing tabs on his touch-board.

“Any idea what
happened?”

“I don’t have a clue,
sir,” said the young man, shrugging his shoulders.  “We have no indication of
EMP or light amp, no vids of missiles.  They just went off the air, and then
they fell.”

“The Abomination did
something,” said one of the other officers.  “That’s the only explanation.”

“And he had to have a
reason for knocking down the aircraft in that sector,” said Gerasi, looking
over at a larger screen that was showing the river valley.  “Like he wants to
cross that river without us seeing him.  Can we bring that river under fire?”

“If we could see him,”
said the Tactical Officer, nodding his head.  “But I would bet my life he will
be hard to find.”

“But we can look,”
yelled the Admiral, looking from Tactical to Sensory Officer.

Suddenly the screen
looking over the river valley erupted with static.  The river was still
visible, but the picture was so degraded there was little chance of seeing a
trio of stealthed objects crossing that water.  The Admiral cursed and threw
his hands in the air, wondering why his God had tasked him so.

The Admiral looked over
at another officer, a Lt. Commander in charge of flight operations.  “Get every
plane you can over that valley, right now.”  He turned to his Marine Liaison
Officer.  “Do we have any boats you could put on that river?”

“There are none in the
area,” said the officer after a moment’s thought.  “We could probably get some
there within a half an hour.  But I don’t think he will still be there.”

“Are there any other
rivers in his path where they might be of some use? asked the Admiral, walking
over to the main viewer, which was now showing a map of the region in question
in lieu of the useless live feed.  “What about this one here,” he said, his
finger pointing to one about a hundred and fifty kilometers from the river the
Abomination had to be crossing at this moment.

“It’s not as big as the
other one,” said the Flight Operations Officer.  “Only two hundred meters
across on average.”

“Still a chance to stop
him,” shouted the Admiral, glaring at the officer, then looking over at the
Marine Liaison.  “Get some damned patrol boats on that river right away.  We
might be able to stop him, with a little luck.” 
And luck was not something
we’ve had a great run on
, thought the Admiral, shaking his head.  “Just get
those boats there, and reaction teams in transports.” 
You may be a devil
,
he thought of the bald, wide browed creature that haunted the nightmares of his
people. 
But we have God on our side.  And who can stand against us, when
God is for us.

*     *     *

Watcher scanned the
river for a moment from the edge, still back from the foliage.  A large
crocodilian type of creature, in the ten ton range, was gulping down one of the
pilots who had landed in the water on the other side of the broad river.  He
felt a little bit of guilt at having dropped the man to his death into the
belly of a predator, and so many of his fellows to an end in crashing
airplanes.  When he was
Vengeance
he had been responsible for so many
deaths, in the trillions.  Even though he knew he had not really been
responsible for those killings he still felt guilty.  And now, even when he had
to kill, he regretted the necessity.  But he also knew he had to get to Pandora
before it was too late, if it wasn’t already, and these men were in his way.