To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well) (18 page)

The tank to the left
also released a hyper-v missile that tracked in on the troop carrier twenty-two
kilometers up the river.  That vehicle might have had time to track the missile
for the first two seconds of its flight.  Unfortunately for the passengers and
crew the first two seconds were the only two seconds, and aircraft, crew and
ten marines fell in fiery ruins into the river.

Watcher’s tank elevated
the secondary barrel next the kinetic cannon, tracking on one of the aircraft
flying high above.  With a loud humming sound like a million angry insects a
dark red beam seemed to instantaneously link the tank with the aircraft.  It
was not really instantaneous, the beam was only traveling at point zero one c,
a mere thirty thousand kilometers per second.  It still imparted enough kinetic
and heat energy into the fighter to vaporize the center section of the craft. 
Wings, tail and a portion of the nose fell out of the explosion caused by vapor
trying to expand outward, and the fighter was gone before it knew what was
happening.

The turret traversed
again, barrel tracked, and a second beam blew another fighter out of the sky. 
The tanks accelerated across the river, and Watcher fired his last shot before
being swallowed up by jungle again.  All three tanks elevated their guns
upward, and fired a kinetic round and a short burst of protons up into space,
striking one of the enemy battleships and blasting holes in her hull.  It was a
pinprick, Watcher knew, but a satisfying one.

And then the orange and
red canopy was again overhead, his tanks forging back into the jungle.  Several
minutes passed before there was the response he expected.  A bright flash
appeared behind him, followed by a rumble through the ground and a hot wind
that whipped through the foliage.  Branches fell from the air, striking the
tanks and bouncing  away.  A couple of trees toppled, one hitting the leftmost
tank, which shrugged it off and plowed ahead.

More flashes appeared
ahead, and soon the jungle was a burning mass of vegetation.  Watcher waited a
moment, letting the smoke and debris provide cover, then started going again,
stealth fields on full, sticking to areas that still had some cover, until he
made his way up a slope and into untouched jungle again. 
That should give
them something to think about
, he thought, looking back at the devastated
river valley on his microsat network.  That view bothered him a bit, even
though he hadn’t caused the destruction, he had been the reason for it. 
Pushing those feelings down he switched the view to the damaged Nation
battleship, a sextet of new holes in her bow, and smiled.  He had shown that he
could strike back, and the fear of the planet’s automated defense system still
restricted their use of kinetics to the smaller variety, below a hundred
kilotons.  And they would have to target him much better to kill him with
those.

*     *     *

“We’ve lost all contact
with forces in Valley Alpha Ten,” called out one of the techs on the flag
bridge.

“Show me,” said Gerasi,
getting up from his chair and heading for the tech’s station.  Before he took
three steps another voice called out.

“
Thresher
reporters they are under attack.”

“From where?’ asked the
Admiral, turning in mid stride to head for the other station.  He was concerned
about his forces planetside.  He was more concerned for his fleet.

“From the planet,” said
the tech, looking wide eyed at the Admiral.

“Could the planetary
defenses be engaging us again?” asked the Captain, stepping up to the other
side of the tech.  There was fear written on the man’s face, and as much as he
didn’t like or respect the man, the Admiral really couldn’t blame him. 

They really didn’t have
a chance against those defenses.  As far as they knew they were still over the
horizon from the batteries that had fired on them before, using their
reactionless drive to stay in a holding position in low orbit over the area
they were most interested in.  But a regiment of Marines was on the way to the
pyramid that housed those batteries, and they could be in real danger.

“What is the status of
the pyramid assault force?” he shouted out, looking over at another tech, who
started talking into his mic, then looked back at the Fleet Commander.

“They report nothing
out of the ordinary,” said the tech, a look of relief on his face.  “ETA
twenty-three minutes.”

“
Thresher
reports they were struck by three particle beams originating from Valley Alpha
Three,” said the first tech, the one who had reported the cessation of signals
from the so named valley.

The Abomination
, thought the Admiral,
clenching his fists at his side. 
He’s throwing a challenge in my face, the
damned freak.
  “What’s their damage?”

The tech talked for a
moment, listened, then looked over at the Admiral.  “They report minimal damage
to the bow.  One missile compartment opened to space, damage to one laser
projector.  Six killed, unknown number of wounded.”

“We need to hit that
valley,” said the Captain, looking over at the Admiral with an expression of
anger.  “Blow the hell out of it.”

But we can’t hit him
with a big weapon
,
thought the Admiral, remembering that the defenses let them get away with
strikes in the ten kiloton range, then whacked them hard when they went to
megatons.

“Prepare to fire three
ten kiloton range weapons,” ordered the Admiral, looking over at the Fleet Tactical
Officer.  “Whichever ships are in best position to deliver them.”

“You need to hit him
harder than that,” yelled the Captain, his eyes wild.  “He dared to attack the
children of God, and must be smitten as if from the hand of God.”

“Calm yourself, Captain,”
said the Admiral, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.  “This is a military
operation, not a religious seminar.”

“You dare to
blaspheme,” yelled the Captain, knocking the Admiral’s hand off his shoulder. 
“You dare say that God is not involved in this campaign.”

It’s my experience that
God lets men settle their own affairs,
thought the Admiral, looking into the Captain’s
eyes and seeing only madness.  “Sergeant,” he said, looking over at a Marine
who was standing guard on the bridge.  “Please escort the Captain to his
quarters.”  He looked into the Captain’s eyes and spoke as if to a child.  “You
are relieved of duty, Captain.  Please go with the Sergeant.”

Gerasi really expected
the man to protest, or to fight back.  But the Captain looked like a man
defeated, nodding his head and following the Marine from the bridge.

“Thresher
reports they have been
hit again,” yelled a tech.

“Particle beams again?”
asked the Admiral, running over to the station.

“No, sir,” said the
tech.  “Kinetic rounds.  Again minimal damage.”

And they must have been
fired at the same time as the particle beams, with a much greater flight time
, thought the Admiral. 
And the Abomination is again under cover, escaped while we debated.

“Porpoise
is firing a kinetic
round,” called out a tech. 
“Sea Sanke
is also firing.”

And we’ll hit nothing,
while he escapes us again, to strike again
, thought the Admiral. 
All this for
a woman?  And he will not even get her.  He will deliver himself to us
eventually, and we will remove that which should never have been made from the
Universe
.

*     *     *

The ground rumbled
underfoot, and dust fell from the ceiling of the cavern.  A second later the
ground rumbled again, then again a moment later.

“They’re’ dropping
kinetic weapons again,” said Lt. Commander Dasha Mandrake, staring at the
stalactite covered ceiling above.

Fleet Admiral Nagara
Krishnamurta looked up as well, wondering if some of those rock spears might
come down, causing more casualties among his small command.  “At least they are
not targeting us,” he said, looking at the holo the robot was projecting that
was giving the take of the pizzos Pandora had left for their use.  The view
showed a squad of Nation Marines sweeping through the jungle, then switched to
some climbing the slope of a hill.  So far they had not found an entrance to
this cavern complex that they couldn’t even  suspect existed.

“Why do you say that,
sir?” asked the Commander, looking at the holo.

“Because, as murderous
as they are, I don’t think even those fanatics would be dropping KE weapons on
their own people.  And those hits had to be at some distance.” 
And I wonder
who they are attacking.  Hopefully not the Latham woman.  And if so, I pray to
the Gods she can keep out of the line of fire.

Chapter Seventeen

Racism springs from the lie that certain human
beings are less than fully human.  It's a self-centered falsehood that corrupts
our minds into believing we are right to treat others as we would not want to
be treated.   Alveda King

“Ah, she is regaining
consciousness,” said the hated voice as Pandora became aware of her
surroundings again.

She opened her eyes,
nausea warring with the rush of stimulants she felt coursing through her body. 
They had injected her with something, a drug that had helped to raise her back
to awareness.  She was sure that they hadn’t done that because they missed her
sparkling wit.  The rush was also diminishing as she took stock of herself, and
she knew her nanites were already attacking it en mass.

Pandora still hurt like
hell, especially in her breasts and private areas.  Her nanites were
stimulating the release of endorphins and blocking nerve transmission, and
there were finally enough of them in her system to reduce agony to pain.  Her
muscles and joints were in good shape, repaired and maintained by the nanites,
which at her command had ignored needed repairs to her skin so that the game
was not given away.  She could tell from her implants that her muscles were
fully charged with ATP, and that she was almost ready to carry out what she had
planned from the moment she had found herself on this table of horrors.

“Are you ready to
answer some more questions?” asked the dwarfish man, moving to her side while
his hand reached for the heat probe.

“I thought you already
got what you wanted,” she said, making her voice sound weaker than it was. 
“What more do you want, you sons of bitches.”

“What language,” said
the man, chuckling.  “Perhaps I should burn that tongue out of your head.”  The
man moved the now hot probe toward her mouth, then withdrew it.  “But no, we
need you able to talk, for the while.”

Pandora tried to link
with the ship’s computer, using the pathway they had shown her when they
extracted her code.  She linked to the outer layer with ease, but the inner
workings, like those that controlled her shackles, were still locked to her
mind.

“What the hell do you
need from me?” she growled, linking with the nanites that had left her body
soon after she had first woken on this table.

“We would like to know
of the defenses on the
Donut
,” said the man, almost caressing the handle
of the probe.  “We would like to know the location of the control center.”

“I’m not telling you
that,” said Pandora, spitting up at the man as soon as the last word left her
mouth.

“Oh, I think you will,”
said the man, a cold smile playing across his face. 

He brought the tip of
the probe close to her left eye, till she could feel the heat drying the
surface of her eyeball.  She closed her eye tight, but another Inquisitor put
his fingers on her lid and pulled it open.

“I think we need you to
keep your tongue, for now,” said the Chief Inquisitor, hovering the tip of the
probe over her orb.  “But you don’t really need to see to give us the
information.  Only to feel.”

Fuck
, thought Pandora,
staring at the probe which was weaving back and forth in her sight like the
head of a cobra. 
Superficial damage I can take, but not the loss of my
sight
.  She had wanted to wait a little longer, but time had just run out,
and the probe was moving in a motion she knew would only end when her left
eyeball was burned out of its socket.

With a thought the
nanites that had infiltrated the magnetic lock mechanisms made their final
move, pulling atoms out of the power conduit that fed the manacles.  They
worked at blinding speed, moving objects ten thousand times a second at the
nanoscale.  Billions of atoms were moved in less than a tenth of a second, and
power was interrupted to the locks, which clicked open.

The Inquisitor holding
the probe didn’t notice the manacles on wrists and ankles opening.  The other
torturer did, and tried to move away from the table and grab a weapon.  Pandora
moved like a snake whose tail had been set afire, her right hand smacking the
Chief Inquisitor and knocking him to the side while her left hand grabbed the
heat probe.  With a twist she was off the table and on the floor, taking a
couple of quick steps toward the second man, swinging the probe out wide, then
smacking it hard into the man’s ear, piercing the auditory canal.  The man
screamed and his legs went out from under him.  Pandi swiveled on her right
foot while her left struck out in a front snap kick to the falling man’s jaws. 
He continued his fall while consciousness fled, and rolled flopping bonelessly
onto his back.

“Oh no you don’t,” yelled
Pandora, jumping over the form of the unconscious man, landing on her right
foot and spinning into a left hook kick that caught the Chief Inquisitor in the
chest, knocking him back.  She jumped up and came down with an angled side kick
to the man’s knee, the satisfying crack of his joint breaking coming to her
ears.  The man let out a high pitched scream, trying to grab his knee and keep
from falling back at the same time, and failing badly at both.  He hit hard
with an oof of outgoing air, tears in his eyes, while he grabbed for his broken
knee with both hands.

A high velocity round
cracked by Pandora’s head, and she ducked and turned at the same moment,
cringing inwardly as several more went overhead.  The only cover was the table
she had been laying on, which had a solid base of metal and plastic.  She let
herself fall behind the table, banging her knees and grimacing at the new but
minor damage she was doing to herself.  More shots cracked overhead, and the
men, she thought there were three, starting yelling at each other, each giving
commands that the others were seeming to ignore as they shouted out their own
directives.

I need to get moving
, she thought, looking
over at the first man she had downed.  He was conscious again, lying there
screaming with the heat probe stuck deep in his ear.  There would be Marines
here any moment, and she didn’t like her odds against heavily armed and
possibly armored soldiers, unlike the torturers she was currently engaged with.

Pandora slid over
toward the screaming man, then hit him in the throat with a knife hand, turning
the screams into gurgles.  She hit him again, crushing his throat, not
intending to leave any of her torturers alive to tell a story of how they
survived her vengeance.  She grabbed the handle of the probe and pulled it from
the dying man’s ear, making sure that the tip was still white hot.  Then she
was on her feet and throwing it toward the centermost of the men, who flinched
and threw his arms up while the other two were trying to get her lined up for a
shot.  Pandora fell back to the floor, flinching herself as shots cracked
overhead, then smiling as she heard the scream of the centermost man.  She knew
that the probe hit him, and while not sure of how much damage she had done,
from the scream she could tell that the hot end had connected.

The men all started
yelling at once, and Pandora ran her hands over the body of the man she had
just killed, finding a mag pistol and a magazine pouch on his belt under his
robes.  She checked the pistol, turning it on and setting it for maximum
velocity.  She set the magazine pouch down on the floor near the table, then
crawled around to the side and looked around, pistol gripped firmly in both
hands.  She knew better than to fire over the top of the table, an amateur
mistake most likely to get her killed.  The men didn’t seem to know that trick,
and she remembered that they were not military at all, merely religious
fanatics who could cause enough pain to get the information they wanted.

Suddenly klaxons went
off, and she knew someone had either checked in on the room through the viewer,
or one of the inquisitors had finally gotten his shit together and sent for
help. 
Probably the former
, she thought with a tight smile as she looked
around the table and lined up her first shot, also planning her next two. 
Either way she needed to move, and move now, or she would either be dead or
again a prisoner.  She swore to herself she would not again be captured, and
squeezed the trigger on the pistol.

The mag pistol bucked hard
in her hands, the recoil from accelerating the metallic pellet down the magnet
lined tube that was the barrel.  She had guessed at the recoil, and had
slightly overcompensated, so that when the barrel rose the round struck her
target in the throat, instead of the face like she had intended.  The man
dropped his pistol and started to reach for his throat before his body
registered the damage to his spine.  After that he simply fell dead to the
floor.

The other men made the
mistake of looking at their dead comrade instead of trying to target his
killer.  Pandora’s second round took the man to the left through the forehead,
then she put two rounds into the upper chest of the last man.  Both fell, the
first dead immediately, the other choking his life out as blood filled his
lungs.

Pandora was on her feet
in an instant, heading for the door, her gun still covering the men, switching
back and forth.  She reached the door and hit the lock button, knowing it
wouldn’t hold long.  She then sprinted back to where the Chief Inquisitor was
still rocking on the floor, holding his knee, scooping up the magazine pouch as
she passed the table.

“I need the codes for
the security system,” she said, looking down at the small man.  “And I need
them now.”

“I’m not giving you those
codes, woman,” said the man through clenched teeth, a grimace of pain on his
face.

Pandora aimed the
pistol and shot the man in the other knee.  The Inquisitor screamed again, a
high pitch noise that carried his agony with it.  “I hope that gives you an
idea as to how much pain I am willing to inflict, you piece of trash,” said
Pandi, aiming the pistol at his groin.

“I’ll give you the
codes,” said the man, his eyes wide.  “Just don’t hurt me anymore.”

“Can give it but can’t
take it,” said Pandora with a sneer.  “Figures.  Now send those codes through
my link and I won’t cause you no more pain.”  Pandora opened the pathway to her
brain, meshing her own link with the man’s as he sent the information down the
pipe.

“Thank you,” she said,
pointing the pistol at the man’s head, her own vision almost red with anger as
she thought of how she had been violated by this slime ball.

“You promised you
wouldn’t hurt me,” screamed the man, one hand going up in front of his face
like he could stop a bullet with it.

“Oh, it won’t hurt,”
she said with a cold smile playing across her face.  “I promise.”

“You will go to Hell
for this,” said the wide eyed man.  “This is murder, plain and simple, and I
will see you in Hell.”

“You sure will,” said
Pandora with a quick laugh.  “And you’ll be there personal to see me march in. 
After I send you some more company.”

Pandi pulled the
trigger and put the round right through the inquisitor’s forehead.  The man
fell back to the floor with open mouth and staring eyes, and Pandora, though
she really didn’t believe in Hell, hoped that it did exist, and was opening its
gates for the man.

Pandora looked over
toward the door and used the codes to set a block in place on the lock, then
looked to a vent high in the wall that appeared to be her only way out.  Her
eye caught her clothes, panties and bodysuit, lying on the floor in a corner,
and she took a moment to grab the dirty and ripped clothing.  She knew it was
irrational, but she was tired of parading around naked in front of the fanatics.
 She pulled the panties on, then the body suit, moving as quickly as possible.

Next she pulled the
table that had been her prison over to the wall and climbed on top, looking
into the duct that was now blocked by a security door.  With a thought the door
was retracting, and Pandi pulled off the grill and herself into the duct,
grimacing as her ruined chest contacted the metal floor and she scraped along
it.  She pulled the grill back into place, moved down the duct, then closed the
security door behind her with another thought. 
I better make good use of
this while I can
, she thought, knowing that the enemy would change the
codes as soon as they figured out what was going on.  She pulled up the
schematics of the ship and found what she wanted, her next target, and the
thing that would give her some real power aboard this ship.

*     *     *

Colonel Wilhem Johanson
of the Nation of Humanity Marines had never been to the Supersystem before.  He
had been privy to all the intelligence gathered from Admiral Gerasi’s first
mission to the
Donut
, but had never experienced it himself.  He really
wasn’t sure if he was qualified to lead this expedition to the station, but he
had been ordered to lead the regiment onto the ancient artifact, and so here he
was.

“Clear, sir,” came the
voice of the Regimental Sergeant Major, Charlie Patterson, over the com. 

Patterson had been on
the
Donut
before, as a First Sergeant.  Most of his company had been
wiped out, along with a good portion of his battalion.  But the man knew what they
were facing, which was more than most of the regiment.