To Well And Back (The Deep Dark Well) (27 page)

The two squads of the
other assault team blasted through the hatch leading from ready room to
corridor.  The air was sucked through the opening to space, and the robots forged
into a hallway in which crew were struggling to get to oxygen masks or
spacesuits.  Oxygen masks were in lockers built into the walls.  Space suits
were stored in ready rooms, the nearest of which was behind the robots who
weren’t interested in letting the humans get to them.  There being no air for
sonics, the robots took out every human in the corridor with stun darts as soon
as the organics got to a mask and a supply of air.  Watcher was not interested
in causing unnecessary deaths, and captured Nation personnel were more
desirable than dead.  That was a lesson he had learned from looking at vids of
Vengeance,
learning how not to act.

In less than a minute
the section of corridor was secure, and the robot squads were moving into the
rooms nearest to each emergency bulkhead, two left to guard the closed off
section at each end while the others opened an entrance to the next room over
with negative matter.

Watcher meanwhile moved
his own two squads out of the ready room and into the corridor beyond.  Like
the other this one had some few Nation personnel who started and ran as they
saw the massive battlebots coming into the hall.  A couple of sweeps of sonic
stunners took down the humans, and the battlebots moved on in a crouch under
the ceiling that was just a little bit too low for them.

Klaxons were going off
throughout the ship now, everyone alerted to the boarding action, and Watcher
thought that soon they would be engaged with armored Marines.  The two things
going for him, beyond the shock of surprise, was that most of the Marines the
ship normally carried were either dead , captured or still fighting on the
planet, and that his equipment and that of his robots in general was far
advanced of theirs.

The first of those
Marines showed up just moments later, running down a branching corridor in
plain sight of the microbots that Watcher had deployed to sweep the hallways. 
They came around the corner and right into the ambush set by him and his
squad.  Particle beams reached from Watcher’s side, heavy lasers from the
other.  One robot took a hit to an arm that disabled the limb in a shower of
glowing sparks.  The twelve Marines died quickly under the kinetic and heat
energy of the superfast protons that struck them down, leaving glowing holes in
the armor and partially vaporized bodies underneath.

[Move, now
,
]
he
sent to his other two squads on the other prong of the assault. 
Acknowledgement came back as those robots finished blasting through the walls,
into the empty rooms beyond, and then to the doors, where in both actions they
took Marines who waited by the bulkhead doors in the flanks.  Those men died to
a man, and the robots moved on to sweep further into the ship.

Maybe I can take the
whole ship
,
thought Watcher, dismissing the idea as soon as it came.  He might just be able
to do that, or he might stretch his resources too thin to accomplish his major
task, that of rescuing his lover.  He was sure that eventually the other ships
would be sending reinforcements over here, even as they were taking fire from
the planetary defense base his Suryans were manning.  He checked his take from
the robots outside and cursed, noting that the ships were moving, going back
into low orbit and putting the planet between themselves and the base.

At least those Suryans will
be safe
,
he thought as he led one squad toward the brig, while his second squad moved
along a parallel corridor and tried to tie up more of the enemy forces.

*     *     *

“We have a situation
back here, sir,” came the voice of the Security Chief over the com while the
Admiral sat in an examination seat and the doctor started the scan.

The Admiral tapped into
the ship’s system and saw exactly what kind of situation they had back there,
cursing under his breath.  “So what are you doing about it?”

“We have all Marines on
alert,” said the Security Chief, as if that covered all the bases.

The Admiral checked the
information link again, and saw that the ships were almost out of range of the
surface base they had been unsuccessfully dueling with.  The curve of the
planet was protecting them from that base, unless it had missiles to reach
around the horizon, and it had shown no indication of that so far.

“Contact the other
vessels,” said the Admiral.  “Have them get some more Marines over here.”  He
shifted his attention and looked up at the doctor, who was studying a monitor
with an intent expression.

The doctor looked back
at the Admiral and shook his head.  “Nothing in your system.”

“Are you sure we need
more Marines, sir?” said the Security Chief.  “Surely the hundred and fifty we
still have on board will be enough.”

“You just get them over
here and let me determine if they’re needed,” said the Admiral, growling.  “And
get every damned Spaceman armored up and armed as well.” 
Idiot
, thought
the Admiral, linking into the situation and looking at it in his mind. 
Like
a hundred and fifty Marines are going to stop the Abomination and his robots. 
He’ll go through them like shit through a goose.

“You’re clear, sir,”
reiterated the doc when the Admiral dropped from the circuit.

“I’ll be on the
bridge,” said the senior officer with a nod.  “And I would get ready for a lot
of casualties.”

The ashen faced doctor
nodded back and left the examining room in a run, while the Admiral headed out
and toward the corridor, thinking of the disaster that the two residents of the
station had already caused him. 
At least I have one of them under wraps
,
he thought, running for the lift. 
And maybe I can use her to get the other
one
.

*     *     *

Fleet Admiral Nagara
Krishnamurta wondered whose side the Gods were on as he watched the last of the
Nation warships dip below the horizon, and out of his firing arc.

“That’s it, sir,” said
Lt. Commander Dasha Mandrake, running a hand through her short, dark hair. 
“Not much we can do while the planet is between us and them.”

“Keep an alert crew
ready,” said the Admiral, looking at the taller woman who had become his right
hand on the planet.  “In case they come back, or some other assets come within
range.  Then come with me.”

The officer nodded,
told off some crew, then followed the Admiral from the control room.  Mandrake
was no longer in her battle armor, having shed it soon after she had a command
crew assembled in the control room.  The Admiral had to admit that she was a
fine figure of a woman.  Larger than he was used to, she would be considered a
Valkyrie on his home world, though on hers she was closer to the norm.  Growing
up under heavy gravity had made her strong, and he wondered if she had ever
considered a career in the Marines, where her heavy gravity muscles would have
served her well.

The Admiral walked into
a room that contained scores of combat suits, next to another room that
contained battlebots.  The Admiral walked up to one of the suits, armor that
looked like it might have been made for someone near his stature, and ran a
hand down the metal forearm.  “Amazing, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” said the
other officer, putting her right hand on another suit.  “Amazing tech, far
beyond anything we have.”

“But maybe not for
long,” said the Admiral, looking over at the woman and smiling.  “I want you to
figure out how to use these suits.  And then train our other people in their
use.”

“Are you sure that
Watcher would want us doing that?” asked the officer, narrowing her eyes.

“Watcher is not here,”
said the Admiral, plinking a finger against the hard metal of the suit’s
chest.  “And besides, he showed us how to use that control room, and its tech
is just as advanced as these.”

“Very well,” said the
Lt. Commander, looking around the room.  “I have a feeling these will come in
handy in the next couple of days.”

“That’s the spirit,”
said the Admiral, clapping the younger officer on the back.  “I’m going to
wander this complex a bit, and see what else I might be able to find that could
come in handy.”

The Admiral left the
Lt. Commander standing there looking over the suits while he walked down the
sloping corridor, moving deeper into the complex.  He passed room after room of
robots, then quarters for the station personnel who no longer existed.  There
were what looked like cafeterias and recreation rooms, and cross corridors that
seemed to lead off into an infinity of perspective. 

And then he reached the
wonder he had hoped would be here.  A long room with the Tori Gates of the
wormholes, scores of them beyond a thick door that was meant to close this room
off from invasion.  There were the skeletal remains of humans and aliens, over
a hundred bodies, and the remains of the robots they had been battling. 
Remembering those rooms above he realized that these robots had come through
the wormholes from elsewhere, and that the defenders had not been able to bring
their own bots into action.  Or had it been that those robots had somehow been
deactivated?

And Watcher was
supposed to be alive at this time
, thought the Admiral, an image of the tall,
muscular superman in his mind. 
What part did he have in all of this?  What
is he hiding?

He looked at the gates
as he walked along the wall.  There were forty-four of the things, but only
eleven of them showed the mirrored surface of an active wormhole.  Krishnamurta
wondered where they led, and was tempted to actually jump into one to see what
would happen, where it would lead.  But that way led to death, most likely,
coming into an unknown environment totally unprepared. 
But as soon as we
have some people outfitted in that armor
, he thought, his imagination
bringing him to those unknown places. 
Then we will go exploring, and see
what parts of the Galaxy this opens up for us.

Chapter Twenty-Four

It sometimes amazed me how Pandora Latham was
constantly getting into trouble, as it constantly amazed me how she could
extricate herself from trouble, usually to the extreme detriment of those who
opposed her.  I attributed it to having matured in a society where there were
none of the safety systems that Imperial Humans depended upon.   Memoirs of
Watcher.

Pandora woke from
blackness, fully alert.  She remembered the flash of the explosion and nothing
else.  She was in a room, standing upright in her battle armor.  There were
people moving at the far end of the room, gathering equipment that seemed
vaguely familiar.  She ran through a quick diagnostic of her suit and her
person, and found that all was working.  There was some surface damage to the
suit, and there would be some gaps in the stealth field when it was activated,
but nothing that would prevent her from engaging in combat.

“Are you there?” came a
familiar voice over the com link.

“Good to hear your
voice, lover,” said Pandora, the rush of emotion almost overcoming her.  “And
you came for little ole me?”

“What else could I do,
you insufferable woman,” said the voice of the superman.  “For some obscure
reason I have become very attached to you.”

“And where are you
now?”

“I am fighting my way
into the brig to rescue some Suryans,” said Watcher, and Pandi could now hear
the sounds of combat in the background.  “Then I will come for you, if what I
can determine as your location is correct.”

Pandora looked at the
beacon that was superimposed over the schematic of the ship and grunted.  She
checked her own suit system and verified that he was on target.  “But I think
you better hurry,” she said, trying to move the arms and legs of her suit, and
not shifting a centimeter.  “I seem to be stuck, and people are coming toward
me with bad intent.”

“Is it your suit, or do
they have your suit confined in some manner?”

Pandi ran through the
quick diagnostic again and found that everything was working, but that she was
still unable to move.  Then she noted that her arms and legs were held by bands
at wrists/ankles, forelimbs and upper limbs, and that restraints were around
her chest and neck as well.  “The latter, I’m afraid,” said Pandi, watching as
the men moved the laser cutting equipment toward her.

“OK,” said Watcher. 
“That’s actually good news.  Maybe we can figure out a way to get you out of
there.”

“So,” said one of the
Nation Techs, a man with the tabs of a Lt. Commander on his collar.  “She’s
awake.  You might as well come out of that lobster shell, woman, before we have
to cut you out of it.  You might not like the result of that, because I can’t
guarantee we won’t cut off some parts of you as we go.”

Pandora felt panic
starting to overcome her as the man spoke.  She was helpless again, and in the
hands of the fanatics.  And she knew those laser cutters would penetrate her
armor, tough as it was, and as the man said, they might slice into her as
well.  She could grow back a limb, but would still be rendered helpless by the
loss of a leg, and weakened by the absence of an arm.

“Stay calm, Pandora,”
said Watcher in her com.  “Are your forearm laser units still in operation?”

She forced herself to
take a calming breath and checked those units.  “They seem to be functional,”
she said.  “But what good are they going to do?  They’re pointed the wrong
way.”

“Good.  They rotate out
in this manner,” he said, sending her a short vid of the laser nozzles shifting
down and moving into a configuration that pointed them out from the forearm.

“Who thought of that,”
said Pandi, wondering at the paranoid mind that had built in what looked like
an escape function from the improbable.

“Why I did, of course,”
said the superman with a laugh.  “Sometimes, when you think they’re out to get
you, they are.”

Pandora sent the
command to the suit, and the laser heads slid out of their forearm sheaths and
rotated.

“What the hell is going
on,” yelled the tech who held the laser torch that was coming down to her right
leg.

Pandora brought the
laser nozzles into play at that moment, slicing through both of the restraints
that held her wrists.  The lasers continued to rotate up and bit into the bands
holding her forearms.  Sparks flew from the metal bands and from the harder
metal of her suit, catching some of the overflow from the beams.

“Stop her,” yelled the
officer in charge, and the tech brought the laser torch up and fired it into
the laser unit on her left arm. 

The unit sparked and
stopped working before it got to the upper band.  The right arm unit continued
up and cut partially through the upper limb band.  Pandora sent a command to
the unit to rotate back to weapon configuration, but the tech hit it with the
laser cutter before she could finish the transformation.

The tech swung the
laser toward Pandora’s faceplate, a place she really didn’t want him to go.  He
activated the beam before the nozzle pointed at the target, intending to sweep
it up and into the weakest part of the suit, even if it was not that much
weaker compared to the rest of the armor.  Pandora grabbed the man’s wrist with
her right hand and squeezed, feeling bone crunch under her armored fingers. 
The man screamed in pain and attempted to switch the unit to his other hand,
but the woman was much faster, releasing his wrist and grabbing the laser
cutter head before he could aim it into her body.  She clasped the unit tightly
and punched the man in the head with it, sending him reeling away to stumble
and fall with a broken nose and other possible facial damage.

The officer screamed
out for help, while turning on the other laser cutter and aiming it at
Pandora.  The beam missed the laser she was holding, his obvious target, and
hit the arm of the suit, burning a centimeter into the hard armor.  Pandora
moved her own beam onto the Commander, cutting through uniform, flesh and bone. 
The man had time for one squawk of pain before his head was rolling off his
body.  That body folded in on itself, the right hand still gripping the laser
cutter.  The body twisted and the beam struck another Spaceman coming up to
grab it, cutting across his stomach and releasing a cluster of entrails that
splattered onto the floor.

The Marine guards had
been paralyzed for a moment, and afraid of hitting the spacemen who might get
in the way.  As the last man fell they raised their weapons and started to
fire, just as Pandora engaged the suit’s electromagnetic fields.

Mag rifle rounds sprang
from her armor while she cut through the last of the bands on her left arm,
then moved to her neck, followed by the waist.  She cringed as some of the
rounds hit her faceplate when she looked up.  But the armored faceplate used
light transmission on both sides of its structure to mimic plastic, unlike the
Nation suits which actually used a hardened plastic.  It may have been the
weakest part of the armor, but that did not make it weak at all.  Round after
round bounced from the faceplate, and despite its strength Pandora knew she
needed to do something about the Marines before she went for freeing her legs. 
Things had been known to happen, and she didn’t want one of those things to
happen to her.

Laser torches were not
really made as weapons.  They were made to cut through metal at short range. 
That said, there was no range limit to a beam of light.  The beam from the
torch spread out faster by design than a beam from a weapon, so that it would
not propagate over long distances, and burn through things that the user didn’t
want to burn through.  The Marines were not out of the effective range of the
beam, and it might as well have been a heavy laser that cut through the
faceplate of the first target and sent him dropping to the floor.  The second
Marine fared no better.  The third targeted the torch and knocked it apart with
a trio of well-aimed shots, then walked toward Pandi, firing away.

Shit
, thought Pandora as the
man moved to the other laser torch and swung the rifle around his shoulder. 
He’s
going to burn through me if I don’t do something.
 As the Marine picked up
the nozzle of the torch Pandi grabbed the heavy power unit of the inoperative
one she held and raised it over her head.  The Marine looked up, the activated
torch in his hand, just in time for the power unit to strike him in the face
and chest, knocking him back.

Pandora popped both of
the sets of close in fighting blades from her forearms, the twin trios of
knives coming out of hidden recesses and deploying.  She bent and placed the
tips of a blade in each of her ankle restraints, sharp side out, and sliced
through the metal bands that were no match for the ultra-hard blades.  While
not in the same class of the katana that she had lost, they were up to the task
of taking out the restraints, and sliced easily through what to them was soft
metal.  She did the same to the calf restraints, and then moved up to her
thighs.

The heat coming through
her helmet was the first indication that the Marine had gotten back to the
laser and started firing, trying to take out her head and kill her as fast as
possible.  The armor had superconducting heat absorbers, which siphoned off
some of the heat that made it through the electromagnetic field and the
reflective surface of the suit.  But it was still coming through, and Pandora
could smell her hair scorching while the skin underneath burned.  She knew that
the helmet would soon be pierced, at which point she would have a hole burned
into her brain, and it would all be over.

Pandora straightened in
a swift motion, her left forearm coming up to guard her head from the beam,
which started to eat its way through that part of the suit.  She screamed at
the top of her lungs at the pain, pulling her legs and snapping the cut through
bands that had been restraining them.  She lunged forward, a couple of quick
steps that covered the three meters between them, keeping her forearm in the
way while she brought her right arm back.  In range, she swung her right fist
forward, the triple blades cutting through the laser, pulling her hand back,
then forward again, thrusting through the chest of the Marine.

The Marine grunted as
the blade cut through what to him was hard armor, but to the tech of the
Donut
was nothing of the sort.  It pushed through his skin and ribs, and he only had
time for the one grunt before it skewered his heart.  Pandora pulled the blade
out and retracted both for the time being, pulling the mag rifle from over the
Marine’s shoulder and grabbing a pair of hand grenades that were attached to
his belt.

“I’m free,” she called
to Watcher, looking around the room and shooting him the image.  “What do you
want me to do?”

“Find a place to hide
and I’ll come for you,” said Watcher.  “I’m almost through here.  Just stay
safe.”

“Will do, lover,” she
said, looking at a schematic and coming up with a plan.  When the squad of
Marines came into the chamber moments later she was nowhere to be found.

*     *     *

She’s alive
, thought Watcher, his
emotions soaring.  He reined himself back and talked to her on the com, making
sure she knew what options to take.  He was watching the feed from her suit as
she fought herself free from captivity.  His heart in his mouth as she battled
the tech with the laser, then the Marines, in each case making the right move,
and getting herself out of situations that would have killed most.  He had
marveled at the way a non-enhanced (well, at least not in his range) had
reacted, and had taken out a room of people once she had been shown how.

Now he had to take care
of the business in hand if he wanted both of them out of here.  The hanger deck
was his, his rearmost squads having taken it at the cost of four robots,
leaving eight to secure the hanger and the three shuttles that were housed
there.  He didn’t know how he was going to get those shuttles back to the
planet without their being shot out of space by the fleet, but when he figured
that out he would have the transport he needed.

The superman watched as
the last guard was dispatched and the way cleared, then stalked in his metal
suit into the brig.  The robots had already opened the cells from the central
control panel, after moving the body of the security officer off of it.  “Who
is in charge of your group?” he questioned, his voice booming out of the suit
speaker system.

“I guess I am,” said a
young woman, stepping from the group that was starting to gather in the central
room of the brig.  “Since the bastards killed my captain.”

Watcher looked the
proud young lady in the face, noting the commander tabs on her torn jumper. 
She looked back at him with big dark eyes that were unafraid, despite the
treatment she had received at the hands of the Nation of Humanity.  Both of
those eyes were blackened, and there were cuts on her face, and the gaps where
teeth used to be showing when she spoke.  The jumper was almost ripped apart,
and her flesh was marred with many cuts and bruises. 
And I’m sure the
injuries go deeper than the surface
, thought Watcher with a grimace.  He
knew the Nation had sophisticated torture methods that they must have also
used. 
Bastards
, he thought, then cleared his mind.  There would be time
for rage later.  Now it was time to act.