The Deep Dark Well (2 page)

Narrow minded fool
, thought Pandi.  Even
her fundamentalist minister father, with his Southern Baptist upbringing, knew
that humanity didn't know everything about the Universe.  It was likely to be
stranger than any of them could imagine.  But many scientists thought that
everything there was to know was known.  Anything not possible according to
current dogma was not possible period.

The shaking stopped as
suddenly as it started, leaving them none the wiser for its cause.

"Captain,"
said McIntyre in a quavering voice, "I suggest we get the hell out of
here."

"I agree,
sir," said Lee.  "We are at a disadvantage here."

"Afraid of the
unknown," said Pandi in her best angry voice, eyes glaring and lower lip
quivering.
First contact with the unknown
, she thought, what she had
been waiting for her whole life.  She had volunteered for the thankless duty of
a Kuiper explorer/miner because it offered the greatest chance to be the first
to make an on the scene discovery, as unlikely as it was.  Damned if she was
going to run away at the first little shudder of the space-time continuum.

"I'm with
Panda," said Zhokov, purposely mangling her name.  "This is a chance
for immortality."

"Or sudden and
swift mortality," said McIntyre.

"This may be the
only chance humanity will have to get a look at this thing," said the
captain.  "But this is a civilian vessel, and you haven't signed on for
this kind of hazardous duty.  So we'll put it to a vote."

The vote came out six
for and five against among the eleven member crew.  Only those who voted for
staying would consider leaving the relative security of the
Niven
for
the unknown dangers of the Alien.  They still considered it Alien, for whether
it was from another time or another space, it was still beyond their ken.

*    *    *

One hour and
twenty-eight minutes after first contact.  The airlock door slid open on a
scene of unrelieved strangeness for those born to the comfortable confines of
Earth, or even the farms and corridors of the off planet colonies and
habitats.  Stars everywhere, in limitless numbers, their light unpolluted by
sources natural and artificial that reigned in the inner system.  Objects
existed in their millions out here, but space was enormous, and the distances
between Kuiper objects were enormous as well.  Humankind had been out here for
only a couple of decades, and the billions of ice balls of the Ort Cloud were
still only known from the pictures or radar images of the nearer and larger
few.

The Ort Cloud
, thought Pandi as she
jetted her way from the airlock towards the gaping hole in the stranger.  The
Santa
Maria
was in the inner system getting ready for the flight out to the Nemesis
system, on the way becoming the first vessel to really penetrate into the Ort. 
She had been really disappointed that she hadn't made the cut for that
mission.  The chance to be on the first crew to visit another stellar system,
even if it was but a small brown dwarf in far orbit around the home star.  More
qualified computer techs had been the excuse, though she was still sure it was
due to her less than glamorous background as a working class spacer, PhD in
Aerospace Engineering notwithstanding.  Now she felt more than happy to have
been passed over, because if she had been in the inner system with the
Maria
,
she wouldn't have been out here in the Kuiper when this monster ship appeared
on radar scan from Harrison, skirting the edge of the system on a path that
would lose her forever in several months. 
Blind luck
, she thought.
Or
is it fate?

Her suit felt hot as
she drifted across the hundred meters separating
Niven
from this
Hernand
,
following the lead of Zhokov, who had almost reached the transparent dome.
Crewman Chavis, a large black man from Mississippi, followed twenty meters or
so behind her.  The temperature out here was only a couple of degrees above
absolute zero, she knew.  In the inner system heat was more of a problem on
EVAs than cold.  They normally didn't have to worry about cooling systems this
far out.  And the bulky suits were insulated enough that their own body temp
kept them toasty. 
It must be the adrenaline shooting through my system
,
she thought. She did feel pumped.  Even her breathing was strained, the sounds
of inhaling and exhaling through her com circuit heavy in her ears.  She had
more than five hours of air at her normal usage rate, maybe three hours of
hyperventilating.  They would surely be back at the
Niven
before that. 
It was still good to know that the diamonoids injected into her bloodstream
would give her twenty hours of oxygen if needed.

"You alright back
there, Panda?" asked Zhokov in his heavy accent.  Couldn't cover up your
physiologicals on an EVA.

"Yeah," she
replied with a calm voice as she repeated a mantra to herself to calm her heart
and breathing rate.  She caught a flash through the transparent bubble of the
helmet out of the corner of her eye and turned her head to the right.  A harsh
pinpoint flare in the far distance, a nuclear blast.  Another Kuiper miner
boosting a comet back toward the fires of the sun.  Volatiles for the
terraforming of Mars, or fuel for the space industry around Earth. 
Carter
,
the ship that had been closest to the stranger when radar contact had been
made.  The laws of physics had ordained that the
Carter
would not be
able to make contact.  Her velocity was too great, and by the time she
decelerated enough to change her vector, she would be even further from the
stranger than Harrison base.

It has to be fate
, thought Pandi, as she
turned in time to watch Zhokov catch himself on the edge of the hole in the
dome.  She was approaching fast herself, and panic shot through her for a
second at the thought of bouncing off the dome and drifting back into the cold
depths of interstellar space.  She dismissed that thought as she reached out
for Zhokov's extended hand, conveniently separated from hers by the twin layers
of suit glove they each wore.  Of course she was in no danger.  She had her own
suit propulsion system, as well as the proximity of two other spacemen, and the
twin shuttles back at the
Niven
were ready in case something went really
bad.

"We're here,
captain," said Zhokov over the com, as he passed Pandi over so he could
reach out and grab Chavis' hand.

"Everything
OK?" came Morrison's voice over the com.

"Yes sir,"
replied Pandi as she slapped a transponder link onto the dome with molecular
glue.  It stuck, meaning that the material was at least something they could
understand, even if it didn’t look like anything she had ever seen. "We're
preparing to enter the ship right now."

"Be careful."

"Aye, sir,"
said Zhokov, “I think Panda has us covered.”

Her hands reached to
pat the butts of the twin forty-five automatics she had set in the holsters
attached to her equipment belt.  She had brought them aboard
Niven
with
her personal effects, to the laughter of the other members of the crew.  “Do
you think you’re going to run into aliens?” they said.  Now she was glad she
had them, and she didn’t care what anyone said.  The filled magazine pouches
added to her sense of security.

Zhokov pulled himself
into the gap in the dome, his bank of lights bringing the interior into a stark
contrast between bright illumination and total darkness.  Pandi and Chavis
followed, suits set on station keeping, attitude jets firing short bursts to
bring them into the center of the enclosure, where they could get the best view
of the whole area without getting too near to any kind of trouble.

Lights picked up the
frozen remains of plants set in the soil beds on the floor of the area.  A
large empty depression lay in the center, probably a pool that had exploded its
contents out into space when the dome was pierced. 
No bodies around, so no
way of telling what had used this huge recreation area
, thought Pandi. 
Probably blown out into space as well.

"Dammit,"
exclaimed Chavis, as he maneuvered his way down to the deck, looking at the
trunks of dozens of plants that stuck out of the soil, "but I'd swear that
was a palm tree."

"Come in,
Niven
,"
called Pandi over the com link, "come in."

"We hear you
Pandi," came the reply from the captain.

"No bodies here,
but Chavis thinks there are the remains of terrestrial palm trees.  It looks
like some kind of recreation area."

The ship shuddered
slightly around them, shaking them in their suits as some of the dead trees
fell from their shattered trunks that broke like glass in the vibrations.

"How in the hell
are we being shaken in a vacuum?" yelled Zhokov.

"Some kind of energy
we don't understand," said Pandi.

"Bullshit,"
yelled the Russian.

"Then you explain
it."

"Pandi," came
the voice over the link, "are you alright?"

"Yes
Michael," she said.  "It looks as if this area was filled with
terrestrial vegetation."

"Convergent evolution,
maybe," said Chavis.

"And what about
these?" said Zhokov, hovering over what looked like a very human chair,
one of hundreds built into the deck.  "These look pretty terrestrial to
me."

"And these?"
said Pandi, moving towards some chairs that looked to fit an entirely nonhuman
anatomy.

"Maybe they had
guests," said Zhokov.

"That we had never
heard of," said Chavis.  "You think someone made contact with aliens
and just left the rest of the human race out of it?"

"Nothing like this
ever came out of the system," said Morrison's voice over the com link, as
pictures of the outside of the
Hernand
were projected onto their
faceplates.  "We sent one of the shuttles around the ship on remote, and
we've found some very interesting things."

"What the hell are
those holes on the side?" asked Pandi, looking at row after row of open
round ports, some still holding the rounded noses of some kind of capsule.

"We think they're
escape pods of some kind," said McIntyre.  "Maybe we'll find some
remains in the ones which didn't get away."

Pandi shuddered at the
thought of looking for bodies, even as she admitted to herself that it was one
of their primary tasks.  That thought was interrupted by a picture of the stern
of the ship and the two big globes that occupied the rear.  One had been
obviously damaged, as if a big scoop had been taken out of it,

"Is that the
ship's drive?" she asked.

"That's what we're
guessing," said McIntyre, "though we surely can't guess on which
principle it works.  No exhaust, fusion tubes, ion tubes, anything that we
would consider an engine."

"Maybe it is a
warp drive," said Zhokov with a chuckle.

"Whatever it is,
maybe we can find out more about it from the inside," said Pandi.
"That gash in the lower deck looks like a good opportunity to explore.”

“Just keep in touch,”
said Morrison.  “Make sure to keep putting relays LOS.  I’m still not sure if
we can transmit through whatever that hull is made of.”

“Aye, sir,” said Zhokov
as he set another relay on the gash in the deck, whose melted sides attested to
its origin as a burn through from those beam wounds on the outer hull.  Then he
propelled himself through the gash and into the darkness beyond, followed by
his two teammates.

*    *    *

"Damned if this
thing isn't spacious," said Pandi, her helmet spot reflecting off the
walls of the wide corridor.

"Just make sure we
stay together, sirs," said Chavis.  "We don't want to get lost in
here."

"We can do that
just as easily together as separately," said Pandi, shuffling across the
floor which refused to allow her magnetic boot soles to stick. "But you're
right.  We want to stay together in case we run into some kind of
trouble."

The corridor ended at a
large, bivalve door set into the thick walls of the ship.  A set of buttons
were placed on a pad to the left, dark and dead.  Pandi pushed a button, and
then another, with no result.

"I wonder how long
the power has been off around here?"

"I don't know, my
Panda," said Zhokov, "But I have feeling it has been a very long
time." 

Zhokov pulled a
motorized opener from his belt and pushed the prongs into the small gap between
the valves.  With a push of a button the motor started twisting the screw that
moved the prongs apart, slowly pulling the valves open as they slid into their
slots in the wall. Zhokov reversed the opener and returned it to his tool belt,
as his helmet lights picked up the flotsam and jetsam that floated around the
room.  Flotsam and jetsam that included a number of frozen bodies, some only
partially dressed, many only partially complete. 

"They look pretty
damn human to me," said Pandi, pointing to the stiff form of a bare
chested, mini-skirted woman close to the door.  Many other doors opened onto
the large room, the furnishings of which indicated some kind of banquet or
gathering hall.