The Deep Dark Well (37 page)

“Full maneuverability,
with up to fifty gees acceleration for a half hour or more.  Or an emergency
burst of three hundred gees for ten seconds.  Inertial compensators can take
more, but the power rating won't.  You would be on emergency power after that
kind of burst.”

“So save it for the
last moment.  I got it.”

“Now this is a particle
beam rifle,” he said, pulling a large, submachine gun sized weapon from a
locker.  “Not allowed on the station.”

“Damn.  Yet another
rule to be broken.  But why would a particle beam be forbidden from the
station.”

“This weapon fires two
separate beams of particles,” continued Watcher, as if he were teaching a
recalcitrant child.  “This blue trigger fires a beam of charged negative
matter.  Able to eat through anything, as the negative matter will cancel out
an equal amount of matter.”

“And the red trigger?”

“A beam of pure
antiprotons,” he replied.  “Extremely dangerous, and also able to destroy any
material object.  These switches control the flow.  For negative matter it
allows you to blast through with a pinhole, or a hole large enough for your own
transit.  For antimatter you can destroy an insect, or set off a kiloton blast.

“These insulated
magnetic conduit tubes attach to the storage tanks I will affix to the backpack
of the suit.  The outer emergency lever on the buckle here will jettison both
tanks with inertial drive charges, to get them away from you as fast as
possible.  Maybe fast enough to allow you to survive, in the case of a
rupture.”

“If negative matter
ruptures, I have a hole eaten through me,” she said.  “Better to have the
antimatter rupture.  Then I won’t know what happened.  What is the inner lever
on the buckle for?”

“That is your final
fail safe.  It locks the suit into a rigid mode that will cushion the effects
of most detonations.  At least as much as possible.”

“So my flailing limbs
won’t break, huh?”

“Right,” he replied. 
“You never cease to amaze me.  In many respects you are more intelligent than
the sentients I was used to.”

“Probably because I had
to think on my feet all my life.  Your humans were too civilized and docile. 
Those of my time would have probably fought a little harder.”

“You are probably
right.  And the
wild
humans of this time as well.  Now let me show you
the weaponry on the ship itself.  You’ll need something a little bigger than
this toy to breach the skin of the station.”

*    *    *

“OK, I think I can
handle this thing.  It’s amazing how much information that thing implants in
your brain.”

“Just waiting for you
to make the physical connection for them to come out,” said Watcher.  “You have
complete emergency protocols programmed in as well.  They’ll come to the fore
if you need them.”

“And the computer will
never know I’m coming, until it’s too late.”

“Don’t get too much of
an attitude,” he said.  “As soon as the access hatch to this bay opens the
computer will know that something is up.  It has the skin of the station under
continuous surveillance, and even a fifteen second delay, the best you can
expect, will not be enough if you do something that gives your position away. 
The decoys may keep it busy for a few moments.

“Move fast and sure,
with enough curves and deceptions to throw its best guess off.  It will have
repositioned the graviton projectors by now, and nothing you have will stop
them from collapsing your vessel if they get a lock.”

“What’s the second ship
for?”

“That’s for the cavalry,”
he replied, the little smile back on his face.  “Let’s just hope it arrives in
time.”

Pandi locked her arms
around him and pressed her lips hard to his.  This might be their last kiss,
she knew, and she meant it to be memorable, even if the memory was only to last
for another hour or so.

“I will come back to
you,” she said as she broke the embrace.

“And I for you,” he
replied, wiping a tear from one eye.  “Now we need to concentrate on business.”

She walked him from the
bridge to the access lock.  She watched his back as he strode across the
chamber.  He turned and waved before he went through the hatch.  She raised a
fist into the air in salute.

“Victory,” she called
at the top of her lungs.

“Victory,” he yelled
back, before ducking through the entrance.

*    *    *

Pandi was secure in her
chair, all systems powered up, when the signal from Watcher came through.  They
would communicate through a wormhole com link, totally secure and
instantaneous.  The wormholes had changed technology beyond anything her time
had imagined.

“All ready at this
end,” he said through the holo link.

“I’m ready as I’ll ever
be,” she replied.  “Let’s do it.”

Her hand pressed the
panel configuration control.  Up came the display on the board, controlling the
bay hatch.  Her fingers danced across the touch panel, in the sequence
determined to get her out of the bay in the fastest possible time.  Docking
clamps opened with a light thud.  The ship backed out of its berth, swinging
easily to point its nose toward the hatch, which was now sliding open.

A dozen drones, all
emitting the signals of a standard ship of the same configuration as her own,
sans stealth systems, sped through the opening as soon as it was large enough
to allow a ship like hers to exit.  They moved in different directions, some at
minimal acceleration, some at emergency burst.

One of the drones
collapsed and exploded out in a millisecond.  Targeted by the graviton beams. 
The others moved out of sight in an instant.  She hoped they did their jobs
well.

She reconfigured the
control panel and then danced her fingers across the board.  The ship slipped
quickly through the opening and into the vacuum.  She linked with the ship’s
computer and made sure all stealth systems were working.

Hellfire
she had named the
ship, because that was what she and it were going to go through. 
Hellfire
slipped smoothly into place a hundred meters below the hull of the station, as
she accelerated along at a steady twenty gees, keeping close and tight. 
Nothing
now but a ride
, she thought.  Then the real work would begin.

Chapter 19

Man is an artifact
designed for space travel.  He is not designed to remain in his present
biological state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

William Burroughs, 1985

The inner hull of the
station passed above her, too fast for her to make out any but the largest of
details.  There were plenty of those.  Hatches tens of kilometers wide, the
large projections of the magnetic field generators, antennas of unknown
purpose.

So far so good.
  Nothing had attacked
her so far, which had to be a good sign.  Of course it wouldn’t strike at the
bridge, as that would violate its programming.  And of course there could be
automated defenses, programmed long ago by sentient creatures without the restrictions
on taking sentient life.

“It’s time to start
decel,” came Watcher’s voice over the com system.

“OK,” she said. 
“Smooth and easy.”

She could feel no
difference in the orientation of the ship as it reversed its engines.  Only the
figures on the control board indicated that they were now slowing down at fifty
gees.  Kind of disconcerting for an old space hand, she thought.  Her body was
attuned to the motions of a ship like the
Niven
.  Though acceleration
might be small, you could at least tell which direction the thrust was in. 
This ship could be going a hundred gees on the wrong vector and she wouldn’t
know for quite some time.

Light flared out in
space toward the hole.  One of the drones that had been more successful than
the others at avoiding the sweep of the computer.  Of course the computer had
to wait for confirming information to be certain it was destroying an unpiloted
drone, and the drones were programmed to keep moving, not giving the computer
the chance to gather intelligence on them.

It had to know she was
out here as well.  Why else would the decoys have been launched, to fly on
random vectors that led to nowhere, but to cover something up.  That was the
problem with any kind of military operation.  It was always a tradeoff.  There
was never an absolutely successful tactic.

Minutes passed as she
drew closer to the first target, a section of the hull that sheltered one of
the backup processors and memory cores.  This would be the shortest jaunt, and
the computer would then definitely know what they were up to.  The others would
take a longer flight time, as well as entail a greater risk.  But it would be
one less target to worry about, part of the total mission completed.

“Powering up now,” said
Watcher.  The magnetic field generators switched on, the nearest fifty thousand
kilometers to her front along the curve of the station.  She looked down into
it, shielding her eyes for a moment before the viewer adjusted to the light
level.  A line of electrons raced toward the hole, curving as the gravity swirl
pulled them along.  All of the magnetic field arrays were pulling the charged
particles through the tidal swirl of the charged black hole, turning it into
the most enormous electric dynamo ever conceived by sentient beings.

Enough to open a wormhole
, she thought,
or
several over a short period of time
.  Even as this thought entered her mind
the gravimetric sensors picked up the disturbance to her front, at the time and
place where planned.  The hole opened schematically on her holo display, too far
away to be seen.  Not the smooth, mirror like surfaces of the wormholes she was
familiar with, but a whirling maelstrom of chaos, leading down to the hell of
the event horizon.

She knew this was the
second tunnel opened by Watcher.  The first was dumping matter into the
Schwarzschild radius, generating a storm of gamma radiation, uncharged neutron
particles that would radiate into space like a hellish laser of monstrous
proportions.  The mouth to the second hole had expanded to scoop up these
particles, restricting their passage to where Watcher and Pandi wanted them to
go.

Right into the station,
in a five thousand kilometer radius of dispersal.  Hard radiation, unaffected
by charged particle shields, sleeting through the structure of the station,
breaking down solid state and crystalline machinery.  Within that radius
mechanical equipment was ceasing to function on the molecular level.  Even the
omnipresent nanobots that quickly repaired all damage were being annihilated. 
Repair crews would have to come from without the zone, if in time at all.

Ahead of her the
wormhole closed.  The ship had decelerated enough to pick out the medium sized
details of the hull, as she rotated the vessel nose first to the station.  The
ship slid into place, engines on station keeping, holding above the optimal
point for the assault.

Her fingers triggered
the controls, engaging the quadruple particle beams in the nose.  Sentient
control was needed to engage these weapons.  A tenuous mass of negative matter
was accelerated from the cannon, traveling at near light speed into the hull of
the station.  Where negative matter touched matter both canceled out without a
trace.  Not all the matter of this thick section of hull was negated, only one
in ten atoms.  But enough for the hull section to dissolve away in a spray of
dust.

Like a true
disintegration beam
,
she thought.  Thoughts of what had happened to Zukov came back to her mind.  A
deadly substance if there ever was one, capable of canceling the existence of
matter as if it had never existed.  Would it even leave a soul in its wake
thought her Christian subconscious?

Scanners showed the
hole not quite fully penetrating the skin, so another burst of negative matter
cleared the way. 
A hole big enough to admit her easily
, she thought, as
she unstrapped and headed for the airlock complex.

The suit was fully
assembled and waiting for her in its harness.  She backed into the open array
as the harness closed it around her quickly.  She could feel it tighten around
her as it sealed.  The helmet lowered over her head, sealing quickly and easily
at the neck.  The breastplate swung into place across her chest, she snapped
the buckles over the front, and she was fully ready for action in less than
fifteen seconds. 
Not bad
, she thought, as it had taken her over five
minutes to get into her much smaller prospector’s suit.

A quick check of the
heads up display on the view plate showed that all systems were operational and
fully charged.  With a thought the suit lifted from the floor under repellers
and slowly moved toward the airlock.  The door closed behind her and the air
was evacuated in an instant.  The outer door opened, revealing the glory of
open space.

Pandi thrust the suit
into the vacuum, turning the small spaceship as she exited the vessel.  Light
amplification sensors pulled the hull of the station into sharp definition as
she maneuvered the suit toward it and added velocity, aiming directly toward
the hole.  A few last second adjustments and she was in.