The Deep Dark Well (45 page)

Navarin
had been at reduced
acceleration for over twenty minutes.  Only two gees, allowing the crew to
leave their acceleration tubes and staff their normal battle stations.  It was
well and good to be able to maneuver the ship at maximum sustainable gee.  But
robots could only be trusted so far.  And it gave captain and crew comfort to
know that human beings could react to any damage to the ship.  That human hands
could work to correct any problem.

“Any chance they didn’t
get a return signal?” Lucille asked the officer.

“No ma’am,” replied the
Pole.  “Signal will be attenuated. But they will know we are here.”

“Full alert status,”
she ordered.  “Train all weapons on the closest target and fire on my command.”

“Aye ma’am,” replied
the tac officer, his fingers dancing along his boards.

“All crew prepare for
combat link,” ordered Lucille as she keyed the ship-wide intercom button on her
command chair.

Within the bulk of the
vessel the crew mentally and physically prepared for battle.  They were already
fully armored, having gone from tubes to protective gear as soon as they were
out.  Now they made doubly sure magazine systems were clear and ready to
operate, laser capacitors were fully charged, and particle accelerators were
whirring their inmates around their circumferences.

“Combat link,” she
ordered as she surrendered her own consciousness to the group mind.  The
delicious feeling of melting of self, while at the same time self became all
through meshing with the sensory and computational capacities of the ship, came
upon her in a rush of pleasure.  Like the most seductive and addictive drug
ever developed by mankind.  Which of course it was.  The rush was compounded
every time another consciousness joined the link, increasing the capacity of
the group mind.

Yes
, she thought.  She was
the controlling link in the group mind, still retaining enough of her self to
think semi-independently. 
We feel like a god, in our omnipotence and power.
Our capacity for destruction.
  But some sense of reality still existed. 
She looked through the sensory apparatus of the group mind and saw the enemy
vessels ahead, each with an equal or greater capacity for destruction than her
own.  Looking at her ship with their targeting computers.  Locking on her ship
with their weapons.

Navarin
was now operating as a
unified entity, the crew members going about their tasks in the most efficient
way possible.  Some would sacrifice themselves during the battle without a
thought of self-preservation, only thinking of preservation of the whole. 
Weapons were aimed at the weak points of the closest enemy vessels while the
ship itself prepared for the worst that would come its way.

Protective shielding
up,
ordered the group mind that was fifty-one percent the will of its captain. 
Nozzles on the outer skin of the ship released a cloud of charged metallic
particles that were instantly grasped by the strong magnetic field the ship was
now generating.  Within microseconds the hull was surrounded by a whirling
cloud of obscurants.  On the hull itself armored shielding swung into place to
cover hatchways and observation portals, while within the ship hatches closed,
isolating sections of the vessels that they might survive a hit to somewhere
else.  Meanwhile the ship calculated firing solutions at a speed the enemy,
with their less sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, could not match.

The group mind looked
out at the array of enemy vessels their ship was falling toward.  Big battle
wagons toward the center of the formation, with an average separation of a
million kilometers.  A couple of battle-cruisers front and rear.  While a heavy
cruiser, a couple of light cruisers and some destroyers provided the screen a
couple of million kilometers out from the battleships.  The battleships would
be able to give support to the outer screen.  But four seconds would pass
before they knew which ship had been hit, and another four seconds at light
speed to respond.  And that with their light speed weapons, the weakest they
had.  Even longer to make an effective response with particle beams or the even
slower kinetic rounds or missiles.

The closest of the
alien vessels, a heavy cruiser, locked on with laser beams, the attenuated
photons striking the skin of
Navarin
.  The ship responded with an
immediate alert that it was under attack.  But the majority of the energy was
absorbed by the obscuring cloud, which whisked superheated particles away to be
replaced by new heat sinks, while the molten particles radiated their heat into
space at the opposite side of the ship.

Fire
, ordered the group
mind, and
Navarin
fired its own beams of coherent energy through the
holes that opened before them in the shielding cloud.  For some reason, maybe
arrogance, the enemy heavy cruiser had not put up its own shield and the beams
of energy struck true on their targets.  One of the laser turrets of the enemy
vessel flashed with brilliant light as invisible photons turned to heat.  With
a puff of streaming particles the laser turret was put out of action, while the
enemy ship adjusted the reflectivity of its own skin so that the laser beam
would not move on to wreak more destruction.  But
Navarin
had already
compensated for the maneuver, changing the frequencies of the outgoing laser
beams, shifting from gamma to x-rays and tearing a huge rift in the hull of the
alien vessel.

Navarin
was approaching bow
forward to the side of the heavy cruiser, bringing its main weapons to bear,
while the hapless target could not.  It tried to swing its bow around, to
target the human vessels with its main weapons, but started the maneuver too
late and achieved too little.

Fire
, again ordered the
group mind in control of the vessel, as thrusters aligned her nose to where the
enemy vessel would be when the weapons reached her.  Particle beams of
antiprotons reached out, their flight time of three seconds allowing the enemy
ship to know of its peril.  Frantically it attempted to deploy its own particle
screen, too late.  The antimatter particle beam hit its hull and exploded
through.  Even the few ounces of material in the beam was enough to blast a
gaping hole through the armored hull, releasing atmosphere and flooding the aft
port section of the ship with gamma radiation.

The human ship’s
kinetic weapon fired next as it continued its approach to the doomed cruiser. 
Three rounds accelerated out in rapid succession, their own drives flaring as
soon as they left the tube.  Missiles flew from the cruiser on interception
courses, attempting to take out the warheads before they could close for a
kill.  The kinetic warheads launched their own counter missiles in a duel of
weapon against weapon.  The night was illuminated by the painful flare of
fusion warheads exploding, as counter missile hit missile and missile hit
cylindrical warhead.  But one of the warheads made it through, its evasive
maneuvers moving it away from lasers and particle beams as it closed within a
hundred meters of the enemy’s hull.  A half-ton of antimatter detonated like a shaped
charge, sending a flaring jet of superheated antiparticles into the cruiser, a
death blow that annihilated her center section in a cloud of heated particles,
debris and hard radiation.

A trio of fusion
warhead missiles impacted the dying cruiser bow and stern, taking out any
intact systems and spinning the cruiser out of control, into the center of the
enemy formation.  And, observed the group mind of
Navarin
, obscuring the
firing path of one of the massive battleships.

An array of lasers and
particle beams reached out from the enemy ships as
Navarin
passed fifty
thousand kilometers over the twirling hulk of the dead heavy cruiser.  The
battle-cruiser bucked and twisted in a series of evasive maneuvers.  But the
distance now was not sufficient for total evasion, and the shield of particles
quickly overheated, radiating as much heat inward as outward.  With a quick
release of the magnetic field the superheated particles were dumped into space
as a new mass was ejected from the ship to take up positions within the field.

More ominous were the
multiple launches from all of the ships in the enemy fleet whose formation
Navarin
was penetrating.  Missiles sped from tubes at significant fractions of the
speed of light, accelerating on fusion overdrives toward the human vessel. 
Kinetic energy weapons spat large cylindrical warheads toward the human.  Space
was instantly full of destructive weapons systems, all with one objective in
mind.  To find and strike the enemy within their midst.

Navarin’s
group combat mind
quickly calculated the odds as defensive weapons systems were locked onto the
most lethal of the attackers.  The odds were not good.  At most a two percent
chance that the battle-cruiser would survive the onslaught.  Without fear,
without regret, the group mind got on to business. Assigning priorities to the
rest of the incoming weapons. Calculating firing times and trajectories. 
Looking into the near future to assess possible outcomes.

Along the length of
Navarin’s
hull counter-missiles flared into space.  Not needing the long acceleration
tubes of offensive missiles since their own targets were accelerating toward
them, their fusion drives only fired for a dozen or so seconds, pushing them at
hundreds of gees and leaving only enough boost for last minute corrections. 
Other missiles left the forward tubes of the ship, pushed to an appreciable
fraction of the speed of light by the long accelerators that provided their
initial boost.  Lasers and particle beams locked on and fired on those enemy
weapons that were at closest approach.

The targeted weapons
were not completely helpless.  Clouds of particles were released to interpose
themselves between larger warheads and beam weapons.  Decoys and smaller
interceptor warheads were released to speed between incoming weapon and
counter-missile.  Jammers flooded space with interfering radiation, blinding
the sensors of incoming missiles or confusing the targeting systems of the
human battle-cruiser, rendering the incoming weapons invisible.

Within seconds the
first act of the play was over.  Beams struck or missed.  Hurtling objects
collided with flashes of light and bursts of hard radiation.  Five hundred
gigaton warheads blotted the views of the battle from complete shipboard
sensory systems, rendering all combatants blind for tens of seconds.

Through it all, against
all of the odds,
Navarin
came unscathed except for minor hull damage
from the heavy sleet of particles filling the nearby space.  The group mind
calculated the odds of surviving the next volley, found them to be even worse
than before, and looked for anything that might increase their chances.  The
legendary luck of their captain entered into the equation and the odds were
suddenly adjusted upwards to a respectable ten percent. 

Within microseconds the
group mind rejected those odds as the closer of the enemy ships let loose with
a new volley of beams, missiles and kinetic warheads.

*    *    *

Lucille was still
linked into the group mind when the impossible happened.  One instant she was a
center-less, selfless intellect.  Just another processor and source of input
into the super-mind that was the ship crew link.  The next she felt her own
self coming to the fore.  Still in overall control of the group mind, making
the major decisions that meant life and death to them all.  But also separate;
again an individual, compartmentalized, being.  Something that had never been
known to happen during the linking process.  And then she felt the wrongness. 
A feeling of things not being right in the Universe around her.  The feeling
that had pulled her partially from the link.  But for what purpose?

They’re coming.
  The thought resounded
through her mind. But it was not her thought.  It came from another mind.  A
mind that was not part of the link.  And there was only one such mind aboard
ship.

Siohban?
  It had to be the
child.  The resonance seemed familiar.  One she had felt before.  But suffused
with a terror she had not felt the last time their minds had touched. 
Who
is coming, child?

The monsters are
coming.  They’re stepping across the dark places.  They’re coming here.

Lucille’s mind was
pulled back to the here and now as she noticed the large warhead that had
gotten through her ship’s defensive fire.  Within seconds of striking a death
blow to
Navarin
.  And there was nothing she could do about it.

No
, she thought. 
I
don’t believe this is happening.  It can’t be the end.

She didn’t know why she
hadn’t seen it before.  The mass of metal that flew into the path of the
warhead, striking it squarely on the side and sending it tumbling harmlessly
into space. 
Lucky Lucille
, she thought.  More legends would grow from
that fortunate intersection of object with object. 
But such things do
happen.  Don’t they?

They felt you do that,
said the thoughts of
Siohban in her head. 
They know where we are, and they’re coming.