The Deep Dark Well (4 page)

"We can tell it's
a wormhole by traveling through it," she said.  "And it will take
forever to reach the level of technology to make one of our own."

"Forever?"
said Morrison.

"Beyond my
lifetime," said Pandi. "It might as well be forever."

"Your life is more
important to me than this discovery," said Morrison.  "All of our
lives are more important than this thing that might just kill us.  Now get out
of there."

"Wait,
captain," said Zhokov, slowly moving toward the shimmering mouth. 
"She's right.  This is too important a find to leave.  With a working
wormhole, who knows where we might go, almost instantaneously.  At least where
this ship came from.  Who knows what technology we might find.  We could
conquer space," he said, fascinated by the shimmering field, like a rodent
drawn to a snake, unaware of the danger, "and time."

"Don't touch the
exotic matter, Zhokov," yelled Pandi.

Zhokov seemed to
realize where he was, drawing his hand back, but continuing to stare at the
source of so much power.  She realized he knew a little about wormholes.  But
he did know that an astronomical source of energy was needed to inflate or
create one.  And that kind of power could get one Sergi Zhokov whatever he wanted. 
More than he had ever dreamed of.

Pandi also stared at
the shimmering rectangle.  But other dreams moved through the neurons of her
brain.  Dreams of exploring strange worlds, seeing by the light of strange
suns, meeting creatures undreamed of by man.  Traveling to the stars in an
instant, not in the lifetimes needed with current technology.  Even the Nemesis
mission would take twenty years to reach the closest stellar body known to
man.  Alpha Centauri would take more than twice as long.  But this gateway,
this door through space, and maybe time. This...

"Oh my god,"
said Pandi, the knowledge of what they faced now becoming clear, "this
wormhole leads into the future.  Paradox.  That's what's causing the
distortions.  Paradox, and the Universe won’t allow it."

"What are you
talking about, woman?" yelled Morrison.  "Calm down and tell us what
you know."

"The time
paradox," she said.  "It all makes sense now.  This ship came from
the future."

"How?"

"I don't know
how," she said. "But it all makes sense now.  The huge ship, with Terran
vegetation and humans on board, as well as creatures we've never heard of.  The
wormhole.  We are not supposed to know about this.  Every discovery we have
made has disturbed the balance of time, and caused a disruption."

"Then let's get
the hell out of here," yelled Morrison.  "Get moving."

"It's too
late," she said.  "It's too late."

Space shuddered around
them, a rippling that made what came before seem like a mere quiver.  Pandi
scream in agony as her body wavered through the compression and distortion
effects that the human animal had never evolved to face.  She held on to
consciousness, fighting the pain, knowing that she had to think her way out of
this, somehow.

Zhokov screamed as his
hands flew to his helmet, as if that could drive away the pain that assaulted
his every nerve ending.  His foot hit the floor as he writhed, propelling him
slowly toward the exotic matter that held the mouth of the wormhole open.  He
didn't notice his trouble until his out thrust elbow gently touched the
rectangle.  A rectangle made of thousands of tons of compressed negative
matter, exerting its antigravity effect on the wormhole to keep the link open,
but too low a repulsion to keep Zhokov's momentum from carrying him into
contact.  Negative matter, the opposite of matter.  The material of his suit,
his skin, muscle and bones were canceled in an anticlimactic fade of several
kilograms of matter and negative matter.  Atom for atom canceled, a kilogram of
the negative matter rectangle for a kilogram of Zhokov, the cosmic ledger
balancing out. 

The massive rectangle
shrank imperceptibly, the mouth of the wormhole following suit.  But it was
perceptible to Zhokov, as pain flooded his nervous system from the ruin of his
arm.   His forearm floated into the wormhole, as the man drifted back out into
the room, where the compression waves moved him screaming across the chamber,
air and blood jetting from the perfectly smooth opening in his suit.

The compression waves
moved instantaneously from the wormhole, growing stronger as they radiated
outward. 
Niven
was designed to never approach a strong gravity source,
at least not out of free fall.  She could accel at .1 G for a very long time,
with the force along her primary axis.  She was not made to withstand a dozen
Gs of pulsating gravity waves, energies released in a manner never dreamed of
by her creators.  Her hull plates crumbled, atoms excited to the point where
the metal began to melt along the seams.  Fuel tanks, filled with water for the
most part, ruptured along their own seams, sending
Niven
into a hard
spin on a trajectory for interstellar space.  Girder frameworks bent and tore,
bulkheads ripped, and air was jetted in crystals to join the expanding cloud of
water around the vessel.  Several crewmen joined the stream of flotsam, helmet
less spacesuits dooming them to a quick and relatively painless death.  Those
not so lucky spun into space with helmets on and oxygen packs working, their
training serving them not so well as they screamed in agony for minutes, before
the compression waves shattered face plates and sent them on the same path as
their more fortunate brethren.  

The shaking stopped,
and Pandi felt the pain leaving her head like a rush of water from an
overturned bucket.  It took her a moment to regain her ability to think, but
soon the enormity of the situation lay upon her.  From the sounds that had come
over the com link during the last eruption, the
Niven
was destroyed and
the rest of her crew dead.  No way home by that route.  Movement caught the
corner of her eye, and she turned in time to see the lifeless suit that
contained the mortal remains of Zhokov bounce from a far wall, the momentum
carrying it slowly back across the room. 
How I hated the you, with your bad
breath and constant propositioning
, she thought, and then he had turned out
to be the closest thing to a kindred spirit on the
Niven
.  Even more so
than her lover, Captain Morrison.  That thought, of Michael drifting dead
forever through the depths of space, brought a catch to her throat.

The air was pregnant
with barely contained energies.  She didn't have time for emotions right now. 
She could deal with them later.  A silence hung over the ship that she couldn't
put into rational thought, the silence of a disaster about to happen.  That
last shock was the worst, strong enough to destroy her vessel and kill her
crew.  But even worse was waiting she knew.  For she was still alive, the
strange vessel from the future was still here with its open gate through
space-time, and the danger of a paradox still existed.  The Universe would not
allow it to exist for long.

"Son of a
bitch," yelled Chavis over the com link.  "Son of a bitch.  They're
gone.  Zhokov's gone. What the hell are we going to do?"

"Calm down
Chavis," she yelled back, using his own panic to pull her into the realm
of calm, trying to think her way out of this.

"We got to get out
of here," he screamed, moving toward the still open portal.  "We got
to get out of here."

"Wait," she
yelled, too late, as he shuffled out the door and jetted down the hallway.  She
could hear him hyperventilating on the com link, laughing hysterically and
cursing under his breath.  She could reach him on the com link, but she could
no longer reach into the man, a panicked animal with no thought but to put as
much distance between himself and this cursed place as possible.  It would not
be distance enough.

She looked back at the
wormhole, the source of the paradox energy that threatened her existence.  Any
second now it would again spread out through this space, and this time nothing
would survive.  Not her, not the ship, not even the wormhole.  But she didn't
see any problem with her traveling into the future, through the wormhole.  It
was her only chance, the unknown. 
How do I know it's a Wormhole?
she
asked herself. 
How do I know it's a gateway to the future?

Only one-way to find
out
,
she thought, slowly jetting herself into a position to make a run through the
center of the hole. 
No fucking with negative matter for this southern girl
,
she thought, her hands grasping tightly on the attitude control joysticks. 
Before she could move the sticks forward for a powered straight flight, space
began to expand and contract behind her.  Pain invaded her every cell, wearing
spiked jack boots.  Her vision began to blur, and she knew, with her last
coherent thought, that time was running out.  Hands pushed forward and the
thrusters in her backpack pushed her forward at full power, 1.2 meters per
second per second, right to the middle of the hole in space-time.  The suit
quickly picked up speed, flying straight and true.  Pandi felt consciousness
leave her with a last thought,
will I ever wake up, and if so, where?
 
Then the suit was through the entrance of the wormhole, down the long tunnel
with a flash of light.

Compression waves grew
swiftly in strength, the diamond hard hull of the ship rippling with the waves,
crumbling into dust like dry plaster in a strong man's hands.  Chavis was
gripped by the waves, trying to find his way to any kind of safety, ripped to
pieces as if by a giant clawed hand.  Fusion took place between the atoms
pulled apart and pushed back together with terrible force, melding light atoms
into heavier atoms, releasing torrents of energy like the heart of a star. A
star that flared for long minutes as matter went beyond fusion, converting to
total energy as particles picked up velocity and sped off in random
directions.  In a little over four and a half hours, the first photons of the
great explosion would reach Harrison Base.  Many hours later the outposts of
the inner system would note the great flare of light as a new star was born in
the heavens, only to die moments later.  Other photons, in a steady stream over
two billion kilometers long, carrying the information transmitted from the
Niven
to Harrison Base, changed from participants in a coherent beam of light,
becoming a muddle of incoherent quantum particles that told nothing of what had
happened.  The Universe had righted the wrong, preserved causality, and
maintained the flow of history as it was meant to be.

Chapter 2

I was willing to give
anything to face the unknown.

Anything, but the lives
of my crew.   Pandora Latham.

I made it
, was Pandi's first
thought on exiting the mouth of the Wormhole. 
What's coming after me?
was her second thought, as the blast of superheated air threw her across the
wide room and to the floor.  She raised herself on an elbow as she checked to
see if her body still worked after all the punishment.  Her head swiveled in
time to see the still open mouth of the wormhole, a sight out of the ancient
visions of hell.  Fire raged in the still intact ship, hot enough to burn the
very hull, which was glowing white and gushing great gouts of black, oily smoke
into the vacuum.  The waves of imminent disaster still radiated on some
unconscious level, and Pandi was on her feet in a second, looking for the
quickest way to put something more substantial than air between her and the
cosmic disruption that threatened to come blasting out of the shimmering mouth
of the wormhole.

And then it was gone,
so quickly she blinked her eyes and it had faded from existence before they had
reopened.  The wormhole was gone, whether cut off by the mass of printed
circuitry now revealed in the empty alcove, or a natural action of the energy
that was preparing to flow from past to future, she didn't know.  All she truly
knew was that the danger was gone, for the moment at least, and the chances of
her survival had been greatly increased.

But where am I?
she thought, looking
up at the quadruple gallery of wormhole gates that stretched across the long
wall.  All in the shape of a, a Torii, if she remembered the name right, the
traditional Shinto gateway whose horizontal bars reached toward heaven.  Golden
in color, with strange symbols etched into the lower crossbar, and glowing with
some unknown radiation from the squares between crossbars and centerpiece.  At
least some were glowing; the ones with a shimmering red wall of, something,
over what would be the entrance to the gate.  Many were as dead as the one she
had just passed through, walls of circuits and shapes of unguessable purpose in
the alcoves the wormhole end would inhabit if working. 

All of the gates that
she could see seemed to be of similar dimensions, with an opening about eight
meters wide by four meters tall, able to pass even small vehicles with ease, it
would seem.  Set in cells, three on the first and third levels, two on the
second and fourth, with what looked like lift tubes and stairs between each
cell.  Pandi craned her head up to look at the wall that continued up to an
arched marbled ceiling, centered over a hundred meters above.  Swiveling her
head as her mind tried to take in all the strangeness around her, she noted
with some detachment that the near end wall was about a half K to her right. 
Her head shifted swiftly to the left, and her breath left her lungs in a rush. 
The wall went on for what must have been at least three kilometers, holding
hundreds of gates, if not thousands.  Still in shock, she stumbled around till
she was facing the parallel wall, over a hundred and fifty meters away. 
Another endless wall of gates, across an open area of benches, planters filled
with flowers familiar and strange, low structures that reminded her nothing more
than underground station entrances, long pools of water.  A tremendous
structure, she thought through a confused mind. But, where?