The Deep Dark Well (46 page)

What in the hell are
you talking, or thinking about, child?  Who is coming?  And what did I do?

A trio of missiles,
their smaller warheads bearing the promise of crippling but not killing the
capital ship, came through the defenses.  Drives flared as they made their last
second adjustments and accelerated into their target.  Again the captain of
Navarin
looked on with a feeling of disbelief.  The ship shuddered.

That wasn’t a hit
, thought Lucille.  No
warning klaxons.  No damage reports.  Something had moved the ship.  But not
the hundred-megaton warheads of a trio of missiles.  She shifted her awareness
to surrounding space and noted the trio of missiles coasting outward from her vantage,
drives dead from lack of reaction mass.  A quick calculation showed her that
the ship was now a hundred kilometers from where it should be, though its
vector through the system had not changed.

They’re here
, called out the
frightened mind of the child. 
And they’re crazy with anger.

And there they were,
outside of the ship.  A hundred tentacles of pitch black shadow that obscured
the stars.  A wrongness that made Lucille shudder.  A wrongness of something
existing in a space in which it was not meant to be.  The tentacles whipped
into action, penetrating the hull of the battle-cruiser, seeking the life
cradled within the vessel.

The crew,
realized Lucille. 
They were helpless in combat mind link.  They needed free action to be able to
defend themselves. 
Terminate mind link
, she ordered, forcibly ejecting
all of the members of the crew.  They would be groggy for a second.  But they
would soon be aware of the danger.

*    *    *

“What in the name of
all the Gods just happened?” exclaimed Admiral G’narjanasan.  The human ship
had been right in the path of a trio of missiles fired from one of his
battleships.  Then it had not been there.  It had been someplace else.  An
instantaneous translation of space. 
Quite impossible
, he thought. 
And
contrary to all the known laws of physics
.

“Maybe they did
something to our sensory input,” said one of the junior officers on the bridge.

“Or they transmitted
the data to us,” said another.  “Somehow they got it into our systems, like a
virus.”

“Impossible,” said the com
officer. “There are too many filters between any uncleared transmissions and
our data systems.  That information would still be held up in quarantine while
check after check was being run on it.”

“Something happened,”
said the admiral, his eye stalks swinging around the bridge to glare at the
other officers three at a time.  “Either that ship has some unknown capability,
or some manner of making us think so.  But I need to know what it is.”

The nightmare of a ship
that could instantly translate space ate at his imagination.  It could appear
right next to his flag, penetrating all of its defenses, to loose a volley of
destruction before disappearing.  Away from retaliation of any kind.

“What’s that?” said the
tactical officer, breaking through his thought.

G’Narjanasan looked
over at the screens depicting the space around his flagship.  His hearts beat
faster as the wrongness of what he saw penetrated into his system.  The dozens
of tentacles, made of something blacker than space, waving around his vessel. 
A glance at other video inputs showed that the objects were around every ship
in the fleet.  But nowhere were they more concentrated that around the human
ship. 
Another trick of the human?
 

“Open fire on those,
things,” he ordered, realizing as he said it that he might have made a
mistake.  Particle beams and lasers had trouble making a lock.  But the crew
compensated on manual and they were soon visually aimed at the targets, flaring
their beams of death and destruction into the total blackness of the objects. 
All of the tentacles went wild as some of their fellows were struck.  Waving
this way and that, though the beams seemed to be having very little effect on
them.

Then they were through
the hull of the flagship and the screams of terrified crewmen rang over the com
circuits.