Free The Deep Dark Well by Doug Dandridge

itself into the ventilation shaft, until it was gone.
    *    *    *
    Pandi dreamed.  Alabama,
and her father was lecturing her again on religion.  On the need to honor God,
and turn away from the temptations of man.  He had just caught her with her
latest boyfriend, in the boy’s embrace in the hayloft of the barn.  His face
was red with righteous rage, his voice shrill.  What was he going to think when
she told him she was leaving home after she graduated?  When she told him she
was to study aerospace science, a discipline he considered the handiwork of the
devil.  After all, God gave the world to man.  What right did man have in
trying to leave the home God gave to him?
    The sound of the vent
cover hitting the floor roused Pandi from her dream.  She flinched, waiting for
her father to hit her, as her mind tried to orient itself.  She had always been
a sound sleeper.  But through exhaustion her mind struggled up from the haze of
slumber.  This was not the time or place for sleep, unless she wished to sleep
forever.  It took her a second to focus her eyes.  She immediately honed in on
the bent vent cover, lying in the middle of the floor.
    Her gaze flicked from
one wall to the other.  The one on the left had an intact cover.  The one on
the right?  It took Pandi a second to realize what was flowing out of the
vent.  A quadruple thick flow of two inch wide square blocks, sliding to the
floor.  The floor, where a larger collection of blocks was expanding every
moment as it gathered more of itself to it.
    Pandi pulled her
pistols and aimed them at the robot, realizing as she did that she had not reloaded
them.  A quick check of her ammo pouches confirmed her fears.  Only one seven
round magazine left for each gun.  She could totally destroy fourteen blocks of
the massive robot, if she was careful.  Pandi didn’t think that the creature
would have any trouble dispatching her minus fourteen blocks. 
    The blocks started to
reconfigure while it was still gathering itself from the vent.  Legs grew from
the sides while a sensory cluster formed to the front.  Pandi was happy to
notice there were no barrels protruding from the head .  She must have
destroyed them all.
    She looked at the
doors, the one she had entered by and the other.  She knew where the first
led.  To the openness of the subway station.  That left the other door
as the only possible path to refuge.  A thought to leave behind the jetpack was
put aside.  She knew how to work this piece of equipment, which was more than
she could say about the stuff she might find along the way.  It had the
potential to become a weapon, and any weapons were welcome at this time.
    The robot lurched onto
its legs as she went through the doorway, pushing the button that slid the door
closed.  Pandi pivoted into a full out run down the hall.  She heard the sound
of the door swishing open behind her and knew the robot was in pursuit.  There
was no illusion in her mind as to what it would do to her if it ever grabbed
her.  She turned corners as the corridor bent, looking for any hint of an
entrance.  But there was no way to go but forward.
    The corridor widened,
opening into a long room.  Pandi’s breath caught as she saw the wide chasm that
stretched the length of the room, across her line of flight.  Stopping at the
edge, she looked down, into an infinity of drop.  The chasm was over twenty
meters in width.  No chance of jumping that, even at her best.  She turned
back, hoping to somehow find another way, just as the robot came into sight
along the corridor.  It moved smoothly and quickly toward her, radiating a
horrible menace in its unemotional approach. 
      Only one hope ,
she thought, as she shifted the jet pack onto her shoulders and buckled in. 
Joysticks came to hand as she turned and sprinted toward the chasm.   She
pressed the fire buttons for a second as she leapt into the air.  The pack
flamed, and she whimpered as the heat