The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  The ship didn’t make it through. It stuck out like a bee’s stinger in flesh, but enough of the fighter had breached the hull for her purposes. She hit the emergency override to pop the cockpit open, and with a quick power armor-assisted leap she was in the enemy ship. Dinah didn’t know if there were automatons to deal with here. Probably; the robots on AR-559 had come from somewhere, but she had no intention of waiting to find out.

  Once she gained her magnetic feet, she looked around. The room she found herself in was akin to the shuttle bay of Gringolet, but smaller. There were four cradles for holding what she assumed were the same style of automated drone fighters that she had fought off near Mars and again by the remains of Cronos Station. All of them were empty. Suddenly, she felt the ship move, and there was a thrumming through her feet. She guessed it to be flak cannons. Her first thought was to hope that one of the missiles got through, but of course, that could easily mean her death. Either way, it was beyond her control, and she hadn’t come here to sightsee.

  She leapt across the room to the rear wall. Similar to most vessels, there was an elevator shaft leading further up into the vessel. Rather than call the elevator, she simply ripped off the wire-mesh lift doors and pushed herself up the shaft. When she reached the midpoint, she tore through another set of doors, feeling high on the strength the suit granted her. It had been nearly three years since she had used armor like this, and it felt good to be so powerful, though she knew she was far from invulnerable.

  The door to the engine room was closed but unlocked. In fact, she saw no locking mechanism on the door at all, and she supposed that made sense. There was no crew to guard against. The reactor, however, was something the designers should have worked harder to protect, she thought. It stood in front of her now, small and innocuous looking.

  To anyone else it might have just looked like a shrunken version of the reactor on Gringolet, but to her engineer-trained eyes, it was a marvel of modern technology. More efficient, lighter, and completely automated, this reactor was not only thirty years beyond the technology currently on her floating home, it was ten years ahead of the cutting-edge engines on the public market.

  Her admiration of its design did not stop her from damaging it as quickly as she could.

  She found the nearest control panel and simply ripped it off the engine. Just as with the elevators, the reactor would have been accessed and designed with the need for human interface, and that provided weaknesses. Dinah had no desire to fill the room with radiation; her armor would only do so much to protect her from that. There were other ways that she could cripple the heart of the ship, however, and she went about them quickly and systematically. In less than thirty seconds the reactor was offline.

  That meant it was time to go. She retreated the way she had come, shoving herself down hallways and around corners, all the time expecting to come face to face with the automatons. She had left her rifle on the interceptor for expediency’s sake, and now she was regretting it. As she descended the elevator shaft, she turned her coms back on.

  “Sir?” she said, hoping her captain would answer.

  The reply came almost immediately. “Dinah?!” It was Staples. “Are you all right?”

  As she reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, she glanced above her. In the silence of the atmosphere-less ship, they had almost sneaked up on her. Perhaps half a dozen automatons were moving down the shaft straight for her. She did not stop to count them.

  “I’m fine,” she said as she pushed herself out of the ruined doorway and back towards the fighter that jutted three meters through the flooring into the room. “But I’m in need of extraction, sir.” The robots reached the base of the elevator shaft and pushed off after her. She had perhaps a twenty-second lead on them.

  “It’s good to hear your voice.” It was Templeton. “We’re on our way back to the base to get you. Should be just a few minutes.” She reached the fighter and grabbed its hull to stop herself from sailing past it. She deftly swung herself around and into the cockpit, then closed it just as the first of the automatons reached the ship. It latched on, beetle-like, and began to bang on the polycarbonate in front of her. A second later two more had joined it, and the windscreen sprung spider-web cracks.

  “Actually, sir,” she said, “I’m not on the asteroid,” then she fired the retro thrusters at full blast.

  There was a grating of metal that she felt through her suit, and abruptly the small interceptor was free and in space again. The three robots, however, still clutched the frame of the fighter, and the polycarbonate was starting to give way.

  Staples’ voice came to her through the coms. “Can you be more specific?”

  Dinah grabbed the rifle, pointed it at one of the robots, and fired through the windscreen. There was no atmosphere to vent in the cockpit, and the gun made no sound, though she felt the recoil in her arms. The automaton shattered to pieces, leaving a magnetized hand gripping the hull.

  “I’m in a fighter under the enemy ship,” she said curtly as she turned the rifle on the next robot and pulled the trigger. One round burned through the windscreen and the robot beyond, and that was all. The gun was out of ammunition. One of the robot’s arms was severed, but it had magnetized its feet to the ship and continued to use its other hand on the windscreen. The third and as-yet undamaged robot finally put a fist through and into the cockpit. Immediately it began reaching for her.

  “You’re where?” Staples asked incredulously.

  Dinah didn’t answer. She estimated that she had perhaps twenty seconds before the robots got through and tore a hole in her suit. She had seen them work with deadly efficiency on the joints of the suits of her comrades, and she knew that they would make short work of her. Instead of trying to fight off the searching hand, she seized the controls and the ship surged forward. She pushed it right back towards the now drifting Nightshade, and a second before she struck the hull, she tilted the interceptor’s nose down.

  There was a tremendous, jarring shudder as the top of her small ship hit the ventral hull of the larger one. It knocked her teeth together, and she bit her lip painfully, but it had the desired effect. The robots were crushed between the two vessels. As the fighter, windscreen ruined and hull badly scraped, drifted away, she allowed herself a sigh of relief.

  “Dinah?” Staples said again. “Charis says she sees you. We’ll be there in a minute. Can your ship fly? We’re coming to you, but those fighters and in a defensive screen, and they’re still active-”

  Just as she said it, Dinah saw one of them. Instinctively, she accelerated the ship, and the small black fighter came flying in behind her. Gringolet was right in front of her growing bigger with every second, but the fighter was firing at her. She felt the slugs hit the rear of the ship, and suddenly her fighter lurched to the side as one of the four rear-mounted engines went out. The fighter was designed in part for dogfighting, but neither she nor the ship were good enough to deal with the drone. Her guns were forward facing, and she was out of missiles. Her best hope was to get to safety aboard Gringolet.

  She swerved the fighter erratically in hopes of buying herself a few seconds, and it seemed to work as the slug impacts stopped momentarily. She pushed the remaining engines harder to compensate for the loss of thrust, and Gringolet rapidly grew larger.

  “Coming in hot, sir,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “We see you,” Templeton replied. “We’re opening the shuttle bay. Jang’s going to try to give you some cover.”

  “Hurry, sir,” she said. Another fusillade of bullets struck the fighter, and the controls shook under her hands. From the corner of her eye, she saw a second drone come flying at her from the side. She tried to roll the ship as she had seen Bethany do, putting the belly towards her attacker in hopes of protecting herself, but before she could, slugs from Gringolet tore through the small black drone. She rolled the ship anyway, and just in time as the debris, the velocity and trajectory of which had not changed, peppered her ship. An
other violent shake marked another deluge of slugs from the remaining drone behind her, and another engine went cold.

  Gringolet was right in front of her now, and the open shuttle bay yawned out for her. With a curse, she threw the damaged fighter end over and pushed the two remaining engines as high as they would go, which gave her nearly three Gs of thrust, and fired the forward-facing cannons as she did so. The drone fired as well, and a burst of slugs tore through the cockpit of her ship just as she blew the fighter to pieces with her own fire.

  Dinah was very good at her job, she knew, but there were times when she was also very lucky. The slugs that had slammed through the cockpit had not penetrated her armor. Three of them would leave bruises on her, but none had hit joints, and so she was more or less intact. An alarm sounded inside the helmet indicating loss of atmosphere resulting from a crack in the abdominal piece. She could feel the cold of space seeping in on her stomach, and her heads-up display revised its estimate on remaining air from several hours to several minutes. More than enough time.

  She did the best she could to cut thrust on her engines when she was moving the same relative speed as the larger ship, and then the walls of the shuttle bay surrounded her. A moment later the interceptor struck the rear of the bay at a gentle twenty-three KPH.

  “I’m in, sir,” she mumbled, and suddenly found that she was incredibly exhausted. The shuttle bay door in front of her closed, and the room began to flood with atmosphere and heat. When it had finished, Dinah removed her helmet, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply.

  Chapter 14

  In the end, they decided to leave the other Nightshade vessel floating dead in space. Dinah had assured them that the reactor would be inoperable for at least a week, but with the caveat that her estimate was based on human repair and work schedules. There was no way of telling how many automatons were aboard the other ship, and it was possible that they might have the engines up and running sooner. They could try to destroy it to prevent it from giving chase later, but though the ship was unable to defend itself with weapons or missiles without power, two of the drone fighters were still active. Charis provided a radar return that showed them buzzing defensively around the enemy vessel, ready to shoot down any incoming missiles. For the time being, the drones seemed unwilling to leave their escort, but if Gringolet attacked the ship, they might retaliate. Dinah and Bethany had demonstrated their ability to handle the drones in the past, but they also knew that a single shot from one of them had almost cost John and Gwen their lives.

  Even if the other ship was capable of making repairs in half the time, there was still every expectation that Gringolet would be on Mars by then. Being in well-traveled space had meant safety thus far due to Victor’s reluctance to expose the warships. They would have to be as cautious of potential assassins on Mars as they were on Titan Prime, but at least they would be safe from orbital attacks. After asking Bethany to extract them from the asteroid field and having Charis plot their journey to Mars, Staples went to have a very important conversation.

  As the ship was under light thrust until they cleared the asteroids, Staples climbed down the ladder from the cockpit. She paused on a bulkhead to tap her watch.

  “Brutus, where are you?”

  “I am in the machine shop, Captain,” the tinny voice replied.

  The machine shop was a tiny workshop tucked next to the reactor room one deck down from the ReC. It was used to manufacture small parts as needed; long-range ships like Gringolet sometimes were in space for weeks on end, and if something broke, the ability to provide replacements was vital. They carried replacements for critical and sensitive parts for the sake of redundancy, but it was cheaper and lighter to simply keep a small foundry onboard for smithing and assembly when necessary rather than overload the ship with potentially unnecessary spare parts.

  Four minutes later, she opened the door and found Brutus sitting in the small room. It was barely three by three meters, and much of that space was taken up by workbenches and machining equipment. Brutus was perched on a stool at a workbench, and in front of him lay his right forearm and hand. The break had come at the elbow joint, and on both his remaining upper arm and the severed appendage she could see twisted metal and severed wires.

  She closed the door behind her, feeling slightly claustrophobic in the enclosed space, and drew up the other stool. Brutus watched her placidly. Just as she sat, her watch pinged.

  The tiny speaker on the watch did little to diminish the richness of Evelyn’s husky voice. “Clea – I mean Captain, where can I find you?”

  “Machine shop,” she replied.

  “Be there as soon as I find it,” Evelyn said cheerily, then closed coms.

  “Does it hurt?” Staples asked, gazing at the arm.

  “I think you know the answer to that, Captain,” Brutus replied evenly.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know; you could be programmed to react to injury as though it were pain.”

  “I am aware of the injury, but it does not cause me distress, at least not physically. There are some advantages to being an artificial intelligence, and a lack of pain receptors is one of them. It would be silly to throw that away by way of programmed pain responses.”

  He picked up a pair of pliers and a soldering iron from their cradles and placed them in front of him. They were magnetic and so adhered to the table. A slight movement to starboard as Bethany veered around a chunk of rock in their path made the advantages of this design obvious. Staples leaned involuntarily with the shift in gravity. Brutus did not.

  “Wouldn’t feeling pain make you more human?”

  He cocked his head to the side as he met her gaze. “I am not on a quest to become more human, Captain. As you know, I already consider myself human. I am interested in growing and changing, becoming more than what I am, but that, I would argue, is a trait of humanity. I am aware of my differences from you, and the ability to avoid agonizing pain due to personal injury is one I am quite content to keep.”

  Staples thought of the time she had broken her arm on a swing set as a child and felt a light surge of envy. “Can’t blame you for that.”

  “Is there something you would like to blame me for, Captain?” Brutus inquired, seemingly without aggression.

  “You mean do I think you led us into a trap? Well, yes, I do, but unwittingly. You put the information on the table; I’m the one who chose to pick it up. You’ve demonstrated your loyalty to us many times over. My real concern is whether it bore fruit.”

  Brutus continued to array other tools in front of him at the work station, but his head dropped slightly. “I’m afraid not. The majority of work stations were damaged, and there wasn’t time to extract the necessary components.”

  Staples fought back disappointment. The idea that their visit to AR-559 had not borne fruit was not so upsetting when she considered what had been lying in wait for them there. “Well, we can’t go back. There’s no telling how many of those things,” she paused slightly as she reflected on the robotic form in front of her, “are still in the base. We were damned lucky not to lose anyone, and I’m not one to thumb my nose at luck.”

  “Indeed. Additionally, it would be best to put as much space between us and the other vessel as possible.” He glanced over at her. “And please do not worry about associating me with the automatons that we faced on AR-559. They are robots programmed to assess threats and eliminate them. They are not self-aware; they and I have no more in common than you do with a steak.”

  Staples chuckled. “In that we’re both made of meat?”

  Brutus nodded. “Exactly. It is not the material we are constructed of that makes us similar.” He held up his remaining hand and rubbed his fingers and thumb together. “It is what animates us that makes us unique, not this crude matter.”

  Footsteps sounded outside in the hallway, then the door opened and Evelyn appeared. She was flushed from the climb down, and she still wore her EVA undergarments: a white linen shirt and pants. They looked exce
edingly comfortable to Staples, who always felt a little self-conscious around the gorgeous computer scientist. There was a dark surface in her hand.

  “Hey you. Oh, ouch!” she said sympathetically as she looked at the arm on the table.

  “I believe you saw this happen, Ms. Schilling,” Brutus said. He lifted the arm and placed it in a nearby vice attached to the table.

  She frowned in response. “It looks more painful in the light. And please call me Evelyn.” She turned her attention back to Staples. “Look what I got!” Her brown eyes were wide, and she was beaming.

  Staples took the surface from her. It wasn’t one of the standard surfaces they used on the ship, and it appeared to be a few years old. “What is… is this from the base?” she inquired, her voice rising.

  “Yep!” Evelyn rocked back on her heels, evidently quite proud of herself.

  “I am impressed, Evelyn,” Brutus said. “I did not notice you retrieve that.”

  “Well, I guess you’re not a super robot after all,” she countered, still smiling.

  “I suppose I am not,” Brutus replied, humor in his voice. “Have you looked at it?”

  “Not yet. Tempting though.”

  “Evelyn, this is wonderful,” Staples said, running her hand over the darkened surface. “I was just about to lament how all of this trouble was for nothing.”

  “I do not wish to rain on our parade, Captain, but there is no guarantee that the surface in your hands holds sufficient information to create the weapon we discussed, or anything useful really.”

  “It certainly sounds like you want to rain on us,” Evelyn said, but her grin remained. “At least it’s something, yes?”

  “Yes,” Staples said, and Brutus nodded. “Thank you, Evelyn. Excellent work.”