Deadly Nightshade

by H. Paul Honsinger

  He passed the time as best he could. Resisting the very strong temptation to bounce aimlessly around the confines of his ship, Max put himself on a strict military schedule: each day rising at 05:30, making his bunk in a manner that would please the strictest Mother Goose, putting in the regulation 75 minutes of exercise on the ships’ highly compact but capable fitness equipment, performing personal hygiene, spending three to six hours studying for his Warship Officer’s Qualification Examination, taking his meals at 06:30, 12:00, and 18:00 hours, performing ship cleaning and maintenance, keeping up his mission logs, updating his mission reports (in the event he ever got to transmit them), devoting at least two hours a day to working his way through the Junior Officer’s Continuing Education Curriculum, and spending appropriate amounts of time on recreational reading, listening to music, and playing computer games. He went to bed wearing a clean jumpsuit, undergarments, and socks promptly at 22:30.

  Having completed the sixth day of this routine, Max had just fallen asleep when he was awakened by the sensation of his ship being moved. In less than 30 seconds, he had his boots on, his sidearm in his hand, and was in the control cabin keying the monitors to display optical and passive sensor scans of his ship’s immediate surroundings. The Nightshade was no longer in its hangar. A Vaaach tug was pulling the ship along a path very like, if not identical to, the one it took to the hangar from the point at which it had been pulled inside the immense alien vessel. Max’s hopes continued to rise when the forward optical scanner showed a tiny black square ahead—a tiny black square that Max instantly recognized as outer space. The square continued to grow until the tug pulled the Nightshade out of the Vaaach ship. Its job done, the tug shut down its grappling field and scooted back inside the alien vessel.

  As soon as the Vaaach had recovered their tug, the door through which Max’s ship had been pulled slid shut and the gigantic black spear point sped away into the distance with jaw-dropping speed. In less than ten seconds, it was no longer detectible by any of Max’s sensors. All of the darkened panels in the control cabin suddenly lit up: fusion reactor, weapons, auxiliary power, compression drive, main sublight drive, communications, navigation. and active sensors. Grinning from ear to ear at his change in status from that of a helpless captive to that of an officer of the Union Space Navy at the helm of a fully functional warship, Max keyed the fusion reactor restart sequence, engaged attitude control to stabilize the ship in space so that the star scanners wouldn’t have to pick out navigational references from a moving star field, instructed the nav computer to pinpoint the ship’s location in the galaxy, and requested it to prepare a flight plan to take him to the nearest Union base.

  I’m going home, as fast as I can get there.

  He turned to the sensor console and spent a few seconds inputting instructions for a passive sensor search of the immediate vicinity for any ships (friend or foe) after which he spent another half minute or so keying the comms systems to search for signals on the standard Union fleet channels. Max then turned back to the nav console expecting to see his coordinates, the name of the nearest base, a listing of suggested routes to take him there, and a computation of estimated travel times.

  Instead, the dedicated SHIPLOC (SHIP LOCation) display in the center of the navigational console was still showing *******.*******.*******, meaning that the navigational computer had not yet determined the ship’s current location. Meanwhile, the navigational computer primary display was blank except for the blinking message CALCULATING COORDINATES. PLEASE WAIT.

  That’s odd.

  Max had never seen the Nightshade’s state-of-the-art navigational systems take more than four or five seconds to pinpoint the ship’s position. The computer had been chewing on this position update for nearly a minute. He was about to key for a system diagnostic when a set of coordinates came up.

  0543487.5095554.0121592

  That’s totally insane. Must be an output error.

  Navigational computers were exceptionally reliable, but even the most reliable computer sometimes generates an anomalous result. Max hit the REDISPLAY key and took a deep breath. He was sure he would get a more sensible set of numbers.

  0543487.5095554.0121592

  No way.

  The Union, and most other human space farers, used the Standard Galactic Coordinate System or SGCS (which replaced several earlier and less satisfactory systems), the space equivalent of the system of latitude and longitude invented by Western European explorers on Earth. Navigation on Earth required only positioning oneself on the surface of a sphere (planets are not perfect spheres, but standard navigation typically ignores that fact), a task that the navigator can accomplish with only two coordinates: latitude, which measures the distance in the north/south direction between the equator and the pole, and longitude, which measures distance in the east/west direction around the globe from the prime meridian at Greenwich, England. Interstellar navigation, however, involved plotting positions in three-dimensional space throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which is shaped like a pancake with a golf ball shoved through the middle--A pancake more than 100,000 light years across. This task required three coordinates which the SGCS system rendered as three numbers, seven digits each, separated by periods. The first number, known as Galactic Longitude, measured distance coreward and rimward, how far an object was from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy on a scale calibrated such that 0 was at the precise center and 1100000 represented Earth’s distance from that center—where you are between the outer edge of the pancake and the middle. Max could never find a satisfactory explanation for why that number was 1100000 rather than a nice, super-round 1000000, but—as he liked to tell the squeakers he tutored in celestial navigation—the authorities failed to consult him when they were setting up the system.

  The second number, known as Galactic Altitude, measured distance “up and down” through the thickness of the galaxy’s disk—where you are between the top of the pancake (where you put the syrup) and the bottom (where it sits on the plate). That scale was calibrated such that the plane of the galaxy, a kind of stellar equator with half of the galaxy’s stars “above” and half “below” it, was represented by 5000000. This scale left lots of room both up and down for plotting near extragalactic objects like globular clusters.

  The third number, known as Galactic Latitude, measured distance spinward and antispinward, how far an object is “around the circle” of the galaxy—if the pancake were a clock face, at what o’clock your position falls on. So that the coordinate system would consist entirely of numbers without any modifiers such as plusses and minuses or some sort of equivalent to the east and west longitude designations on Earth, 0000000 represented the position of the sun. As a result, the most commonly plotted locations had very low latitude numbers such as 0078902 (spinward of Earth) or very high ones, such as 9985374 (antispinward of Earth).

  And, while two of the numbers on Max’s display—longitude and altitude—were within the realm of reason, the first—galactic latitude—was not. While every latitude within the reach of human exploration fell somewhere between 1000000 and 1300000 (its first two digits between “10” and “13,) the Galactic Latitude given by the Nightshade’s nav system was “0543487,” which would place Max, in the words of the cliché, “where no man has gone before.”

  If the Nightshade was actually at these nutcase coordinates, that would mean that, in the less than a week the Vaaach had held Max, the Vaaach had travelled a distance greater than that covered by the fastest human long range exploratory vessels over voyages lasting decades. Max crunched a few numbers in his head and figured that such a feat would require a speed of tens of thousands of times faster than the fastest human vessel and, indeed, faster than was theoretically possible with compression drive because compressing space to that degree, even with engines producing 100 percent efficiency, would require more energy several whole stars could produce in a hundred years. Travelling that far, that fast, was simply impossible.

  I’ve got
to get to the bottom of this crap.

  Despite his frustration, Max smiled, remembering what Lieutenant Hall and Ensign Anders, his two best shipboard mathematics instructors, would continually tell him to do, especially when he would come up with some totally off the wall answer to a problem: “show your work.” Max instructed the computer to display the basis for its calculation of the Nightshade’s position in space. The system responded, in the precise but arcane manner in which shipboard computers responded to such requests, that it had first tried to fix its position relative to at least three of the Union’s several hundred metaspacial navigation beacons or those of other friendly or neutral species like the Pfelung or the Tri-Nin. Unable to receive signals from any beacon (which was a really bad sign given that the beacons had ranges that varied between approximately 2500 and 7000 light years), it had then looked for known pulsars, bright extra-galactic Cepheid variable stars, and other “landmarks” detectable from just about anywhere in the galaxy, and had found several. Max keyed for a graphic display of the reference points and their bearings and was rewarded with a map of the galaxy showing a point—the ship’s position—radiating several lines along each of the bearings the system used in its calculation. Everything looked normal until Max enlarged the relevant part of the map and looked more closely.

  The spokes all intersected, not in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the galaxy (the spiral arm that held all of Known Space), not in the Sagittarius arm (the arm just coreward of Orion-Cygnus and reputed, but not known, to be the home of the Lakirr, the Sarthan, and the Vaaach), but in the Centaurus-Crux arm—the arm that lay even farther coreward beyond Sagittarius, about halfway between Earth and the center of the galaxy, far beyond the limit of the most far-reaching human exploration. He checked the data—verified the landmarks, had the sensors recheck the bearings to the landmarks, and instructed the system to recompute the position based on the verified bearings. The system considered the new inputs for about as long as it took Max to go to the head and take care of the kind of business that was substantially more difficult in zero gravity, and generated an updated position calculation:

  0543487.5095554.0021592

  Again.

  No fucking way. I got a 97% on my Celestial Navigation exam. I suppose I need to do this the old fashioned way.

  He directed that the ship’s attitude control system stabilize the ship to within a one ten thousandth of a degree in all three axes, deployed the ship’s powerful Three Mirror Anastigmat telescopic imaging system, set the angular encoders on the telescope’s mount to their highest resolution, and measured—manually, with extreme great care—the bearings to three globular clusters above the galactic plane, two globulars below the plane, a bright Cepheid variable in the Andromeda Galaxy, and a bright Cepheid in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This exercise took nearly three exhausting hours.

  To put it mildly, meticulous attention to minute detail wasn’t exactly Max’s greatest strength. But, he had stuck it out and was confident that the measured bearings to these seven objects were correct to the limits of the precision of his instruments.

  Max then manually input the bearings, checked them three times, and used the auxiliary navigation software in the ship’s main computer, rather than the dedicated processor and software in the nav system, to compute the ship’s position based on the new data. The main computer, something like five or six times more powerful than the unit in the nav system, still took 19 seconds to compute the ship’s coordinates:

  0543487.5095554.0021592

  Fucking way.

  Almost dizzy with the implications of what he saw, Max slowly turned his head to the screen on which he had instructed the system to display his route back to the Union. He saw what he was afraid he would see:

  ON BOARD CONSUMABLES INSUFFICIENT TO REACH PROPOSED DESTINATION. AVAILABLE MAINTENANCE CAPABILITIES INSUFFICIENT TO REACH PROPOSED DESTINATION. IN ROUTE OVERHAULS AT CLASS 5 OR HIGHER FACILITIES NEEDED TO REACH DESTINATION: 3. NUMBER OF KNOWN CLASS 5 FACILITIES WITHIN 500 LIGHT YEARS OF ROUTE: 0.

  He didn’t have the fuel or food or mechanical endurance to get home.

  Just to deepen his despair, Max instructed the computer to make the fanciful assumption that the ship would be resupplied and maintained along the way.

  * NEAREST UNION FACILITY: ABBASI STATION. CARTESIAN DISTANCE FROM PRESENT VESSEL POSITION 13,895.4 LIGHT YEARS. * MINIMUM ESTIMATED TRANSIT TIMES

  ** JUMP DRIVE, UTILIZING KNOWN AND REASONABLY CONJECTURED JUMP POINTS, 11 YEARS 94 DAYS 17 HOURS 53 MINUTES

  ** COMPRESSION DRIVE, FOLLOWING DIRECT LINE CARTESIAN ROUTE [“LUBBER LINE”] AT MAXIMUM SUSTAINABLE VELOCITY, 17 YEARS 205 DAYS 2 HOURS 44 MINUTES

  ** HYBRID COURSE EMPLOYING JUMP AND COMPRESSION DRIVES TO MINIMIZE TRANSIT TIME AND OPTIMIZE FUEL EFFICIENCY, 9 YEARS 14 DAYS 19 HOURS 2 MINUTES.

  ** HYBRID COURSE IS RECOMMENDED.

  The Vaaach had dropped Max off in the middle of nowhere, 13,895 light years from the nearest Union outpost.

  Getting back into Commodore Hornmeyer’s good graces was the least of his worries.

  Chapter 3

  01:14 Z Hours, 30 June 2304

  Max was not particularly proud of his immediate reaction to the news that he was nearly 14,000 light years and more than nine years away from the nearest Union base, a distance he could not cross even if he had the fuel and the food to do it because his ship’s engines and life support systems would wear out long before he could get home. It was something of a blur to him now, but he was certain that there had been a great amount of screaming involved, as well as beating of his fists against solid bulkheads, and profanity.

  Lots and lots of profanity.

  He had bruises on both of his hands and was bleeding from several knuckles. His throat hurt. His voice sounded hoarse. There was even a large bruise in the center of his forehead, accompanied by a truly epic headache. When the screaming and beating and cursing exhausted themselves, Max had sat in the command chair immobile, nearly catatonic with fear and depression, for at least half an hour, maybe more. He kept staring at the ship’s position display—at those bloody, damn, horrible coordinates. Slowly, a sensation began to intrude upon his depleted, petrified state.

  He was hungry. He was usually asleep at this time and he had last eaten about seven hours before. Notwithstanding his new and exalted status as a commissioned officer in the Union Space Navy, Max was a still-growing 16 year old male with a high metabolic rate, which meant that, for him, seven waking hours without a solid meal was an eternity. For about ten minutes, he ignored the growling of his stomach, asking himself whether eating even mattered, now that he was certain to die anyway when his food ran out in four months, or when he ran out of air purification catalyst in seven or eight months, or when he ran out of some other thing essential to life and of which he had a limited quantity on board.

  Max suddenly realized that he was totally alone in a way that no human being in the history of Homo sapiens had ever been. It was an inarguable, objective fact. One statistical comparison said it all:

  Human population of the Orion-Cygnus Arm: about 200 billion.

  Human population of the Centaurus-Crux Arm: 1.

  In about four months, he was going to die alone, leaving his body to mummify and then freeze in the dry, cold air of his ship, perhaps to be found by future human explorers when they ventured this far out into the galaxy decades from now. Or centuries.

  As Max considered the subject in more detail, he realized that the mummification process wouldn’t start in four months, but in something more like five and a half months once one accounted for the time consumed by the thrilling experience of slow starvation after he ran out of food.

  Max felt as low as he had ever felt in his life. He slumped in the pilot’s seat and covered his face with his hands.

  Max didn’t know how long he sat like that—motionless, in self-imposed darkness. It might have been ten minutes. It might have been half an hour. With sight cut off, Max became slowly aware of other
senses insinuating themselves into his consciousness. With the heels of his hands, he could feel the warmth and moisture of his own breath. With the third finger of his right hand, he could faintly sense the pulsing of a tiny artery in his forehead. He heard the circulating fan for the CO2 scrubber kick on as the life support system determined that it was time to cleanse the cabin air of some of Max’s exhalations, a sound that was drowned out a few times by his digestive system emphatically repeating its need for food. He smelled his own sour sweat, worked up during his earlier outburst of frustration, panic, and anger. Max felt, heard, and even smelled signs of life: objective evidence that a living organism occupied the control cabin. Breathing. Metabolizing. Eating. Sweating.

  Living.

  I’m not dead yet.

  Max sat up and looked around the control cabin, surveying the systems monitors, status displays, controls, computer interfaces, and other sophisticated hardware in which he was cocooned. He watched the displays on all the consoles flicker and change in response to the stupifyingly convoluted software that helped run the hardware. He contemplated all of the complexities of the Nightshade that he could not see: the engines based on principles of physics that he only dimly grasped, life support that purged impurities from the air he breathed using exotic catalysts he couldn’t even pronounce, weapons capable of destruction beyond his imagination, stealth systems dependent on computer algorithms consisting of hundreds of millions of lines of code written by teams with tens of thousands of programmers, hull plating made from alloys that didn’t exist only a few years ago, kilometers of tubes, pipes, and conduits—it was more information than would fit into the 1.5 kilograms of neurons crammed into the human skull. And, he remembered a trip with his now-dead father, a brilliant senior engineer with the gigantic Boudreaux and Thibodeaux Aerospace Company, to the firm’s plant in Chenier de Arceneaux on Nouvelle Acadiana when he was seven or so. He saw hundreds of engineers working in the dozen or so buildings of the “Design Center” adjacent to a factory spread over more than two dozen square miles and employing more than 40,000 workers. His father then took him into orbit over New Acadiana where tens of thousands more workers assembled ships too large to be launched from the surface, such as carriers, battleships, and battle cruisers, from prefabricated sections built at the plant on the ground.