Deadly Nightshade

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Max remembered how staggered he was to learn that all of this was one of the dozen or so shipbuilding centers operated by this one, single company, which was, in turn, one of the “Big Six” aerospace firms that designed and built the bulk of the Union’s warships: BouThib (Boudreaux and Thibodeaux, pronounced “boo tib”), MiTuYak (Mikoyan Tupolev Yakovlev), Boeing-Mitsubishi, Hyundai-General Motors, Dassault SAAB, and NOGRULOMA (NOrthrup GRUmman LOckeed MArtin), each of which had a similar number of similarly sized facilities. Although BouThib was the lead designer and prime contractor for the Nightshade Reconnaissance Fighter that now carried Max, Max knew that his ship included systems, subsystems, assemblies, and parts made by several other Big Six companies and literally hundreds of smaller concerns scattered throughout the Union. These ranged from the vessel’s Integrated Stealth and Emulation System, made in Katy, Texas, on Earth by NOGRULOMA, to the bolts that attached the control cabin command chair to the deck, designed and fabricated in downtown Place des Écureuils on Nouvelle Acadiana at the Altergard Nox Machine, Tool, and Digital Casting Corporation plant.

  The realization struck Max that he was surrounded by the work of hundreds of human minds and tens of thousands of human hands—men and women who poured their creativity and their drive and their energy into creating and building machines of war so that the human race might live. Carried through space and kept alive by their handiwork, Max suddenly had a strong sense that those men and women were with him in spirit--that they built the best machine that they knew how to build with the intention that it would keep him alive and bring him home.

  I am not alone.

  Maybe, just maybe, between his own skills and the Nightshade’s capabilities, Max had what he needed to make it back to the Union alive. His ship was, after all, the very flower of human technology, lovingly designed and built by the most gifted aerospace engineers and builders who had ever drawn breath (or, at least, who had done so since the Apollo program). He had fuel enough to carry him for thousands of light years. With the sophisticated sensors, intel computers, signal interception and analysis systems, and communications monitoring systems at his disposal, who knows what he might be able to find: water, oxygen, material that his autochef could process into food, maybe even allies who could provide him with fuel or transport him at high speeds back to the Union.

  On top of that, there was Max himself. Even though he was only sixteen years old, Max had gone to space at the age of eight. He had more time in space than many Lieutenant Commanders had possessed before the Navy adopted its present recruiting and training system (and, by the time he became a Lieutenant Commander, he could easily have amassed the experience that was once possessed only by a Captain or a Commodore) When the Krag captured the cruiser USS San Jacinto, Max had taken refuge in the ship’s interstices and secret places, leading the relentless Krag on a merry chase for twenty-six days without being captured. As Senior Midshipman on the battlecruiser USS Lynn Whitlake, Max had personally led a force of midshipmen that routed a Krag boarding party by leading his charges through the ship’s vents and access crawlways to mount a ferocious surprise attack on the enemy’s rear, preventing the Krag from taking the ship’s CIC. Max was no megalomaniac, but he knew that he was smart, resourceful, creative, and tenacious.

  The Vaaach are fucking with the wrong ensign.

  No, Max Robichaux was most emphatically not dead. Not by a long shot. He resolved to defy the aliens who abandoned him out here in the lonely emptiness of interstellar space to die by slow starvation. He would find a way to survive and he would find a way home.

  Somehow.

  And he would never lose his cool that way again.

  Never.

  “You left me out here to die slowly, you cold-hearted sons of bitches!” he shouted, knowing that no one would hear him. “Well, Vaaach assholes, I’m going to fuck up your plans! I’m not going to die fourteen thousand light years from home! You just watch me.”

  So, Max, what’s the plan?

  Step one: avoid being killed. Max remembered one of Admiral Middleton’s best known maxims: “Don’t get yourself killed: that’s your first priority. Careful analysis of after-action reports demonstrates that, on most mission types, dead personnel have a very low success rate.” That meant getting the Nightshade into motion. Max knew nothing about who or what inhabited this region of the galaxy. He certainly did not know if the locals were friendly or if they would kill him on sight. Accordingly, since any aliens in the vicinity might have detected the arrival and/or departure of the huge Vaaach ship and might swoop down at any moment intent on reducing him to flaming atoms, Max knew he needed to assume that he had been detected by a hostile ship or ships and act accordingly.

  Which meant that he had to make his location difficult to predict, either for an attacking force bearing down from a distance who would use the point in space where the Vaaach dropped him off as the initial datum for their search, or for any unfriendlies who had already managed to sneak up on him and started to compute a target solution to ruin his day. He knew that to accomplish this goal had to do two things: “clear the datum,” meaning to get away from the point in space at which he may have been detected; and, having gotten away, he would need to make himself difficult to track so that no enemy could pick up his trail as he left the datum behind.

  He engaged his stealth systems, instructed the computer to select a course at random, and engaged the compression drive at the relatively slow but highly stealthy speed of 800 c. He also instructed the computer to change to another randomly chosen course at a slightly higher speed of 920c in an hour.

  There. That should do it for now.

  Step two: learn the lay of the land and collect intelligence on its inhabitants, if any. His sensors having detected no ships within a 10 billion kilometer (roughly one light hour) radius, Max reconfigured them to detect all stars and associated planetary systems within a ten light year radius, a process that could take an hour or more depending on the star density of this area of space. Next came the comm system which, even set at the highest sensitivity, showed absolutely no transmissions on any of the known channels. He reconfigured the system to scan for any kind of signal on any band transmitted by any known method. That scan could take up to three hours.

  Since these scans were going to take some time, Max’s thinking came inevitably to step three: midrats. Technically “midrats” stood for “midnight rations” but which, most warships actually served in the form of sandwich fixings, leftovers, and pastries between midnight and clearing for breakfast. In other settings, “midrats” meant any simple food served during any significant gap between regular meal times. Although he might starve to death in four months, now that he had decided he was going to live through this ordeal, Max had no intention of engaging in the short-term implementation of his long range survival plan on an empty stomach. He unstrapped, floated back to the tunnel, pulled himself through to the accommodation cabin, fired up the zero G coffee maker, and made himself a ham sandwich on white. low-crumb bread (slices of which were known in the Navy as “ceiling tiles” because of their less than tender texture and superficial resemblance to the acoustic variety thereof), with spicy mustard and kosher pickles.

  Pickles, along with nuts, were a commodity of which the Navy never seemed to have a shortage. Max had always suspected that this was true because the shelf life of a jar of pickles was likely measured in decades, if not centuries.

  He also had the autochef dispense a serving of potato chips (another commodity the Navy had in abundance), a candy bar (those were strictly rationed), and a vitamin/mineral supplement tablet (those were mandatory—if he didn’t dispense one a day the computer would stop issuing food to him until he did).

  Max took the pill, marched through the sandwich, chips, coffee, and candy bar, and vacuumed the crumbs floating around in the air, all in less than ten minutes. He was sucking on his second insul-bulb of coffee and watching the computer assemble a map of the surrounding star systems on the 3D
stellar cartographic display when the comm system chimed for attention—the chime that went off only when the system received a signal that was specifically coded for the attention of his specific vessel. The chime caught him in mid swallow and startled him greatly, as vessel-specific comm traffic was the last thing he expected at that moment. So great was his surprise that it was all he could do to keep from spraying coffee from his mouth and nose, which would have made quite the mess in zero G.

  The MSG RCVD light was on. Max keyed to read it:

  MAXIME TINDALL ROBICHAUX. YOU HAVE DECIDED TO LIVE. GOOD. LIFE IS NOT TO BE WASTED EVEN WHEN IT IS THAT OF AN INCONSEQUENTIAL IMMATURE UNTRAINED UNSKILLED IRRESPONSIBLE AND CARELESS MEMBER OF A PRIMITIVE CULTURE. THAT WAS YOUR FIRST TEST.

  HERE IS THE NEXT. THE INHABITANTS OF THE G2 CLASS STAR SYSTEM 2.7 LIGHT YEARS ANTISPINWARD FROM YOUR CURRENT POSITION URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR HELP. THIS TASK MAY KILL YOU. IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE THAT THIS MISSION IS NOT BEYOND THE CAPABILITIES OF A PUNY PINK FANGLESS CLAWLESS TINY-BRAINED GIBBERING PRIMATE WHO JUST CLIMBED DOWN FROM THE TREES TO CRAWL INTO HIS ASTONISHINGLY RUDAMENTARY CRAFT. MESSAGE ENDS.

  Test? Beings? Help? Kill? Gibbering primate? Rudimentary craft? What the fuck? Who the hell do these people . . . creatures . . . beings . . . whatever . . . think they are, Midshipman Trainers to the galaxy?

  Max had more questions than answers, but one thing was clear: the Vaaach, whoever and whatever they were, wanted him to jump through some hoops. Perhaps, after Max jumped through all their hoops, the Vaaach would return him to his own part of the galaxy. Perhaps not. But, for now, passing the tests laid out for him by the Vaaach looked like the only game in town.

  Not wanting the Nightshade to carry him away from his destination at just shy of 1000 times the speed of light while he figured out where he was going, Max disengaged the compression drive from the accommodation cabin’s miniature helm console, ran a proximity scan for any nearby ships or other objects, and finding none, entered a random course and engaged the sublight drive programmed to accelerate the ship to 0.05c. As he felt the ship turning to its new heading, he entered a query for the computer to tell him everything it knew about the star system in question. The terminal displayed the synthesis of the data gathered by the ship’s various sensors: optical, gravimetric, infrared, EM, neutrino, and so on:

  QUERY: SUMMARY DATA REF G2 CLASS STAR SYSTEM 2.7 LY FCP.

  RESULT: G2 CLASS STAR SYSTEM 2.7 LY FCP. BEARING TO PRIMARY 225/019. USNGS SURVEY NUMBER: NONE YET ASSIGNED. SGCS LOC: 0543485.5095555.0121585. MASS: SOL X 1.12. PLANETS DETECTED: 7 TOTAL, 3 TERRESTRIAL TYPE, 4 GAS GIANT TYPE. 11 PLUTINOS. NB: EM DETECTORS SHOW EXTENSIVE AMPLITUDE AND FREQUENCY MODULATED EMR FROM SECOND PLANET, PROBABILITY OF ARTIFICIAL ORIGIN >99%.

  This information was followed by links to further data on the system’s primary, on each of the planets, on the radio transmissions, on the various sub-planetary bodies scattered throughout the system, and so forth. He keyed the link for the second planet’s summary screen. He skipped the parts about the semi-major axis, sidereal period, and inclination of its orbit and got to the part that he considered useful.

  MEAN RADIUS: 5284 KM. MEAN DISTANCE FROM PRIMARY: 0.75 AU. MEAN DENSITY: 5.522 G/CM2. SURFACE PRESSURE: 0.85 ATM. ATMOSPHERE: 55.3% NITROGEN, 43.3% OXYGEN, REMAINDER TRACE ELEMENTS BELOW RANGE/SENSOR THRESHOLD. HUMAN RESPIRATORY INDEX 95.5/100 (PROVISIONAL ESTIMATE PENDING ANALYSIS OF TRACE ELEMENTS AND POSSIBLE MICROBIAL HAZARDS). SURFACE CLIMATE RANGE: SUB-TROPICAL TO SUB-ARCTIC. SURFACE 18% LAND CONSISTING PRIMARILY OF ONE EQUATORIAL AND TWO TEMPERATE ZONE CONTINENTS AND 82% OCEANS AND LAKES.

  So, the planet was somewhat smaller than Earth, had almost exactly the same density which meant that its composition was similar, had a narrower range of climates, and possessed an atmosphere that was thinner overall than Earth’s but richer in oxygen, meaning that humans could get by without any kind of respiration support. It had a higher proportion of water on its surface than did Earth, which explained the smaller climate swings—water soaked up heat during the warm seasons and radiated it during the cold.

  Nothing on the first screen was particularly surprising. Until he got to the bottom.

  VIEW VAAACH SURVEY TEAM REPORT ON INHABITANTS OF SECOND PLANET? YES. NO.

  Vaaach survey team report? That didn’t come from the Navy’s database weenies.

  If the Nightshade’s computer now contained a report from a Vaaach survey team, maybe the Vaaach had loaded other goodies into the database. If Max could see at a glance what information the Vaaach had given him, he might be able to come to some conclusions about what they had in mind for him. He entered a command for the system to perform a date code scan and display all files added to the computer’s directory since he left Union space, other than logs and recorder data.

  ERROR 104: RESPONSE FORBIDDEN.

  Typically, the computer delivered this error message when a user requested information that the computer was capable of providing but that was classified higher than the security clearance of the user. Max ran into this message often when he poked around in the Nightshade’s database to get a clearer idea about how the war was going: where the various task forces were at given times in the past, what battle tactics the various commanders were using, and what specifically happened in particular battles. All of which told him that the war was probably not going very well for the Union.

  In this case, Max surmised that the Vaaach had simply programmed his computer to refuse to produce this kind of summary for Max. In other words, the Vaaach wouldn’t let him get at the information the easy way. There were probably some hard ways he could try—convoluted pieces of computer trickery he had picked up here and there--but Max was more interested right now in seeing what the Vaaach survey team had reported about the inhabitants of the second planet.

  The report was extensive and contained several detailed, subject matter specific appendices. Max keyed for a word count: 250,854--the length of a long novel. Very, very long. The hypothetical Vaaach staff officer who wrote the report failed to provide an “executive summary.” In the Union Space Navy, any similar report would have such an executive summary, that is, unless the officer who wrote it wanted to be reassigned to a tiny, Spartan early warning station in the frozen depths of the Oort cloud of some forgotten, uninhabited star system. Furthermore, Max could tell after reading the first thirty pages or so that the writer of the report was in no hurry to make his, or, her, or its, point. No hurry whatsoever. Maybe the Vaaach were a more patient species than humans.

  Much more patient.

  There was, however, a concise and well written (or, at least, succinctly and clearly translated) “Sentient Species Biological Summary,” supplied as an appendix to the report, providing an overview of what these aliens were like physically and intellectually. It described them as insectoid/arachnoid race that had originally crawled on eight legs and now walked upright on two. As for the other limbs, one thin pair ended in delicate, seven-fingered hands for fine manipulation, one thick pair ended in powerful, chitinous claws used for heavy lifting and fighting, and one pair was so short and weak as to be nearly vestigial. Those limbs were, it seems, used only in mating, and it was a grave social affront to move them so much as a millimeter under any other circumstances. Having never evolved communication by sound, perhaps because it carried less in this planet’s thinner atmosphere, these aliens “spoke” to each other with by varying the color and duration of bioluminescent flashes of light. The Vaaach called them “Species 2297,” apparently not wanting to refer to them as something like the Vaaach equivalent of “Two Blue Blinks, Three Red, Two Yellow.” Other than their unusual means of communication, they were a “typical” insectoid race according to the report, which led Max to conclude that the Vaaach must have encountered several other insectoid beings. Otherwise, they would have no basis of comparison from which to judge that Species 2297 was “typical.”

  Based on the report’s detailed description of their various discoveries and achievements, Max concluded that
—as of twelve years ago when the report was written--Species 2297 was at a level of techno-social development approximately equal to that of Earth circa 1930 but with peculiar deviations from that average. Some deviation was natural and, in fact, based on what humankind’s Xenotechnosociologists had learned so far in their limited contacts with other races, and from the assessments of humans by other races with a broader range of contacts, humans were anything but typical. In most areas, the sons and daughters of Earth were at or near average in their speed and level of development given, the amount of time since the last glaciation. Indeed, they far exceded expectations in the biological sciences and in medicine in particular. Experts guessed that this deviation from the local norm might be based on the unusual emphasis on the sanctity of human life in the moral systems that were for, the critical centuries of Earth’s technological explosion, the dominant ones on the planet. Humanity, on the other hand, lagged tremendously behind the Orion-Cygnus arm average in its socio-political development. It seems that most races had attained complete politico-economic self determination and eliminated all but brushfire wars among themselves before reaching for the stars whereas humans had yet to succeed completely in either goal.