Deadly Nightshade

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Species 2297 had a substantially different pattern, both from humans and from the norm. From the Vaaach descriptions, it appeared that the insectoid aliens’ knowledge of organic chemistry, biochemistry, medicine, geology, and astronomy were at something like a 1910 level while, on the other hand, they had already built “Fat Man” type nuclear weapons, supersonic aircraft, and had begun construction of a large, permanent, space station. For a culture that had not discovered antibiotics or the structure of whatever molecule or molecules life on their planet used in place of DNA to, nevertheless, have built nuclear weapons and space stations was unusual and, as far as Max knew, unheard of. It was as if Yuri Gagarin had returned to Earth from his first orbital flight only to have his celebratory parade through Red Square cancelled because of a raging epidemic of whooping cough. He tried to tease the reasons for this anomaly out of the report, but found himself becoming frustrated by the document’s apparent assumption that the reader already knew a great deal about Species 2297 and needed only an update on recent developments. As if that were not bad enough, the Vaaach-to-Standard translation left a great deal to be desired and was, in fact, so bad in some places that—if he were a more suspicious person—he would wonder whether the Vaaach had deliberately muddied up the document to make his assignment more difficult. There was, for example, this:

  It is kind of problem is the source of great concern to the observation team that species in question not to show psychological emotional processing either sociology or of individual trauma caused by the activities of Plunderers most important is trauma relating to removal of the Precious Treasure is to be high or not to be high. Their failure is likely to result in pervasive non-good workingness of mind and society in the society as a whole in the form of maladaptive behavior can lead to literally self make to exist not.

  That’s almost as bad as “all your base are belong to us.”

  Notwithstanding these issues with the survey report, Max had little difficulty discerning that things had not been going well for Species 2297. In fact, as he got deeper into the document, it became increasingly apparent something very bad was happening to them. From what Max could make out through the truly horrific translation, he derived the conclusion that these aliens were under some sort of threat, the worst of which involved someone taking their Precious Treasure. He could also tell that the threat was probably from at least one, if not two, more advanced, space-faring races.

  Who and what that race or those races were, what they wanted from Species 2297, what was the “Precious Treasure,” what kind of threat these races posed, and what level of technology they brought to the festivities, were just the beginnings of Max’s questions. Whatever assets the attackers had, he got the impression from the report that the threat they posed was very serious.

  Max laid in a course for Species 2297’s homeworld and engaged the compression drive. If he were still back in a combat zone or even in the Union within the Zone of Plausible Enemy Penetration (called, quite naturally, the “Z-PEP”), he would have programmed in a randomly varying three-dimensional zigzag course with several speed changes and maybe even a few loopbacks. But, out here in the middle of interstellar space, with his sensors now indicating a complete absence of threats for light years in every direction and flying the stealthiest vessel every produced by humans, he saw no reason to bother. He set a lubber line course straight for his destination at his highest stealthy speed. If he was going to the rescue of this race, he decided that he should get there as soon as he could.

  Max would have to figure out the answers to his questions using either the information the Vaaach had given him or analysis of his own sensor data. Then, he would have to find some way to take what he learned, combine it with the capabilities of the vessel under his command, and help these beings. He would figure it all out when he got there.

  He hoped.

  Chapter 4

  23:27 Zulu Hours, 2 July 2304

  A zero G bed isn’t really a bed at all, at least not in the conventional sense. It certainly doesn’t look like a bed. It’s more of a light mesh sleeping bag moored firmly to the panel in the accommodation cabin that folds down to deploy the 1 G bed with its ordinary mattress, sheets, blanket, and pillow. The sight of this particular piece of equipment in use can be somewhat unsettling for the uninitiated because the sleeper resembles nothing more than a mummy stuck to the wall. The sleeping bag was roomy enough inside that the sleeper didn’t feel like he was wearing a straightjacket, but confining enough that he didn’t feel like he was floating in mid-air in the middle of the compartment. Max supposed that a lot of research had gone into the things.

  The sight of Max using the zero G bed, had there been anyone to see it, would have looked even stranger than the usual mummy on the wall because, not only did he like to sleep with his head zipped up inside the bag because that meant a face pad there absorbed any escaping blobs of saliva or nasal mucus thereby preventing Max from having to encounter floating droplets of spit and snot as he went about his business when he got up, but he also liked for reasons he never quite understood to sleep with his head pointed toward the deck and his feet near the overhead. As a matter of fact, he would have preferred to sleep at a 45 degree angle with his head lower than his feet, but the receptacles set in the bulkhead to which one attached the bed’s anchors weren’t properly placed for that orientation. He had frequently considered greenie rigging some sort of tie down arrangement allowing him to sleep at an angle, but such things were contrary to regulations and were rightly considered to be unsafe. Besides, sleeping upside down was comfortable enough.

  It hadn’t been long after Max had settled himself into this heterodox sleeping position and begun dreaming some particularly heterodox dreams involving a blonde and a redhead each wearing a shiny skin-tight spandex parody of the Union naval uniform, that he awoke abruptly to a shrill, continuous, deafeningly loud WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP, which Max instantly recognized as the Nightshade’s primary master alarm. Unbidden, the list of conditions that triggered the primary master appeared in Max’s mind. There were eight.

  Only a few of them were bad. The rest were very bad.

  His heart racing and his every cell awash in adrenalin, Max grabbed for the fist-sized, glow in the dark D ring that served as the pull tab for the bed’s inside zipper. In less than two seconds, he had extricated himself from the bed, grabbed his boots from a pocket sewn onto the outside of the bag, stuffed them uncomfortably down the front of his jumpsuit so he would have both hands free, and—using the grab bar installed in response to flight crew demands—launched himself into the access tunnel to the Control Cabin. Having honed his aim and velocity over weeks of practice, this launch procedure had in the last two hundred attempts carried him effortlessly down the tunnel’s full length, into the Control Cabin, and close enough to the command chair that he could grab one of the restraining straps, bring himself to a stop, and use the chair’s arms or the other restraining straps to pull himself quickly into his seat.

  Instead, when he had traversed about three-quarters of the tunnel’s length, an outside force suddenly accelerated him into the Control Cabin at three or four times the normal speed, after which a similar force from a different direction deflected his precise aim toward the command chair causing him to miss by nearly a meter and crash into the point defense weapons console.

  It was at that point that Max knew he was in real trouble.

  The ship’s computer had just implemented a protocol that created a four G gravity artificial gravity gradient between the two cabins such that travelling from either of the two cabins toward the center of the tunnel was like going straight up against four times the force of gravity. It had also created a weaker gradient in the Control Cabin itself pulling objects away from the Command Chair toward the compartment’s periphery. This spelled trouble because the computer implemented the protocol only if it calculated a very high likelihood of the ship being hit by enemy weapons fire: the gravity gradient in the tunnel was to ke
ep any smoke, toxic gases, or atmosphere leaks confined, at least to a limited degree, to the cabin in which they occurred; while the gradient in the Control Cabin was to deflect away from the occupant of the command chair any debris, spall, and other small objects that could be flying around the cabin.

  Max reached for the handholds set in the overhead, pried himself off the console, and clawed his way into the Command Chair. The top of his head dribbling droplets of blood that hung in the air like a load of glutinous glistening dark purple buckshot, Max shoved his feet into the boots and then used his right hand to belt himself in while using the left to enter a series of commands into the tactical console to find out what the hell was going on.

  As the left hand went about its business, the right finished its work with the safety belts and groped for the button on the arm of the Command Chair that would silence the incessant whooping of the alarm before it split his head open right down the middle like a watermelon at a Texas barbeque. He jabbed at the button with great satisfaction, but noticed as he did so that the toggle that shut off all voice alerts was engaged. He had turned the alerts off when he was trying to work around the Vaaach system lockouts because the system was driving him nuts with its repeated warnings and advice to stop doing what he was doing any time he tried to bypass any system, and had forgotten to turn them back on.

  He reactivated the voice alert system and immediately heard the ice goddess sex kitten who lived inside the computer declaim in its seductive, soulless voice (chosen to get the attention of naval personnel who were almost universally male and had an average age of 25) “Proximity alert. Unidentified vessel inside primary defense perimeter.”

  “Alert acknowledged,” Max said. At least an oral acknowledgment prevented the announcement from repeating.

  A few more not quite frantic keystrokes brought up a 3D tactical plot at a usable scale and resolution, allowing Max to finally see what was happening. He had already concluded from the Nightshade’s automatic responses that he’d blundered into the kill zone of a hostile ship.

  He was wrong. Max had blundered into the kill zone of four hostile ships.

  The computer was classifying them as long range attack fighters which told him absolutely nothing about their weapons, speed, maneuverability, shielding, armor, countermeasures, point defense capabilities, stealth, emulation, and any other characteristic of these ships that Max would need to know in order to evade them or, if unavoidable, to fight them. What the tactical display did tell him was that the four ships had already deployed into the four fighter attack/kill formation used by just about every species to go to war in space: two elements, each comprised of a lead and a wing man, attacking from completely different directions. The first element was coming in from ten o’clock low (a bow/deck-relative bearing of 318/323), and the other approaching from two o’clock high (relative bearing 49/112), both ahead of his own ship so that, no matter what evasive maneuver he executed, his momentum would, at least for a while, continue to carry him closer to one or both of the fighter elements. Not only was Max greatly outnumbered and most likely greatly outgunned, the enemy fighters had the drop on him and had already set themselves up in a markedly superior tactical position. Well, as with so many other situations, there was an Admiral Middleton maxim that covered the spot in which Max found himself:

  Courage deferred is courage preserved.

  Max was brave as a lion, but he had no problem running away from a fight he couldn’t win. The decision made, he turned to the compression drive console to initialize the Randall-Sundrum generators and had already flipped the first few switches before he saw the orange light bar blinking at the top of the panel. The one labeled LOC FIELD INHIB.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  These aliens, whoever they were, had popped their version of an egg scrambler, disrupting the normal space/metaspace quasi-interface thereby inhibiting the compression drive from being able to distort the time-space continuum to provide FTL propulsion. Just as he came to that realization, a series of shrill beeps began to assault Max’s ears. Although Max had heard that sound only in simulations, he identified it instantly and felt his ass pucker.

  The terminal lock warning.

  It meant that the enemy targeting scanners had gone into terminal lock mode and were within seconds of being able to provide a usable firing solution enabling them to fire their weapons at Max’s ship. Each beep was a sweep of the enemy fire control scanner at or very near the Nightshade. When the beeps became continuous, the scanner was locked and it was c’est tout, mon cher Max. There were beeps of four different frequencies or musical pitches, each about a major third apart, a distinct note for each enemy ship. The beeps for each ship were at the rate of one about every two seconds or so, meaning that all four enemy ships were locking their weapons on him but that the enemy scanners were still sweeping a fairly wide cone. Max knew he had some time.

  All the time in the world. Ten . . . who knows . . . maybe all of even fifteen seconds.

  He had to solve two problems and solve them fast. First, no conceivable maneuver in the universe other than blowing himself up right now would stop the range between him and the enemy (which is how Max thought of them, given that they were trying to lock their weapons on him) from continuing to close for the next several seconds. In fact, anything he did to reduce the rate of closure would have the initial effects of slowing him down, making the Nightshade easier to target, and keeping his ship within enemy weapons range longer, allowing the enemy to get off more shots.

  Second, the two enemy ships had been accelerating toward him for a few minutes, and had built up velocities approaching half the speed of light. Max, on the other hand, had been creeping into the star system that served as home to Species 2297 at 0.01 c, a speed designed to avoid attracting the attention of either of the two species that had been making life difficult for the aliens the Vaaach had sent him to help. At the moment, Max was in the inner Oort cloud (or the outer Kuiper belt—Max never knew whether he was in one or the other and the subtle astronomical distinctions between the two were lost on him) of his destination star system. He had been getting some rest in anticipation of marathon sessions monitoring the communications intercepted from the insectoid aliens in his effort to learn more about the enemies who threatened them.

  All of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, however, it was looking more and more like a major fuck up that, unless he was very skillful or very lucky, would almost certainly become a fatal mistake. Max’s decision to fly a lubber line course probably put these particular aliens on his trail and, because his position could be accurately predicted even without maintaining sensor contact, they had been able to lie in wait for him and spring their attack without having to take the time to derive an accurate intercept solution. They could just zoom in toward the point in space where their computers told them he would be at that particular moment and blow him to flaming atoms.

  Until he had time to accelerate to speeds approximating those of his attackers, their much greater velocity would allow them to get into firing position irrespective of any clever maneuvers on his part. Further, they would be able to catch him no matter which way he chose to run. The laws of physics were on the aliens’ side.

  Shooting was, of course, out of the question right now. Not only did it violate the Rules of Engagement that applied to Union warships that found themselves unexpectedly in unexplored space (yes, several other Union ships had somehow wound up in unexplored space before Max and had made it back home; this had happened to enough such people for someone in Norfolk to think the Navy needed a rule), it was almost self-evidently stupid. Right now, these guys weren’t actually shooting at Max, but if he fired they almost certainly would shoot back right away.

  Max shot a glance at the far left display on the Tactical console: labeled CATPAN (easily the most absurd name for any system on the ship) for Combat And Tactical Predictive ANalysis. Max usually ignored this display and would leave it turned off most of the time if h
e could figure out a way to do so without being detected by the Nightshade’s systems monitors. Disabling the system was a Captain’s Mast level infraction which, in Max’s case, would land him in front of Commodore Hornmeyer, who would probably take the occasion to reassign him to man one of the stations monitoring for violations of the Ning-Braha quarantine zone—the monitoring stations that had not detected a single violation in the nearly three hundred years of their existence.

  So, CATPAN stayed on. It was capable of producing a variety of displays and recommendations but, in its default mode, it projected a three dimensional plot of the maneuver or maneuvers it recommended as being the most likely to result in a good outcome from the present situation, as well as a probability estimate of that maneuver’s success. Because Max was fresh out of ideas for getting out of his current predicament, he held out a small hope that CATPAN might have a recommendation he could use.

  The 3d recommended maneuver projection was blank. The tactical recommendation text screen read: UNABLE TO GENERATE MANEUVER PROVIDING NON-NEGLIGIBLE PROBABILITY OF FAVORABLE TACTICAL OUTCOME. SURRENDER IS RECOMMENDED.

  How helpful.

  Even if Max did wind up surrendering, he didn’t think it was a good idea to do so when he was in just about the worst bargaining position he could imagine, right under the enemy’s guns. He had to come up with some way of restoring a fluid tactical situation, as opposed to his being a bug stuck in amber about to be gobbled up by a couple of birds.

  If Max were in a normal fighter, something like an FS-51 Piranha (now those were fun to fly!), he’d shoot off a couple of Vulture anti-ship missiles which, even if they missed, would force the attackers to take evasive action and give him a chance of escaping. But, the Nightshade was built for speed, stealth, the ability to gather intelligence, and occasionally to slip through enemy lines to destroy early warning stations and sensor platforms in advance of a Union attack. It was most decidedly not built to go toe to toe with enemy fighters. His ship’s only weapons were a rather anemic pulse cannon, some Spoonbill missiles (optimized for destroying stationary targets, therefore unable to follow moving ones) and his point defense systems. If he had some kind of anti-ship missiles, he might be able to do something. The Spoonbills were no good to him, even as a distraction, because even the most rudimentary sensor scan would show that they lacked thrust vectoring and were, therefore, no threat to anything that wasn’t standing still or moving in a predictable trajectory. Without something he could shoot at a maneuvering target, he was in a world of hurt.