Deadly Nightshade

by H. Paul Honsinger

  But, I do have something I can shoot at a moving target.

  The Nightshade’s point defense weaponry included a very generous load out of Piculet anti-missile missiles—short to intermediate range, highly maneuverable weapons designed to intercept and destroy enemy missiles. Of course, Max’s scans showed that the full force of the Piculets’ miniscule 0.5 kiloton plutonium warheads wouldn’t even come close to penetrating the fighters’ deflectors.

  But, they don’t know that.

  To the best of Max’s knowledge, these aliens had never encountered any Union vessel of any kind. They didn’t even know that human males had two eyes and one dong, much less have any idea about his Piculet missile warheads’ explosive yield. The fighters would have no choice but to assume that the missiles were powerful enough to pose a danger.

  Max entered the targeting instructions, waited a few more seconds until the enemy ships entered the Piculets’ range, and hit the firing key.

  Eight missiles emerged from the Nightshade, four each from each of the two point defense batteries located amidships port and starboard. As soon as the missiles were clear, Max executed a classic evasive maneuver, a twisting hairpin away from the enemy ships, his main sublight drive at full power. Max, however, had switched the coolant flow management for the fusion reactor powering the drive from AUTO, where the computer set a flow rate appropriate for the reactor load, to MAN, where the pilot controlled the flow rate from the Drives console. Having made this switch, Max reduced the flow rate, causing the reactor to radiate a level of heat more commensurate with a drive being run, not at FULL, and not even at the faster FLANK, but at EMERGENCY. Max was not particularly fond of pushing the reactor this close to overheating.

  But, he was even less fond of being killed.

  With eight missiles fired at four ships, the normal targeting would be for two missiles to be assigned to each ship. In this case, however, there was one Piculet headed directly for each of the enemy ships with the other four following serpentine courses leading in the general direction of Max’s former heading.

  As expected, the enemy fighters veered off to evade the instant they detected the incoming missiles. But, designed to intercept incredibly fleet, highly deceptive Krag anti-ship missiles, the Piculets were far too nimble to be given the slip by the much more massive and, therefore, less maneuverable, fighters. The four craft looped, switched back, and tried their own alien-variant but still recognizable versions of the Mad Murchison, Lamonica Loop, Bockrath Ballet, Spaht Spiral, Hawkland Hairpin, Maraist Meander, and several other standard missile escape and evasion maneuvers, to no avail. All four Piculets effortlessly stayed on the fighters’ tail and closed for intercept, easily slipped through point defense systems designed to strike down larger missiles with more powerful warheads, and managed by dint of their speed and miniature anti-graviton generators to make it about a quarter of the way through the enemy deflectors before their warheads exploded. Even with the deflectors partly breached, however, the enemy fighters had plenty of deflector power to absorb the Piculets’ almost trivial explosive yield and suffered no damage.

  But, as Max expected, the energy released by the warheads propagated through the protective shells of the fighters’ deflectors, which—after all—are nothing more than continuously regenerated layers of highly energetic polarized gravitons, lighting them up along the entire electromagnetic spectrum and temporarily making them virtually opaque to sensors. For a few moments, at least, the fighters were almost completely blind.

  As soon as the warheads blew, Max reversed course, returned the reactor coolant control to AUTO, and ran the drive up to EMERGENCY. Like a warhorse dashing toward the sound of the guns, the Nightshade accelerated at an astonishing rate, unseen by the fighters.

  Just as Max turned, so did the remaining four of his missiles. They all bent their courses toward points in space between each of the enemy ships and the general area of Max’s position. Just as the energy from the first group of missiles dissipated almost enough to allow the fighters’ sensors to function, the second group of missiles exploded in unison, each nuclear fireball growing into a several kilometer wide sensor-opaque sphere of swirling, incandescent plasma, once again blocking any enemy sensors directed toward the Nightshade’s position.

  The fighters shaped their courses to skirt the edges of the fireballs and put themselves in positions from which they could acquire the Nightshade with their sensors. Max knew he had only a few seconds until his enemies had an unobstructed view of his location. He dropped a stealthed sensor buoy, altered course radically “up” and to starboard toward a typical Oort cloud-Kuiper belt object, and re-engaged all of his stealth modes (naturally inoperative during a high-speed run) course.

  Clear of the fireballs from the second set of missile detonations, the alien ships began to search for Max using a search pattern not very different from one that four Union fighters would execute under similar circumstances. As would any sensible beings in their position, the aliens estimated Max’s top speed based on their sensor readings, calculated how far he could have gotten during the relevant period of time, and searched the resulting sphere.

  Max watched as the search pattern developed and, as the parameters of the search area became apparent to him. He allowed himself a slight smile.

  Sonofabitch! It worked!

  Max’s little coolant flow rate ruse had fooled the aliens. When Max had run his main sublight drive up to FULL while manually reducing the coolant flow, the reactor’s heat output mimicked that of a unit being run at the very limits of its capabilities. As a result, what the aliens thought was Max’s maximum rate of acceleration was far below his actual maximum, allowing Max to put himself outside the aliens’ search area by exceeding their estimates of his ship’s performance. He had finally gotten a break.

  But not much of one.

  Max was still in deep shit. Very deep shit. The aliens had already proved that they could track him when he was fully stealthed, so he couldn’t run away from them. Further, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that he wasn’t in the search area, at which point the searchers would broaden their search in a series of progressively larger, concentric shells until they found him. All Max could think of to do at this point was to latch onto one of the orbiting icebergs out here in Oort-Kuiperland and use it to conceal his heat signature. Plastered to the surface of a Kuiper Belt Object, Max would be invisible to the aliens until they hit the KBO with a high intensity scan at fairly close range, as they would eventually. It just might take them a day or so to get around to searching around his location.

  So, as the aliens were busily flying patterns and scanning their too-small initial search area, Max found a suitable chunk of frozen water, methane, ammonia, grit, and trace volatiles—about two kilometers across at its widest point--snugged up to it, and watched the aliens at work courtesy of his sensor drone. After watching them ply their trade for just shy of two hours, Max calculated that it would take them about ten hours to search the area.

  He secured the Control Cabin, went aft, thawed and ate some roast chicken, steamed carrots, and mashed potatoes, and zipped himself into his bed with a wake up alarm in seven hours. He also made sure that he instructed the computer to awaken him if the aliens significantly deviated from his search projections. So that he could get out of the bed and be ready for anything more easily than usual, he left his head outside the sleeping bag, kept his boots on, and wrapped his right hand around the D ring on the bag’s long zipper.

  As hyped up as I am now, I bet I’ll never be able to go to sleep in this position.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think of something pleasant and relaxing. It was harder than it sounds, particularly given that it was very possible that he would never zip himself into a zero G bed, or use any other kind of bed for that matter, again.

  After several minutes of sorting through his memories, Max remembered one night when he was eight and nursing a black eye from a fight that had started when a cert
ain Claude Arceneaux had said that Max’s father was a coward because he wasn’t in the Navy. Although he had won the fight by sheer dint of white hot fury, Max had suffered a few licks and was having a hard time sleeping. Max’s mother sat beside his bed, held his hand, and sang him to sleep. She had sung in Cajun French and Max couldn’t remember the verses—something about a white chicken laying a little egg on a branch and a gray chicken laying a little egg in a church, all so the little baby could sleep. But he could still hear his mother’s soft but clear voice singing the sweet refrain:

  Fais dodo fais dodo

  Dans les bras de ton Papa.

  Fais dodo fais dodo

  Dans les bras de ta Maman

  “Go to sleep, go to sleep, in the arms of your Papa. Go to sleep, go to sleep, in the arms of your Mama.” Although she had died in the most horrifying manner during the Gynophage attack only six days later, that memory felt very distant while this one felt very close, almost as though she was with him at that moment, comforting him in this time of extreme danger.

  “Fais dodo, fais dodo . . .”

  An earwax melting honking rescued Max from a dream in which he was being sliced, diced, filleted, and spiral cut by Commodore Hornmeyer for failing to trim his eyelashes to the regulation length (Max didn’t think that there was actually a regulation on eyelash length, but he vowed to check the first time he got a chance). He shot a quick glance at the bulkhead chrono. He had been asleep for slightly less than five hours. It would have to do.

  He pulled on the D ring on which his right hand still rested, pushed himself out of the bed toward the access tunnel, got a good hold on the grab bar, and shot himself through the tunnel into the Control Cabin. In less than five seconds, he had strapped in, killed the alarm, pulled up the main tactical display and was squinting at the tiny icons hovering in the air over the system’s three dimensional projector: one minute blue shape vaguely resembling the Nightshade’s silhouette, four red triangles for the ships hunting it, and dozens of irregular grey blobs representing the various icy bodies orbiting this star in what was nearly interstellar space, where its light reached only dimly and its warmth reached not at all. Max keyed for the display to rotate slowly so that he could see the situation from all angles and to help him create a three dimensional picture in his mind to match the one projected in the air in front of him. He needed to figure out why the computer woke him up and he needed to do it fast.

  The way my luck is going these days, it has to be something bad.

  The thousands of hours Max had spent during his childhood running tactical simulations when most of the other midshipmen had been watching TridVids or reading e-comics paid off. He discerned almost instantly what was happening. Once again, Max discovered that he was seriously wrong.

  This isn’t bad. It’s catastrophic.

  A ball of ice formed in Max’s gut—somewhere between his sternum and his navel and about five inches below the skin. Two of the four ships were still doggedly executing the original search pattern. That was expected. The catastrophe was that the other two were headed in Max’s direction. Not in his approximate direction. Not toward his general vicinity. They were on exact headings down to one ten-thousandth of a degree toward the Kuiper belt object where Max was hiding. Max would have had to have been wildly delusional to believe even for a moment that their course was a coincidence.

  They were in an offset line ahead formation: one ship in front probing far in front beyond the KBO with long-range, narrow beam active sensor sweeps, and the other behind and slightly to one side using intermediate and short range lateral sweeps to probe around itself in all directions except directly ahead.

  Similarly, Max would have had to have been wildly delusional to believe that, once they arrived, the ships wouldn’t find him. The aliens’ close range scan of the black snowball to which he had attached his ship would reveal a large lump of frozen ammonia, methane, ethane, and water shot through with carbonaceous dust, grit, rocks, and boulders, along with one other object: a largely-hollow lump consisting of hundreds of tons of metal, electronics, fuel, and consumables in the shape of a Union warship. It would all be over.

  Not only would it all be over, it would all be over very soon. Although the enemy ships were approaching slowly, probably to enhance sensor performance, the computer’s best estimate was that they would be within high resolution sensor range in 54 minutes and weapons range in 66 minutes.

  Max could hear Admiral—then Captain—Middleton’s famous “Fundamentals of Battle Tactics” lecture, one of the most downloaded and viewed video files in the history of the Union Space Navy (after, of course, Three Cheers for the MacArthur Triplets ): “There is no more important knowledge in warfare than knowledge of the enemy’s intentions and expectations. You can derive this knowledge in almost every case from how he deploys his forces and must make doing so your highest priority before the shooting begins.”

  Easier said than done.

  The thudding in Max’s chest and the pain just above and behind his temples that throbbed in time with his galloping heart made following Admiral Middleton’s advice extremely difficult. There were anti-anxiety medications available to him in the ship’s medical stores. Under the current circumstances, not only was he allowed to take them, there were some “combat experts” whose opinions he studied who would encourage him to take them. Max never touched them. He would not touch them now. The common wisdom among young officers was that the anti-anxiety meds issued to ships without medical personnel (a) weren’t the “good stuff,” and (b) made you stupid.

  I’m already stupid enough.

  He closed his eyes and took three breaths from the diaphragm while thinking the word “calm” and visualizing (and hearing) the semi-tame ducks swimming contentedly in the pond behind his childhood home on Nouvelle Acadiana. His emotions somewhat more settled and his fight or flight response somewhat more muted, he opened his eyes to take a fresh look at the tactical display. There had to be something here that clued him into the enemy’s intentions and expectations.

  What’s the enemy intending? Well, moron, they intend to check whether you’ve hitched a ride on this KBO. What are they expecting? They’re expecting, if they find you, to blow you to flaming atoms.

  Deriving those particular “insights” was neither particularly difficult nor even slightly useful.

  Look deeper. . . . Correction, more deeply. Whatever.

  Silencing his inner grammar Nazi, Max tried to look more deeply, and still found nothing. Shaking his head in frustration, he thought he might shake some sort of fresh idea loose by reciting out loud the basics of what he saw in the tactical display: “Okay, gang, the enemy force consists of four fighter type vessels deployed in two elements of two ships each. The first element . . . .”

  His voice trailed off. He saw something. One thing. But, just as finding and picking loose the string end in a ball of string is the key to unravelling the entire ball, a single observation opened up Max’s understanding of what his unnamed enemy had in mind.

  Two elements.

  Max worked through the analysis just as a Tactical Officer would on a frigate or destroyer. What did he know--really know? First: The enemy had deployed his four ships into two elements—one continuing the original search and the other headed straight for him. Second: both ships in the second element were engaged in heavy active sensor searches, one ship performing deep scans directly ahead and the other conducting shallower, omnidirectional scans.

  Okay, then, what conclusions would a smart tactical officer draw from these facts?

  “Smart tactical officer.” It would sure be great to have one of those on board!

  He thought for a moment and came up with nothing. He considered again. Still nothing.

  Well, talking out loud helped a minute ago. It can’t hurt to try it again. It’s not as though there is anyone around to think that I’ve gone space happy.

  “Okay, Max, they’ve split their force. What does that tell you? Hey! If t
hey KNEW I was hiding here on this KBO, they would have sent all four ships and they would have sent them at flank speed, instead of sending two, slowly searching along the way.

  “What else . . . The first ship is doing deep scans, so these guys think that maybe I ran for it and that I’m pretty far away by now. And, the second ship is scanning in all directions along the way, so they think maybe I’ve gone stealthy and I’m hiding out among these smaller KBOs.

  I know what they are expecting. Now, maybe if I give them something that looks like what they already think they are going to see, they’ll take the bait.

  It was a slender hope, but it would have to do.

  Max prepared, programmed, and launched one of his four precious Killdeer Mark XVII drones. The missile-like vehicle crept at its most stealthy setting around the KBO until the icy object was between it and the enemy ships. Then, the Killdeer ran its compact but powerful drive up to maximum and accelerated rapidly toward the system’s inner planets, all the while using the KBO to shield it from detection by the oncoming fighters.

  Meanwhile, the enemy came on inexorably. With every neuron screaming at him to do something, the only thing Max could do was watch them. For twenty-nine minutes. It was the longest twenty-nine minutes in Max’s life. Max was glad that there was no one else in the Nightshade, because he could feel himself sweating and was certain that the stress-induced perspiration didn’t exactly smell like rose water and lilacs.