Deadly Nightshade

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Max watched his tactical display as frightening monotony was about to become terrifying excitement. The show began when the Killdeer drone altered course so that the KBO was no longer between it and the enemy fighters. When it was well within the area being painted by the enemy sensors, it began live up to its namesake—a bird that lures predators away from its eggs or young by pretending that it has a broken wing. The drone lit up its sensor emulators and presented every appearance of being a Nightshade fleeing for its life.

  It took just over a minute for the lead fighter’s FTL sensor scans to reach the drone and be reflected back to the sender. It took another thirty-seven seconds for whoever or whatever was flying the fighters to make up their minds about what to do, at which point one of the fighters ran its drive up to flank and took off after the drone.

  Shit.

  Max had been hoping that both fighters would take the bait. Then, while they were off on a wild Killdeer chase, he would sneak out of the area of space disrupted by the aliens’ egg scrambler, engage his compression drive, and disappear into the vastness of interstellar space where finding him would be a thousand times harder than finding a needle tossed randomly into dune seas of the 7500 mile long and 5300 mile wide Oba-Bar Desert on Tau Ceti II C. Then, after the fighters had given up looking for him, he could slip back into the system to try to help the insectoid aliens.

  No such luck.

  Until the first fighter caught up with the drone and got a good enough scan to determine that it wasn’t Max’s ship, turn around, and rejoin its partner, he still had one fighter to deal with. After which, of course, there would be two to deal with once more.

  Then, quite suddenly, Max could see that dealing with the fighter that was still approaching him was going to be a problem. A big one. The first fighter firewalling its main sublight drive to catch up with the drone had given Max his first chance to observe this type of ship at maximum acceleration. It was a highly disquieting observation.

  It was faster than he was.

  Which meant that, since his scans showed all four ships to be virtually identical, they were all faster than he was. Not a lot faster: their maximum rate of acceleration was just 0.05 G higher than his. Just five hundredths of a gee. Unfortunately for Max, even that small difference on paper translated into an enormous advantage in a real engagement between real ships. A mere difference in speed results in a tactical advantage that remains constant: once both ships have reached their top speed, a ship that’s 5000 kilometers per second faster than its target gets 5000 kilometers closer to it every second. On the other hand, superior acceleration is the gift that keeps on giving. One second the enemy is 5000 kilometers closer, in the next it closes another 5500, in the next 6000, and so on. If the chase goes on long enough, the pursuing vessel can be travelling one and a half, two, or even three times faster than the ship it is overtaking. Simply put, there was no way that Max could get away by making a quick dash and outrunning the aliens.

  He would have to outsmart them.

  Not much chance of that.

  In hopes that some new ray of insight would manage to penetrate the murk that presently seemed to be occupying the space between his ears, Max reviewed his options. He couldn’t stay put because the second ship would soon arrive in the vicinity, do a deep scan on the KBO against which he was hiding, and reduce both him and the KBO to a ball of incandescent plasma. He couldn’t run for it, because the enemy ships’ superior acceleration would allow them to overtake him. And, he couldn’t sneak away stealthily because, as their ability to track him thus far showed, they would eventually detect him, after which all four ships would converge on him and snuff out his life like a wilderness camper blowing out a match. As far as Max could tell, those were the only options available to him. And, as far as Max could tell, none of them resulted in him still being alive at the end of the day.

  Option 1, staying put, would result in him dying in something like ten minutes. Option 2, running away at top speed, would result in him dying in—he did the rough time-speed-distance calculation in his head—something like an hour and a half. Option 3, sneaking away under stealth, would lead to his being caught in about three or four hours, depending on the breaks.

  Option 1: I die. Option 2: I die. Option 3: I die. What’s the difference? Dead in four hours is just as dead as dead in ten minutes.

  An unaccustomed emotion began to fill Max: despair. The fires of defiance that had blazed so brightly only a few hours before were burning out.

  This hopelessness was new to Max. When he was still hardly more than a squeaker, Max had been on board the cruiser USS San Jacinto when the Krag captured it. Although the enemy had killed most of the crew and captured the rest but for him and the ship’s cat, the crafty old General Sam Houston, Max had stayed alive in the ship’s vents and crawl spaces for twenty-six days, evading the relentless Krag while using his knowledge of the ship’s internal spaces and systems, not only to elude the enemy, but to mislead them, disrupt ship’s operations, and even damage her sensors and weapons. His ordeal was something of a legend in the fleet. During all that time, no matter how dire the situation had looked, Max had never given up hope. For reasons he never understood, at no time during those weeks did he doubt for so much as a moment that Union forces would recapture the cruiser and that he would survive. Not for a moment.

  Now, the certainty that he had felt during those terrifying days eluded him. Applying every kind of tactical analysis to the situation that his mind could recall, he could find no rational basis for entertaining even the most slender ray of hope that he would survive this engagement. At the age of only sixteen, he would die out here in the unexplored Centaurus-Crux arm. No human being would ever know what happened to him.

  Max’s heart was a cold lump in his chest. The best tactic that he could devise would keep him alive for only another four hours.

  Why bother? Rather than endure four hours of fear and anguish and struggle after everything I’ve already been through on this mission, I can just sit here and it will all be over in ten minutes. Ten mercifully short minutes.

  Max slumped with a shuddering sigh in the command chair and brought up the checklist for taking his main sublight drive and combat systems offline. He would shut everything down and wait for the end. It wasn’t the way it’s done in the tridvids, but here—far beyond the edge of human exploration—no one would know that the flame of Max’s life had gone out in so ignominious a fashion.

  Max’s mind had told his spirit that all hope was lost. His spirit had listened.

  Geez, I’m only 16. I’m just a kid. This hop was supposed to be a simple recon mission. I could have handled that, but being carried halfway across the galaxy and dumped right in harm’s way is just too much. There’s just no way out, no way to save the fucking day.

  Suddenly, unbidden, Max’s unusually retentive memory for the spoken word supplied an answering voice. Max could hear it clearly in his mind. What he heard wasn’t the calm, quiet, measured speech of Admiral Middleton that Max often recalled when he was searching for a way out of a jam, but the loud. profane, permanently pissed off voice of Commodore Louis G. “Big Horn” Hornmeyer that he often heard when he was about to fuck up. Max recalled vividly Hornmeyer’s famous comments to his tactical staff less than twenty-four hours after being promoted to Commodore, and minutes after winning the Battle of Klavan IX D. Hornmeyer’s battle staff, just as recently appointed as he, had been unable to recommend any course of action that they believed would result in the task force surviving the entire engagement.

  “As long as you think that every recommendation you make has to be a path to victory or a road to a successful withdrawal, you goddamn wannabe Litvinoffs are as useful to me as a fucking screen door on a goddamn airlock. You need to understand that sometimes things can be so totally fucked up that all you can hope for is to find a way stay in the fight just a little while longer. Entire goddamn wars have been won just because some grim, stubborn son of a bitch had enough gr
it in his gizzard and iron in his backbone to keep fighting for just a little while longer. And, goddamn it, if that’s all you’ve fucking got, then that’s what you fucking do. Maybe you can’t see a road out of the valley of the shadow of death, but so long as you’ve got life in your body and defiance in your heart, you have not been beaten.”

  Hornmeyer, you crusty old bastard, someday I’ll thank you for saving my ass.

  Max shoveled a few hundred pounds of coal onto the barely glowing fires of his defiance, sat up a bit straighter in the command chair, and made preparations to get underway. Hell, no, Max wasn’t going to lay down and let these aliens kill him. He wasn’t going to give up. Not today. Not ever. He would spit in the enemy’s eye. If the enemy was going to destroy him, they would have to do so without his help.

  Max disengaged the grappling field holding the Nightshade to the KBO and gently fired the maneuvering thrusters. One always had to be careful when creating any kind of heat around a KBO. Made mainly of frozen water, methane, ethane, and ammonia, it didn’t take a lot to make parts of the dang things flash vaporize and blow off big pieces that could seriously damage a warship and, not incidentally, give away that some damn fool had just fired his maneuvering thrusters too aggressively in proximity to a KBO. Once he had nudged his ship to a safe distance, Max steered a curved trajectory around the object to place it between himself and the nearest alien vessel. Just as had the Killdeer missile before it, Max turned the ship away from the KBO and accelerated away from the enemy, always using the KBO to block the enemy’s sensor sweeps.

  The sensor drone Max had launched earlier gave him a good perspective on what the enemy ship was doing as he continued to accelerate away at the highest drive setting he dared. Even with a giant snowball in the way, a main sublight drive at a high setting would show up on any reasonably capable sensor array, so Max had to limit his drive emissions. The sublight was set at sixty-six percent output.

  For the next several minutes Max watched the feed from the sensor drone showing the enemy fighter’s approach to the KBO. Also, if only out of habit, he made certain that the Nightshade’s sophisticated monitoring systems were recording the enemy sensor emissions in detail. The original purpose of his mission was to gather that kind of information about the Krag, so he might as well gather it about these guys.

  Soon the enemy fighter was within seven-hundred meters of the KBO and was scanning it at an intensity that was at least forty-percent higher than a Union fighter would be using under similar circumstances and almost three times what Max would use when employing the Nightshade’ exquisitely sensitive systems designed for covert intelligence gathering. Max turned to another console and pulled up the recordings of the other fighter’s sensor emissions as it sped out of the Kuiper belt on its wild goose chase in pursuit of the Killdeer. Its scans were also significantly more powerful than those of a Union fighter. Yet, Max observed that, when it made a minor course change to avoid getting too close to a small KBO, the course change profile looked just like that of a Union fighter. More powerful emissions plus equivalent range equals less sensitive detectors. That might prove to be a useful bit of information.

  The second fighter continued to pour sensor sweeps into the KBO, looking in vain for Max. After nearly half an hour of sweeping it from every direction at a broad range of frequencies, all at very close range, it broke off the search and began sweeping around the object. Max immediately cut the main sublight drive back to thirty-three percent to avoid detection as the enemy turned its active and passive sensors along the plausible escape routes from the KBO.

  Max monitored those activities for twelve minutes or so when he lost telemetry from the Killdeer. Because he was getting the data from the little drone via metaspace tunneling, the event that cut off the transmission had happened only a few seconds before he became aware of it, as opposed to the several minutes that would have been required for the information to reach him at the speed of light. He replayed the last few minutes of passive sensor telemetry from the Killdeer to see if he could glean any insights as to what happened. The replay showed that it wasn’t anything complicated. The first fighter had caught up with the Killdeer, performed an old-fashioned visual light scan, saw that it was a decoy drone rather than the Nightshade, and pounded it to dust.

  Now, presumably, the fighter was on its way back to help its cohort search for Max in order to do the same to him.

  This is bad.

  At that moment, Max’s threat detectors lit up. He pulled up the record of the emissions that had hit the Nightshade. The other fighter had just hit him with an active scan at high enough intensity that it probably had detected him, stealth systems or no stealth systems. Max’s suspicions were confirmed when the ship ran up its main sublight drive and began accelerating toward Max.

  This is even worse.

  Max responded by running his own drive up to EMERGENCY and steering toward the edge of the area of space disrupted by the enemy’s egg scramblers (the ships back in the original search area had popped two new ones to maintain the local metaspacial boundary disturbance). He thought he might be able to beat the enemy there, and then get away on his compression drive. He ran the current geometry and projected acceleration rates of the two ships through the computer to see if the immutable laws of time, distance, and speed yielded a result that spelled life for him. Or death. It took the computer less than a second to derive the answer once he gave it the proper instructions.

  Death.

  He scowled at the appropriate console. “You’re no fucking help.”

  Max desperately searched his mind for something—anything—that might help him. What conceivable advantage did he have over the aliens and how could he exploit it? The only thing he could think of was the sensor sensitivity differential that he had just discovered, a discovery that he could not think of any way to use in combat.

  Another threat detector went off, this time at much lower levels. And another. And another. And another. He checked the bearings from which the threats originated. There was no doubt what happened. The nearest fighter had informed the rest of the group of his location. They were all now headed in his direction with their active sensors pointed forward to warn them of any obstacles or threats.

  Once again, all four enemy ships were on his trail. His perception shifted: these were no longer enemy ships maneuvering through space to surround and kill him; they were hunters and he was their prey.

  Max shuddered and broke out in a cold sweat. He could feel the perspiration popping out on his forehead, along his back, and on the backs of his legs. Suddenly, Max was eight years in the past: September 2296. His mind was filled with the impossible to ignore image of himself slowly yet frantically squeezing himself through an unused optical cable conduit on the USS San Jacinto, trying to get out of an area in which the Krag, who had taken the ship, thought they had him trapped. The diameter of the conduit was barely enough to allow him to pass. In another month or two, he would have grown too much to fit. As it was, the metal loops that anchored the cables to the walls of the conduit had already scraped off large portions of his uniform and were now doing the same thing to his skin. He knew he was providing a trail of blood for the Krag to follow, but it couldn’t be helped. It was better to leave a few drops of blood for the Krag to find later than to give them several liters of the stuff much sooner.

  He had been eluding them for nearly two weeks at that point and he was desperately tired and hungry. He had been stealing food at every opportunity, but because he was constantly on the run, he had no chance to develop a stockpile. He remembered from his own explorations of the ship before it was taken that there was a conduit junction up ahead where he would have a little more room. He should be outside of the Krag search area by then and he could stop to take a short rest. Until then, he had to keep scrambling, keep crawling, and keep making the forward progress that continued to scrape the skin off his shoulders and his back and his belly and his legs as he continued to crawl for his life. I
f the Krag caught him, he knew they would cut pieces of his flesh from his body and eat them before his living eyes. It wasn’t propaganda. He had watched through an air vent as they had done it to his shipmates, some of whom were only seven years old. He could still hear their high-pitched screams.

  “NO!” Max shouted at the top of his lungs from the Nightshade’s command chair. “Go the fuck away and leave me alone you Krag bastards! Get out of my head and go where I will never see you again!” He went on more quietly, his breath coming in spasms, his eyes squeezed shut. “It’s been almost eight years. Why won’t you bastards just leave me the hell alone?”

  Max opened his eyes, focusing them on the most innocuous display he could think of: power and environmental systems. All the schematics, lights, and indicators were lit in a pleasing, relaxing shade of green showing that everything was nominal. He willed himself to calm down and fought to control his breathing. He had done this hundreds of times before, using a technique he learned from a bookfile on a discipline known as Yoga.

  Breathing. That’s the key to everything. Your emotions are centered at the center of your body and that is where you center your breath to center yourself. Breathe from your center. Breathe as though you are calm and you will become calm.

  Max focused on his diaphragm, breathing from the center of his body as though he were calm and at peace instead of from his chest like a rabbit cornered by a couple of wolves. After a few moments, it started to work. He continued until he felt the tightness and the urge to pant leave his chest. Max took a short self-inventory. His galloping heart had slowed down to a fast trot. The rivers of sweat pouring down his back had shrunk to mere creeks. Feelings that were beyond unmanageable panic had abated to a feelings that were not quite stark terror.