Deadly Nightshade

by H. Paul Honsinger

  I can live with that.

  “All right, Max,” he said. “Now that you’ve got yourself where you can function, how about doing something to keep these bastards from shooting you like a fish in a barrel.”

  Barrel?

  Max smiled slightly at a memory and then more broadly as he saw a way to turn that memory into a tactic that might prolong his life. He turned the Nightshade toward the most densely packed part of the Kuiper belt, tuned the sensors to be more sensitive to the ices from which the KBOs were made, and cranked up the gain on the active sweeps from those sensors to that he would have the earliest and most complete data on the objects in his path.

  Time to do a little barrel racing.

  Max’s father had twin sisters, Marylise and Sylvie, both of whom—unlike his own sisters, mother, and grandmothers--survived the Gynophage because they were both stationed on isolated communications outposts on the Sarthan frontier when the attack struck. Marylise and Sylvie were very competitive with one another and, when Max was a young boy on Nouvelle Acadiana, each of them had owned Appaloosas. When they were growing up, and whenever they were home on leave, they often raced against one another across the pasture, over various courses, and around obstacles. On a straight course, Marylise’s horse, Souris, usually won. But, if the race required negotiating a large number of obstacles, particularly if they were close together, Sylvie’s horse, Renard, was typically the winner. And, if the two horses barrel raced, Renard won every time. Max especially remembered how Sylvie and Renard looked negotiating the barrels when they were set up in a straight line, going around the first barrel on the right, the second on the left, and so on, leaning one way and then the other with Sylvie’s knees almost touching the barrels as she went past, exaltation on her face and her hair flying behind her in the wind

  Max was hoped that the Nightshade was more like Renard than Souris—that superior sensor capabilities might give him an advantage in an area of space filled with obstacles.

  Within seconds of Max’s course change, all four ships had altered their own courses to intercept him. From the looks of things, it was going to get hairy. If it came down to having four ships all in proximity and all trying to get a kill shot, Max didn’t want to confuse one ship with the other when he was computing intercept times and making other determinations.

  I suppose I should go by the book every now and then.

  Max pulled up the correct command sequence and did what he should have done a long time ago—assign contact designations to the four ships. The fighter that had been scanning the KBO, and that was closest to him, was Hotel 1. “Hotel” being the Union Voicecom Alphabet phonetic equivalent of “H.” The “H” stood for “hostile” as in “hostile vessel.” The fighter that had been following the Killdeer decoy was Hotel 2 while the two ships that had stayed behind to scan the area where the aliens first lost contact with him were Hotels 3 and 4. Now, the tactical display’s icons, instead of being tagged simply UNK for “unknown”, were tagged H 1—UNK, H 2—UNK, and so on. The Nightshade had, from the beginning, been labeled RV—NTSD, the RV or Romeo Victor standing for “Reference Vessel” and NTSD being the naval tactical display abbreviation for “Nightshade.”

  Max looked at the intercept solutions. It was definitely going to be an interesting day. Hotel 1 was the closest to him and was positioned best for an intercept. Given Hotel 1’s acceleration advantage and relatively close position when the aliens discovered Max’s position, he would be dealing with him fairly soon—he would be coming up on the Nightshade’s six in about twenty-four minutes. By that time, Max would be in the thick of this system’s Kuiper belt.

  Hotel 2 would be making a bow intercept, coming up on Max’s eleven o’clock position about seventy-three minutes after Hotel 1 got within weapons range. Like Hotel 1, Hotels 3 and 4 would approach Max from his six o’clock position, but would arrive much later than the other fighters—about two hours after Hotel 2. While the book said that Max had some slim chance of evading a single ship. With two ships after him the odds became considerably less favorable. By the time there were four ships, his goose would be cooked.

  Unless I throw away the book and manage to get rid of Hotel 1 before his friends arrive.

  “Great idea, Max. Of course, you have no more idea than a fucking gerbil how you’re going to do that.”

  Max’s stomach growled. His need to eat frequently hadn’t been much of a nuisance on board destroyers and cruisers because he stood four hour watches. So long as he ate right before going on watch, he did fine until he was relieved. And it hadn’t been much of an issue for the first several weeks of the present mission because nothing had demanded his attention for more than a few minutes at a time. But now that he was in combat conditions for hours at a time, it was getting to be a pain in the ass.

  After making a quick check of his displays, Max secured all of the active consoles in the Control Cabin, unstrapped from the command chair, and launched himself down the tunnel to the Accommodation Cabin. He grabbed one of the sandwiches he always kept ready in the chiller (leaving five behind—you never know when you’ll need five sandwiches, right?), snagged a soft drink from the shelf above the sandwiches, got a candy bar from the dispenser, stuffed the provisions into a few of his numerous and capacious pockets, and propelled himself back up the tunnel to the Control Cabin. As he was strapping himself back into the command chair, he checked the time. He had been out of the chair for less than two minutes.

  Strapped in, Max peeled the plastic back from a corner of his sandwich and took a bite. He remembered that the package from which he had gotten the meat for this particular sandwich had been labeled as “Beef, roast, sliced (thin), for sandwiches (500 grams net mass)—see nutritional information and serving recommendations on reverse of this package.”

  If that’s beef then I’m Admiral Litvinoff.

  After a few more bites, Max rebuked himself for being unfair to the naval logistics services. Although the meat on the sandwich had almost certainly never been part of any actual animal with actual hoofs grazing on some actual green pasture on an actual planet somewhere, it probably was beef in the strictest, technical sense of the word. Max suspected that the core of his sandwich was comprised of cow muscle tissue cultured from cells containing cow DNA lovingly resequenced to grow the greatest amount of the most palatable meat in the shortest possible time from the smallest possible quantity of nutrient input. He was in no position to critique the flavor, anyway, as it had been so long since he had eaten “real” beef that there was no way he could compare the meat he was eating now with the meat that came from a cud-chewing quadruped.

  Max managed to convert the sandwich, candy bar, and drink from their original forms to a sensation of fullness in his stomach and a few satisfied belches in only slightly more time than it had taken him to contemplate the provenance of the meat on the sandwich. He tossed the wrappers and drinking bulb into the recycling chute, enjoying as always the whoosh of suction as he opened the chute cover, and vacuumed the bread crumbs out of the air.

  Max turned his attention back to his displays and found no surprises. His most immediate problem was Hotel 1, which was closing from his six and gaining on him more rapidly each second as it accelerated more rapidly than the Nightshade. It would be within what Max conjectured to be its weapons range before Max’s most recent meal was more than slightly digested. The ship’s pilot was probably getting an itchy trigger finger, eager to blow Max to flaming atoms.

  “Maybe the bastard is going to be able to carve a notch on his gun at the end of the day.” Thinking about his Aunt Sylvie and Renard, the Appaloosa, Max patted the Maneuvering console the way his aunts had patted their horses. “But, old girl, I’m all for making the son of a bitch work for it. How about you?” Of course, Max received no answer from the Nightshade, but he had always felt that, on some deep level not reached by engineering and physics, machines were imbued with the spirit and will of the people who designed and built them. And, if the Nigh
tshade had a spirit and a will, Max knew that it was the spirit of defiance and the will to live. If the Nightshade could have answered his question, Max knew that it would have said, “No one is going to take us without a fight.”

  “Atta girl,” Max said. “Now, let’s head for the barrels.”

  Max picked a KBO at the edge of his sensor range that lay within a few degrees of his current course and turned to head straight for it. Unless he made another course change, the Nightshade would slam into the 137.93 kilometer diameter (at its widest point) irregularly shaped lump of gritty ice at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, which would make quite a show for Species 2297’s astronomers. Max also modified his forward deflector profile, more than tripling the diameter of the path disrupted by the Nightshade’s passage through the tenuous blend of gases and particles that streamed and swirled through the far reaches of Species 2297’s star system.

  As expected, Hotel 1 altered course to follow and his comrades made the slight course changes necessary to stay on intercept headings. On a secondary display, Max called up detailed course, speed, sensor output, and other related information on Hotel 1.

  He’s still right on my tail. Pretty soon, I’ll be right in the center of his target solution.

  Max smirked briefly at his own use of “his” to describe the alien. Max had no idea whether his four pursuers were male, female, some male and some female, non-gender, hermaphroditic, tri-gender, or any of the other arrangements found on the twenty-seven planets on which human scientists believed life independently evolved. For the sake of convenience, Max would stick with “his.”

  “I promise to work on being less sexist when I get back to Union space,” he said, forgetting about the cabin voice recorder until it was too late.

  I suppose I’ll have to explain that remark to someone.

  “If I’m lucky.”

  Max pulled up a detailed navigational plot of his ship’s projected trajectory relative to the KBO and made a miniscule adjustment. His new course, plotted down to the ten-thousandth of a degree and now subject to continual checking by the navigational computer against the latest sensor data, would bring him within only fifty meters or so of the surface of the KBO toward which he was headed. At his current velocity, now nearly half of the speed of light, even the tiniest error that caused even the most infinitesimal contact between his ship and any part of the KBO would reduce both the Nightshade and the mountain of ice to a brief but brilliant flare of searingly hot ionized gas. Accordingly, it was for good reason that skimming that close to a body in space at Max’s current speed violated more Union naval safety regulations than he cared to count. At the moment, however, disciplinary proceedings were the least of Max’s worries. In fact, Max would have given his left arm, his eyeteeth, and his right testicle to be in front of a Union naval court martial at that very moment rather than fighting for his life against a quantitatively and qualitatively superior force.

  But, since court martial was not an option at this point, Max watched carefully as he grew closer and closer to the KBO with Hotel 1 closing from behind. Every scan showed that his course was correct—he would pass insanely close to the object. Max kept one eye on the relative positions of the Nightshade, the KBO, and Hotel 1 while he gave the rest of his attention to programming a series of commands into the ship’s computer.

  Max’s ship rapidly came up on the KBO with Hotel 1 about 450,000 kilometers behind and now gaining fast. One moment Max saw the dark, cratered surface of the KBO growing larger at a terrifying rate in the light-amplified optical scanner feed display and, an instant later, he was past it. Max noted with satisfaction that his earlier deflector modifications plus his drive plasma and the body of his ship itself had prevented Hotel 1 from detecting the KBO until Max was past it. Even though Max had cleared the surface of the object, as soon as Hotel one picked up the KBO it had radically altered course to miss it by over a thousand meters, diverting it from an intercept course and imposing a significant penalty in terms of velocity.

  Clearing the KBO triggered the commands that Max had just programmed. First, the ship engaged all stealth modes and reduced its drive output to a level that could be concealed by the ship’s stealth systems. Second, Max’s instructions put the ship through a radical course change in both yaw and pitch, throwing off Hotel 1’s targeting solution and any computation it might be making about the Nightshade’s position in space. As soon as the ship was on its new course, the drive shut down entirely, allowing the ship to coast, it’s residual speed still more than four tenths of the speed of light but producing no drive signature whatsoever. And, third, the ship launched a sensor drone so that he could monitor Hotel 1’s actions even if the KBO were between the two ships blocking Max’s sensors.

  When the telemetry from the sensor drone began to come in, Max was pleased to see that things were progressing as he had hoped. He had gambled that Hotel 1 would change course to avoid the KBO and, in fact, that it would do so by moving its bow away from the object along a line perpendicular to the surface of the object at the point of Max’s closest approach—which was the most efficient way to gain the greatest distance from the KBO in the shortest possible time with the least expenditure of fuel.

  The enemy did exactly that.

  Based on that prediction, the Nightshade was already on a course that would keep the KBO between it and Hotel 1’s new course for the longest possible time, so that both the sensor shadow cast by the KBO and Max’s own stealth systems would help hide him and delay his inevitable detection. When Hotel 1 cleared the KBO, it continued for nearly a minute along its previous course, scanning ahead with its sensors at full power, apparently with the full expectation that Max had continued on more or less the same course and was still trying to outrun his enemy. Every second he continued on that course, Max gained distance, making up for Hotel 1’s earlier speed and acceleration advantage.

  Before a minute was up, however, Hotel 1 reduced speed—likely to improve sensor efficiency—and began to scan the vicinity with active sensors while Max continued to coast on undetected. After nearly ten minutes, Hotel 1 began to execute a spiral search pattern, moving away from his starting point beyond the KBO in ever-widening circles.

  This time gave Max the opportunity to think what he would do next. He could keep using his barrel racing tricks against a single vessel, but once Hotel 2 arrived, the second ship would simply get ahead of him. The two ships would then coordinate keeping him under the eye of their sensors and he wouldn’t be able to spring any surprise maneuvers on anyone. He had to do something about Hotel 1 before Hotel 2 arrived, and the only way to do that would be to use some resource or weapon or maneuver that the enemy doesn’t expect.

  Max suddenly remembered a question he had just missed on a Military History test covering the Battle of Belogorsk—Russian General something or other had said something about using terrain to even the odds. Max resolved to look up his name and just what he said later. But, for now, it occurred to Max that he had remembered the Russian general’s point for a reason. He tried to think of some way to put the idea to use. But, the only terrain Max could think of in the vicinity was the collection of KBOs that filled this region of space.

  “How the hell do I use one of those?” Max asked the deck beneath his feet. “If I could get Hotel 1 to smash into one, that would be great.” But, Max had no ideas about how he could make that happen.

  But, what if the KBO smashes into Hotel 1?

  Max broke into a wide grin as he did the requisite calculations to see if his crazy idea would work. It took only a few minutes to determine that there was a 58.6 percent chance that it would.

  Not the best odds I’ve ever seen, but I’ll take them.

  Max started the preliminary work on setting things up. He might not get out of this alive, but there was a better than even chance that he would take Hotel 1 with him.

  On its fifth circle in its spiral pattern, nearly an hour later, Hotel 1 had increased its angular distance
from its starting point enough that the KBO was no longer between it and Max. Max’s threat detectors picked up the sensor beam and, less than a minute later, Hotel 1 accelerated for all he was worth on course to intercept the Nightshade. Max immediately disengaged his stealth systems (which didn’t seem to help a bit—Max wondered how the enemy managed to detect him so easily) and ran his main sublight drive up to emergency. He selected another KBO of suitable size and set course for another skimming maneuver. He was gratified to see that Hotel 1 was mimicking his course exactly, even though Max configured his deflectors as he had before. The pilot of Hotel 1 was going to try to stay on Max’s tail by coming as close to the surface of the KBO as Max did.

  Max had fooled the alien into breaking off changing his course from an ideal intercept once. Hotel 1’s pilot had apparently resolved that Max was not going to fool him in the same way again.

  No. I’m going to fool you in a different way.

  The last encounter with a KBO had allowed Max to open up the range between the Nightshade and Hotel 1 to just under a million kilometers, meaning that Max would pass the KBO twelve point four seconds before Hotel 1—more than enough time for Max to implement his truly nasty scheme. He spun up the systems that he needed and gritted his teeth as the Nightshade rapidly approached the next KBO.

  Just as before, Max’s ship flashed past the KBO low enough for the exhaust from its main sublight engines to fry the chickens in the barnyard, if the KBO’s surface had been home to such prosaic things as chickens and barnyards. But, unlike before, Max did not change course so as to place the Nightshade in the sensor shadow of the KBO as viewed from where he predicted Hotel 1 would be in a few seconds. Rather, he maneuvered the ship into the sensor shadow as viewed from Hotel 1’s course as of that moment.

  As soon as Hotel 1’s scans were blocked by the immense mountain of frozen volatiles, Max brought the Nightshade around 180 degrees to unmask his missile tubes and fired a Spoonbill. Max new that there was almost no conceivable attack profile that would allow the large, lumbering, unmaneuverable Spoonbill to hit any target capable of detecting it and executing any kind of evasive action. All of which is precisely why Max didn’t aim the Spoonbill at the enemy ship. Instead, Max aimed it at a target that would not evade the missile and that was so big that there was no chance of the weapon missing.