The Hunters of Vermin Read online

  THE HUNTERS OF VERMIN:

  A NOVEL OF MAX ROBICHAUX,

  A JUNIOR OFFICER IN THE UNION SPACE NAVY

  (Being a prequel to the “Man of War” Series of Interstellar War Novels and a sequel to the novella “Deadly Nightshade”)

  by

  H. Paul Honsinger

  Military Science Fiction by H. Paul Honsinger

  Deadly Nightshade (a Novella)

  The Hunters of Vermin (a short Novel)

  The Man of War Trilogy (Published by 47North Books)

  To Honor You Call Us

  For Honor We Stand

  Brothers in Valor

  The Brothers of the Black Sky Trilogy

  (Forthcoming: titles tentative, publisher and dates TBA)

  To Stations My Lads

  Our Courage Defiant

  Hearts of Steel

  Other exciting titles from Honsinger Publications:

  The Soul-Linked Saga by Laura Jo Phillips

  The Dracons’ Woman

  The Lobos’ HeartSong

  The Katres’ Summer

  The Bearens’ Hope

  The Gryphons’ Dream

  Bertha’s Choice (a Novella)

  The Vulpiran’s Honor

  The Tigrens’ Glory

  The Falcorans’ Faith

  The Tigrens’ Glory

  The Orbs of Rathira Trilogy by Laura Jo Phillips

  Quest for the Moon Orb

  Quest for the Sun Orb

  Quest for the Heart Orb

  The Hearts of ICARUS Series by Laura Jo Phillips

  Nica’s Legacy

  Tani’s Destiny

  Rayne’s Return

  Salene’s Secrets

  Vari’s Choices

  Ria’s Visions

  Bean’s Heart

  Rikki’s Star

  Other Titles Forthcoming

  Stand-Alone Novels that May Each Become the Cornerstone of a Series

  Jenna’s Cowboys

  Daughter of the Everstar

  The Mixed Blood Series by Kathleen Honsinger

  Secrets Kept

  Secrets Told

  Other Title(s) Forthcoming

  Nonfiction by H. Paul Honsinger and Kathleen Honsinger

  How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers

  © 2017 by H. Paul Honsinger, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including, without limitation, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other technology), without express written permission of the author/publisher.

  The characters and events depicted in this book, save for well-known historical figures represented under their own names, and documented historic events presented as such, are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental, and not intended by the author.

  Notwithstanding the foregoing, the character of Admiral Charles L. Middleton is a deliberate homage to the late George Middleton, Ph.D., a truly great man. For more information on the relationship between Dr. Middleton and Admiral Middleton, see the “Acknowledgements” to my first novel, To Honor You Call Us. Suffice it to say here that the reference is made with the deepest respect.

  Cover illustration and design by Kathleen Honsinger

  Published by H. Paul Honsinger and Kathleen Honsinger

  November 2017

  Topock, Arizona

  Dedication

  To my dearest wife, Kathleen, the shining star of my life and the everlasting font of inspiration from which I drink daily. It is fitting that we both spend our lives spinning tales set against the vastness of outer space, as—like space—the love we share is infinite, boundless, and filled with unexplored wonders. I look forward to our spending many more years “exploring strange new worlds” . . . together.

  Topock, Arizona

  03:19 Zulu Hours

  15 November 2017

  Chapter 1

  01:16 Zulu Hours, 10 July 2304

  “I’m about to die.”

  When Max Robichaux, a 16 year old junior officer in the Union Space Navy, made this statement, it wasn’t a complaint. It wasn’t a cry of anguish. It wasn’t a plea for help.

  It was merely a statement of fact.

  Even though the direness of Max’s predicament would have been obvious to even the most ignorant and oblivious lubber, the ship’s computer had been rubbing Max’s nose in it for the past twenty-three minutes through a series of seemingly endless verbal warnings blasted loudly into the Command Cabin. Naturally, the computer didn’t come right out and say that Max’s young life would come to an abrupt end less than a quarter of an hour from now. Max very much doubted, after all, that “Warning! Pilot death imminent!” would ever get past the Navy’s Vessel Command Interface Review Board.

  What the computer did do, with the soulless indefatigability of which only the most sophisticated AI devices were capable, was to recite for Max at great length the specific facts that meant his goose was cooked. It was up to Max to come to the ultimate conclusion about the actual baking of the actual bird.

  The latest such warning was very much in the vein of the others: “Warning! Warning! Thermal and structural stress to vehicle spaceframe approaching failure thresholds. Catastrophic spaceframe failure may result. Urgent recommendations follow. One: immed-- ”

  “Computer, discontinue audible warning,” Max barked, cutting the computer off in mid “immediately.”

  There. Blessed silence. At least until some new hazard pops up.

  The ever-helpful ship’s computer was chock full of news of the gloom, doom, catastrophe, and disaster that Max and his little spacecraft were about to meet. Not only that, the machine’s highly capable pilot advisory program caused it to offer exactingly specific recommendations about the changes in attitude and velocity Max needed to make in order to save himself and his ship. Yet, with all of this information pouring out of its verbal and graphic interfaces, and with even more reams of data available within fractions of a second at Max’s request, the computer simply would NOT spit out the few tiny, measly grains of information that would enable Max to save the ship and preserve his own life.

  Instead all the computer and its litany of warnings accomplished was to spell out for Max what kind of shit he was in, how deep it was, and how bad it smelled.

  He already knew.

  Max already knew that his SFR-52 Nightshade class stealth reconnaissance fighter was plunging into this particular planetary atmosphere (what planet, and where, were mysteries to him) at an insanely steep angle and at an even more insane speed.

  He already knew that, while his angle and speed of descent were insane, coming in at the aforementioned angle and speed totally without deflectors was just plain batshit-howl-at-the-moon “here’s a little shot so you’ll stop trying to bite the orderly’s leg” crazy.

  And, while Max was occasionally accused of implementing tactics marked by a certain lack of prudence, or even of saving his bacon and that of others by coming up with extreme spacecraft maneuvers that people called “crazy” but that—when they stopped screaming in abject terror--were really only “highly unorthodox,” he would never pilot the sweet little ship he now commanded in such a psychotically suicidal manner. He was in his present predicament, for one reason and one reason only.

  He wasn’t piloting.

  He was, as the intrepid astronauts of the Jurassic Space era used to say, nothing but “SPAM in a can,” their term for a human being sealed inside a spacecraft over which he had no control. And, while Max wasn’t all that sure exactly what “SPAM” was, he was quite sure that he was completely locked out of his drive controls, attitude controls, maneuvering thruster
controls, aerodynamic maneuvering controls, trim thruster controls, inertial attitude controls, docking and landing thruster controls, and any other controls more consequential than the controls that set the temperature of his shower water or the bake time on his convection oven.

  Max felt as though he were in the worst of all possible worlds. Like a secondary school junior strapped into his seat on a jump liner hop from Bravo to Earth to stay with his grandparents for the summer, Max had no control over his own ship: his destiny was not in his own hands, a situation which Max always found decidedly uncomfortable. Yet, unlike most lubbers, who were usually in the dark about the nature of shipboard emergencies and who might not understand the details even if you explained it to them, Max could read the instruments and punch up the displays and understand the nuances of the aerodynamics and heat transfer theory and spaceframe stress analysis that let him know what kind of death was sitting only a few minutes in the future, drumming its fingers waiting impatiently for him to arrive.

  At least, he thought he knew.

  When the present wild ride began, Max had originally believed that he would be incinerated as his ship’s uncontrolled plunge into the unidentified planet’s atmosphere caused it to burn up like a meteor. But, in this particular hike through this particular jungle, after believing for the first part of the journey that he was going to be eaten by a tiger, it was starting to look as though what he really had to worry about was dying from snakebite.

  The snake in Max’s strained analogy was the extreme atmospheric turbulence which was far beyond what Max expected and what his computer told him was reasonable given the planet’s atmospheric density and general climate. It was almost as though he had been so unlucky that his seemingly random approach vector had somehow brought him down right into the middle of a Category 5 hurricane.

  High level winds struck the ship from unpredictable directions, randomly shoving it with extreme violence one way and, a moment later, kicking it even more viciously in another. As the atmosphere battered the ship—a vehicle designed primarily for extreme speed and stealth in deep space, not for flying at murderous speeds through severe storms in the very thick of a dense planetary atmosphere--Max began to wonder whether those aerodynamic stresses would break the ship apart, followed by the pieces burning up in the atmosphere, or whether the ship would start to burn up whole, and then break up into pieces. Max ran a few quick computer simulations and came up with ambiguous results.

  One fact was, however very clear to Max: that there would be no notation in the ship’s log informing any future investigators whether the ship broke up first and then burned, or burned first and then broke up. Either way, Max would be far too dead to make the entry.

  As Max was comparing these equally unsavory outcomes, he was blindsided by a series of tooth rattling jolts that twisted his body in unexpected directions and inflicted more than a little pain. Hard on their heels, what felt like a powerful atmospheric vortex threw the ship into a violent yaw, twisting Max’s head and giving it a good hard shove toward a point located about half a meter aft of his tailbone. Max felt something give in his neck, followed by a sharp cracking sound accompanied by searing pain.

  I think I just blew a disk between two of my cervical vertebrae. Or not. I’ll never know for sure, will I?

  Max suddenly found himself wondering whether, on this jungle journey, he would meet his end not from tigers and not from snakes, but from Pygmy hunters with curare-tipped blowguns. Max had been focused on what was happening to his spacecraft which may not have been the weak link in the chain.

  Maybe Max was the weak link. Maybe this atmospheric entry would shake Max to death before it destroyed his ship.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Dead is dead.

  The frustration was almost unbearable. There he was: tightly strapped (VERY tightly strapped) into the Pilot’s Station of an ultra-highly sophisticated military spacecraft, surrounded by the most advanced avionics ever developed in the Union of Earth and Terran Settled Worlds, lovingly installed in a beautiful little ship brilliantly designed and crafted by the “Cobra’s Nest” Advanced Design Group of one of the Union’s premier shipbuilders, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux Aerospace Enterprises (better known as “BouThib”). Yet, for all the control he had over this marvel of technology and ingenuity, Max might as well have been riding in the center of a stupefyingly expensive meteor.

  It’s not as though Max was a stranger to frustration. As best he could remember, he had been a very willful child and his mother—who made her living as ramrod for an unruly gaggle of software designers at BouThib and was known as “Hell, no Robichaux” for her typical response to folks who tried to push her around—was a steel magnolia descended in blood and in spirit from those dauntless exiles who built a thriving culture in the inhospitable swamps, marshes, and salt grass prairies of South Louisiana. When Josephine Bernard Robichaux took a principled stand on something, no one, not a BouThib Senior Vice President and not a stubborn four year old boy having a tantrum, was going to budge her so much as a millimeter. Max had several clear memories of his mother standing before him, smiling placidly, with her hands on her hips and her feet solidly planted shoulder-width apart, calmly but clearly and sternly saying “No, Max. And don’t ask again.” He could still remember the sense that his brain was almost boiling with unbearable exasperation at being unable to satisfy his desire for a cookie, to keep playing past bedtime, to watch some luridly violent TridVid war drama, or to go outside and look at the stars in the wee hours of the morning when the whole family was supposed to be asleep. To Max, it seemed as though the frustration of those moments burned more acutely in the warm glow of that beautiful, loving, gently smiling face that refused to get angry but that equally refused to give way.

  That feeling was nothing compared to this. In fact, the frustration he felt at his present circumstances was so intense that he was certain there must be another word for it—something that conveyed a level of rage at his total impotence two or three orders of magnitude beyond anything that could be labeled with such a prosaic word as “frustration.” Max could feel the veins bulging in his temples, his ears burning, and deep wrinkles writing themselves in his hitherto smooth teenage brow, all accompanied by the feeling that his head was about to explode, messily splattering gelatinous cerebral goo all over the brilliantly engineered displays and controls of the Nightshade’s Control Cabin. His hands had long ago ceased to be normal human hands with fingers that could be used to manipulate ship’s controls and other things in his environment. Instead, they were mere unarticulated clubs, clinched into fists of rage that simply would not open no matter how hard he tried. If Max were not afraid that opening his mouth in the violently shaking spacecraft would cause him to break a tooth, he would probably have screamed. He was convinced that things couldn’t get any worse.

  Until they did.

  For no reason Max could identify, whether deliberate action of the beings who put him in this situation, or an unexplained change in atmospheric density, or tiny gremlins using tiny socket wrenches to move the tiny micro-actuators that operated the ship’s control surfaces, Max could tell that his ship was now coming in even more steeply than the already unavoidably fatal trajectory of just a moment before. A more acute angle of descent meant both that the spacecraft would heat more rapidly and that Max would experience higher G forces.

  Normally, in an uncontrolled descent, Max would have had to worry only about the heating and dynamic stresses on the spacecraft. The ship itself was far stronger than needed to ride out Gs of this magnitude (the dynamic stresses from the turbulence, however, were a different matter). The added load would normally not be a problem for Max, either, save that when they locked Max out of the control systems, the aliens in charge of this festive event had also deactivated the ship’s inertial compensation system, resulting in Max feeling the full effects of the ship’s deceleration.

  Up to that point, the ship had been following an erratic descent profile, ca
using Max to experience anywhere between 3 and 7 Gs. The higher G periods were a danger to Max, not because the force was enough to crush organs or break bones--which takes somewhere between 60 and 80 G--but because the heart isn’t strong enough to pump uphill to the brain blood that weighs 7 times more than it should. Deprived of the oxygen and nourishment that blood delivers, the brain starts to shut down, initially resulting in loss of consciousness and, if high G conditions last long enough, death.

  Max had stayed conscious through the worst of these periods only by earnest application of the “anti-G straining maneuver,” known to generations of spacers as “Auntie Gee,” by which pilots experiencing periods of high Gs help the overworked heart deliver blood to the brain by taking shallow, rapid breaths, clenching the muscles of their thighs, and straining with their abdominal muscles in the manner of a constipated person trying to take a crap.

  The navy enhanced the effectiveness of these low-tech expedients by supplying Max and his cohorts with the Standard Pilot Undergarment. The SPU looked a lot like old fashioned “long Johns,” but had woven into it in strategically selected locations patches of “Intelliweave” fiber. The Dow-Sinopec Interstellar Chemical Corporation invented Intelliweave in 2188, endowing it with the highly useful trait of contracting when subjected to high frequency alternating current which, in the case of the SPU, arrived courtesy of a pea-sized control module woven into the waistband and containing a gnat-sized accelerometer. In high G conditions, the fibers contracted, squeezing the pilot’s legs and abdomen more thoroughly and for longer than the pilot could manage without artificial assistance. Further, it was of no small assistance to Max that, in those situations, his pilot’s seat automatically inclined to a 35 degree angle to lessen the height difference between his heart and his brain, helping the hard working former organ maintain blood flow to the occasionally lazy latter.