Deadly Nightshade Read online

  Max had been the Sensors Operator on seven Intel gathering sorties in the Nightshade’s predecessor, the SFR-44 Nighthawk, a slightly less advanced spacecraft that required a second man to operate, which made him a reasonable choice to pilot this mission.

  And maybe get back in the commodore’s good graces.

  Fortunately, the “Cobra’s Nest,” the design group at Boudreaux and Thibodeaux Aerospace responsible for the firm’s most innovative and classified projects, had designed the Nightshade for just this kind of mission. Fast, stealthy, packed with advanced sensors and comms gear, possessed of great range and endurance, and yet easy to pilot, it was the perfect platform for the task. Max had been quite confident that he and his ship were up to the mission.

  But the Vaaach! That’s a different story.

  Intel knew precious little about the Vaaach. In fact, Intel was sure of only two things about them. One: they were a highly advanced and powerful race. Two: they took an extremely dim view of incursions into their territory. Max was had serious misgivings about being caught in the crossfire between them and the Krag. Set against those misgivings, however, was the unprecedented opportunity he now had to gather at least some intelligence about the Vaaach. That might be a feather in his cap. It might even get Hornmeyer off his back.

  This routine mission had suddenly become both highly important and exceptionally dangerous. Max knew he was in over his head. Way, way over his head. For about ten seconds, he didn’t know what to do. He stared at the maneuvering and drive controls, his hands shaking as much with frustration at his own inaction as with fear.

  Think it through. Prioritize. Okay, Maxie (he loved it when Leslie called him that), highest priority: keep your happy ass from getting killed in the next ten minutes.

  Given that priority, Max knew what he had to do next. He retracted the dozen or so antennae and scanner arrays that had to be stored in internal bays when the ship was under significant acceleration, turned the Nightshade toward the nearest edge of the Krag formation, and began to creep away. Every instinct told him that things were about to get very, very messy. Max knew the Krag. They were the most arrogant creatures in Known Space. They never believed they were wrong and they never backed down. Max didn’t know the Vaaach—no human did—but their transmission had the ring of coming from beings who weren’t bluffing. He wanted to be as far away as possible when the Vaaach deadline came.

  Faster.

  Max gave the drive a tiny nudge, inching his acceleration up ever so slightly. The Nightshade was, as far as Max knew, the fastest ship in Known Space. If he ran his sublight drive up to EMERGENCY, there wasn’t anything in the Krag fleet that could catch him. And, of course, if he kicked in his compression drive, he’d be halfway to the edge of the sector before the Krag sensor officers could say the rodent equivalent of “what the hell was that?”

  Bad idea.

  Either move would give away that he had been there, to both the Krag and the Vaaach. Doing so would not only be a violation of his strict orders from Commodore Hornmeyer to avoid detection but might also invite his own death from the Vaaach who could almost certainly catch Max’s vessel without working up a sweat. Plus, if Max ran away now, he wouldn’t be able to gather intel on what happened next, in addition to satisfying his own curiosity.

  The Krag divided their day into tenths and used the resulting unit the way humans used hours, so Max knew from the message’s reference to a “daytenth” that the Vaaach were computing their deadline based on Krag time units. The Krag homeworld had a rotational period of 35 hours, 18 minutes, 15 seconds; so, a tenth of a daytenth was just a shade over twenty-one minutes. Max had directed the Nightshade’s main computer to determine the exact moment the Vaaach terminated transmission and start a countdown clock based on that point in time. Seven of the twenty one minutes had already passed. Max’s natural tendency to watch the clock receded as he entered a denser part of the Krag formation. He got very busy managing his stealth systems and making countless course changes to thread his way around the enemy ships’ scanning arcs and to avoid the most intense sensor coverage from the battle station. A direct hit from one of the more powerful sensor beams would reveal his presence, stealthy ship or not, as would passing through the intersection of two or more weaker beams.

  “Stealthy” doesn’t mean “undetectable.”

  He made it through the most difficult part of his planned egress trajectory, giving him a few seconds to take his hands off the controls and his eyes off the stealth and navigation displays.

  Four minutes.

  Max quickly paged through half a dozen displays devoted to showing him the current Krag tactical dispositions. The wealth of information available to him was astonishing—even headed directly away from the heart of the Krag formation and with its most sensitive arrays retracted, the Nightshade was a highly capable sensor platform. The Krag ships all appeared to be oriented so as to bring their weapons and sensors to bear on the Vaaach ship. The battle station had all of its batteries powered up and aimed at the Vaaach. The Krag were loaded for grizzly.

  But were they loaded for Vaaach?

  They’re not looking in this direction. And, I probably have less time than shows on the counter because, if I know the Krag, they’re not going to wait for the Vaaach’s deadline before they do what they’re going to do.

  He gave the drive controller another slight forward nudge. His acceleration was still only a feeble 0.24G, but that drive setting would put him outside the Krag formation in one minute and three seconds. Although the higher speed made him easier to detect, Max was betting that the rat faces had more important things on their minds than chasing the tiny flicker he might be making on their infra-red detectors.

  Three minutes.

  There was another flurry of signals on the Krag comms channels. Orders. It had to be orders. In response, the Krag tightened their formation around the Vaaach vessel so that their ships no longer surrounded Max. The Nightshade’s displays showed that the battle station was flanked by two cruisers while the other capital ships arrayed themselves in a separate formation consisting of two arcs intersecting at right angles—each ship was equidistant from the Vaaach vessel. The two formations were 23,955 kilometers from one another and 35,101 kilometers from the Vaaach ship, forming an isosceles triangle with the Vaaach ship at one vertex, subjecting it to overlapping fields of fire from both formations while keeping the Krag vessels well out of each other’s firing arcs. The fighters formed themselves into three orderly squadrons—already in pursuit formation—behind the capital ships, presumably as a reserve force or to be ready to cut off any attempt by the Vaaach to escape. The Krag may have been foolhardy, but no one could say that they were not exceedingly proficient at the business of space warfare.

  Just as the last Krag ship settled into place, Max’s threat detectors went crazy—the cacophony of beeps, hoots, flashing lights, and text warnings making him jerk against the straps holding him to his seat. The Krag had just lit up the Vaaach ship with every targeting scanner they had.

  The stupid bastards are really going to do it.

  Max cut his drive and swung the Nightshade around, pointing its sensitive bow-mounted sensors at the Vaaach ship and the Krag vessels surrounding it, deployed a few of the retractable antennas and arrays that took the shortest time to bring into action, and switched all of his recorders to their highest resolution. The Intel boys would want to see this in as much detail as possible. He was quickly rewarded by a brilliant fireworks display as the Krag opened up on the Vaaach ship with enough pulse cannon energy to slag the surface of a good sized planet, followed up by a couple of dozen thermonuclear warheads just for emphasis. About ten seconds later, they stopped firing. The Krag never lost any sleep worrying about overkill.

  Scratch one Vaaach ship. Maybe the Vaaach aren’t so tough after all.

  The plasma glow from the Krag salvos had scarcely faded when, once again, all the comms went silent.

  Then again, maybe they are s
o tough.

  This time, the Vaaach didn’t bother with an attention signal. They just transmitted their message.

  “[Translated from Krag Intership Transmission Text Protocol G to Standard.] Krag forces. You have destroyed our uncrewed sensor and communications vessel. you are vermin. we will kill you now. transmission ends.”

  Just over 2,000 kilometers from the Krag battle station a ship suddenly appeared. Max had no trouble detecting it or even seeing it on optical from his distance

  In fact, there was no missing it. First, it was lit up like one of his Aunt Emma’s famously over decorated Christmas trees. And, second, it was big. Really, really big.

  The Vaaach ship was 22,779 meters long. Longer than the diameter of both of the moons of Mars. Put together. Max didn’t know the size of the largest space vehicle known to humankind, but he was pretty sure that this ship exceeded that record by a comfortable margin. The Vaaach stealth gear was still blocking Max’s mass detector, but something that immense had to mass 50 or 60 million tons. That the Vaaach were able to hide a vessel that large said things about their level of technology that Max couldn’t even begin to contemplate.

  The Vaaach ship was shaped like the business end of an enormous spear: long, narrow, menacing, and pointed directly at the center of the Krag battle station. Every inch of it exuded deadliness. It was, in fact, the most intimidating looking space vessel Max had ever seen. The Krag opened fire on it with everything they had.

  They might as well have been shooting spit balls.

  By some invisible, incomprehensible means, the Vaaach caused all of the Krag pulse cannon bolts to detonate about half way to their target. The Krag tried to compensate for this countermeasure by closing the range, only to have the bolts detonate immediately upon firing, destroying or severely damaging each of the ships that fired them.

  Once they determined that pulse cannons were useless, the Krag switched to missiles. They launched a textbook, coordinated missile attack: wave after wave of missiles programmed to approach the target simultaneously from multiple vectors.

  To no avail. Somehow, the Vaaach managed to hack the missile control systems which caused the Krag weapons to safe their warheads, veer away from the Vaaach ship, and continue to accelerate, each vanishing into deep space before running out of fuel and coasting on a random heading in the endless dark on an infinite but futile journey.

  But the Krag were nothing if not dogged, and their warriors were amply endowed with courage. Unknowingly emulating Earth’s kamikaze pilots of nearly 400 years before, several of the Krag fighter pilots went to maximum thrust and turned their vehicles straight toward the immense spear point, only to obliterate themselves in spectacular but futile fireballs when they struck the Vaaach deflectors at high fractions of lightspeed. Larger vessels then made their own attempts to ram. The Vaaach shut down the attackers’ drives, scrammed their fusion reactors, and used a powerful repulsor field to fling them away, like a man brushing so many gnats from his jacket.

  The remaining Krag capital ships closed to about 55,000 kilometers and began hitting the Vaaach ship with their beam weapon batteries. The Krag generally reserved that element of their arsenal for fighter defense or close-in “knife fighting,” but the beam batteries were the only arrow left in their quiver. When they hit the Vaaach deflectors, the focused particle beams lost cohesion and dissipated long before striking the hull of the target. Notwithstanding the impotence of their attack, the Krag kept shooting, apparently in an effort to wear down the Vaaach deflectors by the sheer volume of their fire. Max detected no change in Vaaach deflector strength. He suspected that the mysterious aliens could keep this up all day.

  Hell, probably all month.

  Max wondered how long the Vaaach vessel was going to just sit there and mutely absorb the worst that the Krag could throw at it. He had seen what the Krag could to the Vaaach, which wasn’t Jack. Now, Max wanted to see what the Vaaach would do to the Krag.

  He was practically salivating.

  An alert on one of his screens drew Max’s attention to a sudden increase in gravimetric flux centered on the Krag battle station. He pulled up a visual scan of the station at high magnification. One moment, the station hung in space in all its apparent impregnability. The next, an undulation moved across it from left to right, as though the 23.7 million ton installation were nothing but a thin leaf floating on a pond and a ripple had passed through the water.

  Only, in the case of the station, the ripple did not fail to leave evidence of its passing. As an artificially-generated distortion of the very fabric of space-time propagated through the station, welds failed, viewports shattered, hatches exploded, and every other joint or fitting in the station’s construction broke as the station flexed, compressed, and expanded. The Vaaach somehow had the ability to manipulate space-time, Planck interval by Planck interval, at the Universe’s finest level of the granularity at which even miniscule quarks loom like mountains. Atmosphere vented in a thousand places, plasma roared out from breaches in the fusion reactors’ containment, and the station began to tear itself apart from secondary explosions. The Vaaach had reduced one of the most powerful battle stations in Known Space to complete junk in two seconds.

  The Vaaach weren’t through with the station. Space rippled again, and Max watched in amazement as the station collapsed in on itself, as though being crushed by immense but invisible hands. When the collapse was over, the station resembled nothing more than a wadded up piece of paper ready to be tossed into a waste receptacle. Max stared dumbfounded at the image on the monitor: the station had been reduced to a roughly spherical and extremely dense lump of metal, just under 100 meters across, spinning slowly in space, glowing a dull red from compression-generated heat, containing the remains of thousands of Krag crushed down to their constituent atoms interspersed throughout. And the Vaaach just left it there for everyone to see.

  Holy shit.

  The Vaaach weren’t done. In fact, they were just getting warmed up. Krag ships started exploding right and left. The hard gamma radiation produced by each explosion left only one explanation—the Vaaach had some sort of antimatter cannon that could punch right through the toughest Krag deflectors, and they were systematically and methodically shooting everything in sight. A single shot would cause a fighter to simply evaporate in a dandelion-like puff of blue-white gas. When turned on a larger ship, the weapon would paint an entire side of the vessel’s hull with antimatter particles. In the bizarre world of antimatter physics, this meant that the antimatter and the surface of the hull it touched annihilated each other releasing mind-numbingly enormous quantities of pure energy (which Einstein famously computed to be equal to the mass of the annihilated matter times the square of the speed of light) which usually had the effect of turning anywhere between twenty-five and ninety percent of the ship to incandescent plasma and whirling debris. Even the largest and most heavily defended and armored Krag ships were blotted from space with only a single shot, lasting less than half a second.

  That was intimidating enough. Then Max saw that the Vaaach warship had started wielding a second one of these weapons. And then a third. Then a fourth. And a fifth. Soon, the deadly Vaaach spear ship was firing at the Krag vessels with nine antimatter cannons simultaneously. At this rate, the remaining Krag ships would be gone in less than a minute.

  Suddenly, Max’s orders to avoid detection began to weigh less and less heavily in his calculations, particularly given the increasing likelihood that no Krag were going to make it back to any of their bases to report his presence. If he, on the other hand, were going to make it back to his base, it was looking as though he had “best git while the gittin’s good.”

  After retracting all of his retractable sensor and comm arrays, Max slewed the bow of the Nightshade toward open space, punched in a course back toward his own lines, flipped the drive selector from Main Sublight to Compression, and advanced the drive controller to 80%. He exhaled with relief as the compression field formed and went
propulsive.

  And suddenly collapsed.

  What the hell?

  The Compression Drive Status Display was a seething cauldron of blinking and shifting caution and warning messages. Max shut down all power to the Compression Drive, started diagnostics on the non-functioning systems, and racked his brain to figure out what could cause such an oddball configuration of malfunctions. After a few readings came back, the nearest he could figure was that something—he couldn’t begin to imagine what—was preventing the Randall-Sundrum generator from producing the tachyo-gravitons necessary to alter the shape of the space-time continuum around the ship.

  I’ll have to puzzle that one out after I get the hell out of Denver. Or Detroit. Or Dallas. Whatever town you get the hell out of.

  Max flipped the Drive Selector back to Main Sublight and pushed the drive controller forward to the stop, bracing himself against the g-forces from the Nightshade’s blistering acceleration that even the most powerful inertial compensators couldn’t entirely negate.

  And felt nothing.

  The Main Sublight and Fusion Reactor Systems Status Displays erupted into a Caution and Warning fireworks display that made the Compression Drive panel look nominal by comparison. Max was relieved to see that the fusion reactor was still on line and was still keeping life support running, powering the personnel deflectors that protected Max from radiation, and energizing the power distribution net for sensors and computers. But the systems that drew fusion plasma from the reactor, cheated the rules of inertia to accelerate that plasma to near light speed, and then directed it through the drive nozzles to push the ship, were shut down and locked out, apparently due to computer instructions that Max could not override.