The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  The Nightshade Problem

  Sol Space Book Two

  James Ross Wilks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover design by Christen Eure

  Copyright © 2017 James Ross Wilks

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1542472199

  ISBN-13: 978-1542472197

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to Emily, the best thing to happen to me since Science Fiction.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  Chapter One

  Pg 10

  Chapter Two

  Pg 32

  Chapter Three

  Pg 42

  Chapter Four

  Pg 57

  Chapter Five

  Pg 68

  Chapter Six

  Pg 93

  Chapter Seven

  Pg 117

  Chapter Eight

  Pg 133

  Chapter Nine

  Pg 154

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Pg 174

  Pg 195

  Pg 232

  Pg 267

  Pg 280

  Pg 307

  Pg 323

  Pg 329

  Pg 354

  Pg 375

  Pg 399

  Prologue

  August 1, 2123

  The weightlessness no longer made her queasy. It had taken months in the station dug into the asteroid, but the desire to vomit that had plagued Igraine Olafson upon waking and after meals had finally abated. She still got headaches, but those she attributed to ten hours of screen time rather than the slight drift she experienced even while strapped into her computer console. She was coming up on hour seven of her present shift, and the pain that had begun shortly before lunch was spreading like a fungus from the back of her skull towards her forehead. She rubbed her eyes, cognizant not to eject her contacts, and sighed deeply.

  “Are you going to make it?” the woman next to her asked. Like Igraine, she was belted to her seat in front of a console displaying three different surfaces, all covered with scrolling code. A fourth surface showing a three-dimensional rendering of an ethics tree sat on her lap.

  “Maybe,” Igraine replied with a halfhearted grin. She tilted her head up, her short blonde hair swaying slightly in the zero-G environment, and looked through the reinforced glass square in the ceiling above her. Through it she could glimpse another asteroid; Pallas, the only chunk of rock close enough to see, looked to be only a few kilometers away, though she knew that was a trick of perspective. It was actually over a hundred kilometers off. That was actually quite close in space terms, but the team had received every assurance that the next scheduled collision with her asteroid was some three hundred years distant.

  “I need coffee,” she added, beginning to unbuckle herself. The other woman, an overly thin forty-something programmer named Naaz, inclined her head towards the bulb of coffee fastened to Igraine’s desk. “I need fresh coffee,” Igraine amended as she cast her restraining belt aside and plucked the container free to take with her.

  “Bring me some?” Naaz asked. “Black, two sugars?”

  “Sure,” she replied and pushed off towards the hallway at the back of the room. As she drifted free, the sound of computer programming came to her from all sides. Some of the team still preferred to work with mechanical keyboards, and the insistent clacking from a dozen consoles combined into a nearly sub-aural drone that she tended to notice only when it stopped. This was not often, as after Igraine, Naaz, and the rest of their team of programmers retired for the night, the next shift came in rested and ready to work. Igraine floated past the other workers and toward the security guard who sat belted and at ease in a grey ballistic suit.

  His name was José, and he held his rifle across his lap and inclined his dark and attractive features towards the surface he was reading. He and Igraine had been on good terms for a while, but after they had slept together a few weeks prior, he had become distant. She knew that he had a wife on Mars, but she could not quite bring herself to feel bad about the sex. They were over two hundred million kilometers from the red planet, and there was very little to do in a base with sixty-eight employees, most of whom were stiff security types or socially awkward computer programming experts. She hadn’t wanted anything more than a distraction from the tedium of her daily routine, but she supposed the man was free to feel about it however he liked.

  José looked up as she approached, tried on a smile that was more of a grimace, then buried his gaze in his surface again. Igraine rolled her eyes and pushed past him. Suddenly the whole facility seemed claustrophobic and suffocating to her, and she decided to make her way up to the observation lounge. Strictly speaking she wasn’t on break, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel bad about that either. Awkwardly, she rounded curves in several tunnels carved out of the asteroid’s interior and finally grasped the grip bar outside the door labeled OBSERVATION. The short trip and the stifling atmosphere of the facility had brought back traces of the old nausea she had thought gone for good. She paused for a moment for her stomach to settle before she pulled the door open.

  The lounge was barely worthy of the name, as it contained only a few couches with worn belts, but there was no arguing with the view. The entire ceiling was a reinforced polycarbonate blister on the surface of the asteroid. It was peppered with grip bars, and Igraine managed to snag one of these after leaving the magnetic bulb of old coffee on a table and pushing away from the doorway at a poor angle. With her head only a few inches below the transparent surface, she could take in a three hundred and sixty degree view of the surrounding asteroid field. She knew there were thousands of them out there, but she could make out only a few with any real clarity, Pallas being the largest by far. She slowly twisted around, breathed deeply, and tried to relax as she looked at each distant rock in turn. Suddenly she stopped.

  There was a light out there. Logically, she knew that to be impossible; the next supply ship wasn’t due for weeks, and no one should even know about the facility built into AR-559. There was little point in having a top-secret asteroid research lab to conduct illegal computer experimentation if its existence and location were common knowledge. Even as she squinted at the light, she realized that it was growing larger. There was no question that it was the main drive of a ship pointed directly at her, and though she was no expert in space vessels, she thought that this one was approaching awfully quickly.

  Igraine stared at the steadily growing torch and considered the possibilities. A commuter vessel that happened upon them? The chances were too slim. There were over a million asteroids in the belt, and the belt itself was over one hundred and fifty million kilometers wide. Pirates? The same problem persisted; how could anyone know they were here? Whatever the ship was, it made her nervous, despite the numerous security crew stationed in the lab with her. She was reaching for her wrist communicator to call José, his puritanical views be damned, when the co
mbat alarm sounded. She started and released her grip on the bar, stunned into inaction. It took her a few seconds to place the sound since she had never heard it in the facility before.

  She pushed herself back to the door and fumbled with the handle, her heart pounding and her ears ringing. She knew that she was very smart, but she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the situation at hand. The worst she had thought might happen when she accepted the lonely, lucrative, and illegal two-year job was some time in prison, though her employers had assured her that there was virtually no chance of discovery. It had never occurred to her that she might find herself in real physical danger, the usual perils of space excepted.

  Igraine careened off the walls as she desperately pushed herself down the hall. Her breathing was quick and shallow, and she could just barely hear it over the continual surge of the klaxon. She rounded a corner and found herself face-to-face with a fully suited member of the security team. The man’s helmet was in place, the faceplate opaque, and she had to look at the nametag to realize that it was José. She instinctively reached out a hand to his shoulder to arrest her momentum.

  “What’s-” she began, but he interrupted her.

  “You’ve got to get out of here. They’re already cutting into the main airlock door!” His voice was raised, but he didn’t shout. He and the other security forces were not just for show; they were highly trained, and many of them had prior combat experience. He pointed down the hallway behind him to a junction Igraine had passed a few minutes ago. “Get past before they breach the facility and we lose atmosphere. Hide. I’ll come find you after.”

  It occurred to her that he had been coming to look for her in order to defend her, and she was briefly touched by the heroic gesture. The feeling faded, however, as her need for self-preservation resurfaced. “Who are they?” she asked as she clawed her way past him.

  “No idea, but they’re wearing power armor. They look military.” He gave her a light push to help direct her down the hall, bracing himself against the equal and opposite reaction by placing a hand on the wall.

  Her fear deepened. Had some government found out what they were up to? Were they here to steal their work? If so, she thought, they were too late. The primary project had been finished more than a month ago. The only thing their invaders would get from the mainframes was a half-completed ethical standards program and some core schematic data.

  As Igraine reached the intersection, she couldn’t resist looking to her right down the hallway that led to the main airlock and the docking port beyond. Half a dozen of the station’s security were assembled behind makeshift barriers, strapped to bars set into the flooring and braced for weapon recoil. All of them were fully suited and helmeted, which would theoretically protect them from vacuum.

  There was a cacophonous explosion and the airlock doors ruptured inwards. Igraine’s trajectory past the hallway was interrupted as the force of the explosion slammed her against the far wall. She hit hard on her shoulder and the back of her head, and for a moment her vision dimmed.

  She braced herself against the wall she had just struck, taking hold of a nearby grip bar, and shook her head to clear the mental fog. In front of her, people were about to die. The sound of gunfire reverberated off the walls, louder even than the screeching alarm. The security forces behind their barriers should have had the advantage; they were firing at a focused space from cover, but it didn’t seem to matter. A figure fully eight feet tall, cradling a rifle and wearing powered armor, charged through the ruptured airlock doors on magnetic boots. He or she fired short controlled bursts at the security men and women that Igraine had shared meals with for the past eighteen months. Their armor helped, but not enough. Two of them dropped almost immediately.

  The team that guarded the door was good. They did not flee as the individual in the massive green and grey armor worked through their ranks. They trained their weapons on the armor’s head and the joints. Finally, one of the bullets seemed to penetrate, and the armored figure staggered back holding a joint at his or her neck. As one of the remaining security women spoke into her communicator and asked for heavier munitions, two more sets of powered armor surged into the hallway. Igraine, her head still fuzzy, watched the ballet of violence with a sick fascination. In just a few seconds, the remaining security forces were dead or bleeding out, and the first enemy attacker stood slumped and motionless against the wall.

  One of the two invaders surveyed the damage for a second, then seemed to take note of her. Igraine thought she was looking in his eyes; she imagined it was a him, though she didn’t know why. She couldn’t actually see any features, just an opaque visor in a rounded grey helmet, but for a second they were regarding each other steadily. Almost casually, he raised his rifle and pointed it at her.

  Not me! her brain screamed. Igraine could fathom no reason this person would shoot her. She obviously wasn’t armed and she clearly constituted no threat. The whole thing was so absurd that she almost laughed. Just as her would-be executioner’s finger tensed on the trigger, she felt herself violently shoved further down the hallway towards the far intersection and the rest of the facility beyond. The rifle sounded, deafening in the enclosed space. José, who had just done his best to push her out of the line of fire, was peppered with high velocity rounds.

  As she flew clear, she felt a searing pain in her right calf. She glanced down and realized that she had been shot in the leg. Blood speckled the wall behind her as she drifted away from the carnage, and her one-time lover’s body hung limp in the air. His nobility tugged at her heart, but as before, her need to survive overrode her emotional response to his sacrifice. She used the wall to steer herself away from the killers who had invaded her temporary home. She was breathing heavily and beginning to cry, and she was leaving a trail of blood floating in the air behind her like breadcrumbs.

  Her first instinct was to find the other programmers and take refuge with them, but a second’s thought made her realize that the situation was hopeless. She was a woman approaching her fortieth year, plain but kind, socially inept to be sure, but utterly harmless – and that man had tried to kill her almost as an afterthought. The attackers might be after their mainframes, but they clearly did not intend to leave anyone alive. She could go to the hangar in the belly of the base, but access was restricted, and she didn’t know how to fly a ship anyway.

  Instead of heading to the dorms or main workrooms, she steered herself down a series of hallways towards the maintenance section. Several times during her short journey she heard the motorized whirring of the power armor and the thunk of their metallic boots behind her, but she pressed on desperately. She knew she was leaving blood behind her, but she was too frightened to stop and try to bandage the wound.

  Finally she rounded a corner, pawed a door open, and slammed it shut behind her. She was in a storage room in a little-used section of the facility. After quickly stripping off her jacket, she awkwardly tied the arms around her calf. She resisted the urge to scream as she tightened her makeshift bandage, then used the crates magnetically fastened to the flooring to move towards the small room full of cleaning supplies at the back of the chamber. Once she had ensconced herself within, she waited and prayed.

  Ten minutes after the last shot had sounded, she began to allow herself to hope that she might survive. Then the storage room door opened, and she heard magnetic boots move through the room towards her. Igraine closed her eyes tightly and held her breath, thinking of every drop of her blood that she had left behind her like a beacon. The door to her tiny closet opened and a figure in power armor stood before her. Unlike the others, the woman who stood in front of her had her opaque visor up, and Igraine could see her face clearly. She was dark-skinned with angular features, a broad nose, and wide lips. She looked dispassionately at the woman cowering in the closet, produced a sidearm from its holster, and shot her in the chest.

  Chapter 1

  After twelve days at high burn, Cronos station was finally visible from t
he aft viewing ports of Gringolet. It hung, needle-like and small, a tiny spec in Saturn’s gargantuan shadow. The rocky rings stretched above the ship at such a distance that they appeared uniform and smooth. From the cockpit, the crew’s destination was not visible. As they were decelerating rapidly in their approach, the engines at the rear of the ship were facing the station. Clea Staples sat in her captain’s chair in the center of the tilted cockpit and tapped her fingers impatiently. Don Templeton, her first mate, sat next to her and monitored ship functions on his console. Bethany Miller and Charis MacDonnell manned their stations in front of her. Beside Bethany sat the construct they had come to know as Brutus, a robotic automaton that possessed, to the best of their knowledge, one of only two fully sentient artificial intelligences in existence.

  “How long now?” Staples asked for the fourth time in the past thirty minutes.

  “Still ninety-seven minutes out if all goes well, Captain,” Charis replied. Her voice betrayed no annoyance at her captain’s constant request for updates. She shared the other woman’s sense of urgency and anxiety.

  It had been a hard journey from Mars for everyone onboard the commuter vessel. The ship had suffered significant damage in the attack from the Nightshade class vessel that Victor, Brutus’ estranged “father,” had sent to destroy them. Since then, just before they left Martian space, Brutus had relayed an encrypted transmission informing his parent program that he was on the ship. It was Brutus’ belief that his presence would protect the crew of Gringolet and the ship itself from further reprisals, but not all of the crew was comforted by this, and certainly few of them fully trusted Brutus. The concern over a further attack was only one of the many problems that had plagued the crew on their journey.