The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  Staples grunted again. “How do we find him?”

  “My best guess would be Owen Burr. He is my father’s closest human confidant, and Victor’s most devoted servant. Victor is naturally very wary, and he does not trust easily. I believe Burr is our best chance.”

  Staples screwed up her face. “Well, I suppose it’s not time to worry yet. About that anyway.”

  “Atticus Finch?” Brutus inquired.

  Staples laughed shortly and put her hand on the robot’s cold shoulder. “I have to say, our lives have been insane since you showed up, but it’s nice to have someone around who gets literary references.”

  Brutus cocked his head. “Small comfort, I’m sure.”

  “These days I take my comforts where I can find them.” She glanced at her watch. “We’d better head back to the mess hall for the voting.”

  The climb up the ship took them past Medical, and Staples found that Jabir was waiting for her outside the door on the bulkhead.

  “Might I request a moment of your time, Captain?” he asked. His tone was artificially light.

  Another look at her watch told her there were still ten minutes until the crew was due to meet. She looked at Brutus and said, “You go on. I’ll catch up.”

  A moment later they were alone together in Medical with the door closed behind them. Staples felt off-balance, having gained entry into the gravity-plated room essentially by stepping on the wall.

  “If you’re going to tell me that I’m making more bad decisions as captain,” she began, “the crew might save you the trouble in a few minutes.”

  He waved her comment away with a hand. “Spare me, Captain. They’ll confirm you and you know it, though they might regret that when they realize that you framed Piotr for the attempted murder of Mr. Quinn and Mr. Parsells.”

  Staples stiffened, and a bolt of adrenaline lanced through her stomach. If she had been prepared for the accusation, she might have been able to dismiss it, but she knew that shock and concern were written all over her face. “How…” she began.

  “How did I know?” he asked indulgently in his lightly accented voice. “Well, I’m not an imbecile. There were a great many revelations made in that mess hall. I will admit that the grand prize goes to proof of the existence of intelligent alien life. However, a distant but still quite relevant second place should be awarded to the fact that Ms. Miller was abused by her father, and that she killed him. It may have been retribution or self-defense, but that young woman is indeed a murderess, if you’ll pardon the gender-biased term. The nature of the abuse is not hard to discern, and given our former security agents’ attempted crime and the fact that Mr. Kondratyev never supplied sufficient motivation for his attempted murder, the truth of the matter is not hard to reason out.”

  A thousand explanations ran through Staples’ head, but she knew that they were all pointless. The man standing in front of her and staring her down was smarter than she, and he had clearly thought this through.

  “What I don’t know is how you convinced our erstwhile cook to take responsibility for attaching the vacuum pump and draining the makeshift cell of air.” It was not a question, but he clearly expected an answer.

  She looked down at his shoes, then back up in his eyes. “I bribed him.”

  Jabir threw up his hands. “Wonderful. So we have bribery, obstruction of justice, threatening an officer of the law, and harboring a known fugitive. Am I missing anything?”

  She desperately wanted to ask him if he was planning to expose her, but she knew it was the wrong thing to say. Instead, she simply said, “Not that I can think of.”

  “Fleeing the scene of a crime,” he added with an air of disappointment. “In Las Vegas.”

  She nodded grimly, but she held his gaze.

  “Clea,” he said more softly. “I’m not going to tell the rest of the crew. It’s not my place. I agree that we need Ms. Miller to fly this ship; none of us would be alive without her. Your concern is this: if I can deduce what she did, then others can as well, and when that happens, you are going to have a great deal of trouble on your hands. I wonder, have you asked yourself what it is about her that pushes you to go to such lengths to defend her?”

  Staples shook her head. She meant to communicate that she did not know the answer, but Jabir might well have taken it as admitting that she had not really examined the impulse within herself. “I don’t know. I just know she needs to be protected. She’s not a bad person. Maybe she’s bad in the eyes of the law, but that doesn’t make her evil.”

  “I didn’t know that you believed in God, Captain.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then it’s your own morality you refer to? Something outside of collective human law?”

  “I suppose so,” she conceded. “Listen-”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “We don’t have time right now, Captain. There’s voting to be done and a solar system to panic. I just want you to be prepared for what’s coming.”

  Slowly she nodded her head. “Thank you.”

  He looked at her for a long second. “You really shouldn’t.”

  The voting went just as Jabir had predicted. Staples was confirmed captain through anonymous votes that Jang collected in a bowl and counted. Of the twelve slips of paper, four were votes of no-confidence. The crew also voted unanimously in favor of exposing the information they had on the alien transmission and the Nightshade class vessels.

  “Well, now that we know what we’re going to do,” Templeton said to the assembled crew, “How are we going to do it?”

  Staples realized that they were all looking to her. She knew their confidence was far from absolute, and that some had wanted someone else to fill her role, but she also felt more justified in taking command than she had in some time. Now she had a mandate, even if it was not unilateral. Not until this moment, as she stood in front of the assembled people looking to her to make decisions, did she realize the degree to which she had felt that she was imposing her will on them. The fight with Charis, the debacle with Declan, her take-no-prisoners defense of Bethany: all of it had felt like she was mastering some wild bull into submission through sheer tenacity and force of will. The wave of relief she felt arising from the support of her crew filled her, and she vowed never to try to lead as a dictator again.

  “I think Mars is still our best option. The planet has some well-respected journalists.” She turned to Brutus and asked, “You’re sure the information you retrieved from your hack of the general’s computer will stand up to scrutiny?”

  The automaton nodded. “I am, Captain. I would guess that any journalist worth his or her salt would see it for what it is, and there are military signifiers embedded within the data that virtually ensure its authenticity.”

  “Then that’s our play,” Templeton nodded as he spoke.

  “I also have friends on Mars that can help get this into the right hands, Captain. Friends who can help verify the data should any consider it apocryphal,” Brutus continued.

  There were some murmurs from the crew, probably at the idea of their robotic companion having friends on the red planet, but Staples ignored them. “Good. You might want to get in touch with them.”

  “I will do so.”

  Staples looked at Templeton and gave a slight nod. He raised his voice and said, “Well, let’s get a move on. This old man can only fly himself for so long. The sooner we get to Mars, the sooner this info can stop burning a hole in our hull.”

  A few people gave the first mate and his mixed metaphor strange looks, but they broke up and headed to their stations nonetheless.

  Chapter 19

  It was near to dinnertime the next day, just about time to flip the ship over and begin decelerating towards Mars, when Charis detected something wrong. Since their voting the previous day, life on Gringolet had progressed much the same way it had in the past few weeks. People went about their assignments, they met for dinner, lamented the lack of a good cook, and slept when they could.
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  To Staples, everything felt somehow different. There was light ahead; their first real victory, and this created an air of expectancy. She could feel it from each of them. They might have known that spreading the alien message and the existence of the Nightshade vessels across every news network would not shake Victor’s interest in them, but it still felt somehow like they were almost home free. Until now they had just been doing their best to survive, but now they had made real progress. Brutus was working on a weapon to use against the malevolent AI that wanted them dead, and many of their enemy’s secrets were about to be revealed. It was beginning to look like they might actually win.

  “Captain, I’ve got a ship on a pursuit course.” Charis said, noticeable apprehension in her voice.

  “There’s a lot of traffic out here,” Templeton soothed. “Could easily be another ship headed for Mars.”

  “It… it looks like a Nightshade.” Her voice shook slightly.

  Templeton shook his head. “Hard to believe Victor would risk-”

  Charis interrupted him. “And I’ve got another one on an intercept course. It’s coming at us laterally.

  “Intercept sounds a lot more suspicious than pursuit,” Staples said. Bethany turned to watch the navigator with wide, frightened eyes.

  “No wait, two more.” Charis said loudly. “There are three total, Captain.” She turned around in her chair to look at Staples, and she saw that all of the hostility she had felt from the woman before had gone. Charis’ expression was begging her to save their lives.

  “Three?” Staples asked. “Are you absolutely sure they’re Nightshades?”

  “They’re accelerating at five G.”

  There was a moment of silence while they digested that.

  Templeton blinked a few times. “Well, that settles it.”

  “Captain, I’m afraid that my presence on this vessel may no longer protect you. My father may not wish me dead, but this pursuit seems to suggest that he is willing to sacrifice me to keep this information from becoming public knowledge,” Brutus said, and he sounded apologetic.

  “I think you’re right,” Staples said. “If he’s going to chase us down and destroy us this close to Earth and Mars, he’s ready to risk an awful lot. I guess he’d rather people know his ships exist than know why they exist.”

  “Well, what the hell do we do?” Templeton asked desperately. “We can’t take on one of those things, let alone three. If the threat of dragging those warships into the spotlight won’t stop him, then how can we possibly get away from them? We can’t exactly hide in space.”

  “We’ve got to transmit what we’ve got to your friends on Mars,” Staples said to Brutus. “Take away his reason for killing us.”

  Brutus was facing his coms console, and he was silent for several moments while he worked. “I’m afraid I can’t get through, Captain. The Nightshades are generating a blanket signal that’s interrupting communications.”

  “How did you not notice that before?” Charis asked accusingly.

  “It just began,” Brutus replied calmly. “Timed no doubt to coincide with the moment they knew our radar would detect them.”

  “Can you clear it?” Staples asked.

  “I will try. The closer we get to Mars, the more likely I will be able to get a signal through.”

  “Then let’s get there,” Templeton said.

  “If we accelerate now,” Charis said, “we’ll shoot right past it.”

  “I can live with that,” Staples said. “Just so long as we can get this information out.”

  “There’s no guarantee that if we do get through and manage to transmit that they won’t shoot us down anyway,” Templeton cautioned.

  “I know.” Staples was silent for a few moments, then added, “Survival isn’t our number one priority right now.”

  Everyone wanted to argue with her, but no one did.

  Being pursued in space was an exhausting and stressful affair. Because of the vast distances involved, it was not a quick and intense experience with a foreseeable end. Instead, it went on for hours and hours. Once everyone had been warned and had a chance to prepare, Gringolet’s engines had fired the vessel up to a debilitating two point three Gs of thrust. Dinah warned Staples against pushing the engines any further; if the reactor failed, they would be easy prey. The missiles, attitude thrusters, flak, and slug guns required power to function.

  They hoped their adjusted speed would whip them past Mars in under half a day, but eleven and a half hours seemed interminable when their joints hurt, their heads throbbed, and even sitting up straight felt like calisthenics. The increased gravity would have made sleep difficult; the knowledge that three warships were bearing down at them at over twice their acceleration made it nearly impossible. The crew was strung-out, bleary-eyed, and miserable. The optimism that Staples had felt after the voting had evaporated like fog, and there was only the stark reality of their situation in front of them.

  They couldn’t get away. Charis, Brutus, and Bethany went over the physics exhaustively, but there was simply no solution that they could see. If the ships wanted them destroyed, there was nothing they could do except delay the inevitable. Even armed with that knowledge, they ran the numbers again and again, seeking to buy themselves a few extra minutes, hoping that some solution would present itself. When he wasn’t examining thrust tables and astrogation maps with the navigator, Brutus worked at his console to try to clear the jamming signal the other ships were broadcasting.

  It was past two in the morning, and Staples was dozing fitfully in her captain’s chair. Bethany was curled up in her chair sleeping, and Charis shifted uncomfortably, sores beginning to form on her backside. Templeton had moved to the viewing seats at the back of the cockpit to lie down and sleep. Descending the ladder to their cabins was simply too dangerous, especially for the first mate. He weighed over two hundred kilograms at the moment, and a fall of even four meters could be fatal if the safety tethers malfunctioned. Even if they had descended, climbing back up would be incredibly taxing, and none of them wanted to be far from their stations in case the situation changed rapidly.

  “I believe I have an idea, Captain,” Brutus said, rousing Staples. She shook herself and tried to sit up. Neither Bethany nor Templeton stirred, but Charis looked at the automaton expectantly.

  “What is it?” Staples asked, rousing herself.

  “The signal the ships are sending is not deadening our communications. We are able to transmit, but no one can hear us. They are generating such strong signals that ours are swallowed by them. Imagine keeping someone from being heard, not by silencing them, but by shouting so loudly that their voice is drowned out completely. We need to find a way to not only boost our coms signal, but also to differentiate it.”

  “To change the pitch,” she said, catching on, “so that it stands out more. So how do we do that?”

  “I believe that the communications suite from the Yoo-lin satellite that Mr. Durin installed in the coms room could be adjusted to provide the necessary frequency modulation, or ‘pitch,’ as you put it. I believe I can also use it to further boost our signal, but it is still unlikely that anyone will pick it up until we get closer to Mars.”

  “How long will it take?” she asked hopefully.

  “I’m not sure, but a few hours I suspect. I will need to be in the communications room.”

  “Go,” she said peremptorily. Brutus rose from his station and crossed the room as though they were at normal Earth gravity. Staples found herself actually envying him again for a moment. “Stay in touch and give me updates,” she said as he swung himself onto the ladder.

  “Yes, Captain,” he said and disappeared.

  “That still doesn’t save us,” Charis said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Staples sighed. She knew the navigator was thinking of her family. She looked at Bethany, small and fragile, her darkened eyes closed and her lips slightly parted. “But if we’re going to die, I’d rather it not be in vain.”
r />   “They’ll be in weapons range in ten minutes,” Charis reported.

  “Better get Dinah up here,” Templeton cautioned.

  “Not yet,” Staples replied. “John’s down there with her, but she said she needs to stay with the engines as long as she can.”

  Dinah had told them that the engines needed constant attention. The ship was exceeding its cruising thrust by a factor of four, and at this rate they would be going half a percent of the speed of light by the time they reached Mars. It was not the fastest they had traveled, but it was the longest they had pushed the engines at such a high burn.

  “She said it takes her two and a half minutes to get here from the ReC, so we’ll call her when the ships are three minutes out of weapon’s range,” Staples added.

  Templeton sucked in a breath through his teeth, but said nothing.

  Staples tapped the coms speaker on her chair and said, “Brutus, please tell me you’re getting through.”

  Brutus’ tinny voice came back almost immediately. “I have been broadcasting for several hours, Captain, and I have augmented the signal the best I can using the materials at hand. Every moment we get closer to Mars increases the chances that someone will hear us. Unfortunately, we will be unable to pick up any replies.”

  “Guess we’ll never know if we got through,” Templeton said grimly, now buckled back in his seat next to his captain.

  Mars was now much closer than it had been. The red planet filled a quarter of their forward facing view, despite the angle of the cockpit, and it was growing visibly from minute to minute. They were moving at a great speed now, and even if the Nightshade vessels magically vanished, it would take them the better part of a week at normal thrust just to decelerate to zero relative speed.

  “We’ll get through.” Staples hoped her voice carried more conviction than she felt. It was difficult to suppress her frustration, knowing they were going to die now when they were so close to finally striking a blow against Victor that might set them free. The finish line was right in front of them, but they would never reach it.