The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  There was a breath and the sound of someone leaving the ladder and entering the room behind them. Staples glanced over her shoulder at the dark form standing there just as Templeton spun around and said, “Dinah, I thought you were going to-”

  Gunfire erupted in the cockpit. Bullets thudded into the back of Staples’ chair, the windscreen in front of Bethany, and Templeton’s chest. He looked down at the holes in his torso in surprise.

  Against all logic, Staples turned in her chair more fully and looked at the person shooting up the cockpit of her ship. The man was slight and smaller than Dinah she realized, now that she saw him more fully. He wore a flat black silk shirt and dark slacks. His skin was swarthy, and his dark hair hung to his shoulders. He held a pistol extended in his hand. Staples had never seen him before.

  With a slight adjustment of aim, the man pointed the gun at Staples. She instinctually swung her chair back to face him, brought her legs up to her chest and held her head. She felt the chair shudder as two more bullets struck it.

  In front of her, both Bethany and Charis were similarly hiding in their chairs. Staples watched another bullet strike the window over Bethany’s head. The polycarbonate spider-webbed slightly, but did not crack. Fortunately for them all, bullets did not travel nearly as fast as the piece of debris that had ripped through the ship and their pilot. She glanced at Don Templeton. His eyes were still open, and he was still looking down at his chest, but he was not moving. Staples didn’t think he was breathing either. Adrenalin flooded her system, and her hands began to shake. She wondered that it had not happened before now.

  More bullets struck consoles and chairs as the stranger continued to fire at all of them. Staples had no idea who he was or how he had gotten onboard. The reptilian part of her brain urged her to run, though of course there was nowhere to run to. Acting on instinct, she actually started to leap out of her chair, but her restraints held her firmly in place. Another bullet slammed into the back of her chair, and she screamed, “Stop it!”

  There was a vacant click, the sound of an empty chamber, and Staples started to wrestle with her belt. The man was almost certainly reloading, and in another second he would realize that he could simply walk into the room and shoot each of the remaining three women without effort. She struggled with the buttons, throwing free one shoulder strap, but it was taking too long. She pushed her chair to an angle again with a leg and saw that the man already had another clip in hand.

  There was a sound of footsteps behind her, and Staples glanced to see Charis charging at their assailant. Her restraints hung heavily around her chair behind her, and as she ran in the intense gravity, a war cry of sorts escaped her throat. Charis was no doubt feeling the same fight or flight response that had possessed the captain a minute ago, and she had chosen fight. Stunned, her belt forgotten, Staples watched the scene play out as though it were in slow motion.

  The man had already dropped the empty clip. It struck the flooring with a hollow thud. Charis was halfway to him, just past Staples’ chair and Templeton’s unconscious form, when he rammed the spare clip home. He pulled back on the slide to chamber a round. He did not lower the weapon to do this; it remained pointed at the navigator the whole time.

  Charis held out her hands, and it was now clear to Staples that her intention was to push him down the corridor behind him. It was a five-meter drop, and at the intense gravity caused by the ship’s current acceleration, a bad fall from that height could be lethal.

  Charis wasn’t fast enough. The gun was loaded and ready. When Charis was less than a meter away from him, he fired at her, the range so close that it was impossible to miss. She crashed into him and both of them disappeared down the shaft.

  There was a series of sickening thuds as the two fell, then silence filled the room, broken only by Bethany’s faint and quiet crying. Staples still could not see her, only the bullet-pocked chair.

  “Bethany?” she asked. When the woman did not respond, she shouted, “Bethany!”

  The weakest of replies came. “Yes?”

  Staples let out a shuddering breath, then turned to Templeton. His expression had not changed. His shirt was covered in blood, and she could see now that he was still. His eyes were glazed. She finally threw off her belt and began pawing at him, not knowing what to do.

  “Are you okay?” she half-shouted at Bethany. “Are you shot?”

  Bethany’s chair swiveled around, and Staples glanced for a moment and saw that she was terrified but seemingly uninjured. Staples looked back at her first mate, and she knew that he was dead.

  She looked out the windows in front of her, and Mars was still growing in front of them. Suddenly she remembered the three Nightshade vessels. They had been nine minutes from weapons range. How much time had passed since the man had opened fire? One minute? Three? It felt like a week.

  Throwing aside the safety restraints, Staples rushed to the back of the cockpit and peeked over the lip of the shaft. There was one body at the bottom, that of Charis MacDonnell. The woman lay motionless. Blood matted her bleached and wavy hair at her temple. Her left foot was wedged into one of the recessed steps set into the wall nearly a half meter up, and the leg was bent at an unnatural angle as a result. Staples thought it was undoubtedly broken, probably in multiple places. Her hand was a bloody mess, almost unrecognizable as an appendage. Despite all of this, the woman was breathing.

  Staples turned and dashed back to her chair, barely aware of the fact that she currently weighed nearly one hundred and fifty kilograms. Struggling to think logically through the brain-numbing chemicals in her body, she tapped the coms console on her chair to call the doctor and Jang. The first was for her navigator, the second for the intruder. The surface on the arm of her chair was dead, probably the victim of one of the bullets that had struck her seat. We just bought these, she thought ridiculously.

  Her watch forgotten in her haste, she leaned over Templeton to his coms panel, which was still lit and undamaged. She didn’t know whom to call first, and for a second it felt so much like the moment she had ordered the doctor to treat Bethany before Declan that she froze. Then she knew what to do and entered a command into the console.

  Amit climbed down another ladder and carefully set his feet on the deck plating. His right ankle was a bonfire of pain. He didn’t doubt that it was broken; he could feel the bones grinding when he stepped on it. As he limped towards the back of the ship, he heard a woman’s voice fill the vessel from the speakers all around him.

  “We have an intruder. He’s armed and he… he killed Don. He just left the cockpit. Everyone get somewhere safe. Charis is hurt. Jang, get the doctor and safely to the cockpit. Overton, try to find him. If you find him, shoot him. I don’t know where he’s headed, but it’s probably the ReC.”

  Amit swore to himself and shook his head. That’s exactly where he was headed. He dragged his shattered ankle around another corner and instantly came face to face with an Asian man. Without thinking, Amit pointed and fired almost blindly. The man fell to the deck and hit hard, unmoving. Only after he had fallen did Amit see that there was someone with him, a small girl.

  She had hair the color of mahogany and intense eyes that stared at him in fright. For a second she looked down at the man that Amit thought must be her father, and a faint cry escaped her mouth. Her throat convulsed as she hitched once, then she looked back at the gunman before her.

  Amit didn’t know if the man he had shot was alive or dead, but he could not take his eyes off the child. Everyone. God had said that everyone on this ship must die. Slowly he raised the gun and pointed it at her. She was a scant meter from him. He could not miss.

  Her eyes flicked to the weapon, and she shuddered all over as though the temperature had just dropped twenty degrees. Then she looked back at him. Amit tried to do what he was bidden. If he questioned, if he doubted, the abyss yawned open for him, purposeless, empty, ready to swallow him. It was a very simple question. Either he had faith, or he did not. There was no m
iddle ground. The girl continued to stare at him, eyes watery but clear, imploring.

  Something snapped in Amit, and he dropped to his knees in front of her. Tears coursed down his cheeks, and the gun pulled his hand down to the deck plating.

  Dinah Hazra crept up the recessed ladder and risked a glance over the lip of the hallway. She had been in the ReC a minute earlier. John was supposed to be depositing Gwen safely in their quarters, then coming to relieve her so that she could take her post at tactical in the cockpit. Then Staples’ announcement had come. It had scarcely begun when Dinah had freed a pistol from the weapons locker nestled in the corner of the ReC. By the time it was ending, she was climbing out of the room and making for the nose of the ship. A second later she had heard the gunshot, and it had brought her running.

  The scene in front of her stopped her dead. Park was unconscious on the floor a half dozen meters from her. He was bleeding, but Dinah didn’t think it was bad. Shoulder wound, she thought, not likely to be lethal if he didn’t bleed out. He was breathing evenly, and she thought that he had probably lost consciousness from a blow to the head when he fell.

  Beyond her assistant engineer knelt a man she did not know. His long hair formed a curtain around his face, obscuring it, and he appeared to be crying. He was still armed, but the gun hung limply in his hand, the muzzle resting lightly on the floor. Park’s daughter stood in front of him, her hair in two short pigtails behind her. It would be very difficult for Dinah to fire on him without hitting the girl. As Dinah watched, the girl reached out and touched his cheek, wiping off a tear. The man trembled in response and looked up at her.

  Without taking her eyes off his face, Gwen slowly and deliberately reached down to the stranger’s hand and gently pulled the gun away from him. He did not resist. A second later she stood, holding the gun limply at her side just as he had a moment ago. Her finger was not on the trigger.

  Dinah moved. She clambered to her feet and leveled her own gun at the man. Her slightly awkward gait carried her down the hallway. The man looked at her briefly, but he seemed to care only about the girl in front of him.

  “Gwen,” she said, and the spell was broken. Startled, Gwen whipped around to see Dinah. With her attention diverted, Dinah thought that if the man was going to try to take the gun back from the child, he would never get a better chance. He did not try.

  “Give me the gun,” Dinah said, and held out her other hand. The girl looked down at the weapon in her grip, then handed it over as if it were a venomous spider. She ignored both of them and knelt before her father.

  Dinah looked the man in the face, and he looked broken. She leveled the pistol at his head. He looked away from her and to Gwen, who was shaking her father in an attempt to awaken him. Park muttered vaguely.

  “I’m sorry,” the man on his knees said to the girl. “Please forgive me.”

  Dinah had no intention of doing so. Her finger tensed on the trigger, and she visualized the moment when the bullet would enter the man’s head. She thought about Don Templeton, a man whom she had worked with for the past two years and had genuinely liked. The sound of her own teeth grinding came to her. She could feel the moment perfectly, and then she glanced down at Gwen. Dinah was more than capable of executing this man in front of an eight-year-old girl, but she knew that she should not.

  Instead, she tucked the man’s pistol into her waistband and tapped her watch.

  “Overton, get to corridor C3 as fast as you can.” She didn’t wait for him to reply before she keyed another sequence.

  “Captain, I have him,” she said tersely.

  “Did you kill the bastard?” Staples asked, anger straining her voice.

  “He’s… contained,” she replied.

  Dinah looked down at Gwen and her father. Park was stirring now, his hand pressed to his bloody shoulder, and he was glancing around in confusion at the scene. His eyes found his daughter, and he reached out to clasp her to him.

  “That girl saved your life,” Dinah said to their would-be killer.

  The man did not look back at her. Instead, he watched the father hold the girl. “No,” he said quietly. “My soul.”

  Dinah did not know or care what he meant by that. “Whatever,” she replied.

  They stayed like that, frozen, for the thirty or so seconds it took Overton to appear. As soon as he did, Dinah flicked the safety on the pistol she held and tossed it to him. In his surprise, he barely caught it, and he looked up in time for Dinah to grab him roughly by the shirt, kiss him violently, and then take off running without a word for the ladder at the end of the hallway.

  A minute later, Dinah saw Jang’s armed form standing by the ladder up to the cockpit. The doctor knelt below him, and he was rapidly wrapping a compression bandage around something. As she ran towards them, she made out the form of MacDonnell, the navigator, bloody and broken on the floor. The doctor was working on her arm, which to Dinah looked so damaged that she thought only the sleeve of her shirt was holding it together.

  “Make way,” she shouted. Jang stepped to the side quickly. The doctor looked at Dinah, who was sprinting towards him, at the ladder behind him, and finally at his patient, who was bleeding out on the floor between them.

  He straightened out and began, “Now just a minute-”

  Dinah accelerated and leapt over Charis, no mean feat given her current weight, and grasped the rungs set into the flooring-made-wall. She was breathing hard, but she surged up the ladder to the cockpit above. Without a word, the doctor bent back to his work.

  Staples watched the heaving and sweating form of her first engineer scramble to her feet in the cockpit. The captain had moved to Charis’ station to take over her duties, though she knew that she was a poor substitute for the woman.

  “Status?” Staples asked.

  She saw Dinah glance around the room and take in the damaged consoles, the shaken pilot, and Templeton’s body. It only took her a second, and then she was crossing to the tactical station.

  “Sir, Overton has the attacker. Park is down, but he’ll be okay I think. MacDonnell’s hurt bad, but the doc’s working on her. They’re at the bottom of the shaft, and Jang’s with them. We shouldn’t pull any high G maneuvers until they’re secured.” As she spoke, Dinah worked the controls in front of her, bringing flak guns online and opening missile tubes. “Time till intercept, Captain?”

  Staples looked back at the surface in front of her. “By Charis’ math, about two minutes.” She couldn’t believe it had been only eight minutes since the man had opened fire. She glanced out the cracked polycarbonate window in front of her. Since the nose of the ship was tilted, Mars appeared above them, but it was huge at this point. She could even make out Phobos, the larger of its two moons. The course Charis had plotted would take them within a few hundred kilometers of the planet.

  “Any idea why they haven’t launched long-range tac missiles at us yet?” she asked Dinah.

  “Because we’d have plenty of time to see them coming and shoot them down. The closer they are, the faster we have to react. There’s no reason for them to rush, sir. There’s nowhere for us to go, sir.”

  The light shudder of slugs against the hull came to them; they were all familiar with the experience by now. Staples pulled up the rearward camera display and saw the sleek dark shapes of the Nightshade class vessels closing on them.

  “I guess Charis’ estimates were off,” Staples said as though only slightly disappointed. “I thought we had another minute.”

  “Bethany,” Dinah said, “get ready to cut thrust so we can give them our broadsides. We should be ready for missiles and drones.”

  “Okay,” Bethany replied. Staples was amazed that her pilot was still functioning. Given all of the trauma the girl had been through not only in her life but in the past few weeks, she would not have been surprised if she had been catatonic right now. Instead, she was visibly frayed but still able to fly. Staples thought about the body of her first mate behind her, still strapped into his
chair, and her mind began to fracture. She pushed the image aside and tried her best to forget it for the moment. There was little doubt that the rest of the crew would be joining him in the next few minutes.

  Staples tapped the shipwide coms in front of her and said, “Prep for zero-G and combat maneuvers. We’ll go as easy as we can, but get yourselves strapped in.” Another fusillade of slugs struck the rear of the ship.

  An alert sounded on the surface in front of her. She brought it up, and it took her a few seconds to process the new data. “I think…” she said, her brow furrowed. “I think there are more ships. A lot more ships.”

  “I need coordinates, sir,” Dinah scolded.

  “Right…” she shook her head, trying to make sense of the radar return data. “Right in front of us.”

  She lifted her eyes to see a dozen or more vessels burning fiercely towards them. They had appeared from behind Phobos. Dinah saw them too.

  “They’re not Nightshades,” Dinah said to Staples, then added, “cut thrust,” to Bethany. A second later she said, “I’ve got missiles incoming. A dozen from our pursuers. Nothing from the new contacts. Give me broadside, Bethany.”

  Suddenly they were weightless for the first time in days. The crushing thrust that had made them all nearly two and a half times their normal weight for the past ten hours was gone, and despite the desperate and all but hopeless situation that faced them, Staples sighed in relief. The view began to change as Bethany turned the ship to bring the flak guns to bear on the incoming missiles.

  “A dozen,” Staples whispered. Anything else she might have said was drowned out by the deep throbbing of the flak guns. Dinah manipulated the controls furiously, trying to independently target three missiles at a time, a nearly impossible feat. The first missile detonated in a bright and silent flash that rocked the ship slightly.

  Alerts flooded the surfaces in front of her, and Staples did her best to sort through them. She concentrated on the new ships, and then she realized that they too had opened fire. More than thirty fast moving projectiles, missiles she thought, were thrusting their way at Gringolet at more than seven Gs of thrust. She opened her mouth to tell the other two women, then snapped it shut. If Dinah managed to shoot down the rest of the missiles Victor’s ships had fired at them, it would have been one of the best efforts of point defense ever performed. She saw no reason to tell them that twice as many and more were approaching from their other side.