The Hunters of Vermin

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Too bad there isn’t an auxiliary supply of whatever fuel it is that keeps pilots going.

  Then it hit him.

  The Union Space Navy, in what passed for wisdom for an organization of that size and purpose, has provided exactly that. It was called “G4.” Max suspected that the name stood for some convoluted chemical term, but every pilot who had ever used it agreed that “G4” could mean only one thing: “GO GO GO GO!”

  His hand shaking from exhaustion, Max managed to stab the orange/red button directly in front of his left knee. A small drawer slid out, carrying a big, fat pressure syringe. Max knew that the gas ampule at the top had enough power to punch through an armored pressure suit which, thankfully, Max wasn’t wearing now.

  “Warning,” the computer intoned. “Pilot emergency stimulant injector has been deployed. Use of emergency stimulant presents significant hazards including, heart attack, stroke, cerebrovascular accident . . . .”

  “Discontinue warning. All that shit is a hell of a lot less hazardous to my health than crashing this fucker into the forest floor.” Max rarely said things like that out loud, knowing that the computer recorded every word.

  Oh well.

  Max popped the cap off of the syringe and stabbed it into his thigh, depressing the red thumb button as he did so. Max expected the gentle “hiss” one normally heard with pressure syringes. This one went “BANG!” and hit Max’s leg like a small caliber rifle round.

  “Jeeeeeeezus!” he shouted.

  It took only three seconds before Max felt the drug hit him. It was like being kicked in the head by a pharmaceutical mule. The cobwebs went away. Max’s hands stopped shaking. Strength returned to his muscles.

  Now, I’m flying on my twenty-liter reserve. Gotta set’er down before that tank runs dry, or it’ll be far worse for me than Cousin Maurice’s crawfish farm.

  Of course, all this time, Max had been fighting to keep his vessel in the air and headed toward what he hoped would be a reasonably soft landing.

  Unfortunately, in the moments leading up to the injection, the ship’s deteriorating aerodynamic control and Max’s exhaustion meant that, by the time he got the Nightshade pointed more or less in the right direction, he had overshot the glide path by several hundred meters. The necessary course correction required him to edge the ship slowly toward the correct line of approach without making any sort of sharp maneuver that would cost him precious velocity and lift. Union Space Navy officer training didn’t give Max the ability to ignore completely the adrenalin (much less the G4) coursing through his veins, so, even though the electronic control system meant that Max needed no unusual amount of effort to hold onto the yoke or to move it in the desired direction, he found himself holding it in a white-knuckled, death grip as he fought the tendency of the ship to dart first in one direction and then another.

  He paid for each zig and zag with the precious and dwindling currencies of altitude and velocity that this planet’s gravity and atmospheric friction exacted for crossing the remaining distance to the lake, knowing that he probably wouldn’t survive the landing even then.

  If I make it to the lake my death is highly probable.

  But if I don’t it’s highly certain.

  Max allowed himself a quarter of a minute inner smirk time at the “highly certain” usage error before another zig of unusual force, probably caused by a downdraft as Max crossed over a small lake filled with water from a cold spring, banked the ship and dropped it with a lurch, shooting it off course over 200 meters to the left and robbing Max of 163 meters of precious altitude and 250 meters per second of velocity. Max gradually corrected and winced at his new and much diminished speed and distance from the ground. A glance at the computer’s glide path projections confirmed his suspicions.

  I’m not going to make it.

  He wasn’t going to be far short--just over 100 meters--but undershooting the lake by as much as millimeter would be enough to kill him, not by the short contact with dry land, but because to be that short also meant that he wouldn’t have enough altitude to clear the trees that grew around the lake. In just over three minutes, the ship was going to crash into those trees.

  Over the years, morbid curiosity had led Max to review reports of hundreds of spacecraft crashes. He had seen that, although--without exception--the pilots had died in either case, ships that struck densely spaced trees at a shallow angle generally bled off enough velocity that they came to rest either in the tree canopy or on the surface. The pilots’ bodies and their ships were usually in better condition than the ones that just plowed into the ground.

  Of course, Max didn’t have to wait to die messily in the crash. He could end it now, and more easily, of course. His sidearm was readily at hand and a single bullet would end it all without the prospect of a lingering death as he bled out in the pilot’s seat.

  But, Max didn’t pick up the 10 mm Browning-Beretta M-62 “Grizzly.” He just continued his struggles to keep the Nightshade in the air, keeping himself alive for just a few seconds more.

  For the second time in the last few weeks, Max remembered Commodore Hornmeyer’s remarks to the effect that every solution you implement doesn’t have to be the ultimate answer to the fix you’re in, so long as you find a way to stay in the fight just a little while longer. According to “Big Horn,” entire wars have been won “because some grim, stubborn bastard had enough grit in his gizzard and iron in his backbone to stay in the fight just a little while longer.”

  And, that’s what Max was going to do. He would struggle to keep his ship in the air. He would fight to keep flying and keep from dying.

  For just a little while longer.

  He was not going to stop trying to find a way to survive. Of course, the calculating part of Max’s mind knew to a high degree of certainty that his death was nigh. Yet, just as Max the Pilot continued to struggle for life in a brilliant display of flying skill, Max’s inner Vehicle Systems and Operations Officer continued trying to find a way to use the few systems not locked out by the Vaaach to squeeze out the extra increment of kinetic energy needed to get the ship to the lake. What he needed was some way of giving the ship a push to carry it that extra hundred meters or so. It wouldn’t even have to be much of a push. Just a nudge, really, only 60 or 70 kiloNewtons, the output of a small aircraft jet engine for two or three seconds would do it. His maneuvering thrusters would do the trick.

  If they worked.

  Burning a few hundred pounds of conventional rocket fuel and oxidizer in the main sublight’s exhaust nozzle would also suffice.

  If he had it.

  I might as well ask for a million kN thrust for an hour and a half, because there’s no way I come up with so much as a single Newton for a single second.

  Almost reflexively, and without quite admitting to himself that he was going to experience what some pilots liked to call “sudden ground contact,” Max began to run through the Hasty Crash Preparation Checklist. He couldn’t carry out most of the steps on the list because the Vaaach had locked him out of the relevant systems or controls, so he made rapid progress.

  Max liked to read checklist items two or three at a time because, by design, many sequential items on the list involved switches or controls that were near one another. Items 16 and 17 were a case in point. In order to keep the propellant and oxidizer for the maneuvering and trim thrusters from exploding in a crash, the standard procedure was to vent both substances from the ship at least several seconds before impact.

  In particular, Item 16 called for the pilot to detonate pyrotechnic charges blowing the emergency seals on the aft set of tanks containing the hydrazine/unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine propellant (known since Jurassic Space days as “Aerozine 50”) for the maneuvering thrusters. The pressure already in the tanks, and a supply of pressurized helium that the charges would also release, would expel the fuel through the normal feed lines and be shunted to the aft maneuvering nozzles where, presumably, it would be dispersed in the ship’s wake.


  Item 17 called for Max to wait for five seconds after blowing the first set of charges and then repeat the same process as Item 16, but this time with the tanks that supplied nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer to the maneuvering thrusters so it could be vented in the same manner.

  “The delay is necessitated,” remembered Max from his training, “because the propellant and oxidizer are hypergolic, meaning that contact with one another, even in the absence of an ignition source, will result in instantaneous and spontaneous combustion of these two substances. Accordingly, simultaneous venting of propellant and oxidizer is extremely hazardous and is to be avoided.”

  I’m gonna crash. The last goddamn thing I need to deal with is “spontaneous and instantaneous combustion.”

  Max verified that he had a control circuit pathway that would enable him to blow the tank seals. The appropriate lines and boxes on the relevant display were green, so Max reached for the box labeled VENT PROP TANK with his right hand.

  And snatched it back.

  Combustion! Spontaneous and instant combustion in the aft maneuvering thrusters!

  That might not be such a bad thing. Not bad at all.

  The Vaaach-imposed system lockouts kept him from using the rear maneuvering thrusters in their normal operating mode to give the ship a push. But, if Max didn’t wait the five seconds between performing an emergency blow on the seals for the Aerozine and the N2O4 tanks, same fuel and oxidizer that normally burned in the maneuvering thrusters would flow from the same tanks and through the same pipes that normally fed the maneuvering thrusters, burning in the maneuvering thrusters’ combustion chambers and ejecting hot gases through the maneuvering thrusters’ nozzles.

  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and shows up during duck season, then it’s probably just like firing the aft maneuvering thrusters.

  Or something.

  Except that that this “duck” was more like the fishy-tasting and somewhat duck-like coot known to Cajuns as the poule d’eaux because, unlike in normal thruster operation, he would have no control over the power or duration of the burn. And, unless he missed a guess, a burn resulting from an emergency dump would produce far higher temperatures and thrust than a controlled thruster firing.

  Max had the computer run a few quick computations based on tank capacity, flow rates, predicted combustion efficiency in thrust chambers not designed to accept fuel and oxidizer at such high rates, drag coefficients, lift to drag ratios and a few other variables. The computer’s best estimate was that blowing the tanks simultaneously would provide 13.7 kN of thrust, significantly more than Max needed. The sudden acceleration would probably render the ship unstable. Max could only hope that the instability was slight enough that some fancy stick work on his behalf would suffice to keep from using his ship as the galaxy’s most expensive ditch digger.

  It would also subject the nozzles for those thrusters to higher-than-rated temperatures and pressures, reducing their service life and requiring that they be replaced several years early.

  Which would be far better for them than scattering them all over some alien landscape to be found by some Union survey team a hundred or more years from now. Max could just hear some planetary survey field scientist from the year 2400 saying “What are these pieces from a Union SFR-52 recon fighter doing way out here?”

  Still flying the increasingly unstable ship with his left hand, Max input a series of commands to have the computer simulate dozens approaches and landings to determine when to blow the tanks and what flying techniques to use to give him the best chance of survival.

  It took only a few seconds for the system to inform Max that his best shot was to blow the tanks about 1500 meters short of the lake and fly the ship as level as possible during the burn. The fuel would exhaust itself about 200 meters short of the shore, at which point Max should “flare out,” by raising the nose of the ship to just below the stall point and ride the decelerating ship down to the water, when Max would hit the switch that reconfigured the deflectors from aerodynamic to hydrodynamic mode allowing the ship to use the lake as a breaking system to bring it to a stop. Then Max would simply fire an omni-grappler into the shore and winch the ship onto the land.

  Unless, of course (and far more likely), Max lost control during the landing causing the ship to tumble and break up. Or, unless he maintained control but had too much velocity and slammed the Nightshade into the opposite shore.

  He hated to do it, but Max couldn’t help but key up the computer’s outcome estimates:

  Probability of vehicle destruction: 23.3%

  Probability of vehicle damage not repairable under field conditions: 63%

  Probability of pilot fatality: 42.9%

  Probability of pilot serious injury (incl. fatality): 84.2%

  Probability of pilot intermediate or greater injury: 95.7%

  This is going to hurt.

  That’s one of the reasons for having inertial compensation systems on spacecraft--to keep the pilots from getting turned into fist-sized blobs of reddish purple dessert gelatin when they had a rough landing. With that system working, Max could have been reasonably sure of surviving the landing more or less uninjured. Now, he would be lucky to survive the landing in good enough shape to treat his own injuries.

  Max watched the distance to the lake’s edge count down on one of his displays. He glanced at the feed from the forward optical scanner, giving him a view something like what he would see through the front window, if his ship had a front window. He could see the lake ahead and the forest’s tall trees that were whipping past at a speed that somehow managed to be uncomfortably high because he knew that hitting these trees here would be fatal, and uncomfortably slow because his eyeballs and instincts were telling him he didn’t have enough velocity to get to the lake.

  Or, at least, he wouldn’t have enough velocity but for the kick in the pants he was about to administer.

  Here it comes.

  At 1500 meters, Max hit one of the “pilot trigger” buttons on his yoke that he had configured to blow the rear trim thruster fuel and oxidizer tanks. There was an immediate crack as the small but powerful pyrotechnic charges blew to vent the tanks, followed almost immediately by a hard push accompanied by a loud, shrieking roar as the maneuvering thrusters burned the flood of propellant at far higher than their rated pressure and temperature. Max did his best to steer the ship straight and level while the hypergolic thrust pushed it toward the lake.

  The burn lasted only eight tenths of a second, but it was enough to boost Max’s speed by the 30 or so meters per second necessary to get him to his destination, now only 42 seconds away.

  The ship’s speed began dropping the moment the thrusters burned out. The rate of slowing seemed to increase as Max imagined that he could feel the planet’s atmosphere getting a firmer and firmer grip on the ship as it cut through the air. It was not Max’s imagination, though that the ship became even more difficult to control as the speed bled down below 1300 kilometers per hour.

  WHAM WHAM WHAMWHAMWHAM

  The ship clipped the top of several trees with surprising noise and violence. Max felt the impacts through his feet and his seat and had to pull back on the yoke to compensate as the collisions caused the ship to pitch down. He had scarcely time to get the ship’s nose back up before a loud boom followed by a push from below and behind told him that his shock wave had hit the lake, flashing some of the water to steam in a small explosion creating its own shock wave pushing against the ship.

  A louder boom less than a quarter second later signaled the impact of the atmosphere deflector boundary with the water. More water flashed to steam, exerting a strong upward force on the ship’s stern. The nose of the ship started to come down and it was apparent to Max that he could not tweak his makeshift deflector based flying wing enough to compensate. There was only one thing left to do.

  Max shut down the entire deflector system but for a set of tiny winglets projecting from the nose. With the lift from the rear of the s
hip cut off and the airfoils in the bow generating lift, the nose of the ship came up again, returning it to a flyable attitude. But, Max cringed because, with most of the deflectors shut down, what he had planned to be a four or five second, fairly gentle descent as the interaction between the water and the deflectors slowed the ship causing it to gently touch down on the water was going to turn out to be . . . .

  WHAM! The ship dropped like a rock, hit the water at a shallow angle, and became airborne again like a stone skipped across a pond.

  This is bad.

  Max’s landing calculations had been predicated on his setting the ship down on the surface of the lake and the friction with the water acting to slow the ship from that moment until it came to rest. If the ship were skipping instead of landing, it would retain too much of its velocity and crash into the opposite shore in a manner distinctly not conducive to the health of the pilot.

  WHAM! The ship struck the water again, this time at a slightly slower speed, and skipped back into the air.

  Shit.

  Max thought about configuring the deflectors to project a hydrodynamic shape into the water that would hold the ship to the surface on the next skip and create enough friction to slow it down enough for him to survive. But, in the few seconds available to him, Max knew that he could not create a hydrofoil that would prevent the ship from skipping, create the appropriate amount of friction, all without simply causing the ship to dive into the water because the drag would come only from beneath the ship without a balancing force from above. The end would be disaster. After all, the ship was a recon fighter, not a submarine.

  Submarine. Maybe it can be a submarine, for only a few seconds.

  A space vehicle is inherently airtight, and a fighting space vehicle is structurally strong enough to withstand being submerged in water to a depth of several hundred meters. The Nightshade could serve as submarine, albeit not a very good one.

  Max quickly roughed out and implemented a deflector shape in which a long keel extended from the ship’s underside with a set of steerable hydrofoils at the bottom, and the rest of the ship was enclosed in a traditional submarine shape--a cylinder with a rounded bow. He also programmed a sequence of deflector changes to occur once the ship reached the surface.