The Hunters of Vermin

by H. Paul Honsinger

  As the ship descended for what would have been another skip, the deflector-keel struck the water and would have pushed the nose straight into the water but for the hydrofoils which were rotated with their leading edges down, exerting a counterbalancing force pushing the nose up.

  The ship quickly smacked into the water and submerged, at which point the keel automatically retracted and a pair of control planes extended from the bow and a “t” shaped set of planes formed aft. With the ship completely under water, there was much greater friction to slow it, but Max wasn’t sure that even that much friction would be enough after two skips had used up almost a third of the lake’s diameter.

  To make his landing run longer, Max started to steer the ship in a serpentine pattern. His limited control was enough for him to turn only about 10 degrees to the right and left, but it was better than nothing. The steering was very rough, making his “S” curves jagged and irregular. Of greater worry was depth control. The ship was “porpoising,” pitching up and down causing corresponding rapid depth changes. The lake was very deep, about 400 meters--probably having been carved by a glacier. But, it wasn’t the bottom Max was worried about. With the ship insisting on diving as far down as 95 meters, Max was worried about the deflectors.

  Another pitch down, this one steeper than the others. Max watched in horror as the depth gauge showed a rapidly increasing value. He was using all the control surfaces available to him, and knew that what he was doing would cause the dive to bottom out at some point, but had not yet succeeded in pulling out of the dive.

  The ship passed through 120 meters, and Max cringed. He didn’t know the exact depth but he knew that pretty soon . . . .

  A deafening BOOM signaled the moment at which the increasing water pressure overcame the weakened deflectors and the lake’s water was flowing over the decidedly unhydrodynamic shape of the ship rather than the smooth contours traced by the deflectors. With a wrenching twist the ship inverted and dove almost straight down, striking the lake’s bottom at the still considerable speed of about 160 kilometers per hour. Max was thrown against his seat restraints harder than he had ever felt before as he heard several of his bones crack and felt something that he could only describe as his “insides tearing.” The lights in the control cabin stayed on and the ship remained water tight. On the other hand, but for a few green lights on the reactor and environmental systems panels, every other status indicator turned red or orange and started blinking rapidly.

  The pain would take as long as a minute before it filtered through all the confusion in Max’s nervous system, but shock took only a few seconds to take hold. Max’s vision blurred and his awareness began to fade as he scanned the status displays.

  Too bad there’s not more green lights to go with all that red. It would look like Christmas. I always liked Christmas. My mother would sing . . . her voice was so beautiful . . . “Joyeaux Noel. Son étoile est montée, Joyeaux Noel, Le roi est né.”

  It was with a pleasant recollection of Christmas during early childhood, with his father and mother in their modest, rural home on Nouvelle Acadiana, and the smile brought on thereby, that Max faded into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 3

  16:55 Zulu Hours, 19 July 2304

  Green.

  Max slowly opened his eyes only to be nearly blinded by the bright light that seemed to suffuse into his surroundings from every direction. Light that, for some odd reason, was vividly green. Max’s eyes had the feeling of not having been used for a while as they felt gritty and it took two or three full minutes before he could get his eyelids to stay open, his eyes to focus, and his brain to assemble a coherent image of his surroundings. During that time, Max’s mind retraced his steps from pulling his Nightshade out of the hangar at Rathmell station to nosediving that same Nightshade to the bottom of an unknown lake on an unknown planet orbiting an unknown star. He remembered in particular the sound of various parts of his precious pink body snapping, tearing, and otherwise sustaining serious injury.

  Which is why, once Max had managed to open his eyes and conduct a quick visual scan of his surroundings, he was profoundly surprised to find his body intact and without any sign of having been bent, folded, stapled, or mutilated. He was covered with a light blanket, lying on what looked like a conventional hospital bed, save that the mattress was far more comfortable than any he had encountered in any naval hospital, and that the dimensions didn’t exactly square with standard hospital beds as he remembered them. Max saw no evidence that he was physically restrained in any way. For all he knew, he could hop off the bed and walk out the nearest door. In fact, unless he was very much mistaken, he would be checking that door sometime in the next two minutes to see if it is locked.

  On the other hand, Max saw no evidence that he was in the custody of the Vaaach. But, he also saw nothing of the tan and green color scheme characteristic of Krag facilities, so at least he probably wouldn’t see any of their ugly twitching whiskers anytime soon. For all Max knew, some other race--a race about whom Max knew even less than about the Vaaach--had him in their keeping. He had no idea what these aliens, whoever they might be, had in mind for him.

  Max’s naval training taught that there were things one did in this kind of situation. The first was of these was “assessment.”

  Ah, yes, can’t skip assessment. This is the step where I must carefully, rationally, with a maximum of resourcefulness and a minimum of fear, determine to what degree I am totally, absolutely, and completely screwed.

  Even so, taking thorough stock of the situation at this point wasn’t entirely stupid. Max found himself in a loose-fitting, lightweight, short-sleeved one-piece garment, similar in cut to the navy’s jumpsuit-like working uniform but made out of thin, cotton-like fabric, like pajamas. Under the blanket, Max’s feet were bare. He very gingerly tested his ability to move, and found that he could shift his position on the bed with only a few slight twinges and minor soreness. He sat up so he could get a better look at his surroundings.

  The bed was situated in a structure that looked more solid than a tent but less permanent than a full-blown building. He was in a roughly ten meter square windowless room with a single door. The walls and roof appeared to be made of some kind of plastic-like material, fashioned into translucent sheets rigidly locked together—somehow--at the edges.

  The room contained Max’s bed, a compact but advanced-looking surgical set up, a few rolling carts and sets of shelves loaded with equipment and supplies, eleven pallets of what looked to Max like medical supplies, and what appeared to be four different kinds of diagnostic imaging machines, each on its own wheeled base. There was also a small square-topped table about the right size and height to serve as a dining table for two to four people, along with two chairs.

  The green color came mainly from sunlight filtering through the structure’s panels, which were made of a green material, and from the artificial lighting from fixtures spaced about two meters apart along the tops of the walls giving off a spectrum that was very strong in the green band. When he looked more closely at the panels, Max could see their color wasn’t uniform, but that the panels were a mosaic of dozens of overlapping leaf-shaped areas, each a slightly different shade of green and each transmitting a slightly different amount of sunlight, creating the impression of being under a canopy of trees in a dense subtropical forest rather than in an artificial structure.

  The only source of natural light was through the panels as there were no windows. Max pulled back the blanket, hopped down from the bed, and walked on unsteady legs to the room’s one door. By the time he got there, he was walking as well as he ever had.

  He tried the door. Locked, with the hinges on the other side and no visible lock mechanism. Max surmised that it must be biometric, opening only for certain personnel with approved access.

  No way out. I’m trapped.

  Max had scarcely been able to come to this conclusion when he heard the unmistakable sound of a door opening and closing. There was a dist
inct echo.

  That echo says “long corridor.” Okay, Mr. Young Naval Officer on an Intelligence Gathering Mission, what does the presence of a long corridor attached to this room tell you?

  It tells me that I’m trapped in a room that has a long corridor attached, that’s what. I’m a sixteen-year-old recon pilot, not Sherlock Fucking Holmes, so what the hell do I know about what a long corridor means to me right now. Okay, here’s my brilliant deduction. The presence of a long corridor means the following: I’m scared shitless that before long I’m going to hear alien footsteps echoing down that corridor as some ten-eyed purple hexapedal alien with nine hundred and seventy-seven poison-injecting fang-teeth comes to torture me for information, or do medical experiments on their first captured human, or just keep me locked up until I go crazy and die.

  How’s that for brilliant reasoning?

  No, Max, you’re gonna have to do better than that. A lot better. I’m too scared to think straight, but if I’m gonna live through this thing, I’ve got to get my brain working.

  Max took a deep breath to clear his mind. He remembered something Admiral Middleton said in one of his famous recorded lectures to a group of young officers: “Clear thought is like a river issuing from an ever-flowing spring. Yet, even with an unending source of water, some parts of the river can dry up--not because there isn’t enough water, but because something is blocking the flow. Self-doubt. Hesitation. Second-thoughts. Fear. They are like logjams, dams, and sand bars choking the stream. Create a clear mental image of yourself removing them. Dynamite the logjams. Breach the dams. Dredge the sand bars. Visualize the waters as they run their course to the sea. You will find the answers you seek.”

  Too bad my “stream” is more of a trickle. But, I’ll work with what I’ve got. He took several deep breaths while creating a visual image of a middling-sized creek from which he imagined himself removing some obstructing rocks and tree branches, and then saw himself knocking over some sand banks that confined the flow. He visualized the water moving more swiftly and spreading into new channels. He felt his mind start to work again, transitioning haltingly from frightened rabbit mode to the kind of thinking expected of a young naval officer.

  Now that the naval Corps of Engineers has worked on my little creek, let’s see what we can figure out. Okay, if there is a long hall that means a few things. First, this isn’t just some temporary medical hut thrown up for my benefit. That echo sounds like a corridor at least sixty or seventy meters long. So, this is a facility, at least a hundred meters long and—allowing for the width of this room and for a room on the other side of the hall, probably no less than forty meters wide, with multiple rooms with different functions. Second, a facility with that kind of size, containing the miniature hospital found in this room and at least one “prisoner,” pretty strongly implies the presence of armed personnel with the training and equipment to track me down if I escape from here. Third, because they went to a lot of trouble to repair my crash injuries, there’s a good chance that these aliens have some sort of specific plans for me—plans that require that I be kept here, alive, at least for the time being. Which implies, fourth, that they will go to a lot of trouble to hunt me down and bring me back if I get out, but probably won’t kill me. Therefore, fifth, if I’m going to get out, I’m going to have to somehow convince these guys to let me go and to help me get to my ship.

  And, just how the hell do I expect to convince these aliens to do anything?

  Max listened to the footsteps, which sounded very odd to him. He couldn’t figure out what kind of being would make steps that sounded like that. But, he could tell that the footsteps, for the moment, were getting fainter as the owner of the feet in question walked away from Max’s location. Although that meant Max was safe for now, it also meant that someone was moving around in the building and Max was pretty sure whoever it was would check on him before too many minutes passed. Someone, or something was going to come for him, and Max could not count on it being even slightly friendly, much less that it would follow the customs and treaties that the beings in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the galaxy observed in their treatment of prisoners of war.

  Max was totally helpless, without even the flimsy protection of the Laws of War. The Interstellar Red Cross would never find him. These beings, whoever they were, were free to do to him whatever they liked. Max didn’t like that one bit, as he very greatly desired not to be vivisected, beaten by sadistic captors for their own entertainment, starved, subjected to hideous medical experiments probably involving anal probes and electrified needles in his eyeballs, or to end up as chunks of succulent meat floating around in some alien’s equivalent of a gumbo pot.

  If aliens are like my people, they will pay attention to that last detail. “Remember, cher,” said the old Paw Paw purple alien to the adolescent purple alien, “humans are very hard to skin and field dress, but sure do taste good in gumbo.”

  Max rummaged around in the room, hoping to find his boarding cutlass, which was nowhere to be found. Neither was his sidearm nor his dirk nor anything else made to serve as a weapon.

  Having managed to calm himself enough to think clearly and analyze his situation, Max found the result of that analysis anything but calming. Quite the reverse, in fact. Alone in an alien facility, with no weapons and no knowledge of his captors’ intentions, and with no hope of rescue by Union forces, Max judged himself to be in dire, extreme, and deadly peril. Throughout Max’s naval training, the refrain had been that the most important thing to do when in dire, extreme, and deadly peril was to avoid panic.

  This was not a problem for Max. No, no, not a problem at all. Max was not trying to remain calm in the face of panic; he was trying to remain calm in the face of abject, deer in the headlights, mind shredding, blood-curdling scream bloody murder terror strong enough to reduce him to a quivering mass curled up in a fetal position on the floor in a puddle of his own piss and shit crying for his mommy.

  Calm yourself, Max. If you freak out, you’ll die. Bet on it.

  He took a deep breath from the diaphragm. Another. Then, he relaxed his muscles by focusing on each muscle group from head to toe. In particular, he found that his shoulders were scrunched together and rounded forward. After about two minutes, Max found that he could think again with at least some clarity.

  “When stripped of his weapons, often an enterprising spacer can improvise weapons with materials and artifacts readily to hand.” Now, that’s odd, I can remember that statement verbatim but I don’t remember which training manual it comes from.

  But, I DO remember thinking it was fucking stupid when I learned it. What the hell am I supposed to do? Jeez, I don’t even know whether this rock has a breathable atmosphere, is bathed in deadly radiation, or is swarming with quadrillions insects with a taste for the tender, pink flesh of Union Naval Lieutenants. Even if I can get out, and somehow manage to survive outside, what happens then? Do I scrabble around the landscape with absolutely no idea of the geology and mineralogy of the planet, much less of the particular area, and--miracle of miracles!—fortuitously find coal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate (particularly miraculous because I don’t know what naturally occurring potassium nitrate looks like) all within a few hundred yards of one another, find some way to grind them fine enough to burn evenly, come up with some method of measurement that would allow me to mix them together in the proper proportion (whatever that is), then find some kind of tube that’s closed on one end but open on the other, some way of making a touch hole in it, some smallish hard objects to serve as shot, and a way to set the whole thing off? Bullshit. Anyone lucky enough to have all these improbable events break in his favor is too lucky to fall into the enemy’s hands in the first place.

  But Max didn’t have time to figure out how to break out, much less to break out and prospect for minerals he could combine to make gunpowder. Someone could come through the door any minute. He dashed over to a large cabinet with what looked like the kind of flimsy lock one puts on desks and fil
e cabinets containing non-classified material--the kind designed to deter children, casual thieves, and snoopers. Right beside the cabinet was a set of shelves holding medical supplies such as gauze pads, tape, and bandages. There were a few bundles of instruments inside clear plastic cases. He found one that contained a couple of probes that looked about right for his purposes.

  Max inserted the probes into the lock in the manner taught to him by Larry “Light Fingers” Lafourche (pronounced “la foosh”), a midshipman two years ahead of Max on the USS San Jacinto who used their common Cajun heritage as an excuse to take Max under his wing. A very old knife stuck into a very old scar in Max’s soul twisted through five or six full revolutions as Max remembered how Larry had been tortured and killed by the Krag when they boarded the old San Jacinto.

  Max could still hear the poor boy’s screams.

  Roughly kicking that memory back into the malodorous swamp from which it had clawed its way onto dry land, Max jiggled the tools in what he hoped was just the right way for an alien lock mechanism he had never seen before, felt a reassuring click, and turned the lock mechanism through two thirds of a rotation and felt the lock open. Max threw open the doors of the cabinet and smiled broadly as what he saw was clearly shelf after shelf holding hundreds of pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

  Thanks, Larry. I bet I can make some mischief with this stuff.

  He then looked at the labels on the bottles.

  Oh, fuck all.

  As one would expect in an orderly medical facility, all of the bottles were labeled. And, as one would expect in an alien medical facility, all of the bottles were labeled in an alien language. Not only was the language alien, even the script in which it was written was totally strange to Max. The writing looked like someone took a raccoon’s paw, coated the foot pads with ink, and then pressed the paw again and again on a piece of paper while holding one or more of the toes selected at random from touching the paper. Max presumed that a paw print with the first and fourth toe pulled up was one character, one with only the last toe pulled up was another, and so on.