The Hunters of Vermin

by H. Paul Honsinger

  When he got to the door, he fished out one of the Krag hands and placed it on the biometric scanner on the left side of the door. The scanner recognized the hand and, determining that the hand was still at or near body temperature and—therefore—was not a dead, severed limb—unlocked the door. Apparently, this planet was deemed to be of such low risk that a biometric scanner and an armed Krag inside were enough security that no access code was necessary. Once inside, Max threw both hands (the second was in case the scanner rejected the first) on the floor.

  Neither he, nor their now-dead owners, would have any further need of them.

  Max turned left into one of the facility’s main corridors and stopped in front of the first door on his right. This door, according to the Vaaach data, led to the secure part of the station.

  Max reached into a pocket and pulled out the plastic bag containing the eyes, removing one and holding it up to the retina scanner. The lock clicked open.

  Max tossed the bag on the floor, drew his sidearm with his right hand and his boarding cutlass with his left, and stepped inside. He crept down the corridor to the control room, which was only a few meters ahead on his left. The door was open, as the Vaaach data indicated was standard practice.

  Before he got to the door, he heard some loud squeaking and chittering, presumably Napoleon shouting to his comrades in the Krag language, which no human could understand without computer assistance.

  I wish I knew what the Krag bastard was saying.

  Unbidden, the translation presented itself to Max’s mind, thanks to the Vaaach implant.

  Damn, those little suckers are handy. I wonder if mine will keep working when I get back to the Union.

  Of more immediate interest, however, was what Napoleon was saying:

  “It’s about time you late-sleeping eaters of last year’s seeds returned. Did you find Doesn’t Look at You or has he slipped away to that secret place in the woods he’s always going to?”

  There was no way Max could answer. Neither he nor any other human could so much as say “Good morning” in Krag, as human speech organs were simply incapable of duplicating the sounds. Max’s only option was to speed up to engage Napoleon before the Krag figured out something was wrong.

  Quickly but in dead silence, Max slipped toward the open door. Max’s observations showed that Napoleon wasn’t anybody’s fool, so it would not be long before he deduced that something wasn’t right.

  “Who is there? Identify yourselves!”

  Max figured he had about five seconds before Napoleon hit the General Alarm, alerting the Krag sector command that something was going on in this system that required further investigation—and twelve thousand Union spacers died.

  This is no time for finesse.

  Max burst through the door, sidearm pointed at his best estimate, based on the Vaaach blueprints, of where the control console was.

  Max quickly brought the sights of his M-62 10 millimeter pistol to bear on . . . .

  Nothing.

  Honed by days of stalking through the forest attuned to the rustle of every leaf, Max’s senses alerted him to movement to his right, so he was looking in the right direction even before Napoleon, leaping over a two meter high bank of signal processing equipment, cleared the cabinets and came into view.

  As a result, Max had about a quarter of a second more time to react than he would have had a few days ago, and managed to start turning toward his attacker before the Krag was on him, a wicked-looking serpentine bladed dagger in its hand and murder in its eyes. The Krag’s momentum knocked Max to the ground and sent his sidearm flying. Max reflexively reached for where the Krag’s sidearm would be and saw that he wasn’t carrying. Inside facilities such as this one, lazy Krag garrison troops often left their sidearms in the armory.

  Max still had a grip on the cutlass with his other hand, but it was too long to be much good to him with the Krag close enough for Max to smell the grass seeds on its breath. He grabbed the Krag’s knife arm just as it started a stabbing motion toward Max’s heart. The Krag had the advantage of leverage but, while in general Krag could run faster, leap higher, and kick harder than humans, their upper body strength was somewhat less than that of their distant primate relatives.

  So, even though at a mechanical disadvantage, Max was able to stop the Krag’s arm and hold it in place, the dagger quivering with the extreme exertion of both human and rodent. They lay there, Krag on top of Max, both panting, both breathing each other’s air, the Krag’s viscous saliva dripping onto Max’s cheek.

  While Max’s right hand was engaged in holding the Krag’s left—the one with the dagger, Max grabbed wildly for the Krag’s throat with his own left. The Krag easily batted his hand away. In batting Max’s hand away with its right hand, the Krag pushed down harder with his left, creating a slight imbalance.

  That imbalance was all that Max needed. Although Max did not stand out from his peers in terms of his hand to hand combat skills, all Union naval personnel--midshipmen, recruits, and even officers all the way up to Grand Admiral, unless excused for medical reasons--wrestled and received other hand to hand combat training every day that they had access to an instructor.

  “All” meant “all.

  And, “every day” meant “every day.”

  Not every week day. Not every working day. Not every day on which it is convenient.

  Every. Fucking. Day.

  So, Max instinctively sensed the imbalance and—as taught in the navy’s hybrid fighting style—moved toward the enemy’s weakness which, in this case, was the Krag’s right side. This motion quickly flipped the two fighters, but not before the Krag was able to reach across and stab deeply into Max’s right bicep.

  Something wet and warm immediately splashed onto Max’s face, but he was too busy to notice as he pinned the Krag’s knife arm to its chest, drew his own dirk, and plunged it into the Krag’s heart, giving the weapon a vicious twist. Max felt the Krag’s last two heartbeats transmitted to his hand as two slight twitches of the dirk’s smooth, well-worn grip as he watched the life in the Krag’s eyes quickly dim and then go out.

  Never before had he experienced so intimately the death of another thinking being. The experience filled him with grim satisfaction.

  “That is for the officers of the USS San Jacinto.” He stood and gave the body two swift kicks. “And that is for pissing on their bodies before you spaced them. Burn in hell you rat. [Kick.] Fucking. [Kick] Bastard. [Kick].”

  Those three kicks were interest on your account earned since those men died.

  They were family.

  Now, I gotta move fast.

  Max knew that the station had a “dead man” switch that, if not manually operated every six minutes or so, would automatically trigger an alarm signal to sector command. If that signal were to be received, the nearest three Krag monitoring stations on their side of the FEBA would retarget their long-range metaspacial scanners on the system and, with their combined power, would be easily able to detect anything unusual.

  Like a Union task force jumping in.

  So he stepped over to the panel, located the switch, and pressed it. Only then did he notice he was dizzy and that his right arm hurt. He looked.

  Mother. Fucker.

  The arm was sliced open from elbow almost to the armpit. While the brachial artery wasn’t cut, several middling sized veins were sliced open such that Max was bleeding heavily. He judged the blood loss rate to be enough that, if he didn’t do something, he would be dead in half an hour or less.

  Union junior officers might be a little weak on their knowledge of philosophy, or economics, or the history of the First Age of Interstellar Exploration, but—like practically everyone in the fighting arms of the navy—they were well drilled in combat trauma treatment. And, more often than not, had a fair share of practical experience under field conditions thrown in for good measure.

  As a result, Max had a good idea what he was trying to do when he pulled the first aid kit off of h
is web belt and did the best he could with what he had—spraying the inside of the wound with antibiotic, squeezing a whole tube of Coag-U-Seal into the wound, and then wrapping it as tightly as he could.

  He was still bleeding, albeit more slowly.

  Too bad. More work to do.

  Having prevented an alarm, Max had another task ahead of him. Unfortunately, Max’s mission wasn’t like the typical TridVid drama where all he had to do was get inside the relay station, plant a few explosive charges, set the timers, and run like hell. In fact, following that plan of action would be a good way to get everyone in the task force killed.

  If the relay installation was destroyed, the warning system would drop off line, alerting sector command that something was amiss, and the game would be up in the same way as if time ran out on the dead man switch.

  So, the station had to remain up and running, sending valid signals back to sector command. The trick was to see that those signals continued to be sent, but that they showed no sign of the task force. This was accomplished by plugging the padcomp the Vaaach had given him into an outlet on the console using an adaptor provided by the Vaaach. Thus connected, software in the pad overrode the signal coming from the station’s sensors and supplied it with a signal showing that no enemy ships were in the area.

  That’s great. Except that if I keel over before the task force has passed, the dead man alarm will go off and the task force is screwed.

  The next hour was torture. Max shot himself up with vasoconstrictors to keep his blood pressure up so that he didn’t pass out from blood loss, but he still felt himself fading. He needed to stay awake only another forty-five minutes or so, but he could tell that he wasn’t going to make it unless he did something and there was nothing he could do. Without intravenous fluids, Max was going to keel over from hypovolemic shock, and a lot of people would die. Max knew that If the dead man switch was triggered after the task force passed, and the Krag long range scanners swept the system and found nothing, they would assume that something happened to the station, not that an invasion was underway. So, all he had to do was stay conscious until the task force cleared the system.

  It wasn’t very much to do. Yet, it might well be more than Max could manage.

  If I had plasma or even saline I could get my fluid volume up high enough to keep from going into shock long enough to get the job done, but I don’t have plasma and I don’t have saline. I’ve got syringes and a few drugs, but that’s not going to cut it.

  Max’s mind started to wander. Odd things kept surfacing in his mind. Bitch out sessions by Commodore Hornmeyer. Fatherly advice from Admiral Middleton. His mother singing him to sleep. His baby sisters’ laughter. His father’s enveloping bear hugs and the scent of his old-fashioned after shave.

  And, hundreds and hundreds of Star Ranger tips from old Handlebar Simms. One kept repeating in his mind:

  “Other than courage, the two things a ranger needs most are tenacity and resourcefulness. Tenacity means that the ranger never gives up. Resourcefulness means that the ranger is able to apply the things that he knows to the things he has on hand to make the things that he needs.”

  A lot of fucking good that does to me, Handlebar. What do I have that I can use to give myself a saline infusion? Jack squat, that’s what.

  Max’s stomach grumbled. A snack might go well right about now, but this was just about the worst time in human history for a snack, or . . . .

  Maybe not.

  Hungry teenage boy that he was, Max never went far without rations, even if it was a few packages of cheese crackers stuffed in some pockets. He pulled a few tiny salt packs from his vest. Max liked salt on his food. Lots of salt. He always kept dozens of single serving salt packs in his pack, in his pockets, in his quarters, and anywhere else he could think of. The Vaaach had left his supply of salt packs in Max’s pack, and he had transferred a handful (or two) into the pockets of his uniform.

  Now, it’s time for some math. Just what I need.

  He had two canteens of water on him, one of which was full. It contained exactly one liter of water. He also had a pocketful of salt (and pepper packets, and even a few miniature bottles of hot sauce, truth be told). The math was actually straightforward. After putting two pieces of chewing gum in his mouth, Max poured 18 of the 0.5 gram salt packets into the liter canteen, giving it a salinity of 0.9%, the same as human blood. He closed the canteen, and gave it several vigorous shakes. Then took one of the pre-loaded medkit syringes containing an antibiotic. He administered the antibiotic to himself by shooting it into his thigh muscle (what he was about to do was less than sterile, so the antibiotic was not a bad idea) and cut the pressure ampule off the end leaving the shaft and the needle.

  He then took out the plastic tubing that was supposed to allow him to drink from his canteen in a toxic environment while wearing his filter mask. He flipped open the cap within a cap on his canteen made for the tubing and screwed it into place. He then took the other end, shoved the shaft of the needle into it, and sealed it in place with the chewing gum.

  Talk about not sterile! Plus, that salt is iodized and has some kind of anti-caking agent, so I don’t know what that’s going to do to me in the long run. But, as long as I survive the next few minutes, it won’t matter.

  He inverted the canteen, allowing the water to force the air out of the tube and the syringe, after which he stuck the needle in a vein in his arm, an act that required seven painful trials because the vasoconstrictors had shrunk his veins to the point that his amateurish aim was not good enough to hit the mark on the first six tries.

  Having nothing to hang the canteen on, Max just held it in the air with his arm, which was decidedly less than comfortable.

  Max could still feel himself fading, but much more slowly now. He heard the Krag timer go off so he hit the dead man switch again, just as he saw the local monitor screens—the ones showing the incoming signals from the detector array but before being relayed to sector command—displaying the first ships from Hornmeyer’s task force jumping into the system. It took about twenty minutes for the whole task force to jump in and get into a widely dispersed formation, at which point the ships kicked in their compression drives and vanished from the system.

  Max needed to keep it together for just a few more minutes, to be sure that when his failure to hit the switch triggered the alarm, the Krag scans from their side of the FEBA wouldn’t pick up any compression wakes indicating that the task force had come through the system. Even with his makeshift fluid infusion, it took every ounce of will for Max to remain conscious with his arm in the air holding the canteen.

  But, as hard as he fought, he still felt things slipping away from him. The room dimmed and he heard the canteen hit the floor. He allowed himself to fall to the floor, hoping that being horizontal would give him an extra few minutes of consciousness so that he could hit the switch one more time and buy just a few more minutes of safety for his comrades.

  Just after he hit the floor, and before he could get up to check the timer so that he would hit the switch when due, he heard some odd footsteps and then saw a narrow, furry face peek over the console while a skinny, equally furry arm slapped the switch.

  “There you go again, impulsive young monkeyspawn doing the most creative and yet the most impulsive and foolhardy things. Because we have nanomonitors all through this facility, I was forced to watch you violate virtually every precept of sterile infusion procedure. Every precept, without exception, and in the most astonishingly risk-seeking manner. But, there you went, impulsive and foolhardy in everything you do. If your species gave names to beings based on personality traits instead of whatever it is you people name each other after, which I cannot at the moment manage to call to mind, that would be your name: Impulsive and Foolhardy. Only the Great Maker can begin to know how many dangerous and perhaps even lethal microorganisms you have introduced into your body with this ridiculous, improvised intravenous infusion device. I’ve never seen any more dangerous, co
bbled together, haphazard, and irregular medical instrumentality used on a sentient being in over 200 cycles of practicing medicine on more than twenty species. I dare not even begin to contemplate the probably astronomical number of toxins, impurities, and other deleterious materials coursing through your primate circulatory system even as we speak. More work for me to do, as if any being can even begin to keep up with the damage that one borderline psychotic young Union naval officer can do to his body when left without proper supervision by those with more age and greater sense. What’s a poor, overworked Bwhoid to do?”

  Epilogue

  12:47 Zulu Hours, 31 July 2304

  “Unidentified Union vessel, please provide a valid transponder code or verbal recognition. Failure to do so will result in your being fired upon! Unidentified Union vessel—“

  Max killed the audio while keying to reply on the same frequency. He noted that the signal was in Clear. Looking back on it, Max was getting the feeling that maybe he shouldn’t have used the Nightshade’s stealth capabilities in combination with his own innate sneakiness to slip into the heart of the formation and turn on his “I am here” transponder signal a scant 200 kilometers from the flagship.

  Note to self: sneaking up on the flagship, in a highly stealthed vessel, in a war zone, right after a battle . . . bad idea.

  “This is Union Reconnaissance Fighter Kilo Mike Romeo Hotel Seven Two Three Niner, Lieutenant (JG) Maxime T. Robichaux commanding. I don’t have a valid transponder code or a current code word. [Pause.] I’ve been away for a while.”