The Killer conference finished before she could quite pin down what they'd decided and the other spiders vanished from the network, leaving her spider alone. Chiyo and her twin moved further away from the central nexus to reintegrate and decide on a new course of action. Only one course of action seemed to make sense. She would have to create hundreds of copies of herself and start exploring the Killer network as thoroughly as possible. If she could figure out how to take control, or even to send a message…
She skimmed through the network until she found a vast tract of memory that served no purpose and slipped into it, reformatting it carefully until it suited her purposes. The one advantage of being a personality completely buried within the network was that she could actually see the network and defeat any routine security checks, ones configured to watch for self-aware viral packages. It was easy enough to create the illusion of her old room and bed back on Samaria and lie down on it, before starting to fission again into new copies. It wasn't quite like giving birth – as she acknowledged with a wry grin – but it would suffice. Besides, she’d always wanted children one day.
The Killers, she decided, as the first of her copies headed out to examine the Killer network from the inside, were never going to know what had hit them.
Chapter Twelve
Captain David Heidecker was composing a video letter to his wife, Sharon, when the Observer began to shake violently. The starship had watched from a distance – a distance the entire nine-man crew hope fervently was safe – as the Lightning’s attack wing and the Footsoldiers launched their assault on the Killer starship. They'd then spent a week floating in space, watching for any sign of a Killer response, but nothing had materialised.
He pulled himself to his feet, catching the edge of his desk as another shockwave threatened to send him sprawling onto the deck, and sprinted for the hatch. The one advantage of the tiny Alpha-class destroyers, far smaller than their massive Killer foes, was that every compartment on the ship was close to every other compartment. It only took seconds for him to reach the bridge and hurl himself into his command chair, just as yet another shockwave crashed over the destroyer.
“Report,” he snapped, clutching on to the chair’s arms for dear life. “What’s happening?”
“Major gravity waves, emitting from a source point two light years away,” the sensor officer reported, grimly. “I have been unable to locate their cause.”
“The Killers,” Heidecker snarled. Space wasn't as empty as most civilians believed; gravity waves, ion storms and countless other natural hazards bedevilled starships and their crews. Gravity waves were uniquely dangerous in that they travelled faster than light – the crew would have no warning about the danger before the first wave struck home – but waves on such a scale couldn’t have a natural cause. “Sound red alert and send a FLASH transmission to Sparta. The Killers are coming out to play.”
He leaned back in his chair as the display updated rapidly. “The gravity waves are focusing now,” the sensor officer added. “I’m picking up a Killer starship…two Killer starships” – he broke off in horror – “seventeen Killer starships, emerging from the gravity pulses and closing at four hundred times the speed of light.”
“Helm, prepare to take evasive manoeuvres,” Heidecker ordered, tightly. No one had ever seen more than three Killer starships together outside of one of their systems, no one. They didn’t seem to have the urge to build vast fleets, or to deploy them as a group, although normally the firepower of a single starship would be more than sufficient for any likely threat. They’d noticed the loss of the captured vessel, all right, part of his mind whispered. They’d brought an entire fleet to…discuss the issue with the humans who had captured it. “Time to intercept?”
“Nine minutes and counting,” the tactical officer reported. He sounded stunned; Heidecker couldn’t blame him. A single Killer starship would have been a hopeless foe for Observer; seventeen of them could probably exterminate the entire Defence Force without raising a sweat. Another shockwave hit the starship before he could continue. “They’re scanning local space with FTL sensors, sir; they know we’re here.”
Heidecker looked up towards the display. The daunting sight of so many massive vessels racing towards him was almost hypnotic, yet his training kept him from panicking. “Move us to a safe distance,” he ordered, calmly, refusing to consider that there might not be any such thing. “Keep updating the Admiral on our situation; anyone who wishes to open their recorders may do so.”
Observer started to shudder constantly as the Killer starships plunged closer. Heidecker braced himself for a collision, but the helm officer responded smoothly and pulled them out of the oncoming enemy fleet’s course. He looked down at the feed from the passive sensors as they slipped away; no one had seen any Killer starships using such sensors, or even travelling anywhere in such a hurry. The sheer scale of their power was terrifying. How had they worked up the nerve to attack and capture one Killer starship?
The shuddering seemed to fade away as the Killers raced towards their destination, coming to a sudden stop that should, by rights, have turned the crew into jelly. A human starship that attempted such a manoeuvre would have suffered immediate and terminal compensator failure, but the Killers just seemed to do it effortlessly. He glanced down at the plotting chart, but his hunch proved to be correct; they had stopped at the exact spot where the captured Killer starship had died.
“They’re quartering space pretty thoroughly,” the sensor officer said, grimly. He looked nervous – no, terrified; his implants were all that were keeping him from falling apart – as he studied his readings. “I doubt that there’s a single atom that they haven’t catalogued out there.”
Heidecker shared a long look with his tactical officer. “They won’t locate any debris, will they?”
“No sir,” the tactical officer said. “If the captured starship had experienced a complete matter-to-energy conversion it would have gone up like a small supernova. They could hardly have failed to miss the evidence as they came roaring in. No, they’ll probably know that the craft was moved after the Footsoldiers captured it and killed the alien operating the ship. If they don’t know where…”
Heidecker nodded. He’d kept abreast of what little the Admiral had allowed him to learn of the captured starship, but security considerations had forbidden him to know more than the bare minimum. One of the things he did know was that the Admiral was worried that there might be an emergency beacon on the Killer starship, but if the Killer fleet was examining its last known location instead of Star’s End, it suggested that there wasn't. It was an odd oversight – communications and life support were always the last things to go on a human starship – but perhaps it made sense to the Killers.
“Keep us well back,” he ordered. Somehow, he doubted the Killers would be ignoring any human starships today. The links to the other picket ships suggested that they were still being ignored, but the last set of updates reported that four of their targets had opened wormholes and vanished…perhaps to join the fleet hunting for their missing comrade. “Sensors…can they read us at this distance?”
“Uncertain, Captain,” the sensor officer said. “They scanned us earlier, but we are not putting out any kind of active radiation. They may be capable of maintaining a sensor lock using technology beyond our ability to detect, but if that’s the case, we have no way to know about it.”
“You don’t know, in other words,” Heidecker said, without anger. There were still far too many Unknowns about the Killers. “Keep watching them through passive sensors, but don’t go active without my direct order.”
He sat back in his command chair, feeling his implants slowly calming his mind and body. The one advantage they had was that the Killer starships were so vast they generated their own gravity fields, allowing them to be tracked through passive gravimetric sensors. They seemed to be remaining still, but it was anyone’s guess how long that would last. By now, even assuming strict parity wi
th human technology, they would know that their missing comrade was gone.
And what, he asked himself, would they do then? Would they start doing what human crews would do and start examining nearby systems, or would they come after Observer on the assumption that her crew could tell them where to find their missing comrade? Heidecker knew that if there was a chance of Observer falling intact into their hands – if they had hands – he had strict orders to trigger the self-destruct sequence and blow the starship, along with the recording implants in their brains, to atoms. He looked down at the communications screen that should have linked him with Sparta, and the Admiral, but it was silent. Sparta wasn't trying to micromanage from their distance, for which he was silently grateful. The last thing he needed was some desk jockey trying to run the encounter from thousands of light years away.
“They’ve cancelled their high-power scans,” the sensor officer said, suddenly. “If they’re still scanning, they’re using something beyond our ability to detect.”
“Assume they’re no longer scanning,” Heidecker said. “What might they be doing?”
The sensor officer shrugged. Active sensors could be detected at a considerable distance; they could even be detected at ranges that allowed the hunted to know that it was being hunted, without informing the hunter that they’d found their target. Passive sensors, on the other hand, listened for other sources of energy, including active sensors, warp signatures and weapons being fired. The Killers could be watching them like hawks through their passive sensors and they’d never know about it.
Heidecker shivered. He’d taken part in drills that had two starships creeping around, each one hoping to detect the betraying signature of an active sensor before the opponent detected his presence. They had always struck him as creepy, in a sense; the only consolation was that the Killers hardly needed to sneak around, not with their level of firepower. Unless…the thought was tantalising; unless they thought that humanity had invented a whole new weapons system that could take out an entire Killer starship! How much did they actually know about what had happened to their comrade?
The starship shivered slightly under his feet. “Low-level gravity waves,” the sensor officer said, a moment later. “They’re moving…sir, one of them is heading directly towards us.”
“Evasive action,” Heidecker snapped. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Killers had to be coming for them. “Helm, prepare to trigger the Anderson Drive and jump us out of here on my signal.”
“The Killer starship is now exceeding the speed of light,” the sensor officer added. “They’re altering course to match ours. They’ll be in observed weapons range in twenty-three seconds and counting.”
Observer twisted again in space, ramping up her own warp drive and speeding away from the Killer starship, only to have her course matched effortlessly. The monstrous starship was giving chase, calmly pacing them and closing in steadily. It shouldn’t have been able to maintain such speeds without warp drive – Heidecker found himself hunting for evidence of a warp field and saw nothing – but once again, the Killers defied the laws of science as humanity knew them. The helm officer did the best he could, yet the Killers tossed a twenty-kilometre long starship around as if it were a starfighter.
They’re playing with us, Heidecker thought, suddenly. It was hard to be certain, but he was very aware that the Killers could probably have killed them all almost from the start. They’re trying to see where we go.
His gaze slipped back to the display as the Killer starship drew closer. “Helm,” he ordered, “jump us out of here.”
The starship rang like a bell. New emergency icons flashed up in front of his eyes. “The Tachyon Field refused to form,” the engineer reported, through the data network. “They somehow countered the field and threw the energy back at us. I can’t explain it or counter it.”
“Understood,” Heidecker said. That changed everything. No one had known that it was possible to counter a Tachyon field…and all of a sudden, escape had become impossible. He’d dawdled too long and now they were trapped. “Tactical, load warp torpedo bays and prepare to open fire on my command.”
It was a desperate gamble and one he already strongly suspected to be futile, but what choice was left to him? “Weapons ready, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Warp torpedoes are locked on target.”
Heidecker looked back at the monstrous starship steadily closing in on them. “Fire, he ordered calmly. “Fire at will.”
Observer shuddered as it unleashed a spread of warp torpedoes towards their target. The Defence Force had designed them to solve a tactical problem, yet the destroyer was limited in how many such weapons it could deploy. Energy weapons couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light and an enemy ship could simply outrace lasers or plasma bolts, therefore warp missiles – antimatter warheads mounted on a warp sled – could be used to hit a target retreating at warp speed. There was an additional benefit to using the weapons. Powerful explosions within the target’s warp field tended to disrupt the warp field and cause them to drop out of warp, back to more mundane speeds, where they could be targeted with standard weapons. If the Killers truly didn’t use warp fields, however, there was no way of knowing what would happen when the warp missiles detonated.
The Killer starship didn’t bother to try to dodge or unleash counter-missiles of its own. The warp missiles tracked in and slammed right into the prow of the killer starship, vanishing in the bright-white glare of matter-antimatter mutual annihilation. If the Killer ship took any damage at all, it didn’t show it; it just kept coming, without even bothering to slow its pace. It seemed to be mocking the human crew. Heidecker knew it was unlikely, but he was convinced that the Killers were laughing at them, enjoying their sport at human expense. It was personal now.
“No observed damage,” the sensor officer said. There was a sudden pause. “Captain; energy spike!”
The Killer starship seemed to twinkle and unleash a single ball of white light towards the Observer. The helm officer didn’t wait for orders – standard procedures existed for such situations – and threw the destroyer into a corkscrew manoeuvre, evading the ball of energy with ease. Heidecker looked down at the sensor readings and shook his head. How were the Killers projecting energy faster than light? Like so much else they showed off so casually, it should have been impossible. The Killer starship shimmered and unleashed a second ball, and then a third, steadily bracketing the human ship. Heidecker ran the calculations in his head and concluded that they had bare minutes to live.
“Find me somewhere we can hide,” he ordered, tartly. At their speed, they were crossing hundreds of light years every minute, yet the Killers were still closing in on them. He thought about setting course for the nearest Defence Force base, before dismissing the idea at once. There was nothing they could do to help them and he would merely lead the Killers to the base. “A nebula or a gas giant, or…”
“Got it,” the sensor officer said. Heidecker heard a new flash of hope in his voice and hoped that it was not misplaced. “CAS-3473746-6; a Jupiter-class gas giant. It’s two minutes away at our current speed.”
Another white ball of light flashed past the Observer. “Take us there,” Heidecker ordered, grimly. If they could slip into the gas giant’s atmosphere, they’d be safe, unless the Killers decided to give chase down into the gravity well. They’d have to be mad even to try. How could they hope to steer their ship inside a gas giant’s atmosphere. If he hadn’t been desperate, he wouldn’t have done it on a bet. “Maximum warp.”
The Killers didn’t stop their pursuit, or their firing, as the Observer flew right into the uninhabited system and decelerated rapidly, racing down towards the massive gas giant. Heidecker had never seen the legendary Jupiter – the Sol System was off-limits to everyone without special authorisation – but the gas giant they were approaching seemed similar, although there was no trace of a Big Red Spot. Instead, the gas giant’s atmosphere seemed to billow with orange-yellow clouds, sugges
ting a perfect hiding place…
“Enemy contact,” the sensor officer barked, as a new red icon flashed into existence. “It’s coming out of the gas giant.”
Heidecker stared, unable to believe his eyes. The massive Iceberg-class Killer starship emerged slowly from the mists of the gas giant, as it if were giving birth to a monstrous child. The Killer ship was tiny compared to the gas giant, but it was right in the Observer’s path, blocking their escape. He wondered, absurdly, what kind of lift system would allow them to move such a starship so effortlessly, before he began to bark orders at his crew. They might just be able to hide in the rings surrounding the gas giant.
For a moment, he thought that they had escaped, but then the Killers opened fire, scattering even that false hope. They were shooting at the rocks and ice that made up the rings, the brilliant glare of total matter-energy conversation illuminating the rings…and revealing their location. The helm officer took them out of the rings as fast as possible, leaving the Killers smashing through the rubble in hot pursuit, but it was useless. As soon as the Killers were clear of the rings, they went FTL themselves…and they were no longer playing around. The distance between the two craft shrank so sharply that it was horrifyingly clear that the Killers had been playing with them.
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