Memory returned and she tried to sit upright, only to be held down by the straps. The Killers, the Killer star system, the dismantling of an entire star system… and her final death at the hands of a Killer ship… except that she wasn’t dead. Her mind wondered briefly if she were in heaven or hell, but it felt too real to be either; her body hurt badly, too badly. It was an effort to move her fingers, but finally she was able to undo the straps and release herself from the chair. She struggled to pull herself out of the chair, straining against an unusually heavy gravity field, and finally managed to stagger onto her feet. The gravity pulled at her and she almost collapsed onto the deck, before steadying herself on the console. It was as dark and silent as the grave.
“Report,” she ordered, hearing her own voice for the first time. “Report.”
The AI didn’t answer her. Chiyo repeated her command, but there was no response from a system that should have remained online permanently, short of the complete destruction of the scout ship. Her hands danced across the control console, but there was no response, not even from the emergency systems. It, combined with the loss of her implants, suggested that the entire craft had been completely drained of power.
But that can’t be right, she thought, dazed. Her implants drew their power from her own body. They shouldn’t have gone offline until she died and some, including the MassMind recording implant, should have remained online permanently. It would have completed its recording of her life and personality, everything that made her what she was, and waited patiently for a chance to upload her into the MassMind. A flicker of panic ran through her mind; she had known, intellectually, that she risked losing immortality if the Killers caught her and killed her, but now it was terrifyingly real. She touched the side of her head, half-hoping that she could still feel the implants under her fingers, but there was nothing apart from smooth skin. She had never been able to feel the implants, yet she had always known they were there.
It took her another ten minutes to confirm that almost all of the scout ship’s systems were online. The emergency illumination system used a natural bio-luminance rather than anything powered, or it would have been killed as well by the Killers. She remembered the last moments of her flight and wondered just where she was. Was she a prisoner, or was her craft now melded into the strange structures the Killers had been building around the star? The thought was chilling. No one would have a hope of being able to rescue her and she would die, inevitably, if she ran out of oxygen. The emergency illumination system also acted as an emergency air freshener, but it wouldn’t last forever. It wasn’t designed to serve as more than an emergency measure.
“Shit,” she said, just to hear her own voice. The entire craft was hauntingly quiet. She opened up one of the emergency supply boxes and pulled out a bar of semi-chocolate, eating it quickly to gain what energy she could, while taking stock of her supplies. They might last, if she were careful, little more than a week, yet the absence of fresh water would kill her far quicker. The recycling system was completely down, along with the implants that would scrub her system and keep her healthy. She chuckled, bitterly. She’d been saved from certain death to be transported to a more lingering and unpleasant death at the hands of her own body and its demands. Oddly, it felt liberating. If death was certain, she might as well risk everything.
She turned back to the cockpit and tried to open the hatches covering the viewport. They refused to open, even when she attempted to use the manual system. That suggested that the system was either jammed, or there was something outside preventing them from opening. If the latter… it did suggest that they were encased in something, but what? Her mind returned to the image of the tiny craft melded into the structure the Killers were building and she shivered. If that were the case, she was dead, yet the Killer should have dismantled her craft — and her — completely, right down to the bare atoms. There was no reason why they would have kept her craft intact, unless they wanted a prisoner, but they had never shown any interest in taking humans prisoner before. What — if anything — had changed?
A brief search of the emergency supplies turned up a plasma pistol — dead — a lighting wand — also dead — and a very primitive design of firearm, shooting material bullets rather than energy rays. There was no way to check it — she couldn’t even remember why the weapon was included among the emergency supplies without her memory implants — but merely buckling it onto her belt gave her a feeling of confidence. She examined the survival belt quickly, but there was little that was actually useful to her, although she would have been reasonably well-equipped if she had crashed on a planet’s surface. Her gaze fell to the final item in the belt and she winced. It was a black injector marked with a skull and crossbones, a suicide capsule. If there was no way out and nothing ahead, but a slow lingering death…
She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and walked over to the hatch leading to the outside. She considered pulling on a space suit before deciding only to wear a breath mask; if the outside was that hostile, she was dead anyway. Besides, the spacesuits were as dead as the rest of the craft. The mask wouldn’t last for long either. She stepped through the airlock and had to struggle with the manual release before it slowly cranked open. It was more of a struggle than she remembered, but then, she hadn’t had to do it since her first training session. No one had anticipated something that would kill every system on the craft, but leave her alive.
I shall have to inform them to change their procedures, Chiyo thought, as she peered out. No wave of outpouring air threw her into empty space; no mass of implacable metal confronted her. Instead, she was staring into an empty bay, illuminated only by glowing green smoke. It was an eerie sight and she found herself rooted to the spot, before she realised where she had to be. She was onboard a Killer starship, the first human ever to set foot on one of their ships — as far as she knew. If she had been taken onboard, it was quite likely that others had been as well… and vanished. No one had returned from such an encounter. She stepped gingerly onto the deck and was relieved to find that it was solid below her feet. The mists seemed to withdraw slightly as she stepped forward, circling the remains of her scout ship, but pressed in behind her. She couldn’t see more than a few meters ahead of her.
The scout ship looked as if it had been in the wars; it was scorched and pitted, every sensor node or weapons system burned out. It was so far beyond any theory that Chiyo abandoned any lingering thoughts she’d had of recharging the scout ship and escaping — as if escape were possible. Whatever the Killers had done to her ship had killed it stone dead. She turned away from the craft and stared into the mists. After a moment, the mists cleared in front of her, revealing a path into the heart of the starship. It occurred to her that the mists were the Killers, but it seemed impossible. It was far more likely that they were just part of their environmental system. She wished, desperately, that she had a working remote sensor. She would have loved to know what the mists actually were, or even what was in the atmosphere.