The breath mask fell from her face before she could react and she found herself gulping in a mouthful of their air. It was cold and clammy, but breathable. The working theory about the Killers suggested that they came from a planet like Earth, which suggested that they would breathe a similar atmosphere to humanity, yet no one had ever located a Killer-inhabited world. They might destroy inhabited worlds with gay abandon, but they didn’t even seem to settle the worlds themselves, or even the uninhabited Earth-like worlds they encountered. It was another mystery surrounding them and she wondered if they were providing an atmosphere suitable for her. If that were the case, it was yet another reminder that she was completely dependent on them for everything, including life-support. She was nothing more than a prisoner.
She took another breath and walked slowly into the mists. They closed in around her, seemingly just out of reach, and orbited her threateningly. She looked behind her, but the scout ship had already vanished into the mists and she was certain — very certain — that if she ran back, she would discover that the scout ship had vanished. There was nothing for it, but to press onward through the mists and see where the Killers wanted her to go. There was nothing else she could do. It felt as if she had been walking for hours — an effect of the higher gravity — and she almost yawned as she stopped for a rest. The mists boiled around her — she was sure that she could see shapes within the mist, although it might have been just her imagination — but she waited until she had caught her breath before continuing. There was little point in hurrying.
The mists cleared away suddenly, revealing a small room packed with strange machinery. Some looked to be comparable to the remote orbital manufacturing machines that humanity used to construct its starships, others looked so different, so alien, that she found herself developing a headache just looking at them. She looked behind her to see a blank wall. Wherever she was now, she was trapped — but then, she’d been trapped all along. There hadn’t even been the illusion of freedom. The air seemed somehow tenser now, as if Bad Things were waiting to happen, yet she could see no sign of anything moving. The compartment seemed as dark and silent as her scout ship had been, after she’d been taken prisoner…
Something moved behind her. Before she could react, she found herself scooped up by a giant machine and deposited inside one of the other machines, floating inside a tank of air. It took her a second to realise that she was inside a variable gravity field inside another gravity field — humanity couldn’t do that, yet the Killers did it so casually — before feeling a tingle at the back of her head. Strange lights flickered across her eyelids and she realised that her body was being scanned. She wondered what they would use as she struggled to control her panic — it could be anything from primitive x-rays and ultrasounds to something unimaginably advanced — but there was no clue. A buzzing noise echoed through her ears and rapidly became a high-pitched sound that made her scream in pain, before being replaced by sound waves that were too low for her to hear, yet she could feel them running through her body. Her teeth hurt suddenly, for no reason she could determine, before a stab of pain went through her head. It occurred to her that they were torturing her, rather than examining her to see what made her tick, yet they weren’t even shouting any questions. It was like a child pulling the wings off flies.
She blacked out as another dull sound echoed through her body. When she awoke, she found herself lying naked on an operating table, staring up into blinding white light. She tried to close her eyes, or to turn away from the glare, but her body refused to move. It was completely paralysed. Another wave of panic passed through her mind, but if the Killers noticed, they didn’t care. She saw something glimmering in the corner of her eyes and, as it moved down towards her forehead, she realised that it was a long silver needle. They were going to drill right into her head! She wanted, desperately, to scream, but even that relief was denied her as the needle slid neatly into her forehead… and she blacked out again as pain flared through her entire body.
There was a brief moment of blackness, and then she felt her entire body twitch, shaking violently against the paralysis. She was itching everywhere, but she couldn’t scratch, or even move of her own volition. Waves of emotion washed over her- she found herself utterly terrified one moment, completely delighted the next and unbearably aroused the third — and she realised that the Killers were touching off emotions in her head, just to see what happened. They’d turned her into an experimental animal, yet it made no sense. They’d never shown any interest in individual humans before…
But how would we know? She asked herself. They could have taken thousands of humans from Earth, or one of the other worlds they Killed; we wouldn’t have seen them if they didn’t want us to see them. They could have kidnapped the entire population of Earth without any problems…
Other probes were descending now from the light, advancing down and burning their way into her body. Oddly, they hurt less, as if the aliens had decided not to hurt her any longer, or if they’d permanently damaged her body’s ability to feel pain. She feared the latter, even as she hoped for the former; if they were showing compassion, they might be inclined to talk to her, or even to recognise her as a living person in her own right. It didn’t seem likely. Even if they stopped probing her body now, she was still going to be badly injured. With her nanites offline, she would be reduced to nothing more than baseline human, like the idiots who tried to colonise worlds without high technology convinced that the absence of technology would save them from the Killers. Could her body recover from such abuse? It had been so long since she had studied medicine and all her implanted memory stores were offline. There was no way to learn what she needed to know quickly enough to matter.
Something else to report when I get home, she thought, dazed. The pain was fading away almost completely now, replaced by a sense of… harmony. It dawned on her that she was being tranquillised, but suddenly it was hard to care. The absence of pain alone was worth everything to her. Her mind kept blanking out and restarting, yet somehow she wasn’t concerned at all. It didn’t matter to her. She could barely form a coherent thought.
A shock ran through her body and she found herself jerking on the table. The needles had vanished, replaced by streams of light that seemed to flicker on the edge of perception. As they passed over her face, she recalled events in the past that seemed of staggering importance; her first day at school, the first boy she’d kissed, the first moment when a boy had gently slid between her legs and countless others. It made no sense to her that the Killers would be interested in such matters, then it dawned on her that she was having flashbacks, and then she realised that they were triggering her memories, perhaps even reading them directly. The sense of violation wasn’t enough to convince them to leave her alone and she couldn’t blot out the memories. She tried to remember bad times, but they refused to focus. The Killers were ripping her mind apart, tearing into her to learn whatever they wanted to learn. There was a moment of pain, a moment of complete and total violation, a moment of darkness…
And then she was looking down on her body from the outside.
Chapter Six
“I have a live feed from the Observer,” Lieutenant Gary Young said, from his position at the tactical console. “They’re transmitting directly to the attack wing.”
“Show me,” Captain Andrew Ramage said, linking his mind into the Lightning’s main computer. “Put it on the main display.”