The image of the Killer starship appeared in front of him, sending a shiver down his spine. It was over twenty kilometres long, far larger than any starship in his attack wing, and looked as if it was effortlessly maintaining its speed, a leisurely four hundred times the speed of light. A human starship could have matched that in a warp bubble, but hundreds of years of research hadn’t managed to determine how the Killers achieved such speeds without a warp bubble themselves, or an Anderson Drive. The massive starship seemed unaware of the Observer, which had been tailing it for the last three years ever since human explorers had stumbled across its course, but Andrew doubted that the Killers were truly unaware of the picket’s presence. It was far more likely that they just didn’t care.
But they had good reasons not to care, he reminded himself bitterly. No Killer starship had been lost in combat against the Human Defence Force since the Defence Force had been formed. He wasn’t expecting to take out this Killer starship either; the attack wing was there merely to distract the Killers and preventing them from realising that they were being boarded until it was far too late. The plan had seemed workable on paper, but now he was looking at the starship, he had an urge to go find a less daunting target instead. It seemed impossible that the Killers could fail to realise that they were being boarded. They would swat his fleet like gnats.
He sent a command into the system and watched as the seventy-two destroyers of his attack wing checked in, confirming that they were ready for action. Humanity could have built their own starships to the same scale of the Killers, but it would merely have given the Killers a target they could hardly miss. Their weapons would blow the Lightning apart with a single shot, if they scored a direct hit; the only defence the destroyer had was not to be there when the Killers fired. At seventy meters long, the destroyers were the most manoeuvrable starships in the galaxy. If anything could evade the Killers and their impossible weapons, it was his attack wing.
“Stand by to jump,” he ordered, as the final results downloaded into his head. They had drilled and simulated and exercised every contingency they could, but if the Killers had any additional surprises, they wouldn’t know until they actually engaged the enemy. They should have had weapons that matched and exceeded everything humanity had produced, even in a thousand years of concentrating on building the most formidable weapons possible, but they had only showed humanity a handful of surprises. Perhaps they didn’t feel they needed more, or perhaps they were keeping their deadliest weapons in reserve for a real threat. There was no way to know. “Charge weapons.”
“Weapons charged,” Gary confirmed.
“Jump coordinates said,” Lieutenant David Dunagin confirmed, from the helm. “Anderson Drive is online and ready to jump.”
Andrew tensed. “Jump!”
There was a barely-perceptible sense of dislocation and then the display cleared, revealing the Killer starship, now close enough to be seen with the naked eye as a dark shadow blocking out the stars. The Anderson Drive, humanity’s proudest technical achievement, used a tachyon field to provide nearly infinitive speed. It couldn’t reach infinitive speed — the starship would quite literally occupy every point in the universe simultaneously — but it could get a starship clear across the galaxy, or outside, in a matter of hours. Hundreds of human starships had used the drive to flee the Milky Way for somewhere more habitable, with less hostile natives, but the drive had its own limitations. Moving the entire Community out of the Milky Way was logistically impossible.
“Enemy vessel twenty thousand kilometres away and closing,” Gary reported, as the destroyers proceeded under more normal warp drive. The Killer starship ignored them as they rocketed towards it, already falling into evasive patterns that should have made them hard to target. “No sign that they have detected us or are responding to us.”
“Understood,” Andrew said, watching the Killer starship though the Lightning’s sensor blisters. It didn’t seem to have any distortion caused by an FTL drive, or even any temporal shifts or space warps. It was just something else that the Killers did that humanity couldn’t do — yet. He had to remind himself that if they succeeded in capturing the Killer ship, they would have their first real insight into Killer technology. “Lock weapons on target and inform me when we are coming into firing range.”
“Weapons locked,” Gary confirmed. “The attack wing is following us and targeting their own weapons.”
Andrew smiled bitterly. They were about to unleash enough firepower to disintegrate several major worlds, yet the Killers would barely be troubled by the assault. They might not even respond, but based on prior encounters, they would eventually try to swat the gnats surrounding them. Oddly, he found that a hopeful sign; if the human assaults were so useless, why would they bother to try to drive them away?
On the other hand, gnats are just irritating, he thought, grimly. Humanity had managed to bring flies and cockroaches into space with them, along with a handful of farming animals, even though the rest had died off when Earth had been destroyed. There was no one, outside the MassMind, who had seen a tiger or a lion, an elephant or a rhino. There was nothing left of them, but radioactive ashes and memories the MassMind had turned into educational realities for the children, teaching them about what the Killers had stolen from humanity. Maybe they just want to swat us because we annoy them.
The Killer starship came closer and closer. It seemed impossible that the starship wasn’t aware of their presence — he was chillingly convinced that it was looking at the attack wing and dismissing any possibility of a threat — but the Killers just ignored the fleet. The range was closing rapidly — they could have fired at extreme range, but he intended to fire from point blank range — and he prepared himself. The time was almost right…
“Fire energy torpedoes,” he ordered. The starship jerked slightly as it unleashed its main weapons onto the Killer starship. “Helm, begin random evasive manoeuvres!”
The energy torpedoes lanced out of the starship’s weapons blisters, crossed the distance between the two ships at just under the speed of light, and detonated against the hull. Each shot would have been enough to seriously damage the Lightning, but the Killer starship was barely scratched, if at all. The explosions lit up the darkness of space, yet there was no trace of any serious damage. The bombardment from the other starships lit up the entire side of the Killer starship in flickering eerie light as the remainder of the attack wing followed them in… and then the Killer starship vanished.
“They’ve cut their drives,” David reported. That was another mystery about the Killers. They seemed to be able to come to a dead stop instantly without suffering any damage or losing their drives. No one quite understood how the Killers did it. “Course laid in.”
“Take us back to them, attack pattern alpha-four,” Andrew ordered, tightly. At such speeds, the distance between the attack wing and their target closed rapidly. “Gary, open fire as soon as they come into range.”
The Killer starship was already dumping heat from the attack, he saw, but the starship seemed undamaged. It waited patiently for the human attack ships to come back into range, seemingly ignoring their shots as they crashed against its hull and faded out, watching them. He had the sense that it was angry now at having been forced to cut its speed, or perhaps at the imprudence of the gnats who dared to launch an attack on it’s monstrous bulk.