He checked the feed from Observer again and noted the position of the Footsoldier landing craft. Unlike the destroyers, the landing craft were doing everything in their power to remain unnoticed. They weren’t firing or broadcasting anything; they were just using the live feed from the other starships and the MassMind to keep on course. They would be in launching position within seconds…
“Take us in,” he ordered, and designated a course with his mind. The remaining starships fell in around the Lightning as it raced back towards the Killer starship. It grew closer again and, this time, he had the satisfaction of seeing that it was definitely damaged. Whatever self-repair functions the Killer starship possessed, it was already using, but it was damaged! They had scored a victory! It might not be a true victory, it might not have been a destroyed ship, but it was something to take home and use to boost morale. “Lock noisemakers on target.”
“Noisemakers locked,” Gary confirmed. A moment passed as the Killer starship drew closer. “Entering effective operating range now.”
“Fire,” Andrew ordered tightly. “Full spread.”
Noisemakers weren’t weapons at all, not in a conventional sense. They caused nothing, but a volley of heavy distortion that would confuse any sensor for vital seconds — any human sensor. The Killers would be blind for just long enough to allow the Footsoldiers to land without seeing them, unless they had impossible sensors to go with all the other impossible things they had. If they saw the Footsoldiers coming, there would be a quick slaughter and that would be the end of the mission.
“The Footsoldiers are launching now,” Gary confirmed. “They’re on their way.”
“Good,” Andrew ordered. “General signal to the attack force; pull back to observation position and wait. It’s out of our hands now.”
Chapter Seven
The Armoured Combat Suit was humanity’s most advanced infantry weapon. It wrapped its wearer in armour that was impregnable to most handheld weapons and carried enough firepower to dominate an entire starship. The AI installed within the suit could act in concert with its wearer or independently, even to the point of operating the suit without a wearer or transporting a critically wounded user out of the battle zone. It could have devastated any pre-space human force without even noticing the effort.
It all fell into the proper context as the Killer starship grew closer. It had long since ceased to be a mere starship; it had rapidly become an approaching horizon, or a planet towards which the Footsoldiers were rapidly falling. The starship was vast enough to generate its own mild gravity field, reeling the Footsoldiers in without forcing them to use their own motive systems. In theory, the Killer starship was no larger — even smaller — than one of the asteroids the Footsoldiers had raided in times gone by. In practice, it was far more formidable and Captain Chris Kelsey felt as if he were wearing nothing more than paper. Indeed, some of the planners had seriously considered going without the armour and relying on speed and stealth.
It seemed impossible that the Killers were unaware of their approach, but nothing arose to bar their path, nor did any energy weapons burn them out of space. The Killer weapons somehow caused direct matter-energy conversion and utterly annihilated whatever they hit and he was grimly aware that the suits would provide no protection at all against even a glancing hit. The Killers wouldn’t even care about the possibility of damage to their own ship. The complete destruction of the armoured force wouldn’t even scratch the paint.
He prepared himself as the suits fell down towards the surface — what he had to think of as the surface, to avoid vertigo — and fought the insane urge to cut in the antigravity systems and flee. The Killer starship came closer and closer and before he knew it, he was touching down on the surface. New icons blinked up on his HUD as the suit analysed the Killer hull, but concluded that it was unable to identify any of the elements in the material. The suit could keep them attached to the surface, a lucky break in an environment where a jump could see them flying off into space beyond all hope of rescue, yet it couldn’t determine much else about the hull. Chris had once bored his way into an enemy-held asteroid by using a simple burner, but that wouldn’t be an option here.
“Link up,” he ordered, quietly. The suits went active and linked up into a single fighting force. In theory, the transmissions were so low-powered that nothing could detect them unless they were looking for them, but he had already decided to assume that the Killers would know that they were there. Human starships had hull-monitoring systems and he had to assume that the Killers were no different. “Jack, check the hull.”
One of the suits, completely indistinguishable from the others, knelt down and pushed a small device against the black hull metal. There was a brief orange glow and then the device fell off the surface of the ship, rising into the darkness of space until Jack caught it and returned it to his belt. Chris bit down a curse. He’d hoped that the molecular disintegration device would allow them to cut into the hull and hopefully avoid having to go in an entrance that the Killers knew far better than his men, but it hadn’t worked. IT had seemed a long shot, but it had had to be tried.
“The disintegration field was instantly countered, sir,” Jack said, through the communications link. “The hull just pushed the gadget away somehow.”
Chris nodded to himself, looking down at the hull. Streaks of white light were flaring under their feet, gathering around them… or so it seemed. It was as if they were standing on top of the icy surface of a lake, looking down at submarines operating under the water, with nothing visible but the lights. The energy pattern seemed to be constantly shifting and changing, suggesting that the Killers were aware of their presence, even if they hadn’t bothered to actually do anything about it. He was overwhelmed with a sense that something was watching them from just under the hull, like a mouse hidden behind the mouse hole, unable to see the cat, but knowing that he was there, waiting. His suit countered the flash of near-panic at once; it injected various stimulants into his system and kept him concentrated. Chris gathered himself quickly. Suits had been known to declare their occupants unfit for combat before and he didn’t want to retire. Not yet.
“This way,” he said, and led the Footsoldiers across the hull. At starship speeds, two kilometres was nothing; they wouldn’t even notice travelling so far. On their scale, it was nearly ten minutes before they reached their destination, passing all kinds of strange blisters and instruments on the hull. He had to urge Paula to keep up with them, despite her protests that studying the tools on the hull would advance the cause of science, and silently cursed the decision to bring her. If the Admiral hadn’t insisted…
They came across the entrance suddenly, a massive blocky hole leading into the heart of the starship, and he peered down it with the suit’s lights. The hole seemed never-ending, but he had to keep reminding himself that it might be nothing more than the barrel of a gun, or something worse. The vision of suddenly being blown to pieces by a Killer weapon firing while he was in its barrel made him smile as he extended a series of remote probes, checking that the passageway actually led somewhere important. It seemed to terminate at one side of a recognisable hatch, but without the regulation opening wheels that a human asteroid habitat would have had. He smiled at the irony — it would have been far too easy to just walk inside, even if they had recognised a Killer opening device — and led four of his men down the rabbit hull.