“Perhaps,” Chris said, unwilling to dismiss it out of hand, but knowing nothing about the background. “Look at this.”
He stopped outside a lighted column that seemed to rise into the endless green mists. At first, he could see nothing inside the column, but as he peered into the light, he started to see shapes within, strange crystalline shapes that danced just on the edge of perception. He pushed the suit’s sensors against the column, convinced somehow that it was important and frowned. The column was made out of a transparent metal that was stronger than anything humans knew. There was no way they could break into the light to find out what it was.
“I’m getting only a low-powered reading from it,” Paula said, as she joined him. “Whatever it is, it isn’t part of the starship’s power supply. It reads out as almost organic.”
“Almost organic?” Chris asked. “Some kind of bioelectric system?”
“Could be,” Paula said. “Whatever it is, its emitting low-level transmissions as well as odder signals my systems cannot identify. We can barely pick them up. I’m recording everything and transmitting them back to the starships for the MassMind to analyse, but I fear it could take years before we unlock them, if we ever do.”
“I thought that codes could be broken instantly in the MassMind,” Jock said, as he came up to the hauntingly beautiful column. “Can’t you just crack it that quickly?”
“This is alien,” Paula said. “Even with the resources of the MassMind, it took years to decrypt the written languages on each of the dead worlds and they were apparently very close to humanity; they breathed the same air, ate the same foods… if the Killers hadn’t existed, we might have been competing with them for worlds and resources. The Killers are apparently more alien than anything else we know about, yet…”
She frowned as she leaned closer. “Yet I think I’m starting to build up a picture of how this starship distributes power,” she added. “I think some things are starting to make sense.”
Chris nodded impatiently. “Are you sure we’re heading in the right direction?”
“The power core of this ship is easy to detect now,” Paula assured him, seriously. The confidence in her voice surprised him. “We knew that much before we launched. I think, however, that the nerve centre of the ship is much closer to us.”
Chris frowned. “How can you be sure?”
“Because the alien power relays are very precise,” Paula said. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting that the core of the alien system is here” — she transmitted a location to his HUD — “because they all seem to spring from there. The other teams have located similar columns and all of them lead down there…”
“It’ll have to wait,” Jock snapped suddenly, as new shapes appeared at the edge of the room. The remote drones hadn’t even noticed their presence. Chris felt a chill run down his spine. Paula had speculated that the Killers might not even register as a form of life to the sensors. Had they been missed completely? “We’ve got company!”
“Ready weapons,” Chris snapped, sharply. The Killers had finally responded to their presence. The shapes might still be obscured within the mists, but they were definitely there and almost certainly hostile. He peered at them through the suit’s sensors, yet no signs of life revealed themselves, suggesting that they were robots. The mists cleared suddenly, revealing Octopus-like machines staring at the humans. “Stand by…”
A moment later, the machines lunged forward. “Open fire!”
Chapter Eight
Before Paula could react, her suit took over and sent her diving down to the deck. She hit it hard enough to shake even the suit as new red warnings flared up in her HUD, warning her of enemy fire nearby. She felt her head spin as new downloaded memories bubbled to the surface, pushing her to crawl away from the firing as fast as she could, leaving the Footsoldiers to defend themselves without having to worry about her. She still wanted to know what was going on and to see the Killer machines directly, but her suit remained in firm control, keeping her out of the firing line. They weren’t going to risk her life any further.
Part of Paula’s mind insisted that that was silly; she was in the heart of an alien starship, one commanded by a race that had thought nothing of frying all seven billion humans on Earth when they’d stumbled across the Solar System. The remainder of her mind was grateful; it took years to learn how to handle a suit properly and the brief lessons she’d had — and the downloaded memories — weren’t enough to make her an armoured combatant. It was more likely that she’d accidentally shoot her own side from the rear.
“Show me the feed from their suits,” she ordered, as the suit kept crawling away. “Show me what they’re seeing.”
The image appeared in front of her and she winced. Humanity had given its androids and other repair systems a vaguely humanoid form, but the Killers hadn’t bothered — or perhaps they did look like giant Octopuses. The machines seemed to have little sense of tactics — they marched relentlessly into the teeth of the Footsoldiers and their weapons — but they just kept coming. It was hard to tell if they had any vital components to hit at all; judging from the way they kept moving, Paula wouldn’t have bet against them having to be reduced completely to junk before they would stop moving. They didn’t seem to carry any projectile weapons of their own, but she saw one of them catch a Footsoldier in his suit and start tearing the suit apart as if it were made of paper. A suit that would allow its wearer to survive a near-miss from an atomic weapon or a hour’s bombardment with a laser cannon was just torn apart.
She felt her heart racing frantically as the suit kept moving, following orders from its own AI or from the Captain. Chris Kelsey hadn’t been happy to see her at all and had loudly protested her inclusion on the mission, but Paula hadn’t understood, not until she’d realised how far removed an Armoured Combat Suit was from a General Protection Suit. She’d used the latter constantly at Intelligence and had been used to using it, but the former was something entirely different. She was hardly qualified to take part in the mission and, as shots ricocheted over her head, wished that she was back on Intelligence, watching through the MassMind. Her students and fellow researchers would be watching her cowering from the fighting.
“We’re going to have to head onwards,” Chris said, through the suit’s communications system. “Get over to the far exit and prepare to run when I give the command.”
Paula allowed the suit to take control, concentrating instead on pulling up what the intruding teams had discovered about the Killer starship and studying it, trying to see the pattern she knew had to be there. The Killers could do a lot of things that humanity couldn’t do, but they weren’t gods, or super-beings. Their tech had to be based on the same laws as humanity’s tech, which meant that if she could unlock the puzzle, she might figure out how the starship actually worked. She studied — again — the way the power relays seemed to work. If she was reading it correctly, there was a major source of transmissions coming from an area just short of the power core — a bridge? A command nexus of some kind?
Three Footsoldiers ran past her, their weapons raised, ready to take on anything they encountered, and then her suit came to life and hurled her after them. She felt the suit cushioning her as she ran onwards, down corridors she could barely make out after the bright light of the previous room. The other teams breaking into the ship had found similar rooms in similar locations, suggesting that the Killers were surprisingly regular in their thinking. If the pattern held true, it suggested that the columns they’d found were more important than they seemed, perhaps part of the starship’s command network.