But we can’t break into them, she thought, as they ran into another brightly lit room. This one held nothing, but a single blocky piece of equipment that seemed to have no discernable function. She scanned it anyway, using the neutrino scanning function in her suit, and wasn’t too surprised when the scan revealed that the device was almost impenetrable. It would take years of study before they broke through and worked out what the device actually was, years that she didn’t have, unless they succeeded in capturing the starship. At the moment, it seemed like an elusive goal.
“Keep down,” Chris warned, as the rearguard entered the compartment and reloaded their weapons. “They’re right behind us.”
Paula couldn’t help, but admire their professionalism. The arrow guns weren’t explosive — plasma cannons would have made short work of the Killer machines, at the risk of blowing up the entire team — and they would run out of projectile weapons. The suits could normally use nanotechnology to scavenge raw materials and create new ammunition, but that might not be possible on the Killer starship. Could their nanotech dismantle the machine in the room and what would happen if they did? Would it provoke another reaction…?
Provoke a reaction, she thought, slowly. Something was dancing right at the corner of her mind, refusing to come out into the light. Something important, something she was missing; the Killers hadn’t responded until… when? They hadn’t responded to the starships until they had been attacked; they’d even let the starships zoom close and unleash enough firepower to vaporise any other kind of starship, or devastate a whole planet. They’d been secure in their invulnerability… and they had ignored two hundred armoured Footsoldiers breaking into their starship, until they had found the column. There was something important about that column then, something so important that it had provoked a reaction…
She pulled up the results from the scans and examined them as the firing started again. The scans hadn’t been that deep — whatever the column was made of was good at blocking basic scans and there hadn’t been time to use nanotech probes to break through the metal — but they had definitely picked up traces of organic components and unidentified liquids. The column might have been just a bioelectric system, but that made no sense… unless it was part of the starship’s control system. No, she realised suddenly; it was more than that. The column had held a Killer! They had been looking at one of humanity’s greatest enemies and they hadn’t even known it.
The shooting was getting closer, but she ignored it, concentrating on studying the craft. If the Killer was actually meshed into the starship, like an oversized Spacer, it explained a lot. It probably hadn’t cared about the intruders until they’d actually stumbled upon the column and — perhaps — recognised it for what it was. It had sent its mechanical minions to terminate their curiosity; hell, perhaps it had decided to open a wormhole, travel somewhere else and exterminate the intruders away from their gnat-like starships. She couldn’t quite understand it. Where would such a creature even evolve?
She looked down towards the billowing green mists and understood. The atmosphere matched that of a gas giant. The Killers might have evolved in such an atmosphere themselves and had created their starships, like humanity had created its starships, to make them feel comfortable. That explained the poisonous atmosphere — an effective defence against an unprepared enemy — and maybe even the gravity. It made a depressing kind of sense. Humanity had searched endlessly for the Killers and their homeworld, but no one had taken a serious look at the thousands of gas giants. They could have millions of inhabited worlds right under the noses of everyone who searched for them.
“Suit, open a link to Captain Kelsey,” she ordered, grimly. Her conclusions would already have been sent out to the MassMind and the Community — the MassMind would study her theory and model out the possible dimensions of the Killers, now they knew more about them — but that wouldn’t help the team. “I need to talk to him.”
Chris was feeling pushed back as he unleashed another burst of arrows into the heart of a Killer machine. Several mechanical arms and legs disintegrated under his fire, but the remainder of the machine kept coming. The suit sensors warned that some of the cutting tools the machines carried had monofilament blades and even clouds of remote nanotech, explaining how four of his men had been killed so effortlessly, despite their suits. It was oddly reassuring, in a way; the Killers evidently hadn’t been able to solve the problem of controlling vast clouds of nanotech either. If they had the entire team would have been wiped out within seconds.
“I see,” he said finally, as Paula finished outlining her theory. “Are you sure about this?”
“I think so,” Paula said. “I’ve been looking at everything we know about the Killers — and everything we’ve found out on this mission — and it all fits together.”
“And we don’t have a way to get out of here now,” Chris confirmed, dryly. The Killer machines ignored the remote drones, which were still watching the enemy advance, and they were confirming that the way out to the hull and escape was firmly blocked. If they could use their plasma cannons, it would be a different story, but that would just have killed them all. It might be worth the risk as a final resort, but nothing else. “All right; send the additional drones forward and then prepare to follow them.”
He selected an EMP grenade from the list of possible weapons, locked it on one of the Killer machines, and fired it towards them, before turning and running for the far exit. The other Footsoldiers were already ahead of him as the EMP grenade detonated, sending an electromagnetic pulse against the Killer systems, but not entirely to his surprise they showed no signs of being affected. It wouldn’t have bothered the armoured combat suits either.
“Here,” Tom Pearson said. He picked up the strange Killer machine and pulled it after him, dumping it in a position to slow down pursuit. Chris smiled and nodded before pointing him down the corridor and running after him, avoiding a flashing blade by a millimetre. The starship seemed to be shuddering now, as if it were channelling power to something else, or perhaps fluctuating the gravity field to confuse them. “Sir, it…”
He stumbled against a silver wall and fell right into it. Chris stopped and stared in horror as the wall literally swallowed Tom up, despite his struggles. He reached out and caught his comrade’s hand, pulling him with all the strength of the suit’s mechanical muscles, but he couldn’t budge him from the wall. A moment later, Tom shoved him back, just before he fell into the wall and vanished. His icon vanished from the display.
“Don’t touch the walls,” Chris shouted, as they kept running towards the heart of the Killer ship, the bridge Paula had identified. Other traps kept appearing and grabbing for them as they moved, from a pair of tiny mechanical crab-like creatures to a sudden crippling change in the gravity field. Without the armour, they would have been helplessly trapped against the deck until their pursuers caught up with them. Even with the armour, crawling until they reached the edge of the gravity field was a near-impossible struggle.
“I don’t understand how they can muster an independent gravity field inside the ship,” Paula gasped as she struggled forward. She sounded on the edge of breaking, despite the suit taking care of her, and Chris couldn’t blame her. “Having two different gravity fields in a starship risks destabilising the starship’s structural integrity, unless the starship is large enough to absorb the effects without harm…”