Chris tuned her out as the gravity field suddenly reversed itself and left them floating in zero-gee. The suits countered the effect with their own motive power, pushing them onwards towards their destination, flying much faster through the air. The Killer evidently realised that that trick had backfired, because a moment later they crashed back down to the deck. Chris heard a scream and saw Thomas Ellisevans, one of the newer Footsoldiers, bleeding on the deck. A moment later, his suit sealed itself up to preserve what remained of its integrity.
“What happened?” He snapped. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas sent back. He sounded as if he were going into shock. “My suit’s arm just cracked!”
“Keep moving,” Chris said, grimly. They were almost at their target. There was another vast room, large enough to house an entire Defence Force destroyer, and then finally they broke into the command nexus. “Paula…”
She was staring at the massive room, barely hearing him. It looked more like a rocky asteroid cave than a bridge, dominated by the presence of a dozen columns like the one they’d seen in the previous room. The columns all seemed to blur together in the base of the room; Paula examined it and proclaimed that there was a massive tank underneath, set into the rock. She waved a disintegrator over it and the rock collapsed into dust, leaving the tank revealed… and the monstrous mass inside it.
Chris was reminded, irresistibly, of a brain, except it looked to be nothing more than a mass of chemicals. His suit was charting out the power links leading from the mass to the remainder of the ship and, finally, identified the mass before him as the source of the RF transmissions they’d picked up earlier. The Killer was sending signals out to the remainder of the ship and, a moment later, they were being repeated back to it, like a rote lesson. No, he realised, not quite a rote lesson. It was something much more complex.
“That’s a Killer?” Someone asked. “It doesn’t look very dangerous. Why rock?”
“It might be traditional,” Paula said, absently. “They might have decreed that its part of their culture, or it might be just like a hermit crab, inhabiting a shell created by another creature.”
“So,” Andrew Summerlin said, looking back towards the advancing machines. “How do you intend to slap the cuffs on it and take it prisoner?”
Chris had a more practical question. “How do you intend to kill it?”
Paula stared down at the Killer, her suit’s sensors tracking the power fluctuations surrounding the alien creature, wondering if it were aware of her presence. She couldn’t see anything reassembling eyes, but that meant nothing; the Killer might be present within the column, but it might also be present within the mists, or even the remainder of the ship. The Spacers were a merger of human flesh with mechanical technology and artificial intelligences. There was no reason why the Killer couldn’t be the same, or perhaps even something more advanced; if she understood what she was looking at, it might even exist as a distributed intelligence, rather than the fleshy mass in front of her.
She would have loved to spend years studying it, but there was no time. The advancing machines would cut them apart and lose them their one chance to take a Killer starship intact. After their successful boarding of the Killer ship, the other Killer ships would probably improve their own internal defences, or maybe stop ignoring the pickets that were shadowing them at a distance and destroy them. There was no more time…
“I’m going to cut into it with my nanotech probes,” she said, quickly. The very thought made her queasy — she had never killed before — but it was the Killer or them. “If I can break through, we can use the nanotech to kill it…”
She watched grimly as the first probes started to make their way through the Killer’s tank, dismantling the strange metal as they progressed. It should have collapsed at once — nothing could resist a nanotech assault, as far as humanity knew — but it was somehow holding out, forcing her to concentrate on digging into the tank while the Footsoldiers covered her. The advancing machines became frantic, desperately trying to reach her to rend and tear her apart, but she ignored them, concentrating on her grisly task. She pushed harder, controlling the nanomachines directly, and broke through, sending the machines to dig into the Killer. There was no time to be subtle. She had to kill the creature — and fast. There was a moment’s chaos…
And then the craft seemed to shudder violently, as if it was a living thing struggling to survive, and then it went dark. Paula felt a moment of panic as the darkness surrounded her like a living thing, before she realised what it had to mean. Somehow, without quite knowing what she was doing, she had killed the Killer.
“I think you got it,” Chris said, finally. The utter darkness surrounding them was suddenly broken by the lights on the suits, illuminating frozen machines and technology. The column seemed to have broken apart completely. The Killer was nothing more than a collapsing mass of dark material. “Well done.”
He turned back to his men as Paula started to retch. “Link to the starships and tell them to start taking this monster in tow,” he ordered. “The Killer’s friends will be coming to see what happened to it and we don’t want to be here when they arrive.”
Chapter Nine
“Sir, the Killer power curves are fading away,” Lieutenant Gary Young. “Sir, they’re gone!”
Andrew brought up the image of the Killer starship and stared at it. The Killers had been almost stationary in space, so there was no sense of drifting motion, but the starship had gone completely dark. The massive power curves that had propelled it through space had completely vanished, leaving only a single source of power on the starship, which seemed to be cooling down itself. The starship was no longer firing on the human ships; it was merely… dead.
“They succeeded,” he said, in surprise. He had never really believed that the plan would work and the early telemetry from the boarding parties hadn’t been encouraging. Two hundred Footsoldiers had boarded the Killer starship; seventeen had survived the experience. Several boarding parties had been completely wiped out, or had become lost within the vast bulk of the starship. “Are they sure that it’s dead?”
“They’re confirming now,” Gary said. “I think they knocked out the driving intelligence and the remains of the starship are now shutting down until it can be recovered.”
Andrew nodded. The Killers probably had their own instant FTL communications network. If the Killer starship triggered a distress beacon, as a human starship would do in a comparable situation, they could have another Killer starship arriving within minutes. The picket ships had reported that there were several within two hundred light years, but with the Anderson Drive or a wormhole, reinforcements could come from right across the galaxy. A fully-alert Killer starship might be breathing down their necks at any second, no longer inclined to ignore the gnats floating in space.
“Call the tugs,” he ordered, sharply. “Prepare to move the starship to Star’s End.”
The tugs flickered into existence a moment later. They were unarmed civilian ships and had been kept back from the fighting along with the Observer, which would have reported back if the entire attack wing had been wiped out. At Andrew’s command, the tugs moved to the Killer starship and took up position on the hull, despite their concerns. If the starship had powered up again, the tugs wouldn’t have been able to evade before the Killers blew them apart.