The argument seemed to soften for a moment, and then resumed, with different simulations being created and used as talking points. It was so like a comparable human meeting that she almost laughed, yet there was a dangerous undertone to their voices and thoughts. They weren’t questioning the existence of the human threat, or dismissing it completely; they intended to apply corrective measures. The sheer dispassion continued to throw her, but as the Killers reached towards a consensus, she realised that they were casually talking about completing the extermination of the human race…
Or were they? They didn’t seem to have made any connection between her and the attack on their ship. Might they suspect, she wondered, that she was from a different race? It seemed unlikely, yet how would a Killer know, even if they cared, that the destroyers and her scout came from the same culture? A human would know — they’d be able to see clear links between the two starship classes — but would a Killer? That led neatly back to the first question and she looked up at her spider, her Killer. Why had he taken her onboard, dissected her, and accidentally added a hitchhiker to his local network? It didn’t seem to suit their normal mode of operation.
On impulse, she suggested to Chiyo2 that she try to hop into another Killer starship. It didn’t work. The MassMind drew no distinction between its different nodes, but the Killers seemed reluctant to allow the same degree of harmony between their separate networks. It made no sense to her — that harmony, which had created the MassMind, accounted for humanity’s survival — but the Killers were aliens. Maybe they liked their mental privacy. She looked down at her self-image and smiled wryly. Her image wore nothing, not even a traditional fig leaf. If they caught her, the Killers probably wouldn’t appreciate her naked body before they wiped her out of their network.
The Killer conference finished before she could quite pin down what they’d decided and the other spiders vanished from the network, leaving her spider alone. Chiyo and her twin moved further away from the central nexus to reintegrate and decide on a new course of action. Only one course of action seemed to make sense. She would have to create hundreds of copies of herself and start exploring the Killer network as thoroughly as possible. If she could figure out how to take control, or even to send a message…
She skimmed through the network until she found a vast tract of memory that served no purpose and slipped into it, reformatting it carefully until it suited her purposes. The one advantage of being a personality completely buried within the network was that she could actually see the network and defeat any routine security checks, ones configured to watch for self-aware viral packages. It was easy enough to create the illusion of her old room and bed back on Samaria and lie down on it, before starting to fission again into new copies. It wasn’t quite like giving birth — as she acknowledged with a wry grin — but it would suffice. Besides, she’d always wanted children one day.
The Killers, she decided, as the first of her copies headed out to examine the Killer network from the inside, were never going to know what had hit them.
Chapter Twelve
Captain David Heidecker was composing a video letter to his wife, Sharon, when the Observer began to shake violently. The starship had watched from a distance — a distance the entire nine-man crew hope fervently was safe — as the Lightning’s attack wing and the Footsoldiers launched their assault on the Killer starship. They’d then spent a week floating in space, watching for any sign of a Killer response, but nothing had materialised.
He pulled himself to his feet, catching the edge of his desk as another shockwave threatened to send him sprawling onto the deck, and sprinted for the hatch. The one advantage of the tiny Alpha-class destroyers, far smaller than their massive Killer foes, was that every compartment on the ship was close to every other compartment. It only took seconds for him to reach the bridge and hurl himself into his command chair, just as yet another shockwave crashed over the destroyer.
“Report,” he snapped, clutching on to the chair’s arms for dear life. “What’s happening?”
“Major gravity waves, emitting from a source point two light years away,” the sensor officer reported, grimly. “I have been unable to locate their cause.”
“The Killers,” Heidecker snarled. Space wasn’t as empty as most civilians believed; gravity waves, ion storms and countless other natural hazards bedevilled starships and their crews. Gravity waves were uniquely dangerous in that they travelled faster than light — the crew would have no warning about the danger before the first wave struck home — but waves on such a scale couldn’t have a natural cause. “Sound red alert and send a FLASH transmission to Sparta. The Killers are coming out to play.”
He leaned back in his chair as the display updated rapidly. “The gravity waves are focusing now,” the sensor officer added. “I’m picking up a Killer starship… two Killer starships” — he broke off in horror — “seventeen Killer starships, emerging from the gravity pulses and closing at four hundred times the speed of light.”
“Helm, prepare to take evasive manoeuvres,” Heidecker ordered, tightly. No one had ever seen more than three Killer starships together outside of one of their systems, no one. They didn’t seem to have the urge to build vast fleets, or to deploy them as a group, although normally the firepower of a single starship would be more than sufficient for any likely threat. They’d noticed the loss of the captured vessel, all right, part of his mind whispered. They’d brought an entire fleet to… discuss the issue with the humans who had captured it. “Time to intercept?”
“Nine minutes and counting,” the tactical officer reported. He sounded stunned; Heidecker couldn’t blame him. A single Killer starship would have been a hopeless foe for Observer; seventeen of them could probably exterminate the entire Defence Force without raising a sweat. Another shockwave hit the starship before he could continue. “They’re scanning local space with FTL sensors, sir; they know we’re here.”
Heidecker looked up towards the display. The daunting sight of so many massive vessels racing towards him was almost hypnotic, yet his training kept him from panicking. “Move us to a safe distance,” he ordered, calmly, refusing to consider that there might not be any such thing. “Keep updating the Admiral on our situation; anyone who wishes to open their recorders may do so.”
Observer started to shudder constantly as the Killer starships plunged closer. Heidecker braced himself for a collision, but the helm officer responded smoothly and pulled them out of the oncoming enemy fleet’s course. He looked down at the feed from the passive sensors as they slipped away; no one had seen any Killer starships using such sensors, or even travelling anywhere in such a hurry. The sheer scale of their power was terrifying. How had they worked up the nerve to attack and capture one Killer starship?
The shuddering seemed to fade away as the Killers raced towards their destination, coming to a sudden stop that should, by rights, have turned the crew into jelly. A human starship that attempted such a manoeuvre would have suffered immediate and terminal compensator failure, but the Killers just seemed to do it effortlessly. He glanced down at the plotting chart, but his hunch proved to be correct; they had stopped at the exact spot where the captured Killer starship had died.
“They’re quartering space pretty thoroughly,” the sensor officer said, grimly. He looked nervous — no, terrified; his implants were all that were keeping him from falling apart — as he studied his readings. “I doubt that there’s a single atom that they haven’t catalogued out there.”