Heidecker shared a long look with his tactical officer. “They won’t locate any debris, will they?”
“No sir,” the tactical officer said. “If the captured starship had experienced a complete matter-to-energy conversion it would have gone up like a small supernova. They could hardly have failed to miss the evidence as they came roaring in. No, they’ll probably know that the craft was moved after the Footsoldiers captured it and killed the alien operating the ship. If they don’t know where…”
Heidecker nodded. He’d kept abreast of what little the Admiral had allowed him to learn of the captured starship, but security considerations had forbidden him to know more than the bare minimum. One of the things he did know was that the Admiral was worried that there might be an emergency beacon on the Killer starship, but if the Killer fleet was examining its last known location instead of Star’s End, it suggested that there wasn’t. It was an odd oversight — communications and life support were always the last things to go on a human starship — but perhaps it made sense to the Killers.
“Keep us well back,” he ordered. Somehow, he doubted the Killers would be ignoring any human starships today. The links to the other picket ships suggested that they were still being ignored, but the last set of updates reported that four of their targets had opened wormholes and vanished… perhaps to join the fleet hunting for their missing comrade. “Sensors… can they read us at this distance?”
“Uncertain, Captain,” the sensor officer said. “They scanned us earlier, but we are not putting out any kind of active radiation. They may be capable of maintaining a sensor lock using technology beyond our ability to detect, but if that’s the case, we have no way to know about it.”
“You don’t know, in other words,” Heidecker said, without anger. There were still far too many Unknowns about the Killers. “Keep watching them through passive sensors, but don’t go active without my direct order.”
He sat back in his command chair, feeling his implants slowly calming his mind and body. The one advantage they had was that the Killer starships were so vast they generated their own gravity fields, allowing them to be tracked through passive gravimetric sensors. They seemed to be remaining still, but it was anyone’s guess how long that would last. By now, even assuming strict parity with human technology, they would know that their missing comrade was gone.
And what, he asked himself, would they do then? Would they start doing what human crews would do and start examining nearby systems, or would they come after Observer on the assumption that her crew could tell them where to find their missing comrade? Heidecker knew that if there was a chance of Observer falling intact into their hands — if they had hands — he had strict orders to trigger the self-destruct sequence and blow the starship, along with the recording implants in their brains, to atoms. He looked down at the communications screen that should have linked him with Sparta, and the Admiral, but it was silent. Sparta wasn’t trying to micromanage from their distance, for which he was silently grateful. The last thing he needed was some desk jockey trying to run the encounter from thousands of light years away.
“They’ve cancelled their high-power scans,” the sensor officer said, suddenly. “If they’re still scanning, they’re using something beyond our ability to detect.”
“Assume they’re no longer scanning,” Heidecker said. “What might they be doing?”
The sensor officer shrugged. Active sensors could be detected at a considerable distance; they could even be detected at ranges that allowed the hunted to know that it was being hunted, without informing the hunter that they’d found their target. Passive sensors, on the other hand, listened for other sources of energy, including active sensors, warp signatures and weapons being fired. The Killers could be watching them like hawks through their passive sensors and they’d never know about it.
Heidecker shivered. He’d taken part in drills that had two starships creeping around, each one hoping to detect the betraying signature of an active sensor before the opponent detected his presence. They had always struck him as creepy, in a sense; the only consolation was that the Killers hardly needed to sneak around, not with their level of firepower. Unless… the thought was tantalising; unless they thought that humanity had invented a whole new weapons system that could take out an entire Killer starship! How much did they actually know about what had happened to their comrade?
The starship shivered slightly under his feet. “Low-level gravity waves,” the sensor officer said, a moment later. “They’re moving… sir, one of them is heading directly towards us.”
“Evasive action,” Heidecker snapped. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Killers had to be coming for them. “Helm, prepare to trigger the Anderson Drive and jump us out of here on my signal.”
“The Killer starship is now exceeding the speed of light,” the sensor officer added. “They’re altering course to match ours. They’ll be in observed weapons range in twenty-three seconds and counting.”
Observer twisted again in space, ramping up her own warp drive and speeding away from the Killer starship, only to have her course matched effortlessly. The monstrous starship was giving chase, calmly pacing them and closing in steadily. It shouldn’t have been able to maintain such speeds without warp drive — Heidecker found himself hunting for evidence of a warp field and saw nothing — but once again, the Killers defied the laws of science as humanity knew them. The helm officer did the best he could, yet the Killers tossed a twenty-kilometre long starship around as if it were a starfighter.
They’re playing with us, Heidecker thought, suddenly. It was hard to be certain, but he was very aware that the Killers could probably have killed them all almost from the start. They’re trying to see where we go.
His gaze slipped back to the display as the Killer starship drew closer. “Helm,” he ordered, “jump us out of here.”
The starship rang like a bell. New emergency icons flashed up in front of his eyes. “The Tachyon Field refused to form,” the engineer reported, through the data network. “They somehow countered the field and threw the energy back at us. I can’t explain it or counter it.”
“Understood,” Heidecker said. That changed everything. No one had known that it was possible to counter a Tachyon field… and all of a sudden, escape had become impossible. He’d dawdled too long and now they were trapped. “Tactical, load warp torpedo bays and prepare to open fire on my command.”
It was a desperate gamble and one he already strongly suspected to be futile, but what choice was left to him? “Weapons ready, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Warp torpedoes are locked on target.”
Heidecker looked back at the monstrous starship steadily closing in on them. “Fire, he ordered calmly. “Fire at will.”
Observer shuddered as it unleashed a spread of warp torpedoes towards their target. The Defence Force had designed them to solve a tactical problem, yet the destroyer was limited in how many such weapons it could deploy. Energy weapons couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light and an enemy ship could simply outrace lasers or plasma bolts, therefore warp missiles — antimatter warheads mounted on a warp sled — could be used to hit a target retreating at warp speed. There was an additional benefit to using the weapons. Powerful explosions within the target’s warp field tended to disrupt the warp field and cause them to drop out of warp, back to more mundane speeds, where they could be targeted with standard weapons. If the Killers truly didn’t use warp fields, however, there was no way of knowing what would happen when the warp missiles detonated.