The Killer starship didn’t bother to try to dodge or unleash counter-missiles of its own. The warp missiles tracked in and slammed right into the prow of the killer starship, vanishing in the bright-white glare of matter-antimatter mutual annihilation. If the Killer ship took any damage at all, it didn’t show it; it just kept coming, without even bothering to slow its pace. It seemed to be mocking the human crew. Heidecker knew it was unlikely, but he was convinced that the Killers were laughing at them, enjoying their sport at human expense. It was personal now.
“No observed damage,” the sensor officer said. There was a sudden pause. “Captain; energy spike!”
The Killer starship seemed to twinkle and unleash a single ball of white light towards the Observer. The helm officer didn’t wait for orders — standard procedures existed for such situations — and threw the destroyer into a corkscrew manoeuvre, evading the ball of energy with ease. Heidecker looked down at the sensor readings and shook his head. How were the Killers projecting energy faster than light? Like so much else they showed off so casually, it should have been impossible. The Killer starship shimmered and unleashed a second ball, and then a third, steadily bracketing the human ship. Heidecker ran the calculations in his head and concluded that they had bare minutes to live.
“Find me somewhere we can hide,” he ordered, tartly. At their speed, they were crossing hundreds of light years every minute, yet the Killers were still closing in on them. He thought about setting course for the nearest Defence Force base, before dismissing the idea at once. There was nothing they could do to help them and he would merely lead the Killers to the base. “A nebula or a gas giant, or…”
“Got it,” the sensor officer said. Heidecker heard a new flash of hope in his voice and hoped that it was not misplaced. “CAS-3473746-6; a Jupiter-class gas giant. It’s two minutes away at our current speed.”
Another white ball of light flashed past the Observer. “Take us there,” Heidecker ordered, grimly. If they could slip into the gas giant’s atmosphere, they’d be safe, unless the Killers decided to give chase down into the gravity well. They’d have to be mad even to try. How could they hope to steer their ship inside a gas giant’s atmosphere. If he hadn’t been desperate, he wouldn’t have done it on a bet. “Maximum warp.”
The Killers didn’t stop their pursuit, or their firing, as the Observer flew right into the uninhabited system and decelerated rapidly, racing down towards the massive gas giant. Heidecker had never seen the legendary Jupiter — the Sol System was off-limits to everyone without special authorisation — but the gas giant they were approaching seemed similar, although there was no trace of a Big Red Spot. Instead, the gas giant’s atmosphere seemed to billow with orange-yellow clouds, suggesting a perfect hiding place…
“Enemy contact,” the sensor officer barked, as a new red icon flashed into existence. “It’s coming out of the gas giant.”
Heidecker stared, unable to believe his eyes. The massive Iceberg-class Killer starship emerged slowly from the mists of the gas giant, as it if were giving birth to a monstrous child. The Killer ship was tiny compared to the gas giant, but it was right in the Observer’s path, blocking their escape. He wondered, absurdly, what kind of lift system would allow them to move such a starship so effortlessly, before he began to bark orders at his crew. They might just be able to hide in the rings surrounding the gas giant.
For a moment, he thought that they had escaped, but then the Killers opened fire, scattering even that false hope. They were shooting at the rocks and ice that made up the rings, the brilliant glare of total matter-energy conversation illuminating the rings… and revealing their location. The helm officer took them out of the rings as fast as possible, leaving the Killers smashing through the rubble in hot pursuit, but it was useless. As soon as the Killers were clear of the rings, they went FTL themselves… and they were no longer playing around. The distance between the two craft shrank so sharply that it was horrifyingly clear that the Killers had been playing with them.
“Load torpedo bays,” he ordered, hopelessly. The Observer’s drives were on the verge of burning out. A few minutes more and they’d lose the warp drive and end up dead in space, and then literally dead when the Killers overran them. “Charge weapons and bring us around to face the bastards.”
The distance between the two starships closed terrifyingly quickly as the Observer closed in on the Killer ship, ducking and weaving to avoid the brilliant flashes of white light. The tactical officer opened fire as soon as they entered weapons range, trying to at least scorch the Killer’s hull, but it was useless. The Killers shrugged off their attacks and kept coming. All they needed, Heidecker knew, was a single hit. It would be enough to blow the Observer into atoms.
“Point us straight at them,” he ordered, finally accepting their fate. There was no longer any point in running. “Dump the memory to the MassMind and go to ramming speed!”
The two starships slammed together at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Observer vanished in a ball of fire. The Killer starship staggered under the impact, but seemed undamaged. There was no one left to care. A moment later, it turned about, opened a wormhole, and vanished to parts unknown.
Chapter Thirteen
Seen from high above, it was easy to perceive the Milky Way as nothing more than a shining disk of light. The stars seemed to blur into one harmonious glow, creating the illusion that the galaxy was a living thing, spinning in space. The spiral arms could barely be made out as separate from the remainder of the galaxy; they were, after all, only areas where the stars were denser than average. Admiral Brent Roeder could have stared at the image for hours, forgetting the Killers and the desperate struggle to survive. It was almost hypnotic.
He shook his head and uploaded a single mental command into the room’s processor. The disk vanished, to be replaced by a tactical chart of the entire galaxy, marked out to display the location of known Killer bases and starships. A thousand years of exploration, Brent knew, had barely touched the surface of the galaxy. God alone knew what might be lurking in some of the darker recesses of space. It would be easy to become convinced that there were other races and civilisations out there, hiding from the Killers, completely beyond human detection. It would be nice to believe that humanity wasn’t alone — or, rather, only sharing the galaxy with homicidal aliens in massive starships — but there was no time for wishful thinking. To all intents and purposes, humanity was alone.
Two hundred years ago, humanity had happened across yet another dead world, after a starship on a routine mission had detected radio transmissions coming from the sector. The starship had moved to investigate — carefully; it might have been a Killer installation — only to find another blackened ruin of a world. The ship had kept picking up the signals, right up until the final moment, when the Killer starships had appeared in an alien sky. The aliens had been bird-like, taking their first steps into a whole new medium, when the Killers destroyed them. The human race knew that they had existed and bore silent testimony to their existence, yet who would record humanity’s presence? What race would arise in the future to oppose the Killers?