“Understood,” the Admiral said. “Good shooting.”
“Sir,” Gary said, suddenly. “The remaining Killer starships are turning to engage the fleet!”
“That’s the second time they’ve responded to us here,” Andrew said. Twenty-two Killer starships bearing down on him, each one keen to rescue their friend and exterminate the human scum… he’d never felt happier. They were hurting the Killers in a ship-to-ship action. “Fleet orders; attack wings are to form up and engage each of the Killer craft. Don’t give them time to adapt and react to the new reality; just hurt them, whatever it takes.”
“Aye, sir,” Gary said. “Recommend that we continue attack pattern beta-seven.”
“Make it so,” Andrew said. “Engage!”
“They’re hurting the bastards,” Chris said, in delight. “Your weapons worked!”
“They weren’t just my weapons,” Paula pointed out, although she was somehow tempted to claim all the credit, at least in front of Chris. “They’re also not inflicting enough damage.”
It was true. The implosion bolts caused localised explosions on — no, within — the Killer hull material, blowing it into atoms and leaving the hull exposed. It should have been a decisive weapon, but the Killers were compensating for the effects somehow, rendering it harder to hurt them. Their weapons, on the other hand, were lethal; what they hit, they killed.
She pulled up the sensor readings and studied the energy fluxes covering the battle, trying to determine exactly what was happening. It wasn’t easy to distinguish any particular weapon from another — the Killer weapons emitting vast amounts of radiation when they were fired and more when they hit something — but the implosion bolts had their own signature. It was easier to separate those out from the remainder of the firepower emission signatures, but there were no answers, until she picked up a tiny wave of gravity fluctuation from one of the wounded behemoths.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, shaking her head in awe. “They’re smothering the blasts and compressing them into tiny quantum black holes.”
Chris stared at her, bemused. “So?”
“Do you have any idea,” Paula asked, “how much power it would take to do something like that? How much capability to control one of the fundamental forces of the universe to do that without blowing up the entire ship?”
“I see,” Chris said. “They don’t fight fair, do they?”
“No,” Paula agreed. She frowned, studying the readings from her sensor drones. Now she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to pick out the other fluctuations and see how the Killers were channelling the implacable fury of antimatter detonations into their portable black holes. The human weapons were simply feeding the Killer power source. In the long run, it might destabilise the black holes, unless the Killers could somehow dampen the effect down — which was theoretically possible — but it wouldn’t happen quickly enough to be immediately useful. “I wonder… inform the fleet to engage with energy torpedoes and particle beams, rather than antimatter weapons. They have to have a lower limit to how much they can absorb.”
She scowled as Chris headed off to inform the fleet. It should be possible, she decided, to actually duplicate the Killer defence tactic and use it as a weapon, but it would take some time to figure out how to turn it into a practical weapon that could actually be deployed. The Killers themselves hadn’t bothered to deploy such a weapon, which suggested that it wasn’t possible for them, or that they simply hadn’t seen the need to build it. Either one was possible.
“They’re trying to henpeck them to death,” she muttered, as another flare of light marked the death of a human starship. The Defence Force starships were pressing insanely close to the Killer ships, attempting to fire directly into the rents and gashes in their hull, but that made it easier for the Killers to target and destroy them. Several Defence Force starships were attempting to destroy entire hull sections so they could shelter from the Killer weapons and fire directly into the hull without having to evade, but as the Killer fleet fell into formation, it became increasingly difficult to avoid their fire. The only saving grace was that the Killers seemed reluctant to risk hitting each other now that their armour had been compromised.
“Their weapons would probably mess the interiors of their own ships up good,” Chris agreed, when she mentioned that out loud. “Or would their black holes merely absorb all the power?”
Paula shrugged as another Killer starship staggered under a wave of implosion bolts. Somehow, they were using their entire hull surface as a weapon; they lacked weapon blisters or missile tubes. Damaging entire kilometres of the hull didn’t seem to prevent them from returning fire, although it seemed to limit their field of fire slightly. If the entire hull material could be removed… but it couldn’t be destroyed quickly; the implosion bolts only took out a few meters of hull material, at most. The Killer starships were still deadly dangerous.
“No way to know,” she said, looking down at the black hole she’d created. The Shiva Hole — as she had decided to call it — was barely visible now, but there were still some hints of the remaining gases from the star. When the battle was won — if the battle was won — she would have to begin the immensely more dangerous task of tuning the black hole to use it as a communications device. The whole process was rooted completely in theory. She, for the first time in far too long, would be performing genuine original science. “One way or the other, we’ll find out soon.”
“They’re working as a team now, sir,” Gary reported, as the Lightning narrowly avoided certain death by a completely random burst of fire. The Killers had pulled all their starships together and were working to cover each other, an unprecedented display of concern about their human opponents, although they were still winning. The Killer starships had been damaged — all of the starships had lost parts of their hull material — yet they were still dangerous. “We’re just not making enough of an impact.”
Andrew nodded, bitterly. The antimatter weapons, deployed against the interior of the Killer starships, should have ended the fighting in short order. Instead, they seemed to be snuffed out as soon as they were deployed, leaving particle beams and energy torpedoes to wreck havoc on the Killer starships. It just wasn’t good enough. He had the grim certainty that they’d started a battering match that would only end when one side was completely wiped out… and the human race had already lost two hundred and seven starships. Their deaths hadn’t been in vain, but the Killers hadn’t even lost a single ship.
“Lock particle beams on the exposed areas of their hull,” he ordered, shortly. “The attack wing will follow us in and bombard the areas we target.”
“Understood, sir,” Gary said. He sounded tired; for the first time, Andrew understood why the Killers sought such close harmony between their biological bodies and their technology. If they ever got tired, no human had ever seen any evidence of it. “I have weapons locked on target.”
Andrew nodded to David. “Go,” he said. “Take us in.”
The Lightning spun on its axis and dived down towards the immense Killer starship, running through a series of evasive manoeuvres to avoid incoming bursts of fire. The Killers seemed to have problems targeting multiple foes at once, although Andrew had to keep cautioning himself that that might be nothing more than wishful thinking; the sheer volume of firepower they could put out was daunting in its own right. They drew more fire as they zoomed closer, but none of the Killer blasts came close enough to blow the Lightning into dust.