“Weapons locked on target,” Gary said. “We are engaging the enemy.”
Andrew watched as the particle beams dug deep into the Killer starship, vaporising metal and burning through deep into the interior. The strange Killer atmosphere — which they now knew to be representative of a gas giant — was streaming from a dozen holes, yet the damage wasn’t deep enough to be fatal. Gary launched a spread of energy torpedoes into another rent, but half of the spread smashed against an protected section of the hull, and the remainder simply didn’t inflict much damage. Andrew was sure, looking at the power curves as they ran over the Killer starship, that they were hurting the enemy ship, but it showed no inclination to run, or to die.
Gary added a spread of implosion bolts as they roared up and over an undamaged part of the Killer hull. The Killers returned fire with a cold fury that seemed to rend and tear at space itself, but somehow the Lightning escaped destruction. The tiny explosions — tiny, but so devastating n the long run — sparkled on the Killer hull, before they were swept away by particle beams from oncoming human starships. The Lightning climbed away from the Killer starship, firing another spread of energy torpedoes and noisemakers to cover its flight; David avoided the last two bursts of Killer weapons fire with ease. The Killers had other targets to engage.
“Two more starships were destroyed in the run,” Gary said, shortly. Andrew nodded once and pushed his feelings away into the back of his mind. They’d mourn later. If there was a later. It was easy to build hundreds of destroyers, even factoring in the new weapons, but harder to train the crews, even though the Community had had plenty of volunteers after the Killers attacked human settlements… and humanity had proven that they could be beaten. “Another… sir!”
Andrew turned and saw one of the starships. Somehow, it had been hit, but survived. It was falling down towards the Killer starship, using the last vestiges of its drive field to point itself right at the target and ramped up the drive to full power. It flew right into one of the damaged sections of the Killer hull and exploded. A moment later, a series of massive explosions tore the Killer starship apart. There was nothing left of it, but a wavefront of expanding plasma and radiation.
“Sir, the Melbourne and the Payback are launching suicide runs,” Gary reported. Andrew stared in numb disbelief. The starship commanders were ignoring all signals from the command ships, or entities from their friends, but launching themselves against the enemy. The Payback’s Captain, he recalled suddenly, had lost family at Asimov. He had been the first to grasp the possible uses of the new weapons. “They’re throwing themselves right at the Killers!”
Two minutes later, three more Killer starships died.
Chapter Thirty
Chiyo found herself looking onto a scene from hell.
She had been studying the Killer communications network — and trying to understand some of the Killer race memories she had figured out how to access — when she’d sensed a wave of alarm rushing through the network that played unwilling host to her. She’d thought, at first, that one of her duplicates had been detected, or that Chiyo Prime herself had been located, but the Killer mind had seemed unconcerned about its own security. Instead, she had become aware — as it had become aware — of new gravity waves sweeping across the galaxy, marking a sudden change in the universe itself.
It was hard to know just what she was actually sensing — she couldn’t tell if the gravity waves were reaching her starship or if the Killer was merely sensing a change in the overall fabric of space — but she could sense the Killer minds reaching their conclusion. It was unlikely in the extreme, they seemed to decide, although she wasn’t sure even if she was understanding them properly, that the star would suddenly have become a black hole. The conclusion was obvious; the enemy — the human race, Chiyo knew, unless a new player had entered the field — had moved on from creating supernovas to creating black holes. It had to be terminated, now.
A wormhole had formed around her starship and she had sensed its leap through space to a rendezvous location, where thirty-two other Killer starships had materialised. The Killer mind had monitored the creation of the black hole while waiting for its allies — Chiyo found it oddly reassuring that the single starship hadn’t gone charging in itself — and as soon as the remainder of the fleet assembled, had ordered an advance. Chiyo wasn’t sure if her starship was actually the leader — it was so hard to gain more than vague impressions of what they were saying to each other — but it did seem to be taking the lead. Space warped around it again and, when the wormhole had collapsed, revealed a black hole only a few AUs away from their new position.
Chiyo watched, fascinated, as the starships raced towards the black hole. The Defence Force had never studied black holes too closely — they had been more concerned with probing Killer star systems — and she had only seen one at a distance, although the Technical Faction had proved them closely, often at a cost of the starship doing the probing. A single starship hung in orbit near the black hole; Chiyo guessed, in a moment of dark humour, that the Captain had probably taken one look at the advancing Killer fleet and wet himself. The human ship was completely outmatched.
And then the human starships had arrived and the battle had begun. Chiyo had been stunned at the pain and shock in the Killer mind when the human weapons actually inflicted damage for the first time, ever. Systems that were so old that they had literally worn away, even on a starship that was effectively bonded with the mind controlling it, were pressed into service to repair the damage, even as the Killers gritted their teeth and fought back savagely. They had never experienced such pain in their entire lives, yet they held on and returned fire. Chiyo would have been impressed under other circumstances, she decided, but their stubbornness was costing human lives. She watched, unable to understand why the antimatter weapons weren’t working, until the first starship rammed a Killer ship. A moment later, two more followed… and the Killers lost their first starships in combat, since…
There was no sense of time — she wasn’t even sure if the Killers had any concept of time as humans reckoned it — but she had the strong impression that the Killers hadn’t died in a very long time. They were effectively immortal, she knew; they had no real concept of death, just… stagnation. The deaths of three of their number shocked them, the more so because they lacked anything like the MassMind, as far as she could tell. Humanity had invented religions to give the human race some concept of life after death, but the Killers… had not. Whatever drove them wasn’t anything that a human could understand. For an immortal to die, to be exposed to the fates, had to be terrifying. Their response to the human kamikaze starships would be drastic.
There’s no more time, she thought, grimly. She had already prepared her messenger — a duplicate of herself — and planned her moves carefully. The duplicate had been compressed down to a tiny data file — she had probably violated yet another legal restriction, she decided, although it would be interesting to see if the Community could legally prosecute her for hurting herself — and she swept her up into the Killer’s data stream. The Killers used constant low-level transmissions to communicate with themselves — it made little sense to her, but she was sure that she understood what they were doing, if not why — but she had another use in mind. She launched herself into the transmission stream, took a breath she knew she no longer needed, and pushed the signal out into open space. One way or the other, the die was definitely cast.