“Evasive action,” Andrew snapped, as the Killer starship loomed closer. The starships should have been cumbersome, sitting ducks for the far more nimble human ships, but now they were throwing themselves around the battlezone like flies. They were still firing, a mocking reminder that there were still thirty Killer starships near the black hole and that they still had the power to wipe out the human force. Andrew wasn’t sure, even, how the Lightning had survived. One blast had come close enough to scorch the hull. “Keep us spinning and return fire!”
Another spread of implosion bolts shot out of the ship, hacking away at the Killer hull material and opening new targets for more conventional weapons. The Killers were trying to avoid a fourth ramming attack, Andrew realised, yet they couldn’t avoid one forever. A starship made a run for an exposed section of the Killer hull, only to be blasted into vapour before it could ramp up its drive and fly right into the damaged area. Another twisted and feinted, before firing a spread of energy torpedoes into another rent, sending tiny explosions glaring into the darkness of space. The Killer starship heeled like a wounded whale, before recovering and blowing the human starship into dust.
“I have new targets,” Gary said. “Request permission to engage.”
“Fire at will,” Andrew snapped. The old rejoinder — failing that, fire at Fred — surfaced in his mind and he pushed it down savagely. “Helm, take us in to point blank range and strafe the bastards.”
“Working on it,” David said. The starship twisted and rocketed down towards the Killer ship, firing as it came. Gary fired an entire spread of energy torpedoes into a gaping hole and was rewarded by the sight of a burst of gas blowing out of the side of the starship. The vaporised interior material lit up space for a second before it cooled and faded out of existence. “Pulling away…”
The starship shook violently. “What the hell,” Andrew demanded, “was that?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” David said. “A random gravity fluctuation…?”
“Get on to the Technical observers and tell them to tell us what it was,” Andrew snapped. “And then…”
“Sir, the Havoc,” Gary said, suddenly. “She’s in trouble.”
Andrew snapped the live feed into his console. The Havoc had been zooming towards a Killer starship with the intention of ramming the ship — or, perhaps, trying to convince the Killers that they intended to ram. She was stopped, dead in space, twitching violently against an invisible force holding her in place. The starship was buckling even as he watched; a moment later, it broke apart and vaporised as the quantum tap blew, causing a massive explosion. There had been no time for anyone to get to the lifepods.
“Hellfire,” he snapped. “What was that?”
“Unknown,” the AI said. There was a sudden change in its voice. “Alert; possible viral software detected!”
Andrew blinked. The Killers didn’t attempt to hack into human computers. It wasn’t their style. “Report,” he snapped. “Who’s attempting to hack into the system?”
There was a long pause, an eternity in computer time. “Uncertain,” the AI said, finally. “We picked up a transmission from one of the Killer ships containing a compressed human mind pattern.”
“A compressed human mind pattern?” Andrew asked. “What the…?”
“Confirmed,” the AI said. “The pattern is definitely human, the product of a Community personality recording implant, standard issue. I have placed the compressed pattern in suspension and will alert the MassMind. Further analysis here may put the ship in danger.”
“Cut yourself out of the local command network,” Andrew ordered, shortly. “If you’re contaminated, we don’t want it spreading throughout the fleet.”
“Yes, sir,” the AI said.
Andrew pushed the mystery to the back of his mind and looked over at David. “Take us back into the fight,” he ordered, “but be ready to run if they start trying to rip us apart.”
“Aye, sir,” David said. The display flickered for a second as a fourth Killer starship blew up and vaporised. A moment later, a fifth followed it as two starships rammed it in quick succession. There was no way to know, but Andrew would have bet good money that the Killers couldn’t replace their losses any faster — if that — than the human Defence Force. It only took three days to build a destroyer, yet a destroyer was tiny; an Iceberg-class ship was massive. How long would it take them to replace their losses? “Do you think it could be an attempt to communicate?”
Andrew shook his head. “Why would they send us a human mind pattern to communicate?” He asked. If it was an attempt to communicate, how had the Killers known how to do it? Had they taken a human alive after all? They’d certainly had the opportunity… and there were billions whose deaths had never been confirmed. “It makes no sense at all.”
Paula watched grimly as another human starship was ripped apart before it could ram a Killer starship amidships. “It’s unbelievable,” she said, shaking her head in awe. A human mind might have thought of such a system, but actually deploying it in combat? Anything could go badly wrong. “They’re actually using focused gravity beams as a weapon. The power levels it uses must be astronomical.”
“Never mind that now,” Chris snapped, shortly. “Can they counter it?”
“We should be able to tune the warp fields to compensate for sudden unexpected changes in the gravity field,” Paula said, slowly. Gravity technology was her area of expertise, after all, and she was learning more from the Killers than they would have liked, if they were even aware of her existence. “I can write them a formula for it, but their AIs should be able to counter it… hell, if they manage to alter their attack patterns, they should be able to prevent the Killers from taking out more than one or two craft. They won’t be able to maintain that kind of power generation and deployment for long.”
Chris frowned. “Are you sure of that?” He asked. “We’ve underestimated them before?”
Paula shrugged as another Killer starship died. The odds were turning rapidly against the Killers, she realised, even though she had never claimed to be a military tactician. They had to prevent any and all human starships from ramming — and there seemed to be no shortage of commanders willing to commit suicide to take down a Killer ship — while the humans only had to get lucky once. The fleet might have been reduced sharply — the once-neat attack wings had been broken up and destroyers were flying with whatever wingmen they could scrape up — but there were still far more human starships than there were Killer ships. She was rather surprised that the Killers had decided to continue the fight, rather than opening wormholes and escaping across the galaxy.
“I managed to get some background figures on what they could handle onboard their ships,” Paula said, finally. The hours spent studying the captured ship had answered all kinds of questions, and raised thousands more. “Projecting such massive gravity beams would require…”
Her voice broke off. “That’s how they’re doing it,” she said, slowly. “They have a black hole on each of those starships and… they’re using the black hole as a source of the gravity beams. Damn; that’s clever. They’re creating the power by skimming it off the black hole and running it through the focusing fields. I wonder how they actually compensate for the gravity flux… no, they counter that by using their own fields to handle it.”