She shook her head. “It should be easy enough to watch for a sudden rise in gravity fields and set the warp drive to get the starship out of range,” she added. “I’d give anything to know just how they do it.”
Chris gave her a wry look. “I thought you intended to use Shiva to learn how they do it,” he said. He grinned at her. “Wouldn’t that be cheating?”
Paula scowled at him. “Trust you to see it that way,” she said. She saw no reason why she shouldn’t steal the answers from the Killers if she could. That might solve other questions as well. A nasty thought had been lurking at the back of her mind, a sense of just what the Killers could do if they decided to apply themselves to the task. “It’s terrifying, though; with enough power and patience, they could dismantle the entire galaxy.”
“Watch out for gravity flux,” Andrew warned, as the attack fleet closed in on another Killer starship. The massive starship rotated with terrifying speed, bringing its weapons to bear on the human ships, which split up as bolts of white light flared out towards them. Their speed was still greater than the Killers — and a flurry of implosion bolts began wrecking havoc on the Killer hull — but the Killers were still fighting. Andrew had long since lost his admiration for their sheer bloody-minded determination. He just wanted the fight to end. The Killers had lost ten massive starships. A human enemy would have withdrawn to rethink matters. The Killers kept fighting. “Fire at will.”
The Killer starship staggered under their blows. A moment later, it blew away two of its tiny tormentors, while a third vanished in the blue flash of warp drive before it could be torn apart by a gravity field. The Lightning slipped into a complicated series of spinning evasive manoeuvres — firing all the time — before it pulled up and escaped, seconds before it would have crashed into the hull. The other starships followed, their weapons digging deeper into the Killer hull, before they too escaped with ease. The Killer starship was dying. Its hull material had been reduced so much that it was far less capable of returning fire. It was only a matter of time before it was battered to rubble and destroyed.
“Concentrate fire on the drive section,” Andrew ordered, as the destroyers came around for another run. If they could take out the limitations controlling the black hole, the results should be explosive. It might not matter. Andrew was grimly aware that other Captains were making their own preparations for suicide runs; backing up their personality recordings, allowing crewmen to escape their ships and taking direct command of their final flight. In time, he was sure, the Defence Force would deploy automated ramming ships; it would save lives and prevent the Admiral ever having to ask someone to commit suicide. There was no longer any need for suicidal stands against the Killers. They could hurt them now.
“Engaging,” Gary said, as the massed firepower of the remaining attack wing dug deep into the Killer’s interior. The starship shuddered under their fire. “I think we’re hitting heavier shielding deeper inside the ship; the particle beams aren’t having a greater effect…”
“Keep firing,” Andrew snapped. A thought struck him. There was no reason why the Killers couldn’t use their hull armour material — and supporting power — further inside the ship. The black hole would provide the power for its own incarceration. “Deploy implosion bolts if necessary…”
“Gravity flux,” David barked. The starship heeled drunkenly to starboard before stabilising and flying straight for as long as they dared, around two seconds. It was long enough to evade any chance of being caught and destroyed. “They’re opening a wormhole!”
Andrew saw the icon blossoming open and enveloping the Killer starship, which dived into the wormhole and escaped the human fleet. It left behind considerable amounts of space junk and debris floating in space. He looked down at the display as new wormholes blossomed into life, swallowing the remaining twenty-one Killer starships, ending the fight… no, one of them had remained in the fight. It was still firing at his ships.
“Scan that ship,” he ordered, as the Killer ship picked off a Defence Force starship that had come too close. The other starships regrouped at a safe distance before advancing on the final target. “Why is it still here?”
“Low power curves,” Gary said, after a moment. The image of the Killer starship floated in front of Andrew, looking as formidable as ever. It was still firing, even if it hadn’t escaped. It was still in the fight. “I suspect that it lacks the power to open a wormhole.”
Andrew smiled. It would have been easy — and that was a great change — to destroy the Killer ship, but he had another idea. “Contact the Footsoldiers,” he ordered. “I want them to take that ship and its controlling mind intact.”
“Aye, sir,” Gary said. He paused, suddenly. “The risks will be considerable.”
Andrew surprised himself by laughing. “No, Gary, the risks were considerable before we developed the new weapons,” he said. “Now we can fight and hurt the bastards on more even terms.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“This was a dumb idea,” Private Ron Friedman muttered to himself, as the transport floated closer to the trapped Killer starship. “We should have come in with the suits instead.”
“Silence in the ranks,” Sergeant Michael Francis Carey barked, although Ron suspected that he privately agreed. The tiny transport should have been hard for the Killers to locate, let alone kill, but it was a much bigger target than two hundred separate Footsoldiers wearing powered combat armour. “Prepare to debus!”
Another flicker of white light flared off in the distance as the Killer ship shouted its defiance of the human gnats tormenting it. The Defence Force starships were circling, like hyenas circling a wounded lion — not that Ron or anyone else outside the MassMind had seen a lion — and distracting it, nipping in to fire a few bursts of particle beams or energy torpedoes into the hull, before pulling back before it could gore them. The sheer immensity of the starship — and the powerful force fields holding it together — made taking it apart a difficult task. Ron wondered, absently, why the starship commanders hadn’t unleashed their antimatter warheads, or even good old-fashioned nukes, but perhaps they’d decided they wanted a trophy on their wall. Who knew what went through the mind of starship commanders? They enjoyed nice clean ships and clean living, while the Footsoldiers slogged through the metaphorical mud and grime. They probably thought that the Footsoldiers would be able to take the ship as an afterthought — and then they could claim credit for it.
On the other hand, he decided, as the transport ducked low and zoomed through a massive gash in the Killer’s hull, it does beat shepherding refugees around the Community…
“Out, now,” the Sergeant barked. Tubes opened and expelled the Footsoldiers into space, their sensors coming online and rapidly scanning for possible threats. No one expected the Killer mind in command of the vessel to react quickly, but they’d already lost one ship to Footsoldiers and probably wouldn’t want to lose a second. “Form up; section leaders, on me.”
Ron allowed the suit to guide him towards Lieutenant Drake, his section leader, and winced inwardly. His old unit had been a finely-tuned machine, commanded by a Captain most of them had referred to, in private, as the Iron Bitch. The new unit consisted of Footsoldiers from fifty different units that had been scattered by the Killer blitzkrieg and they had barely spent any time training together. He’d looked up the stats on the commanding officers and had been mildly reassured, but it was almost like his first day in a suit, with the entire unit blundering everywhere. It would have made for some comedy in a training camp, yet in combat, it would get people killed.