“Follow me,” Drake ordered, slowly, and glided down towards a wide-open gash further into the hull. The interior of the Killer starship looked torn and melted, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to plastic and metal, yet it still managed to convey a sense of alienness that spooked him, even though he knew that the Killers had been defeated — for the first time, ever. The destruction of a star — and an entire Killer settlement — had been remarkable, but now humans had fought the Killers toe-to-toe and won. Perhaps, he decided, as he glided further into the massive ship, the starship commanders knew what they were doing after all.
The local atmosphere had gone, the suit informed him; they were floating in a pure vacuum, with only a tiny gravity pull drawing them towards the rear of the vessel. The online specs for the Killer starship weren’t that helpful — they all seemed to have different interiors and in any case they’d been thoroughly disrupted by human weapons — but he knew that that was where the Killer stored their black hole. Idly, he wondered what would happen if the Killer starship, black hole and all, was pointed towards the Shiva Hole. Would the two black holes coexist, or would one swallow the other? No one had ever expected the Footsoldiers to be fighting on the edge of a black hole.
He checked his plasma rifle again as they passed through what looked like a battered airlock, into a deeper section of the ship. It was lit up by frequent discharges of energy that seemed to have no apparent cause, unless the Killer starship’s entire power grid was backfiring and on the verge of collapse. There was no way to know for sure until the Technical Faction pulled a research team together and sent them to take possession of the hulk, but Drake’s orders — updating frequently in his HUD — warned them to stay away from the lights. Who knew what they could do to the human Footsoldiers?
Probably nothing, Ron concluded, although he suspected that Drake was right. One particular Footsoldier training exercise had the trainees, totally naked and unarmed, being told to find their way through a particularly innocent-looking compartment in a starship. The careful trainees stayed well away from anything that looked remotely suspicious, the less-cautious ones died in explosions or were trapped in paralysis beams — all simulated, of course. He’d trained in exercises that involved delaying a boarding party for as long as possible and there was no reason why the Killers couldn’t do the same. They might have their own contingency plans…
The gravity pull suddenly increased a thousand-fold, sending the Footsoldiers crashing to the deck. If the suits hadn’t compensated automatically, the entire platoon would have been wiped out, along with the other platoons on their own missions. As it was, red lights flared up over four suit icons, warning of broken limbs and one head injury, even within the suits. Drake halted the platoon long enough to access the damage, before ordering the injured to take sedatives and allow their suits to get them back out of the Killer starship, back to the transport. Two of them protested, claiming that they could still use the suits with broken legs, but Drake sent them back anyway. The remaining Footsoldiers struggled forwards until the gravity field suddenly collapsed again, allowing them to float onwards into the hulk.
“Keep the antigravity fields on full,” Drake ordered. No one argued. After the Killer had wiped out a third of the platoon, no one felt like taking chances. They could counter that trick, but what else did the Killers have up its sleeve? Ron accessed the reports from the first two penetrations of Killer starships and scowled. The captured starship had also deployed automatons to face the human intruders. “Keep an eye out for other threats…”
“Yes, sir,” Ron said, with the others. It was an unnecessary warning. Everyone was jumpy after the gravity field had fluctuated around their position. It was more worrying to realise that the sensor drones they’d deployed hadn’t reported any shifts in the local gravity near them — the implications were easy to understand. The Killer knew where they were. It would be easier penetrating a human starship. If they’d boarded a human ship, they could have used the suit AI to hack into the human computer network and take it over, but no one knew how to do that — yet — with a Killer system. He snorted to himself. The Technical Faction would probably figure out the answer tomorrow, after it was useless. “Standing by…”
A motion caught the suit’s sensors as they pushed further down into the next section; a pair of automatons were working on a piece of machinery, trying — he guessed — to repair it. There was nothing humanoid about the Killer machines; they looked more like giant octopuses, or perhaps spiders. They moved and flexed from form to form as they worked on their task. He covered them automatically with his plasma rifle, but they ignored him, concentrating on their work.
“Sir?” He asked. “Should I kill them?”
Drake didn’t hesitate. “Kill them,” he ordered. “Now.”
Ron squeezed the trigger and shot a pulse of superheated plasma into the first Killer automaton, which exploded and melted down into a mass of useless metal. The second automaton turned and looked at him — he was sure it was looking, even though he could see no eyes — and he was suddenly convinced that it was aware of his presence. It wasn’t a good feeling. He shifted his targeting, took aim, and fired a second shot. The automation exploded into fiery debris.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” another Private said. “You the man, Ron.”
“Quite,” Drake agreed. He led them off down the long corridor towards the rear of the ship, which was still a dozen kilometres away. The suits could get them there in bare minutes, if it were a straight run, which it wasn’t. At least they’d located the command centre of the Killer starship. “Come on.”
Ron took point as they moved further into the ship, but they saw only a handful of automatons at a distance, and they moved out of the way before they were shot. Miss one and you miss the whole fucking lot, he thought, as he lowered the plasma rifle; the target had vanished into a cranny and there was no point in chasing it. The Killers were definitely aware of their presence now, he decided, and they had to know where they would go. They weren’t picking their way through cracks in the hull any longer, but running down corridors the Killers would know better than the human intruders. It didn’t strike him as a wise idea, but a quick check revealed that they didn’t have anything heavy enough to burn through the walls. The Killers might not have used their indestructible — formerly indestructible — hull material to line the interiors of their ships, an oversight that they might have come to regret, but whatever it was, it was tough.
“We’ll have to figure out a way to produce handheld implosion bolt guns,” he said, finally. “We’ll need to be more random if we keep breaking into these ships.”
“True,” Drake said. They entered a long corridor with mirrored walls. Ron caught sight of his own reflection — a man wearing a massive black suit of armour — and smiled to himself. A moment later, he stopped smiling. The wall was changing in front of his eyes, shifting like water. Drake noticed a second later. “Stand at the ready…”
The wall seemed to shimmer, just a few meters from their position, and an automaton appeared, coming right out of the wall. It turned to face the Footsoldiers and extended a set of weapons. Ron shot it instinctively, only to see the plasma pulse vanish in the flare of a forcefield. He shot it again and again as the automaton advanced, finally overloading the force shield and destroying the automaton.