“I don’t think so,” Brainy said, plotting the location on the main display. “They’re actually heading away from us and…”
The AI’s voice seemed to change. “Justin,” it said, slowly. “The Killer starships have been in the wars.”
“You’re joking,” Justin said. He pushed the flippant side of his personality to the rear and concentrated on the reports from the passive sensors. “Do we have something close enough to eyeball them?”
“We have four probes close enough to get visual images,” the AI confirmed. “I’m downloading their live footage now.”
“And get it out of here as well,” Justin added. He sometimes tried to analyse the sensor take, but if the Killers decided to chase him out of the system, he wouldn’t have time. The human race had to know what he knew. “Get it to Intelligence and Sparta and everywhere else that might be able to use the data…”
“I have an image,” the AI cut him off. It appeared in front of him and Justin fell silent. “They’re definitely damaged.”
Justin said nothing. The mighty Killer starship, the most feared ship design in the galaxy, had been broken and torn. The once-invulnerable hull material had been cracked open in a hundred places, leaving carbon scoring marking the hull and signs of internal damage. It trailed a leak of glowing plasma, flaring out against the darkness of space before it faded into nothingness, suggesting that the battle to save the starship was barely underway. Justin was staggered — and impressed. No human starship could have survived that level of damage and carried on regardless.
He’d read a hundred tales of damaged starships somehow managing to make their way home after losing their FTL drives, but they were simple nonsense. No starship could take so much damage and keep flying, even at sublight speeds. It would have — should have — died in the vastness of space. The sight brought him to his feet in respectful silence, enemy ship or no, as it staggered home. No spacer could have been entirely unmoved by the sight.
The probe image panned out, revealing the other starships in the fleet. They were all damaged to some extent, some of them trailing even more plasma into space than the lead ship, somehow giving off a sense of defeat. No one who spent their entire lives amid starships could doubt that they had a personality of their own, even Killer starships, and these looked broken and battered. It shouldn’t have happened to us, they seemed to say; the universe has turned upside down.
“I don’t believe it,” Justin said, as the probe relayed an image of a gaping hole, revealing a broken and torn interior. “What happened to them? Did they run into something more powerful than themselves?”
“I am receiving a tactical download from Sparta,” Brainy said. There was a long pause as the AU stretched out the drama as far as it would go. “They would appear to be the survivors of the Battle of Shiva. The Killers retreated from the battlefield.”
Justin burst out laughing. “They fled,” he carolled in delight. If the AI had been human, he would have hugged it tightly. It wasn’t right, he would have admitted later, to gloat over the downfall of so many mighty starships, but they were the Killers! Every human in existence was raised to fear their wrath, their determination that no other forms of life but their own should exist, their invincible starships… and now they had been broken! They were still dangerous, but they were not invincible. “They ran from us!”
“So it would seem,” the AI agreed. There was a heavy note of satisfaction in its voice. “The Defence Force wants an update on their current status.”
Justin nodded. “Put us on a hair-trigger,” he said. Even damaged, so many Killer starships would have no problems making short work of his tiny scout. “If one of them even farts in our direction, I want us out of here.”
“Understood,” the AI said. “I am continuing to monitor their activities, but it does not seem if they are any more aware of our presence than the local Killers.”
“This has to be tearing holes in their morale,” Justin pointed out, as he pulled himself to his feet and walked over to the food processor. “Neat Scotch; no ice.”
Brainy made an unsettling electronic cough. “Are you drinking so early?”
“There’s something to celebrate,” Justin pointed out, as the drink formed in the processor. He took a single gulp and smiled as it ran down his throat. The personalities in the MassMind swore that it was far from the real thing, but Scotland and the Distillers had been blown away over a thousand years ago. “How often do you get to see a limping Killer fleet running home with its tail between its legs?”
“The Killers do not have tails,” Brainy pointed out, pedantically. “They are creatures composed of a free association of cells. They lack anything reassembling a human body, let alone tails.”
Justin shrugged and took a smaller sip. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for them,” he said. “Do you think that their butts sometimes vote to secede from their heads, or perhaps their legs rebel against their arms?”
“There is no way to be certain, but it seems likely they will have more of an AI-level merge rather than a human body, although they may have different cells for different functions,” Brainy said, after a moment in which he emitted a very human sigh. “They may merge into one mental pattern and then separate out again without any of the hassles that human group minds would experience…”
“I’d hate it if half my body went one way and the rest went the other,” Justin said, dryly. “I remember an old story when some dumb kid managed to work out how to talk to his body’s organs and learned that they thought he should eat less sweet junk.”
“Words to live by,” the AI said, mischievously. “Your body is probably rebelling against the remains of that drink.”
“I’d better have another one to suppress the revolution,” Justin said, and laughed, before he placed the glass in the disposal and turned to the observation console. “I want to build up as complete a picture of those ships as we can, even if we have to zone out parts of the remaining system. We can still track anything coming to get us, can’t we?”
“Killer starships are very noticeable,” Brainy assured him. “We will not be disconnecting the near-space warning system.”
Justin laughed. The Defence Force was fond of sharing a joke about a pilot who had taken his starship out to an unexplored star system and powered down everything, apart from life support, in order to do some meditation. Two days later, he had opened his eyes and seen — though the viewport — an advancing Killer starship. It had come within metres of smashing right into the human ship and destroying it, without even noticing that it was there. The pilot had survived, to find himself the butt of jokes right across the Community. The general conclusion had been that the Killers had thought that he was too pathetic to kill.
“See that we don’t,” he said, finally. The images of the Killer starships began to get clearer as some of the probes slipped closer, compromising their stealth to get a close look at the enemy starships. Justin suspected that under normal circumstances, the Killers would ignore them anyway, but now… they might well wipe the probes out and then start looking for the command ship. They had to be jumpy themselves after the loss of a third of their fleet. No one would have hit them so hard since they had started their mission. “What the hell did we hit them with?”