“And now we know what the Killers actually are.
“They are their starships. They are perfect mergers between biological life forms, if rather alien ones, and massive starships. They are our dream come true. And if they did this to themselves, and went on to slaughter uncounted trillions of lives, to commit genocide against all other races… what does this mean for us? When our human-starship mergers go mad, then… does that explain the Killers?
“Are the Killers mad?
“There is no way to know,” he concluded. “Their behaviour shows either an alien mindset or complete insanity. They kill everyone they encounter; threat or no-threat, even races that could be no possible threat. We know they committed genocide against races that had barely learned to make fire, let alone nuclear weapons, spacecraft and antimatter. Are they mad to do this? I like to believe — we like to believe — that our prohibition against genocide is a universal truth, yet there are — there may be — aliens that regard genocide as morally right. Are they mad to believe such a terrifying thing? Are the Killers mad?
“And that’s why I have to come here and see their ship with my own eyes. I have to know if they’re mad, because if they are mad, it means that we too may be mad to continue to push the limits between man and machine. I have to see it for myself, even if I may see nothing that no one else has seen. I have to know…”
He made a moue of exasperation and deactivated the log with a single mental command, sent through his implants, before ordering the tiny starship forward towards the Killer ship. He couldn’t contain a hint of fear at approaching so boldly — the Spacers, too, had lost people by coming too close to the Killer ships — but he pushed it down ruthlessly, commanding his central processor to up the amount of drugs flowing through his system. It wasn’t a time to allow himself fear, or anything other than a kind of nervous interest. Who knew what he would see inside the Killer ship?
“You are cleared to approach,” System Command said, suddenly, breaking into his thoughts. Star’s End was currently occupied by thousands of researchers from all across the Community — and millions more, attending via the MassMind or direct neural feeds. They were all intent on being the first to pull yet another discovery from the alien craft, yet none of them were Spacers. Rupert had hoped that a few Spacers would volunteer to visit Star’s End, or even to study and absorb the stream of data being dumped out as fast as possible, but none had. They felt the same fear that he did, the nameless worry that the discoveries would eventually prove that the Spacers were on the verge of committing a terrible mistake in their drive for self-improvement.
He ignored the reminder flashing on his communications board, calling him to the War Council. Whatever happened, the War Council could deal with it — or, if it was vitally important that they had a Spacer representative, they could summon his deputy to the meeting. The MassMind had called the meeting anyway, and Rupert, like all Spacers, distrusted the MassMind. It wasn’t human any longer, but a blurring between human and machine, personalities who thought they were human and AIs who knew very well that they were not. Spacers were natural loners by inclination, even before they went through the procedure that cut them away from the remainder of the human race; they saw no need for the MassMind and kept a distance between themselves and the collective entity. It was yet another cause for worry. What if the MassMind, not the Spacers, was the precursor to Killer-hood?
The tiny craft settled down on the Killer hull and locked itself firmly to the Killer hull metal. It wasn’t magnetic, but the starship was capable of clinging on to anything. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway — there was no way the starship could vanish or drift away — but he checked anyway, using habits that had acuminated over four hundred years of life, three hundred of them as a Spacer. He checked his internal equipment carefully, opened the hatch — Spacers needed no atmosphere and didn’t bother with airlocks — and stepped onto the Killer hull.
A normal human might have struggled to ignore the strangeness of the sight, or the perspective of walking vertically on a horizontal hull, but Rupert ignored it, catching sight of his own reflection in the odd hull material. It was easy to see why most humans feared the Spacers; he was tall, and half-wrapped in metal, his handful of exposed flesh treated to prevent it from feeling pain when he walked in a vacuum. Rupert, at least, was humanoid. There were Spacers who were effectively tiny spacecraft in their own right. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
He checked his internal database for the charts of the vessel, turned, and started to walk towards the nearest hatch. The Technical Faction’s researchers had done a good job of locating other access points for the scientists and had opened up nine of them, allowing hundreds of people to slip into the starship and carry out their research programs. Rupert clumped over towards the nearest access point, wrapped in a shimmering force field that kept the atmosphere within the craft, although all of the researchers either wore heavy spacesuits or personal force fields. Rupert disdained the latter. He had an internal force field himself, but it was easier to build protection into his own body, rather than rely on something that could fail at any moment. If the ship were to vent its atmosphere, it would kill anyone without proper protection…
The handful of Footsoldiers on duty at the hatch — Rupert suspected that they were there just to keep them from getting in the way of the researchers — checked his access credentials and allowed him through, although they were clearly surprised to see a Spacer. They were wearing powered combat armour, but they would be able to take it off at the end of a day, when they returned to their transports for food and sleep. They probably wouldn’t want to live in their armour permanently, even though it was theoretically possible, and wouldn’t understand why the Spacers chose to do so. They, Rupert decided, were not yet sick of being mortal flesh and blood. It would change soon, when they got older… if they lived that long. No one doubted that the Killers were still looking for their missing vessel.
He looked up, his enhanced sight picking out the running lights of a handful of Defence Force destroyers floating near the captured ship, before he stepped through the force field and into the access hatch. The gravity field twisted around him and he almost lost his footing, before finally managing to secure himself as he stepped out of the other end. The interior of the Killer starship rose up around him. He turned his great head from side to side, allowing his internal cameras to record everything he saw, even as he wondered at the absence of the mists. The first team had recorded strange alien mists, but now there was nothing, but a poisonous atmosphere. The researchers had speculated that the mists were part of the Killer biology, but no one knew for sure.
He smiled internally — his face was fixed in a loose grimace, permanently — as the results of his atmospheric scan scrolled up in front of his eyes. The Killer ship’s atmosphere seemed to be in a constant state of flux — the sensors recorded low-level energy discharges without apparent points of origin — but also seemed to match the original readings, taken during the first boarding mission. Rupert would have liked to have been on that mission, despite the danger; it would have been a worthy cause for a Spacer to take for himself, even at the risk of death. It would have been…
Rupert stopped, suddenly, as he looked further down into the ship. It was dead, or almost completely powered down, and yet… he was sure that he could hear something, a keening on the edge of awareness. It was like hearing a recording played too quietly to make out the words, but just loudly enough so that the listener knew that someone was talking. There was a sense of unrefined… potential in the air, as if the ship wasn’t dead, but merely biding its time. He shivered, despite himself, as he started to walk again. The starship didn’t feel dead to him.