He accessed the report from the Technical Faction and scanned it rapidly. They’d concluded that the starship had powered itself down to the bare minimum after the Killer had died, reserving only enough power to maintain the atmosphere and keep the black hole under control. They hadn’t detected much activity in the ship’s computer networks — which had prevented them from tapping into the system — yet did that actually mean it was dead? Rupert walked down a long corridor and looked into a vast chamber, filled with strange alien material and technology. Had the Technical Faction been wrong about the starship?
It was the work of a moment to bring up his internal sensors and scan the local area, hunting for signs of… what? It wasn’t something he could explain to himself, let alone anyone else, yet there was a freakish sense of… something lurking nearby, watching him. The sensation was overwhelmingly powerful and he ran forward, accessing his internal weapons and deploying them in battle configuration, but he saw nothing. It was as dark and silent as the grave. He shook himself, convinced that he was being silly and succumbing to night terrors, yet he couldn’t shake the impression of looming disaster.
“Enough of this,” he said, aloud, and accessed the local communications channel. The researchers had set up a dedicated communications network for the entire ship. He was a Community Representative. He should be able to talk to whoever he liked. “Get me the nearest Technical Faction representative.”
There was no response.
“The hell…?” Rupert asked, puzzled. The communications system was the most advanced that the Community could design. It didn’t fail. There were so many backups in the system that he would have to be broken down to atoms before it failed. It drew its power from his own body; it couldn’t fail unless the rest of him failed as well, and he was still alive. He rekeyed the mental command sequence and tried again. “This is Rupert, Spacer; link me to the nearest person on the ship.”
There was still no response, apart from a hint of… something, growing louder, at the edge of his awareness. He turned sharply, as if he expected something to be materialising right in front of him, but saw nothing. The sensation of being watched was growing stronger all the time. He opened his sensors and scanned the ship again, using the highest power levels at his disposal… and picked up hundreds of tiny flashes of power, flickering throughout the entire ship. The starship was coming to life.
The whole concept held him frozen for a second, and then his training and experience reasserted itself. “This is Rupert,” he repeated, as he turned to head back towards the access hatch. He would not panic. He’d been in worse situations before, although he couldn’t remember exactly where. Being trapped on an asteroid heading towards the local star hadn’t been as bad, although he remembered that it had been terrifying at the time. “I am declaring an emergency. I repeat…”
There was a burst of static through the communications network, loud enough to make his head spin, and then it cut off completely. He forgot dignity and ran forward, only to discover that the door he’d used to enter the chamber had vanished. It had been right there, but now there was nothing, but a solid wall. The starship was reconfiguring its internal structure as it brought itself back to life. He checked, quickly, to ensure that he wasn’t simply looking in the wrong place, only to have his original route confirmed. The door he’d used had vanished. He was trapped.
He turned around and boosted, searching for another way out of the chamber, but there was only one door at the far end, leading further into the ship. It dawned on him that the only reason the starship would have left it open was to lure him into a trap, but there was no other choice, but to race down it. He considered trying to blast his way out, but a simple scan of the wall material revealed that attempting to burn through it would merely cause the plasma weapons to bounce off it. Whatever it was made from, it was strong. He would have given his remaining teeth to know how it was done.
The lights flickered once, and then came back up completely, illuminating the corridor in stark relief. It was utterly bare and barren, barely large enough to allow two men to walk down side by side, and Rupert soon found himself scraping on each side of the corridor. It was closing in on him. He turned, hoping at least that he could get back to the chamber, but he was greeted by the sight of a solid black wall. The way back was blocked. He attempted to access the communications channel again, but there was nothing. The other men and women on the ship had to be experiencing the same kind of hell he was going through, discovering to their horror that the starship had come alive in front of them. By the time anyone on the outside learned what was going on, it would be too late.
Desperately, he activated his on-board arsenal and opened fire. Plasma bolts, laser cannons and particle beams flared out against the corridor walls, but they merely faded and vanished. He altered the frequency modulation of the weapons and tried again, but somehow the energy was being sucked away into nothingness. They weren’t inflicting any damage at all. The walls closed in and pressed his arms against his side, for all of his augmented strength, and then stopped. He was trapped. Rupert expected to die at any moment, but instead… in the distance, towards the end of the corridor, he saw a strange grey cloud forming out of nothing. He tried to scan it, only to get a series of contradictory results that didn’t seem to make any sense, even as the cloud advanced on him. A moment later, it swarmed over him and…
There was an instant where every augmented component in his body screamed an alarm at once, reporting endless violation of every part of his body, and then nothing, but darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“What the hell?”
Captain Mikkel Ellertson had been bored, oddly enough. At first, the task of commanding the Defence Force units at Star’s End had been exciting, with the danger of a Killer starship dropping out of a wormhole to dispute possession of its captured cousin with the human race. Later, as more and more data was shunted out to the rest of the Community — and the Killers had launched their own blitzkrieg against the Community settlements — Star’s End had diminished in importance. It wasn’t exactly a backwater, not with the Killer starship sitting nearby and being slowly dissembled by the Technical Faction, but it wasn’t the front line either. The fact that it could rapidly become the front line didn’t impress him.
“We’ve got multiple power surges coming from the Killer starship,” Lieutenant Luke Falk reported, from his console. Red alarms were flashing up all over the board. “I’m picking up distress signals from hundreds of platforms and small craft.”
“Send an emergency signal to Sparta at once and alert the destroyers,” Ellertson snapped. It was right out of the tactical handbook. First, inform higher authority. He forced himself not to think about the reason that regulation was engraved in stone; the vast majority of Defence Force starships and installations that encountered the Killers didn’t live to report it afterwards. “Inform them to stand by to take action.”
It was a vague order; he didn’t know what action they should take. “And get me Doctor Singh,” he added. “I want to know what is going on.”