“I can’t raise anyone on the platforms,” Falk reported, shortly. “The power surges are blanking out everything from them, even the quantum entanglement communications system. I can’t reach anyone within two hundred kilometres of the Killer starship!”
“That’s impossible,” Ellertson protested, angrily. A nasty thought occurred to him. The one known way to block a quantum entanglement communications system was to destroy the transmitter. If the Killers had destroyed, or drained, the platforms, there would be no signals coming out. It was preferable to believing that the Killers could somehow — again — do the impossible. “Get a recon probe over there.”
“Aye, sir,” Falk said. There was a long pause. “Sir, the Killer starship is definitely powering up.”
“It was dead,” Ellertson said, in disbelief. “It shouldn’t be able to move at all without our assistance.”
“It is definitely moving, sir,” Falk said. There was another pause. “I have the Admiral on a direct line for you.”
Admiral Brent Roeder’s image materialised in the command centre. “Report,” he snapped. “What’s happening?”
Ellertson found his voice. “Sir, the Killer starship appears to be powering up,” he said. He couldn’t hide from the facts any longer. “I am totally unable to account for it, but I suspect that the ship intends to power up completely and jump out. I request permission to engage it to prevent it from escaping.”
“Granted,” Brent said, shortly. “I want an aftermath report explaining exactly how the starship started to power up and just what they did to it.”
“Aye, sir,” Ellertson said.
“Good hunting,” Brent said, and vanished. His final words seemed to hang in the air.
“Get the destroyers to close in and engage with implosion bolts,” Ellertson ordered, grimly. “I want them wrecking as much internal havoc as possible.”
Falk frowned. “Sir, there may still be people onboard the ship,” he said, “including the Spacer Representative.”
Ellertson hesitated. If they killed a Representative, even by accident, it would torpedo his career. He’d be lucky to be assigned to a fuelling station in the middle of nowhere, yet if he lost the captured ship, he’d certainly face a court-martial and probably be disgraced. The Spacers would demand his head for killing their leader… but what choice was there? If the ship powered up completely, it could lay waste the entire settlement before it escaped.
“I know,” he said, finally feeling like a real commanding officer. He hadn’t understood the price until now. “I’ll take full responsibility.”
He glanced down at his console and hit a key he had never expected to use. “Now hear this,” he said, knowing that his voice would be heard everywhere across the system. “This is a direct order. All non-Defence Force personnel are to immediately head to their evacuation stations and leave the system. I repeat, all non-Defence Force personnel are to immediately head to their evacuation stations and leave the system. I am declaring a full state of emergency.”
The channel closed. Ellertson hesitated, and then called Major Percival. He didn’t like the Footsoldier very much and suspected that the feeling was mutual. “Major, I need you and your men to supervise the evacuation,” he ordered, shortly. The Major would already know what was going on. “I want everyone off this asteroid before that thing breaks loose.”
He looked back at the shape of the Killer starship and the invisible power surges surrounding it. “I don’t think that that will be very long at all.”
“Damn it, Cindy,” Professor Lawton barked. “Can’t you get us a lick of power?”
Cindy winced, inwardly, fighting the urge to cry. The only reason she’d been assigned to the University of Chin’s contribution to the research program was that Professor Lawton, who was one of the foremost experts on matter-conversion theory outside the Technical Faction, couldn’t be relied upon to look after himself, let alone three other scientists and a horde of admiring graduate students. Cindy, who had hopes of going into advanced drive theory herself, had been selected on the entirely reasonable grounds — to a university administrator — that she knew how to fly the University’s small research craft and wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about flying too close to a possible threat. Docked, as they were, on the side of the Killer starship, she suspected that that final qualification was more of a sick joke than anything else.
“The system is completely drained,” she said, finally. She ran her hands over the touch-sensitive console, but it was only for effect. Nothing happened. “I don’t know how, but we’ve been completely drained of power.”
She ignored their protests as she continued to study the problem. The tiny starship had no quantum tap, but it did have two fusion reactors — guaranteed for at least fifty years service — and enough battery power to get them home from anywhere in the galaxy, as well as numerous tiny power sources for the emergency systems. The entire starship shouldn’t have been drained completely of power, yet it was unquestionably what had happened. The spacesuits and environmental gear had suffered the same fate. She didn’t want to think about what might have happened to anyone caught outside when disaster had struck.
“But what are we going to do?” One of the others asked. She was a fellow student and sounded as if she was on the verge of panic. “What happens when we run out of air?”
“We die,” Cindy said, just to shut them up. She peered out of the viewport towards the horizon, looking for signs of power. The other starships mated to the Killer starship hull weren’t moving, or showing signs of life. She picked up a pair of visual enhancers and peered through them, but not entirely to her surprise she couldn’t see anything, even a trace of other living human beings. Somewhere in the distance, a spacesuit was drifting towards the Killer ship…
”Hellfire,” she said, angrily. It was the obvious question and she hadn’t even thought to ask it — where, without power, was the gravity coming from? The answer was obvious; they were being held down by a gravity field generated by the Killer starship, which meant that somehow the starship had been powered up. Had it drained their power and used it to refuel itself? “Everyone; get back to your seats and strap in, now!”
She ignored their protests as she watched the hull of the Killer ship. Once, when she’d been considering archaeology as her career, she’d attended a dig on an icy world, where she’d seen bioluminescent creatures swimming under the ice. She was reminded of that now as she saw lights flaring into existence under the hull material; cold, strangely ominous lights, somehow sending chills down her spine. She looked up towards the stars, towards the great disc of the galaxy laid out in front of her, and grasped for the first time how far they were from home. If the power had failed on a system-wide basis, hundreds of thousands of humans were about to die.
The ship quivered slightly. At first, she wondered if their power had somehow been magically restored, but when she checked, she realised that everything was still dead. The Killer ship itself was shaking as the lights grew brighter, preparing to… what? Open a wormhole and escape, or devastate the entire system before departing? The lights seemed to shimmer under the hull material, irresistibly drawing her attention towards their formation, and then concentrated underneath one of the other ships. There was an explosion, chillingly silent in the darkness of space, and the starship disintegrated. The lights flared under the hull, racing towards the next starship, and a moment later that one exploded as well. Scientific platforms, monitoring stations and research ships; they all disintegrated, one by one. Cindy knew that it was just a matter of time before they died as well.