Professor Lawton couldn’t see. He didn’t understand. “What’s happening, girl?”
Cindy didn’t reply. The lights were drawing closer. Two more starships exploded in bursts of light, and then finally the lights raced towards her ship. She shook her head, remembering all the students who had wondered if there was a way to make peaceful contact with the Killers, and closed her eyes. An instant later, it was all over.
The Killer was young and unformed, yet it could draw on the race memory of its parent, the Killer Paula Handley had killed, and use it to understand what was going on. It was mildly surprised that it had even been born at all, but with the death of its parent the starship mentality had acted to bring forth another controlling mind. It slid into position, gazing out at the universe through eyes that were both young and very old, and felt its mind expand. The presence of the little mites inside its hull was a danger and it reached out to trap them, preventing them from causing any further harm. Somehow, it knew that the mites, the vermin, had killed its parent.
It had no sense of parental loyalties — the Killers had never developed that emotion, lacking the equipment to understand it — but it was coldly angry at the mites. As its mind expanded to study the universe, it became aware of other mites; some neutralised by the starship’s mentality, others hanging back, watching as the starship started to power up. They had docked their tiny ships on its hull, the Killer realised, and in a flash of anger it started to wipe them out. The hull absorbed the force of the blasts effortlessly.
They had held it prisoner, it realised, with another hot flash of anger. They had killed its parent and held it prisoner while it gestated. Only simple ignorance had saved it from being killed before it achieved the critical mass required for sentience. It wanted to carry on the fight, to obliterate every last vermin in the system, but it knew that it was unready for battle. It had not yet attained full merger with the starship mentality. The starship had been so used to its parent that it wasn’t ready to merge with a new mind, even a child of the original mind. It needed to escape, yet it would take time to generate enough power to form a wormhole. Reluctantly, it started to prepare to fight. If the mites wanted to destroy it, they would have to struggle to do so.
As the mites and their tiny ships angled around, the Killer rapidly rescanned the interior of its hull, checking for any mites it might have missed. The mites were so small that many of them had escaped its attention the first time, trying desperately to escape to their little ships — the little ships that no longer existed. It no longer needed to hide, so it reached out through the nanomachines its parent had used to build and maintain the ship and reformed the hull around them. The mites would be moved into smaller and smaller areas until they would be completely neutralised. The Killer was not yet practiced enough to split its awareness safely, but it wasn’t a complicated task. All it had to do was seal off all the possible escape routes and prevent the mites from penetrating into the heart of the starship. They would not be allowed to kill it as they had killed its parent.
The Killer refocused its attention, watching the tiny ships as they closed in on its position, and locked its weapons onto their projected positions. A moment later, as soon as they came into range, it opened fire.
“The Killer ship has opened fire,” Falk reported, from his console. They were the only two men left in the command centre. The remainder had been evacuated to the starships and sent out of the system. “They’re concentrating on the Defence Force starships.”
“Good,” Ellertson said, slowly. The entire system had enough starships to evacuate the entire population — unlike most of the other systems the Killers had attacked — but it was still taking time. Scientists were not inclined to put down their work and run, even with a Killer starship breathing down their necks… and most of them had seen the captured starship as harmless. Ellertson himself had seen the starship as harmless, a mistake that — he suspected — was about to cost him dear. “Tell me… does it know that the Defence Force starships can actually harm it?”
“I don’t know,” Falk said, after a moment. “When we captured it, it had soaked up the fire of an entire attack wing without taking significant damage. If it had a link to the remainder of the Killer communications system, surely it would have brought other Killer starships here…”
“Surely,” Ellertson agreed, reluctantly. He couldn’t envisage anyone, even the Killers, leaving a starship in enemy hands if it were within their power to recover it. The researchers had already developed new weapons from the captured ship and had used them to hurt the Killers badly. “Inform Captain Jackson to watch for a chance to disrupt their black hole. If we kill the black hole, we kill the ship.”
“Aye, sir,” Falk said. He hesitated. “Sir, we have visual confirmation. Every starship docked on the Killer hull has been destroyed. They’re all dead.”
Ellertson looked over at the Killer starship, slowly shaking itself free of the surrounding platforms and tethers. “Understood,” he said. The Defence Force would understand now. The starships were opening fire, implosion bolts digging into the Killer hull. “Tell Captain Jackson… no, belay that. Let him fight as he sees fit.”
The Killer barely noticed the different mite weapons as they opened fire, for the simple reason that its parent hadn’t bothered to collect information on its technology and tactics. It was aware that there were Killers who studied the mites, as if there was anything useful to be learned from the mites, but it had preferred to simply destroy them. The mites represented the greatest threat to their existence and therefore had to be destroyed. Learning about them, as a man might study a particularly venomous species of snake or spider, would only distract from that fundamental task. They had to exterminate the mites to ensure that the mites never threatened the Killers.
The weapons dug into its hull and it screamed, shocked at the agony, but it wasn’t shocked senseless. Unlike the older Killers, it hadn’t lived with millions of years of effective invulnerability, a universe where nothing short of a supernova or an uncontrolled black hole could harm it. It was shocked, yet it was not surprised, and it continued to return fire. It noted, absently, what the weapons were doing to its hull and concentrated on altering the hull’s spectrum to make the weapons less effective. It also swung its hull around to prevent the other weapons from making a more serious dent in its innards, although it did note that some of the weapons were likely to kill more of the mites than parts of itself. Their blasts were coming very close to where it had stored the prisoners.
It wouldn’t matter for long, anyway, it decided. It wouldn’t be long before it could open a wormhole and escape, taking its prisoners with it. Perhaps there was something to be said for studying the mites after all. The information would assist the Killers to locate their homes and burn them out, once and for all.
“Sir, we’re not inflicting enough damage,” Falk said, grimly. The entire attack wing was surrounding the Killer ship, pouring fire into the damaged sections of the hull, but it wasn’t enough to complete its destruction. The Killer starship was just too large to destroy easily and Ellertson refused to order anyone to ram it. Antimatter missiles were merely adding their power to the Killer ship’s power reserves. “They’re… sir, I’m picking up a massive gravity shift! They’re opening a wormhole, right on top of it!”
”Pull the fleet back,” Ellertson ordered, seeing the wormhole icon flickering into existence. The Killer starship slid forward, firing parting shots at the research platforms and starships as it escaped, and vanished into the wormhole. A second later, the wormhole collapsed to nothingness and disappeared. “Contact Sparta and tell them…”