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“They’re losing her,” Gary said, suddenly. The gravity beams were flickering out of existence, one by one, replaced by a pair of far more powerful beams that seemed to be trying to speed up the compression, rather than preventing it or slowing it down. Andrew silently took his hat off to the Killer who had thought of that; if it worked, they would have a new black hole to use as a power source, rather than a supernova exploding in their system. “I don’t think they can compress it down enough, sir…”

There was a long pause. The fate of the universe seemed to hang in the balance. “And they can’t,” Gary said. “The star has gone supernova.”

The display looked odd. The star looked normal and would continue to look normal until the light and blast of the supernova finally reached their position, but the gravimetric sensors told the true story. Agonised, tormented beyond reason, the star had blown off much of its mass in a colossal explosion and doomed its child star system. The Killer gravity beams flickered out of existence as the Killers redoubled their attempt to escape. They couldn’t get their entire population out in time.

“Get us out of here,” Andrew ordered, quietly. Warp bubble or no warp bubble, nothing human could protect the Lightning if she were caught by the expanding wavefront of energy. He could have taken the starship to shelter behind a planet, but with so much gravity disruption in the system, it might have had additional dangers. “Take us to the second waypoint.”

From a safe distance, they watched the star system die. The expanding wavefront had washed over the gas giants, igniting the gas of two of them and burning billions of Killers living down in the clouds, and overwhelmed the remaining Killer starships. They hadn’t even tried to seek shelter, or escape from the supernova; they’d just… accepted their fate and died. The massive Killer installations melted under the wavefront, but were too large and solid to be completely destroyed, even the ones completely exposed to the supernova. Andrew made a note in his report; the Defence Force would have to send experts to pick over the rubble and see if there was anything useful there. It didn’t seem likely, but the Killers had surprised them before.

“I think we won,” Gary said, softly. He sounded as shocked as Andrew. This was the third star that humanity had killed… and the second Killer star system to be utterly destroyed. It represented a whole new level of destructive achievement. “I think we hit them hard enough to make them consider peace.”

“Sure,” David said, from his console. He looked up from laying in the course back to the supernova bomb arsenal. Lightning had three more systems to roast before the end of the day. “Or perhaps we made them really mad at us.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“I am not interested in recriminations,” Brent said, staring at the small council that had assembled — in person or via telecommunications — in his office. “I am interested in knowing just what went wrong.”

He looked around the group, from person to person. “I have a dozen reports saying that the ship — the captured ship — was dead. I have a hundred scientists who still cannot believe a word of the report that you filed” — he glowered at Captain Mikkel Ellertson, who lowered his eyes and stared at the desk — “and believe that we somehow decided, for reasons they cannot articulate, to keep it for ourselves. I confess that I would probably wonder the same myself. After all, based on everything we knew about the Killers, we knew that it was dead.”

“Based on everything we knew about the Killers, we had good cause to believe that it was dead,” Paula Handley said, calmly. She had loudly protested being dragged away from Shiva to attend the meeting, but Brent had known that she was in no position to refuse. The Technical Faction hadn’t quite decided if she should be rewarded, suspected or expelled… and as long as she didn’t know where she stood, it would be unwise of her to annoy other factions. “There were, clearly, things we did not know about the Killers.”

“Really,” Brent said. His scowl owed nothing to facial manipulation. “Your own reports suggested that there was something… still alive in there. Do you believe that you were wrong when you were clearly right?”

“In hindsight, I was right,” Paula said. Her mouth tightened noticeably. “I conducted the first survey of the hijacked ship during its passage to Star’s End and its subsequent placement on a free orbit around the star. I reported at the time that the ship had powered down to the lowest recorded levels of any known Killer starship and was no longer attempting self-repair, communication or anything, apart from keeping the black hole under control. The loss of the guiding mind had, I believed, disabled the ship permanently and prevented it from doing anything about its situation. I concluded that the fact that no other Killer starship had come to reclaim the missing ship proved that it wasn’t communicating… in short, that it was dead.

“And yet, while I was alone on the vessel, I sensed… a kind of free-floating awareness, a presence, surrounding me. I was unable to define it in terms that could be put into a report. It was like hearing whispers so quietly that I couldn’t even be sure that they were there, let alone understand their content. My supervisors in the Technical Faction told me that I wasn’t alone in having such feelings — other researchers, boarding abandoned human starships, had similar experiences. It was dismissed as nothing, but nerves and night terrors.”

She shook her head. “I am unable to account for its sudden awakening,” she concluded. “It is possible that the Killer somehow rebuilt itself inside the craft’s biomechanical interface, or that some kind of emergency program was tripped, but we have no way of knowing for sure. By the time emergency alarms started to sound, the craft was already halfway towards escape.”

“And it swallowed up the Leader of the Spacer faction, as well as seven hundred and fifty scientists and researchers from all over the Community,” Brent snapped. He turned his gaze to another hologram, floating in the centre of the room. “Do you believe that that was intentional, or merely a coincidence?”

Chiyo99 seemed to flinch slightly under his gaze. As a mortal Lieutenant, she would never have seen an Admiral, unless she was posted to one of the command ships or support bases. As a personality in the MassMind, she was no longer part of the Defence Force, yet she had been willing to remain attached to him as long as she was needed. Her eyes held a vaguely haunted look; the MassMind, at her request, had strip-mined her entire mind, just to confirm her story. Brent shuddered every time he thought about it; Chiyo99 might have been a duplicate of a duplicate of a woman whose body had probably been recycled or fed into a black hole, but she was still a person. No one deserved to be violated like that, willingly or otherwise.

“I do not believe that the Killer I knew, the one I spied upon, was aware of our existence in more than vague terms,” she said, finally. “It — he, perhaps — showed no awareness of individual humans, or even anything other that a vague interest. I doubt that they could tell the difference between a Representative and a… well, a Technical Faction Researcher. They may even be unaware that they picked up a few hundred prisoners. The prisoners may even be able to disable the starship again before it gets too far…”

“It could be halfway across the galaxy by now,” Brent growled. That was wishful thinking at best. Disabling the starship the first time had been sheer luck and, the reports had made quite clear, the Killers had already begun to improve their internal defences. The prisoners would probably be hunted down and killed. “Do they stand a chance?”