“Report,” he barked, as he strode into the command centre. It was buried within the heart of the asteroid, protected by a kilometre of rocky cover, yet it wouldn’t stand up to the Killer weapons for more than a few seconds. He took his command chair and stared up at the display. “What’s happening out there?”
“Four Killer starships, very close to us,” Captain Waianae said, “but they’re doing nothing. They’re just staring at us.”
Brent pulled up the main display and nodded slowly. Captain Waianae was right. The Killers had returned in force; four of their starships sat just outside weapons range, dominating the entire star system by their sheer presence. The Defence Force starships were scrambling to intercept, but even the ten attack wings that he had reserved for the defence of Sparta were grossly outmatched. The destroyers would hurt their opponents badly, perhaps even wipe them out if they rammed the Killer ships, but the asteroid system would still be devastated.
“Attempt to hail them,” he ordered, finally. Perhaps they wanted to talk. They had eyeballed Sparta before without opening hostilities. “Inform me the moment you get any response.”
He turned to the communications officer without waiting for a reply. “Send a general warning out to the other command bases,” he continued. “Inform Admiral Hawser that he may find himself promoted to Supreme Commander” — inheriting a dead man’s shoes, part of his mind whispered — “and that he should start considering contingency plans to meet that eventuality.”
“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said. He didn’t show any signs of fear, but Brent could hear it in his voice. It was hard to blame him. If the Killers bulled right at the human asteroid settlement, they’d punch right through the defences and wreck havoc. “He’s responding and wishes you good luck.”
Brent snorted. “And inform the evacuation coordinator that I want everyone not in Category A to start moving off the asteroid now,” he said, silently thanking God that he’d ordered everyone non-essential off the station after the Killers had buzzed past the first time. “We can try and prevent a massacre.”
“There is no response from the Killers,” Captain Waianae reported, as Brent turned back to her. “They’re making no attempt to communicate, even in their own internal RF signalling frequencies. They’re just… watching us.”
Brent glanced up towards the ceiling and saw others doing the same. They wouldn’t even be aware of the Killer starships without their sensors, but now they knew that they were there, they seemed to feel them at the back of their necks. The tension in the compartment was rising, not helped by several Category B personnel who insisted in remaining behind and facing possible death along with the remainder of the Category A personnel. Most of the duty officers were quietly preparing to upload copies of their personalities to the MassMind, just in case they died in battle. Brent remembered what Chiyo99 had gone through and shivered. After watching what she had become, he would think long and hard before grasping the immortality the MassMind offered humanity.
He was vaguely aware of new personalities peering out through the sensors; the War Council, come to watch what happened when the Killers went up against humanity’s foremost military base. He didn’t attempt to talk to them. There was nothing that they could do to help, but they could distract him at a crucial moment. He considered ordering the starships to attack, to attempt to drive the Killers away before they carried out another slaughter, but that would merely have started the fighting. What, he found himself wondering, was so special about the Sparta System that the Killers were reluctant to pick a fight there? There was no gas giant in the system, no possible cause of Killer hesitation, apart from the human ships. Could it be that the Killers had finally learned fear of humanity?
Chiyo99 was still peering through the sensors herself, rather than retreating back into the MassMind. “Tell me something,” Brent subvocalised. “Is there anything, anything at all, in the data you obtained about this system? Is there anything here that they couldn’t just take?”
“No, sir,” Chiyo99 said. Her voice darkened. “I didn’t get a complete copy of their database, so it is possible that there’s something here to interest them, but I can’t think what it could be. There’s nothing here, but a lot of asteroids — and Sparta.”
“And Sparta,” Brent repeated. Perhaps the Killers actually had learned fear after all. Humans had surveyed the system carefully when looking for a place to locate a military base and hadn’t found anything other than asteroids. “Perhaps…”
“New gravity surges,” Captain Waianae said, as alarms echoed through the command centre. “They’re opening new wormholes.”
“Where?” Brent demanded. The Killers had been waiting for reinforcements. “Where are they coming in…?”
“Here,” Captain Waianae snapped. There was an undertone of panic in her voice as new red icons flashed into existence on the display. “They’re coming in right on top of us!”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ozzie Allen saw it clearly from his position. He had been outside the asteroid in a mechanical bug when the Killers arrived and had chosen to remain outside, rather than returning to the dubious safety of the asteroid. If the Killers opened fire, he had reasoned, he would be safer in the harmless bug — so tiny that no one could consider it a threat — than in the asteroid, which was almost certainly their primary target. He had been staring at the Killer starships, so large that they were visible with the naked eye, when a new gravity wave had picked up the bug and tossed it hundreds of kilometres from its former position.
The wormhole opened in a brilliant swirl of light and disgorged a massive Killer starship, already far too close to Ozzie for his liking. He almost panicked and triggered the bug’s drives to escape, but caught himself in time, knowing that an active drive field would be detected and destroyed automatically. The Killer starship ignored him and charged right at Sparta Asteroid. It looked, to Ozzie, as if it were committing suicide… and then the horrifying truth dawned on him. The kamikaze ship was undamaged. It possessed an intact, impregnable hull… and it was closing in rapidly on the nerve centre of the Defence Force. He keyed his radio to scream a warning, but it was already too late. The Killer starship, moving at several thousand kilometres a second and packing more mass than any other known starship, struck the asteroid dead centre and battered right through. The asteroid seemed to shatter under the impact.
Ozzie watched in stunned disbelief as the Killer starship, utterly unharmed by the experience, pulled away from its target, bright white lights flaring over its hull. A moment later, it opened fire, sweeping bolts of white light out at every conceivable target. The other Killer starships, closing in rapidly from their prior position, opened fire as well, bombarding every human installation within range. The battle had lasted barely twenty seconds… and the Killers had already struck most of the important starships. The defending ships closed in rapidly, bombarding the Killer ships with implosion bolts, energy torpedoes and particle beams — joined by the still-formidable defence platforms located near the main asteroids — but it was too late. The Killers had already inflicted decisive damage on the entire star system.
System Command, what was left of it, was shouting instructions to the small fleet of support craft, trying to organise a rescue mission, but Ozzie suspected that it was hopeless. The remains of Sparta Asteroid were more intact than he had dared hope, but the entire asteroid had been torn open to the vacuum of space and most of the emergency systems had to have been knocked out by the unprecedented attack. He brought the bug’s drive systems online — he wasn’t going to leave his fellow officers in space at the mercy of the Killers — but knew there was little hope of finding many survivors. They would all have been killed by the impact alone.