“Aye, sir,” she said. Her voice, even though the communications implants, was calm and practical. “Will you be putting on a suit yourself, sir?”
“Of course,” Brent said. It was like having a Mother Hen pecking at him, but she was right. “I’ll activate the emergency systems first, then get dressed.”
He placed his hand on the emergency systems panel and waited for them to respond to the implant emplaced in his right hand. It took a moment before the emergency system came online — it should have come on automatically when the asteroid was hit — and it couldn’t tell him anything useful. The asteroid’s computer network was all screwed up and half of the asteroid seemed to be gone. Brent wasn’t entirely surprised. The Killer starship might have smashed the asteroid right in half.
“I’m getting nothing on the progress of the battle,” he said, after a moment. The external sensors seemed to be completely down as well, for reasons he couldn’t understand. Most of the systems should have existed independently of the main computer, although it was possible that the sensors were fine and the computer relay system was messed up. “We may not get any help from outside.”
Captain Waianae nodded, her face pale behind the suit’s visor. “That may make escape difficult,” she said, with masterful understatement. The Killer starship had separated them from the docks. The FTL starships would be gone or otherwise inaccessible. “We’ll have to get outside and see if we can signal for help from there.”
Brent nodded. The emergency procedures should have let them all remain inside the shelter until rescue arrived, but few people would want to remain there. The Sparta System had just been knocked out of the war. After the asteroid had been hit so badly, it was possible that there would only be a cursory search for survivors before the Defence Force starships pulled out to other war fronts. They might be left alive to wait until the atmosphere ran out. They couldn’t afford to assume that there would be time to mount a search for them.
And, he thought, in the privacy of his own head, anyone on the outside may not even pick up the distress beacon. Everything else has failed today.
“All right,” he said, addressing all of his people. “Listen carefully.”
He ran through their situation and explained the problem. “We have to get out onto the surface, but only a handful of us have to go,” he concluded. “Does anyone want to stay here? It will not be counted against them.”
No one, much to his private pride, chose to stay behind. “You two are staying behind,” he said, pointing to two of the injured girls. “If anyone else turns up here, get them into a spacesuit as well and prepare them for possible evacuation. Keep in touch via implant communicators and keep heart. We’ll be back for you before you know it.”
He turned and nodded to Captain Waianae. “Let’s move,” he said. “Open the hatch.”
There was no rush of air this time, but only a spooky silence. He called up the map in his implants and found the quickest way towards one of the emergency egress hatches, but decided, after a moment’s thought, to head towards the hull breach instead. The hatch might be jammed, or otherwise inaccessible, and they knew that the hull breach was open to space. He led the way down the corridor, flying the suit as well as he could, bumping off the walls as he moved. It was small consolation to know that everyone else was having just as bad a time; spacesuit drills, too, were a thing of the past. It was something else that he would have to change.
They passed several more dead bodies as they moved further towards the hull breach, both men who had been deemed essential. There would have been more bodies if the Killer attack had been a complete surprise, without the evacuation plans, but Brent couldn’t account for their delay in attacking. Why had they watched the asteroid system without attacking? Why had they waited so long to mount an offensive? The only explanation that made any sense to him was that the Killers had used the first ships to triangulate the location of their wormhole when they had charged through it and into battle, but why would they even need to do that when they could have just opened fire? Had they believed that humanity had duplicated their impregnable hulls?
He pushed that, too, out of his mind as they rounded a corner and saw the hull breach at the end of the throughway. The damage was much greater than he had expected; the Killer attack had bisected the entire asteroid. He accessed his implants and scanned again for any other signs of life, but nothing presented itself for inspection. They might as well have been alone in the universe. He attached a tether to the asteroid hull — that, too, had been taught back at the Academy — and used the suit’s jets to push himself out into space. The stars were still watching him in their silent majesty, but he could see signs of a space battle raging out amidst the system, tiny flashes of light… yet each of those flashes signified the death of a human starship. The Killers were still out there, somewhere…
“This is Admiral Roeder,” he said, concentrating on a full-spectrum distress call. Out in space, the starships should be able to hear them without interference. If they could break contact and come in to pick up the survivors… that, he knew, was a different story. “Emergency; we require an emergency pick-up now, I repeat…”
Ten minutes later, a bug drifted into view. It was hardly the kind of ship normally used for a rescue mission, but Brent had no choice. The pilot managed to take the wounded onboard and departed to deposit them on one of the evacuation systems, while Brent and the remaining command staff waited for the next pick-up starship. It wasn’t long in coming.
“They’re breaking contact,” Captain Ackbar reported, once Brent reached the bridge. The small destroyer had left the combat zone to pick up the survivors; a pitifully small number, compared to the thousands who normally manned the asteroid. “They’re running from us.”
“No,” Brent corrected. He felt very tired and it was all he could do not to slump on the bridge. There were reports flooding in from all over the Community of new Killer attacks. “They did what they came here to do.”
Chapter Forty
From a safe distance — a very safe distance — Shiva was completely invisible to the naked eye, apart from a faint blue glow. Paula wasn’t entirely sure if the glow was her imagination or not, but it hardly mattered; the black hole was very apparent to her sensors as it curved space and time into a tight ball. The flickers of radiation emitting from it as it consumed tiny particles — the remains of the battle debris that had once littered the system — marked its position well enough for her work. The network of gravity-emitters she’d had built in position around the black hole were enough to give her some degree of control over the hole in space she’d created. She had to hope that it was enough.
The Killers had achieved a high degree of control over black holes and Paula was all too aware that the human race was trying to catch up with them; there was no time for a quiet research program that could explore and consider every possible angle before the actual experimentation began. Paula had never been too enthused about exploring all of the angles before actually testing the theories — theories tended to grow on researchers, pushing them into looking for ‘proof’ rather than observing the experiment with an open mind — but now that she was prepared to start her experiments, she almost quailed. The Killers might pick up her experiments — no, she knew; there was no doubt that they would pick up her experiments — and move to silence her forever. The thought of the Killers recognising that Paula Handley, a Technical Faction Researcher, was a personal threat to them made her smile, but they might well decide to destroy her station and take possession of the black hole.