Storming Heaven

(War of the Gods)

Christopher Nuttall
http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

 
Prologue

For Once-Captain Tabitha Cunningham, the dream was always the same.

She was on the observation deck of her spacecraft, the massive bridge ship Endeavour, as it started to rock violently.  They were midway between Earth and the Ceres Asteroid Colony, millions of kilometres from anything that could have threatened her ship, safe in the vastness of interstellar space.  The political situation down on Earth might have been heating up again, as the Russian Confederacy and the Chinese Hegemony confronted the Atlantic Alliance, but no one would have taken a shot at a Bridge Ship.  Only wreckers – terrorists – would have dreamed of harming the ultimate symbol of man’s achievements in space…and no terrorist could have penetrated the security blanket protecting the ships.  They should have been safe.

The ship rocked again as she stumbled onto the bridge.  “Report,” she gasped, unable to understand what was happening.  Endeavour was rocking like a boat out at sea, caught up in a tidal wave, yet there were no tidal waves in space.  “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” her first officer said.  Colin Hastings was young for his position, but out in interplanetary space, there should have been nothing that could have threatened them, or forced them to act quickly.  “There’s no damage; the ship…”

A final wave struck the spacecraft as new alarms sounded, reporting the build-up of weird energy patterns in space, far too close for comfort.  Tabitha’s eyes snapped towards sensors she never expected to have to use – military-grade sensors intended to watch for possible tracking radars and incoming missiles – to see a massive source of energy shimmer into existence.  It struck her, suddenly, that the…event was producing gravity waves as well, and it had been the gravity waves that had rocked her ship.  The event wasn’t natural – it couldn’t be natural – but if that was the case, then who was behind it?

She ignored the increasingly frantic calls coming in from all departments of her ship and pulled up the images from the ship’s telescopes.  The wave of energy was visible even at their distance, a boiling mass of space that, even as she watched, was drawing into a funnel.  It was already large enough to swallow Endeavour and her sister ships and it was still growing.  She saw, with a sudden frisson of pure excitement, stars at the rear of the funnel that bore no resemblance to stars seen from Earth, but before she could articulate what that meant she saw the starship appear.

It was massive, fifty kilometres long if it were a kilometre, large enough to utterly dwarf everything that humanity had put into space.  It looked like nothing less than a massive iceberg, pointed right at Earth, glittering with strange lights and weird power fluctuations.  It was impossible, yet it was in front of her; it was beyond her comprehension.  It was almost impossible to grasp the sheer size of the starship.

It was terrifying.

It was as alien as hell.

“First contact,” Tabitha breathed, feeling excitement, yet disappointment – and terror.  What value did Endeavour have compared to the behemoth that was closing its wormhole behind it and was advancing steadily towards Earth?  What was the human race to the people who had built that massive ship?  Were they friends, or would they see humanity as nothing more than ants crawling around their feet?  She wished, with all her heart, that she was in Earth orbit to meet the aliens, yet she also wished that she had died before she saw their arrival.  The galaxy, the galaxy that humanity had barely touched, was already taken.  Nothing would ever been the same again.

The alien starship ignored all attempts to communicate with it as it closed in on Earth.  It ignored pleading messages from one political faction or another.  It ignored the UN’s attempt to greet it in the name of Earth.  It ignored offers of friendship and military alliance, pleas and supplications, promises and threats, choosing instead to maintain its ponderous approach.  Despite its size, it was moving far faster than Tabitha’s ship, seemingly unconcerned with the laws of physics, as humanity knew them.  It slid past the moon’s orbit, past the L4 and L5 colonies, and seemed to pause, only a few thousand kilometres from Earth itself.  There was a sudden jump in power…

…And a white streak of light flashed from the alien starship towards Earth.  Tabitha watched in horror as the pulse came down somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, sending great gallows of vaporised water into the atmosphere and causing tidal waves all across the planet.  The second came down in Europe, detonating with the force of a thousand atomic bombs; the third came down in China.  Pulse followed pulse – the Middle East, North America, Russia, Antarctica and countless more – until the entire planetary ecosystem had been thoroughly destroyed.  The orbiting defences, designed to stop missiles rather than alien attack, could do nothing.  The alien ship was sitting well outside their range.

Her view changed as the firestorms raged across the planet.  She was no longer on her ship, but standing on the surface, watching her friends and family, her country and her planet, burning away under the alien bombardment.  She was untouched by waves of fire that eradicated cities and continents, wiping the human race out of existence.  She could hear the sound of nine billion people crying out in agony as they died, smell their burning flesh as they burned, feel their hands desperately grabbing at her for a safety she couldn’t offer them.  Again, she watched her planet die…

And she was floating in space, watching the alien craft completing its task and slowly moving away from the planet, ignoring the orbital habitats and the remains of the human race.  It seemed to pause, just long enough to look on its work and find it good, before it opened up the wormhole again and vanished, leaving a dead world behind.  On the surface, the planet was still burning.

And then she woke up, screaming. 

Chapter One

“We have entered the system,” the AI said.  “Awaken.”

Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi came awake as her bio-implants pushed stimulants and refreshers into her bloodstream.  For a long moment, she stared around in confusion, before remembering where she was – and why she’d been in hibernation.  The tiny scout ship, so small and insignificant that no one had bothered to give it or its AI a name, was approaching a Killer star system.  In theory, even the Killers would be unable to detect her presence.  The tiny ship had been stealthed completely, using the most advanced human technology, but no one knew just how the Killers did what they did.  Her probe into their space might end with her death at their hands.

“I’m awake,” she slurred, as she pulled herself upright in the command chair.  Her mouth tasted bad despite the best efforts of her implants and her enhanced genetics, so she washed it out with a glass of recycled water.  She called up a reflector field and winced at her face.  Her oriental features looked tired and drawn.  “Report.”

“Passive sensors are detecting traces of Killer activity,” the AI reported, its voice as dispassionate as ever.  No one programmed a scout ship AI to show emotion.  “Optical observation confirms the presence of a major Killer base.  We are flying right through the heart of their territory.”

“And it all seemed so easy back when the Admiral was briefing us,” Chiyo muttered, peering down at the holographic display as it sprang to life in the darkened cockpit.  Back on the carrier, her task had seemed simple, but now she was flying through a Killer star system at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light, it was much more daunting.  If the Killers caught a sniff of her presence, she wouldn’t last long enough to do more than scream for help that wouldn’t come.  “Show me what you’ve detected so far.”

The holographic display expanded to reveal the solar system in all its glory.  Humanity might not have mastered gravity technology – just how the Killers were able to manipulate gravity so easily was a mystery – but the scout ship’s sensors could detect the use of gravity technology at a considerable distance, along with the presence of anything else that cast a sizeable gravity field.  The planetary system was fairly average – seven planets, three of them gas giants – but the waves of focused gravity crossing the system told another story.  There was no way that such gravity waves existed in nature.  The Killers were in residence.

“I am detecting powered sources from four of the planets,” the AI added, illuminating the active planets.  “It would appear that the Killers are tearing the planets apart.”

Chiyo winced, wondering if the planets had developed intelligent life – or any kind of life at all – before the Killers came calling.  Humanity knew little about their tormentors, but one thing they did know was that the Killers were brutally xenophobic and completely ruthless.  A thousand years of covert space exploration and careful observation of thousands of star systems had confirmed that the Killers had wiped out hundreds of other intelligent races, leaving any survivors well hidden, as well hidden as the remains of humanity itself.  It was quite possible that the only forms of intelligent life left in the Milky Way were humanity and the Killers.

And, if the Killers had their way, one day it would just be them.

A thousand years ago, humanity had been pushing into space when the first Killer starship arrived in the Solar System and opened fire on Earth, bombarding the planet into a radioactive wasteland.  The starship had ignored the bases on the moon and the asteroids, perhaps in the belief that the remainder of humanity would writher and die without Earth.  Instead, humanity had managed to survive and eventually escape the Solar System, only to discover hundreds of other dead worlds and a handful of habitable planets.  Several of them had been settled by humanity…only to be eventually located and wiped out by the Killers.  The remainder of humanity now lurked in asteroid settlements and dead worlds, knowing that if the Killers found them, all of humanity’s technology wouldn’t save them.  The only saving grace was that the Killers didn’t seem to care about asteroid settlements.  No one knew why.

It wasn't the only thing humanity didn’t know about their alien foe.  No one, even after a thousand years, knew what a Killer looked like, or even spoke their language.  Human archaeologists had explored hundreds of alien worlds – their populations exterminated by the Killers – and decrypted several alien languages, but no one had found a dead Killer world to explore.  No one knew why they were so determined to wipe out all other intelligent races, or even how far they’d spread across the universe.  The Defence Force’s probes had located dozens of bases…and hundreds of their massive starships, wandering across the galaxy on seemingly-random courses.  The sheer scale of the galaxy itself defeated such efforts.  Even on the scale the Killers operated, it was like searching for a tiny needle within a very large haystack.

But Chiyo’s commander had lucked out and located this system.

“Wormhole opening, seventeen million kilometres away,” the AI said, suddenly. Chiyo looked up from the display towards the near-space monitor.  It wouldn’t have done any good if the wormhole had opened up right on top of her position, but at least she would have seen her enemy coming at her.  “Confirmed; one Iceberg-class Killer starship, heading in towards the inner solar system.”

“I wonder why they’re heading in at such a clip,” Chiyo said, thoughtfully.  If the Killer starship had come in via wormhole, rather than using their still-inexplicable normal space FTL drives, there wouldn’t be a human scout following it.  According to the last report she’d downloaded from the Network, there were at least seventeen known Killer starships within a hundred light years of the star, and all of them seemed to be wandering at random.  There seemed no purpose at all to their journey, unless they were watching for signs of other intelligent life.

“Unable to speculate,” the AI said, pedantically.  “Alert; passive sensors have detected traces of seven other Killer starships powering up their drives.  Gravity fields are expanding; brace for possible impact.”

“Understood,” Chiyo said.  She’d been told that there were things called tides on a planetary surface, where the gravity of a moon pulled the water into waves and sent them crashing into the land.  Space had gravity tides caused by the presence of several heavy bodies – or Killer gravity drives.  They could generate waves that propagated across the system faster than light and shake humanity’s starships like a child shaking her toys.  She couldn’t have said how it confirmed to being on a beach, or a boat on a real sea; she had never set foot on a living planet.  Very few living humans had and those who lived in the MassMind swore blind that no simulation matched the reality.  “Alert me if the waves come near us.”

She turned her attention back to the display as the Killer starships came to life.  They were massive starships, each one shaped like a massive iceberg, studded with eerie lights and flickering with strange energies, almost like a city come to life.  Whatever else one could say about the Killers, they thought big and built bigger; their starships utterly dwarfed everything humanity had produced.  No such starship had been lost in combat with human forces either; the massacres at Terra Nova, Hope, New Jehovah and Peace had been little more than routs.  Humanity’s attempts to make a stand against the Killers had been doomed from the start.  No one even believed that the Killers had noticed humanity’s stand.  It certainly hadn’t prompted them to go after the remaining human settlements.

“Incoming wave,” the AI said, suddenly.  The scout ship rocked suddenly.  “No damage; no major course adjustments.”

“Thank God,” Chiyo breathed.  The course they were on should take them through the star system without passing too close to any Killer facility – although no one, of course, was sure what ‘too close’ actually was.  The Killers might have ignored a routine fly-though their system, but she knew that if she came too close to one of their facilities, they would respond.  Her tiny scout couldn’t stand up to their weapons for more than a second.  “Show me their position.”

“The fleet is moving towards Planet One,” the AI said.  “They do not seem to be in a hurry.”

Chiyo eyed the AI’s icon suspiciously, suspecting that it was making an impossible joke, before turning her eyes back to the display.  The Killer starships didn’t use warp bubbles or even the Anderson Tachyon Drive – at least as far as humanity could tell – but it didn’t seem to hamper them any.  No human technology could have generated a warp bubble large enough to cover a Killer starship, but their gravity drives could propel them through space at sublight speeds with ease – and then there was their inexplicable FTL drive, or their wormholes.  The AI was right; whatever they were doing, the Killers were in no hurry.  They advanced on the world, ominous intent clearly written in their formation, and surrounded it.  Chiyo had the mental impression that the world was cowering under their gaze…

“Power spike,” the AI snapped.  “Major power spike…”

The display seemed to blur as the Killers went to work.  The rocky planet was struck by beams of powerful energy, rapidly disintegrating into an asteroid field.  Chiyo watched in terror and awe as the Killers wove their gravity net around the asteroids trapping them and slowly funnelling them towards the star.  The sheer power left her speechless; the Killers hadn’t just rendered the world uninhabitable, they’d torn it apart!  It made no sense to her at all.  The system had plenty of asteroids they could have used without destroying an entire planet.

“They may have required additional resources,” the AI suggested, finally.  It would have been monitoring her physical condition and would have known that she was on the verge of going into shock.  She relaxed slightly as her implants fed more calming drugs into her system.  “Human theorists suggested, at one point, destroying Mercury in order to use the presence of Sol to assist in working the released ores.  The Killers may have evolved a similar concept.”

Chiyo said nothing for a long moment, watching as the Killers continued their task.  “We may even be on the verge of discovering another Killer shipyard,” the AI added, in hopes of raising the human’s enthusiasm.  “The construction of Icebergs certainly requires considerable resources.”

“Maybe,” Chiyo said, slowly.  “They could still have mined the asteroids for a hundred years and not run out of material to produce a thousand Icebergs.”

The next few hours passed slowly.  The Killers were wrapping the entire system in beams of gravity, somehow using the star as a source of power.  Beams of gravity reached out across the star system, catching the newly formed asteroids and pulling them in towards the star.  The Killer starships broke off as the beams of gravity took over and headed towards their next target, the second rocky world.  Chiyo watched as that world, too, was shattered, the raw material released pulled towards the star.  The sheer scale of their power kept her focused.  She couldn’t believe that anyone, even the Killers, would destroy an entire star system just for fun.  There had to be a deeper purpose in mind.

“I am picking up additional power fluctuations from the star itself,” the AI said, as new icons appeared on the display.  “They do not seem to confirm to any previously observed Killer activity.”

“They’re not planning to rip apart the star,” Chiyo said, in flat denial.  It seemed impossible…but with such command of gravity, it might just be possible.  It would also mean certain death for her.  Without the star’s gravity, her scout ship would be hurled away on the wrong course and she’d never locate the carrier again.  She would have to risk a transmission, which might bring the Killers down on her.  “They can’t…”

“Apparently not,” the AI agreed.  “Power fluctuations are coming from an installation orbiting the star at ten thousand kilometres.”

“It should have melted,” Chiyo said.  Ten thousand kilometres was nothing on a cosmic scale.  If she took her scout ship so close to the star, it would be destroyed.  “Show me; direct optical observation.”

The image appeared in the centre of her display, dimmed to protect her eyes.  The star was a massive white globe; the installation, a massive hexagon seemingly floating just above the star, was a black shape.  The AI put up a scale for her without even being asked; the hexagon was over a million kilometres across, huge beyond imagination.  The Killers had built vast structures before, but this…Chiyo felt, not for the first time, the huge gulf between humanity and their tormentors and felt afraid.  How could anyone hope to stand against power like that?

“What is that?”  She asked, finally.  “Are they trying to enclose the star?”

“Uncertain,” the AI replied, flatly.  “I am unable to obtain accurate data at this distance.  My current position is not suitable for active observation, but I believe that even if they mine the entire resources of the star system, they would be unable to enclose the star unless they mined material from the star itself.  Their use of wormholes and gravity technology would suggest that they could accomplish that, but it would seem to be pointless.  Even a partial enclosure of the star would give them access to considerable power.”

“Or they might mine other star systems as well,” Chiyo said, flatly.  Unlike a warp bubble, there was no theoretical limit to the size of a wormhole.  She could see the Killers opening up a wormhole in another star system, capturing an entire planet and launching it into their new system.  It would be industrial engineering on a massive scale, but not beyond their technology.  “Do we have any bases near this star system?”

“Unknown,” the AI replied, flatly.  “My data banks do not contain information that might be tactically useful to the enemy.”

Chiyo nodded, ruefully.  The Defence Force was outmatched enough without risking giving the enemy the locations of humanity’s remaining settlements in one disastrous mission.  No list would ever be complete – the Community included hundreds of settlements that preferred to keep their location a secret from the rest of the human race, for various reasons – but a disaster could expose billions of humans to their fire.  It was something she would have to report to higher authority when she returned to the carrier.  If the Killers were mining entire star systems now…they might scoop up and destroy human colonies, quite by accident.  They wouldn’t even know what they had done.  Resistance would be, quite literally, futile.

There was a sudden pause.  “I am picking up a second hexagon,” the AI added, sharply.  “It just came into range.  This one is smaller than the previous one, but definitely growing larger.  They must be using nanotechnology to break down the asteroids and other debris as they are propelled into the hexagons and used as building material.”

“I’d love to get a look at their power field specifications,” Chiyo mused.  Humanity had developed its own form of nanotechnology, but the Killers used it on a scale far beyond anything humanity could accomplish – again.  Her body had thousands of the tiny machines running through her blood, fixing any damage and extending her life as far as they could, but there were very definite limits.  She had never wanted to become a Spacer and give up her gender in exchange for effective immortality, but one day she would have to choose between that or entering the MassMind.  “What about…”

The AI sounded an alarm before she could finish.  “We were just scanned,” it said, flatly.  Chiyo felt her body jolt to full wakefulness again as the implants did their work.  “They just located us.”

“So much for the stealth field,” Chiyo said, grimly.  “How much did they get?”

“Uncertain, but enough to locate us,” the AI said.  “We are unable to take evasive manoeuvres without leaving a trail for them to follow.”

“Compress a full report into the transmitter and prepare to transmit,” Chiyo ordered, tartly.  It was just possible that the Killers would ignore them – a tiny scout ship was hardly a threat – but there was no point in taking chances.  If she had located an alien ship in her system, she would have wanted to ask them a few questions before letting them go – or destroying them.  “Stand by…”

The scout ship rocked suddenly.  Chiyo found herself caught in a field that seemed to tear at her entire body for a second, before the Structural Integrity Field compensated for the sudden change in environment.  Red alarms flashed up in her virtual vision, warning of massive internal damage to her body; she fought down a wave of pain and struggled to focus.  She couldn’t even talk and had to use her implants to transmit a command to the AI.  Report.

“They have locked onto us with a gravity beam,” the AI said.  It displayed an image of the ship’s course.  They were plunging right down towards the sun.  Chiyo realised – and almost laughed aloud – that the Killers hadn’t cared who they were or why they were in their star system; they’d just decided that the scout would make additional raw materials for their project.  It was almost insulting, but quite typical of the Killers.  “Twenty-two minutes to impact.”

“Transmit,” Chiyo ordered, knowing that she would be dead long before the nanites started disassembling her ship.  The gravity waves were compressing her, trying to squash her flat.  “Get the information out of here.”

“Transmitting,” the AI said.  There was a pause.  “Signal sent.”

The gravity field increased suddenly and Chiyo blacked out.

Chapter Two

“At that point, the signal terminates,” Admiral Brent Roeder said, as the final images of the doomed scout faded and died.  “We do not know for sure what happened to Lieutenant Takahashi, but we believe that she was killed in the line of duty, along with her AI.  We do not believe that there is any point in a fast-recon mission to attempt to locate any traces of her vessel.”

“You intend to abandon her?”  Father Sigmund asked, coldly.  “I believe that you could get a starship in and out of the system before the devils could respond.”

“If we jumped a starship into the system, either in a warp bubble or though the Anderson Drive, we will certainly attract their attention,” Brent said, with forced calm.  “They will act at once against the starship and the crew will be lucky to escape.  The telemetry from the scout suggests, quite strongly, that the craft was broken up and used for raw materials, along with the pilot.  I will not waste additional resources attempting to rescue a dead woman.”

“There’s little point in arguing,” President Patti Lydon said, as calmly as she could.  It had been a long day even before the War Council had been summoned by the Admiral.  “I believe that the Admiral still holds the confidence of his peers and they do not appear to have condemned the decision.  I assume that the Lieutenant knew the risks?”

“Yes, Madam President,” Brent confirmed.  “Those of us in the Defence Force all know the risks.  We live with them every day.  We face them every time we scout out a potential Killer star system or shadow a Killer starship.  We lose hundreds of people each year to the Killers, or simple accidents in space; we all know the risks.”

Patti nodded tiredly.  There were times when she wished that the Community was a more formal structure, but the truth was that humanity could not afford any such structure, not now.  The members of the War Council couldn’t share the same asteroid settlement, or even visit each other socially, merely because of the risk of a Killer attack leaving humanity leaderless.  There were thousands of asteroid settlements, billions of humans in hiding across the stars, but without the Community, any hope of united action would be gone.

“And another one of God’s Children dies,” Father Sigmund intoned.  “How many more must die, Admiral?”

“We have been unable to communicate with the Killers,” Brent pointed out, tightly.  His words came in sharp choppy sentences.  “We cannot offer to surrender.  They want us all dead.  We can either try to fight – or hide, hoping that we will not be discovered.  As the events last year proved, even the asteroid settlements are not safe.”

“The settlers of High Singapore brought their fate on themselves,” Rupert said.  The massive Spacer’s electronic eyes seemed to flicker towards the Admiral, before turning to Father Sigmund.  “They were careless and were detectable when a Killer starship entered their system.  Other settlements do not make the same mistake.”

Patti scowled.  She remembered the images High Singapore – a settlement of several hundred asteroids, comprising over twenty million humans – had sent, in the last moments before the Killers wiped them out.  The massive Iceberg-class starship had appeared in the system, tracked them down, and systematically blasted every asteroid, while the Defence Force struggled to hold them off long enough for some humans to escape.  Only ten thousand humans had escaped the brutal and utterly ruthless attack…and over a hundred Defence Force starships had died in the battle.  The Killers had barely slowed to swat the gnats before destroying the asteroids.

“May God keep them,” Father Sigmund said, and for once there was general agreement.  “May he take them into his heaven as righteous souls.”

Humanity had once had hundreds of different religions, but the destruction of Earth had wiped out almost all of that rich tapestry.  There had been a handful of religion-based asteroid settlements, but over time, almost all of them had merged into the Deists, an overarching religious community.  They had borrowed elements from all human religions, but they spent so much time arguing about the actual way of God that they were barely a political power in their own right.  Patti had long since decided that that was for the best.  The last thing humanity needed was a religious civil war.

“The more worrying implication of all this is what might be happening to other star systems touched by the Killers,” Tabitha Cunningham said.  “Are they going to be dissembling other star systems – and, if so, why?”

Patti studied Tabitha carefully as she posed her question.  At one thousand and forty years old, Tabitha was probably the oldest person – personality – in existence.  When she’d been human, she’d watched helplessly as the Killers destroyed Earth, before setting out on an asteroid generation ship to try to escape the solar system, only to discover that she’d been beaten to the new system by a warp drive starship.  It had been a surprisingly friendly meeting and Tabitha, now on the brink of death by old age, had accepted the offer to be transcribed into the MassMind.  She now represented the MassMind on the War Council.  Patti had learned to value her insights, but she was from a very different age.  She had never accepted that humanity had to hide indefinitely.

“They appear to be building a Dyson Sphere or a variant on the theme,” Rupert grated.  The cyborg studied Tabitha thoughtfully.  The Spacers grafted artificial implants onto their bodies, giving up their gender and much else to live and work in space without any form of protection.  They also looked obscene; their flesh and blood mangled by implanted machines and augments.  The Spacers claimed to be immortal, and it was true that they only died through accidents, but most humans considered it a high price to pay.  Only those who feared that the MassMind wasn't true immortality wanted to join the Spacers.  “That would grant them access to even more stupendous sources of power.”

“Indeed,” Administrator Arun Prabhu agreed.  The Technical looked around the holographic simulation of the dying star system.  “The current theory is that they might even be able to take control of the star altogether and collapse it into a black hole.  It would give them another source of power.”

“I believe that we are slipping away from the point of this meeting,” Tabitha said.  “Computer; return to general display.”

The image of the star system vanished, to be replaced by an image of the galaxy, seem from a view point high above the galactic core.  It gave the illusion of god-like power to the War Council as they gazed down on the perfect image, spoiled only by the hundreds of tactical icons as they orbited the galaxy.  The red icons marked known Killer star systems, or the locations of known Killer starships on their endless hunt for intelligent life to exterminate; the blue icons marked some of humanity’s settlements.  Patti had grown up with such maps and knew how to read them; humanity was steadily being driven to the brink of extinction.

Tabitha’s image was one of her in her prime, commander of a spacecraft that had been the most advanced of its time – and pitiful compared to the Killer starship that had destroyed Earth.  Patti found herself respecting Tabitha, even though she feared the woman’s icy determination to wreck revenge on the Killers, a desire shared by far too many humans.  If there had been hope, Patti would have joined them, but there was none.  Every engagement had ended badly for humanity.

“We need to face the facts,” Tabitha said.  “We are still retreating from their advance, unable to escape unless we flee the galaxy entirely.  We need to find a way to strike back at them.”

“We believe that we may have a way,” Brent said.  Patti found herself staring at him, and then wondering if Brent and Tabitha had planned the meeting beforehand.  “One of our main problems is that we have been unable to obtain any samples of their technology on more than a small scale.  What we need – desperately – is one of their starships to analyse.  We believe that we can obtain one.”

He sent a command into the room’s processor and it displayed an image of a Killer starship, a very familiar image.  Patti felt her heart race as she took in the massive form, a starship far larger than anything humanity had ever built.  The others were showing similar reactions.  They all knew what those ships had done to humanity.

“This is Killer #453,” Brent said.  “We do not, of course, know what the Killers call it, but we located this one over a year ago and tracked it as it moved from star system to star system.  It appears to be comparatively isolated from the remainder of the Killer fleet and doesn’t seem to have any actual links with any known base.  Of course, we can’t hack into their communications network, so we don’t know for sure, but all warfare is based on risk.  The important thing is that this ship is isolated.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Father Sigmund said, after a long pause, “but only one engagement has ever been fought against more than one Killer starship.  All of the engagements have been disasters.  How many more people are you prepared to send to their deaths against this monster?”

“That’s not entirely accurate,” Brent said, firmly.  “In their attack on High Singapore, and most of the other engagements, we had to stand and fight.  We couldn’t break because the Killers would just have moved on to destroying the asteroids and slaughtering the civilians.  That meant that we were permanently exposed to their fire and, when they came at us, they broke through.  This battle will be fought in a location that is clear of civilians and our starships can jump in and out at will.”

He paused.  “One thing we do know about their ships is that their targeting capability isn’t actually that good,” he added.  “If our starships keep evading in random patterns, they will be unable to target them easily and we can pound away at them from relative safety.  That will not, however, be the actual threat.  The starships will distract the Killers while the Footsoldiers board the craft.”

There was a long pause.  “You intend to board a Killer starship?”

“Yes, Father,” Brent said, firmly.  “I intend to put an entire army into one of their ships and take control of it from the inside.”

“Impossible,” Patti said flatly.  “You don’t know enough about the enemy ships to take control of one.”

“We have volunteers for the mission,” Brent countered, “and at least some understanding of their technology.  Even if we cannot gain control, detonating an antimatter mine inside the craft would certainly wreck it and give us something we need desperately – a victory.  If we could even get our hands on a real live Killer…we might even be able to learn how to talk to the bastards.”

“And even images of what the interior of the craft looks like would be helpful,” Arun added, from his position.  “We believe that we are on the verge of unlocking some of their technology, or at least developing theories that account for how it works, but we need additional information to allow us to develop a defence.”

“That still leaves the risk of provoking them into coming after us,” Patti countered.  “The Community is on the verge of falling apart anyway.  We cannot take the risk of forcing them to drive after us and completing the task of wiping us out.”

“They’re intent on wiping us out anyway,” Tabitha pointed out, sharply.  “I’ve been watching and listening through the MassMind.  Over the last thousand years, the human race’s….determination to overcome everything in its path has been steadily broken by the Killers.  The number of people who have just…given up is astonishingly high, worryingly high.  Thousands are seeking refuge in fantasy inside the MassMind or other simulations; hundreds more are committing suicide or just giving up inside.  They will locate and destroy every colony of ours, eventually.  They even wiped out the pastoral worlds and God alone knows what attracted them there.”

Patti winced.  Three hundred years ago, a group of settlers had concluded that the reason the Killers located human worlds so fast was because of the emission signatures caused by their technology, so they’d settled a handful of worlds with nothing beyond hand and water powered technology.  It hadn’t been a pleasant life – no one had any experience living in a world without technology – and, a hundred years later, the Killers had arrived, bombarded the worlds into radioactive wastelands, and that put an end to that.  Perhaps it was telepathy, as some humans had speculated at the time; there seemed to be no other explanation for how the Killers had located their prey.

“They are set on destroying us all,” Tabitha continued.  “We don’t co-exist with them.  We merely…wait until they turn their attention to destroying us.  If we can take out that craft, or capture it, it will give the human race a boost, a boost we desperately need.  If we can’t fight back, we might as well commit suicide now and save them the trouble of exterminating us.”

“We can’t do that,” Brent said.  He smiled, thinly.  “We’d never get everyone to agree to commit suicide.”

Patti looked down at the image of the galaxy.  There were hundreds of known Killer star systems and thousands of known Killer starships.  It seemed absurd to believe that the Community could wage war against such a foe and yet…they were right.  The human race was in hiding, the Defence Force only capable of observing and monitoring the enemy…and it was tearing the Community apart.  There were groups launching colony fleets to the nearest galaxies, using the Anderson Drive to cut the journey times down to a manageable level, but what would happen when the Killers reached those galaxies as well?

And humanity was alone.  There were no allies out there, no aliens who might be friendly or would join humanity in war against the Killers.  The Killers had wiped out thousands of races over the years, leaving humanity alone.  It didn’t bode well for humanity’s future.  The human race wasn't the only race that had reached space before the Killers arrived, but no others had survived, unless they were in hiding.  She would have liked to believe that some of them were hiding under the noses of the Killers, but the Killers would probably have ferreted them all out – eventually – and destroyed them.  Humanity was just the last in a long line of defeated and exterminated races.

“Can we even break into the craft?”  She asked, finally.  “Can we board craft coated with invincible hull material?”

“We believe so,” Brent said, simply.  “We have studied the craft carefully and believe that it might be possible to board it with Footsoldiers.  There is an element of risk, as I said, but we believe that it can be minimised.”

“And if it is not, they all die,” Patti said.

Tabitha smiled.  “Shall we move to a vote?”

Rupert, the Spacer, spoke first.  “We support this risky endeavour,” he grated, slowly.  “We will grant what support we can to the Footsoldiers.”

“We agree,” Arun added.  His voice was distressingly eager.  “We need insight into their technology and this is the only way we can obtain it.  The risk is worthwhile.”

It isn’t you who will have to take the risk, Patti thought, but she knew that it wasn't quite accurate.  The Technical Faction would be intimately involved with examining the captured ship – if it were captured – and if the Killers arrived to recover their ship, they’d be caught in the firing line.  She made a mental note to ensure that the starship was flown well away from any inhabited human settlement, just in case, before waiting for the next person to speak.

“I believe that this is futile,” Father Sigmund said, tightly.  Patti wasn’t too surprised by his stance.  The Deists believed the life was sacred and not to be risked, ever.  Their beliefs would make very little difference if the Killers attacked, just as they had slaughtered most of humanity’s religious adherents on Earth.  “I cannot in good conscience support this crazy plan.”

“I must agree with you for once,” Matriarch Jayne said.  The Rockrat leader stared at Brent harshly.  Her ancient face refused to budge.  “This plan risks far too much for a very chancy reward.  We cannot afford another High Singapore so soon.”

Patti smiled.  The Rockrats had formed the basis of much of the Community – and one of their traditions was female leaders.  After Earth had been destroyed, the women on the asteroid belts had suddenly become worth far more than their weight in gold and had been prevented from going outside sheltered accommodation.  While the men struggled to build a new society, the women had quietly taken control of the asteroids and ended up running the original Community.  They were generally more careful than men in their dealings with the Killers.  They knew what was at stake.

“So does certain death,” Tabitha said.  Her voice hardened slightly.  “I cast my vote in favour of this plan.”

“As do I,” Brent said, unnecessarily.

“Four in favour, two opposed,” Patti said.  She sighed, heavily.  If she cast a vote now, it would be useless, whichever way she moved.  Her constituents would not be too happy, but there was little choice.  “I choose, therefore, to abstain from the vote.  Admiral, you have your permission to proceed.  Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Brent said.  He looked down at the image of the Killer starship for a long moment.  Patti wondered if he was having doubts now about the wisdom of his plans.  “We won’t fail you.”

Chapter Three

As soon as the meeting ended, Tabitha Cunningham translated herself out of the meeting perceptual environment and back into her own apartment – or what she thought of as her apartment.  It looked like her old apartment back on Earth – nothing more than radioactive dust now – even to her enhanced senses, but she knew that it was not.  It was an image, formed in her mind and given a certain trace of reality by the MassMind, yet it was nothing more than the tiniest tiny section of the network that linked the human race together.  Tabitha knew that the illusion was an illusion and could never give herself completely to it, but she needed the comfortable to remind her that there was something worth fighting for, even if it was a dream long gone.

Was she human?  It was something she had struggled with for centuries, ever since the Endeavour – a starship only called a starship by the grace of semantics – had reached a new star and encountered humanity’s first warp-capable starship.  The aging Tabitha had dreamed of a new world, but instead she’d been warned that no Earth-like world was safe for humans, and she could seek a kind of immortality as a ghost in the machine.  Her mind, her personality, perhaps even her soul, had been transcribed into the growing MassMind…but was she human?  Was she still Tabitha, who had captained a Bridge Ship and led humanity’s desperate struggle to survive, or was she nothing more than a tiny computer program that dreamed it was a woman?

She wasn’t the only one to have those doubts, but as humanity grew older, it seemed to her that the number of humans who had those doubts fell.  She had been Roman Catholic on Earth, but humanity’s religions had been almost completely exterminated by the Killers.  By becoming part of the MassMind, she had wondered at the time, was she trying to cheat God?  Was she doomed for punishment on the Day of Judgement?  And yet, she thought from time to time, could anyone cheat God?  If He wanted to summon her, He could do it with ease, no matter where she hid.  He could certainly reach into the MassMind for her.

Her eyes closed as she slumped into a chair that was not a chair.  It would have been easy to lose herself within the MassMind and thousands of human patterns did so every year.  She could hear the faint whispers of the collective MassMind at the back of her head – everyone in the MassMind would hear them – and she knew that one day she would succumb to the song herself.  She was the oldest personality within the MassMind, over a thousand years old, and she was tired.  The illusion of being tired was the only link she had to being human.  There were people – personalities – in the MassMind who never grew tired, or bored with their games.  They could do anything in the MassMind; it never failed to shock her, even after a thousand years, how far people could go.  The MassMind never judged, for no one was hurt, but she still struggled with her own morality.  Was it right to lose oneself in a rape fantasy, even if no one was actually hurt?  Was it right to take part in a paedophilic encounter if the child was nothing more than a computer-generated illusion?

She remembered her own early days in the MassMind and shuddered.  She’d explored all of the possibilities.  She’d been a man for a few dozen years, learning what it felt like to be the opposite sex, before reconfiguring herself back into a woman.  She’d been a child again, and then an animal, and then creatures out of modern myth.  It hadn’t been real, yet it had felt real, and when she had finally pulled herself out of the endless illusionary luxury, she had realised the truth.  The MassMind existed to keep the human race distracted from the truth.  If the Killers stumbled across the MassMind and its remote nodes, they would wipe out billions of human personalities without a second thought.

A magazine appeared on her coffee table and she picked it up thoughtfully.  It claimed to be a listing of various entertainments, but none of them drew her attention.  She was perhaps the only personality still active that would have recognised the origins of some of the entertainments, the programs and illusions that distracted humanity from the truth.  It still astonished her how much had been lost over the years, but the latest version of Star Wars, in which the heroes went up against the Galactic Empire, was still going strong.  She didn’t think that there were so many nude scenes in the original though – and she would have given her soul to only fight the Galactic Empire.  Humanity faced a far worse foe.

She shook her head impatiently as the MassMind transmitted a signal to her, informing her that someone would like to enter her personal environment.  She nodded, transmitting an acknowledgement, and smiled ruefully as the door opened, revealing Administrator Arun Prabhu.  In the MassMind, he reassembled a Sikh from Old Earth, although Tabitha was probably the only person who recalled what the Sikhs actually were.  It was even more of an illusion than her own personality; Arun lived outside the MassMind, in reality.  She envied him more than she could say.

“Captain,” he said, in greeting.  Tabitha rolled her eyes inwardly.  Her title of Captain was the only one she’d kept over the years, even though she’d been Administrator of the Asteroid Belt, President of the Community and Matriarch of the Rockrats in her long life.  “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

Tabitha scowled at him, knowing that she was being teased.  “To business,” she said, tightly.  The environment could quite easily have been a nude steam bath, or a simple Government-Issue conference room from her own time; her apartment was merely a matter of personal choice.  “I trust that the Admiral is on his way?”

“I believe that he was briefing some of his subordinates,” Arun said, as Admiral Brent Roeder stepped in through the door.  He looked like a fairly average military man, although the Defence Force uniform owed more to various science-fiction movies that had survived the years than anything Tabitha had seen from a human military.  She had once been a Colonel in the United States Space Force – which had ceased to exist along with the United States and Earth itself – and part of her found the uniform amusing, and silly.  “Ah, Admiral.”

“Captain,” Brent said, calmly.  He, at least, wasn't too awed with her reputation.  “We had better make this quick.  I’m scheduled to attend another two briefings before the end of the day.”

Tabitha smiled.  She approved of efficiency and the Defence Force, even though it was largely helpless against the Killers, was an efficient organisation.  Brent had handled much of that when he became its Commanding Officer, rebuilding what had been a rapidly decaying communications and reconnaissance force into a formidable military machine – formidable against anything, but the Killers.  He controlled firepower that would have been unimaginable back in her youth and starships that could span the galaxy in mere hours, yet the Killers didn’t care.  To them, humanity was just another race of insects that needed to be exterminated.

She sent a mental command into the MassMind and the image of the Killer starship materialised in front of them.  It didn’t look any less formidable than it had looked in the Council Chamber and she wondered, suddenly, if they were doing the right thing.  Humanity had survived by hiding in the asteroids and out in interstellar space, but now…now they were talking about going on the offensive, against an overwhelmingly superior foe.  Tabitha had been a military officer long enough to know that that was dangerous, yet there was little choice.  The only other choice was to flee the galaxy entirely and escape.  The MassMind couldn’t be moved so easily.

“Our target,” Brent said, seriously.  “The planning sessions have all been completed.  As we know nothing about the internal environment of the Killer starship, we were very limited in what we could tell the Footsoldiers about it.  We believe that we are prepared for anything reasonable, but…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence.  They all knew how formidable the Killer starships were…and how little humanity knew about their interiors.  The Killers didn’t take prisoners, or capture starships; they just came, saw and destroyed.  The commando teams boarding the enemy starship were risking everything.  It was quite possible that they wouldn’t be able to survive within the Killer ship, although every destroyed world had been quite Earth-like.  There was no reason to believe that the Killers were that alien.

“It’s out of our hands now,” Tabitha said, feeling – once again – the helplessness of being part of the MassMind.  By long tradition, the MassMind only had one vote on the War Council, or even as part of the Greater Community.  It might be the largest single population – if one counted human personalities as being part of a population – but the living would not permit the dead to dictate to them.  Besides, Patti might be the President of the Community, but the Community was such a decentralised system that the President counted for very little.  “What about the other project?”

“The Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator is in final development now,” Arun confirmed.  Tabitha had chosen the name herself, secure in the knowledge that no one would connect the name with any actual project.  “The problem remains testing it.”

Brent changed the image – a serious breech of MassMind etiquette – to the final images from Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi.  “I have a target right here,” he said, coldly.  “If we strike that star, even their technology would be unable to prevent a disaster.”

“We’d have to blow up a lot of stars to make an impression on them,” Tabitha pointed out, coldly.  The Killers had thousands of star systems.  She had a dark suspicion that humanity hadn’t located even a fraction of them.  It was a mystery why the Killers seemed to ignore uninhabited Earth-like worlds in those systems, but it wouldn’t matter – humanity couldn’t use them so near the Killers.  “How many stars do you want to kill?”

“As many as we have to,” Brent said.  “We’re at war.”

“They may be able to counter the effect,” Arun said, reluctantly.  “My team have been going through the images from the scout ship flight and they believe that the Killers are actually attempting to take control of the star.  If they are capable of operating on such a level – which is theoretically possible – they may be able to compensate for the supernova effect.”

“They dismantle entire star systems to build their structures and now you’re telling me that they’re taking control of entire stars,” Brent said.  “Why?  What’s the point of taking control of a star?”

Tabitha said nothing, thinking hard.  One benefit of the MassMind was that it allowed the brightest scientists and technicians of humanity to work together without being lumbered with their own care and feeding.  Arun might have been the Administrator of the Technical Faction, but much of the real work was done in the MassMind, by the ghosts of scientists who had centuries of experience and the ability to assimilate data and study the implications almost instantly.  They could use the MassMind fantastic processing power to run simulations and experiments that would have been impossible in the outside world and repeat them as many times as necessary.  They’d been concentrating on the mystery of Killer technology for thousands of years.  They’d even cracked some minor mysteries.

“The best we can suggest is that they want the power the star represents,” Arun said, finally.  “If they took control of a star, they’d be able to tap into its power on a far more effective basis than anything they’d have even if they enclosed the star completely.”

“But why not use energy drawn from the universe itself?”  Brent asked, shaking his head.  “Or even other sources?  Why go to all that trouble just to take control of a star?”

“We don’t know,” Arun admitted.  “They already have more power at their disposal than we have.  Anything they want or need…they can get it with the power they have already.  Why would they bother to reconfigure a star?”

“We’ll just have to hope that capturing one of their starships will give us some answers,” Tabitha said, grimly.  “If we can’t crack one of their starships, we may be reduced to blowing up stars just to get them to pay attention to us.”

She winced inwardly, remembering Patti’s concerns.  The President knew that humanity was in a fragile state and the Killers could come after them at any moment.  She believed that it would be better if the Community did nothing to anger the Killers, but humanity couldn’t live like that.  The hundreds of thousands who fell into the MassMind and its illusions, or committed suicide or even fled the galaxy entirely were merely symptoms of humanity’s growing despair.   The human race couldn’t go on being the hunted prey.  Whatever it took, she knew, the war had to end.

***
Paula Handley allowed herself to feel a hint of nervousness as she was called into the Administrator’s office on the Technical Asteroid.  She hadn’t seen the Administrator in person since she’d joined the Technical Faction as a young girl just out of school and qualified to become a Technical in her own right.  She was proud, very much so, of what she had accomplished, yet she was young and knew that it would be a long time before she rose to the position where she could pick and choose her own research projects.  She’d been funnelled into studying Killer technology – gravity science was an interest of hers – and she took some pride in knowing that she had enhanced humanity’s understanding, yet she knew how little it was compared to what the Killers did so effortlessly.  It didn’t help that certain old women of both sexes were worried about the consequences of experimenting with gravity technology.  Gravity waves propagated instantly across space and they believed – feared – that they would attract the Killers.  They could hardly fail to respond to someone attempting to crack the secrets of their own technology.

The Administrator looked like a young man, but appearances were deceptive; Paula knew from his biography that he was over three hundred years old, an early recipient of regeneration therapies.  Humanity could now live longer than ever before without going into the MassMind, or becoming a Spacer and losing most of their humanity.  He had light brown skin, hints of stubble on his chin and a faint smile on his mouth.  His eyes focused on her sharply, suggesting that he’d been communing with the MassMind and only just come out of contact to talk to her.  She supposed that she should have been flattered.  The people who believed that her experiments should not go ahead lived in the MassMind.

“Paula,” Arun said.  A chair flowed out of the floor and took shape in front of her.  “Have a seat.  We have some things to discuss.”

Disciplinary matters, surely, Paula thought, as she sat down.  The chair moved slightly under her, conforming to the shape of her body.  They probably know that I urged the Defence Force to consider the experiments even without the consent of the MassMind.

“You’re not actually in trouble,” Arun said.  He’d probably seen her thoughts written over her face.  Contacting the Defence Force directly had been a risk, but there’d been no choice, damn it!  “You have, however, marked yourself out as a person suitable for an immensely dangerous mission.  The Defence Force intends to capture a Killer starship.”

Paula felt her eyes go wide.  She had seen countless entertainments where the Technical Faction, or a single isolated mad scientist, made a breakthrough that allowed Killer starships to be blown out of space with a single hit, but none of them had been real.  She had learned to hate them rapidly; she hated them and the humans who wasted their lives dreaming of easy victories and an end to humanity’s long torment.  They were nothing more than illusions.

“Seriously?”  She asked, finally.  “Why…?”

“You don’t need to know,” Arun said, holding up a hand.  “The important detail is that it might not be possible to actually capture the ship, even if they do manage to board it, and if that’s the case we may lose the entire attack fleet.  They want someone along who has an understanding of gravity technology and…well; you’re the best we have who is still mortal.”

Paula nodded, slightly dazed.  Everyone else was in the MassMind.  “I can’t promise you anything, but incredible danger,” Arun added.  “You might be killed outright, or trapped on a Killer starship as it opens a wormhole to escape, or…we may never be able to transcribe you into the MassMind.  Do you want the position?”

She touched the side of her head.  There was a chip in there that recorded everything that made her herself; her thoughts, her personality, even her deepest darkest secrets.  She rarely thought about it, but if she were to be killed, the chip would be uploaded into the MassMind and she would live again.  The thought of losing that immortality was terrifying, yet if she went, she would be the first Technical to set foot on a Killer starship.  How could she refuse?

“Of course,” she said.  “Where do I go to sign up?”

“There’s a shuttle waiting for you now to transport you to Sparta,” Arun said.  “The Admiral and his men will brief you there.  Listen carefully to them.  I don’t want them refusing other requests because you annoyed them, or acted dangerously.  And Paula?”

Paula looked back at him.  “Yes, sir?”

“Good luck,” Arun said.  “You’re going to need it.”

Chapter Four

Sparta Asteroid was nothing remarkable, from the outside; a simple piece of rock floating in an endless free orbit around a dull red star.  On the inside, it was very different.  It served as one of the main hubs for the Defence Force and held part of the command staff.  The Defence Force was very decentralised – no one had any illusions as to how long Sparta would survive a Killer attack – but if anywhere could be said to be the headquarters, it was Sparta.

Captain Andrew Ramage walked through the asteroid, barely aware of the security probes that checked and rechecked his identity.  It had been years since he had served a team as a dispatcher on Sparta and it was rare for any Defence Force officer to be recalled to the headquarters unless he or she had an absolutely pressing reason to be there.  Rumours had been flying around the various communications networks for weeks now, but nothing concrete had been said, not when the Killers might eavesdrop on the Defence Force’s communications links.  Andrew privately doubted that they could – hacking into a network bound together by quantum entanglements was supposed to be impossible – or that they would, but no one questioned the requirement.  The Killers weren't the only enemy out there; there were human foes as well.

The Community, by its very nature, counted hundreds of thousands of different types of society, scattered across the stars.  Andrew had seen asteroids that worked by a form of pure communism, asteroids that practiced free enterprise and universal franchise, systems based on aristocracy and meritocracy and everything else.  It never ceased to astonish him how many different systems humanity could invent to govern themselves, or how often they could come to blows over political questions.  The Defence Force didn’t have the muscle to reform all of the unpleasant governments – the Community would come apart at the seams if they tried – but the Defence Force did try to keep a lid on any conflicts.  They might attract the attention of the Killers.

And then there were the hidden colonies, which didn’t recognise the authority of the Community and sought to remain in isolation, and the pirates, who preyed on human shipping with gleeful abandon.  The Anderson Drive was a great invention – Andrew would never have denied it himself – but it gave the pirates too many advantages.  They could jump in, carry out their raids, and then jump out again, escaping anyone who came in pursuit.  Andrew sometimes wondered why the pirates didn’t form a Counter-Community, but that would have destroyed their secrecy.  It was about as likely as them preying on the Killers and their massive starships.

His last mission had been against fanatical adherents of the Dreaming Meme.  The Dreamers believed that they – and they alone – should dominate the MassMind, apparently in the belief that it would one day rise to godhood and remake the entire sorry universe.  The remainder of their beliefs were so complicated that no one, short of a entire team of researchers, could make sense of them, but it hardly mattered.  The Dreamers had left hundreds of people dead in their wake and, worst of all, they had mutilated their heads.  The chip that would have given their victims immortality within the MassMind had been destroyed.  It was the ultimate horror.

Bastards, he thought, as he stepped into the Admiral’s private office.  He’d only seen it once before, back when he’d been a dispatcher, and so lowly as to pass unnoticed by the senior officers.  The Defence Force recruited from the entire Community and was surprisingly egalitarian, but order and discipline had to be maintained.

“Captain Andrew Ramage, reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting

“Captain,” Admiral Brent Roeder said.  He was a short fireplug of a man, smoking a cigar so vigorously that he looked as if he was going to chew it in half.  He was over two hundred years old and he’d been heading up the Defence Force for the last fifty of them, serving so well that no one had sought to remove him.  “Stand at ease.”

Andrew relaxed, slightly.  The only reason he could think of for the Admiral to call him to Sparta was for a special mission of some kind.  The mission against the Dreaming Meme had been a success, but that wouldn’t have called for a special reward, apart from the medal his immediate superior had pinned on his chest.  The only other reason was for disciplinary action, but he knew for a fact that he had committed no offence sufficient to be summoned before the Commander-in-Chief.

“Be seated,” Brent said, after studying him for a long moment.  Andrew took the forming chair and waited patiently for the Admiral to tell him what he was going to tell him in his own time.  “You did well against the Dreaming Meme, Captain; well enough to recommend you for a more dangerous mission.  Admiral Al-Rashid was unhappy to lose you, but I insisted on having you and your entire attack wing prepared for a special mission.”

There was a pause.  “You’re going into Killer space,” Brent said, after a moment.  “We want you to capture – or destroy – a Killer starship.”

Andrew blinked, the only sign of concern he would allow himself.  He’d seen the images of High Singapore; they’d been shown throughout the Defence Force.  The entire Defence Force could have used the Anderson Drive and railed to the defence of the asteroid settlement, but it would have been a hopeless battle.  It would have cost hundreds of starships, for nothing.  His attack wing was the most formidable force humans had assembled – he had built and trained it personally – yet they could barely scratch the paint on a Killer starship.  They would be decimated if they had to stand and fight.

Brent read his expression and smiled.  “Don’t worry,” he said.  “We’re not expecting you to take the starship down yourself.  We plan to board the ship.”

“Board the ship?”  Andrew asked.  It seemed impossible.  “Can they actually get onboard?”

“We believe so,” Brent said.  He didn’t say any more, not entirely to Andrew’s surprise.  The chip in his head would have recorded it and if his body had fallen into enemy hands…they would learn everything he knew.  The recording chips posed a security nightmare for the Defence Force, but there was little choice; if they had been banned, the recruitment stream would have dropped to almost nothing.  “There are some possible ways into the Killer starships and the Footsoldiers will attempt to use them.”

He paused.  “Once inside the ship, they will attempt to disable it and allow you to take it in tow to Star’s End,” he continued.  “Your remaining ships” – neither of them had any illusions as to how many starships would survive the coming encounter – “will take it though by linking your Anderson Drives together.  Once there, the researchers will take command and take the starship apart to find out how it works.”

Andrew scowled.  “It seems like one hell of a gamble,” he observed.  “What happens if they vanish somewhere within the Killer starship?  We don’t have any idea what they’re going to be facing.”

“You fall back and break off the engagement,” Brent said.  “If they lose contact…well, there’s no point in taking additional risks.  One of the Footsoldiers will be carrying an antimatter mine and if that baby goes off inside the ship…”

“Goodbye Killers,” Andrew said, slowly.  The plan sounded workable, but there were far too many unknowns.  Defence Force training had focused on how dangerous unknowns could be in combat.  On the other hand, there weren’t very many other choices.  If they couldn’t gain samples of Killer technology to study, the Defence Force would never be able to match the killers.

“Probably,” Brent confirmed.  Andrew nodded.  Killer starships had survived enough firepower to lay waste a hundred worlds.  They had barely even noticed that they were under attack – or perhaps they just hadn’t bothered to launch a serious counterattack.  Who knew what really motivated them?  “We’ll run through an entire series of simulations and contingency plans before the attack wing departs, but if the unexpected happens, use your initiative.  We can’t afford to lose this one, Andrew.”

“Yes, sir,” Andrew said.  The Defence Force might have been rebuilt, but its morale was fragile; they knew that they couldn’t defend humanity against its single worst enemy.  The destruction of a Killer starship, one of thousands, wouldn’t alter the material balance of power that much, but it would give the human race a massive boost.  They needed the victory desperately.  “I won’t let you down.”

“I hope so,” Brent said, standing up.  “Come and meet your team.”

***
The human race hadn’t developed much of a military presence in space – not that it would have done much good anyway – when the Killers arrived.  The legendary human armies and Special Forces – the Special Air Service, the United States Marine Corps, the Spetsnaz and many others – had been wiped out along with their planet, destroyed by an enemy they couldn’t touch, let alone fight.  The isolated law enforcement and paramilitary units in space had been folded into the Community, but there had never been a serious military presence.  The Community had had to build one from scratch.

They called themselves the Footsoldiers, a name that Captain Chris Kelsey had always found more than a little ironic.  The human race might have lost most of its heritage – he’d never been sure if some of the stories about Old Earth’s Special Forces were real or exaggerations – but the Footsoldiers were far from common infantry.  They were too expensive to train and maintain.  They had more in common with the Special Forces – they operated in small groups and were rarely deployed to the surface of a planet – but they wore heavy Armoured Combat Suits and carried enough firepower to take out entire armies, each.  If a platoon of armoured soldiers had been sent back in time to the heyday of Old Earth, or the Second World War, they could have conquered the world.

Provided we had our armour, of course, Chris thought, as he took his seat in the main briefing chamber.  There were over two hundred Footsoldiers gathered together, which was unusual.  Normally, they operated in teams of ten to twenty Footsoldiers, rarely more.  Without our armour, we’d probably be captured or killed outright within seconds.

The thought reminded him of the survival training they’d done on a nameless planet along the edge of the galaxy.  The trainees had been dropped on the planet with nothing, not even their clothes, and told to make their way to the pick-up point alone.  The planet was completely uninhabited, at least by humans.  The local wildlife was nasty and intolerant, the local fauna was either disgusting or poisonous – or both – and it wasn't easy to find anything that could be used as a weapon.  Those who had survived had known that they’d been the best; those who had failed at that point had died.  It hadn’t been a pleasant experience and it had given him a new respect for the old-style soldiers back on Earth.  They’d probably gone through worse.

“Attention,” a voice said, and the Footsoldiers came to attention.  Military formality wasn't part of their nature – they’d been taught to use their brains and work together, not operate by rote – but they showed respect for officers who’d earned it.  Admiral Brent Roeder had definitely earned their respect.  “At ease.”

Chris opened a memory cell in his augments – the Footsoldiers might not quite qualify as Spacers, but they were almost as heavily augmented – and started to record as the Admiral began to speak.  The locker rooms had been full of chatter about the mission, with speculation ranging from clearing out a pirate base to rescuing hostages, although that wouldn’t have required two hundred Footsoldiers to handle.

“This is Killer #453,” Brent said, as the image of a Killer starship materialised above them.  Chris felt, more than heard, the angry helpless rage that flared though the audience at the sight of the massive starship.  “You’re going to board her.”

The shock that ran through the audience was greater this time.  They all knew that boarding a Killer starship meant jumping right into the unknown, yet they’d all volunteered to be Footsoldiers, knowing that one day they might be called upon to jump right into a Killer base.  The Defence Force might sneak around Killer star systems, trying to learn as much as they could, but the Footsoldiers had always known that the only way to learn would be to capture one of their systems.  It wouldn’t be easy – they knew nothing about internal defences, but the outer defences on an Iceberg were known to be formidable – but they were the best.  If it could be done, they could do it.

“Once you board the craft, you’ll have to proceed independently towards the main power source and put it out of commission,” the Admiral continued.  One of the few things that were known about the Killer starships was the location of their main power plants.  No one knew how they worked or what they looked like – which added yet another degree of risk to the mission – but they knew where they were, roughly.  “We cannot advise you on passing through the internal defences, or what kind of environment you might encounter, but we believe that there is no other way to secure control of the ship.  Do not lose contact with the escorting starships; we need whatever data you can retrieve from the interior.”

Even if we don’t survive, Chris finished, ruefully.  He understood why the Admiral hadn’t said that out loud – he wouldn’t want to demoralise them with the knowledge that the Defence Force starships had been ordered to abandon them rather than attempt a rescue – but no one in the audience was fooled.  They all knew full well that it might be a one-way trip.  It was what they had signed up to do.

“I want operational plans in my processor by 1900,” the Admiral finished.  “Good luck,”

Chris opened up his secure processor and linked into the other Footsoldiers.  One advantage of their communications implants was that they could share tactics and information – and hash out assault plans – without needing to talk aloud.  They had also been known to use the channels for whispering during boring lectures, but the senior Footsoldiers tended to stamp on that hard.  What little they knew about the Killer starships was waiting for them and rapidly assessed, before the discussion turned to the more mundane issue of breaking into the starship.  Nothing the Defence Force had used had scratched the surface of the ships, yet openings had been observed on their massive hulls.  It was just possible that they could be used as access points.

“I don’t like this,” one of the Footsoldiers said.  “There’s far too much that can go wrong.”

“If you’re backing out, I know hundreds who will take your place,” someone sent back.  “They’d all volunteer too.”

“I wasn't saying that,” the first Footsoldier said quickly.  “I was just saying that she’s going to be a bitch to crack.”

The planning session was well underway when Chris was interrupted by a message, summoning him to report to the Admiral personally.  He disengaged from the network and left the room, walking quickly through the corridors to the Admirals office, passing some of the clerical staff as he walked.  Normally, he would have stopped to flirt with the girls, but time was pressing.  It reminded him that he would have to ensure that his men spent some time in a brothel, or attending to their other needs, before they set out on the mission.

He’d expected to see the Admiral when he entered, but he was surprised to see another person sitting in the office, waiting for him.  She was young – at least on the surface – blonde and surprisingly attractive.  She wore the simple white uniform of the Technical Faction and carried an insignia he didn’t recognise.

“This is Captain Kelsey,” the Admiral said.  “Captain, this is Paula Handley, a technical from Intelligence.”

Chris nodded, slowly.  Intelligence was the heart of the Technical Faction, a distributed university that stretched across hundreds of asteroid settlements and research bases, including several that had gone rogue or created rogue AIs.  He’d visited once when he’d been looking for his future career, but he hadn’t found patient study to be a suitable career path.  Research work bored him when he could be blowing things up.

“She will be accompanying you on your mission,” the Admiral continued.  “She…”

“Absolutely not,” Chris said, firmly.  By long tradition, the CO of a given mission had absolute authority – and responsibility.  “I cannot take a civilian into a combat zone.”

“The entire galaxy is a combat zone,” the Admiral snapped, coldly.  “Paula has volunteered to accompany you…”

“She’s not trained, or checked out on the suits, or anything else,” Chris said, equally coldly.  “She will be nothing more than a liability…”

“She has a name, you know,” Paula snapped, irritated.  “I do know the risks and I do accept them.”

“We have to consider the possibility of failure as well,” the Admiral said, before Chris could say something cutting about civilians who didn’t know what they were getting into.  “If your teams are wiped out, we still need to learn what we can, even if it’s only what killed you all.  Paula will carry observation equipment and she’s the closest thing we have to an expert on their gravity technology.  Your men are good, but they don’t have the understanding she has, so she’s going.  Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Chris said, annoyed.  He scowled at Paula.  “You will do exactly as I tell you at all times.  I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with disobedience.  If you turn into a liability, we will simply abandon you, understand?”

“Yes,” Paula said.  He was pleased to see that she didn’t back down easily.  “I understand.”

“Good,” Chris said.  “Now, come with me.  We’ll go get you checked out on a suit.”  He smiled, suddenly.  “Feel free to change your mind at any time.”

Chapter Five

At first there was nothing, and then there was pain, a strange distant pain that almost felt as if it were happening to someone else who just happened to share her body.  She wavered on the edge of awareness for a long time – hours or days or months or years; she couldn’t tell and they all seemed believable – before slowly struggling up towards the light.  Her eyes flicked open, yet she could see nothing, but darkness.  It was a moment before a strange green glow – the emergency illumination system, her mind whispered to her – penetrated her eyelids and illuminated the cockpit.  She was lying in the wreckage of her scout ship.

“I’m alive?”  She said, or tried to say.  Her throat hurt in a manner she hadn’t felt since she’d swallowed something far too large on a bet, back at the training centre.  Her mouth was dry and tasted foul; her body seemed paralysed, unable to move.  A wave of panic swept through her mind and she found herself twisted and turning in the chair before remembering the straps that bound her safely, protecting her from sudden acceleration.  “What happened?”

Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi lay back and concentrated on summoning up information from her implants.  Nothing happened, not even a ping to reassure her that they still had minimum levels of power.  That was impossible, her mind insisted while she reeled in shock; no one ever lost their implants.  Only prisoners and criminals were stripped of the internal network devices that were the birthright of every human and she wasn't a criminal, was she?  Her head felt so musty – normally, her implants would have cleaned her mind and helped her return to sanity – that it was impossible to be sure of anything, even her own name.  She didn’t even know what she was doing in the cockpit of a scout ship…

Memory returned and she tried to sit upright, only to be held down by the straps.  The Killers, the Killer star system, the dismantling of an entire star system…and her final death at the hands of a Killer ship…except that she wasn't dead.  Her mind wondered briefly if she were in heaven or hell, but it felt too real to be either; her body hurt badly, too badly.  It was an effort to move her fingers, but finally she was able to undo the straps and release herself from the chair.  She struggled to pull herself out of the chair, straining against an unusually heavy gravity field, and finally managed to stagger onto her feet.  The gravity pulled at her and she almost collapsed onto the deck, before steadying herself on the console.  It was as dark and silent as the grave.

“Report,” she ordered, hearing her own voice for the first time.  “Report.”

The AI didn’t answer her.  Chiyo repeated her command, but there was no response from a system that should have remained online permanently, short of the complete destruction of the scout ship.  Her hands danced across the control console, but there was no response, not even from the emergency systems.  It, combined with the loss of her implants, suggested that the entire craft had been completely drained of power.

But that can’t be right, she thought, dazed.  Her implants drew their power from her own body.  They shouldn’t have gone offline until she died and some, including the MassMind recording implant, should have remained online permanently.  It would have completed its recording of her life and personality, everything that made her what she was, and waited patiently for a chance to upload her into the MassMind.  A flicker of panic ran through her mind; she had known, intellectually, that she risked losing immortality if the Killers caught her and killed her, but now it was terrifyingly real.  She touched the side of her head, half-hoping that she could still feel the implants under her fingers, but there was nothing apart from smooth skin.  She had never been able to feel the implants, yet she had always known they were there.

It took her another ten minutes to confirm that almost all of the scout ship’s systems were online.  The emergency illumination system used a natural bio-luminance rather than anything powered, or it would have been killed as well by the Killers.  She remembered the last moments of her flight and wondered just where she was.  Was she a prisoner, or was her craft now melded into the strange structures the Killers had been building around the star?  The thought was chilling.  No one would have a hope of being able to rescue her and she would die, inevitably, if she ran out of oxygen.  The emergency illumination system also acted as an emergency air freshener, but it wouldn’t last forever.  It wasn't designed to serve as more than an emergency measure.

“Shit,” she said, just to hear her own voice.  The entire craft was hauntingly quiet.  She opened up one of the emergency supply boxes and pulled out a bar of semi-chocolate, eating it quickly to gain what energy she could, while taking stock of her supplies.  They might last, if she were careful, little more than a week, yet the absence of fresh water would kill her far quicker.  The recycling system was completely down, along with the implants that would scrub her system and keep her healthy.  She chuckled, bitterly.  She’d been saved from certain death to be transported to a more lingering and unpleasant death at the hands of her own body and its demands.  Oddly, it felt liberating.  If death was certain, she might as well risk everything.

She turned back to the cockpit and tried to open the hatches covering the viewport.  They refused to open, even when she attempted to use the manual system.  That suggested that the system was either jammed, or there was something outside preventing them from opening.  If the latter…it did suggest that they were encased in something, but what?  Her mind returned to the image of the tiny craft melded into the structure the Killers were building and she shivered.  If that were the case, she was dead, yet the Killer should have dismantled her craft – and her – completely, right down to the bare atoms.  There was no reason why they would have kept her craft intact, unless they wanted a prisoner, but they had never shown any interest in taking humans prisoner before.  What – if anything – had changed?

A brief search of the emergency supplies turned up a plasma pistol – dead – a lighting wand – also dead – and a very primitive design of firearm, shooting material bullets rather than energy rays.  There was no way to check it – she couldn’t even remember why the weapon was included among the emergency supplies without her memory implants – but merely buckling it onto her belt gave her a feeling of confidence.  She examined the survival belt quickly, but there was little that was actually useful to her, although she would have been reasonably well-equipped if she had crashed on a planet’s surface.  Her gaze fell to the final item in the belt and she winced.  It was a black injector marked with a skull and crossbones, a suicide capsule.  If there was no way out and nothing ahead, but a slow lingering death…

She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and walked over to the hatch leading to the outside.  She considered pulling on a space suit before deciding only to wear a breath mask; if the outside was that hostile, she was dead anyway.  Besides, the spacesuits were as dead as the rest of the craft.  The mask wouldn’t last for long either.  She stepped through the airlock and had to struggle with the manual release before it slowly cranked open.  It was more of a struggle than she remembered, but then, she hadn’t had to do it since her first training session.  No one had anticipated something that would kill every system on the craft, but leave her alive.

I shall have to inform them to change their procedures, Chiyo thought, as she peered out.  No wave of outpouring air threw her into empty space; no mass of implacable metal confronted her.  Instead, she was staring into an empty bay, illuminated only by glowing green smoke.  It was an eerie sight and she found herself rooted to the spot, before she realised where she had to be.  She was onboard a Killer starship, the first human ever to set foot on one of their ships – as far as she knew.  If she had been taken onboard, it was quite likely that others had been as well…and vanished.  No one had returned from such an encounter.  She stepped gingerly onto the deck and was relieved to find that it was solid below her feet.  The mists seemed to withdraw slightly as she stepped forward, circling the remains of her scout ship, but pressed in behind her.  She couldn’t see more than a few meters ahead of her.

The scout ship looked as if it had been in the wars; it was scorched and pitted, every sensor node or weapons system burned out.  It was so far beyond any theory that Chiyo abandoned any lingering thoughts she’d had of recharging the scout ship and escaping – as if escape were possible.  Whatever the Killers had done to her ship had killed it stone dead.  She turned away from the craft and stared into the mists.  After a moment, the mists cleared in front of her, revealing a path into the heart of the starship.  It occurred to her that the mists were the Killers, but it seemed impossible.  It was far more likely that they were just part of their environmental system.  She wished, desperately, that she had a working remote sensor.  She would have loved to know what the mists actually were, or even what was in the atmosphere.

The breath mask fell from her face before she could react and she found herself gulping in a mouthful of their air.  It was cold and clammy, but breathable.  The working theory about the Killers suggested that they came from a planet like Earth, which suggested that they would breathe a similar atmosphere to humanity, yet no one had ever located a Killer-inhabited world.  They might destroy inhabited worlds with gay abandon, but they didn’t even seem to settle the worlds themselves, or even the uninhabited Earth-like worlds they encountered.  It was another mystery surrounding them and she wondered if they were providing an atmosphere suitable for her.  If that were the case, it was yet another reminder that she was completely dependent on them for everything, including life-support.  She was nothing more than a prisoner.

She took another breath and walked slowly into the mists.  They closed in around her, seemingly just out of reach, and orbited her threateningly.  She looked behind her, but the scout ship had already vanished into the mists and she was certain – very certain – that if she ran back, she would discover that the scout ship had vanished.  There was nothing for it, but to press onward through the mists and see where the Killers wanted her to go.  There was nothing else she could do.  It felt as if she had been walking for hours – an effect of the higher gravity – and she almost yawned as she stopped for a rest.  The mists boiled around her – she was sure that she could see shapes within the mist, although it might have been just her imagination – but she waited until she had caught her breath before continuing.  There was little point in hurrying.

The mists cleared away suddenly, revealing a small room packed with strange machinery.  Some looked to be comparable to the remote orbital manufacturing machines that humanity used to construct its starships, others looked so different, so alien, that she found herself developing a headache just looking at them.  She looked behind her to see a blank wall.  Wherever she was now, she was trapped – but then, she’d been trapped all along.  There hadn’t even been the illusion of freedom.  The air seemed somehow tenser now, as if Bad Things were waiting to happen, yet she could see no sign of anything moving.  The compartment seemed as dark and silent as her scout ship had been, after she’d been taken prisoner…

Something moved behind her.  Before she could react, she found herself scooped up by a giant machine and deposited inside one of the other machines, floating inside a tank of air.  It took her a second to realise that she was inside a variable gravity field inside another gravity field – humanity couldn’t do that, yet the Killers did it so casually – before feeling a tingle at the back of her head.  Strange lights flickered across her eyelids and she realised that her body was being scanned.  She wondered what they would use as she struggled to control her panic – it could be anything from primitive x-rays and ultrasounds to something unimaginably advanced – but there was no clue.  A buzzing noise echoed through her ears and rapidly became a high-pitched sound that made her scream in pain, before being replaced by sound waves that were too low for her to hear, yet she could feel them running through her body.  Her teeth hurt suddenly, for no reason she could determine, before a stab of pain went through her head.  It occurred to her that they were torturing her, rather than examining her to see what made her tick, yet they weren’t even shouting any questions.  It was like a child pulling the wings off flies.

She blacked out as another dull sound echoed through her body.  When she awoke, she found herself lying naked on an operating table, staring up into blinding white light.  She tried to close her eyes, or to turn away from the glare, but her body refused to move.  It was completely paralysed.  Another wave of panic passed through her mind, but if the Killers noticed, they didn’t care.  She saw something glimmering in the corner of her eyes and, as it moved down towards her forehead, she realised that it was a long silver needle.  They were going to drill right into her head!  She wanted, desperately, to scream, but even that relief was denied her as the needle slid neatly into her forehead…and she blacked out again as pain flared through her entire body.

There was a brief moment of blackness, and then she felt her entire body twitch, shaking violently against the paralysis.  She was itching everywhere, but she couldn’t scratch, or even move of her own volition.  Waves of emotion washed over her- she found herself utterly terrified one moment, completely delighted the next and unbearably aroused the third – and she realised that the Killers were touching off emotions in her head, just to see what happened.  They’d turned her into an experimental animal, yet it made no sense.  They’d never shown any interest in individual humans before…

But how would we know?  She asked herself.  They could have taken thousands of humans from Earth, or one of the other worlds they Killed; we wouldn’t have seen them if they didn’t want us to see them.  They could have kidnapped the entire population of Earth without any problems…

Other probes were descending now from the light, advancing down and burning their way into her body.  Oddly, they hurt less, as if the aliens had decided not to hurt her any longer, or if they’d permanently damaged her body’s ability to feel pain.  She feared the latter, even as she hoped for the former; if they were showing compassion, they might be inclined to talk to her, or even to recognise her as a living person in her own right.  It didn’t seem likely.  Even if they stopped probing her body now, she was still going to be badly injured.  With her nanites offline, she would be reduced to nothing more than baseline human, like the idiots who tried to colonise worlds without high technology convinced that the absence of technology would save them from the Killers.  Could her body recover from such abuse?  It had been so long since she had studied medicine and all her implanted memory stores were offline.  There was no way to learn what she needed to know quickly enough to matter.

Something else to report when I get home, she thought, dazed.  The pain was fading away almost completely now, replaced by a sense of…harmony.  It dawned on her that she was being tranquillised, but suddenly it was hard to care.  The absence of pain alone was worth everything to her.  Her mind kept blanking out and restarting, yet somehow she wasn't concerned at all.  It didn’t matter to her.  She could barely form a coherent thought.

A shock ran through her body and she found herself jerking on the table.  The needles had vanished, replaced by streams of light that seemed to flicker on the edge of perception.  As they passed over her face, she recalled events in the past that seemed of staggering importance; her first day at school, the first boy she’d kissed, the first moment when a boy had gently slid between her legs and countless others.  It made no sense to her that the Killers would be interested in such matters, then it dawned on her that she was having flashbacks, and then she realised that they were triggering her memories, perhaps even reading them directly.  The sense of violation wasn't enough to convince them to leave her alone and she couldn’t blot out the memories.  She tried to remember bad times, but they refused to focus.  The Killers were ripping her mind apart, tearing into her to learn whatever they wanted to learn.  There was a moment of pain, a moment of complete and total violation, a moment of darkness…

And then she was looking down on her body from the outside.

Chapter Six

“I have a live feed from the Observer,” Lieutenant Gary Young said, from his position at the tactical console.  “They’re transmitting directly to the attack wing.”

“Show me,” Captain Andrew Ramage said, linking his mind into the Lightning’s main computer.  “Put it on the main display.”

The image of the Killer starship appeared in front of him, sending a shiver down his spine.  It was over twenty kilometres long, far larger than any starship in his attack wing, and looked as if it was effortlessly maintaining its speed, a leisurely four hundred times the speed of light.  A human starship could have matched that in a warp bubble, but hundreds of years of research hadn’t managed to determine how the Killers achieved such speeds without a warp bubble themselves, or an Anderson Drive.  The massive starship seemed unaware of the Observer, which had been tailing it for the last three years ever since human explorers had stumbled across its course, but Andrew doubted that the Killers were truly unaware of the picket’s presence.  It was far more likely that they just didn’t care.

But they had good reasons not to care, he reminded himself bitterly.  No Killer starship had been lost in combat against the Human Defence Force since the Defence Force had been formed.  He wasn't expecting to take out this Killer starship either; the attack wing was there merely to distract the Killers and preventing them from realising that they were being boarded until it was far too late.  The plan had seemed workable on paper, but now he was looking at the starship, he had an urge to go find a less daunting target instead.  It seemed impossible that the Killers could fail to realise that they were being boarded.  They would swat his fleet like gnats.

He sent a command into the system and watched as the seventy-two destroyers of his attack wing checked in, confirming that they were ready for action.  Humanity could have built their own starships to the same scale of the Killers, but it would merely have given the Killers a target they could hardly miss.  Their weapons would blow the Lightning apart with a single shot, if they scored a direct hit; the only defence the destroyer had was not to be there when the Killers fired.  At seventy meters long, the destroyers were the most manoeuvrable starships in the galaxy.  If anything could evade the Killers and their impossible weapons, it was his attack wing.

“Stand by to jump,” he ordered, as the final results downloaded into his head.  They had drilled and simulated and exercised every contingency they could, but if the Killers had any additional surprises, they wouldn’t know until they actually engaged the enemy.  They should have had weapons that matched and exceeded everything humanity had produced, even in a thousand years of concentrating on building the most formidable weapons possible, but they had only showed humanity a handful of surprises.  Perhaps they didn’t feel they needed more, or perhaps they were keeping their deadliest weapons in reserve for a real threat.  There was no way to know.  “Charge weapons.”

“Weapons charged,” Gary confirmed.

“Jump coordinates said,” Lieutenant David Dunagin confirmed, from the helm.  “Anderson Drive is online and ready to jump.”

Andrew tensed.  “Jump!”

There was a barely-perceptible sense of dislocation and then the display cleared, revealing the Killer starship, now close enough to be seen with the naked eye as a dark shadow blocking out the stars.  The Anderson Drive, humanity’s proudest technical achievement, used a tachyon field to provide nearly infinitive speed.  It couldn’t reach infinitive speed – the starship would quite literally occupy every point in the universe simultaneously – but it could get a starship clear across the galaxy, or outside, in a matter of hours.  Hundreds of human starships had used the drive to flee the Milky Way for somewhere more habitable, with less hostile natives, but the drive had its own limitations.  Moving the entire Community out of the Milky Way was logistically impossible.

“Enemy vessel twenty thousand kilometres away and closing,” Gary reported, as the destroyers proceeded under more normal warp drive.  The Killer starship ignored them as they rocketed towards it, already falling into evasive patterns that should have made them hard to target.  “No sign that they have detected us or are responding to us.”

“Understood,” Andrew said, watching the Killer starship though the Lightning’s sensor blisters.  It didn’t seem to have any distortion caused by an FTL drive, or even any temporal shifts or space warps.  It was just something else that the Killers did that humanity couldn’t do – yet.  He had to remind himself that if they succeeded in capturing the Killer ship, they would have their first real insight into Killer technology.  “Lock weapons on target and inform me when we are coming into firing range.”

“Weapons locked,” Gary confirmed.  “The attack wing is following us and targeting their own weapons.”

Andrew smiled bitterly.  They were about to unleash enough firepower to disintegrate several major worlds, yet the Killers would barely be troubled by the assault.  They might not even respond, but based on prior encounters, they would eventually try to swat the gnats surrounding them.  Oddly, he found that a hopeful sign; if the human assaults were so useless, why would they bother to try to drive them away?

On the other hand, gnats are just irritating, he thought, grimly.  Humanity had managed to bring flies and cockroaches into space with them, along with a handful of farming animals, even though the rest had died off when Earth had been destroyed.  There was no one, outside the MassMind, who had seen a tiger or a lion, an elephant or a rhino.  There was nothing left of them, but radioactive ashes and memories the MassMind had turned into educational realities for the children, teaching them about what the Killers had stolen from humanity.  Maybe they just want to swat us because we annoy them.

The Killer starship came closer and closer.  It seemed impossible that the starship wasn’t aware of their presence – he was chillingly convinced that it was looking at the attack wing and dismissing any possibility of a threat – but the Killers just ignored the fleet.  The range was closing rapidly – they could have fired at extreme range, but he intended to fire from point blank range – and he prepared himself.  The time was almost right…

“Fire energy torpedoes,” he ordered.  The starship jerked slightly as it unleashed its main weapons onto the Killer starship.  “Helm, begin random evasive manoeuvres!”

The energy torpedoes lanced out of the starship’s weapons blisters, crossed the distance between the two ships at just under the speed of light, and detonated against the hull.  Each shot would have been enough to seriously damage the Lightning, but the Killer starship was barely scratched, if at all.  The explosions lit up the darkness of space, yet there was no trace of any serious damage.  The bombardment from the other starships lit up the entire side of the Killer starship in flickering eerie light as the remainder of the attack wing followed them in…and then the Killer starship vanished.

“They’ve cut their drives,” David reported.  That was another mystery about the Killers.  They seemed to be able to come to a dead stop instantly without suffering any damage or losing their drives.  No one quite understood how the Killers did it.  “Course laid in.”

“Take us back to them, attack pattern alpha-four,” Andrew ordered, tightly.  At such speeds, the distance between the attack wing and their target closed rapidly.  “Gary, open fire as soon as they come into range.”

The Killer starship was already dumping heat from the attack, he saw, but the starship seemed undamaged.  It waited patiently for the human attack ships to come back into range, seemingly ignoring their shots as they crashed against its hull and faded out, watching them.  He had the sense that it was angry now at having been forced to cut its speed, or perhaps at the imprudence of the gnats who dared to launch an attack on it’s monstrous bulk.

“Weapons locked,” Gary said.  “Opening fire…energy spike!”

The Killer starship came alive, launching a ball of white light towards the human starships, which broke into a series of evasive patterns to avoid the incoming shot.  It missed, but the Killers kept firing, launching ball after ball towards their targets.  One of them struck a human starship directly and blew it into flaming debris; another came too close to a second human starship and was somehow attracted to its hull, acting almost like a missile as it blew the starship apart.  Andrew tensed as a ball of white light came too close to the Lightning, but apparently not close enough to be attracted to the human ship.

“Keep dodging,” he ordered, tartly.  Oddly, now that the penny had dropped, he felt more reassured.  The worst was already happening.  “Take us in.  Attack pattern beta-nine.”

The Lightning and four of her consorts swooped down on the Killer starship, firing as they came.  Andrew watched as the energy torpedoes struck home on the Killer weapon ports, but they didn’t seem to be enough to prevent the Killers from firing back, even though every time an energy torpedo struck the hull the Killer starship’s power curves seemed to jump.  The human researchers suspected that the Killers actually used their seemingly unlimited power reserves to strengthen their hull against attack, but no one knew for sure.  It was just another mystery that he hoped capturing one of their ships would solve.

“They hit the Defiant,” Gary noted, as one of their wingmen blew apart in a blaze of white light.  The Killers were firing much more rapidly now as the Lighting flew away from their starship, allowing other units to launch their own attacks.  Andrew called up the readings from the active sensors and studied the results grimly.  Apart from massive fluctuations in their power grid, the Killer starship might almost have been untouched.  “Sir, I request permission to engage with antimatter torpedoes.”

“Permission granted,” Andrew said, shortly.  “Fire at will.”

Antimatter torpedoes were the most powerful weapon humanity had invented, yet they had their own limitations.  They couldn’t be used as energy weapons, but had to be fired as material missiles that could be shot down by the enemy point defence – if the Killers had their own point defence.  They had certainly never demonstrated any such capability in the past.  Gary launched a spread of torpedoes right towards the Killer ship, joined by spreads from other starships as they joined the attack before evading the furious return fire, and Andrew watched as the torpedoes struck home.  The entire Killer starship seemed to be wrapped in white light for a long second, and he wondered if they had, by some miracle, destroyed it, and then it burst out of the explosion, still firing.  It seemed totally untouched.

That’s not possible, part of his mind gibbered.  The Killer starship was taking a beating that should have destroyed it long ago, yet if there was any actual damage, there was no sign of it – apart from the fluctuating power grid.  He sent a query into the MassMind, which was watching through the live feed from the attack wing, asking it to compute if the Killer power grid could be overloaded.  If it were possible to overload the field holding the Iceberg together, perhaps the starships could be destroyed after all.

The response came back within three minutes, which was unbearably long for the MassMind, the greatest computing resource that humanity had ever created.  It should have had the answer almost instantaneously.  It had concluded that it should be possible, but the power levels required were astronomical and the Technical Faction would have to invent a whole new kind of weapon to handle the task.  Andrew fired a request that the Technical Faction invent the weapon yesterday and turned his attention back to the battle.  It wasn't going well.  The Killers had picked off twenty-three starships so far and were concentrating on the others.  The more they picked off, the less damage humanity could inflict – such as it was – and in the end, they would have to flee the battle.

“But at least its not like it was at High Singapore,” he muttered.  He’d not been present at the battle, but he had studied it carefully.  The Killers had forced the Defence Force to stand and fight, while his attack wing could keep ducking and dodging, forcing the Killers to work to hit each of his ships.  He could drag the battle out indefinitely, yet the Killers would eventually open a wormhole and escape, or force him to back off, having inflicted little damage.  Another human starship’s icon flickered and vanished.

“Gary,” he said, suddenly.  “Open a general channel to the attack wing.  I want everyone concentrating on targeting the following coordinates; I want them to break off and form up on us.”

“Aye, sir,” Garry said, as Andrew sent the coordinates.  The attack wing fell back, leaving the Killer starship to lick its wounds, and assembled around the Lightning.  “Concentrated fire, sir?”

“Yes,” Andrew said.  He heard the savage tone in his own voice and it shocked him.  “Take us in.”

The Killers didn’t ignore them this time, he saw, as they opened fire savagely as the fleet descended on their target coordinates.  Two more human starships vanished in flares of white light, but the remainder survived and opened fire, pounding the same coordinates time and time again.  Wave after wave of energy torpedoes, antimatter torpedoes and even high-power plasma cannons slammed into the Killer hull, sending the power curves spinning like crazy.  Andrew felt an absurd moment of hope.  Were they actually going to blow right through the Killer hull?  It was almost worth losing the chance to capture a Killer ship just to prove that it was possible to destroy one.  The War Council and the Admiral would be annoyed – no, the Admiral would understand.  Humanity needed the boost in morale dreadfully.  The War Council might even be delighted themselves, although they would be worried about Killer retaliation.  Andrew tended to dismiss that thought himself.  What could the Killers do that was worse than what they’d already done?

A shockwave rushed through space and knocked the starships away from their target, sending them spinning helplessly through space.  It took the helm several minutes to regain control, by which time they were already hundreds of thousands of kilometres from their target.  Andrew watched red lights flare up on the ship status board and cursed.  The Killers had revealed another surprise.

“Report,” he barked.  It was almost like being caught up in a wave.  He’d never been in a real boat, but he’d been in simulated perceptual environments in the MassMind.  They were almost real.  “What did they hit us with?”

“Some kind of gravity wave,” Gary said, concentrating on his console.  “They just knocked us away from their position; seven starships were destroyed by the wave.  We got lucky, sir.  If we’d been closer, the gravity wave would have ripped us apart.”

Andrew brought up the feed from Observer and scowled.  The Killer starship actually had been damaged, he saw now, but it had been able to counter their attack with a new weapon.  It was the first time any human starship had been able to make them sit up and take notice, yet it wasn't enough to destroy them, only enough to force them to reveal a whole new weapon system.  It would have to be countered and that would take time.  It was even possible that the entire mission would have to be called off…

He shook his head.  They'd lost too many people to call off the mission, not now.

“Order the fleet to regroup around us,” he said, examining the live feed.  He’d started with seventy-two destroyers, a full wing.  He was down to forty craft, two so badly damaged as to be beyond savaging.  There was little point in asking them to remain with the fleet and he ordered them to jump home.  “Prepare to fire noisemakers.”

He checked the feed from Observer again and noted the position of the Footsoldier landing craft.  Unlike the destroyers, the landing craft were doing everything in their power to remain unnoticed.  They weren’t firing or broadcasting anything; they were just using the live feed from the other starships and the MassMind to keep on course.  They would be in launching position within seconds…

“Take us in,” he ordered, and designated a course with his mind.  The remaining starships fell in around the Lightning as it raced back towards the Killer starship.  It grew closer again and, this time, he had the satisfaction of seeing that it was definitely damaged.  Whatever self-repair functions the Killer starship possessed, it was already using, but it was damaged!  They had scored a victory!  It might not be a true victory, it might not have been a destroyed ship, but it was something to take home and use to boost morale.  “Lock noisemakers on target.”

“Noisemakers locked,” Gary confirmed.  A moment passed as the Killer starship drew closer.  “Entering effective operating range now.”

“Fire,” Andrew ordered tightly.  “Full spread.”

Noisemakers weren't weapons at all, not in a conventional sense.  They caused nothing, but a volley of heavy distortion that would confuse any sensor for vital seconds – any human sensor.  The Killers would be blind for just long enough to allow the Footsoldiers to land without seeing them, unless they had impossible sensors to go with all the other impossible things they had.  If they saw the Footsoldiers coming, there would be a quick slaughter and that would be the end of the mission.

“The Footsoldiers are launching now,” Gary confirmed.  “They’re on their way.”

“Good,” Andrew ordered.  “General signal to the attack force; pull back to observation position and wait.  It’s out of our hands now.”