“Leave it,” Chris said, shortly. “We have to get down to the power source.”
Paula dismissed the HUD display of the captured Killer starship as she moved further down towards the heart of the disabled ship. It was only confusing her mind and she couldn’t take many more deviations from the other ship. Instead, she watched as the radiation levels kept rising and falling, studying the burned-out components and corridors they were passing through, shaking her head in awe. The Killer starship should have been vaporised. Instead, it had barely survived — no, she corrected herself; it was still dead. It was not beyond salvage, perhaps, but it was definitely dead. If it had survived the supernova…
She remembered the images the Lightning had recorded, the massive Killer cities floating up, trying to reach clear space before their planet exploded below them. The Killers had an awesomely effective launch system, or so Captain Ramage had believed, but Paula suspected now that she knew how it worked. The weird radiation emissions from the dead planet confirmed it, even though the supernova wavefront had blown much of the burning gas into space. The Killers didn’t use drive fields. The Killers used…
The thought vanished from her mind as they stepped through the control centre of the ship. It was the first compartment of the new ship that was identical to the old and she felt a flash of Déjà vu, remembering how she’d killed the Killer and saved the entire team from being wiped out by the Killer automatons. The radiation detectors sounded the warning before they stepped into the compartment; there was enough radiation irradiating the interior to kill them all within minutes. Chris led them away from the compartment, slowly finding a new way around the radiation and down deeper into the starship, leaving Paula to muse on what had killed the alien. It was almost as if the Killer had tried to suck in the radiation and had overdone it… or had it meant to commit suicide? There was no way to know.
She found herself pulling up the diagrams of the captured starship again as they advanced down into the rear, preceded by the drones. This compartment was far more standard, although there were still odd differences. Very few of them seemed to make sense, at least to her, yet she had the feeling that if she had enough time to study them, she would understand what the Killers had been thinking. They stopped, weapons snapping into position, as they encountered one of the Killer automatons, but the device ignored them. It was trying to repair part of the ship, Paula realised, yet it was completely alone. The task would take it centuries.
Chris pointed a plasma cannon at its heart. “Should I?”
“Take it out,” Paula agreed. The automaton could become dangerous very quickly, or so she explained. “It’s only going to become a danger to us.”
Chris pulled the trigger and a searing burst of white light blew the automaton apart. “Got it,” he said. She heard the smile in his voice and rolled her eyes. There was no real skill involved in hitting an unmoving target at point-blank range. “I love having the plasma cannons back.”
“Don’t get used to them,” someone said, over the open channel. His voice was vague and slightly amused, as if he were joking to avoid the tension. “I heard a rumour that we might be sent to board more starships, with the same weird atmosphere and no plasma weapons.”
“Nonsense,” another Footsoldier put in. He sounded very definite. “I heard that they’re going to work on finding a way to ignite their atmosphere and blow the ship up. Hey, Paula, would that actually work?”
“We don’t know,” Paula said, finally. Truthfully, she had no idea if the idea had even been considered, but she suspected that the Killer starships were more robust than that. The detonation of their atmosphere might hurt, but probably not kill, unless some of the more interesting theories were accurate and the mists were actually part of a Killer mind. “We’d have to try it and find out.”
“Knock it off,” Chris snapped. His voice had become tense again. The other Footsoldiers sobered quickly. “We’re coming up to the power core now.”
Paula nodded, checking her internal sensors for possible dangers. The Killers had armoured their power cores with enough armour to contain a nuclear explosion, or perhaps even an antimatter strike. It suggested that they were worried about the dangers of losing power, for the armour alone would add to their mass and cost them additional power to drive the starship to its destination, but Paula — for once — could understand their logic. Losing control of the power core would almost certainly destroy the ship. She was happy to see the disabled ship, but… it should have been destroyed.
“I’m picking up low-level power readings,” one of the Footsoldiers said. Paula quietly confirmed his results, checking to ensure that the power surges posed no actual danger. It didn’t seem likely. There was barely enough power to light a match. The remaining power had been expended. “They seem to be on standby, or powering down. I’m not sure what they are and… I’m getting some very odd readings concerning the interior of the core.”
Chris looked over at her, his face hidden behind the black armour. “Well?”
“Give me a minute,” Paula said, examining the shielding surrounding the core. It was cracked and broken, bearing mute testament to the forces that had been unleashed in the starship’s hellish final moments. The power levels required to crack that shielding were nothing short of astonishing. “Here… no, stay back.”
She stepped forward, carefully, and peered beyond the shielding. Unyielding blackness looked back at her, yet when she activated her suit’s illumination and shone lights into the darkness, it revealed a vast spherical chamber, empty apart from strange distortions in the air. She ran a quick measurement with her suits sensors and concluded that the distortions were fading away along with the power readings. The Killer’s automated servants had saved the wrecked ship from complete destruction by pushing the power core out of reality, leaving it for the human race to salvage. They probably wouldn’t appreciate the humour of it.
“All right,” Chris said, angrily. He’d reached the end of his willingness to accept her silence… and she could understand his point. “No more games. What the hell is that thing?”
Paula suppressed an insane urge to giggle.
“Well,” she said, finally. “Not very long ago, Chris, it was a black hole.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Are we there yet?”
Private Ron Friedman sighed inwardly. It wasn’t part of a Footsoldier’s job to deal with small children and Mary, the young girl sitting on his armoured lap, was smaller than most. He rather suspected that she thought he was actually a robot, rather than a man wearing an Armoured Combat Suit; after all, he hadn’t dared crack the suit open for the entire week he’d spent onboard the Family Farm. The suit’s automated scrubbers were doing a grand job of keeping him reasonably clean and active, but he was grimly aware that when he did open the suit, he was going to stink the starship out.
That said, the Family Farm didn’t smell very good at all, at least according to Virginia Basil. The hatchet-faced woman — Ron would have said she had a face like a bum seen sideways, apart from the fact he had been brought up never to speak ill of a lady — had been complaining about each and every thing since they had fled the Asimov System, just ahead of the advancing Killer blitzkrieg. The small freighter was rated for carrying ten passengers at most, but their desperation had led the evacuation coordinator to pack over fifty children and teenagers — along with two armoured soldiers — into the starship. The over-design of the ship’s life support system could tolerate it, barely, but the ship wasn’t designed to carry so many comfortably. It was impossible to find any real privacy on the vessel; indeed, Ron was privately concerned about accidentally hurting or killing one of the kids with his armoured suit. The Footsoldiers had more than their fair share of training accidents and a person without a comparable suit would crack like an eggshell if he walked into them. It had contributed to the tension of the journey…