Free Storming Heaven by Christopher Nuttall

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