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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