Storming Heaven (15 page)

Paula nodded.  “Not something I want to do again,” she admitted.  Chris wasn’t surprised.  Funerals were never decent occasions…and as for that crazy preacher, well, he wanted a few words with whoever had selected him.  What was wrong with a more standard farewell?  “And you?”

“Inside looking out,” Chris said.  In fact, he'd been trying to get his dress uniform on and failing miserably.  The only redeeming feature of the uniform was that it encouraged teamwork.  “I would have traded places in a heartbeat.”

“Lucky you,” Paula said, dryly.  “Tell me something.  Why are you still here?”

“You didn’t tell me to go,” Chris said, and then understood.  “You mean at Star’s End?  I don’t know.  The Admiral seems to have decided that we are to remain here to provide you researchers with the benefit of our experience in the enemy starship and perhaps provide security if required.  The location of the captured ship should be a secret, but with the MassMind around hardly anything is secret these days.”

Paula nodded.  “True,” she agreed, “but I can’t believe that the MassMind would betray the human race.”

Chris snorted.  “If the Killers should happen to listen in to the MassMind and its thoughts, or even our communications, they could be led right here without any intention of betrayal at all,” he reminded her, dryly.  The security issues had been hammered into his head repeatedly.  It wasn't helped that no one knew just what the Killers could actually do.  In theory, no one could tap into quantum entanglement fields, but in practice…no one knew for sure.  “It’s just a routine precaution.”

“I know,” Paula said.  She looked over at him suddenly.  “Answer me another question.  Why are you Footsoldiers all men?”

“Tradition,” Chris said.  It had struck him as odd before he joined up – every other post in the Defence Force was determined by ability, not gender – but after his induction he understood the reasoning.  “Just after the Killing of Earth, the first Footsoldier units were formed from men only, because men were more expendable than women.  The tradition just continued into the present day.  Some of my men are actually women who changed themselves into men just to join up.”

Paula gave him an odd look.  “Are you a woman?”

“No,” Chris said, with a half-leer.  “I’m all man, with a bit of animal thrown in.  Roar!”

“Twit,” Paula said.  Chris laughed out loud.  “I never even thought about becoming a man.”

“I never even thought about becoming a woman, or a Spacer,” Chris agreed.  The Community allowed perfect sex changes at will and it wasn't unknown for civilians to change sex several times in their lives, but Defence Force personnel tended to be more stable and secure in their identities.  Spacers, by contrast, cut themselves off from gender, literally.  They were effectively tiny spacecraft in their own right.  “I always thought I was perfect.”

Paula laughed.  “I always wanted to become a researcher and everything else could go hang,” she said, dryly.  “And now…I seem to have to spend time shaking hands and telling everyone what fine work we’re doing, instead of exploring the alien ship.”

She paused.  “You’ve been exploring the ship and laying beacons and probes as well,” she added.  “Do you have any…sense that the ship is still alive?”

Chris felt his eyes narrow.  “Now you come to mention it,” he said, “there’s something about the inside of that ship that makes my skin crawl.  It’s not a human ship, but I’ve been through Ghost wreckage and I didn’t have the same reaction to
their
ships.”

“Me too,” Paula said, “but there’s nothing the Ghosts built that we couldn’t duplicate.  They were actually more primitive than we were when the Killers arrived, while the Killer ship is beyond our current understanding.  I just keep having the feeling that the ship is biding its time and preparing to make its next move.”

Chris opened his mouth to say something, but he was interrupted by a FLASH RED alert signal from the Defence Force, coming directly in through his implants.  One look at Paula’s horrified face told him that she was hearing the same message.  A major Community system was under attack.

The Killer retaliation had begun.

The massive sensor array was large enough to envelop an Earth-sized planet comfortably, yet so thin and gossamer that a single tiny asteroid could wreck hideous damage on its system.  It had grown up over the years from a tiny cell of nanites placed on an asteroid by a human starship, supervised by an AI called IQ-HI, configured to scan for signs of alien activity over thousands of light years.  It was a task demanding inhuman patience, watching vast areas of space for tiny spikes of energy that might mark the existence of a hidden civilisations yet IQ-HI didn’t mind.  The AI had no sense of time passing, or any capability for boredom.  It had more than enough to keep even its vast mental facilities occupied.

Its watch for distant flickers of energy was suddenly disrupted by a massive energy spike bare thousands of kilometres from the array.  The wave of energy was so intense that it blinded hundreds of different sensor nodes on the array, forcing IQ-HI to rapidly reprioritise its systems to handle the sudden overload.  The wave of energy kept building rapidly, finally stabilising into a massive gravity singularity.  IQ-HI compared it rapidly to every known natural event in its memory banks and concluded that it wasn't a natural phenomenon.  Microseconds passed as it checked and rechecked, before reluctantly deciding that the only known source of such power were the Killers.  It sent an emergency signal back to System Command and retuned its sensors again.  Priority One orders were to record and analyse anything to do with the Killers, even at the expense of more theoretical studies.  It had no capability to feel annoyed at the interruption, but if it had had such a capability, it would have done so.  It hadn’t been built to respond to every little piece of interference from so-called intelligent beings.

The wave of energy focused into a funeral and then into a wormhole.  IQ-HI recorded the sudden shift in power rapidly, noting the arrival of a massive object from somewhere across the galaxy.  A lucky shift in the wormhole’s position revealed a glimpse of a star on the other side, wherever it was, allowing IQ-HI to compare it to the massive database of stars in the galaxy.  It only took additional microseconds to confirm that the other end of the wormhole was alarmingly close to the galactic core.  In the time it took the AI to determine the terminus, four more Killer starships had arrived, accelerating away from the wormhole at sublight speeds.  They could have moved quicker, but apparently they were in no hurry – or perhaps the Killers only thought as fast as fleshy humans.  The AIs wondered, sometimes, if the Killers were rogue machines, rather than living creatures.  It might have explained quite a bit.

It watched dispassionately as the wormhole folded down and faded away, leaving only gravity shockwaves as proof that it had ever existed.  Absently, subroutines began to analyse the sheer level of power the Killers had displayed, calculating just how much power they would require to create such a wormhole.  No known power source would suffice, unless they actually risked generating the wormhole and keying it to drain power from the quantum foam.  The human race had attempted such experiments in the past, but they had always ended badly, destroying the research stations.  If the Killers had mastered such technology, it would merely make them a more formidable threat.  Their five starships possessed enough firepower to lay waste to the entire system.

And they were accelerating towards the array.  An AI, unlike a human, had no room for wishful thinking.  At the very least, IQ-HI concluded, they were going to smash straight through the array and destroy it.  It would almost certainly terminate IQ-HI’s existence.  The AI worked rapidly and uploaded its findings into the MassMind, knowing that more powerful minds would use its readings to generate their own theories, perhaps gain new insight into how the Killer technology worked, before concluding with a compressed copy of itself.  Unlike a human, an active AI mind-pattern could be downloaded into another AI core, or even allowed to run freely in the MassMind.  It would live again.

It noted the power spike building on one of the Killer craft and added its sensor readings to the upload.  The power seemed to build achingly slow – a human would have barely been aware of any delay at all – but eventually the pulse of white light leapt towards the array.  There was a brief moment of pain as the array disintegrated – it regarded sensor damage as pain – and then darkness.

***

Every alarm in the Asimov System Command Centre was going off at once.

“Shut that racket down,” Captain Thomas Mandell barked.  The five massive red icons that were proceeding in towards the heart of the system needed no explanation.  The day he’d dreaded ever since assuming the position was finally here, yet nothing, not even the most advanced simulations, had prepared him for this moment.  “What is their ETA?”

“They will enter firing range of the main cluster in twenty-one minutes,” his tactical officer reported.  Every sensor in the system was focused on the incoming Killer starships.  It crossed his mind that any number of pirates and smugglers were probably making their escape while the Defence Force was distracted, but that was hardly a serious concern.  They might be the only survivors of the system.  “They will be in firing range of mining craft and a handful of tourist ships within ten minutes, unless they change course.”

“Order the tourist ships to jump out now,” Mandell ordered, grimly.  A day ago, everything had looked so peaceful.  Now he was going to watch as the Killers tore his home system apart.  “Contact the mining craft and tell them to pull as many men and women off the platforms before they have to run.”

“Several mining craft have jumped out already,” the tactical officer said.  Mandell scowled, but he couldn’t blame them.  They hadn’t signed up to face the Killers and their little craft wouldn’t even scratch their paint.  “The others are complying.”

“The Docking Master is reporting that almost every starship in the system is either requesting permission to depart or attempting to depart without permission,” the local system officer added.  “There’s panic sweeping the asteroids.”

Mandell took a breath.  The Asimov System was nothing, but asteroids; there were thousands upon thousands of asteroids circling the dull red star.  No one was quite sure why they hadn’t collapsed into planets thousands of years ago, but it suited the human settlers just fine.  There were hundreds of asteroid colonies scattered throughout the system and over five
billion
human lives…all of which were at risk.  They all needed to be evacuated before the Killers arrived, yet he could see no way to move them all.  It would have been impossible even with the entire Defence Force fleet of starships, let alone the few hundred he had in the system.

“All right,” he said.  “Open a channel into the asteroid public announcement system.”

“Channel open, sir,” the communications officer said.  “You may speak when ready.”

Mandell smiled bitterly.  “This is Captain Mandell,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as possible.  “There is a Killer fleet approaching this system.  I am hereby declaring martial law over the entire system and commencing evacuation procedures.  I want everyone to report in to their local processors if they wish to be evacuated and further instructions will be issued.  Any panic or violence will be quelled with as much force as is necessary.”

He drew one finger over his throat and the channel cut.  “The Local Government isn’t going to be happy about that,” the tactical officer muttered.  “They’re going to want to handle the evacuation themselves.”

“They can have me court-martialled if we survive this day,” Mandell snapped, angrily.  One Killer starship would be beyond their ability to handle.  Five Killer starships were massive overkill.  The handful of actual warships in the system would barely be able to slow them down; hell, the Killers could just ignore them and keep burning into the system.  “Gunn?”

“Here, sir,” the AI said.  Gunn was one of the oldest AIs in existence and claimed to have developed a sense of humour.  Everyone else, including other AIs, doubted it.  AI attempts to understand human jokes had rarely succeeded.  “Where else would I be?”

“Link into the local processors, emergency priority, and start assigning berths for evacuation,” Mandell ordered.  “Follow the emergency protocols and push life support on all starships to the limit.  I want you to get as many people out as possible.  Dump the local MassMind nodes onto the network and snap everyone in the VR worlds out of it; they have to know what’s going on.”

“That would be inadvisable,” Gunn pointed out.  “Community Medical Regulations clearly state…”

“Override,” Mandell snapped.  The AI was correct – breaking a person out of a VR world would cause massive disorientation, at best – but the alternative was to leave them to die.  A treacherous part of his mind wondered if that might not be the best solution – they’d die in their personal heavens, with no awareness of the fate that was about to befall them – but his oath forbade it.  “Wake them up and brief them, now.”

He turned away from the AI console, trusting it to handle the task, and looked down at the coordination officer.  “Inform the starship commanders that I’m commandeering their vessels for the evacuation effort, centred on the main cluster, and they will dump their holds and take on as many evacuees as possible,” he ordered.  “Inform them, in addition, that any attempt to jump the gun and flee without taking on a full load will result in them being engaged by the defences and destroyed.”

The coordination officer worked his console.  “They’re pissed, sir,” he reported, with a trace of gallows humour.  Evacuation or no evacuation, the Defence Force personnel would remain at their posts.  “They’re already filing protests about your orders to everyone who will listen.”

“Never mind,” Mandell said.  He could understand their position – the starships represented, even for the Community, a considerable personal investment and real wealth – but he wanted to save as many people as possible.  “The Admiral may permit them to bring charges later, but at least they will be alive to bring the charges.”

He turned back to the main display.  The Killer starships were closing in on the first mining station, an unnamed asteroid housing a single man and a team of robots.  It didn’t matter to anyone, but the miner, yet the Killers targeted it anyway.  Streaks of white light tore from their starships and blew the asteroid into a boiling storm of energy.  The remaining mining craft pulled back and jumped out as one, escaping the juggernauts bearing down on them.

“I have completed my evacuation plan,” Gunn said, diffidently.  “Sir, assuming that the current situation does not change, we will be unable to evacuate more than five million people from the main cluster before the Killers open fire.”

“That well?”  Mandell asked.  There were so many bottlenecks in getting people out onto the starships, let alone into space and away from the targeted asteroids, that he’d be surprised if they got half that many out.  “Don’t hesitate.  Start issuing the orders now and move them out as fast as possible.”

“Aye, sir,” the AI said.

“I’ve got Captain Jeff Zeitlin for you,” the communications officer said.  “He wants a word with you.”

“Patch him through,” Mandell ordered.  “Jeff.  What can I do for you?”

“My squadron intends to attempt to delay them,” Zeitlin said, firmly.  “We’ll buy you time to evacuate the cluster.”

Mandell shook his head.  “I can’t allow that, Jeff,” he said, grimly.  “You and your squadron will be destroyed, for nothing.”

“We have to try,” Zeitlin snapped back.  “How can we stand by and watch as the Asimov System is torn apart?  If we can delay them and win you even a handful more minutes, it would mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people.  We have to try!”

“I know,” Mandell said.  He ran one hand through his hair, tiredly.  He felt as if he had aged a thousand years overnight.  “Good luck.”

***

“We have to get out of here,” Captain Basil snapped.  “You don’t understand!”

“And I’m telling you that we are waiting for the evacuees to board,” Private Ron Friedman replied, tiredly.  The pair of Footsoldiers wore their full combat armour and carried their weapons in their hands, but both of them knew how tiny they were compared to the advancing Killer starships.  The Killers wouldn’t be intimidated by the black armour…and their advance meant that it was losing its power to intimidate Basil and his family.  “Please, sir; be patient.”

Basil glared at him.  He was an overweight man in a galaxy where such conditions could be corrected easily; Friedman wasn't sure if his refusal to do so was a result of religious conviction or simple laziness.  It would be easy to sympathise with the man – the
Family Farm
was the only thing he had, apart from his family – but the Footsoldiers had their orders.  No starship was leaving the asteroid cluster without a full complement of evacuees.