Storming Heaven (26 page)

She hesitated.  “This allowed us to deduce what happened to the starship at Cinder,” she added.  “The force of the supernova created an implosion pattern in parts of the hull.  The result was that the
remaining
indestructible parts of the hull channelled the radiation right into the heart of the starship…and, well, the Killer in command of the ship was killed almost instantly.  I believe that the safety systems on the ship pushed the black hole back into the quantum foam before it could expand and destroy the ship.  The Killers may intend to return to the Cinder and salvage what they can.”

“A concern,” Brent agreed.  “Can we use what we’ve learned to harm them?”

“Yes,” Arun said, flatly.  “We have already started the development of new weapons.”

He nodded to Paula, who stepped forward and continued.  “We have studied their hull material carefully and concluded that it should be possible to duplicate the effects of the supernova on a very small scale,” she said.  “The implosion bolts – as we have termed them – will cause low-level damage to the hull, preventing it from retaining its integrity.  The result
should
be a series of hull breeches – and, given that we can fire hundreds of implosion bolts at them, the Killers should find it disastrous.  The interior of the craft is tough, no doubt about it, but it doesn’t include the hull’s ability to stand off incoming fire.  A hail of implosion bolts should allow us to confront them on more even terms.

“However, we have been unable to either duplicate or defend against their main weapon,” she said, grimly.  “Once the Killers realise that they can be hurt, they will certainly attempt to wipe out the attacking starships as quickly as possible – and that is very quickly indeed.  It will be a battering match; you’ll have to degrade them while they try to drive you away.  It won’t be much of an equaliser.”

“It’ll be enough,” Brent said, grimly.  “All we need is a suitable target.”

“The old problem again,” Tabitha agreed.  “Do we pick on an isolated Killer starship, hoping to overwhelm it by sheer weight of numbers, or do we aim an attack directly into one of the star systems they’re redeveloping?  If the latter, we risk disaster, yet with the former, we risk the Killers learning about our weapons…”

“It’s no risk,” Paula put in.  “The Killers have their own FTL communications network.”

Tabitha scowled at her.  She didn’t like being interrupted.  “Are you sure of that?”

“Yes,” Paula said.  She gave Arun a sharp look, and then turned back to the War Council.  “It has long been theorised, even before Old Earth died, that it was possible to create wormholes and instantaneous communication links by creating two black holes that were perfectly synchronised.  The Killers can create black holes at will.  There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to use them to communicate.”

“There’s also indirect evidence,” Brent said.  “The Killers reacted to the capture of one of their starships far faster than they could have if they lacked FTL capability.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Paula said, “and I believe that we can use that to our advantage.”

Tabitha smiled inwardly.  Paula was presuming to dictate strategy to them?

“Go on,” Brent said, dryly.  If he were offended, he didn’t show it.  It was a surprising response, but perhaps it made sense.  Standard military tactics were useless against the Killers, who brushed entire fleets of starships away as if they were flies.  “How can we use their black hole network against them?”

“Simple,” Paula said.  She shot Arun a second glance.  “We create a black hole of our own and use it to hack into their communications network.”

Arun glared at her icily.  “The Committee decided that any large-scale experiments with gravity generation would attract the Killers,” he said.  Tabitha privately suspected that he was already writing out a disciplinary report in his head.  Paula had crossed a line.  “The ban on such experimentation was put in place for good reason.”

Tabitha kept her face blank, despite the tidal wave of laughter that threatened to burst out of her lips.  Paula was hoping to manipulate the War Council into dropping the ban, a…cheeky attempt, and yet she might just be right.  God knew the human race needed to do whatever was required to beat the Killers and end the fighting. If it was possible to link into the Killer network…

“And if it does attract the Killers?”  Brent asked.  “What then?”

Paula smiled.  “You refit the Defence Force with the new weapons and have it sitting on top of the black hole,” she said.  “If the Killers come to the system, they’ll run right into a trap.”

“And maybe the mice will manage to bell the cat,” Brent said, with a half smile.  “I like it.”

He looked around at the other faces.  “Shall we vote?”

Something had happened

She could feel it in the whispering pervading the Killer network, strange images that hovered on the brink of becoming comprehendible, yet somehow beyond her understanding.  The Killer mentality was a vast chamber of ordered thoughts and cold dispassion, but she could feel the shock pervading the entire area.  It had alarmed her when she had first felt it – it might have been a sign that her presence had been discovered – but it wasn't focused.  It might not have been aimed at her – no, it hadn’t been aimed at her – yet something had happened.  She leaned forward, feeling her body-image tilting within the Killer mentality, and tried to listen to the whispers.  They rose up around her and suddenly they were deep inside her.

The violation
hurt
, a rending tearing wave of endless pain that lasted until she remembered that she didn’t have to feel pain and stopped it.  The images were more than just a direct download from a memory cell, or even a live feed from the MassMind; for a long second – it had felt like hours – she had been part of the alien mind.  Her human body was laughably small, her self-image nothing compared to the strange organic-technical biology of the Killers; the only thing that staved off a headache was her conviction that she didn’t have to feel one.  Even as she pulled herself out of the stream of data, it still echoed through her head.  Her body felt puny compared to the alien mind.

And it was hard to focus, to remember what Chiyo had actually
looked
like, if she had been anything beyond a cluster of human thought routines operating in an alien mental matrix.  She found it hard to remember what she had been and ended up sitting in a corner, sucking her thumb as she tried to pull herself back together.  She looked down at her self-image and almost screamed again.  Instead of her human body, there was a cluster of cells, without gender or apparent organs.  She closed her eyes and concentrated, opening them again to see a childlike body, as she had been before she grew up and became an emancipated citizen.  Her mother had never allowed her to shape her young body according to the dictates of fashion – the young Chiyo had wanted to be stick-thin, then overwhelmingly fat, and then a change of gender or race – and Chiyo had resented her dreadfully, then.  Her appearance now was almost comforting, yet she couldn’t afford to fall back into a childish mind.  It would mean her certain death when the alien realised her presence.

She concentrated desperately and finally recalled her body, remembering an outfit she’d worn a year before boarding the scoutship for her final mission.  It had been a good party at one of the Defence Force bases, when calibrations had been few and far between, and the newly-promoted Chiyo had allowed herself to go wild.  She was still baseline human, but she had worn a skimpy top and a set of feathered wings, allowing her to drift through the air like an angel.  The mental image helped her to concentrate; it was easy to believe that she was drifting through the alien computer network, studying it without drawing its attention.  She remembered one of the young male soldiers she’d met at the party and smiled to herself, wondering where he was…and what had happened to the Killers.  Something had scared hell out of them.

It wasn't easy to access the memories again, but she had to try.  They rushed at her again, frighteningly powerful, but this time she was ready.  The Killers didn’t see the universe as humans saw it; there were gravity sources, radiation and stellar events, and that was it.  It dawned on her slowly that the Killers might not even be able to
see
human starships, or understand that humans existed apart from their starships…it seemed unlikely, but humans hadn’t realised that the Killers occupied gas giants.  Two mighty civilisations had existed for over a thousand years without either really being aware of where the other was…

The images rose up in her mind, showing her scenes of great beauty wiped out in a split second.  The very atoms in the air were breaking apart, releasing their energy in an onrushing explosion that finally threatened to consume her.  She found herself sweating, despite the lack of a physical body, as the fires raced towards her position and overwhelmed her.  The sensations she was feeling bore no resemblance to anything she had felt before; it seemed impossible, but it was as if she was feeling what the observing Killer had felt.  Years ago, on a dare, she had taken a direct memory download from a boy in her class and experienced weird sensations from a body very different to hers.  It had taken her weeks to stop checking for a penis that had never existed on her body.  The Killer was completely alien…

But the images refused to fade.  They changed, suddenly, and she realised that the first Killer was dead.  This time, she was floating high over a gas giant that was rapidly becoming a star, fire reaching out over its atmosphere.  She was dimly aware of massive constructions trying to make their way to orbit, to open wormholes and escape from the onrushing storm, but it was too late.  She cried out as a tendril of fire reached up towards her and the world went white…

She was watching from further away as the city – if it were a city – vaporised under the onrushing wave.  It looked almost as if it had been deliberate, as if the city had been targeted purposely…and somehow, on the edge of her mind, she knew how it had been done.  Focused gravity waves could have caused such an eruption, but there was no source, only the tiny knot of radiations that had escaped into the inner solar system.  She followed and found herself too close to the star, blinded by the waves of radiation…and then the star started to destabilise and explode.  It was too late to escape…

The conclusion was impossible to avoid. 
My God
, she thought, as she felt her body returning to normal. 
We killed an entire star
!

Everything suddenly seemed to make a great deal more sense.  The Killers had been absolute masters of space for so long that they’d never been genuinely threatened…and now they’d been hurt.  It might not have mattered in the long run – the Killers had thousands of starships and probably millions of planets – but in the short term, they’d never been stung like that before since their first contact with non-Killer life.  They had only vaguely been aware of other intelligent life, seeing them all as rivals to be exterminated as quickly as possible, never really accepting that there was a serious threat.  There was a serious threat now.

She recalled her duplicates and drank in their memories.  Between them, they had explored almost the entire Killer network and worked out what corresponded to what.  It was impossible to read the Killer thoughts directly – that might have alerted the Killer to their presence – but they could listen and try to comprehend.  They would never learn specifics, but they might get a general idea of what was happening…

It was easier, somehow, after having seen space through a Killer’s eyes.  The Killers were seriously worried.  The Grand Plan – the capital letters somehow came through the translation – was threatened.  The Enemy had destroyed a star and killed many of their…collectives?  Individuals?  Group-Thought?  She couldn’t comprehend the terms they used, or how they worked; the Killers were alien, after all.

And then she saw what they had in mind.

The realisation sent her reeling back into the outer depths of the Killer matrix.  It was impossible to believe that they would succeed in their mad aim, yet
they
believed that they could succeed…and they had the technology to try.  If they succeeded, the Community would be exterminated without even having a hope in hell of fighting back.  No
wonder
the Killers were holding back.  They would destroy all their enemies in one fell swoop!

She concentrated and started to produce more duplicates.  The risk of being discovered no longer mattered.  The risk of creating duplicates she could no longer reabsorb no longer mattered.  She had to find a way to warn the Community before it was too late, even if it cost her life and sanity.  The human race had to survive.

It was all that made her life worthwhile.

***

“Give me two good reasons,” Administrator Arun Prabhu said, “why you should not be immediately sacked from your current position and assigned to some station at the end of nowhere?”

Paula held herself perfectly still.  The Administrator hadn’t offered her a chair, or any comfort at all, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that at any moment, he might throw her out physically.  It was almost like facing her father after he had discovered some childish misdemeanour, or her principal after a practical joke had gotten out of hand, with the promise of certain punishment in the future.  Arun looked dark with anger, and disappointment.  She really had blotted her copybook with him.

“You decided, on your own initiative, to attempt to convince the most powerful men and women in the galaxy to rewrite a policy which has been in existence for over five hundred years,” Arun continued, without waiting for her to answer.  “You decided to call into question the…assembled understanding of the Technical Faction in front of our few peers and the MassMind itself.  You may well have caused a major dispute within the inner ranks of the Community government.  I spent the last four hours fielding questions – very hostile questions – from all kinds of government officials.  Do you have anything, anything at all, that you wish to offer in your defence?”

Paula said nothing.  She had been summoned back to Intelligence the moment the meeting ended – and given strict orders not to communicate with anyone else until after she had spoken to the Administrator.  She had disobeyed that instruction just long enough to send a personal message to Chris, but she had said nothing to anyone else, although that wouldn’t be enough to assuage the Administrator’s anger at her.  He was right, in a sense, she
had
broken all procedure, but there had been no choice.  Humanity’s only hope for survival lay in understanding gravity technology…and they had reached the limits of what could be learned by computer simulations.  They needed a real experiment.

“The Circle is already pushing for your expulsion,” Arun said, coldly.  Paula blinked.  The Technical Faction’s governing body rarely involved itself in the lives of ordinary researchers.  “It may surprise you to know that many of them want to use you as a live test subject for retroactive genetic sequencing experiments, or other procedures that require a live human for the final touch.  Others want to expel you in disgrace to places so primitive that they think that a time machine is just a watch.  What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Only what I have said before,” Paula said, finally.  It had taken the efforts of all her implants to keep her voice calm and firmly under control.  “We must learn how the Killers manipulate gravity in order to master their technology and destroy them before they destroy us.”

“And all of the simulations agree that creating a black hole would be detectable right across the galaxy,” Arun said.  Paula didn’t bother to dispute it.  Gravity waves moved at FTL speeds and a new black hole would send them echoing for thousands of light years.  “Do you deny that your…experiment would certainly be detectable by the Killers?”

“Of course not,” Paula said, silently grateful that her hands were clasped behind her back.  He couldn’t see how tightly she was gripping them together.  “The ban on such experimentation was intended to prevent them from tracking us down.”

“And you decided to ignore the ban,” Arun said.  His eyes refused to leave her face.  “Why?”

“You never actually forbade me not to discuss it with the War Cabinet,” Paula pointed out.  They'd only discussed the new weapons and other insights into Killer technology.  “In fact…”

“Don’t give me that legalistic crap,” Arun thundered, genuinely angry.  Paula felt a brief shiver of regret and forced it down with an effort.  The die had been thoroughly cast.  “You should know better than to discuss such matters without clearing them with your supervisor first.”

Paula took a firmer grip on her temper. “The Killers have rediscovered us,” she said, calmly.  “If they were unaware of our existence, which is unlikely in the extreme as they attacked New Singapore last year, they are now aware of us beyond doubt.  There is little to be lost by attempting to create a black hole.  We may even be able to link into their communications network and talk directly to them.”
 

Arun scowled at her.  “And if it does lure an entire Killer fleet to the new black hole?”  He asked.  “We can’t stop one ship, let alone an entire fleet…”

“Even if our fleet is armed with the new weapons?”  Paula asked.  “Are you sure that we would lose such a battle?”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Arun said, coldly.  “Allow me to remind you of our purpose, Paula.  The Technical Faction was founded to explore scientific questions that were officially decreed forbidden territory by Earth’s various governments.  We created the foodstuffs that would have fed Earth’s teeming multitudes using genetic engineering, despite the belief on Old Earth that genetic engineering was somehow evil.  We created cures for diseases that had plagued humanity since the dawn of time.  We developed fusion power and improved fission reactors.  We carried out the first tentative experiments into antimatter production and use.  We ignored the whims and foibles of an Earth packed with morons who believed that science was dirty and filthy, who ignored the fact that science was the only thing keeping them from barbarism, and created wonders.  We ignored their religious prattle and their claims to moral superiority, we rejected their belief that they were somehow qualified to tell us what to do.  And it was rewarded!  We survived when Earth itself died.