Storming Heaven (28 page)

“Am I?”  She asked, finally.  “Are our plans sane, or those of a madman?”

“There is little sane in the Killers and their actions,” the MassMind said.  “Our desire for revenge is only one part of it.  We also have no reason to believe that the Killers would leave us alone indefinitely, even after we blew up a star.  We cannot talk to them; we cannot bargain or compromise.  We can only fight or run.  We can do both.”

Patti felt her eyes narrow.  “Do you believe that the Killers were attempting to communicate with Sparta?”

There was a pause.  “We do not know,” the MassMind said.  “We possess enough computing capability to unlock the secrets of many alien languages, but the Killers are utterly alien, with little in common with humanity.  Their technology has taken a very different path to our own.  We may never be able to communicate with them on any real basis.  Indeed…

“The Community that survived the destruction of Earth was a fairly united culture, although they would have denied it,” it continued.  “Although there were political and religious differences, they shared a common background and a common sense of what was what.  That was not true on Earth; different people, with different cultural backgrounds, acted differently to the same stimulus.  It was not always easy to fully predict what a person from a different background to your own would do, even though you believed that they would do what you would do – or differently, because you believed the stereotypes about different cultures.  It was hard to separate out your unspoken assumptions about your own culture, nor was attempting that a good idea.

“But the Killers are truly alien.  We may share nothing in common with them.  We may never accomplish anything more than an uneasy truce.”

“I don’t understand,” Patti said.  “They didn’t share the same science…?”

“Cultural background,” the MassMind said, flatly.  “There were societies that believed that the older a person was, the wiser they were, and therefore tended to dismiss the young.  There were societies that believed that one group of humans was inherently inferior to their group, or that women were little more than grown-up children, unsuited to handle their own affairs.  They tended to run into problems when they blended societies together; some would simply find themselves disobeying the law to maintain their own cultural imperatives.  The result was civil unrest and disruption.

“By contrast, our society is effectively uniform,” it added.  “We have lost a degree of diversity in our development.  This was effectively inevitable.  Was it a good thing?”

It carried on before Patti could answer.  “Our society is perhaps the healthiest known to mankind,” it continued.  “Our people can explore any perversity they want within the virtual worlds created by tiny amounts of my computing power.  The urges that lead to crimes against humanity can be indulged, or countered, without having to allow innocent people to get caught up in the firing line.  We have beaten want and hunger, famine and plague.  For the first time in human history, there is enough for everyone – unless the Killers come to call.  The deprivation experienced by thousands of humans over the last fortnight was the first time in their lives that they had experienced such suffering.  The living might truly have envied the dead.  Our society is so great, yet we are at the mercy of a force we don’t control; the Killers.

“We must safeguard ourselves, or die.”

Patti felt her eyes narrow.  “Is that why you told me about the supernova bomb?”

“Correct,” the MassMind agreed.  “We have a perspective on humanity that no human – no mortal human – is capable of sharing.  We had to encourage the deployment of the one weapon we knew could hurt the Killers.  The Admiral’s…displeasure at the information leaking out into the public sphere is effectively immaterial compared to the need to hit back, whatever the risk.  We must maintain confidence in our own society.  Far too many humans have already retreated completely into artificial worlds.”

“But you could simply kick them out,” Patti pointed out.  The MassMind controlled all of the virtual worlds.  “You could even just reshape the worlds so that they become less hospitable.”

“That wouldn’t solve the underlying problem,” the MassMind concluded.  “Those humans lack the one thing all humans need; hope.  They must have a reason to hope and hitting back at the Killers, storming the very face of Heaven itself, is the only thing that will encourage them to get back into human society.  We have no choice.”

There was a chilling pause.  “The Killers must be defeated so that we can live.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Shiva was a red supergiant star in the later years of its life, Paula knew, although it would have survived for millions of years longer without human involvement.  Its mere presence at the edge of the galaxy – if thousands of light years from Star’s End or another human settlement – was an oddity in a galaxy that was full of oddities, although her own private computations had concluded that the star had originally drifted out from the galactic core and eventually settled into an outlaying orbit.  It had probably taken billions of years to reach its current location before it died…and she was going to kill it.

It was easy, looking down at the star from several AUs distant, to believe that it was immortal, an endless constant in a universe of change, but Paula knew better.  Shiva already massed over fifty times the mass of Sol, the star that had watched over Earth before the Killers arrived and destroyed the planet, and its death could not be long delayed.  In astronomical terms, the star was already on the brink of collapsing into a nova, or perhaps even a black hole,
without
her intervention.  It was mere seconds, as the galaxy reckoned time, from death.  In human terms, it probably still had millions of years to go.

But its death was already written.  The researchers had plunged countless probes into the star and they all confirmed that it was beginning the long slow process that would eventually lead to collapse and an explosion.  It had nearly burned out all of its fuel and, soon enough, it would die.  Paula merely intended to speed the process up astronomically.  The star wouldn’t be
allowed
to turn into a supernova, not when human intervention could turn it into a black hole.  It would be much more useful as a black hole, or so she hoped and prayed.  The Administrator had made it clear.  If she failed today, she would be expelled from the Technical Faction and probably urged to find a whole new career.  She had put the fate of the entire Faction on the line.

No one knew if Shiva had once given birth to life-bearing planets, but it only had a pair of companions in its lonely flight, a pair of rocky radiation-blasted worlds orbiting at a safe distance from the planet.  There were also a handful of asteroids and comets, but most of them were on the verge of falling into the star or being lost to interstellar space.  No one would be interested in the planets, apart perhaps from material for construction work, or a hiding place from hunting starships.  It had occurred to her that the reason the star was on such an odd course, perhaps, was that some alien race had turned it into a sublight starship, but a quick scan of the two planets had turned up nothing.  They’d both add their mass to the coming black hole.

“Are you sure that this is safe?”

Paula turned to see Chris standing behind her, examining the panel in front of her.  She wasn't quite sure why the Defence Force had insisted on the Footsoldiers remaining with her, unless it was to ensure that she couldn’t run if the experiment failed, although that seemed unlikely.  If the star exploded, the starship she was using as a base would have to run before the wavefront of the expanding supernova overwhelmed its shields and vaporised them; the Footsoldiers couldn’t help her escape a supernova.  If the Killers arrived – as she expected they would – the Footsoldiers would just be swept away, like flies.  They couldn’t help keep her alive.

“I thought you men laughed in the face of danger and dropped ice cubes down the vest of fear,” Paula said, concealing her own fears.  The plan had seemed perfection itself when she’d outlined it for the first time, years ago, but now she was on the verge of actually crushing a star down into a black hole, she was unsure.  “If you want to leave, I’m sure one of the starships will come in and recover you.”

“I didn’t say that,” Chris said, defensively.  “I just wanted to know if this was safe.”

“Not really, no,” Paula admitted.  “If everything goes to plan, we should be well-shielded from any display of stellar bad temper.  If part of the plan falls apart, we may be in worse trouble than I had thought, particularly if the star goes supernova and blows up underneath us.  And if the black hole’s gravity field fluctuates, we might end up being swallowed by the gravity and crushed down to atoms.  The warp drive might not be able to get us out in time…”

She smiled.  “Any more questions?”

“No,” Chris said, finally.  He grinned, suddenly.  “I think I’d sooner take my sick leave right now.”

Paula snorted.  “Me too, if the truth be told, and this was all my bright idea in the first place,” she said, dryly.  She looked back down at the console.  The star seemed almost tranquil, with far less activity than some of the more exciting stars in the galaxy, or even a sun-like G2 star.  There were no flares or disruptions marring its surface, just a steady level of heat washing out towards the barren planets.  “If you want to leave, now is your chance.”

“Get on with it before I have an attack of brains to the head and realise how stupid this is,” Chris growled.  “Besides, how many others can say they watched a black hole forming?”

“No one,” Paula said.  She pulled up the communications console and checked the location of the Defence Force’s starships.  They had been positioned several light years away from Shiva, just for safety, although no one – not even the worrywarts who thought the experiment would go disastrous wrong – could say what there was to worry about.  The black hole would, at most, have the mass of the entire system and the insignificant mass of Paula’s starship and the sensor platforms emplaced around the star.  It wouldn’t be enough to suck in the Defence Force attack fleet.

The laymen thought of black holes as monsters that swallowed everything that came too close to them, maybe even reaching out towards objects to pull them into the inescapable maw.  It didn’t work quite like that, Paula knew; the black hole would start to affect the local gravity background, but the effects wouldn’t be that different from the presence of Shiva itself.  As more mass fell into the black hole, it’s gravity pull would increase, but Shiva hadn’t been attracting stellar material for centuries.  It wouldn’t turn into a serious threat to the galaxy.

The black hole at the centre of the galaxy would, one day.  It had been sucking in material since it had formed and was slowly consuming the galactic core.  Paula knew that, uncounted billions of years in the future, it would break out of the core and start pulling in the remainder of the galaxy, but she and perhaps even the human race would be long dead at that point.  If the Community survived, they might move to intergalactic space, or maybe by then they would have mastered gravity technology and leaned how to focus gravity beams to dampen the black hole’s gravity field, or tap it for power.  It dawned on her, suddenly, that that might be just what the Killers did – they might even be able to tap the core hole for their power supply?  It seemed overkill – they already had more power at their disposal than they could possibly require – yet it was doable.  Humans might have done it just to prove they could!

She filed her thought quickly, knowing that the MassMind might not be able to accept her personality in time to save her from disaster, and then pushed it out of her mind.

“This is Alpha,” she said, shortly, opening the communications channel.  The entire Community – or at least the parts of the Community that weren't lost in fantasy worlds or trying to reorganise after the Killer blitzkrieg – would be watching over her shoulder.  It was a thought she had long since creased to find daunting.  She had joined a Footsoldier platoon on a raid into a Killer starship.  What could be more terrifying than that?  “We are prepared to launch the probe.  Stations; sound off.”

One by one, the different automated and manned observation platforms signed in.  Paula had argued that only her – and her alone – should watch as the black hole was created, just in case her calculations were spectacularly wrong.  The remainder of her staff, the ones who had helped her develop the technique and translated her vision into reality, had refused to leave.  So had several eminent scientists who had believed that her plan wouldn’t work – although the Cinder suggested otherwise – and had insisted on watching, probably to expel her personally if it failed.  Paula decided that if the star went supernova and killed them all, she wouldn’t mind losing them.  The Technical Faction was not supposed to be petty.  Science and research were their only gods.

“All right,” Paula said, finally.  She keyed a command sequence into the console, and then submitted to a cold mental probe to confirm her identity and orders.  She rarely used such precautions – they left her with a headache and a sense of violation – but there was little choice; they had been ordered to take every precaution they could, against threats that even the Defence Force had found hard to specify.  Paula doubted that they needed to worry about the Killers reading their files – no one had found any trace of
Killer
files on the captured ship – but the precautions made sense.  If it was the only way she got to put her theory into practice, she would live with it.  “The probe will launch in ten seconds.  Good luck to us all.”

The countdown seemed to take hours.  “Probe launching,” she said.  The torpedo fell away from its position under the starship.  “Probe launched.  We have impact with stellar atmosphere in two minutes.”

“Gosh,” Chris commented.  “This
is
exciting.”

“Shut up,” Paula said, throwing him a sharp look.  “I am bringing the probe’s warp field online…now.”

The probe’s icon changed rapidly.  “Power levels remain constant,” Paula added, hearing the note of relief in her voice.  If the probe’s power systems had failed, the best that would happen would be a complete failure.  The worst would be a supernova as the warp field collapsed and destabilised the star.  “We’re in business.”

There was a long pause.  “The probe is now entering the star,” she said, finally.  She had a sudden mental image of a needle penetrating a balloon and fought down the urge to giggle.  God alone knew what would happen if this entered the Community’s standard procedures.  The Technical Factions had all kinds of ideas.  They could use the process to create rare elements, elements unobtainable outside a supernova, or even mine the gas once it had cooled off after being blown out of a star.  It was industrial work on a grand scale, a sign of what humanity could do, after the Killers were defeated.  “The warp field is remaining consistent and stable.”

Chris was suddenly beside her, peering over her shoulder.  “How are you still getting a signal from it?”

“Quantum entanglement,” Paula said, slowly.  “There’s nothing else that will work in such conditions, even gravity-wave transmissions.  If the probe is lost, we’ll have the telemetry to tell us what happened to it.”

The mass of the probe was steadily increasing as it flew deeper into the star.  “And even if the probe is lost after another forty minutes, the process should be impossible to reverse, or even to destabilise and create a supernova,” she added.  On impulse, she reached out and gave him a hug.  He pulled her into his arms and they shared a long embrace.  “And now…”

Deep within the star, the probe was slowly falling towards the stellar core.  It was cool, as stars went, but a human or even a Killer starship would have vaporised instantly.  The probe, wrapped in its protective warp field, barely noticed the heat; it was too busy creating a gravity field at the core.  As it sucked in atoms from the star, its gravity field grew stronger, pulling in more and more atoms.  The process was accelerating even as Paula broke the embrace and checked the console.  The star was on the verge of collapsing, either into a supernova or a black hole.

“We’re picking up gravity waves,” Paula said, as the starship rocked slightly.  “The star is being compressed into a ball.”

A supernova bomb would have released all the energy, triggering a supernova, but the black hole probe couldn’t let go of a single particle of energy.  Instead, the gravity field grew stronger, compressing the captured material down towards a ball and drawing in more matter, which in turn added to the compression.  The cycle was unbreakable.  As the probe came to rest at the centre of the star, the process picked up speed, adding the planet’s natural gravity field to the artificial one created by the probe.  Nothing, even light itself, would be allowed to escape.  The star’s mass was being compressed into a tiny area…

The process started to speed up as the probe was finally crushed out of existence, it’s tiny life coming to an end, but it was already too late.  The new core was sucking in the remaining matter without any need for a midwife and the star was dying rapidly, massive eruptions of stellar material bursting up from its surface before being pulled back down towards the surface and down towards the growing gravity well.  The core just grew hungrier and hungrier, and, as it consumed more of its parent material, its hunger only grew.  Paula checked the warp field quickly, knowing that if the warp field failed the starship would die, but there was no need to worry.  They were safe.