Storming Heaven (35 page)

“We have been interrogating the personality of Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi,” the MassMind representative informed the War Council.  They had all been briefed on the odd communication, although none of them had understood quite why the Killers had chosen to broadcast a human mind pattern at the Defence Force fleet.  They knew now that it was nothing to do with the Killers.  “She has revealed considerable information about the Killers and their ultimate plan for the galaxy.  We may be required to act quickly.”

An image of the galaxy appeared in front of them, with thousands of stars marked with red icons.  “The Killers have infested over five hundred thousand star systems, of which seven thousand coincide with our own settlements,” the MassMind continued.  “Most of them, however, are their version of civilian settlements, which may account for the fact that we never located them.  CAS-3473746-6, which became the Cinder, was one such system.  We only located it by accident.

“A comparative handful, around two hundred or so systems, are parts of their war machine,” it said.  The icons flashed a darker red.  “Some of them, however, have a darker role.  The Killers intend nothing less than reshaping the entire galaxy to their design.  They intend to shatter every rocky planet into asteroids and exterminate all other forms of life, but their own.  They were developing this as a minor program, but following the Battle of Shiva…they may intend to bring it forward and use it to exterminate us.”

There was a long silence.  “That’s madness,” Patti said, finally.  “How long would it take them to destroy every planet in the galaxy?”

“Maybe not as long as you think,” the MassMind said.  “In layman’s terms, they intend to turn the Core Hole – the black hole at the centre of the galaxy – into a weapon and use it to focus powerful waves of gravity at any target that takes their fancy.  With an unlimited source of power – which they would have – they could just keep firing gravity pulses until they ran out of targets…and, with their capabilities, they would have no problems locating new targets.  The results would be disastrous.”

It paused, carefully.  “Our worst case estimate may be completely wrong – we have little to go on, apart from the theory – but if we’re right, they could dismantle every planet in the galaxy in less than a month.”

“But we don’t live on planets,” Father Sigmund pointed out.  “We occupy asteroids…”

“There are all the morons who believe that living on planets without technology keeps them safe from the Killers,” Brent put in.  “We’d have to evacuate them, at the least, and they’d refuse to go…”

“We would not have the resources,” the MassMind said.  “The disruption caused by the gravity cannon – as we have termed it – would be disastrous to vast sections of the Community.  The destruction of a planet, in such a fashion, would unleash gravity waves that would wreck havoc.  They may shatter our habitats without ever knowing what they did – or maybe they intend to do it.  The results would be disastrous in either case.  Starships might survive, as would settlements in every star system that wasn't targeted, but we’d lose
trillions
of lives.  They have to be stopped.”

“This is madness,” Father Sigmund protested.  “Why…?”

“When humans wanted to commit genocide, they built gas chambers to speed the whole process up,” Patti said, bitterly.  “Why should the Killers not do the same?”

“It’s not the same,” Father Sigmund protested.

“Yes, it is,” Patti said.  “The Killers at least have the excuse that they’re not slaughtering their own people.  We attempted to do it to ourselves.  Why is it such a surprise that other races do the same, to themselves and to others?”

“This argument is completely immaterial,” Matriarch Jayne snapped.  “There is only one issue of importance now.  What do we do to stop the Killers from slaughtering us all?”

“The only thing we can do,” the MassMind said.  “We take out the devices – at whatever cost – that will take control of the black hole.  We take them out and we win the time we need to make sure that if only one race can survive, that race is humanity.  We always knew that we were fighting an enemy who wanted to kill us all.  Now we have to kill them, or be killed.  We have no other choice.”

“Why did I come here?”

Rupert, Leader of the Spacer Faction – insofar as the Spacer Faction
had
individual leaders – looked up at the looming shape of the captured Killer starship, before resuming his dictation.  Even from such a distance – his personal starship was keeping several hundred kilometres from the Killer ship – it looked very intimidating.  It was illuminated by spotlights from the human platforms assembled around the ship, like Gulliver being restrained by the Lilliputians, yet it seemed to almost soak up the light, existing as nothing more than an oddly-shaped black hole in space.  It wasn't an ill-suited analogy, Rupert knew; the rear of the starship held a tiny black hole.

“Why did I come here?”  He repeated.  It was a Spacer custom that all Spacers kept detailed logs and records.  They never uploaded themselves into the MassMind and made themselves available to their future descendents and so it was the only form of indirect immortality they had.  “I came here because I had to see it for myself.  I had to know for myself.  Logically, a verbal report would have sufficed, but I had to see it with my own eyes.  I had to
know
.”

He paused, considering.  “We believed at the start that the Killers were nothing more than rogue machines that obliterated their creators and went on a slaughtering spree, killing every last form of intelligent life they encountered,” he continued.  “We thought that that explained everything; their insensitivity to mass slaughter, their willingness to permanently kill entire life-bearing planets and, indeed, the absence of any structures or settlements on still-living worlds.  We preferred to believe that they were rogue AIs and built strong limits into our own AIs.  We could have created AIs that controlled entire starships, without the need for human crews, but we refrained from that final step.  We were too scared of the consequences.

“And we, the Spacers, believed that the key to humanity’s future lay in pushing the boundaries of human-machine interfacing as far as possible.  We implanted and augmented our bodies with the latest technology, giving up some elements of our humanity to gain eternal life and a new perspective on existence.  We believed that, in the end, we would gain the ability to link permanently into our starships, making the human race immortal.  We would be able to give every human a destroyer-sized starship to use as a permanent body.  It would be merely an exercise in mass production.

“And we failed, at first, to develop a brain-powered starship.  The test subjects went mad.  It didn’t discourage us, because others had gone through our procedures and then gone mad.  The powers of a minor god are given to us by augmentation and not all could take it.  Others learned to regret the loss of sex and gender, or taste and smell, and killed themselves, or took foolish risks in the belief that they were already dead.  We thought that the starship project was merely experiencing teething problems.  Why not?  It had happened before.  Every failure was eventually overcome.  The remainder of the Community might tut-tut at us and question the death toll, but they used our technology as well.  Their long lives and direct mental links to the MassMind came from our research.

“And now we know what the Killers actually are.

“They
are
their starships.  They
are
perfect mergers between biological life forms, if rather alien ones, and massive starships.  They are our dream come true.  And if they did this to themselves, and went on to slaughter uncounted trillions of lives, to commit genocide against all other races…what does this mean for us?  When our human-starship mergers go mad, then…does that explain the Killers?

“Are the Killers mad?

“There is no way to know,” he concluded.  “Their behaviour shows either an alien mindset or complete insanity.  They kill everyone they encounter; threat or no-threat, even races that could be no possible threat.  We know they committed genocide against races that had barely learned to make fire, let alone nuclear weapons, spacecraft and antimatter.  Are they mad to do this?  I like to believe – we like to believe – that our prohibition against genocide is a universal truth, yet there are – there may be – aliens that regard genocide as morally right.  Are they mad to believe such a terrifying thing?  Are the Killers mad?

“And that’s why I have to come here and see their ship with my own eyes.  I have to know if they’re mad, because if they are mad, it means that we too may be mad to continue to push the limits between man and machine.  I have to see it for myself, even if I may see nothing that no one else has seen.  I have to know…”

He made a moue of exasperation and deactivated the log with a single mental command, sent through his implants, before ordering the tiny starship forward towards the Killer ship.  He couldn’t contain a hint of fear at approaching so boldly – the Spacers, too, had lost people by coming too close to the Killer ships – but he pushed it down ruthlessly, commanding his central processor to up the amount of drugs flowing through his system.  It wasn't a time to allow himself fear, or anything other than a kind of nervous interest.  Who knew what he would see inside the Killer ship?

“You are cleared to approach,” System Command said, suddenly, breaking into his thoughts.  Star’s End was currently occupied by thousands of researchers from all across the Community – and millions more, attending via the MassMind or direct neural feeds.  They were all intent on being the first to pull yet another discovery from the alien craft, yet none of them were Spacers.  Rupert had hoped that a few Spacers would volunteer to visit Star’s End, or even to study and absorb the stream of data being dumped out as fast as possible, but none had.  They felt the same fear that he did, the nameless worry that the discoveries would eventually prove that the Spacers were on the verge of committing a terrible mistake in their drive for self-improvement.

He ignored the reminder flashing on his communications board, calling him to the War Council.  Whatever happened, the War Council could deal with it – or, if it was vitally important that they had a Spacer representative, they could summon his deputy to the meeting.  The MassMind had called the meeting anyway, and Rupert, like all Spacers, distrusted the MassMind.  It wasn't human any longer, but a blurring between human and machine, personalities who thought they were human and AIs who knew very well that they were not.  Spacers were natural loners by inclination, even before they went through the procedure that cut them away from the remainder of the human race; they saw no need for the MassMind and kept a distance between themselves and the collective entity.  It was yet another cause for worry.  What if the MassMind, not the Spacers, was the precursor to Killer-hood?

The tiny craft settled down on the Killer hull and locked itself firmly to the Killer hull metal.  It wasn’t magnetic, but the starship was capable of clinging on to anything.  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway – there was no way the starship could vanish or drift away – but he checked anyway, using habits that had acuminated over four hundred years of life, three hundred of them as a Spacer.  He checked his internal equipment carefully, opened the hatch – Spacers needed no atmosphere and didn’t bother with airlocks – and stepped onto the Killer hull.

A normal human might have struggled to ignore the strangeness of the sight, or the perspective of walking vertically on a horizontal hull, but Rupert ignored it, catching sight of his own reflection in the odd hull material.  It was easy to see why most humans feared the Spacers; he was tall, and half-wrapped in metal, his handful of exposed flesh treated to prevent it from feeling pain when he walked in a vacuum.  Rupert, at least, was humanoid.  There were Spacers who were effectively tiny spacecraft in their own right.  The irony wasn't lost on him.

He checked his internal database for the charts of the vessel, turned, and started to walk towards the nearest hatch.  The Technical Faction’s researchers had done a good job of locating other access points for the scientists and had opened up nine of them, allowing hundreds of people to slip into the starship and carry out their research programs.  Rupert clumped over towards the nearest access point, wrapped in a shimmering force field that kept the atmosphere within the craft, although all of the researchers either wore heavy spacesuits or personal force fields.  Rupert disdained the latter.  He had an internal force field himself, but it was easier to build protection into his own body, rather than rely on something that could fail at any moment.  If the ship were to vent its atmosphere, it would kill anyone without proper protection…

The handful of Footsoldiers on duty at the hatch – Rupert suspected that they were there just to keep them from getting in the way of the researchers – checked his access credentials and allowed him through, although they were clearly surprised to see a Spacer.  They were wearing powered combat armour, but they would be able to take it off at the end of a day, when they returned to their transports for food and sleep.  They probably wouldn’t want to live in their armour permanently, even though it was theoretically possible, and wouldn’t understand why the Spacers chose to do so.  They, Rupert decided, were not yet sick of being mortal flesh and blood.  It would change soon, when they got older…if they lived that long.  No one doubted that the Killers were still looking for their missing vessel.

He looked up, his enhanced sight picking out the running lights of a handful of Defence Force destroyers floating near the captured ship, before he stepped through the force field and into the access hatch.  The gravity field twisted around him and he almost lost his footing, before finally managing to secure himself as he stepped out of the other end.  The interior of the Killer starship rose up around him.  He turned his great head from side to side, allowing his internal cameras to record everything he saw, even as he wondered at the absence of the mists.  The first team had recorded strange alien mists, but now there was nothing, but a poisonous atmosphere.  The researchers had speculated that the mists were part of the Killer biology, but no one knew for sure.

He smiled internally – his face was fixed in a loose grimace, permanently – as the results of his atmospheric scan scrolled up in front of his eyes.  The Killer ship’s atmosphere seemed to be in a constant state of flux – the sensors recorded low-level energy discharges without apparent points of origin – but also seemed to match the original readings, taken during the first boarding mission.  Rupert would have liked to have been on that mission, despite the danger; it would have been a worthy cause for a Spacer to take for himself, even at the risk of death.  It would have been…

Rupert stopped, suddenly, as he looked further down into the ship.  It was dead, or almost completely powered down, and yet…he was sure that he could hear something, a keening on the edge of awareness.  It was like hearing a recording played too quietly to make out the words, but just loudly enough so that the listener knew that someone was talking.  There was a sense of unrefined…potential in the air, as if the ship wasn't dead, but merely biding its time.  He shivered, despite himself, as he started to walk again.  The starship didn’t feel dead to him.

He accessed the report from the Technical Faction and scanned it rapidly.  They’d concluded that the starship had powered itself down to the bare minimum after the Killer had died, reserving only enough power to maintain the atmosphere and keep the black hole under control.  They hadn’t detected much activity in the ship’s computer networks – which had prevented them from tapping into the system – yet did that actually mean it was dead?  Rupert walked down a long corridor and looked into a vast chamber, filled with strange alien material and technology.  Had the Technical Faction been wrong about the starship?

It was the work of a moment to bring up his internal sensors and scan the local area, hunting for signs of…what?  It wasn't something he could explain to himself, let alone anyone else, yet there was a freakish sense of…
something
lurking nearby, watching him.  The sensation was overwhelmingly powerful and he ran forward, accessing his internal weapons and deploying them in battle configuration, but he saw nothing.  It was as dark and silent as the grave.  He shook himself, convinced that he was being silly and succumbing to night terrors, yet he couldn’t shake the impression of looming disaster.

“Enough of this,” he said, aloud, and accessed the local communications channel.  The researchers had set up a dedicated communications network for the entire ship.  He was a Community Representative.  He should be able to talk to whoever he liked.  “Get me the nearest Technical Faction representative.”

There was no response.

“The hell…?”  Rupert asked, puzzled.  The communications system was the most advanced that the Community could design.  It didn’t fail.  There were so many backups in the system that he would have to be broken down to atoms before it failed.  It drew its power from his own body; it couldn’t fail unless the rest of him failed as well, and he was still alive.  He rekeyed the mental command sequence and tried again.  “This is Rupert, Spacer; link me to the nearest person on the ship.”