Storming Heaven (9 page)

Chris was reminded, irresistibly, of a brain, except it looked to be nothing more than a mass of chemicals.  His suit was charting out the power links leading from the mass to the remainder of the ship and, finally, identified the mass before him as the source of the RF transmissions they’d picked up earlier.  The Killer was sending signals out to the remainder of the ship and, a moment later, they were being repeated back to it, like a rote lesson.  No, he realised, not quite a rote lesson.  It was something much more complex.

“That’s a Killer?”  Someone asked.  “It doesn’t look very dangerous.  Why rock?”

“It might be traditional,” Paula said, absently.  “They might have decreed that its part of their culture, or it might be just like a hermit crab, inhabiting a shell created by another creature.”

“So,” Andrew Summerlin said, looking back towards the advancing machines.  “How do you intend to slap the cuffs on it and take it prisoner?”

Chris had a more practical question.  “How do you intend to kill it?”

***

Paula stared down at the Killer, her suit’s sensors tracking the power fluctuations surrounding the alien creature, wondering if it were aware of her presence.  She couldn’t see anything reassembling eyes, but that meant nothing; the Killer might be present within the column, but it might also be present within the mists, or even the remainder of the ship.  The Spacers were a merger of human flesh with mechanical technology and artificial intelligences.  There was no reason why the Killer couldn’t be the same, or perhaps even something more advanced; if she understood what she was looking at, it might even exist as a distributed intelligence, rather than the fleshy mass in front of her.

She would have loved to spend years studying it, but there was no time.  The advancing machines would cut them apart and lose them their one chance to take a Killer starship intact.  After their successful boarding of the Killer ship, the other Killer ships would probably improve their own internal defences, or maybe stop ignoring the pickets that were shadowing them at a distance and destroy them.  There was no more time…

“I’m going to cut into it with my nanotech probes,” she said, quickly.  The very thought made her queasy – she had never killed before – but it was the Killer or them.  “If I can break through, we can use the nanotech to kill it…”

She watched grimly as the first probes started to make their way through the Killer’s tank, dismantling the strange metal as they progressed.  It should have collapsed at once – nothing could resist a nanotech assault, as far as humanity knew – but it was somehow holding out, forcing her to concentrate on digging into the tank while the Footsoldiers covered her.  The advancing machines became frantic, desperately trying to reach her to rend and tear her apart, but she ignored them, concentrating on her grisly task.  She pushed harder, controlling the nanomachines directly, and broke through, sending the machines to dig into the Killer.  There was no time to be subtle.  She had to kill the creature – and fast.  There was a moment’s chaos…

And then the craft seemed to shudder violently, as if it was a living thing struggling to survive, and then it went dark.  Paula felt a moment of panic as the darkness surrounded her like a living thing, before she realised what it had to mean.  Somehow, without quite knowing what she was doing, she had killed the Killer.

“I think you got it,” Chris said, finally.  The utter darkness surrounding them was suddenly broken by the lights on the suits, illuminating frozen machines and technology.  The column seemed to have broken apart completely.  The Killer was nothing more than a collapsing mass of dark material.  “Well done.”

He turned back to his men as Paula started to retch.  “Link to the starships and tell them to start taking this monster in tow,” he ordered.  “The Killer’s friends will be coming to see what happened to it and we don’t want to be here when they arrive.”

“Sir, the Killer power curves are fading away,” Lieutenant Gary Young.  “Sir, they’re gone!”

Andrew brought up the image of the Killer starship and stared at it.  The Killers had been almost stationary in space, so there was no sense of drifting motion, but the starship had gone completely dark.  The massive power curves that had propelled it through space had completely vanished, leaving only a single source of power on the starship, which seemed to be cooling down itself.  The starship was no longer firing on the human ships; it was merely…dead.

“They succeeded,” he said, in surprise.  He had never really believed that the plan would work and the early telemetry from the boarding parties hadn’t been encouraging.  Two hundred Footsoldiers had boarded the Killer starship; seventeen had survived the experience.  Several boarding parties had been completely wiped out, or had become lost within the vast bulk of the starship.  “Are they sure that it’s dead?”

“They’re confirming now,” Gary said.  “I think they knocked out the driving intelligence and the remains of the starship are now shutting down until it can be recovered.”

Andrew nodded.  The Killers probably had their own instant FTL communications network.  If the Killer starship triggered a distress beacon, as a human starship would do in a comparable situation, they could have another Killer starship arriving within minutes.  The picket ships had reported that there were several within two hundred light years, but with the Anderson Drive or a wormhole, reinforcements could come from right across the galaxy.  A fully-alert Killer starship might be breathing down their necks at any second, no longer inclined to ignore the gnats floating in space.

“Call the tugs,” he ordered, sharply.  “Prepare to move the starship to Star’s End.”

The tugs flickered into existence a moment later.  They were unarmed civilian ships and had been kept back from the fighting along with the
Observer
, which would have reported back if the entire attack wing had been wiped out.  At Andrew’s command, the tugs moved to the Killer starship and took up position on the hull, despite their concerns.  If the starship had powered up again, the tugs wouldn’t have been able to evade before the Killers blew them apart.

“They’re locked on,” Gary confirmed.  “They’re ready to generate the tachyon field now.”

“Check with the Footsoldiers,” Andrew ordered.  No one was quite sure how the Killers would respond to being transported across the galaxy.  If the starship really was dead, it shouldn’t matter, but humanity used AIs to serve as emergency commanders and there was no reason why the Killers couldn’t do the same.  It was a calculated risk.  “Ask them if they want to be pulled out before we remove the ship.”

Gary worked his console.  “They’re saying no,” he said, finally.  “They want to continue exploring the dead ship while we transport it out of here.”

Andrew took one look back towards the
Observer’s
icon on the display, watching everything from a distance, and turned back to his console.  The picket would remain in the same general location of space for a few weeks, just to see what – if anything – the Killers did in response.  Andrew expected nothing less than a large fleet to kick ass and take names, but no one knew how long it would take the Killers to respond.  If they figured out how to read the starship’s computer banks – if the Killers had computer banks – they might actually discover just how the Killers worked and the location of all of their bases.  They might finally be able to take the offensive.

“Jump,” he ordered.

Space twisted around the remains of the attack wing as the fleet jumped out towards Star’s End.  He found himself tensing again as the Killer starship and its tugs followed, knowing that the tachyon field might refuse to form.  The Battle of High Singapore had included a desperate attempt by a human destroyer – identical to the
Lightning
– to destroy the Killer starship by using a tachyon field to tear the Killer ship apart, but the field had simply refused to form.  No one knew if it had failed because the field hadn’t been able to encompass the whole hull – although theory had suggested that part of the ship should have been cut away from the hull – or if the Killers had countered the field somehow, but there was no other way to move the Killer ship.  A warp bubble might have worked, but the Killers would easily have been able to detect it and give chase, when their response force finally arrived.

The icon of the captured Killer starship flickered into existence on the display and he allowed himself a sigh of relief.  Any starship using a tachyon field travelled at inconceivable speeds, but larger starships seemed to move slower, although no one was quite sure why.  Even Thande, the composite of Professor Anderson and some of his brightest students in the MassMind, didn’t fully understand what they had created.  The Anderson Drive had limits no one fully understood.

Andrew had read a speculative paper that suggested that it was really a function of the amount of mass being taken through the jump – which had struck him, at the time, as stating the obvious and taking thousands of words to say it.  The author had gone on to speculate that tachyons, being particles without mass, could attain infinitive speeds, while anything with mass could only come close to infinitive speed.  There might even be only one tachyon in existence, occupying all possible locations simultaneously, and what the Anderson Drive
really
did was nothing more than re-determining where the starship actually was.  At that point, he had given up with a headache.

“Transit confirmed,” Gary said, softly.  Andrew heard the awe in his voice and shared it.  No one had believed that they would actually get away with it, but now…now, the entire human race would get a massive boost in morale.  The men and women who were born and spent the majority of their lives in simulated environments, generated by the MassMind, would get something else to live for.  They might even join the Defence Force in greater numbers.  There were trillions of humans in space, occupying millions of asteroid colonies, and yet the Defence Force was always short of manpower.  “We have arrived at Star’s End.”

Andrew looked down at the single star glowing on the display.  Star’s End was a star right at the edge of the galaxy; indeed, it was practically a separate object, only kept in position by the galaxy’s vast gravitational pull.  The Killers had never shown any interest in it and, more importantly, it was thousands of light years from any human colony.  The Technical Faction had used it as a research base for hundreds of years, building their experimental weapons and researching objects recovered from dead alien worlds, but now…now it would be playing host to the first captured Killer starship.

“Contact System Command,” he ordered, formally, and then grinned.  “Tell them we’ve brought home the bacon.”

“System Command confirms,” Gary said.  They shared a look.  The mere sight of the Killer starship would probably have triggered a panic as the defenders braced themselves to fight a delaying action while the scientists evacuated the base.  “They’re welcoming us to the base and offering our people leave.”

“Not now,” Andrew said.  The recreational facilities onboard the starships would be sufficient, while keeping the crews ready to fight if outraged Killer fleets arrived to recover their lost starship.  There was no sign of any emergency signal emitting from the Killer starship, but that proved nothing.  There were any number of ways to transmit an FTL signal without being detected.  The researchers would have to make shutting any such system down their first priority.  “We’ve done our part, so…tell them good luck.”

He stood up.  “Stand down from red alert,” he added.  “And general signal to all ships; well done.”

“Yes, sir,” Gary said.

Andrew nodded.  He'd have to make a full report to the Admiral, of course, and then he would have to arrange for a ceremony for those who had died in the battle, but for the moment, he could afford to relax.  It wouldn’t last.

“Move us into observation position,” he ordered.  “I’ll be in my cabin.  Inform me at once if anything changes.”

***

The interior of the Killer starship was, if anything, far more daunting now that the lights were out.  The starship’s gravity field had failed along with the power, leaving the Footsoldiers and Paula floating in the middle of the chamber.  Paula wasn't sure that that was such a bad thing.  She had the uneasy feeling that the starship wasn't dead, just resting.  The absolute darkness was worse than the mists.  She kept thinking that she saw something out of the corner of her eye and, when she turned to illuminate it with her suit’s lights, saw nothing.  The darkness was getting to her, no matter what the suit did to keep her stable, and she was seriously considering having it sedate herself before she collapsed completely.

“We have arrived at Star’s End,” Chris confirmed.  Paula nodded.  She’d felt the wrench that marked the use of an Anderson Drive, but she’d been more aware than the Footsoldiers of every little thing that could go wrong.  If the tugs had messed up their calculations, they might just arrive in the heart of a sun instead, or on the other side of the universe.  There were just too many unknowns surrounding the Killer starship and its capabilities.  “Has there been any sign of activity?”

It took Paula a moment to realise that the question was addressed to her.  “Negative,” she said, as crisply as she could.  She would never match the Footsoldiers for professionalism, but she could try.  “The only power source in the ship is the power core and it appears to have gone into a form of stasis.”

She heard Chris’s snort though the communications link.  “Are you sure?”

“No,” she replied, dryly.  Whatever the Killers used – and she was starting to suspect that it was either a singularity or a micro black hole – was a complexly unknown technology.  “All I can tell you is that it is no longer emitting the high levels of radiation it was emitting before we – I – killed the Killer.  It may actually be fading away completely.”

“And that’s a bad thing, right?”  One of the other Footsoldiers asked.  “What would happen if we lost it completely?”

“We might lose the ability to power up the starship again,” Paula said.  “I don’t think that we could actually manipulate the systems ourselves…”

“He means; will the starship blow up on us?”  Chris injected, sardonically.  “Are you sure that we’re safe here?”

“No,” Paula said.  She took a measure of revenge by giving them a detailed answer.  “It is possible that the power core will destabilise and explode, killing us all.  It is equally possible that it will just fade away, leaving the starship completely powerless.  It is - even – possible that the power core will just stabilise at a low level and remain that way until the Killers recover this ship, if they ever do.  It’s a completely unknown technology.”

She looked back down towards the column and tanks that had once held the Killer.  Her mind kept returning to a single point; it had been an alien being, an intelligent alien being, and she had killed it.  Its race had slaughtered humanity – and countless other alien races – but she had never killed anyone in her life.  She felt sick, despite the constant massaging of the suit, and had to swallow bile.  She had killed a unique creature…and she wasn't even sure how!  Her nanotech had killed it – why?  What had she actually done to it?

The lights played around the massive chamber, but it took her a moment to realise what was missing.  The mists no longer hung in the air.  The temperature was dropping rapidly – that wasn't a problem as long as they remained in their suits – and it was possible that it had merely condensed on the walls, but perhaps it had some other explanation.  It might have been part of their native atmosphere – although if she were right about them being native to gas giants, the pressure should have been much greater – but she had the odd feeling that the mists were actually much more important than they had realised.  They had no time to study now, but she was already compiling a list of priority areas to research – and the mists were on the list.

“We’re moving out,” Chris decided, finally.  “Paula, follow me; in fact, set your suit to automatically shadow me until I tell you differently.”

The lead Footsoldier’s lights seemed to fade away into the darkness as he took point, drifting ahead of them, back towards where a wall had swallowed up one of their teammates.  It dawned on Paula, suddenly, why they’d gone back the same way; the Footsoldiers wanted to see if they could rescue their comrade.  Flying through the air, using radar pulses and sonic signals to fill out their knowledge of the alien starship, they made much better time, but when they reached the man-eating wall, it was cold and silent.