Storming Heaven

Chapter Eighteen

Charlie Reynolds scowled as she knelt down under the Good Bush and started to pick the berries. There would be a good crop of berries this year if the sun kept shining down on New Hope, but the fifteen-year-old girl wasn’t enthusiastic at all. Picking the berries was hard work and then they had to be mashed, boiled and then stored for several weeks before they were even remotely good to eat. There were men and women on New Hope who had expired ahead of their time from eating Good Fruit berries, but what else could they eat? There were so few things on New Hope that humans could eat safely at all.

The Elders swore that God would provide, as He had provided before, but the younger men and women suspected otherwise. The Elders had come down from the stars to create New Hope — a colony where the sinfulness of the human race would be redeemed, sparing them the destruction that had swept billions of humans away in a massive flood — and insisted, firmly, that hard work and prayer would turn New Hope into a paradise. Charlie agreed with the others of her generation; the more they worked New Hope’s soil, the smaller the amount of yield. Charlie didn’t know much arithmetic — maths was no proper skill for a girl, said the Elders, or a young man — but it seemed obvious to her that the end result would be starvation and death. No amount of grovelling in front of an altar the Elders had placed in the centre of the village would change that. Charlie was the fifth child of her parents, the first to survive to maturity, and the great hope of her parents. There were times when she wondered, keeping the thought privately to herself, if New Hope was not God’s Chosen, but God’s Enemies. Nothing else seemed to explain why they could barely grow food in seemingly-fertile soil.

But another kind of fertility occupied her thoughts, distracting her so that she pricked herself on one of the thorns. Inquisitor Johan had asked her parents for her hand in marriage — and you didn’t say no to the Inquisitors, or share your secret thoughts with them, not if you valued your life. The Inquisitors had burned her old teacher only seven months ago for daring to suggest to the children that there were truths beyond that which the Elders knew — and he had been an Elder himself! The Elders might live longer than the younger generation, but Charlie had thought that that was far too harsh — although she hadn’t dared say that aloud. The Inquisitors wouldn’t have hesitated to burn her as well, along with her family. No, there was no doubt; her parents would tell her officially, soon enough, that she was to be Johan’s bride, and that would be the end of it. She would marry him, he would take her to his bed, and…

She wasn’t quite sure of what would happen next, but she doubted that it would be pleasant. The girls of the village whispered to one another of what some of the men were like, and Johan was one of the worst. His position made him unquestionable and, as the food supplies fell further, he had turned into a threatening bully. No one dared question him and few dared remain alone with him, male or female. He was the most feared person in the village. Her parents wouldn’t even dare ask for a heavy dowry for her, even though Johan could have paid with ease.

If I’d been born a man… she thought, but it was wishful thinking. The younger generation of men had slightly more freedom than the women, but they would die too when the food supplies ran out, or perhaps in fights when they couldn’t get married. The young women were all being married off to the Elders, or their servants, those who had the influence or power to demand whatever they wanted. Charlie knew that she might even be one of the lucky ones; Johan, at least, was young and wealthy. She knew girls who had barely passed their first blood before being married off to Elders who were ancient. Her parents had made no secret of the fact they had wanted a son… but their two sons had all died in infancy. It just wasn’t fair.

She stamped her foot impatiently and stood up, looking back towards her parent’s cottage. Being late, even now, would have drawn harsh punishment from her father, but being outside, even in the garden, was the only time when she felt free. It was just an illusion — she cast a wistful look towards the muddy track leading out of the village, towards other villages she’d never seen and never would — but it was all she had. She turned, picking up the basket, and then she saw the flash of light in the sky,

The Elders swore that there was nothing beyond the blue-black sky of New Hope, and that the points of light in the darkness were nothing more than God’s decorations, but she could see that there was something coming closer and closer to the village. It looked like a falling star, drifting off to the left as she watched, as if it was going to come down somewhere beyond the mountains. They dominated the horizon and added to the sense of being hemmed in, although some of the young men had once set off to climb them — and never returned. The spark of light came down… and the entire horizon lit up with a blinding flash of light. A moment later, the shockwave picked her up and threw her right over the village. She had a bare moment to realise that she’d escaped Johan, her parents and life itself, before the wave of energy wiped her out of existence.

“They haven’t replied to our messages, sir,” Ensign John Wagner said, from the communications station on the bridge. “They’re completely defenceless.”

Captain Andrew Ramage nodded bitterly. The Lightning had been on a training mission since the attack wing had been decimated by the Killers, a fancy way of saying that the surviving starships would probably be assigned to new attack wings, once more starships rolled out of the fabricators. If nothing else, the successful capture of the Killer starship had encouraged tens of thousands more to sign up with the Defence Force, which was now having problems absorbing all the excess manpower. They’d been on a routine pass ten light years from New Hope when they’d detected the Killer wormhole and Andrew had ordered an intercept course. They’d reached the New Hope system in time to see the Killer starship on final approach to the planet… and charging weapons.

“They don’t have any defences anyway,” Andrew said, grimly. It hadn’t taken a moment to review the information on New Hope… and what he’d found appalled him. New Hope had been founded by colonists who had believed that the Killers were God’s punishment on a sinful humanity and that, if they avoided technology and prayed heavily, the Killers would leave them alone to build their paradise. It was obvious now that they’d been disastrously wrong. The Killer starship closing in on the planet was ample proof of that. “They’re completely pre-technical. They don’t even have matchlocks or cannons.”

He felt his teeth clench. The Community had watched New Hope and concluded that the colonists had managed to create a hell for themselves, rather than a paradise, but there had been no grounds to interfere. The Community didn’t have the legal right to intervene even when human rights were being shredded by other humans and an attempt to do so would have started a civil war. Very few humans would have tolerated New Hope willingly, but the precedent would have worried at least two-thirds of the Community. Who cared about New Hope when the entire Community was at stake?

The reports had concluded that the Elders of New Hope had, accidentally or deliberately, removed most of the genetically engineered modifications that their children would have otherwise inherited. New Hope wasn’t that habitable, but Andrew could have survived there indefinitely, relying on his modified body to handle the poisonous plants and animals. A baseline human from Old Earth would have suffered from all kinds of deficiencies… assuming, of course, that they didn’t eat anything lethal and die before they realised the error. The Elders had also deliberately lost most modern medical techniques, even techniques and medicines that had been developed a long time before humans had stopped believing that the Sun went round the Earth. It was disgusting, to Andrew’s mind, but they were still human. They didn’t deserve to die…

“The Killers are opening fire,” Lieutenant Gary Young reported. The tactical officer put up the main display without even being asked. Andrew watched in far too much detail as streaks of white light lanced out of the Killer starship and struck the planet, devastating the entire biosphere. Anyone lucky enough to survive the first blast — which had come down on top of the largest city on the planet — would soon wish that they had died with the others. It wouldn’t be long before their wish was granted. “They’re just… hammering the planet at random.”

“They don’t have to be subtle, Lieutenant,” Andrew reminded him. “Helm, keep us at a safe distance and prepare to trigger the Anderson Drive if they come at us.”

“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant David Dunagin said. “I have a course laid in and ready.”

John Wagner was young, too young. “Sir,” he protested, “shouldn’t we be doing something?”

The desperation in his voice convinced Andrew not to snap at him. “There’s nothing we can do, Ensign,” Andrew said, seriously. If the report of a single Killer starship being destroyed was accurate — and the MassMind hadn’t passed on more than vague details — it might be possible to intervene, but how? If the Lightning attacked, the Killers would either ignore them or open fire… and keep firing until they picked off the gnat that had dared to confront them. “All we can do is watch, and bear witness to the fall of New Hope.”

The Killer weapons couldn’t — thankfully — convert the entire mass of the planet into energy. If they had, the result would have been a small supernova, but the devastation they caused was quite enough to exterminate any life on the surface. A single hit would probably have wiped out all of the human settlers, yet they kept firing until the planet was rendered lifeless. The massive clouds of radiation, the dust in the atmosphere, the shockwaves that would have knocked down any human construction… all ensured that the planet was thoroughly dead. The Killer starship halted its firing pattern and waited, for what? Andrew frowned. Normally, the Killers arrived, destroyed, and vanished again. Were they waiting for someone to meet with them?

“Hold us here,” he ordered, watching the Killer starship carefully. If it had sensors equal to human technology, it shouldn’t be able to detect the Lightning, but Andrew had assumed from the start that the Killer knew exactly where they were. “John, dispatch an updated warning to Sparta and inform them that we are… observing the target.”

He heard John’s sniff and considered calling him on it, but there was little point. He wanted, desperately, to engage and destroy the Killer starship, but how? The most they could do was distract it, if that, and only then if the Killer took the bait. There was no point any longer anyway; even if they had had a Killer-killing weapon — the thought made him smile grimly to himself — New Hope would have been destroyed anyway. The Killers had wiped out the entire planet’s population. The explosions were detectable even at several AUs distant and no one, not even someone using the latest Community technology, would have survived.

“Captain,” the AI murmured in his ear, “I have the latest update from the MassMind. Do you wish to review it?”

“Snap me out if anything changes,” Andrew ordered. “Show me.”

The update unfolded rapidly in his brain, a direct information download. The Killers had retaliated for the capture mission, on a scale that defied belief. A hundred settlements, including several dozen that everyone had believed were beyond detection, had been destroyed, with billions of fatalities. A hundred Defence Force starships had been destroyed, directly or indirectly, while over fifty civilian ships had been picked off while they tried to evacuate people from the settlements. It didn’t look as if the Killers had intended to massacre fleeing civilians — they could have killed millions more if they had been so inclined — but it hardly mattered. The devastation had been shattering. Merely accommodating the refugees would stretch the remaining settlements to the limits.

On one scale, the attacks had been tiny, a drop in the literally millions of hidden settlements and human outposts scattered across the entire galaxy. The Community numbered in the trillions, after all, even if they didn’t count the ships that had headed right outside the galaxy, either to the Clouds or further beyond. On the other, it was just another reminder of the sheer power the Killers possessed… and those other settlements might not remain safe indefinitely. If the Killers maintained their attacks, the other settlements might be destroyed as well, leaving the human race scattered across the galaxy, doomed to die out, like the Ghosts and countless others. Andrew stared into the face of the future, a truth that the Elders of New Hope had sought to escape, and shivered. There was no escaping reality.

And yet… a single Killer starship had been destroyed.

Andrew reviewed the download, such as it was, and cursed. Cochrane Twists were rare, even when the enemy was cooperating; the sheer speed of the warp drive ensured that starships rarely interpenetrated and destroyed each other. The tactic had actually been designed for warp missiles — which were generally fired at other targets moving at FTL speeds — yet even warp missiles, which were expendable by definition, couldn’t guarantee an interpenetration event. It was easy to tune a low-level warp field to prevent interpenetration and that, the Defence Force had assumed, had been what the Killers had done. God alone knew that they had all kinds of technology that humans could barely imagine, let alone duplicate. Why shouldn’t they have warp drive as well?

Apart from the fact that they don’t have warp fields when they move at FTL, or even a warp signature, he reminded himself. No warp field; no warp drive.

He shook his head and came out of the download, feeling his skull ache slightly as he opened his eyes. Direct memory downloads always gave him a bit of a headache, but there was no choice. The Technical Faction claimed that, one day, humans would be so perfectly integrated with their mechanical servants that direct memory downloads — and much else — would become as easy as taking a walk, or swallowing a pill. It would be yet another modification of the baseline human form, one that the Elders of New Hope would have hated, but was it necessary? Every generation, Andrew had discovered, questioned just how much more modification was actually required. It was sometimes disturbing to realise how far they’d come from the basic human form.

“No change, sir,” Gary said. The tactical officer sounded concerned, with good reason. “They’re just holding position and waiting for something.”

Andrew tapped into the AI and studied the Killer starship directly. It was a standard Iceberg — if there were internal differences, they were beyond the ability of his sensors to detect — and should have had enough firepower to deal with the remainder of the system with ease. There was actually little in the system to attract its attention; there were no asteroid settlements, as far as Andrew knew, or anything else, apart from New Hope. The Elders had chosen New Hope precisely because it was completely isolated, with no technology to attract the Killers. Their precautions had failed spectacularly.

“Give me a low-level scan of the surrounding system,” Andrew ordered, finally. “I want to know if there’s someone out there waiting for them.”

There was a pause. An active scan, even a low-level one, would almost certainly betray their presence — assuming, of course, that they weren’t already under Killer observation. Andrew smiled suddenly, remembering something his father had told him when he’d visited the asteroid settlement’s fish farms; they’re as afraid of you, son, as you are of them. The thought was ridiculous — the Killers had little reason to be scared of the Lightning — yet it refused to fade. In all their history, had the Killers only lost two starships? Were they actually scared of him?

“I’m picking up nothing apart from a handful of fading ion trails,” Gary reported, finally. “If there’s anything else, it’s too well-hidden for low-power scans to detect.”

Andrew nodded. Ion trails meant warp-capable starships, which probably meant smugglers. Had that been what had attracted the Killers? The Defence Force could track warp signatures at over a hundred light years distant — could the Killers do the same?

An alarm sounded suddenly. “Power surge,” Gary snapped, as Andrew came to full attention, using his implants to snap himself into full awareness. Tiredness was never a problem on a Defence Force starship, but like all things, it had to be paid for eventually. “The Killers are opening a wormhole…”

Before he had finished, the wormhole had already expanded, swallowed the Killer starship, and faded away into nothingness.

“Stand down from battlestations,” Andrew ordered, finally. The Killers might not have had the Anderson Drive, but wormholes allowed them the same degree of strategic mobility as a Defence Force starship. “Helm, set course for Sparta.”

He looked down at the display as the starship’s main drive powered up, preparing to hurl them tens of thousands of light years to Sparta, and — hopefully — new orders.

“Now tell me,” he said, softly. “What the hell was all that about?”

Behind them, a planet burned.